Market porters are a breed apart.    By this I don’t mean that they are a breed apart from other men, but that they are a breed apart from every other species on the planet.    At Camden, their main roles are the enthusiastic consumption of competitively priced lager and the ferrying of traders’ stock between storage areas in the Middle Yard and stalls throughout the Lock market.    This is an important duty, as most traders are too busy drinking tea and swearing at each other to manage this for themselves.    When I was at Camden, I was usually too concerned with hunting down the component parts of my stall to bring my own stock up.    Especially tricky to locate were the wooden table tops, which I would usually have to carry in from the West Yard, a chore which I made less annoying – for myself at least – by saying ‘I always get wood in the morning’ or ‘Every time I see you I’ve got wood’ or some similar inane wood-related innuendo to fellow East Yard urchin Slack Matt every single time I walked past him, regardless of how large a number that might be.    He left eventually, possibly due to inevitability fatigue.

Strangely, it is often considered unmanly to avoid serious spinal injury by having porters bring your stock to and fro.    As we’ve discussed before, I solved the problem of having Danny and Keith at Greenwich Market referring to me as a lady in lady voices and asking what a pretty thing like me is doing in a place like this, and so forth for hours every single trading day, by redistributing stock contained within two large crates that I can’t lift among three smaller crates that I can, and saying that I had a greater volume of stuff as a cover story.    This subterfuge has thus far kept me out of hospital and also allowed Danny and Keith to pursue their main hobby – writing obscenities on each others’ cars, which they will go to genuinely extraordinary lengths to achieve – without interruption.

Not only do porters possess a capacity for manual labour that borders on the superhuman, they may just possess a capacity for the supernatural, too, as we shall see.    The supernatural – in terms of superstition – plays a part in the whole business of market trading.    Despite being only vaguely religious I have a small picture of St Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Market Traders, above my stall.    This was given to me by a well wishing customer, who I hope wasn’t doing so because St Francis is also the Patron Saint of Lonely Death.    I also habitually observe the Camden Nepalese tradition of rubbing the first takings of the day across my forehead to encourage further business and the spreading of germs.    While working at the Thames Festival last year I kept the ancient riverbank traders’ custom of hurling a coin into the river before kick off, which I suppose must hark back to the appeasement of an ancient water god, possibly Ludd, after whom Ludgate is named.    With pretty much every belief system from Ancient British to contemporary Nepalese covered, you’d think the average market trader is immune from any kind of ill fortune.    Sadly this is not the case.

This brings us rather neatly to the market porters’ supernatural ability to bring bad luck.    Around Christmas, the Goat Bag Man decided to wheel his own stock about, thereby avoiding paying the porters’ fee.    This entailed removing crates from storage, bumping them over the cobbles in the Middle Yard on a barrow past the veggie bar and Barry the Cakes, up Camden High Street, and into the Lock market East Yard.   I had always been told by the porters that it was bad luck to wheel a barrow up Camden High Street on a trading day, but thought little of it.    The Goat Bag Man also thought little of it, until his fortunes took a turn for the worse when, on the third occasion he portered his own stock, the wheels fell off his barrow.    An examination showed this to have come about as a result of the nuts and bolts holding the wheels together somehow removing themselves.   The next day, having asked the porters to shift his stock about again and paying the requisite fee for them to do so, he found that the missing nuts and bolts had put themselves in a small plastic bag and sellotaped themselves to the frame of his barrow.    When questioned, the porters themselves put it down to poltergeist activity, which seems reasonable enough.

Twitter.

Facebook page: book’s coming along quite nicely as it goes, but Facebook remains hatefully evil so I’m not looking after this page as carefully as I perhaps ought.

Pictards: This weeks’ trawl through the photographic archive has revealed:

Top: self, seated in the Ornamental Hermit’s tiny room in Clerkenwell.    I am sharing this image with various items including skeletons of a kangaroo and a rabbit, and an advertisement for a project called the Cirque d’Actualite, featuring ‘Amazing Spectacles Of The Everyday, Commonly Seen By All’.    These include: The Bearded Man, the Iron Cannon Ball, the Death Defying Cautious Man (He Takes No Risks!), the Sensational Swimming Fish (It Needs No Air!), the Dead Pigeon (It Flies No Longer!) the Living Cadaver (He Has A Body That Lives!) and Shops.    You may wonder, as indeed I do, what the Ornamental Hermit actually does all day.    Well, I can reveal him to be the hitherto anonymous brains behind this, which apart from being entirely safe to view at work is almost beyond description: click here and on Thursdays we sit about in a derelict shop writing murder mysteries to pass the time.

Middle: The aforementioned Cirque d’Actualite.

Lower: Chris the Knowledge with his new sherbert* at Greenwich Market.    It took Chris a year to learn the Knowledge, but it’s already paying dividends.    He reckons he can do a couple of centuries** on a decent day, and a monkey*** at the weekend.    Most cabbies are confident of a long one**** if they do a protracted shift and have a few crispy***** fares.     It certainly makes a change from making bath salts in his actual bath and selling them on the cobbles.******

*Cockney rhyming slang – Sherbert Dab = cab.

**London market slang.    Century = one hundred pounds.    Also ‘ton’ and ‘one-r’.

***London market slang.   Monkey = five hundred pounds.

****London market slang.    Long one = one thousand pounds.    Also ‘grand’ and ‘bag of sand’ (Cockney rhyming slang – Bag of sand = grand).    ‘Bag of sand’ is remarkable, as it is a slang term for something which is already a slang term.

*****Cockney rhyming slang.    Crispy Duck = Luck, as in ‘Things might look up – you never know your crispy.’

******London market slang.    On the cobbles = at a market.

The shipping forecast, in case you are unfamiliar, is a weather report on Radio 4 for maritime vessels in British coastal waters.  I’ve discovered that whenever I hear it, I can smell Vosene.   I’m sure this stems from my old dear using the eye-melting shampoo classic on my lovely locks while bathing me in the kitchen sink as an infant, with Dettol in the water.  For some reason, she always had the undeniably classy Radio 4 on in the background as she did so, presumably in an attempt to introduce some culture into proceedings, but I hadn’t listened to it – or indeed gone near a kitchen sink – for many years until recently receiving a digital radio for my birthday.  I wonder if, perhaps, the association would also work the other way round too, and if I washed my hair with Vosene in the kitchen sink, it would prompt the shipping forecast to appear.   You never know.

