Ride Wid Da Riddim

Yesterday evening my stalker stood me up. She was set to travel down from York today. I had imagined her carrying a pair-of-scissors and harbouring dark intent. Instead she phone and politely told me that she had found another with whom she could 'find nothing wrong'. She was going to stick with him on a first come, first served basis. My chagrin was increased to find out that I had been pencilled in ahead of him. Her first thought had been to come down last Saturday but she had wanted to buy a cheap-day return and with there being only available one week-in-advance, suitor No.2 had slipped in ahead. Blaggard!

It will sound fake to say that I am not disappointed but I am genuinely not as something important seems to be taking shape elsewhere. I'm not disappointed but I am humiliated. B pointed out that, in the humiliation stakes, being stood up by a stalker is up there with your imaginary friend taking their own life.

As a way to disavow the hideousness of what had just happened, B and I fell to reflecting on what would have been the best way to put my stalker off me. I offered M's suggestion of 'starting to talk about Pyramid Selling'. B thought bring along some sandwiches wrapped in cellophane and a flask with weak lemon squash 'to share' might dampen the other's ardour. I added that saluting in a stagey way as you ushered them through the door might be the requisite coup de theatre sufficient to make them turn around and head back through the door through which they came. (Another salute?)

I had hooked up with B and the crew after the knockback from the Stalker. From the boozer we went to see the Bug at the Electrowerkz. I will upload the Bug's magisterial 'Politicians and Paedophiles' when I get a moment. Unfortunately last night the Bug was working with a staff shortage - no sign of Cutty Ranks et al. The first chap toasted with some presence. His lady friend had that nice Jamaican burr but didn't have much to say. She fell back on frequently enquiring whether we were feeling Irie. They had bought along with them the least adept dancer I have ever seen. She looked liked the toasting lady but was shorter of statue. She jigged around in a visor, made a few of those move that you'll remember from trance nights (looking up and into the distance whilst making a gesture that seems to say 'all this' with your outstretched arm up) and then just stopped. As the Bug went more mental with his beatz, the other two came to halt too. They seemed not to know quite what to do.  After a few more enquiries about my Irie-ness, I left the fetid acridity of the hall for the bar, where I tucked into a few more lagerinos. I reflected that the electronic world, with the exception of the toasting, hasn't really come along since 1996 when I used to go to the Weird Beatz Collectives - a similarly largely male constituency jigging up and down as the air pounds when the phat base drops.

Old. Old. Old.

96.6 - c'mon little bit more.

 

Bank of Froideur

Two weeks ago I met S in the boozer. We were friendly at school and at university but he ran with different sets. I was surprised to see him in edgy Hackney. Having now  seen five ex- College in the George, it might be the time to accept that for certain scions of the its population Hackney isn't edgy, it's just cheaper than elsewhere. S invited me to his party.

On arriving at the party I made my way to S. He was the only person that I knew there.

He is doing well for himself. For some time, when we have met in the past, I've had problems pinning down what he did. On this occasion he gave me a better view on it. He is a freelance classics scholar. He translates plays and publishes commentaries . It sounds a penurious profession but judging by the newly bought town-house, attached to a not modest guardian, he is getting the readies from somewhere. 

He used to seem puppyish but he has aged well. He has grown into his fine dravidian features. With his height he exudes an aimable hauteur. He has an artsy girlfriend M who edits some high profile section that drops out of the Guardian on a Saturday. 'Cash' perhaps. At school he was a good spin bowler. He used this talent to get into some theatrical cricket team, I think it was it is the one run by Sam Mendes. It is called something gay like 'The Harlequins' or 'the Humpties' or 'the Thesps'. He met Harold Pinter there and they are now mates. Although perhaps Pinter doesn't have mates, perhaps he only has friends ... and he probably has some dear friends too. S told me that he was set to play to start playing Bridge with Pinter. 'Antonia and I are fucking good, y'know?' said Pinter.

S set off through life at a leisurely stroll and he is continuing at a saunter. He is doing very nicely. He would however like to be a theatre reviewer because he adores the theatre. Unfortunately the incumbent critics don't move on. I got the impression that this was no more than a minor irritation and something quite fun would also probably happen along instead.

I arrived at the party alone. I was waiting for R who was in the process of disentangling himself from a party that he had unadvisedly decided to attend. It was being held by a group of callow Management Consultants that he used to work with. S graciously chatted to me for a while but as he was the host, I didn't want to cling onto him. The company looked promising, but I knew their type from of old. Being marginally on the precious side, they would not loosen up till later. As S set off to do the rounds, I stood in the middle of the garden, without much of a story. I felt myself hitting a bank of froideur.

