Yardie Filth?

A new episode in the ongoing quest for nuggets of language. Overheard in South-East London recently: “Yardie filth”. An expression meant to convey the information that a certain man who participates fully in particular demotic aspects of Jamaican culture is also apparently an employee of the Metropolitan Police.

Other recent bits of found speech:

“Greeks are very Russian” (Part of a conversation about the division of Cyprus between Millwall supporters in a pub – with genuinly interesting comments about what it looks like from the Turkish side)

“Yes, he had a gun, but the landlord took it off him” (Middle-aged builder bloke to slightly younger man describing an incident at another pub, some time ago, that I am happy not to have been at)

“Lucy is a fat girl’s name” (Young woman called Lucy who is in fact rather thin)

“I had FIFTY POUNDS to spend because my Mum STOLE it” (Girl of about 7 or 8 years old talking to even younger girl)

Sometimes Lewisham lives up to its reputation.

Overheard in a pub.

“Flop me knob out – thats my chatup line”

(self-deprecatingly, by a Turkish Millwall fan)

Four-nil!

If Millwall carry on playing like this, someone will start liking us and then we’ll have to care…

Where are they all going?

Walked past the queue for 341 bus at Waterloo this morning an it was over 40 metres long (I counted paces). But no queue at all for 1/59/68/168/188 and seats on the buses. I’m usually over an hour later to work than I am today – seems to make huge difference to commuting patterns. At London Bridge only one passenger got out of the door I was standing near on a very packed Jubilee Line train. And very few at Waterloo. At the times I usually travel they are the two major destinations. Where are they all going?

Ernest Dowson – Lewisham’s Finest Poet?

Well, not quite finest. That has to be David Jones. But a little bird tells me – by which I mean a link I got from Wikipedia – that there is a ceremony at Ernest Dowson’s grave in Brockley going on more or less right now: Link to Ernest Dowson campaign

And today is his 133rd  birthday.

Dowson was born in Belmont Hill just off Lee High Road, smoked hash all through Oxford, and tried and failed to be a successful poet. and drank himself to death in Catford when he wasn’t much over thirty. His father had died of a possibly accidental overdose, his mother had hung herself, his girlfriend had left him for another man, and the whole lot of them were consumptive.  He only published one collection in his lifetime apparently, though friends got another one together after he died. One of the unluckier poets.  We are talking absinthe, laudanum and faded violets here.

But it seems that he wrote at least one poem that everyone has heard of  (if not heard) – Days of Wine and Roses – and another few dozen they ought to have had. And, weirdly, is claimed as the oldest citation for the word “soccer” (though he spelled it “socca”) As well as the phrase “Gone with the Wind” – originally in a poem that Cole Porter sort-of-borrowed for a song in Kiss Me Kate.  And that wonderful line: “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”.

Travelling around London is always time-travel. Partly because the buildings themselves are from different parts of the past, partly because the street plans and boundaries and placenames are usually far older than the buildings, mainly because many districts are associated in my mind with the time I first got to know them – so Shoreditch is the late 1970s and early 1980s when my Dad was in the print there,  the areas between West Croydon and Thornton Heath is as well, but Knightsbridge and the Legoland end of Rotherhithe are mid to  late 1980s, the Isle of Dogs (in its Canary Wharf instantiation) is 1990s,  and for me there will always be something of late summer or autumn 2003 about Walthamstow and Tottenham marshes.

BUT towns and suburbs and neighbourhoods also carry about with them a feeling of the time or times when they were in tune with history.  And for some reason Lewisham is full of the late 19th and early 20th century.  That’s when it produced, or housed, its small crop of famous  writers -  Edith Nesbit, Henry Williamson, David Jones, and Ernest Dowson. There’s an indelible tinge of late Victorian and  Edwardian about the place. Though maybe not so much literary decadence these days.

Links to some more about Dowson and early modernism, and to Dowson’s page on the website of the friends of Brockley and Ladywell cemeteries

Shopping.

Just noticed today that the same shop in Lewisham High Street that sells Fish Tea also sells Tropical Sun Cock Flavour Seaaoning.

Oh well

Overheard on a bus. An American and someone who might be Russian and someone who speaks Spanish discussing how Caledonian Road got its name. One it must be something to do with France because New Caledonia is French island and ”they own the whole planet”

Slow train slower tunnels

should have never bothered with the Tube and gone the whole way by bus. But at least I am now on the 91 and about 2 hours late to party. 

And why does it take this bus about five minutes to loop the loop at the stupidly laid-out Euston bus stop?

Scratch that, its more like 10, got here at 12 past, just getting back to the road again at 21 past.

Overheard on a bus

Child of about six or seven years old:

“Mum, you said that Dad’s church was the bookies. But *he* says that your church is your house”

A little litany of stations.

