I should not read the Evening Standard. I am developing a town version of the middle-england Mail reader's "disgusted of tunbridge wells" etc.
Yesterday I read a letter by some posh fellow moaning about the very last remnants of real life near Kings Cross (the bookies' shops across the road). I thought, "Fuck!" They really do want to turn all of London - ALL of London - into a Guardian readers' wet dream of perfectly tasteful, safe, fragrant, "quarters" or should that be "quartiers" or "arondissements". Please, leave a little of the dirty mucky seedy London that some of us need as much as we need air and water.
Today I read of plans to "gut" the market halls of Smithfields to build more offices.
"Low-rise", they say.
It makes me love the hulking stumps of the square mile. London has already lost any battle over skylines and heights. The best recent buildings are the gherkin and the shard, they both have character and intelligence and poise and grace. The worst are those tastefully scaled excresences around St Pauls, etc. They do not immediately offend the eye, but when you try walking around them you get that sense of gloom, the ghastly touch of HRH Chas his self. The beautiful medieval streets have gone. You might as well be walking in Croydon, not in what should be absolute heart of the city of London.
If you need offices, please build them super-high, do some more shards, get all those offices up off the ground, shoot them up into massive syringes into the sky. The old meat market? I would rather die than see it turn into yet another Covent Garden, but that at least seems a way to keep the shape, to feed the greed of developers, and to bring in the spenders. And I am going to die soon anyway!
SO - leave Smithfields to the meat-men and clubbers and the very rich advertising folk of Clerkenwell who - much as we might not like them awfully - at least want somewhere interestingly blasted to stumble home through after a heavy night out.
For good god's sake, PLEASE don't make Smithfields into yet another Broadgate/ St Pauls/Spitalfields festival of blandness.
PLEASE!
Spinning happily at thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, not wanting to stop
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Angela Carter , a street in Clapham, and a homesick Japanese novelist
It's almost 30 years since I moved to this street. It was January 1985 - a very cold January. My father had just died, I was recovering from the funeral and all that fallout, and at exactly the same time I realised I was living in the same street as one of my favourite writers.
I remember going to buy a Sunday paper. I got back to my new front door and realised, with a strangely un-panicked realisation, that I had forgotten my keys. There was snow blowing all around, settling lightly now. I was simply thrilled to have a new flat in what seemed to me at the time, a rather lovely street, wide and lined with beautiful, gaunt trees. And I no longer had a father.
Luckily the house was in scaffolding. I scaled the three or four ladders, I climbed over the parapet onto the roof, and slithered down a drainpipe onto my own roof terrace and in through the bathroom window (I am too fat to do that now).
I made some coffee and started reading this plump bundle of newsprint. In the colour supplement, Ian McEwan was writing about visiting Angela Carter. As I read it I realised he was describing my own street. How the terraced houses crowded together as if for mutual protection as they approached the social border of Wandsworth Road. How hers was one of those last houses before the badlands of the Battersea marshes and their sprawling estates.
How her famous visitors sauntered down the road, looking at house numbers, wondering, where on earth does she live?
I encountered her a few times in the newsagents, but I was a fan, awestruck, struck dumb, mumbling nonsense. "Hi. Keep well, it's freezing out there ...", etc. Never daring to say how much I loved her writing.
After that I was always watching. I was so proud to have such a wonderful near neighbour. I found out all I could about her, and soon realised she was (like me) an aboriginal south Londoner. She had even worked as a junior reporter for the Croydon Advertiser (I tried to get work experience there, they sent me away).
This amazing woman with her commanding presence, that face, that beaming smile, the extraordinary cloud of grey hair, and then - not , as I remember, so long after, her child, the baby in the pushchair, the shy man who I imagined was her husband....
Soon after this, I discovered that another well-known writer had lived even closer. The Japanese novelist, Natsume Sōseki, had been sent to London as a young man, and had found miserable lodgings - about six doors up from where Angela Carter lived. Opposite the house where he endured a foul
English winter is a small museum devoted to his works. In the summer, Soseki fans (usually middle-aged Japanese couples, or younger, often solitary, students) would arrive in The Chase to visit the museum, and to photograph the blue plaque. Often, I would see them looking puzzled, and think, should I volunteer some information? Offer them tea? Then think, well, they will soon find what they seek - and the last thing they want is inadequate help from some bumbling, clumsy Englishman.
