bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

I almost always get the Times on a Saturday and Sunday morning. As it is no secret as to how I earn a living you’ll understand that I have no use for the Business, Money or Leisure sections, all of which go straight into the bin.  I read the Sport section and then give it to Simon who sells jackets, and give the magazines to Keith.  I give the cryptic crossword to Danny to colour in, and have a go at the jumbo one in the weekend section.  This is only, however, if I am trading in my usual area, which is the centre of the market known to me and Danny as the Hood.

The original Hood was a ghetto in Los Angeles full of drug gangs shooting each other; the Hood in Greenwich Market differs slightly, as its most notable features are Danny and I trying to bully Keith into hanging himself, and Jean and Marva on the hand cream stall saying ‘Try our lovely soft handcream’  which after a while sounds a lot like ‘Try some Lowestoft hand cream’, which in turn sounds like a euphemism for something unspeakable.

The other Saturday, I had a rare jaunt away from the Hood and found myself trading opposite a pleased with herself lady who designed and made leather clothing.  She’d done a lot of bespoke fetish stuff in her time, but more pertinently had the unfortunate mannerisms of someone who believes their own hype.  While I have never truly flowered as a psychoanalyst, I felt she came across very much like one of those dismal bints on Tribal Wives, who think that the reason they have never been able to hold a relationship together is because they intimidate men, when actually it is because they are too annoying to fuck twice, and leaving Hackney for Peru in order to find a whole new culture to patronsise is unlikely to change anything very much.

Anyway.  I had gone over to say hello and all that, and in response to her question, I revealed that no, actually, the smell of leather does nothing for me whatsoever, although I do like the smell of toast.  ‘Do the clothes I am wearing intimidate you?’ she said, after a short pause in which she presumably estimated that I had never seen a set of tits before.  While our old mate Louis the Goat Bag Man’s one line description of me – ‘…a mouthy, stroppy, shifty, scrap-happy Mile End geezer’ – is only fancifully accurate, I am certainly not the kind of person to be intimidated by a Guardian reader in a leather basque.   I would probably have guessed she read the Guardian, even if she hadn’t come over and said ‘Have you got the Guardian handy?’ in a manner which suggested that immediately establishing which daily newspaper she read was quite important to her.  As we already know, I had the Times, for the jumbo crossword.  Examining my stall with a disdain that was almost edible, she concluded that the Guardian ‘would be too wordy’ for me.  Yes, probabfuckingly, I sighed, inventing a new one right there on the spot.

I often use the phrase ‘there is more than one way to skin a cat’, the origins of which are obscure, even though the correct use of the phrase itself is pretty obvious.  I felt that the correct way to skin this particular cat was to pretend not to notice her staring in horrified customerless disbelief at our gallant little pitch as it set sail once again across the high seas of casual retail, and concentrate instead on visibly and deliberately counting money.  I separated notes by denomination, then by general condition, then by serial number, and so forth, remembering to first secrete the previous two days’ takings about my person and looking surprised when I found it, tactics which by the end of the day give the impression that I’d taken about eighty thousand pounds.

Twitter. Protected account and everything these days – us at our accessible best.

Facebook: Someone joined this week, so we’re back up to 116.   At first I thought it was Diana Stone, but she’s been here a while.  She plays guitar and violin and her solo project is called – oh dear – Glass Cage, and features All I Do Is Cry.  She looks a bit like she is posing with a fishing rod rather than a violin in her profile picture though, which is good enough for us.   Cheer up Di!   No need to go all Tribal Wife on us!  The boys from publicgriefjunkie are fighting your corner now!

This week’s delve into the photard album is:

Top: Storage boxes, with the giveaway ‘Paul Aprons’ on them.   Under no circumstances can you show any sign of weakness while hefting storage boxes, even though those ones can get pretty heavy, or you’ll be branded a lady or a gay or something along those lines and people will talk to you in a high pitched lady or gay voice.

Middle: Interior of a service lift with which I am very familiar at London Bridge station.

Lower: Camden High Street, by the railway bridge, viewed from upper balcony not open to the public.   A lot of the chewing gum on the pavement is mine.  The stuff that isn’t on the pavement is probably still being combed out of peoples’ hair.