A Common Shop Girl of my acquaintance and I considered this on Wednesday, during an afternoon which consisted of tea and the critical analysis of passers-by in a gift shop in a deserted seaside town.   Despite the phantom smell of haircare products, I find the shipping forecast, with its reassuringly monotone run down of gales and rainstorms at Fair Isle and Rockall and Main, nicely comforting.   This must be because in childhood I only heard about these remote and watery places while bundled up in warm towels or possibly newspaper in a state of post-kitchen-sink-bath drowziness.   I certainly remember them more fondly than another feature of my youth that I had to work hard to persuade the Common Shop Girl had ever actually existed: Protect and Survive booklets.   These were found in libraries and other public places in the eighties and told you what to do if a nuclear war popped up, and they warrant further explanation.

The topic arose as we recalled the first records we’d ever bought.   Mine was Geno by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.    The second would’ve been Uptown Top Ranking by Althea and Donna, but I stole it instead of buying it, and the third would’ve been Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood but, instead of buying it or stealing it, I simply borrowed it from Barry Roberts and never gave it back.    I’ve not been an adolescent for a long time, but presumably music aimed at that age group still deals with issues such as the arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction that would come to fruition should the Cold War escalate into a full scale nuclear conflict.    I’m pretty sure children are still being called Barry, too.    In any case, Two Tribes contained samples of Protect and Survive’s audio track – which must’ve been a hoot – and this is what lead me to spend longer than you might think immersed in the paper version.    I also read the Exorcist and the Omen at around the same time, which I don’t think did me a lot of good, either.

I was always struck by the forthright but cheery nature of the text and the expressionless figures that populated the pages although, even as an eleven year old, I suspected that there may be more to shrugging off the percussive effect of a hydrogen bomb than painting your windows white and hiding behind the sofa.   As it went on, it explored the dilemmas that might confront show offs who, perhaps sharing the same nagging doubts as myself, constructed underground shelters in the garden for family members.    My favourite of these was the question of what boardgames to take in to fend off tedium for a three month period.   Three months was as long as a nuclear winter – the aftermath of a nuclear war, when the air and everything in it was too toxic to touch or eat or breathe– was expected to last, and also a suitable length of time in which to consider whether or not you were better off than the instantly vapourised people hiding behind their living room furniture.   Brilliantly, it suggested Monopoly, as it was engrossing and lengthy.    It would certainly need to be if it was going to take your mind off the fact that, when you finally emerged, you were going to starve.    Presumably, the irony of building houses for an extinct population on a Mayfair that no longer existed, or arguing over control of the water and electricity companies in a freshly post-apocalyptic world would make you giggle hysterically after a while, too, and this would help break the tension.

Towards the back was the grimmest section of all.    It dealt with how to fend off unprepared friends and neighbours as they attempted to rush your shelter in the four minutes between sirens announcing that the bomb was going to fall and it actually doing so.    Among other things, it suggested piling blankets and cushions against the door to drown out the desperate thumpings and clawings of the people on your Christmas card list who were locked outside forever, and I wondered how much of an elephant in the room this would become as the Monopoly-playing months dragged by.    Probably, I reasoned, this being a British nuclear winter, it wouldn’t be mentioned directly but would instead come up in an outburst like ‘Six hundred quid for a hotel on the Pentonville Road?   You’re loving this aren’t you, like you loved thrashing old Mrs Collins across the teeth with that rounders bat just before the sky melted’, or something similar.

After some further discussion, we concluded that the best way to avoid the upsetting last minute scramble would be to replace air raid sirens with the shipping forecast, as this would be nice and calming and, as you were reduced to carbon atoms, you would at least know if there was stormy weather off the Faroe Islands, and remember that the worst things happen at sea.

Twitter: Online shoutbox for Guardian readers and the hysterically judgemental.

Facebook page: Yes, it’s the Facebook page for the book.   Been putting a few bits and bobs on it, nothing dramatic, mainly some pictards and such.   I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, to be honest.

Pictards:

Top: This is a print by Keith, from an exhibition of East End portraits he exhibited at the Museum of London a few years back.   He gave it to me for my birthday.   When I showed it to Richard, who makes and sells silver jewellery opposite me on Saturdays, he said he recognised it as Keith’s work because of the style and composition.    I recognised it as Keith’s work because no one had bought it.    Nice thought, though, and being fan the Greenwich Market photographic nutcase I’ll get it framed and such.    The bloke is called Shef, a Romany gypsy who lived around Brick Lane for years and years.

Middle: Vinny and Gary at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1.  By the look of it, it’s the part of the night where Gary demonstrates his fanciful grasp of the passage of time by saying things like ‘Right, I need to be at Waterloo by one for the last train, it’s a twenty minute journey from here, and it’s ten to now, so I’ve just got time for a cheeky last pint before I nip off.’   How Gary ever gets home is an enduring mystery to all of us.

Lower: Parker Sonnet fountain pen, a birthday present from our Head of Provincial Development.   As is widely known, I love fountain pens, and the Parker Sonnet is ideal for everyday use.    This particular one is French made with a gold plated nib and detailing setting off a brushed steel barrel and cap.    I dislike both gold plating and brushed steel, but they combine rather well here I think.

Camden Market is the most famous market in the world.  It’s also a nutcase magnet.   All markets attract nutcases, but Camden more so.   In fact, it has the highest ratio of nutcases, recovering nutcases, and nutcases-in-waiting to normal people of any place on earth, and this is a ratio that can be equally applied to both traders and punters.   It has all varieties of nutcase too, from friendly to psychotic, via boring, incoherent and needy.   It’s like a mental health pick n mix, and some nutcases gain localised celebrity celebrity status.   Myself, I particularly liked the bloke with the bewildering number and combination of physical deformities who for many years used to sit outside the pizza shop playing Nowhere Man on a weird metal harp, although he has long since moved on somehow.

I can’t remember ever talking to him, so it would be lazy and wrong to list him among the nutcases.   He would, though, fall squarely into the category of General Market Person.   These are a very different breed from the nutcases, and they inhabit the strange twilight world between traders on the one hand and punters on the other.   This group includes managers, porters – who I am convinced are superhuman, such is their work rate and application – cleaners and an enigmatic sub category: the people who, despite having no real purpose, are the market.    Into this last category we must place Camden landmark and brandy enthusiast Old Bob.

