Nelson Mandela

I once told Jane all about Nelson Mandela when she admitted that she had no idea who he was. It was a complicated, long story involving Nelson, the Dutch man, rowing all the way to Africa in only a small kayak. It was especially surprising that he was adopted by Africans as a leader since he was a white man. He fought Robert Mugabe who assembled an army of mercenaries. He was victorious and united Africa.

One day we were sitting in her lovely house and her father mentioned Nelson Mandela after South Africa had been discussed on the television news, 'but I bet you know nothing about him' he said to Jane, smiling, to which she happily declared 'oh, but I do' and then recounted the story to prove it. Sorry Jane.

Gambling Addiction

When Lisa and I had only just moved to Whitechapel we were walking down Whitechapel Road and, passing the amusement arcade 'Carousel'. I told her never to let me set a foot in there because only two years earlier I had sought treatment from psychologists for an addiction to playing slot machines. We hurried past and I explained that I didn't trust myself to even set eyes on the place and how I had to fight my feeling that that environment felt so enticing, warm, so right.

A year later and we found ourselves bored, waiting for a flight to Malmö, Sweden to visit Lisa's mother and her husband. I suggested playing a slot machine to kill time but she told me off anxiously, she seemed shocked by the suggestion. I had no idea why. I had forgotten telling my innocent fruit machine addiction lie you see, I never imagined that she would take me seriously anyway.

My ES250/2

I'd never much cared for motorbikes until I saw one of Joe's MZs. It was built from brand new parts and stood, never having seen oil nor petrol, in his living room. Red and black, it looked so cool that I decided then and there that it was my destiny to ride a bike just like it.

A while later, after having owned a smaller MZ for a couple of years, (the plan was to then pass my motorcyle driving test) I was sitting on the train to Milton Keynes in order to buy my new MZ ES250/2.

I was met at the station by a fat, taciturn biker. The bike had been standing for years but it seemed to ride just fine. I bought it for £400. As I say, I intended to pass my motorcycle driving test but had not yet at that moment. This meant that it was illegal for me to ride a 250cc bike but I planned only to take it back to Whitechapel and keep it there until everything was above board.

I was concerned that it had been standing for so long and I was concerned that I hadn't a valid driving licence nor insurance and the bike had no MOT certificate. The sky was a blanket of low grey clouds, stretching in all directions for as far as the eye could see, threatening rain. But how peculiar it was to ride the bike. It felt so different to the one that I was used to. And the headlamp shell was fixed which gave a strange impression, as though the handle bars were static.

It was the first time that I rode on a motorway, yet another thing that I was prohibited in doing without a full motorcycle licence, and the feel of the bike, the ominous clouds and the illegality of it all made me very uncomfortable. And then the engine started to sound odd. It sounded slightly scratchy and clunky and the noise grew worse. I knew that a two stroke engine, as the oil mixed with the petrol aged. was liable to have bearings become pitted when left standing. At first they bear up but, as the work of the engine wears them, they begin to break up. I knew this because it had happened to me driving once from Southend to London (a disastrous adventure which is a story in itself) and it would actually prove to be the case. It was some consolation that I was just arriving at services. I rode the bike around the garage forecourt there and it was obvious that there was no going on.

A kind lady at the Little Chef restaurant allowed me to store the bike in a small bin area in their car park, a sort of open air wooden shed. My father bailed me out, as usual, and he hired a trailer with which we picked it up. Weeks had passed and they were beginning to think about getting rid of it they said.

I loved it so much. People remarked on it wherever I went, tourists took photographs standing beside it and people from the former East Germany would shout 'MZ, MZ!' as I passed. It is, by far, my favourite thing that I have ever owned. It is standing at my parents' house. So if anybody wants to buy a motorbike.. It would be sad to see it go but perhaps one day I will be able to ride it again and I will buy it back off you. It has a nice registration plate number, huh?

Consuelo And I Swapping

As Consuelo arrived in London to be with me my MS got so bad that I found it difficult to leave the house. The stairs became unmanageable at our Liverpool Street flat. At the very beginning we did see the Mount Cherries play at the Bethnal Green Working Men's club (The Projects, incidentally, were the first band ever to play there when they decided to cash in on having a stage in such a good location,) The Monks at the Dirty Water Club and something or other at The Spitz, Monade, I think. The Mount Cherries were terrific, what a shame they split up! Their singer Dora had a great voice and they all always had lots of fun on stage, there were many of them, they were a gang.

