'Tis the season to download some fine podcasts

The battered, dust-filled shoebox with the motley collection of Christmas decorations is once again dragged out of its hideaway above the hot water tank.

The remnants of five decades worth of tarnished tinsel, plastic baubles, one surviving glass bauble, papier maché angels, lights that no longer work. Add to this a 2009 Waitrose Xmas pudding with real cognac, a gift that has yet to be opened, and probably won't be - and you're ready to face the season.

For a decade or two my personal Advent treat was listening to John Peel's Festive 50 countdown. Then Peel died, the 50 was no more, and there was a big gap in that strange collection of repeated experiences that - for me - made Christmas Christmas.

But now that gap has been filled. Yep, I've acquired a new listening habit, the depleted stable of Christmas/New Year traditions has a new, very 21st century member. It's an Advent Calendar, but not the type that offers stale sickly chocolate behind cardboard shutters. It's Daniel Ruiz Tizon's Advent Calendar, a sequence of 24 daily podcasts recalling his past Christmases, and always asking the question: will it ever be possible to love Christmas again as much as we did in those distant times?

These bundles of memories, deeply autobiographical and rooted in a certain area of south London, but also deeply resonant for anyone who has grown up in the UK over the past few decades. Each 12 minute episode arrives like a little gift-wrapped memory bomb. I'm a lot older than Daniel but the references to life in the 80s and 90s are as powerful as any Proustian madeleine.

"When you live in Lambeth, you learn not to pick up the snow". Well, that was true in almost any urban area where dogs roamed the parks and pavements.

If you like your wine extra dry, your lemon very bitter, and your oil extra-virgin, this is the advent calendar for you. Catch it today: we're not even half way there yet. Listen, and like me get hooked. But don't cheat - one day at a time please. As with the chocolate variety, there was always one lirttle piggy who scoffed the whole lot on December 1, and suffered as a result.

Literature has Dickens' A Christmas Carol; TV has  The Snowman. Now podcasting has its own Christmas classic. Listen!

Peter bows out: a bit of Clapham High Street that should forever be Greece has gone. Almost...

Peter the Greek's final, final closing down sale last week: another bit of old, untidy Clapham is about to disappear
to meet the tidy, buttoned up and thoroughly steel-gated demands of London's property vultures.

2015 will be remembered for plenty of bad reasons. For some of us, amongst much else, it will probably go down as the year in which two of the pillars of Clapham's small but tenacious Greek Cypriot community finally chucked it all in, and called it a day.

If you've been listening to ace SW8 podcaster Daniel Ruiz Tizon's marvellous interviews with Andy, the Greek Cypriot barber of Landor Road, (Part 1 here and Part 2 here)  (and if not why not?) you will know that he is now really on the verge of retirement, after half a century of expertly wielding the clippers and the cut-throat razor to the astonishing parade of characters who have navigated this important furrow between SWs 2, 9 and eventually 4.

So, if you believe him, Andy will be back on the isle of his birth, tending his vines and the olive trees, in January 2016. Meanwhile, it seems that Peter,  the Greek second-hand-goods dealer of Clapham High Street, has also finally had to shut up shop. His lock-up on Prescott Place will soon disappear and be turned into yet more expensive residential property.

His final day was officially  Monday 23 November - as the often repainted "Closing down sale" banner made clear. But by the end of that day the bailiffs had not turned up, so Peter kept on trading a little longer….and then, a few more days…but one day soon, he will be gone.

The vine begins in the soil of a tiny garden
outside  St Peter's Catholic Church...

You wander down Prescott Street today and the shop is shut-up. But even when the single storey lock-up is demolished, there's going to be a durable reminder of his two or three decade presence here. It's a grape-vine, which was planted back in about 2009 in the tiny bit of garden by the side of the catholic church, which by happy coincidence is dedicated to St Peter.

Amazingly the vine has thrived, twisted itself round the corner, and started out on a long journey towards the joys of Clapham High Street. If you look at it even now there are clusters of this autumn's black grapes still hanging down.