Old Bob, as the name implies, was no spring chicken.    That is the sum total of my definite knowledge of him.    In an environment where everyone falls somewhere between slightly dodgy and outrightly criminal, it is usual to be vague about certain details regarding history, whereabouts, associates, and general activities.   It’s not so much a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, but rather that neither of them will admit to knowing each other in the first place.   This does make piecing together factual information somewhat tricky.   However, according to a good source, Bob worked on fishing boats in Canada at some point in the distant past, and for reasons unknown came to London and opened a clothes shop in the Middle Yard.   This was burgled at some point in the early 70s, stranding him in NW1 and marking, among other things, the last time he wasn’t full of brandy.

By the time I arrived at Camden – in fact, by the time anyone I know arrived at Camden, even people who have been there for ages – Bob had for a very long time been in charge of keeping punters out of the market hall at the end of the trading day.    No one liked to point it out, but he didn’t look like the most effective sentinel, and we just hoped no one actually tried to steal anything.    He also had a weekday t shirt stall in the East Yard, and outside the Oxford Arms at the weekend, which as I recall only sold Ramones and Sonic Youth t shirts.   It wasn’t a glamourous life.    It certainly wasn’t life in the fast lane, because Bob had no concept of rapidity.   I once remarked to him that he would move his stock more quickly up Camden High Street every morning if he tied it to a tectonic plate, and also that tourists must find buying stuff from him pretty nerve wracking, as the exchange rate could change several times during the course of the transaction.   On both occasions, he invited me to fuck off.   The first time he met my old dear, he said that she was very charming and, sending me off to buy tea, that I must therefore take after my father.   This redoubtable quality was never better demonstrated then when he was unwisely picked upon by some shirtboys in the Oxford Arms – never one to waste words, he summoned up  the only turn of speed I ever saw him produce and broke the jaw of the lead protagonist, who was six decades his junior.   On this evidence, he might have been a more effective security guard than he at first appeared.

Bob was found dead in his tiny room above the Oxford Arms by one of the market porters last Thursday morning.   I was originally going to start this post by equating market life with what Shakespeare said about greatness; that is, that some people are born to market life, some people attain market life, and some people have market life thrust upon them.   However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the latter group are by far the most numerous, because no-one sets out to work in a market.   Quite frankly, most of us are here because there is nowhere left to go.   This makes life simple but precarious, and it is this precariousness that people tend to grumble about.   In the years I knew Bob, I never once heard him grumble about anything, despite having a more thankless and precarious existence than most.   Bob quietly did his time; moreover, he it well and he did it without complaint, like a man.   Camden has, yet again, lost one of her own.   I only hope they stocked up on Courvoisier in Valhalla when he and Amy Winehouse sat down to talk about old times.

I spend a lot of time near fish and water, but this is because I often wander along piers eating cod and chips.   I suppose I spend time among fish and their natural habitat, rather than fish in their natural habitat.   Anyway.   I have no interest in fishing itself, and had therefore not heard of what are known as the Fishing Tackle Wars until very recently.   These have apparently broken out between anglers and the costume jewelery industry, two factions which at first glance would not appear to be natural antagonists, and I learned about them while having my eyebrows threaded.    The threading, while not painful, was distraction enough to make it difficult for me to understand how the Fishing Tackle Wars had come about.   It wasn’t that I doubted the credibility of my source – she is, as a sideline, involved in the retail of costume jewelery – but that I am suspicious of things that sound incredible because of what happened when I was 13, in love, and told by Sam Banks that her old man was Bungle from Rainbow.

Even though none of the actors that played Bungle are called Banks and Sam herself went as far as to tell me it wasn’t true at a birthday party in 1994, a part of me still persists in believing it.    Strangely, my belief in her old man being Bungle even though he absolutely and categorically wasn’t is of more anecdotal interest than if he actually had been Bungle, which is quite curious, and perhaps says something profound about the nature of belief.    If I was to introduce him to people, I would introduce him as the man who used to be Bungle, and insist to him that he was, until he eventually agreed that yes, now I come to mention it, he can remember being Bungle after all.    Similarly, a few years later, a man in a pub told me that in the year 2000 the Egyptian government was going to build a new pyramid in the Valley of the Kings and put a massive jukebox in it containing every song ever recorded, in order to mark the 65th anniversary of the birth of Elvis Presley.   This is even more preposterous.    There are holes in the Elvis Pyramid story that you could drive a bus through.   What currency would you use on it?   Would it be every song ever recorded until that moment, or would they keep updating it?   What is the commercial viability of a jukebox in a pyramid in a desert? among others.    The thing is, it’s nonsense, and nonsense doesn’t have to be watertight, and even though I came to doubt the Elvis Pyramid as the ’90s wore on, I would still occasionally look online for it well after the turn of the century, just in case.

It was comforting, therefore, to have a factual basis for the The Fishing Tackle Wars.   They are centered upon the the supply of feathers, and the control thereof.   The feathers are from a particular species of guinea fowl and, if they are bound up with weights and dangled from a fishing rod, trout go mental for them.   Although they have very little value – they can be purchased for perhaps 12p each – if you tie two together and charge £8.50 for them as costume jewelery at a festival, human females also go mental for them.    It’s money for nothing, unless you are a guinea fowl or, to a lesser extent, a trout.   This creates dangerous tensions between the trout fishing and costume jewelery communities as they compete for resources.   Oddly, the guinea fowl and trout – who doubtless have their own views on the conflict – have never been consulted.    It’s not likely to end any time soon, either, as it will cost more to have fake feathers made than to use real ones, so the world will have to accustom itself to having yet another nuclear flashpoint.

Anyway.   The man with the Elvis Pyramid story was a vending machine salesman from West Drayton, and I have no idea what subsequently became of him.   It’s a shame that I didn’t know the daughter of Bungle from Rainbow, but more of a shame for her actual old man who was at the time doing three years for an armed robbery on a post office van.    I don’t think I was the first person to say ‘He certainly bungled that, didn’t he?’ to Sam when she told me at the party in 1994, and this may go some way to explaining why I was unable to rekindle our adolescent romance over the course of the evening.

