Recently, a colourful advertising banner in the Times claimed that Ten Pilates was the workout that ‘everyone’s talking about’.   While I doubt that this claim was ever meant to be taken as statistically accurate, I allowed myself a small smile as I read it.    I did this because what everyone around me at that moment was talking about was as follows: a) Danny, outlining the sexual attributes of Keith’s wife Barbara to Chris the Knowledge in order to annoy Keith, and b) Keith, involved in an extraordinarily foul mouthed discussion about the sale of Cuban cigars to the bloke who runs the juice bar outside the antiques shop with the Millwall fan in it.   All four participants in these exchanges were talking very loudly, principally as a result of Danny trying to drown out Keith, and Keith trying to drown out Danny.   Chris the Knowledge, incidentally, is so called as he is training to be a cabbie which – if you are unfamiliar with the procedure – involves acquiring ‘the Knowledge’.   The Knowledge is knowing where every street in London is and knowing how to get there from every other street in London, and is an impressive thing to have floating round your cerebral hippocampus.

I am on occasion partial to a cigar, and I will vouch for Keith’s price of three hundred quid for 25 San Christobal La Fuerzas being very fair.   Nonetheless, it was difficult for him to maintain a credible bargaining position when, within comfortable earshot, Danny was saying ‘Oh I remember that place – I had a go on Barbara there the other week’ in response to Chris the Knowledge offering a stage by stage guide to a notional journey between Plaistow and New Cross Gate.   I’ve just checked the route myself, and considering that Danny claimed to have had a go on Barbara on every single thoroughfare that Chris the Knowledge mentioned, this adds up to sixteen joyless liaisons from Selwyn Road to New Cross Gate station, including what must’ve been an appalling contretemps in the Blackwall Tunnel.   If ever I am called upon to undertake delicate international talks, perhaps for the United Nations, I will take Danny along to loudly claim to have had a go on my opponent’s mrs – including all the usual details of having to arrange proceedings so he could see the telly, as Million Pound Drop was on, and so forth – as it is a remarkably efficient way to add weight to an argument.   In the midst of this, I looked up to see a bloke walking through the market, yawning.   It wasn’t until I looked at him a second and third time that I realised he wasn’t yawning at all – he was just walking along with his mouth wide open, in the manner of a basking shark.   At this point, I found myself wishing that everyone actually was talking about Ten Pilates, if only for a couple of minutes, as it would feel like a little holiday.

After the noise and threats had died down, the weekend immediately set about presenting its specialities, which were boredomness and sub-zero temperaturality.    Trying to keep me behind my stall is like trying to keep a dog in a bath at the best of times, however on a weekend as hyperthermically cold and tedious as the one just past I am prone to wandering about all over the place in search of light conversation and warmth.    I often use Trader Wandering to judge the economic health of the market; if Alex the Jackets pops in for a natter about the footie, it’s a reasonably slow day for everyone.   If Hand Cream Jean does the same, it’s a very slow day as she is busier and further away, and if – as happened on Sunday – I find myself wandering around the grounds of the Maritime Museum and bump into Leather Thierry doing the same, I might as well catch a bus up west and see Five Guys Named Moe or something, and leave any punters to sort themselves out.    Either that, or leave Dave in charge.

Most market people (with the exception of Danny and Keith, now I come to think of it) are known by their first name and some kind of qualifier, to denote what they sell or where they are from, and thereby ease identification.   I am, for example, widely known as Paul Aprons or – even after all this time – Paul Camden.    Go back far enough, of course, and this is how surnames started.   Dave, though, is just ‘Dave’, because like Elvis, everyone who has seen Dave will immediately understand the implications for the immediate cultural landscape.    In the likely event you haven’t seen Dave, the image you need is this: a man goose-stepping up and down outside the Flood Gallery, shouting incoherently, and saying ‘You don’t want to mess with me, sunshine’ to Golden Retrievers, a species of canine with whom he seems to disagree about almost everything.   There is a theory that the mentally ill are actually the sane ones, and it’s the rest of us that are mad.   Using Dave as evidence, I will immediately refute that.   However, when it’s too cold and boring for even the insane to come out and – in Dave’s case – claim to have a two hundred room luxury hotel in Canary Wharf and Theo Pathitis’ thirty two digit phone number while casually approaching female browsers and blowing raspberries into their shoulder bags, you know you’re on a losing ticket.   God knows I know what being poor in a market is all about, but on this occasion, which was last Saturday, I only got through by promising myself that when the day was over I would go to the Lighthouse Fish Bar on Tooting Bec Road, get chips, walk home, and eat them in bed fully clothed – including hat, coat and scarf – until I felt warm again.   Later, throwing dining etiquette to the wind, that was exactly what I did do, and it was quite simply fantastic.

Attention: These posts are being turned into a book.  Or rather, the basis of a book.   It’s an idea that’s been floating around for a year or so, but after a couple of false starts, it’s well and truly underway.   Interestingly, ‘underway’ should really be ‘underweigh’, as it was originally a naval expression linked to ‘weighing anchor’.   Anyway.   It’s underweigh and I should think it’ll be finished in August, which is a keeping-everyone-happy expression I like to use when I actually mean October.

Photards – this weeks studies are:

Top – There was considerable commotion around the perimeter of Greenwich Market last Sunday, with cheering crowds and all that.   I rushed out excitedly, thinking that it might be a hanging, only to be met with this anatomically correct representation of Queen Elizabeth I.  It was all to do with Greenwich becoming a Royal Borough, which should make everything alright.   I declined the market’s generous invitation to trade in royal themed fancy dress as, like the actual royals, I value my dignity.

Middle: For all its manifold qualities, the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 has the worst bar staff in the entire world.   They have literally not heard of anything.   Unless Vinny or the one who looks like Amy Winehouse is serving, I ask for a pint of Fosters and half a Strongbow and mix snakebite myself at the table, in a manner strangely reminiscent of salt n shake crisps from my childhood.

Lower: The South Wing of my home in Tooting Bec, London SW17.

There have always been widespread reports of ghostly passengers on the tube, especially for some reason on the Bakerloo Line between Paddington and Oxford Circus.   I think I know how they have come about.   This accidental ghostbusting occurred last Thursday while removing a pair of gloves at Holland Park.  Around Christmas, I suddenly took to glove removal by gently tugging at each gloved finger in turn, before removing the glove proper, for no other reason than I felt it might lend me an air of sinister gravitas, in the manner of a Bond villain.   Catching myself doing this in the reflection of the window opposite revealed that actually it makes you look like a preposterous homosexual weirdo and I immediately resolved to never do it again, but not before I had noticed the reflection of the girl sitting next to me.   She had a canvas shoulder bag with ‘OMG’ written on it in giant letters, which I thought was quite a larf, and more crucially was wearing the commuter classic office clothes with trainers combination, which I have always found strangely endearing.

