I’m not sure I believe in horoscopes, although I do see how having several different innate character types would be useful if you were inventing a species from scratch. As a means of prediction it seems flawed to me, although no more flawed than an origami salt cellar. This is the official name for one of those paper devices from everyone’s childhood which consist of four folded quarters, the contents of which contain a ‘fortune’ which is revealed and read aloud after the ‘enquirer’ has first picking an assigned number and colour.

Recently on my stall at Greenwich Market, I was confronted by Dalek Stu’s endearing son Peter and Mental Dave, who owns an imaginary hotel in the Bloomsbury area, who appeared from different directions at the same time. Peter shoved an origami salt cellar at me and asked me to pick a number, to which I replied ‘Four’. Mental Dave informed me that former Spurs and England midfield maestro Glenn Hoddle was looking for me in Marks and Spencer, to the amusement of nearby customers. Meanwhile Peter, having counted to four and rearranged the salt cellar accordingly, asked me to pick a colour. I said ‘Blue’, while Mental Dave asked if I’d heard any more from Phil Spector about his car keys. Peter unfolded the origami salt cellar and invited Mental Dave to read what was written there.

‘The Problem Is You’re An Idiot’, he said, quoting the salt cellar and bringing a look of ill-disguised glee to my customers.

‘That is uncanny’ I said, and walked off to get an Americano from Coffee Keith, leaving them all to their own devices.

To examine the consequences of living in a society without character types, go to Brighton. If you don’t know what Brighton is, it’s a very pleased with itself indeed small town on the south coast of England, inhabited by two sorts of people: middle class people who are gay, and middle class people who wish they were gay in order to make themselves more interesting. I have a dash of the Highlander in my DNA, and was driven around the place recently by a Welshman, making us the most diverse mix for miles. It’s not that it’s a bad place exactly, it’s just that you start off thinking ‘Oh this is nice, isn’t it all lovely?’ because that’s what everyone there tells you, and because everyone there tells you this constantly you find yourself going along with it, until eventually you see one smug forty year old hipster too many and have to be physically restrained from thrashing their teeth in. It’s just so relentlessly twee. People in Brighton have never seen a pub without boardgames in it, or a bike without a basket on the front, for example. Consider Our House, by Crosby Stills Nash and Young. If Brighton had a national anthem this would be it, on account of its description of the local sport, which is buying vases, putting flowers in them, and then singing love songs to each other in a cosy room in a lovely house which, in order to stop anything getting too varied, will be painted the same colour as every other house in the area. Well, I should imagine the other local sports are eating cupcakes and self-loathing, although these are seen as more of a necessity, along with trying to get retweeted by Caitlin Moran or having a poem published in the Big Issue.

Myself, I am happier in a place with a bit of dirt under it’s fingernails. Brighton doesn’t have any of this, perhaps because it has never had any industry beyond pet grooming and anti depressants. Driving through the various parts of the town – in fact, come to think of it, Brighton may have been granted city status, to keep it happy for five minutes, although it’ll be pressing for a collective knighthood for services to Unconvincing Niceness in the New Years’ honours list, I should think – my mate and I discussed the Welsh language. Welsh manages to be both lyrical and prosaic, and has given us the longest place name in Britain: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. This riotous union of conjoined consonants and practical description means ‘St Mary’s church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool of Llantysilio by the red cave’. If the Welsh had named Brighton, it would be called  ‘Casglutrefapartheiddiflasllelightweightsdosba-rthcanolgwyngydahunanbarchiselatddibenionbitchingamLundain’, which means ‘Boring apartheid town and gathering place of middle class lightweights with low self esteem for the purposes of bitching about London’. Indeed, the continued existence of London is a sore point with Brightonians, most of whom used to live there before deciding that although they like hanging out with people exactly like themselves, they’d rather do it somewhere less interesting. As a Londoner, I am obliged to apologise for myself as I pass through the ticket barriers at Brighton station. I am then further obliged to agree that yes, the air is just so much cleaner and yes, it’s just so nice to be away from the constricting atmosphere of somewhere fascinating and yes everything is just so marvellous and so forth, before being granted an eight hour visitors’ visa. I consider this getting off lightly: at the back of the station is a large shed where permanent residents have their gravitas, individuality and regional accent removed. This last point is inevitable anyway, as everyone in Brighton has the Universal Guardian Readers’ Accent, ie, mainly bland but slightly posh. I think we may have covered UGRA before, as I remember once making the point that if you gave ET or Chewbacca or R2D2 a six month subscription to the Guardian, they would sound like Home Counties primary school teachers at the end of it.

That said, it’s impossible to offend anyone from Brighton. This isn’t because of the renowned chilled-outness that the residents will have you fined £95 by the local authorities for not agreeing that they have, though. It’s because there isn’t anyone from Brighton, as the first thing middle class people do when disinfecting a town is insist that anyone born there is demonised, removed, and obliterated from history. There is – and let’s be absolutely clear about this – not a single thing wrong with being middle class and living wheresoever you like, except the propensity to smother everything that was flourishing beforehand. This happens everywhere, and has even eroded much of the individuality of London. Next time you’re in the capital on a Friday night, pop down to Brixton. It’s like Glastonbury. ‘When a man is tired of London,’ wrote Samuel Johnson, who invented the dictionary, ‘he is tired of life’. This may or may not be true, but when a person is tired of Brighton, it’s because they’ve been there.

Twitter: Since we last spoke, Twitter has taught me what I’d suspected all along, which is that the people who hated Margaret Thatcher are even more unpleasant than the people who didn’t.

Facebook: Our Facebook group, which is still hanging on.

Kindle: Apologies to anyone subscribing to all this via Kindle, as there’s been a bit of a break in transmission. Allow me to assure you that everything will be lovely again from now on. It’s the second time this year I’ve assured you of that, which makes it doubly true.

Photards – this weeks rummage through the Polaroids has yielded:

Top: This is a flyer we were obliged to display on our stalls at Greenwich Market. There were, as you might expect, various defacings, this being my effort.

Middle: I was having a quick chai steamer at Norwich station and took this self shot in the reflection of the counter at AMT. Note folding bicycle, which that morning had charged through Elephant and Castle, over Vauxhall Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, across Trafalgar Square and into Soho, and that afternoon would hurtle through rural East Anglia.

Lower: A tenner with Charles Darwin’s phone number on it. Someone should ring him up and pretend to be God.

I am fond of the middle class, and would invite them to give themselves a round of applause if they weren’t already doing so. I don’t really have the self-loathing to get involved properly, but I am definitely partial to the things they like – I keep loose leaf tea in a caddy, I own a folding bicycle and a box set of The Thick Of It, and not only do I understand cricket, but I consider it to be the most exciting boring game in the world. I have a decidedly middle class snobbery about stuff, too – for example, I think tomato sauce with a roast is poor form, as is gravy on the same plate as baked beans. This is more to do with style than class, I suppose, because you’re either Blue Peter or Magpie, Swap Shop or Tiswas, Liberty or Selfridges. You can’t be both.

