The first experience that I had of playing in a band was when Patrick, who was working as an engineer at The Strongroom Studio on Curtain Road, offered me an afternoon recording there in his free time before the pop group Spiritualised came in for the night. They had taken weeks, and would take weeks more, finishing an LP there. Lisa and I had worked out a few songs which we rehearsed a couple of times with Nick, Howard and Dino and then persuaded Joe to come along and play drums with us.
Recording was new to everyone except Joe who had seen it all before and who sat on his drum stool in between takes reading the paper. The results from The Strongroom weren’t that great. We didn't really know what we were doing after all.
Not long after came our first gig. It was downstairs at the Hope and Anchor in Highbury. The guitarist from Blur came but was turned away at the door since it was sold out. Is that note worthy? Probably not and it didn't seem so at the time either.
I made the mistake of taking some cocaine that Howard passed around. Aside from the fact that I don't like cocaine and I don't like people on cocaine and I don't like myself on cocaine and generally hate drugs, it proved to be a bad idea because it amplified my nervousness to the extent that I literally could not speak. My brother Adrian tried to make conversation and I had to run away, Lisa introduced her father, who was on holiday in London, but I couldn't reply to him.
After playing half a dozen shows I had no pre-performance nerves whatsoever, providing that I stayed away from Howard whose stage anxiety was so overwhelming it was contagious. It took me a while to realise this but, before I did, we'd always go to a pub together after the sound check. I'd enter feeling clear headed and leave, destined for the stage, a nervous wreck.
So, by the time we went to the newly opened Milo's studio on Hoxton Square (Howard knew someone who worked there perhaps) we had a name, Miss Mend, had rehearsed and had played a few shows. We hadn’t realised that we ought to have booked an engineer, it was a Saturday and for a while it looked as though we wouldn’t be able to get hold of anyone at the last minute. When we finally did get going it went smoothly. Listening to the record it seems like the studio must have had a great set up. At the time I really wasn't interested in the process of recording and just wanted to finish up and get to the pub but I’d love to know now what desk they used, what equalisers and compressors, which reverb unit.
Mixing the record was a pain. First of all we tried some people who had a studio set up below Proud Gallery (when it was located just off Villiers Street.) It was hot, cramped, humid and dusty in the cellar there, the environment was unbearable and the results were dreadful. In the end Clive Painter, who had recorded with the band Tram with whom we played many shows (we were label mates) mixed it at his home studio (where we would subsequently record our second single.)
Lisa sings the excellent A side, Living City Plan, and I one of the two songs on the B side. It really pains me that I sing with a slight inflection to some of the words like I’m pretending to be Stephen Pastel. Which, I am so sorry to say and it pains me on so many different levels to admit it, I probably was.
We were awarded 'Single Of The Week' by the New Musical Express but assumed this to be a fairly normal event for a new band, or I did at any rate, and so when the label Independiente summoned us for an interview at their Baron's Court office none of us put in any effort to impress them at all.
Myself and Lisa visited my parents house shortly after it was released and my parents' friend Cliff was also at the house as a guest for dinner. He'd played drums in jazz bands throughout his life. He asked to hear the record, I had given a copy to my mum and dad and so I put it on the turntable. It upset him, he didn't think that it qualified as a real song he said, he said that it was not music. He got quite agitated so I changed the subject.
Tuesday 31 May 2011
Monday 30 May 2011
Guitar Chase
In 2005 I'd left the rehearsal rooms in Camden where The Projects met up once a week, gone on to a bar in Shoreditch, caught a bus back to Liverpool Street when I was done and then went in to the Tesco Metro for groceries. But my heart sank when I realised that I'd left my guitar on the bus. I ran outside and the double-decker was just disappearing from view down Bishopsgate.
It took some time but, eventually, I hailed a taxi. It didn't bother the driver that I might not be able to pay for the ride, having only ten pounds in cash, he was very excited by the challenge. He put his foot to the floor, he consulted with bus drivers and taxi drivers that we encountered en route through his open window as to the probable destination and current location of the bus, he was jumping red lights, he was having a really good time.
