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Knitters With Attitude
March 5th, 2010
Dear Rachel
Wedding reception music is brilliant, and I refuse not to dance to it. For me, the genius of the genre is that even though I rarely own any of the tunes being played by DJ Barry or whatever, it’s like Phil Collins or Jive Bunny themselves have been placed inside me through a zip on my spine and are now trying to dance themselves to freedom.
I am at a difficult age, though, when it comes to social gatherings such as these, because I am too old to be dancing in my own right and not old enough to be sitting things out by the buffet. I therefore regularly find myself chaperoning Small Girls In Pretty Dresses or Lovely Old Aunties – the pre teens and pre Wars, as I have latterly taken to referring to them – and always, it seems, to You Can’t Hurry Love. I’d love DJ Barry to drop Straight Out Of Compton in – if only because I could then refer to my more senior partners as Knitters With Attitude – but this seems unlikely. Thinking about it though, I might have that at my own wedding, assuming I have one, and hand out semi automatic weaponry before the service which can be discharged into the ceiling as a salute to the radiant new Mrs Griefjunkie as we leave the church.
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Coping With Jazz
March 1st, 2010
Dear Rachel
I am by nature deeply mistrustful of people who signal the impending start of songs by clicking their fingers and counting in French. You’ll therefore understnd my nonplussed stance last week at the Duke of Wellington when I learned that Vinny not only has a twenty piece jazz band living upstairs but that they are doing live music nights every forth Sunday. This information was presented to me in ambush format when the air suddenly filled with clicked fingers and numbers en Francais as I was minding my own business at the bar. I just don’t know what possesses a person to do stuff like that – the bloke wasn’t even French – except an overwhelming desire to be thrashed across the face with a fire extinguisher again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jazz, in case you didn’t know, is a musical art form consisting of 1% genius and 99% please just fuck off. However, by eavesdropping on two jazz people at the bar, I did learn about a conversation one of them had recently had, in which someone who presumably wasn’t as uberjazzvolk as them had asked if they liked Kenny G. No, I don’t know who Kenny G is either, but the answer you give in this situation – and you might want to write this down in case you ever find yourself wanting to come across like someone who knows a lot about jazz – is ‘I haven’t heard any Kenny G for a while – but then again, I don’t get in many elevators these days!’ They both considered this simply splendid, and I really thought that, when they stopped laughing, they might catch each other’s eye, lean in together, and have a really long kiss.
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All Change On The Intertubes
February 22nd, 2010
Dear Rachel
If you can smell paint fumes and bubble wrap while reading this, it’s because we have at last launched our new site, and, unless you are getting this via email, you are looking at it. It is very very new, so don’t get too close to the screen as it is still wet in places and may well come off on your hands and clothing.
Astonishingly, it has taken three years to arrive. For the lives of the principle people involved with publicgriefjunkie, those three years have contained two weddings, one divorce, two bankruptcies, four changes of address, several arrests, a death, two major fires, and a baby. Come to think of it, if you put all that to musical verse, it would resemble the Twelve Days Of A Christmas You’d Rather Not Have.
Anyway. Better late than never, and now that the new site is finally among us, it’s like a huge waiter’s been lifted off our shoulders. It has been quite hard work, especially over the last couple of weeks, with an awful lot of awfully late nights, and my eyes feel like I have been trying to blink myself to death with them.
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Coughing Up A Storm
January 29th, 2010
Dear Rachel
There is a primary school report of mine somewhere in which my teacher, Miss Spickett, writes ‘Paul has been poorly for much of this term, and describes his cough as ‘like a clown leaping from a wardrobe’, and I must say I agree with him’. This is a description I stand by to this day, although I’d possibly add that it also sounds a bit like a shark trying to cough up a seal.
It doesn’t, you know, produce anything, or anything horrible like that, it just comes as quite a surprise sometimes. Coughing runs in our family, as my old dear and I established the other day while talking about my grandfather. My old dear always wistfully mentions that he ‘had such a desire to be a teacher’. This is true, and, as I usually point out, if only it was as strong as his other desire – to repeatedly steal curtain material from warehouses in Limehouse and sell it at Petticoat Lane market – a lot of things might have been very different.
[HItting read more now will reveal all manner of lung related rambling]
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Throwing A Phone Through A Taxi
January 24th, 2010
Dear Rachel
Yeah there’s a saying – I forget exactly what it is, or what it is supposed to demonstrate – but it’s something about if you have a monkey at a typewriter hitting random keys for an infinite amount of time, he will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. No, I don’t get it either. Anyway, now imagine the same monkey, surrounded presumably by balls of screwed up paper, monkey vending machine coffee cups and banana skins, still hitting the keys randomly, but with the added pressure of an editorial deadline. This extra element means that at the end of a set amount of time, he has to go with what he’s got, no matter what it is or how little sense it makes.
After some months of careful observation, I have reached the conclusion that this monkey supplies the scripts from which Winkle, Greenwich Market photograph trader of distinction, reads by way of conversation. Trading near Winkle is to drown in a tidal wave of total irrelevant fucking nonsense. I sometimes think he only talks to me because he is lonely. However, he is a man of hidden depths, and these to a large extent compensate for also being a man of ill-hidden dimensions, suggesting a diet of butter, glazed ham, cushions, and entire buffaloes.
[Hitting Read More will reveal possible ancestors and poorly concieved sporting challenges]
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Greenwich Lean Time
January 10th, 2010
Dear Rachel
A few years ago, when Camden first began to really slide, its decline was slowed by the Israeli traders bringing awesome stuff. Then, the Israelis stopped coming, and the Chinese came instead. Then the Chinese stopped coming, and it was left to the mentally ill to fill the breech. Camden is now in a situation where even the mentally ill – and anyone who has traded the Lock can name the human timebombs – have realised that they’re backing the wrong horse. So when, like us, you find that you’re supporting an outlet in an environment that even people who hear voices telling them that they are Pontius Pilate have realised is no good, it may be time to consider your overall strategic approach.
