The hands and the knees

My career as a life model never really happened, did it?

The failure to become a naked corpse on a mortuary slab, my failure to audition for RAM, my failure to respond to the invitations of artists in Barnes and Vauxhall, all point to one - that I do not have the bottle.

True, you did strip for Belarus, on one of the coldest January days of 2012. But who, who would really want to look at and draw a naked, skeletal 60-year-old stringbean for hours on end? It would be too distressing, too odd. I think they prefer a nice cheerful middle aged chap with a bit of a beer gut and a head of curly hair.

My one paid job does not in fact require nudity. Quite the reverse, in fact, for I am being the hands and knees double for an eminent academic whose portrait is to be painted for a national collection.

For this work - I cannot reveal the subject or artists' name yet - I have to dress up rather than undress, wearing a selection of lovely tweedy suits and ties - and for one, later rejected pose, a beautiful corduroy overcoat.

It's not terribly exciting and surprisingly difficult to model someone else's hands - even though they look the same, my knuckle-joints are not as flexible as his. The amount of time spent arranging my extremities, trying to hold them still, changing the light, moving the toes an inch back, tucking in the shirtcuffs, is an eye-opener. He endlessly photographs, and then seems to do it all over again, and then again.

But the artist is a charmer, young but steeped in the traditions of portraiture. His studio easy to reach and the pay very fair. How can I complain?

Fela Kuti musical at NT in November

Ages ago I wrote this stuff about Fela the musical:

"In two minds about the news that the Broadway musical hit, Fela!, is coming to London this autumn.

I've loved Fela Kuti's music through four decades (first heard him in the early 70s, when UK rock gods started falling over each other to get a bit of authenticity by visiting Lagos).

Now he's going to be up there on the same billboards with the likes of Freddy Mercury, Abba, and Andrew Lloyd Weber - a curious fate for this tempestous musician and political activist.

Am I just being a snob? I mean, the fear that it won't live up to the reality of his music and stage presence is ridiculous isn't it? I don't like music biopics much (apart from those old Ken Russell BBC films on the likes of Delius) - but I do like the idea of Fela being brought to new audiences."

Since then I've seen the show. It was at Sadlers Wells, and it was astonishing. I never did see the real Fela, I never went to Lagos to visit the Shrine, the Kalakuta republic, I just have been deeply attracted to his music since - when?

I first heard Fela when a friend made me listen to the Ginger Baker/Fela Ransome Kuti recordings back in the early 70s. It was exciting stuff, but then so was Osibisa, and then along came Bob Marley and I was totally absorbed in Jamaican music for the next 10 years or so. Apart from a wee bit of Ian Dury, and a lot of jazz, and the Clash, PiL, Robert Wyatt  and Jah Wobble.

Partly thanks to John Peel, but even more thanks to another radio man, Charlie Gillett, I  started again listening to wider ranges of stuff. Gillett's show on BBC Radio London was a beautiful thing. He was so mild, modest, and engagingly knowledgable, he out-Peeled Peel for me.

 Thanks to him, African, specifically South African,  music, re-entered my airspace in the early 80s, and then thanks also to repeated visits to a Kentish Town pub where the great (and now late) Dudu Pukwana's band – Zila – had a regular slot. This music was just so crazily, beautifully, infectiously hot and full of human charm, and this coming form a band of exiles who'd been forced out of their own country by hatred and death-threats.

The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, District Six, Hugh Masekela, Paul simon's stuff - and the way  UK musicians like the Specials, Robert Wyatt etc, signed up to anti-Apartheid with the whole of their musical as well as political souls  - that music was powerful, joyful and even quite dangerous, in the best sense.

And then we had the Bundhu Boys,  etc etc....I needed to get back to the Nigerian sounds but there was just too much else of beauty around. Rare groove revivals, James Brown. Funk, punk, Rip Rig and Panic. All that Cuban and Brazilian stuff too, and the rise of Soca. Those were good times to love music in London, or anywhere else I am sure.

