bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

On the 23rd of August, 2002, at about midday, I was on a bus turning right out of Blandford Road onto Hartland Road, in the Whitley Estate, Reading, where I lived at the time, on the way to Reading Festival. I dunno if you’ve ever noticed, but bus drivers will usually wave at or generally acknowledge each other when they pass on the open road. Well, that happened here. As a bus, the 21 I think, was coming down Hartland Road – which is quite a steep hill, climbing to Northumberland Road , from where the world is your oyster – the driver of my bus, the 5, waved at his oncoming colleague. Instead of casually waving back, the other driver threw his arms across his face and pretended to be helpless and screaming, as if at the wheel of a runaway vehicle. I was in an ideal position to see this, sitting directly behind the driver of my bus, and I giggled all the way to town, with the Vines on my Sony Discman.

It was still quite early when I arrived at Reading station. Zpoonz was there and Omar ‘He’s Making Eyes At Me’ Khan was there. Geraghty was there. Possibly Ladyboy, although I can’t remember now, and some friends of Zpoonz’s who I didn’t see again until I bumped into them earlier this year on the Cambridge Heath Road. Zpoonz was wearing some comedy spectacles fashioned from drinking straws that he was convinced would give him cancer, although he enthusiastically balanced this potential flaw against the fact that they only cost a quid, and that you could actually drink through them.

[Hitting Read More will reveal all kinds of stuff, among other things]

I was particularly happy, as Pulp were playing. I was scandalised that they had been barged out of top spot by the Strokes, who had refused to perform at all unless they headlined, but was otherwise very chirpy as we trundled off down Richfield Avenue. Conversation had turned to a discussion of whether or not the origin of the term ‘watch my back’ hails from the days of punishing people in the stocks from where, conceivably, they would attract the attention of opportunistic sodomites. This followed the revelation that the term ‘up the stick’ – for pregnancy – had originated in Merthyr Tydfil, a town which owed its explosive population growth during the early industrial revolution in no small part to the huge amount of time spent queueing for water at the town’s only pump, or ’stick’, which became a popular and legitimate meeting place for the restless and fertile.

It may have been during this line of conversation that I first became aware of a small man setting up a trestle table on the grass verge by the pavement, some distance ahead of me. August 23rd, 2002, was in the immediate aftermath of the deaths of two young girls known collectively as the Soham Angels, who were murdered at the hands of one Ian Huntley, and his girlfriend in a neatly chilling reminder of the Moors Murders three and a half decades earlier. This kind of thing was distressingly popular in the early years of the twenty first century, and ugly people in particular were very cross about it.

As we approached the man and his trestle table, he started – and I suppose this is the right word – decorating it with front pages from the newspapers that angry, cross people like. Of particular note was the ‘Huntley Did This’ headline from, I think, the Daily Mirror, which appeared in huge letters above a photograph of slashed and bloodied children’s clothing. The rest of the group were still engaged in conversation about the logistics of procreational activity in eighteenth century Merthyr Tydfil, but I had become oddly fascinated by the little man and his table of tabloid horrors. My attention may have been momentarily caught by something else, because, although I didn’t see him approach, he was suddenly all but climbing up me, waving a tin in my face, and asking for a donation to the Soham Angels, of whom he had apparently assumed posthumous guardianship. I declined to give him any money. His response was to state that I was ‘as bad as the bloke what killed them’. There was a pause. A small pause, but long enough for me to inhale quite deeply.

Zpoonz later said that I shouted for four minutes without drawing breath, although Omar ‘He’s Making Eyes At Me’ Khan says it was more like six. It is entirely possible that I sprouted a neck fan in the manner of an angry lizard, as I weighed up the comparison of my refusal to give money to a squalid little man clinging to the deaths of children in order to make himself feel important, and my being a predetary sexual psychopath. You must love this, I remember saying to him, amid a very large amount of other things, you must love it when kids get murdered, because you’re a fucking grief junkie, in fact, you’re a public grief junkie. When I finally finished, I noticed with some satisfaction that I was applauded by a small crowd, which was quite nice, and as I walked off, the horrible man fell over his trestle table. But it just goes to show how two seemingly insignificant things – an altercation with an elderly idiot, and the invention of digital telecommunications – combined to create our brave little outpost, at the terminally unfashionable end of the internet.

Incidentally, I didn’t see much of Pulp as Omar ‘He’s Making Eyes At Me’ Khan got me so drunk I ended up in a hedge unable to do anything other than breathe or blink.

Twitter.

Facebook. Still stuck on 94 members. Sometimes it goes to 95 then drops back to 94, as someone is obviously still weighing up the pro’s and con’s of joining a Facebook group. I mean, yes, don’t do anything rash.

Photards: Top – pictar taken from my stall last Saturday, proving that Greenwich Market is indeed a magnet for young radicals.

Middle: Gary from Retro GT signs his suicide note, later the same day.

Bottom: Church Street, Greenwich. Look – it has a little restaurant on it.