Eventually, on The Strand, we caught up with the Double Decker. He blocked its route, jumped on the bus and appeared triumphant with the guitar case held above his head.
It took some time but, eventually, I hailed a taxi. It didn't bother the driver that I might not be able to pay for the ride, having only ten pounds in cash, he was very excited by the challenge. He put his foot to the floor, he consulted with bus drivers and taxi drivers that we encountered en route through his open window as to the probable destination and current location of the bus, he was jumping red lights, he was having a really good time.
Eventually, on The Strand, we caught up with the Double Decker. He blocked its route, jumped on the bus and appeared triumphant with the guitar case held above his head.
Sunday 29 May 2011
Chicken, Cheese, Chips
Whilst employed as a computer programmer, working for an agency on Charlotte Street EC2, I worked with a boy who only ever, strictly, ate chicken or cheese or chips. Never anything else, except he did once try some of my rice while we were all dining at the Thai restaurant above the Bricklayers Arms pub a few doors down the road where, coincidentally, I had also worked a couple of years earlier.
Friday 27 May 2011
Car Wheel
When I was a teenager I didn’t think much about other people.
One night I was at a party in a village close to my home town. I can’t remember very much about it but I do remember it not being good. I was with a crowd of people that I didn’t usually spend time with. Seamus and Paul, Darren, who they called Spooner and Robert, who they called Pieface. Paul was later to get married to his co contestant after appearing on Cilla Black’s Blind Date. I liked Robert very much, he was thoughtful and good natured. He surprised me when I discovered that he wrote poetry. Darren had this amazing skill of reciting television adverts word for word, one after the other. In fact, the only thing that I remember about this night was him exercising his talent, staring straight ahead, grinning, reeling the adverts off in a monotonous voice. It was a good party trick, it really was.
I left in the early hours. I can’t remember him being at the party but somehow a boy called Simon came to be sitting beside me in my car, perhaps I picked him up en route? I’d first met him on the school bus a few years before and found him a little intimidating. He was very bright but quite introverted and surly. He was a non conformist. He had long hair. One time I copied him a tape of the band Spacemen 3, who I really, really loved. He wasn’t that enthusiastic although he did like a song called ‘Losing Touch With My Mind.’ A line on it goes ‘I'm shooting, shooting off my gun. It's too bad now babe, but it's a lot of fun.’ He explained that he empathised with that and imagined walking into a shopping centre and ‘going crazy with a gun’.
We were driving through the town when disaster struck! To avoid a fox trotting across the ring road, I swerved, hitting the curb. That put everything out of kilter and the car shot from one side of the (deserted) ring road to the other, and I pulled into a small car park in front of a small, single story 1950s building marked ‘British Red Cross.’
We stood under the stars staring at the car. ‘Well, the wheel’s fucked’ I decided. I announced my intention, after a quick think, to go and find a similar car and get a new wheel. I didn’t use the word ‘steal.’ I took the jack and socket spanner from the boot.
Dawn was breaking as we crossed town, walking through the estate there. Simon suggested that since it was now tomorrow morning we may as well give up. He would later say that he never believed that I was for real, but I spotted a similar car to mine and approached it with my jack. Goodness knows how my mind worked in those days, I would never dream of doing such a thing today. Like I say, I didn’t care about people when I was a teenager, although today even a sad story in the newspaper can make me cry with empathy. I have gone from one extreme to another.
I worked fast, and I soon had the bolts out of the wheel and the car jacked up. I was disturbed when the front door opened of the little terraced house in whose driveway I crouched. A ten year old girl dressed in a pink nightie, holding a cup of tea stood blinking at me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello’ I replied. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked ‘I’m just getting this wheel off the car’ I explained. She stared at me momentarily as I worked, I just had to raise the car a little more so that the wheel would clear the pavement completely, and then she shut the door.
So there it was, I had the wheel from the car lying beside me, free to carry away and I knew that I ought to have run. But the jack, I had to get the jack, somehow I reasoned that if I didn’t leave the jack behind then I wouldn’t have done a bad thing. It was somehow an expression of how I often approach things in my life, where I will stake all risking everything. I reasoned that if I had the jack the business would be neatly resolved and therefore, somehow, I would be free of guilt.
