The Shard? Maybe it's too good for London.

Today, the Shard was showering silver light across Southwark and into my borough, Lambeth. I liked it a lot.

The  debate about Renzo Piano's strange addition to London skyline has been quite good fun, if predictable. Many have complained that it's too big or damages views of St Paul's or whatever. As if London actually had a skyline worth preserving, before this rather beautiful  reverse icicle appeared, shaming all the shabby 60s and 70s and - ugh - 80s and - yee-uch - 90s stumps it looks down on.

That great Canaletto skyline of St Pauls lording it over all the other Wren churches and warehouses was finally trashed in the 1950s and 60s. I'd argue that the so-called Shard (spike? stalagmite? stretched tee-pee?) acts as a sort of peg for all the new rubbish. It gives them a wonky sort of focus, hints at what might have been had London had a proper cluster of aerial architecture. It suggests this most strongly only from directly due north and due south viewpoints. From Brixton Hill, or from suicide bridge in Highgate, say.

From others - as from the little south London train that clatters between Clapham High Street and Peckham Rye - you see all of London's new, tall buildings in a washing-line parade, or as a receding gum stabbed with an absurdly variegated assortment of rotting and disintegrating teeth.

Like the Gherkin, but unlike most others, the Shard works well as a standalone. Nothing else built in this muddy riverside settlement over the past three decades has quite so cleverly exploited our fast-changing estuarine skies and cloudscapes. I am very biased, I love real skyscrapers. By real, I mean something that soars away and makes you gasp. In the 70s, Centre Point and Barbican and the NatWest tower tried and failed. I have always despaired at London's pussyfooting approach, and I hate the dreary cluster of sub-Dallas identikit bricks downriver.

But even sceptics are beginning to enjoy the Shard. I love the way it pinpoints London Bridge for anyone anywhere within a 20 mile radius. How, as you follow the Thames, it approaches, and recedes, and approaches again, and teaches you just how extreme are the river's bends.

I love how it disappears into the grey eiderdown and blotting-paper clouds that so often flop down  across the city. I love how it wears its glass like a sort of frozen gown, translucent drapery that reveals flashes of the muscles beneath.

I love how it rises, so un-phallic, above the city as you cycle down any of the seven south London hills towards the centre, and get that reverse-Whittington view of the golden cow of the city. I love how, quite often, I think I am looking at yet another view of the Shard and then realise it's just another Victorian church spire a few hundred yards away.

From Hampstead Heath, it complements St Pauls, standing back, offering the great cathedral some reflected light, and in no way competing with it.

I love how it seeems to bulge at the base and embrace poor ugly old Guys Hospital next door. At times, it's almost a mother-and-child portrait - you wish the shard could wrap some of its glittering glass skirts around the malformed granny, hide her brutal planes. But then again, Guys has a mad beauty about it. It is really the dwarish grand-parent of this ludicrously elongated sapling.

I love how it shines with almost biblical auras at dawn on clear winter mornings. And how on dull grey afternoons it takes on much of the grey-green muddiness of the thames water it rises out of.

It's really a far better building than London deserves at the moment. The true spirit of London of 2013 seems more honestly reflected in the thuggish, moronic, shoulder-padded silhouette of the lump going up on Fenchurch Street. Now that really is ruining views.

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.