bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel.

Yeah I was on a train today reading the fantastic Catherine Arnold’s history of – yes, that’s right – the mentally ill in medieval and late-medieval London, and there was a bit about my favourite mentalist, Eleanor Davies, who was totally spasmodic. Davies claimed that, because she could anagramatically extract the words ‘Reveal, O Daniel!’ from her name, she was therefore blessed with prophetic powers. Armed with this excellent reasoning, she would accost people around what is now Liverpool Street Station and tell their fortunes, which were always rubbish, for money. She became something of an annoying celebrity, until in 1633, she was eventually arrested. In court, it was pointed out that an anagram of her full title – Dame Eleanor Davies – was ‘Never so mad a ladiee’, at which point she was locked up in Bedlam for eight years. Job done.

[Hitting 'Read More' mow will reveal tricks to combat the cold when trading outdoors, and - at last - why Englsnd is colder than Australia]

I was reading about Eleanor Davies while wearing gloves – reading while wearing gloves is surprisingly annoying – as I prepared for coldness at Camden. There are many ways to cope with the cold in the East Yard. The best way, I find, is not to trade at all and just stay indoors watching four hours of Biker Build Off while eating biscuits under a little house you can make on your sofa with a duvet and some cushions. Once in the Yard, however, a good thing to do is to rest your wet shoes on the three bar fire they always have in the Hemp Store until steam starts pouring out of them, then go back to the stall and say to Martin, who trades jewellery next to us ‘Yeah what’s going on, I ran over here as quickly as I could’. Martin and i worked out the other week that we’ve spent ten thousand hours trading next to each other over the last half decade. Interestingly, this makes us common law man and wife. For a larf, I used to give Martin’s business cards out to people and tell them he was a stripper, and was rewarded when someone rang him at home and tried to book him for a hen party.

Perhaps the most tiring thing about the cold weather, from a trader’s point of view anyway, is having Australians – and it is always Australians – telling you how hot it is in Melbourne or whatever. From what I can gather, Australia is the same as England, except that absolutely every single thing about it is massively, massively overrated. In any case, the reason that England has different weather to Australia is – and you might want to check this yourself – they are different countries. They’re even spelled differently, as an aid to identification. If England was any further north, it would be in Scandinavia, which – in my opinion anyway – explains why the climate is different to a subtropical island on the other side of the planet. You have to embrace places for what they are, surely. If I go to Australia, I’m not going to go round moaning that there is no internet or mobile phones or decent music or clothes or whatever, and that the whole of popular culture is between six and nine years behind everything else, because you should be going there to enjoy a simpler and more boring and rubbish life, and work with that. Having a warm climate isn’t some sort of skill. It’s just what the weather does where you live. You didn’t influence it. Australian people didn’t build the sun or invent the Gulf Stream or whatever. That stuff was there anyway. Environmental circumstances that apply to the broad geographical area in which you were born cannot be claimed as part of a personal skill set, like typing or shorthand or having an HGV licence.