This is where you came in. Sort of. Back in the beginning, if you remember, I was out in the Bedfordshire countryside being plastered by acorn-hard balls of paint whilst the new-old East London line was resurrected and…and… No. That wasn’t it.
Was it when Rob and I went out to the Big Chill bar, just further down Brick Lane from where I was standing in this semi-fictionalised recreation? That night when I couldn’t find the new Shoreditch Station? Well, kind of. That was when I decided to walk from Dalston to home, following the railway as it chomped through the East End’s skyline and uploading the new layout of the city into my head, but that wasn’t when it all started. Nor was it when we walked past Miquita Oliver looking all gauchely showbiz on the street corner outside The Golden Heart or, indeed, a decade or so before when, in the same pub, people had been so drunk they’d tried to use the basin as a toilet and it had been wrenched off the wall in a sloping mush of piss and faeces and jetting tap water.
That wasn’t me, that time. In fact, I may not have even been there. I may just be borrowing someone else’s memories. I can’t always tell anymore what’s my experience and what’s a story retold too many times, but I do know that every time I walk past The Golden Heart I hear the crack of porcelain hitting a dirty tiled floor.
No, this is a story and so I get to start, like so many of the best things in life, with a kiss as the first dawn light yawned itself across the sky. But the beginning might also be the end and I wasn’t there yet. Instead, I was in the middle. More or less. I was in Shoreditch.
The route out of Arnold Circus enabled me to skirt around the back of the old Tea Building. Its rear is less coldly designed than smooth reflective cladding front and so I’m protected from the vaguely pretentious mix of media consultants, psuedo-publishers and art spaces. The railway line was clear to see in front of me as it arched above the unfinished building site. I wondered if the reason I’d failed to find the station previously was because the new managers had deliberately hidden it away to save it from closure in advance. Stations called Shoreditch never have much luck. The first was opened in 1840 as a mainline station, although it had changed its name to Bishopsgate long before it burnt down in 1964. It then got some revenge by haunting the new line’s construction. Even as far back as 2002, when I’d sold my soul for an architectural magazine, I remember reading about Bishopsgate’s goods depot and its remarkable example of ornate gates that needed to be saved from the vandalism of regeneration.
The second existed between 1865 and 1940 and was also an overland station, but one that existed in the sky, built into the viaduct as the line headed up to join the old Haggerston station. They went down together, not from bomb damage but from lack of commuters. Most of whom were, presumably, busy dying in the sands of North Africa or the jungles of East Asia.
Shoreditch tube station, the northern most point of the old East London line, was open between 1869 and 2002 - nominally at least. As a child I had a large poster map of the tube network on my bedroom wall. Despite having rarely visited London I found the coloured lines and mysteriously named stations mesmerising, but none more than Shoreditch. I was fascinated by its disclaimer to only be open peak hours Monday to Friday and then Sunday morning. Unaware of the city’s geography I couldn’t understand why it would keep those irregular hours. What would happen to people who needed to get in or out on a Wednesday afternoon?
Perhaps it was this fascination that took me, when I arrived in London, to the other end of the short, obscure orange line? Perhaps, subconsciously, I was trying to answer a ten year old unasked question?
Nah. It was the same reason as I do most things. It was because of a girl.
This time I was determined to find the station entrance and I carefully followed the line along. It proved to be not so expertly hidden down a side street. There was nothing mysterious about it. There was even a handy pedestrian sign on the main road. All of which raised two concerns: One, a sense of vague disappointment that what I had suspected might be the biggest challenge of my quest in fact proved shockingly easy. Two, how much had I drunk that night?
Never mind. There was still the journey, after all. Still much more history to be passed through. As if to remind me that I was grounded in 2010, my stomach chose that moment to growl and gurgle and demand to be fed.
I sat on Hilly Fields late one Saturday afternoon recently with my book in my lap and the view out to the plains of Bexleyheath and beyond them Kent sprawling out in front me. A group of people in their mid-twenties, three girls and a boy, had been picnicking in the summer sunshine. The one girl, the one in the knee length denim shorts, swayed as she stood up, the empty bottle of wine dangling from her fingers.
‘Anyone want the rest of this cake?’ the boy asked.
‘Oo, no. Not me.’ Another girl in a long sweeping green and beflowered dress said. ‘I’ve only just lost all that weight.’
‘Yeah,’ shorts girl sat back down with a thump. ‘I noticed. You look fab. How did you do it?’
‘Oh, it was easy. I starved myself for two weeks. Didn’t eat a single morsel of food. Still went into work, mind. I was a bit spacey after the third day, but then that cleared and it was like walking on air.’
Her friends all nodded and mmed their approval.
Brick Lane, for many non-Londoners, may be closely associated with Monica Ali and her novel and despite the fact that the signs are in Bengali as well as English, the Bangladeshis weren’t the first immigrants to take root there. First there were the Huguenots and then the Irish and then the Ashkenazi Jews; the ghetto of Emmanuel Litvinoff’s childhood and the battles with Mosley’s fascists and then David Rodinsky, the reclusive academic who lived in a room on Princelet Street and one day locked the door and disappeared into the shadows of time. It was twenty years until access was forced and a perfectly frozen memory was discovered. The room was untouched, abandoned in a mass of scrawled papers and annotated books and moth riddled clothes and unfinished dinner, blackened and greened by the rot of life fading.
Iain Sinclair’s still following me about and he reminds me that he wrote Rodinsky’s Room with Rachel Litchtenstien. I know, I tell him, where do you think I get all this stuff from? I’m not just making it up. I read it in books.
Still, whilst Litivinoff’s childhood streets wafting with the smells of pickled herrings and the shouts of orthodox indignation may have drifted further north, more remains than the tightly packed terrace housing and litter strewn streets and improvised capitalism. There are Hot Salt Beef Bagels.
Two take away bagel joints at the northern tip of Brick Lane offer twenty-four hour service. It had never occurred to me that a bagel could be a sobering snack for the way home in the small hours until I moved to London. Of course, there is every possibility that I’d never had a bagel nor even knew what one was before I moved to London. I stood in the queue leaning across the back to basics, stainless steel counter, but the swelteringness of the day made my skin itch. I couldn’t stand the idea of eating something hot and dehydratingly salty, so I switched at the last moment to smoked salmon and cream cheese which I ate in hulking mouthfuls whilst striding on down the road feeling nauseating metropolitan with myself.
I passed the door to what may or may not have once been an arts space where I’d once been dragged to see a video piece. A slow-motion zoomed in grainy black and white film of one man inserting his penis into another’s anus on a twelve foot high screen. It was one of those times when I couldn’t work out whether I didn’t like it because of some otherwise undiscovered homophobia, or because I was a prudish philistine or because it was actually a bit crap.
A Friday morning and couple got on the train at New Cross Gate as it headed into work. She wore big shades that shielded most of her face from the excess of the new day; he a crumpled linen shirt that looked like it was more than fresh on. She slipped her arm around his waist, but tentatively as though it was still something new. She looked almost doll like next to his over-gymed frame. Her index finger chased the shape of his abdomen.
‘I can’t believe how much better I feel this morning,’ she cooed. ‘It’s like all the tension has drained away.’
‘Told you,’ he smiled smugly. ‘Best cure for any stress that is. A right royal seeing to.’ And they proceeded to reminisce all the way to London Bridge about the varied angles from which they’d fucked the night before. ‘Genius.’
‘Best not to get carried away,’ she pecked him on the cheek as the doors opened. ‘After all, it’s not like we’ll ever see each other again.’
Brick Lane has been making a land grab to become the hipster central for the vaguely trendy. It’s launched an all out assault on the dominance of neighbours Hoxton and Old Street. Places like the Vibe Bar and the Big Chill have aggressively transformed parts of the deformed Truman Brewery into something at the opposite end of the drinks industry from that which it was originally created to serve. Instead of churning hops into beer, dressed up blissed out twenties and thirties types are tightly packed into its broken lit rooms with soundtracks of twisted out samples, the inky stamps pressed onto the backs of their hands marking their tribe.
It’s seems almost a shame that the Black Eagle brewery, to use its original more imperial name, should end like that. Founded in 1683 it swamped London with ale for centuries – although not as literally as the Meux Brewery on Tottenham Court road did in 1814 when 1.4million litres of beer escaped and flooded the area drowning eight and giving one alcohol poisoning.
By day the brewery serves an even more innocuous purpose as a home from home for the artisans and purveyors of random life who were ejected by the gentrification of Spitalfield’s market. Across multiple concrete soaked floors, in rooms that once contained copper vats packed in ice and oak barrels ranked up for collection by the horse and cart, there are now uber-trendy slit cut jeans, ironic metal shirts, handmade cushions and unlistened to yet resold for the umpteenth time obscure reggae records.
Whilst browsing around this mush of culture for a Christmas gift for my sister or one of my cousins, someone attached a sticker to the small of my back. I wore an old woollen duffel coat and yet the sticker read: “I wear real fur; I am a cunt.” I felt violated, not least for the inaccuracy of the accusation. An unpleasant feeling of being wronged hung around me for a day or so, making me sneer with irritation.
Despite my continued disillusionment and disappointment with how Spitalfield’s has so enthusiastically grasped glass walls and middle class fakery to its hub, I still felt its draw. The pull of times past. On the way I’m reminded of the Water Poet, a pub I’d only been to once. It was a rustic retreat for the city types lurking just over the way, those who normally could be found clustering around Liverpool Street Station and its easy escape back West. I had semi-gatecrashed a Christmas party. My friend worked in the banking sector and this was 2008, just after they’d decided that bringing down western civilisation might be a bit of a giggle and so the party was a secret. It took place in the pub’s back room, rented out anonymously. The signage on the doors bore the name of a charitable foundation.
They covered up their guilt in plain sight yet I milled around being provocatively sarcastic. None of them took the bait. They were immune to conscience. It wasn’t their fault. It was system. It was life, get over it. It was you and me.
Letters and magazines kept arriving for the people who used to live upstairs. They’d left me their new address, another flat in Brockley, and like a dutiful neighbour I walked their post round one evening. I’d watched him write the number and street name down carefully, pausing to check he’d spelt the road correctly, and yet when I got there I found that number 67 was missing. It was occupied by a patch of grass; the gap left in the numbers in case a property was ever added. I stood in the evening sunset and wondered what to do with the Time Out and the water bill and the post card and whatever else for the people who no longer existed.
As I walked past the market itself, I noticed that the Spitz bar had been replaced by an ornately flushed brown leatherette sofa shop. I knew that, yet still it surprised me. I’d been researching gig venues earlier in the year and had struggled to understand how somewhere so identified with the rafters of the Victorian market hall could so easily up sticks to King’s Cross. Now all I had left was the live cd of bands who had never made it and the memories of Holly Golightly, despite the blackout, singing her bluegrass songs of woe in a voice that was like Americana corn twisting in a cockney breeze.
On the other side of the road is Christ Church, one of Hawksmoor’s – remember him? – icons of the city. A few years ago, I came to the end of a much grander walk around the city. One that had crisscrossed ancient monuments as it followed a path laid down in a story. As I approached the final furlongs I came along side that same church. Outside the front of which was one of those three wheeled scooters, with mobile coffee bars fitted to the back, which were briefly omnipresent. It was ridden by a girl with a thick eastern European accent. As she fixed me an espresso, I noticed a tubbaware box full of cupcakes with thick fake pink icing smeared across them.
‘Huh,’ I muttered, ‘cute.’
‘Would you like one?’ she asked ‘Only fifty pee, but it must be a secret.’
‘A secret?’
‘Yes. I make them myself. We are not allowed to sell our own cakes. Just company’s coffee. You see? But, people like them. They make sadness smile.’
How could I resist? It was a little moment of innocence in a place even now haunted by a murderer. You might have heard of him. People call him Jack.
The pub on the opposite corner is the Ten Bells; a decent enough boozer, if a little kitschly trendy and playing heavily on its possibly self-invented Ripper association. It was, allegedly, the favoured gin and porter haunt of the Whitechapel’s Victorian whores that Jack the Ripper carved his way through.
Still, me and Jack: We go a long way back. As a teenager I was almost morbidly intrigued by the unsolved romantic terror of it all. But you’d be forgiven for thinking that old Jack was just a story. I mean, he’s been reinvented and interpreted so many times and in so many ways that he’s almost become fictional.
He’s no longer an unknown person, but something more than reality. It’s starting not matter what he did and the horrific way in which he did it, but the unknown story has come to dominate. A story without end. A tale of love children, Masonic royal conspiracy, psychotic painters, depending, of course, upon which edition you’ve submerged yourself in. They’re all true and yet they’re all made up too.
Across the road there was, in amongst the rat warren of slums, once a street called Miller’s Court. Number thirteen was a single room. A room with a bed and fire and where Mary Kelly, the fifth and final canonical Ripper victim, slept. She was the only one not to be killed on the streets where he might have been disturbed and so Jack appeared to take his time with her. Probably, the first gaping slash across her throat killed her, but that was just the start. Incisions at the edges of her eyes allowed him to carve shapes and messages into her face, gauging the balls out with a pop. The removal of her right breast. Splitting her open from vagina to mouth. The extraction of her liver. Then the removal of her left breast, dropping it casually onto the soaked sheets. The churning out of chunks from her thighs. And finally, her heart was pulled out and discarded into the fire.
In Alan Moore’s From Hell, a dissection of the murders, Jack was William Gull, the Queen’s personal physician, committing ritualised murder and giving birth to the twentieth century. A hundred years of horror and gore conjured up in the bloodied guts of murdered woman. We all paid the price Jack’s crimes. But that’s just a story and we, all of us, make our own destiny.
That’s just a story and Mary Kelly was real. And what’s on the site of Miller Court now? A fucking car park.
I couldn’t think of anything else to think and so turned to walk deeper into Whitechapel.
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
Hoxton
“We all need the perfect smile for the day we’re on tv,” said the sign in the dentists’ window. Below the slogan a caricature of a beaming set of perfectly artificial teeth was drawn, complete with the necessary pinging star at the corner. I couldn’t decide which was worse, the cynical sleaziness of the dentists selling unsustainable dreams to the impressionable or the fact that I saw lies rather than optimism everywhere I looked.
I turned back to the clustered street market stalls and squinted as the sun shone down between the plastic canopies and steel poles that formed the temporary frames. It seemed familiar, and yet I hadn’t popped out where I’d expected to. The a-z that lives in my brain had short-wired itself. I’d expected to find myself walking along a narrow residential street where the two storey terraces slumped forwards and overhung the gutters, casting the pavements into much needed shade. Instead, I had arrived in the middle of stalls draped in mix-matched clothing, jeans and striped vest tops, summer dresses of purple and lime green, shirts with flowered detail running from nipple to navel, dvds of films unrecognisable, unbranded vats of toilet bleach, blackened plantain and sprouting sweet potatoes, halal chicken wings sweltering in the late morning, the flies idly swatted aside and yet something about that unexpected world felt both reassuring and uncomfortable at the same time.
