Colour Me Walking

Searching For ‘My’ Soho

Ever since I started writing as an ‘occupation’, whatever that means, Soho has been the one place I have periodically disappeared off to. It’s the place where a large portion of my first book was written in theatre bars, time was spent skulking around Frith Street the year I first went freelance, and my colleagues still joke as to how the ‘baby journo’ once haunted the Groucho.

I recently read Amy Arthur’s piece titled Looking For Blue - which has the prompt of going for a colour walk. Intrigued by the proposition - all the while caught in a place of trying not to become burnt out at work, on the cusp of one role being curtailed - it seemed like a very good excuse to go visit my favourite place. The idea is simple: follow the colour of your choosing, and document with a camera or smartphone as a kind of mindfulness exercise. I chose yellow.

Looking for blue

Soho is a place of history; the place that I work often, as it turns out, is the place where television was invented almost 100 years ago. It is the same place where a private war of a campaign has been built, films have flourished, stories swapped and then forgotten. Now, that is the one thing that is written too often in the margins, later excised out of the final piece. Those are the small fragments I can never tire of.