Fun & Frolics In Exotic Dagenham

It was late at night. I couldn't sleep, so I got up and went into the next room to surf the web and generally kill time. Then I heard a loud cry outside:

"ARMED POLICE!!!"

And two loud bangs. For a brief moment I thought they were gunshots. But then I guessed they were the noises made by a door being pounded in. My pulse went up for a moment, in part through fear, but also excitement.

Cautiously, I turned out the light and opened the window to see outside. Nothing. All was still and no signs of life could be seen, not even the two or so urban foxes that are usually making a racket this time of night. It must have been in a street nearby.

I felt disappointed, but also afraid. I realised how thin the glass in the windows was, and how little I knew of whether the walls could stop something getting in. I realised how exposed I was. So I sat down and wrote a blog about it instead. Did I tell you about how charming it is living in Dagenham?

Tales From The Shop Window

Living in the blasted wastes of Dagenham has its advantages. For example, you're never short of things to blog about, even though the end result is seldom life-affirming or joyful.

For example, most newsagents around here have ads in their windows. These are put up by the newsagent in exhange for a small fee, and are usually there to sell second hand goods or offer services. This is pretty common throughout the country, but the ones in London and the South East are particularly revealing...



***

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And so on. There is a sort of class system in shop window ads though. An ad by a mother with young children who wants to flog an old pram is lucky if she gets to plug it for a week on a plain white postcard in exchange for £10-£20. The local franchise operations, established firms and comunity groups will have bigger ads - A4 bare minimum, and often in full colour, simply because they can afford it.

But at the top of the pile are the events posters. No travelling circus worth its salt would forget to give all the shops in the area a big colourful poster in exchange for some free tickets. And for the most part, it's these travelling shows that do most of the advertising on this level: all that garish imagery featuring Clowns, Lions, Monster Trucks and Dancing Horses. But there are others.

For example, most ethnic food shops and Indian restaurants will feature large posters plugging Bollywood and Bhangra music gigs, often in major venues like Wembley Arena. Unheard of outside the Indian community, these gigs are still big business as are the musical events for other minorities in London. I've heard of these a few times before, like that Astoria gig back in 2001 by the Bulgarian metal band APC: the place was packed out with Bulgars, but barely anyone else knew it had happened. Or those one-off shows where a big Japanese or Taiwanese band will turn up, play a big venue and vanish again, with nary a mention in Time Out before or after.

Boxing and Pro Wrestling ads are often put up in windows too. You may not have heard of these promotions, but they're always there, always plugging away and making a lot of money. A lot of young boxing talent is honed in these local events, while many a burnt-out ex-wrestling superstar will ply his trade in town halls and small theatres inbetween jobbing with the indy promotions back home.

A new addition to this top rank of shop window ads is in the form of posters promoting Cage Fighting/MMA. Fans of the noble art of bald men in shorts rolling on the ground with other bald men in shorts will be glad to know that the number of events where this happens are waxing by the day, at least if the number of big posters are anything to go by. These feature dark, menacing designs, often with barbed wire or wire mesh in the background and a dozen or so young men with identical bald heads, stripped to the waist and posing with their fists.

But for the most part, the shop window ad is dominated by those small white cards with shabby writing and badly used apostrophes. After all, if you want a prostitute, a dangerous dog or a lady gardener with reasonable rates, where else could you find them all in one place?

Clapham South Shelter (And Disused Bogs)

As described in Wikipedia, this deep level shelter was built in WW2 to accomodate those seeking cover from the Blitz. It's very near to Clapham South Tube Station and is, of course, on Clapham Common itself.



Nearby are these striking if rather eery looking public toilets, abandoned and left to rot like most bogs in London. A sour sight indeed if you need to spend a penny.

Chadwell Heath At Night

Ordeal On The Buses

London was a seething mass of tourism. The streets and attractions were filled with foreign visitors all streaming in an unstoppable if rather slow wave of loud, gawping pedestrians. Having put up with this for a while, I thought it was time to go home.

The tube seemed too hot. On the other hand, buses are cramped miserable slices of Hades at its worst. Naturally, I thought it was a good idea to get on board one.