Fully aware of my memory’s fallibility I had a back-up map in my bag, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. That felt like too much of a cheat. After all, I wasn’t lost. I knew where I was, I understood how I fitted in within the wider Hoxton geography, I just didn’t know when I was; I couldn’t place when I’d walked down this street and for what purpose. I couldn’t make it distinct from all the other half-recalled moments that had been slowly spilling out across the early morning.
Perhaps I was merely being directionally challenged. Perhaps it only seemed weird because I’d arrived from the wrong angle. I turned and began to walk backwards down the road. That felt a bit better, the line-up of shops felt more accurate in reverse. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I reopened them, the sun’s heat was gone to be replaced by the looming gloom of a winter’s afternoon, the grey bite of deserted London streets after the weather has turned and I had a sense of searching for something; somewhere that was fading into nothingness as the light turned to dark and the memories broke apart.
‘Look where you’re fucking well going, you dick,’ someone sidestepped me and I was back in the heat and the bustle, vaguely aware of people wondering why the hell I was walking backwards. I righted myself and the memory was gone again; strewn to the winds of time. Why couldn’t I remember? It irritated me irrationally, but under that was the bigger question: How much else had I forgotten? How much of my sense of self had I surgically burnt away with whisky over the past couple of years?
Which, of course, had been the intention, but suddenly it was something I regretted. I didn’t want to forget, I wanted to embrace my ghosts. I wanted to remember how it felt to like myself. All of myself, not just an idealised publicly presented version of me.
Hoxton. Phh. It’s always self-indignantly felt shat upon by its neighbours, starting way back in the sixteenth century when, apparently, the agricultural lands were levelled to enable the middle class citizens of Islington to use the green walks for their leisure. It makes noises about being the downtrodden underbelly, but right after the great trampling European ambassadors to Tudor England began building moated manor houses to idle away their weekends there. Somewhere around there, on the crumbling wall of a fifties flat block, is a blue plaque marking where the house of William Parker, the Lord of Monteagle, the guy who grassed up the Gunpowder plot conspirators lived. Rebel spirit? More like establishment crony, but, ssh, don’t it.
As I crossed the end of Falkirk Street, the cheery sign pointed out Hackney Community College. Once upon a time a lunatic asylum stood on the same site. Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented upon it, around the same time as he was trying to get himself incarcerated to effect a cold turkey cure for his opium eating, and his friend, the poet Charles Lamb, bounced in and out as did Lamb’s sister after she stabbed to death their mother with a knitting needle. Poets: Mad bastards, the lot of them. It finally boarded its doors up in 1911. I wondered if anyone’s ever told the College’s staff.
Eh, it was a cheap gag but it made me smile as I strolled on through the streets.
Just beyond the market stalls I found the Macbeth and put myself on a slightly stronger geographical ground. The Macbeth is a pub that’s achingly cool in a scabby sort of way; somewhere that kids in bands watch other kids with guitars strut their stuff and appraise angled haircuts and the latest post-ironic clothing trend. It never used to be. Once it was a gravely Guinness focused drinking den far enough away from the media scene to cope, but in the past decade it has sold its soul to the fashion devil.
Opposite, though, my heart was broken as I realised that the bookshop has gone. This was somewhat hypocritical of me, given that I hadn’t visited let alone exchanged money for words with the proprietor in years and yet just another book seller disappearing into yesteryear made me feel bitterly sad. It used to be a pokey stack packed place where the light didn’t quite make it through the blinds. It was a muddle of smudged lovingly devoured favourites passed on when their owner did too and editions too archaic or confusing to have ever been fully read. I think I last bought some Kafka there. Or maybe something by Burrows. I couldn’t remember exactly, but the idyll in my mind’s eye was that it was the sort of place for fiction that was a little dangerous, a little dark and a touch lost within itself. Typically, I couldn’t remember what its damn name was.
I headed on towards the belly of the chic, Hoxton Square itself.
But before I could arrive I bumped into something else not quite properly recalled. The Red Lion stood on the corner and instinctively I glanced upwards. I could see large garden umbrellas overhanging the brightly white and red window boxes along the perimeter of the roof garden. I’d been up there once, years before on a balmy summer’s evening, nowhere near as hot as it was that morning, but when it had been warm with a soft wind fluttering past. I pictured myself at the bar, buying drinks and then climbing the tightly coiled staircase, where the carpet ruffled unevenly and then, finally, stepping out into the light. There was a largish group of people; I could see their movements, but their faces are blurred and their voices spoke Latin through a distorter that left just a cackle, like a lost medium wave transmission.
‘The thing I find really annoying about her,’ said the girl with the short black hair and the southern French accent, ‘is how she’s so full of self-confidence.’
‘Whilst you,’ I replied, ‘are just full of bluff?’
She stopped, turned and looked at me for a moment and then smiled: ‘This?’ She pointed to her extroverted self. ‘Hell, yeah: Total bravado.’
‘Takes a faker to spot a fake,’ I said but wondered, in that case, what was she really thinking .
‘I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are,’ wrote
Coleridge in Dejection, yet I found Hoxton Square strangely deserted. On such a warm summer’s morning, I had expected it to be full of lounging glitterati; cool art kids stretched out in the rare sunshine, their brows shaded by implausible hats.
Instead, the only people present were the two blonde five year old girls skipping gleefully in the dappled shadow created by the overhanging gnarled trees whilst a young man – surely a cheekily disgraceful uncle rather than their father – in his mid twenties sat on the ground smoking a hand rolled cigarette, an unopened can of Polish lager by his bare ankle; cut tight demin shorts and a combat green vest top, deliberately matted unwashed hair, greasy to his brow and four days of cultivated stubble. He fitted a stereotype and yet didn’t. His comrades in fashion, those who I’d expected to see there, were, I realised, still asleep in their beds continuing the nocturnal cycle.
Uncle’s hand shook as it moved the burning tobacco-paper mix up to his lips; spiralling red flickers of life drifted in the turbulence. It made me think, nastily, that James Parkinson had once lived on Hoxton Square, before the gifted and the damned swanned into town, and he wrote there about the disease that took his name.
I left them to it. Them and the closed up cafes and bars, the place where I’d sat with the girl from the band and the journalist desperately passionate about the importance of the press, but without a paper to work on and the place where we’d once argued about whether you should factor the price of cool into a Sunday lunch.
I drifted away to the main road, back to the railway line again. I slid alongside the Spread Eagle popping out underneath the old bridge across the road back to Dalston. Across the street were the Catch bar and whatever the place that used to be called the Bar Under the Bridge was called that week. The types of places I used to go when wanting to feel a tad more metropolitan. I’d gone to the latter that time my sister had come down to stay, showing off a bit the supposed diversity of the big city, and that girl with the acres of uncontrollable hair had come and laughed that infectious raucously carry-on laugh all night long. It was a shame we’d lost touch after she lost the plot.
I always think that the Catch should be called Catch-22 even though it has no connection to Joseph Heller and is not infused with self-contradictions. If ever there was a novel that deserved a bar to be themed after it then it was that one. A boozers’ bar; a place where alcoholics could be trapped in the inescapable circle of existence. Catch-22.
I tired to return to the plot and realised that I couldn’t see the station. That was supposed to be the point of this journey; to track and map the locations of the new East London line stations – not to lose myself in some never-ending spiral of confused memories. I could see the bridge, but that was all. There was nothing for it, but to head back up towards Haggerston and try and catch a sight of it down some random side street.
So, off I set. Past the place where somehow I’d once stumbled through the Turner prize winners’ book launch; past the Vietnamese that was the default option for food out round Old Street at one point, until I hung a right on the corner where the old neon sign manufacturers used to be, where it used to say things like “Think Twice” and “Cheer Up” in shimmering green or blue, glowing in the deep midnight black. It was a lucky guess for no sooner had I passed the garage with the huge mural of ganja smokers on the outside wall and just the two ancient rusting mini hulks inside then the station could be seen jutting out the underside of the bridge as it arched over the road.
It was only then that I realised why the road seemed so familiar. At the far end, before it reached the Hackney Road, was the converted warehouse where she’d had one of her first exhibitions, a crazy disconnected show of fifty or maybe even more artists all crunched together as though trying to give a still birth to some kind of communal movement. I didn’t need to go and see that place again. Even if it had survived and hadn’t been resurrected as some kind of funky nu-wave office block for businesses with no function, I remembered it clearly enough. It was a good piece of art. Cutely funny. It had stayed in my head happily enough.
I smiled to myself as I thought of the bug’s impossible journey and walked back through the light industrial estate that tickled along by the arches whilst the railway line groaned steel crunches overhead, and then popped out on the Hackney Road opposite St Leonard’s. As per usual, a rag-tag collection of bristled and bustled faces clustered amongst the tombstones supping cans of super strength cider, tugging lovingly at dog-eared cigarettes and occasionally losing their gaze to the wonders of the middle distance.
St Leonard gives his patronage to the imprisoned, women in labour and horses. Join the dots there if you can, but here’s another line: No-one had really paid much attention to the sixth century French monk until his spirit apparently helped guide the release of Bohemond of Antioch from an Anatolian jail at the dawn of the twelfth century. Bohemond was a particularly brutal minor Norman noble who’d already ravaged his way through most of Southern Italy, sticking two fingers up at various Popes as he went, before chancing his luck on the slaughterhouse run that was the First Crusade and consequently became one of those bastards I became slightly obsessed with trying to understand around the age of eighteen.
The inside of the church is stripped back bare boned Anglican worship faded by the sunshine that has worked through the stains for generations. Its washed out glory suits it; makes it feel real and not artificially restored. And that time I watched a performance art evening from one of the hard backed pews, it had sparkled with life unlived.
Opposite, in a rather elegant demonstration of a nation’s fucked up moral decline (should you be looking for such a fiction) is the strip club Brown’s, complete with roman styled pillars and gas-fired flaming torches on the doors. Years ago, just as I was leaving work, I said: ‘Yeah, just going to meet a mate up Shoreditch way.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ replied my boss. ‘Going to end up in Brown’s, then?’
‘Nah, I don’t think that’s likely.’
‘While the cat’s away, David will play,’ he said alluding to my absent girlfriend doing something in the Californian foothills.
‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever,’ and I walked out the door. Strip clubs don’t really do it for me. I can see through the façade too easily. I’ve been to a couple, sure, and generally found the experience slightly odd, like the time the person wiggling inches away from my nose looked, as far as I could tell in the bizarre light, remarkably like a girl I’d been to school with. But still, I appreciated the irony of Gomorrah’s vileness being sweated out so close to a church.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Hoxton. The author of woman’s rights and mother of Mary Shelley and therefore mother-in-law to Percy and his dandified bohemian shagging spirit of life and the grandmother to that beastly combination of science of stark fear, Frankenstein’s monster. The city throws up weird alignments at times. Just down the road is the Circus Space, London’s school for clowns and trapeze artists and beyond that, on Leonard’s Street indeed, there once was a media company I used to work alongside. They balanced atop the car pound for central London where rusting hulks were dropped down into a pit, semi-submerged by an office block, and left to die. It’s all gone now of course, just another passing whiff of the city’s memory.
Around the corner is St Arnold’s circus; a raised up garden roundabout surrounded by mansion blocks from the late 19th century. Red brick structures that pushed inwards to a central point until resisted by the sloped steps and spiked shelter in the middle of the grass. I crossed the road, at the same time as a woman, three or four metres ahead. She turned and glanced at me as though I might be following her. We both joined the pavement on the far side and she glanced across again. How was I giving off menace? What was she seeing other than someone going the same way?
In the centre of the Circus, near where the school that used to host the small press festivals in August, was where we’d once watched cyclists ride around and around and around in an endurance test for charity or somesuch. The bikes soared in tight loops as the world blurred in a repeated montage for the riders. A recurrent flash of the same beaming sun soaked faces and the same open windows with the tips of lace curtains fluttering in the breeze created by their own momentum until their eyes crossed and closed and the world collapsed in upon its dizzy self.
The woman turned to look at me again. What was her problem? Did she think she recognised me? It crossed my mind that, secretly, I’d have quite liked that. Not being mistaken for someone well known, but being someone well known.
When the New Yorker and the Daily Telegraph published their respective lists of the best American and British authors under forty, I was relieved to see that only one on each was younger than me. ‘Phew,’ I almost vainly posted on Facebook, ‘there’s still time then.’ But creating something beautiful that lasts and says something about the world is not the same as being photographed just for being you nor as making lots of money. Is that why the dentists’ sigh so riled me, because it made me realise that I occasionally dream of shallow fame too?
I cringed inwardly. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The way to be heard was to say something true not loud. Take St Leonard’s Church, for example. It was built in the 1740s by no-one famous. It has been in continual use, looks immortal and means something to its people. Its greatest claim to immortality though comes in a child’s song: ‘When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.’
I turned back to the clustered street market stalls and squinted as the sun shone down between the plastic canopies and steel poles that formed the temporary frames. It seemed familiar, and yet I hadn’t popped out where I’d expected to. The a-z that lives in my brain had short-wired itself. I’d expected to find myself walking along a narrow residential street where the two storey terraces slumped forwards and overhung the gutters, casting the pavements into much needed shade. Instead, I had arrived in the middle of stalls draped in mix-matched clothing, jeans and striped vest tops, summer dresses of purple and lime green, shirts with flowered detail running from nipple to navel, dvds of films unrecognisable, unbranded vats of toilet bleach, blackened plantain and sprouting sweet potatoes, halal chicken wings sweltering in the late morning, the flies idly swatted aside and yet something about that unexpected world felt both reassuring and uncomfortable at the same time.
Fully aware of my memory’s fallibility I had a back-up map in my bag, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. That felt like too much of a cheat. After all, I wasn’t lost. I knew where I was, I understood how I fitted in within the wider Hoxton geography, I just didn’t know when I was; I couldn’t place when I’d walked down this street and for what purpose. I couldn’t make it distinct from all the other half-recalled moments that had been slowly spilling out across the early morning.
Perhaps I was merely being directionally challenged. Perhaps it only seemed weird because I’d arrived from the wrong angle. I turned and began to walk backwards down the road. That felt a bit better, the line-up of shops felt more accurate in reverse. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I reopened them, the sun’s heat was gone to be replaced by the looming gloom of a winter’s afternoon, the grey bite of deserted London streets after the weather has turned and I had a sense of searching for something; somewhere that was fading into nothingness as the light turned to dark and the memories broke apart.
