Town and gown

Well, it's the cusp of another weekend.  I've got several items in the diary over the next couple of days, football tomorrow and off to the Globe on Sunday for a production of The Merchant Of Venice.  It's at times like this that the value of living in a city becomes apparent to one.  Yes, it can be frantic, but the diversions available to are huge.

I grew up in east London, and it was the received wisdom when I was a nipper, and probably still is, that as soon as one was able, you should up-sticks and move out to the country.  By country I mean west Essex of course.  Our faith in the desirability of Essex was blind.  None of us knew the place.  It was simply the closest "not-London" to where we lived, and therefore better.

I nearly gave into this fad myself a few years ago.  The wife and I were that close to buying a house out in the sticks.  It was a lovely house in a lovely university town nestling on the banks of picturesque river.  We took the precaution of visiting the place on a nondescript February weekend.  We stayed over in a B&B, and so were able to spend the evening in our soon-to-be home town.  And that's what derailed the whole project.  The pubs at night were a very different proposition from the same establishments during the day.  During the day the place was full of day trippers.  The pubs were convivial, packed with pleasant people and their gun dogs.  At night they were full of bored and drunk young locals.  I thought to myself then: if we lived here, we'd never go out after dark.  And we like going out after dark; it's "our thing".

So we pulled out and stayed in London.  And here we are still.  

 - Taxi!  Take me something stimulating and nearby, would you?  And don't spare the horses.

A tangled web

If London has one overriding virtue, it's its sheer size.  You don't ever really tire of the old place because it would take more than your allotted three and a half score years to become familiar and jaded with it.  This was further evidenced for me today as I had a wander around a then uncharted part of the Isle of Dogs.  I've worked on the isle for five and a half years, but this spot, which is only 10 mins' walk from my desk, is completely new to me.  It's an idyll of suburban calm alongside an old dock, right in the centre of a formerly grimy part of docklands.

I've had stuff like this happen to me in the centre of London too, which is extraordinary when you consider that I'm a native Londoner of some 46 years, who spends all his free time in Soho and environs.  But now and again I'll find myself strolling down some new avenue somewhere, thinking "where the fcuk am I?".  That's what keeps the magic alive.  You can't do that in a town of 5,000 inhabitants, sadly - sorry bucolic types.  You need at least 8 million punters.

My worry about the present construction projects ongoing in Londres, and there are loads, is that the architecture takes no account of the area of London it's proposing to blight.  London, as has been well-documented over the years, is a collection of disparate villages, not a uniform entity.  Each area has its own look and its own ambiance.  When architectural homogeneity takes over, everywhere looks and feels the same.  Take Canary Wharf for example.  It's perfectly fine.  The buildings are well designed and it's clean and easy to navigate, but it has no USP, no birthmark to distinguish it from any other moneyed part of a major world city.

There are developments of this CW kind in both Soho and Fitzrovia, two historic, low-rise areas of central London that thus far have maintained their unique identities.  The new stuff is their to attract Russian money, I'm told.  And our esteemed mayor, Boris, is only too happy to accept their nouveau largesse.  This dolt is going to be remembered in London for centuries, but not for the reasons he supposes.

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."

Only five minutes from this cinema...

The missus and I are off to our new local cinema tonight.  It's one of those faceless, multiplex shitholes - the kind of human skip I normally wouldn't touch with a barge pole - but it's a cinema that's walking distance from our front door, and that has got to be worth celebrating.

Our last local one closed in 2003.  Since then we've had to travel by bus or tube to see cutting edge flicks.  To those of you who don't live in a large city, this won't sound like much, but to a Londoner, not having a cinema hobbling distance away is like not having central heating.  Yes, one can manage, but surely this shouldn't still be happening, should it?  It's 2014 ffs.  People were coerced into fighting a war for this country.  What was the point?

My only misgiving about the new place is that multiplexes are like honeypots for scumbags.  There's a risk, therefore, that one might be sharing the auditorium with noisy, fcuk-witted fellow denizens, of which there are plenty in my hometown.

