Tag: london

Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part V: A Score Settled

Dec 6th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: I was for several years a trader at Camden, Spitalfields and Greenwich markets, to add context to the following post. There is an old 300,000 word blog dealing with that, but I have mislaid it for the time being.

Unless you are trying to see how far you can slide in your socks – which in my part of the NHS we do quite often – you never run along a hospital corridor. The trick to getting around efficiently is to walk fast-slow, so as not to disconcert patients, while maintaining your hospital voice. Sid’s interpretation of me doing this involves charging around the front room shouting ‘CALM DOWN MY NAME IS PAUL WHEN DID YOU LAST EAT?’, and this is a reasonable approximation. On rare occasions, however, there is a need to ‘walk, but run’. Basically, this means jogging, but it’s over-dramatic, even if I sense there are some staff whose entire reason for joining the medical profession in the first place is, one day, to run along a corridor doing this exact thing. Dicks.

That said, there are times when no amount of jogging, calming down, dietary enquiry or explaining what my name is will change an outcome, as was the case recently with a Stoke City fan. He was an entirely likeable man, cheerfully and calmly accepting his deteriorating situation. In fact, so admirable was his stoic manliness that, as a result of speaking with him, I no longer want to kill former Stoke midfielder Chris Kamara, proof that your opinions about people can change. In case you are unfamiliar, Kamara broke West Ham striker Frank McAvennie’s leg some years ago, and the refrain Kill Kamara! echoed around Upton Park for the rest of the season. It echoes still, in faded spray paint, along the less frequented alleys and burger vans of E13 – a haunting reminder of a happier time. It also lingers in north Norfolk, where I once delighted my current girlfriend and startled our dozing son by yelling it when I discovered him reading the CBeebies bedtime story, but perhaps it is time to move on. As I explained to the Stoke City fan, if Frank McAvennie is allowed to break Chris Kamara’s leg in return, I am finally prepared to draw a line under the episode.

(Incidentally, at around the same time, former Liverpool and England stalwart Emlyn Hughes publicly criticised West Ham in the tabloids. Disaffection among fans was transmitted in a blunt refrain set to the tune of When The Saints Go Marching In and utilising the ‘call and response’ method most closely associated with the gospel music of the Deep South, replacing the line ‘I want to be in that number’ with ‘He’s gonna die, die and die’. Emlyn Hughes did actually die, twenty-four years later, of a brain tumour, so the song proved to be chillingly accurate.)

My opinions on Nat Baker haven’t changed much since he stole my Minstrels, but I occasionally wonder what might have come to pass if I’d just stabbed him in the fucking face when we were children and had done with it. Perhaps he might have avoided a subsequent life of crime, culminating in an arrest in a Honda Passat containing half a million pounds’ worth of Ecstasy, for which he received eight years in Belmarsh and, presumably, lost his driving licence. When in Belmarsh – ‘a local nick, for local people’ – with my old Camden co-trader Plastic Dave he discovered a flair for kitchen work. Had he not done this, he may not have acquired Abra Kebabra in Turnpike Lane upon his release, buying salad wholesale from Greenwich Market trader Fruity Eddie, whose sister he subsequently married. His kebab shop was great, and did the magic combo of kebabs and chip shop chips, so perhaps not stabbing him was a positive move, after all. As I have explained to him since, I could slash away like a combine harvester these days and never hit an artery, such is his tremendous fatness. Ah well. Perhaps this, perhaps that.

Not that we had any contact before Fruity Eddie recommended me as a source of kitchenware for the six outlets he and Mrs Baker went on to own across north and west London, as Eddie and I were both trading at Greenwich Market at the time. Had this not happened, I would never subsequently have been re-acquainted with Nat in the now-demolished Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1, and a deal between us would never have been struck, with my insistence upon a catering sized bag of Minstrels and a vinyl copy of Don’t Mess With My Toot Toot by Denise LaSalle thrown in for a larf. Subsequently, I would not have had care labels with ‘Enormous Thieving Wanker’ attached to the inside neck hem of sixty bleach-resistant poly-cotton bib aprons with adjustable halter and anti-tangle ties. Above all, though, I would never have been in happy receipt of cash payment for the same and, while pondering what to do with it, received a call from Mrs Baker about swear words in her aprons. I assured her that there was no need to worry because, although foul language around food was unprofessional, it was perfectly hygienic, and embraced the warm and calming sensation of justice finally done.