In my case, I am tempted to suggest that this is genetic. My grandfather thought that sandwiches cut diagonally were ostentatious and that eating them would make him a class traitor, but that garden gnomes were tacky and common. I discussed this recently with his daughter – my old dear – as I rolled around her living room in an armchair. There is such a thing as a castor cup, which is placed under chair wheels to prevent this happening: demonstrating the irrational snobbery of the family line, my old dear refuses to have them in the house.

Asked about his refined tastes compared to his relatively lowly birth, the Duke of Wellington said ‘Being born in a stable does not make one a horse’. My old dear was born in a post war bomb site, but in late middle age has grown up to be someone who, rather than follow my advice to put small wooden wedges under the wheels of her runaway armchairs, instead suggested that John Lewis re-carpet the entire house with a slightly thicker floor covering. It’s not a big house, but I’m not set for big inheritance either, and as vulgar as it is to say I could almost literally see it checking its watch, putting on its coat, and calmly walking out of the room as the days of zooming around the place mid conversation like Chorlton and the Wheelies vanished forever. Even when I pointed out that the wedges could be arranged in such a manner as to allow armchairs to be launched over prone members of the Friends of Langley Park when they visit to talk about charity dog shows and the correct way to re-plant a rhododendron, it was to little avail.

In addition to sundry other peculiarities, texting my old dear can be time consuming. When she sends a text, she sends a second one with ‘I have sent a text love mum xx’ or something similar on it, and when you reply she will send a variant with ‘I have received your message love mum xx’. She’s very much a human receipt in this respect. Predictive text has been a blessing, as she is so profoundly dyslexic that before the digital age shopping lists, birthday cards and her sundry other correspondence appeared to have been written with an Enigma machine. She also considers herself to be the only person in the world who can take a photograph with a mobile phone. As the traditional ‘I am sending you a photo love mum xx’ text came through on the day of the scheduled re-carpeting, I braced myself for badly composed portraits of several thousand pounds’ worth of Axminster and, probably, the roof coated in gold leaf to replicate the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

While my grandfather thought that gnomes were common, he was entirely at ease with the idea of acquiring curtain material via bonded premises in the Limehouse area and selling it at Petticoat Lane market – this, as mentioned, being the era of post war bomb sites and a generous interpretation of property law. When the photos downloaded, I was pleased to note that rather nice shirvan rugs were under both armchairs, and from what I could make out, the sofa as well. It would appear that a gift for clandestine textiles has been maintained across the decades and, among the Friends Of Langley Park, something of the post war bomb site urchin remains. I draw this conclusion because when I asked how she’d got hold of them, she said ‘Don’t ask me that, son. You wouldn’t want to make your mum a liar, would you?’

Twitter

Facebook Group

Kindle: I think the last posting was slow downloading from Amazon, and as far as I’m concerned, Kindle subscribers are very much in the First Class compartment of this blog. Speaking as someone who won’t get on a train unless there is such a thing, I also understand the value of good service, so I’ll try and sort out some complimentary refreshments for us by way of recompense.

Photards: This weeks lucky dip in the picter album has produced:

Top: The Cutty Sark, which dominates Greenwich. The National Trust guidebook is spot on when it refers to it as ‘fucking enormous’.

Middle: Before The Magic Happens: early morning, Greenwich Market. This really is early – about ten to seven – and here Danny and his dog Marshall are talking to Dalek Stu’s son about canine clothing in cold weather, which is presumably how Marshall came to be involved in the conversation.

Lower: Coffee Keith and his tiny van. For scale, Coffee Keith is the size of a cotton reel, and his van will fit into the Cutty Sark forty million times. Even though I don’t really like coffee, Keith’s is nice. Annoying to drink though, because the cups are the size of a full stop, so you need loads of them. I take a flask these days – it’s just easier.

Keith’s coffee van at Greenwich Market is so small that when he’s driving it, it looks as though it’s been painted onto his jacket. If it were mine, I would save petrol by bouncing it there like a basketball. It is in fact so very miniscule that my only involvement with it on Sunday – I wasn’t trading due to a state visit to the east end – was to almost run over it as I cycled past him at Elephant and Castle, causing it to flurry about in my slipstream like a Kit Kat wrapper.

If you are unfamiliar, Elephant and Castle is a joyless mess in south London, through which I cycle often and as quickly as I can. The nicest building there is the Imperial War Museum, which housed Bedlam lunatic asylum when it left Whitechapel, and the only cheery feature are the tube station lifts, which play the same sound when the doors open as Pacman does when he eats a power pill and runs about chasing ghosts. I assume this is a deliberate feature, as Elephant and Castle is a stupidly complex maze of tunnels and subways – not unlike that which Pacman has to charge around – and the station itself is one of the most haunted places in London. If they were any more similar, your reward for clearing a screen on Pacman would be a Bakerloo Line train to Regent’s Park or Marylebone, both of which are much nicer places to be on a Sunday afternoon then Elephant and Castle.

I was in the east end because, at a time when clouds are gathering over Greenwich Market, it’s prudent to bolster your position elsewhere. That said, there was little to enthuse me beyond Scouse Andy’s valiant attempts to make twenty of the Goat Bag Man’s satchels cover a fourteen by six double pitch at Up Market. This is essentially an overspill from Spitalfields, which along with Petticoat Lane is the best known market in the area. Camden is so devoid of traders that these days it resembles a car park. Up Market resembles a car park these days because it actually is a car park, with stalls spread across the parking bays on two levels. The entire ground floor level was vintage clothing sold by bored people saying ‘amazing’ a lot and using ‘virtually’, ‘literally’, ‘physically’ and ‘almost’ on an interchangeable basis. A feature of any market visit for me is the obligatory looking after of other people’s stalls while they nip off for tea or whatever, so after being a temporary t shirt, jewellery, leather jacket and babywear vendor, I also had a cup of tea with Puja, another visiting Greenwich trader. Well, I had tea; Puja insisted upon buying coconut milk, which she then insisted on drinking from a halved coconut she’d bought somewhere on a whim. At the end of Brick Lane I bought an art deco style tea caddy in the shape of a battleship for my girlfriend who, being essentially a gay man trapped in a fag hag’s body, has a keen appreciation of Fifties kitsch. Beyond this, there was little to see.

It would be a shame to leave Greenwich, if I should have to. It’s worth pointing out that the source of the apprehensive grumbling around that beleaguered corner of SE10 is not the management. Market management is difficult job to do well. Admittedly, it’s difficult to do as badly as it usually is, too, but the management at Greenwich are better than most. It’s more to do with the French bank – BNP Paribas – who now own the place, and who have rendered the management all but obsolete. There’s no especial reason why a bank shouldn’t own a market, I suppose, although they did ask the managers to wear suits, which would be a sight to see, especially as one of them was a dwarf extra in Lord of the Rings and would look like a novelty pepper mill. I love clothes, and wouldn’t let people out of their houses unless they were well presented, but perhaps fortunately I don’t own Greenwich market. Of greater concern is the standard issue unhappy modern female sent out with a spiral bound notebook and a biro to grade traders and decide what to do with us. I would imagine that her only previous experience of markets is on city breaks to wherever these bland people and their bland boyfriends go when they aren’t shopping in Dubai – Barcelona I should think, or Paris – and that gobby London traders are kryptonite to her. If we don’t manage to steal her notebook sharpish, we’ll be knee deep in cake stands, crotched headwear and cat tapestries before we know what’s hit us.

