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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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Margarine Dreams
January 27th, 2012
Dear Rachel
Whenever I think of supermarkets, I think of slow people with fat arms putting huge bags of crisps into trolleys, and I therefore avoid going into them whenever possible. This means that until last Wednesday I had no idea that you can’t buy margarine anymore. This in turn means that an austere speciality of my old dear’s and feature of my childhood – dry Weetabix with margarine on top – can sadly no longer be prepared. It’s difficult to spread margarine on dry Weetabix, as they are fragile and break easily, with the result that the recipient of such bounty is often left sitting in front of Blue Peter with a joyless bowl of wheat dust and hydrogenated fat. As I write this, it’s just come to mind that I also ate dripping as a child, which is revolting. If you’ve never eaten dripping, think of things that drip, and then think about how hungry they make you feel. It isn’t even an appetising word. How my arteries survived adolescence continues to baffle the medical community.
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Collins, Hughes, and the Camden Nepalese
January 18th, 2012
Dear Rachel
Some years ago, I consumed an estimated seventy bottles of vodka and five hundred Kit Kats on a ninety day festival trading tour with the Camden Nepalese. Midway through, concerned that we hadn’t had quite enough vodka yet and remembering that it’s always better to be safe than sorry, we blagged our way backstage at V and swiped most of Babyshambles’, too.
Although I found myself happily free of lasting health problems when the whole remarkable jaunt finally shambled to a close, I retained the Nepalese habit of rubbing the proceeds of the first sale of the day across my forehead in order to – so the superstition goes – encourage more to follow. I was explaining this last week during idle discourse with a common shop-girl of my acquaintance. Our conversation was made more interesting than usual on account of the fact that she’d had some stitches in her mouth earlier that morning, which rendered her unable to move her jaw or tongue in order to facilitate speech. A side effect of this was that she spoke in exactly the same way as one of the endless parade of Yorkshire terriers trained to say ’sausages’ on demand through bared teeth that were a staple of early evening light entertainment shows in the 1980s, which is an unfortunate look for someone working in a patisserie.
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Goodbye, American Jeff
January 3rd, 2012
Dear Rachel
When Camden is as unfashionable as it is at the moment, the Good Mixer – a well known Camdenite pub at the end of Inverness Street, midway between the market and the tube station – is an enjoyable place in which to take refreshment. I myself often do this of a Saturday evening, having first attended to commercial interests in the Lock market, and usually find myself in the company of the Goat Bag Man, American Jeff, Wolverhampton Mike, Bibbsy and sundry other traders. The evening is usually punctuated by a wandering Camden victim called Blue, who simply isn’t funny enough to be as intrusive as he is although, to his credit – and I have a soft spot for the relentless – this does little or nothing to stop him.
However, it is to American Jeff that our attention must turn on this occasion. Jeff has the ultimate showbiz marriage of abrasive voice and ill-advised subject matter, the overall social effect of which is quite remarkable. A conversation with him is strangely like being repeatedly slapped round the face, and you find yourself unwilling to disengage in case he jumps on you and continues to shout words into your ear as you walk off towards the tube station, go down the escalator, and make your way home.
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Adventures With The Aspirational Poor
December 29th, 2011
Dear Rachel
Until this Christmas Day, I had assumed that the word ’scrage’ – pronounced to rhyme with ‘rage’, and used to describe a minor skin abrasion – was the sole linguistic property of my old dear and, by association, myself. It turns out to be Bristol slang, according to a book on the subject being bandied about the Christmas dining table along with an inventive and eyewateringly potent butter collection which consisted of brandy, cherry brandy, and amarula cream variants. I dislike alcoholic butter, and instead familiarised myself with sundry other Bristolian phrases, which enabled me to safely arrive at the conclusion that I was in no danger of being stung by a macky buzzer if I was of a mind to go outside and see if the snow was pitchen yet.
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Lullaby Of Tooting Broadway
December 21st, 2011
Dear Rachel
A couple of Saturday mornings ago in Greenwich Market, volley after volley of threats, curses and expletives of all flavours and descriptions being hurled at Danny were my first indication that Keith had returned from an eight week sojourn in Cuba, where he is the guest lecturer in photography at Havana State University. I pride myself on an eye for good tailoring and a confident, understated sartorial style, and to this end was giving a full length cashmere overcoat from Liberty’s of Regent Street rare market airing. It is a fine garment supplied by a fine English company, and both Keith and Danny know that I do not tolerate profanity or foul language in front of it. I once made Childbrain apologise to it for swearing, to the amusement of Cartoon Ben, and indicated my displeasure with Keith’s tone by addressing him with a stern look and tapping a lapel with my forefinger. I’m afraid to report that he responded with further recourse to the language of the gutter, with which I shall not trouble you. Informing Keith that he was a very common fellow indeed, I retired to what seems to have become my regular pitch near the lesbian cake ladies – who have taken to providing me with shortbread so sugary that it actually makes me shake – and waited to see what all the fuss was about.