I fiddled with the phone for a bit, made to look as though i was making important calls and then moved to a bench at the end of the garden. I tried to stand in a way that declared a state of readiness for conversation, but the people being ever so slightly 'up themselves' were not be so kind as to call upon my services. I have no doubts that had I been on the inside of the party, I would have included in the 'ever so slightly up themselves' category too. 

If I had not reattached myself to S, I would have left. He was busy, but with some suavity he introduced me to some twins who were called Nanu and Luli. A whiff just on the pleasant side of rotting flowers, an updated patchouli signature, emanated from the chain-smoking Nanu. She was a freelance dancer. I kid you not. I enquired what sort of work she was doing at present. She said that she was doing a movement installation piece for an unspecified but apparently significant artist. She was unclear where it was going to be shown. Luli was a cinematographer for TV. Seeking clarification on how you could be a cinematographer for TV, seemed too much like heading up a conversational cul-de-sac, so I switched my line of enquiry to their names. Were they Greek, for example? They said not. They said that their real names were Nancy and Lucy but as children they had been unable to pronounce them so they had stuck with Nanu and Luli.

It was just as well R then arrived.

With a friend by my side, I had a story, and with the party becoming better oiled, people were beginning to mingle. R and I sat in a sunken bit of the garden and let revellers come to us. Whenever anyone came up, R intoned a deep 'Welcome to the sunken garden, take a seat'. I thought him a bit of a prat for doing this. He had only just arrived and knew no-one, so was in no position to be welcoming anyone at all. Despite or perhaps because of this gall, R proved a draw. In the last stretch of partying a woman who looked somewhere in between R and R's wife A, attached herself to R and I. R claimed that 'she wanted it'. That might have been true. It was more true to say that R wanted it.

I had taken up with a bottle of Limoncello and was binging on it, as if I were eating chocolates. 'I'll jush have a lil'bish more...' By the time I had got through a quarter of it, I was frequently using the word 'Cunt' to refer to parties not present. And sometimes I used the word 'Cunty' too. The girl went to powder her nose.
'Never use the word 'Cunt' in front of a woman', said R.

We went inside. The Pretender's 'Greatest Hits' had been on on loop for duration of the party up until that point. One or two of the drunker people left were trying to engineer something more lively. The rest of the guests were prone.

I left.


 
97.6

Tackle

At rugby training yesterday, I was faced with the dilemma of how hard to tackle a girl. E (f) has been training with us boys and wants to form a ladies team. E has played before in Wales, I expect on the wing. She could politely be described as lithe. She is probably a runner too because she wears running shorts, not rugby shorts. These shorts have the word 'Alexanders' written over the back of them. Like a licence plate. I know this because I was looking at E's bum last night. J, the team captain, caught me me at it. As he grinned at me, I pulled my head around to inspect a tree that suddenly and thankfully had taken my interest.

We did some hill-sprints and then we did some drills. At the end of the session we did some semi-opposed. In rugby circles, contact is sometimes refered to as a bosh. Although the exercise that we did was not testing 'bosh', rather it was testing spatial awareness and communication, tired as we were, it soon degenerated into 'bosh'. At the beginning it was the bosh was a bounce, by the end of the sesssion it was drop the shoulder and hit the runner in the stomach.

I found myself lined up opposite E, I tried to move in one but the person next to me continued to take up a position one inside. He constrained me to remain on the outside.

A girl who plays with boys is not wanting any concessions. As E set off towards me, compared with the other players' assured movement, she seemed like a new-born foal taking its first few steps, it became clear that she was not going to fling the ball back to a support players but rather was going to take the contact.

The first time she came at me I simply pushed her back. It is difficult to decribe the almost complete lack of resistance her body presented. There was indeed a body there but it was deflected easily from her course.

I decided that the best thing to do was to mark the player inside her and leave someone else to pick her off if she went past on the outside. A few drills after and the player inside trundled up and past out of the tackle to E who headed off at some speed. My team mate did not give pursuit, so it fell to me.

I got level with her as she neared the try line and set myself to push her into touch. I launched myself at her derriere. Something raw and red flashed in my head as pushed her to one side. As she tumbled over I had a feeling that can best be described as prehistoric. She fell a little ahead of me and I got up first. Some primal command megaphoned in my head, - 'pin her to the ground!' I gave her my hand, and pulled her up.

Nasty.

96.7 'I'm the slick man, the rapper-slash-part-time hitman.' Victor off Big Brother.