As long as you can avoid tripping over it, Coffee Keith’s tiny van has always provided a natural place for traders to gather and discuss what they talked to each other about on Facebook during the proceeding week. However, traders’ Facebook and Twitter accounts are now monitored by BNP Paribas, so instead I write about things here, as I work on the basis that no one reads blogs, and that I have therefore rendered it invisible. It’s the ultimate form of hiding in plain sight. I have, come to think of it, invented the unsecret code.

Twitter: I’m not using this much at all at the moment. In case you’re worried, I’m generally ok. I went to the dentist last week – just a checkup, all fine.

Facebook Group: I’m continuing my drive to like Facebook. In doing so, I have discovered that the more people I mute, the more I enjoy it, which makes it of limited value as networking tool. This week, I learned via ‘I Fucking Love Science’ what Oscar Wilde said about religion, which is this: ‘Religion searches in a dark room for a black cat that doesn’t exist, and finds it’. Myself, I tend to think that science also searches in a dark room for a black cat that doesn’t exist, and also doesn’t find it, but finds a table and chairs, or perhaps a wardrobe, and tells us that’s a cat instead. This is because scientific method cannot provide perspective, and therefore science will only answer the questions that it asks itself. By extension, the only difference between atheism and religion is that atheists will believe anything.

This is a lot to explain on a Saturday morning by Coffee Keith’s van, especially to an entirely amiable t shirt vending associate of mine who lacks the capacity to grasp either science or religion, or indeed to find his own arse with both hands and a mirror. He was the unlikely source of the Oscar Wilde quote, and in his defence if there’s one thing that habitual users of social media understand it’s what a cat looks like, so perhaps there’s something in it after all.

Photards: this week’s adventures with the Instamatic have yielded

Top: Artist Lew and Up Market John. This was taken in the entrance to the Back Yard Market off Brick Lane, where they have stalls. They look too dodgy to trade in the main bit.

Middle: At the Wheatsheaf, Tooting Bec. As you can see from this table, chasers are the done thing when drinking with John the Boxes in SW17. I look forward to introducing the idea at the Duke of Wellington this season, as I think a gin and tonic is a fine accompaniment to a pint of snakebite.

Lower: Christ Church, Spitalfields, one of my favourite buildings. For many years, starting in Victorian times, the most verminous derelicts in the area would sleep en masse in the graveyard here, and as a result it was dubbed ‘Itchy Park’ by locals. Years later, it was the inspiration for the Small Faces’ ‘Itchycoo Park’. I’m more of a Kinks man than a Small Faces one, but it’s a useful fact to bring out during awkward silences in first dates, job interviews, funerals, and so forth.

I was speaking to a gynaecologist recently, and was impressed by the way she could sketch a female reproductive system without looking at the paper she was drawing on. We were talking on a non-professional basis, but she estimated that she’d drawn over eight thousand female reproductive systems in her career and, as an encore, drew another one as a single unbroken line. I suggested she arrange for cannons to go off and glitter to come down from the ceiling when she reached the ten thousandth, because something like that should be given a sense of occasion.

Market trading is more difficult to represent with diagrams, so instead I turned the paper over and drew the principal causes of the War of the Roses, as I’d been reading about them that morning. Despite the Battle of Hexham having to appear on the back of a market rent receipt placed next to the main drawing, it worked quite well, and I was struck by how weird we’d be to play Pictionary against.

Danny is not, despite his continued insistence to the contrary, a gynaecologist, and neither are there any in the shops around the perimeter of the cobbled yard that forms Greenwich Market proper. Well, if there were, there probably isn’t any more, considering that of thirty two such premises, ten have been vacated in the last six months. I was able to give someone directions to Cutty Sark station on Saturday by telling them to walk past what used to be this, and turn left at what used to be that, and so forth, which was rather poignant. Unfortunately, it’s bleak news on all fronts at the moment: the Lower Market Hall at Camden Lock, once one of the most sought-after locations in market land, is now referred to as ‘the ballroom’ as it has literally no traders where there once were forty and a waiting list. Leadenhall Market – always tricky, but the only place in London with a chance of a half-decent weekday income – is closing this afternoon, representing the end of three thousand years of stuff being sold from stalls there. It was already ancient when the Romans arrived and built a forum on the site where, over twenty centuries later, an affable Greenwich trader called Jigsaw John discovered that the way to sell colourful wooden jigsaw puzzles is to put them in front of parents who feel guilty about how little time they spend with their children.

Being in the middle of the City, there were always various sorts of consultant wandering around Leadenhall. These are private sector consultants. They differ from public sector consultants in that although they’re also highly paid regardless of what they do, they aren’t pretending to be nice while they’re doing it, which brings a refreshing honesty to proceedings. Public sector consultants are what Guardian readers want their children to be: a pleasing combination of vast salary, social superiority and moral high ground. The only thing a Guardian reader wants their child to be more than a public sector consultant is a gay public sector consultant. In the unlikely event you know where Leadenhall Market is, I should probably point out that the building itself isn’t vanishing, only the rows of market stalls that traded in the middle. Anyway, I think Greenwich Market will be demolished this year, although I’m only drawing a conclusion from a series of hunches rather than divulging inside information. If it does, it’ll be back to crime again for most of us, I suppose, and crime – despite being a legal minefield – is at least exciting.

On Sunday, amid the gloom, the chirpy subject of how we’d all kill ourselves when we can no longer work was discussed. Of course, we’ve already been beaten to the classic understated British suicide by Captain Oates who, aware that he was hampering his friends’ chances of survival during the 1912 Polar expedition, said he was ‘…just going outside, and may be some time.’ I would also like a death both classic and understated and, in a manner befitting a British officer, could perhaps inform my companions that I was ‘…just going outside, and may have a bit of a headache afterwards’ before calmly retiring to the billiard room with a service revolver. The Goat Bag Man favours a barge full of hallucinogens and a one way wander up the Himalayas. Danny, I suspect, would have much the same idea but instead of the Himalayas it would be Deptford High Street, and instead of hallucinogens it would be half a ton of Frankie Vaughan*, carried behind him by heavily tattooed Lewisham-based single grandmothers.