Twitter

Facebook – for the very last time, actually.   The new Facebook page is here but I only put it up this afternoon and decided to lounge about drinking tea and eating rice pudding once I’d done so, so I’ve not uploaded much in the way of photards or text or anything really.   Still, it’ll look lovely for next time.

Photards:

Top: Something of a rarity – a west London trader in the East End.   It’s legendary Ealing nutcase Viran at his baby wear stall at Spitalfields market.   On Sundays, Viran has a few bevvies at the Pride of Spitalfields, and then quite often joins the happy throng at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 at about nine o’clock.   I have never seen him get past nine thirty without getting barred for something.   Viran’s a lovely bloke as it goes but, in keeping with the vague children’s programme theme of this post, I always seem to find myself apologising for him in the same way that Rod Hull apologises for emu.

Middle: Standard but nonetheless quite amusing light switch gag at Greenwich Market.

Lower: Worried dog at Greenwich Market, possibly concerned about the outcome of the Fishing Tackle Wars.

No one enjoys being the focus of attention for the demonically possessed, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to me on the Northern Line at London Bridge last Sunday week.   I found a seat and got comfy, but found myself unable to concentrate on Louis Barfe’s The Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson because of a sinister woman who gave the impression that if she were to speak, she would have the voice of a raven, or of two massive stone blocks scraping against each other.   She probably didn’t, but imagine the kind of person who can convey that kind of thing across a tube carriage: it’s quite a trick.   She was sitting perhaps six foot away and glaring and glaring and glaring, at one point standing up to have an even better glare.   She had a creepy way of standing up too, as if she was a puppet being pulled vertically upright with no muscular effort of her own.

As she sat back down, again with no apparent muscular effort, she leaned forward – effectively across the man sitting next to her – in order to further scrutinise me.   As we got to Kennington, I acknowledged her by raising my eyebrows and smiling slightly.   I honestly thought she was about to scream angrily, perhaps with bats flying out of her mouth.   She was, as I think I pointed out on Twitter at the time, well diabolical.   Had it not been for the smoking ban on the tube I’d have tied her to a stake and burnt her.   Unnerved, I changed carriages at Oval, and spent the evening getting wrecked at the Wheatsheaf at Tooting Bec.   This gave me time to reflect upon my Chevvy Chase, which does a sterling job under difficult circumstances, and which had already been the subject of unwarranted fascination that weekend, as we shall see.

If you’ve ever wanted to sneeze but can’t, and then force-sneezed by looking at a light source, you’re triggering what’s known as the photic sneeze reflex.   This reflex is hereditary.   As I had never heard of it until earlier that day, I’m assuming it is not in my particular genetic makeup.   If I had heard of it, however, a baffling conversation at Greenwich Market might have made a great deal more sense.   It started when Italian Aggie, who sells handbags opposite what has become my new regular Sunday pitch, bounded over to my stall and said, completely out of the blue, ‘Look at the light look at the light look at the light look at the light look at the light’.

I was somewhat startled, and as I had been cleaning my fingernails with a penknife at the time, only narrowly avoided injury.

‘What light? I said, ‘Where?’

‘Look at the light look at the light look at the light look at the light look at the light’ she continued, clearly very insistent that I find some kind of light and, once I had done so, look at it.

‘Where is this light?’ I said, looking towards the roof and wondering if she meant the sun or perhaps the second coming of Christ.

‘This light here’ she said, tapping one of the inspection lamps I use for my lavish stall lighting display ‘Look at this light, look at it, look at it’

I looked at it.

‘It will make you sneeze’ she said.

‘But I don’t want to sneeze.’

‘Your face – it always looks as though you want to sneeze.   I have been watching your face.   You have a sneezing man’s face. Look at the light, it will help you to sneeze.’

In order to keep her happy, I looked at the light, but didn’t sneeze.    If I had my time again, I’d have faked a sneeze at that point.

‘Better?’ she said.

‘No’ I replied.

‘Next time, try and look at the light earlier, it will help you to sneeze’ she said, and went back to her stall.

I was puzzled by all this, and decided to seek opinions among my customers.

‘Do I look like I’m going to sneeze, to you?’ I asked a lady who had popped up and was browsing.   Before she could answer, however, Danny shoved his head through the side of my stall and said ‘Paul mate – in your experience, what part of a bird do you have to spunk over before you’re an official couple?’   He is fond of doing things like this in an effort to embarrass either myself or my customers.    What I usually do is throw the question open to the audience, so I said ‘Any ideas, my love?’ to the lady, who as luck would have it was Tyne Daly from Cagney and Lacey, who’s now in a big show up West.   ‘I don’t really think I’m the right person to ask’ she said, which considering she’s an industrial strength lesbian icon, seems fair enough.    I might hold a secret ballot on the subject this weekend, if it’s quiet again.

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Facebook

Picters – this week our selection is:

Top: An old fridge magnet I’d forgotten we’d ever put out, from 2007.   We probably sold a couple but I can’t remember now.   IKEA weren’t interested, I’ll tell you that much.

Middle: I’m assuming that this hoodie is some kind of cry for help, as no one actually wears clothing with wolves on.   It’s a form of self harm, and should be treated in the same way as bulimia.  Note the redoubtable Richard Chown, jewellerysmith, in the background with what I like to term the money hammer.    His stuff isn’t cheap – it’s made by hand out of silver – so whenever I hear the money hammer going, it means the market’s in good shape.

Lower: I don’t know why I keep being taken into places that have stuff like this written on the walls.   ‘A place to come when you feel sad and leave happy’?   For a starters, it should be ‘…and want to leave happy’ surely, and secondly, it’s incitement to arson.   I bet whoever wrote this wears purple a lot and has an iphone cover that looks like a cat.   The streets are angry enough, and this is exactly the sort of thing that could push the nation over the edge.

Physical violence has a terrible reputation, although mainly among people who aren’t very good at it.    There is a time and a place for it, however, although I didn’t expect the place to be Balham High Road and the time to be six weeks before my fortieth birthday, which is an undignified age for this sort of thing.   I should probably explain further.