The Blue Plaque was added about five years ago, a crumb of comfort to those Soseki followers whose plans to erect a statue of the writer on Clapham Common had been thrown out after a particularly mean-minded and xenophobic campaign by the so-called "Friends of Clapham Common".
Angela Carter lived in Japan in her 20s, and I assume she was well aware of this connection. But was it a coincidence that she moved into this street? As much as Soseki loathed London, and especially loathed Clapham, so Angela Carter seemed to feel at home here.
I wonder how she'd feel now, about this street, dominated as it is by super-rich city types with their Range Rovers and Aston Martins, their royal connections, their street parties for the queen's jubilee and the wedding of william and kate. I wish she was still around to ask, because now, having shed that vile false modesty and shyness of the hobbledehoy, I would ask her too.
 |
| Clapham was a dirt cheap place to lodge when Soseki came here in the 1900s. Two of the many often bewildered Japanese literary pilgrims photograph his Blue Plaque. |
Luckily the house was in scaffolding. I scaled the three or four ladders, I climbed over the parapet onto the roof, and slithered down a drainpipe onto my own roof terrace and in through the bathroom window (I am too fat to do that now).
I made some coffee and started reading this plump bundle of newsprint. In the colour supplement, Ian McEwan was writing about visiting Angela Carter. As I read it I realised he was describing my own street. How the terraced houses crowded together as if for mutual protection as they approached the social border of Wandsworth Road. How hers was one of those last houses before the badlands of the Battersea marshes and their sprawling estates.
How her famous visitors sauntered down the road, looking at house numbers, wondering, where on earth does she live?
I encountered her a few times in the newsagents, but I was a fan, awestruck, struck dumb, mumbling nonsense. "Hi. Keep well, it's freezing out there ...", etc. Never daring to say how much I loved her writing.
After that I was always watching. I was so proud to have such a wonderful near neighbour. I found out all I could about her, and soon realised she was (like me) an aboriginal south Londoner. She had even worked as a junior reporter for the Croydon Advertiser (I tried to get work experience there, they sent me away).
This amazing woman with her commanding presence, that face, that beaming smile, the extraordinary cloud of grey hair, and then - not , as I remember, so long after, her child, the baby in the pushchair, the shy man who I imagined was her husband....
Soon after this, I discovered that another well-known writer had lived even closer. The Japanese novelist, Natsume Sōseki, had been sent to London as a young man, and had found miserable lodgings - about six doors up from where Angela Carter lived. Opposite the house where he endured a foul
English winter is a small museum devoted to his works. In the summer, Soseki fans (usually middle-aged Japanese couples, or younger, often solitary, students) would arrive in The Chase to visit the museum, and to photograph the blue plaque. Often, I would see them looking puzzled, and think, should I volunteer some information? Offer them tea? Then think, well, they will soon find what they seek - and the last thing they want is inadequate help from some bumbling, clumsy Englishman.
The Blue Plaque was added about five years ago, a crumb of comfort to those Soseki followers whose plans to erect a statue of the writer on Clapham Common had been thrown out after a particularly mean-minded and xenophobic campaign by the so-called "Friends of Clapham Common".
Angela Carter lived in Japan in her 20s, and I assume she was well aware of this connection. But was it a coincidence that she moved into this street? As much as Soseki loathed London, and especially loathed Clapham, so Angela Carter seemed to feel at home here.
I wonder how she'd feel now, about this street, dominated as it is by super-rich city types with their Range Rovers and Aston Martins, their royal connections, their street parties for the queen's jubilee and the wedding of william and kate. I wish she was still around to ask, because now, having shed that vile false modesty and shyness of the hobbledehoy, I would ask her too.
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
I am so fucking angry. I need caffeine.
I am 59 years old. I should be calm and placid.
Or dead.
Not so. I am fucking furious and fuming.
I have just read an article about the corporate thieves who sell what they call coffee to the world.
You know, Starbucks, Costa etc.
The ones who thieved the beauty of the Italian espresso bar back in the 80s and turned it into this grotesque global money-minting machine.
I cannot explain or describe how angry I feel. Certain things cause me, an already near-permanently angry old man, to overheat, almost to spasm.
The music for The Archers on Radio 4 is one such irritant. The words Starbucks, or their pronunciation of a type of coffee as "lah-tay" is another. Even worse is how scum-mongers such as Costa coffee have compounded the sins of the (initially well-meaning) Starbucks project.
