Disgrace and the notion that we read what we need to read

How strange it is that, so often, books appear to offer themselves up to readers, as if they know what is needed, they are aware that they are so closely attuned to what is going on in reader x's life.

Back in 1980, even before the dust and blood and rubble had settled in Beaufort Street, I read Anna Karenina and I had no idea why, but it was a sort of literary equivalent of being in the ring with Mohammed Ali. Every argument I tentatively held up to try to justify my indiscretions with an older, more intelligent, supremely beautiful married woman were retunred with such powerful and almost vindictive velocity by the text that I was dumbfounded, floored, forced to think again.

Maybe if I had read Madame Bovary instead I would have had a more comfortable Christmas?

Anyway, I had an echo of the same effect in the last few weeks when reading in quick succession, Zadie Smith's On Beauty and  Disgrace,  the Booker  and Nobel Prize winner by  J. M. Coetzee.

I had no idea that both books centred on the chaos caused by men in their late 50s having affairs with much younger women, girls in fact. On Beauty is thought of as Zadie Smith's tribute to the E M Forster school of big English novel of families, their sense and sensibilities. And indeed there is so much going on that it is possible to pick your own route through it and concentrate on that. Needless to say I concentrated on the far-from-pitiable figure of the art-historian dad.

He has it all, it seems; the reasonable successful academic career, the beautiful Trinidadian wife, the trio of interesting children - and above all, as Zadie Smith leaves us in no doubt about - he's an attractive and witty man, even in his late 50s. Oh yes, and he also has a bigger-than-average penis. Both he and Zadie know that this latter fact is truly at the root of his being.

So this novel has little choice but to show him messing up in a big way, which he does, against a skilfully painted landscape of ealry 21st century Anglo-American life, with all its social, religious, ethnic and political richness.

Disgrace is much tightly focussed on a man of similar age, similar career,  and similar predispositions. It is set in a harder landscape - South Africa in immediate post-apartheid years - and everything is rather sharper, tougher.

He's a divorced womaniser; when his intense but one-sided relationship with a beautiful call-girl ends abruptly, he's thrown into a bit of a crisis. "He ought to give up, retire from the game. At what age, he wonders, did Origen castrate himself?"

Well, that's the sort of question that really hits home. I wonder how many men of this sort of age in these sort of social positions ask themselves this one? Might one, he asks himself, approach a doctor and ask for it? "Severing, tying-off". Yes, we know this feeling, we also eye the kitchen knife, we also remeber Mathieu in Sartre's Roads to Freedom.

Ageing is not graceful, and old men are a hideous sight, with their priapic thoughts, and their wrinkled bodies.  I'd go for it: chemical castration on the NHS. That's why these two books fell quite by chance into my hands.

Of course, like x in On Beauty, he does not go for this drastic option and lands himself in a heap more trouble, in very similar circumstances. Which provides the grounds for the rest of the novel -  his disgrace and his struggle against notions of redemption.

The book clearly ticked all the boxes for the judges, but it does so in such a beautiful and economic stlye that you cannot begrudge its success. His stumbling steps towards redemption, the suffering he inflicts on himself and perhaps also his daughter, all these are  deeply  moving as well as shocking.

Maybe the knife is the answer after all.

Was the Rev Francis Kilvert the original grumpy young man?

The Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840 - 79) has got me hooked. On page 26 of the old Penguin selection from his Diaries, (edited by William Plomer), in an entry written on Tuesday April 5 1870,  he visits Llanthony Priory, a few miles from his home in Clyro in the Brecon Beacons.

Yes, we were also tourists at
Llanthony Priory, deep in
the Black Mountains of
south Wales. What would
the Rev. Kilvert have made
of us?

Much to his horror, there are two  tourists visiting the site, identifiable by  their "staves and shoulder belts all complete, postured among the ruins in attitude of admiration..."

Kilvert had some very interestingly modern views, especially on the subject of tourists:

"Of all noxious animals too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist."

