FEAR & LOATHING IN LONDON

" Two Good Reasons"

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:49:59 +0100

T'was aroundabout the summer of 2000, upon my return to N. London - tail well between legs - from 6 years exile in sunny Scotland and a tale of two ladies, one most dear to my heart, both lost to men about as interesting as a Woolworths ironing board. Still, there's no accounting as they say.

And you know what they say about the saint - he benefits all he comes into contact with .

But I digress of course....

Well, parking up for a mo' on zebra crossing zigzags, I dashed into the Estate Agents to finalize the completion details on a flat I'd bought just around the corner. On emerging with some conveyancing paperwork in hand after only three minutes or so, I was dismayed at the sight of a dreaded jam buttie parked behind my Golf and a gentleman of the traffic law patiently tapping his manicured fingernails on its roof.

"Here we go" I thought. You know when you're back in England ok, the filth straight on your back at the slightest indiscretion-opportunity.

So after the obligatory lecture by the officer, about kids on bicycles and little old ladies on zebra crossings, the sight of whom I was blocking to oncoming vehicles... etc, I kind of knew I was in for some kind of high jump or other.... until...

... I remembered my old cop-dealing tactics from my previous daze in Fear and Loathing Land.
NEVER put up a fight with the bizzies, ALWAYS admit your guilt right there, on the spot, whilst looking ashamedly down at the ground. There's nothing the pigs like better than to apprehend a "disrespectful" and argumentative driver after he/she has committed an infringement.

So I acted the part of the remorseful and repentant motorist.... " yes I know officer"... " I should have known better" etc etc.

I did note however, during his lecture on the life-threatening consequences of parking on zig zags, that the uniformed chap on my case was some young Irish whippersnapper fresh out of Hendon, the Old Bill recruitment college just up the road... the accent was unmistakable.... and he was beginning to tone down his act somewhat at my fake display of submission ( I stood down off the pavement to lower my 6' 2" frame to more his height... oh yes I know all the old tricks... )

Just when I was expecting Irish cop to reach for his booking book, he paused, drew a breath, looked away and appeared to speak to the sky....

" Tell you what, I MIGHT consider letting you off with a caution, IF you can give me two good reasons why I should."

My brain shifted into overdrive, as it does in such situations...he continued..

" ONE of which must be funny."

I blinked at the guy's sudden role-reversal - from traffic cop to comedian....how about that !

Jeesus H. Christ pogo-sticking in the outside lane of the M25 in rush hour, I thought. What have we here. Like a cash till calculator performing a sum, the "two good reasons, one of them funny" spewed from mind to tongue like the machine grating out its paper chit total.

" Ahem, well first of all I was only in the Estate Agents for three minutes... and secondly, as my grandfather on my father's side was Irish and was badly injured in the war... and you seeming to be Irish yourself... maybe just maybe you might consider letting me off just this once if I promise never to park on zigzags again?"

Christ almighty, I felt like a Nazi at Nuremberg creeping to the judge to dodge the drop.

"Right e ho", he said quite matter of factly... "very good!". My young Irish persecutor snapped shut his booking book and walked away with the token finger-wag warning about the "never again" bit.

Lost for words but overjoyed at having escaped an automatic £80 fine & licence points added, I drove cheerfully away, safe in the already established knowledge that it isn't what you know but who you know that counts.

Especially in that rotten old town.

M St.M

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Ye Fear and Ye Loathinge in old London town (Pt5)

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:24:15 +0200

Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

***

With the sharp sensitivity of " a man without skin" Tobias Smollett humorously attacked the frivolity and foibles of eighteenth-century England. Humphrey Clinker is his mirthful tale of a tour by coach and four through cities and countryside. as misadventure follows misadventure, each character reveals his true self by giving his own conflicting view of the incidents, places, and people encountered along the way. The result is an entertaining and realistic picture of that wonderful age when gentlemen duelled, ladies swooned, and servants rose from rags to riches.

...continued from Pt 4 (previous page).

... if you pick up a diverting original by accident, it may be dangerous to amuse yourself with his oddities - He is generally a tartar at bottom; a sharper, a spy, or a lunatic.
Every person you deal with endeavours to over-reach you in the way of business; you are preyed upon by idle medicants, who beg in the phrase of borrowing, and live upon the spoils of the stranger - Your tradesmen are without conscience, your friends without affection, and your dependents without fidelity. ( hmm .. slightly familair - ed )

My letter would swell into a treatise, were I to particularize every cause of offence that fills up the measure of my aversion to this, and every other crowded city - Thank Heaven! I am not so far sucked into the vortex that I can disengage myself without any great effort of philosophy - From this wild uproar of knavery, folly, and impertinence, I shall fly with double relish to the serenity of retirement, the cordial effusions of unreserved friendship, the hospitality and protection of the rural gods; in a word, the jucunda oblivia vitoe, which Horace himself had not taste enough to enjoy. -

I have agreed for a good travelling-coach and four, at a guinea a day, for three months certain; and next week we intend to begin our journey to the North, still hoping to be with you by the end of October - I shall continue to write from every stage where we make a considerable halt, as often as any thing occurs, which I think can afford you the least amusement. In the mean time, I must beg you will superintend the economy of Barnes, with respect to my hay and corn harvests; assured that my ground produces nothing but what you may freely call your own - On any other terms I should be ashamed to subscribe myself
Your unvariable friend,
Matt. Bramble.

London, June 8.

***
That's it for the London mention from the book, which in itself is truly an education on the full read.

Hope the account met with your amusement,

M St.M

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Ye Fear and Ye Loatheing in Olde London town ( Pt.4)

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:06:16 +0200

Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

***

... continued from the previous page..

... the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

I shall conclude this catalogue of London dainties, with that table beer, guiltless of hops and malt, vapid and nauseous; much fitter to facilitate the operation of a vomit, than to quench thirst and promote digestion; the tallowy rancid mass called butter, manufactured with candle-grease and kitchen-stuff; and their fresh eggs, imported from France and Scotland.

Now, all these enormities might be remedied with a very little attention to the article of police, or civil regulation; but the wise patriots of London have taken it into their heads, that all regulation is inconsistent with liberty; and that every man ought to live in his own way, without restraint - Nay, as there is not sense left among them, to be discomposed by the nuisance I have mentioned, they may, for aught I care, wallow in the mire of their own pollution ( here here! - ed ).
A companionable man will, undoubtedly, put up with many inconveniences for the sake of enjoying agreeable society. A facetious friend of mine used to say, the wine could not be bad where the company was agreeable; a maxim which, however, ought to be taken cum grano salis ( with a pinch of salt - ed); but what is the society of London, that I should be tempted for its sake, to mortify my senses, and to compound with such uncleanness as my soul abhors?

All the people I see, are too much engrossed by schemes of self-interest or ambition, to have any room left for sentiment or friendship ( hmm, not much changed there either then - ed ) - Even in some of my old acquaintance, those schemes and pursuits have obliterated all traces of our former connexion - Conversation is reduced to party disputes and illiberal altercation - Social commerce, to formal visits and to card-playing ( read television - ed ) - If you pick up a diverting original by accident, it may be dangerous to amuse yourself with his oddities - He is generally a tartar at bottom; a sharper, a spy, or a lunatic...... ( oh lordy, these echos! - ed).....

Final part next up so tune back soone, ye bloggers...

M St.M

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Ye Fear & Ye Loatheing in Olde London Town (Pt 3)

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:50:43 +0200

Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

***

...continued from part 2, below...

... a circumstance sufficient to turn a Dutchman's stomach, even if his nose was not saluted in every alley with the sweet flavour of "fresh" mackarel, selling by retail - This is not the season for oysters; nevertheless, it may not be amiss to mention, that the right Colchester are kept in slime pits, occasionally overflowed by the sea; and that the green colour, so much admired by the voluptuaries of this metropolis, is occasioned by the vitriolic scum, which rises on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water - Our rabbits are bred and fed in the poulterer's cellar, where they have neither air nor exercise, consequently they must be firm in flesh, and delicious in flavour; and there is no game to be had for love or money.

It must be owned, the Covent-garden affords some good fruit; which, however, is always engrossed by a few individuals of over-grown fortune, at an exorbitant price ( nothing changed there then - ed ), so that nothing else than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the community; and that is distributed by such filthy hands, as I cannot look at it without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleaning her dusty fruit with her own spittle; and, who knows but some fine lady of St. Jame's parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries, which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and perhaps ulcerated chops of a St. Giles huckster - I need not dwell upon the palid, contaminated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt; and then presented with the worst milk; thickened with the worst flour, into a bad likeness of cream; but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco quids from foot passengers, over-flowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by rogeish boys for the joke's sake, the spewings of infants, who have slabbered in the tin measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk for the benefit of the next customer; and finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of Milk Maid.....

TBC in Part Three - do tune back ye bloggers for yet more niceties of olde London town.

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Ye Fear and Ye Loatheing in Olde London toon PT. 2

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:57:26 +0200

Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

Some things ne'r change.

***

....continued from the previous post;

... This is the agreeable potion, extolled by the Londoners, as the finest water in the universe - As to the intoxication potion, sold for wine, it is a vile, unpalatable and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with cyder, corn spirit and the juice of sloves. In an action at law, laid against a carman for having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper, that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which held above a hundred, and even that had been brewed and adulterated by the merchant at Orporto.

The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.
The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn; thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye; and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.

The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal, which is bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, til there is not a drop of juice left in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies; so void of all taste, nourishment and savour, that a man might dine as comfortably on a white fricassee of kid -skin gloves, or chip hats from Leghorn.

As they have discharged the natural colour from their bread, their butchers' meat and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts, fricassees and sauces of all kinds; so they insist upon having the complexion of their pot-herbs mended, even at the hazard of their lives.

Perhaps, you will hardly believe they can be so mad as to boil their greens with brass half-pence in order to improve their colour; and yet nothing more is true - Indeed without this improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit. They are produced in an artificial soil; and taste of nothing but the dunghills, from whence they spring.

My cabbage, cauliflower and 'sparagus in the country, are as much superior in flavour to those that are sold in Covent Garden, as my heath mutton is to that of St.James market, which, in fact, is neither lamb nor mutton, but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and Essex, pale, course, and frowzy - As for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal, fed with horse-flesh and distillers' grains; and the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence of this cruel retention.

Of the fish, I need say nothing in this hot weather, but that it comes sixty, seventy, fourscore, and a hundred miles by land carriage; a circumstance sufficient without any comment, to turn a Dutchman's stomach......

TBC in Part 3 - tune back soon ye bloggers!

Comments

Ye Fear & Ye Loatheing in Olde London Town Pt. 1

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:44:56 +0200

Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

Some things ne'r change.

*******

With the sharp sensitivity of " a man without skin" Tobias Smollett humorously attacked the frivolity and foibles of eighteenth-century England. Humphrey Clinker is his mirthful tale of a tour by coach and four through cities and countryside. as misadventure follows misadventure, each character reveals his true self by giving his own conflicting view of the incidents, places, and people encountered along the way. The result is an entertaining and realistic picture of that wonderful age when gentlemen duelled, ladies swooned, and servants rose from rags to riches.

*******

Part One

Page 124

To Dr. Lewis.

Dear Lewis,

Your fable of the monkey and the pig, is what the Italians call ben trovata; but I shall not repeat it to my apothecary, who is a proud Scotchman, very thin-skinned, and, for aught I know, may have his degree in his pocket - A right Scotchman has always two strings to his bow, and is in utrumque paratus - Certain it is, I have not 'scaped a scouring; but, I believe, by means of that scouring, I have 'scaped something worse, perhaps a tedious fit of the gout or rheumatism; for my appetite began to flag, and I had certain croakings in the bowels, which boded me no good - Nay, I am not yet quite free of these remembrances, which warn me to be gone from this centre of infection ------

What temptation can a man of my turn and temperament have, to live in a place where every corner teems with fresh objects of detestation and disgust? What kind of taste and organs must these people have, who really prefer the adulterate enjoyments of the town to the genuine pleasures of a country retreat?

Most people I know, are originally seduced by vanity, ambition, and childish curiosity; which cannot be gratified, but in the busy haunts of men: but, in the course of this gratification, their very organs of sense are perverted, and they become lost to every relish of what is genuine and excellent in its own nature.

Shall I state the difference between my town grievances, and my country comforts? At Brambleton Hall, I have elbow-room within doors, and breathe a clear elastic, salutary air - I enjoy refreshing sleep, which is never disturbed by horrid noise, nor interrupted, but in a-morning, by the sweet twitter of the martlet at my window - I drink the virgin lymph, pure and crystalline as it gushes from the rock, or the sparkling beverage, home-brewed from malt of my own making; or I indulge with cyder, which from my own orchard affords; or with claret of the best growth, imported for my own use, by a correspondent on whose integrity I can depend; my bread is sweet and nourishing, made from my own wheat, ground in my own mill, and baked in my own oven; my table is, on a great measure, furnished from my own ground; my five-year old mutton, fed on the fragrant herbage of the mountains, that might vie with venison in juice and flavour; my poultry from the barn door, that never knew confinement, but when they were at roost; my rabbits panting from the warren, my game fresh from the moors; my trout and salmon struggling from the stream; oysters from their native banks; and herrings with other sea fish, I can eat in four hours after they are taken - My sallads, roots, and pot herbs, my own garden yields in plenty and perfection; the produce of the natural soil, prepared by moderate cultivation.

The same soil affords all the fruits that England may call her own, so that my desert is every day fresh-gathered from the tree; my dairy flows with the nectarious tides of milk and cream, from whence we derive abundance of butter, curds and cheese; and the refuse fattens my pigs, that are destined for hams and bacon - I go to bed betimes and rise with the sun - I make shift to pass the hours without weariness or regret, and am not destitute of amusements within doors, when the weather will not permit me to go abroad - I read and chat, and play at billiards, cards or back-gammon - Without doors, I superintend my farm, and execute plans of improvement, the effects of which I enjoy with unspeakable delight - Nor do I take less pleasure in seeing my tenants thrive under my auspices, and the poor live comfortably by the employment which I provide - You know I have one or two sensible friends, to whom I can open all my heart; a blessing which perhaps, I might have sought in vain among the crowded scenes of life. finally I live in the midst of honest men, and trusty dependents, who, I flatter myself, have a disinterested attachment to my person - You yourself, my dear Doctor, can vouch for the truth of these assertions.

Now, mark the contrast at London - I am pent up on a frowzy lodgings, where there is not room enough to swing a cat; and I breathe the streams of endless putrefaction; and these would, undoubtedly, produce a pestilence, if they were not qualified by the gross acid of sea coal, which is itself a pernicious nuisance to the lungs of any delicacy of texture; but even this boasted corrector cannot prevent those languid sallow looks, that distinguish the inhabitants of London from those ruddy swains that lead country life - I go to bed after mid-night, jaded and restless from the dissipations of the day - I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchman bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants; and by five o' clock I start out of bed, in consequence of the still more dreadful alarm made by the country carts, and noisy rustics bellowing green pease under my window. If I would drink water, I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster - Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality......