Picters:

Main: Abra Kebabra in, I think, Croydon. This is an actual chain in Ireland, so I am not sure how it all works with copyright and whatnot. In any case, the last I heard, Nat had sold the business, so who knows.

Top: Chris Kamara, still alive and everything.

Lower: Writing important things on my arms in Main Theatres, as always.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part IV: Marmalisation

Nov 26th, 2022

Public service announcement: I gave up smoking a long time ago.

I mentioned to Sid’s teacher at a recent parents’ evening how pleased I was that there seemed to be an awful lot of fighting at the school, and how this had attracted us to their syllabus in the first place. Despite my current girlfriend telling me to ‘For fuck’s sake shut up’, I pointed out that we’ll be glad of this if he turns out to have a violent career in later life, and that it was illegal to swear in a classroom such as the one we were currently sitting in, on tiny adorable children’s chairs. The conversation drifted a bit after that, eventually turning to a large picture of the late Queen Elizabeth that Sid and his friend Harry Christ had painted. Incidentally, Harry Christ’s name isn’t Harry Christ, but Sid has always maintained that it is, because it sounds similar. Anyway, I doubt Sid’s teacher is going to be particularly fussed about a bit of playground scrapping, as she has a drinker’s face and has probably been about a bit. I’ll ask about her drinking when I see her at the Christmas carol concert, just out of curiousity.

Remarkably, my own school managed to arrange a fight with the Windsor Chapter Hell’s Angels a couple of years prior to the Minstrel stealing episode that we are, at some length, discussing. No, I also don’t believe that this actually happened, either, and I speak as one who believed a classmate’s father was Bungle from Rainbow, as previously discussed. Anyway. My school claimed victory when they did not turn up at the appointed time and place, which I think was Plaistow tube, in the days before it was full of Guardian readers gluing themselves to public transport, obviously. The fact that they probably didn’t want to fight children was of no mind: as a school, we had faced down the Hell’s Angels and, even though the incident can’t possibly be true, we felt it gave us bragging rights.

To return to our story: one of the worst things that could happen prior to having a fight at our school was for a teacher to intercept the combatants on the way to the wall behind which disputes were traditionally settled. If this happened, you were fucked. For a start, there was the legal minefield of liability for lost television revenue. There was also the no-holds-barred surprise lynching you would receive at some unknowable future juncture because you didn’t ‘stand’, and were therefore some sort of wanker. If the contest went ahead you were in the clear, legally speaking, even if you got marmalised, because at least you ‘stood’. Of course, I intended to avoid marmalisation by stabbing Nat with a sharpened compass point because I was of the opinion then, as now, that you either get bullied once, or bullied forever. It was tricky though. We had been, well, not close mates exactly, like Sid and Harry Christ, but on good terms. In fact, Nat taught me to smoke a few years later, and that’s what friends are for.

Thus it was that on an otherwise nondescript school day afternoon behind an anonymous wall at the end of the ninth decade of the twentieth century, Nat Baker and myself readied ourselves for combat. The thing about bringing localised but overwhelming force to a broad-front conflict – the schwerpunkt or ‘blitzkrieg’ doctrine associated with German success in World War Two, for example, or my improvised weapon consisting of a modified technical drawing instrument with which I intended to stab a Tottenham fan who had stolen my Minstrels – is that you only have a short amount of time to use it. A surprise is not a surprise if your opponent knows it’s coming, after all. As far as modified classroom equipment goes, it’s not a surprise at all if your opponent can already see it because it has worn through the pocket of your Farahs, as had happened in my case. This was extremely bad news.

‘You gonna stab me with that?’ said Nat, gesturing towards the compass point.