Seemliness

I was watching 'What Sadie Did Next' and hoping that both the 'Star' and the Programme Makers end up in that corner of hell that up till now has only been reserved for the creators of that tantalising slice of Nowhere, HollyOaks. (I don't want to see US life-style and attitude dropped in and trod down into the Surrey/Cheshire/Whereever's Sod) . During the course of the programme, I developed a cognitive twitch, incessantly asking myself, 'what is the content here'? We learn that Alison GoldFrapp was once chased by a Pig, Sadie gets on better with children and animals than adults, and that, gloriously, in his own considered opinion, Mr Agent Provocateur's crowning achievement, his monumental contribution to underwear design, are a pair of black crotchless knickers that are braided with a red rim around the pudenda opening. Why? So that the chaps can aim better? A less understated piece of schmutter I have never seen.

Why should I be interested in these people? Print your tshirt, sing your ditty and then fuck off! It hurts me to think that I used to buy the glib and flatly ironic magazines that supported this shower.

From the vantage point of my Dalston Granny Flat, I note that Porn is changing. (Note in passing - B says that I should refer to Dalston as 'Hackney' or, better still, 'Stokey'. 'Stokey' is stretching the bounds of credibility not to say the city's own lineament. There are a lot of artists in Hackney and Stokey, doncha know? But what will then happen to unhappy Dalston.)

Hi-speed Porn can be sprayed into your home through your broadband. Now, you would have thought that would have put the honest shopkeeps of our city's Sex Shops out of business. But that seems not to be the case. I noticed a new Harmony Bonk Megastore opening on Oxford Street. The red hoarding presented a demur but scantily clad woman wistful pondering ... what? some acrobatic congress that she is about to perform. With three men. It is clever how they make her demur at the same time as having nothing on. A marketting sleight of hand. Riding along the already drek-laiden Oxford Street past this purveyor of finest spaff, this dildo salesman, I thought to myself, 'ah just what the centre of town was crying out for, another dirty shop'.

The punters have lost whatever modesty they had. As I walk around colourful soho, there is no shame on the face of the lunchtime punters emerging from those boxed-in shops. Replete after their Egg Mayo Bap, before they heading back to their office cubicles, they enjoy a flick through 'Barely Legal'.

From memories of Razzle and Whitehouse, old indigenous porn was undertaken by pallid matronly women. I first noticed them in a local newsagent. Mum never used to take me there because the newsagent had migrated the topshelves mags down to a child level carousel. On the occasions that it was most convenient for Mum to get our newspapers from this locale, I grabbed as many eyefuls as I feasibly could, without getting a stiffy. I remember that in a moment of excitement I once span the carousel. So much flesh flashed past my face that it was like being in an Abbatoir. Today though it is more like being in a car showroom. The girls have been rubbed down with a digital shammy. Orifices are a dashboard. And it is not chestnut. It is chrome. Even the men have souped themselves to become chippendales. Not the Gareth Cheesemans of yore. Anonycocks to a man. It could be me or you.

95.9 - "I'm flying, Jack!"
The brutal regime at the rugby club is having its effects. Emerging from the showers this morning, I noted the few trimmings that seemed to be taking place. But mine is a man's body. Attached to the midriff it has man yag and it has a man history in its shadow. It is like those men bodies in the showers at the local baths, when I used to go their with Dad.

Just as well.

Exit Y

Tired of short time benefits
And being exposed to the elements.
I'm homeward bound
got my head turned around.

Y complained of headachey deconstructive moments when he was inside but outside, outside but inside the culture at the same time. It must be tiring. He would like to find someone that understands that tension. Trace the moebius strip together.

With a nod to the family, Y has headed first to Honkers and then to Mother China.

Anyway Y's exit mean no more last orders at the George, no more tripping the light fantastic, no more Tommy Steele and no more Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And for that he will be missed.

I should add that he has only gone for 2 months, so we have to hope his roots pushing up the pavement.



98.

Let love in

Mild disapproval is the hatchet of the do-gooding classes. I have had enough of mild disapproval.
 
'Of course, I would never go out with a Tory.'
'You want to be successful. Oh how distasteful.'
'You work for the Yankee Dollar. Personally I'd never touch it.'
'Your doctor friend drinks too much. That's very bad'.
'You play rugby. It involves discomfort, doesn't it? How could you? And I understand like so many of these sports, it is competitive and involves a loser'.
'You believe Nature to be alien and impersonal and not an environmental friendly backdrop amenable to my type of bucolic fantasy.'
 
