The stupidity of the EU vote: problem one, how to control the rage?

Been feeling physically sick since about 2.30am today when it became clear the "leave" people were going to win.

The feeling, at 7am, that if I didn't look at the internet or turn on the radio, it might not actually have happened.

The feeling, during the day, cycling around south London, that every sighting of a Union Jack or St George's flag triggered an immediate desire to deface it with red or brown paint. You know, a bit of reciprocal vandalism, a sort of childish urge to hit back at the types who have shat all over our (and our children's) futures.

Sadly, many such flags, sodden with the earlier rain, are flapping around in this very street.

A sort of provocation, a squad of dangling insults, these flags were strung out two weeks ago for some snooty street party, ostensibly to celebrate the queen's birthday, actually to celebrate just how frightfully rich most of the residents here are.

And they left the flags up. Last week they seemed merely pathetic, today they seem insulting, in a borough that voted 80 per cent to stay in the EU, that voted overwhelmingly to support and extend the supra-national European project.

So the sodden flags dangle and flap. At least many of them are pink versions of the flag, LGBT jacks perhaps, nice thought, maybe that's OK. The tolerant UK flag. But maybe not....check out the fake blue plaques on a wall at the southern end of this street, celebrating two earlier street parties to celebrate two other events in the life of the dreary Windsor family.

Please, take down these flags!

It's a time to grieve and mourn the destruction of 40 years of efforts to bring people together, to soften borders, to encourage mobility, to increase understanding.

Clapham, now! Too much ordure, too many toff-fests

Oh no, hang on this must be a mistake. It can't be what it seems to be.

Something came through the front door last week.

My street is an an odd street. Have you read "Capital" by John Lanchester? If you have you might latch on to this strangeness.

This street has some of the more expensive property in this very expensive bit of south London. The SW4 bit, formerly known as "Cxxxxxm".

Like many of these "most exclusive and luxurious" areas, it is basically a bit of Victorian speculative jerry-building over a few muddy acres of the Battersea and north Surrey marshlands, the Wandle basin and its surrounding dung-fields.

Lots of collapsing old buildings, lots of mud, dirt, dog muck, dumped infested mattresses, festering bomb-craters, used condoms, burned out Rage Rovers, you name it.

A valley of used disposable nappies, and a plateau paved with well-filled dogshit bags.

A pizza box filled with yuppie vomit. I named it.

Lots of three or four storey houses, each one costing £2 to £3million, and that's before the lads have scooped out another house underneath, a basement paradise with bubbling water-features and extra garage space or whatever it is they do down there, in the deep mud.

Something came thru my front door. It wasn't a plump buff package of dog shit this time.

No, nor even human shit. I know that's what you wanted it to be, but you lose this time.

Well, around here you wonder. These streets are paved with filthy lucre. Last week I narrowly missed seeing a young lady poohing behind a parked BMW suv. Her drunken, well-dressed friend was on watch-out and when I appeared around the corner, she signalled for me not to proceed, but to cross the road.  Good advice.

Next morning I passed said BMW and said pooh - large, humanoid, stinking - was still in situ.

This is Cxxxxxm. Now.

You'll do it next time, and I know your name. And your address, by the way. But I haven't got a dog.

ANYWAY…..It was something worse!

It was an invitation, like I said, an invitation to a party.

A "street party".

Only £15 a ticket! Well it included some lunch, soft drinks, a dog show and so on...

So, as I was saying. This road or street has certain aspirations, it seems, certain pretensions shall we say. It thinks it is, it believes itself to be ….to be a bit better than the  rest, or so it thinks.

You might not be surprised to learn that this street party was sponsored by an Estate Agent and was held to celebrate a royal birthday.

Now, I'm a strict roundhead, I have no interest whatsoever in the Windsor family, who have always struck me as just as dull as my own family and almost as sad. If those with a different view want to celebrate this birthday, then fine, that's up to them. But this is the third royal-themed street party in this street in the past decade, for Thunderclap's sake!

