a Dirty Martini

We Hear the Christmas Angels

The first week of December is our company's traditional Carol Service attendance.  Tucked away in Soho the pretty church and newly landscaped gardens are 2 minutes walk from the sex shops, gay bars, not so gay bars and many restaurants sprinkled round the area. 

The always-changing menagerie of Soho includes media types, tourists, prostitutes, theatre patrons, restaurant workers, shoppers, drug dealers, club-goers, beggars and sex-shop connoisseurs of all ages, races and sexual orientations. From where I stand, giggle and sing I can usually see some raggedy looking half naked teenage prostitute loitering in the freezing cold in the doorway of a seedy strip joint come lapdancing bar next to a mini cab rank.  Such is Soho that it's the same place I stand opposite with my Hungarian best friend Krisztina, sipping a cocktail on balmy Summer evenings, simultaneously ripping the piss out of punters darting inside and up the stairs to visit the "model - 3rd floor". She has stuffed toys in her window, up there on the 3rd floor, behind the greyish white lace curtain.

The gardens with it's little church are surrounded by a fence made from 16 oak tusks supporting a tall steel mesh that by day appears to be a security fence and at night is all lit up in pretty colours. It blends in with the neon that bounces off the restaurants, cafes, bars and shops.  The gardens were originally part of St Anne's churchyard and contain a massive 60,000 bodies, including William Hazlet.  It also has a memorial to the Soho nail bomb victims, since it is near the Admiral Duncan pub where the bomb went off.  An evening I remember well for not being able to raise my sister on her mobile phone, when she had been out for an evening's drinking in that same street.

The idea behind the carol service is to raise money for local residents, make the most of the brave new landscaping and regeneration project, make some kids happy. That sort of thing.

They handed out song sheets and coffee. And we sang some not too politically correct carols.  I enjoyed it. The French girl in our office was a bit thrown by Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer which is funny ("what the hell is theees?"). They lit the pretty tree. Santa appeared from behind a Plain tree. A group of little boys surged towards him like a swarm of crazy bees. Seconds later the little boys rushed back in the opposite direction yelling "That aieen't Santa! ee's a fake!". And to round it off a really pretty little brown haired girl aged about 6 darted around us chasing after a little boy, yelling "come 'ere ya littawl fucker!"

Not exactly silent night. But very London.

Black and White

The book store in the street where I live, winter 2007

 

Random Thoughts & Links

Whoever made the switch from Ken's bendy buses on my route to the brand new double decker complete with almost HD colour CCTV inside, allowing you to check the top deck without venturing up, would get a kiss from me. A big kiss.

Ken Livingstone is still a c***

The women in my office will always complain it's cold even with the thermo set to 100 and while we all sit there sweating away with an office hotter than the sun

This is deeply deeply depressing:- America wakes up to the shift in global power

We will probably never know what really happened to Meredith Kercher. Her murder sickens me. Considering all the DNA that must have been available and suspects in custody at the time, that bit baffles me. Beyond reasonable doubt?

Nevertheless the accusation of anti Americanism is pure and utter crap. Two of the jurors cried when sentencing was read out. They were clearly not motivated by any visceral hatred.

Spooks is my favourite thing on tv. House is now in second place. And my guilty pleasures are the BBC's Life and the Antique Roadshow. 'Life' is simply stunning and watching the making of it is just as much of a thrill. Those people at the BBC are a supremely talented bunch. I thought their Blue Planet was amazing but this is even better.

The end of Sunshine makes me cry. All things Space-related make me feel small. Here's a clip from the greatest and most underrated film ever

Laura is comedy genius. Funniest blogger on the net

I wish we still queued. People always ripped the piss out of Brits for this solemn orderly process but now it's gone, eschewed in favour of casual modern manners by people embarrassed to be British, I miss it. 

I love listening to the church bells across Islington on Sunday mornings as I make my coffee.

Hot water with apple cider vinegar honey and lemon first thing in the morning does help speed up your metabolism and make you feel good. And warm milk with a teaspoon of honey before bed does help you sleep. Thanks for all your help Organic Pharmacy.

This is simply wonderful. Modern Heroes.  

I really want Prince William and Kate Middleton to get married. She's lovely.

Next week is going to be hell in blue. Cryptic work thing. Basically it's going to be the busiest week of the year for me :(

I'm addicted to Farmville. It relaxes me.