Bus travel is slow, painful (if you have to stand all the way, like I did) and full of sullen miserable sods who hate you. A friend said being on a bus was better than the (much faster) tube because 'it was like an adventure'. Whether she meant A Clockwork Orange or Heart of Darkness I'm not sure. Add this to the dark and rather cramped space in a bendy bus (AKA, the 'accordion of death') and it's FUN FUN FUN all the way.

The highlight of the trip was a savage row between two women who were jammed up close to me. One fumed that the other's son was behaving badly while the other swore blind that firstly her foe was talking crap and secondly it was a moot point, as her child couldn't even talk in the first place. (Whether that meant he was still a toddler or a very backward 12-year-old, I couldn't really tell, owing to the claustrophobic press of flesh I found myself in.)

It reminded me that kids on public transport are a menace. Or at least their parents are. Earlier that day, some oaf rammed his child's buggy into my foot. Later on, some twit let her toddler slowly wobble down the stairs at Russell Square on his own, nearly making the rest of us all miss a train.

Getting back to the row, though, what stood out was that they were both clearly speaking English as a second language but were putting in a lot of effort effort to abuse the other one with as much care as can be. You could even hear them putting effort into pronouncing the syllables as well as they could while at the same time getting very, very pissed off.

Perhaps this is the answer to the age-old dilemma of integration versus diversity? Just stick 'em on a cramped, odious bus for an hour and let the hate and bile come flooding out via the world's Lingua Anglais. 'Cos nothing sums up London, and indeed the UK, better than irritable, bitter commuters who really just want the rest of their species to FUCK RIGHT OFF.

As I got off, a Pakistani man said sorry for letting a support strap hit my head as I got off. He sounded very sincere and upset about it. I hoped he heard me say back that it was OK while I leapt off the bus with some relief. It seemed a rather strange moment, like it should not have happened, and that we should have simply grunted at each other as one shoved his way past the other instead.

G20 2009 - I (Don't) Predict A Riot.

The day started well enough. The TV stations were abuzz with potential violence at the G20 protests, with an emphasis on girly slap fights between protestors and police. Some idiots drove in via a fake armoured car. The BBC was there to report on it - and anything else to make the protests look like epic battles or demonstrations of stupidity rather than, well, protests.

Two Jehovah's Witnesses then knocked on the door. They were a pair of old women - one who did all the talking, and an older woman in a wheelchair. Having had dealings with the Watchtower people before, I assume they always travel in pairs to protect themselves, but how these two could deal with some of the arseholes round where I live is anyone's guess.

The spokeswoman was friendly. "We're having a ceremony to remember Jesus' Death", she said, handing me a flier. "It would be nice to see you there!" What can you say? You don't believe but you don't really want to hurt their feelings. So I took the flier and said thank you. Why not? She then asked permission to pick up one of their 'tracts', which had blown out of her hand and onto the lawn. I said "yes - please don't worry!" and gave my goodbyes, closing the door. At least they're polite, I thought.

It seems like a doomed cause. Trying to spread faith in the blasted no-man's land between East London and Essex (aka Dagenham, Romford and Barking) is a fool's errand. Perhaps the point was in the trying rather than the success rate. But I wondered whether the death of Jesus was the point - surely it was his life and resurrection that really counted. Then again, that was my vague, slack-arsed Church of England perspective speaking there. What would Thor and Queztacoatl make of it?

I decided to go out to the British Library. Riots or no riots, I would push forward, without fear... As to be expected, it turned out to be an anti-climax. There were no riots outside of the main areas under such scrutiny. I spotted at most two people in keffiyehs (the patterned scarves first worn by noted peace-loving vegetarian feminists Hezbollah and the PLO). But it's pretty common these days and they may well have been just commuters like the rest of us.

The police were nonetheless out in force. There were two on the train in - big bastards in hi-vis vests, helmets and stab-proofs. They talked about the day's events like gossiping old women.

At Liverpool Street itself there were scores of Met Police, British Transport Police, City of London Police and Community Support Officers, all working in pairs or the occasional trio. It was a decisive show of fluorescent yellow, checkerboard patterning and glittering steel on black. They all looked bored.

Still, as I waited for the tube to take me to King's Cross, a tannoy boomed ominously that the Waterloo & City Line was closed after a request from no less than... "THE POLICE." (This line links up Bank station, where the protests were mostly happening, to the potential escape route of Waterloo Station.) Later, I heard from another tannoy that Bank itself was closed.

