bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel,

The phrase ‘He could sell sand to the Arabs’ is a common expression used, of course, to describe someone who is a very good salesman.  Myself, I would rather buy sand from the Arabs, who have loads of it, and sell it to the Eskimos, who don’t have any. This is because I am not a salesman, but a business.  In fact, what I would really rather do is arrange for the Arabs to sell sand to the Eskimos themselves in return for salted fish, impose excise duties on the ports at both ends, and then go on a nice holiday, so as not to disturb the cash as it rolls its way in.  That’s because I’m not a salesman, I am a business, but I’d like to be a merchant, because that’s where the real money is.

I think this salesman-business-merchant hierarchy works quite well, if only to illustrate that even an operation as miniscule but tenacious as ours has to understand that it is part of a larger world with complex agendas.  This larger world fell upon Greenwich market a couple of weeks ago.  It came in the form of yet another group of developers looking to demolish it and put a hotel in its place, and a meeting they were holding with the market traders to discuss this.

Within the framework I described earlier, it was the merchants meeting the salesman.  There were a lot of sentences being started with phrases like ‘I’ve been a market trader man and boy for 23 years’ all of which concluded with the useless discussion of utter bollocks.  There were a lot of questions about getting a tenner off the rent for the London Marathon, which goes straight past the market and effectively destroys trade for the day.   At one point, a trader who had been waiting to put her question across for some time used the opportunity when it eventually came to say ‘Can I just ask: is there a hidden agenda?’  One of the defining characteristics of a hidden agenda is, surely, its uncanny ability to evade detection, cover which is unlikely to be blown by its own creators saying, I dunno ‘Yeah actually there is – not only are we shutting your market we’re going to pop round and burn your houses down, too’.  In any case, the unhidden agenda – the imminent deletion of our livelihood – would, I’d have thought, have provided enough material for contemplation and debate on its own.   Surveying the scene, I concluded that if I was one of the developers, I would look at the assembled handbag and t shirt sellers and think ‘You are a fucking shambles, and I am going to roll right the fuck over you’, immediately prior to actually doing so.   I turned to Amy – whose prescription sunglasses I later inadvertently stole – and said ‘They’re fucked, these people. You do know that don’t you’.

Seeing as we opened with a well known phrase, it seems appropriate to close with one, too.  The phrase I’d like to close with is ‘Fiddling while Rome burns’, attributed to the alleged violin-playing activities of Emperor Nero during the great fire of – I think – AD 68.   I’m sure we’ve all had enough Christmases ruined by bitter shouting matches across the dining table about whether the fire was started deliberately or not, and I do not propose to inflame old arguments here.   Suffice to say that the overwhelming majority of my likeable but priority-challenged colleagues seem to be fiddling not only while Rome burns, but also while their violin is on fire.  If only some kind of coherent opposition could be arranged, lead by a rogueish rascal of a man, lithe and taut like a young Nureyev, with an excellent haircut, strong teeth, and eyes as blue as the Mediterranean, twin whirlpools from which no lady swimmer could ever hope – or want – to escape.  Ideally a decent line in novelty kitchenware and ownership of a sack barrow would be handy too.  O! Deliver us, young blade!  But where could he be?  Where?

Twitter: I’ve kinda gone off it again.  It just wants to give itself a great big hug for being so fucking nice, and who the fuck wants to hang out with that.

Facebook group: Holding steady at 118 members – representing a gain of 6 since November.   Peoples’ cats have bigger Facebook groups than us.