This is not exactly news, of course. It was half-man half-debris East Yard plastic handbag magnate Pikey Dave who first pointed out that Camden had become a place where you buy rubbish and sell it to idiots. This has always been substantially true, and was a remarkable observation for a man who smells of stolen motorbikes. Also, I leant him a pen once, and he tarmacced it.
[Hitting Read More now will reveal cold weather skillz]
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Cheerful Theft and Ben-heaviness
January 5th, 2010
Dear Rachel
My first customer of the year at Greenwich was a lady who I didn’t fancy, but also did a tiny bit on the grounds that she was wearing a National Portrait Gallery hoodie, and therefore looked very much how I imagine urban street youths would if they appeared in an Enid Blyton book.
It put me in mind of an occasion in which an acquintance of mine had his van stolen by two friendly thieves in Canning Town, who advised him that, contrary to his protests, they were going to steal his van, and that he was going to watch them. They then drove off within the speed limit, stopping at the traffic lights, where, this being summer, he could hear them retuning the radio through the open passenger window. It was, as he pointed out later, the acceptable face of theft.
[Hitting Read More now will reveal slum secrets of Spitalfields, among other things]
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Joyful All Ye Nations Rise
December 29th, 2009
Dear Rachel.
I often use cutlery to scratch my head in mid conversation, so tend not to get invited out to dinner very often. However, I see no need to waste time in restaurants over Christmas when you can get a turkey kebab with cranberry sauce at Panic Kebabs on Junction Road, served by a genial Turkish man in a paper hat and Santa beard. Admirably, he dismisses the increased fire risk by jovially explaining that ‘It’s Christmas’, an explanation I suspect he would cling to even if his face was in flames. (Also – and this just occurred to me as I was writing – he is in the habit of wearing at least five gold rings, so there is a nice festive tie in there, too.)
The cranberry sauce part of the kebab is, oddly, far more important than it should be. I only eat one teaspoon of cranberry sauce per year, but, if it was denied me, I would be outraged to the point of civil disobedience. I suppose it’s the tradition of the thing, like clip shows of Morecombe and Wise Christmas Specials. There was, incidentally, a huge turn out for a local Boxing Day custom near my auntie’s which involved running into the River Medway, under conditions which the Met Office described as ‘fucking freezing’. I tagged along as I thought there was going to be a hanging, and was therefore disappointed.
[Hitting Read More now will reveal I dunno all sorts, probably]
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Friday Afternoon Down Bishopsgate Way
December 17th, 2009
Dear Rachel
Last Friday, I had my boxer shorts on backwards all day, which made the world seem like a more roomy, but also more cramped, place than normal. I might do it more often, as it was sort of wrong but right, like Elvis in Vegas. I only noticed in the gents’ at the Lamb public house at Leadenhall Market, when, at a happily deserted urinal, I spent rather more time than I suspect would be considered socially acceptable trying to work out where my cock had gone.
I have very little to do with our stall at Leadenhall, apart from dropping off stock to Tony, which usually occurs on a Thursday afternoon, and I found it interesting to trade there for the day. All the markets we operate in have their own little foibles: Greenwich floods suddenly and dramatically whenever there is heavy rain. Camden has its hoardes of shrieking fucktards, and Leadenhall, I noticed, has endless likeable but slightly, I dunno, strained full-on career ladies. One of them got her face out and gave me a proper look with it when I extended a hearty welcome to our lovely kitchenware stall, so I said ‘Yeah, sorry, you look really familiar – have you ever done any porn?’ as she stalked back off to, I presume, a life of hair straighteners, opaque tights, waxing, internet dating, Snow Patrol, solitary wine consumption and weeping herself nightly towards childless spinsterhood. People who don’t want aprons with ‘Beam Me Up, Biscotti’ written on them are all the same.
[Hitting Read More now will reveal pigeon-related near arrests]
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A Binliner Full Of Thighs
December 4th, 2009
Dear Rachel
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a meat raffle. If you are unfamiliar, a meat raffle is a lovely old Sunday afternoon pub tradition where a local butcher supplies a carrier bag full of, I dunno, stomachs and offers it as the main prize in a draw, splitting the proceeds with the landlord. At the Printer’s Devil public house, Stoke Road, Slough, the landlord was, for quite a while, me. I tidied the meat raffle up a bit by insisting that the contents of the bag should at least be recognisably bovine, or porcine, or sheepine, as otherwise I might as well have slung a cloak and bowler hat in among the whole ghastly jamboree and auctioned it off as Jack the Ripper’s overnight bag.
Anyway. As a result of me adding a touch of sophistication to proceedings, the Printer’s Devil ‘Win A Bag Of Legs’ raffle, in which a lucky drinker could go home with a selection of miscellaneous shins, was born. I would further entice participants with the promise that it was ‘All hooves – no paws’ to get around the fact that at first glance it appeared to be a binliner full of thighs. To compete with the Grapes, which had a big screen for the footie, we had a disco and music quiz as well. Sunday afternoon was party afternoon down Stoke Road way, I can tell you. One of my many golden memories of the Win A Bag Of Legs raffle is of a delirious and clearly hammered Mr Singh – rotund local carpet vendor of distinction, whose unlikely catchphrase was ‘A pint of John Smith’s, you fucking bastard’ – dancing around a Tesco bag full of animal legs to ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and the Waves.
[Hitting Read More now will reveal further horrors, I should think]
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