bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

To my considerable delight, it occurred to me yesterday that Come Dine With Me, when spoken in a strong Northern Irish accent, sounds a lot like Calm Down With Me, which I think would make a lovely show, possibly featuring a grandma with a pot of tea and a plate of jammy dodgers. A smiley old skool grandma, though, not one of those new style ones that look like Iggy Pop. Delving into my own family history, my grandfather once calmed down my cousin Stephen after he had rather comically stung on the nose by a wasp by placing a teabag on the affected area to ‘draw out the sting’. Such is the unconditional trust placed in senior family members that it took me until literally the last week – ie a full quarter century – to work out what you may already have spotted, which is that this is bollocks.

Those of you with very long memories will recall my grandfather as a man who not only shot one of his own ears off by accident but made German air raids even more annoying for my grandmother by endlessly repeating the same admittedly quite funny joke over and over again until she threatened to walk out into the firestorm, find a solicitor, and divorce him.

[Hitting Read More now will reveal reasonably interesting tourist attractions, ineffective swine flu precautions, and sundry other items]

He took me on a visit to the Monument once. If you are unfamiliar, the Monument is a two hundred foot tall doric column in the Square Mile. It’s got an array of bronze flames at the top, as it is a monument to the Great Fire of London, which seems a bit insensensitive really, what with it being a massive, massive inferno and all that, and perhaps they should’ve topped it off with something a bit more comforting, such as I dunno a really big bucket of water, or a fireman strippogram. On the way up, he stopped as I recall twice for fag breaks, and I should imagine a further four times for jellied eels and choruses of Knees Up Mother Brown.

Anyway. Finding myself at a rare loose end, I decided to revisit the thing the other day. It was nice and sunny when I started, and pissing down when I got to the top. The ascent would be a treat for claustrophobics, being a tightly winding staircase entirely enclosed within a narrow stone tower. It was also a rare treat for a group of Spanish tourists who were all wearing face masks to prevent contracting, presumably, swine flu, and were subsequently coughed openly upon by everybody they passed on the way down, along with cheery greetings advising them that they were all about to die.

At length I stood at the summit, wet and cold and being heavily rained on, thinking yeah I bet what they’ve done is write LOOK AT THIS FUCKING IDIOT up the side of the thing with an arrow pointing at my drenched and shivery self, and any second now someone will pull a lever and all the surrounding buildings will fall away for the purposes of enhanced laughing and pointing. I sulked my way down, got a frappacino from the Starbucks nearby, fucked off back over London Bridge and scuttled up the Northern Line, home.

Picters: Top – an alley at Greenwich Market. This has the coffee shop in which I talk like Gandalf.

Middle – Greenwich Market, early morning. Note Fabrice, a Frenchman, on the right. He is drinking wine and thinking about onions.

Bottom – East Yard, Camden Market, early morning. This picture was taken in July – note canny traders stocking up on fleeces.

Facebook.

Twitter.