They are all crooks, of course. How much do those horrible mugs of frothed hot milk and sugary additives really cost them? How much do they pay those poor girls and boys who look at you so blankly when you ask them if they can produce something a little stronger than usual? They just want to sell you a muffin.
I hate how Costa and Strabucks appear like a rash wherever there's a little disposable income. I hate how they have forever ruined two innocent colours - Costa red and Starbucks green.
I want more caffeine, I do not want some marshmallow-infested gloop with sweetie-pie hundreds and thousands floating on top!
I want fucking coffee! Is it too much to ask? Even at the South Mimms Service Station on the M25 where caffeine is surely a necessity and could be sold at a premium. No such thing. That liquid fudge you just sold me is not going to help me avoid that 16-wheel arctic that is about to srcunch my poor little Renault to nothing.
Blah!
Or dead.
Not so. I am fucking furious and fuming.
I have just read an article about the corporate thieves who sell what they call coffee to the world.
You know, Starbucks, Costa etc.
The ones who thieved the beauty of the Italian espresso bar back in the 80s and turned it into this grotesque global money-minting machine.
I cannot explain or describe how angry I feel. Certain things cause me, an already near-permanently angry old man, to overheat, almost to spasm.
The music for The Archers on Radio 4 is one such irritant. The words Starbucks, or their pronunciation of a type of coffee as "lah-tay" is another. Even worse is how scum-mongers such as Costa coffee have compounded the sins of the (initially well-meaning) Starbucks project.
They are all crooks, of course. How much do those horrible mugs of frothed hot milk and sugary additives really cost them? How much do they pay those poor girls and boys who look at you so blankly when you ask them if they can produce something a little stronger than usual? They just want to sell you a muffin.
I hate how Costa and Strabucks appear like a rash wherever there's a little disposable income. I hate how they have forever ruined two innocent colours - Costa red and Starbucks green.
I want more caffeine, I do not want some marshmallow-infested gloop with sweetie-pie hundreds and thousands floating on top!
I want fucking coffee! Is it too much to ask? Even at the South Mimms Service Station on the M25 where caffeine is surely a necessity and could be sold at a premium. No such thing. That liquid fudge you just sold me is not going to help me avoid that 16-wheel arctic that is about to srcunch my poor little Renault to nothing.
Blah!
Saturday, 6 October 2012
Saturday 6 October year of satan numero 12
I have these unlinked thoughts on this day when the BBC is due to re-broadcast the Magical mystery Tour I watched with such adoring fascination 45 years ago.
These thought-dream ideas are so evanescent, they are the flames burning off the edges of other flames. I had it then, 10 minutes back, now it has gone.
The cellar-bound, the basement man. An old man with his books. Not his books, their books, and upstairs the fragrant Kensington folk, the less fragrant Portobello men with their bad teeth, their antique-dealer shrugs, their nicotine skin.
Above all, E. She could've been that skinhead girl back in 1968 with high-waisted blue jeans with big turn-ups (big as turnips and just as white) above the dm boot top, the braces and the rusty buzz cut, the blank eyed glare as she dodged between the gorilla-male skins around bethnal green, spitting venom at the little suburban hippies making their way to victoria park for some ill-advised peace and poetry event.
Now she's 70-ish, makes tea, her late hub was a printer at new printing house square, lost job when murdoch moved them, was a wapping picket, died later, sons are taxi-drivers, grand-daughter is already doing the knowledge.
You get the score. She's a character out of the screenplay I never wrote for Bridget in 1989. A true rough diamond geezer-essa, a riot-grrll 50 years ahead of her time.
Then there's D, a barmaid type, must've been so pretty once, now - as so often with these big beautiful blousy blonde types, she's widened out and hardened, she's becoming furniture, a bow leg at each corner to support the substantial corpus.
Of any interest or not, none of this was what I wanted to write tonight. I might instead write a love poem to Asda - its three for £10 wine deals keep me afloat.
These thought-dream ideas are so evanescent, they are the flames burning off the edges of other flames. I had it then, 10 minutes back, now it has gone.
The cellar-bound, the basement man. An old man with his books. Not his books, their books, and upstairs the fragrant Kensington folk, the less fragrant Portobello men with their bad teeth, their antique-dealer shrugs, their nicotine skin.
