As I stand at the crossroads at the top of the High Street, where I think of as the top of the hill, I look at Church Street stretching upwards and realise I am actually only half way up. To my left and right is Hoe Street, a mental barrier across which lies the Village. I do not wish to go there. Let others speak for the Village.

I shall turn back, down to St James's Street and carry on my musings about why I like this town. I shall do it in the part I actually like. Before returning, standing on the stretch of High Street from Cleveland Park Avenue to the end, I contemplate the derelict arcade site wrapped in its piss-soaked corporate health and safety fence. It is thought by many to be one of the biggest monuments to the public disgrace and shame we have brought ourselves to, having elected a council of monumental incompetence and let it stay in power for year after year. Something must be done. That is history I am not so interested in, and no doubt, something will be done. I let the arcade site pass from view.

I am actually more ashamed of Hoe Street, with its Macdonald's and wall to wall estate agents, a street of falsity and get rich quick deceptions, of the shabby neglect and hopelessness that radiates from the Citizen's Advice Bureau stranded within its midst. It is a street of lies. It stretches to my left, past the old closed cinema and on to Forest Road, in my mind an unredeemingly blighted place. No doubt there are residents who love it as much as I do St James's Street, Coppermill and even Blackhorse Road.

But as I stand at the top of the hill, it is not love I feel, but shame. I am ashamed of the slot joints, bookies shops and the pawnbrokers, the rubbish consumer stores like Bright House with promotions of fantasy life-styles, living by farming the interest rates and killing the false hopes of an under-educated underclass. Why are these greedy bastards so disproportionately represented in our local economic life? How can we go on with these blood-suckers draining the wealth and hope from our borough and giving nothing back?

I need to lift my mood before I call somebody a cunt. Why pick on the individual when its a rotten system that has been going on for years? I can still look back down the hill, and see the wonderful people, their fabric shops, food shops and supermarkets, the cafes, - young people with energy trying to make a go of their lives. People with optimism have invested themselves into making a go of their lives here - Ligita, Glamour, Faris's Supermarket, Simple Design, Ferdin Fashion Fabrics and countless telecom companies are proof of this. Even the two young graphic designers who have set up the egg stall outside Woolworth's are.

Its easy to be distracted by the grim sweepers and feel how their optimism must be drained away, as day after day the dvd gangs, the hoodie merchants, the piss-artists and drug addicts slowly take the shine off their dreams. I can't ignore the truth - we do have a problem with our public spaces. They are full of a public which is human and flawed. But this is a great place. It is a great place now and it could be so much better. I think of all the money that gets wasted and channeled into gambling and out of the borough to shareholders in the leafy shires. I know that the people who hire teams of amoral marketeers to promote this cash machine have the gall to look down on places like Walthamstow with contempt. I think of the respected people who invest in the pawnbrokers and loan sharking companies taking their family holidays abroad - anywhere they don't have to see or think of people they see as chavvy scum. I know they are wrong - that people round here, on the whole, are not how they are seen by these hypocrites at all. Even the local scumbags are more interesting than that. Most people are, well, people. Why are their weaknesses being taken advantage of so much? Yes, they should be responsible for themselves - given a chance they usually are.

When I first started writing this blog, it was autumn. Now it is summer.
Now I again have the pleasures, then just a memory, of summer evenings' strolls. The street I love most, at the bottom end of the High Street has changed in the last few months. We did see Oakam open, yet another outfit geared up to living off the backs of the poor. I see they are trying to convert the flats above their premises into a rat-hole of 'studios' to see if they can squeeze out a little more. Passersby still sometimes scavenge after the market, before the sweepers arrive, but not as much as before. It is light and sunny. In June, the tables outside the cafes were legalised and this picking would have to take place under too many eyes. I will have to look on the internet to see if there is such a thing as a 'pride to light ratio'. New places, have opened, and old ones, like Rio, are flourishing as never before. The Windmill now has parties in it of an evening, and the commuters don't hurry on home quite as determinedly as they did. Things are just a little bit easier.

Of course, many are still just on their way to Sainsbury's, as ever, but a few folk call in at Faris's or Tradicia, as well, and maybe have a coffee on the way. The Turkish shop is as welcoming as ever, tomatoes 39p a pound.

What of the newcomers, the Russians, Lithuanians and Poles? I feel they look more purposeful now, less wary and more like they live here now. Their clothes are slowly blending in with the crowd, there are fewer flipflops and shell suits and pasty faced scowls beneath hair showing its roots. Friends keep telling me the Poles are all going home, but I am not so sure. My polish neighbour didn't leave after he dislocated his shoulder taking his motorbike to the building site. His baby is growing bonny and her mother wants to find a job where she can use her degree. Could some of them be beginning to think of this as home, I wonder?

Last autumn I was not yet captured by Olympic fever. I have been to China since and am still not though Beijing will start in a couple of weeks. The council has installed a huge TV screen as part of the build up to 2012 in the Town Square. The Town Square means nothing to me. St. James's St. library, which does, is still empty on Coppermill Lane.

When I started this blog I wondered what made this place feel like home. I thought I could seek an answer in a few 'coming weeks'. I see now that it will take longer than this. I have only taken up a literary walk up the High Street so far, which as any middle-aged bloke can tell you who has been wild cherry picking and to an illegal rave on the same summer Sunday morning in Walthamstow, is not all there is to this part of the world.