As we discussed our arrangements, we were joined by a remarkable man I call the Zoom Lolly. I call him this because he always has a cool, clean look, like someone who habitually sleeps in a chest freezer. I have no idea who the Zoom Lolly is, or what he does for a living, but he is often around Greenwich Market. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think he and Danny used to import clothing from Milan in the murky past, and fly pitch it in and around the formally seminal but now appalling Lacy Lady nightclub in Romford. This would make sense, because the Zoom Lolly looks brilliant all the time, a mixture of Noel Cowerd in the ’30s, Marlene Dietrich in the ’40s, Tommy Nutter in the ’60s, Oswald Boetang in the ’90s, and Paul Smith now, and if there’s any justice in the world he’ll be getting paid for his sense of Plymouth Argyle** alone. In keeping with this, I’m happy to report that his method of suicide was break dancing himself to death in a special coffin with a dance floor and strobe lights.

While gynaecology holds all the cards when it comes to prospects and income, there are undeniably only so many sorts of uterus you can draw. There are many different types of market trader you can meet, though, and in an effort to lift spirits, I have assured several of them that rent receipts – such as the one I used to represent the Battle of Hexham – function like air miles: if we collect enough, we can trade them in for a real job. It would be typical of our luck if that didn’t actually turn out to be true.

* Rhyming slang: Frankie Vaughan – porn.

** Rhyming slang: Plymouth Argyle – style.

Public Service Announcement, Monday 11th February – Market traders always know somebody who knows somebody, and as a result of all manner of contacts being, well, contacted, the decision to close Leadenhall Market was reversed less than three hours after taking effect. Market traders are the new Freemasons.

Twitter: Increasingly irrelevant platform for non-comma using Boden shopping Save Our Libraries people to agree with whoever’s shouting loudest, to the applause of other people exactly like them. As much fun as it sounds.

Facebook: At least it isn’t like being yelled at by a Sixth Former, which makes it slightly more palatable than Twitter. The Facebook Group’s been going for years, but I’ve only recently started using Facebook in a personal capacity, so if we’re Facebook friends, I’m sorry for flooding everything with my ‘Likes’. If we’re not, I like among other things tea, Lacoste clothing, The Thick Of It, Slough Town Football Club and Peter the Great. Also, I changed my profile pictard to one of me sitting in front of a kangaroo skeleton, and five people liked that, too.

Photards: this weeks wander around the gallery has provided:

Top: A small statue of St Francis of Assissi. Well known as the patron saint of animals – which is why he is holding a dove the size of a chicken – he is also the patron saint of market traders and lonely death. He sits on the top of my stall and keeps an eye on things.

Middle: The excellent Steve Veedub’s equally excellent stall at Camden. I had a shop next to him a long time ago in the Stables Market, and on quiet afternoons he would attempt to make me vomit by inviting me to look at things he’d pulled from his nose. I countered this by only looking at things he’d pulled from his nose while we were standing in his shop, so that his stock would suffer if I did vomit, and asking him if he felt lucky.

Lower: Twenty pound note with intriguing inscription. From what I can gather, we are to expect some kind of New World Order to be ushered in on May 19th. It’ll ruin a decent Sunday’s trading, but I might be able to use my rent receipts v real jobs idea and end up as Prime Minister. That’ll give Twitter something to bitch about, alright.

There are no consecutive months more dissimilar than December and January, and this is especially true for those of us involved in market trading, the chip shop scuffle at the ragged end of retail. For a start, there are far fewer traders in January; Christmas attracts any number of Kirstie Allsopp fans who don’t understand that unless you actually are Kirstie Allsopp, no one’s going to be interested in something you saw her make on her show and thought you’d replicate for the retail benefit of the general public. Essentially, these are craft show traders – the giveaway here is that they talk about ‘table fees’ rather than ’stall rent’ – and are used to operating in a rather more sanitised environment than Greenwich Market. Not that Greenwich Market is rough in any way (in fact, it borders on the genteel), but it is a lot rougher than a trestle table in a home counties scout hut, to which they are more suited.

Another difference is underlined by the the mentally ill, who are vital to the overall ambiance of any proper market. Indeed, at Camden they form the core of the trading community itself, and while they are less in evidence south of the Thames, my favourite at Greenwich is Dave or, to give him his full name, Mental Dave. Mental Dave is something of a mascot, and his wise words are welcomed by all. I think I’ve mentioned him before ages ago, when he gave me Theo Paphitis’ forty digit phone number and spent an afternoon issuing threats and warnings to golden retrievers, but I particularly enjoy his string of imaginary hotels. This prompts him to say things like ‘I can’t stop to chat, Boris Becker’s waiting outside on a double yellow, he’s working for me at the Dorchester’, which is disconcerting if you are unfamiliar with him. Those of us who speak in terms of stall rent value people like Mental Dave whereas those who talk in terms of table fees are not quite so at ease, as we shall see.

Anyone not understanding the importance of fresh traders with good stuff in a market doesn’t understand what a market is, and although there is always a fair amount of upheaval involved in accommodating the Christmas traders, it seldom leads to any real animosity. After all, everyone has to be a new trader at some point. Also, I regularly encroach upon the weekday market during the year as and when it suits me, and I don’t expect a fuss to be made when I do. The Christmas traders all had a bit of the ‘Save Our Libraries’ about them this time round though – that’s the Allsopp influence – and this always makes me suspicious. On one December Saturday, I found myself in a remote corner of the market, next to a lady who certainly had the demeanour of someone whose main concern was that Finn and Tilly might never get to see a noticeboard in the wild, or watch a compact disc being borrowed. I don’t know what she was selling – I’m going to brainstorm the words ‘cats’, ‘vintage’ and ‘funky’, though, and safely assume I’m pretty near the mark – and had it not been for her husband asking me if I could get myself moved to a more suitable part of the market, I would probably never have paid her stall any mind. This, however, is fighting talk, and whereas at Camden you could just smack someone and have done with it, Greenwich is far nicer, and in any case I was dealing with people who clearly didn’t really know how things work, and therefore couldn’t get angry with them. Unbeknownst to me, they hadn’t left it at that, and I was informed by an embarrassed market manager that they’d formally petitioned for me to be relocated. It should be understood that a ‘petition’ in market terms is not an actual petition, with lots of names and such on it. ‘Petition’ in this context would be the equivalent of, I suppose, a ‘Firm Request’, is only made by one person, and is almost unheard of.

With the rain and hyperthermic temperatures, it was always going to be a quiet day, so I packed my stock back into my cases, and had a chat with Fruity Eddie about his van (which is currently in need of a new started motor and costing him a small fortune), while waiting for what might happen next. While doing so, it occurred to me that the best thing to happen next would be for me to counter petition to be moved back for a larf, and this is what duly happened. In order not to cause a scene, I decided not to mention several key things to my neighbours, who were less than happy at my return. I didn’t mention my counter petition, for example. I didn’t mention that I’d told Mental Dave that they were opening a hotel next to Claridges, which he claims to own, either. I also didn’t mention my considerable mirth at the outraged and prolonged nature of his protests – ‘You can’t open a hotel there, and good luck with borrowing mine from the Duke of Marlborough and Ziggy Stardust’, and so forth. Lastly, I didn’t mention the reason that they couldn’t get rid of him, which was that every time they managed to shoo him away, Danny and Keith sent him back again. Incidentally, Danny and Keith are now so closely associated that they have become rhyming slang for ‘teeth’, as in ‘Got any Nurofen? My Dannies are playing up’, and if only the formula worked correctly, ‘Save Our Libraries’ would be slang for ‘fuck off back to Sussex’.

