Overheard on a train

As part of my project to document unusual idioms, this is recorded mainly for the interesting use of the word “privy”. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Names are changed to protect the innocent (i.e. me)

Genuinely overheard on a train from Dartford to London:

“I still think the youngest was X’s”

“How could you possibly prove that?”

“Do a DNA test.”

“But he’s dead.”

“That doesn’t matter. They can use anything these days. Bits of hair or fingernails. Dig up the body”

“But we burned him”

“There must be bits left. On the carpet or in the toilet.”

“Why do you reckon he bottled that nutter?”

“Messing with his bird.”

“One of them”

“But what he did to that geezer from Gravesend was still out of order.”

“He didn’t expect that when he knocked on the door.”

“Maybe it was because he was such a little guy. No-one expected it”

“Built like a brick privy though.”

“Only just over five foot tall and almost as wide as he was high”

“Still seems weird he’s dead. He was younger than us”

Playing by Faversham rules

There are certain rules by which English small towns are ordered. Some shared between them, others unique to particular towns – such as Faversham in Kent. Thanks to my stupendous powers of observation I can now share these with you, so you will never again be dazed and confused in Faversham. Over the weekend I spent all of twenty hours in in the town. During most of them I was either drinking or asleep or both. But so strong are my natural abilities in this line I can assure you I have got the placed pinned down already! The Rules are arranged in suras of decreasing order of length.

• The prosperity of a small town can be judged by the ratio of shops selling silly toys or expensive antiques or second-hand books or organic food (on the top of the fraction) to charity shops, junks shops and cheap antique shops (on the bottom of it). By that rule Corbridge is better-off than Faversham which is better-off than Lewes which is better-off than Woodbridge which is better-off than Chichester which is better-off than Huntingdon. (Note the failure of the North-South Divide in Small Town Land – this is partly because southern small towns have a quota of poor people who can’t afford to live in the city, and northern small towns have rich people who can afford not to)
• No-one of European appearance is allowed to work in a shop that sells food after 6pm. Walking down into Faversham on Saturday evening I passed maybe six takeaways and three restaurants, all staffed by Asians, but only one Asian-looking person in the street (a little boy riding a chopper bike down a twitten) But all the pubs, which are many, seemed to be run entirely by white people.
• Every small town has at least one pub with bare wooden floorboards populated by women in their twenties or thirties with piercings in uncomfortable looking places who drink cider and snakebite and put rock music recorded before they were born onto the juke box. In Faversham it seems to be called the Swan.

  

• Most locals never walk anywhere except to the pub. They all drive. So if you ask directions to anywhere and they tell you it is a long way away don’t believe them. They only ever go by car and have no idea how long it really takes to walk. London is the last stronghold of human-powered mobility in the country.
• All women are beautiful. Even the fat fourteen-year-olds sitting in the street between the Hole in the Wall and Wetherspoon’s, too pissed to get up, drooling into their bottles of cheap vodka and giggling at their slighly older mates pathetic attempts to chat up the bouncers.
• No-one can do simple artithmetic. The otherwise very wonderful
  Shepherd Neame shop webpage is advertising a case of 24 cans of Spitfire for £22 – and four cases for £110. That’s about 14p a can more expensive.
• All women aged between 16 and 60 are married with children. But that doesn’t stop them cuddling random blokes they just met. Even when their husbands are in the next room.
• If you go to the pub over the road from the station for one last pint before you return to London, you will miss your train. (Also known as the “Lansdowne Arms Rule”)
• Somewhere there is a pub full of people who look like they used to drink in bars in Brighton twenty-five years ago. If you talk to them it usually turns out that they did.
• There is a creek or a river. It usually doesn’t have enough water in it to float more than a rubber duck. This is why the small town is still a small town and not a big city.

  

• The older and narrower the roads, the nice the town. If there is anywhere called a “by-pass” you can be sure it is deadly.
• Sleeping outside on a bare wooden floor is often more comfortable than inside on a mattress. Until it rains.
  

• Middle-aged men who have been in the pub since lunchtime do not need to drink Margaritas after midnight.

  

• Ten-year old girls who play pool in pubs and know the words to Iron Maiden songs actually exist.
• Lax enforcement of the smoking ban is not confined to South London.
• Spitfire actually does taste better than Master Brew.
• It was a really great party, thanks Mark and Stella!

  

• Fish and chips is usually nicer outside London
  
• Breweries are larger behind than in front.
  

  

• Acts of Morris Dancing are perpetrated
• They no longer have cattle markets
• They still have Co-ops.
  

Eavesdropping

Its been a good weekend for found sentences.

