I went to a trade fair yesterday afternoon. At the Excel Centre in Docklands. That’s exciting. A trip to the wilds of the south east. Of London. Millwall Country.

Our traditional optical trade fair is in Birmingham. And for that one you have to, in fact, travel all the way to Birmingham. Generally. Which is itself quite horrible. You have a choice of spending 3 hours tangled up in motorway snarls on the M1 or M6, or both, or you can take a smelly train direct to the National Exhibition Centre. Either way, within 6 minutes of your arrival you start having those ‘why the fuck did I come to this????’ thoughts. Which quite frankly poison the whole experience.

So having an event in London is a bonus. For Londoners. The rest don’t count.

Thus we set out. Drove down to St Johns Wood, where cars can be left on Sundays safe from Camden Council’s usual Parking Death Squads who hunt in packs, ticket cars 24 hours a day and drink the blood of small children. From there you simply hop on a tube train which takes you effortlessly from North West London over to South East London. A couple of stops on the delightful little DLR and you arrive at the Excel. About 40 minutes. Rather than driving all the way and regretting every single yard you crawl.

It was a sunny afternoon, so ‘everything looked lovely’ bathed in the glow. There was The Dome, or Faulkner’s Folly, as some of us still remember it. All… domed and… big. A fabulous monument to New Labour ‘investing’ 850 million of our English pounds to build a tent on a swamp. They then sold it to O2 to become The Arena, for about 50 quid. Good business, that.

In the other direction is the Emirates Air Line, the cable car named after Arsenal’s stadium because its a bit slow and all about show with not much ‘go’, sailing majestically across the River.

And all around those iconic landmarks there is… there is… there is shit. Old warehouses, disused rail-yards, horrible, fit-for-demolition 1960s council blocks, heaps of garbage and all the other crap that lets you know you’re in South East London. I’m not even sure if I was north or south of the River at that point, as it doth meander so. Whichever bank I was on; it looked pretty horrible. So I’ll assume: South.

So we have Canary Wharf, we have a sodding Dome, City Airport, an Excel Centre and a cable car. But holy moly they need a lot of work doing round there to make it in any way ‘nice’. Plant a few trees for fuck sake, make a bleeding effort.

Nice to be home.

Happy Monday

A xxxx