‘Look where you’re fucking well going, you dick,’ someone sidestepped me and I was back in the heat and the bustle, vaguely aware of people wondering why the hell I was walking backwards. I righted myself and the memory was gone again; strewn to the winds of time. Why couldn’t I remember? It irritated me irrationally, but under that was the bigger question: How much else had I forgotten? How much of my sense of self had I surgically burnt away with whisky over the past couple of years?
Which, of course, had been the intention, but suddenly it was something I regretted. I didn’t want to forget, I wanted to embrace my ghosts. I wanted to remember how it felt to like myself. All of myself, not just an idealised publicly presented version of me.
Hoxton. Phh. It’s always self-indignantly felt shat upon by its neighbours, starting way back in the sixteenth century when, apparently, the agricultural lands were levelled to enable the middle class citizens of Islington to use the green walks for their leisure. It makes noises about being the downtrodden underbelly, but right after the great trampling European ambassadors to Tudor England began building moated manor houses to idle away their weekends there. Somewhere around there, on the crumbling wall of a fifties flat block, is a blue plaque marking where the house of William Parker, the Lord of Monteagle, the guy who grassed up the Gunpowder plot conspirators lived. Rebel spirit? More like establishment crony, but, ssh, don’t it.
As I crossed the end of Falkirk Street, the cheery sign pointed out Hackney Community College. Once upon a time a lunatic asylum stood on the same site. Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented upon it, around the same time as he was trying to get himself incarcerated to effect a cold turkey cure for his opium eating, and his friend, the poet Charles Lamb, bounced in and out as did Lamb’s sister after she stabbed to death their mother with a knitting needle. Poets: Mad bastards, the lot of them. It finally boarded its doors up in 1911. I wondered if anyone’s ever told the College’s staff.
Eh, it was a cheap gag but it made me smile as I strolled on through the streets.
Just beyond the market stalls I found the Macbeth and put myself on a slightly stronger geographical ground. The Macbeth is a pub that’s achingly cool in a scabby sort of way; somewhere that kids in bands watch other kids with guitars strut their stuff and appraise angled haircuts and the latest post-ironic clothing trend. It never used to be. Once it was a gravely Guinness focused drinking den far enough away from the media scene to cope, but in the past decade it has sold its soul to the fashion devil.
Opposite, though, my heart was broken as I realised that the bookshop has gone. This was somewhat hypocritical of me, given that I hadn’t visited let alone exchanged money for words with the proprietor in years and yet just another book seller disappearing into yesteryear made me feel bitterly sad. It used to be a pokey stack packed place where the light didn’t quite make it through the blinds. It was a muddle of smudged lovingly devoured favourites passed on when their owner did too and editions too archaic or confusing to have ever been fully read. I think I last bought some Kafka there. Or maybe something by Burrows. I couldn’t remember exactly, but the idyll in my mind’s eye was that it was the sort of place for fiction that was a little dangerous, a little dark and a touch lost within itself. Typically, I couldn’t remember what its damn name was.
I headed on towards the belly of the chic, Hoxton Square itself.
But before I could arrive I bumped into something else not quite properly recalled. The Red Lion stood on the corner and instinctively I glanced upwards. I could see large garden umbrellas overhanging the brightly white and red window boxes along the perimeter of the roof garden. I’d been up there once, years before on a balmy summer’s evening, nowhere near as hot as it was that morning, but when it had been warm with a soft wind fluttering past. I pictured myself at the bar, buying drinks and then climbing the tightly coiled staircase, where the carpet ruffled unevenly and then, finally, stepping out into the light. There was a largish group of people; I could see their movements, but their faces are blurred and their voices spoke Latin through a distorter that left just a cackle, like a lost medium wave transmission.
‘The thing I find really annoying about her,’ said the girl with the short black hair and the southern French accent, ‘is how she’s so full of self-confidence.’
‘Whilst you,’ I replied, ‘are just full of bluff?’
She stopped, turned and looked at me for a moment and then smiled: ‘This?’ She pointed to her extroverted self. ‘Hell, yeah: Total bravado.’
‘Takes a faker to spot a fake,’ I said but wondered, in that case, what was she really thinking .
‘I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are,’ wrote
Coleridge in Dejection, yet I found Hoxton Square strangely deserted. On such a warm summer’s morning, I had expected it to be full of lounging glitterati; cool art kids stretched out in the rare sunshine, their brows shaded by implausible hats.
Instead, the only people present were the two blonde five year old girls skipping gleefully in the dappled shadow created by the overhanging gnarled trees whilst a young man – surely a cheekily disgraceful uncle rather than their father – in his mid twenties sat on the ground smoking a hand rolled cigarette, an unopened can of Polish lager by his bare ankle; cut tight demin shorts and a combat green vest top, deliberately matted unwashed hair, greasy to his brow and four days of cultivated stubble. He fitted a stereotype and yet didn’t. His comrades in fashion, those who I’d expected to see there, were, I realised, still asleep in their beds continuing the nocturnal cycle.
Uncle’s hand shook as it moved the burning tobacco-paper mix up to his lips; spiralling red flickers of life drifted in the turbulence. It made me think, nastily, that James Parkinson had once lived on Hoxton Square, before the gifted and the damned swanned into town, and he wrote there about the disease that took his name.
I left them to it. Them and the closed up cafes and bars, the place where I’d sat with the girl from the band and the journalist desperately passionate about the importance of the press, but without a paper to work on and the place where we’d once argued about whether you should factor the price of cool into a Sunday lunch.
I drifted away to the main road, back to the railway line again. I slid alongside the Spread Eagle popping out underneath the old bridge across the road back to Dalston. Across the street were the Catch bar and whatever the place that used to be called the Bar Under the Bridge was called that week. The types of places I used to go when wanting to feel a tad more metropolitan. I’d gone to the latter that time my sister had come down to stay, showing off a bit the supposed diversity of the big city, and that girl with the acres of uncontrollable hair had come and laughed that infectious raucously carry-on laugh all night long. It was a shame we’d lost touch after she lost the plot.
I always think that the Catch should be called Catch-22 even though it has no connection to Joseph Heller and is not infused with self-contradictions. If ever there was a novel that deserved a bar to be themed after it then it was that one. A boozers’ bar; a place where alcoholics could be trapped in the inescapable circle of existence. Catch-22.
I tired to return to the plot and realised that I couldn’t see the station. That was supposed to be the point of this journey; to track and map the locations of the new East London line stations – not to lose myself in some never-ending spiral of confused memories. I could see the bridge, but that was all. There was nothing for it, but to head back up towards Haggerston and try and catch a sight of it down some random side street.
So, off I set. Past the place where somehow I’d once stumbled through the Turner prize winners’ book launch; past the Vietnamese that was the default option for food out round Old Street at one point, until I hung a right on the corner where the old neon sign manufacturers used to be, where it used to say things like “Think Twice” and “Cheer Up” in shimmering green or blue, glowing in the deep midnight black. It was a lucky guess for no sooner had I passed the garage with the huge mural of ganja smokers on the outside wall and just the two ancient rusting mini hulks inside then the station could be seen jutting out the underside of the bridge as it arched over the road.
It was only then that I realised why the road seemed so familiar. At the far end, before it reached the Hackney Road, was the converted warehouse where she’d had one of her first exhibitions, a crazy disconnected show of fifty or maybe even more artists all crunched together as though trying to give a still birth to some kind of communal movement. I didn’t need to go and see that place again. Even if it had survived and hadn’t been resurrected as some kind of funky nu-wave office block for businesses with no function, I remembered it clearly enough. It was a good piece of art. Cutely funny. It had stayed in my head happily enough.
I smiled to myself as I thought of the bug’s impossible journey and walked back through the light industrial estate that tickled along by the arches whilst the railway line groaned steel crunches overhead, and then popped out on the Hackney Road opposite St Leonard’s. As per usual, a rag-tag collection of bristled and bustled faces clustered amongst the tombstones supping cans of super strength cider, tugging lovingly at dog-eared cigarettes and occasionally losing their gaze to the wonders of the middle distance.
St Leonard gives his patronage to the imprisoned, women in labour and horses. Join the dots there if you can, but here’s another line: No-one had really paid much attention to the sixth century French monk until his spirit apparently helped guide the release of Bohemond of Antioch from an Anatolian jail at the dawn of the twelfth century. Bohemond was a particularly brutal minor Norman noble who’d already ravaged his way through most of Southern Italy, sticking two fingers up at various Popes as he went, before chancing his luck on the slaughterhouse run that was the First Crusade and consequently became one of those bastards I became slightly obsessed with trying to understand around the age of eighteen.
The inside of the church is stripped back bare boned Anglican worship faded by the sunshine that has worked through the stains for generations. Its washed out glory suits it; makes it feel real and not artificially restored. And that time I watched a performance art evening from one of the hard backed pews, it had sparkled with life unlived.
Opposite, in a rather elegant demonstration of a nation’s fucked up moral decline (should you be looking for such a fiction) is the strip club Brown’s, complete with roman styled pillars and gas-fired flaming torches on the doors. Years ago, just as I was leaving work, I said: ‘Yeah, just going to meet a mate up Shoreditch way.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ replied my boss. ‘Going to end up in Brown’s, then?’
‘Nah, I don’t think that’s likely.’
‘While the cat’s away, David will play,’ he said alluding to my absent girlfriend doing something in the Californian foothills.
‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever,’ and I walked out the door. Strip clubs don’t really do it for me. I can see through the façade too easily. I’ve been to a couple, sure, and generally found the experience slightly odd, like the time the person wiggling inches away from my nose looked, as far as I could tell in the bizarre light, remarkably like a girl I’d been to school with. But still, I appreciated the irony of Gomorrah’s vileness being sweated out so close to a church.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Hoxton. The author of woman’s rights and mother of Mary Shelley and therefore mother-in-law to Percy and his dandified bohemian shagging spirit of life and the grandmother to that beastly combination of science of stark fear, Frankenstein’s monster. The city throws up weird alignments at times. Just down the road is the Circus Space, London’s school for clowns and trapeze artists and beyond that, on Leonard’s Street indeed, there once was a media company I used to work alongside. They balanced atop the car pound for central London where rusting hulks were dropped down into a pit, semi-submerged by an office block, and left to die. It’s all gone now of course, just another passing whiff of the city’s memory.
Around the corner is St Arnold’s circus; a raised up garden roundabout surrounded by mansion blocks from the late 19th century. Red brick structures that pushed inwards to a central point until resisted by the sloped steps and spiked shelter in the middle of the grass. I crossed the road, at the same time as a woman, three or four metres ahead. She turned and glanced at me as though I might be following her. We both joined the pavement on the far side and she glanced across again. How was I giving off menace? What was she seeing other than someone going the same way?
In the centre of the Circus, near where the school that used to host the small press festivals in August, was where we’d once watched cyclists ride around and around and around in an endurance test for charity or somesuch. The bikes soared in tight loops as the world blurred in a repeated montage for the riders. A recurrent flash of the same beaming sun soaked faces and the same open windows with the tips of lace curtains fluttering in the breeze created by their own momentum until their eyes crossed and closed and the world collapsed in upon its dizzy self.
The woman turned to look at me again. What was her problem? Did she think she recognised me? It crossed my mind that, secretly, I’d have quite liked that. Not being mistaken for someone well known, but being someone well known.
When the New Yorker and the Daily Telegraph published their respective lists of the best American and British authors under forty, I was relieved to see that only one on each was younger than me. ‘Phew,’ I almost vainly posted on Facebook, ‘there’s still time then.’ But creating something beautiful that lasts and says something about the world is not the same as being photographed just for being you nor as making lots of money. Is that why the dentists’ sigh so riled me, because it made me realise that I occasionally dream of shallow fame too?
I cringed inwardly. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The way to be heard was to say something true not loud. Take St Leonard’s Church, for example. It was built in the 1740s by no-one famous. It has been in continual use, looks immortal and means something to its people. Its greatest claim to immortality though comes in a child’s song: ‘When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.’
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Haggerston
It only took a few steps for Dalston became a memory, a place abandoned to the moment previous. The main road instantly seemed less congested, less frantic, more dissipated, as though it wasn’t trying quite so hard to be something. I turned right onto the streets of De Beauvoir Town. Nominally part of Hackney, it desperately wants to be Islington. In contrast to Dalston’s tightly packed narrow terraces, De Beauvoir prefers wide avenues with trees like ornaments forced through the concrete; it felt like a place of triumph as though, if a sun bleached army of stragglers strode out down it they would come in peace and be welcomed.
Iain Sinclair, who was still travelling with me at a discreet distance and offering helpful titbits of arcane folklore, accused De Beaviour’s residents of mounting middle class raiding parties across the border to Dalston. He gets to say things like that because he lives on one of those streets. I don’t so all I get to do was slouch along with the barest hint of a sneer from my deep rooted appreciation of its, well, its niceness.
But after drifting past the Vietnamese housing centre, I paused as a shiver of déjà vu snuck up. The Talbot. A typical Victorian curved wooden bar pub that was suddenly recognisable. A night, years ago, on one of my first foray’s into the Islington-Hackney borderlands, I’d ended up drinking there. I’d never known where it was since I’d been following rather than leading for once. I remembered stumbling out and finding my way home more by luck than anything else.
We’d gone to the Talbot because Brian lived around there somewhere. In reverse snobbery he always called it Hackney, but, as I’ve said, it’s Islington in disguise really. I glanced in through the windows of a house broken into flats that might have been Brian’s. It wasn’t. The shape of the room and the angle of the light falling across the newly scuffed brown leather sofa were all wrong. Brian and I once invented a word for that, for snooping in through people’s windows. It was a word that combined the innate nosiness with an appreciation of pretty things. Why couldn’t I remember it? Why was my head a jumble of half-formed ideas all the time, clinging onto the useless and forgetting the important?
Frustrated I aimed a half-hearted kick at a dawdling pigeon and missed.
Brian and all the others I’d been with that night are all gone now. They’ve upped sticks and fled the capital to gain space and raise children in access to green fields. At times I have felt as though I could follow them; to run screaming from the city’s suffocating tendrils and then, at other moments, I cannot envisage being anywhere else. London now has such a hold over me that it is as much a key to the lock of my identity as anything in my past. Hasn’t it?