It took forever to wind that jack down. I looked over my shoulder and saw Simon hiding behind the wall of a churchyard some way down the road. The possibility of finding myself explaining what I was doing to the girl's father was real and I contemplated abandoning the jack more than once. But I could not leave without it! Nobody else did come to the door and soon I was passing Simon the jack and spanner as we jogged down the road.
We returned to my car, changed the wheel (hiding the old one in what was perhaps an old coal bunker) but, of course, the car's steering was completely out of alignment. So it had all been a great waste of time.
Behind the car park and the Red Cross building was a funeral home (where, in 2005 I would see my grandmother lying, I wish I hadn’t been invited in to see the terrible sight of her lying there,) and behind that was a local landmark called ‘Castle Hill’. A small hill where there once, or so they say, stood a castle. When I was sixteen a friend called Russell and myself and a few others (including Jamie Lidderdale who is now a crooner on Warp records going by the name of ‘Jamie Liddell’) invented a great game after an evening in the Waterloo pub which involved hurtling down the hill in a shopping trolley. We returned to play that game night after night. Terrible really what you have to resort to when life can be so (actually, not seemingly) meaningless as teenage life in a small town is.
Well, I fell asleep on Castle Hill and awoke a few hours later with a very sun burnt face. That evening I had Howard return me to the scene of the crime in his car where I left the wheel at the end of their driveway with a post-it sticker attached which read ‘sorry.’
Incidentally, Robert Pieface and Darren Spooner also both crashed their cars that night on the way home from the party.
One night I was at a party in a village close to my home town. I can’t remember very much about it but I do remember it not being good. I was with a crowd of people that I didn’t usually spend time with. Seamus and Paul, Darren, who they called Spooner and Robert, who they called Pieface. Paul was later to get married to his co contestant after appearing on Cilla Black’s Blind Date. I liked Robert very much, he was thoughtful and good natured. He surprised me when I discovered that he wrote poetry. Darren had this amazing skill of reciting television adverts word for word, one after the other. In fact, the only thing that I remember about this night was him exercising his talent, staring straight ahead, grinning, reeling the adverts off in a monotonous voice. It was a good party trick, it really was.
I left in the early hours. I can’t remember him being at the party but somehow a boy called Simon came to be sitting beside me in my car, perhaps I picked him up en route? I’d first met him on the school bus a few years before and found him a little intimidating. He was very bright but quite introverted and surly. He was a non conformist. He had long hair. One time I copied him a tape of the band Spacemen 3, who I really, really loved. He wasn’t that enthusiastic although he did like a song called ‘Losing Touch With My Mind.’ A line on it goes ‘I'm shooting, shooting off my gun. It's too bad now babe, but it's a lot of fun.’ He explained that he empathised with that and imagined walking into a shopping centre and ‘going crazy with a gun’.
We were driving through the town when disaster struck! To avoid a fox trotting across the ring road, I swerved, hitting the curb. That put everything out of kilter and the car shot from one side of the (deserted) ring road to the other, and I pulled into a small car park in front of a small, single story 1950s building marked ‘British Red Cross.’
We stood under the stars staring at the car. ‘Well, the wheel’s fucked’ I decided. I announced my intention, after a quick think, to go and find a similar car and get a new wheel. I didn’t use the word ‘steal.’ I took the jack and socket spanner from the boot.
Dawn was breaking as we crossed town, walking through the estate there. Simon suggested that since it was now tomorrow morning we may as well give up. He would later say that he never believed that I was for real, but I spotted a similar car to mine and approached it with my jack. Goodness knows how my mind worked in those days, I would never dream of doing such a thing today. Like I say, I didn’t care about people when I was a teenager, although today even a sad story in the newspaper can make me cry with empathy. I have gone from one extreme to another.
I worked fast, and I soon had the bolts out of the wheel and the car jacked up. I was disturbed when the front door opened of the little terraced house in whose driveway I crouched. A ten year old girl dressed in a pink nightie, holding a cup of tea stood blinking at me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello’ I replied. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked ‘I’m just getting this wheel off the car’ I explained. She stared at me momentarily as I worked, I just had to raise the car a little more so that the wheel would clear the pavement completely, and then she shut the door.
