Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog
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No Jacket Required
July 26th, 2010
Dear Rachel
Glastonbury Festival is a hundred thousand mid to high earning Guardian readers and/or their offspring standing in a field listening to Paul McCartney. That’s counter culture for you. Pretty much the whole festival season is basically an excuse for middle class people to get away from ethnic minorities for a bit, and apart from a downturn in sales of halloumi, hummus, cava and Apple products in Hackney and surrounding districts, I don’t see that the traditional mid summer slump in market stall revenues can be attributed to it.
It’s the heat that makes things tricky, as far as I am concerned. The other Friday it was 38 degrees at my stall under the roof at Greenwich Market. I coped by sitting around and looking grumpy, and a seven hour wait for the first sale was my reward. I passed the day reflecting upon how far from what I had expected my life to be like this all was, and generally losing the will to live. After a while, though, I snapped out of it and instead began to lose the will to allow anyone else to live, and felt better for it.
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Can You Smell Burning?
July 16th, 2010
Dear Rachel,
The phrase ‘He could sell sand to the Arabs’ is a common expression used, of course, to describe someone who is a very good salesman. Myself, I would rather buy sand from the Arabs, who have loads of it, and sell it to the Eskimos, who don’t have any. This is because I am not a salesman, but a business. In fact, what I would really rather do is arrange for the Arabs to sell sand to the Eskimos themselves in return for salted fish, impose excise duties on the ports at both ends, and then go on a nice holiday, so as not to disturb the cash as it rolls its way in. That’s because I’m not a salesman, I am a business, but I’d like to be a merchant, because that’s where the real money is.
I think this salesman-business-merchant hierarchy works quite well, if only to illustrate that even an operation as miniscule but tenacious as ours has to understand that it is part of a larger world with complex agendas. This larger world fell upon Greenwich market a couple of weeks ago. It came in the form of yet another group of developers looking to demolish it and put a hotel in its place, and a meeting they were holding with the market traders to discuss this.
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Gary Numan, Dalek Dentist
July 4th, 2010
Dear Rachel
I am the only heterosexual man ever to have bought Faith by George Micheal, and I continue to like it despite the number of people who think it would be nice if they could touch my body dwindling by the year. I’m already resigned to increasing reliance upon professionals in this particular arena, a process which begun in earnest with a memorable bout of dentistry last week. It started reasonably enough in the waiting room with the usual reading of Build Your Home magazine while assuming that the extra mouth washing I had undertaken prior to coming to the surgery would reverse several years of eating almost nothing that wasn’t caramel based.
While reading, I noticed a bloke Windolene-ing the glass doors of some kind of dental cabinet, and it was only when our names were called at the same time that I realised he was in fact my dentist. I actually held the door open for him as we went into the dentistry parlour, and asked for a show about Gary Numan to be put on MTV for me to watch while we got down to the matter in hand. This is how I came to be contemplating Gary Numan’s dentistry skills very intently indeed in a happily successful bid to take my mind off the drills and pain and gurgling. He certainly has what appears to be a dentists’ shirt on in the ‘Are Friends Electric?’ video, I reasoned over the smell of scorched enamel, although admittedly it does make him look like the kind of dentist whose clientele would be either daleks or thought criminals, or who is employed on the Death Star doing fillings for stormtroopers.
For all his admirable if baffling attention to waiting room tidiness, though, my dentist is a larf, and quickly saw through my clever ruse of putting ‘Dentist’ as my occupation on my new patient form in order to get preferential rates. Before we got underway, he asked me ‘Are you nervous of dentists at all?’ ‘No’ I replied, quite truthfully. ‘Well you might be after this’ he said ‘As it’s really going to hurt’. I raised my arm very slightly as I felt our easy and highly enjoyable familiarity would support a high five, but it became immediately apparent that he had stopped pissing about and had started to earn his money.