The Open Road London

Things that stood out apart from the quietly obvious and the oceans of time? There are a lot less people and way less traffic. Best of all the men are wearing hats and noone is wearing bloody jeans or t-shirts and rucksacks. These days perhaps we have way more road markings and traffic lights but the monuments are much much cleaner. Poor old Nelson looked a bit grubby, as did Tower Bridge back then. As you all know by now, I'm still in love with my city. Watching this I feel sentimental for a time I never knew.

thanks to Little Man in a Toque for the video

The World Turned Upside Down

Harry Brown. Starring Michael Caine and a number of kids from an infamous housing estate in the Elephant and Castle where the film's story is set. I love the references to the area and the Old Kent Road.  I know it well.  If the roads we drive around in our lives are like bones, the Old Kent Road would be a solid backbone in mine. 

It filled me with melancholy. As a teen it was the link road between south London where I was born and grew up and the places I wanted to be. It  connected me to the various clubs, bars and buzzingness of central London. To life. It's a long dreery dual carriageway over what used to be the old Roman road that ran from Dover to Holyhead. Chaucer's pilgrims travelled it on their way to Canterbury. It looks lifeless but it isn't. Inside the houses and estates there is life. The kind noone cares for. 

It winds, vertebrae by vertebrae, from the Elephant and Castle all the way to New Cross Gate, with Peckham , its gangs and bloody shootings on a regular basis, and a long bank of industrial estates and business parks flanking it all the way, like ugly mottled grey flesh. Huge old pubs like the Old Kent Gin Palace once lingered awkwardly, harking back to a Victorian era when Gin palaces were Las Vegas beautiful. The Palace became frequented by mafia types before being obliterated to a hiccuping rest. 

Now it's McDonalds, KFC, Toys R Us, hoardings, adverts, empty car parks, run down shops, Nail bars and seedy massage parlours.  A newsagents' window has a "tall, exotic, Brazilian beauty" offering the "ultimate massage".  It's a safari park of world cuisines too.  Every possible type of international cuisine you can imagine from South American to Polish to Ethiopian and the red and white sign advertising an undying devotion to halal. The El Aztec catering service for tacos unlimited, the Parillada del Sur, dishing out masses of meat "tipica Bolivia". Not to mention the Auberge patisserie, the Bar Afrik, the Tawfiq Cappucino, El Paso and El Turkistan.   There's a Tesco, of course. Like some kind of mighty food church. Plus The Ryad Halal Emporium and the Bangladeshi grocer.  There's also the  Miami Health Centre, the Mount Zion Church, "the dwelling place of God". And the Bali Car Wash.

The commercial offerings reflect the disjointed society. Immigrant and underclass, grubby and brutal, just as they feature in the film. In the underclass little distinguishes men and women in just how violent and detached and brutally ugly they have become. I hate them. Apathy and stagnation, a lack of will to live and to make the most of life, grimy tracksuits drinking Special Brew, chain-smoking Rothmans and swearing at kids, or worse behind closed doors, wandering aimlessly down the road with a head most of the way inside a family sized bucket of KFC, their daily food staple.  Gangs, immigrants, hoodies rub shoulders with one another uneasily. I twice encountered a machete wielding Jamaican on my dart from work to the train station, where I would sit in the bleak November chill, avidly reading Black Hawk Down, unaware that half of Mogadishu had wound up living not 10 feet from me as a result of that tragic US exploit.  There used to be urban myths about Russian arms deals at the drive through McDonalds. I don't think they were myths.

The long and giggly drive back from the Ministry of Sound club after an amazing 12 hours of glittery glowing bliss made the journey back seem irrelevant and surreal. The inside of that club was a universe away from what surrounded it.  I have come to love that drive for what it meant, even if we would get through it as quickly as possible and never ever stop, driving carefully, wide Ecstacy-eyed and drug-tinglingly conscious of being stopped by the cops.  A few women drivers were carjacked at traffic lights and brutally gang raped by Jamaican gangs.  I would keep watch for that big green and white sign at the Bricklayer's Arms, it's po faced symbolism: "Straight on to The Channel, Dover and Peckham".