Oh yes!

Dub Vendor, the 2011 riots, and the death of Smiley Culture

Not sure if it was the 2011 riots that were to blame, the recession, or the shifting tastes in music and shifting populations - or, most likely, a mix of all these factors.  All I know for sure is that the great reggae record store in Battersea, Dub Vendor, has gone from this area for good.

In fact, it went ages ago. As I began to write this I looked the store up on Google and found that the two final  Dub Vendor shops - in Ladbroke Grove and at Clapham Junction - closed a few weeks after the riots of August 2011, when its founder and owner John McGillivray decided to concentrate on the online mail order business.

For that sad fact I am indebted to an article by Ian Burrell in the Independent. When I heard about the riots, and particularly the destruction by fire  of the old Party shop on Lavender Hill, I wondered why no-one had mentioned Dub Vendor bang next door.

Read the article, it tells you all you need to know -  the way reggae went put of fashion, how Dub Vendor was always not just a shop but also a record distributor, and partners with the label Fashion Records, run by McGillivray's old schoolfriend Chris Lane, which had a studio in the basement of the Clapham Junction store.

As sales of Jamaican import dub-plates and such gradually slipped away as younger audiences moved off towards hip-hop, etc, so Dub Vendor and Fashion moved with the times, cultivating a new generation of local talent,  the toasters and MCs of south London dancehall clubs. Names like Maxi Priest were cutting records there - and in 1984 their biggest ever success arrived in the form of Smiley Culture. He cut Cockney Translation there, and then at the end of 1984 the real chart success, Police Officer. Both tracks are sheer joy, the sharp and hilarious wordplay between Smiley and the cop (played by Smiley) is timeless.

Even before major the UK chart success, Smiley attracted the attention of the ITV show Ear Say which did this special on him and Dub Vendor in 1984.

Dub Vendor  and the burned-out
Party Superstore a few days after the riots
of August 2011

Do watch this video, it is priceless, and  extremely poignant. See the young Smiley - real name David Emmanuel, born in Stockwell 1948, pupil at Tulse Hill Comp -  just as success was hitting him, then think of how he ended, during a police raid on his home out on the rural fringes of south London back in 2011.

Stabbed himself, they said. There was an IPPC report in to all this but its findings were never made fully public, leading of course to intensified suspicion of a cover-up, which in itself - in a hideous bit of irony - was later cited as a possible contributor to the tensions that led to the 2011 riots.

Seems the truly bad riot at Clapham Junction on August  9 2011 was a final straw for owner McGillivray, who sold his shop to the the burnt-out Party store next door to allow them to re-open as a much bigger superstore.

Still, Dub Vendor keeps going, with a great online reggae store, and also a  living presence in the BM record shop in Soho. So, cutting cloth to fit, it is doing.

One step forwards, no steps backwards, please.

No more tears, just buy, buy, buy!

Sweet and sour thoughts on Open House London weekend

The 21st annual Open House London weekend has been bigger and more popular than ever, hitting the news with reports of 18,000 strong queues in Battersea  to get a first and final glimpse of the interior of the derelict power station.

Being 60 miles from the city this weekend, am feeling rather envious and sad not to be there. But then again, am beginning, in a very churlish way,  to dislike these admirable initiatives.

This year's , for example, has acted as a great piece of extra publicity for the developers of the Battersea Power Station site - offering a tantalising glimpse of what remains of the interior for two afternoons before turning the whole place into a property goldmine of luxury apartments. With or without plastic chimneys.

Surely this is just an old bugger's sour grapes? Open House London was and remains a brilliant idea, to persuade the owners of all manner of strange and wonderful buildings - from the grandest palace to the most humble council flat - to open doors to public for one weekend.


It started in 1992 and has become so popular and successful that it is an institution in itself, supported by loads of sponsors and copied in 20 or so other cities around the world.