This clothing mis-match once sparked a prolonged debate between myself and Joe as to whether or not it constituted a Modern Sin, and if it could therefore be placed alongside white jeans, saying ‘Can I get?’ instead of ‘Can/may I have?’, and several others we were compiling for a long-gone project of ours.   I recall many hours spent in the Lion on Junction Road, Archway arguing if liking the Clash more than the Pistols was a sin (Joe: no, me: yes) and similarly if liking the Velvet Underground more than the Stooges also constituted sinful activity (Me: yes, Joe, no).   This sort of thing was happening a lot at the time.  2008 was not a vintage year – to think otherwise would, now we’re in the swing of things, be sinful.

Anyway.    I was traveling at the time from Hyde Park Corner to Mile End – from central to east London, if you’re unfamiliar – where I spent large parts of a hair-raising but happy childhood.   Mile End has enabled me to formulate a theory recently about class, which is this: if you’re a middle class person, you can return to the area in which you grew up, and it will be pretty much the same.  If you’re working class and return to the area in which you grew up, it will be full of middle class people.   They’re everywhere.   You can’t move in east London for Bestival tickets and self-loathing.    Before we go any further, however, it’s worth pointing out that this is not necessarily a bad thing.    Having a middle class means that your society is civilised and successful.   Imagine a society without a middle class – yes, we’d lose the Strokes, the Guardian, Apple products and the Labour Party, and all the therapists would be bankrupt in a week – but we’d also be open to the worst excesses of medieval society by becoming either peasants or aristocrats.   The main flaw, as far as contemporary society is concerned, is that there is only a middle class, with everyone else demonised, marginalised or discredited, which throws the whole system out of kilter.   Be that as it may, gentrification of Mile End has been slower than in other parts of east London simply because whatever it is that middle class people want – kitchen plumbing so that hummous comes out of one tap and cava comes out the other, picnics every day from March to October, compulsory viewing of This Is England, gay children – can’t seem to take root there.   You could move Harrods, Kew Gardens, Buckingham Palace, Holland Park and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Association to Mile End, you could literally pave the streets there with gold, and it would still be shit.

It is for this reason that I retain a soft spot for it, of course.   It’ll come up eventually, like Deptford is nearly doing, but it’s not a bad place as such.   It was, however, unlikely to gentrify in the time it took to get there from Hyde Park last Thursday, and as we passed St Paul’s I noticed that the girl with the OMG handbag and trainers was no longer being reflected in the window opposite.   This was presumably because she’d left the tube at some point – my money’s on Chancery Lane – without me noticing, leaving her seat empty, and the window opposite unreflected-in.   It nonetheless gave me a bit of a jolt, and I wondered for a second if indeed she had been a spectre of some kind.  She wasn’t, obviously – ghosts don’t have jobs – but to my mind that is how these ghostly passenger stories start, with people seeing the reflection of someone in the opposite window and thinking it’s an apparition.   It can sometimes be wise to check that everyone is alive, though – a man was once challenged by a ticket inspector at East Finchley, whereupon it was found that he had been dead for a week.   It would be an awkward thing to have to point out to someone, though, so I can see why people didn’t like to mention it.

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Photards – this week’s studies are:

Top: Childbrain, aka Mike, with his dog.   The dog has just beaten him at backgammon.

Middle: Butters from the Christmas table.   They were generously laced with alcohol and so strong that they made your eyes water.   Some diners attempted to ’slam’ Christmas pudding with them.   From the left – brandy, cherry brandy, and Amarula Cream dairy treats.

Lower: My old dear with Lawrence of Arabia’s motorbike, in the Imperial War Museum.   Perhaps they should call it the Imperial Warm Museum to make it sound friendlier.   In any case, my old dear (who I think may have been at the sherry) is imitating the stance of a motorcyclist.   Lawrence of Arabia tore round the place on this motorcycle organising the Arab Revolt, digging up pyramids, wearing boating blazers, and generally having one of the most interesting lives of all time.   My old dear seems to think that he did it pushing a shopping trolley.

Whenever I think of supermarkets, I think of slow people with fat arms putting huge bags of crisps into trolleys, and I therefore avoid going into them whenever possible.   This means that until last Wednesday I had no idea that you can’t buy margarine anymore.   This in turn means that an austere speciality of my old dear’s and feature of my childhood – dry Weetabix with margarine on top – can sadly no longer be prepared.   It’s difficult to spread margarine on dry Weetabix, as they are fragile and break easily, with the result that the recipient of such bounty is often left sitting in front of Blue Peter with a joyless bowl of wheat dust and hydrogenated fat.   As I write this, it’s just come to mind that I also ate dripping as a child, which is revolting.   If you’ve never eaten dripping, think of things that drip, and then think about how hungry they make you feel.   It isn’t even an appetising word.   How my arteries survived adolescence continues to baffle the medical community.

Meanwhile, midwinter in the markets sees musicians shoved into the fray as gaps appear due to regular traders taking a bit of time off.   For some reason at Greenwich, it’s always folk singers, and I suppose because of the maritime connection they are usually doing sea shanties.  While I have nothing against the genre, I simply do not care about barrels of tobacco, or rigging, or what happened off the Cornish coast in 1847, or any of that stuff – I have an auntie in Plymouth, and that is as near as I get to the seafaring life.   This last happened on Sunday, an already commercially dismal day, which I coped with by downloading books about the Franco-Prussian War to my Kindle, shopping for dressing gowns at Liberty, and writing an entirely fictitious CV with which to apply to every single job in the Sunday Times Appointments section, every single Sunday, until I get one.   I’ve decided to do this as I have no education whatsoever beyond GCSE but do like having money to – as we have seen – shop for dressing gowns at Liberty on a quiet afternoon.   It’s a numbers game, as I see it, and as I am of absolutely no use, interest, or value to society, and am profoundly unlikely to find worthwhile employment unless I bluff my way into being a non executive director for the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS or chief safety regulator for Australian National Rail which, if I just keep applying often enough, is bound to happen.

