A post about nothing – feel free to comment about anything

This is just a sort of test, a placeholder, The idea was to replace a dead link in some other web pages with something that went somewhere. I was intending to update the previous post with more pretty pictures of high-density low-rise housing in North London but I can’t easily do that until I have reactivated my Flickr account and I can’t do that until the bank sends me a new card after having cancelled my last one because I naughtily spent lots of money I didn’t have. Even though it wasn’t really my fault. And the unpaid phone bills probably take precedence over Fickr, or even my intention to go to Glastonwick

But I hate to short-change my loyal readers (all both of them) with an entirely empty post, so here is a poem:

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days -
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

John M. (Mike) Ford

(Copied from Making Light )

Pseudo-aleatoric traverse of North London by bus.

When done properly the idea is to get on the first bus going anywhere, get off where it goes, get on a bus going somewhere else, , see where you end up, then work your way back home – preferably by bus.

It helps not to have a goal. Last week, I did have a sort of goal, if not a very big one, because someone had more or less challenged me to go to the Grahame Park council estate in Hendon.

There was an argument about dangerous bits of London. Someone was saying there were “no go” districts of London where it isn’t safe to walk the streets if you were a white Christian. I think that’s nonsense. I’d claim, that there aren’t any, or at least nowhere much less safe than anywhere else – in particular I think there is no neighbourhood in London where you are very likely to be in danger because of your apparent ethnicity or religion. And if there was such a place – which there isn’t – the people in danger would be more likely to be Asian-looking Muslims rather than whiote Christians. So I asked for an example and they suggested Grahame Park in Hendon.

A long bus journey across London is a great way to get a feel for the local diversity
There are very few neighbourhoods where most people are of the same ethnicity (and nearly all of them are white and English) and probably nowhere where almost everybody is (not even the Bengalis east of Brick Lane) . But the nature of the minorities changes, often on a very fine basis

Exactly where I live there is no majority but white British people are the largest minority. The second largest is probably West Africans, with large (and growing) numbers of Tamils, and also a lot of Eastern and Central Europeans, But you only have to cross the main road to find more West Indians, or walk a short way in the other direction to see more Chinese, Turks, and Somalis.

On Sunday morning after church I get on a 21 bus in Lewisham most of the other passengers are black women, and I guess most of them African. Which os pretty par for the course. If I can believe the census (& I suppose I can) only about a fifth of the population round here are black but I’d guess that more like half of the people you see in the streets are and most of the bus passengers. Maybe the white people are more likely to stay in doors, or maybe they mostly have cars.

Late spring flowers everywhere – it’s lilac time in Brockley and there are other shrubs and hedges in bloom everywhere.

At New Cross quite a lot of young white people get on. Goldsmiths students maybe? Getting the bus because its cheaper, or because of the engineering work on the railway? As we move up Old Kent Road more spanish-speakers get on, and a few Asians and a man who looks Turkish (not that you can tell who is Turkish or not by looking at people)

Almost all those putative Goldsmith’s students and all but two or three of the black and Hispanic people get off at London Bridge and are replaced by a small number of older people, an Asian family and some Dutch tourists. They do little more than cross the river – by Bank there are maybe twelve left on the whole bus.

Delay at Moorgate as the road is reduced to single track by a tower crane lifting airconditioning units up a building. If I had had my camera out of my bag at the time I could have taken a photo of one going up maybe a metre from the upstairs window I was sitting at. I suppose it was safe…

The big metal arches over Old Street Station loom at the top of Moorgate like the famous tusks in Mombasa (which I’ve seen) or Saddam’s crossed swords at Baghdad (which I haven’t buy we all know them from telly). Except that, this being London, they aren’t some bombastic nationalist statement – we gave up building those in the 1920s – but the support for a giant advertising hoarding.

Back into residential areas north of Old Street, and things take a turn for the poorer (thoug not a s poor as Lewisham and New Cross – not that the houses are any different, similar Edwardian “villas” and slightly older terraces of three or even four story houses – but the people and the cars seem more prosperous). And they still have joggers in this part of the world. White middle class ones who look sane. Down south half the joggers look like they are in training for boxing and half the rest shout religious slogans at you. Or is that just Loampit Vale?

