"If you call your dad he can stop it all..."

To Shoreditch, then, in London's fashionable East End.

On the junction of Commercial and Great Eastern Street, there's a massive billboard tethered to a building advertising Wrangler Jeans.  The picture features a semi-feral girl, emerging head first from some green, stagnant-looking water; the caption,  "We are all animals."  11am on a Saturday morning and there's people stumbling round the streets of Hoxton looking like victims from a bomb blast, all dazed expressions and slightly jerky movements.  Ha, they've just not been to bed yet.  Tsk, kids!

I'm pretty shocked by the state of Shoreditch these days.  When I lived here, there was a certain shabby chic about it, sure, that felt a bit cool; hey, urban, a bit edgy, yadda yadda.  And, yes, I didn't go to bed some nights either.  Now it's just gone beyond ironic and looks horrible.  I could smell the mould growing outside The Old Blue Last.  There's broken windows and boarded up buildings a hop, skip and a jump from Shoreditch House with its rooftop swimming pool.  Everything's covered in graffiti, some of which is quite good but mostly agonisingly arch:  naked women in gas masks, sub-Banksy stencil work, yawn.

It baffles me why people are prepared to live here.  It baffles me, also, why the bar staff in the Griffin think it's somehow cool to put a Swastika on a head of Guinness instead of a shamrock.  I did ask, once, but I just got shrugged at, ironically.  It's probably part of the same condition.

Walking down Curtain Road, towards Mr N. and co's old warehouse, I pass The Hoxton Pony.  Semantics suggest that with a name like that it'd be a down-at-heel old boozer, like The Owl & The Pussycat or The Pride Of Spitalfields.  But, no, this is all modern and stuff, with brushed grey steel and tinted windows.  Ha -- do you see what they've done there?  Their website promises "an individual and unconventional slant to the gang of venues in Shoreditch" and the music that greets me when I open their homepage is... electroclash!  It's a virtual 2002, and no mistake.  But are they being ironic..?

I am nearly 40.