And so at this time, because we liked the same kinds of bands and the same sorts of locations, Consuelo began to go to all of the same places that I used to go to. It felt strange to greet her when she came home from a night out and she'd say that she ended up at such and such a place, ask if I'd heard of it and I'd recall fun times and say 'oh yes, I used to go there lots.' Then we moved to Dalston, the plan was that we would be going out together all the time, but my doctor prescribed me a pill which made me feel so dark and ill that I didn't want to be around the people that I used to spend time with, despite the elevator and no staircase to contend with. Consuelo would propose places to go and things to do but  I would always turn them down. I've mentioned this elsewhere here, I think the entry was called 'reclusiveness.'

And then, just at the same time as Consuelo decides that she has had enough, I realise that the medication was the cause of my troubles. I have also mentioned this before and how I felt better and started to go out again. And now it's me going to these places and spending time with these people. I only mention it once more because it strikes me as such an odd, unfortunate progression of events, how we swapped like that.

Tanya

I placed an advert requesting English/Russian language exchange in an English language school on Oxford Street. I would have been twenty five at the time and so there was quite an age gap between myself and Tanya, who answered my advert, who was aged around 40. Of course, I didn't pay much attention to this, after all it wasn't a date, we were meeting for conversational practice.

She decided better of my idea to use one of the class rooms and suggested instead that we find a pub. We compromised and set off for a cafe. It struck me as a little odd that the first thing that she had me do, after walking down to the street from the language school on the fourth floor, was wait for her as she bought knickers in a small lingerie shop on the corner. She spent some time holding panties up against her body and assessing herself in a mirror before buying a red g-string.

We met a half dozen times, she was only in London for a fortnight, extending a business trip in order to take her language course. Each meeting would end with me turning down an invitation to accompany her to the pub. Late afternoon is not late enough for pubs.

It was only at our final meeting that I realised that she was interested in seducing me. I agreed to go and sit in a pub with her. I think that we ended up in the tourist pub The Cambridge, where Old Compton Street meets Charing Cross Road. She tried to get me drunk, with some success, and then asked me if I'd like to see her hotel.  I wondered if Lisa would approve of me sleeping with a pretty, friendly Ukrainian woman but I knew that she wouldn't and I am a faithful person so, much as I'd have liked to have taken up the offer of hotel room sex, I went home instead. Still, I have her number written in the front cover of a Russian/English dictionary and an invitation to give her a call should I ever find myself in Kiev.

My Grandfather

I loved my grandfather on my mother's side dearly and we were very close. Looking back I suppose he would behave slightly oddly, although I never really noticed, after all, I was very young.

He was a man of habit. In the morning, if it were a winter's day, he would fetch coal and kindling wood for the fire and arrange them in the hearth in preparation for the evening. He would conduct his chores around the three meals in the day which my grandmother prepared for him, perhaps visit the shopping centre there in Huyton, Liverpool and then he and my grandmother would watch television after the fire had been lit. They would drink tea from a teapot, with three biscuits and then later coffee prepared with hot milk. Occasionally the two of them would drink shandy prepared with only a half a can of lager between them.

But there is nothing peculiar about this. Some of his ideas might have seemed strange to some people though. He would declare that all motorcars ought be banned,  despite the fact that he himself drove (and not because he was concerned about pollution but because roads were too crowded in his opinion), he argued for the abolition of inflation (which could perhaps be supported by valid arguments but he was unaware of them), that all communists should be hanged (he would declare, out of the blue, that the Russians were very cunning but, nevertheless..) He would chuckle to himself  'it's a funny old world.' As he pottered around the house.

I think he felt, and quite rightly, that he had been dealt a poor hand in life. He could have been a skilled engineer, he was very practical and was fascinated by industry, the workings of engines and how things were manufactured. He succeeded at school and won a scholarship to university but my great grand mother insisted that he go and work and bring money home. So, as a teenager, he went to Liverpool Docks and found a job as a deck hand. He would later become a steward on the Red Star Line of cruise ships. He said he almost got a job as a cook but they were only taking on cooks with cookery books. It was common to hear a foreman shouting, so my grandfather told me, affecting a strong Lancastrian accent 'cooks with books' at docks because cooks were always in demand.

My grandmother and he were close and held each other in high regard but they were not loving. He never gave my grandmother a present, he never surprised her. I am guessing that he suffered from depression.