What happened was this: I was leaving Tooting Bec tube station last Friday, when a man walked very quickly and deliberately in front of me, looked back, and slowly shook his head in a disappointed manner.   As confrontational behaviour goes, it wasn’t very confrontational, so I ignored it.    The thing was, he wouldn’t stop doing it, to the extent that after about ten seconds he turned completely around and was walking backwards along Balham High Road, still shaking his head, still looking disappointed, and maintaining a distance of about four foot, which isn’t really the done thing.

I was bought up in the school of thought that dictates you should walk across a room, or across a pub, or – as in this case – out of a tube station as if you’re going to smack the first person to look at you; it doesn’t mean that you ever actually would, of course, but it has meant that I rarely find myself troubled by charity people with clipboards as I go about town.    It also means that I don’t find myself being ineffectively threatened by commuter types on the way from the tube to the flat.   Nonetheless, this was clearly a thing that was now happening so, finding myself wishing I had something a bit more fitting and less treble-y than ‘I Can’t Let Go’ by the Hollies in my earphones as a soundtrack, I prepared to get to the bottom of the matter.

I was at the time wheeling along a large case full of stock for the weekend.   The significance of this will shortly become clear.

‘Mate – what is it you’re disagreeing with?’ I said, considering this to be a reasonable opening.

‘You know what I’m disagreeing with’ he said.

‘Well that’s just it’ I replied, ‘I don’t, but to be honest I’m getting a bit curious, so perhaps you could let me know’

‘Your case’

‘My case?’ I said, looking down at it and deciding to lighten the somewhat surreal mood,  ‘He’s just a case.   There’s no need to bring him into it.’

‘I nearly tripped over it as I came out of the station.’

‘Ah sorry mate’ I said ‘I was listening to the Hollies.’

‘But I nearly fell over your facking case’ he repeated, and in an unexpected turn of events started squaring up to me.

It became clear to me at this point that, despite his stance, this was a man ill-suited to the behaviour he was exhibiting.  In fact, what I think had happened is that he’d had a couple of pints after school with the rest of his department, watched Football Factory on his phone on the Northern Line down from Moorgate, and as a result had made the rather embarrassing mistake of thinking that because he had watched it, he was now in it.   This was an interesting juncture, because unfortunately for both of us I actually lived in it during what, if I were Winston Churchill, I would document in the same volume of my autobiography that he entitled The Wilderness Years.   Mind you, I had felt the case scuff against something as I got to the top of the stairs at the station, so it was hard to dispute him.   I swiftly concluded that the easiest thing to do would be to knock him out and go home.

‘Well the thing is that you were behind me, you see, and my wing mirrors seem to have fallen off, so I had no idea you were there.  Although I see what you mean – it’s an easy thing to miss.  I mean look at it – it’s the size of a matchbox.  Sometimes it goes through the washing machine in my jacket pocket.’

Actually, it’s huge, but I was japing to wind him up a bit.   There was a pause.   This annoyed me as I am self employed, and time is money.   Another feature of self employment as that you’re unlikely to pass yourself over for promotion or give yourself frosty looks at the departmental Christmas party if you pick up a charge of Actual Bodily Harm, which is always worth knowing.   I was, however, getting the distinct impression that my would-be assailant had run out of steam.    He’d stopped trying to stand in exactly the place as me, for a start, and seemed to have shrunk somewhat.

‘Tell you what’ I said ‘I don’t really think it’s in you to do this sort of thing.   Shall we just go home?’

Fortunately, I was heading to the Lighthouse Fish Bar on the Tooting Bec Road and he was heading down the Balham High Road, so we were spared what would’ve been an awkward shared stroll.   I walked off smiling slightly and listening to ‘Just One Look’, which was the next track on my Hollies playlist.   I should imagine that he walked off to concoct some story for Monday morning about some bloke he’d kicked all over the place by the tube station.   I hope it was a good story and I was well represented, as I think he needs the victory more than I do.

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Post script: When I mentioned this incident to my old dear, she said ‘Well you were very patient with him son, so it’s only fair you batter the next fella who tries it’.

Photards - this week it’s:

Top: Dog In Initial Stages Of Astonishment, Greenwich Market.   It’s anyone’s guess as to what he’s just seen to his left, but I think we’d all love to know.

Middle: At the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1.   From left, the Goat Bag Man, myself, Chris, and Artist Lou.   I am being fascinating for the benefit of Chris and Artist Lou, while the Goat Bag Man is adopting the look of someone who might pull a gun with a silencer attachment from inside his coat and start eliminating people for old times’ sake.

Lower: I remain the only heterosexual man to have bought Lisa Minelli merchandise, although I bought it for John the Boxes.    John the Boxes isn’t gay in the flouncy sense at all, which is a relief, but more in the sense of being a perfectly normal man who says things like ‘I’ve got a special, secret ingredient for peanut sauce.   I’ll tell you what it is, but you must promise not to tell anyone or I swear Paul I’ll kill you’.

I was cornered on a train from London to the eastern provinces by a lady novelist for three hours last week.  If you’ve never happened across a lady novelist, it’s what pretty much all middle class girls want to be before a) deciding to be a journalist instead, then b) deciding to be an English teacher instead before finally c) keeping a blog about the novel they are writing instead, instead of actually writing it.    The only good thing about a blog of that kind is that it at least it avoids the Big Three blog subjects: Having A Baby, Having A Cat, or Having An Illness.   Come to think of it, this blog also avoids those things, although as it is largely concerned with me wandering through London market trading life in a state of appalled resignation, it avoids almost everything else, too.

Our unlikely convergence had been sparked by a phone conversation I was having with our e-commerce gnome, Gary.    It is customary for me to call him on a Monday morning after visiting my wholesaler, to discuss the weekend’s trade and sundry other topics, such as how we managed to get into this shambles in the first place, and how can we make it stop.    As is also customary, the conversation started with Gary listing all the things either going wrong, or about to go wrong, with the business.    ‘On the plus side’ I said, striving as ever to put some kind of positive spin on the situation ‘At least we’re not being ruined by malevolent Twitter assassins, which would be easy for them to do as we’re pretty much ruined anyway, and on top of that I’ve got a latte and some Welshcakes from AMT.   I always win, Gary.’   I was unaware that I was being eavesdropped upon by the lady novelist as she briefly removed her earphones to rummage in a suitcase.  Returning to her keyboard, she felt compelled to leave the poetry blog she was updating to write this on Twitter:

Listening to this guy behind me telling someone on phone about how easy it is to use twitter to ruin people and how he always wins… #wanker

It being Twitter, I had no idea of this at the time.   Having presumably taught me some kind of a lesson – albeit a lesson for which I was not actually in the classroom – she replaced her earphones and continued writing poetry.