Of the bus at Newington Green and walk around for a little. Lots of apparently 30-something women with flowery dresses, some of them wearing flowery dresses. Turkish bakeries and pastry shops and four or five cafes or bars with green or organic style, some with blues music coming out. Some Turkish people hanging around (this time I know they are Turkish Cypriot because I hear them talking in a mixture of Turkish and English) , a few of them drinking cans of lager. One of them a scruffy overweight middle-aged woman with a shaved head wearing a Judge Dredd T-shirt, shouting and drinking Holsten Pils. If this is the mythical Londonistan, these guys are going native pretty fast. Two teenage girls, also Turkish I think, long black wavy hair. wearing pretty dresses and figure-revealing tight black T-shirts and huge hoop ear-rings.

Another bus, and north towards Wood Green. We’re moving very slowly in a traffic jam. Horse chestnut in flower at Clissold Park. For me this is a trip back in time. I tend to associate different parts of London with different times. Brownswood Road and the are the late 1980s but the water tower and the New River are the early 80s or even late 70s. Views of the Stoke Newington reservoirs on the other side of a council estate – glimpses of dinghy sails at the ends of short streets. If I remember correct there used to be huge houses that were run-down cheap hotels, and the HQs of small charities and political organisations. And it seems I do – some o them are still here though a lot have been redeveloped into posh flats. And the ethnic mix changes again – Greeks alongside Turks, more Africans, and the Asians seem to be Muslims rather than Hindu.

I get off and walk around somewhere between Palmer’s Green and Bound’s Green for a bit, then get on a 232 bus to see where it goes and write up some notes on what I just saw. One bad thing about looking at London from the top of a moving bus is that the notes I took on the bus from Wood Green onwards are illegible… apparently there is something interesting about the Wood Green Spiritualist Church and a little Anglican parish hall nearby – but I can’t remember or decipher what it was There is a huge “Assembly Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses”. Why not “Kingdom Hall”? Most of their buildings seem to be Kingdom Halls. Is is some sort of regional centre, a Watchtower Cathedral? Or a social rather than a religious institution? Or just a different name?

And round the North Circular – which isn’t one of the scenic parts of London and is one of the noisier and smellier – and off the bis again at Henly’s Corner on Finchley road where the trouble is getting over the road. as the cars come fast and at irregular intervals and there are vast complex but obscure systems of pedestrian routings to the traffic lights on the Great North Way, but in the end I find them and launch myself into the north-eastern reaches of Hendon. Which get very boring very quickly, so I sneak off down a side street and find myself walking amongst suburban houses that look as if they were built for Pooter’s grandchildren – bank clerks and taxi drivers. But I think the area has gone upmarket since then. You can tell the people by the cars. A lot of them seem strangely similar. If not identical. Some driveways have two identical cars – same model, same year, same upholstery, same colour. Unisex taken to extreme? Or company cars. They are all very clean as well. Clean enough that they look as if someone gets paid to clean them. Some of the gardens look as if people get paid to tidy them as well. One or two have signs with the phone number of the company that does it.

There are houses with odd extensions, and strangely massive gateways and fences, and obvious alarm systems, A lot of the place seems to have been upmarketed [can I say that? "upgraded" sounds wrong] beyond the expectations of the original builders. Its as if the people who live there are living a packaged corporate lifestyle that really wants more space. But this near to London that kind of space comes REALLY expensive.The streets are narrower than the cars in them want to be in. Mercedes, BMWs, Range Rovers. One Maserati. How many people keep Maseratis in the street?

The cultural mix? I hardly see anyone. Apart from a couple of dodgy dog walkers, and one bloke who looks like a bodyguard, there aren’t many people in these streets. Some family parties getting into and out of cars. Most white, some Asian, hardly any black. I think I hear Eastern European accents. If forced to guess I’d guess mostly Jewish.

Another turn back towards the main road – the A1 approaching M1 Junction 2 – and the whole feel changes again. The houses are still mostly 1920s or 1930s mock-tudorbethan, or 1960s and 1970s imitations of those imitations, with a sprinkling of places that look like they were designed by genuine architects, and a few 1990s brick boxes, but the few visible people are suddenly almost all Asian. There is a man who smiles at me from a car as he waits at a pedestrian crossing, an old lady in a sari waiting on a doorstep, two young Indian-looking women stepping out of a car driven by a man with a turban and a huge beard. And a very large house with a sign saying “Mirpuri Lodge”.