'A' lived there when he arrived in London, working as a waiter at the Savoy while learning English, bussing it back at 2am to a single room he shared with 12 other men. The place smelled heavily and constantly of black bean feijoada and one man's feet. It's the cheapest place on a Monopoly board for a reason. The ancestral London of Albert Chevalier's music hall songs and loveable cockneys, like our Mr Caine, who noted that it had changed a touch since he grew up there but who still seemed attached to it. He made some wise remarks about the vicious form of machismo on display there in 2009.  I nodded along.

That towering and terrifying Estate and the blood curdling underpass feature in the film and stick in my mind. 

The Thomas A Beckett pub, part of boxing history, still remains but was transformed into Beckett's Estate Agents. Plenty of boxing clubs are dotted about.  Aside from this lingering Cockney tradition, elsewhere it also retains an element of British charm, buried in there in between the Divine Gospel Ministries,the ubiquitous Money Transfer Centres, Phils Garment Design for tribal wedding dresses and people hunting for God and Mammon in the Divine Bookshop. "The World Turned Upside Down" pub. It's name steeped in British irony, cocky smiles and unstifled humour. It bangs out karaoke on 'Wacky Wednesdays', now minus the blue smoke rising as that brown lace sinks.

Pictures of Helmand Province

 

 

Photos credit: Major Paul Smyth via Helmand Blog
 

Going West

An advert by the New Zealand Book Council

Colour

A tiny section of Hampstead Heath, London, November 2009

Detroit

Earlier this year at my parent's 40th wedding anniversary in LA, I brought with me hours of old cine footage, some of which featured my father visiting his cousin in Detroit. My father was jumping in and out of a beautiful car, a Ford cabriolet of some kind. He and his cousin raced up and down a lovely sunny street, broad smiles on their faces, manicured lawns, pretty little houses, every inch Americana. In the background I can see my grandmother waving, a lovely smile, immaculately dressed. I never knew her.

My dad used to talk fondly about arriving there to visit for the first time after the war, on a trip with his mother. They arrived from a war devastated London, where he had spent most of it as an evacuee in a Welsh farm with two perfect strangers caring for him and about a dozen other London children.  My dad was so skinny on arrival in Detroit, a local shopkeeper took pity on him and pulled out a "gallon" of ice cream for him to eat. He had never eaten ice cream in his life and made light work of this enormous tub. He never forgot it. 

Our family there were doing well for themselves, all worked for Ford. When he went back home they packed him off with shiny baseball kit for the entire West Ham boys school football team.  None of the kids had ever seen this strange oversized shiny material before. There is a picture of the whole school team ahead of a local football match, standing in front of their war battered school, in this odd looking ill fitting shiny kit. They called my dad the American Kid. 

I don't recall much of my American family and Detroit as I grew up. They moved out of the city when my sister and I were both still small so we never got to visit - and all we ever recall of them were several short work related visits to London when we were teenagers, each time my dad's cousin turned up with a new wife. Divorce was a big deal in our family and neighbourhood. I'd never heard of anyone divorcing before. So to be honest this was all a bit strange. To this day not a single person I grew up with saw their parents divorce, or any of our old neighbours. Their kids, my school friends, on the other hand, that's a different matter. 

I met up with my dad's cousin last year. He came over to London pretty much to say goodbye to my dad although it was never billed like that. His son treated his father to the trip over. It was just the two of them. I adored flicking though the photos they brought with them. He's a little bit older than me, but we aren't in touch much. His dad, my father's cousin, is pretty sick now. I should make more of an effort. 

So reading the papers today was a little depressing. This is an absolute tragedy. I'm not even sure the end of the ship building industries here is comparable in terms of how utterly destroyed Detroit appears to be from the description given. I hope the city finds its salvation somehow. It just doesn't seem right to let it erode away like this.

It's still not really chilly here but it's Autumn nonetheless. This pic was taken in Central Park NYC, October last year.