Above all, E. She could've been that skinhead girl back in 1968 with high-waisted blue jeans with big turn-ups (big as turnips and just as white) above the dm boot top, the braces and the rusty buzz cut, the blank eyed glare as she dodged between the gorilla-male skins around bethnal green, spitting venom at the little suburban hippies making their way to victoria park for some ill-advised peace and poetry event.
Now she's 70-ish, makes tea, her late hub was a printer at new printing house square, lost job when murdoch moved them, was a wapping picket, died later, sons are taxi-drivers, grand-daughter is already doing the knowledge.
You get the score. She's a character out of the screenplay I never wrote for Bridget in 1989. A true rough diamond geezer-essa, a riot-grrll 50 years ahead of her time.
Then there's D, a barmaid type, must've been so pretty once, now - as so often with these big beautiful blousy blonde types, she's widened out and hardened, she's becoming furniture, a bow leg at each corner to support the substantial corpus.
Of any interest or not, none of this was what I wanted to write tonight. I might instead write a love poem to Asda - its three for £10 wine deals keep me afloat.
Thursday, 27 September 2012
The small pleasures of autumn
Today's brief autumn pleasure: being seven years old again on Clapham Common.
The walk back from the Venn Street sorting office, bright morning sunshine, clutching latest eBay mistake under arms, saluting the crows and applauding their intolerance of the plump pigeons trespassing on their rightful bounty of stale mother's pride.
Dodging the young mums with their large babies and tiny dogs, sidestepping the late-for-work brigade legging it to the tube, dodging the 88 bus driver's determined attempts to soak all pedestrians by aiming at the biggest puddles.
In this late september, low angle sunshine, gleaming treasures reveal themselves on the too-green, dew-drenched grass. They are big fat conkers, left to rot since few boys can be bothered to collect them these days it seems. I am incapable of passing without aiming a kick at one. And then another. And them I am seven again, but really I am Jimmy Greaves. An even plumper conker manifests itself a yard ahead of my right toe. I swerve and chip the little ballock expertly, it flies, curving a fabulous arc over the park bench, and then slamming itself, with a satisfying "dank-e" into the gleaming black door panel of a range-topping Audi parked on the north-side.
I turn on my heel and walk away, head down, fast, in case anyone had noticed.
The walk back from the Venn Street sorting office, bright morning sunshine, clutching latest eBay mistake under arms, saluting the crows and applauding their intolerance of the plump pigeons trespassing on their rightful bounty of stale mother's pride.
Dodging the young mums with their large babies and tiny dogs, sidestepping the late-for-work brigade legging it to the tube, dodging the 88 bus driver's determined attempts to soak all pedestrians by aiming at the biggest puddles.
In this late september, low angle sunshine, gleaming treasures reveal themselves on the too-green, dew-drenched grass. They are big fat conkers, left to rot since few boys can be bothered to collect them these days it seems. I am incapable of passing without aiming a kick at one. And then another. And them I am seven again, but really I am Jimmy Greaves. An even plumper conker manifests itself a yard ahead of my right toe. I swerve and chip the little ballock expertly, it flies, curving a fabulous arc over the park bench, and then slamming itself, with a satisfying "dank-e" into the gleaming black door panel of a range-topping Audi parked on the north-side.
I turn on my heel and walk away, head down, fast, in case anyone had noticed.
Monday, 3 September 2012
I stood on Battersea Bridge and wept
Well, not quite. To say I felt sick and sad at heart would be more accurate, looking again at that magnificent stretch of the Thames as it sweeps around from Wandsworth Bridge to Chelsea Reach.
Early winter evenings with a low sun and some cloudscape, the view west here can be astonishing - the Thames is still wide enough at this point to seem like a truly great river, and not the wealthy playboys' amenity it seems to become upstream of Teddington.
That view, to my mind, was only slightly compromised by the towers of the World's End estate in the 70s, or by the silly Costa Brava look of the 1980s folly Chelsea Harbour.
But since the mid-90s it's the south bank that has offended most, as great lumps of riverside residential development emerged like diseased teeth from the mudbanks of Vauxhall, Battersea and Wandsworth. The view - sorry about this cliché - has been yuppified.
Immediately to the east you get Norman Foster's offices and the same practice's doughnut shaped building, which are each elegant and interesting buildings.