PARTs TWO & THREE to follow..... kindly tune back, ye bloggers.

Comments

Albany Street.

Fri, 25 May 2007 22:57:51 +0200

New entry's been a long time coming - apologies folks, the Viagra must have been from a bad batch

Seriously. Yes where was I..... ah yes... Albany Street.

********

Circa 1987. There she was, standing half lager jar in hand towards the back of the small crowd of motley post-punk lost souls at a little rat hole re-named the Hype club, after its antecedent, " The Shoebox". . .no I jest - actually Timebox.
Where each act got exactly 15 minutes of infamy to prove their genius to the world. The club's owner, one Jon Beast, although whilst it has to be said lived up to his name in looks, was a diamond geezer and nurtured his acts as best he could as a low-powered version of Harvey Goldsmith.

The Hype club nee Timebox was actually more on the lines of a shoebox, a former beer cellar at the back of the Bull & Gate pub which is adjacent to The Forum in Kentish Town NW5, - that famed venue for a good thousand rock etc acts over the years.

No such stardom luck for the myriad of "musical" hopefuls who paraded their out-of-tune wares to an audience often comprising one man and his blind guide dog. Quite the testimony to the eternal font of baseless hope that somehow miraculously springs from the youthful human heart.

Before life gets its Rotweiller lock jaw into them.

But I digress yet again.

There she was, a rather scraggly hippy type, leaning up against the flaking paintwork of the Hype club's purple walls, absorbed in listening to the act of the eve'....a three-piece outfit from hell called Bladder Bladder. Quite the epitome of eccentricity, they waded through their own unique edition of Postman Pat etc with ignited and fizzing sparkling sparklers jutting merrily from the machine heads of their guitars.

Like, wow.

Being the eternal opportunist ( after a quart of Dutch Merrydown), I shuffled over to the lone lass and began a superficial chatter. She seemed tipsy-receptive and responsive and happy to do the "lift home" c/w the coffee trip and before I knew it we were having a really good old fashioned/.....game of tiddly winks...

Maxine, as it happened, I found out the next morning, was an Irish lass who had procured for herself, by means of feigning a heroin addiction to Camden Council, a pokey ground floor council flat just off of Albany Street in London's west end almost. Albany street connects Camden Town with the Euston Road. Its some long drag of the original start of the old Great North Road I do believe which in turn - betrayed by its uncanny straightness - was once upon a time a Roman road.

Whatever, Irish Maxine (Stoute) turned out to be a bit of a "goer" and brutally honest into the bargain. However the wicked humour her parents posessed upon keeping the father's surname seemed completley lost on "Miss Stoute".

! I like a good sex session y'know?" was her Socratic refrain, expressed in bog Irish tones, upon my wandering past the loo in my flat and seeing her, door wide open, squatting on the throne, completely inebriated at 4am.

The next morning I dropped her off to get ready for work at Albany St, from my flat in Hampstead. She seemed kinda different all sobered up like...
" You could have killed me last night" was her romantic line just before hopping out of my car ...
" Yes but I obviously didn't did I" I said, as she turned to open the passenger door..

" See you then"
" Yeah, see you then".... and I thought that was that...

Little did I know...

**...**...***

PART TWO

...Little did I know she would ring me - after all with a parting shot like that, any normal'ish guy would have thought any normal'ish girl would rather boil her own head in a pan of water than risk being "killed" again.

So a relationship of all sorts developed, based around the Hype-like B Movie music industry, for Maxine was a part time vocalist ( croakalistTM ) in a part time back street garage band called The Cripples of Rage, and as it happened they were looking for a drummer ( that's me!). Well I thought, what the hell, have some fun, get me out a few evenings, get to know Miss Stoute a little better....

Which I sure as hell did. On first entering her studio flat on the ground floor just off ( and facing) Albany Street, the main impression was that of complete dishevelment reflecting a, shall we say, rather random mind. Clothes strewn around on her floordrobeTM ..... that's right, her robes were all floored.
" Don't you have a wardrobe" I asked
" No room" she shouted through from the kitchen as she attended the boiling spaghetti she was cooking us. Upon finding spaces on the jagged carpet between the knicker, tights and shoe scatter to place my feet, I gingerly tippy-toed in.
The kitchen window was open and two feral cats hopped out as I entered. This space was different again, but only in the respect of empty tins and potato peelings etc in the stead of the clothes spread in the living/sleeping room.

" Sorry the place is a bit slovenly" she remarked, pouring the tuna & pasta sauce onto the plated spag'
" They say that's the mark of a true artist.. y'know?"

" Hmmm, really?" I replied.

I am blessed with tolerance of other's living conditions however and we settled down to eat our "spag bol" together off the elegant splendour of her dining table ( a tray on your knees). Between forkfuls, my eyes wandered among the amazing squalor of Maxine's living quarters - and braked hard at a couple of torn open condom wrappers laying near her bed ( one old spring-shot and stained mattress on the floor).
I said nothing, but broached the subject of "other boy friend?" later during a break in rehearsals with The Cripples Of Rage.
" Oh yeah, broke up with him a few months back" she replied.

I took it then, that when a piece of paper falls in Miss Stoute's palatial residence, there it stays for months on end. Well it made sense, looking at the general back alley ambiance of the place....so I kind of put the condom wrapper sighting to the back of my mind and got on with the drumming with the band and the bedding of Irish Miss Stoute......

PART THREE

After a couple of months of this routine and on my guesstimated seventh visit to Maxine's pad, I felt compelled to comment on another anomaly I'd noticed laying around on the floor - empty packets of Marborough ciggies. Considering she didn't smoke, I thought the question fair...
" Oh those are my ex-boyfriends" she quite candidly admitted,,
" Yeah he sometimes pops by.."
"Ah ha", I said.

From then on, in my mind, I associated this other fellow as "Marlborough Joe", simply because I never asked for, not was given his name.
Despite the fairly obvious, my suspicions were still not fully stoked, partly because the sex was great and she seemed quite content with my company and the "progress" of the band up through the motley ranks at The Hype club, to headline once a fortnight in front of at least 50 people.
On one rather hedonistic weekend, when we were both in some altered state of reality, she suggested engagement and that I get her a ring. In some moment of madness I bought her a £350 emerald and ruby job and that was that. Sorted.
Until I sobered up and thought about it....

On Maxine's next visit to my place after another storming COR gig, she casually mentioned that she'd had the workmen around her flat to fix a faulty tap. She'd "left the ring out on the soap shelf" and when they'd gone, so had the ring.

I'd also by then started referring to the ex openly as Marborough Joe, as in "seen Marlborough Joe recently?" I think she must have reported the nickname back to him, because on my next visit to Miss Stout's for cocoa, I noted one of the Marlborough packets was stuffed with condoms in their wrappers.

Some bells began tinkling. I said nothing but took them out and put them in my pocket. On my next visit another Marborough packet was stuffed with...... used ones.

Now the Westminster Big Ben bells were gonging. I confronted Maxine who abruptly relied " I don't ask you what you do in your spare time do I, y'know?"
It was that old romantic heart again. Well, as in that Morrisey song " I won't share ewe" I felt the time had come to split, somewhat wounded, from this dirty rambunctious little lady.

So I pulled the plug from the relationship and from the band. However, late one Saturday evening, about a month later, as I happened to be driving down Albany Street, I saw the light on in her studio room and out of curiosity thought to stop and walk by. There was no one around and her window was at the base of a tower block facing out onto the large pedestrian walkway about 50 yards from the road.

Parking up and strolling across in the darkness, I noticed a crack in the curtains where they had not been altogether closed. Peeking in, as you do, there was a sight to behold!

Yes, you guessed it, directly under the window, on the mattress, a naked Miss Stout taking a slow ride
atop some guy who was casually sipping on a Marlborough.
I watched for a couple of minutes and went on my way, curse-thinking "he's fcuking well welcome to the lousy bitch".

That was that, I thought - until about a year later I again sallied forth to see an up and coming ne'er do well act at the old club, called Magnetic Fishpond ( you couldn't think these names up, could you!).
Amongst the loud smokey rabble gathered there I noticed a familiar female profile, leaned against the flaking purple wall.
" Well hi Maxine, long time no see!" I exclaimed as I approached her.
" Erm Hi Mike"..she seemed quite unfazed at seeing me again and we began some inane chatter about the band ( they'd found a replacement drummer) and this and that and I couldn't help notice a vaguely familiar red and green stone set gold ring on her finger..... I thought about it for a minute, then said

" Nice ring you're wearing... ".

On this, she flushed and excused herself to go to the Ladies. Re-appearing five minutes later, half jar of lager in hand and, completely blanking me, she walked over to the opposite side of the club, to the exact spot where I had first noticed her 18 months previously - and commenced absorption in the band, who were performing their latest single " I missed out on you".

Full Fear and Loathing circle, then.

MSt.M

Comments

Whiteleys

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:19:05 +0200

. . .that epitome of central London shopping excellence, just north of Hyde Park and yapping at the heels of Mr Al Fayed's Harrods, was close to yet another temp' residence for YT in the early 1990s.

Legend ( as well as fact ) has it that one of the Fuhrer's top rocket man's best WW2 V2 rockets made a somewhat surprising visitation upon this multi-layered store in c. 1944. In fact right through the top dome. Some expert guidance system that dastardly Nazi Verner Von Braun knocked up for sure. In fact he was so good the thick yanks snapped him up to pioneer their space program and fake missions to the moon, 1969-1972.

But I digress. I habituated a rather grand Georgian ground floor flat, not a minute walk from the renovated and rejuvenated ( sounds like a massage ad) Whiteleys for approx 6 months.
During that time much fear and loathing transpired.

It didn't take long to kick off. In fact before it kicked off it kicked off. The evening I was moving in, I had leaned one of the two Persian rugs I had especially purchased for the front and back rooms, against a stately pillar outside the front door to my proud new flat. My car was parked up not 20 yards away with the second carpet inside. As I returned with it over my shoulder I blinked twice to see the first carpet had disappeared! I had not been away more than 20 seconds! Incredible!

Some swine had nicked it! In shock, for this was a £200 rug, I toured the streets in vain, looking for the dastardly villain who had snatched my carpet right out from under my nose -but to no avail.

Coming to terms with my loss, after a couple of weeks of settling in to my apartment and upon checking the location of the electric cupboard, I casually noticed the old electricity consumption wheel merrily whizzing around at some rate of knots, when the only electrical apparatus operating in the flat was the fridge.

So I switched the supply off at the mains. Still the wheel whizzed.

On complaining to the landlord's agent and shelling out 50 notes for my own independent electrician to give a report, it transpired the people next door ( the agent's E. European cheapo handymen) had wired their electric supply through my flat's electric meter via a drilled hole through the 2 ft separating wall.

Apppy polly loggies all round of course and on I went with my hopeful life in the West End.

Day and night however, despite the rather cool wooden shutters at the front bay windows, I found it rather difficult to put up with the 24/7 ( know you wont believe me but I invented that very term) passage of drone tourists parading on the pavement outside. The traffic was incredible in it's never-say-die tiresome insistence and the monoxide hell drifting into my lungs oppressive and constant.

So "fuck it" I thought, this place is getting to me.

So I defaulted on the rent and upped sticks to go to Scotland. Threats ensued from the agent for the rent. But I had already paid a massive deposit, so decided to use it up and leave on the exact date it ran out. I'd had enough of the congestion, basically.

Early on the lease expiry morning, my stuff packed into the hire van for the journey to my next move - Glasgow, I waited in the van. . . .and watched.

There, with the spare key, standing on the doorstep of my empty old flat, was one of the Polish handymen from next door who I had learnt to recognize. Ready to take over my flat - and with a lovely big Persian rug hanging over his shoulder.

London. Just love it to bits!

MSt.M

Comments

Drilling for Gold

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:11:37 +0100

Just a little ditty on my vast experience in various London dentistry torture chambers over the years.

Would it be mere flights of fancy if I were to convey to you about the Blackheath dentist who sent me milk tokens after my complaining by letter that I thought he had the "chairside manner of a garage mechanic? Or the Maida Vale one who fed me cups of sugary tea in between root canal sessions? ( Beverley the black suction application nurse all the while recounting how she loved to watch horror videos afer a good day staring down a goodly variety of vile orifices)

Or how about the Kentish Town one who took vomit-inducing plasticine impressions by the dozen of my particular peculiar teeth arrangement after several decades of Cadbury's molar crumble in order to sell on to dental students at a college he taught at, out of hours?

Well, I kind of gave away the plot there a little. . . but nevertheless.

I must begin by recommending a visit to
www.foodpoisonindustry.blog.co.uk

(Please I beg you, steer well clear of SUGAR in any form in your diet - or face the executioner's chair!)

. . .in order that you, dear reader, may avoid a similar fate to YT, who, down the years has suffered the eye-watering tortures of the damned whilst seated in that hospital-horrid drop-back chair with overhead multi-faceted light c/w blood-spit basin attached.

At the end of a list too long to mention, "Dr" Cohen, in 2002, drilled down two perfectly healthy teeth to replace with caps. This, exactly one month after performing fillings on them ( which to anyone with any sanity would indicate salvageability).

As I was ushered into the waiting room with a couple of Kleenex to mop up the spewing blood after the ruthless drilling ( without asking or informing me what he was about to do), I began to overcome the shock to replace with overwhelming angst. Upon returning to my seat, blood gush stemmed, I asked the smiling little fellow. .
" why did you have to drill them down after filling them only a month back?"

" Precautionary" was the terse reply.

( Well he was married and with a new babe on the way, household expenses must be met, not to mention his skiing trips to Austria every winter)

These goddamn London dentists are on a gravy train of freebies from the Govt, for doing unnecessary work, no matter that the patient must suffer for the rest of his/her days with the consequences.

Thwey're ALL on the make, every goddam last one of them.

We are simply seams of gold to be drilled to them, nothing more nothing less.

I feel an irresistible urge to purchase some paint-stripper to baptize and anoint a certain fellow's sparkling back Merc' this very eve.... . . ..resist resist, vengeance is for the weak!

MSt.M

Comments

Some pre-festive diary scribblings

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 13:42:18 +0100

Rampant stress in the air.
Sizzzzzzle

Impossible to move hardly a foot without someone in my space.

Roads jammed and fuming to hell with agitated Xmas shoppers.

Served in shops - some stranger guaranteed to be vibing impatience over my shoulder within 10 seconds, to bloody hurry up and "GET THE FCUK OUT MY GODDAM WAY, I'VE GOT THINGS TO DO ! "

Women out n' about seem starey/wobbly as if on a drink/Valium mix, or else purposefully striding pavement-staring abouts, constant fag-drawing as they go.

Men seem dazed, fazed or blazing irate with frustration.

Not my cup of tea personally, but I could fully understand the dude who feels a pressing need for a shot of Afghan sherbet in the left hand arm before proceeding out the door for a spot of Christmas shopping.

