Happy Everything! It's 2009 look!

Dear Rachel,

Like many of us I'm sure, I get quite nostalgic when I imagine the smell of fried onions, fag smoke and piss, all mixed together and coming at me through freezing rain while trudging along the Barking Road. This is what going up the footie smelled like before it went all gay, and I spent an inordinate amount of my younger, better days buggering about watching my beloved yet profoundly annoying West Ham. Without wishing to be vulgar, I have always thought that being a West Ham fan is like looking at your genitals and discovering that you've contracted some horrible STD: despite being irritating, distressing and frequently embarrassing, you'd never be without them.

Traditionally suspicious of victory, West Ham have snared a massive haul of two trophies in my entire lifetime. When I was was growing up, however, they were known as a 'good cup side.' This meant that, in theory, they were good at winning the FA Cup - and with three victories in only one hundred and fourteen attempts, the facts certainly bear this out. Despite the unlikeliness of West Ham actually getting to Wembley, FA Cup Final day was, for idiot urchin children like us, the summer solstice. Or maybe it was more like a little Christmas, but in May and without presents or joy. In any case, it was certainly special: for a start, it was likely to be the only live footie you saw all year, which is strange to think about now. Also, this was before keyboards were invented, so you couldn't just download stuff or whatever. It was unreal, you would look at this fantastic spectacle which was happening only about six miles from your street, and was happening live, now, at that very moment. It was wildly exciting.

Over the actual Christmas just gone, I finally watched the 1979 FA Cup Final, between Arsenal and Manchester United. It is regarded as one of the most dramatic Finals of all time, and, as I discovered while listening closely to commentary by Brian 'Is There Something You Want To Tell Us?' Moore, and a clearly drunken Brian Clough, one of the most homoerotic. Those of you who don't want to know the final score should look away now.

[You'll be wanting to click 'read more' now, for a rambling account of a thirty year old football match]

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ogm!!!1 teh animation!!111

Ahoy there, casual lovers

I am over tired at the moment, and I know this because I happened upon the opening sequence of Bagpuss the other day and very nearly burst into tears.   Bagpuss is a genuinely warm and lovely programme, although I was always a bit worried about the sepia photards of Emily that appear at the beginning, as she looked to my undeveloped mind like the ghost of a dead child.    I also loved Pipkins, which featured a mental rabbit called Hartley the Hare, who looks like Basil Brush would do if he had been in the Happy Mondays.    He was a wreck, and in a permanent state of decline but I loved him, like Emily loved Bagpuss.   I once got very upset when I noticed that the Pipkins van had a dent in the rear door, having to be calmed down by my Auntie Beryl.  

[You should do 'read more' now, and at the end I have put links to both Bagpuss and Hartley the Hare, largely for the benefit of foreign types who are unfamiliar with the English tradition of posh and/or gay children's television characters.    I draw particular attention to the first link 0:58 - 1:47, in which Hartley claims to have 'beautiful ears', a 'glorious nose' and 'wildly exciting eyes'.]

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ogm!!11! teh west yard!!1

Ahoy there, casual lovers

When not at Camden, I can often be found drifting around NW1, NW5, N19, or E's 1-9 like something out of a novel by Dickens, a painting by Lowry or advert by St Mungo's Shelter for the London Homeless.   Like any Englishman, I consider it my birthright to nip into various hostelries of my acquintance and have a swift half with the friends, associates, petty criminals, and general violence enthusiasts who comprise my social circle.   I have no capacity for alcohol whatsoever, as previously discussed here on September 4th, which makes me all the more impressed with a simple drinking game common among ladies in London in the 1730s, which any ladies reading this in contemporary times might want to make a note of for the forthcoming Christmas season.  The rules are like this: 1) Find two friends - this game is traditionally for three players.  For authenticity, they should be called Molly or Meg or Eliza, have few teeth, raucous cackling laughs and probably work as competitively-priced prostitutes.   2) Drink gin.   3) Carry on drinking gin until two of you are dead.  4) The last lady alive is the winner.    Say what you like, it knocks the shit of vodka shots, pretending to be happy, crying yourself to sleep, and being sick in your hair for a girls night out.  

(You'd be better off clicking 'read more' at this point)

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ogm!!11!!1 teh joint effort's!!11

Ahoy there, casual lovers.