Anyway.   Margarine covered Weetabix and dripping on toast aside, my old dear can still whip up a mean roast.   She had the opportunity to do so on Christmas Day for her new neighbours, who are Asian Christians.   I know they’re Asian Christians, because as my old dear herself said when excitedly informing me of such said ‘They’re Asian, Paul love, but they’re Christian.  They’re Asian Christians.   Asian, but Christian.   They’re Christian, but they’re also Asian.   Paul luvvey – they’re Asian Christians’.    My old dear is hardly unfamiliar with either Asians or Christians, what with being a churchgoer living in Slough, and was delighted to have them in for a Yule fest and, I should imagine, an extended discussion upon how funny it was that they were Christian, but also Asian – to all intents and purposes, Asian Christians.    I suppose it is because I have reached that point in life where your parents become your children that I found myself explaining that being Asian does not preclude you from being Christian, or indeed vice versa – Jesus was a very devout Christian, and would have been quite Middle Eastern looking, what with being from the Middle East and everything.   It’s not like her new neighbours have blacked up for a larf.   In any case, interrupting my old dear in full conversational flow is like trying to stop a runaway train by putting a bag of flour in front of it, and the combination of chattiness and faith – which she describes in the classic English fashion as ‘generally Christian, mainly’ – has provided all concerned with many hours of happy company.   I have instructed them to think of her as ‘bewildering, but a good source of cakes’, a description which should perhaps appear on her passport.

Photards: this weeks’ snapshots are -

Top: Marshall, Danny’s dog on Royal Wedding day.   I am unsure of Marshall’s views on constitutional monarchy, but Danny and Keith were for some time trying to train him to bite Communists.

Middle: The Goat Bag Man on the left and myself on the right, at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street London E1.   I bought that wrist chain from a bloke fly-pitching in Soho on what I remember was the hottest day ever recorded in Britain – which having just looked it up, was August 11th 2003 – and I haven’t taken it off since.   The Goat Bag Man is laughing at something Chris said, but which as this picture was taken I have yet to understand.   Once everything had died down I suddenly understood it and spat a mouthful of snakebite over both of them.

Lower: Empty barrows on midweek Petticoat Lane. There is a tradition among Borough Market traders of wheeling their barrows from London Bridge to Brighton in the interests of charity.   East Yard catastrophe magnet Pikey Dave is strongly rumoured to have wheeled one of the Petticoat Lane trolleys from the here to Camden Lock in the interests of stealing it.

Some years ago, I consumed an estimated seventy bottles of vodka and five hundred Kit Kats on a ninety day festival trading tour with the Camden Nepalese.  Midway through, concerned that we hadn’t had quite enough vodka yet and remembering that it’s always better to be safe than sorry, we blagged our way backstage at V and swiped most of Babyshambles’, too.

Although I found myself happily free of lasting health problems when the whole remarkable jaunt finally shambled to a close, I retained the Nepalese habit of rubbing the proceeds of the first sale of the day across my forehead in order to – so the superstition goes – encourage more to follow.   I was explaining this last week during idle discourse with a common shop-girl of my acquaintance.   Our conversation was made more interesting than usual on account of the fact that she’d had some stitches in her mouth earlier that morning, which rendered her unable to move her jaw or tongue in order to facilitate speech.   A side effect of this was that she spoke in exactly the same way as one of the endless parade of Yorkshire terriers trained to say ’sausages’ on demand through bared teeth that were a staple of early evening light entertainment shows in the 1980s, which is an unfortunate look for someone working in a patisserie.

Other things of superstitious concern to the Nepalese trading community include the precise actions of the first customer of the year.   This is far too arcane to go into in any great detail here.   However, the first person to visit our outpost in the western provinces was comedian Sean Hughes, who you may remember from such years as 1992, and from absolutely nothing else since.  1992 is one of the Godless years between the end of the Smiths and the start of Britpop.   During this time, I attended the Phil Collins-themed 18th birthday party of a girl I knew.   It wasn’t an ironic Phil Collins party or anything – she just really liked Phil Collins, and had a jean jacket with his face on in order to underline this.   Phil Collins has always struck me as quite a larf to be honest – I read a brilliant interview with him in a magazine at the dentists’ last year where he revealed that he retired from music because he was sick of hearing himself on the radio, which is pretty cool.   Nonetheless, I knew that my formative years were set against a backdrop of bad times for popular culture when the highlight of a birthday party for this well liked and popular girl was a slow dance to Another Day In Paradise.    I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think Nick Lovell fingered her in the car park after.

Anyway.   By all accounts, Sean Hughes was unimpressed with our lavish kitchenware range, which he considered somewhat lowbrow.   In our defence, I am tempted to point out that at least we still have a brow, however, by way of his defence, I’ve just watched twenty minutes of Sean’s Show and found it fairly amusing by modern standards, which must’ve made it an absolute riot in an era where 18 year olds had unironic Phil Collins parties.   In his continued defence, we probably caught him on a bad day, whereas he caught us on a completely normal one, and to convert this continued defence into a knockout blow, he was on Never Mind The Buzzcocks for ages and drinks in Quinns on the Kentish Town Road, which is an excellent pub.   There was no such controversy surrounding my first customer of the year at Greenwich, who was one of those likable but disconcerting 30-something girlwomen who spend a great deal of time making cup cakes and dressing like an 8 year old.   Talking to someone like this is strange, because although they have an endearing perkiness about them it’s too self conscious to be convincing, and you can sense their own Ghost Of Every Evening standing just behind, drinking wine and crying.

I should like to point out that the common shop-girl was in no discomfort throughout our conversation, despite replying and interjecting in the manner of a diabolical night creature.   The most common question she was asked by customers was – not unreasonably – ‘Why are you working?’  to which she had to reply ‘Short staffed’, which I quickly learned contains all of the hardest sounds for someone with a static tongue and jaw to pronounce, and which came out in the manner of a furious snarl.   Have a go yourself next time you’re in front of a mirror – it’s terrifying.   Interestingly – and so as to return us back to where we started – the word ‘festival’ contains all the hardest sounds for a Nepalese speaker to pronounce, to the extent that Bipin, who is an old skool East Yard comrade and excellent stalwart of the Camden Nepalese community, simply substitutes the word ‘vegetable’, as it sounds similar and is much easier to say.    Bearing that in mind, I must demonstrate my admirable forward planning business skills and turn back to sorting out this summer’s vegetable trading season, which I regret will be sadly Nepalese-free.

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Photards:

Top: Spitalfields childwear vendor Viran at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1.  He does this t shirt in a baby grow if you’re interested.

Middle: The writing desk at Tooting Bec.   Note airmail envelopes and paper; I write letters to my old dear with these to make it look like I’m somewhere exciting.   Note also budget Parker fountain pen, which was only a tenner and is an excellent ‘pocket pen’, as we like to say in the fountain pen community.

