bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

Yeah, no one knows how Stonehenge and the other stone circles were built, or what they are made of, or what shape they are. They are a total mystery, like where the Loch Ness Monster has gone. There’s all the smaller mysteries as well, with which I’m sure we are all familiar ie where are my doorkeys, why do I bother clinging to life, and I dunno why is there a lion in my kitchen, and so forth.

However, for me, the greatest mystery of all took place in the area of spatial uncertainty where the worlds of mass transit, chips, Leeds and football overlap. It doesn’t concern football itself, but an incident that used to happen on the way to the football, and immediately after a great deal of chips had been consumed.

[Hitting Read More now will reveal a load of stuff about, as you might expect, chips and such]

Ellend Road is where Leeds United play, and it’s a fair walk from the city’s central railway station. My own team, perennial never-the-bride slackers West Ham could expect to take perhaps six thousand fans there, back in the days before going up the football was more than an excercise in wearing comedy headgear and crying on the telly. I should think four and a half thousand of these would come up by train, and of these, maybe three thousand would buy chips and eat them on the way to the ground. It’s an unusually high proportion of chip buying, and it came about because everyone bought chips at Leeds. It was a ritual. Or rather, it was the first part of a ritual.

The second part of the ritual involved chucking your chip papers in someone’s garden. Not anyone’s front garden – and this is the ritualistic bit – but the same front garden, season after season, year after year. It was quite a nice garden as I recall, walled all round, and with the suggestion of gnomes with fishing rods and all that. But, driven perhaps by the same instincts that allow migratory birds to fly to Africa in the winter or humpback whales to navigate the Gulf Stream, three thousand or so urchins would pause from impish scalley-waggey, cheeky ne’er-do-wellery and all round scampish mischiefity and just know to discard their chip papers in this particular sacred spot. By early afternoon it would be an ocean of paper, bits of fried fish, sausage ends, and so forth, and would have seagulls hovering above it. I had fish and chips the other night, and by measuring the paper they were wrapped in and using it as a template, I calculated that every time West Ham played at Leeds, this front garden would have the equivalent of one large bit of chip paper with sides nine thousand foot long lobbed into it.

I was all for upping the stakes a bit, and perhaps stealing a chip van and driving through the front of the house, or organising some kind of overnight event where the entire building would be buried in chips, or – and this was admittedly a bit ambitious – re-arranging the plumbing so that batter mixture came out of the bathroom taps. Curiously, it was only West Ham fans who did the Chip Paper Ritual, my cousins explained when I asked them. No one had any idea how or exactly when it had started, but we worked out that Churchill was still alive and the Beatles were still a touring band when chip papers first started appearing in this one front garden. It had become a bona fide English tradition, like unhappiness and chlamydia.

It was, of course, a nightmare for the bloke whose garden it actually was. Eventually, after perhaps thirty five years of having his garden submerged in rubbish, he finally snapped. You may well ask how I know this. Well, I know this the last time I went to see West Ham play at Leeds, he was sitting in a deckchair in a spotless front garden with an air rifle across his lap, muttering ‘Go on Cockneys, I fucking dare you.’

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Photards: top – Spitalfields Market on a Friday afternoon.

Middle – unmistakeble – it’s London Bridge.

Lower – rail of t shirts belonging to our old ally Gerry at Spitalfields Market.