From my initial resentment at its sprawling insanity, the city has burrowed its way into my heart the way William Lyttle, the mole-man of Hackney burrowed his way out from his cellar and into London’s arteries. He was called the mole man of Hackney, but really he was of De Beauvoir town too. Lyttle died the week after my exploration of the East London line, but as I walked I already knew his legend and just maybe I heard the tiny scrapings of his trowel clearing away chunks of dirt.
Mole-man’s excavations were so extensive that they moved far beyond his original claims to merely be extending his cellar. Sturdy shafts of mining darkness dropped down from his garden. Neighbouring houses had reported subsidence, daunting cracks running up their internal walls. The pavement collapsed to reveal a patterned spiral of cubby holes and routes possibly drawing out a message to hell. The electricity was cut off to the whole side of the street. He was a one-man warrior against property prices. He reminded me of Mick Jackson’s the Underground Man, although equally eccentric the Duke of Portland seemed to be trying to get away from the ghosts pecking at his shoulder. I suspect Lyttle was more like the munacielo of Naples. The munacielos were employed to clear the water systems underneath the city, according to legend one sneaked into the homes of the city’s elite stealing their valuables and seducing their frustrated wives. They are still blamed for lost car keys and earrings, although I don’t know whether they’re also held responsible for the city’s infidelities.
Not that mole-man would have been planning anything so seedy. He struck me as naively romantic; someone searching for something yet never knowing what it would or even if he’d already found it.
Sound familiar?
The idea of another world packed with lost ideas underneath London is a potent one for stories. From HG Wells’ the Morlocks, to Toby Hill’s Underground via Neil Giaman’s Neverwhere, the mythological potential in reading in the dark is powerful. It is an area I’ve explored but never quite descended deep enough into. There might be something there in the future, but for the moment, my stories need daylight. I need sunshine.
I reached De Beauvoir square to the neck shredding mewl of an anguished child. The sirens rebounded off the elaborate Dutch gabbled houses that encircled me. The buildings’ windows were like eyes, the balled sun blinking back at me from the glass. In the grassy centre a man in a pale kaki gap t-shirt and matching shorts squatted down and attempted to reason with the howling toddler: ‘What? What is it? Do you not understand what I’m saying? Is Mummy only speaking to you in Latvian at home?’
Beyond him, sprawled in the combative sunshine, two pasty white girls exposed their bikinis and much more. They lay in the direction I walked, their hands rubbing along their thighs, lathering up sun cream. To not look at them would be to not look where I was going, to consciously have made the point of turning away, which would have highlighted that maybe I had been looking at them ourselves. The one stared back at me, almost daring me to do what I’m not entirely sure. Challenge her? Make an approach? Wink suggestively? Whatever, it all made me feel mildly perverted.
I broke her gaze and looked West. A block across was Lawford Road where George Orwell lived. It was there, according to one flatmate the critic Michael Flynn, he attempted to perfect his style of prose devoid of adjectives; a way of writing that couldn’t lie or be misconstrued. It was also there that he beat up his other flatmate, Rayner Heppenstall, with a shooting stick after the less successful author staggered home drunk, making bit too much of a row. It was too beautiful a day for Animal Farm or 1984 or Coming Up for Air to be found anywhere other than the depths of my mind, but George picked up the pace and fell in behind Iain and I.
The cracks were appearing in De Beauvoir’s happy calm façade and so I returned to the main road, and crossed into Haggerston proper. The two areas are often like two different worlds ripped apart by the Kingsland Road. A Hackney ying and yang. I slipped across the traffic, weaving between buses and holiday bikes and then underneath the rail route I was supposed to be following and not being distracted by its surroundings. The railway bridge arched high above. In the distance I could see a train approaching. I expected the framework to rattle, like the apocalypse. Instead, it proved to be annoyingly restrained; little more than a shimmer of fuzzed up air. All mildly disappointing.
‘You keep disappointing me, David,’ slurred the girl with the dyed red hair under her breath. As she spoke she shook her head and in doing so her whole body swayed awkwardly from side to side. I wondered if she might fall of her chair. ‘So disappointing.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I looked around and decided I didn’t want an argument, ‘ain’t I just that.’ I took myself far away to bed. What else could I have done? What else should I have said? "Sorry" wouldn't have worked. There was nothing to apologise for. Was there?
At home I was suddenly all alone: the couple upstairs had moved out; the old chap who lives downstairs was in the hospital. It was just me rattling around the rooms of the large house where sweat clung to the walls and yappy barks echoed from somewhere downstairs. I made noise just to drown out the silence, to pretend there was someone else who knew I was alive.
Back in Haggerston I unearthed the skeletons of low rise housing, semi-gutted by regeneration. A tiny square, designed pre-car, hosted a war memorial adjacent to a window boxed pub flush with colour that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the most remote village. It was immaculately rebuilt English of imagination.
Haggerston apparently has the highest crime figures in Hackney, yet I felt safe. Utterly relaxed as I sauntered along. Funny how the sunshine does that; how the brightness exposes everything yet gives it a sheen of enchantment and you a sense of immunity. It could have been so different on a drizzling November evening.
Of course, the whole rail route had been regenerated, really. Haggerston, like Dalston, like the others, is not a new station specially constructed for the East London line. It once was on the overland out of Liverpool Street’s disowned sibling Broad Street, a station discarded into the gutter to starve to death by a Victorian parent with too many mouths to feed. It had been resurrected. The East London Line feels as though it’s about giving things purpose once again.
After a while I reached the canal. Unlike the canals of my youth, those that wind their way through Birmingham and the surrounding area, the Regent’s canal has only recently been semi redesigned to serve a leisure function. Now it aches its way from east to west, interspersed with tiny metal foot bridges like camel’s humps, and occasional flushes of sandstoned pathways or carefully landscaped greenery past wonderful corners of London such as two of my favourite Islington pubs, the gorgeously maintained Island Queen and the bonkersly eccentric jazz bashing ale guzzling Wenlock Arms.
My earliest experience of this canal was further west, at the York Way bridge where the road drops down to the Kings Cross fork. Another glorious summer’s afternoon on some sort of art treasure hunt which also included table tennis in what was once a broken down MOT garage and is now, probably, a Nando’s chicken joint or a faceless glass drowned office block. Down on the towpath, a man in his thirties leant back against the wall, his arms splayed either side, his head arched upwards his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open in a gasp of exhalation. In front on him, on her knees a woman hitched her skirt up to reveal the tops of her stockings and wrapped her blood red lips around his erect penis. I’ve always presumed she was a prostitute, but perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps she was just his enthusiastic amour.
‘Afternoon,’ I should have said nonchalantly, but I was younger in those days and less conscious of the audience in my head requiring entertainment. I was more afraid of consequences. I hadn’t worked out that inertia was the worst course of action.
My friend, a sometime poet, was mugged along the Regent’s canal. Somewhere probably not too far from the bridge I had momentarily paused in the sunshine atop. Drunk on cold cheap cider after an equally warm afternoon in London Fields - or was it Victoria Park, I forget - he walked along in the late gloom until confronted. The ring on the finger of one of his assailants, probably worth more than anything the poet owned, split his cheek open. That’s the thing about the canal: Beautiful in the sunshine, lost and isolated with occasional flashes of crimson in the dark.
I tried to glance at my own reflection in the stagnant water, for I can be a little vain, but it was too thick and green to offer more than a dark, shivering shadow. A shape, possibly a person yet indistinct. Hovering between reality and fiction. Someone without an identity. Without a character.
On the opposite side of the canal were blocks of flats with silver steel doors and shattered windows that left jagged tears. People still lived inside, abandoned to the inevitability of the builders, lost to transition as their world is pulled apart. And yet, down the street a gaggle of small boys ran laughing, spraying water at each other out of empty coke bottles, lost in the moment with no aspiration other than to soak their opponent.
Is that it, I wondered? Am I too concerned about the big narrative arc? Am I afraid that, like mole-man, I will strive without ever actually finding what I am looking for? Without ever achieving anything? But perhaps it is the journey that is more important. Perhaps the end point would only reveal itself when the story’s threads had been fully unravelled and then rebound.
I found myself back on the main road where the sun made my skin feel flushed. Partly to seek shade and partly because I knew where it led to, George, Iain and I crossed the road and disappeared between two tower blocks down a side street. I felt that odd buzzing tingle again. Maybe I was foreshadowing, but then again it was Hoxton next.
Iain Sinclair, who was still travelling with me at a discreet distance and offering helpful titbits of arcane folklore, accused De Beaviour’s residents of mounting middle class raiding parties across the border to Dalston. He gets to say things like that because he lives on one of those streets. I don’t so all I get to do was slouch along with the barest hint of a sneer from my deep rooted appreciation of its, well, its niceness.
But after drifting past the Vietnamese housing centre, I paused as a shiver of déjà vu snuck up. The Talbot. A typical Victorian curved wooden bar pub that was suddenly recognisable. A night, years ago, on one of my first foray’s into the Islington-Hackney borderlands, I’d ended up drinking there. I’d never known where it was since I’d been following rather than leading for once. I remembered stumbling out and finding my way home more by luck than anything else.
We’d gone to the Talbot because Brian lived around there somewhere. In reverse snobbery he always called it Hackney, but, as I’ve said, it’s Islington in disguise really. I glanced in through the windows of a house broken into flats that might have been Brian’s. It wasn’t. The shape of the room and the angle of the light falling across the newly scuffed brown leather sofa were all wrong. Brian and I once invented a word for that, for snooping in through people’s windows. It was a word that combined the innate nosiness with an appreciation of pretty things. Why couldn’t I remember it? Why was my head a jumble of half-formed ideas all the time, clinging onto the useless and forgetting the important?
Frustrated I aimed a half-hearted kick at a dawdling pigeon and missed.
Brian and all the others I’d been with that night are all gone now. They’ve upped sticks and fled the capital to gain space and raise children in access to green fields. At times I have felt as though I could follow them; to run screaming from the city’s suffocating tendrils and then, at other moments, I cannot envisage being anywhere else. London now has such a hold over me that it is as much a key to the lock of my identity as anything in my past. Hasn’t it?
From my initial resentment at its sprawling insanity, the city has burrowed its way into my heart the way William Lyttle, the mole-man of Hackney burrowed his way out from his cellar and into London’s arteries. He was called the mole man of Hackney, but really he was of De Beauvoir town too. Lyttle died the week after my exploration of the East London line, but as I walked I already knew his legend and just maybe I heard the tiny scrapings of his trowel clearing away chunks of dirt.
Mole-man’s excavations were so extensive that they moved far beyond his original claims to merely be extending his cellar. Sturdy shafts of mining darkness dropped down from his garden. Neighbouring houses had reported subsidence, daunting cracks running up their internal walls. The pavement collapsed to reveal a patterned spiral of cubby holes and routes possibly drawing out a message to hell. The electricity was cut off to the whole side of the street. He was a one-man warrior against property prices. He reminded me of Mick Jackson’s the Underground Man, although equally eccentric the Duke of Portland seemed to be trying to get away from the ghosts pecking at his shoulder. I suspect Lyttle was more like the munacielo of Naples. The munacielos were employed to clear the water systems underneath the city, according to legend one sneaked into the homes of the city’s elite stealing their valuables and seducing their frustrated wives. They are still blamed for lost car keys and earrings, although I don’t know whether they’re also held responsible for the city’s infidelities.
Not that mole-man would have been planning anything so seedy. He struck me as naively romantic; someone searching for something yet never knowing what it would or even if he’d already found it.
Sound familiar?
The idea of another world packed with lost ideas underneath London is a potent one for stories. From HG Wells’ the Morlocks, to Toby Hill’s Underground via Neil Giaman’s Neverwhere, the mythological potential in reading in the dark is powerful. It is an area I’ve explored but never quite descended deep enough into. There might be something there in the future, but for the moment, my stories need daylight. I need sunshine.
I reached De Beauvoir square to the neck shredding mewl of an anguished child. The sirens rebounded off the elaborate Dutch gabbled houses that encircled me. The buildings’ windows were like eyes, the balled sun blinking back at me from the glass. In the grassy centre a man in a pale kaki gap t-shirt and matching shorts squatted down and attempted to reason with the howling toddler: ‘What? What is it? Do you not understand what I’m saying? Is Mummy only speaking to you in Latvian at home?’
Beyond him, sprawled in the combative sunshine, two pasty white girls exposed their bikinis and much more. They lay in the direction I walked, their hands rubbing along their thighs, lathering up sun cream. To not look at them would be to not look where I was going, to consciously have made the point of turning away, which would have highlighted that maybe I had been looking at them ourselves. The one stared back at me, almost daring me to do what I’m not entirely sure. Challenge her? Make an approach? Wink suggestively? Whatever, it all made me feel mildly perverted.
I broke her gaze and looked West. A block across was Lawford Road where George Orwell lived. It was there, according to one flatmate the critic Michael Flynn, he attempted to perfect his style of prose devoid of adjectives; a way of writing that couldn’t lie or be misconstrued. It was also there that he beat up his other flatmate, Rayner Heppenstall, with a shooting stick after the less successful author staggered home drunk, making bit too much of a row. It was too beautiful a day for Animal Farm or 1984 or Coming Up for Air to be found anywhere other than the depths of my mind, but George picked up the pace and fell in behind Iain and I.
The cracks were appearing in De Beauvoir’s happy calm façade and so I returned to the main road, and crossed into Haggerston proper. The two areas are often like two different worlds ripped apart by the Kingsland Road. A Hackney ying and yang. I slipped across the traffic, weaving between buses and holiday bikes and then underneath the rail route I was supposed to be following and not being distracted by its surroundings. The railway bridge arched high above. In the distance I could see a train approaching. I expected the framework to rattle, like the apocalypse. Instead, it proved to be annoyingly restrained; little more than a shimmer of fuzzed up air. All mildly disappointing.
‘You keep disappointing me, David,’ slurred the girl with the dyed red hair under her breath. As she spoke she shook her head and in doing so her whole body swayed awkwardly from side to side. I wondered if she might fall of her chair. ‘So disappointing.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I looked around and decided I didn’t want an argument, ‘ain’t I just that.’ I took myself far away to bed. What else could I have done? What else should I have said? "Sorry" wouldn't have worked. There was nothing to apologise for. Was there?
At home I was suddenly all alone: the couple upstairs had moved out; the old chap who lives downstairs was in the hospital. It was just me rattling around the rooms of the large house where sweat clung to the walls and yappy barks echoed from somewhere downstairs. I made noise just to drown out the silence, to pretend there was someone else who knew I was alive.
Back in Haggerston I unearthed the skeletons of low rise housing, semi-gutted by regeneration. A tiny square, designed pre-car, hosted a war memorial adjacent to a window boxed pub flush with colour that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the most remote village. It was immaculately rebuilt English of imagination.
