Prospect from a bar stool (part 2)

In all sorts of ways the pub’s got more boring under the new management. I spent an hour or so there the other night and hardly talked to anyone. Maybe it’ll pick up later. Maybe its just me reacting to having been one of the “in” group before (ore rather one of about four different in-groups) but now watching a different set of people in that position. But changes are happening and more are in the pipeline.

One change is that S’s idea of a poker school seems to be coming off. Most of the card playing that’s been going on for the last ten years or so has been the elderly West Indians who come in on Friday evenings and Sunday lunchtimes. When they tire of playing dominos – and the way they play it it is bloody tiring, all that hard work smashing little dominos against the table – they play some card game I still don’t recognise and haven’t yet had the face to ask what is. Maybe its some mutated form of crib, but if so its far enough gone to be not easily parsed by me. very occasionally some of the Irish construction workers or those Heythrop students who were around last year might have tried a hand or two of brag or five-card stud, but that was pretty rare and late-night.

For the last few weeks two or three of the twenty-something regulars and a some friends of the landlady’s teenage daughter have occasionally been playing poker on the table by the northern door to the Ladies. A few days ago someone got some chips out, and this evening a green plastic thingy covering the table with little pots in it for chips (or beer bottles) and markings telling you where to put your cards. A sort of do-it-yourself casino table. Looked a bit naff to me. Though I like chips. I have been occasionally tempted to buy a box myself, though I don’t play enough to make it sensible. And I don;t actually gamble really which would mean it was a complete waste. They just look fun.

If I was really an Intrepid Reporter, instead of some bloke who pops into have a last quiet pint on his way back from town, I’d have followed the game, but I didn’t, I read the Economist Christmas Double Issue instead. I asked Bobby what game they were playing. “Texas hold’em”. I suppose that makes sense if they learn their cards from the TV rather than their Dads. “Are you doing OK?” “Fucking awful”.

Somehow I don’t think I’ll join in. But then somehow I don’t think I’ll be invited.

It’s trendy oop North

I’ve been spending a lot of time in north London over the last few days because my Mum is staying at my brother’s house. (He’s not there at the moment himself – another story) We were there over Christmas for three nights and I’ve been up once before and so far twice since.

My main problem with the district is what to call it. Its the northernmost cranny of the London Borough of Islington, in the angle between Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road. And more precisely is an island of once rather upmarket housing between Hornsey Road, narrow, full of Turkish clubs and shops, and Stroud Green Road, which becomes Crouch Hill round the corner, once an island of West Indian settlement in a mainly white district, and now surprisingly trendy, if still a little downmarket of nextdoor Crouch End, full of theme bars, traditional bakeries, and delicatessens – but we are unreliably informed that Dave Stewart, Bob Hoskins, Lily Allen, Gillian Anderson, Ho Chi Minh, Marina Sirtis, Josette Simon, and most famously Bob Dylan got there first – almost as cool as New Cross!. Climbing up the Northern Heights, full of infill and rebuilding, very densely populated. The local authority ward is “Tollington” but no-ones ever heard of that. I suspect that mildly dishonest estate agents would sell it as “Finsbury Park”, and very dishonest ones as “Crouch Hill”. But both those places are on the border of Hornsey, nowadays in the London Borough of Harringay – which apparently started as a typographical error for “Hornsey”. Or perhaps the other way round. Hornsey Road is not Hornsey, its the road to Hornsey. We’ll have to settle for “Upper Holloway” in the knowledge that most people who hear that name would think of somewhere about a mile to west. Most of the few people who know anything about the detailed layout of inner London suburbs that is,

On Christmas Eve we went to St. Thomas’s Finsbury Park (same street as the better-known mosque) for midnight mass. Wonderful place. Well it was then. Enough incense to blur the edges of the robes of the gold-clad priests against the golden east-facing altar with traditional Christmas carols with dodgy new words bowdlerised by brain-dead Anglo-Catholics from the New Engerlish Horribymnal. All this and a woman celebrant too. Wonderful. Our clothes still smelled of incense the next day.

On Sunday morning and Christmas Day we worshipped at the parish church, St. Mark’s Tollington Park (Rt. Rev. Preb. +Sandy Millar, NSM incumb.) which was really rather nice. I was half expecting – no, be honest, three-quarters expecting – a congregation of young middle-class white couples with excessively clean children, but it wasn’t like that. Well, it was at first, but this was a real Anglican church. Most people arrived late. I sat down two minutes into the service at the back of a mostly white congregation, and stood up an hour later in the middle of a typically Inner London congregation, maybe 40% black , 50% white, the balance made up by Asians. In fact a lot more diverse, both by ethnicity and age, than St. Thomas’s.

Bishop Sandy can certainly preach. Twenty-five minutes of decent rambling evangelicalism, with a gospel challenge at the end. Illustrative quotes from Thomas Merton, the Book of Common Prayer, St. Francis, and the Times. As well as that dubious anecdote about the secret police who burst into a church and said everyone had to leave or they would be shot – I know you know it, so there is no point in repeating it. The burden of the Christmas Eve sermon being that just as we prepare materially for Christmas – food, drink, decorations, presents – so we should be preparing ourselves spiritually for receiving the gift of Jesus Christ. The early church decided, and the Reformers agreed, that today is still the Fourth Sunday of Advent in the church calendar. Which is why we are talking about John the Baptist this morning, and waiting till evening to talk about the baby Jesus.

If I was giving point scores it would be eight out of ten for delivery, nine out of ten for content, but maybe only five out of ten for form and structure – it was all good stuff but you had to keep awake to see how it fitted into his theme. But a good sermon, and we could do with more preachers like him.

