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Me And The Girl From Clapham
May 20th, 2012
Dear Rachel
Anyone who, like myself, was glued to rolling news coverage of the London riots last August will have swiftly concluded that what this city needs more than anything else is a velodrome. Fortunately, the Olympics have given us one, and as if this wasn’t bounty enough there is also a swimming pool and, basically, everything’s going to be alright forever. The Games themselves will bring many new visitors to London, which is always good but will, inevitably, result in more hilarious cutting edge social comment about Londoners being miserable and stand-offish, based upon their behaviour on an overcrowded and frequently malfunctioning underground railway, which seems a bit harsh.
I think this is a subject we may have discussed a couple of years ago, but anyway, I can only guess at the disappointment of people mistaking the entrance to Tufnell Park tube or wherever for some kind of magic portal to a non-stop party world. The London Underground isn’t Alton Towers. There is no log flume at High Barnet. There is no Ibiza-style foam party at Kennington. If you started chucking a beach ball about at Stockwell people would probably be a lot more amenable than you might think, but even so, don’t. The reason is simple: if you look closely, you’ll notice that the London underground is not Disneyland Paris, but a Victorian mass transit system operating surprisingly well under the considerable pressure of serving a major world city with an urban catchment area of ten million people. While there is the occasional conga at King’s Cross and hokey cokey at High Barnet, it’s a bit unfair to expect people quietly going about their business to be wearing novelty headgear and endlessly blowing those paper whistles that unroll and have a feather on the end in order to get a party that no-one’s asked for going with a bang. That said, while being at ease with people on the Northern Line being less than ecstatic, you don’t expect one of them to get on at Clapham North and weep in front of you all the way to Tooting Bec, a slightly awkward scenario I encountered myself last Friday.
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Supernatural Porters
May 8th, 2012
Dear Rachel
Market porters are a breed apart. By this I don’t mean that they are a breed apart from other men, but that they are a breed apart from every other species on the planet. At Camden, their main roles are the enthusiastic consumption of competitively priced lager and the ferrying of traders’ stock between storage areas in the Middle Yard and stalls throughout the Lock market. This is an important duty, as most traders are too busy drinking tea and swearing at each other to manage this for themselves. When I was at Camden, I was usually too concerned with hunting down the component parts of my stall to bring my own stock up. Especially tricky to locate were the wooden table tops, which I would usually have to carry in from the West Yard, a chore which I made less annoying – for myself at least – by saying ‘I always get wood in the morning’ or ‘Every time I see you I’ve got wood’ or some similar inane wood-related innuendo to fellow East Yard urchin Slack Matt every single time I walked past him, regardless of how large a number that might be. He left eventually, possibly due to inevitability fatigue.
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Working For The Bad Guys
April 22nd, 2012
Dear Rachel
The shipping forecast, in case you are unfamiliar, is a weather report on Radio 4 for maritime vessels in British coastal waters. I’ve discovered that whenever I hear it, I can smell Vosene. I’m sure this stems from my old dear using the eye-melting shampoo classic on my lovely locks while bathing me in the kitchen sink as an infant, with Dettol in the water. For some reason, she always had the undeniably classy Radio 4 on in the background as she did so, presumably in an attempt to introduce some culture into proceedings, but I hadn’t listened to it – or indeed gone near a kitchen sink – for many years until recently receiving a digital radio for my birthday. I wonder if, perhaps, the association would also work the other way round too, and if I washed my hair with Vosene in the kitchen sink, it would prompt the shipping forecast to appear. You never know.
A Common Shop Girl of my acquaintance and I considered this on Wednesday, during an afternoon which consisted of tea and the critical analysis of passers-by in a gift shop in a deserted seaside town. Despite the phantom smell of haircare products, I find the shipping forecast, with its reassuringly monotone run down of gales and rainstorms at Fair Isle and Rockall and Main, nicely comforting. This must be because in childhood I only heard about these remote and watery places while bundled up in warm towels or possibly newspaper in a state of post-kitchen-sink-bath drowziness. I certainly remember them more fondly than another feature of my youth that I had to work hard to persuade the Common Shop Girl had ever actually existed: Protect and Survive booklets. These were found in libraries and other public places in the eighties and told you what to do if a nuclear war popped up, and they warrant further explanation.
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Arrivederci, Bob
April 6th, 2012
Dear Rachel
Camden Market is the most famous market in the world. It’s also a nutcase magnet. All markets attract nutcases, but Camden more so. In fact, it has the highest ratio of nutcases, recovering nutcases, and nutcases-in-waiting to normal people of any place on earth, and this is a ratio that can be equally applied to both traders and punters. It has all varieties of nutcase too, from friendly to psychotic, via boring, incoherent and needy. It’s like a mental health pick n mix, and some nutcases gain localised celebrity celebrity status. Myself, I particularly liked the bloke with the bewildering number and combination of physical deformities who for many years used to sit outside the pizza shop playing Nowhere Man on a weird metal harp, although he has long since moved on somehow.
I can’t remember ever talking to him, so it would be lazy and wrong to list him among the nutcases. He would, though, fall squarely into the category of General Market Person. These are a very different breed from the nutcases, and they inhabit the strange twilight world between traders on the one hand and punters on the other. This group includes managers, porters – who I am convinced are superhuman, such is their work rate and application – cleaners and an enigmatic sub category: the people who, despite having no real purpose, are the market. Into this last category we must place Camden landmark and brandy enthusiast Old Bob.