As I alighted from the carriage, I noticed her apparently struggling with luggage.    Declining my offer of assistance, she explained that she was balancing various holdalls and laptops cases and so forth about her person prior to walking the entire length of the train towards a connecting service.   Finding that I was now wandering along beside her, and that furthermore I was catching the same connecting service to the same final destination, I asked what had brought her to this part of the country in the first place.   Her answer – ‘I’m burying my father tomorrow’ – left me slightly stumped and unsure where to go, conversation-wise.    ‘But it’s ok, as I’m a romantic novelist’ she added, qualifying which variety of lady novelist she was and possibly noticing me umm-ing and ahh-ing and looking at the roof in a suddenly fascinated manner.   I had never associated lighthearted whimsy with the death of a parent before, but decided to sound very much like I completely knew what she meant, in order to move the conversation, that I now realised I was going to be having for quite some time, along a bit.

We found our connecting service, and made ourselves comfortable at a table by the bicycle compartment.    Shortly after we had done so, I realised how far I am away from the sensibilities of a romantic novelist when she leaned forward and said, ‘Oh by the way – I called you a wanker on Twitter earlier’.   Myself, I’d have either deleted the tweet, or saved it as an amusing story to tell friends after the subsequent marriage that, if you are a romantic novelist, probably happens pretty much every time you find yourself talking to a stranger on a train.   For this to work, however, would require me to want to marry someone who has as their Twitter biography: ‘Artful….Sharing all things Artful with yahs….Smooches…xOx‘ and who claims their location to be ‘Planet Artful‘.   True love will always find a way, I’m sure, but in this case only if you bludgeoned it with a table leg and bundled it into the back of a van.   We actually got on rather well, and I must say that after a shaky start, she turned out to be quite a good larf, and very interesting.   As we parted company she mentioned the possibility of deleting the tweet if she thought it necessary.   I’ve just checked, and it’s still there, so I can only assume that the jury is still out.

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Photards – this week’s voyages into photography are:

Top: Coat made from a single blanket in 1940.   It belongs to a friend I think I’ve mentioned before, who is setting himself up as an Ornamental Hermit.   If you’re wondering how much it costs to hire an Ornamental Hermit, it’s £3,000 a month, and you need to provide some kind of grotto.   For that, he’ll wear ragged clothes and contemplate profound things for you, regardless of the weather.   Bargain.   He once wrote ‘Real Life Is Not Here’ on the specials board outside a sandwich shop in which he was employed, then sat in the bin until he got fired.   This was shortly after being expelled from school for smoking in the class photograph.   The man’s a walking anecdote.

Middle: My lavish lighting display at Greenwich Market.   These are inspection lamps for looking under cars, and because I always use bulbs which are far too powerful, they slowly melt over the course of a long day.   You can see where this has started to happen on the right hand one.

Lower: Dog willing discarded chips to fall within snaffling distance using the power of his mind, Greenwich Market.   In the end, I did it for him.   His owner, who was in the chip shop, told me that he does this sort of thing all the time with various combinations of foodstuffs and passers-by, and as a result enjoys a considerably more varied and interesting diet than he does.

Recently, a colourful advertising banner in the Times claimed that Ten Pilates was the workout that ‘everyone’s talking about’.   While I doubt that this claim was ever meant to be taken as statistically accurate, I allowed myself a small smile as I read it.    I did this because what everyone around me at that moment was talking about was as follows: a) Danny, outlining the sexual attributes of Keith’s wife Barbara to Chris the Knowledge in order to annoy Keith, and b) Keith, involved in an extraordinarily foul mouthed discussion about the sale of Cuban cigars to the bloke who runs the juice bar outside the antiques shop with the Millwall fan in it.   All four participants in these exchanges were talking very loudly, principally as a result of Danny trying to drown out Keith, and Keith trying to drown out Danny.   Chris the Knowledge, incidentally, is so called as he is training to be a cabbie which – if you are unfamiliar with the procedure – involves acquiring ‘the Knowledge’.   The Knowledge is knowing where every street in London is and knowing how to get there from every other street in London, and is an impressive thing to have floating round your cerebral hippocampus.

I am on occasion partial to a cigar, and I will vouch for Keith’s price of three hundred quid for 25 San Christobal La Fuerzas being very fair.   Nonetheless, it was difficult for him to maintain a credible bargaining position when, within comfortable earshot, Danny was saying ‘Oh I remember that place – I had a go on Barbara there the other week’ in response to Chris the Knowledge offering a stage by stage guide to a notional journey between Plaistow and New Cross Gate.   I’ve just checked the route myself, and considering that Danny claimed to have had a go on Barbara on every single thoroughfare that Chris the Knowledge mentioned, this adds up to sixteen joyless liaisons from Selwyn Road to New Cross Gate station, including what must’ve been an appalling contretemps in the Blackwall Tunnel.   If ever I am called upon to undertake delicate international talks, perhaps for the United Nations, I will take Danny along to loudly claim to have had a go on my opponent’s mrs – including all the usual details of having to arrange proceedings so he could see the telly, as Million Pound Drop was on, and so forth – as it is a remarkably efficient way to add weight to an argument.   In the midst of this, I looked up to see a bloke walking through the market, yawning.   It wasn’t until I looked at him a second and third time that I realised he wasn’t yawning at all – he was just walking along with his mouth wide open, in the manner of a basking shark.   At this point, I found myself wishing that everyone actually was talking about Ten Pilates, if only for a couple of minutes, as it would feel like a little holiday.