So there it was, I had the wheel from the car lying beside me, free to carry away and I knew that I ought to have run. But the jack, I had to get the jack, somehow I reasoned that if I didn’t leave the jack behind then I wouldn’t have done a bad thing. It was somehow an expression of how I often approach things in my life, where I will stake all risking everything. I reasoned that if I had the jack the business would be neatly resolved and therefore, somehow, I would be free of guilt.
It took forever to wind that jack down. I looked over my shoulder and saw Simon hiding behind the wall of a churchyard some way down the road. The possibility of finding myself explaining what I was doing to the girl's father was real and I contemplated abandoning the jack more than once. But I could not leave without it! Nobody else did come to the door and soon I was passing Simon the jack and spanner as we jogged down the road.
We returned to my car, changed the wheel (hiding the old one in what was perhaps an old coal bunker) but, of course, the car's steering was completely out of alignment. So it had all been a great waste of time.
Behind the car park and the Red Cross building was a funeral home (where, in 2005 I would see my grandmother lying, I wish I hadn’t been invited in to see the terrible sight of her lying there,) and behind that was a local landmark called ‘Castle Hill’. A small hill where there once, or so they say, stood a castle. When I was sixteen a friend called Russell and myself and a few others (including Jamie Lidderdale who is now a crooner on Warp records going by the name of ‘Jamie Liddell’) invented a great game after an evening in the Waterloo pub which involved hurtling down the hill in a shopping trolley. We returned to play that game night after night. Terrible really what you have to resort to when life can be so (actually, not seemingly) meaningless as teenage life in a small town is.
Well, I fell asleep on Castle Hill and awoke a few hours later with a very sun burnt face. That evening I had Howard return me to the scene of the crime in his car where I left the wheel at the end of their driveway with a post-it sticker attached which read ‘sorry.’
Incidentally, Robert Pieface and Darren Spooner also both crashed their cars that night on the way home from the party.
Thursday 26 May 2011
Mind Reading (Stuffed Birds I)
Lisa, Howard and myself sat in a cafe close to Spitalfields market one day in December 2003. Howard was visiting us from the U.S. where he had moved a few years previously. It was a great occasion, Howard's visit. We always have a lot of fun together and here, in the cafe, we were laughing and telling each other stories and having a good time.
Lisa had been Christmas shopping earlier that day and now she decided to try to guess what I might have got her for Christmas. I said that I thought that guessing was a bad idea, after all, what if she guessed right and spoiled the surprise?
‘But you could never guess what I have found for you.’ Lisa told me. She was convinced of that. 'Never, ever.'
‘I bet I can’
‘I bet you can’t’
‘I bet I can.’
Lisa whispered the secret in Howard's ear.
‘You will never,’ he explained, ‘guess what it is.’
'You've got me a stuffed bird.’ I said automatically.
'You told him!' she cried.
Lisa had seen an ancient, stuffed sea gull in the market that she knew I would like. It is a beautiful bird and I do hope that it wasn't killed by the taxidermist, but died a natural death. I have no idea how I guessed correctly. We had never discussed stuffed birds, I hadn't seen the seagull in the market, how I guessed such an obscure thing, with my first attempt, is a mystery.
Sadly, the gull became a moth factory. It has long since stopped producing moths and isn't in such bad shape but is in a plastic bag in my parents' attic nevertheless, which reminds me, I have to get it back from them.
Lisa had been Christmas shopping earlier that day and now she decided to try to guess what I might have got her for Christmas. I said that I thought that guessing was a bad idea, after all, what if she guessed right and spoiled the surprise?
‘But you could never guess what I have found for you.’ Lisa told me. She was convinced of that. 'Never, ever.'
‘I bet I can’
‘I bet you can’t’
‘I bet I can.’
Lisa whispered the secret in Howard's ear.
‘You will never,’ he explained, ‘guess what it is.’
'You've got me a stuffed bird.’ I said automatically.
'You told him!' she cried.