To this day, I can’t remember exactly what I said to de-escalate the situation. He maintains it was ‘No, I had to measure my bollocks for biology homework’, and this sounds plausible, clutching at straws as I was. In any case, he claimed it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard and, whenever our paths have crossed since, has never failed to mention it. In return, I usually offer to stab him now, if it will shut him up, but have thus far not done so. In any case, peace was restored and, thanks in no small part to all the Superkings which children smoked at the time, tranquility descended once more upon the school. Say what you like about smoking, but it kept a generation of children calm, focussed and slim during the Cold War and AIDS. That said, a liberty had been taken, and I was still a disgruntled plaintiff. I decided that the best thing to do was wait for a quarter of a century before my next move.

Picters:

Main: Sounds nice. This was in Bermondsey or New Cross somewhere, part of a feud between Tottenham and Millwall.

Top: Windsor Chapter Hell’s Angels. Why would people like this want to hang out with children?

Lower: Liver biopsy stuff. This is for four consecutive biopsies; I never set up for more than one at a time because it looks cluttered and untidy unless the patient actually has four livers or has been force fed foie gras style for a larf beforehand.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part III: Life Skills

Nov 22nd, 2022

Public service announcement: For the benefit of foreigners, Minstrels are a British confectionery staple consisting of chocolate in chocolate shell. They are wonderful and if, once my scheduled MRI scan has happened, it turns out that I do indeed have peripheral arterial disease, they will be in no small part responsible. Je ne regrette rein, except not eating more of them.

While acknowledging that we are mid-way through a story of childhood confectionery theft to illustrate a series of connected posts on the theme of bullying to, in turn, highlight the need for the establishment of a new trade union for non-clinical NHS staff, I sometimes wonder if stealing cars is still a thing. It was a national sport when I was growing up, especially in Canning Town. In case you are unfamiliar, this is a part of London where, traditionally, West Ham fans are made. Not now, obviously, as it’s all organic bakeries and Guardian readers and pronouns and what not, but for decades it was wall-to-wall claret and blue and an almost comically criminal place. Well-liked local notables included Mono and his dog Trio, who only had four legs between them, and Frank the Wank, a harmless man with an unfortunate muscular affliction that made him appear to be constantly nursing a tremendous invisible phallus.

The most Canning Town crime ever happened to an acquaintance of mine at some point in the 1990s. He was surveying a roof prior to doing some work or other when he noticed an urchin trying to break into his van, parked below. When the urchin failed to heed shouted warnings and threats, my acquaintance ascended to pavement level and remonstrated with him further. Unmoved, the urchin replied ‘OK mate, what’s happening here is that I am going to steal your van, and you are going to watch me’. With this, he forced the driver’s side door, hot wired the steering column and made good his escape. My acquaintance said that what annoyed him most was that he didn’t even bother to hurtle away in a cloud of screeching tyre smoke, but drove off within the speed limit, stopping at some nearby traffic lights in accordance with the Highway Code, whereupon he could be heard adjusting the radio and hurling an unwanted CD from the offside passenger window.

(On the subject of car crime, the Ford Sierra became legendary at our school due to a manufacturing fault that made the windscreen easy to pop out and sell on, due to the rubber surrounds expanding with a blast from a hairdryer. You could also bypass the central locking systems of the day, which operated on compressed air, by cutting a tennis ball in half and banging it against one of the door locks. Also, pretty much everyone knew how to open padlocks with spanners, and how to distill cyanide gas from silk. Not that everyone went around doing that stuff all day, of course, but still. Life skills, mate.)

My Minstrels were stolen by Nat Baker with the same efficient nonchalance as a roofer’s van in Canning Town. I’m sure he just said ‘I’m having those’, and fucked off with them. I tried to wrestle them back in a rough-and-tumble kind of a way, but was restrained by one of his huge hands appearing on my black Lyle and Scott jumper, along with some nonsense threat like ‘Right. After school’ as if this was Grange Hill or something. I don’t recall feeling nervous during the intervening afternoon, perhaps presuming that our respective legal teams would sort it out. I do, however, recall being told I was going to be ‘marmalised’ – the only time I have heard this preserve-based adjective – and being advised to feign epilepsy as a result.