Winchester Geese

While I refind my blogging "mojo" thought I'd leave you with this since it fits nicely with the post below. A lamb, heart and ribbon tied to the gates of CrossBones graveyard, Borough, near London Bridge - unconsecrated ground used since medieval times for poor burials, where London's prostitutes were buried throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.  It's sad and fascinating history is neatly summarised here and worth a click. When they briefly excavated the grounds in the 90s they uncovered bodies piled upon bodies.  They examined 148 19th century corpses. One third were perinatal, another 10% were babies under one year, the adults were women aged around 38.  Tests showed that those buried had died of smallpox, tuberculosis, Pagets disease and syphillis. The gates to the grounds are covered in ribbons, tokens, flowers and gifts left by Londoners as a sort of people's shrine ( I have other photos). Locals are trying to preserve the grounds, to save them from the perpetual rhythm of modern London, the building of swanky glass fronted office blocks. The name "Winchester Geese" was given to prostitutes licenced to the Bishop of Winchester (the King's Chancellor) since 1161, to work in the Liberty of the Clink. In his 1603 Survey of London Stow writes:

'I have heard of ancient men, of good credit, report that these single women were forbidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman's churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church.'

Autumn Thinking

 

I got back from checking out J's new appartment up in Holloway. He wanted a new build. Coming from LA I expect that made sense to him but not to me. The area he chose is my least favourite part of London which is why I didn't recommend it. The other is the Old Kent Road which I have written about here before. To me lower Holloway was the dustpan into which they brushed life's scum when King's Cross was regenerated to garage the Eurostar and the regeneration of it's fabulous old/new terminal, a magnificent Victorian building. Less than half a mile down the road from where I live.  A mile the other way and a future piece of regeneration awaits.  

Not that we passed it today but “Sex Workers use the park and accost people on Market Road,” warned an old bulletin put out by The Friends of Caledonian Park in Lower Holloway, an area which among other things used to be a stop off point for cattle making their way to Smithfields Market centuries ago. The whores had been pushed north by the King Cross redevelopment. It’s a different kind of meat market now. Pimps, prostitutes, kerb crawlers, undercover police surveillance twitching in the bushes, grubby looking men 'reading their papers'.  The girls had the faces of ghosts, the spirit having departed the body for protection. The Gazette once carried the gruesome story of a prostitute picked up in Market Road then pushed out of the seven and a half tonne lorry after rowing about the cost of oral sex and crushed to death under its back wheels.  Down the road a woman’s mutilated body was fished out of the Regent’s Canal by a group of kids. “Ripper Killing Horror” screamed the Islington Gazette. She was a prostitute, probably from the Market Road meat-rack, chopped up in a crack den round the corner on Conistone Way, an area that once housed abattoirs and horse slaughterers. 

Maybe all that rich juice will float J's boat. Who knows. If it doesn't there is always Londonistan which is in the same area.  I used to visit Beth up that way around 2000 before she moved back to Devon and then on to Seattle. It was always a safe bet I'd get beckoned like the men outside the kebab houses were inviting a cat over for a bowl of milk. Alternatively I'd get called a whore by the men in white robes. I always had a bunch of responses for either, inviting more trouble but leaving me with a feeling of control. 

The ghost whore's streets, park and sink estates are going through the process of regeneration but as with all areas in London,  streets represent thin borders for these areas and you can sometimes be a only footstep away from all these human horrorshows.  I'm not so sure that depressing area is quite beyond it all yet.

Anyway. I get home and see the Times which carries the story of a whore made good in blogging and publishing with the media pretence that she is somehow different to the sad Victoriana cows above because she turned tricks to suits at £300 an hour. Not in my view. But no doubt the libertarians and libertines will be busy gobbling that story up as an example to all of a bright sexy tits and ass future.  And I then check my mails. This is a good time of year for inward thoughts and I had plenty of those on the tube journey back, my unbroken arm squeezed reassuringly by A, my hero, the gentlemanly antidote to the stories (and modern life generally). Memories of an area running through my mind. ..

My emails. Ever had one of those "who the hell do people think they are" moments that kind of stick? I'm wondering what goes on in people's minds to make them write some of things they do or act they way they do on the net or in life generally. Sometimes I brush it off. Other times I hit delete. Sometimes I internalise it a little bit and wonder how people come to construct a view of you as a person from the little you share in the net or in emails or lecture you about the way you run your blog. It makes me wonder where I fit in this fantastic space they call the net. 

 

Cat in the Feather Dress

Wanted a warm autumnal maybe a little cheery picture for you all so I settled on this.  A black Egyptian looking cat in a feather dress, sitting in the local pub window. xxxx

And this little piece of eye candy. Dedicated to all the true wordsmiths out there....