Those of you familiar with the far end of the Stables Market at Camden - where, as you might recall, we had a little shop for a while - will know that venturing up the cobbled ramp in the dark and the rain is bleak, depressing, and like accidentally wandering onto the set of Bladerunner, or between the pages of George Orwell's dystopian classic 'It's 1984!'

I popped up there the other Sunday to see what was what, as I'd quite like to get our old shop back, for a lot of the newer stuff we've been mucking about with all year.   There's a tarot reader in it these days, which yes, we didn't see coming.  Otherwise, things are pretty much as they were.    Steve Veedubs still has the shop next door, for which I paved the way by lying to the former occupant that the market was being demolished.   Steve, who once drank a great quantity of his own urine, initially by mistake, is an excellent and trusted friend of the House of Griefjunkie.   If, instead of writing Baloo as a lovely old clearly gay bear, Walt Disney had instead portrayed him as an enthusiastically flatulent ex engineer who is so gadget obsessed that he would buy a dog turd if you put a microchip in it, it would pretty much be Steve.

(You'll need to click 'Read more', and now is an ideal time)

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ogm!!111! its teh german's!!111

Ahoy there, casual lovers

I was on the quiet carriage of a train the other day, reading the Downing Street Years - which, incidentally, is the most grown up thing you can do - when a slight mishearing of a tannoy announcement lead me to believe that there was a Nazi trolley service passing through. The phrase 'at seat' (which to my relief was what the trolley service turned out to be) when uttered in a lumbering and neanderthal northern accent sounds like 'Natzee', as opposed to the correct and melodious southern 'Nartsie', and the announcer was from somewhere in the north. Bolton, Sheffield, I dunno. Somewhere. In any case, I would probably have have been in the clear, racially speaking, if it had come to checking documents and bloodlines, as I am descended from at least six generations of undiluted total fucking idiot, employed in Chatham Dockyards in Kent, or the Port of London, in London. My grandmother walked to Chatham from Whitechapel, where she is from, to get work, met my grandfather there and married him on the basis that he 'had a nice hat'. Their courtship was romantic, and involved lots of walks in Victoria Park in Mile End, during one of which they adopted a stray dog called Mickey. They also named all their subsequent dogs Mickey, and many of them enjoyed far more success and prosperity then any of their human descendants.

[There is more stuff, you need to click the easily missed 'Read More' at this point.]

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ogm!!1! teh street entertainer's!1

Ahoy there, casual lovers,

Yeah I dunno if you remember a couple of years ago, there used to be this hunchy bloke with child legs who used to play Nowhereman all day on a sort of metal harp in the cobbled yard at Camden, right next to the pizza place. The mentally insufficient warbling Beatles classics is just the sort of thing to sharpen your apetite right up, so the pizza people must have been well chuffed. Incidentally, scandal fans will be interested to learn that all the loose change he used to get from suddenly not that hungry passers by was spent on a well known local prostitute and crystal meth afficianado, in what must have been very bleak sexual congress indeed.

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ogm!!11! teh bleary idiot's!11!

Ahoy there, casual lovers

Yeah, one of our celebrity customers is none other than telly chefess Nigella Lawson, who, as I am fond of pointing out, has two legs but, incredibly, three thighs. I was watching a show of hers the other day where she was going on about visiting some fish market in Portugal and being 'enchanted' by all the traders singing and such as they dragged the mornings' catch up to their stalls.

It prompted me to consider how enchanted she would be in the East Yard of Camden Lock at 7 am, with a bunch of not-getting-any-younger idiots blearily shouting at each other to fuck off. Usually mingling with this are the horribly juicy range of noises produced by Sammy the Orange hockling up phlegm, which sounds like a racehorse being throttled and is audible as far away as Belsize Park. I must drop Lawson an invite to pop down and see how peckish she feels after listening to twenty minutes of that, while having to contend with Dave trying to put his cock in her coffee for a laugh.

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ogm!111 hear's to teh happy couple!111

Ahoy there, casual lovers

Being a Londoner I am suspicious of air that I can't chew, I need to be mugged at least annually and if someone isn't trying to blow me up I don't feel loved. I was therefore on principle less than enthralled with having to trawl out to Gloucestershire, which could be on the moon for all I know, for Joe and Abby's wedding. The ceremony itself - over which, let's not forget, I was actually presiding - took place in the garden of Abby's uncle's house or something, and those of us who made up what was effectively the Away support for Joe had met in Bristol to await a minibus. Our progress was immediately hampered by having to hunt around for some girl who nobody actually knew and was only known by her description, which was 'very fat'. This was further complicated by the fact that, as the enormous woman in question was very sensitive about her size, no one was to make any reference at all to, I dunno, cake retention, placing armed guards around the wedding buffet, or cramming food into your face like a panicking hamster.

