the corner office

I saw the movie 84 Charing Cross Road when I was younger. I loved the movie, and read the book, written by Helene Hanff, some years after, and loved that too.

I work in the area and I've walked along Charing Cross Road countless times, and it embarasses me to admit that it took me some years before I thought to actually find number 84.

But one morning on the way to work, I did. Starting at St Martin-in-the-Fields, I made my way up the road, counting off the building numbers. And the numbers started getting pretty close, and I came to Shaftesbury Avenue, and crossed over, and then I found it, and laughed. The irony!

If you look for 84 Charing Cross Road today, all you'll find is a small round plaque (plenty of photos online), saying:

The booksellers Marks & Co were on this site which became world renowned through the book by Helene Hanff.

What made me laugh, is that the plaque is next to the entrance to the Cambridge Circus McDonalds.

Ironic in two ways. The obvious, that a location made famous by a book about love of literature should now be a fast food joint, but really, it's been more than half a century since the shop closed down. Searching online I see it's been many things since then, including a restaurant, other fast food places, and a record store. (What's more remarkable perhaps, is that I'd guess that Charing Cross Road was a bookseller's street, a bit like Denmark Street around the corner is for musical instruments, and a few booksellers, small and large, are still there, or down side streets, although at least one or two have closed down since I first explored this area, more than a decade ago).

But no, the main reason it was ironic to me, is that this is a McDonalds with which I was very well acquainted.

In the first few years after starting my current job, I'd commute into London early to beat rush hour, and find places to sit and read or study, before heading into the office. And for a while, the Cambridge Circus McDonalds was one of my haunts. It was quiet first thing in the morning, and I'd usually be able to find a table in a corner.

(Now, even after all this time, there will be those who care about me making Good Choices, who will be reading this disapprovingly. Obviously I'd never have sat there each morning without buying something, and all I'll say is this: often I'd just get coffee, and many times I'd order oats. And I'll leave you to draw the Venn diagrams for yourself, while I get on with the story.)

Some days I'd people watch. The Chinese pensioners who'd all gather at a large round table for coffee each morning. The gangsterish dude whose girlfriend became more cloying and obsequious, the more dismissive and rude he was to her. The Australian and the South African in suits, loudly discussing the meaning of life (the first time I heard the three essentials for happiness quote).

But mostly, I'd put in my earphones, block out the world, and study.

At the time, I was teaching myself an area of maths I'd not studied at university. I enjoyed doing it at the time, and that was reason enough to do it, but after all these years, I've forgotten much of it, and I have little to show for my time, apart from my notes and proofs and drawings in a ring-bound notebook, lost somewhere on a shelf at home.

Which, in a round-about way, is the tenuous point of this post. These were the days before two things substantially changed how I studied, and how productive my studies actually were. The first of these was spaced repetition (using Anki), which I'm not likely to write much about, and then a couple of years later, my approach to note-taking, which came to encompass more than just academic interests, and which I do intend to write a bit more about.

(I wrote the first draft of this post years ago, and then in the past year or two, started to develop an interest in "reading" and "literature", and put the book back onto my to-read list to see what Hanff was interested in. Then a few months ago, I actually re-read it. So this is likely to be a set-up for a couple of other things too, including a book review, in good time, perhaps).