I mean, why this street? I've never seen any of the royals around here, why do we keep on kow-towing to the old dears? (Mind you the old ones are preferable to their children and grandchildren, don't you agree? OK, maybe not.)

Later this year there's another anniversary which might be a more interesting excuse for a party. Of course it will be too cold and dark for a street party by then, but maybe a genteel house party.

In December it will be the 100th anniversary of the death of the great Japanese writer, Natsume Soseki.

He lived in this street for his last few miserable months in London, early in the 20th century. He put up with the prejudice and stupidity of the local Brits, and he put up with cold, the wind, the rain, the ugliness, the filthy food, the hideous manners of the locals, just because he adored English literature and  history, and had a sort of reverence for a London of the imagination.

His subsequent writing added to that image of London …. but also set him on the path to becoming one of the most famous Japanese novelists of his time, maybe Japan's first real modern novelist. And it seems his unhappy few months Clapham was a catalyst for all this.

Thank god this street has something in its past, to make up for the embarrassment of the here and now. A house wrapped in pink, for heaven's sake. Well, maybe it's a good joke…yes, let's take the positive view.

Quick! Get down to Josephine Avenue's Urban Art festival - a visual feast with a party atmosphere

Local artist Matt Crump and some of his wonderful, intricate digital collages at the Urban Art Festival in Josephine Avenue, Brixton. Some of his work uses 3D - hence the specs on the young connoisseur, left.

If you live where I do, and you want decent community events, you go two miles east to Brixton, where this weekend Josephine Avenue is holding its annual Urban Art festival, just off Brixton Hill,

In fact this is the fourteenth year of this unique combination of street party, urban graffiti artist's spray-in and open-air art show. Forget Affordable Art, Bayswater Road and The RA Summer show - this is where you'll see (and, if you like, buy) new art from over 200 painters, print-makers, mixed-media artists, photographers and craftspeople, eat some delicious home-cooked food and drink a beer or coffee in someone's front garden, and chat.

Kevin McMayo with some of his gorgeous
paintings at the 14th annual Urban Art festival
in Brixton's Josephine Avenue

Having cycled up and down this lovely street at least once a week over many years, I'm ashamed to say this was the first time I've been around on the right weekend for the event.

I went for  a quick look and stayed for more than three hours. I spoke to as many of the artists as I could,  and I enjoyed the whole thing enormously. I've never felt more included in any public event. The people living in this very beautiful, very green crescent half way up the Brixton hill have the good fortune to live in one of the most delightful streets in south London, and they have the generosity to share it with everyone.

Many the artists are local, others  come from far away to join in this unique event.  Photographer and mixed-media artist, Estelle Vincent, had come up from Bournemouth to exhibit her beautiful images of Beirut, London, Bournemouth, Hastings and elsewhere.

Another photographer with an amazing double-exposure technique was A J Silistrie, who was also showing some gritty local street shots in black and white.

And I loved the street photography of Francesca Brecciaroli, that wonderful shot up to peoples' feet crossing a glass panel in New York.

Others, like Matt Crump, who specialises in strange, sometimes 3D prints made from hundreds and even thousands of separate scans of old book and magazine illustrations, have become more and more local over the years of the event.

Akeisha Walters with some of her
 beautiful prints

The work of two artists in particular seemed to burn with brilliant colour in the strong sunshine of the first day.

Akeisha Walters' small digital prints had a mesmeric, stylised look, somewhere between ancient Egyptian  paintings and 1920s fashion illustrations - glorious in the sunshine, they'd certainly be a tonic in the more normal London gloom.

Nearby Kevin  McMayo was exhibiting his large, gorgeous oil paintings, memories of the luxuriant greens and golds of Trinidad, on this day enhanced by the darker deep greens of Josephine Avenue's Lime trees in sunshine.

There were so many more excellent artists there, I wish I'd had more time (and every)  to speak to more, I hope some of the images that follow might whet your appetite.

