From the weird to the bloody awful, as the old saying goes. Fulham Broadway is a really rubbish place to spend an evening. First off, expensive cocktails in an Indian restaurant with ambitions to be a hotel. A warm pint in a backstreet boozer that gave you the feeling you were in, I dunno, a run down part of Worcester. Another drink in a repulsive hellhole rammed with idiots who wouldn’t move slightly when I said “excuse me” three times, thus forcing me to barge my way through and almost knock over the dinner of some bloke who then got annoyed with me, despite the fact that the only way I could have avoided doing it was to, well, remain in the pub all night. And I wasn’t doing that. luckysaddle departed at this point, and who could blame him, really.

On to a place next to a McDonalds and opposite a cut-price off license but with huge pretensions; it’s changed hands and indeed names about 4 times in the past three years. Empty. Another name-change ahoy, I reckon. By this point, I was hungry, depressed and alone, rather like a round-the-world yachtsman but without the water, or the yacht, or the fish. So I sat down in a fish and chip shop and had a dinner that probably helped to seal the demise of a once-great north European underwater species. I braced myself for the final destination. I arrived, to find that it was “Fulham’s funkiest fun bar”. I went in, to find about 4 dozen teens gyrating to the sound of “Young Hearts Run Free” and failing to twig that the grim message of the song is that all men are scumbags and will continue to make women’s lives a misery until the death of civilization. I felt old. I went to the toilet. I felt older. I came back into the room, and skirted the throng of young people in the search for a seat. I cast my eyes over an empty sofa, albeit with bags and coats on it, at which point I noticed a group of people who clearly thought I was a balding bagsnatcher. “I don’t have to put up with this,” I wrote in my notepad, and went home.

West London is just rubbish, isn’t it? I know two three five people in West London that I like. Just three, compared to dozens in North, East & South. What’s that about? Is Acton really full of idiots? Is Ealing rammed with twonks? I remember reading some theory that in the great cities of the world, the poorer people drift to the East, which was followed by some ludicrous analogy about the prevailing wind, or the setting sun, or something. All absolute nonsense – anyway, don’t go to Fulham, as Elvis Costello almost sang.

PS – luckysaddle, PLEASE post that picture you took of the job centre. Please. This is great, everyone, wait for this. Seriously.