(and I’ve been in five pubs, and saw people smoking indoors in three of them – so if the new law is going to work They are going to have to do a few pub landlords PDQ – I suspect they won’t)

Overheard in a street in Faversham:

“We can’t go in there. Children aren’t allowed in pubs”
“Its not a pub. Its a Wetherspoon’s”

(girl of about 11 or 12 talking to boy of similar age)

Overheard in a public lavatory:

“Did that English boy win the Grand Prix?”
“Dunno, do you mean Lewis?”
“Apparently he’s English now. The Great White fucking Hope of England. I’m sorry but I’ve been waiting a long time and now he’s English?”

(by their accents two thirty-something West Indian blokes)

Overheard in Catford:

“When I went to Jamaica I was in a club dancing and there was this woman with bleached blonde hair who stood on her head for about a whole minute. She was wearing a miniskirt and no underwear. It was disgusting man. I didn’t know where to look. She had this big blonde hair and brown arms and a fair skin and it was all out of a bottle cos I’m telling you her pussy was black, man. You wouldn’t have liked it if you saw it.”

(young black woman trying to persuade a white male friend to come to Dancehall raves with her)

Overheard in a street in Faversham:

(retching noise)
“Did you really smoke them all?”
“Take a look in that little alley!”

(Small blond boy of about 11 or 12 years old)

I was walking down that little alley at the time and this is what I saw:

Overheard on train:

“What have we done? What haven’t we done! Come and get us you lazy mare!”

(Middle-aged woman with strong south London accent talking to her mobile)

Overheard on train:

“But baseball! Baseball is catastrophe! If I have son and he likes baseball I kill him!”

(tall muscly young bloke with film-star looks and some kind of Slavic accent. Talking to a man who might have been Italian, sitting next to two rather flash looking blonde women who were chatting away in what might have been Russian or Serbian or Czech – I’m not good at identifying languages. I once mistook a group of Polish students for Spanish)

I could never be a London City Missionary

Conversation in pub with M on Saturday night. (I call him “M” because that’s the letter his name starts with – but its also the way the LCM people always talk about their contacts in their terribly interesting monthly magazine).

M, a very drunk fifty-something bloke said:

“I’m pissed. I’ve been out for two days. Had an row on Thursday. She said If you are going to get pissed again dont bother to come home, So I didn’t go home. I popped in on Friday to have a shower and change my clothes and went straight out to the pub again. But I need to go back home now. I need to sleep. They say’you are in trouble’ But I’m not in trouble. What’s she going to do, throw mw out? I pay the bills. Its my house. Well, its our house. We both live there. But whats she going to do about it?”

If I was a proper LCM-type missionary evangelist I’d have advised him to go home and told him that Jesus loves him

But actually I just nodded and said ‘I know what you mean mate”

Overheard in a pub:

“Our Community policeman is OK. He comes round and chats to us and everyone is hanging around on the corner puffing on a bit of blow and he says hello. He’s just like your next-door neighbour. That’s the way it ought to be. He’s got respect.”

Also overheard in a pub:

“I need to be protected from my Dad. I’ve got a gaff. I pay rent for it. He’s got a gaff…” (and a lot more)

Nuts. The TV is doing a late-night re-run of Dallas. It just came on. And which episodes? The one in which JR got shot, and the one afterwards. I used to hate it. I hardly ever watched it. I can’t actually remember who shot JR. But its strangely compelling…

Smoking’s last day at the pub.

To Battersea briefly.

A. went to the Pride march, and I went to the Vicarage Tea Party. OK, it was the sort of Vicarage party with Rioja and Cotes du Rhone, and it wasn’t our vicarage, but it was over soon after eight and I missed the last episode of Dr Who – the things we suffer for the Faith.

Has Battersea changed or have I? When I first started visiting London back in the 19-ahem-0s I used to go to Battersea to see friends from Brighton. Some living in a squat, some in one of those slab blocks by the railway. It was one of the grottier bits of London as far as I could tell. Not so different from next-door Stockwell or Vauxhall.

But nowadays I read Battersea as posh.

Maybe it because I’ve been living in Lewisham or nearby for twenty-odd years and compared to South East London Battersea always was a bit upmarket. Maybe its because I’m remembering the area towards the river and this church is up almost on Wandsworth Common. Though even the shops by Clapham Junction (which never was in Clapham, its always been Battersea) are rather trendier and flashier than anywhere in the South East. (Maybe they always were – Battersea, unlike Lewisham, kept its department store, even if it is now only a Debenham’s) Or maybe its creeping Claphamisation. There were certainly plenty of bars with plate glass windows or cafes opening onto the street and rather unfeasibly cute 30-something mothers eating organic food with young kids and with skinny white-haired blokes who in Lewisham I would assume were the children;s grandfathers but here I suspect their fathers.