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ogm!11 i needlessly fought teh law!11

Ahoy there, casual lovers

Yeah, considering I don't like either honey or brandy, I was intruiged to find myself banging honey brandy shots off the bar at the Wellington at 3 in the morning with the rest of the Idiot Battalion making up Joe's stag night. It was a shambolic crew by that point, as you can probably imagine, and I had reached the point where words seemed to be too large to get out of my mouth. I have a recollection of the best man raising a glass to the happy couple and falling over, exactly like the Statue of Liberty would do, and of Piers - Joe's brother, with the title of ringbearer on the day of the wedding itself, like some kind of hobbit or whatever - shouting at a jukebox.

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ogm!!!111! teh matrimony's!!11

Ahoy there, casual lovers

I decided to escape the confines of Griefjunkie Towers and go to a county fair the other day, which is how I came to be watching fourteen sullen labradors being led around a field in the pouring rain to, improbably, Solitary Sister by Seal.   I had been particularly keen to see the display of working dogs in case they were going to pull accountancy skillz out, but they had nothing more remarkable than the ability to walk slowly in a big circle, although one of them was pulling a tiny cart that had nothing in it.   I am a noted dogophile and tbh cant get enough of the hairy little fools, but it was proper raining so I left them to their unenthusiastic wanderings and took shelter in the Star Wars Role Players tent till it stopped.   I also entered a tombola, but won fuck all.

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ogm11!!1 dinner is served!11

Ahoy there, casual lovers

With his wedding hurtling towards us with dizzying speed, Joe has discovered that to get married in this country costs £103.50. That covers everything you need - vicar, poisonous gossip, scuffles at the buffet, and so forth - and seems a bit steep, really. It seems especially pricey when you consider that the cost of legally kicking a naked midget in the UK is just £20.

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ogm!!11 teh aminal's!1

Ahoy there, casual lovers

Yeah last night saw a short wander up the canal for those of us in the East Yard to London's popular London Zoo.    They do these late opening evenings there now and then - a bit like a parents' evening I suppose, where all the animals' parents are invited in to chat to the zookeeper - and we get free tickets because we are the best.   I had a hotdog and then saw a lion roar, then sneeze, then look embarrassed, and as you can imagine I was well chuffed with that. 

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ogm! teh identical sealed box's!!11

Ahoy there, casual lovers.

Like all working class people, we would rather win money than earn it.

It is this instinct which prompted me to apply to appear on Deal Or No Deal, which is the only thing guaranteed to bring life to a standstill here at Griefjunkie Towers. I am a particular fan of the bit where they get the other contestants to offer advice as to what to do vis a vis dealing or not dealing. What I want to do at this point is ask if any of my fellow contestants are versed in statistics and probability, as this will be genuinely useful advice, and will enable me to make a more informed decision. Otherwise, you just get some fat-armed old growler from, I dunno, Knaresborough, saying either a) follow your heart b) stay true to yourself or c) follow your dream, which is just a variation on a) if you ask me.

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DRESS YOU'RE BABY NICE!!1

Ahoy there, casual lovers.

We are awaiting the screaming of tiny lungs and the constant emptying of tiny digestive systems here at Griefjunkie Towers, on account of Joe getting his dolly up the duff. (See 'ogm! teh pregnancy' blog, July 10th.)

To celebrate, we decided to whip up a range of baby bibs. They're all organic and fair trade and made by, I dunno, mermaids or whatever. Which is nice.

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ogm!!11 bob in teh oxford arm's1

Ahoy there, casual lovers

Anyone who has found themselves wandering up Camden High Street in the bleary hour before the casual pitches are allocated will doubtless have seen what appears to be a pile of hair and dirty clothing piled against the door of the Oxford Arms.

This is none other than Bob, or Old Bob, who is a familiar sight in Camden, if only for a kind of moonwalk he does which requires no particular dance floor prowess but instead the ability to walk so very slowly behind a barrow that you appear to be moving backwards.

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