Stop it now.
 
Let the barbarians at your hearts' gates have a night out in your precincts. Things might kick off at booting out time but then you can draw your enemy close to you and lullaby them to sleep.
 
I learnt from the pseudo-sciency Sunday Big Brother that narcissists (Jason) look into the mirror in order to deny the damage that they feel within. In Jason's case I think that it is a very phallic type of self assurance. With his unyielding and veiny ribbings, he has quite literally turned himself into a cock. I note with interest that I haven't checked my weight for some days. Perhaps the inner damage is coming under control, love's hangover is beginning to subside.
 
Unrelated, but round every corner of recollection and dream, I encounter my grandmother. When she was young, my grandmother's mother did not want her so my grandmother went to live with her aunt who wanted her only marginally more. In her middle years she had most of lower intestine out. She died from a stroke that she sustained whilst she was trying to secure a fence from falling on cabbages during a storm. The fence fell on top of her. The neighbours saw and she went to hospital. The family went to her bedside. I arrived first. I started to cry. She put her hand on mine to tell me to stop. I did and then left the room. She died after a couple of days. From her point of view it was job done. Her obduracy had threatened to make her live considerably longer, despite her limited plumbing.

Why has she turned up again just now?

Not-a-techie

'I'm not a techie.'

That's a bit essentialist isn't it - I mean we're all techie in some shape or form. Or to put it another way, where exactly did you part company with technology. Did you give up at the typewriter or was it at the production line that you chucked yourself down with despair? Or was it the the loom? or was agrarianism too much? Perhaps even the indolence of the pescatorial setting was too hemmed in, with all those rods and lines? or the Pastoral - too many pens and shearing? And when we first started breaking open nuts, was that you pissing around at the back saying that you'd prefer just to stick to berries? Yes, and I find the opposing thumb quite oppressive too, all that fine movement is so much work, work, work.
The non-techie is a species of the Big Picture Guy. You will recall the Big Picture Guy is too consumed by his Vision to bother with work. That is for the Details Guy. The Details Guy is the spearcarrier of the piece, the Sancho Panza to the Big Picture Guy's Don Quixote. The Details Guy toils in the field while the Big Picture Guy, gin and tonic in hand, admires the vista from the shade of the terrace.
Friend L says that the opposition 'Vision' or 'Detail' is one bit of a 4 bit DNA that mark out your professional make-up. In a test that you can take to determine whether you are Vision or Detail, it turns out that Steve Ballmer is the Big Picture Guy and Bill Gates is the Details Guy. Well HELLO? (a collocation that I am not overly fond of, but works well here) Wasn't it Gates's company before the Marketeers swooped? Wasn't it Gates's granular, Xray, vision that saw through to the production of this digital monolith? Before the flower-arrangers arrived, before the non techies had scented bung in the air, Gates had already constructed his Architectonic.

I grant you that it is not necessary to hear the music of the bytes to work in Computers. But it is disspiriting to hear these self-elected visionaries preface our every chat with 'I'm not a techie'. The conversation will then move onto some Data Entry that they want doing or perhaps some formatting they aren't quite getting right in their word documents. ('Oh I do sympathise, it's a devil getting those columns right') For this Elect, though it is not enough to kindly ask you to act as their own personal help desk for a short while. They leave you in no doubt that your proficiency in their area of expertise confirms you as corporate untermensch. The realisation releases a nasty whiff of disdain which then completely pervades the surroundings.

It used to be that there was a culture of apprenticeship, where it was not until you had mastery that you could shimmy up the pole. What happened to that? Now you start off looking up the trouser leg of the value-adders who somehow seem to have got the jump.
 
And if they start slipping down, they won't baulk at standing on your head.

But let's face it. Non-Techie - you are a monumental failure to the field of human curiosity. You like taking the pig to market but you do not like feeding it, its swill. Please leave the field to those would rather patiently work at those intransigent bastards, the machines. And to the Big Picture Guy - you have inflated views of yourself based only on your ability to volubly assert fatuous truisms. Nothing you say is falsifiable because you have never been on more than nodding acquaintance with the particularities of the world. You are the most alienated, even if you are the best remunerated.

98 - All that is solid melts into air, All that is sacred is profaned. It's one of those days.

A modest proposal (afternoon reverie)

Hoxton is abristle with fins, mullets, feathering and facial topariary of varying lengths and bushiness.

Such rude health indicates it is time for Hoxton to become autonomous.