A posy for mother Mary

Its no surprise when roses bloom on in suburban gardens in north-east London on Christmas Eve. Everyone knows roses flower all through winter, at least some varieties do. Rosemary is another plant that famously flowers in winter.

Dandelions are just being ruderal and opportunistic, like the ubiquitous (in London) annual mercury no-one (except me) seems to notice, or the little patch of chickweed I just saw, trying to get a breeding cycle into even a few frost-free days. And so far we have had no frost at all this winter so they are in luck. The very struggling Michaelmas daisies might just be late, continuing in flower till winter really starts. (if it ever does)

Those primroses look planted. Maybe they are some weird variety. The Pelargonium do look like some florists variety, and they aren’t native, so might not have the cues they need to flower at the right time in our environment. The violets by the gatepost are just about believable – after all there are winter-flowering pansies – though they look as if they might be a florists variety as well.

But hollyhocks? Hollyhocks???? At Christmas? That is absurd.

Almost as absurd as walking home from church on Christmas Eve in North London and seeing over ten species of plants in flower in gardens. Maybe its global warming. Maybe its so the shepherd’s can pick a bouquet for Mary. But whatever it is, its strange.

Christmas by Night Bus

I’m in north London over Christmas to see my Mum who is down from the North staying in my brother’s house near Holloway. Its only about ten miles from where we live in Lewisham, maybe less, but on Christmas Day it might as well be a hundred, so we’re staying here for a few days. I arrived here on Saturday evening, had a sandwich, did too much shopping, and waited and waited for my daughter to turn up. And waited and waited until she got here just after midnight.

A few minutes later she mentioned she had blistered her hand touching one of the pans on the cooker. She assumed that I must have cooked something in it and left it there hot. (Actually I’d washed it and heated it up to dry it quickly but that’s another story) So, I asked, its turned off now isn’t it. You did check the gas to make sure the hob wasn’t alight?

No, she never thought of that.

Now no-one could leave it there. Could I go to bed, go to church on Sunday morning, not knowing for sure if we’d left the cooker on? not possible. If only because of the responsibility to the people who live upstairs.

So a four-hour round trip by night. Out to the street, run for a 91 bus, get ll hot and wish I was wearing less coat, it stops at King’s Cross instead of Trafalgar Square, walk over to see a 73 coming, take that to Tottenham Court Road, where the stops are all messed up by Centre Point, get a 29 to Trafalgar Square, wait for an N21 to Lewisham, then find that the gas ring is of course off. Quick look round the flat, pick up a rosary (I think I’ll need one of my blood pressure rises much more) and the phone recharger which she – safe and warm back in Holloway and drinking GIN and tonic – had asked me to fetch (Even though, writing this two days later, she instantly mislaid it when I gave it to her and was then cross with me for not knowing where she put it. AND I have nearly but not quite finished the Very Big Book I was reading on he bus so I can’t leave it but need to take it back which is irritating.

Night buses show a fascinatingly different side of London life. If you like watching wrecked clubbers and grumy night-shoft workers who’d rther be in bed. Like I would. Or at least I’d like to have the choice

So back out at something like 02:20, miss an N21, wait for the next bus, decide to try to get a bus from London Bridge area to cut of having to go into the West End and back out again, wait in fog at the top end of the bridge while another N21 and an N47 go past (I should have just got in them in retrospect) foolishly get on a 149 that goes to Stoke Newington but doesn’t cross the route of the 91 anywhere (Why didn’t I take my AtoZ? Why is there no direct bus from London Bridge to King’s Cross?) so end up walking though Stoke Newington at 04;00 in order to wait for nearly half an hour opposite a snooker hall on Manor Road for the N106 to Finsbury park (I could have probably walked it) and then walk up Stroud Green Road and back to my brother’s. Getting there, and pouring myself a good stiff GIN (first drink of the evening) at something like 04:40.

I was only two minutes late to church on Sunday morning.

Ethnopoesis, or, Neocons nicked my new word!

I thought I had made up a cool new word. I was walking through Russell Square in the rain – its a beautiful drizzly first of December in London, not quite cold enough to need to wear a coat, but cool enough that you don’t feel too hot if you do, lovely subdued light, mottled pail sky, water everywhere, the trees have finally shed most of their leaves in the last week or so, the limes that are so common as street trees in south-east London and the planes in Bloomsbury are holding on to their last few yellow raggedy leaves flopping about in the wind – and I was thinking about a question someone asked on the Ship of Fools a while back, Why is South Africa more liberal? (which was originally about legalisation of same-sex partnerships)

The obvious reply to the question is another question: “why do people expect different African societies to be like each other?”

And so my thoughts drifted. OK I hadn’t got to Russell Square yet, I was still on the 68 bus at this time, and wishing I’d waited a minute more to get on the 188 behind because it goes straight to the north side of the square (saving me a road crossing and about two minutes to get to work) And I was composing a little story in my head about it, using bits of African history to illustrate the idea of a stateless society or a functioning anarchy, comparing the Igbo with the Yoruba, or the Kikuyu with the Baganda, or the Nuer with the Dinka and Shilluk.

And I made up the word “ethnopoesis” for “Deliberatly writing a people into being”. It could be used for the literary side of ethnogenesis, the rhetorical and mythical aspect of the definition of a new ethnic group. Its not often I invent a new word while walking from the bus-stop to work. A pun as well. That’s Deeply Cool. I was pleased with myself.

Ands then I arrived at college and searched for the word on Google. And there are twenty-one hits. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! I am beaten to it! (and I got slightly crosser about it at my Rant of the Month site)

I confess. “pail sky” was a genuine mistake, but I have now noticed it and I could change it if I wanted to. But I don’t. Because its full of water and some of it is the same kind of dull silvery grey as the dirty zinc bucket I have at home.re,