As you leave Shoreditch going north towards Hackney you will probably go up the Kingsland Road.

This too has been a melting pot over the recent years, transforming itself from local Hackney types through a period of Russian occupation, and now it’s the turn of Viet Nam.

There are more Viet Namese restaurants in this little stretch than anywhere else in the whole of London (OK I made up the statistic, don’t quote it! But hopefully you get the point).

Eating here is great, assuming of course that you like the food that is a bit like a meeting point between Thai and Chinese. It’s usually dirt cheap. The places tend to be heaving with nationals and students, and if it’s not busy you have to ask yourself why – you might be better off queuing for a busy one rather than saving time and eating at a quieter one. And what makes it better still is that you can often get knock of beers from the Russian off licenses down the road for stupidly low prices.

End result. Have a fun meal and get drunk, or at least on the way, for about £15. And they say that London is expensive. Not if you know where to look.

We went to Tay Do Café, it was probably the first one I went to years ago and we have been back there so many times. The staff are often surly to the point of being rude – but that’s part of the fun.

The toilets aren’t fun though – just hold on if you can, they’re bad enough to put you off your food.

We used to live just off brick Lane. It was an amazing place to have mates come to visit as it used to seem that all life existed there.

It was a cultural melting pot of Jews, and Banglas, and Indians, and super rich city types, and artists who’d chose well a decade earlier and street traders and some pretty nasty types too.

It still is, but it just feels a whole lot more commercial now I guess.

It’s still exciting and there are still a good proportion of little independent shops surviving.

But what amazed me is the number of big brands who have tried to get in under everyone’s radar by trading as something different. Timberland. All Saints. Hobbs. Karen Millen and others, either using a completely different name hoping some cool will rub off, or making their name so small that you don’t notice for a while.

I wandered around for ages, even saw a guy I knew and had a quick catch up in the Golden Hart, a pub on the corner of Commercial Street where Tracy Emin will often be drunk and lording it over anyone who cares.

I checked out Chester Street and a cool house that is often in the magazines on Bacon Street. Looks nothing from the outside, but looks amazing on the inside. I missed the chance to have a peep once when there was an open house there.

Bloody hell business is slow this month. I might need to think about finding a real job at this rate!

No fear though. The Andrew will win through.

I decided to make good use of the quiet time and shoot off down to the smoke for a couple of days of catching up with a few mates and seeing if I can drum up some work somewhere. I often find that when work is quiet just turning up at someone’s office helps them remember all the things that they really ought to have asked you to do.

I booked a ticket dirt cheap on The Trainline and then booked in to my old favourite Kings Cross Hotels of Jesmond Dene. They’re the same guys we use up in the north east when we’re working out of Newcastle. Good clean, simple hotels that deliver what you need, don’t bother with stuff you don’t need, and as a consequence they charge you a decent rate. The location is the best bit though, if you come out of Euston you can just walk there, and it’s even closer from Kings Cross or St Pancras.

I will be demanding that we have a curry on Brick Lane, a Vietnamese on Kingsland Road, and too many beers wherever we go.

I really must win some work when I’m there or I’ll be relying on my mates to sub me.

Everyone has to pull that one now and then, but you don’t want to do it more than once in a year or you become a parasite rather than a friend.

And the story of car repairs at home goes on!

Having been delighted with the ease and convenience of ChipsAway I then heard an ad on XFM Manchester for a new local business called Tyres on You Drive.

It’s just that.

A tyre replacement service where they come to you.

So I called. It wasn’t the cheapest – The AA quoted the best price online, but then I went to their local place, actually a National Tyres depot, and they moaned on and tried to charge an extra twenty quid for each tyre, so I left.

These guys have just turned up and got to work straight away firstly repairing a puncture (dirty great screw in a rear tyre, reckon it has been there for ages as it has always needed the most air when I have checked them). When he’s done with that he’ll pop a ne pair of Avons on the front. Total cost is £260 because for some reson the Passat has higher load bearing tyres than most cars. Maybe that’s because it’s a big estate that often gets used more like a small van.

The fella comes in, hand out for the shake, shows me his immaculate van come workshop, and he has won my trust straight away. He looks a bit of a case, but he has been well trained, he’s polite, clean, and I’ll recommend them to others – as I am right here right now.

Although I hire all sorts of vans and mini bus type things for the day to day work I do as a driver, my own car is just a rather boring run of the mill Passat. I bought it about two years ago, and almost straight away a neighbour put a big fat and deep scratch in the door.

He was having problems at the time. Like major problems, the sort of thing that sees you do time in an institution, not prison, poor fellow was in the looney bin.

So while we knew it was him, Richard has never been questioned about the incident – I just make sure that the car is parked scratch side towards his as a silent reminder, day in day out. He’s probably in denial – but I’m sure it nags.

Anyway, after all this time I have finally got around to having it sorted.

Right now, Steve, from ChipsAway is downstairs, rubbing it down, filling it, spraying it, lacquering it, polishing it, and if their past work is anything to go by it’ll look like there was never a scratch.