En route, I found myself sitting over the way from a man with one eye. He looked Somalian or North African, and his right eye had been replaced by scar tissue and skin, while his remaining eye was closed. He was asleep. As I got off the train, I saw him alight too, with a guide stick. I avoided him and pretended not to look.



The British Library itself is not an impressive building. It looks like Wood Green Shopping Centre minus the personality and aesthetic charm. It won't be loved or accepted and they will knock it down in 30 years at most.



I saw the statue of Urizen, stooped and unaware of the city around him. There was no room for Barrack Obama, AIG, Lehman's or even Anarchism in his purview. There was only the pursuit of knowledge.



I renewed my membership, had a piss and then travelled back to Liverpool Street. It remained peaceful. Shockingly so. I was within walking distance of the demonstrations and I could hear nothing. Everyone around me acted as though it was business as usual. A screamer on an Evening Standard booth outside King's Cross squealed 'RIOT POLICE FIGHT ANARCHY IN CITY'!!! Yet it was hard not to think of disappointed spikies, riot cops and aggro-loving city workers all surveying the relatively urbane scene and thinking 'is this it?'



When I got back to Liverpool Street, only one or two obvious protesters in lurid clothes could be spotted. When I bought a Standard, though, three young men - all punks - were crowded around the booth reading the headlines. One of the punks, who had black spiky hair and a leather jacket upon which an 'Exploited' band patch was sewn on the back, bought a copy and then stormed off with his friends in tow. "They said it started peacefully and then turned violent! Bollocks!!!" he said, aflame with indignance at the mendacious press.

A friend of mine then took me to one of the demonstrations, which was in the southern half of Bishopsgate at this point. The crowd was loud and rowdy, but harmless, and the police were relaxed. But my friend pointed out the riot vans she had spotted down the side roads nearby and how she had seen a few plain clothes cops talking into their walkie talkies, standing about like they owned the place. And above, constantly, there was the never-ending wail of police helicopters looking down from above.



My friend asked if we should mingle with the crowd. "Sod that!" I said. "What if the spikies and the rozzers kicked off?" "Hmph! Well, I think you'll find it's actually a minority that causes all the problems" she growled. "It's rogue elements, not the protesters!"

We walked off, dodging the trail of piss leaking out a doorway that was being used by some of the protesters as an ad hoc latrine. It was in a sense the official G20 urinal, but taking a photo of it just seemed too weird for some reason...

There was little in the way of actual violence, then, but lots of fear. The employees of the big firms in the area were taking no chances. No one we saw come out of the offices were wearing suits - they were all in street clothes instead. They were, ironically, as much in disguise as those protesters who wore hoods and masks. You had to wonder whether the more colorfully dressed protestors were only wearing their clothes for that day too, and would wash out the hair dye and undo their dreadlocks when they got home.



Still, the anxiety was all around. We went to a Starbucks that overlooks the courtyard at one end of Liverpool Street. There were no customers and all the tables, chairs and bins had been removed. We sat nearby, but the area seemed half deserted while people all walked past quickly, not wanting to tempt fate. A woman some distance away started having a panic attack - we left when the first aiders from a nearby office ran up to help her. Was it the protests she was afraid of, or some terrible crisis in her life? We left quickly - nothing is more frightening than seeing fear itself.

We went to Tesco's. They had banned alcohol sales, but the few protestors in there were well-behaved and relaxed. The LCD screens were all broadcasting BBC and Sky footage of the protests, making skirmishes and squabbles, minor injuries and a few arrests all look like a Violence-Jack-With-PMT bloodbath. Despite the anti-consumerist doggerel down the road, we all shopped as if nothing had happened. And in a sense it hadn't. Nothing had really changed.



As we walked out, another punk was in front of us. His hooded top had the Crass logo on the back, with the legend - "Jesus Died For His Sins, Not Mine". What would the Jehovah’s Witnesses make of that, I wondered? What they and the protesters had in common, though, was this: a desire to change minds, remake the world, and bring about their own vision for the future.

We went to a pub for a drink. Again: no protesters, but plenty of city workers, all lairy, shouting and arm wrestling alpha males to a man. It was just another evening for them. We then went home. My friend wondered if we shouldn't go to the next protest in May. Why not? It might not change anything, but it wouldn't do any harm either - despite the media's efforts to make it seem otherwise.

Welcome To Maryland!!!