Haggerston apparently has the highest crime figures in Hackney, yet I felt safe. Utterly relaxed as I sauntered along. Funny how the sunshine does that; how the brightness exposes everything yet gives it a sheen of enchantment and you a sense of immunity. It could have been so different on a drizzling November evening.
Of course, the whole rail route had been regenerated, really. Haggerston, like Dalston, like the others, is not a new station specially constructed for the East London line. It once was on the overland out of Liverpool Street’s disowned sibling Broad Street, a station discarded into the gutter to starve to death by a Victorian parent with too many mouths to feed. It had been resurrected. The East London Line feels as though it’s about giving things purpose once again.
After a while I reached the canal. Unlike the canals of my youth, those that wind their way through Birmingham and the surrounding area, the Regent’s canal has only recently been semi redesigned to serve a leisure function. Now it aches its way from east to west, interspersed with tiny metal foot bridges like camel’s humps, and occasional flushes of sandstoned pathways or carefully landscaped greenery past wonderful corners of London such as two of my favourite Islington pubs, the gorgeously maintained Island Queen and the bonkersly eccentric jazz bashing ale guzzling Wenlock Arms.
My earliest experience of this canal was further west, at the York Way bridge where the road drops down to the Kings Cross fork. Another glorious summer’s afternoon on some sort of art treasure hunt which also included table tennis in what was once a broken down MOT garage and is now, probably, a Nando’s chicken joint or a faceless glass drowned office block. Down on the towpath, a man in his thirties leant back against the wall, his arms splayed either side, his head arched upwards his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open in a gasp of exhalation. In front on him, on her knees a woman hitched her skirt up to reveal the tops of her stockings and wrapped her blood red lips around his erect penis. I’ve always presumed she was a prostitute, but perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps she was just his enthusiastic amour.
‘Afternoon,’ I should have said nonchalantly, but I was younger in those days and less conscious of the audience in my head requiring entertainment. I was more afraid of consequences. I hadn’t worked out that inertia was the worst course of action.
My friend, a sometime poet, was mugged along the Regent’s canal. Somewhere probably not too far from the bridge I had momentarily paused in the sunshine atop. Drunk on cold cheap cider after an equally warm afternoon in London Fields - or was it Victoria Park, I forget - he walked along in the late gloom until confronted. The ring on the finger of one of his assailants, probably worth more than anything the poet owned, split his cheek open. That’s the thing about the canal: Beautiful in the sunshine, lost and isolated with occasional flashes of crimson in the dark.
I tried to glance at my own reflection in the stagnant water, for I can be a little vain, but it was too thick and green to offer more than a dark, shivering shadow. A shape, possibly a person yet indistinct. Hovering between reality and fiction. Someone without an identity. Without a character.
On the opposite side of the canal were blocks of flats with silver steel doors and shattered windows that left jagged tears. People still lived inside, abandoned to the inevitability of the builders, lost to transition as their world is pulled apart. And yet, down the street a gaggle of small boys ran laughing, spraying water at each other out of empty coke bottles, lost in the moment with no aspiration other than to soak their opponent.
Is that it, I wondered? Am I too concerned about the big narrative arc? Am I afraid that, like mole-man, I will strive without ever actually finding what I am looking for? Without ever achieving anything? But perhaps it is the journey that is more important. Perhaps the end point would only reveal itself when the story’s threads had been fully unravelled and then rebound.
I found myself back on the main road where the sun made my skin feel flushed. Partly to seek shade and partly because I knew where it led to, George, Iain and I crossed the road and disappeared between two tower blocks down a side street. I felt that odd buzzing tingle again. Maybe I was foreshadowing, but then again it was Hoxton next.
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Dalston
The airy cool sheen of the station’s atrium felt like it belonged in Blade Runner. No, Star Trek. It was too swish and clean to be from out of Philip K Dick’s bleak imagination. Besides, the sky outside was flushed with light blue not the dreary perpetual rain that Ridley Scott gave the world. Wherever, it should have been from a place yet discovered. But there it was. Opening out across four patiently idling trains poised to dart down under the Thames and away to the distant South East. Mid-Saturday morning it was quiet. Just three people disembarked with me and only four more waited to clamber onboard. One of them was a young boy with tussled blonde locks, surely no more than eight or nine years old, who wore a pale blue t-shirt that screeched in white bold type ‘No I am not on ~*%^ing facebook!’
‘Nice,’ I mumbled to myself - and you can take that any way you choose to.
Dalston. I’d been there many times before, although not for over six months. Previously, it had been a bit of a foreign, far-flung land; a place only reachable by a complex network of public transport (or at the very least a train and a bus). Yet suddenly it felt so much closer, almost an extension of my, if I may, manor. It was the furthest northern tip of the bit of London I could claim as my own.
I stood on the edge of the Kingsland crossroads and blinked in the searing sunshine. Summer had fully arrived in all its oppressive bollock chaffing half blinding misery glory. A bus’ hydraulics hissed aggressively at the woman struggling to force the pushchair across the road. The carbon monoxide clung to the air before it settled in the back of my throat.
Iain Sinclair, in Lights Out For The Territory, called the Kingsland crossroads “bandit territory”; the runs down from Hackney to the perceived sanctuary of the City fraught with threats behind every lamppost. He was, of course, parodying the perception of a certain type of Londoner that anywhere North-East of Cannonbury or De Beaviour Town is unsafe; an alien land full of weird, less economically viable, folk. Sinclair hams up the stereotype by dropping a Haitian exile into the flat above the old bank, where in the dead of the night he practises ancient rites twinning Dalston with downtown Port Au Prince; two voodoo republics within the larger sea of their cities.
The odd thing is, Sinclair wasn’t writing a novel.
But, there are definitely ghosts in Dalston. Memories whispered in my ear that morning. Memories that I needed to exorcise once and for all. I turned right; I headed north.
Further up the road, past the sixties fronted mall straddling the east-west railway, past the lurid ménage of Ridley Road market, past the guys in bulky parkas with thick eastern European accents sitting and smoking heavily outside Tesco Metro, past the overflowing car boot sale in the Primary school playground and the Turkish restaurant in the building that, with its minarets, looks as though it was once a mosque, up where the road’s one way split cracks open north so there’s no way back south, I once sat in the car and waited.
It was well gone midnight as I slumped down in the driver’s seat, my stomach tucked underneath the steering wheel so that my eyes were level with the bottom of the window. The world service bumbled patriotically in the background. I can’t remember what about. Something about books and dying on the cusp of morning, perhaps.
There was a bang; an indecipherable crack like sated thunder and then shouts, but no words - just guttural noises. I sat up and looked about. I switched the radio off and coming down the street behind me, from somewhere deep inside the maze of terraced back rows, there was the rhythmic flapping of sneakers smacking against tarmac and as I blinked the young man hurtled past the car. Ahead, he burst out on the main road where his skin was flushed by the tired orange hue of streetlights. He paused in the middle of the road. For a moment it was like he was mesmerised by the headlights of oncoming traffic embedded in his memory; as though his brain couldn’t understand why there were no cars or buses or trucks angrily honking and swerving their way around him.
And then he was off. North. Always with the fucking north around Dalston.
As he disappeared from view I became aware of the slower. heady thudding of middle aged boots and a policeman bumbled on by, truncheon in hand, utility belt of modern restraint gadgets gently slapping against his hips. At the end of the road he paused too, but because he was knackered. His hands rested on his thighs and his shoulders, buried under the stab proof padding, slouched. He looked south then north and then grudgingly headed off in the correct direction.
I didn’t go quite as far north on that summer’s day. I didn’t need to. I knew what the road looked like. It was yet another run of windows and doors straight out onto the pavement. It could have been any of them; there was no difference between the streets. It was just a cipher; an image of a road rather than an actual place. Instead, I was distracted by the glimpse of a monolithic tower gasping out between the terraces. So I went for a closer look.
The church turned out to be St Matthias’ – the patron saint of alcoholics who replaced Judas Iscariot after thirty pieces of silver changed hands. The building felt derelict. A sensation enunciated by the wall that effectively sealed off the doors, but a sign helpfully pointed out that access could be gained from the rear. Built in 1856 it seemed extraordinarily large and dominating; all red brick aggression, dulled slightly by several generations of street dust hanging off its walls, and a cavernous central nave. Given that, according to the 1851 map of London that hangs on my kitchen wall, Dalston at the time was on the periphery of the city, little more than a rag tag hamlet clustered around a farm and a pub serving the north Essex and Hertfordshire horse drawn traffic pummelling capital bound down the road. When its foundations were laid, the architectural sketches must have shown it lording over the manor and eclipsing the skyline yet over the twentieth century it had become smothered by endless runs of houses and flats that snaked many miles further north before there’s even a sniff of greenbelt.
The church’s architect was William Butterford who designed dozens of churches, not least the cathedral in Melbourne and whose name seemed familiar. It took me a moment, but eventually I remembered the blue plaque on Bedford Square that bears his name and which I pass most days. A coincidence in a city built upon them.
As I turned to leave, I noticed that the church was cornered, unsurprisingly, on Matthias’ road which in turn runs down to Newington Green. I worked in Highbury for years and frequently lunched on cheap Turkish stew off Newington Green and more than once caught the twenty-one night bus back to New Cross through the darkened sulk of London. It was another reminder that the city which, when I first arrived, seemed implausibly sprawling was in fact contracting with every day that passed until eventually it would be small enough to fit in my head.
Finding my way back to the main road I recognised the block of flats and a couple who’d I’d completely forgotten had ever existed came back to life. I looked up at the windows where I thought they might have once lived, but probably didn’t, and wondered what had become of them. They were just more faces blurred into the haze of time. I remembered that his Aunt ran a private detective agency, but equally I failed to recall any of the conversations we must have had about it. I must have pried? Surely, I couldn’t have been so bloody English about it? And I remembered Mexican food at a birthday party and feeling like it didn’t matter how drunk I got because there were always constants to ground me.
Back on the main drag, a white haired guy with a dog curled at his feet was drinking his second pint of Guinness. The sunshine sparkled through the dregged froth clinging to the skin of the empty glass. It was just gone eleven o’clock in the morning.
And I thought about that night at the Shacklewell Arms. The time when we’d arrived at one in the morning, after several hours drinking potent Belgian beer down in Dove on Broadway Market, to see a friend of a friend’s band play. The band hooked themselves up in the back room, tucked away behind the serious business of serious faced men with serious sized stomachs and serious expressions on their faces as they stared down opponents across draughts boards. The six of us doubled the audience.
Someone passed me a pint of Guinness and it barely touched the sides as I fought dehydration.
Another stout found its way into my hands and I tried to pace that one. I decamped briefly to the bathroom to flush water around my aching eyelids. Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was the band, but I struggled to stay conscious during the set. They didn’t seem as vibrant nor as self-confidently artlessly cool, with their raybans hiding their twenty yard stare and the dangling unsmoked cigarettes tucked under guitar strings, as they had when they’d climbed atop the roof of the old Keith Talent gallery and the traffic on the side street had ground itself up amongst the swirling bodies below. In fact, I only perked up sometime around two when they played the one song I particularly liked. You know, the one with the catchy jangling picked up riff and the call-return vocals?
Nah? Well, it was a while ago now. Someone told me they’re not together anymore. Just another casualty of growing up.
And when we did finally fall out at Lord-knows-what-o’clock, again the Dalston road was eerily empty. It was wide and clear, stretching out north to the city’s hinterlands, like a prairie that had lost its mechanised herd.
Somewhere around Dalston is, allegedly, the square that the original writers based Eastenders on. Like I care, but it’s a “fact” that seems to be a source of at least a little local pride and morbid curiosity from some who have struggled to prise themselves off the sofa. After all, some people, I guess, love it:
‘Did you see Eastenders last night, babes?’ asked the girl with the dyed red hair who I thought I’d written out this narrative ages ago, but keeps coming back like a persistent dose of thrush.
‘No I fucking well didn’t,’ I replied and rolled my eyes, wishing I’d never answered the phone.
‘You should watch it. I’d love to able to chat about soaps with you.’
‘Would you now?’ I outrightly scowled.
‘God,’ she tutted, ‘I don’t know what’s up with you, but you’re being really grouchy these days. Cantankerous, even.’
‘I am not fucking cantankerous,’ I grunted back and reminded myself that ghosts come in different guises and don’t have to be ancient.
Slightly further south I stepped off the main road and onto the bustling concrete slabs of Gillett Square. People sat all around. One guy squatted on a door step stuffing MacDonald’s into his mouth, appearing to guiltily wince with each chew. Some perched on the low walls enjoying the sunshine. Most sat on brittle aluminium furniture, off which the sun winked like it had a plan, with their fashionably curved cups of macchiato in-between their fingers. I closed my eyes and the bright daylight and chatter faded away to be replaced by the downpour and the shuddering thumps of rain globules hitting those same tables and rebounding upwards.
We sat in the hazed deliberate gloom of the jazz bar on the far side of the square and watched the rain to avoid looking at each other. We talked in circles around a relationship that had died without truly saying anything. It had been almost a year – a year that had felt both indefinite and instantaneous – yet still the specifics were shunned in favour of generalisations and attempted similes. If we didn’t characterise it fully then neither of us could be culpable. It was only when I caught her briefly looking at me with what I imagined to be the edges of tears in her eyes did I realise that we had probably been talking about different people all along. People who had both once been us and yet had never been; people who were specific others yet still ultimately unknowns constrained by the stories in our heads.
In a stone’s throw from the jazz bar is Justin’s flat where I looked down from his living room window at the rust smeared east-west railway line as it nipped under the road. Across the tracks stood a signal box. I found it strangely calming to watch the man go about his nightly levered work under the sixty watt bare bulb glow. On the side of the box someone had scrawled ‘Go home artist scum.’ I looked at the green and purple hatcheted letters and I thought sour things about how perhaps not everyone was as welcoming and open minded as the cult setters would like us to believe.
And mere steps away from Justin’s flat, back on the main road, one Halloween I hung onto the pre-purchase ticket machine at the bus stop like it was a life raft for my body and soul as they drowned in white wine. I held it tight between my shuddering arms lest it float off south without me, closing my eyes against the swirling glittering lights of closed shop signs and headlights refracted in glass and curved around poised mannequins.
Back at Sinclair’s “front line” and left down the road to Hackney, past the multi-hued mural, there once was a flat within a converted warehouse where the concierge sulkily read fitness magazines and ignored the visitors becoming increasingly saturated in the rain. It was the place where I’d climbed out of the American’s window and pranced along the gutter rim, one foot unsteadily in front of the other under the clear night sky with now forgotten music jangling in my ears and bottles of this and that dangling from my fingertips.