Lower: Keith reads Cartoon Ben something of interest from the Sunday Times magazine.   Sharp eyed film buffs will spot Cartoon Ben in this.   He runs in exactly the same manner along Nelson Road in order to get to Greenwich Market for stall allocation these days.

When Camden is as unfashionable as it is at the moment, the Good Mixer – a well known Camdenite pub at the end of Inverness Street, midway between the market and the tube station – is an enjoyable place in which to take refreshment. I myself often do this of a Saturday evening, having first attended to commercial interests in the Lock market, and usually find myself in the company of the Goat Bag Man, American Jeff, Wolverhampton Mike, Bibbsy and sundry other traders. The evening is usually punctuated by a wandering Camden victim called Blue, who simply isn’t funny enough to be as intrusive as he is although, to his credit – and I have a soft spot for the relentless – this does little or nothing to stop him.

However, it is to American Jeff that our attention must turn on this occasion. Jeff has the ultimate showbiz marriage of abrasive voice and ill-advised subject matter, the overall social effect of which is quite remarkable. A conversation with him is strangely like being repeatedly slapped round the face, and you find yourself unwilling to disengage in case he jumps on you and continues to shout words into your ear as you walk off towards the tube station, go down the escalator, and make your way home.

You would have to be a member of a generation as yet unborn not to realise that American Jeff likes a bit of a drink. Or rather, he likes frequent and generous bits of a particular drink, which is known as a Jeff Special. I can’t remember exactly when Jeff Specials first appeared, but I can remember the first time I was asked to get one, because I refused to go to the bar and ask for it. It was explained to me that the ‘Special’ part of the equation pertained to the price; it was cheaper than buying the constituent parts in the normal manner. I counter-explained that, while I rarely find myself in the company of someone who has had a beverage named after them, I would still rather buy every single combination of drinks in the whole pub than ask for something called a Jeff Special, because I understand what style is. The bar staff at the Mixer are consistently excellent and, bearing this in mind, I decided to experiment by getting the rest of the round in, and then saying ‘Oh, and one for our shouty friend’, which brought the pleasingly immediate response of ‘Oh – a Jeff Special?’ which it turns out is a double gin and tonic with fifty pence off.

It isn’t often that you get the chance to wet yourself in public as an adult, but later that same evening I was presented with a golden opportunity to do so. It’s seventeen stops down the Northern Line from Camden Town to Tooting Bec, or sixteen if you go via Charing Cross but then you have to wait about at Kennington, so the advantage is lost. Fortunately, American Jeff now lives in Tooting Broadway and has invented a dietary supplement called Tube Booze, which is a couple of cheeky cans outside Booty Wines in Kentish Town Road, and then another couple to keep them company as the train winds through the City, under the Thames, and on to Surrey, which is where south London is. Jeff is a welcome source of conversational diversion on such an epic journey, however, by the time we reached London Bridge I was in a state where – to use a charming phrase – my back teeth were floating and, as we rolled into Clapham Common, I was unable to hear what he was saying over the roaring sound in my ears produced by the sheer effort of keeping disgrace at bay. As I mentioned earlier, I am a man who understands style and I concluded that if this horror story really was going to unfold, then my best bet was to get off at Balham and walk home via the High Road. This is quite dimly lit and if I decided to just let go, I would have a far better chance of nonchalantly strolling along while doing so, hoping that no one would notice that I was somehow leaving a trail of footprints. I seem to remember that my plan was to explain this away by claiming to be a god. In any case, there would at least be a few seconds of bliss, and I would aim to concentrate upon those to take my mind off the cold legs, clinging jeans and squealching that would be my steadfast companions for the rest of the journey.

I had mentioned none of this to American Jeff, as he was keen on explaining something quite important that, although I couldn’t hear, I didn’t want to interrupt. I bade him farewell, bounced up the escalator at Balham hoping I wouldn’t have to laugh or sneeze, and marched along the High Road not letting myself be tempted by the many alleys leading off of that noble Roman thoroughfare, because I considered that in my state popping into one would be akin to showing the dog the rabbit and that, if I subsequently found myself confronted by a restaurateur or assailant, I wouldn’t be able to control myself. Unexpectedly, walking seemed to relieve matters somewhat, although I was wary of the classic error whereby you put your key into the front door, and the anticipation of blessed deliverance is so great that you don’t make it over the threshold. This phenomenon has a name, which escapes me. Splashy Doorstep or something. Anyway, all was well in the end, and I the next time I saw Jeff I explained the reason for the pained but distant expression that I had worn throughout our journey, and all was well. Incidentally – and in significant news for all those who like myself enjoy boisterous and engaging conversation – American Jeff is no more. This is because he now has British citizenship, which means that a) we should henceforth more properly refer to him as British Jeff and b) by choosing Britain over America as his home, he’s managed to lower the average IQ of both countries.

Until this Christmas Day, I had assumed that the word ’scrage’ – pronounced to rhyme with ‘rage’, and used to describe a minor skin abrasion – was the sole linguistic property of my old dear and, by association, myself.   It turns out to be Bristol slang, according to a book on the subject being bandied about the Christmas dining table along with an inventive and eyewateringly potent butter collection which consisted of brandy, cherry brandy, and amarula cream variants.   I dislike alcoholic butter, and instead familiarised myself with sundry other Bristolian phrases, which enabled me to safely arrive at the conclusion that I was in no danger of being stung by a macky buzzer if I was of a mind to go outside and see if the snow was pitchen yet.  

Where my old dear picked up ’scrage’ from is anyone’s guess, but as she is the kind of woman who claims to have ‘alumillion saucepans’ and constructs sentences like ‘I told him, Paul, I said as Gawd is my witness. I said ‘I told you’, I said to him, so help me Gawd’, I’d always assumed she had invented it herself.   While ‘alumillion’, along with ‘ramnifications’, ‘obstensively’, things not making ‘one Toyota’ of difference and references to the now-defunct DIY chain Em Fie Eye are, I think, unique to her lexicon, ’scrage’ would not be the first time she has invented words that have already been invented.   During a baffling phone chat on Christmas morning which partly concerned a conversation she’d had with a friend, she said ‘I left a tiny gap before answering – what I’ve always liked to call a ‘pause’ – and then I told him alright, oh yes believe you me’. Having a special word for something which is the same ordinary word as everyone else uses is another hallmark of a conversation with my old dear, and it occurred to me that anyone enjoying a large and lavishly varied meal to celebrate the birth of Christ this season might also like to ask Him to have a bit of a rummage around in her brain and let the rest of us know, just once, what on earth she is on about.

