Seriously I love it. I have a garden big enough to have discovered a (fourth) pond we didn t even

Apparently, a new mortgage mercat de la boqueria questionnaire has recently been introduced by the powers that be to make the unalloyed pleasure of purchasing a house an even greater joy. I imagine Question 1 is something along the lines of,
If mercat de la boqueria the answer is yes you are immediately denied a mortgage while they arrange for you to be openly mocked in the nearest public space that hasn t been sold to amoral developers, on the understanding (rather than condition ) that a tiny alcove is set aside and labelled affordable housing cupboard .
Having spent the last seven years happily ensconced in Battersea, mercat de la boqueria two miles from where I was born, I would very much like to have bought a house there, but sadly I don t speak Russian, have a trust fund, or wish to live in a cupboard.
Battersea has, to use a technical term, gone mental. The imminent arrival of the new American Embassy and the attendant building sites along the river in Vauxhall, the millionaires-only-need-apply Power Station development and the boon to travel delays that is a planned mercat de la boqueria extension to the Northern line have fired up a massive housing bubble within a bubble that is itself within mercat de la boqueria such a bubble they should get Michael Buble to play the opening ceremony. The present state of the London housing market is a genuine horror mercat de la boqueria story, with its roots in the politics of the eighties, the ramifications of which threaten to stretch into a bleak and irreversible future for which we will all be poorer.
It was my good friend Marcus Brigstocke , himself a long term resident of SW11, who recently mercat de la boqueria pointed out to me that Battersea was becoming like Hong Kong essentially mercat de la boqueria lots of very rich people living on top of one another, and if there s a phrase to truly take the charm out of an area, that s it right there. Marcus is moving to Balham because he managed to get on the property ladder a long time ago and because he does considerably more telly than me.
Seriously I love it. I have a garden big enough to have discovered a (fourth) pond we didn t even know we had when we bought the place. I have three bedrooms, a loft, a basement, ample space for expansion and I m still waiting for the morning when I wake up and decide the whole thing has been a dreadful idea, but with every passing day that seems more and more unlikely. To buy anything like this in Battersea, we would simply have had to add a 0 to the price, and that, for somewhere twenty miles away, really is proper mental.
My first farewell to Battersea was to a building I had already said goodbye to some time ago. What is now a second outpost of Brixton s (rightly) well-regarded Boqueria used to be a tiny branch of the less well-regarded Barclays Bank until it shut suddenly a couple of years ago, with the cheery announcement that the standard of service would not be affected in any way. Since I now had to cross a rather large river to get to my nearest branch, I begged to differ, but simply mercat de la boqueria chalked mercat de la boqueria it down as yet another bare-faced lie from the financial sector.
The building lay dormant until a few months ago when the builders moved in and in no time at all we had a shiny new tapas restaurant perched on the junction of Queenstown Road and Battersea Park Road, right next to the traffic lights, just like in Spain. Boqueria is named after the famous market in Barcelona, and really my only serious criticism of the whole venture is one of location. As Marcus and I sat on the raised area overlooking the crossroads and tucked into some really quite excellent Spanish food, I could not have felt less Hispanic if you d nicked my football, banned bullfighting mercat de la boqueria and refused to let me have a nap in the afternoon.
Marcus had been singing Boqueria s praises mercat de la boqueria for some time, and for the most part with good reason. mercat de la boqueria While a plate of cured hams was not the finest I ve ever had, we had gone for the mid-price option, and with Spanish ham you get what you pay for. There were many highlights beautifully plump anchovies in vinaigrette matched with perfect mercat de la boqueria olives, spicily fragrant chorizo with cider, faultless prawns, punchy alioli, delicious squid in its own ink with rice and a zinging plate of courgette carpaccio so cleverly done it had letters after its name. There was good bread, a fine selection of cheeses and the only minor let down was a pork shoulder with foie gras and truffle puree which probably suffered most from simply being more expensive and yet not quite as exciting as we thought it would be. All this was washed down with sparkling water and fresh pink grapefruit juice cutely served in jam jars. We finished with a couple of cortado coffees and a bill of 82.55 excl service, which seemed very reasonable for what we ate, which was quite a lot. Would I recommend Boqueria? In terms of food and service, unreservedly, but it is instructive that every time I recall the meal, the image that persists is one of a huge articulated lorry belching fumes behind mercat de la boqueria Marcus s head. I would happily mercat de la boqueria return, but as I