Dodge round a corner and into a very nice park called Sunny Hill Park. It is sunny and there are hills. People walking dogs, kids playing football, twenty-somethings playing tennis, families with babies, the usual suspects.

Its getting hot and I haven’t eaten since a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits at church seven hours ago. There ought to be a cafe. There is a cafe, the Sunnyhill Cafe. The food is kosher – it says so on the menu – there are fizzy drinks with Hebrew writing on the cans, and the waiters are mostly very friendly-looking blonde women with Eastern European accents. I have a huge sloppy felafel salad and pitta. I can hear the noise of the cars on the M1.

It takes quite a while and about half a mile of walking to negotiate the subway under Watford Way and find a walking route through shedlands around the motoway junction and a pedestrian bridge over the motorway and the mainline railway out of Euston. At that finally brings me to Grahame Park.

There’s not actually that much to say about Grahame Park. Its big. Its divided into a few districts each with a different style of building. Mostly low-rise high-density brick-build sub-brutalist flats with a few large medium-rise slabs or spines and quite a lot or more ordinary newer houses round the outskirts. Its penetrable navigable on foot. Its not exactly pretty but its a damn sight better-looking than a lot of other such places. Most of the streets and blocks are named after things to do with aircraft. Is this the site of the old Hendon Airport? I can’t say I felt at all scared. And to the person who said it was a no-go area because of all the evil Somalis around, all I can say is they must have been somewhere else that day.

I didn’t manage to take many photos because there were people around for a change. Kids playing in the street. And I tend not to take photos of kids playing in the street on the foolish principle that some people don’t like strange middle-aged men hanging round taking pictures of their children. And most of the few photos I took seem to have just got messed up by me trying to upload them to Flickr on the day my subscription ran out… maybe more later.

By 7pm I’m on Edgware Road and looking for a pub. There are lots of pubs. It takes a while to find one that sells real ale and doesn’t have lots of crap music coming of of it.

I am the only customer. The two barmaids are very pleasant Australians. I realise that when in a strange bit of London I avoid exactly the sort of pubs I frequent in my own bit of London.

And a bus down to Kilburn Park Station and being reminded just what a nightmare of tunnels and staircases it is to get out of the Bakerloo Line at Elephant and Castle station by the Walworth Road exit.

Lewisham Bridge roof protest

This was meant to be an account of my traverse of North London in search of the fabled Grahame Park Estate. But I’m knackered so writing it up is put off yet again.

In the meantime, here is a picture of the usual suspects on the roof of the kitchens of Lewisham Bridge School, taken a couple of weeks ago:

A mess that is far too complicated and personal for me to go on about it here – other than to say that the future is out of our hands – come the Day maybe it won;t be an communities will run their own schools – and we’re trying to do the best we can for the kids who are there now, and the best unfortunatly means bussing them up to New Cross. Which is not good enough. And it wasn’t the teachers, or the other staff who fucked up. Or even the governors.

And this is where we are now:

And I intend to keep on taking photos of Loampit Vale during all this long delayed new building:

(now if only I hadn’t just let my Flickr sub lapse I could put a lot more of those up here… maybe next month)

Tamils gone

From the street, I mean. All the shops shut, no-one walking around. Slghtly weird, slightly scary. A little ghost town row of shops.

Presumably they have all gone to one of the various demonstrations or political meetings going on in London. Or else perhaps there is some sort of mourning. Or maybe they are all trying to get their relatives out or find out what happened to them. (I’m assuming they aren’t all under secret orders from the LTTE. Not all of them at once, anyway)

These people are watching their world end and we’re just walking past on the way to the bus-stop. Maybe we pop in to buy a packet of fags or a few lemons. Well, noit tday we couldn’t.

I suppose they will be back tomorrow. Which is not going to happen in Sri Lanka. It all seems to be over over there. No-one is sure of course. No news in or out of the last corner that they say the LTTE were trapped in. No news and, so the Sri Lankan government says, no escapes either.

Of course I have no idea what happens next. Peace? Persecution? Guerilla warfare? Some sort of improvised government in exile of an unrecognised country, a kind of self-perpetuating Provisional Army Council? Refugees?

