One of the reasons I no longer live in London is that I grew up in a fairly leafy part of west London, a part now very much home to well-heeled media types, television presenters and the like. We weren’t ‘well heeled’ as such, my parents just happened to buy at a time when real Londoners could afford to live in London, before relatively rich media types could afford to buy up properties and force the real Londoners out (mostly in the direction of Essex), easily capable of inflating house costs and pricing locals out.

When Mr. Keng and I first got together there was no way we could afford to live in that part of the city, so we moved to a fairly gritty, grimy and alien (to me) part of north London, almost as big a culture shock as if I’d moved to, say, Baltimore or Alice Springs. You recognise the language, but not much else.

In a flat that was broken into twice in the first eight months we were there, every teenage hoodlum saw crime as their only earning potential (that or dealing drugs).

Early one morning we were awoken to the sound of a great commotion, a car alarm go off and as we got up to see what was the source of the noise at 500am on a Sunday morning, saw one of our neighbours running down the street after a couple of teenage tearaways attempting to steal his car.

Car theft was nothing unique in that area, but seeing a man dressed only in a trench coat and boots chasing after them was, even for London, a strange sight.

I saw that Carson, who blogs for Fab Free, blogged a trench coat from American Bazaar a few days ago, free at Hoorenbeek (there’s also a ladies version, buttoned up and less revealing) (no group join fee). SL had to replicate RL, yet again!

One model, one L$1 running pose from the Marketplace, and a couple of days for our model to set the scene up, and here’s a replication of that sight from many years ago.

We didn’t live there long after that, and the die was cast. We’d move further north where, for the price of a London terraced house, we could afford a detached house with almost an acre of woodland and garden around it.

Incidentally, Love has subsequently blogged the female version of the same outfit.

Ella