‘Forty Years Of Sunny Days’ is the tagline on a Sesame Street boxset I happened across over Christmas, and this is a milestone I myself will be reaching in April. Feeling perhaps a strange sense of kinship, I spent enjoyable time counting to twelve, and marvelling at the solo adventures of each individual number involved as they found themselves variously fired around pinball machines, sailing across oceans, and landing on the moon. I was, however, slightly confused when returning from the kitchen with more merlot to find that the emphasis had shifted from a discussion of words which rhyme with ‘cat’ conducted by Kermit the Frog and the Cookie Monster to a discussion of neurological transmission within the cerebral cortex which, despite no experience in the field whatsoever, I thought was too steep a learning curve for Sesame Street’s target audience. This was because, in my brief absence, the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures had started. If you are unfamiliar, these consist of a series of talks given annually, by a nervous scientist to a audience largely consisting of highly scrubbed and henna’d adolescent girls, and are hugely fascinating. To illustrate how the brain forms associations, the audience was played Greensleeves and, when questioned, admitted to thinking about ice cream, due to the fact that Greensleeves is routinely played by ice cream vans. This was somewhat lost on myself, as I have reached the point where I have read so much history that when I hear Greensleeves – which is widely accepted to have been written by Henry VIII – I immediately think of the dissolution of the monstries, the break from Rome, and having my girlfriend beheaded.

Be that as it may, it’s been a long year in commercial enterprise. I remain as grateful and humbled as ever by the interest in and continued if modest prosperity of our gallant little business. We never take anything for granted: perhaps as a result of this the London markets, especially Greenwich, have been very good to us. This time next year, however, Greenwich Market will be a pile of rubble, and the pile of rubble with be on its way to becoming a hotel, and there will be no Greenwich Market any more. Where this will leave us I have as yet no idea, although we have a couple of tricks up our sleeve and have been trying to – and I love phrases like this – diversify our revenue portfolio all year, with some notable and pleasing successes. While the party isn’t quite over, the first parents are crunching up the driveway to retrieve offspring full of cake and ice cream. Already bundled into the back of the metaphoric Ford Mondeo is our long term friend, ally and drinking buddy Chris, with his lovely floppy blonde hair, soft skin like a baby dear and thin indie legs. Chris is so middle class that he considers the Strokes to have had a bigger cultural impact than the Sex Pistols, and the fact that he reads the Guardian and does a bit of work for the public sector probably qualifies him to actually forgive sins if he wasn’t, oddly enough, an atheist.

While Chris will be fine, if disoriented, as he emerges blinking into the post-market trading world, for us next year will have to be the year in which we stop mucking about behind market stalls and start being a real business. Or rather, continue to muck about behind market stalls but not have to rely upon doing so for the vast majority of our income. I am prepared for the queasily exciting but very necessary changes this may entail. For now, though, I shall be retreating to my sofa with a Cadburys Occasions selection box and Jeff Chang’s History of the Hip Hop Generation and seeing how much of both I can devour before dozing off. Myself as a person and ourselves as a business continue to count ourselves lucky indeed to be submerged in the resourceful world of the aspirational poor; an associate of mine is contemplating listing himself as an Ornamental Hermit on eBay in order to raise funds while another is applying for a grant to turn his Morris Minor into a ‘Mobile Cabinet of Curiosities’, with room for guest exhibitions in the glove box. On a slightly different note, livestock-owning friends keep donkeys which children ride up and down an unfashionable, but splendid, English beach in the summer months. Throughout December – a quiet month for coastal resorts – they attached antlers to the thankfully patient and good natured animals, and attempted to pass them off as reindeer in an optimistic display of entrepreneurship that I am told would not have fooled a three year old. Surrounded as we are by commercial audacity of this calibre, I’m sure we’ll be alright, one way and another.

A couple of Saturday mornings ago in Greenwich Market, volley after volley of threats, curses and expletives of all flavours and descriptions being hurled at Danny were my first indication that Keith had returned from an eight week sojourn in Cuba, where he is the guest lecturer in photography at Havana State University. I pride myself on an eye for good tailoring and a confident, understated sartorial style, and to this end was giving a full length cashmere overcoat from Liberty’s of Regent Street rare market airing.   It is a fine garment supplied by a fine English company, and both Keith and Danny know that I do not tolerate profanity or foul language in front of it.  I once made Childbrain apologise to it for swearing, to the amusement of Cartoon Ben, and indicated my displeasure with Keith’s tone by addressing him with a stern look and tapping a lapel with my forefinger.  I’m afraid to report that he responded with further recourse to the language of the gutter, with which I shall not trouble you.   Informing Keith that he was a very common fellow indeed, I retired to what seems to have become my regular pitch near the lesbian cake ladies – who have taken to providing me with shortbread so sugary that it actually makes me shake – and waited to see what all the fuss was about.

What all the fuss was about, more or less, was the arrangement of a pre Christmas do at a Turkish restaurant in Dalston. Despite being in north London, Dalston has no tube station, and if you’re new to the city this is your reason to be suspicious of it. It’s also one of the many parts of town famed for its diverse mix of people, and like all the other parts of London with this tag line, consists either of yapping gangs of Bens and Lauras and Henrys and Sophies, or crack dealers from Eritrea, whose lives barely acknowledge the same rules of physics, let alone any shared commonality or purpose. The Bens and Lauras and Henrys and Sophies are usually related to Emilys and Julians and Simons and Beckys from the early nineties who liked Carter USM and the Wonderstuff and are the reason that Indie music fans are not allowed to breed. This latter group are mainly in Crouch End and such these days, which is also in north London but which also – see how quickly the pattern emerges – has no tube station. I think it’s because Crouch End and the surrounding areas are so much like south London that they have no tube access, because nowhere in south London has. Well, Tooting has, and I recently arranged to meet Martin, my old cohort from the distant Camden Lock days there to pick up some stock that I couldn’t even begin to heft up the Northern Line to his stall.