Twitter: #saveourlibraries

Facebook: I don’t even know if Facebook groups are a thing any more, but this is ours.

Kindle: You can have all this sent to your Kindle if you like. It’s a dream come true.

Photards:

Top: Grandparents, mother’s side. He has the traditional ‘This actually is a gun in my pocket, and no I am not pleased to see you’ look favoured by the male line of the family. Meanwhile, her pose is strangely reminiscent of the test card, which was thirty years in the future at the time of this photograph.

Middle: Detail from the Illustrated History of the Medway Towns. I was taught to read from this book (which is currently on my bookshelf, just across the room) by my grandfather and aunt. This scene pertains to the siege of Rochester Castle during the Barons’ Revolt of 1215. An army under King John has just attempted to storm the outer bailey and – well, you know the rest. I was the only child at my infant school with a working knowledge of medieval warfare, which unfortunately wasn’t part of the syllabus. It does explain why I knew what the Magna Carta was before being allowed to use scissors unsupervised, though. I have purposefully made this entry 1215 words long, as a silent tribute.

Lower: Contents of a party bag I was handed by a five year old at his birthday bash. Note ridiculously long pencil. The sweets were nice, but unfortunately I inhaled the bubble mixture by accident and had to be taken home in a blanket by my old dear.

One of the ways Danny copes with market trading during the quieter parts of the year – such as January – is by having text sex with grandmothers from Lewisham. Danny’s romantic texting technique is best described as forthright and committed to getting things over with as quickly as possible, and I am often drafted in to add a line here or there, check spelling, edit out the more horrifying parts, or generally jolly things along. As I usually trade near Danny and also get bored easily, I am sometimes handed the phone and asked to keep things ticking over while he is busy with a customer or walking his dog, and as it’s always nice to find a new low, I’m happy to oblige.

The latest such occasion was on Sunday and involved some tired old dinner lady called, probably, Alison or Janet or Mags or Peggy. While supplying me with background information, he told me that he likes to say ‘What’s my name?’ in a threatening and aggressive manner at critical moments during sex. Intrigued, I asked for a vocal demonstration. Upon receiving it, I larfed for eight minutes, to the point where I had to return, weeping with mirth, to my own stall to calm down. I assumed that this ‘What’s my name?’ business was something to do with her senility, but he told me that it ‘adds a bit of terror’ to proceedings. Considering the answer is presumably ‘Daniel’ – not a conventionally terrifying name – I’m not sure how long a menacing atmosphere could be sustained in this manner.

If you ever want the sensation of seeing into a person’s soul, co write Danny’s sex texts and then meet the recipients. It’s a genuinely eerie feeling, and it happened to me again on Sunday. With Alison/Janet/Mags/Peggy en route, I said I’d only get involved if I could dictate what he sent for a larf, to which he unexpectedly agreed. This worked out splendidly. After some initial appallingness on his part to set the scene, I told her that his main turn ons were ’spotless carpets, washing up put away nicely, and the work of REO Speedwagon’ which was the first of a series of messages answered with either ‘?’, ‘wtf?’, ‘????looool????’ or random combinations of all three. I did this mainly because he was going round to her’s after trading, and if you’re already tired you at least want the place tidy when you get there.

With everything going rather well I decided it was time to up the ante and got Danny to write the ‘Whats my name?’ showstopper. Her answer was ‘u already no lol’, which wasn’t really in keeping with the overall tone, although as Danny pointed out, she was now under the impression that the attentively houseproud got him frisky. Undeterred, I got him to send ‘What’s my name?’ again. There was silence for some time, possibly because she was on the Jubilee Line somewhere or had decided to stay in and watch the Bargain Hunt omnibus instead. I suggested that the next time he aggressively said ‘What’s my name?’ to her during sex, he could follow up by asking ‘Where are my car keys?’, ‘Have you seen my glasses?’ and ‘What time does Morrissons shut?’ in an equally aggressive manner, to make the conversation a bit more suitable for her age group. Remarkably, he agreed to text these questions to her, and as much as I would like to report that she replied with ‘On the table where you left them’, ‘Have you checked your jacket pocket?’ and ‘I think it’s open till nine’ it sadly didn’t happen.

Nonetheless, I did feel slightly less hollow than usual when she arrived at the market. On the one hand, she is a grandmother, although on the other she is 37, making her, I suppose, an intoxicating mixture of youth and experience. It’s the best of both worlds, although in this instance I suspect you wouldn’t want either of them.

Links:

Twitter – unpleasant bullying platform for Guardian readers and the righteously hysterical – essentially, the same thing.

Facebook – the defining communication experience of our age. Christ. All that evolution and technological advancement just to find out that we’re a bunch of dicks after all.

Kindle - what people originally thought the internet would be like, I think.

Photards – this week’s portraits are:

Top: Dave from Chas n Dave, who I saw on a pier last year. If you don’t love Chas n Dave, you have no soul and won’t go to Heaven. For a start, the voice of exasperated romanticism has seldom been so well represented as in ‘Ain’t No Pleasing You‘, and their entire back catalogue is an exercise in unbridled joy. It has become a tradition that Chas n Dave are played over Christmas dinner here to add to the general sense of revelry, and by the time the pudding and custard are on the go all present are in a state not unlike Pete Doherty in this splendid clip. I once explained this tradition to Chas himself, but I was well lit up at the time. When I had finished babbling on, he thought for a second and said ‘Long may it continue’ which was a good answer under the circumstances. He also put an arm around my shoulders as he said it, which probably stopped me falling entirely over.

Middle: I almost never cook because it is boring, but this is my signature dish. Note peas instead of beans – a classy touch, I think you’ll agree.

Lower: Some of my stock in storage at Greenwich Market. My boxes are on the right – you can just about make out ‘Paul Aprons’ on the green one – and I am sharing the space with Magic Alex, who as the name suggests is a magician, hence the hat. Sharing storage with a magician is endless fun. I like to ask a member of the audience to come and check if the locks are secure and everything before we go home.

I am spending Boxing Day in a house which no one has walked or driven past since Christmas Eve, when I arrived here via Land Rover straight off the train from London. I am about as far into the countryside as it is possible to get, and not being naturally rural would certainly have gone mad by now if the house in question were not equipped with merlot and Smarties in special fire extinguishers with which I can be hosed down by my companions whenever I feel a panic attack coming on.