When I was thirteen or fourteen my parents decided for him that he should replace his old blue Ford Escort with the Vauxhall Astra that they had been driving for a few years. They had made the offer of buying my grandparents a new car a few times previously but he had always turned it down. He loved his car and it's engine and modern cars are so much more difficult for enthusiasts to tinker with. My parents surprised them with the gift of a new car, my grandmother was delighted. My grandfather, for fear that the neighbours might think that they had been abroad, covered up the GB sticker with black tape.

I'm Smooth As Vanilla 'Cos I'm Ice On The Mic

When Howard and I lived in Stamford Hill we'd go lots to the old man's Wetherspoon pub in Stoke Newington, The Rochester Castle, because it was cheap and we had little money. We'd have no fun at all and then we'd go to the Jolly Butchers up the road which, in those days at least, had the potential of odd, aggressive people forcing themselves on you. They had a lock in most nights, so we would go there and have no fun.

On one occasion we met a rapper (that was his description of himself) in the Rochester Castle. He insisted on teaching me his favourite rap. I found this very amusing and we all had lots of fun getting drunk and then he decided to take us to a local recording studio, we were to improvise a rap together.

Fortunately the studio was just closing and didn't want anything to do with him since he was drunk. But then an amazing thing happened. On the corner of Evering Road and Stoke Newington High Street he christened me with a gang name using something that he found on the road in place of a sword, with three other gang members present to bear witness.

I woke up the next morning with a real hangover. Honestly, hangovers don't usually bother me but this one was notable. But I had forgot my gang name!! I remembered the ceremony well, but my special gang name, to which I was now entitled, well, it was gone, forever.

I do remember the rap that he made me learn over pints and pints of lager though:

'I'm smooth as vanilla 'cos I'm ice on the mic,
weaving in and out like a flying kite,
but there's death on the block 'cos dope's on the scene,
sucker gettin' iced 'cos the gansta leads'

More of a poem than a rap, huh?

Shrinking Primary School

I rode my motorbike to Stanmore, in North London, a long time ago. It was the smallest, the first, of the two motorbikes I would own so it must have been around 2002. The motorbike was a blue MZ TS125 by the way :)

I went there because I had spent the first seven years of my life there and I felt, on a whim, like taking a look at the place again. I passed 'Mike and Angela's' newsagent which, of course, was renamed since, in my seventh year, Mike killed Angela to punish her for infidelity.

I saw the entrance to Stanmore Common where the family would pick rose hips for mum to make jam. I stood outside my old house, which had shrunk, along with the open spaces and the playground around it.

The most astonishing bit of shrinking had occurred at my primary school.
The hill in the playing field there, which I remember being so mountainous, which I remember exhausting myself running up, was two foot high.

I looked the school up on youtube today, and only one result came up, a choir recital in the school hall. I was surprised to see the same piano standing there, all these years later, although that's hardly surprising, is it?

Bianca Tinned Tomatoes

One day I was shopping in Whitechapel Sainsbury's a short walk from my flat in the old schoolhouse there, when I noticed that Patsy Palmer was pushing a trolley down the aisles. It made sense, it was, after all, just around the corner from The Blind Beggar' and I could easily imagine her and the Krays sharing a joke over a pint of lager there.

I had followed her from a distance before I carried on and picked out my stuff, not because I was impressed by her or her celebrity, but because of  people’s faces when they realised they were looking at Bianca from Eastenders, in the flesh. Jaws dropped in awe.

I was very pleased to see that Sainsbury's were stocking a cheap brand of tinned plum tomatoes called 'Bianca.' I filled my basket with a dozen cans and went in search of Patsy. I caught up with her near the bread counter, She had left her trolley standing so as to push through a small crowd there and choose her bread. I put the tins in her shopping trolley, it took some time to conceal them all but she was waiting for a loaf to be sliced. I hope that she found the tinned tomatoes to be a pleasant surprise at the checkout.

Dennis Nordern

Once I was walking with Jane through Soho, down Berwick street. Just where the market stalls begin we bumped into Dennis Nordern, host of television's 'It'll Be Alright On The Night.'

I remember that it was Victory in Europe day and so, for some reason or another, I was carrying an old World War Two British Tommy helmet. I got so sick of the sight of the thing I was to give it away in 2005 via an ad on Freecycle. A very grateful Italian student inherited it.

At first Dennis seemed quite open to the idea of finding a photobooth and having passport photos taken with us but, to be honest, I'm not sure that he was that aware what was going on around him. He soon became agitated and insisted on parting company. I had promised him that he could wear the helmet in the photos which had appealed to him at first but now he became disinterested. I dragged him by the arm but the commotion that he made was attracting the attention of passers by so, reluctantly, I released him.