bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

At Greenwich, I trade very near a bloke who sells hand cream which smells of roses. This is not in itself remarkable – the average rose presumably smells nicer than the average hand – however he says ‘Would you like some hand cream, madam?’ to every single female who passes by, and after a few hours of this, it sounds like he is saying ‘Do you have a hankering, madam?’ which is hardly the sort of question you ask a lady on a summer’s morning.

I look after his stall quite often, and yesterday I used a discarded child’s doll to demonstrate the rejuvenating effects of his hand cream by saying ‘Yeah be careful with that stuff though – this lady used it every day for a year, and instead of being forty six, she’s now four months old, which is awkward as she’s the shadow home secretary’, and so on. Looking after other peoples’ stalls is always quite a larf, and makes a bit of a change from, at Camden anyway, having to spend more time than you might imagine explaining t shirts to people. There really is only so many times you can enjoy people saying to you ‘Yeah, sorry, this t shirt you have here, how can a dolphin be a gay shark? They’re different animals’ or ‘Yeah sorry, why has that Bono t shirt got Twat written across it?’ and so on. Often I would either pretend that I didn’t speak English or that it wasn’t my stall or just say “How odd, I hadn’t noticed that was hanging there, and now you come to mention it, I don’t understand it either.’

[Hitting Read More now will reveal widespread point missing on behalf of the general public]

Bearing all that in mind, I was not greatly surprised when I found out the other day that the average reading age of a British adult is eight years old. I use this to rationalise why we no longer do the new range of mugs I designed specifically for the Greenwich stall. If you’re familiar with the symphony in ceramics that was the old skool griefjunkie mug collection, you’ll be familiar with our patented formula of making a statement on the front and writing factual information on the reverse to back it up. I did a load of new ones – about thirty, I think – exploring how various people might make tea. For example, the Kray Twins one had Make Tea Like The Kray Twins on the front, and then on the reverse, stuff about nailing tea bags to a snooker table in the East End to intimidate all your future cups of tea into making themselves, because this is what the Krays once did to a rival gangster and snooker fan who annoyed them. Similarly, Make Tea Like Jack The Ripper was all about adding milk and sugar in a frenzied and sustained manner in a cobbled back street off Bishopsgate, and so on. I’m sure you get the idea.

Anyway. What people would do is point at them, shout gleefully ‘Make Tea Like The Kray Twins! That’s brilliant!’, laugh a great deal, shout it gleefully another couple of times, quite often call companions over from other parts of the market and shout it gleefully at them, and then walk off. I don’t mind the walking off – you’d be a pretty bitter market trading man if you got annoyed every time someone who liked your stuff didn’t subsequently buy it – but I did find myself getting increasingly baffled at people getting all excited about what is effectively a feed line, because you see, it’s the wrong bit. After a while, I would start to wonder if these people point miss like this all the time, so that if they were, I dunno, ordering a pizza they’d say to the waitress yeah can I have a large pizza, but just the base, as I don’t want any cheese or anchovies or olives or any of that stuff as it just gets in the way, so can you just top it with another large pizza base, and can I have for afters ice cream and wafers, but actually just wafers because the ice cream is too cold and creamy, and also, with all of it, can you just pour it straight onto the table, or maybe even the floor, because plates and that are too circular and good at holding food while you eat it, and so on. I’m sorry to labour the point, especially as we already established a few weeks ago that essentially, the general public are a bunch of special needs children, but after a while I got really obsessed with it.

After the first hundred or so times of this happening, I would display two of each mug, one showing the front and one showing the reverse, so that it might prompt people to embrace the whole mugly experience. Typically, what would then happen would be that they would continue to gleefully shout the front of the mugs, descend into a stony, confused silence while reading the reverse, and walk off silently, looking a bit cross. All the new stuff from Greenwich will be on this very site when we upgrade it at the end of July, so be aware that our mugs, like an argument, need to be seen from both sides.

To bring ourselves back to where we came in, I miss telling Martin’s customers that he did a bit of stripping on the side, mainly hen nights, which would pass the time while he was getting the teas in. Martin is a robot, as anyone who has traded next to him for any length of time will testify, which may explain why only one lady tried to book him, which, let me tell you, was quite a moment. He’d be a rubbish stripper anyway, as it’s just all wires and circuits and motherboards under his clothes, which also explains why he is so meticulous with setting all the covers and such up in the morning – if he gets rainwater on him, he’ll rust like C3PO.

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