Romping In Romford

(Above: A mural on the pavement of Romford's market area. In case you were wondering.)

A memo to myself: don't sit at the back of a bus. They're magnets for arseholes, idiots and the banal. Like the trio of very loud, lurid girls who walled us in as they got on and went straight to the back where we were sitting. They all had absurdly bleached hair of a tone normally only associated with albinos and Boris Johnson. Their clothes were gaudy and sparkling, like they were going out to a nightclub, even though it wasn't even noon. And they wore lots of junk jewellery, which clanked and changged like chainmail. They weren't chavettes or your common or garden toerag though. Just young and silly and thoroughbred in their Essex Girlishness. My only real complaint was that they kept putting their feet on the seats, which really ought to be grounds for exile to South Georgia.

It was hard to keep up with their stacatto wittering, but some snippets stay in the mind:

"Yeah, oo's that gel? Ain't she gaar'n to th' Sickth Form? Stoopid Cahh!"

"I've never bin ta Sarrfend before. Is it true the sea gets bigga if it gets rained on? I've goht sicktee paahnd so I'll get really smashed there!"

"Y'knaa, if someone stole flaaars off my family's graves, I'd faaaaking kill 'em!"

"Stop takin' photahs of me, Shell, ya bitch!"

And so on. Halfway through our trip, we drove past a white plaster-coated house with the legend 'Pixy Cottage' written on it. You'd have to wonder what kind of fae folk would live in the Dagenham-Romford wastes, as it's hardly the sort of place where fairy dust flows freely.

Later we were sitting down for a coffee at an outside burger bar in Romford Market. The day was gloriously sunny. Suddenly I saw a strange bearded man in dark clothes and sunglasses in the distance. He slouched down and started running towards us, around the back of the burger van and then around the seating area, past the corner and into the market once more. He was holding a pair of numchucks, but whether he was the local ninja assasain, I couldn't really tell.

At the end of the day, while queueing for an ice cream in McDonalds, we heard the following pearls of wisdom from two lads behind us - young enough to still be living with their parents, old enough to ponder the meaning of romance:

"Yeah, like, she's sooo immature, y'know-what-I-mean?"

"Mate, at their age they're just too young to know what love is."

"Tell me abaaht it, mate, tell me abaaht it..."

It sounded rather silly and yet profound, like the sort of wisdom that could only come from a broken heart.

Turning Japanese (In Dagenham)

Sunday Paranoia

Trains on a Sunday can be frightening places... Not too many people there... Just scary ones... You stand on the platform, looking over your shoulder... They're sitting on the seats, looking rough... Don't look back... Don't let them hear you on the phone - your accent's too different... They hate difference...

The train's coming... You get on... There's a family of leering ugly chavs with a pitbull sitting over there... Get to the other end of the carriage... Sit amongst the old and the gentle-looking and the female... Stack the odds in your favour...

A young man gets on a few stops later... He's wearing sports gear... Laughing loud into a mobile... He's standing close to you... But wait, his voice is cheerful and moderate and his face looks friendly... He's talking to his girlfriend about dinner: chicken with salad... You're safe... He sounds like he's been off doing Sunday sports... Yes, very respectable... Your train leaves the station - there's graffiti on the archway - 'YOU'RE BEING WATCHED'...

It seems safer now... Just a few more stops... Past Stratford now... Chavs have got off... In the home straits... Liverpool Street the terminus is next... Get off quick... Don't tempt fate... Will the tube be safe? Will the tube be safe?

You stand up, ready to get off straight away and look at the passenger who's still sitting down on the next seat... He's reading a book with a lurid cover of a fascist looking policeman in riot gear firing a gun on a turquoise background... The book's called - 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said'... It seems scary for some reason...

The train pulls in... You get off... There's a reassuringly large number of people at the station... A hooded youth stomps past you as you near the ticket gates... You show no fear, but there's a sense of relief he didn't start anything... Get on the tube... Next stop Clapham... Then Brixton... Fearsome, unpredictable Brixton... Keep on going... You can make it...

As cities go, London is pretty safe. Just blend into a crowd, avoid lonely dangerous places and do your thing by day and you'll have no problems. Still, some areas are better than others. Paranoia about what could go wrong (loons with trainers and knives, loons with beards and bombs, loons with football colours and broken bottles) makes one choose where one lives quite carefully. If one can afford it.

The end result is the gentrified neighbourhood, that most maligned of places, at least by those who haven't the money to move there. Here the well-off go to breed, force up house prices and swamp the gastropubs with their kids, who turn the local state schools into de facto grammars or preps. Their names are infamous: Hoxton, Notting Hill, Islington, Clapham, and, ironically enough, bits of Brixton... Can you feel the bile rising yet? Yes, some people are more successful than others - and so the UK's national sport of envy and spite is engaged for yet another outing.

And yet what all these places have in common is a serene, empty calm. Even if the enclave is in relatively wild parts of town like West Kensington, these places bring such a sudden surge of placidity and lack of threat or CCTV, it hits you almost as hard as some of the rougher locals might. For the neo-yuppies at least know what anyone who's lived in a particularly godforsaken neighbourhood knows: sane, rational neighbours who don't have criminal records come at a premium. Being free from fear is a luxury item.