What happens there affects what happens here a little. If there is a stream of new exiles, they will come here. Maybe right here, this street, the corner by the bus stop.

Assuming the shops open again tomorrow .

The micro-ethno-geography of football.

Well, I went to the pub on Thursday when the Millwall/Leeds match was on. Support your local team and all that. (Though what support they get from me drinking a few pints I don’t know)

But what really is the local team? My mate Dave insists it ought to be Charlton. But then he was from Woolwich or some such place.

All the pubs round our way are Millwall if they are anything at all (not that that many pubs are open at all any more) And I think that local kids at the schools my daughter went to tended to be Millwall, if they supported any South or East London team. And I see far more Millwall than Charlton insignia in the local council estates. You don’t have to go very far to see more Charlton – just the other side of Lewisham High Street – but our exact location is more Millwall.

Just going by who turns up to drink in our local pubs when the footy is on TV, at a rough guess I’d say Arsenal actually gets the largest barstool following. Especially from black people (something I only noticed quite recently, I must be slow on the uptake) ManU and Chelsea are closely behind them. Though practically any Premiership game will draw a few viewers in.

Nerdish as it sounds, I actually have been counting the “extra” people in the pub when there is football on. For the recent Euro semi-finals, the Arsenal/ManU games got about 50 extra in when they were on Sky and about 30 on ITV. Chelsea/Barca was about 35 and 12. The management actually charged entry to the pub on a couple of those nights. Though of course those games sort of rate as internationals and so get more attention. For ordinary Premier League games both the ManU/Wigan and Newcastle/Middlesbrough matches got in about a dozen. They didn’t charge for the Millwall matches though!

Millwall aren’t on the telly that often of course, and when they are it tends to be one-off big games, so its not strictly comparable. The few matches that get shown on the TV in the pub tend to attract a big following though – the largest crowd I ever saw there was the day Millwall was in the FA cup final. Much, much, larger than the last couple of year’s finals.

But of the London sides that aren’t anywhere near the top of the Premiership, Millwall is clearly the most popular locally. Some support for Charlton, but not as much. Palace are all but off the radar – they seem to attract about as much comment as Fulham and QPR.

Maybe someone should produce a map of local and ethnic affiliations to London football clubs.

Are there actually Fulham neighbourhoods and Chelsea neighbourhoods? Or are they all mixed up together? Do they tend to split by class or race?

How far out into Essex does West Ham go? All the way to the coast I suspect, but I don’t know.

Is there still anyone in South West London who counts MK Dons as a local team? And is the hole in South-West London left by the defection of Wimbledon filled by Chelsea? Or Palace? Somehow I suspect it isn’t Brentford.

And who on earth supports Brentford anyway?.

And who is your local team if you live in Brixton? Certainly not Millwall – they fizzle out somewhere about Camberwell Green. Again I suspect Chelsea or just possibly Palace, but I’m not at all sure and am more then willing to be informed.

And while we’re at it, going south of London where is the cut-off line between Crystal Palace (Palace? Palace?) and Brighton? Or is it all Chelsea in posh Surrey? (For those few who support a local team at all I mean)

And is Hammersmith locally Fulham/Chelsea (as I would expect) or QPR (as a taxi driver from Shepherd’s Bush implied the other day? Though he also claimed that the reason West Ham have hammers on their badge is because they used to be connected with an ironworks which sounded totally spurious to me but seems to be true)

And are there or have there ever been any teams in London whose support is anti-Protestant or anti-Catholic (as you find in Scotland, and used to just a little bit in Liverpool and even Manchester)

How much truth is there in the stereotype that racist East Enders are more likely to support West Ham, but anti-racist ones either Arsenal or Spurs? (As famously portrayed by Warren Mitchell, the lefty Jewish Spurs supporter playing Alf Garnett as a Hammers man)

And if you are a posh Hampstead socialite, what is your local team? I suspect Arsenal somehow, even if QPR is closer. Bet it isn’t Barnet.

This is all valuable anthropological and ethnographic information! It should be documented somewhere!

