It's crisp in London. We're hitting freezing every few days and tonight I braved the cold to get to a local restaurant. It's no secret we don't deal with the cold well in the UK. In the last few days it's been -30 in Eastern Europe, yet here in London if the thermometers sink below 2 degrees, alarms start going off.
Anyways, people were scuttling off the street pretty fast and one of the places that was benefiting from all this scuttling was the laundrette in the road behind my place. Laundrettes are warm. So if you're going to scuttle they're a pretty good destination on a night like this. But they're also tediously boring. True, my last encounter with a launderette was back at college, but thinking back to all that waiting for all those endless drying cycles still hurts (the trick is to put dry towels in there with the wet stuff apparently). It's just boring. And with few exceptions your average launderette owner hasn't exactly done a heap of stuff to change things.
Except tonight it's movie night at the local washerteria. Thanks to a Dell Lattitude and a pair of headphones the world's changed. The girl with the shoulder-length brown hair and the woollen jacket is a million miles away from the drying cycles around her. And I guess that's how it's gonna be from here on. Digital technology, even before it gets networked, can transform public and private spaces. I'm just wishing I'd had more than a heap of Sunday papers back at college.