Much increased frequency of police and ambulance-wail, indicating terrific aggro' abouts the city. Only tapers-off Sunday & Monday evenings as everyone cripples with exhaustion - even the muggers are feet up with a spliff after their hard weekends' manual labour.

A mentally unhinged ex-girlfriend's stalker has recently started loitering around outside my house come an evening, threatening " Hi Mike" every time I go down the shops. For the moment I ignore him.

A new abstract art scrape along the lower left side of my camper resulting from a bro' sporting his £50K brand spanking new Merc' cutting me up on the inside lane in a Crouch End mega jam.

Said gent' now demanding money WM for his repair bill as he is is uninsured (natch). He "knows where I live". Stop Press 18.12.06 Bro' now wants £1,600 for a new wing and bumper even though it was only a small dent & some scratches.

So on and so forth. . . .

Huge ques at all main London Post Offices - well out the door into the street - as the sheeple shuffle about in mute English acceptance and cold coughing endurance of the meat-hook consequence of the closure of thousands of sub POs.

Did I hear the very sane Vort1gern relate a piece he had read somewhere?
" Is it me or is everything shit? "

www.wendigo.blog.co.uk

Well, you know, sometimes your paranoia is Spot On, people.

Especially in the world capital of fear and loathing ( excluding Baghdad of course)

It's as if we're witnessing nothing less than the degradation and destruction of physical consciousness itself. As if the submerged iceberg of the unconscious is being forced to the surface and wreaking havoc in society on an increasingly epic scale.

Naturally, when the foundations of material illusions are being exposed & therefore cut within, external material society itself will undergo big changes. And stresses.

Great prospects for Threshers, mind.
Hmm, what's their share price just now. . .?

M St.M

Comments

If there's anything you want. . . / Blue Monday

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:58:34 +0100

During my in-car radio & stereo system-fitting earnings heyday ( surely that should be "hay day", as in "making hay while the sun shines" day, OED? ) during the mid-eighties, comprising mad-dashing abouts London in me white Ford Fiesta van ( man ), installing a Blaupunkt here, fixing a sub-bass speaker there (Brixton); I would occasionally be Yellow Pages-called out to do a private number at some private person's address, usually in the leafy suburbs of our grand metropolis.

So it was on one fine Monday morn' ( my very favourite weekday ) that I found myself turning into a rather splendid gated driveway attached to a refined gingerbread manse of detachment in that nether region between "Sarth Landan" and Ken'uh ( they don't pronounce the "t" at the end BTW ).

Mr Beech was a fine upstanding wee fellow who owned a pub nibbles supply company, re-stocking hundreds of London's finest ale houses with good wholesome salt-packed packs of snacks. Summoned to his office on the ground floor and shown through by Mrs Beech - a rather ravishing tall blonde of about 35 - I walked into an oak-panelled room and perceived the gentleman of the house through a thick blue pall of cigar smoke, plushly seated at his grand antique writing desk. Mr Big, he appeared to want to give the impression of, in every way except the (nearly) most obvious ( when he stood to hand-shake, he seemed at a roughly similar height to when he was seated.)

Nevertheless Mr B seemed, as I say, a fine upstanding chap of about 50. Business-like, he showed me to one of the motors standing proud on the wide driveway. A rather shining example of a Porsche Carrera.
" That's the missus's" he explained, " just bung in a CD player matey - got to hop out now, so how much will it be?"
Jonny Beech handed me five crisp pinkies, commented
" you're a gen'uhleman 'n a skolar sir" and hurtled off in his Merc' SLK.

I was half way through the fitting, wires dangling the fcuk everywhere, when I heard a call from the gingerbread doorway.
" Fancy a cuppa tea Mike? "
Craning my neck up from under the porker's dash, I saw through a summer traffic-grimed and insect-splattered windscreen, the lean, sporty and curvaceous figure of the lady of the manse smiling and summoning me into her parlour.

Five minutes later I was sitting up from the creaking depths of a new purple leather sofa to receive my tea and biscuits on a tray. Mrs Beech had by this time changed, I could not help noticing. Changed into a snazzy red Zen-patterned mini kimono; loosely worn and with the silk belt slackly tied.

Gulp. Mr mid-twenties me could barely take the tray from her hands, but got it to to the flat armrest just in time to avert a spillage, as it were.

" Er, thanks, that's very kind of you. "

As I raised the first shaky sip of rippling tea to my trembling lips, Mrs Beech slowly climbed the open staircase directly in front of me. The belt fell down . . .she continued to climb and, turning to me . . .

. . spoke the words that will haunt my automobile industry memory forever. Quite matter-of-factly she said,

"If there's anything you want, I'll be in the shower. . ."

. . .and disappeared up onto the landing.

Quite a The Graduate moment, that.

So. Mr Beech perhaps not quite the upstanding fellow in every regard ?

MSt.M

Comments

Con-Safe

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:58:33 +0200

"Con Safe 5 to control, do you read me control?" . .so droned the peak-capped manager into the black housebrick cellphone whilst driving his way to Lazard Bros merchant bank in the City, circa the mid-eighties.

" Contrrrrrrol here" crackled back the fat man at erm, Control, in a broad emotionless Bavarian accent. . ." reading you L...A...C ! .. .."

So it went, the tedious check-call from within this smartly liveried Con-Safe hatchback dog van, with YT ensconced in the passenger bucket staring blankly out into a wet and hoary West End predawn jazz of a technicolour watercolour through a frenziedly wiper-ed windscreen.

For I was on my way to take charge of "security" at the bank. Lazard's was one of "Consolidated Safe Guards'" prestige accounts and not all had been well there the night before, I had heard. When we arrived, the two young Kiwi guards on duty were standing somewhat sheepishly in their tinpot-decorated uniforms on a soggy carpet alongside the teak security desk, packed, seemingly eager and ready to be relieved, as it were.

I noticed their lower trousers and shoes seemed to be a darker shade of dripping wet. A fire hose, connected to a chugging water pump ran through the reception to a lone fire engine standing outside. Two firemen sat feet up in the cab, each leafing through an early edition of The Sun.

" You did a man's job sir" expounded the manager, thumping one of the guards on the dark blue back as he swept keenly out through the large stainless steel and glass revolving door. He turned, briefly.
" Oh oh . . .yyeah. ..thanks. .." he stuttered before swishing out into the wet London dawn.

A Man's job? Well hardly. For the accurate account of the carry-on in the bank that night was one of incredible ineptitude combined with pure bare-faced brazenness, I got to hear later on the Con Safe grapevine.

The two guards had actually fallen asleep and missed their alternate hourly patrols of the 10-storey building and corresponding check-calls to fat man at Contrrrrol. They awoke to find a horror-show of water gushing down the stairs from an upstairs washroom -one of the merchant bank's many witless hooray henry employees had apparently left a tap running into a plugged sink before leaving work the evening before.

In a dazed and stumbling panic, their brains functioning on some basic motor survival level, the two Kiwis bounded up the waterfall of a staircase to the 4th floor where they traced and shut off the offending tap and released the plug.

In a panic/survival instinct stroke of sheer genius they proceeded to open up the washroom radiator connector pipe with a spanner from the janitor's broom & tool cupboard, then watched as the subsequent release of water joined the existing cascade down the stairwell. After making a splashing descent to the ground floor they phoned the fire brigade and made the check-call, explaining they'd been " too busy trying to shut off the leaky radiator on the 4th floor." to call in.

When the fire fairies arrived the guards directed them to the scene of the happy accident, saying they couldn't find a spanner in the whole place and had been heroically trying to close the leak with their bare hands and a pen knife.

In the stead of the sack, a Con Safe commendation and promotion followed.

This, just one in a long merry line of high jinx at Con-Safe. A precis of others would have to include more slumbering guards, this time at the Kensington house of the prince of the UA Emirates, said mansion only being used by the spoilt brat himself about twice a year. The rest of the time some of his elder extended male family flip-flopped about the plush pad in full Arab bed sheet get-up, liquorice head hoops included, chewing cloves and blatantly burping out digesting Harrods fare.

The brief here included a half-hourly rotating patrol around the 3-acre grounds by the four guards on the shift - so as a constant presence would be maintained. However the Con-Safe mobile night shift manager caught all four guards napping in the lounge and woke them with a torch in their faces to get the excuse they'd "only been asleep a minute or two".

" Go back oot into the garden" explained the Scottish supervisor, " There, by the Koi pond you will find standing an empty coke tin with my initials scratched on it. I left that there an hour ago after climbing over the wall from the road outside."

All four sleepy heads were replaced the very next day.

The Con Safe account at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank, London was one of their best money-earners and the day guards there more stringently vetted. Nevertheless, at an exhibition of Barbara Hepworth sculptures, one of the gallery touring public enquired of the supervisor ( not me at that time, thankfully )how there came to be chips out of and bits missing from a small stone semi-abstract statue of a hawk.
" Oh someone knocked it over, that sort of thing happens all the time" replied the supervisor, nonchalantly.

This member of the public turned out to be one of Hepworth's surviving family and estate-heirs who had helped arrange the show.

Boom Boom!

(maybe more follow, tune back )

MSt.M

Comments

Sheilas' Wheels

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:32:50 +0200

NB. This is a longish post, divided into three parts with an epilogue added. View one or two parts at a time or scroll to your start point from previous visit ( or read right through of course, if you want the full zanymanic impact )
Cheers
MSt.M

-------------------------------------------------
SHEILAS' WHEELS
Intro

I must get around to featuring a little ditty on a couple of lady driver-encounters in the crapital one fine day, I would often keep reminding myself not to forget to remember, if you catch my drift.

And it has been pretty fine today, as far as I could see anyway through the blue fume monoxide layer that drapes like a deadly Dickensian coal smog over the chaotic metropolitan sprawl whenever the wind speed drops below 5 knots; so what the hell "it's a short life. . .and getting shorter all the time" TM.

Sheilas' Wheels 1)
Kilburn-tending, sometime in the early '90s

Strolling over gum-splattered flagstone along some terminally banal side street just off the High Road NW6, heading god knows where doing god knows what; just up ahead a surreal sight beckoned.

Standing apart from the familiar bunched-up bumper-to-bumper lines of metal and glass boxes on wheels kerbside, appeared one such A to B device. A prehistoric light beige Morris 1000 no less.
Standing out? How so, you may ask.

I mean, like standing out from the pack by dint of standing out on the pavement itself. Way onto the pavement. And it was still moving back and forth, engine reving. This seemed to be a case of - I stood and squinted through the sunlight glinting off of the Morris's convex back window - a slightly mis-judged parking manoeuvre gone terribly wrong.

That should read womanoeuvre in fact.

For there at the helm of the upturned bathtub sat a struggling wee lady, wrestling and grappling with the car's thin large diameter steering wheel. Though all windows appeared fairly wound up, I could sense some sort of fury brewing within, for women in private, I have heard, swear like goddam troopers.

See, I could see where this thing had started and where it would finish without intervention of sorts. Like a standard parking move from the road into a space between two other cars. . .and the copious birch thicket hedge where sidewalk meets private garden.

In fact the side panels were already brushing with ear-torturing fingernails-down-blackboard-like metallic scratch-noise against the multiple spindly twigs of the hardwood hedge itself. Yes the more she forwarded and reversed the more she moved away from the road and more towards becoming part of a totally unique garden feature.

Suddenly a jolly smirking young male face appeared over the Morris's roof - a guy approaching from the other side. As he closed in on the disaster scene I could see he was clad in a blue overall jumpsuit, suitably oil-besmirched - a mechanic ( obviously'ish)

The driver leaned across and wound furiously. The automotive knight in shining armour bent down for a word through the passenger side window then opened the door. The woman smartly hauled herself across the front seats - as the driver's side door was rammed into the spikey greenery - and out onto the road. All flushed and flustered she was. The keen garage denizen jumped in, laughing, and within 20 seconds the car was perfectly parked.

Out jumped the jovial spanner-weilder with a
" There y'are luv, sorted !"
Off he went to regale his pub mates with the hilarity of it.

The woman straightened her attire, plumped her hair and, completely blanking me, clicked off down the road to her appointment.

After all, nothing had happened, had it?

____________________

Sheilas' Wheels PART TWO

The Morris Minor, in it's collectors' item heyday - and as it is usually found today.

These vintage Morris Minor 1000s seemed to be a particularly des' res' drive for young single independent-minded women during the 1980s, I would oftimes observe.

One of whom was my old friend Nina, an only daughter of a Russian immigrant family, who had craftily managed to secure for herself a pucker council maisonette with balcony overlooking the Regent's Canal, on the basis of a pregnant urine sample to her quack. Said pregnant pee in fact supplied by an up-the-duff friend.

Yes, it was that easy to con the council back in those days. Nowadays I've heard you must know some jobsworth drone in the Housing Dept and have at least £5K in rolled-up pinkies as a backhander bung upfront. That might just about procure you a surround-sound rabbit hutch 20 floors up on some pimply ghetto of a high-rise sink estate down the east end.

Nina, although not a trained violinist, was nevertheless herself quite highly strung - she'd flip at the drop of a hat, to be frank. So we would tend to give her a pretty wide berth. Once ensconsed in the snug innards of her beloved Beatrice however, she could change personality completely. . .into an out and out raving psychopath.

It didn't used to take much.

One typical Nina traffic incident she related started out at a set of lights near Swiss Cottage on the north side of town. Being a little slow off the mark at the green, she was given the horn from behind. . .ahemm .. . .by some guy in a brand spanking new Rolls Royce.

Must have been a hot day, or an off day, or a premenstural off hot day, or something; for Nina stubbornly stayed put, giving the toff the evil eye in the mirror. Of course this inflamed the situation and before long a 100 yard stretch of backed-up traffic began blasting an entire orchestra of multi-fangled multi-toned bad noise.

This had the effect on Nina to stay put in a he's-not-getting-the-better-of-me kind of way. So, arms folded, Nina sat and sat while the lights changed and changed.

After a couple of minutes of this the Roller driver started nudging his pride and joy up the rear of Nina's tiny Morris, shifting her gently along the tarmac a couple of inches at a time. . . bump . . bump. . bump.

Bit of a mistake that, as it happened, for Nina's cork popped. Straight out the car she flew, screaming at the Roller guy, who immediately pressed the electric window wind to UP and sped off around the stationary Morris to the next junction.

Nina jumped back in and, foot to the floor, sped after him in a blind rage. Screeching to a halt behind the Silver Shadow, she slammed the Morris into first and viciously shunted the shiny Coventry beast, seriously denting the gleaming super car's rear bumper and trim.

Nina jumped out again and, still ranting and babbling like a rabid racoon, grabbed the radio ariel with both hands, snapping it clean off. The Hooray Henry meantime sitting stupified with shock behind tinted glass in the Roller's plush interior.

N walked calmly back to the Morris and drove off - straight through a red light and into the oncoming traffic flow.

More mayhem. In fact the entire Finchley Road ground to a standstill for several minutes, until the obligatory arrival of the filth. Fortunately no-one was injured.

In court, playing the weeping victim, N claimed her foot had slipped off the clutch at the lights, the beak believed her and she got clean off.