It’s probably worth pointing out that there is very little actually wrong with south London. It’s not as cosy as north London, all the streets are too wide and feel drafty, and to a north Londoner (or indeed east Londoner in my case) it feels like a collection of suburbs trying to be a city, but despite this parts of it are undeniably very nice. The part near Tooting Bec tube, which is well known to myself, is alright, and has a small Sainsbury’s if you like that sort of thing. It was in this car park that I had arranged to meet Martin and his stupid purple van for the purposes of exchanging stock for cash. Martin’s stupid purple van differs from south London in many key areas, but not least because whereas south London does have some things going for it – I am out about my liking for roomy, high ceilinged south London pubs, for example – the stupid purple van simply does not. It’s a Volkswagen camper van from 1871 or something with all the original log books and engine parts and all that and while this makes it an excellent vintage vehicle, it also makes it a highly annoying modern one. The first time I was ever in it I put my seat belt on while Martin started the ignition and pulled the choke out, and we then sat in silence for about a minute and a half instead of joining the traffic on Kentish Town Road, which I had assumed would be the next thing to happen. The silence had a loaded and awkward quality to it, and I thought that Martin might have been about to tell me he was gay. What he was actually doing, however, was waiting for the engine to warm up, which I’d forgotten engines even needed to do anymore. It has a lovely sound to it, though, and once the thing is actually moving Martin hurls it around the London streets like a matador’s cape. He hadn’t hurled it into the car park of Sainsbury’s though, despite telling me that he had. Increasingly tetchy voice mails from myself as I traipsed up and down the Upper Tooting Road in the pouring rain pushing a sack barrow full of aprons alluded to mistaking his van for a skip full of old tyres, and expressing surprise at his claim that he had managed to put both his indicators on to aid recognition as this would mean he had both hands out of the window at once and wouldn’t be able to hold either his phone or the steering wheel. I further mused that in any case this last action was unnecessary as I would just look out for the large group of people pointing and laughing which I assumed accompanied him every time he took to the road. This was unfair on poor Martin, who is a redoubtable and trusted ally, but entirely fair on his stupid purple van, which isn’t.

Anyone who shops at Sainsbury’s in the Tooting area will know that both Tooting tube stations – Bec and Broadway – have a branch next to them, and anyone familiar with language will know that ‘Bec’ and ‘Broadway’ are entirely different words, with different meanings, and – most crucially of all in this context – different geographic locations. I only became of the former at the same moment as pointing out the latter to Martin amid a torrent of foul language not dissimilar to Keith’s Saturday morning outburst. There is a difference, however. In my case, annoyance was caused by a simple error exacerbated by rain, cold, and the hefting of stock; in Keith’s case it was caused by Danny’s booking of a table for fourteen at a Turkish restaurant in Dalston for us, and a table for one in a Chinese restaurant in Seven Sisters for him, and exacerbated by how much he was laughing about it.

Post Script:

In an entirely futile attempt to preserve the few remaining iotas of Danny’s good character I should like to emphasise that, in the end, everything was alright.

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Dyspraxia is often accurately, if unkindly, known as ‘clumsy child syndrome’, but adults have it too: Harry Potter has the condition, as did Albert Einstein.   If Winston Churchill had had it, his famous broadcast to the Empire and Commonwealth as the Germans threatened seabourne invasion would’ve been ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender.  Blast it, I’ve knocked my bloody brandy over’.  It’s that kind of a thing, really.

If you had your house rewired so that you could drive a bumper car from room to room, or even across rooms to feed the goldfish or put the kettle on, it would be similar to the interactions that a dyspraxic child has with their environment.   I don’t have children and I don’t have dyspraxia, and while the former would appear to be creeping up the agenda, the latter is unlikely to change.  I would suggest, however, that our allegedly impoverished public sector could save a great deal of money spent on conventional testing for infant dyspraxia by simply getting children to walk through a wide doorway with no distractions whatsoever, and seeing what happens.  I myself was sitting near a doorway of this type at a dinner party recently.   Had I not already known the the daughter of my host had very mild dyspraxia, I would’ve offered a prognosis to this end with no paediatric training whatsoever, on account of the number of times she charged into the back of my chair while walking through at steady pace with no distractions at all, then pinballed into the doorframe while trying to correct her trajectory.   This was before the dinner had started.   After the dinner had started, and in support of a conversational point, I managed to say ”Basically, I just can’t stand children’, offering a quick ‘No offence’ to all the people seated on my right, none of whom were over 10.

Much of my attitude towards food comes from my grandfather, a man so working class that he once refused to eat bread cut diagonally on the grounds that it represented unacceptable flamboyancy.  This clashes somewhat with his keynote advice to me as a child, which was ‘always eat as fast as possible, before some other bugger gets it’.   His attitude I suspect stems from a horrifically impoverished childhood in the East End, and therefore has sobering undertones.  Unsurprisingly, he had something to say on the subject of sobriety too, claiming that he was ‘teetotal, apart from all the booze and fags’.  An old friend of mine, Ejaz, once memorably stated that I am the only person he’d ever met who looks around the room every time he has a bite of something, and I am a somewhat tense dinner date for that reason. I think we touched upon this a few years ago when, demonstrating my inability to ignore a thrown gauntlet, I entered into an eating competition with a girl who was so bulimic that she could regurgitate individual courses of a meal.

The day had started curiously, with a massive fry up that consisted of more components than I can list. Eggs are my single favourite foodstuff, and I am sure I had both scrambled and fried varients. There was even a pork chop in there, as I recall.  This was followed by a couple of lunchtime pints at the Nag’s Head public house, Stoke Road, Slough.  The details escape me at this distance, but I think there was some kind of buffet or carvery or something happening, as I remember having a large roast dinner and remarking to Mickey Conroy – a shag-happy ginger bricklayer and serial bigamist who went by the unlikely name of ‘The Tangerine Dream’ in the Slough pubs pool league – that I was more meal than man.  However, bearing in mind that I wasn’t throwing up between courses, I was holding up well.  I remember watching a Manchester derby which United won 3-0, dating this event to Saturday 11th Febuary 1995, although I’m sure it was a Sunday.  Anyway.  Francesco’s in the High Street was the scene for the final act of the day’s grotesque three act culinary horrorshow.  I forget what we ate, but after starters and main, it came down to a penalty shoot out, in which each chose the other’s dessert.   I never look at restaurant menus – the descriptions of the various courses are usually too annoying – and I usually have the options read out to me instead.   In any case, it turned out to be an unfortunate time to discover that I don’t like tiramisu, which I had never heard of until that moment, and this realisation cost me the competition in which I had battled so heroically.  Walking back over the railway bridge to the Printer’s Devil public house – which I later ran – on Stoke Road, I remember feeling drunk on the sheer amount of things my metabolism was having to cope with.  I was, however, entirely fine until I sat down and began listing everything I’d eaten to Ejaz, at which point I had to excuse myself and throw up generously in the staff toilet.  Nonetheless, it was the kind of first date I enjoy.   It seemed to work, too, as our union lasted for six years, which is as long as the Second World War, or enough time, if recommended guidelines are observed, for an adult male such as myself to consume 4,818,000 calories.