Pandoras box from Michael Flückiger on Vimeo.

The War in Pakistan

A little Pakistani girl refugee, fleeing the current fierce fighting between the Taliban and Pakistani army

A copy of a comment I left on another site because I am that fed up with the simpering twittishness about Major Hassan and his motivations and how noone can say anything unless it attributes this murderous jihadi spree of the Major's to either a mental disease or America's foreign policies. I've read that crap before here too. And in respect of bloody Irish terrorism, the appeasement of which was the catalyist for so much of the touchy feely crap in an approach to terrorism these days.  

The deeper issue here however is a religious justification.

My comment:

There is only one religion which insists on remaining political.

There is only one religion with a whole range of crazies who can teach whatever they like - complete and extreme gender inequality, death, racism, mysoginy, the death of gays - from their pulpits without anyone being able to say anything to roundly criticise lest they be considered racists. There is only one religion where the immediate rush following yet another atrocity is to sympathise with fellow followers of that faith rather than immediately criticise a religion which provides rich pickings for an educated Major in the US military no doubt inspired by the Taliban antics against British troops last week. There is only one religion where its leaders actively call upon followers to act in its name violently and robustly and racistly slur members of other religions as "kuff'r" inviting divisiveness, mistrust and hatred within their own rank and file. And thus one religion providing massively fertile ground not for the odd random act as everyone likes to pretend this is - but consistent and continual "random acts" around the globe against "kuff'r" and non compliant muslims alike since way before 9/11 and using fear, intimidation and violence. All of which is invited and endorsed by the most vociferous and loudest voices within Islamic Leadership itself. You don't hear the Pope calling for people to murder anti -abortionists. You DO hear Islamic leaders calling for murder and insisting on divisiveness. The sum total of all this action and hatred IS terrorism. Islamic terrorism.

That it has reached its hideous tentacles inside the US army to its highest ranks is a massive issue. That the military authorities were too scared to take action against Hasan despite his praise for suicide bombings and daliances since before 9/11 is a major worry in exactly the same way as it would be right to question the British forces working alongside rogue Taliban.

No doubt the next few weeks will be filled with more platitudes to Islam in a pathetic and desperate attempt to curry favour with the world's fastest growing "faith" for fear of being castigated as racist or extreme. Just how many more people have to die so that people who favour this politically correct idiocy can believe themselves to be politically virtuous? For a good few years I hoped like hell that I was wrong and that it is not the whole faith itself that needed a massive kick up the arse. But I was wrong. And it does children like this one above and the girl in the video in the post below NO favours at all pretending this is not an issue as these sick politically conniving and media savvy people hijack their whole faith and violently act in it's name. They storm around steeped in their violent sense of group self righteousness with either their cock or an AK47 in one hand and the Koran in the other mitigating their brand of Islam, morality and power politics.

Perhaps if Major Hassan had watched that little girl's education being snuffed out by these hideous men in thrall to the same shit he was, seen her pray to Allah and beg to us for help to save her beloved Pakistan,  instead of versing himself in net-based Islamist propaganda, he would have questioned who the bad guys actually are  - the ones ruthlessly hijacking his precious faith since way before 9/11 and to this day in their global terrorist spree.  

The stupid murderous piece of shit. 

Accommodating Treason - brilliant post by Andy

Remembrance

Wear it in remembrance and with pride. 

On average 40 million Britons wear a poppy in the days leading up to and including November 11.

I would have written something of my own but it is a bit of a struggle typing so I will leave it to the Royal British Legion....

 

Dear Alison

At 11 am, on the 11th day of the 11th month, silence will fall over many parts of the country. In town and country, the nation will salute the men and women who lost their lives while courageously protecting our country.

It is now 91 years since the guns fell silent on the Western Front. 90 years since the Two Minutes Silence was first observed in London in honour of the men who fell on the battlefields of the Great War.

Today, young Service men and women face dangers daily in Afghanistan – over 200 heroes have already paid the ultimate sacrifice and died thousands of miles away from their families. 

Whether you are at home, at work or out and about, please take the time to bow your head and pay your personal tribute to the courage of so many members of the Armed Forces who never returned home from the front line.

Thank you for respecting this important tradition of Remembrance.

	Russell Thompson OBE Director of National Events and Fundraising. Royal British Legion