Out in the City: Let me out of this Notting Hill bubble

10 April 2012

I gave a party last week and invited 400 of my closest friends. Three hundred and forty-three of them came, including five men I fancied.

I was again working under the proviso that surely one should pull at one's own party. The odds were good. But of course I was too stressed, and then too drunk, to do anything.

Still, I woke up the next morning with a sense of achievement. Firstly, I had not disgraced myself: sometimes I panic in the middle of the night when I remember how at my 21st I had taken ketamine and been found repeating my name over and over again while holding onto a pillar that was in turn holding up the marquee.

Secondly, I had invited Katie Price — she and Cheryl Cole are the two people I love mostest in the whole wide world — and she had come. But I was less happy when I overheard that she had fallen in love with my housemate Willa and that they haven't stopped texting each other since.

It made me even unhappier that I overheard this all from two idiotic blondes who were sitting at El Camino underneath the Westway eating a burrito, discussing us. They went on to share a juicy piece of gossip about me that — unfortunately — was untrue, and as I'd gone to bed with room spin at 2am couldn't have been.

What was odd was that they were talking about me yet I'd never seen them before in my life. The Notting Hill bubble is getting claustrophobic, I thought, as I wandered down Portobello.

So this weekend I was encouraged to head east. I went to a friend's house off Bethnal Green. It used to be owned by a gangster called the Butcher and, as every criminal in the area is still scared of it, it never gets robbed.

On Sunday night I went to the fireworks in Victoria Park. These East Enders were celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Blitz and Forties music was blaring. I hung with the Pearly King and Pearly Prince of Finsbury, who are far more interesting than any real royal.

I loved the fact that the Tower Hamlets council was throwing this fête for free. I wish the Royal Borough of K&C had the nous to do something similar in Holland Park. But the jeunesse dorée of west London are far too self-conscious to dress up unless, of course, it's Carnival and they've taken copious amounts of pills.

"It would only be distasteful if they set off sirens," a friend joked, minutes before the noise of air raid sirens went up and search lights beamed into the sky.

Maybe anything goes in the East End. Maybe you can do whatever you like there without people gossiping about it the next day. Maybe it's time to move there.

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