After doing what I had to in Clapham (again) I then headed off to Brixton. I had to change at Stockwell to get there, but the Victoria Line was down so I needed to get a bus. I walked past the shrine-memorial for Jean Charles De Menezes that's just outside the station's main entrance/exit. It's a permanent fixture now, a reminder of grievances that are far from resolved. And police who panicked and shot to death an innocent Brazilian electrician. Even armed men in kevlar get paranoid. You never know when danger may strike...

At the bus stop, I found myself being stared at by a black kid. He looked 15, but a bit short for his age, in dark street clothes and a white imitation New York Yankees cap. But maybe I was staring at him too? Or maybe we were staring at each other? Maybe, just maybe, we were sure the other was staring at us so felt justified in staring back. Or maybe he looked away just as I did. Paranoia is a funny thing. At times it's synchronised.

I got off at Brixton. The upmarket pubs are closing down and house prices are falling. Maybe it's time for the degentrification to begin and for the urban grot to reclaim parts of its realm once more like the jungle gobbles up old Mayan cities. It certainly seemed scarier than last time, but then again, I live in Dagenham and like to cast the first stone.

Nonetheless, Brixton still had its way with me. I was walking down Coldharbour Road. It was loud and rowdy like it's always been with my visits. Suddenly a man on a bike screeched past me. He stopped and looked back: he was a middle aged West Indian man, thin and wiry.

"Glasses, mate! GLASSES!"

He was looking rather smug, like he'd scored a moral victory by doing this. How dare I get in the way of his bicycle on the pavement? Bloody pedestrians.

"Sorry" I mumbled, and crossed the road. No point in picking a fight with a man who thinks you should be able to see behind you via some strange ESP ability or weird physical mutation. Who knows what he might do? Attack me with a plucked chicken or strip naked and smear himself with jam while screaming his father's name, perhaps. For there's always been a latent weirdness about Brixton. It's the Twilight Zone of South London, or maybe its answer to Wales.

Or maybe I was being paranoid.

Seeing a bus, I got on and sped away, if not from my fears then certainly from any encouragement.

Clapham Strangeness

A strangely bulbous and distorted tree on Clapham Common.

And we all thought black cats were meant to be lucky...

High Misanthropy in Old London Town

As I went to get a bus at Holborn, I heard what seemed like a choir of banshees slitting their own throats. It turned out to be a gaggle of young teenage girls, middle class, and reeking of hormones and cheap perfume, all shrieking as some pigeons flew low over them. Partly they were doing it out of genuine girly fear of the yucky. But they were also doing it as a way of bonding, a shared experience of being annoying. Being a twit is a great unifying force.

A stout Asian security guard came out of a shop to see whether the screams were rape, theft or murder. But a rather aloof young women in a green coat told him, as she walked past, that it was just "some silly girls". She then nearly barged into me as I was on my phone and not paying attention. I got a dirty look.

Once on the bus, I went past the girls again. They were still running wild and had now started fencing each other with rolled up free newspapers while moving down the street at a pace. The Easter Holidays are hell.

I got on the tube some time later. At London Bridge, a tramp boarded. He was reasonably tall, had a short beard and a black woolly hat. He smelt of booze and stale sweat and wore grubby dark clothes, with a large empty-looking black sports bag over his shoulder. He could have been anywhere between 20 and 30. The tramp was swaying slightly and not just from the motion of the train. He took out a piece of folded cardboard and opened it up. Written in black marker was the legend:

Hungry
Please give generously
I need food.
Thank you very much

He then gave a long rambling slurred sales pitch about sleeping rough on the streets and how he needed to buy a sandwich and perhaps some other food, and then he asked politely for any money from the "ladies and gentlemen" in the carriage.

Almost no one, including me, gave him a penny. But a man sitting next to me - bald, with glasses and wearing a DPM combat jacket - gave him a few quid and gently asked him to only spend it on food. The tramp thanked the man and then everyone else (who gave him nothing), and got off at Borough. He walked unsteadily onto the platform.

The rest of us, and me too, barely even looked at him. We were either too embarrassed (shamed even) or callous to care. True, he would no doubt have spent the money on alcohol or drugs or both. But that did not stop us being just a few amongst millions of sour, stone-faced, surly commuters, neither caring nor cared for. All we really worried about was not looking at the next person in case they thought we were weird or wanted to have sex with them.

After some business that had to be done, I found myself walking down Clapham High Street, past the now abandoned local branch of Woolworths. An Estate Agent's had put up a sign that said the site had been 'secured' for 'interested parties'. It was dark and empty inside. The security cameras at the doors were still on though. The monitor showed a blurry monochrome view of the world, with me and the other passers-by appearing as vague grey ghosts as we walked by in turn. Soon all memory of the place will be gone, and with it, any trace that we walked by that day.

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...



***

BOOTYLICIOUS!

EXCLUSIVE BLACK MASSAGE

AVAILABLE WEEKDAYS

CALL 0XXXXXXXXX

****

FOR SALE

STAFF PUPPIES (GIRLS AND BOYS)

MUST SEE £250 EACH

NO TIME WASTERS

CALL 0XXXXXXXXXX

****

TO RENT

SINGLE BEDROOM £75.00
DOUBLE BEDROOM £110.00

NO DHSS

CALL 0XXXXXXXXXX

****

LADY GARDENER

WILL MOW LAWNS

HEDGES, TRIMMING, PLANTING

EXCELLENT RATES

CALL 0XXXXXXXXXX

****



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?