Lisa had seen an ancient, stuffed sea gull in the market that she knew I would like. It is a beautiful bird and I do hope that it wasn't killed by the taxidermist, but died a natural death. I have no idea how I guessed correctly. We had never discussed stuffed birds, I hadn't seen the seagull in the market, how I guessed such an obscure thing, with my first attempt, is a mystery.
Sadly, the gull became a moth factory. It has long since stopped producing moths and isn't in such bad shape but is in a plastic bag in my parents' attic nevertheless, which reminds me, I have to get it back from them.
Routemaster Buses
I used to love standing on the footplate of a Routemaster Bus. I trained myself to jump on and off them at high speed. One way or another, what with me getting MS at around the time when they began to disappear from the streets of London, route by route, those days are over.
In August 2003 the skill came in very handy. A power cut had left most of London without electricity for a day and, of course, consequently without tube trains. At rush hour I was trying to get a bus from Liverpool Street Station to the centre to meet Lisa. Bus after bus came and went, they were all absolutely packed and there were hundreds of people clamouring to get on them. In time I jumped onto a Routemaster bus and hung from the pole. It was unbearably crowded. A businessman kept complaining to himself, slightly drunk as he was he thought that commenting on the unpleasantness of the situation and on the people around him was amusing. He was a nasty piece of work. I told him to be quiet when he began to pick on a lady who he described as 'little miss fatty' and, in response, he pushed me off the bus, which was travelling at quite a pace. My feet touched the ground running and I didn't break my neck.
I got to the centre eventually, drenched by the pouring rain, and Lisa and I dined at some restaurant on Villiers Street. I had pasta with mussels (I ate fish and seafood in those days, I was only half a vegetarian I'm sorry to say) and we argued (which wasn't unusual).
In August 2003 the skill came in very handy. A power cut had left most of London without electricity for a day and, of course, consequently without tube trains. At rush hour I was trying to get a bus from Liverpool Street Station to the centre to meet Lisa. Bus after bus came and went, they were all absolutely packed and there were hundreds of people clamouring to get on them. In time I jumped onto a Routemaster bus and hung from the pole. It was unbearably crowded. A businessman kept complaining to himself, slightly drunk as he was he thought that commenting on the unpleasantness of the situation and on the people around him was amusing. He was a nasty piece of work. I told him to be quiet when he began to pick on a lady who he described as 'little miss fatty' and, in response, he pushed me off the bus, which was travelling at quite a pace. My feet touched the ground running and I didn't break my neck.
I got to the centre eventually, drenched by the pouring rain, and Lisa and I dined at some restaurant on Villiers Street. I had pasta with mussels (I ate fish and seafood in those days, I was only half a vegetarian I'm sorry to say) and we argued (which wasn't unusual).
Tuesday 24 May 2011
Peter Stringfellow
One lovely spring morning quite some years ago, perhaps in 2002, I was walking down Upper St Martins Lane toward Covent Garden when I heard petulant shouting coming from what I'd later realise was Stringfellow's nightclub (that I'd heard of but never actually been to.) The front doors were flung open and leonine Peter Stringfellow stomped outside carrying black bin bags which he threw on the curb before stamping back inside, slamming the doors.
I can't decide whether this is remarkable or not. Night club owner puts out rubbish? But then it was leonine Peter Stringfellow.
I can't decide whether this is remarkable or not. Night club owner puts out rubbish? But then it was leonine Peter Stringfellow.
Monday 23 May 2011
Foreign accents
Lisa would have liked to have rid me of the habit of speaking with accents when we started to spend a lot of time together. It drove her nuts. On one occasion in 1998 we were walking past the shopping centre on Kingsland Road and I was chirping away, pretending to be a Frenchman. 'You're attracting attention!' she complained, 'people are looking!' I really didn't think that anyone was paying any attention, I thought she was joking, I didn't know her so very well at the time, so I persisted. This made things worse and then she really lost her temper. It must have been very irritating, after all.
Yes, I was quite good with accents I thought, quite convincing, and it was all down to practice and dedication. Howard and I, for example, were Australians for a whole fortnight, day and night, while helping to construct a film set in Ealing Studios. From time to time I like to try out a Russian, German, Birmingham or some other foreign accent today still.