Round the back of the church a small high-density estate (“…nicely in scale, with pedestrian ways replacing some of the roads” according to Pevsner) that looks a lot like the one I saw in Jarrow the other week.

Then walking in the pouring rain through some medium-sized streets towards Clapham Common, (“Between the Commons” to estate agents) and a Blast from the Past at the sight of a house. Not because it was unusual but because it isn’t unusual any more. An ordinary house in an ordinary terrace, large bay windows with no net curtains or blinds, almost inviting passers-by to look in. You can see straight through what must have been two rooms knocked into one, with some sort of French doors or large window at the back, so you can see right through to the garden. The floor is polished bare floorboards, with maybe a round, shaggy, dark green rug towards one end. There are tasteful prints on the walls – these vaguely early 20th-century black-and-white drawings of dancers or tramps or something. There is a musical instrument of some sort. Two or three bookshelves, maybe one or two hundred books in them – more than most people will have but still nothing like as many as a vicar or sf fan might.

A young couple, maybe late twenties or early thirties. He is tall and thin and sitting on a chair, dressed all in black, clean-shaven with slightly spiky short hair. She is actually sitting on the floor, with her arm resting on the arm of the chair, smiling up at him in a Sergeant-where’s-mine-evoking sort of way. She’s wearing a chunky knitted jumper. Which she (or rather her mother at the same age) could have been wearing thirty years ago, except she probably wouldn’t have been wearing it on the first of July, such are the strange effects of global warming.

Back in 1967 or 1968 when we were kids helping our Dad campaign for the Labour Party for Brighton Council there were probably five hundred houses like that in Brighton (for all I know they might have been half of the whole number that there were in England) and it sometimes seemed as if we we knew all the inhabitants. These were the sort of Labour supporters who did not (as we had been) live on council estates or in little flats, but had just discovered that you could University lecturers (they were well-off in those pre-Thatcher days), advertising copywriters, architects, people you who didn’t quite seem to do anything for a living but mysteriously ended up working for the government next time Labour got in (and one or two, then in their twenties not in their fifties or sixties, who have been on the outer fringes of the Cabinet these last ten years)

Knocking through was all the rage, and white-washed minimalism and Chinese paper lanterns were big, though on the way out, moving through stripped pine towards “restoring” the “original features”. A fashion that still seems to have the artier half of the middle-middle-aged middle-middle class in its grip. It had just become possible to make a living by stripping out old Victorian and Edwardian decorations from poor people’s houses and selling them to the richer people moving in next door, as the middle classes started to move back into the city centres and inner suburbs. Though it took the government and councils twenty years to notice – so by the end of the 1970s you had councils still wanting to demolish terraces that were by now full of prosperous lawyers and well-informed accountants and replace them by slab blocks and dual carriageways in the name of redevelopment and regeneration, and by the middle of the 1980s millions of people all over the country had knocked through and pulled up carpets – though in a slightly jollier version of the style with walls brightly painted in solid colours, and shiny ethnic ornaments.

The thing that stopped me about this house was the way it was so very, very, exactly like my memories of houses years ago when all this was rare. Though of course it is probably all different really.

And of course no photos – as I’m not really given to taking pictures of people I don’t know just as they start a canoodle in their own living room. You can get arrested for that.

Later that same night, waiting in the rain on the north side of Clapham Common for a bus back to urban civilisation, a genuine bus-stop conversation. You don’t get many of those in the South of England. She perhaps 60, years old, from Glasgow. He (or she?) maybe in his thirties, very camp possibly Scouse accent. He being English wants to move on, she is up for a chat.

Had I heard about the idjits in Glasgow who drive a car into the airport? No, I hadn’t – I’d been at a party then walking for a couple of hours.

She reckons its a good thing, as they’ll all take notice in Glasgow now and do something about all the wee Paki shops. Apparently the trouble up there is that these Muslims and Pakis are all integrated. Not like Leeds where she lives now where they all keep themselves to themselves. The thing about the Scots – and especially about Rangers supporters – is that they take no shite. Or so I was told.

On the other hand she (like me) says she has both Protestants and Catholics in the family, so there cause of integration is perhps not yet lost.

They go indoors. I wait for a 37 bus to Peckham. When it gets to Clapham South a whole load of posh white people get off the bus, and lots of rather less posh black people get on. Battersea is behind me, and the last night of legal smoking in the pub ahead. Once in the pub I win 20 quid at Texas Hold’em which can’t be bad. Though between the beer and fags I must be down on the deal somehow.