At last! ES magazine provides a reason to live in Clapham

Guilty pleasures can occasionally bear fruit.

One of my many such pleasures is to scan the celeb-stacked pages of ES magazine every Thursday. It's wonderful moan-fodder for pessimists, grumpy old farts, prigs and miserabilists like me.

Last week they featured yet another pair of posh young west London fashion gals,  Edie Campbell and Christabel MacGreevy. I started reading it because the name Edie made me think of the Warhol muse, but it turned out this was nothing to do with Ms Sedgwick, and rather more in the spirit of AbFab's Eddy.

Nevertheless I carried on reading, because despite everything they were indeed extremely good-looking. I even liked the look of their Itchy Scratchy Patches that you can buy from their website and iron onto your jeans. I can remember sewing pink velvet and green satin and orange corduroy patches onto ancient Levis jeans back in about 1974 so I am a natural customer.

After all the usual stuff about their wild times and their famous friends, they are asked where they like to go out. They giggle a bit but refuse to specify, and mock the types who will say things like "I will only be seen in Shoreditch…Peckham….etc"

They love to go all over London, and dear Christabel even has a studio in Camberwell and she does love it "down there" and she tries to spend as much time as she can "down there".

The cunning interviewer has another go: "Where would we never find you?"
They name a nightclub or two, then Edie asks Christabel, "Where would you never be seen dead now?"

"Fulham or Clapham. What happens in Clapham?" asks Christabel.

Yes! There we have it. You just have to imagine that look of disgust on her face as she enunciates "Clapham".

How great to have it so explicitly expressed: Clapham is now the antithesis of a fashionable or desirable place. It is still what it always was: an ugly, dull, mediocre place where people live. Another dismal zone 2 London suburb where a mixed bunch of types have washed up and are trying to get on with their lives. Let's face it, nearly all of them would rather be in Islington, Notting Hill or these days, Dalston or Bethnal Green!

Yes, there's a good deal of ghastliness in SW4.

We have all known this for ages, but to hear it spoken by such a fashionable young W11 thing is, oh, such a joy! Because, if such dear creatures feel this is the one place, the one thing they can be rude about without anyone telling them off for political incorrectness, etc etc…then surely that's one clear sign that this is where we (I am mean I) should be! We're just a few degrees off being on the cusp again!

Anyway, sorry, sorry, sorry.