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Pep Talk With Graeme Souness
June 25th, 2010
Dear Rachel,
One of my favourite sporting stories concerns Graeme Souness, ex-Liverpool archetypal midfield general, and, by 1992, manager of Glasgow Rangers. In this latter capacity, he went to scout Red Star Belgrade, who were at the time one of the greatest sides in Europe, and who Rangers were due to play in the third round of the European Cup. Arriving back in Glasgow, the team, squad members and associated personnel were assembled for a tactical overview of the Yugoslav giants, and were somewhat surprised when this consisted entirely of Souness unveiling a flip-chart upon which he had written the words ‘We’re Fucked’.
Almost everyone I have ever traded with in any market in London had their first Souness-like moment of clarity shortly before realising that they were going to have to trade in a market in the first place, and has typically had several subsequent ones on an almost daily basis, leading to an outlook which, now I come to think of it, essentially consists of one long pep talk prior to an upcoming game with Red Star Belgrade, which never actually arrives. In fact, for anyone connected with this particular company, it is as if Graeme Souness is hiding behind every apron and leaping out of every storage box, eternally tapping his motivational flip-chart in a knowing manner.
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No Distance Left To Run
June 19th, 2010
Deat Rachel,
I visited a hospice recently, and it had a merchandising department. I was quite intrigued by this, having already contemplated making my Auntie Mavis, of whom I am inordinately fond and who is actually in the hospice, a t-shirt with ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Live Here – But It Helps’ on it, but was dissuaded by my old dear. However, the merchandising in question was actually very nice – pens and all that with little sailors and such along the side, it being run by the Royal Naval Benevolent Fund, and not as I had hoped bumper stickers with ‘I’ve Been To Pembroke House, Apparently’ on them or ‘I Came For The Food And Stayed Because I’ve Forgotten Who I Am’ commemorative plates.
Auntie Mavis and I have always had a very close bond, and I am well qualified to state that I have known her with considerably more marbles than currently seem to be in her possession. She had very little idea of where she is or why, a fact brought to my immediate attention when she took me aside and whispered urgently that “I’m not sure I should be here. I like these people but some of them are really ill.”
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The Eyes Are The Windows Of The Face
June 7th, 2010
Dear Rachel
…or so they say. However, even if I had traded all day on Saturday with my eyes tightly closed, I would still have known that there was a framed Pac Man tube map prominently displayed behind the stall because of the relentless waves of highly excited people rushing up to the pitch and shouting ‘Oh my God! Space Invaders!’ at it.
This was, however, only one of several irritations on what was an annoying weekend. I had commenced it slightly later than I would usually like, a fact stridently announched by Jimmy who sells ho-hum artwork by the entrance. Jimmy is one of those people who is ‘a bit of a character’, and his voice and demeanour suggest a strict diet of Highland terriers and tartan headscarves. ‘Yes,’ I replied while hastily hefting storage boxes about, ‘but I would rather be late than Scottish’, which seemed to keep him quiet.
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Three Men In A Queue
May 29th, 2010
Dear Rachel
I am writing this on a train. I travel on trains a lot, and on the whole I enjoy it. I almost always travel First Class – I think the nation expects it of me – and in any case reading on trains is one of my favourite things, and it is nice to do this in a usually silent carriage. Very often, I write stuff while on the train too, and one of these occasions is, as we have already established, now.
The reason I am writing this now is that I have just been to the buffet for tea. I like to get suitably provisioned before the journey starts in earnest, and when I arrived, the buffet wasn’t quite open. While I was waiting, I noticed a heterosexual man in a pink shirt also waiting, just in front of me. It takes a certain type of heterosexual man to carry off a pink shirt confidently – I tried it once with a Fred Perry, and binned it after being called a bender all evening – but this bloke was one of those people, and we acknowledged each other in the Unspoken Language of Men as we waited. He then nipped off for a second, perhaps to check something at his seat. At that moment two things happened: the buffet shutter opened, and a Third Man appeared, leant on the counter, and ordered a cup of tea. This constitutes queue jumping, which is a crime against civility, and therefore, perhaps the worst kind of crime there is.