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Tiramisu And The Dyspraxic Diner
November 1st, 2011
Dear Rachel
Dyspraxia is often accurately, if unkindly, known as ‘clumsy child syndrome’, but adults have it too: Harry Potter has the condition, as did Albert Einstein. If Winston Churchill had had it, his famous broadcast to the Empire and Commonwealth as the Germans threatened seabourne invasion would’ve been ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Blast it, I’ve knocked my bloody brandy over’. It’s that kind of a thing, really.
If you had your house rewired so that you could drive a bumper car from room to room, or even across rooms to feed the goldfish or put the kettle on, it would be similar to the interactions that a dyspraxic child has with their environment. I don’t have children and I don’t have dyspraxia, and while the former would appear to be creeping up the agenda, the latter is unlikely to change. I would suggest, however, that our allegedly impoverished public sector could save a great deal of money spent on conventional testing for infant dyspraxia by simply getting children to walk through a wide doorway with no distractions whatsoever, and seeing what happens. I myself was sitting near a doorway of this type at a dinner party recently. Had I not already known the the daughter of my host had very mild dyspraxia, I would’ve offered a prognosis to this end with no paediatric training whatsoever, on account of the number of times she charged into the back of my chair while walking through at steady pace with no distractions at all, then pinballed into the doorframe while trying to correct her trajectory. This was before the dinner had started. After the dinner had started, and in support of a conversational point, I managed to say ”Basically, I just can’t stand children’, offering a quick ‘No offence’ to all the people seated on my right, none of whom were over 10.
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Awkward Moment
October 24th, 2011
Dear Rachel
I would not list the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 alongside the Houses of Parliament or the Oxford Society as a white hot crucible of enlightened debate. However, the fact remains that many decisions of vast importance in the lives and businesses of the people who drink there have taken place around the circular table by the dart board, the oblong table between the Gents’ and the Ladies’, and my personal favourite table beneath the portrait of the Iron Duke himself.
It was at this table, at about the time when a long evening has turned into an early morning which has in turn given way to the irrefutable truth that actual people with real jobs are on their way to work, and that very soon you’ll have to dawdle down to Liverpool Street station and take the Central Line to Soho to see your wholesaler, that I had to inform Lou that I knew nothing whatsoever about comic book art. There are several reasons that the exact sequence of events surrounding my revelation can never be replicated, not least because Vinny the landlord has recently replaced the Duke of Wellington portrait with yet another telly, on the curious grounds that life is too short to look at anything more than eight feet away. Read the rest of this entry »
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Prudent Purchases In SW17
October 12th, 2011
Dear Rachel
I have only been abroad once in my entire life – I decided on a whim to ride a mountain bike from Atlanta to New Orleans and back on my own, for reasons that now escape me – and perhaps because of this I have always found airmail writing paper curiously exciting. It makes a lovely crackly noise when you handle it, for a start, and it has a romantic quality, too – whenever I recieve letters written on airmail paper I always imagine that the person writing them is sitting under a palm tree in the East Indies, even if they are in a rented room in Chatham. Not that Chatham or the nature of rented accomodation are necessarily without romantic qualities of their own, of course, but they do not spring as readily to mind as a classic romantic backdrop.
I have spent a good deal of the past summer outside London, scampering around the provinces in the interests of our wider commercial affairs. While doing so, I’ve taken to using Basildon Bond airmail paper over emails for personal correspondence as, due to what we may now call the Chatham effect, it gives a letter from Hastings or Ramsgate or Grimsby an exotic aura that it might otherwise lack. When writing from home I usually use standard Basildon Bond post quarto paper, either blue or champagne, depending upon my mood. For very special letters I whip out couple of sheets of Eclats D’or, which has tiny flecks of gold in it, and I favour a Parker Duofold pen. There are only two downsides to written correspondence: 1) It could be misconstrued as self conscious whimsy, which runs the risk that the kind of women who feature prominantly in Match.com advertising will drag me off to meet their cats and parents as soon as I start to write anything, and 2) my handwriting is so atrociously bad that I routinely have to send a version of all written correspondance by email, so that the recipient can actually read it.
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Billy And My Monotone Brothers
October 4th, 2011
Dear Rachel
I was returning to London last week, having spent a couple of days tending to our commercial interests in the provinces, when I found myself considering the Essex countryside from the window of an inter city train. While doing so, the following forgotten rhyme from my childhood suddenly unforgot itself and came to mind, as the greenery between Manningtree and Colchester tumbled by:
My friend Billy had a ten foot willy,
He showed it to the lady next door,
She thought it was a snake,
And hit it with a rake,
And now it’s only four foot four.
While I’m sure that none of the above is based upon actual events, I do have a friend called Billy – he sells handpainted Jerusalem pottery at Greenwich Market – and he can’t be much more than four foot four tall, being the shortest man in casual retail. He lives in a flat in Tufnell Park, and although there is a lady living next door to him, neither of them have a garden and she is therefore unlikely to own a rake, or indeed gardening implements of any kind. Whether she needs to chill out a bit, as the lady in the rhyme would appear to, I suspect we will never know for sure.
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