I’ve always been uncomfortable with Remembrance Day. I think it’s really important to remember the horrors of war and those people who have died and are dying in wars. There’s not very much about the ceremony at the Cenotaph that does that for me. The politicians who provoke disputes for political ends, the generals who constantly lobby for more and more spending on weapons, the industrialists who will sell anything to anyone, the priests who argue that God is on our side, they’re all there. I feel sorry for the soldiers who have seen or done dreadful things, suffered terrible loss. I feel sorrier for the civilians who are increasingly the victims of war.
I love the Two Minutes’ Silence and, if I were King, I would not ban Remembrance Sunday, but I would extend it to a day of remembrance of all the victims of all wars and I would have detachments of housewives, farmers and factory workers standing in Whitehall, because those are the people who made the greatest sacrifices and they always will be.
The Peace Pledge Union site has a lot of interesting things to say about this subject and they also sell white poppies. I like that idea a lot. If I can’t find one to buy tomorrow I may have to make my own.
Category Archives: London
Black History Month
On my way out of school this morning there were two Afro-Caribbean mums, who were both double parked, screaming abuse and threats at each other at the tops of their voices. It made me laugh because they were so undignified and they were doing it right in front of the school, but then I noticed the sad, crestfallen face of another black mum who was trying to hurry her little son away. I’ve always wondered how I’d cope if I had a black son or daughter, trying to make them proud to be who they are in the context of a predominantly white society. But I’ve never really though about the problems that other black people must present for black parents.
It is black history month and the year three children at my daughter’s school were all asked to make a poster about a famous black person they admire. The only famous black person my daughter knows about is Mary Seacole but she’s already done loads of things about her so her diligent mother set her to researching Nelson Mandela. She did an excellent poster but I don’t think she’ll win the prize because her friend Hiab did a poster about Pushkin who had Eritrean ancestors!
I was driven home last week by a taxi driver from Somalia. He’s very interesting to talk to because he’s mad on news and politics. He was telling me about how he lived in Brixton when he first came to the UK. He hated it because he doesn’t like the way that Afro-Caribbean people behave. He told me that he said to a friend of his, “You people must inhale the drug from the air when you are babies or you must get if from your mother’s milk, that’s why you are so crazy.” His friend said, “You should be grateful to us, we are the front line soldiers for all black people.”
Andrew Marr recently made some interesting comments about the liberal culture at the BBC.
…the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It’s a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.
I think that it is a cultural liberal bias that has prevented there being a public debate about the damage that certain aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture do to the wider black community. A while ago it was considered risky to talk about the issues of Muslims and integration, until Jack Straw bravely brought the whole discussion out into the open with his comments about veils. Maybe we still haven’t gone far enough in our discussion about how Afro-Caribbean culture fits into our society. We do after all have a responsibility to all those black parents who’d like to see their children appearing on posters during Black History month.
Mmm… etamorphosis
I went to see the Michael Clark Company show Mmm… at the Barbican last night. It was great in all sorts of ways, including the fact that it left me unable to describe how it made me feel or what it made me think so I won’t try.
It couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the production of Metamorphosis that I saw at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith a couple of weeks ago. That was the worst show I’ve seen for ages: undisciplined, carelessly directed, full of cheap, meaningless acrobatics and crowd-pleasing jokes that the silly audience found hilarious. I felt like I was watching a school end-of-term production in which the Head of English had done his very best to use the performers’ talents in whatever way he could: Smithkinson is very acrobatic, let’s have him bouncing on a trampoline and then he can do that thing on those BBC promo films where they kind of roll their body down a long length of fabric.
It was one of those shows where it looks like the performers are having a marvellous time, the audience are enjoying the spectacle and I’m feeling like a gooseberry. I got the impression that many of the people watching had come to hear the soundtrack, which was done by Nick Cave and was occasionally OK but generally pointless. I suppose the management at the Lyric think it’s a Good Thing to encourage young people into the theatre. Not like this it isn’t. Go and see Michael Clark, young people, even the music’s better.
Horsey, horsey
About a month ago the daughters came running in all excited, trying to tear me away from my computer to come and look at something amazing in the street. It was a vaulting horse, parked like a car in the road, just sitting there. None of the neighbours knew where it had come from. Carol, my partner, wanted us to bring it inside, I was opposed to the idea. In the end I agreed, on the condition that we would freecycle it if nobody had claimed it by the end of the week.
It was really, really heavy, we could just carry it between us. With some manoeuvring it fitted through the front-door, it didn’t fit through any other doors. We left it in the hall.