They are bloody brilliant. It’ll cost a storming £130 – but it’s three hours work and he comes to me, so I reckon it’s worth it.

Shame he can’t work a similar miracle on my Morris Minor!

How come we have suddenly become obsessed with hoarding in this country, largely through what’s on TV?

Most people didn’t even know that there are some strange folk in their neighbourhoods who have become obsessed by hoarding.

Then when the first programme or two came on the TV it was news. It was interesting. The people seemed truly strange, even deranged.

But then came the next programme, and then the series, and there were all sorts of experts jumping onto the bandwagon. And frankly it became a bit boring.

What’s more interesting though is that I don’t necessarily believe it is just the freaks. Loads of people are verging on the edge of the problem without realising. The kids toys spill over and out of control, you leave it for a few days and suddenly you stop noticing – and you have a problem.

For heaven’s sake though peeps. It’s not difficult.

Either have a great big clear out and dump it all, or failing that, if you can’t get rid of stuff because it has real, or intrinsic value, then go to somewhere like Extra Room Self Storage. If you live in the Midlands it’s easy to get to, a good price, and everything is kept safe and secure.

But please don’t make us watch people with a storage nightmare on the TV anymore. I know I don’t have to watch it, but I can’t help myself!

I can’t believe the news each day when they are talking about The Co-operative Bank and the trouble it is going through.

One minute it is poised to take on a few hundred of the old Lloyds TSB branches and become a mid sized player in UK banking.

Then the next minute is seems that it is at risk of going under. The Lloyds deal failed, largely on the back of the problems it inherited when it took on the Britannia Building Society when that was about to collapse.

Then days after that is announced it just gets worse as the chief exec walks out and Moodys down grades its rating not by a notch or two, but by absolutely loads to junk status.

The huge irony in all this is that it traded with the interesting and clever strap line of Good With Money for years. But then when it dropped those words it immediately says to anyone reading the semantics that it is no longer Good With Money – or even good with money! That may be lost on some, but it made me smile.

I’m interested because I have a lot of money with the bank – but fortunately it’s a lot of money borrowed with them!

Not much to worry about there then. I don’t expect to get away with it if they do go down though.

For as long as I can remember I have had a Morris Minor.

OK, that’s a figure of speech to a small extent, but I have had one almost continuously from age twenty through to now.

That’s three cars over nearly thirty years.

The first lasted the shortest time. It was very old, but very lovely when I got it. I was going to give up my job and go to college, so I needed to sell my little sports car to pay the loan I had. I saw a Morris for sale for what seemed a lot of money, but when I drove it I feel in love and traded down, paid off the loan, and had enough for my first Moggy road trip.

My best mate and I took it on some serious drives, including right down to Morocco, although that trip was also its downfall. On the way home after a big party night we crashed in the Pyrenees. The car was a write off, we hitched home over a thousand miles, but it was still brilliant.

I’m going to have to tell the story of all three I think.

Perhaps it’ll be a way of keeping my blogging efforts going when I don’t actually feel like writing anything.

Nice one (spoken with a Manchester snarl). I’ll do just that.

It’s mad that you can run a successful business and yet still go bankrupt if you get into a cash flow crisis.

I’m lucky in that I don’t have to pay out a lot from my little affair, but nonetheless some of my suppliers take so long to cough up on an invoice that they begin to cause me worry. Now I know that I am within my rights to charge them interest, but that’s not realistic is it? I need to stay in their good books if I’m to be called upon for the next job.

I’ve just put a friend with a similar issue on to a good potential solution to having an unpaid invoice problem. Touch Financial factoring advice will help him decide whether invoice discounting could be a good route for him. It’s a way of selling your invoices at a high percentage of their face value and getting paid straight away, then generally you’ll get some more cash when the customer actually pays up. It does cost a bit, but it’s a whole lot better than wasting earning time chasing payment yourself.

Most of the banks will offer you a service like this, but chances are you’ll want to keep something in reserve, not necessarily disclosing everything you do financially to the bank. It’s nice to be able to have something extra to pull out of the hat if you need to go to them for a loan in future isn’t it?

We are all rather downhearted around the area today.

One of our friends. A shop keeper. Bon viveur. And local character, died last night.

Calling her a bon viveur sort of suggests that she was a drinker. That is certainly not the case, but she’d still be the life of the party.

Poor girl lived to the max. Working into the night, but then joining the gang in the pub to enjoy an hour of banter before going home. Always with her lovely collie following her on its invisible lead of loyalty.

She loved the banter, but would hardly ever bother to have a drink at all. Of course the pub didn’t care as Elaine was an attraction in herself and we’d go there just because we thought she’d turn up.

And work?

She’d start early, finish late, but never seem to care.

She said that the day she started doing her own thing was the last day that she worked, because she had so much fun doing it that it couldn’t possibly be considered work.

We’ll miss you Elaine.

Bloody hell. 51. Looked 45. Lived like she was 35. And her daughter usually introduced her as her sister.

Good night my lovely friend.