Like the real Millwall chant, which seems to consist of some of them howling “Mill” as loud as they can, drawing the vowel out for maybe ten seconds, and others singing “wall” (a syllable which contains no consonants in a South London accent) at the same time (maybe they start together but they end in different places) so the combined noise is roughly a completely wordless “eeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrr” (or “uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh” for rhotic Scots and Americans) Though how they thought anyone could hear them in Leeds is beyond me. But it was bloody loud where we were.

And incidentally is, I think, a deliberate playing-up to the media stereotype – portrayed as inarticulate thickos they have a laugh by acting the part. Why bother with words in your chant when no-one listens what you are saying anyway? The thing is a stance, a pose, an attitude. Not particularly a pleasant one to be honest, but a slightly different one from that affected by supporters of some other teams.

And Millwall are going to Wembley!

The Swifts are back!

Loads of them hawking around the trees on the other side of the road while I was waiting for the us to the station this morning. I heard a familiar sound, looked up, and there they were.

Right on time. The latest I’ve ever seen them is the 14th of May, in about thirty years. Usually 10th or 11th, never earlier than the begining of them month.

So I suppose it’s summer Whatever the weather.

Bed leg city

Overheard in a pub:

“Journalists aren’t like us. They all live in a fantasy land. And TV is a fantasy land”

“Especially when Queen’s Park Rangers are on match of the Day”

“QPR? QPR are all about Stan Bowles”

“Tell me about it!”

“I just bloody did!”

In the aftermath of the Millwall/Leeds match last Saturday. Which was a Big Deal at our local pub. The place exploded when Millwall scored – it was almost enough to make me a fan. Looking forward to the second leg on Thursday. We are promised pie & mash.

Millwall fans, of course, aren’t like they used to be. As the small Millwall fan in the blue shirt explained to us while he was describing how he spent two months in Armley jail in Leeds for assaulting a police officer (“I should have got more”). But apparently they are all diamonds up there and the looked after him even though he was the only Londoner in the nick, and so got called “Cockney”. Unlike Durham jail, “bed leg city”, where he feared for both his life and his honour. Not that he put it that way.

I’m not any kind of a football fan of course. Though I more or less made my peace with football a few years back when Millwall was in the FA cup – it was a fun day.

I used to hate football when I was a boy. I was bad at it, skinny and asthmatic and slow, and we were forced to play at school whether we liked it or not. From my point of view sport was what games get turned into when they become compulsory. Secondary school was worse than primary

Sport on TV – which is not really sport at all of course, because its just something you watch, not something they make you do – is more fun if you care who wins. Just as horse racing is more fun if you have a bet on. So if I’m in the pub watching football perhaps I ought to have a horse in the race

So if I was a football fan, which would my team be? You can’t just pick one, you need to care. It would be pointless just looking around for a team that seems to be winning a lot and deciding to be a fan. Though that seems to be what some people do, with all these Manchester United and Chelsea fans you find around the place. Pointless. There needs to be some local connection.

Well, I’m from Brighton, and I live in an area that supports Millwall, and I have some distant family connections with Newcastle supporters, so that gives me three candidate teams. How are they doing?

I took look a few weeks back and it seemed that Brighton and Newcastle were almost certain to get relegated from their leagues. And I didn’t want that to happen. I did care, a little. Especially about Brighton. Not that I really care very much for the football team, but I do care, very much, for the city. I want the team to stay up for the same reason I want the new stadium at Falmer to be built. Its my home town.

And mysteriously, all of a sudden, they started winning. And now they are completely safe from relegation this year. So a result already!

And then I watched Saturday’s Millwall/Leeds match in the pub, and realised that I did in fact want them to win. And was genuinely excited when they did. And am looking forward to the replay (at Leeds – a lot harder job to win there). And, on Monday, feeling in an odd mood after a very frustrating school governor’s meeting (Our little school has been on the national news, and not in a good way) i popped into the pub and saw Newcastle thrash Middlesbrough 3:1. I was thrilled. 3:1! A sort of local Derby (though not as big as a Sunderland match would be) and both in the relegation zone so if there was a draw it was likely that both would go down. And now Newcastle is in with a chance!

So there we go. Maybe not one but three horses in the race. And possibly in different races as well, if Millwall go up (which is at least possible) and Newcastle stay up (which is now almost likely). So three bloody good results so far.

The only trouble is, that’s probably as good as it gets…