Back to her luxury pee-pad she trundled in the battered Beetle lookalike, which seemed to be producing some weird stench through the air vents just of late, she noted.

Better get 'round to taking Beatrice to the garage for a check-up, was the thought.

" There's no oil in the engine, luv! " was the mechanic's verdict, " don't you ever put any in ?"

"Didn't know you had to " Nina replied nonchalantly.

She'd driven the car over 120,000 miles without a service or oil top-up - and amazingly without a seize-up at 70.

Good old fashioned British engineering!

________________________

SHEILAS' WHEELS PART THREE

Moving Rrrrrright along the timeline to 1999 ( a flakey kind of year for YT ) we are out and about once more, don't ask me where I was going or what the hell I was doing - London, like LSD, has a way of messing with time and space inside your head.

Anyways, again it was along another innoccuous side street, this time up the hill a bit in Belsize Park, yet just down the hill a bit from snobland (Hampstead).

Stroll away stroll away and. . .hmm. .what is this we see?

We see a scene that evokes a flashback to Sheilas' Wheels 1 at top of the page. There has to be a particular difficulty here somehow, I mean inside some ladies' heads in terms of spacial awareness with regards parking between two cars at the side of the road.

For here we had proof again, almost 10 years later. But with a difference this time for life, as we all know, is never ever the f'king same - right?

A lady at the wheel of some dreadful run of the mill middle-of-the-range Renault hatchback heap, trying to back her way into a quite A D E Q U A T E space. A lady friend is outwith the car, standing right behind, guiding her in.

" Just a tad more, Liz,. . . yeah, another inch. . .whoooh stop stop,. . . . forward again, right hand down." . .etc etc . . . you get the idea.

My instinct told me to stop on the pavement and watch, for something signalled accident waiting to happen. In the sense of the girl out of the car was standing in the road directly between the rear bumper of the friend's car and the butt end of the parked car behind.

In other words, just one slip on the clutch, or one lurch too far in reverse, would have seen her knee joints crushed like eggshell, most likely confining her wheelchair-bound for many a long and sexually frustrated year.

So I, as the long suffering good samaritan that I used to be, spoke up in a definite non- minding-my-own-business kind of way.

" Ahemm, excuse me luv?" ( that's me trying to be polite.)
The helper glared up at me with such impatient animosity I almost walked off right there and then.

" Yeah, what ? " she muttered, whilst concentrating on curling her fingers at the driver's rear mirror for her pal at the wheel to back up a bit more.

" Erm, you do realize if your friend accidently reversed a wheel-turn too far, your legs would be mashed right here ?" I said, pointing to the spot where the sickening crunch would occur.

The reaction I received will live with me to my dying grave.
" WHY DONT YOU JUST MIND YOUR OWN F**KING BUSINESS!"

So onward I slouched, humbled, saying not a word.

However, looking back over my shoulder a ways down the road, there she was, still directing her mate into the parking space - from a safe stance up on the pavement.

You know sometimes you just think sod other people. . . .

___________________________
EPILOGUE

The standard fare of MCP joke surrounding the female brain's apparent deficiency in spacial awareness during parking goes something along the lines of;

Women have problems judging distances. Reason?
Men are always trying to convince them that
THIS (. . . . . . . . . . . . . ) is 9 inches.

Well, I wouldn't know that. But I do know this; the above illustrated and other highly amusing female cock-ups upon our public highways are as nought compared with the vastly underplayed role that mostly young male drivers play in wreaking havok, death and destruction in society.

Exactly who is responsible for virtually all the drink-drive deaths, the speeding offences, the road-rage GBH incidents, the general aggressive behaviour on our roads?

In all honesty guys, we have to look ourselves in the rear view mirror and hang our heads in shame.

Whilst women can be mildly irritating, slow and generally obtuse behind the wheel, men are almost universally responsible for all the real nastiness let loose on our arterial road transport network.

Thanks for the high jinx laughs ladies, but definitely no thanks to the irresponsible young testosterone-driven ass holes amongst us.

HAVE A SAFE SUPER COOL DRIVE Y'ALL.

MSt.M

Comments

Black and White Beverley ( and shades inbetween)

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 12:32:04 +0200

About one year on from the traumatic Monitor Lizards episode and again on a weary return from work one fine summer's eve' ( oh yes, life's cosh threatens when exhaustion beckons ); I turned the key in the Yale and was just about to push the leaded lights portal to my stately terrace wide open when. . . .my eyes drifted down and slightly to the right - and opened a little.

"What is that?"

Transferring the key bunch to my left, my right index finger snaked out to wipe down through a little greasy fawn streak decorating the sun-hot white gloss of the door frame. Hmm, something slightly out of kilter here, I mused - and as I gained entrance to the entrance hall, shutting the door from the inside. . .there was another one, right at the optimum spot where one would place one's palm to close. Yes a wide arrogant palm print, again in gorgeous smeared fawn.

Descending the couple of steps into the kitchen, metaphorically scratching my head, I hauled the on-the-way-home shopping up onto the long formica worktop. The manic-motif'd Asda plastic bags crispily crumpled and, hey, here's Scrimper and Scraper right at my feet, looking up pleadingly and yowling to high cat heaven for something to douse that animal stomach's hunger fire..
" Alright alright, I'm getting the fucking Felix out, hold your horses".

I reach for the cat food cupboard but my hand jerks away before I touch the handles.
"Oh for fuck's sake, what the hell is this?"
Oh yeah, there's a whole gamut of brown streaks this time, arting their ways right left and left of centre, all over the cupboard doors. This time I smelt the smear on my finger. Perfume (cheap). Makeup foundation!
" Right".

I glanced back up the hallway to the downstairs let room. The room where the only current female was known to be residing.

Beverley was a weekend guest of Daniel, a model tenant from the Borders, who I'd taken in after a more stringent vetting system replaced the old lax (non-existent) one, post Chris-rapist debacle. She was a very pretty black girl of about 25 and of sweet demeanour and personality. She would busy herself frenziedly about the kitchen come the weekend, cooking and cleaning for her boyfriend, as if demonstrating future wife-suitability; but. . . .here there seemed something of a disturbance, somehow?

I waited a couple of weeks, wiping the odd varying shade of brown smear off of the household paintwork as I went. I joined the happy couple one evening in the television lounge ( oh how I spoilt my tenants). There they were, snuggled up on the Schreiber setee happy as you like, munching down through a big shared packet of Kettle Chips and watching some film 4 pretentiousness; for Danny was a photography/film student at a central London college with a proud legend of arse-panning graduates working successfully in the film industry to its name.

Looking over at Bev as I quipped some pleasantry about the weather, I couldn't help but notice her face seemed vaguely blotched and of slightly different shades. Like, her nose was a definite tempura in contrast to her more dun cheeks. Her dark tan forehead of a marginally differing shade to that of her burnt sienna chin. She smiled back, accentuating her pleasing bone structure, blissfully unaware I could plainly see all the differences of tone, texture, colour and pallour.

Bev impulsively waved out the remote to change channels.
" Oh no, put it back" remarked the Lanarkshire laddie.
"Oh ok sweet". Bev pecked her fantasy future film director hero on the cheek.
But wait, that arm with the remote, just look, I thought! Jeeeez, it's like that of some poor goddam leper!
A makeup zebra crossing effect in fact. Where was her artistic sensibility, not to mention supportive feedback from the supposedly visually aware boyfriend?

I wandered back in the empty lounge around midnight to check everything before retiring to my bed and was about to twist off the dimmer switch, when my security eye noticed the black remote handset laying prone on the armrest . . .was not entirely black. I reached to pick it up - there again the tell-tale Beverley signiture, writ large in Max Factor.

But what tale did it tell, I mused to myself as I lay awake that night mulling the situation over. My room was directly above Dan's but I never noticed much noise coming through, except a rythmical sqeaking of a bed spring every so often - and at the end some rather muted squeals and groans.

I hoped the landlord wasn't cramping the tenant's style - but soon learnt that he definitely was.

Part Two

My next door neighbour, Derek - a heavily obese chap in his mid thirties, did as most of that ilk do and stayed put - indoors most the time. Especially at weekends. He inhabited a collapsed setee in the back room of the run-down house which was virtually untouched and left to gradually decay and rot ever since his parents passed away some 10 years earlier.

I would oftimes pop in to spend a couple of hours chatting about this and that and t'other. One day, upon visting the giant armpit-stinking D and after I'd just returned from my weekend stay over the north side of London, where I kept a small studio; he decided to broach a certain subject.

" Erm you know your two tenants in the back room just here" he said, waving a flabby arm in the direction of his open window.
" Not two, just one" I corrected him.
"Whatever. Well can you ask them to keep the sex noise down a bit - I can't sleep 'cause of the bleeding racket"
" Just last night I had to shout through the window at them" he complained.
Derek's one room world was indeed directly next door to Daniel's.
" Yeah" he continued, " I cried for Christ's sake tek her over the edge! "
Hmm I thought, must have been a marathon session. And our sweet Beverley a right little noisemaker.

" Well I can't exactly say keep the fucking noise down can I?" I remonstrated and it was left at that.

Later that very same night, I was gazing out of my bedroom window at the miasmic maze of light traces and sodium yellow street lamp dots way down below; over the river in the bustling East End. I would often sit there simply looking for hours and find myself drifting into a bizarre hypnotic timeless state of mind.

This particular night though ( it was about 12.45am ) I was interrupted from my reverie by the click of the bathroom light cord being pulled. From my vantage point I could see the bathroom window to the side and slightly below. The now lit frosted glass window pane swung open. I could see into the space through the open crack and observed a topless dark-skinned female form in the form of Beverley, her arms in motion, hands busy wiping her torso with a substance from a small plastic tube.

She stooped forward and off came the jeans. More frantic smearing on the legs, then each arm and hand, and lastly face. Bev stretched forward towards her boyfriend's shaving mirror on the window ledge, pouted her ample lips and worked the makeup delicately into the contours with one finger. The effect was to render her entire body one tone lighter.

A light switched on in my head. Surely the poor insecure girl is thinking that if she appears lighter-skinned she will appeal more to Daniel.

Perhaps he had mentioned when they first met that her preferred the lighter-skinned Afro Carribeans to the much darker native Africans? But Bev's cover-up would never work unless she went 100% with the smearing - on her palms, feet, bum - the lot.

Jeez, I thought, what a thing to put yourself through to please your partner.

Just when I thought I'd seen it all that night ( well all of Beverley at least), she began brushing her teeth, leaning over the washbasin by the window, tap running, young dark heaving breasts dangling, tipped by even darker football stud-like nipples. Look. I know I should have looked away and minded my own business, but you know us voyeristic men, we sometimes get kind of visually magnetized don't we.

Bev was giving her big bright knashers a good working over, I observed. She had a great set of teeth which helped her realize that disarming beam of a smile.

Just as I was about to close the blinds to retire, the window suddenly swung full wide and in the same instant her entire head poked out into the night and spat a large gobfull of toothpaste down, to splatter unceremoniously into my back yard beneath. After 10 seconds another dollop of white spit descended into the darkness -and another.

I'd seen enough. More stuff coalesed in my brain, for a week earlier I'd casually glanced out of the kitchen window into the yard and wondered what those white blobs were on the concrete out there, but didn't bother checking it out, putting it down to seagull shit. The following morning I naturally ventured out through the catflapped back door, bent down and as per the makeup smears, wiped an index finger into one of the large white droppings and smelt.. . . .peppermint.

A polite and diplomatic note was slid under Daniel's door requesting the toothpaste spitting be confined to the washbasin in future. An indignant co-penned note was returned a week later denying any knowledge or responsibility. A distinctly offish frostiness thenceforth manifested.

So I left it at that - but good old Scrimper didn't!

Within the week he'd crept into Dan's room whilst both he and Bev were down the shops, jumped into her overnight bag left open on the floor and pisssssed. . . pissssssed. . . pissed away to his little feliney heart's content.

There's a proper place for everything, you see Bev.

MSM
Ps It turned out a longer post than expected - thanks for bearing with it.

Comments

The Reptileophile Rapist of old Shooters Hill

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 20:22:52 +0200

Aroundabout the mid-eighties, that heady time of housebrick mobile telephones, champers-guzzling hooray Henry yuppies and the truly dreaful New Romantics; there stood a freshly purchased 3-bed Victorian terraced house perched on the north side of Shooters Hill, SE London and resisting (just) a graceful subsidance-slide into the River Thames at Beckton, three miles distant and 200m below.

Down on the Blackheath side at the foot of the first shoulder of the hill and on the site of the old police station, they used to string-up dandy highwaymen in days of yore.

The charming 1980s nocturnal view from my back bedroom window up on the hill, however, took in a sweep of most of London's East End, labouring away its grime-laden traffic and fume-puking existence, bisected snake-like by our mutual friend the Thames. At night it all sodium-lit up like a view of some downtrodden amber-putrid mini Hollywood from up near the big fuckoff sign.

My newly purchased pride and joy stood about nine-tenths of the way up Shooters Hill, a slightly refined steep London suburb, which unfortunately is encompassed by the dreaded Woolwich postcode of SE18. Nevertheless it was a shrewd purchase - I thought.

For those heady days of the mid-eighties in London saw a seemingly unstoppable wave of money-euphoria (green energy) on a high roll. Like the San Francisco hippy era in the late 1960s, you would be forgiven for believing -if you were near the orgasmic epicentre of that huge breaker -that it never ever would break.

But hells bells it did - and all too soon for most. Incomes started drying up when everyone cut back on spending after Black Wednesday. Share prices crashed. The great hurricaine hit. Interest rates peaked at a mind-numbing 15%, forcing countless English households to fall back into the role-trap of landlords, having to let rooms in their their former castles to keep up with the extortionate repayments.

I was one of those "lucky bunnies" who had good cause to curse Thatcher and all she stood for. That horrid heartless bitch destroyed more lives than anyone before her since Hitler and founded the money-grabbing house-obsessed wage-slave nation we have become today.

The very first tenants I reluctantly took in to fill the upstairs front double room seemed innocuous enough for sure. A young couple of short stature and chavish IQ. One of the house rules I had to insist on was "no pets" as I already had two racey young toms - Scrimper and Scraper - jetting around the place swiping and hissing away at each other.
"Ok no probs'" said the new lodgers, in almost perfect sycnchronicity.

Didn't need any more fur flying, ripped curtains or animal debris to wipe up, thanks. So when I saw "Chris" struggling to fit through the front door carrying some heavily draped boxes on moving-in day, I didn't think.
" Need a hand?" I said
" Oh no ta " he murmured, bumping bits out of the hallway wallpaper as he went.

When the next quarter's electric bill rocketed I scratched my head but didn't think twice.

But on returning home from work one fine summers eve' and just before entering the front door noticing an upstairs window jerk open and a hand shaking a plastic Asda shopping bag inside out to scatter some strange bits down into the front yard; I thought thrice.

" What the fuck's going on? " was the thought.

I picked a " bit " up - looked like a dried rat dropping. One and one started to coalesce and the number two eventually manifested when I took my spare key and entered the couple's empty room the following day.