Incidentally, I offered to do this a couple of decades later at Joe’s wedding in order to have the ceremony waylaid, the shamefully inaccurate consensus being that this would be a good idea, if only so I could sober up enough to do my speech. In neither event did I do this, however, so did indeed find myself facing marmalisation over some Minstrels and, a couple of decades later, witnessed Joe’s wedding taking place as planned and on schedule. On one of these occasions, though, I had a sharpened compass point in my pocket as an aid to any stabbing-in-the-face opportunities that may arise. (I should point out that by ‘compass’ I mean the technical drawing instrument, not the navigational aid, because on neither occasion would knowing where magnetic North was have been any help whatsoever.)

Picters:

Main: Truth in advertising. Not sure where this was taken. Tottenham I think.

Top: Unused Ministry of Kitchenware apron labels. I miss the Ministry of Kitchenware, and intend to bring it back as an online store in 2023. Most of the old manufacturing plant still works, and it’s just sitting there and everything.

Lower: Old publicgriefjunkie t shirt label, found by my current girlfriend in a drawer in our haunted bookshop of a house.
I Guess God Just Called His Number

Oct 26th, 2021

In his 2004 Patience album, George Michael lyrically posed the question ‘If Jesus Christ is alive and well, how come John and Elvis are dead?’. I should imagine that a lot of it is down to genetics. Presley’s father was a manual labourer with a congenital heart condition, whereas Jesus’ father, famously, is God. There are also lifestyle choices to consider: Elvis and John Lennon had significant issues with drugs, and for many years ate badly, drank heavily, and generally made poor lifestyle choices. Jesus, by contrast, enjoyed a seasonal and organic diet, drank in moderation and despite holding down two jobs – carpenter and son of God – was able to do so while fitting in exercise and plenty of fresh air.

I discussed this with my old dear as we pondered the recent death of her cat, who had been ailing for some time. Towards the end of his life, my old dear, who is not a trained veterinary professional, described him as ‘looking a bit vague, like he was trying to remember his national insurance number, but couldn’t’. It would be heavy handed to have him humanely destroyed for this alone, but he had been poorly for some time; the decision was made, and thus Tuppence was ushered among the countless cushions of Cat Heaven. Coincidentally, two other cats on my old dear’s street have been put down this year, prompting me to remark that ‘it’s like 2016 again’ – a year which, as you may recall, was regarded quaintly at the time as a bit of a nightmare due to a mysterious curse that saw several elderly celebrities die after decades of massive and prolonged drug use for no apparent reason whatsoever. My old dear agreed that yes it is, it really is, despite not knowing what I was talking about. Among the fallen of 2016 was, of course, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, known to the world as George Michael out of Wham!.

Wham! came to my attention one distant childhood afternoon at West Ham, when Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go was played over the tannoy prior to a game against Arsenal. The opening jitterbug refrain coincided with the exact moment a group of Arsenal fans invaded the Chicken Run, an area of Upton Park which had, to say the least of it, little to do with the animated film of the same name. Arsenal, who could put out good numbers back then, were giving a decent account of themselves, and I watched on with interest. As the song continued, I found the reference to the sun shining brighter than Doris Day an interesting contrast to the unfolding melee, which consisted of people in golfing jumpers, as was the terrace fashion of the time, beating the absolute shit out of each other. The line come on baby, let’s not fight also tickled me because, by this point, everyone was fighting. The stewards and programme vendors had waded in, and even the disabled did their bit by hurling coins into the fray from the wheelchair section opposite. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, a view shared by the many kids from my school who were there, and was pretty much all everyone talked about for days, especially as Everton were visiting the following week, and they were blade merchants. I’m sure eight year olds in all those down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness, working class Labour boroughs have exactly the same sensibilities now.