What would have happened, I wondered in the sunshine, if I’d opened my arms out wide to the silver moon and let myself drift out onto the night air? Would I have simply fallen in a crumpled heap, cushioned by sodden cardboard boxes fly tipped in an alley? Or would there have been a breath of magic? A moment of imagined drama in a story not really being told?
I took my glasses off and blinked in the searing sun before rubbing my eyes clear. Questions that proffered no answers were useless. Dalston was full of endings. Or vignettes close to endings; scenes that wrapped up lives and brought thoughts and feelings to a close. There might not have been any answers to be found under its mottled semi-colonised streets, but at least by starting there I was able to make some claim over Dalston for beginnings. And in the doing so, a little chunk of the protective arrogant façade cracked; underneath which there was the faintest glimmer of light. Just a smidge, but it was a start.
I crossed the road and passed through a metaphorical barrier; a border of artificial clique that fizzed as it bushed against my skin. There weren’t any answers. There was only the journey; the finished line heading south stopping next at Haggerston.
‘Nice,’ I mumbled to myself - and you can take that any way you choose to.
Dalston. I’d been there many times before, although not for over six months. Previously, it had been a bit of a foreign, far-flung land; a place only reachable by a complex network of public transport (or at the very least a train and a bus). Yet suddenly it felt so much closer, almost an extension of my, if I may, manor. It was the furthest northern tip of the bit of London I could claim as my own.
I stood on the edge of the Kingsland crossroads and blinked in the searing sunshine. Summer had fully arrived in all its oppressive bollock chaffing half blinding misery glory. A bus’ hydraulics hissed aggressively at the woman struggling to force the pushchair across the road. The carbon monoxide clung to the air before it settled in the back of my throat.
Iain Sinclair, in Lights Out For The Territory, called the Kingsland crossroads “bandit territory”; the runs down from Hackney to the perceived sanctuary of the City fraught with threats behind every lamppost. He was, of course, parodying the perception of a certain type of Londoner that anywhere North-East of Cannonbury or De Beaviour Town is unsafe; an alien land full of weird, less economically viable, folk. Sinclair hams up the stereotype by dropping a Haitian exile into the flat above the old bank, where in the dead of the night he practises ancient rites twinning Dalston with downtown Port Au Prince; two voodoo republics within the larger sea of their cities.
The odd thing is, Sinclair wasn’t writing a novel.
But, there are definitely ghosts in Dalston. Memories whispered in my ear that morning. Memories that I needed to exorcise once and for all. I turned right; I headed north.
Further up the road, past the sixties fronted mall straddling the east-west railway, past the lurid ménage of Ridley Road market, past the guys in bulky parkas with thick eastern European accents sitting and smoking heavily outside Tesco Metro, past the overflowing car boot sale in the Primary school playground and the Turkish restaurant in the building that, with its minarets, looks as though it was once a mosque, up where the road’s one way split cracks open north so there’s no way back south, I once sat in the car and waited.
It was well gone midnight as I slumped down in the driver’s seat, my stomach tucked underneath the steering wheel so that my eyes were level with the bottom of the window. The world service bumbled patriotically in the background. I can’t remember what about. Something about books and dying on the cusp of morning, perhaps.
There was a bang; an indecipherable crack like sated thunder and then shouts, but no words - just guttural noises. I sat up and looked about. I switched the radio off and coming down the street behind me, from somewhere deep inside the maze of terraced back rows, there was the rhythmic flapping of sneakers smacking against tarmac and as I blinked the young man hurtled past the car. Ahead, he burst out on the main road where his skin was flushed by the tired orange hue of streetlights. He paused in the middle of the road. For a moment it was like he was mesmerised by the headlights of oncoming traffic embedded in his memory; as though his brain couldn’t understand why there were no cars or buses or trucks angrily honking and swerving their way around him.
And then he was off. North. Always with the fucking north around Dalston.
As he disappeared from view I became aware of the slower. heady thudding of middle aged boots and a policeman bumbled on by, truncheon in hand, utility belt of modern restraint gadgets gently slapping against his hips. At the end of the road he paused too, but because he was knackered. His hands rested on his thighs and his shoulders, buried under the stab proof padding, slouched. He looked south then north and then grudgingly headed off in the correct direction.
I didn’t go quite as far north on that summer’s day. I didn’t need to. I knew what the road looked like. It was yet another run of windows and doors straight out onto the pavement. It could have been any of them; there was no difference between the streets. It was just a cipher; an image of a road rather than an actual place. Instead, I was distracted by the glimpse of a monolithic tower gasping out between the terraces. So I went for a closer look.
The church turned out to be St Matthias’ – the patron saint of alcoholics who replaced Judas Iscariot after thirty pieces of silver changed hands. The building felt derelict. A sensation enunciated by the wall that effectively sealed off the doors, but a sign helpfully pointed out that access could be gained from the rear. Built in 1856 it seemed extraordinarily large and dominating; all red brick aggression, dulled slightly by several generations of street dust hanging off its walls, and a cavernous central nave. Given that, according to the 1851 map of London that hangs on my kitchen wall, Dalston at the time was on the periphery of the city, little more than a rag tag hamlet clustered around a farm and a pub serving the north Essex and Hertfordshire horse drawn traffic pummelling capital bound down the road. When its foundations were laid, the architectural sketches must have shown it lording over the manor and eclipsing the skyline yet over the twentieth century it had become smothered by endless runs of houses and flats that snaked many miles further north before there’s even a sniff of greenbelt.
The church’s architect was William Butterford who designed dozens of churches, not least the cathedral in Melbourne and whose name seemed familiar. It took me a moment, but eventually I remembered the blue plaque on Bedford Square that bears his name and which I pass most days. A coincidence in a city built upon them.
As I turned to leave, I noticed that the church was cornered, unsurprisingly, on Matthias’ road which in turn runs down to Newington Green. I worked in Highbury for years and frequently lunched on cheap Turkish stew off Newington Green and more than once caught the twenty-one night bus back to New Cross through the darkened sulk of London. It was another reminder that the city which, when I first arrived, seemed implausibly sprawling was in fact contracting with every day that passed until eventually it would be small enough to fit in my head.
Finding my way back to the main road I recognised the block of flats and a couple who’d I’d completely forgotten had ever existed came back to life. I looked up at the windows where I thought they might have once lived, but probably didn’t, and wondered what had become of them. They were just more faces blurred into the haze of time. I remembered that his Aunt ran a private detective agency, but equally I failed to recall any of the conversations we must have had about it. I must have pried? Surely, I couldn’t have been so bloody English about it? And I remembered Mexican food at a birthday party and feeling like it didn’t matter how drunk I got because there were always constants to ground me.
Back on the main drag, a white haired guy with a dog curled at his feet was drinking his second pint of Guinness. The sunshine sparkled through the dregged froth clinging to the skin of the empty glass. It was just gone eleven o’clock in the morning.
And I thought about that night at the Shacklewell Arms. The time when we’d arrived at one in the morning, after several hours drinking potent Belgian beer down in Dove on Broadway Market, to see a friend of a friend’s band play. The band hooked themselves up in the back room, tucked away behind the serious business of serious faced men with serious sized stomachs and serious expressions on their faces as they stared down opponents across draughts boards. The six of us doubled the audience.
Someone passed me a pint of Guinness and it barely touched the sides as I fought dehydration.
Another stout found its way into my hands and I tried to pace that one. I decamped briefly to the bathroom to flush water around my aching eyelids. Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was the band, but I struggled to stay conscious during the set. They didn’t seem as vibrant nor as self-confidently artlessly cool, with their raybans hiding their twenty yard stare and the dangling unsmoked cigarettes tucked under guitar strings, as they had when they’d climbed atop the roof of the old Keith Talent gallery and the traffic on the side street had ground itself up amongst the swirling bodies below. In fact, I only perked up sometime around two when they played the one song I particularly liked. You know, the one with the catchy jangling picked up riff and the call-return vocals?
Nah? Well, it was a while ago now. Someone told me they’re not together anymore. Just another casualty of growing up.
And when we did finally fall out at Lord-knows-what-o’clock, again the Dalston road was eerily empty. It was wide and clear, stretching out north to the city’s hinterlands, like a prairie that had lost its mechanised herd.
Somewhere around Dalston is, allegedly, the square that the original writers based Eastenders on. Like I care, but it’s a “fact” that seems to be a source of at least a little local pride and morbid curiosity from some who have struggled to prise themselves off the sofa. After all, some people, I guess, love it:
‘Did you see Eastenders last night, babes?’ asked the girl with the dyed red hair who I thought I’d written out this narrative ages ago, but keeps coming back like a persistent dose of thrush.
‘No I fucking well didn’t,’ I replied and rolled my eyes, wishing I’d never answered the phone.
‘You should watch it. I’d love to able to chat about soaps with you.’
‘Would you now?’ I outrightly scowled.
‘God,’ she tutted, ‘I don’t know what’s up with you, but you’re being really grouchy these days. Cantankerous, even.’
‘I am not fucking cantankerous,’ I grunted back and reminded myself that ghosts come in different guises and don’t have to be ancient.
Slightly further south I stepped off the main road and onto the bustling concrete slabs of Gillett Square. People sat all around. One guy squatted on a door step stuffing MacDonald’s into his mouth, appearing to guiltily wince with each chew. Some perched on the low walls enjoying the sunshine. Most sat on brittle aluminium furniture, off which the sun winked like it had a plan, with their fashionably curved cups of macchiato in-between their fingers. I closed my eyes and the bright daylight and chatter faded away to be replaced by the downpour and the shuddering thumps of rain globules hitting those same tables and rebounding upwards.
We sat in the hazed deliberate gloom of the jazz bar on the far side of the square and watched the rain to avoid looking at each other. We talked in circles around a relationship that had died without truly saying anything. It had been almost a year – a year that had felt both indefinite and instantaneous – yet still the specifics were shunned in favour of generalisations and attempted similes. If we didn’t characterise it fully then neither of us could be culpable. It was only when I caught her briefly looking at me with what I imagined to be the edges of tears in her eyes did I realise that we had probably been talking about different people all along. People who had both once been us and yet had never been; people who were specific others yet still ultimately unknowns constrained by the stories in our heads.
In a stone’s throw from the jazz bar is Justin’s flat where I looked down from his living room window at the rust smeared east-west railway line as it nipped under the road. Across the tracks stood a signal box. I found it strangely calming to watch the man go about his nightly levered work under the sixty watt bare bulb glow. On the side of the box someone had scrawled ‘Go home artist scum.’ I looked at the green and purple hatcheted letters and I thought sour things about how perhaps not everyone was as welcoming and open minded as the cult setters would like us to believe.
And mere steps away from Justin’s flat, back on the main road, one Halloween I hung onto the pre-purchase ticket machine at the bus stop like it was a life raft for my body and soul as they drowned in white wine. I held it tight between my shuddering arms lest it float off south without me, closing my eyes against the swirling glittering lights of closed shop signs and headlights refracted in glass and curved around poised mannequins.
Back at Sinclair’s “front line” and left down the road to Hackney, past the multi-hued mural, there once was a flat within a converted warehouse where the concierge sulkily read fitness magazines and ignored the visitors becoming increasingly saturated in the rain. It was the place where I’d climbed out of the American’s window and pranced along the gutter rim, one foot unsteadily in front of the other under the clear night sky with now forgotten music jangling in my ears and bottles of this and that dangling from my fingertips.
What would have happened, I wondered in the sunshine, if I’d opened my arms out wide to the silver moon and let myself drift out onto the night air? Would I have simply fallen in a crumpled heap, cushioned by sodden cardboard boxes fly tipped in an alley? Or would there have been a breath of magic? A moment of imagined drama in a story not really being told?
I took my glasses off and blinked in the searing sun before rubbing my eyes clear. Questions that proffered no answers were useless. Dalston was full of endings. Or vignettes close to endings; scenes that wrapped up lives and brought thoughts and feelings to a close. There might not have been any answers to be found under its mottled semi-colonised streets, but at least by starting there I was able to make some claim over Dalston for beginnings. And in the doing so, a little chunk of the protective arrogant façade cracked; underneath which there was the faintest glimmer of light. Just a smidge, but it was a start.
I crossed the road and passed through a metaphorical barrier; a border of artificial clique that fizzed as it bushed against my skin. There weren’t any answers. There was only the journey; the finished line heading south stopping next at Haggerston.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Returning East (a partial dramatisation).
When the East London Line finally reopened in full, I was outside the city being shot. As flabby faced professional toff Boris Johnson waved his Union Jack from the window of the first train and tried to take responsibility for something instigated years before he was elected to office, I was running through a forest with shells ricocheting off trees to either side. The calm silence of the woods and the glorious heat that became trapped in the green bowl were punctuated by the cack of gas cylinders pumping, metal bolts being thrust back and the occasional yelps of pain.
Lying in the unkempt grass in front of the ruined house, I knew I was surrounded. I just couldn’t see them. Too late, they’d seen me. A dozen pelts smacked into my exposed back and shoulders; I couldn’t even tell what direction they come from. All
I knew was the stinging sheer that pinged across my body.
‘Yargh’ I may well have shouted.
‘He’s hit! That’s it buddy,’ the guy in the orange t-shirt and the purple tinted plastic visor bounced across the undergrowth, ‘you’re out.’
I trudged away from the game zone, dragging my paint gun in my wake, the gentle rattle of unfired balls against the plastic magazine rolling in rhythm to my step. In the safe area, behind the protective netting, I unpeeled my bright yellow hood and special forces wannabe face mask. Sweat from the thirty degrees heat plastered my hair in dank streaks across my scalp. I sat down on the overturned log and let the adrenaline surge drain through my bloodstream and out my sweat pores. I chuckled, for from my memory came the bark of a thousand war film sergeants ‘Smoke ‘em, if you’ve got ‘em.’
‘Hey, Dave!’ someone said and I turned. At that moment, the juke box in my head hit emotionally epic and I felt like it was the flashpoint in the credits of a classic movie.
From a bias angle it seemed like the moment when the matinee idol turns to the camera and the right hand corner of his lips curl and goosebumps shiver through the audience. In that single moment, I felt like a hero.
‘The problem is, I’m not you,’ someone recently, helpfully, pointed out. ‘I can’t walk into a room and have the confidence to just stand up in front of people and talk.’
Ssh, I thought, it’s just a bluff. Don’t tell anyone, though.
I’m not a hero. Don’t be ridiculous. I may be arrogant and occasionally my mind plays tricks on me and I become mildly self-delusional, but nothing more.