Fela was there all along BUT stupidly  I only really got back into him in 1983 or so, when, on the last evening of that year's Notting Hill Carnival, as the southern quarter of the crowd of revellers surged back up Portobello towards the tube and the buses, as we surged past pyramids of empty Red Stripe tins and coconut shells, there was one last sound system - not really a sound system, just an indoors hi-fi set up on a trestle table outdoors,  two small but good speakers and a deck and a big amp, and a girl dj/citizen swaying around, selling her last few tins of lager, with Shuffering and Smiling playing off vinyl at maximum volume, and that stream of going-home pople were stopping their going and starting again to dance, and Fela sort of led it all, a big last street dance at the 1983 Notting Hill carnival.

Anyone else who witnessed this please remind me. Maybe I was just too tired and stoned and runk and dreaming to have any accurate memories.

Meat ! Murder! (Most Fowl!)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?)

Volunteers!

Oh lord, I have a confession to make!
I have joined the massed ranks, not merely of the late-midddle-aged underemployed (but please, I am three years too young to be a baby boomer, and at least a year away from any sniff of a pension) - but also, indeed of the self-indulgent sub-culture, the middle-class male 55+ charity-shop volunteer.

You might as well stick the Kalashnikov into my neck and shout, "Die, you BIG SOCIETY scum, you provocateur and Coalition-collaborationist" whilst pulling the rusty trigger.

You might as well break me in two and find "David Cameron is almost as much like God as Eric Clapton used to be" printed in permanganate purple through my gallstones, and my gall.

But yes I am one, I work for a caring charity, a local one, I serve  in their shops, "specialising in books and records" as I tell my friends.

What it really means is that I dodge around doing an entry-level "Are you being served" act as the sinewy ladies of South Kensington glide into the shop, occasionally requiring some reassurance that the Size 8 D & G sequinned gown fits them  "just like a glove, it might as well have been made for you" as they flutter in and out of the dingy little changing cubicle.

"Well, oddly enough, it could well have been made for me, young man...."

Or the monocled ranks of V & A curators and the unsavoury antiques dealers whov've been sniffing around the nearby auction rooms, who like to peruse the books and the "bric a brac", or the big Bulgarian or Ukrainian families,  taking time out from their visa renewal duties or whatever, buying up  market-bag loads of children's sportswear and worn-once Hugo Boss Jeans for the dads and sons and brothers back home.

SO this is how I pass my 10.30s to 2.30s....

Oh Mary-Anne, Oh oh oh. Oh, put anther CD on, make some tea, go to the bank, but some biscuits, "Would you like a bag , madam?" (yes but don't give her a nice one, she's only bought an M & S shirt").

Roll on September when the French will return from les vacances, and all their sweet children pop in and out, brushing their ice-creams against the cashmeres, dripping it onto the comic-books, and the tramping it all into that nasty fake wooden floor.

Slab boy

I have this obsession. I have a burning need to play a corpse in a film, or better still in a piece of live theatre.

I didn't know about this strange urge until last April, when I spotted an ad on one of the many extras wanted sites I belonged to then. A film student needed an old(er) male corpse for her graduation piece, a short film about a mortuary worker befriending one of his deceased clients, and then spending each shift chatting to this old stiff on a slab.

I thought, well, I am well qualified: I'm not that far off from being a corpse, and I could make a good shot at what I imagine I will look like. It helped that I have been described by good friends as having a distinctly cadaverous appearance.

I applied, and the film student called me in for an interview. I met her in the canteen of the London Film School in Covent Garden - a place I knew well from long ago, as my former landlord was its former director.

She seemed keen - though she also seemed slightly surprised when I asked if any make-up would be used to give my skin the correct deathly pallor. As if she hadn't really thought of this until then. Soon after this I had a call from another student, her friend who would produce the movie - it all seemed to be good. I began practising lying very still and controlling my breathing.

A few days later, hearing nothing, I emailed again. A couple of days later another email confirmed that they had decided to use a dummy instead.

Of course I was sad - and I still haven't sublimated this oh so recently opened desire to play dead. SO.....

On being part of the "F" and all of the "T" in "Fuck Realpolitik"

It was not as cold as Minsk, perhaps, but it was still bloody cold, and who but a mad fool would be lying naked on the Hammersmith Riverside terrace as an icy wind ripped off the Thames and straight up your body? Who? Well, as it happens,

 anyone who had been moved by the story of Belarus Free Theatre.