There were no such heroics at the recent dinner party, of course.  I answered the dyspraxic daughter’s question of, didn’t I have school in the morning with, yes, but I’m allowed to stay up till nine on Mondays, and gave an affirmative response to her subsequent ‘Do you really like writing?’ enquiry.  ‘Even homework?’ she said brightly, managing to hand me a text book, put a toffee apple in her hair and say ‘You look about 22′ all at the same time.  Happily, I am now of a sufficiently advanced level of maturity to accept other people’s right to food.  By ‘other people’s right to food’, I do of course mean ‘other people’s right to food that I don’t want’.  Also, in the interests of rounding everything off nicely, when I say ‘dinner party’, I mean excellent bangers and mash and unwise quantities of Chilean red, and when I say ‘dyspraxic daughter’ I mean ‘one of the most charming individuals I’ve met in a long time’.

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Photards: In the continued absence of photographic accompaniment, I shall describe to you some pictures I’ve taken recently which I thought might be of interest among these posts at some point, but which we may well now never see.

The top one was going to be a portrait of Richard Chown, who makes silver jewellery at Greenwich Market, and opposite whom I often find myself trading. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the picture is what Richard is wearing, which is a full length blacksmith’s apron made of thick leather by his old dear – a remarkable skill for any mother to possess – and which heavily suggests that, when not making jewelery, he picks up hitchhikers and then kills them later with hammers.

The middle one was the reverse of a fiver across which someone had written the word ‘cheese’ in red felt pen. This is presumably either as a reminder to get some cheese while up the shop, or an ambitious attempt to make someone eat a five pound note with a baked potato with beans.

The lower picture was a shot of traders setting up in Petticoat Lane, in front of a place called Therapy, which for all the world looks like a gay sauna but is actually a mens’ cut price designer outlet. Imagine my surprise.

I would not list the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 alongside the Houses of Parliament or the Oxford Society as a white hot crucible of enlightened debate.   However, the fact remains that many decisions of vast importance in the lives and businesses of the people who drink there have taken place around the circular table by the dart board, the oblong table between the Gents’ and the Ladies’, and my personal favourite table beneath the portrait of the Iron Duke himself.

It was at this table, at about the time when a long evening has turned into an early morning which has in turn given way to the irrefutable truth that actual people with real jobs are on their way to work, and that very soon you’ll have to dawdle down to Liverpool Street station and take the Central Line to Soho to see your wholesaler, that I had to inform Lou that I knew nothing whatsoever about comic book art.   There are several reasons that the exact sequence of events surrounding my revelation can never be replicated, not least because Vinny the landlord has recently replaced the Duke of Wellington portrait with yet another telly, on the curious grounds that life is too short to look at anything more than eight feet away.

Most conversations at the Duke between those of us in the market trading sector of the economy revolve around a) What the fuck are we going to do? b) Why the fuck did we do this? and c) How the fuck can we stop anything like this happening again?    You don’t get any of that when talking to Lou, because Lou is an artist.   An actual artist, I should like to point out – not a cheerless drab trying to salvage a reason to carry on staying alive for day after day after day by selling horrid self indulgent nonsense at Broadway Market on Sundays.   Lou creates his art while living on discarded Pringles and rainwater that he channels into a milk bottle via a complex system of drinking straws at his unheated rented kennel off Brick Lane.   There is always someone among our number who is skint, due to the financially queasy nature of market trading life, and the fact that for the last couple of years it has always and only been Lou is quite reassuring, as it indicates an era of general prosperity for everyone else.   I, as stated earlier, know nothing about comic book art.   Lou knows a lot about comic book art, and was explaining the history of the genre in such detail that not only had I agreed to read From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (which is, as it turns out, brilliant) but had nodded to Watchmen, by the same writing pair, by way of pudding.   It’s on my shelf now, in fact.   Anyway.  It was about at this time I noticed that Gay Clive had sidled over to our table, sat next to me, put his hand on my bollocks, and fallen asleep.

I think I mentioned last week the exact moment when I realised that John the Boxes was gay.   Gay Clive’s sexual orientation is easier to figure out – his name is a bit of a giveaway – and although I vaguely noticed that his hand might be on my bollocks, it didn’t feel right to interrupt Lou in full flight to point out that I was currently the victim of a sustained, if unconscious, sexual assault.   In fact, it wasn’t until he said ‘Hang on – has Gay Clive got his hand on your bollocks?’ that I was forced to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.   ‘Now Clive, be reasonable’ I said ‘If I let you have a go, I have to let everyone have a go’, which was the best response I could come up with under the circumstances.   He was, however, very deeply asleep indeed – Gay Clive is almost as well known for drinking a great deal and then falling asleep a he is for being gay.  Vinny once told me that sometimes for a larf he will close the pub up around Clive so as not to disturb him as he dozes on the bar, on the grounds that he’s cheaper than a guard dog.   I can vouch for this, as on one of the occasions when I’ve slept in the glamourous surroundings of the cellar, I stumped up the stairs in the morning to find him gloriously a-slumber against the Goldfinger fruit machine.

Vinny had by this point appeared and was offering helpful advice, which was this:  ‘Whatever you do, don’t wake him suddenly.   He’s prone to panic attacks and he might strangle your Alberts*’    To dispel any lingering doubts, it’s probably worth mentioning that both Lou and I were drinking fully clothed – as familiar as we are with each other, a certain awkwardness would be inevitable if we were to conclude a weekends trading by getting drunk in the altogether, especially in an otherwise clothed environment.   It seemed, if anything, that Gay Clive’s hand, while maintaining sovereignty over my crotchal area, was doing so in a protective, almost benevolent way, like an inappropriate United Nations.   Also, while I had certainly been delivered into a happenstance that I wouldn’t have chosen, I didn’t feel that there was any need for Mace or counseling or poster campaigns all over the Northern Line.    The situation was in the end easily remedied by simply grabbing Clive’s wrist and moving it firmly back from whence it came, which rather amusingly caused him to slide off his chair, steady himself, and continue sleeping in a kneeling position with his head on the seat of a different chair, as if in ludicrous prayer to a broadminded deity.   The following week, I discussed the incident with Vinny, pointing out that although I am no judge of these things, I would’ve thought that Lou was a far more tempting target for unsolicited lecherousness, being that I am only something of a hottie if you like shambolic if well dressed men with murky pasts, uncertain futures and criminal families, in which case you really have hit the jackpot.   Vinny countered this by pointing out that it may have been something to do with an ill advised episode earlier in the year when, along with a few others who had forgotten to contribute to a whip round for Gay Clive’s birthday, I took the financially expedient but wrong-signal-sending-out option of showing him my cock.

