a shop window on lower clapton rd

This is a shop window just round the corner from where I live. I've passed it often and never seen the writing there. I picked up a copy of 'Smoke - a London Peculiar: Issue 5' (a collection of writing by new writers about London), and read the following extract by Jude Rogers which described this window and made me wander round the corner to have another look. I've sent him an email asking if I can quote him and had no reply, so I'm going to anyway, because I like it...

"On Lower Clapton’s dramatic curve, where Hackney swings northwards towards the Lea, a weatherbeaten shopfront stands. Wedged between the open-door bustle of the Properfix Barbers ­ – all spotlights and scissorclicks – and a shop with no name that drapes saris next to black t-shirts painted with skulls, its easy to miss. As you stroll down this stretch, you see the schools of red buses impatient at the lights, the fishmonger’s teeming with colours and smells; the tired children having tantrums outside the Kings Hall; the eccentric pleasures of Umit and Son; its windows full of projectors and a creased piece of paper saying ‘Cine Film is made from silver, DVD is made from rust’, and the Strand building opposite, all dirty whites and green pastels, its Art Deco glamour fading into the smoke. The shopfront becomes another lonely space in the chaos, another lost piece of London’s ramshackle geography.

But one day I stopped. Perhaps my mind had wandered at the right moment or a sound pulled my attention upwards. Perhaps my eyes were wrenched by some twist of the wind or turn of the light to the words etched into the window, right at the very top of a pane whitewashed up to its peak. In a pale, gallant typeface, a gentle statement of intent, it said softly: ‘I don’t mind if you forget me’. If you didn’t stop and peer, you wouldn’t see these words, wouldn’t catch the quiet concession, the hint of reservation, the acceptance of loss, the sad, subtle charge of a story untold."

click here for Smoke's website