The horse had a maker’s name on it – Niels Larsen and Son Limited, Leeds. I did a search, they still existed. I asked them to send me a price list. When it arrived I discovered that a modern vaulting horse costs over £700 and isn’t half as charming. Maybe, I thought, ebay would be better than freecycling.
Over the next week I started to get rather fond of the horse. It was a charismatic, bulky and reassuring presence in the hall. I started patting it absent mindedly when I came home from work. The children started climbing up its legs, riding on its back and making up games with it.
Carol rang the police to see if any local schools had reported a missing horse. They checked their database and said nothing had been reported. They said we could do what we wanted with it. We didn’t know what we wanted to do with it.
Today I found a page called Guidlines for Training the Vaulting Horse.
The vaulting horse has to be very obedient and trustworthy. Obedience comes from consistent training, using the vaulting whip in a very meaningful way. It is an extended whip with leather thong capable of reaching the hind legs from the centre of a 15 metre circle whilst the lunger stands still.
The following signals are fairly universal so that anyone taking a trained vaulting horse and using the known signals will have a successful session.
Maybe we’ll keep him after all (I don’t know why it’s a ‘him’, but Carol agrees with me about that), we could train him up, maybe exhibit him after a few months. He’s no trouble, apart from the occasional stubbed toe, and although visitors do sometimes look a bit surprised it’s not nearly as bad as the stuffed Afghan Hound who lived in our previous house. She was called Janet.
Parking Ticket
I am quite keen on traffic wardens. Even the nicest person is inclined to become pathologically selfish when driving and motorists are inclined to do the most outrageously anti-social things if they get the chance. So if I ever do get a parking ticket I just accept it and pay it as soon as possible without complaining. Same goes for speeding tickets, I don’t think there’s ever a justification for speeding. So when I came back to my car in Brixton last week and saw the ticket on the window I went through the five stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) in record time. I had parked in a parking bay on a Red Route and didn’t notice that it was only a parking bay until 13.00, I should have been more careful. By the time I got home I was keen to pay the £50 and get it over and done with. I went to the TFL payments site and typed in my details and that’s when it got difficult. The parking attendant had put the wrong registration number on the ticket. She had got one letter wrong.
So now I’m in a conundrum. I was quite happy to pay the fine but now that I think I don’t have to, I don’t want to. Since the wrong registration number is on the ticket and that number doesn’t exist, according to www.mycarcheck.com, they can’t send me a Notice to Owner or pursue me for the fine because they don’t know who I am. But if the traffic warden took a photo of my car then they will ultimately still be able to track me down and I may have to pay the full £100 fine. Double or quits. And what about the karma thing? Surely if I think parking tickets are fair enough I should pay anyway. I have until 8 August to decide. What do you think?
Help the Homeless
There’s a tunnel I walk through every day on the way to work. It leads from Blackfriars underground station to the pedestrian walkway that runs west along the Embankment from Saint Paul’s to just after Blackfriars Bridge. It’s a great tunnel, low and gently curving as it slopes uphill, with a black and yellow tiled floor and long rows of recessed fluorescent lights along both edges of the ceiling. It often has a strong breeze blowing down it, smelling of the river and when you reach the end you have a great view along the Thames towards Waterloo bridge and the Houses of Parliament. I love the drama of that end of the tunnel; you never know whether the tide’s going to be high or low and the weather often seems different to how it was on the railway station.
Homeless people often hang out in the tunnel. That famous knitted-doll making woman is sometimes there and the man with the pointy face and the little dog. For the last week there’s only been the quiet man. He sits on the mandatory piece of flattened cardboard box with his head bowed down and a small cup in front of him. He never asks for spare change, he has no little sign, he never looks up.
On Wednesday I was looking at him from the side as I approached and I saw that he was smiling very slightly, in a bitter sort of way. I never give money to homeless people, for no reason really, but I really felt the contrast between my happiness at the approach of the beautiful view and his static stare at the floor. In my pocket I happened to have an Alprax (don’t ask). As I passed him I dropped it into his cup. I looked back and saw him take it out, pop it out of its blister without looking at it and stick it straight into his mouth.
So, the next day I gave him a microdot that’s been hanging around. He did the same thing. The day after that I wasn’t working but he was still there yesterday and I gave him two Largactyl. Today I only had Co-dydramol. I’m not working again until Friday but I’m a bit worried – I’ve got quite a few Alprax and Largactyl left but I don’t want to repeat myself and anyway, I might need them! I can’t give them all to him. There is half a bottle of Kemadrin at the back of the cupboard but I’ve never even tried those, they don’t sound like fun.