This all means that I’m not spending Christmas with my old dear and, embracing technology, I suggested that we communicate by Skype, which involved setting her up with an account and such over the phone. I instilled the importance of taking care over filling in the registration form, as I sensed that this could be a bit annoying to someone who has yet to grasp the concept of a search engine and can only find things by typing the entire url of any given website into the address bar. Taking this advice, she confirmed what she was writing by loudly repeating each letter of her name as she typed it. The location part of the registration form was dealt with in a similar fashion. When we got to the password, I said that she should keep that to herself, so she observed security by loudly whispering each letter instead. The password was skype22 if you’re interested, although I have changed it now. In any case, access to my old dear’s Skype account would be fairly useless – I’m the only person on her contact list, and I’d know if you’d hacked it, because you wouldn’t spend the first eight minutes of the conversation away from the keyboard deciding which cardigan to wear.

My old dear’s cardigan could, in theory at least, have been knitted by the Symmetrical Ladies. The Symmetrical Ladies sell knitted dolls at Greenwich Market, are the twinniest of twins, a study in understated winsomeness, and among the most charming people in the SE10 postal district. Curiously, I dreamed that one of them, Sam – the one who always sits on the left, which is the only way you’d know her – turned up at my old dear’s house to do some plastering, which is only slightly less plausible than Danny’s recent idea that the four of us should go out for dinner. This came about because Danny – the urban me – likes to take Marshall for an afternoon walk on trading days, and Laura (who always sits on the right, which again is the only way you’d know her) looks after his stall while he does so. I had suggested that he should at least get her/them lunch as a thankyou, and this prompted the dinner idea. It didn’t happen, of course*, and was in any case so unlikely to occur that I genuinely thought I’d dreamed that, too. Although psychologists everywhere have been denied a landmark study in social incompatibility, at least I didn’t dream about the same blameless colleague twice in the same week, which would have been a bit awkward.

The trading year ended on Sunday with a lovely evening at the Pride of Spitalfields. This is just across Brick Lane from the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1, my traditional post-trading venue. The Goat Bag Man and myself started at the Duke, and then went to the Pride to catch up with Upmarket John, Sox, Artist Lew, Viran and sundry other East End traders. The Pride is very agreeable, and the staff are certainly better than those at the Duke, all of whom have been routinely awful for as long as anyone can remember. This is due to Vinny the Landlord’s staffing policy, which is employ literally anyone as long as they have no idea how to work behind a bar. Indeed, when Vinny goes to his casino in the West End – a process which involves him ‘feeling a bit lucky’, dressing up like a Mississippi card sharp, being driven to the venue in a black cab, and then losing huge amounts of cash – he has been known to send the staff home, lock everyone in, and leave me in charge. Vinny has only ever employed one good barmaid – she is called Rzala, and has the look of someone who misses her days as a police interrogator in a Soviet republic. Over Christmas, she said she’d seen me drunk ‘Ninety five or maybe one hundred and three times’, which I felt showed an easy familiarity with factual information, useful when getting people to denounce other people in East German cellars in the Seventies.

Thus it was that festive cries of ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ greeted me from all corners of the Pride as I made my entrance. Not from Upmarket John, though, as he had found the rumours of me being anywhere other than the Duke on a Sunday evening so hard to believe that he walked over there to check, our paths crossing somewhere on Fashion Street. In truth, my only reason for not visiting the Pride more often is that it is tiny and usually packed, and I like to sit down after a day of trading. As I arrived, some people were leaving, which left a table up for grabs. Quickly, I interrupted Artist Lew and Viran’s conversation, said ‘Right – that table over there. I’m grabbing it’, walked over, put my coat over a chair, arranged myself comfortably, checked my phone, looked around a bit, then went back over and said ‘And the thing is, it would be quite nice if you joined me’. The rest of the evening passed very nicely, although the Goat Bag Man got into an argument with a passer by while smoking outside. I missed this, because I was explaining to Artist Lew and the pub cat what I was going to spend my Christmas trading money on. I’m spending it on a gold tooth, to replace one headbutted out in a Slough pub in 1995, and a couple of other bits of minor dental work. A filling here, a root canal there, that sort of thing. I’m doing this because I don’t think next year will be any easier than this one, and the only thing worse than bankruptcy would be bankruptcy with toothache, so I can at least avoid that.

*We got blown out.

Postscript: There has been a bit of a break from these posts, as I decided to write something else for a bit, which is now coming along reasonably nicely. Anyway, we can be each other’s grubbiest secret here again every week, if you fancy it.

Twitter – We’ve all tried to like Twitter I’m sure, but it doesn’t get any easier.

Facebook – I think this is the only Facebook group still going. It’s all pages these days.

Kindle – If you didn’t cancel your Kindle subscription when I warned you, your faith in me not knowing what I’m talking about has been rewarded, as it’s all up and running and fine again now.

Pictards:

Top: Hello Kitty centrepiece to the Christmas table. I wanted to fill it with helium and float it up the stairwell in the middle of the night with a sheet over it so that the house would appear haunted, but it’s hard to get hold of monatomic noble gasses in the deeper rural areas. They look at you like you’re mental.

Middle: Thirteen hundred pounds.

Lower: The Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 in the early hours of a Monday morning. From left: Rzala, Viran, unknown Spitalfields trader, the Goat Bag Man, Chrissy (with hipster glasses, checking the carpet in case anyone’s dropped any Strokes vinyl), Upmarket John, Artist Lew. The gloves being worn by Rzala are nothing to do with cleaning duties – she about to start hosing people down and tickling them with a cattle prod until they start remembering certain information. She absolutely does have the enthralled expression of someone who has seen me drunk between ninety five and one hundred and three times.

In keeping with the rest of the place, the stairs in the upper storage area of Leadenhall Market are ornate and other-worldly. They are the sort of stairs you have to really commit to, though – steep, twisty, barely wide enough to climb and the cases I have to heft up them are very heavy indeed. Physical strength and fitness are assets for a market trader, and while never having been anything other than slightly overweight I decided to try fasting for a larf in May, and have unexpectedly lost 40 lbs since. On paper, this makes me more suited to my occupation, however this is sometimes not so in practice, as we shall see.

I stopped to adjust my grip while wrestling a case of jewellery boxes up the Leadenhall stairs a few Fridays ago, at roughly the same place where a stouter man might stop for a breather. Whereas our imaginary stout friend would have completed an uneventful ascent thereafter, the case rested against my upper pelvic cavity and caused my jeans to fall entirely down to my knees. This was not an ideal turn of events, and although there was another trader nearby, I felt uncomfortable with the prospect of requesting assistance. I therefore battled on trusting that my new conjoined denim leg warmers would not cause me to topple back over myself and heap further indignity upon an already un-suave situation. Fortunately they did not, although anyone enjoying a lunchtime bevvy outside the Lamb would’ve seen something they may never have forgotten, had they happened to look up.