*Cockney rhyming slang: Albert Halls (plural noun) = balls.

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No photards this week as not only is our main computard still on the blink, but the back up one is looking a bit dodgy, too.   I’m writing this on an Apple MacBook.   It’s a lovely thing and I’d be entirely happy to use one all the time if I wanted to be one those people who use Apple products, but I’m afraid that I can’t allow that to happen, ever.

I have only been abroad once in my entire life – I decided on a whim to ride a mountain bike from Atlanta to New Orleans and back on my own, for reasons that now escape me – and perhaps because of this I have always found airmail writing paper curiously exciting.   It makes a lovely crackly noise when you handle it, for a start, and it has a romantic quality, too – whenever I recieve letters written on airmail paper I always imagine that the person writing them is sitting under a palm tree in the East Indies, even if they are in a rented room in Chatham.   Not that Chatham or the nature of rented accomodation are necessarily without romantic qualities of their own, of course, but they do not spring as readily to mind as a classic romantic backdrop.

I have spent a good deal of the past summer outside London, scampering around the provinces in the interests of our wider commercial affairs.   While doing so, I’ve taken to using Basildon Bond airmail paper over emails for personal correspondence as, due to what we may now call the Chatham effect, it gives a letter from Hastings or Ramsgate or Grimsby an exotic aura that it might otherwise lack.   When writing from home I usually use standard Basildon Bond post quarto paper, either blue or champagne, depending upon my mood.   For very special letters I whip out couple of sheets of Eclats D’or, which has tiny flecks of gold in it, and I favour a Parker Duofold pen.   There are only two downsides to written correspondence: 1) It could be misconstrued as self conscious whimsy, which runs the risk that the kind of women who feature prominantly in Match.com advertising will drag me off to meet their cats and parents as soon as I start to write anything, and 2) my handwriting is so atrociously bad that I routinely have to send a version of all written correspondance by email, so that the recipient can actually read it.

For extended writing sessions, I usually pop round to Greenwich Market stalwart John the Boxes’ flat in order to utilise his excellent mahogany writing desk. A mahogany writing desk, especially a splendid Victorian example such as the one owned by John the Boxes, will set you back between a monkey and three bags*. I imagine however that he bought it in a field in the Home Counties for a quid, in a thought process that will soon become clear. Endless engineering work on the Northern Line has meant that traditional Sunday evening revelry at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 is not currently as regular as it once was, so I am tending to celebrate the end of the working weekend at the reasonably nice but don’t get too excited Wheatsheaf, by Tooting Bec tube.  While doing so last Sunday, John the Boxes presented me with a holdall. It was of course Shakespeare who said ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. Shakespeare never met John the Boxes on a Sunday evening on Trinity Road SW17, or his famous musing about the nature of life and fate may well have come out as ‘All the world’s a car boot sale in Essex, and John the Boxes has once again a bought a binliner full of Caramacs for three quid’. I am regularly invited to consider the post car boot sale contents of John the Boxes’ holdall, and was on this occasion as enthralled as ever.

‘Rewritable cd’s. There’s forty there. Maxell. Quid’ he said, by way of an opener. This was, I sensed, the Twist and Shout of that day’s car boot sale haul – something everyone knew and could enjoy. I particularly like the way that each purchase is described in as few words as possible, and presented in such a way as to suggest that if you hadn’t for example bought forty rewritable Maxell compact discs for one pound sterling that afternoon, you were to be pitied.

‘Razor. King of Shaves. The best’ he continued, holding the item close to my face in case I thought he was making it up for attention ‘Quid’.

‘Look at that’ he went on, holding up a tiny tube of Colgate, ‘Travel toothpaste. Ten p each. I got eighty of them. And these’ he placed two plastic bottles on the increasingly crowded table ‘Radox muscle soak bath lotion and Boots Zingy Lime shower gel. Quid’. There was some further rummaging, which as it turned out ushered in a change of commodity from budget toiletries to inexpensive samples of the Fine Arts.

‘Sixty Rogers and Hammerstein songs on cd. My dad loves that stuff. Quid’ I examined the small box set in order to confirm that yes, it was indeed sealed and brand new, and prepared for what I anticipated would be some kind of crescendo.

‘Two books. Quid. Stars of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor. Improve Your Grammar by Marian Field’. He opened both slightly so that they would stand unaided, and positioned them at the rear of the not unimpressive display of thrift and prudent husbandry.  I’d like to point out that John the Boxes is not some kind of scavanger – his flat is among the coolest I have ever seen, and he has an extraordinary sense of style and knowledge of subcultural history – and if I did not already realise he was gay, I wouldn’t have worked it out from his decision to pack gin and tonic for a recent joint excursion to the seaside.   I would, however, have definitely worked it out from his decision to pack gin and tonic and a lemon.

*London slang: ‘Monkey’ – £500 and Cockney rhyming slang ‘bag of sand’ – grand (£1000).

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Facebook. If you have a Facebook group, you can’t message members anymore, which is a bit of a shame.   If you have clicked through to here from our Facebook group – and I’m not sure how you would know to, because we can’t message you, you see – you might want to subscribe to the RSS thing, or we may never meet again.    Or rather, we already won’t be meeting again, because you won’t know this bit has been written.    And to think we didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye properly, after all we’ve been through together.

Photards.   If you were here last week you’ll recall that Gary hasn’t got round to fixing our main and hugely important computard, so we’ll have to make do with photards that we’ve already seen before.

Top: Christmas tree at Gary’s house, late January.   This isn’t, as you may reasonably suspect, a Christmas tree from December, but a normal tree which has been growing in Gary’s living room for twenty three years and that he hasn’t got round to sorting out yet.   That cat has just been sitting there since Gary’s road was a field, and the house was built round it, as it didn’t get round to moving itself.  It was lifted with a special crane while it was asleep and placed back on the carpet again before it woke up.

Middle: Toynbee Street, London E1.  Gary probably owns all these shops but just hasn’t got round to opening them or whatever yet.  Also, all those posters and such are for Elvis and the Dave Clark Five and what not, which Gary thinks is current music because his ears haven’t got round to catching up and that.

Lower: Bad violinists ruining Christmas as Greenwich Market.   The one in the green hat is Gary, who despite being thirty one, has yet to get round to growing beyond the age of eight.