The area I live in has been furiously regenerating over the last five years or so - particularly the "village" bit I live in.  All my neighbours are respectable, educated and middle-class.  But the self-same area used to be exclusively working-class and not a little rough with it.  Most of the locale still clings doggedly to its lumpen tattooed past.  Nothing wrong with that of course - it's just that I demand respectful silence when I at the pictures.  What's the point otherwise?  

People (middle-class people) snort and pull faces when I complain about things like this.  But that is to misread the target of my ire.  It's not the working class whose nose I aim to bloody (I am one of them after all), it is scumbags I have a problem with.  These two cohorts tend to get confused by the media and polite English society at large.  I suppose my own class is partly to blame for this.  There is a creeping mistrust of education and erudition among today's hoi polloi.  

This is at odds with the prevailing wisdom I was brought up with.  Then, working class children were encouraged to amass book learning if they felt inclined to.  And those to didn't take to formal education were expected and encouraged to learn a practical skill.  As a boy, my (exclusively working class) friends and I revelled in knowing stuff - not Greek myths or calculus maybe, but abstract notions that appealed to us and facts.  Nothing wrong with a distended arsenal of facts, my boy.

Working class children nowadays wallow in their ignorance and this I find contemptible.

Treble-Digit Co-efficient of Arse

Mrs O and I ended-up in Hackney Wick yesterday afternoon.  For those of you who aren't au fait with the east of the capital (of England), I ought to contextualise HW somewhat.  The London 2012 Olympic site sits in a huge swathe of river valley in London's east end.  Previously this site was home to a lot of down-at-heel industrial businesses.  But during the 70s and 80s the businesses either went jugs up or relocated outside London, so the area fell into serious disrepair.  

The residential areas that abutted this wasteland were, unsurprisingly, fairly shitty in their own right, thanks to their proximity to this eyesore.  Stratford, Bow, south Leyton - none of them would set the pulse racing, unless it was from fear of molestation from n'er-do-wells.  Hackney Wick sits to to the south east of the Olympic site, and is an odd place because it's always been rather beloved by the tattooed-graduate-set, who make a bee-line for London as soon as Durham University confers a degree on them.  This is probably due to its name.  It may have Hackney in the title, but Hackney it ain't.

So while the rest of this shabby cohort of districts have tidied themselves up, courtesy of the Olympic money and the need to persuade the rest of the country that they're no longer effectively open prisons, Hackney Wick has rested on its laurels rather.  And who can blame it?  The graduates still come.

To my cock-er-knee eye, however, it's an absolute shithole, HW.  It's looks appalling.  It's like being in an episode of The Sweeney, one of bleaker, nihilistic ones too.  Shirley to goodness Britain's young things will cop on to themselves soon and relocate to nearby Stratford instead?  I suppose, however, that would require them getting some self-awareness and then getting their thumbs out of their derrieres, and that's no going to happen.

The air is rich with ions. The gods must be displeased.

It is super hot in London today - proper oh-Jesus-I'm-melting hot.  It's tough for the English to cope in weather like this as they like to keep a lid on their emotions by-and-large, but that's impossible.  The simplest physical task in this heat requires herculean will-power.  By the time I cycled home last night, I was like a rag doll.  Unfortunately, Mrs O was out carousing with colleagues, so I had cook the tea when all I wanted to do was lie down and have a good tremble.  Thanks to my massive reserves of stoicism and heart I did manage to throw together a Spanish omelette before the tears came.

And I speak as one of the fitter members of the populace.  If I'm struggling, I shudder to think how the flabby rotters are getting on.  Needless to say, it will be carnage in the pubs of the capital tonight.  People will be pouring rubbing alcohol in their ears.  It doesn't help that the weather's supposed to break tomorrow, so the window of crapulent opportunity is small.  He who hesitates is lost.