I also used to like hitch hiking, Glasgow to Cambridge being my greatest achievement. Once, when I still lived in Huntingdon, Tony and I were waiting near a slip road, having already hitched half way from our boring home town to London. Tony, no doubt, was wearing his long herringbone coat, and we would have been rolling cigarettes and chatting about the kind of things that we chatted about as teenagers, friends and music. I remember that Tony was standing half way up the roadside embankment and I was getting on his nerves with a French accent monologue when a car pulled up.
I got in the front passenger seat, Tony in the back, and I made the mistake of introducing myself as a French national. Unfortunately the kindly driver's daughter had only just been married that previous weekend to a Frenchman and so, naturally, he was very curious about France and pressed me on many topics. I had to fabricate a lot. And then we came to a near stand still in a traffic jam on the M25, Tony fast asleep on the back seat, me keeping up this damn French accent for hours and hours.
He was a very good man, our benefactor, he even bought us lunch at a motorway junction restaurant. I was relieved that he didn't notice me inadvertently slipping back into my natural accent when we were saying our good byes, when we finally got close enough to central London for me to be able to escape my French-accent nightmare by tube train.
Yes, I was quite good with accents I thought, quite convincing, and it was all down to practice and dedication. Howard and I, for example, were Australians for a whole fortnight, day and night, while helping to construct a film set in Ealing Studios. From time to time I like to try out a Russian, German, Birmingham or some other foreign accent today still.
I also used to like hitch hiking, Glasgow to Cambridge being my greatest achievement. Once, when I still lived in Huntingdon, Tony and I were waiting near a slip road, having already hitched half way from our boring home town to London. Tony, no doubt, was wearing his long herringbone coat, and we would have been rolling cigarettes and chatting about the kind of things that we chatted about as teenagers, friends and music. I remember that Tony was standing half way up the roadside embankment and I was getting on his nerves with a French accent monologue when a car pulled up.
I got in the front passenger seat, Tony in the back, and I made the mistake of introducing myself as a French national. Unfortunately the kindly driver's daughter had only just been married that previous weekend to a Frenchman and so, naturally, he was very curious about France and pressed me on many topics. I had to fabricate a lot. And then we came to a near stand still in a traffic jam on the M25, Tony fast asleep on the back seat, me keeping up this damn French accent for hours and hours.
He was a very good man, our benefactor, he even bought us lunch at a motorway junction restaurant. I was relieved that he didn't notice me inadvertently slipping back into my natural accent when we were saying our good byes, when we finally got close enough to central London for me to be able to escape my French-accent nightmare by tube train.
Saturday 21 May 2011
Kissathon
Consuelo will not appear as often in this collection of reminiscences as I'd like simply because the time of her arrival in London coincided with my becoming quite a recluse (the reasons for which I'll get to at some point,) but I have had the happiest time sharing my life with her. Time spent with her was precious.
In fact, the happiest time I have experienced, the happiest memory in this collection, was the week of her first visit to London. I felt so very, very happy and so very, very fortunate. I'd had such a run of bad luck but now none of that was important.
On the third day we kissed at mid-day and the kiss lasted until early evening when we decided that we might have a bite to eat.
In fact, the happiest time I have experienced, the happiest memory in this collection, was the week of her first visit to London. I felt so very, very happy and so very, very fortunate. I'd had such a run of bad luck but now none of that was important.
On the third day we kissed at mid-day and the kiss lasted until early evening when we decided that we might have a bite to eat.
Friday 20 May 2011
Distressed Prostitute
When I was twenty I lived with Jane in South London beside Kennington Park. On one dark, cold night I was walking the short distance from Oval Underground Station to our flat down Camberwell New Road. The weather was unpleasant and, since I was keeping my head down as I walked against the wind and rain, I almost barrelled straight into the distressed woman.
Her clothes were in tatters, she certainly wasn't naked but at the same time you wouldn't say that she was fully dressed. She was bawling and, in between the tears, she expressed her distress to the traffic, shouting at the passing cars. She was in quite a state. Very drunk and her make up was smeared.