It happened so fast - the chance glimpse of the post on Time Out blog, the rash email to jagged-edge emily, the damp cycle ride to Hammersmith. And then there I was, naked on the ground, with a dozen other naked men and women.

To explain - I have now added a new skill to my portfolio.

I am now a proud member of the never-to-be-established society of human letter-parts. An anthropo-typographic operative.

Last week for a short time I was part of the letter "F" - the descender, or perpendicular bit, you understand - serif or not I am not sure. That is "F", as in the first letter of "Fuck".

And then, I had the even greater honour of being a "T".

A rather good "T", someone said. The "T" that sits third from last in that potent word, "Realpolitik".

The finished product - a montage, as you can tell, as several people appear more than once. 

Anyway, whether we made good letters or not, we shall see when we see the photographs. If we ever do.

There were 20 of us letter-parts in total - not quite enough to spell out the message required by our hosts, the Belarus Free Theatre. The slogan chosen by the Free Belarus Campaign - "Fuck RealPolitik" - would need around 40 people to form its 15 characters convincingly.

So it was shot in three takes - "Fuck", "Real" and "Politik".

It was quite cold during the prolonged rehearsals, so our delightful supervisors - Emily, Natalia, Nikolai, Fenella - had us run in circles around the Riverside terrace. A chill wind was gusting across the lead-grey River Thames, a few yards to our south.

"Now we jump in and swim!"

It was Natalia who said that - Natalia Koliada, the co-founder of the BFT six years ago in Minsk with her husband Nikolai Khalezin, also here today, pony-tailed, smiling, taking photos, art-directing us all with great charm and gentleness. Natalia, intense, slight, smiling a lot, and yet, and yet, you could tell that she had personal experience of the full horror of this last European dictatorship.

The photos were taken by a leading theatrical photographer, Simon Annand, a quiet and quite posh guy with specs, thinning hair and a moleskin coat. At first I thought he was maybe a critic or a producer.

He was a charmer, and had no trouble persuading us to line up against a whitewashed wall and remove all our clothes, and look straight in front of us. OK, so the shots of vodka also helped.

I kept looking up to the planes as they dropped towards Heathrow. And then I looked at Hammersmith Bridge, and could see the bright yellow jackets of two or three policemen, looking our way.

And then we went, in a sort of mad euphoria of relief at last to be naked in front of each other, to take up our positions on the concrete terrace.

For both "F" and "T" I was lying flat on my back, arms at my sides. I can only imagine that viewers of the photographs will see a rather emaciated and depressed looking naked old man with shrivelled genitals, trying rather hard not to notice some of the beautiful naked people all around him. I sort of worry I will spoil the shot, to be honest.

While being the "F" in Fuck, I spoke to the young woman next to me (without looking, you see) about how cold it seemed. It was 8 degrees C, she politely corrected me, but said in Belarus it had also been a warm winter, that normally it would be minus 20 now. In December 2010, when dozens of citizens protesting at Lukashenko's rigged election victory had been arrested and forced to strip naked in the Minsk winter, and were then tortured and beaten, it had been that cold.

Our self-inflicted ordeal was, almost literally a piece of cake - well, literally it was actually a large paper cup of hot soup, the best possible thing of all, home-made by Fenella of the BFT team - and then another vodka shot.

I think everyone found the experience rewarding. At one point a young guy two letters down from me got a call from a friend, giving him the chance to say: "Yeah, it's great, I'm half of C!"

The lovely Jamie, the bearded Viv Stanishall lookalike who works as a clown in children's wards, summed it all up, really, when he told me why he was there: "Because they asked us to come. They asked us to give them our bodies for a short time. How could we not?".

For much better accounts of this strange January morning in west London, listen to Fiona Mckinnon's audio-blog on BBC Radio London's podcast site, and read Danielle Goldstein's report for Time Out. Then Google the Belarus Free Theatre.

Not surprisingly, nothing ever came of this strange event. There was no exhibition of the photos, nor any publiciation, so far as I can see. Just as well, perhaps - but who knows, we never saw the results.

*UPDATE MAY 2013: Seems I was wrong. An email from BFT informs that there's to be an exhibition of the FuckRealpolitik affair at the Young Vic, starting on 6 June. Same day I have pledged to do a second thing for BFT involving lying down on cold ground - but this time in a body bag. Will report back on both these soon.