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Bungle’s Daughter And The Elvis Pyramid
March 21st, 2012
Dear Rachel
I spend a lot of time near fish and water, but this is because I often wander along piers eating cod and chips. I suppose I spend time among fish and their natural habitat, rather than fish in their natural habitat. Anyway. I have no interest in fishing itself, and had therefore not heard of what are known as the Fishing Tackle Wars until very recently. These have apparently broken out between anglers and the costume jewelery industry, two factions which at first glance would not appear to be natural antagonists, and I learned about them while having my eyebrows threaded. The threading, while not painful, was distraction enough to make it difficult for me to understand how the Fishing Tackle Wars had come about. It wasn’t that I doubted the credibility of my source – she is, as a sideline, involved in the retail of costume jewelery – but that I am suspicious of things that sound incredible because of what happened when I was 13, in love, and told by Sam Banks that her old man was Bungle from Rainbow.
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Not The Right Person To Ask
March 15th, 2012
Dear Rachel
No one enjoys being the focus of attention for the demonically possessed, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to me on the Northern Line at London Bridge last Sunday week. I found a seat and got comfy, but found myself unable to concentrate on Louis Barfe’s The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson because of a sinister woman who gave the impression that if she were to speak, she would have the voice of a raven, or of two massive stone blocks scraping against each other. She probably didn’t, but imagine the kind of person who can convey that kind of thing across a tube carriage: it’s quite a trick. She was sitting perhaps six foot away and glaring and glaring and glaring, at one point standing up to have an even better glare. She had a creepy way of standing up too, as if she was a puppet being pulled vertically upright with no muscular effort of her own.
As she sat back down, again with no apparent muscular effort, she leaned forward – effectively across the man sitting next to her – in order to further scrutinise me. As we got to Kennington, I acknowledged her by raising my eyebrows and smiling slightly. I honestly thought she was about to scream angrily, perhaps with bats flying out of her mouth. She was, as I think I pointed out on Twitter at the time, well diabolical. Had it not been for the smoking ban on the tube I’d have tied her to a stake and burnt her. Unnerved, I changed carriages at Oval, and spent the evening getting wrecked at the Wheatsheaf at Tooting Bec. This gave me time to reflect upon my Chevvy Chase, which does a sterling job under difficult circumstances, and which had already been the subject of unwarranted fascination that weekend, as we shall see.
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On The Case At Tooting Bec
March 7th, 2012
Dear Rachel
Physical violence has a terrible reputation, although mainly among people who aren’t very good at it. There is a time and a place for it, however, although I didn’t expect the place to be Balham High Road and the time to be six weeks before my fortieth birthday, which is an undignified age for this sort of thing. I should probably explain further.
What happened was this: I was leaving Tooting Bec tube station last Friday, when a man walked very quickly and deliberately in front of me, looked back, and slowly shook his head in a disappointed manner. As confrontational behaviour goes, it wasn’t very confrontational, so I ignored it. The thing was, he wouldn’t stop doing it, to the extent that after about ten seconds he turned completely around and was walking backwards along Balham High Road, still shaking his head, still looking disappointed, and maintaining a distance of about four foot, which isn’t really the done thing.
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Disproportional Representation
February 29th, 2012
Dear Rachel
I was cornered on a train from London to the eastern provinces by a lady novelist for three hours last week. If you’ve never happened across a lady novelist, it’s what pretty much all middle class girls want to be before a) deciding to be a journalist instead, then b) deciding to be an English teacher instead before finally c) keeping a blog about the novel they are writing instead, instead of actually writing it. The only good thing about a blog of that kind is that it at least it avoids the Big Three blog subjects: Having A Baby, Having A Cat, or Having An Illness. Come to think of it, this blog also avoids those things, although as it is largely concerned with me wandering through London market trading life in a state of appalled resignation, it avoids almost everything else, too.
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Shouting At Dogs In Greenwich Market
February 8th, 2012
Dear Rachel,
Recently, a colourful advertising banner in the Times claimed that Ten Pilates was the workout that ‘everyone’s talking about’. While I doubt that this claim was ever meant to be taken as statistically accurate, I allowed myself a small smile as I read it. I did this because what everyone around me at that moment was talking about was as follows: a) Danny, outlining the sexual attributes of Keith’s wife Barbara to Chris the Knowledge in order to annoy Keith, and b) Keith, involved in an extraordinarily foul mouthed discussion about the sale of Cuban cigars to the bloke who runs the juice bar outside the antiques shop with the Millwall fan in it. All four participants in these exchanges were talking very loudly, principally as a result of Danny trying to drown out Keith, and Keith trying to drown out Danny. Chris the Knowledge, incidentally, is so called as he is training to be a cabbie which – if you are unfamiliar with the procedure – involves acquiring ‘the Knowledge’. The Knowledge is knowing where every street in London is and knowing how to get there from every other street in London, and is an impressive thing to have floating round your cerebral hippocampus.
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The Girl With The OMG Handbag
February 1st, 2012
Dear Rachel
There have always been widespread reports of ghostly passengers on the tube, especially for some reason on the Bakerloo Line between Paddington and Oxford Circus. I think I know how they have come about. This accidental ghostbusting occurred last Thursday while removing a pair of gloves at Holland Park. Around Christmas, I suddenly took to glove removal by gently tugging at each gloved finger in turn, before removing the glove proper, for no other reason than I felt it might lend me an air of sinister gravitas, in the manner of a Bond villain. Catching myself doing this in the reflection of the window opposite revealed that actually it makes you look like a preposterous homosexual weirdo and I immediately resolved to never do it again, but not before I had noticed the reflection of the girl sitting next to me. She had a canvas shoulder bag with ‘OMG’ written on it in giant letters, which I thought was quite a larf, and more crucially was wearing the commuter classic office clothes with trainers combination, which I have always found strangely endearing.
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