It is a commonplace that London is made up of villages. I suggest that it is made up of villages for people who previously lived in villages. Tell the mopeded holigans of the Islington and Hackney borders that London is made up of villages and hear them laugh. For them London is a race-track.

London is a mood board. On first encounter every turn will reveals a fresh bleakness, but as even as you take in the lowrise fretting the lowering tent-top of the sky, you will notice a change, like a slight modulation in the pressure.

What does it take for a place to unknit itself from this tapestry?

First a priestly caste.
The hairdressers - the shock troops of modernity. A cursory glance at 'the Salon' will have told you that the hairdressers are unencumbered by anything as workaday as human feeling. You want something trying? Hand them a mag extolling the latest drug, shop, sexual orientation or the band, and the hairdressers will put up the ladders and go over-the-top.

So now we have our hierophants who will be able to interpret the mysteries of Style.

But we need to pack out the clerisy and sketch the episcopacy. Drawing closer to the altar, which for argument's sake can be a till in one of those boutiques you see whilst heading down Hackney Road, there are the stylists robed in Signorial Purple. The stylist is an ascetic. He will not sully himself by sweating to earn his bread.

Attendant upon the Stylists, the Shop-Boys. The Shop-Boys are lotus-eaters who having taken the wafer on Thursday lunchtime, flicker in and out of consciousness until the come-down of Tuesday Afternoon. At this time the pain of the crash yanks them back into reality. The shopboys administer the vestment at the till, carefully plying them to ensure they fit the bags.

And the Hoxtonian's San Pietro is Jaguar-Shoes-and-Bags into which the process, enrobed in tshirts with squiggles upon them, and against the backdrop of tasteful swatches of sound - resonant glitchcore and grime.

And thus London has its very own Vatican City.


Articles of association


98.1 Forever and ever Amen.

Note - my shirt is too tight on me. It is faintly obscene. I never admitted it to myself before, as it was a trendy one. Enough - 'off, off ye lendlings!'

'low i'!

W'gwan brere? (what is going on brethren?)

Friend C, who works in Education, advises on the latest slang.

'low i' - trans. lit. 'allow it', it is permitted, let it be
C: 'Class, please put your books away and leave the classroom quietly.'
Member of class: ' 'low i' '

'boyed' - humbled, shamed
C: 'Miggins, you are a pitiful oaf'
Friend of Miggins: 'Boyed!'
Miggins goes red.

Cotchin i'm'drm - relaxing in my bedroom
C: Beasley, why didn't you do your homework?
Beasley: I was cotchin i'm'drm, miss.

Use these expressions at your own risk.

98.1 - Water retention obviously

Nostalgia

Nostalgia will never be what it once was.

This morning I was at the crossroads of Kingsland and Hackney Road, rolling into Shoreditch High Street, and I saw a scene that, to speak frankly, sickened me. Undetered by the red light out of the road to my left there emerged a Chopper followed by a BMX. Atop the Chopper was a woman in her late twenties. She was clad in silken parachute trousers from which ribbons fluttered. Presumably when chucking yourself out of a plane, these ribbons have some purpose. Seated on a Chopper, they only seemed to serve as decoration. On her top half she was wearing a cream cropped jacket that flared prematurely at her middle, emphasising its shortness and her midrift. Behind her on the BMX her boyfriend meekly followed. Upon his bewhiskered head, he wore a highrise peaked polysterene truckers cap. It was as well that the bmx he was riding no larger than a child's bike because his jeans that were around his knees were impeding the full movement of his legs. He had that pinched expression seen at parties on the faces of those prospecting for cocaine. Even from the distance of twenty or thirty yards I could make out that his boxers were stripey. Needless to say they were both wired for sound.

Like a mother duck and her offspring coming out from a clump of rushes they emerged very slowly into the open of the crossroads. Next to me also looking on were two coppers who were so fluroscently garbed and straddling such enormous bikes that I found it difficult to believe that the pair had not clocked them. 'That's torn it' I thought, as the hapless twosome came into the crosshairs of the rozzers' attention.

Did the Plods move to apprehend these lawbreakers? Did they arse!

It must now be police policy not to bust cyclists. Poor sods the motorists, I say.

As I looked askance at the immobile filth, I noticed the signs on their backs announced them to be 'Community Police'. In other words not coppers at all.

I've seen these community police ambling around Soho. They look like year 10s bunking off school. I wonder what the crims must think when with all the statue and menace of Milk Monitors, Ahmed and Surinder arrive at the scene of the crime in their size sevens. And pity the poor landlord who standing over some brawling punters, announces that the Fuzz have arrived only to turn around to see two YTSs struggling to get through the door.


