a Dirty Martini

Happy New Year....

 
 

 

 

Joyeux Noel

Christmas was spent in France and Italy, the usual deeply religious affairs. It tends to rekindle my relaxed catholic relationship with God which has been tested both by his own actions as laid out in the post below and those of many who claim to be christian these days. Too much religiosity and very little christianity. 

Christmas Eve, the quiet, the peace and the joy at Mass define my celebrations as much as the family reunion at the dining table, even with its gaping hole this year.  At Mass this Christmas Eve my atheist mum attended. She went to Communion with her hands across her chest for a blessing in honour of my father. I was stood behind her at the time. The priest unwittingly lent forward and placed the communion bread in her mouth. With a wry smile she returned to the bench and whispered to me later "Should I be expecting a lightning bolt to strike me down?!". The lack thereof should rather tell the Church a thing or two.

This year the commercial theme in town was a Russian Christmas. But by far the more important theme however is the birth of Christ. As it should be right? 

On Christmas Eve everything closes up completely as this is the more special day of the "fetes". There are town centre nativities all week long in France with petting donkeys, bulls, sheep, goats, roosters etc around the Nativity scene, crowds and crowds of people around the main doors of the overflowing midnight masses in each of the four churches in just one street. Neighbours offering "buche de Noel" and "pannetone" to people leaving Mass. The Anglican church around the corner joined forces with the French catholic churches. English carols were sung and lattice marzipan mince pies are offered to all. All week long there were yet more nativity scenes, small ones in the shop windows, in all our neighbours houses where our glasses gently chink. In the Old Town square, lit at night by candlelight and surrounded by a Winter Forest made out of hundreds of cut Christmas trees, there is a Nativity procession for the kids. The more central square had white rigging and material Christmas 'trees' erected against the old buildings and floodlit in pretty colours. All in all it is a far far cry from the now wholly commercially owned Christmas of the UK and US. I mention this because I hit on another aggravating US conservative blog today which lay into Europe regards its apparent lack of christianity. I've long ceased to find these ignorant whitewashing petty minded views relevant much less interesting. In the same way I refuse to listen to any Europeans with petty minded views of the UK and the US. There is as much of the devout in those European crowds of all ages pouring out of church doors at midnight as there is in those claiming God blesses their country. It's not secularism as a product of a blood curdling popular and insane French revolution that has dented christianity, so much as commercialism. But re the PC crap that abounds I'm not celebrating any "Happy Holidays" or wishing people "Season's Greetings". I'm celebrating Christmas and wishing them the same quiet joy and hope I always feel at this time of year no matter their personal belief system. Where is the insult in that? The good and christian wishes last well up to Twelfth Night and then cease the minute I get on the bus on January 2 and start wanting to stab people.

City Lights, City Snow White

Christmas Star Nets across Regent Street, W1, 2009 (image not mine, need credit)

From February this year...more in my Flickr London Snow set
 

 

Tall London Plain trees - Theobalds Road, WC1

 
 

One corner and one half of Soho Square, W1 - Feb 2009

December

I saw her again today. She was wearing a beautiful pair of shoes, a smart jacket and jeans, carrying what looked like paperwork, her hair brushed up and off a beautifully made up face. In her hand she also had the Soho staple - the familiar blue and black coffee cup from Caffe Nero. Her eyes were rooted to the floor and she struggled to look up to say hello. She was fully focused on her mission. Not business, or Christmas shopping or rushing around with the Soho crowds. What fixed her concentration so hard into the cold pavement was simply walking. Each step was small, sideways on and shuffling, her body slightly hunched over, saliva slowly fell uncontrollably from her open mouth onto the ground below.  I see her enough to have said hello in passing a few times and we once had a chat. She's the survivor of an horrific car accident several years ago. Her determined mind is still bright and agile and young. But her broken body is now twisted and strange to her. Every time I see her, dressed so well and slowly moving through Soho, a slow precise but broken version of the thousands of people that pass me every day I am so overcome by emotion I almost stop breathing. Today was no different. I rounded Dean Street into the office and felt the hottest tears burning into my face. For all the things I moan about, my life isn't as tough as that and I hate myself for the rubbish I whine about. Around the same time this woman's life changed immeasurably forever, my mother's did too. In the same way. 

She was walking along London Bridge, on December 3 about ten years ago, in the bitter evening cold when she got a call from her pleading daughter with a special request for a stop-off at Boots, sidetracking her into Borough High Street instead of London Bridge station and home. A bus driver had an epileptic fit and came off the road, taking out several people on the pavement, breaking the bones of several people and crushing and dragging one woman under it and along the road before plowing into a wall. My mum.  It took several firefighters to cut her free, the nature of the accident was such that they improvised with a car jack and one of them spent a good half an hour with her under the bus, keeping her conscious. Back in south London a police man turned up at the door just as I watched the evening news and wondered at how some poor family's Christmas would be wrecked by a devastating accident involving pedestrians and a bus at London Bridge. One of whom was severely injured. The scene on TV looked surreal.