The event was even more amazing when you realise that only a week ago Leander Road, which leads off Josephine Ave, held its own street party last week - and that was also open to all and crammed with outsiders, hungry for some street music and  dance action.

Always thought this was a desirable and magical corner of South London - now I know for sure. It runs until 6pm today so get along there and browse and buy!

Dazzled by the art in Josephine Avenue

The Chase: Clapham's street of no shame

Each day I come home across the northern corner of Clapham Common, then turn right into my street.

Over the road are the beautiful walled gardens of Trinity Hospice, wonderful at any time of year, but especially so in spring, with its abundant wisteria and blossoming trees. This hospice - rightly venerated across the city - still operates according to the policies of its founders, that is - offering a place to anyone i need within its catchment area, regardless of anything else, wealth included.

If only the rest of this street, my street, where I have lived since 1985, could adhere to such policies.

Up on the wall to your left as you turn the corner from Northside into The Chase are two plaques.  Not genuine blue plaques denoting former residents of historical significance. No, these are a less impressive blue, one mid-blue, one dark, but they are not the real thing, not real London Blue Plaques.

Instead,  they are privatised plaques, essentially boasts, commemorating two street parties held in this road, one for the queen's 60th anniversary of accession to the throne,  possibly, and the other for the royal family wedding, a year or so later.

I can't remember the exact dates but I do remember the rather off-putting invitations, stuffed through our front doors back then. They invited us all to join in honouring said royals at "street parties".

 The Chase would be closed to traffic and the residents were invited to buy tickets for a feast in honour of, well I suppose the Queen herself, and ... I can''t remember who the others were - possibly Charles' son's wedding to Ms K. Middleton?

I have no interest in  England's royal family. They seem in some cases to be rather silly, annoying people, I am never sure why they are given the opportunity to comment so often. I do not generally believe them when they speak, it seems like they are actors, voicing someone else's lines.

 I'm sure they'd have similar or even stronger feelings about me. You can't really hate them, they are too bland.  The ones I loathe are the media arse-lickers who seem to think we all want them to plaster photos of these dreary folk all over the front pages of newspapers, and all over every TV news bulletin.

So, I have to admit, it rather annoys me every day, seeing these plaques commemorating these events which gave a few well-heeled households in this street the chance to advertise their patriotism and their connections and their good taste in catering to each other. It is still, in this country, a matter of who you know, or worse still, where you went to school or university.

But why did they have to stick these plates on the wall? It is the equivalent of me putting huge photos of Castro or Che Guevara or even poor old Ken Livingstone over my windows.

I wish I had a similar wall onto which I could screw plaques reflecting my own political views. Living on the top floor of a decaying chunk of jerry-built housing - one the luftwaffe should have put out of its misery, but narrowly missed - I do not.

I wish I had had the nerve to organise a street party  to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of this street's one truly great recent resident, Angela Carter. That might be something good: but I'm sure her many friends and fans and family me members will do something good, in 2017, for this great author.

It happens that there is a genuine Blue Plaque on a house in this street, directly opposite where I live. It marks the spot where the Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki, spent a couple of extremely unhappy and uncomfortable years in London in a miserable Clapham boarding house. That house is now worth approximately £2.5 million. Or perhaps much more...

I doubt if many people will visit this part of Clapham to see where some wealthy residents glugged a lot of champagne in honour of the royals on those days. By contrast, almost every day through the summer, taxis and minibuses stop outside 80 The Chase to disgorge Japansese tourists, young and old, here to pay tribute to Japan's answer to Dickens or Henry James, and to visit the small museum in the flat at no 80b.

Maybe a Japanese themed street party would tick all our boxes?

Meanwhile, another "only in The Chase" sighting today - one of those home-made posters asking people to pick up their dog's shit. Only in this case, it came with a bag of Bob Marten's poo-bags, just in case the shames owners had forgotten to bring their own.

Hurrah!