DC Burnside fingers a collar

You maybe showing your age when you notice that the police seem to be getting younger but it shakes your faith in the powers of Law and Order when you see that the police are getting smaller.

But nostalgia.... In the garages beneath my place of work, on fine days or when there is a railstrike, a fairweather cyclist comes in on a BMX. Now the BMX is bad enough. What makes it worse is that it is fitted with bars of the type you need to pull some stunts on both front and back axles.
I will lay money on this individual being one of the XBox employees. Only one of them would have the requisite grooviness to risk appearing on such a contraption, safe in the knowledge that they will not have to face the opprobrium of their workmates. Further when I look at the largely corporate composition of the workforce, I do not think it is likely that it would be the Vice President of the Division, or the head of Finance.

Now, I have seen the XBox employees at play and they are not in very good physical condition. To pull a 360 by standing on one of the jutting out axels requires a certain amount of physcial prowess. I would adjudge the XBox specimens incapable of that. SO WHY THE DICKENS ARE THEY ON THEM?!

I grant you that whoever is the BMXer, they may have once been pulled a swordfish or a melon or whatever but by reequipping his ride with the required accoutrement now, is he not merely taunting himself about his present lardiness.

Chances are that they never had a BMX the first time around. They had a Grifter, with a kick-stand, and before the kickstand the Grifter had stabilisers on it.

I had Shopper which folded in half. It was pink. I told myself it looked like a Kingpin, but it didn't. It was a girl's bike. Its selling point was that it could be gracefully stowed in garage space. I only hope if I have nippers, I won't treat them to the same indignity. Having said that, it did serve as my steed in the summer of 82 when I endlessly rode up and down the cul-de-sac where I lived with Sharon William, admiring her burgeoning jugs. If I hadn't had the shopper I wouldn't have had this opportuity.

But the point being, I remember these things. I was there when Mark Baylis, pulling a wheelie on the Chopper that his parents had casually lavished on him, fell back and smashed his head. I remember the maladapted 'gearstick' (which apparently has been discarded in the nostalgia version), it was in the style of that of a Ford Cortina's. Now does the women with the satin loonpants remember this. No, I don't think they do.

So don't celebrate it then!

I graduated to a bike that like so many of my possession had been cast off by my cousins. It was called 'The Rebel'. Tip-toeing and perching my nuts on the T-Bar, I could just about touch the ground. In preparation for the BMX that I had been promised to receive as my upgrade, I used to head down the Park on it to practice 'scrambling'. (I was suitably skeptical about this promise, as for my previous birthday, I had been promised a skateboard. I received a plank of wood with half a rollerskate nailed to each end.) One darkening winter's evening when the other children had gone home for their tea, and in emulation of what the bona fide bmxer had been performing before my eyes all afternoon, I boarded 'The Rebel' and launched myself from the top of the hill. My intent was to hit the jump at the bottom at full speed. Halfway down I realised that I had gone past a safe take-off velocity but there seem to be something glorious just about to happen. I hit the jump. Instead of sailing in slow motion front wheel uppermost, like the the General Lee in the Dukes of Hazard, over a length of grassy carpark, 'The Rebel's' front wheel hit the bump with the backwheel lifting up to send me headfirst over the handlebars. I landed someway along, not having fully rotated, on my head. I don't remember ever having been in more pain.

I remember at the time blaming it upon the design of the bike. In my view a true BMX would not have upended me so unceremoniously. 'The Rebel' was consigned to the shed. I went back to riding the Shopper still calling it a Kingpin.

And I lost my way bike-wise after that. I don't know what I got for the next birthday but it was probably some modest(and I mean modest) gratuity which would have been used to buy records.



97.9 - this boy ain't leaving the ground any time too soon.

Mournful

Back in the days of abstract thought, when I was at Warwick studying French thinkers, I heard a lot against the State and Sedentary Molar Being, and a lot pro- lines-of-flight, becoming insignificant and aleatory outsides. The contention was that you could go for a walk in the park and come home a dog. Or you could take the sleeper to Crewe and arrive in Bombay. Literally. Literally literally.

All this went down well with an expresso. And there was also a hefty amounts of rubbishing the commonplaces that most of us limp along on.

Now I wouldn't mind having a home.

I already have somewhere to lay my head. It is bedecked in my discarded accoutrements. There are two piles of washing for no apparent reason. There are wires and gang plugs. There are books. Many of the books' spines have perished. Their pages are dropping out. Food covers the kitchen surface. Admin is strewn across the table and on the floor. And as the disk in the computer under the telly spins, it makes the sound of a small child wailing.