I jolted to. Jeeez! The whole goddam room was lined with dry aquariums ( should that be aquarii?) standing on milk crates. Above the thick glass chambers were suspended large infra red lamps, the room seemed much too hot, even for mid-July. I looked closer.

There, blending in nicely with the subdued texture of the gravel spread at the bottom of the tanks and laying motionless as statues; lurked five or six massive colourless lizards. 14" long - two foot with the tails and coated with grey scales. One gave me a slow 60 million-year reptilian wink. My mouth gaped.

" Bastards !"

So that was where the dozen tins of Whiskas I would leave out on the formica kitchen topboard had gone on the weekends I was away. I marched straight down the hill to "Fur Fin and Feather" pet shop to make enquiries to the knowledgeable acnie'd pet assistant.
" Yeah, Monitor Lizards. . .definitely"
" Not Norweigen Greys then?! I rather snidely remarked, stomping out in utter lividity.

You know there's nothing like someone who I've expressed a degree of generosity to taking the rise with bang-out-of-order behaviour to get my gander up. That era of letting rooms out and trying to play the decent landlord had me tearing my hair out, quite frankly.

I confronted Chris and his girlfriend that evening, told them to move on within the month. The next day a different surprise awaited on arrival back at the house My bedroom had been broken and entered and some items taken.
" Wasn't us. ." shrugged little blond Chris as he fried some supper.
" . .and whats more we 'ave no intention o' movin' 'ither - you'll 'ave te tek us te court mate, we no our rights".

This put the mental cat amongst the pigeons for a day or two - until I picked up a copy of the News Shopper, Greenwich/Woolwich's own local version of The Sun with the subtelty taken out. On the back page appeared a police artist's impression of some guy who had the previous week broken into some woman's flat down the hill in Charlton. The story read that if it hadn't been for her plucky little Yorkshire Terrier savaging the intruder's leg, he would have concluded what turned out to be "only" attempted rape.

The "sketchofit" picture was described as. . "A very accurate portrayal of the suspect, according to the victim ".

And you know what? You know what don't you?
It was Chris alright.

I simply left the rag, back page up, on the carpet outside the double room that evening.

Within 2 weeks they were gone, all rent arrears paid.

That's fear and that's loathing - and that's been going on a wee while 'round these parts.

MSM

Comments

Summer in the City

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:29:56 +0200

The all-powerful sun is now at its head-baking sunblock-inducing zenith and the city is swarming. Just as those nifty red ants get all hot and bothered and start pointlessly excavating sand up through cracks in sidewalk paving stones, so the city is mad just now, mad with fear and mad with loathing.

People buzzing about on foot or by car and by 4 by 4 tank, it seems mostly about getting "ME" off. Like we're all really totally selfish bastards at heart? Each one in the other's way in the relentless dizzying pursuit of personal material happiness, it's a gigantic melting pot of frustrated and blocked energy, hatred and vindictive venom just now; is Londoninium.

Those tiresome all-pervading property-developing builders' stop/start angle-grinders prove a cheese-grater on your eardrums, starting up right on cue - of course just as you pass by another building site every hundred yards and are forced to inhale the toxic dust . .. and. . .out . . ahhhhhh.

The wind drops for an hour and the traffic/incinerator/factory particulates build until you're breathing in some pretty fearsome airborne blend of viledom indeed. Choke away choke away, you may as well be dragging on a Marlborough right there.

It's palpable this inward burning - you can feel the mass mental growl crackling through the urban ether. You turn a corner, there's another wound-up stranger in your space - and you in his. Times that by a hundred in three hours if you're out and about minding your own business.

All males eye one another on suspicion they could be Clarke-now-Reid-released knife-weilding nut nuts (It's not paranoia)

Drive along for thirty yards and its stomp-on-the- brakes time again, for here's yet another crooked baseball-capped father-less spiv-chav shamelessly cutting you up whilst bopping to pedestrian skeleton-jarring sub-bass in his souped-up n' alloyed Vauxhall Corsa, fancying himself as some international bad boy crossed with Formula 1's Fernando Alonso. You give him a honk and it's " fuck you" sign - or worse, he's out of his hot seat pronto and kicking in your side panels whilst spitting an earful of refined Essex verbals..

Jeez, look at the face - it's a brilliant red snarling rabid dog impression. I left the pepper spray at home, dam it, I suppose I'd better get out all smiles then give him a surprise full on straight right to the chinny chin chin before he has chance to pull a blade on me - no point messing about. Then wait for the distant ambulance wail and soon after el filth to arrive and charge me with common assault.
"Well me lud, I agree about the "common" bit."

. . .Back from the world of dreams. . .this World Cup fever seems akin to weedkiller dashed on an underlying fertilzer of discontent and the days of England games the sliver of Semtex to detonate the mix in an explosion of real bad craziness. Yesterday I had to put my hazard lights on whilst driving a half mile stretch to Tally Ho Corner North Finchley, the ambient standard of driving suddenly turning distinctly loopy. Is it the drink, the drugs, the sun or what?

Take someone's parking space and you'll likely as not return to admire a fine meandering piece of key-scratch artwork etched right along your pride and joy's starboard side.

Everyone's getting worn down by daily friction with countless thousands of surrounding strangers - exactly like those smooth rounded-off pebbles on the beach, powerless to prevent each daily tide of life crashing them against each other til in time they're reduced to countless impotent particles of sand.

I sometimes wonder what the city will look like in a thousand years time. Or feel like. Does the fear and loathing ever end? It's not looking all that hopeful. . . like the art school dance, some things go on forevermore.

MSM

Comments

The Slaughterman

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 15:00:19 +0200

Wading way back in time - well it feels like it - to the days of in-car entertainment fitting, another of the car franchise establishments I frequented was the Toyota Clockhouse garage in East Barnet wherein I would be called to perform my technical wizardry every so often over a period of a couple of years.

Mingling with the car valeters ( kind of a skill and kind of not a skill) as one of the lads yet patently not a lad anymore, strolled the supervisor, a diminutive Hispanic-looking chap of about 50, patiently watching over the furious circular hand activities of the little valeters on Toyota paintwork, glass and vinyl. I had a little time sometime to watch him interact with his underlings and saw him to be reasonable, mild mannered and actually rather reserved.

After a few weeks of this, when he noticed I had become a semi-regular fixture at the garage, he shuffled over to my corner of the place and began to chat.
" Blaupunkt today Mike"
"Nahh, another CD player"
. . .was the kind of initial banter between us, but gradually he seemed to become more interested in conversation, probably sensing, rightly so, that I'm a sucker for a sob story. So after a month or so, a casual enquiry about his former occupation let open some floodgates or other within, yes, The Slaughterman.

It transpired he had spent most of his previous working life at the sharp end of a large national abatoir. "Sharp end" in this case, literally. Daily slitting of hundreds of stunned cow's throats had become so routine he had taken it all for granted, just like some hair-netted granny working on a food processing production line - say, packing Mr Kipling apple pies on a conveyor belt.

After a while, he confessed, he started to get horrible claret-soaked dreams of guts and blood-gargling gore. Along with this waking-in-a-cold sweat side effect, a realization grew upon looking into their eyes that the animals experienced fear and knew well what was happening to them. Not only that but an uncimfortable sense that they do indeed have souls.

But the money was just "too bloody good" to give it up so on he went. . .until . . the guilt got too much, by which time he had amassed enough blood money to comfortably semi-retire on - but the horrific dreams continued and so did an increasing weight of fear and foreboding within him. A massive soul-dampening blanket of memory enveloped him.

He felt the need to continue the confession at break neck speed when I admitted I was a vegetarian, but came to a screeching halt when I put my foot in it by mentioning my belief in re-incarnation and the law of Karma to boot( basically what you put about comes back on you in time through the unconscious ). Not to mention ( I didn't) the belief in spiritual circles of the piteable nature of the after-death experiences of such people. The slaughterman visibly shook and turned away, steering clear of the stereo fitting bay from then on.

How to undo the consequences of ones actions in life without experiencing the pain of learning - so as we don't repeat our mistakes? How else for him to learn respect for all fellow creatures?

I sensed he had already accepted his fate - what he now must pass through - and for this I respected him. Never again in his soul's sojourn would he stoop to such depths of depravity simply for money; quite possibly he will actually become a Saint Francis of animal compassion in future times. . . so it goes.

MSM

Comments

The Enforcer

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 22:28:23 +0200

Thinking back to a previous post, Arthur Lives Today (see tags), I mentally stumble upon another cheeky chappy employed by Jack, the then proprietor of London Car :XX" class="middle" border="0"> in his Liverpool Street railway arch garage.

Barry, at five feet five-chubby, short-limbed and gut-overhang-podgy, cut an unlikely "ex-SAS captain" it had to be said, despite this oft' repeated proud boast.

Yet there again this very log-arm thick-set'ness did pose a slight question mark in ones mind which would certainly deter one from ever having a pop at him -just in case. Especially as he rambled in military terms from within a worn old flack jacket, much of the time.

Bazza was employed by Jack as a kind of temp cash-in-hand employed yet kind of not officially employed, chauffeur/ handyman etc. This "etc" however, from the tiny percentage of chit-chat amongst the rail arch garage staff that I picked up on; comprised some pretty heavy duty "protection".

One incident from safely in the past that Barry would unashamedly come right out with in jocular tones over tea breaks, was when Jacko asked him to "persuade" some individual who had bought two Rollers and then defaulted on the payments, to hand them back.

Bazza had turned up one fine spring morn' at some ivy-dripping chinzed-up Surrey mansion, just as the Roller-nicker was doorstep-kissing his wife bye bye for the office. Sawn-off shotgun in hand, he promptly blasted this guy in the leg, right infront of his screaming missus.

Writhing in agony on his driveway, holding his leg with both hands he shouted up " YOU SHOT ME! YOU SHOT ME!

Cool as a cucumber Barry replied
" Next time I will you mug, if you don't get them Rollers back where they came from and pronto"

Baz strolled off, leaving the victim prostrate on the ground in shock, nursing a nasty big bruise on his right thigh.

For Barry had, he chuckled, taken the lead shot out of the cartridge and replaced it with pepper.

One other incident that was more in the actuality occured whilst I was present within the murky confines of the arch, installing some speakers in a Landy. From somewhere, somewhere, somewhere within the damp German Shepherd-stinky interior, emanated another very alien smell.

Definitely not yer country cottage spoilt Hooray Henry green welly mud stench, this. In fact rotten fish to be precise.

Jack called in the car valeter who spent all afternoon spraying all surfaces and upholstery with disinfectant and all manner of coverup scents at his five year-experience disposal. Then a mega steam clean. All to no avail.

Eventually Jack got one of the mechanics to dismantle the Landy's entire back seating arrangement, to reveal one large whole fortnight-old salmon, bloated with decay to bulge a punctuated polythene bag in which it had been wrapped. Foul stench didn't even come close. Real vomitsville infact.

Turns out the previous owner of the Land Rover had had some kind of serious dispute with Jack over the vehicle and had returned it - possibly after another subtle B "persuasion" technique - complete with leapong salmon in situ.

The very next morning SAS Barry casually waddled his thick-set way into the garage, coffee in hand.
" Y'alright Bazza?"
" Interesting night, last night" he said, staring into space.
" Oh yeah, how so" I queried
"Never smashed up a conservatory before" he replied, casual as you like.
" Them modern sealed units take a fair old welly of house brick to cave in"

Barry then wandered into Jacks portacabin office installed at back of the arch. Through the small inside window I could see the two standing in animated conversation. After 5, Jack punched the air in victory and gave Barry the day off.

Such are the tip-of-the-iceberg 24/7 vindictive goings-on in Fear and Loathing Land you see, my little innocents. Under the surface -it's a goddam war going on, physically or psychologically.

Beats me whatever happened to "love thy neighbour".

MSM

Comments

Bill Booze

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:56:47 +0100

Bill was an amiable and jovial wee chappie from Lanark( 5ft 3" - wee), in his mid-thirties who worked as an assistant manager in an engineering design office in Hendon, N. London, in the eighties. I was some shy pip squeek of a trainee but couldn't help being impressed by the sheer nerve of this confirmed batchelor's drinking exploits.

He would turn up to the office consistently well-attired in suit & tie & a pair of shiny Clarks. This however, I learnt to appreciate, was something of a ruse, designed to fool his fellow workers into not particularly noticing that a couple of mornings a week Bill would be still quite drunk & unsteady from the night before, his face skin a giveaway sweaty mottled palid mauve from the Bitter - for that indeed was his alky poison of choice.

His week would be cunningly divided up to revolve around his prime interest and offering the bare minimun token attention to the second. Here was his "rat arse rota" as Bill himself would subtley term it.

Monday night -go out to give something to look forward to during Monday & to face the week ahead - six pints.
Tuesday night - stay in, early night recovery.
Wednesday night - go out to break-up & hasten the week - six pints.
Thursday night - stay in, recovery.
Friday night - go out get blind drunk ( ten pints minimum )
Saturday night - ditto ( twelve - sixteen pints)
Sunday night - stay in, early night, recovery, save energy to face the week ahead.

Bill's appearance at work was that of a good actor, going through the motions. He'd often wander around the office, smartly attired, chatting amicably to all and sundry, but always with some scrap of paper in hand, making him appear quite officious, but in actual fact doing SFA.

In conversation with Bill, he revealed some startling facts about his drinking, for here was no ordinary Joe Bloggs of a tippler, here was a veritable drinking champ from the leaden-skied land of the midge-bitten Kilt-sporting caber-tossers.

He'd explain the logic behind this killer liver-pummelling regime as being that once in a while - about every six months on average - and usually when walking to his car after a session, he would gaze up at the stars ( or falling drizzle, whatever ) to experience some divine revelation wherein the mystery of the universe and of life itself would be revealed to him.

A lot of the other times he'd just be plain sick into the nearest drain.

This mega boozer had the uncanny luck to have steered clear of the local filth and therefore breathalyzer banland, over the years. Amazing when you consider he drove straight -as he could - home from the pub.
Even more incredible when you know Bill's runaround was an imported Jaws of a T. Bird, of Ferrari red complexion, replete with heavy speed stripes and star-spangled stickers. So, true in this case I guess, what they say about small men choosing big cars.
" I know where to park it and the quietest route home" he explained, rolling his rrrs, as you do.

A master of pre-planning then, our Bill. You'd have to be with this level of consumption . .. . but it didn't stop there, for he'd fashioned for himself some wide plastic funnel which he would wedge against the T. Bird's dash, he explained, through the steering wheel, before getting out of the car at the start of the evening.

The narrow end would be jammed over the ignition so as the paralytic Bill - after staggering from the pub and slumping into the cockpit - would, in the semi-dark, be able to guide the unco-ordinated drink-numbed hand holding the ignition key, down the funnel and into the lock to start the six -cylinder Thunderbird roaring to life.