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Up The Pub With Byron
May 25th, 2010
Dear Rachel,
The churchyard of Christ Church Spitalfields, near the market on Commercial Road, was at one time inhabited by tramps and vagrants so verminous and lice ridden that it was locally known as Itchy Park. Fact fans, trivia buffs and tittle tattle afficionados will be interested to learn that this ‘Itchy Park’ was the inspiration for the Small Faces’ 1966 hit – which for some reason I just don’t get on with – Itchycoo Park.
Even more interestingly, it was on the jukebox of the adjacent and dearly beloved (by us) Duke of Wellington public house during my two hour stint as de facto landlord, on March 7th this year. Vinny, the actual landlord, had nipped out for a while, and the only other punter in the place was a bloke in his twenties reading Byron. I know he was reading Byron, because when I asked him what he was reading, he showed me the cover of the book for half a second without saying anything or moving his eyes or head at all. I got the impression that he was really reading Byron, in a way that someone like myself simply could not, even if I chose to try. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he dressed up like Bryon in order to further enjoy the book, but unless Bryon wore Pink Floyd t shirts like some sort of twat I don’t think he had on this occasion.
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A Banana In The Face
May 19th, 2010
Dear Rachel,
Keith inadvertantly struck a public sector worker in the face with a banana at Greenwich Market on Sunday. If you’re reading this outside the UK, the public sector is a thing which either employs three people to do one person’s job, or one person to do three people’s jobs, and whose main role in wider society is to provide secure employment for terminally but non-specifically unhappy women. It’s cats, yoghurts, and crying at desks, basically, and we quickly knew that this woman was a public sector employee because she said ‘I’m a social worker, you know’ a bit angrily, and is probably just settling in to a couple of years off work with depression as I write.
In case you aren’t aware of who Keith is, he sells photographic art in our section of the market, and if a picture of him in shorts in the ’80s is to be believed, is eight inches on the slack. The catalyst between the public sector worker, the trouser proud photography vendor and the accidental fruity missile is Danny, who sells jewellery opposite my usual pitch. When bored, Danny will throw leftover foodstuffs onto the top of Keith’s stall, in order to attract pidgeons who, if everything goes to plan, will relieve themselves all over Keith’s stuff. It’s a remarkably successful ploy, and never one to be outdone, I’m thinking of putting a meadow in the market roof, to see if it works with cows.
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Shooting Over To Acton
May 10th, 2010
Dear Rachel
I have been looking at expanding our lavish kitchenware department recently, and I know a man who knows a man who knows a man who can cut toughened laminate glass. It isn’t his main line of business, but we are usually dealing with people who are doing things that aren’t their main line of business, or else their main line of business would be as ramshackle, haphazard and defined by endless grinding poverty as ours. Anyway. One of the properties I find most pleasing about toughened laminate glass is that, at a thickness of 40mm, it will stop a bullet. This appealed to me greatly, as I thought it would be a bit of a larf to produce a bulletproof chopping board.
Last week, I headed west to Acton to see the prototype. It had ‘Lovely Chopper’ on it, which I’m afraid was the best I could come up with design-wise at short notice, but otherwise it was very Anne Boleyn, which incidentally is London market slang for ‘well executed.’ It did look a bit on the thin side, though, and as the pair of us stood in a long and rather rusty open sided corregated iron shed, which I suppose at some point in the distant past was probably a repair depot for railway rolling stock, I said ‘Yeah it’s nice, but bollocks is it bulletproof’. My astonishment at what happened next – that our new kitchenware manufacturer took out a Glock automatic pistol and shot it, with a bored air more suited to someone examining a wine list in a restaurant they didn’t like but were resigned to eating in – was matched only by my astonishment that I had miraculously not shat myself.
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