After my “NHS Volunteer Responder App Going Berserk” experience the previous Friday…
…it was with some trepidation I switched on the app on my next visit to my Notting Hill “Ivory Tower” the following Tuesday afternoon.
Once bitten twice shy, though. I now knew to regulate my own uptake of the calls by waiting a while between accepting a task and making the call, or between completing a task and confirming that the task was done and that I was available again.
Thus I was able to field another half-dozen or so calls while also completing the work tasks that I had undertaken to do that afternoon.
The last of those calls did want some shopping. The woman sounded old. With a heavy Caribbean accent, she almost apologised for needing help. Her son had been getting shopping for her all the while, but he had developed a chesty-something and the doctor had recommended that he isolate. Sounds sensible.
She didn’t need much and she hoped that I could get everything she needed from the pound shop on Portobello Road, which is just a couple of minutes walk from her place. Otherwise there is a Sainsbury’s (other supermarket chains are available) just opposite the Poundland (other pound shop chains are available)…
…that’s fine, I said, after making sure we had clarity on the payment protocol…
…I told her I’d be about an hour, as I resolved to finish my work, “shut up shop” in the Ivory Tower and get her shopping on my way back to Noddyland…
…no rush, she said, she didn’t want to inconvenience me too much.
…no trouble, I said, delighted to help.
It must have been about 17:45 by the time I parked up in Elgin Crescent (close to her place and the pound shop).
It was a glorious sunny evening. The pavement outside the Duke of Wellington was heaving with trendy young folk eating, drinking and making merry. Trustafarians, mingling with local folk and people who work in the area.
This end of Portobello is the part where bijou Notting Hill meets social housing Notting Hill.
The street scene looked like Portobello as I had always imagined it before I moved to the area, but never really lived it, although I have lived in the neighbourhood now for well north of 30 years.
I hadn’t seen scenes like this since before lockdown…not since last summer…in truth I’d never really seen scenes like this before – it was as if the Notting Hill of my imaginings, back in the 1980s, when I chose to come and live here, had suddenly been brought into existence, filmically, in this time of pandemic. It certainly showed no signs of social distancing or increasing social need.
But just around the corner from that hedonistic street festival was an old lady who needs a few things from the pound shop so that she can get by for a few days; her son is ill and she was almost too proud to ask for help with her shopping.
Indeed, just up the road and around the corners are lots of people who need help, because my responder app goes off as often as I let it and the need for FoodCycle deliveries seems to be going up and up still.
But in many ways this is still the Notting Hill where I chose to pitch my tent 30+ years ago. It always was a strange mix of gentility and grunge.
Stand in the middle of Portobello Road at a suitable junction, such as the Elgin/Colville/Portobello one shown above, look one way and you can see boutique-style shops & The Electric…
…look the other way for the Sally Army, pound shops and (if you venture even further north), informal hawkers under the flyover on a market day.
Anyway, the pound shop indeed had all of the food items that my elderly client had requested. I had no idea that pound shops sold quality-stamped Danish bacon and posh-looking tubs of tiramisu for a pound each. Now I know.
Feeling like a mighty hunter who had landed his prey, I swaggered around the corner to my client with her swag. Old school Notting Hill, her place; a conversion in one of the many old, somewhat dilapidated, Victorian houses around there; not vastly different in architectural style from my place.
The client really did look old; late 80s or possibly even 90. She’d have hardly been a youngster when I moved in to the neighbourhood; she’d have been…
…57 or 58…
…that’s what I am now. There’s a pause for thought.
She thanked me. I wished her good luck and hoped she would enjoy her food.
Less than a minute later, I was back at the youthful throng of Portobello/Elgin:
Heaving even more, it was.
I couldn’t help wondering whether some of these trustas might deploy some of their energy towards volunteering. They mostly didn’t look as though they were demob happy after a hard day’s work. They mostly looked as though they had not yet been mobilised on much, ever, in their lives, other than looking good and having a jolly time.
As I drove back to Noddyland, I resolved to write up this little episode, but then realised that I hadn’t taken any pictures for the blog.
I then also realised that I had in fact never taken any pictures around Portobello. Back in the late 1980s, you didn’t tend to take pictures around your own environment…
…why would you?
So I resolved to return at lunchtime on the Friday and snap a few. They depict the market on a Friday lunchtime, rather than the hedonistic bar/cafe life of that Tuesday late afternoon, but the sun shone and I think I snapped a few nice pics around abouts my own manor.