One of a series of cute habits on arrival home, he joked, would be to have a good old drunken solo fry-up with Walls bacon rashers straight from the fridge. They were yum apparently, especially when it sometimes occured to him to slide them out of the plastic pack before slinging 'em into the overheating pan.

Bill eh, what a card. But this was the cheeky jock's way of surviving London - and some might say via a more colourful life than your average custard cream-nibbling teatotalling vicar, for example. . . . & who knows, maybe with more communion with the Almighty too, in his own perverse way.

MSM
.
Disclaimer.
In no way does this post purport to endorse irresponsible drink/drive behaviour.

Comments

Scam Central

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:36:36 +0100

London seems to be the 21st C. home of the international scrounger/fraudster/scamster/freeloader.

Anyone who has read Dicken's Our Mutual Friend, a vivid account of early 19th century London life, will recognize some of the material here, unchanged in 200 years. The technology's moved on, that's all.

It's the requirement to have to buy a paper shredder before you bin your Tescos receipt in the stead of watching out for the cobbled market's week-old vegetables having being tainted green by a copper coin in water, before you buy them, that's all.

The scam srew is tightening all the time.

Once upon a time ( pre-mid 1990s roughly ) you could feel the inner glow from playing the global benefactor by leaving a fat bin bag of your old clothes in All Aboard and Sue Ryder London charity shop doorways overnight. For a while now the doorways are empty on account of people in vans going around in the dead of night collecting the bags from the doorways to sell on.
The cancer shops have even had to put up signs in their windows, warning folk not to donate out of hours.

Bank Wank

New criteria of identification being rolled out by the high street banks is getting ever stringenter, as it were. Ever-increasing pre-checks and questions on the blower before any info on your account can be given. Cheque books through the post now have follow-up letters within three days to check if you have received them.

On attendance at your local branch to pick up a new Service Card it's passport, driving licence and proof of address time. Wouldn't surprise me if they're demanding a blood sample soon.

The scamming is getting definitely out of hand, the fraud reaching epidemic levels.
Everyone knows who's doing it but we mustn't say. Hushhhhhh now, ye English, hsshhhh, mustn't rock that racial boat now!
.
House Cleaned of ID

Every now and again we get bits of scap paper cut along unclean lines through the door, with some blotchy photocopied handwritten bad English saying;

Helpful reiable lady for your cleaning house.
Phone Makita 07786 708 , , , ,

These little scamsters specialize in dusting your home for peanuts and in the process relieve you of your bank statements, passport and whatever else they can lay their dirty sneaky little paws on.
There's no come-back for them because its always an unregistered mobile number they use (the type that that helpful Tescos sell for £20 - no need to give name & address just pay and go and off you scam.)
. . .now let me think now; who in this country could possibly be in need of fresh ID? The Blair Bullshit Corporation won't ever tell us the obvious.
.
Van Scam
Took me camper into my local VW AUTHORIZED dealer for its 35K service last week. Need that stamp in the maunal to keep up the residual value you see.

Two days later the spare wheel was stolen from under the rear when parked up overnight. Now you see this spare needed a special security locking nut to undo from the chassis. That special nut was supplied new with the vehicle and was kept in the glove compartment. When I checked it was gone.

So straight away I suspected someone at the dealership is supplementing his earnings doing moonlight rounds and half-inching spare wheels & flogging them on. As it happens there is a tyre/wheel business right smack bang next door to the VW dealership.

One and one usually make two yeah?

So I took the van back into the same dealer to get a replacement the next day. I queried about the locking nut with the management and later in the day my mobile rang with the service chap from the dealership saying the van was ready for collection. Ten seconds later my mobile rang again with the same number coming up.
" Hello" I said
"WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE" came the same voice I had just spoken to. Then click, silence.
£120 down the River Scam. Oh yes I'm sure it flows through your town too. It's just that here in London it's in spate 24/7.

So you see, I must learn to take a scam beating every now and then. It's the price I must pay for choosing to live in Fear & Loathing Land. Or else the other choice is to take a real beating, good & proper.
POST SCRIPT Spare wheel stolen again two months on. This time in broad daylight using an angle grinder to cut through the security bolt.
'
I have many more superscam stories up my experience sleeve, but the list would just be too endless to blog.

This is merely the tip of the scamberg!

MSM

Comments

Mr Know-all

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:48:59 +0100

Returning in mind to the Finchley Rd Mac Donalds, scene of no 1 of my Three Lesbian Misunderstandings post from last year; another encounter from within the hideous confines of the cooked cow lips joint might be worth recounting.

There, in the dusty suntrap window seat one May day in 1990, perched a decidedly hippyish-looking chap,scraggly curly dark blond hairdo down to his wasted waistline. I only noticed his somewhat withdrawn presence as I took to the seat adjacent, armed with a piping coffee, small salty crusty fries and Fillet o' fish - my fast food combo fave of that era.

As I began my perusal of The Evening Standard, I was interrupted by a sideways yet quite forward request.
. . ."'Ave ya got 20p? " was the catch-all 20 million dollar question. Looking left, I studied at greater intimacy the hippy and saw him to be in his late 20s/early 30s with a mush of facial hair, scraggly again to match the long rug. He was attired in multicoloured loose patchwork jacket with matching bright canary yellow flares.

He was looking straight back, expectantly, whilst disturbing a paper cup of tea with one of those spindly white plastic stirrers they supply free along with the paper napkins, (which incidently I always used to grab large wedges of from those counterside metal dispensers, with each meal. Well, the company may as well pay for my monthly loo roll supply while I was there, was the reasoning.)

"Sure" I replied and, half standing, dug deep into a side pocket, shuffled him out his 20p and snapped it on the formica table top.
" Ta cheers" he muttered, bringing forth a packet of Rich Tea biscuits from his carry bag and proceeding to dunk away to his hippy heart's content. Noticing that he had a somewhat battered acoustic guitar leaned to one side, I launched into a conversation, enquiring about his lifestyle and outlet for his music. I asked him why he was in London as he'd hinted that he prefered the countryside.

"What, with all that legalized murder? " he replied, quite sharply. I could see that as a "straight", dressed in collar & tie, I was irritating him, as his replies became terser and ever more self-righteous.

Yeah, I could see where he was coming from alright, something had disturbed his mind to the point where he had excluded himself from society. His extreme " know-all" mentality would be quite off-putting to most others too. So lone, wandering 20p-begging minstral he had become. A bit of a dope addict too, I sensed (smelt) from his clothes.

So after 10 mins, with the final wolf of my fillet, I stood and said good day to my ragged friend, who's mood by this time had turned decidedly surly. As I left I bid him
" Well have a nice day"
- quite apt for these famed canivorous environs, I thought.

" Yeah you like, have a banana pantaloon day as well"
he replied.

Next time I saw him, it was within 50 yards of the same Mac Donalds - he was striding purposefully towards me along the pavement, guitar over his shoulder and head down. As we passed, unrecognized from before, I impulsively blurted into his right ear. .

" MISTER F***ING KNOW-ALL! and kept walking.

Rude of me I know, but I've always been a bit of a spitter.

And where would mr KA be today, one muses. It wouldn't surprise should he have straightened-up to fit in a Savile Row pin-stripe and be down the City, bishop-bashing
the system for all it's worth. I've seen that happen to these young "drop-outs" before. Most of them have a luxurious rich parents cushion to fall back on and they just act the part (prat) for a few years before joining all the other snouts in the City trough and screwing us all over.

Yer honest-to-God long-term alternative lifestylers are pretty thin on the ground - they're the salt of the earth they are, real gems of human beings who'll never out.

MSM.

Comments

Upstairs Downstairs

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:14:04 +0100

Some memoirs of apartment life down the years, as I wandered from one to another. Specifically some characters and events from above and/or below my residences. Spiced up to the max, natch.

The man of Athens. (sideways)
.
Paul was a 26 yr old stick insect-thin out and out gay who lived in the room adjacent on the ground floor of the below-mentioned houseshare. I oftimes bumped into him in the kitchen whilst preparing my standard bedsit fare of pasta with canned tuna. He never seemed to be eating much more than crackers and cheese, however. All I remember was he dressed darkly and sported a perpetual badge on the grubby blazer he liked to wear at all times.

Don't ask me why or how; it just said " NIXON NOW ".

Paul was pre-occupied most the day, tap tap tippex tapping away within his room. He was writing a novel, he explained, that would one day make him rich and famous and open up a fabulous new world of mixing it with fellow gay celebs.

I managed to get him to place the clunky old Reed on a rubber mat to dull the sound somewhat, as that constant manic tapping would grate my nerves. Also he had a habit of bouncing pogo-style, in between writing, up and down in his room. This made the entire ground floorboards shudder rythmically, thud thud thud, so I would always know when Paul was taking his daily exercise.

Anyways, the novel progressed on for months and months. He showed me the manuscript once and it comprised a fair lot of ramblings it has to be said. And the grand title?

THE MEN OF ATHENS.

Who knows, perhaps Paul is a respected novelist these days, I'll have to check Google for the above book.

Motorbike Jim ( Upstairs)

In the room above mine, sometime in the lost 80s. A young motorbike fanatic above my living space. Jim had three bikes, one on the road and two parked up decrepits for spares like. Taking hammer and chisel to the parts up there and lumping the bike bits around caused quite a stir! Even the smell of oil permeated down into my living space. So god knows the mess on the carpet up there.
This improvised motorcycycle repair shop upstairs forced a first use of earplugs for yours truly - a ritual that would become routine as I moved from one den of all-human-life to the next over the years.
Jim, the motorbike bedist repair man soon enough got short shrift when David the lanky landlord found out.
Out on his leathers he was, pronto!
David invited me up to take a look at the room afterwards.

Besmirched, darkly!

Upstairs on the south side. . .Mrs Mouse!

Moving right along the timeline to the mid-nineties and Govanhill, south side Glasgow. What the hell I was doing there dont ask me, I think I must have had a brainstorm. Actually I would flit off away from London every few years when I came to the conclusion that no one has much time for anyone else in a big city and it was pretty pointless investing in friendship. Then return again with my tail between my legs.
This upstairs character I termed Mrs Mouse, for she would squeek squeek along her floor(my ceiling) at all odd hours of day and night. Right above my bed too, as it happened. She was a Jehovas Witness of about 65 and spoke to no one in the tenament. Every time I would be nodding off. . .Sqeek from above. A thick carpet needed laying - or else her floorboards needed re-laying. Despite several notes under her door trying to appeal to her Christian good nature, still that darned mouse squeek continued day in day out. Chronic!
One cannot live ones whole indoor existence earplugged up, yet this is precisely what would have been required to make life bearable there.

I resorted to more persuasive tactics of leaving the radio on full blast ( Scot FM too. . .arghhh! ) when I went out to the hills for the day. The squeeks got worse. So I ratcheted up the retaliation by leaving the cold tap running on full bore for hours. I could hear the mains water hissing through the pipes upstairs, he he.

This certainly did the trick, wind-up wise because she came a' thumping on my door one fine morn and let loose with a tirade of quite distasteful verbals. Really! I would have thought I could have expected better language from a JW!

So I told her exactly that.

Her daughter visited the same afternoon and the next morning I discovered my car had received a quite artistic gouge/scratch right across the bonnet.

I ended up moving out to Airdrie after a year. Oh yes, that centre of Scottish excellence and learning.
Mrs Mouse - you were a real upstairs BRICK. Thanks for the memories.

to be continued. . ..

Comments

Dunhill Chris

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 09:24:01 +0100

Woolwich, SE London, is pronounced " wool -itch ". Funny that, to start with, I used to muse to myself.

This garage/Car sales plot mentioned in "Brian" ( see previous) was some set-up. To describe the characters within is to highlight the place. And this Chris, the stressed-out patron, as mentioned, was some fearsome Dunhill chainsmoker.

Never seen without his trademark Dunhill International in hand or to mouth, he strode purposefully abouts the place, checking and assigning his two mechanics, biker Jeff and the other, Polish Jan ( or Yan). Jan Los was from a post-war Polish immigrant family. He'd been working on ( or mostly under ) the same car servicing ramp for 20 years previously, through three owners. The initials JL had been set in the concrete surrounds of the bay just so we all could know he was part of the furniture, he was "here first". Jan had a voice just like a bleating sheep and more, he would oftimes give everyone in the garage a Godly-awful ear-torturing rendition of Charles Aznenvour's " Sheeeeeeep had a face I can't forget " ( I added the p ). The other guys in the garage would invariably pipe up. . ." Shhhut up Jan! ".

One fine Woolwich morning I was given the task of installing a Blaupunkt in Chris the owner's Renault.
" Give it a quick hoover out while you're at it Mike" were his parting words as he handed the keys over.
Ok fine, I thought, til I opened the car door. Unopened 20s packets of Dunhill International were strwen about on all surfaces, seats and dash alike. The headlining fabric, once cream, had been rendered a deep dun. The smell, that familiar nicotine legacy tang, impregnating. . . well everywhere.

Leaving all doors open to vent whilst I commenced the radio install, I had to firstly sweep four Indian red cellophaned packs together with some fine ash away off the seat. During the job I keept glancing abouts the footwells and seats front and rear. More Dunhill boxes! The ash tray brimmed to overflow with aggressively bent stubs, it was so crammed the tray was hell to extricate when it came to the hoover.

Job and a half that - I broke into a fine sweat, interrupted only by one walk back to the office.
" What shall I do with the packs of Dunhill"
" Ahhh, just leave 'em" said Chris nonchalently, looking back down at his paperwork.

Didn't like to ask why and all that - I'd learnt by then not to even mildly question any garage owner, if I wanted to keep the contract. So I asked the good goaty bearded biker Jeff, that authority on this garage personnel.
" Oh he goes on cross-channel day trips to buy them by the hundreds & scatters the unopened packets around the car (in the boot too), just in case.
" In case of what" I asked
" In case he runs out " said Jeff. He went silent for a minute as he tightened a wheel nut. " Yeah, looks a bit strange that don't it? . . . .you see he suffered agonies of withdrawal once when he was driving in the countryside and couldn't make it to a shop for hours to stock up. From that day forth he vowed never again to go short of his beloved Dungmounds."

Jesus H. Christ, is it me, do I attract these characters? Or is the whole friggin' world full of crackpots?

There's more. The respray man, Irish Joe, often used to complain about how tight Chris was, how he would take months to settle invoices. Over one teabreak he recounted the time he was passing Chris's house one dark December eve. A light was on and curtains open. Inside, an overalled Chris stood on a pair of battered stepladders, working away at a wall, decorator's wallpaper scraper in hand ( and Dunhill in the other, natch ).
Next day Joe mentioned he'd seen him.
" See you're re-decorating the house Chris "
The reply came back,
" No. . . .moving "

I think that was meant to be a joke but I never did check it out with Jeff.

MSM

Comments

Brian

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 23:11:05 +0200

" He's not a lucky man, isn't Brian".
So said the biker mechanic at another of the garages I used to attend to rig out radios and CDs and such like. This one in Woolwich, SE London, that centre of refinement and civilization. Jeff was a biker mechanic, I mean he was a Hells Angels type ( tho not actual) biker who was a car mechanic. He knew Brian's story inside out.