But to the west, all hell. The hideous Wimpy-style townhouses of Morgans's Walk set the tone (I remember when it was still the crucible factory, somewhere around there Nick Drake was photographed for the cover of Five Leaves Left). Battersea Church Street. Up the fucking junction, remember?
Beyond the beautiful church (thank Christ, it is still there), there is an unbroken row of show-off, stupid, ugly, shiny projects, none of them in itself quite as foul as the stuff at Vauxhall - but in a way their lumpish, mean-minded, stupid inadequacy is all the more offensive than that brash turbo-yuppie nonsense on the site of the old pleasure gardens.
Worst of all, though, is how it affects the view from the bridges. Cannot help feeeling that old Whistler etc would have wept blood.
Beyond the beautiful church (thank Christ, it is still there), there is an unbroken row of show-off, stupid, ugly, shiny projects, none of them in itself quite as foul as the stuff at Vauxhall - but in a way their lumpish, mean-minded, stupid inadequacy is all the more offensive than that brash turbo-yuppie nonsense on the site of the old pleasure gardens.
Worst of all, though, is how it affects the view from the bridges. Cannot help feeeling that old Whistler etc would have wept blood.
September song
The new school term begins here.
Oh, September!
And the depths of idiocy to which Cameron's goons will descend becomes all the more dimly apparent.
Turn out to be even deeper than that trough in the Pacific.
Goon no 1, our minister for immigration, is that Damian I see? Mr Green, you have just shattered the hopes of 2,000 odd students, you twit, you twerp! You have shat from on high on the hopes of many, including those at London Met who have spent the last three years trying to rebuild a seriously damaged reputation, and they were more than succeeding.
Worse, you've also damaged the chances of this country's higher education system attracting large numbers of fat-fee-paying boys and girls from south east Asia, Russia, Brazil, India, Africa etc!
Silly Mr Green, but you are only bowing to the inevitable diktat of this curiously awful government, apparently so modern and liberal and smart and clever, yet actually just another quickly-stamped pvc mask crudely fitted over the face of good (that is, bad) old fashioned English class-and-race-based bigotry.
M Green has found another easy way of reducing the net immigration statistic.
As someone far cleverer than me said recently, for pity's sake, stop! We need these people. We should rejoice in the knowledge (oh, so heavily rammed home in all those rather sickening Olympic things about London being a world city etc etc, yeuch) they want to come here. In 20 or 25 years we will be begging them to come and live in our shabby, cold, poor, shitty little country!
Oh London? a world city? The world certainly likes to come here, then it gets ripped off by dubious cockerneys in their tour buses and their duckws and their taxis, by their filthy hot-dog stands and their shittly railways and undergrounds and all those ghastly restaurants in the so-called West end (Angus steakhouse still serving up charred gristle and chips in 2012, 40 years on? What?)
Oh, September!
And the depths of idiocy to which Cameron's goons will descend becomes all the more dimly apparent.
Turn out to be even deeper than that trough in the Pacific.
Goon no 1, our minister for immigration, is that Damian I see? Mr Green, you have just shattered the hopes of 2,000 odd students, you twit, you twerp! You have shat from on high on the hopes of many, including those at London Met who have spent the last three years trying to rebuild a seriously damaged reputation, and they were more than succeeding.
Worse, you've also damaged the chances of this country's higher education system attracting large numbers of fat-fee-paying boys and girls from south east Asia, Russia, Brazil, India, Africa etc!
Silly Mr Green, but you are only bowing to the inevitable diktat of this curiously awful government, apparently so modern and liberal and smart and clever, yet actually just another quickly-stamped pvc mask crudely fitted over the face of good (that is, bad) old fashioned English class-and-race-based bigotry.
M Green has found another easy way of reducing the net immigration statistic.
As someone far cleverer than me said recently, for pity's sake, stop! We need these people. We should rejoice in the knowledge (oh, so heavily rammed home in all those rather sickening Olympic things about London being a world city etc etc, yeuch) they want to come here. In 20 or 25 years we will be begging them to come and live in our shabby, cold, poor, shitty little country!
Oh London? a world city? The world certainly likes to come here, then it gets ripped off by dubious cockerneys in their tour buses and their duckws and their taxis, by their filthy hot-dog stands and their shittly railways and undergrounds and all those ghastly restaurants in the so-called West end (Angus steakhouse still serving up charred gristle and chips in 2012, 40 years on? What?)
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