After the noise and threats had died down, the weekend immediately set about presenting its specialities, which were boredomness and sub-zero temperaturality.    Trying to keep me behind my stall is like trying to keep a dog in a bath at the best of times, however on a weekend as hyperthermically cold and tedious as the one just past I am prone to wandering about all over the place in search of light conversation and warmth.    I often use Trader Wandering to judge the economic health of the market; if Alex the Jackets pops in for a natter about the footie, it’s a reasonably slow day for everyone.   If Hand Cream Jean does the same, it’s a very slow day as she is busier and further away, and if – as happened on Sunday – I find myself wandering around the grounds of the Maritime Museum and bump into Leather Thierry doing the same, I might as well catch a bus up west and see Five Guys Named Moe or something, and leave any punters to sort themselves out.    Either that, or leave Dave in charge.

Most market people (with the exception of Danny and Keith, now I come to think of it) are known by their first name and some kind of qualifier, to denote what they sell or where they are from, and thereby ease identification.   I am, for example, widely known as Paul Aprons or – even after all this time – Paul Camden.    Go back far enough, of course, and this is how surnames started.   Dave, though, is just ‘Dave’, because like Elvis, everyone who has seen Dave will immediately understand the implications for the immediate cultural landscape.    In the likely event you haven’t seen Dave, the image you need is this: a man goose-stepping up and down outside the Flood Gallery, shouting incoherently, and saying ‘You don’t want to mess with me, sunshine’ to Golden Retrievers, a species of canine with whom he seems to disagree about almost everything.   There is a theory that the mentally ill are actually the sane ones, and it’s the rest of us that are mad.   Using Dave as evidence, I will immediately refute that.   However, when it’s too cold and boring for even the insane to come out and – in Dave’s case – claim to have a two hundred room luxury hotel in Canary Wharf and Theo Pathitis’ thirty two digit phone number while casually approaching female browsers and blowing raspberries into their shoulder bags, you know you’re on a losing ticket.   God knows I know what being poor in a market is all about, but on this occasion, which was last Saturday, I only got through by promising myself that when the day was over I would go to the Lighthouse Fish Bar on Tooting Bec Road, get chips, walk home, and eat them in bed fully clothed – including hat, coat and scarf – until I felt warm again.   Later, throwing dining etiquette to the wind, that was exactly what I did do, and it was quite simply fantastic.

Attention: These posts are being turned into a book.  Or rather, the basis of a book.   It’s an idea that’s been floating around for a year or so, but after a couple of false starts, it’s well and truly underway.   Interestingly, ‘underway’ should really be ‘underweigh’, as it was originally a naval expression linked to ‘weighing anchor’.   Anyway.   It’s underweigh and I should think it’ll be finished in August, which is a keeping-everyone-happy expression I like to use when I actually mean October.

Photards – this weeks studies are:

Top – There was considerable commotion around the perimeter of Greenwich Market last Sunday, with cheering crowds and all that.   I rushed out excitedly, thinking that it might be a hanging, only to be met with this anatomically correct representation of Queen Elizabeth I.  It was all to do with Greenwich becoming a Royal Borough, which should make everything alright.   I declined the market’s generous invitation to trade in royal themed fancy dress as, like the actual royals, I value my dignity.

Middle: For all its manifold qualities, the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1 has the worst bar staff in the entire world.   They have literally not heard of anything.   Unless Vinny or the one who looks like Amy Winehouse is serving, I ask for a pint of Fosters and half a Strongbow and mix snakebite myself at the table, in a manner strangely reminiscent of salt n shake crisps from my childhood.

Lower: The South Wing of my home in Tooting Bec, London SW17.

There have always been widespread reports of ghostly passengers on the tube, especially for some reason on the Bakerloo Line between Paddington and Oxford Circus.   I think I know how they have come about.   This accidental ghostbusting occurred last Thursday while removing a pair of gloves at Holland Park.  Around Christmas, I suddenly took to glove removal by gently tugging at each gloved finger in turn, before removing the glove proper, for no other reason than I felt it might lend me an air of sinister gravitas, in the manner of a Bond villain.   Catching myself doing this in the reflection of the window opposite revealed that actually it makes you look like a preposterous homosexual weirdo and I immediately resolved to never do it again, but not before I had noticed the reflection of the girl sitting next to me.   She had a canvas shoulder bag with ‘OMG’ written on it in giant letters, which I thought was quite a larf, and more crucially was wearing the commuter classic office clothes with trainers combination, which I have always found strangely endearing.

This clothing mis-match once sparked a prolonged debate between myself and Joe as to whether or not it constituted a Modern Sin, and if it could therefore be placed alongside white jeans, saying ‘Can I get?’ instead of ‘Can/may I have?’, and several others we were compiling for a long-gone project of ours.   I recall many hours spent in the Lion on Junction Road, Archway arguing if liking the Clash more than the Pistols was a sin (Joe: no, me: yes) and similarly if liking the Velvet Underground more than the Stooges also constituted sinful activity (Me: yes, Joe, no).   This sort of thing was happening a lot at the time.  2008 was not a vintage year – to think otherwise would, now we’re in the swing of things, be sinful.

Anyway.    I was traveling at the time from Hyde Park Corner to Mile End – from central to east London, if you’re unfamiliar – where I spent large parts of a hair-raising but happy childhood.   Mile End has enabled me to formulate a theory recently about class, which is this: if you’re a middle class person, you can return to the area in which you grew up, and it will be pretty much the same.  If you’re working class and return to the area in which you grew up, it will be full of middle class people.   They’re everywhere.   You can’t move in east London for Bestival tickets and self-loathing.    Before we go any further, however, it’s worth pointing out that this is not necessarily a bad thing.    Having a middle class means that your society is civilised and successful.   Imagine a society without a middle class – yes, we’d lose the Strokes, the Guardian, Apple products and the Labour Party, and all the therapists would be bankrupt in a week – but we’d also be open to the worst excesses of medieval society by becoming either peasants or aristocrats.   The main flaw, as far as contemporary society is concerned, is that there is only a middle class, with everyone else demonised, marginalised or discredited, which throws the whole system out of kilter.   Be that as it may, gentrification of Mile End has been slower than in other parts of east London simply because whatever it is that middle class people want – kitchen plumbing so that hummous comes out of one tap and cava comes out the other, picnics every day from March to October, compulsory viewing of This Is England, gay children – can’t seem to take root there.   You could move Harrods, Kew Gardens, Buckingham Palace, Holland Park and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Association to Mile End, you could literally pave the streets there with gold, and it would still be shit.