Yes, it allows vogueish architects the chance to show off their gorgeous homes to aesthetically-avaricious audiences of Wallpaper* readers, so what?  It has also given the interested public the chnace to wander around in some of the strangest, most exclusive, most secret, most outrageous built spaces in the most arcjhticturally-bloated conurbation in the western world. Such as - the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Or the Blizard Building at Queen Mary's College in Whitechapel.

Wish it had been around in 1968!

Bugger! London has lost another great second-hand bookshop

Believe it (or not) - two weeks ago I started a new post on the glories of the few remaining secondhand bookshops in South London.

As it happened, my three favourites were all located in places beginning with 'B' - Blackheath, Brixton and Balham.

Now that brave trio is down to even braver brace. The Balham  shop - My Back Pages - has gone. As I discovered to my horror and rage today, out shopping for birthday present books for my son.

I last went there less than a month ago, when it seemed its normal, glorious, ramshackle self, a wonderful labyrinth of shelving snaking through at least two former station parade shops facing Balham tube and BR station.

To my shame, I only discovered this shop about six years ago and in that time have bought a grand total of - what - about a dozen books there.

For each book I bought I probably spent three hours in the shop. It was that sort of place, where you could get lost in dark corners of the shop, find something fascinating and start reading.

It was great for  classics, art and travel, great for foreign fiction and film books, and many other things I had no interest in. Once or twice I spoke to the manager, who generally seemed more cheerful and optimistic than your average second-hand book shop owner.

In 2008 the shop received a boost from this little review in the Guardian. But evidently, this was not enough.

Now it's all gone, empty except for a few shelves.

If only I - and thousands of other book-lovers in this once bohemian part of south west London - had got behind this shop. Good God, the name of the shop alone should  have been enough to make all us middle-aged Dylanites to gather there like moths.

Note to self and everyone else who likes books and lives with five miles of Coldharbour Lane in Brixton - support Bookmongers now or collapse into a puddle of guilty tears. And to cheer yourselves up after the sad news on My Back Pages, watch the video on Vimeo!

And to find more independent bookshops, use the excellent London Bookshop Map.

White bicycles and the death of the London cycling dream

Seeing a photo of a flower-bedecked white bicycle locked to a lamp-post in Toronto reminded me of how, about 8 years ago, I started counting the white bikes of London. Now I know that each white bike marks  the spot where a cyclist has been killed, and in London this almost invariably means killed by a truck or lorry rushing to a construction site.

The first one I saw was on Blackfriars Bridge, and although I didn't at that point know what they

meant, it soon became very clear. That bridge, with its crazy sandwich of  bus, bike and car/lorry  lanes had earned itself a deadly reputation in the early 2000s. I think that concerted campaigning by LCC etc finally succeeded in changing things - but not before a few more had died.

A week or two later I saw another white bike tied to railings at the intersection of Clerkenwell Road and Goswell Road in EC1 (I put a photo of this on Flickr).  By white, I mean completely white - frame, wheels, tryres, handlebars, spokes, the lot.

These were, of course, what we now know to call  ghost bikes, marking the spot where a cyclist had been killed in a traffic accident.

I've seen at least a dozen since then - although I wonder if the practice is fading, as there have been many cyclists killed this year but no signs  of the white cycles near the scene.

Here some of the locations in central London alone:

• The Bow Flyover  roundabout (A11/A12 junction)
• Notting Hill Gate
• Victoria Park
• Angel Islington
• Bishopsgate
• Dalston Lane

Until 2006 I was puzzled at just how many riders were being crushed under the wheels of left-turning trucks. Then I was knocked off my bike by a right-turning car (just a broken collar bone), and I stopped being so damned complacent.

More than 30 years of riding through central London at least four times a week had taught me some things - but it never quite robbed me of the stupid notion that with a little common sense, you were fairly safe in the  mainly slow-moving traffic of London's congested streets.