I was new to this garage. The owner, Chris, was a gent in his late fifties with a constant stress prob' visible on his palid face and always a Dunhill in hand ( lit, naturally ). He features in part two.

Brian was the chief electrician at the garage which was actually a Renault franchise ( they only did Renault new ) but with the odd ( Skoda odd ) used stray on sale from TT Time. They called me in when Brian was too busy to handle an urgent stereo fitting or something.

Brian was in his late forties, very dumpy build and likewise visage. Not at all any kind of attractive physical specemin for the ladies, but on the upside he had a very chirpy personality except when the subject of discussion got around to " wimin".

Brian prefered to talk about " fishin" which, funnily enough, had brought about his downfall with "wimin".

Jeff recited the story of Brian's luck with relaxed deadpan pannache over a tea break once when the electrician was away.

Once upon a time, in sunny Erith, Brian was a happily married chap in his thirties. His wife was faithful, devoted and happy to play the part of the contented domestic engineer ( housewife), standing smiling at her door for hubby to return from work, where waiting indoors would be slippers by the fire and steak& kidney pie in the oven.

But men sometimes being men and Brian certainly being Brian, he started spending more and more time away from home on his fishin' trips. Now SE London, down to the Thames Gateway at least, is infested with rivulets, small ponds and tributaries. A fishermans paradise infact. So, slowly over time, little Brian and wife drifted apart, though the meal was always on the table for him and he assumed all was well.

To garner a little more money for the household, they had both decided years earlier to let one of the rooms in their tiny Erith terrace to a lodger, a quiet fellow who worked nights at the local Tate & Lyle sugar refinery by the Blackwall Tunnel up near Greenwich . . . . . .you can see where this is going you sharp lot, so lets cut ALSS!

One fine June day in 1994, Brian returned from a fishin' trip with a keep net brimming with Rainbow trout, to discover his slippers were not by the fire and his meal was not on the table.

" Where's the dinner" Brian quizzed his wife who seemed strangely quiet and cold.
" In the fridge - make it yourself"
" Whats going on? " he quizzed, dropping his fishing tackle to the floor.
" I'm divorcing you and marrying the lodger".

Well one year later and after intensive psychotherapy - for poor Brian had in the interim, had a nervous breakdown - the situation in the house finally settles thus.

Brian had moved into the tenant's room and became the lodger in his own house. His ex wife married the lodger and were living as man and wife, rocking and rolling in the marital bed in the room adjacent each night, as Brian suffered next door.

I just couldn't believe this story so taking advantage of an opportune moment one afternoon whilst helping Brian install a bass system in some hoodlem's Toyota Skyline, decided to broach the subject of his marriage.

Brian spilled the beans, telling it exactly as biker Jeff had. Of course I had to ask.
" How can you bear to live in the same house as your ex wife with another man, especially the guy who used to be your lodger?

" Easy, chirped Brian. I get to do all the fishin' I like now - even bugger off over to Ireland for a week three times a year. And when I gets back my slippers are by the fire and my dinner is on the table. Lifes a lot simpler now".

Right! I thought, scratching my head. I got on with connecting up an earth wire to the chassis.

Wimin!

MSM.

Comments

Daisy The Whore

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:40:30 +0200

. . .is no more" were the chorus lyrics on some forgotten eighties rock band's song that caught my attention some two years after the event. Somehow, I knew they were referring to the selfsame Daisy, the whore I rescued that dark November night.

It was during the time of Derek and Ron ( see previous blog Confession time. . ) in the run-down shared Victorian mansion in West Hampstead. There were three or four other habited flatlets in the big house, over five grand floors. Which meant many of the rooms were empty -and neglected or half convered into bedsits by the incompetent landlord.

The landlord, at the time called " Ashbern Investments Ltd" gave their address, as many do, at that centre of accomodation addresses , Welbeck Street, W1. One pokey and scanty office with a hired reception handling twenty other companies too, answering phonecalls and the like. In other words a front for a dodgy operation.

This Ashbern owned forty-odd other properties and were the super skinflints of their day, almost gaining Rachman-like legendary status amongst landlords in London. Repairs? They got round to them. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . eventually.

I met one or two of their " directors" - a more shady underhand bunch you could not wish to meet. Fingers in many a pie and they knew all the scams under the sun. "Tax? What's that about then? " would make great epitaphs for them. Their spidered out connections highlighted even more shady personages from that twilight world between opportunistic enterprise and out and out gangsterism.

I was woken from my slumber at 4am one Sunday morning by banging and crashing. It was the huge rickety gatehouse-like front doors to the house being opened and several people quickly piling in at the same time-type banging and crashing. Soon followed by footfalls on the high-ceilinged hallway's threadbare carpet and accompanying urgent voices of two or three twenties males and one protesting young female.

I rolled out of bed and opened the door on the chain, which happened to face out into the hallway. There in the shadows were four unrecognizable figures stumbling right towards me, the smaller female being frogmarched along - I closed the door for a second, then opened the crack again. They turned left and mass- descended the stair boards to the basement. Hmm they know their way around then, was the thought. And they had a key. But, from their voices I knew none of them lived here.

I walked out and looked down the stairwell. Right underneath, on the basement floor had been placed a mattress and on it a young girl was being gang- raped in the semi dark. She was crying for them not to hurt her and that she was pregnant. The young males meantime taking it in turns whilst engaging in "Ugandan discussions".

This was before the days of mobiles and the house telephone was located at the other end of the hallway by the door so it would have been risky to phone the police, I'd have been overheard and probably attacked. So instead I slammed the door to the basement stairs. After 30 seconds the guys exited the house at speed as I dodged back into my apartment. All was quiet. I ventured out again and flicked on the basement light.

There was Daisy, a very pretty toy blonde of 19, all dishevelled, shaking and afraid, looking up through her destroyed makeup, pleading "please dont hurt me". I explained I lived in the house and finally persuaded her to come into my flat, where she immediately downed four blue Valium and crashed asleep in my arms.

But not before explaining she was a working girl and had been street-walking in London's posh Park Lane when she was abducted by three guys in a BMW and driven up to West Hampstead. She showed me the notes they had handed over to get her to jump in. All worthless Russian Roubles ( the rubble of currency).

PART TWO

So little Daisy spent the remainder of the night sleeping alongside me. I recall looking at her pretty, child-like face in the early morning light, the picture of innocence and with her frilly red whore bra promoting two peach soft white mounds of young breast, shadowed sensuously, rising with each breath as she slept.

There was no sexual contact between us despite Daisy rolling over and cuddling me in her sleep. Hard to believe chaps? I tells the truth, honest.

Sunday was spent sleeping in til 2pm and I took her out for something to eat and we talked. She had been married to an Arab prince from age of 15 but ran away back to England and was living with a madam in Knightsbridge. She spent another innocent night with me and on Monday we went to the bank to try to cash the wad of Russian money she had got paid the Saturday before in Park lane. Needless to say the bank manager didn't want to know. Some odd looks we both got, for Daisy was still in her Park Lane tart outfit, dressed to the nines.

I drove her to Hyde Park Corner and dropped her there, never to see her again. Of course I gave her my number, but she never called.

Life can be stranger than fiction, as they say and this saga was no exception. On my return from dropping Daisy, two of my fellow housemates were standing on the steps looking out into the street. Asking what the problem was, they told me three young men had called back at the house looking for something. One fellow tenant, Mr Whittington from a basement flat, was holding a driving licence.
" Probably this" he quipped.

It turned out he too had been disturbed by the Daisy rape and had found the licence on the floor by the mattress. As I was standing there the three guys walked past the house again, looking up at us. Whittington remarked " On your way, we know your game".
He handed me the driving licence to look at. I gasped. Appearing alongside the mug shot & name and address; his line of work.
Metropolitan police.

I said we should report this to the Old Bill but Whittington shrugged. " What good would that do?" and handed me the licence.
I took it up to the local cop shop that same afternoon and explained to the desk officer what had happened. He replied that if the girl didn't want to press charges there was nothing he could do. He did do one thing though. Took the licence off me.

Two years later I heard that song. "Daisy the Whore is no more" and I instinctively sensed it could well be my little friend who had gotten herself into another sc rape - this time a trick too far in fear and loathing land.

Prostitutes - they're the innocents in a hypocritical society.

MSM

Comments

SCARRED FOR LIFE

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 09:28:24 +0200

A little security guard number that I did to fill in a couple of months during summer 1990 saw me posted as supervisor on nights at the LT bus factory in Ealing. Probably shut down by now, what with the destruction of the country's manufacturng base.

This place was mega huge, like twenty aircraft hangers clumped together and filled with a vast assortment and array of machinery, offices and stores. There were rows and rows of dark towering lathes and geared block & tackle hoists suspending wrist thick chain down to the concreted floors.

A persistent oily, tallowy stink pervaded the stale air within. Like somewhere where, if you had an iota of imagination, you could almost see the Alien hanging out in the pitch blackness, all salivating and eyeing you up as his nightime snack.

All in all a great place to jump at your own shadows.

By night the twenty acres or so was deserted apart from the rats and us guards. There was a shift of five alternating patrols through the factory and peripheral annexes during the 12 hours. There were 50-odd check points at locations within the factory for the guards to key into their portable clocking devices to deter slacking and prove they were there and had done the round.

The calible of yon staff mind you left something to be desired. My job was to stay put in the guard hut by the main gate, checking the CCTV monitors displaying the perimeter fence and directing the guards on their patrols.

Or Paaa-trols.

For the company's regulation lowly-paid guards came mostly fresh off flights from various countries on the Aftrican subcontinent. They were around 23 on average I guess, and spoke pigeon English at best. They were polite, if reserved, and seemed pleasant and amicable enough people to me.

Putting this to one side, the most striking things about many of these fellows were the curious parallel lines of scarring, scored vertically down both cheeks. As if ceremonially etched by a tribal elder or witchdoctor in a bizarre rights of passage gig, with razor-sharp fingernails. This is a quite common tribal custom in some regions apparently and the flesh stripes demarcate and identify the tribe to which the scaree belongs, although what good that's going to do them on the streets of London is difficult to see.

One such scarred-up chap arrived one evening, looking smart enough in the company-provided uniform although it was obvious he had not been in the country for more than a couple of days. He was twitchy and nervous and the communication wasn't easy so I slung the check clock over his shoulder and showed him the key points on a map of the factory and out he went with torch into the damp night to get on with his 2 hour round.

After about 30 minutes one of the company's mobile super-supervisors turned up in his company dog van, minus the dog. Paul was an Afro Carribean and cut a tall, suave jokey kind of figure, always ready for a laugh and talking down to the African guards, referring to them individually as "black man". I suppose because his skin was rather less black and more coffee-coloured.
" New starter tonight I see" he murmered, checking the log, " Another scarface?".
"Ah Ha", I retorted.
"Watch this" he laughed, reaching for the mike on the desk. He switched on the factory tannoy system and proceeded to launch into a good impression of a ghost in a haunted house, more Hammer House of Horrors/B. movie stuff than anything, but real enough for a lad fresh from the African sticks.
Ever-louder " Uuuuuh, UuuuuuH, Yaaaaah etc"
I could hear the trebbley tortured sounds echoing round the machine halls even from the guard hut.

Within 2 minutes the poor fresher bust back in through the door, freaked to hell and babbling away like a demented Racoon in double Swahilli or some such. He was gesticulating widely, his starey eyes wide like doorstops, the stripes of scarring now a striking pink contrast.

Within ten minutes he was packed-up and gone, never to be seen again.

Scarred for life.

MSM

Comments

ARTHUR LIVES TODAY

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 10:53:27 +0200

" Another day another peanut eh Arth'? " I would jest to the odd jobs man at the end of the working day in the converted railway arch in the city in the early 1990s.
" Ha" he would mutter and walk off. I know I'm a wind-up merchant and couldn't resist taking the mickey out of him. Of course these days I would be "much more nicer". Back then I was some whippersnapper of a yuppie wannabe, flitting around like a motor industry tart from one dealership to the next with my mobile car electronics repair/installation biz.
" But Mike, ALL cars are mobile," a smart ass friend used to quip. Yeah alright Ken.

Anyways. Arthur was a 40 something 5' 7 something fellow with dark features including a bushy black moustache and permanent fantastic suntan. He was of Romany gipsy extract and he was from Romney, oddly enough, a quintessentially English village on the Kent coast.

His work brief within the railway arch was as a general sweeper up'er, driver, car parker/washer whatever els'er that came to hand'er; within the Jack Raymond empire.
Jack was a likeable chirpy cheerful kind of bloke who had been handed the contract to buy all the used ( more than 3 years old ) company cars from a selection of merchant banks at silly knock-down prices. Jack would then tart them up with valeting and sell them from his used car lot in East Barnet with a massive fat 2 grand mark-up each.
In other words Jack was on to a cushy number. Jack's tale is something else, but let's start with old Arthur.

He'd potter and slouch around the dark confines of the perpetually car exhaust-stinking arch all day, dragging his old black booted feet past; clad in oily blue overalls and with a permanent fixture of a pipe to his mouth. He explained to me once all about the "magic inch" - some pipe technology that was interesting in a read-it-on-the-back-of-a-matchbox kind of way.
So all in all Arthur portrayed an image of a quiet, harmless good natured and genial serf.

Just outside the arch entrance, across a narrow confined city lane and over a 20 metre razor-wired wall stood an electricity sub station. You could see the tops of the brown porcelean insulators and power cables from the lane beneath. A large placard sign bolted to the wall at 10m gave more than adequate warning about DANGER OF DEATH! 250,000 VOLTS! and with a red lightning symbol surround.
You could hear the innards buzzing and sparking away behind the wall. Enough, you would have thought to persuade most folk to steer well clear. It certainly did it for me. Those places give me the creeps.

One sunny August afternoon, on an outcall to Jacks to install a couple of CD players, I drove round the corner into the lane and as I turned into Jack's arch, noticed Arthur was outside and off the plastic chair that he often used to take a break when work hit a slack period. As I entered the dark gloom of the arch I almost cricked my neck looking back at what I had just seen.
ARTHUR!. . YOU MAD F***ER! I thought-screamed to myself.

I jumped out of my van and sprinted back to the entrance and stopped. I looked in disbelief. What had made me stop in my tracks and go no nearer to
Arthur, who cut a lax blue figure, sloping about casually 20 ft away; was the fact that he was holding the car rinse hose and playing the jet of water right up over the wall into the sub station. Arthur was humming to himself some durge of a Romany love song.
" Erm Arthur" I casually but firmly spoke.
He looked back at me as the water hissed from the hose.
" Erm Arthur. You do know that water is a brilliant conductor of electricity don't you?"
Arth' said nothing, but immediately took the play of the water jet away from the stream up over the high wall.
" If you ever wanted to know what its like to be struck by lightning, you're going the right way about it pal"
Arthur shrugged and started hosing the pavement.
" Keep the water away from the power station Arth' lad - or you'll be burnt to a f***ing crisp"

At this I turned back into the arch and got on with my job. I did keep an eye on the Romany though and noticed after about ten minutes a blue-overalled figure wandering through the arch and into Jack's office to get a cup of tea. He fetched his pastic chair in from outside and sat alone in a corner, quietly drinking his cuppa and papping on his pipe.

