It’s a little like living in sandpaper, the coarseness of it takes a while to get used to, while it rubs away your corners and gets to the core of you. It exposes the truth of you. Snap, snap, snap. Celluloid snapshots of an ever-present alternative reality. I like the grit of it. There’s no pretence and no sheen. People are who they are down here. They’ve no time for strangers but hang about for long enough, blending into the brick walls and you’ll see some of the greatest acts of kindness and heroism here too. I don’t mean heroism in the way you’re thinking, I dare say. Not the sort of heroism that runs into burning buildings but the kind of heroism that thinks nothing of sacrificing its own needs and desires to give someone a happy moment or a smile. Everyday heroism, is what it is.

It’s been a while since I was there: things have moved on, passed by, grown up. I’m not the same either. But sometimes I like to go back, in my memories to how it was. Back to days of scalding teas in dirty cafes on the Coatsworth road, and a pint in a seedy pub a little way along, where the locals at the bar looked like they’d mug you given half a chance but behaved better than many of the ‘gents’ I know nowadays.

Living in the dirty side of town taught me lessons I wouldn’t have learnt anywhere else. Lessons about judging people and places. Lessons about the secrets that places like this hold. The beauty you find that most people are blind to the flourishes untended in the cracks. I suppose it tells you a little about me too, my flirtation with the seedier side of town. It becons to me, and seduces me with its whispers of secret dramas. I find myself enticed by the flashing neon promises and flirting with danger.

People walk by the dirty end of town, carefully avoiding coming in. Others scowl from the bus and wish this little blot on the landscape would shrivel up and disappear but I love it, and occasionally in my dreams, I still find myself scurrying along the road, flanked by little dirty shops, in a place that would never be trendy, but to me, was always friendly and real, especially in the middle of the night, when I went walking with my camera.

The studio had suggested wearing and bringing along props that were reflective of your personality and interests. So as I was dragging on my clothes this morning, I automatically reached for a pair of odd socks (can you say that?) for good luck and that got me thinking of the small, almost unconscious, things that we do that make unique in ways we don’t even notice.

My odd sock habit has its depths in my University days, when I would catch the bus in to lectures when the weather was grim and I didn’t fancy a four mile hike in the rain. The bus stop was a five minute walk away across a field, and the buses were often double deckers or bendy buses that jammed us together like sardines. At any rate, I had a spate of bad luck on the buses in my first year, when I consistently fell down, got pushed over or some other calamity (see reasons why I hate buses, many of these ocurred during that fortnight) would befall me whenever I was on a bus. It lasted about 2 weeks, and at the end of the fortnight, I had bruises on bruises and could cheerfully have done without seeing a bus ever again. I was, in fact, on the verge of turning in my bus pass completely.

One fine day, I overslept and when I woke up and realised the time, I grabbed whatever clothes were to hand (I must have made a fine sight!) and threw them on including a pair of odd socks and headed for the bus stop and found, to my undisguised delight, that I had not only an uneventful journey but that I made my lecture with minutes to spare. I could only put this unlikely ocurrance down to the odd socks (or blind luck) and ever since, if I’ve felt the need for a little extra luck, I’ve worn mismatched socks. (Clearly I should have remembered to do that on evil, everything sucks Tuesday, shouldn’t I?)

What quirky habits do you have?