I asked her if she was ok and she told me that she had had an argument with her boyfriend, a bastard she said. He had hit her, stole her money and ripped her clothes.
Jane and our flatmates were surprised when I turned up at our place with her. But, after all, she couldn't get home like that. Jane kindly gave her a jacket to wear, we made her some soup, over which she cried more tears, this time of drunken gratitude, and misled her into thinking that we had no alcohol in the flat.
She was very grateful and confessed that she had been reluctant to accept my offer to come back with me in case I would have beaten her also.
Her clothes were in tatters, she certainly wasn't naked but at the same time you wouldn't say that she was fully dressed. She was bawling and, in between the tears, she expressed her distress to the traffic, shouting at the passing cars. She was in quite a state. Very drunk and her make up was smeared.
I asked her if she was ok and she told me that she had had an argument with her boyfriend, a bastard she said. He had hit her, stole her money and ripped her clothes.
Jane and our flatmates were surprised when I turned up at our place with her. But, after all, she couldn't get home like that. Jane kindly gave her a jacket to wear, we made her some soup, over which she cried more tears, this time of drunken gratitude, and misled her into thinking that we had no alcohol in the flat.
She was very grateful and confessed that she had been reluctant to accept my offer to come back with me in case I would have beaten her also.
Thursday 19 May 2011
Delayed SMS Message
Consuelo and I lay in bed one morning in Spring 2010. She turned over to reach for her mobile and read the text that she had just received. 'It's from you' she said. It was a message that I had sent her almost four years earlier, giving her instructions, when she first arrived in London, on how to get to my old house (which would become our old house) near Liverpool Street Station from Stansted Airport. She didn't complain at the time although she assumed that I had simply not bothered sending the information that she was expecting.
Wednesday 18 May 2011
Police Whistle
On two separate occasions in my early twenties I lived in Stamford Hill in North London. It's quite an unremarkable place where not all that much occurs outside of its big Hasidic community. It did seem to attract peculiar people though, and one couple that I would often see during my expeditions to Safeways stood out. They were in their forties but carried on like they were in their twenties, always exclaiming and laughing and pushing each other in the street. She had long blonde hair, was quite plump and always grinned, he wore a huge red felt hat, a coat with massive lapels and was as tall as a ten year old boy. On one occasion he stopped me on the street, as I was walking past the overground station.
He pointed to an old police whistle that I used to have tied into the button hole of the breast pocket of my coat. It had been my father's, from the days when he had been a police cadet in Birmingham. He remarked on it in a squeaky voice and seemed very pleased when he correctly identified it. 'I've always wanted one of those' he squeaked.
Later that week, in answer to a classified ad that intrigued me ('an Aladdin's cave of marvellous junk and antiques. Everything must go!'), I found myself in a Chelsea townhouse. A lady, who had amassed an astonishing amount of junk, was selling the lot. She was a compulsive hoarder, every bit of space in the rooms, every step of the staircases even, was filled with ancient rubbish. When I got there she explained, in a Chelsea drawl, that her son and daughter, who arrived while I was sifting through the junk, were forcing her to conduct the sale on anticipation of the house being sold. Having to part with her rubbish was making the old lady anxious and short tempered. 'But can't I just keep this, can't I just keep that,' she would say as she stumbled on this and that, 'Just remember Tigger,' she screamed in her son's face, oblivious to my being there, 'I'm only doing this because you tell me to do this.' The daughter sighed and stroked her hair, saying, with a lisp, 'stay calm mother, do try to relax.' There was also some ongoing dispute between the children regarding the Parisian hotel that the daughter managed and they hissed and chastised each other constantly under their breath, apparently it was something to be kept from their mother.
Tigger drove me to Sloane Square Underground Station in his battered Volvo and narrated constantly. He was friendly, absent minded and candid, telling me his life story as we waited in traffic, although he was reluctant to talk about the mysterious dispute with his sister. Years later the film 'Grey Gardens' made me think about this family.
I had travelled quite a distance to experience the Aladdin's cave of rubbish but, despite their being such a huge quantity of stuff, there had been very little worth buying. I went home with some London Underground information leaflets printed in the 1950s that I didn't really want and two police whistles. One for the man with the hat and one for me.