Anyway. We have always been a family club at West Ham, and supporters of every generation, on every terrace, joined in the chorus of South Bank! Do your job! which all but drowned out the final bars of Wham!’s iconic breakout hit. The South Bank ICF* did indeed do their job, even though this meant working on a Saturday, for which they presumably got paid time and a half. In a blur of Pringle jumpers and Adidas Gazelles, Arsenal were pushed out of the Chicken Run, onto the concourse behind the ground, back up the Barking Road, and in many cases into the casualty department of the Royal London Hospital. I didn’t become a huge fan of Wham! afterwards or anything – I was already developing a Beatles obsession which remains undimmed to this day – but the episode stuck in my mind, and George Michael, assisted by Andrew Ridgeley (allowed into the band for having the most Eighties name ever) seemed like a right larf. I liked them enough to decide that Everything She Wants was my favourite of their songs and, years later, I blazed a trail by becoming the only male heterosexual to buy and enjoy George Michael’s Faith album. As a result, I was obliged to defend myself against adolescent accusations of being a bender, even though there was no need to because I had fingered a girl by then, largely, come to think of it, by virtue of owning the album in the first place.

Let us now pause to contrast George Michael with David Bowie, another victim of the 2016 curse. Bowie was more commercially successful and culturally recognisable than George Michael, and great and fantastic and everything, but I could never love him. That said, fandom is irrational, and not some kind of pissing contest – although maybe that’s what George thought was happening when he was arrested for lewd behaviour in the public toilets in Beverly Hills that time. Bowie was cool and full of heroin chic; George Michael usually had hair like someone’s old mum and got accidentally drunk on cough mixture. I could never not love him, with his dad-at-the-disco stage moves, holding out microphones for the crowd to sing into, which they usually didn’t. You wouldn’t catch David Bowie cruising for lorry drivers on Hampstead Heath or stabbing the cat with an undercover cop and, although these are experiences for which I have never yearned, it is somehow brilliant that George got busted for both. George Michael crashed his car into the Hampstead branch of Snappy Snaps while confused; I once rode my bike into the back of an Audi while wondering what Russ Abbot was up to these days, and I feel these are experiences we could have swapped with little surprise to our respective peer groups. There was an easy kinship to be had with the chubby bloke from Finchley Road that the Spider From Mars was too busy banging on about Berlin and outer space to adequately provide.

Few of us can look forward to a genuinely dignified end, death being perhaps the greatest leveller, whether you are an absent-minded domestic pet or an international style icon. Well, except for David Bowie, of course, who knocked out a farewell album and final photo shoot in Soho before dematerialising like Doctor Who and coming back as a Lamborghini. Not so George Michael. His demise was superbly anti-brilliant, falling into a coma following a bout of pneumonia and emerging talking like someone who has spent their entire life in a remote Cornish village, due to Foreign Accent Syndrome, which baffles the world of medicine and could only happen to George. Sadly, it cleared up before a tour could be organised, robbing us all of the astonishing experience of Father Figure and Freedom being rendered in the manner of the Worzels, and he died some months later on Christmas Day, his last weeks spent playing Scrabble while his body deteriorated into a steroid-bloated mess. Only after his death did the extraordinary extent of his benevolence emerge, notably with the anonymous bankrolling of IVF treatment for a contestant on Deal Or No Deal who failed to win enough money to pay for it herself. Being honest, I am uncomfortable with the wealthy and famous deciding which random peasant to elevate with their Godlike power in this manner – could you not just have donated to research or a suitable charity or something? – but let’s not end on a sour note, especially when discussing such a beautiful man. Bloated and Cornish his body may have been at the end, but his soul was in fine fettle, and that’s the main thing.

*’Inter City Firm’, notorious West Ham hooligans.

Photards:

Main: Back of the old South Bank, Upton Park.

Top inset: George Michael in the late Eighties. There was widespread disbelief when he came out as a gay man.

Middle inset: Yes, giggle if you want, but do it from thirty five years away because these malnourished children, who I think are Portsmouth’s extremely handy 657 Crew, will batter you without a second thought. Incidentally, ‘657 Crew’, like ‘Inter City Firm’, is also a reference to public transport – the 06:57 was traditionally the train they would catch from Portsmouth when going up North. I’d like to hear Ringo Starr narrating these exploits in the manner of his work on Thomas the Tank Engine.

Lower inset: The point at which George’s car collided with the Hampstead branch of Snappy Snaps. Someone’s written Wham! on it.