Through the car attendant's billowing blue fumes there appeared a pale, shocked visage - suntan diminished - staring into space, like a living ghost who has only just realized he had been collared by the hand of death - and released again.

I felt a strange surge of divine power over Arthur, as if I was some demigod who had snapped his fingers and decided that "the human should live". After all, I could have dismissed the danger in a " ah, he'll be ok, but who cares anyway" kind of way ~ the way of most other people. In that case Arthur would almost certainly be dead now, if not that day then sooner or later for sure, what with that bad habit with the hosepipe (the water jet earthing a quarter of a million volts through him).

I got no thanks of course. Well it's human nature and London too. What do you expect, gratitude for saving someone's life?

A couple of grand in my bin wouldn't have been out of order at all. But no, not even a word.

MSM

Comments

A LONDON TRILOGY

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:33:52 +0200

Just in the past couple of days, three recurring themes have. . . . .recurred. It's about time I blogged them out of my system I thought at the times, so I biro'd some temporary tatoos on the back of my hand to remind me to write.

THE CONE CON
It could be any motorway in the land, but in this case it's the A406 North Circular near Staples Corner in Neasden. Time; 12.20am. Situation; One lane (of 2) coned off for a good 2 miles. Fuming traffic backed-up to the M40 at the Hangar Lane gyratory, including YT. Yet there appeared to be nothing doing, roadworks wise. Just long stretches of cones, one vacant lane and the jam.

After one mile two guys in lumi yellow works jackets with ONYX proudly emblazened on the back came into view. They were stooped, picking litter from the traffic grime, weed & rat-infested central reservation and into bin liners. As I passed I was so wound up I wound down & shouted " F..KING SCAM" at them.

Then another mile of cones, yaaaawn.

The scam that I refer to, ladies and gents, is that Onyx will now charge either the Highways Agency or Brent Council I should say a good £10,000 for that night's work by two skivvies on £7.50 an hour. I have a friend who used to work for a minor roadworks contractor and he always talks about these huge rip-off charges being levied for minimal or ghost jobs. And about how the invoices were never challenged, no matter how OTT they were. Odd that huh?

Yet this is small spuds compared to our motorways where variations on a theme are being pulled on a grand scale. I've seen 5 miles of cones, again closing off one perfectly driveable lane. Roadworks signs of men opening umbrellas are everywhere, yet no roadworks. This is the Phantom Roadworks scam. All done in the wee small hours, when no one's about to notice. (SO THEY THINK!)

After a good two miles one comes across a truck with flashing ambers on top in the closed lane. Ahh haa you think, at last, its the roadworks.
As you pass, take a closer look -it's the flatbed cones truck with one pair of hands sticking out the back, disgorging more cones onto the tarmac.

So one lane of the motorway is coned-off for five miles to make way for roadworks which comprise precisely one cone truck putting out cones. And taking them back up again after a few hours.

It's roadworks Jim, but not as we know them.

The cost to the taxpayer, through the charged Highways Agency? At least a good £20,000 whack for the nights work.

Its all backhanders under tandoori tables.

The country is one big trough with a large pack of snouts in it, making bent fortunes for themselves.
It's a taxpayers' money-laundering scam of which there are countless. Look at Stagecoach, Jarvis, Railtrack (as was), Rover, Millenium Dome etc etc. Bled dry of massive government subsidy by their executives.

Privatisation was/is just another word for more jobs for the boys via the Tax Revenue trough.

HAMPSTEAD HEATH- A DOGGIES OUTDOOR POO POO PARLOUR
Nice morning I thought, forecast clouding over with beefy showers. I'd better get a brisk walk in before lunch. Off I head and park up near Kenwood and stroll down the tarmac path to the meadows.
Overnight theres been a couple of sharp showers and the ground is damp. The morning sun, still strong, is working all those lovely earthy smells out of terrafirma. In this case the stench of dog shit and it's a' blowin' in the wind. The path is smeared with compressed DS from the previous weeks months and years. For yes folks this is where the spoilt, pampered people of Hampstead and Highgate bring their also pampered pets for their morning trips to the lavatory. Wandering onto the Heath itself, one might expect the stink to subside. But no, it was a constant theme in the air and underfoot.

You know, I bet hell stinks of dog shit.

Years of daily dog droppings. Now melted in doggie turdies underfoot. The evidence is complete with the visuals. Gangs of self-absorbed yabbering young and middle aged women surrounded by packs of dogs playfully yelping about and crapping freely anywhere and everywhere ( a surprising preponderance of black Labradors I note ). Just what is it with women and dogs?

And when I got back I dragged that doggone crap in with me on the wet soles of my trainers, right throughout the house, kitchen and conservatory alike, before I realized my big mistake. Now the whole place reeks of that vile digested Chum jelly meat & Winalot biscuit melange.

Put the rights of people to enjoy the Heath's magnificent array of flora and fauna ( Londons lungs) before spoilt pet owners' present freedom to use any green space they choose as an open sewer for their animals.

LIGHT REMOVALS
This was one of my sidelines when I first moved to London. I had some beat-up Austin van ( good old British engineering, white of course ) and I started up my onemanband removal service called A to B removals( name since nicked ). It didn't last long however, I soon discovered the jobs I was called out on were more suited to Pantechnican Removals of Chelsea.

Evie will know about this one; the customer when ringing for a quote will always understate the load to be moved. Always always there is about one third more gear to be transported than you are informed. So you give an honest quote in good faith based upon the telephone estimate of the amount of rubbish to be lugged. Then when you turn up you are shown a room full of stuff which you think reasonable, "that should fit in nicely". Then, about halfway through loading, the lady of the house will mention in passing " oh by the way ( by the way my ass )there's another room with some things in". She will open a door and there's a repeat of room 1 right in front of your sweat-mangled vision.

Human nature can really piss you off if you don't wise-up - and even if you do. And human nature is exposed back to the raw nerve here.

So. On my vexed way back from the aforementioned wanderings in dogshit land, across the road from my freshly parked-up car stood a prehistoric hi- top rust bucket of a Transit van (white of course, not counting the numerous ruddy patches) with hand painted scrawl and a doodle drawing, as if from some kid at primary school, daubed in black on back and sides.
" Honest Ronnies Light Removals"
" No job too small, call for free quote"
And there was honest Ronnie, sweat-soaked, running-vested, beetroot-faced and unloading the first of two large upright speakers up over his porky shoulder from the back of the. . . . . customer's estate car?

Ah yes I thought, I remember that one. There was too much stuff to fit in honest Ronnies van so they used the back of the removee's vehicle to save a second trip. I was tempted to feel sorry for Ronnie for a split second til I realized he was most likely signing on. I've met one or two of these light removals fellows since - when moving myself. They invariably live alone in some smeller of a run down Baby Belling'd bedsit.
This is where " White Van Man" was born.

Thank the good Lord I dont have to do that back-breaker any more. Still, the good old days, when I first started learning what this city is really all about.

Everyone trying to shaft everyone else, in one way or another.
Basically.

MSM

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CONFESSION TIME; WHAT I DID TO DEREK AND RON

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:34:36 +0200

Sometime in the Yuppie 80's and whilst I was living in a huge Victorian mansion in Compayne Gardens in West Hampstead, I came to know two co-habiting gents, English Derek and Scots Ron, who happened to live in the almost self-contained flat across from my almost self-contained studio on the ground floor.

This house used to be the home of some turn-of-the-century empire-fat cat merchant and his family and domestics. The gentleman of the house had the convenience of being able to walk right through the rear garden, through a door in the wall and hop straight onto his coach ( not National Express either ) to take him to "work" in the city each morn. The family occupied the ground, first and second floors whilst the basement and top floors were reserved for the cooks and maids. In fact my studio ( the piano room) still had the servant-summoning bell attached to the wall. They knew how to build houses in those days, great thick walls, marbled features such as the ornate fireplaces, skyscraper-high ceilings elaborately artexed to hell and with quality hardwood finishings throughout.

Whatever, the reason I mention "almost" self-contained is because each floor's divided-up two or three living units were without loo or bathroom. So both facilities had to be shared and this induced a strange social interaction of a kind between the inhabitants of the entire house. In some ways this was a good thing, because it's not that healthy for anyone to live in isolation, as seems the current trend where everywhere has to be private and self-contained.

So I gradually got to know Derek and Ron who were at that time in their late forties or fifties. Thing about these two chaps was, in common with many other social failures living in bedsits in London at that time, they had made some kind of " pals for life" pact against the world and confined themselves to their room most days of the year. Certainly the sickly sweaty white-faced scared rabbit Ron never ventured outside as far as I saw, in 7 years. Superkings chainsmoking physical wreck Derek went out roughly every other day to grab some meagre morsels at the covenience Asian shop round the corner by W. Hampstead tube and once a week he brought home a treat of a cake from Grodinskys in Golders Green. Obviously both were on sickness benefit.

One other tenant of the house, one Mr Tripp from the first floor almost self-contained flat did mention in passing that once - about five years back he said - he had seen the two out together. He said it was the funniest sight seeing them walking in the road - both their pairs of trousers were at ridiculous half mast, halfway up to their knees. A bit of a self image problem there then.

I was invited to step into their room once or twice and beheld basically one collapsed setee, two single beds and an insanitary sink jammed in the corner next to a gas cooker and, the main feature, a gigantic 25" television taking pride af place in the middle. Behind the telly sat a bookshelf crammed with videos of classic 1940s & 50s films such as Gone With the Wind, Casablanca and Citizen Kane. The room stank of some strange melange of human-habitation-with-the-windows-shut-24/7/52. Derek's proud boast was that both he and Ron were big fans of Noel Edmund's Telly Addicts programme. ( Remember that grinning pullovered talentless BBC gravytrain twerp? )

These were simple people, shut in tight against the world, their inability to fit in being both understandable and sad. The odd thing about these inter-bedsitters relationships I noticed, was that for some weird inexplicable reason, they veered from excellent to very bad at sometimes the oddest incident or misunderstanding.

Because Derek and Ron were confined in such a small space, their entire lives also became cramped into that minute geographical area and the slightest interruption to their rat-on-a-treadmill routine within those confines would trigger pretty major inner crisis in them.

So inevitably it was only a matter of time til I fell foul of one of their house laws, which they considered they had the right to impose, having lived in that room a good 18 years before I came along.

It was the toilet seat what did it.

Derek insisted that it be lowered after use and I used to forget to carry out this simple task from time to time which irritated the hell out of him and we had one or two run-ins over the trivial ( for me but not for him ) nature of the matter. So being the isolated vindictive little fellow that he was, he used to black out the power to my studio at odd times such as when I was back from work enjoying the television. For the fuses and trip switches to the mains power to the ground floor were located within Derek and Ron's room.

What a wind-up that was, for sure. So I made my grovelling apology about the toilet seat and not being short on vindictiveness myself as a young fellow new to London, proceeded directly to the magic/joke shop opposite Camden Town tube ( it's still there ) and bought myself a large packet of PULVER itching powder, waited a month, then sprinkled it liberally on the loo seat ( having of course obeyed the house master's order to lower it first ) and watched and waited. The powder was very fine and virtually indistinguishable from the normal dust/traffic grime accumulations so I was confident in my revenge glory.

Even more so when, within two days the entire wardrobe of Derek and Ron was displayed for all to see, hanging dark, hefty and dripping on the washing line out the back, right in the line of sight of my little studio window. The poor f..ks thought they had lice.
It was the first and last time I saw evidence of cloths washing from room 13. They had been well and truly PULVERIZED!

And by god their taste in clothing was absoloutely shocking. The term Fashion Victims didn't come close.

Sorry to Derek Rhodes and Ron Keddie - for yes those were their real names - who are now both long departed, with no dependants or known family. All in all you weren't bad old sticks, just two more victims of a sick society, that made you sicker still thereby. God rest your souls ( and sorry about the itching powder).

Blame it on life in London, the fear and loathing gets overmuch for all of us sometimes.

MSM

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LONDON ACCOMODATION

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 19:05:48 +0200

Well I feel that I've more or less seen it all over the years I've lived here. What triggers this blog however were the arrest scenes of the alleged 21/7 would be suicide bombers. These Peabody housing estates comprise plush flats and seem ( indeed are) flush with non-white and non-UK originated people. See the two CS gassed suspects on the top floor balcony of one of these prestigeous blocks? Well that's rife throughout the capital. It seems the more foriegn, coffee coloured and dire straights pleading one is, the better ones chance of securing a quick Housing Association or Council flat.

What's the big deal about these these days you may ask. In the eighties the Thatcher govt. introduced new housing laws which did away with the former Protected Tenancy and introduced Regulated ones in the private sector, which essentially means that if one seeks to rent a property rather than buy, the dice are loaded with the landlord.

Formerly, with the Protected Tenancies, one could live in the property virtually as long as one wished as long as you kept your nose clean and payed the rent, which was assessed yearly by the Fair Rent tribunal. Fair enough. Now, one has to up and go at two months notice at the say so of the landlord. So no security of tenure and incentive to relax and make a home for yourself. The exception being these housing trusts, associations and council accomodation, which have kept the old Protected Tenancies on. But then they have filled most of their vacant stock over the years with asylum seekers and immigrants with family.

See this is only one law which the bitch on wheels Thatcher introduced to repress people and which the con Blair regime has kept unchanged.

My own personal experience includes languishing on Camden council's housing waiting list for 15 years, 10 of which were spent in a property deemed unfit for human habitation by the council themselves. Mid way through my stretch they changed their point allocation priority system and arbitarily took away my points for years spent on the list. When I complained about more ethnic people being housed than native and white English, I was told in no uncertain terms that Camden operated a policy of " positive discrimination" where they actively seek to give preference to overseas applicants and more specifically coloureds. Just see the madness.

I'd like to see all the local authority tenancies that have been given to people on false passports over the years freed up. There would be no housing crisis then, there would be enough for all.

Nowadays I lose interest, we must accept our nation and specifically London has been taken over by these vociferous ethnic groups - made up to a large percentage by illegal immigrants, many of them doing identity fraud - and will never be the same again. Politicians over the years are to blame, both Tory and Labour; they have betrayed the British people.

They had no right to inflict this mass immigration upon us, much of it illegal. These cultures by and large have no wish or intention of integrating - they are here for the beer and who can blame them. Britain is, as they say, a soft touch. Now we all must pay the price of further restrictions on our liberties, more checks on our day to day movements and financial transactions etc etc. Oh and, don't even think about applying for local authority housing in London -it's a closed shop.

One thing they can't take away (from me at least) is that I'm smarter than the average bear ( you have to be ) and have found a way to survive in London and live well, without being dependant on these PC nightmareTM idiots and outwith the evil control freak Blair's net of influence and Mr Brown nose's filthy grabbing mits.
Thank God.

MSM

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