Until that moment when an old fellow, utterly lost, up for the day from Portsmouth,  decided to quickly cross the Wandsworth Road into Victoria Rise on his way to visit his daughter.  Only then did I really learn that there are instants where  you can do nothing to save yourself. Apart from bracing every muscle and throwing yourself towards the least invasive parts of the car that you are crashing with.

A year after that, with the Olympic park under construction, as well as massive new buildings in the City and elsewhere, London became infested with gigantic cement-mixer trucks, mobile cranes, dumper trucks, etc, all charging around the city at ludicrous speeds, presumably to avoid late-delivery penalties.

And the number of deaths and serious injuries went on rising.  We saw a young woman with her  right leg crushed under the front wheel of a lorry yards from then work office in Dock Street, E1. Weeks later came my closest-ever near miss when a council dustcart sped past with an inch or two between us. It didn't hit me but I fell off into railings in an attempt to avoid worse.

Today - another death. A young woman killed in Aldgate. By another fucking dumper truck.

Where do they come from, these lethal vehicles? Many from a location near here, just of f Silverthorne Road in Battersea, SW8, there's a massive depot where the cement lorries go to refill. Presumable the stuff comes off barges from the Thames, and is pumped into silos which drop it into a constant stream of 6-wheel trucks. The streets around here are covered with gravel, shed by the speeding trucks as they lurch around the tight corners of these suburban streets. Just another peril for cyclists, as these stones shoot out from under car tyres straight into your eye.

Yeah, cycling is getting more dangerous in London. I am old, I don't care too much, but my son's 26, I am truly scared for him. I used to think that if you made eye contact with every driver about to occupy the boot of road in front of you, you would be OK. But with these trucks, it's different. They are too high up in their cabs for eye contact. They are under too much pressure, they do not have time to think.

This is surely a criminal tendency on our roads - it has gone too far, there have been far too many deaths at their hands, it is beyond coincidence.

So now, every time I hear news of a cyclist killed somewhere in central or north London, I freeze. My son now cycles from Islington to Bloomsbury and back every day. I freeze until the news bulletins come in with more detail: "A man, thought to be in his forties...." Relief, guilt.

Still we cycle because really, when it is good, cycling in London is as good as the best drugs, the best of any experience. Believe me!

South London's east-west divide

North of the Thames, people seem to think of South London as one great undifferentiated blot of unpleasantness (with exceptions made for Greenwich and Dulwich, while Blackheath Village always was a minor southern outpost of Hampstead).

Anyone who lives, or has ever lived in a postcode beginning with 'S' will know how wrong this view is.

The east-west divide on the sunny side of the Thames is just as strong as the rivalries that can flare up between the benighted denizens of the W,  NW,  N and E zones.

And although there is no simple "S" postcode, there certainly is a central south London zone that has no interest in knowing what goers on either side of it. Central South London stretches from London Bridge to Vauxhall Bridge, and takes in Borough, Bermondsey, the Elephant, Kennington, Vauxhall and Stockwell, the zone tapering out in final southern glory at Brixton Hill.

Although Brixtons's codes are SW, it is just as much south London heartland as Lambeth Walk and Bermondsey Street.

Sticking strictly to inner London - roughly the same as zone 2 on the TfL map - you'd  have no trouble naming the adjoining South West and South East neighbourhoods.

SW - which of course shares a postcode prefix with some very posh neighbourhoods across the river - is simply Clapham, Battersea, Wandsworth, Balham, Putney. All of which suffer from their image as  being the not-quite-so-rich-bastards' alternatives to Fulham and Chelsea.

Similarly, for SE we have Camberwell, New Cross, Peckham, Deptford, Brockley and Lewisham. But these prickly places have no such shame, they do not need any reflected glory from north of the river.

So, what about all those other places? Tooting? That's the beginning of  outer south London, having more in common with Mitcham and Norbury.

Blackheath and Greenwich?  They are both distinctly different, they're not in the same game at all.