Although, is it even arrogance when you’re just pretending?
And in the evening after we’d pretended to die a dozen times we raced around the mini roundabout outside the club; building dizziness and pushing aching legs, pulling the spiral tighter and tighter until the late night lights segued into the blackness and then became clear again as a single orange laso encasing us for protection as we giggled blissfully like children.
‘Show me your bruises, then,’ the girl with cropped tar black hair and an accent that oozed southern France said a couple days afterwards. I raised my left shirt sleeve to show the only one I could in public. It was the colour of rotten apples and snaked from my armpit to my elbow along the soft undercurrent of bicep. ‘Cool.’
Except it wasn’t really. It was just, well, life. Bruised skin. It’d heal. But then I do so like to be thought of as cool, especially in a detached Bogart-Marlowe couldn’t give a damn way, so I let it stand and tried to ignore the little accusing voice.
A few days later I fell out of the Big Chill Bar in the old Truman brewery. Quite what I was doing in a place either there or in any of its neighbours, places so metropolitanly groovy that they serve ironic cans of Red Stripe rather than real ale and all the other customers are ‘aving it big style under the neon glow of diluted pupils until they caught your eye and went all laconic and wiltingly cool, I can’t remember. I righted my stance and my jacket and decided to try and grab the last East London train of the night home. Shoreditch to Brockley in less than fifteen minutes. I glanced at my watch and felt the ground sway. Marvellous.
Except I couldn’t find the station.
‘So, you’re sure you know where we’re going?’ asked Rob a few hours earlier as we passed Miquita Oliver on the corner outside the Golden Heart and I’d internally wondered if she was now just paid to lurk around Shoreditch at all hours.
‘Sure,’ I’d winked back, implying that I slinked out there all the time when really I’d checked googlemaps before leaving. But at the end of the night I wandered around the top end of Brick Lane opposite the old Tea Factory and the corners where on sunny afternoons fucked up guys and flowered skirted girls perch with roll ups between their lips and tattered old suitcases open to display random wares and I could not find the damn entrance. I could see the railway line’s swanky new single piece metal bridge sparkling over my head, but the door proved to be more tricky.
When I popped out onto Commercial Street, and looped past the Commercial Tavern for the umpteenth time I wanted to strangle the unbidden memories of nursing a pint of Black Sheep in an idle early evening’s sunshine and watching Tracey Emin sauntering on by and – hey – hadn’t I once read an arrogant article by Jeanette Winterspoon about how she her little house somewhere nearby? I wanted them to shut up. They weren’t contributing anything, they weren’t helping and then the train rumbled its yawning way above my head and was gone without me.
I sulked through Spitalfields and snagged a bus down to London Bridge; heading home the old fashioned way. As the bus bent and twisted its was across the Thames I decided that a thorough exploration of the line was needed, given that the a-z to in my head had suddenly become out of date.
Over the next few days, I concocted a plan for the first free sunny day: I would ride the train all the way to Dalston and walk home, editing my mental map as I went. In the end, I bumped into the new line earlier than planned. On a late night dash from Baker Street home I jumped off the Jubilee Line at Canada Water. I soberly stood with my hands in my pockets, rocking on my heels and looked up the line to Rotherhithe , visible as it had always been just up the tunnel – as though when they’d dug the soft southern chalk out to cut the Jubilee Millennium extension the compass had been faulty and a new station had been erected to cover over the cock up. It had been two and a half years since the line had closed and probably much longer since I lurked on that platform, but suddenly I felt the snuffle of nostalgia sneak up upon me. When I boarded one of the swankily cooled orange and blued up trains home I felt the novelty of it not grinding to a halt at New Cross Gate, but it was still the old East London line. I wanted to experience the twenty-first century version – and, as it turned out – both re-evaluate my relationship with the East End and possibly deliver the final kicks to bring a bloody silence to the final ghosts that could be found there.
I hit shuffle on the memory jukebox and turned to shrug at the imaginary audience, because whilst logically I know I don’t live in a story sometimes it’s more fun to pretend.
Lying in the unkempt grass in front of the ruined house, I knew I was surrounded. I just couldn’t see them. Too late, they’d seen me. A dozen pelts smacked into my exposed back and shoulders; I couldn’t even tell what direction they come from. All
I knew was the stinging sheer that pinged across my body.
‘Yargh’ I may well have shouted.
‘He’s hit! That’s it buddy,’ the guy in the orange t-shirt and the purple tinted plastic visor bounced across the undergrowth, ‘you’re out.’
I trudged away from the game zone, dragging my paint gun in my wake, the gentle rattle of unfired balls against the plastic magazine rolling in rhythm to my step. In the safe area, behind the protective netting, I unpeeled my bright yellow hood and special forces wannabe face mask. Sweat from the thirty degrees heat plastered my hair in dank streaks across my scalp. I sat down on the overturned log and let the adrenaline surge drain through my bloodstream and out my sweat pores. I chuckled, for from my memory came the bark of a thousand war film sergeants ‘Smoke ‘em, if you’ve got ‘em.’
‘Hey, Dave!’ someone said and I turned. At that moment, the juke box in my head hit emotionally epic and I felt like it was the flashpoint in the credits of a classic movie.
From a bias angle it seemed like the moment when the matinee idol turns to the camera and the right hand corner of his lips curl and goosebumps shiver through the audience. In that single moment, I felt like a hero.
‘The problem is, I’m not you,’ someone recently, helpfully, pointed out. ‘I can’t walk into a room and have the confidence to just stand up in front of people and talk.’
Ssh, I thought, it’s just a bluff. Don’t tell anyone, though.
I’m not a hero. Don’t be ridiculous. I may be arrogant and occasionally my mind plays tricks on me and I become mildly self-delusional, but nothing more.
Although, is it even arrogance when you’re just pretending?
And in the evening after we’d pretended to die a dozen times we raced around the mini roundabout outside the club; building dizziness and pushing aching legs, pulling the spiral tighter and tighter until the late night lights segued into the blackness and then became clear again as a single orange laso encasing us for protection as we giggled blissfully like children.
‘Show me your bruises, then,’ the girl with cropped tar black hair and an accent that oozed southern France said a couple days afterwards. I raised my left shirt sleeve to show the only one I could in public. It was the colour of rotten apples and snaked from my armpit to my elbow along the soft undercurrent of bicep. ‘Cool.’
Except it wasn’t really. It was just, well, life. Bruised skin. It’d heal. But then I do so like to be thought of as cool, especially in a detached Bogart-Marlowe couldn’t give a damn way, so I let it stand and tried to ignore the little accusing voice.
A few days later I fell out of the Big Chill Bar in the old Truman brewery. Quite what I was doing in a place either there or in any of its neighbours, places so metropolitanly groovy that they serve ironic cans of Red Stripe rather than real ale and all the other customers are ‘aving it big style under the neon glow of diluted pupils until they caught your eye and went all laconic and wiltingly cool, I can’t remember. I righted my stance and my jacket and decided to try and grab the last East London train of the night home. Shoreditch to Brockley in less than fifteen minutes. I glanced at my watch and felt the ground sway. Marvellous.
Except I couldn’t find the station.
‘So, you’re sure you know where we’re going?’ asked Rob a few hours earlier as we passed Miquita Oliver on the corner outside the Golden Heart and I’d internally wondered if she was now just paid to lurk around Shoreditch at all hours.
‘Sure,’ I’d winked back, implying that I slinked out there all the time when really I’d checked googlemaps before leaving. But at the end of the night I wandered around the top end of Brick Lane opposite the old Tea Factory and the corners where on sunny afternoons fucked up guys and flowered skirted girls perch with roll ups between their lips and tattered old suitcases open to display random wares and I could not find the damn entrance. I could see the railway line’s swanky new single piece metal bridge sparkling over my head, but the door proved to be more tricky.
When I popped out onto Commercial Street, and looped past the Commercial Tavern for the umpteenth time I wanted to strangle the unbidden memories of nursing a pint of Black Sheep in an idle early evening’s sunshine and watching Tracey Emin sauntering on by and – hey – hadn’t I once read an arrogant article by Jeanette Winterspoon about how she her little house somewhere nearby? I wanted them to shut up. They weren’t contributing anything, they weren’t helping and then the train rumbled its yawning way above my head and was gone without me.
I sulked through Spitalfields and snagged a bus down to London Bridge; heading home the old fashioned way. As the bus bent and twisted its was across the Thames I decided that a thorough exploration of the line was needed, given that the a-z to in my head had suddenly become out of date.
Over the next few days, I concocted a plan for the first free sunny day: I would ride the train all the way to Dalston and walk home, editing my mental map as I went. In the end, I bumped into the new line earlier than planned. On a late night dash from Baker Street home I jumped off the Jubilee Line at Canada Water. I soberly stood with my hands in my pockets, rocking on my heels and looked up the line to Rotherhithe , visible as it had always been just up the tunnel – as though when they’d dug the soft southern chalk out to cut the Jubilee Millennium extension the compass had been faulty and a new station had been erected to cover over the cock up. It had been two and a half years since the line had closed and probably much longer since I lurked on that platform, but suddenly I felt the snuffle of nostalgia sneak up upon me. When I boarded one of the swankily cooled orange and blued up trains home I felt the novelty of it not grinding to a halt at New Cross Gate, but it was still the old East London line. I wanted to experience the twenty-first century version – and, as it turned out – both re-evaluate my relationship with the East End and possibly deliver the final kicks to bring a bloody silence to the final ghosts that could be found there.
I hit shuffle on the memory jukebox and turned to shrug at the imaginary audience, because whilst logically I know I don’t live in a story sometimes it’s more fun to pretend.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
We'll be back after these messages...
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
You
This is not a story.
This is not a novel or a film; it is not a play or even a short story. You have been reading a narrative arc, of sorts, but it does not reach any conclusion here.
“Short stories are a very end-centric form,” said the American writer Lorrie Moore when I watched her being interviewed at the Guardian’s sparkling new offices.
She’s right, of course. They are.
They are because a short story is, essentially, the exploration of a moment and the contextualisation of events immediately preceding that moment. Five thousand words, or so, cached into a dramatic finale of a life unseen. The reader is rarely gifted an insight into the world beyond that point. Novels can be a collection of moments culminating in a larger one, but still the temptation, for the writer, is to wrap things up neatly rather than to let it hang; to fictionalise. For the author feels almost obliged to tidy away their toys, whilst the components of a short story are left scattered around the living room waiting for an unsuspecting visitor to stand on and twist their ankle. Completion rather than a moment paused for eternity.
This might be a moment, but it is not a fiction.
Nor is it the truth.
It just is.
Life is a sequence of moments both big and small; our individual experiences of the world are defined by the actions we take and their consequences. It is the immediate, the intimate and the grander scale. It is the words hissed in the heat of the moment that can’t be taken back and the ash spewing from the volcano several thousand miles away that bleaches everyone’s horizon all woven together in a single tapestry.
Each of us carves our personal history; trailblazing our existences in a sparkling shower of gold dust; each with different highlights burned into our memories. When we glance back, everything blurring into a montage for the movie of our lives, we emphasise different things from those who shared them. We remember events in a different way – be it the way she smiled across a crowded room which you took to be adoration and she intended to be scarcely disguised disdain; or the way the stars glinted in the cool evening air above the sea but the person you were with was already thinking about being home in bed.
The history that lingers may be written by the winners, but first it has to be written by individuals.
When I close my eyes at night there are bursting starlights under the lids.
A friend of mine tells the story that when she was a small girl she and her sister used to take pretend scissors and cut imaginary holes in the fabric of space before thrusting their arms through the holes and exploring, by feel, the world on the other side; always careful not to cut too large a hole, lest they slipped through.
I think I know what’s on the other side.
And I don’t think mystical scissors are what are required to access it. I think all it needs is a little touch. A gentle push with your fingertips and the air bubbles up, releasing the past laced with the fiction of interpretation.
‘Whilst I’m enjoying these discourses on the history of Britain,’ my friend chuckled, ‘what are you actually trying to say?’
Maybe that history is everywhere. That it isn’t in the past as such, it isn’t a physical place that we can’t visit because the aerospace is closed, that it isn’t something that can be packaged up and ignored or triumphed as we see fit, but that it’s omnipresent. Our own history and that of the country and our friends and families and even the people who we feel it is “our patriotic duty to kick in the nuts” are defined by the same things.
In order to truly understand where we are going and what we are doing we need appreciate the paths we’ve already travelled and we need to understand that those routes are covered by the confusion of imagination. With every retelling the tales become embellished. The words slip further away from the originals they were tracing over and then a new history comes into being; one defined by a fictional gloss.
Nothing changes. Everything changes. Everything has a starting point.
I don’t believe in Broken Britain. I don’t believe in the Nanny State. I don’t believe that there are swarms of illegal immigrants living in luxury on benefits. I don’t believe that political correctness has ever gone mad.
This is not to say that I don’t realise that sometimes people take well meaning legislation too far, that there aren’t people living Britain who didn’t bother passing through passport control, that the government’s advice on lifestyle choices doesn’t occasionally border on the relentless or that there aren’t large sections of society living below the poverty line. I’m not stupid. I’m just questioning the language that’s used to suggest that it’s something new; something different.
It’s about recognising the context, understanding the facts. It’s about not seeing everything from your own point of view. It’s about decoding the interpretation.
‘You know her, right,’ the girl at my side giggled.
‘Mm-hm,’ I replied not really paying attention.
‘Well, right, you know, she don’t even have a tv. Can you believe that, babes? I think that’s proper sad, I do. Feel really sorry for her.’
‘Have you considered that she might not want a tv, not that she can’t afford to buy one.’
She looked at me like I was mad. ‘Why would she not want a tv? Anyway, babes, you and me should go for a drink again sometime.’
‘Mmm,’ I tried to appear as disinterested as humanly possible.
‘The things is,’ the young guy with the carefully manufactured facial hair, ‘when you’re in a relationship you need to have time to yourself, yeah?’
‘Mm-hmm,’ I sipped at my pint.
‘You need to have your own interests too, not spend your whole lives in each other’s pockets.’
‘Why are we having this conversation?’
‘I’m just trying to give you some advice, the benefit of my experience. I’ve got a lot of tips I can pass on. After all, I’ve been
with my girlfriend for nearly two years now.’
‘Uh-huh, two years.’
We stood chest deep in the Atlantic, as my feet turned translucent with cold, and waited for the waves. Even when they weren’t rising, even when there was little more than the gentle lull of the current, the merest rise of water would induce excitement.
‘Wave! Wave! It’s going to be a monster!’
And we rode it home as best we could because we’d gone there to surf and surf we would irregardless of the weather.