According to Peter, once it was established the vine needed very little maintenance, "Just a little cutting back in the spring".

Will he be there to do it next spring? "Who knows."

It has now advanced about two-thirds of the way along the wall of the Two Brewers bar and nightclub on its way to the main road. Peter's hoping he'll live to see it make  the full distance. He;s got another growing along the alley-way behind his flat. It seems vines like Clapham soil, and like Andy, Peter clearly knows how to cultivate.

Unlike Andy, Peter's not planning to return to his birthplace. He likes Clapham and wants to stay here. It seems though he still has further battles, to do with where he's living, to get through.

And it continues along the wall of the Two Brewers, one of Clapham's most
famous gay bars, on its way to the wide-open spaces of the High Street

But, as for the shop, from what he told me, he did not intend to oppose the closure, as he's ready to give it all up. The shop had been quite busy recently, and whenever I visited there were plenty of people trawling through the boxes of books, records, glass, china, and the rails of clothing.

For Peter himself, maybe not such a bad outcome - but for this curious bit of Clapham, which had hung onto its 1980s feel far longer than you'd expect in an area now swamped by a second or even third generations of blond and blazered and chubby-cheeked ex public schoolboys and their well-groomed gals - it's a serious loss. One more of a very small and fast dwindling number of independent, totally  ungentrifiable business ventures, makes its exit, stage left.

Black pudding, the after-life and the best barber in south-west London: Daniel Ruiz Tison is still available, thanks be

Dear reader (s) (in the hope that there's more than one of you),

Please let me draw your attention to the latest episode of a south London radio series which is a bitter-sweet classic of an as yet not fully-defined genre.

It's Daniel Ruiz Tison Is Available, Episode One Hundred and Two, first broadcast on ResonanceFM on Monday 10 November 2015, but now available in perpetuity (until hell freezeth over) as a podcast from iTunes via Daniel's own website.

Unforgivably I was not aware of his series until he stumbled across a piece I'd written about the the best men's haircutter in all of the south-west London postcodes, Andy's of Landor Road. He has now interviewed Andy – who sadly for us, is on the verge of retirement – for a special podcast which is expected go live very soon.

Meanwhile I am struggling to find time to catch up with his back-catalgoue, as well as keeping up with the weekly broadcasts.

Last night's was another classic, and it had me doing that thing which I don't really do anymore: laughing out loud in private.

I was laughing inwardly, with only my cheap Phillips headphones for company, most of the time.  About the hipster coffee shop somewhere in north-east London. About Solo Electric in Clapham High Street in the 1980s, and everyone else, failing to get Daniel's name right.  About the English and languages.  About the wearing of winter coats. Gingevitis.

About what we're going to find in heaven when we die, assuming we get there. Free music lessons, apparently, on a synthesiser. So not as good as Lambeth back in 1983 then, when you could get free lessons on a range of musical instruments, if you were unemployed.

Honestly, I don't laugh easily, but as soon as the show starts, I am primed. Like all great commentators on our times, he has his obsessions. He has certain phrases which, in his voice, open up great chasms of absurdity. As soon as 'Attempts on the gate' are mentioned, I get this surreal image in my head, and…I laugh inwardly.

It was when he got the bit where he overhears a Portuguese trucker speaking Spanish in a South Lambeth Road Portuguese cafe that triggered the explosion of hysteria.

Daniel repeated some of overheard Spanish dialogue, which was all about the full English breakfast they had just been served. Seems they were wondering why it included hash browns but not black pudding.

He then translated the punchline: "Black pudding is nice. Anything with blood is nice."

Reader, believe me, I woke the sleeping bankers up and down this wide and tree-lined Clapham street.

But like I said it's bitter-sweet. You must also listen to this to get the latest news on Stockwell - on Brenda's fruit and veg stall,  or to be reminded of Jack Cornelius, the wrestler of Stockwell who ran a cafe which is now the Sainsburys local. Or the graffiti about Jazzman of Battersea.  I remember that graffiti, I also remember thinking it must have been about George Shearing…but somehow Shearing and graffiti don't seem to mix.