Bang bang
I found a bullet on the pavement outside my house today. It was about 9mm wide and flattened from the side rather than from the front as most spent bullets are. I thought that I’d better tell the police about it so I rang the number in the phone directory. After 15 minutes on hold I finally got through to someone. He wanted me to take it in to a police station. I said that I wasn’t prepared to spend half the day waiting around in Brixton police station so if it was all the same to him I’d just hang on to it and they could contact me if they needed it. He didn’t take my name but then maybe all my details were already scrolling across a screen in front of him.
Is this quite a usual occurrence in London these days? The man from the Met. didn’t seem very bothered about it. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky not to have found one before now. It’s not as though I don’t keep my eyes open; I’ve found loads of 1p coins.
The World cup is good
Yes, that’s right, you heard me right. Driving around London in the last few days I noticed that at certain times there was a noticeable absence of scumbags, idiots and unsavoury elements. How useful it would be, I told myself, if one could predict these auspicious moments and arrange to be travelling or shopping when they occurred. Well, it can be done and with the help of a footballing enthusiast of my acquaintance (tip o’ the hat to Joe Lawrence) I have produced a handy chart which will enable you, gentle reader, to take advantage of the eerily empty roads, echoing supermarket aisles and quiet, pleasant high streets which occur during the transmission of certain games of particular interest to our less salubrious co-stakeholders.
The judgement as to whether or not a particular game will be deemed essential viewing is a complex business and depends to a large extent on the outcome of games not yet played so I will be producing a more complete version when my advisors are able to provide more accurate data, probably some time after the 20th of June. If you feel you can provide a more accurate insight feel free to alter your copy of the chart with a pen.
The chart is colour-coded for your convenience and contains no garish graphics or references to football so you can safely print it out and stick it on your kitchen wall without bringing down the tone of the place.
Click on the picture to download the chart.
Buses
I saw the aftermath of a serious accident last weekend. According to the people standing around afterwards, a bus had swerved to avoid a pedestrian in the road outside Holborn tube station. It went crashing over a traffic island, ploughing through the pedestrians standing there before coming to rest against a street light. Several people were trapped under the bus, one woman in her thirties died before she could be taken to hospital. As far as I can tell this sad story wasn’t considered important enough to be reported in any national media. It made second item on the BBC London radio news bulletin.
There are a lot of very bad bus drivers in London. I frequently see them speeding, whizzing through red traffic lights, turning without indicating and ignoring people waiting at bus stops. I’d say it’s a miracle that there aren’t more accidents but actually I suspect that there are more accidents; we just don’t hear about them. A while ago, when I had a Land Rover, I was rammed by a bus, twice, because I was driving in a bus lane. Fair enough in a way, people who drive in bus lanes are tossers, but hardly the behaviour of a responsible public servant.
I expect that the drivers are bad because the management is bad. They probably emphasise speed above safety. Even so, a bus driven by a maniac is a very serious danger to the public and so I felt quite encouraged by the news that Transport for London are working on a system that would automatically limit the speed of buses and taxis. I’m completely in favour of a scheme like this, as long as it only affects buses that I’m not travelling in.
BBC NEWS | England | London | TfL looks at car speed limiters
1 Westminster Bridge
1 Westminster Bridge is a big grey forbidding building that stands in the middle of the roundabout at the southern end of Westminster bridge. There’s no obvious way to get in because the entrance used to be via an overhead walkway from the GLC headquarters at County Hall. It was designed by the GLC’s own architects and completed in 1974 but fell into disuse when Thatcher dissolved the GLC in 1987. It wasn’t a very good building. According to an article in the Independent in 1998:
Every time the sun came out, even for five seconds, the blinds would come down for 45 minutes. Because of this they wore out very quickly and took on a life of their own, going up and down at random all day, and finally got permanently stuck down over the windows. The air conditioning tubes sucked in cold air from above the Thames, so the office became Arctic in winter. And the humidity control was so sensitive that you couldn’t boil a kettle in the building for fear of disturbing the air-cooling system.
Frogmore Estates and Galliard Homes bought the building very cheaply in 1995. The developers applied repeatedly for planning permission for various schemes to develop the site but they were all refused for different reasons.
I seem to remember it being occupied by some anarchists protesting about homelessness in London in the early 90s although I can’t find any record of that. I also remember hearing rumours that it was being used by MI5 for interrogations a little while after that.
Anyway, Frogmore finally got permission to develop the site into a 15 storey, 913 bedroom hotel in 2005. And here’s the exciting bit: The existing building is going to be demolished this week, at 11:00 AM on Thursday 25 May. There’s a big LED timer on the front of the building counting down the seconds until it comes down so I’m guessing it’s going to be exciting. I’m going to try and be there if I possibly can.