A few days later I spotted him from the window of my room, at the crowded bus stop across the road. I rushed downstairs and made straight for the man in the felt hat, searching my coat pockets for the whistle. He took a step back and gave an odd, accusatory yelp of ‘I don’t know you!’ I tried to explain but he didn't seem to understand a word. We had already attracted a lot of attention and I was unsure how long it would be until a well meaning member of the public saved the man in the hat from me if I didn't find the whistle soon. The disapproving eyes were suddenly focussed on the bus that arrived in a flurry, the man looked relieved, I found the whistle, I held it out, he paused, grabbed it and jumped on the bus.
Whenever I saw him again on the streets of Stamford Hill he didn't appear to recognise me.
He pointed to an old police whistle that I used to have tied into the button hole of the breast pocket of my coat. It had been my father's, from the days when he had been a police cadet in Birmingham. He remarked on it in a squeaky voice and seemed very pleased when he correctly identified it. 'I've always wanted one of those' he squeaked.
Later that week, in answer to a classified ad that intrigued me ('an Aladdin's cave of marvellous junk and antiques. Everything must go!'), I found myself in a Chelsea townhouse. A lady, who had amassed an astonishing amount of junk, was selling the lot. She was a compulsive hoarder, every bit of space in the rooms, every step of the staircases even, was filled with ancient rubbish. When I got there she explained, in a Chelsea drawl, that her son and daughter, who arrived while I was sifting through the junk, were forcing her to conduct the sale on anticipation of the house being sold. Having to part with her rubbish was making the old lady anxious and short tempered. 'But can't I just keep this, can't I just keep that,' she would say as she stumbled on this and that, 'Just remember Tigger,' she screamed in her son's face, oblivious to my being there, 'I'm only doing this because you tell me to do this.' The daughter sighed and stroked her hair, saying, with a lisp, 'stay calm mother, do try to relax.' There was also some ongoing dispute between the children regarding the Parisian hotel that the daughter managed and they hissed and chastised each other constantly under their breath, apparently it was something to be kept from their mother.
Tigger drove me to Sloane Square Underground Station in his battered Volvo and narrated constantly. He was friendly, absent minded and candid, telling me his life story as we waited in traffic, although he was reluctant to talk about the mysterious dispute with his sister. Years later the film 'Grey Gardens' made me think about this family.
I had travelled quite a distance to experience the Aladdin's cave of rubbish but, despite their being such a huge quantity of stuff, there had been very little worth buying. I went home with some London Underground information leaflets printed in the 1950s that I didn't really want and two police whistles. One for the man with the hat and one for me.
A few days later I spotted him from the window of my room, at the crowded bus stop across the road. I rushed downstairs and made straight for the man in the felt hat, searching my coat pockets for the whistle. He took a step back and gave an odd, accusatory yelp of ‘I don’t know you!’ I tried to explain but he didn't seem to understand a word. We had already attracted a lot of attention and I was unsure how long it would be until a well meaning member of the public saved the man in the hat from me if I didn't find the whistle soon. The disapproving eyes were suddenly focussed on the bus that arrived in a flurry, the man looked relieved, I found the whistle, I held it out, he paused, grabbed it and jumped on the bus.
Whenever I saw him again on the streets of Stamford Hill he didn't appear to recognise me.
Tuesday 17 May 2011
Driving Instructor
When I was seventeen I stayed at my friend Patrick’s house over one summer while his mother was away. There we led a very care free existence and I took LSD a few times each week. I also decided to learn how to drive. I had a driving instructor who kept staring at my crotch on the occasions when we sat stationary in the car in order to discuss the highway code. It was a bit unnerving. He was a little creepy, although he was very good humoured, and I did like his company. My close friend Howard, coincidentally, had been instructed by the same man in the past and had experienced the same problem with the crotch staring. It was unclear whether or not the instructor knew that his pupil would be aware of it, or whether, in fact, he himself was not aware of it. He told me that at times, especially when we were on the dual carriageway, my driving frightened him a little.
A short, pleasant lady conducted the test when my time came and I passed.
A short, pleasant lady conducted the test when my time came and I passed.
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