See? Context.
Let’s try some facts. A single asylum seeker gets £19 in food vouchers a week and £10 in cash. Anyone tried living on less than £30 a week in London recently? A single bus ticket is £2 a go.
590,000 people arrived to live in the UK in 2008, but at the same time 430,000 left. A lot, but not as many as some would have you believe and they’re not all coming to live in a road near you. If all Eastern Europeans were deported numerous industry, such as agriculture and care homes, would collapse – or that the very least suffer major recruitment issues. After sterling weakened against the Euro most of the Poles went home to where they could earn more money and be closer to their families. Economic migrants come and go where the work is the best paid and we get to do it too.
The oft-repeated message to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables and to exercise regularly can become irritating, but when people still claim to do so is “impossible” or they refuse to eat any foodstuff coloured green. Health warnings are there for our benefit. Smoking kills and the number of people smoking has dropped significantly over the past two decades. Alcohol, no matter how much I enjoy it, is bad for me. It’s important that I realise what I’m doing to myself. Ignorance is not bliss, because it does not change the result. If the government removed all advice and health warnings and regulation - removed the so-called Nanny State – then the ultimate end points include the removal of speed limits in urban areas and unregulated firearm ownership.
Apparently, we don’t manufacture anything anymore. Some might say that we are a nation built on shops and telephone banked offices, yet we’re still ranked as the seventh largest manufacturing nation in the world. In the past week I’ve seen plenty of examples of industry, be it Port Talbot belching fire and smoke across the Welsh coastline from the oil refinery, or every second car in Brigend bearing a Rockwool Insulation parking permit, or the Tarmac quarry crunching stone in the shadows of the Heathrow flyover, or the cranes tinkling in the sunset above London Bridge. The country’s alive if you open your eyes.
Britain is not broken. There is a colossal wealth gap which has widened under Labour, but this does not mean the country is crocked. We’ve always had those who are poor; we’ve always had people who are unfairly disadvantaged; there have always been people who had revelled in an offensive, abusive lifestyle, who are violent and cruel. This does not make our society broken. To call it such, suggests that it is beyond repair, that we need to cast them aside and buy a new populace.
Look around the world at how much worse it is in Zimbabwe, in Thailand, in Kyrgyzstan, in Somalia, even, to a lesser extent, in Greece. To begin to define a country as broken you need to be looking for things like violent insurrection, corrupt absolutionist government, hyper-inflation and/or bankruptcy, a complete breakdown of national law whereby the local militia with the heaviest ordinance calls the shots. On my travels around the country I see none of this.
Yes, it is a tragedy when teenage boys torture, sexually abuse and murder one of their peers or the guardians of a child systematically starve and beat a baby to death, but is not indicative of a complete and utter collapse of society. To suggest it is, is to give up, to raise the drawbridge and exist with an isolationist bubble of denial.
It has been suggested that I’ve been trying to force reasons to vote Labour down people’s throats. That has never been the intention. Labour have done a lot of things that I believe would not have been delivered under, for example, a Conservative government. Sure Start, the minimum wage, the fostering of a better cultural attitudes towards gay men and women, heavy investment in the arts, decisive action in the face of economic collapse, better maternity and paternity rights, tax credits, the rebuilding of the NHS to a far-from-perfect, yet still exemplary healthcare service - don’t believe living standards are better in 2010 than they were in 1997? You know, what go and look the facts up yourself. Go to the national office of statistics website, ask questions research, look for answers, compare and contrast, that’s the point.
It is not for me to suggest who anyone should vote for.
You vote for who you want, that’s your right, but try to fully understand what you are voting for and why. Take UKIP, for example, if you solely listen to their campaign then removing ourselves from the European Union would appear to magically reform the country overnight. It won’t. And whilst there are disadvantages to compliance with European law, there are plenty of advantages too – ease of trade, ease of movement around the continent, human rights etc. Understand what you are voting for and consider both sides of the argument before making a decision. Check the validity of the messages all the Parties send you. And if you must vote for BNP, you racist shit you, then realise that you are being judgemental about someone’s character on the basis of their skin colour alone and do not be surprised if people make similar, derogatory judgements about you in return.
There has been much talk of tactical voting to keep the Tories out in recent days. It’s a valiant option, but I do feel that if you genuinely believe in the policies espoused by a minority party then you should vote for them even if they are extremely unlikely to win the seat contested. Why? Because with your vote, they are one more vote likely to win and that’s the point. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You want change, you want the old guard out, then fine – let it build systematically. Stop being so twenty-first century for a moment and realise that it will take more than a single moment.
For that’s what Thursday is. A moment. A dramatic moment at the end of somebody’s story, but I’m not writing it. Nor is the BBC or Murdoch or the Guardian or any of the other media houses. Not even the politicians are writing the script. You are.
But then this isn’t a story and on Friday morning, whatever happens, the moment will have passed and the world continues and we are still here.
This is not a novel or a film; it is not a play or even a short story. You have been reading a narrative arc, of sorts, but it does not reach any conclusion here.
“Short stories are a very end-centric form,” said the American writer Lorrie Moore when I watched her being interviewed at the Guardian’s sparkling new offices.
She’s right, of course. They are.
They are because a short story is, essentially, the exploration of a moment and the contextualisation of events immediately preceding that moment. Five thousand words, or so, cached into a dramatic finale of a life unseen. The reader is rarely gifted an insight into the world beyond that point. Novels can be a collection of moments culminating in a larger one, but still the temptation, for the writer, is to wrap things up neatly rather than to let it hang; to fictionalise. For the author feels almost obliged to tidy away their toys, whilst the components of a short story are left scattered around the living room waiting for an unsuspecting visitor to stand on and twist their ankle. Completion rather than a moment paused for eternity.
This might be a moment, but it is not a fiction.
Nor is it the truth.
It just is.
Life is a sequence of moments both big and small; our individual experiences of the world are defined by the actions we take and their consequences. It is the immediate, the intimate and the grander scale. It is the words hissed in the heat of the moment that can’t be taken back and the ash spewing from the volcano several thousand miles away that bleaches everyone’s horizon all woven together in a single tapestry.
Each of us carves our personal history; trailblazing our existences in a sparkling shower of gold dust; each with different highlights burned into our memories. When we glance back, everything blurring into a montage for the movie of our lives, we emphasise different things from those who shared them. We remember events in a different way – be it the way she smiled across a crowded room which you took to be adoration and she intended to be scarcely disguised disdain; or the way the stars glinted in the cool evening air above the sea but the person you were with was already thinking about being home in bed.
The history that lingers may be written by the winners, but first it has to be written by individuals.
When I close my eyes at night there are bursting starlights under the lids.
A friend of mine tells the story that when she was a small girl she and her sister used to take pretend scissors and cut imaginary holes in the fabric of space before thrusting their arms through the holes and exploring, by feel, the world on the other side; always careful not to cut too large a hole, lest they slipped through.
I think I know what’s on the other side.
And I don’t think mystical scissors are what are required to access it. I think all it needs is a little touch. A gentle push with your fingertips and the air bubbles up, releasing the past laced with the fiction of interpretation.
‘Whilst I’m enjoying these discourses on the history of Britain,’ my friend chuckled, ‘what are you actually trying to say?’
Maybe that history is everywhere. That it isn’t in the past as such, it isn’t a physical place that we can’t visit because the aerospace is closed, that it isn’t something that can be packaged up and ignored or triumphed as we see fit, but that it’s omnipresent. Our own history and that of the country and our friends and families and even the people who we feel it is “our patriotic duty to kick in the nuts” are defined by the same things.
In order to truly understand where we are going and what we are doing we need appreciate the paths we’ve already travelled and we need to understand that those routes are covered by the confusion of imagination. With every retelling the tales become embellished. The words slip further away from the originals they were tracing over and then a new history comes into being; one defined by a fictional gloss.
Nothing changes. Everything changes. Everything has a starting point.
I don’t believe in Broken Britain. I don’t believe in the Nanny State. I don’t believe that there are swarms of illegal immigrants living in luxury on benefits. I don’t believe that political correctness has ever gone mad.
This is not to say that I don’t realise that sometimes people take well meaning legislation too far, that there aren’t people living Britain who didn’t bother passing through passport control, that the government’s advice on lifestyle choices doesn’t occasionally border on the relentless or that there aren’t large sections of society living below the poverty line. I’m not stupid. I’m just questioning the language that’s used to suggest that it’s something new; something different.
It’s about recognising the context, understanding the facts. It’s about not seeing everything from your own point of view. It’s about decoding the interpretation.
‘You know her, right,’ the girl at my side giggled.
‘Mm-hm,’ I replied not really paying attention.
‘Well, right, you know, she don’t even have a tv. Can you believe that, babes? I think that’s proper sad, I do. Feel really sorry for her.’
‘Have you considered that she might not want a tv, not that she can’t afford to buy one.’
She looked at me like I was mad. ‘Why would she not want a tv? Anyway, babes, you and me should go for a drink again sometime.’
‘Mmm,’ I tried to appear as disinterested as humanly possible.
‘The things is,’ the young guy with the carefully manufactured facial hair, ‘when you’re in a relationship you need to have time to yourself, yeah?’
‘Mm-hmm,’ I sipped at my pint.
‘You need to have your own interests too, not spend your whole lives in each other’s pockets.’
‘Why are we having this conversation?’
‘I’m just trying to give you some advice, the benefit of my experience. I’ve got a lot of tips I can pass on. After all, I’ve been
with my girlfriend for nearly two years now.’
‘Uh-huh, two years.’
We stood chest deep in the Atlantic, as my feet turned translucent with cold, and waited for the waves. Even when they weren’t rising, even when there was little more than the gentle lull of the current, the merest rise of water would induce excitement.
‘Wave! Wave! It’s going to be a monster!’
And we rode it home as best we could because we’d gone there to surf and surf we would irregardless of the weather.
See? Context.
Let’s try some facts. A single asylum seeker gets £19 in food vouchers a week and £10 in cash. Anyone tried living on less than £30 a week in London recently? A single bus ticket is £2 a go.
590,000 people arrived to live in the UK in 2008, but at the same time 430,000 left. A lot, but not as many as some would have you believe and they’re not all coming to live in a road near you. If all Eastern Europeans were deported numerous industry, such as agriculture and care homes, would collapse – or that the very least suffer major recruitment issues. After sterling weakened against the Euro most of the Poles went home to where they could earn more money and be closer to their families. Economic migrants come and go where the work is the best paid and we get to do it too.
The oft-repeated message to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables and to exercise regularly can become irritating, but when people still claim to do so is “impossible” or they refuse to eat any foodstuff coloured green. Health warnings are there for our benefit. Smoking kills and the number of people smoking has dropped significantly over the past two decades. Alcohol, no matter how much I enjoy it, is bad for me. It’s important that I realise what I’m doing to myself. Ignorance is not bliss, because it does not change the result. If the government removed all advice and health warnings and regulation - removed the so-called Nanny State – then the ultimate end points include the removal of speed limits in urban areas and unregulated firearm ownership.
Apparently, we don’t manufacture anything anymore. Some might say that we are a nation built on shops and telephone banked offices, yet we’re still ranked as the seventh largest manufacturing nation in the world. In the past week I’ve seen plenty of examples of industry, be it Port Talbot belching fire and smoke across the Welsh coastline from the oil refinery, or every second car in Brigend bearing a Rockwool Insulation parking permit, or the Tarmac quarry crunching stone in the shadows of the Heathrow flyover, or the cranes tinkling in the sunset above London Bridge. The country’s alive if you open your eyes.
Britain is not broken. There is a colossal wealth gap which has widened under Labour, but this does not mean the country is crocked. We’ve always had those who are poor; we’ve always had people who are unfairly disadvantaged; there have always been people who had revelled in an offensive, abusive lifestyle, who are violent and cruel. This does not make our society broken. To call it such, suggests that it is beyond repair, that we need to cast them aside and buy a new populace.
Look around the world at how much worse it is in Zimbabwe, in Thailand, in Kyrgyzstan, in Somalia, even, to a lesser extent, in Greece. To begin to define a country as broken you need to be looking for things like violent insurrection, corrupt absolutionist government, hyper-inflation and/or bankruptcy, a complete breakdown of national law whereby the local militia with the heaviest ordinance calls the shots. On my travels around the country I see none of this.
Yes, it is a tragedy when teenage boys torture, sexually abuse and murder one of their peers or the guardians of a child systematically starve and beat a baby to death, but is not indicative of a complete and utter collapse of society. To suggest it is, is to give up, to raise the drawbridge and exist with an isolationist bubble of denial.
It has been suggested that I’ve been trying to force reasons to vote Labour down people’s throats. That has never been the intention. Labour have done a lot of things that I believe would not have been delivered under, for example, a Conservative government. Sure Start, the minimum wage, the fostering of a better cultural attitudes towards gay men and women, heavy investment in the arts, decisive action in the face of economic collapse, better maternity and paternity rights, tax credits, the rebuilding of the NHS to a far-from-perfect, yet still exemplary healthcare service - don’t believe living standards are better in 2010 than they were in 1997? You know, what go and look the facts up yourself. Go to the national office of statistics website, ask questions research, look for answers, compare and contrast, that’s the point.
It is not for me to suggest who anyone should vote for.
You vote for who you want, that’s your right, but try to fully understand what you are voting for and why. Take UKIP, for example, if you solely listen to their campaign then removing ourselves from the European Union would appear to magically reform the country overnight. It won’t. And whilst there are disadvantages to compliance with European law, there are plenty of advantages too – ease of trade, ease of movement around the continent, human rights etc. Understand what you are voting for and consider both sides of the argument before making a decision. Check the validity of the messages all the Parties send you. And if you must vote for BNP, you racist shit you, then realise that you are being judgemental about someone’s character on the basis of their skin colour alone and do not be surprised if people make similar, derogatory judgements about you in return.
There has been much talk of tactical voting to keep the Tories out in recent days. It’s a valiant option, but I do feel that if you genuinely believe in the policies espoused by a minority party then you should vote for them even if they are extremely unlikely to win the seat contested. Why? Because with your vote, they are one more vote likely to win and that’s the point. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You want change, you want the old guard out, then fine – let it build systematically. Stop being so twenty-first century for a moment and realise that it will take more than a single moment.
For that’s what Thursday is. A moment. A dramatic moment at the end of somebody’s story, but I’m not writing it. Nor is the BBC or Murdoch or the Guardian or any of the other media houses. Not even the politicians are writing the script. You are.
But then this isn’t a story and on Friday morning, whatever happens, the moment will have passed and the world continues and we are still here.
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