Its not quite the Shipping Forecast but the stops on the line from Edmonton to Liverpool Street sound like a fantasy of England. You almost expect to get off at Trumpton and meet Mrs Marple.

Edmonton Town
Silver Street
White Hart Lane
Bruce Grove
Seven Sisters
Stamford Hill
Stoke Newington
Rectory Road
Hackney Downs
London Fields
Cambridge Heath
Bethnal Green

It almost works better if you don’t know anything about the places. Though you get a different kind of thrill if you do.

And for reasons that probably don’t bear up to examination I feel quite chuffed when there are kids speaking Yiddish around.

It can only go downhill from here…

Well that was fun. And very loud, My ears hurt a little at the end and I was slightly deafened by the noise, and its not often that that happens just from people shouting.

So my first season regularly going to Millwall matches turns out to have been an almost perfect season. It could have been a Roy of the Rovers story. They started crap, had loads of players injured, suddenly got better about six weeks into the season (in fact at exactly the moment I walked in late to the first game I attended – they scored one more or less as I sat down and another withn ten minutes), powered up the table with hardly a defeat in three months, trouncing both Leeds (their biggest arivals in that League) and Charlton (their nearest neighbours in south-east London) kicking both of them out of the promotion spots, then faltered right at the end with a stupid loss to fall back to one point outside the top two, nearly clawed they way back in in an amazing last Saturday of the season – five different teams were up for promotion on the same day, qnd the actual result not clear till the last minutes of the matches. And then a clean sheet in the playoffs that were a lot more interesting than only three goals in three games would imply. And victory in the final coming from a goal scored by the captain… you wouldn’t script it.

They say the worst thing that can happen to a gambler is to win on their first visit to a casino because they keep on coming back. I still haven’t seen them lose. It can only go downhill from here…

Some pictures of the crowd celebrating – but not of the actual match because every time I began to take one during the play something happened so I had to stop taking the picture and pay attention… so no good pictures.

So fans behaving slightly badly before the match:

Heavies on the pitch looking slightly scared of us during the award ceremony:

The empty far end:

And the happy crowd struggling up the steps into the tube station. Which must be one of the worst laid out I’ve ever seen.

That’s the way to do it!

Next stop, Wembley.

Millwall find the secret of victory at last – put eleven hundred men on the field!

(The thin yellow line in the distance is a hundred or so police being very protective of the Huddersfield fans. though in the end they weren’t needed – it was all a rather jolly affair)

And a few other recent pictures:

Getting home from the Swindon match wasn’t that easy:

And what we found when we got back:

And last but not least a Really Serious tin tab in Finchley shows the rest of us up:

Who needs East Enders?

Overheard in the garden of a pub

“Do you remember when P was running G pub and that bloke was murdered upstairs and she tried to kill herself?

[Phone rings] [Some conversation] “What nick’s he in? I’ll go and see him…

Different bloke a few minutes later in same pub: “My brother just got made a life peer…”

Who needs East Enders?

Mortboats!

Found a wonderful bit of bad tourist prose (AKA a “mortboat”) at the website of the Slovak city of Presov

Presov is the third biggest town in Slovakia. The key crossroad of the business journeys in the past is today a calm centre of the northern – eastern Slovakia. It is by no accident that it was named also Athens Upon Torysa or Slovak Seattle. You can admire historical sights as well as make trips to its close surroundings – from the easiest walks to extreme experiences. There are plenty of good quality restaurants, cafes and pubs in the centre. You´ll get brilliant rest in Presov.

Discover the undiscovered town. It´s easy to be found, lieing straight on the 49th parallel. English Queen wears an opal from the world´s famous Presov opal mines on her crown. Signature on the 10 dollars note belongs to Michal Bosak, originaly from Presov. What´s more, one of the only 4 copies in the whole world of the Turin shroud is placed in the Presov Greek Catholic church.

Bring on those “extreme experiences”.

Why is this a “mortboat”? Because of the all-time classic invitation to Tolo in the Peloponessos (which is a truly lovely place for a holiday):

The first seaside village you meet on leaving Nafplio is Tolo, situated on a picturesque bay. Its seafood tavernas overlook the water. You take a bite and inhale the salt breeze. You listen to the put-put of the little mortboats chugging over to the islet of Romvi opposite.

Overheard in a cafe

On Friday morning: “If I was that David Cameron I’d shoot myself. Iraq War, credit crunch, cuts, most unpopular PM for twenty years and the Tories STILL can’t win a bloody election”

(paraphrased due to cerebral caffeine deficit syndrome after staying up all night and drinking port at 5am)

Beautiful day!

So much for the weather forecast. Here in London its sunny, warm and dry, an almost cloudless sky. The trees are in leaf, the lilac is blooming, and the birds are singing.

I just voted and the polling statiom was actually busy! If the old cliche about high turnout and good weather being good for Labour is true, then this election could be less disastrous for Labour locally than predicted. Dunno about the rest of the country though.