My home wouldn't have to be a physical location.

BoxofMeat for BoxofMeat

Lady P and I went back to the Source, the boxofmeat shop. (Can I urge those affable sandwich peddlers to create their own website? Have these people not heard of e-commerce? With a little expenditure on a succulent UI, the carnivores of Soho could be ordering plastic troughs from the convenience of their own desks. A little innovation and the lunch economy of Central London will be transformed. And it is not like the boxofmeat boys can sit back on the wild rocket - sure they pack the boxes tight with proteiny goodness but their emporiums sit at the apex of some of the most pissed-stained streets in our capital city.)

P asked for the boxofmeat classico with a side order of rice. It may surprise you to learn that the original boxofmeat is a tuna salad. Illegitimate meat.

After some fingering of the menu, I opted for their 'Carbo-Motherlode' (meatballs and spaghetti) but they must have taken one of my vacillation for my final preference. I got a boxofmeat too.

It had to be, I s'pose. My boxofmeat was meatballs sans sauce accompanied by two broccoli florettes, on a bed of leaves. The florettes had been steamed, which is to say they were raw. Checking back with the menu, I saw that the meatballs had been dubbed 'kebab'. Now I know that the meat boyz have been innovating in the sandwich space for some time, but I felt that they were taking a liberty here. The meaty pellet may have done well coated in a tomato cloak. Nude as it was, it was something more akin to falafel.

With regard to /boxofmeat, P has been something unacknowledged contributor. She provided a lot of the original offal that I reconstituted and packed into a transparent carton. Props to P. She is in the family way now so she will be doing the state-sanctioned bunk-off-work. You will find me alone in Golden Square, golden no more, as in the Larkin poem -

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

On another tip, I read a wonderful article in the LRB by Andrew O'Hagan. In it, he used the expression 'the rough magic of being a bloke'. The article is a review of Men's magazines and in context the tone is dismissive. But that's how it is, isn't it? Doused in aftershave, with swelling paunches and looking increasingly primped, we have to conjure up a peformance that will take us through the piss-taking, the benders and the chat-up-lines. As if we could dispense lose these powers of illusion?!

He also picks out that expression that I really liked from the Richard Wollheim's bio. Wollheim on discovering that he really wanted to be a woman, he set off on the 'hard, arduous, stony road of effeminacy.'

I note with alarm that the pictures on these pages are either of fat men or para-sexual acts. This just won't do. Here is something more life-affirming for my peeps.






99.7 - surgical truss.

Going to the Dogs

'Outside every fat man there is a fatter man waiting to close in', said Kingsley Amis.

I had this made clear to me last night whilst I was returning on my bike from rugby training. I was rolling down Holloway Road at a pace that was no more than stately. Somewhere around North London University, I felt the air become still around me. My first thought was that a bus was drawing up behind. But there was no noise. I flicked a few tentative sideways glances to see if I could get whatever it was in my peripheral vision. There was nothing sufficiently massy to notice. I looked in the shop windows as I rode passed, to see their reflection. It was a man on a bike.

When the road is clear, the etiquette with riding seems to be to for each cyclist to give every other cyclist plenty of space in front of and behind them. This guy was tracking me indian file. Even stopping at the traffic lights he remained behind me. At the third set of lights, I twisted my head to see who was stalking me. I saw a behemoth on two wheels. This bloke was huge. He had a little ratty tash too. Here is an approximation (DJ Sneak)

I continued to make slow progress. My legs were blocks of wood. I wondered why he wouldn't overtake me. It seemed a desperate gesture, stalking another on a bike. I conjectured that he was lonely. Could loneliness be suffcient motivation for murder? Would he follow me home and do for me there?
It was at Highbury Corner where our paths thankfully diverged. As he rode past, I got a full appreciation of his size. He probably wasn't able to overtake me. He had been doing the best that he could.

There was no modesty to his intent though. He was liveried in the branded lycra of the professional cyclist. As he heaved his way around the roundabout, I found words came into my head which although rude sounding, were not mean.
'Go for it fat boy!'
I was a little wobbly with emotion after the physical strains of training but I had that feeling you sometimes get. 'Mon sembable, mon frere.'