It is for this reason that I retain a soft spot for it, of course.   It’ll come up eventually, like Deptford is nearly doing, but it’s not a bad place as such.   It was, however, unlikely to gentrify in the time it took to get there from Hyde Park last Thursday, and as we passed St Paul’s I noticed that the girl with the OMG handbag and trainers was no longer being reflected in the window opposite.   This was presumably because she’d left the tube at some point – my money’s on Chancery Lane – without me noticing, leaving her seat empty, and the window opposite unreflected-in.   It nonetheless gave me a bit of a jolt, and I wondered for a second if indeed she had been a spectre of some kind.  She wasn’t, obviously – ghosts don’t have jobs – but to my mind that is how these ghostly passenger stories start, with people seeing the reflection of someone in the opposite window and thinking it’s an apparition.   It can sometimes be wise to check that everyone is alive, though – a man was once challenged by a ticket inspector at East Finchley, whereupon it was found that he had been dead for a week.   It would be an awkward thing to have to point out to someone, though, so I can see why people didn’t like to mention it.

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Photards – this week’s studies are:

Top: Childbrain, aka Mike, with his dog.   The dog has just beaten him at backgammon.

Middle: Butters from the Christmas table.   They were generously laced with alcohol and so strong that they made your eyes water.   Some diners attempted to ’slam’ Christmas pudding with them.   From the left – brandy, cherry brandy, and Amarula Cream dairy treats.

Lower: My old dear with Lawrence of Arabia’s motorbike, in the Imperial War Museum.   Perhaps they should call it the Imperial Warm Museum to make it sound friendlier.   In any case, my old dear (who I think may have been at the sherry) is imitating the stance of a motorcyclist.   Lawrence of Arabia tore round the place on this motorcycle organising the Arab Revolt, digging up pyramids, wearing boating blazers, and generally having one of the most interesting lives of all time.   My old dear seems to think that he did it pushing a shopping trolley.

Whenever I think of supermarkets, I think of slow people with fat arms putting huge bags of crisps into trolleys, and I therefore avoid going into them whenever possible.   This means that until last Wednesday I had no idea that you can’t buy margarine anymore.   This in turn means that an austere speciality of my old dear’s and feature of my childhood – dry Weetabix with margarine on top – can sadly no longer be prepared.   It’s difficult to spread margarine on dry Weetabix, as they are fragile and break easily, with the result that the recipient of such bounty is often left sitting in front of Blue Peter with a joyless bowl of wheat dust and hydrogenated fat.   As I write this, it’s just come to mind that I also ate dripping as a child, which is revolting.   If you’ve never eaten dripping, think of things that drip, and then think about how hungry they make you feel.   It isn’t even an appetising word.   How my arteries survived adolescence continues to baffle the medical community.

Meanwhile, midwinter in the markets sees musicians shoved into the fray as gaps appear due to regular traders taking a bit of time off.   For some reason at Greenwich, it’s always folk singers, and I suppose because of the maritime connection they are usually doing sea shanties.  While I have nothing against the genre, I simply do not care about barrels of tobacco, or rigging, or what happened off the Cornish coast in 1847, or any of that stuff – I have an auntie in Plymouth, and that is as near as I get to the seafaring life.   This last happened on Sunday, an already commercially dismal day, which I coped with by downloading books about the Franco-Prussian War to my Kindle, shopping for dressing gowns at Liberty, and writing an entirely fictitious CV with which to apply to every single job in the Sunday Times Appointments section, every single Sunday, until I get one.   I’ve decided to do this as I have no education whatsoever beyond GCSE but do like having money to – as we have seen – shop for dressing gowns at Liberty on a quiet afternoon.   It’s a numbers game, as I see it, and as I am of absolutely no use, interest, or value to society, and am profoundly unlikely to find worthwhile employment unless I bluff my way into being a non executive director for the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS or chief safety regulator for Australian National Rail which, if I just keep applying often enough, is bound to happen.

Anyway.   Margarine covered Weetabix and dripping on toast aside, my old dear can still whip up a mean roast.   She had the opportunity to do so on Christmas Day for her new neighbours, who are Asian Christians.   I know they’re Asian Christians, because as my old dear herself said when excitedly informing me of such said ‘They’re Asian, Paul love, but they’re Christian.  They’re Asian Christians.   Asian, but Christian.   They’re Christian, but they’re also Asian.   Paul luvvey – they’re Asian Christians’.    My old dear is hardly unfamiliar with either Asians or Christians, what with being a churchgoer living in Slough, and was delighted to have them in for a Yule fest and, I should imagine, an extended discussion upon how funny it was that they were Christian, but also Asian – to all intents and purposes, Asian Christians.    I suppose it is because I have reached that point in life where your parents become your children that I found myself explaining that being Asian does not preclude you from being Christian, or indeed vice versa – Jesus was a very devout Christian, and would have been quite Middle Eastern looking, what with being from the Middle East and everything.   It’s not like her new neighbours have blacked up for a larf.   In any case, interrupting my old dear in full conversational flow is like trying to stop a runaway train by putting a bag of flour in front of it, and the combination of chattiness and faith – which she describes in the classic English fashion as ‘generally Christian, mainly’ – has provided all concerned with many hours of happy company.   I have instructed them to think of her as ‘bewildering, but a good source of cakes’, a description which should perhaps appear on her passport.

Photards: this weeks’ snapshots are -

Top: Marshall, Danny’s dog on Royal Wedding day.   I am unsure of Marshall’s views on constitutional monarchy, but Danny and Keith were for some time trying to train him to bite Communists.

Middle: The Goat Bag Man on the left and myself on the right, at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street London E1.   I bought that wrist chain from a bloke fly-pitching in Soho on what I remember was the hottest day ever recorded in Britain – which having just looked it up, was August 11th 2003 – and I haven’t taken it off since.   The Goat Bag Man is laughing at something Chris said, but which as this picture was taken I have yet to understand.   Once everything had died down I suddenly understood it and spat a mouthful of snakebite over both of them.

Lower: Empty barrows on midweek Petticoat Lane. There is a tradition among Borough Market traders of wheeling their barrows from London Bridge to Brighton in the interests of charity.   East Yard catastrophe magnet Pikey Dave is strongly rumoured to have wheeled one of the Petticoat Lane trolleys from the here to Camden Lock in the interests of stealing it.