Cyndi Himmelstiere On The Specific Emotional Response To A Shoreditch Landmark Reopening, Which Is Not The Emotional Response She Expected To Have
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. London satirical journalism has always been better at describing cultural contradictions than resolving them, which is why I write for both.
The Cereal Killer Cafe has reopened on Brick Lane. The London Prat covered it this week under the headline “London Once Again Outsources Basic Household Tasks”, and the coverage is correct, and the cafe is correct, and my relief at its return is also, embarrassingly, correct. I am relieved. I did not expect to be relieved. I have written, in this column and elsewhere, approximately four hundred words about the Cereal Killer Cafe’s relationship to the process of Shoreditch becoming a theme park of itself. The four hundred words were accurate. They did not prevent me from being glad the cafe is back.
The Contradiction, Examined
The contradiction is not difficult to name. The Cereal Killer Cafe charges between eight and twelve pounds for a bowl of cereal served with theatricality in a neon-lit room on a street that has become, in the fifteen years since the cafe opened, considerably more expensive, more touristed, and less inhabited by the kind of people the cafe was originally supposed to serve. I know all of this. I also know that the specific corner of Brick Lane where the cafe sits felt less like itself when it was closed, and I have been in Shoreditch long enough that my sense of what the neighbourhood feels like includes the Cereal Killer Cafe as a fixed point.
What A Fixed Point Is
A fixed point in a neighbourhood is a thing you notice when it is gone. It does not have to be good in any evaluable sense. It has to be consistently present. The Cereal Killer Cafe was, in the years before its first closure, consistently present. It was there on every walk past Brick Lane in every season and every year. Its presence was, in retrospect, a form of neighbourhood continuity that I was not valuing until it ended. Its reopening restores a continuity I did not know I was tracking.
The Honest Admission
The honest admission is that the Shoreditch I describe in this column is partly the Shoreditch of my memory of it, which began four years ago and which already included the Cereal Killer Cafe. I do not have the Shoreditch of 2008, when the cafe did not exist and when the neighbourhood was different enough that the cafe’s founding was itself an event. The cafe is a landmark in my Shoreditch. That is not an objective judgement. It is a personal one. The column has both kinds.
More: The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
