Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

It’s not that I don’t like Camden, it’s just that I don’t like Camden. Or rather, I like a lot of the people who trade there, from the familiar Spastics Parade in the East Yard to the darker recesses of the Stables Market where I am known to traders of Asian origin as ‘Mr Paul’ – which gives me the air of smouldering mystery that I really rather like – but overall Camden is grim. It’s like a joke with no punchline, or rather, a sentence that you expect to be a joke, but then isn’t, but that you feel you have to laugh at anyway. Oddly enough, it is the newer bits that everyone always whines will destroy the character of the place that are the best, because they are destroying a character that was in dire need of a good destroying. I’m not sure I am entirely in favour of the huge shopping mall they are building behind Cyberdog, but whatever, most of the people who claim to love the character of Camden Market do all their shopping in New Look anyway, and the new development will give them the opportunity to do both at once.

That said, I do like the place more since discovering that the Britpop fued between Blur and Oasis was sparked by Noel and Liam Gallagher jostling Alex James while he was at the urinal in the Good Mixer, and causing him to piss on his shoes. I learned this from John Harris’ excellent The Last Party, about the fantastic British popular music scene of the 1990’s, which was centred around Camden Town.

[Hitting Read More now will reveal entertainments guaranteed to bring delight to any social occasion]

This kind of casual tomfoolery is a vital feature of a decent night in the pub. I once witnessed a bloke put twenty five two pence pieces under his foreskin in the back room of the Queens Head in Reading while his tired wife explained that ‘he did this sort of thing a lot’. In the Printers Devil in Slough – a pub I worked in for a very long time and eventually ended up running – traditional after-hours entertainment frequently included the legendary Dance of the Flaming Arseholes. This involves removing your trousers, trailing a length of kitchen towel from the leg of your underwear to the floor, and setting fire to it. To add a bit of sport, you have to down a pint before taking any evasive action. A certain regular patron, who must remain nameless, was something of a specialist in this particular excellent feat, and once performed it six times in one session, burning all the hairs off the inside of his thighs in the process and walked like an unskilled roller skater for some days afterwards. While writing this, it has occurred to me that if the Government really wants to improve the health of the nation, it should surely ban alcohol, rather than smoking, from pubs, as I have never seen someone consider that turning their bell end into coin purse, clenching burning paper between their buttocks, or sparking an animosity which threatened to destroy the last great flowering of British popular culture was a really good idea after a heavy evening on the Marlboro Lights.

Bored of Facebook?: Twitter

Bored of Myspace?: Facebook group.

(Incidentally, an average of one person a week leaves our Facebook group. We’ve only got 44 people left. More to the point, who the fuck leaves a Facebook group?