This is rare. I was reading a review of Peter Singer's The Ethics of Globization . In it Robert Skidelsky, the reviewer, makes a point about what Singer has failed to consider. This point can be taken as part of a larger case against Singer's brand of Utilitariasnism. Singer proposes that social practices which presuppose the partiality of parents for their children, of lovers and friends for each other and of nationals for their compatriots should be adjudged from an impartial perspective. In other words when it comes to redistributing the limited amount of goods around the world we should think about what is productive of the greatest happiness with no special privilege accorded to supporting the relationships that which, if you were to ask them, would be picked out as the most important to the beings involved.

This wasn't what attracted my attention. Rather it was Skidelsky's assertion that,
'Moral behaviour arises from the sense that we have obligations to others. These obligations are felt much more strongly to those closest to us - our families and friends - and extend in successive circles to compatriots, coreligionist and so on'.
Now is this true for me?

Yes for family and friends. Compatriots tricky. We can drop coreligionists.

The England. The English. When I think of the best of England, I see that green mote of fields with the grey sky swimming above it. And somewhere after that I think of the village green, the thwack of leather on willow, the Shipping Forecast etc. England is a small hamlet outlying Trumpton. It is Camberwick Green. It is Beckonscot.

This is balls.

Someone has up-ended the waste-bin on the bus-stop. Someone else is pulling a hand-brake turn ('look, fishtails!) in the middle of the cricket square. Pupils arriving at secondary school are first bog-washed and then binned. No one speaks RP any more. Even where they do, as in the Archers, dionysiac orgies are espied behind the fluttering lace curtains. Ambridge's local colour not happy with their farming subsidies have done for themselves and are hanging from their rafters.

Someone get a message through
To Captain Snow
That they better start assembling
The boys from the Balzac.
Keep Mrs. Honeyman right out of sight,
'Cause there's gonna be riot
Down in Trumpton Tonight.

The prescient Half Man, Half Biscuit.

N returns from Rome. He repots that there in the balmy evenings, you can sit out chatting in piazze as late as you like ... wivout no menaces nor no aggravation. I am forced to admit that the 'faaaamily, food and bella figura' triumverate sometimes left we cold, but as I trundle on, in my narrowing lines of sight, these are three of the largest monolithes that sit on the horizon of interpretation.

But you can't wrap yourself in the EU flag and there are no jobs in Italy.



96.6 - a whip.


And one last thing. 'Like the way they say - we apologize to you in advance if you are among those killed'

Short Hand

Where are all the minger male receptionist? Every front-desker who has worked here has been a lady fox.

Some have been less stable than others. Who can forget the young lady who candidly confessed to B that she could not decide whether, come the weekend, she should hang out with her beer-and-pills mates, or with her champagne-and-charlie friends? And the one who, shortly after finding herself attracted to the multi-millionaire Head of Division, who owned helicopter and house of Regent Park, found herself bearing his seed.

The present incumbent has the usual fearsome arsenal - plenty of slap, fluttering eye-lids, air of self-possession and that attitude which flickers between being sneeringly patronizing and being utterly bewitching.

All these attribute can be repurposed on Saturday when she goes out dancing. The black trousers and white shirt give way to the knitted poncho, the pink cowboy boots and scooped-back hair. An egregious use of the word 'Babe' may also be involved.

My sexist suspicion is that, of the serried ranks of beauties marching through Soho, most are of the secretarial class. As they pass, I have the mournful feeling that I used to get as I watches the buses full of High School Girls rolling past our stop.

The girls used to look and point and laugh at us pubescents who were grimly pustulating by the side of the road.

I was buoyed this morning as a woman (let us call her Girl A) with a modern hair styling, the one that looks like someone has tipped a pot of white emulsion over her apparently dark hair, had her own box-of-meat moment.

As she was travelling the length of a window pane, she turned to look in the pane's reflection to see how her image was doing. I presume that she did not know I was observing her as she started to flick her hair as if she was in that old Stu-Stu-Studio line Ad.

Natural! Sparkle! Brightness!

The dream was punctured by her tripping over a Shitsu that unexpectedly emerged from a side street. The shitsu was leading its Mistress on a tour of Soho. In my experience an ugly dog attached to a sashaying tall woman indicates the woman to be a model. Or 'Modil' as they often style themselves.

There was some confusions as to who was to take up the position of having been wronged. Eventually Girl A defered to the Modil. Thus vindicated, the Modil scooped up the pooch and headed off across the road at speed. She gratified her horrid streak with a few daggers aimed back over her shoulder at Girl A. Poor Girl A.

From time to time, I like to regard myself in a glass. 'You're not so bad, my old son', I say to myself.



Can I warmly enjoin my reader to follow this link to the Snailhausen? This piece comes from the prolific MrandMrsWheatley.

97.9