The one upside to the humidity and the heat was that there was an almighty and spectacular electrical storm in the small hours.  The noise was unimaginable.  Even London falls silent for a few hours in the dead of night, so the peals of thunder rang out like you would not believe.  I thought in my dozing alpha wave state that the roof was about to fly off.

Back to normal tomorrow - wet and miserable.  Ho hum.

It's for charadee

A friend of mine is undertaking a trial by exercise in June this year to raise money for a children's charity.  It's a worthy cause.  And just as well too because what he's proposing to do boggles the brain.  He is cycling from London to Paris in twenty-four (count 'em) hours.

It's 280 miles all in, and in a sadistic piece of scheduling par excellence by the organisers, the first tranche covers the 100 miles down to the coast to catch the ferry, leaving 180 French miles to be covered in one go on the final leg.

My friend is a relative novice in matters cycling if his blog is anything to go by.  This is just as well.  Anyone who's done any distance cycling at all remembers the first one well.  You set off with the best of intentions, full of vim and anguished anticipation.  Five hours later you're in a dark place.  No matter how diligently you eat and drink or how well you pace your effort, the horrors seep in.

It starts with seemingly inexplicable extremes of mood and physical discomfort.  For no apparent reason, you'll suddenly feel nauseous and tearful.  Moments later you find yourself singing to the hedgerows as the spirit soars.

The secret is to be aware of these peaks and troughs and what causes them.  The body is trying to protect itself from your idiocy - and quite right too.  If you have an iron enough will, it is more than possible to kill yourself on a bicycle.  Because the machine supports the rider's weight, there is no "wall" that simply stops you in your tracks when the tank hits empty, as is the case with runners.  You need, therefore, to detach yourself from your emotions.  Acknowledge them, yes, but do be fooled into thinking you must do as they implore.  It's important in (near) extemis to reassure the body that you know what you're doing, and that you will allow it stand down ante mortem.

This is the kind of caper James Bond used to get up to when he was being imaginatively tortured inside a hollowed-out volcano in Fleming's books.  He used to have a mental cell that he would retreat to to ride out the physical maelstrom.  It's easier said than done though...particularly when the leather saddle you're sat atop turns out not to have been sufficiently broken in after twenty minutes' cycling, as happened on my last marathon undertaking.  I couldn't sit down for a calendar month after that one.  I had to pretend to colleagues and friends that I'd given up sitting for Lent.  I'd actually given up castor sugar.

...still, what doesn't kill us and all that.

Springtime for Hitler and Germany

The weather in London at the mo is splendid - warm, sunny and basically a joy. It's that period of the year when you sense the sap rising, which makes it difficult to concentrate on the usual emetic impedimenta that life habitually hurls at one. Collective thoughts turn to boozy picnics in parks and walks along the river with physically attractive companions.

Experience suggests we should savour these spring days as the actual summer in this country (England) tends toward the underwhelming. It's all chewing-gum grey skies and tepid humidity in these parts come June. It does go to show, however, that happiness is all about managing expectations, which is why my default position is to assume that absolutely everything will be shite. Due to this, I am rarely disappointed, and just occasionally delighted by the fates. I'll settle for that.

Gene Slacker

It's been a splendid weekend in London. The sun shone and the sap was high. The wife and I spent the time constructively. We went to a barbie on Saturday evening. And Sunday we spent crabbing. Everyone was in rare form down at the coast yesterday. Even the crabs seemed to be enjoying the process. We then popped the tin hat on this world-beating weekend by charging around to our local for a brace of sharpeners last thing Sunday evening.

Sadly the pub was empty. That's the way to plays here in the UK on those rare occasions when the sun's cracking the stones. Our average denizen can't resist pouring drink down himself like a man whose lungs are on fire as soon as the temperature crawls above twenty Celsius. By the time we pitched up then, the rest of the vulgar mob had shot off home to assume the recovery position. I suppose it's for the best. I don't want to be harangued after a trying day crabbing.