About a Boy | St James's Walk, Clerkenwell — the island with a doorbell

Will Freeman has never had a job. He lives off royalties from "Santa's Super Sleigh," the Christmas song his father wrote, and he cuts the day into units — a haircut is one unit, watching Countdown is one, lunch is two. The flat where he runs this system, all matte surfaces and a wall of CDs and a pool table standing where a dining table should be, was built on a stage. The front door was not. The production dressed an entrance onto 16–18 St James's Walk, at the corner of Sekforde Street in Clerkenwell, and that doorway is the one a twelve-year-old keeps turning up at.

The Walk is a narrow lane along the back of the old churchyard, Georgian brick on one side, converted workshops on the other, the tower of St James's closing the view at the end. Farringdon station is a four-minute walk. Nothing about the street announces itself.

That is the joke the location makes. Will insists that every man is an island, and the film hands him an island address in the middle of London — a lane most people pass on their way somewhere louder. Stand at the Sekforde Street corner on a weekday morning and count the cars. You will hear your own footsteps. That quiet is the life he built, and it is the thing the boy walks in and wrecks.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.