By the time the police car deposited me in a daze at Guy's Hospital, I had been told en route she was dying. I felt cold, confused and detached as though this were all happening to someone else. A very calm and organised woman, a nurse, took me from the reception to a room near the trauma centre with a sofa and sat me down to warn me of her injuries before we went through. Severe head trauma, a crushed pelvis, bits of metal bus in her spine, a severed ear and so on. All I really recall of that evening were the incredible A&E staff, the policeman who stayed with me all night, the firefighters who came in several times to check her status and on one occasion weeks later with a poinsettia, her favourite, the bright red Christmas flower. They would tell me how amazing she was as they tried to cut her free. But most of all that night I recall my father when he arrived. His shoulders sunk low in his huge black overcoat that he wore to work, palid and quiet. The man who was a tower of strength throughout my whole life suddenly crushed, speechless and lost. Devastated. That was the evening I realised I had to keep us all going. That it was partly my fault we were in this mess, had I not been so selfish to have asked her to go out of her way.  That was the evening life took on a whole new meaning. I look at people differently and search for the good always because I haven't got time for the mean. Life became deeper and more powerful than I could ever imagined. I relate to people in a different way now. And I hated God so much that night. Every time I see people struggle I hate him about the same. 

Little by little the improvements came. Small things become huge deals. The nurse Jo became our angel at Christmas. My mum sitting up and then standing months later was never a miracle. It wasn't God's to cherish. It was my mum's pure determination to carry on with life as if it hadn't changed. My amazing mum. Slowly and after years her ability to walk returned. The pain is still huge, it is slow, but she never gave up. She is now almost deaf and with severe tinittus as a result of the trauma, with a severe facial palsy, her right eye still half closed, she cannot taste anything and her spine is tremendously painful. But she smiles that wonderful pretty smile, and never ever complains. And I think if I am ever half the woman she is or that stranger in Soho is.... 

She once met a young family where the son had similar injuries to her resulting from a trauma and she said to me "I feel so awful for him and so lucky in many ways" "Why would you feel lucky mum? You have the same problems" "Yes" she replied. "But he had is whole life ahead of him. It's so horrendously unfair that he suffered so young".

The little things in life mean a huge deal to me because of that night. December always comes with a slightly sharp edge to it. 

Finally feeling Christmassy

This pic is a few years old but basically nothing has changed. I just went down the road to grab some bits..tea, milk, biscuits, basics. The lights are all sparkling, it's cold and misty in the little street down the road. And did I tell you guys that I went to see Fulham in a UEFA cup match recently with some mates? For a fiver! Five quid!  Took my American friend J along and he had a grand time. The American striker Dempsey plays for Fulham. So every time he touched the ball there were chants of "U.S.A U.S.A". Wish you guys could have been there.  It doesn't get better than pints and football in the freezing cold, right next to the winding Thames. He's so addicted now, we're looking for Premier tickets to Arsenal. Yeah right. Like THAT is ever gonna come off. I don't have a spare few hundred quid at the mo. Unfortunately.

 

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Been a busy week but haaaaapily it all worked out brilliantly. Very proud of Daveyboyz, Paperlilies and WhatAboutAdam's forray from amateur Youtube vlogging to the mayhem that is the press pen on a red carpet. It all worked out very well indeed and the channel has taken a total of 25ok+ UK and Euro hits since it's go live on Friday. They were more hardworking and keener than any of the privileged world press that rolled up. It was a lot of fun for them. And srsly hard work for yours truly though I'm excited to see how it's all turned out. 

Thought I'd share with you where I've been at and what I've been working on pulling together the last few weeks. I wish I'd had these kinds of ops thrown at me when I was 19, 23 and 26! Amazing how the internet opens up a world of opportunity and thankfully not all of it is hideously unsavoury or plain stupid. Plus it helps to have a me around thinking up the ideas that gave them this chance ;) Aren't they lucky?!I'm very proud of them. And Leicester Square looked wonderful in sparkling blue.

 

Everyone seemed to love them. Is ridonculous even a word? I liked it. And I liked Davey's low key come back to that and his generally casual sarky style and Paperlilies hand bag, lol and Adam's wonderful smile and lovely Irish accent. Feel free to repost, tweet these guys (all in their own right), and help keep their stats climbing. Or maybe leave them a positive comment on their interviewing skills! :) Awwww and I'm looking at the comments on his site too. Cool. :)

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