Blackheath, as already mentioned, is simply oh too nice to really be in the same borough as Lewisham, Eltham or Catford. Greenwich is a weird mix of historic royal Park, posh village (Crooms Hill etc)  and former naval base which also retains a hint of the scruffy Kentish estuarine resort.

Similarly, out in deep SW land, Richmond and Twickenham have more in common with the plump Thames Valley towns of Marlow or Henley than anything in London. Barnes, too, is truly Surrey-by-the-river.

So let's get back to the core SE and SW areas. What's the big difference?

The first, clinching factor is landscape. South East London is built on a range of hills - seven of them, just like Rome! - which lap like great waves towards the city. Rising above Brixton and its own hill, we have Tulse Hill, Herne Hill, Denmark Hill, Champions Hill, Knights Hill. Moving east again, Telegraph Hill, then further south, Stratham Hill, Gispy Hill, Forest Hill.

Overlooking Greenwich - providing the best view of London anywhere - we have the park and  Shooters Hill. On the southern horizon, the Sydenham hills of Crystal Palace with their twin TV towers.

SW, by contrast, is an unudulating plateau falling into marshland. Clapham, Wandsworth and Wimbledon commons are relatively flat. Lavender Hill is a gentle bump in the road. Putney has a hill, but it's mostly tarmac and the view from the top is just not up to the amazing views you get in south east London. Wimbledon has some mild hills but they tend to be associated with tennis players.

The topogrpahy means that SE London's parks are all far more interesting: contrast Greenwich Park, Brockwell Park, or Dulwich woods with the dull commons of SW4 and SW11. OK Richmond Park is beautiful but that's too far out to count.


The second big difference is public transport. SW has tube lines, SE does not. But SE now has the DLR as far as Lewisham and London Overground/East London line linking it with the great orbital movement of rail's version of the M25.

It's clear that SW's tube lines are actually the bane of its life - that hideous tract of the Northern Line from Kennington down to Morden is what attracted all the overpaid city workers to the area.

The next difference - wealth. Traditionally SW was richer, maybe because most of the money in Kensington and Chelsea tended to leach across the river to the nearest adjacent boroughs and then out down the A3 into the stockbroker belt.

But this is to oversimplify. Look at the architecture: by far the finest suburban villas of the 19th century were in SE postcodes. There's no better street of grand domestic architecture in all of London than Camberwell Grove.  The beautiful houses surrounding Blackheath and Greenwich parks are more elegant than any of that brash stuff in NW3.

Those were the days when the most successful actors and writers headed for the wooded slopes of south east London to escape the stinking wen.

The miserable clerk, meanwhile, were shunted towards the endless Victorian terraces of Clapham and Battersea. Comforting as these now seem,  they are pinched in comparison, and cynically repetitive.

Arts and entertainments is the next category, and again SE sweeps the board. Each of the centres - even including New Cross and Peckham - has internationally famous music and art venues, there's Horniman's Museum and the Dulwich art gallery, Depford's Laban Dance centre, Goldsmith's, and the joys of Camberwell.

Overall, you have to admit that SE London is the victor here: it always had the edge, to be honest.
After those vital three decades in the darkness, it has again been rising and shows no signs of falling away.  Peckham the new Dalston, etc.

Whereas SW is stale, saturated, and over-populated with the sort of recently-young couples with small kids who make you want to stay well away from all pubs on any day there's a big "rugger" game, and well away from all public spaces when the sun shines. Sorry, Clapham, but you blew it all away in about 1980 with the arrival of Foxtons and their yuppie clientele.

My advice - do the estate agent's old trick. Ditch the name, Clapham, replace it with "West Brixton".

Oh, and the last word on all this: the word is Death. We all die and need somewhere for our bodies or ashes to rest. SE London has two of London's "magnificent seven" Victorian cemeteries - Nunhead and West Norwood.  SW has none.