Reflecting the role that physical strength plays in market trading, and perhaps inspired by the Olympics, Danny recently opened a gymnasium in Keith’s stall. This is an efficient way for Danny to kill two birds with one stone: the two birds being a) quiet afternoons at Greenwich Market and b) annoying Keith. The stone is not a gym in a traditional sense, but rather a series of strength testing exercises utilising the structural framework of the stall itself, such as the pull ups I indulged in on the central roof bar. Pulls ups are the kind of activity where you would expect weight loss would be a benefit, but they are deceptive. The first one is easy, the second one seems difficult out of all proportion, and by the fourth you feel as if your arms are melting. Three is considered a sufficient test of masculinity in Danny’s gym – or, as he likes to call it make Keith feel better, Keith’s Gym – and I struggled to five, while Danny himself did seven, but was being aided by one of the porters for the last three.

The Greenwich market porters, like all market porters anywhere, are incredible. They would have their own Olympics, if I had my way. They are incredible in the range of things they are incredible at too, so visitors to their Olympics could marvel at the amount and variety of substances they can consume (gold for Camden), the superior and unfriendly attitude they exhibit (gold for Portobello, silver for Borough), or as demonstrated at Greenwich, the amount of pull ups they can perform in a market stall. In true Olympic spirit, this inspires greatness in others – Keith for example, who, angered by proceedings, poured forth such an incredible range and volume of insults that, were it written down in standard newspaper font, would stretch from London to Montreal.

Postscript

This is likely to be the last post for quite a while. I’m sure we’ll be back in due course, but if we should never meet again, thanks for popping in. It’s been seven years altogether and yes, we thought we’d have found a way out of this mess by now, too.

Twitter:

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Kindle: If you’ve subscribed, this might be a good time to cancel. That said, this week we’re at 173,357 in the Kindle listings. Just in front of us is ‘Crossing Jordan: Risking It All To Walk With In The Favour Of God’ and just behind is ‘Treasures From The Journal Of Discourses’. Bearing in mind that this far down the listings it’s all nutters, my tip is the Discourses one, as it is a record of spontaneous speeches covering subjects such as ‘Can resurrected people give birth and if so are their offspring technically ghosts?’ and ‘What changes can we expect when the millennium begins?’ This latter point dates it somewhat, although I should imagine the answer has a lot to do with God, the Chosen People, and so forth, and is nonsense.

Photards: One last rummage through the shoe box of instamatics in the wardrobe has revealed:

Top: Mike, aka Childbrain, and Les at Greenwich Market. They wander down the central aisle every morning and wander back up every evening, and closely resemble a scene from a church in which Laurel and Hardy are getting married.

Middle: One of Keith’s Cuba prints. I have this one up in my living room. It was taken outside a bar in Havana and all these people have rushed outside to watch a parade. My three favourite things are a) the jacket worn by the lady in the middle b) the older lady in the white top, who looks kind and c) Paul McCartney on the right. The dogs are all nice too, especially the one who appears to be wearing a tiny bowler hat.

Lower: Four of the Whitechapel Legitimate Businessmen’s Club at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1. Who knows – we may not have heard the last of them.

I am often told that being a market trader must be great for people watching. This is true. However, you quickly learn that there aren’t that many types of people to watch. Understanding this enables you to develop a kind of shorthand which then enables you to efficiently sort them into accurate demographic groups. I suspect that with close enough observation this would be possible no matter what means you employed; in my case, I use the medium of kitchenware.

For example, I can tell a great deal about someone by how much of ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ by R. Kelly they will shout when confronted with an apron which has ‘I Believe I Can Fry’ written on it as a lazy but effective wordplay. Even if I was to trade blindfolded, I would know as soon as they got as far as ‘…I can touch the sky’ that I was being serenaded by someone with access to competitively priced tattooing facilities and large amounts of bad food. Observations such as these are all well and good, but ultimately it’s how you react to such people that counts. People projecting R. Kelly lyrics in response to a novelty apron aren’t necessarily dull, stupid, plain, predictable and disappointing, but there is always the risk that they might be. There are, after all, a lot of thick people about. The thing about thick people is that they are very good at being angry. I had to explain this once to Tony, with whom I once had an unlikely but successful kitchenware alliance, shortly after one of them punched him in the face.

The ‘I Believe I Can Fry’ apron enjoys joint paternity between Tony and I, and appears both on the various outlets supplied by myself and his operations at Covent Garden, Portobello Road and Leadenhall. This weekend it appeared at the Thames Festival where, as is my custom, I put it at the front of the stall so I knew who to ignore. Knowing who to ignore is a useful by-product of people watching. For example, I will usually ignore anyone drawing attention to ‘I Believe I Can Fry’ with delight and volume in equal measure to companions who are some distance away. This is because it will be broadcast as ‘I Believe I Can Fly. No, Fry. No it’s Fly isn’t it. This says Fry. I Believe I Can Fry. Oh I get it. I Believe I Can Fly. Fry. I believe I can touch the sky’ and so forth. By this point, the person’s companions, alerted to the existence of something simple but shoutable, will have arrived and independently recite almost exactly the same opening sentence, with a slight delay depending upon when they reached the stall. Next, they will usually start to freestyle their way around the rest of our lavish range. If I am paying attention, I will count off the seconds in my head until they reach Beastie Boys tribute ‘You’ve Got To Fight For Your Right Chapati’ (routinely shouted as ‘You’ve Got To Fight For A Chapati’) and ‘Rice To See You, To See You Rice’ – a homage to Bruce Forsyth – typically remixed as ‘Nice To See Rice’. I am then congratulated with ‘Oh mate, these are brilliant, do you think this stuff up?’ I reply with ‘Yeah, kinda’ because this is the most concise way of getting across the point that yes, I did think up the actual words on the apron, but your interpretation of them adds a magic that I could never have foreseen.

R. Kelly is a splendid man whose work has bought pleasure to millions, and he has no case to answer from me. Also, the general public and I never stay annoyed with each other for long. This brings me back to my original point, of how you react to the general public when trading from a market stall. Having stated that there aren’t that many types of people to watch, it’s also worth remembering that most of them are really quite likeable, once you get over the initial impression. I always bear this in mind, which is why I often spend time bumping knuckles with, or being introduced to the dogs and children of, people with poor reading skills and a slippery grasp of wordplay as they yell their way around my merchandise. Tony is also someone who is really quite likeable, and we have quite a lot in common. After all, the last time we were reunited – at Leadenhall Market – we discussed the geo-political climate of eighteenth century Europe, and there aren’t many traders I can do that with. As mentioned, however, he regularly forgets how much thick people like anger. This in turn brings me back to the occasion in the East Yard, Camden Lock Market, when he was punched in the face. The angry person concerned was a lady who had become entangled first in the Goat Bag Man’s stuff and then his own, which drew the response ‘I think you need to go home, peasant’. It was this that got Tony punched in the face. Actually, I’m telling that slightly wrongly. She punched Tony in the face twice. She was slightly wrong herself, though, because it was the Goat Bag Man who said it.

