The way to Holloway

This is a different bus, one that winds through the backstreets of Islington and is heading to Holloway. It’s not even a big red double-decker; it’s far more modest with just one door at the front. It’s jolting on the smallest bumps and it makes it difficult to read. I’m reading Cosa Nostra, which is a history of the mafia from its origins in the lemon and olive groves of 1860’s Sicily. It’s now 1896 and PM Francesco Crispi has disastrously just sent the country’s soldiers to colonise Ethiopia in order to recover Italy’s falling prosperity…. The bus rattles around the corner and I am jolted back to reality: here I am back in Holloway. The streets are messy with people, rubbish, stalls. The same.

Inside the gym it’s the same too. A very different clientele from the City gyms. I think I’m being glared at for lifting such light weights. Or I might be imagining things. Anyway, these people are ridiculous. There’s the same guy with the disproportionately large arms who was there when I used to go with former Holloway housemates Pickles and McCloskey. A muscular black guy is convincing his girlfriend she needs to do more work on her gluteal muscles, as I pull down the lat bar.

I still haven’t convinced the Fitness First staff to transfer my membership to one of their other, closer gyms without paying an extortionate number of pounds, so I might be making my way back up to Holloway again soon, I guess. Not tonight though – I’ll be catching up with a friend who is now studying at LSE at a student Colombian party down by the Thames. Fiesta time!