Twitter

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Kindle: This week, we’re just behind a collection of Sufi Pashtun verse by Rahman Baba, and just in front of Layla and Majnun, which is an epic poem of young love. Layla and Majnun is also a study of women in Persian literature, which sounds nice. According to the cover notes, it’s impossible to underestimate the effect of Layla and Majnun on the world over the last 800 years. Bet it’s well chuffed to be behind this stuff in the ratings, then.

Pictards. This week’s celluloid adventures are:

Top: A French stick upon which I have made a start, Greenwich Market.

Middle: Pensive dog, Greenwich Market. He looks like he’s trying to reconstruct the events leading to where he was when he last saw his door keys.

Lower: Self, in the Ornamental Hermit’s miniscule but entirely fascinating room. Note the cabinets behind me, which contain skulls and skeletons of many creatures, mainly mammals, and also the third coat on the right, which was made from a blanket in 1940. In a lifetime of meeting remarkable people, the Ornamental Hermit is among the most remarkable of all.

‘Each morning when I wake here in Spitalfields’, writes the Gentle Author at one point in Spitalfields Life, ‘I lie for a few minutes contemplating the squirrels gamboling in the yew tree outside my window before climbing from my bed to start another day’. If you don’t know the Gentle Author or Spitalfields Life, the latter is the creation of the former and documents people and places in and around the Spitalfields area of east London, including the famous market there. The Gentle Author and I live in very different worlds, although we both write about market life quite often. I have had plenty of time to consider these differences recently while at Greenwich Market, in the quiet couple of weeks between the various Olympic Games which are being held next door. Well aware of what they have done to Greenwich, I have been fond of referring to this pause as the lull before the calm.

Not having the opportunity to listen to squirrels playing in trees, I started last Sunday by cycling to Greenwich from Tooting Bec, via Clapham, Brixton, Peckham and Deptford – as is my habit on trading days – and walked straight into an argument between Danny and Keith. This broke out because of the way Danny started his day, which was by pouring Marshall’s water bowl over Keith’s chair, as part of an on-going attempt to convince him that he is incontinent, and therefore eligible for the forthcoming Paralympics. Marshall, needless to say, is a dog. Marshall started his day by eating some money, which as you can imagine did little to cheer Danny up. Be that as it may, Danny has been routinely pouring water over Keith’s chair in this manner for several weeks, but on this occasion Keith’s counter measures caused little short of civil war.

Danny was late paying his stall rent that morning, and Keith decided to point this out to the management. Danny’s outraged and horrified reaction is best summed up by this keynote sentence: ‘You lollied me up, you grassy Judas lovely boy Bertie Smalls cunt’. This is a remarkable sequence of words which I suspect will require untangling. To ‘lolly’ a person is to report on their behaviour to superiors in return for preferential treatment. ‘Grass’ and ‘Judas’ are widely known expressions for snitches, although ‘lovely boy’ is more obscure. It pertains to a catchphrase from an old sit com called ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’, the cast of which coincidentally recorded a song called ‘Whispering Grass‘, which ties in quite nicely. Bertie Smalls is a police informant so reviled that his name is considered an insult. ‘Cunt’ is also usually considered an insult, but is used by Danny to address Keith so often that it has taken on the attributes of a pet name, and is therefore the least offensive part of the exchange. Incidentally, Danny’s stall rent was late because it was the money that Marhall had eaten earlier.

I am used to being called upon to settle disputes between Danny and Keith, and was asked to do so again this time. I pointed out that grassing is a grave offence and a diabolical liberty; Danny didn’t grass Marshall for eating the rent, after all. This is an object lesson in manliness and humility, and Keith could learn much from it. Keith’s response was unrecorded, due to a sudden change of subject matter provided by Danny. ‘Excuse me darling – you see my mate over there?’ he said to a passing lady and nodding to where I was standing with a look of anguished surprise on my face, ‘Yes?’ she said, ‘Well’, he said ‘Your kid’s just elbowed him in the bollocks’. The incident, entirely accidental of course, had been bought about by a stray arm flailed recklessly during a boisterous game of chase with a nimbler sibling. The lady apologised in a manner as sincere as barely-concealed mirth would allow, although it wasn’t in truth particularly painful. This was fortunate, because as Danny reiterated the point that ‘A lady’s dustbin has caught Paul in the Jacobs’ – ‘dustbin’ and ‘Jacobs’ being rhyming slang for kid (dustbin lid) and knackers (Jacob’s Cream Crackers) – I made a mental note that in the event of medical attention being required I would either have to be taken to a Cockney hospital or have someone other than Danny liaise with staff.

All these events happened at about the same time that the Gentle Author would presumably have been listening to the squirrels in his garden not so very far away. I like Spitalfields Life, I bought the book and enjoyed it even when it reminded me of what would happen to social history if it was recorded by the makers of Trumpton. He’s calling himself the ‘Gentle Author’, for Heaven’s sake, so he’s pretty out there about the manner in which he’s going to report stuff. I’m not sure the Amazon comparisons with Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys are entirely justified, but they did at least give me something to think about when travelling home that evening, which was a longer journey than usual, up to London Bridge and down through Elephant and Castle. In this regard at least, I was grateful for the Gentle Author and his idyllic morning routine as it gave me something to be jealous of as I rode my bike carefully down Borough High Street on unhappy testicles.

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Kindle – Have climbed 63,621 places to number 85,522 in the Amazon sellers’ ranking since last time, which sounds impressive. In the listings, we’re just behind ‘Father-Daughter Succession In Family Business’ and just in front of ‘Colandra’s World: Caress the Sun, Embrace the Thunder’. This is not the first time we’ve looked over our shoulder and seen Colandra’s World gaining on us. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s about a Paraguayan village which finds God. Of the two, it’s my recommendation this week as the other on is bound to be a bit issue-y.

Picters: This week’s photographic studies are:

Top: Danny, making good his escape having just emptied Marshall’s bowl on Keith’s chair earlier this year.

Middle: Pre-set up view from my stall, looking towards Danny’s (white with Union Jack accessories), Keith’s (next door with chair, cushion removed and drying outside) and John the Boxes (opposite Danny). I once helpfully pointed out that perhaps Keith’s chair is getting splashed by the nearby Flood Gallery, which provoked a robust response. Note the curved bars on my stall in comparison to the flat ones on Danny and John’s; for some reason, these curvy stalls were commissioned especially for the Olympics. The curve means that any hangers and such slide about all over the place, and the whole thing is too high to be in the eye line of anyone wandering past. Still, some consultant somewhere decided that having them designed and made was a good spend of tens of thousands of pounds of public money, which is the main thing.

Lower: Cartoon Ben. If you were to walk backwards eight foot from the vantage point of the previous photograph, you would be standing where he is. Ben can be quite fragile for a variety of reasons, though, and it would really freak him out if you did. The pink stall between Cartoon Ben and myself is the Pink Pamper Parlour, which is an eyebrow threading place. Puja, who runs it, and I have a thing called ‘Saturday Face’. This is the look that we habitually have on a Saturday after about 3 o’clock when we realise that yet again we’re going to remain poor.