Glastonbury Festival is a hundred thousand mid to high earning Guardian readers and/or their offspring standing in a field listening to Paul McCartney.   That’s counter culture for you.   Pretty much the whole festival season is basically an excuse for middle class people to get away from ethnic minorities for a bit, and apart from a downturn in sales of halloumi, hummus, cava and Apple products in Hackney and surrounding districts, I don’t see that the traditional mid summer slump in market stall revenues can be attributed to it.

It’s the heat that makes things tricky, as far as I am concerned.   The other Friday it was 38 degrees at my stall under the roof at Greenwich Market.   I coped by sitting around and looking grumpy, and a seven hour wait for the first sale was my reward.   I passed the day reflecting upon how far from what I had expected my life to be like this all was, and generally losing the will to live.   After a while, though, I snapped out of it and instead began to lose the will to allow anyone else to live, and felt better for it.

I rarely work weekdays, as they are boring, heatwave or not. Unless you have some kind of work you can be doing while you sit there, the hours will grind past in an almost physical manner, like having your face dragged along a brick wall. I find it hard to believe now that me and Martin did a fifty day consecutive run at Camden during July and August 2007, and spent a lot of time discussing with Boo the merits of a tailor he knows up Romilly Street who will cut you a jacket to the exact pattern as one worn by an SS officer. It’s probably worth pointing out that most uniform jackets are cut more or less to the same pattern as one worn by an SS officer – it’s a fairly standard template, just a bit more swastikery when all the optional extras are added – but I was intrigued as to why the tailor concerned would consider it to be a selling point. Neither me nor Boo got an SS pattern jacket, which is a victory for the Free World. At some length we decided that we would go to Damage, which was a brilliant military surplus shop under the arches in the old Stables Market, and get enamel mugs of exactly the same type used by Montgomery’s Desert Rats as they fought – yes that’s right – Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Tunisia and the Middle East in World War Two, in the interests of balancing things up.

My favourite staff member in Damage was Jo.   The first time I saw Jo she had written ‘Fuck Off’ across her face with nail varnish, which is the kind of thing that will endear a person to me.  She explained that she had done it the previous night in the Underworld, when she got bored of people talking to her.  I wondered if getting a taxi home might have been easier and less permanent; she explained that she didn’t even want a cabbie talking to her, and had stomped off to Tufnell Park on foot, which is a fair stroll, even if you are E’ing off your tits.  I sometimes wonder what happened to Jo.  The last I heard, she was working as a hospital porter in Leeds, although I prefer to think of her as dying a heroine’s death by literally exploding when one person too many asked her why she had ‘Fuck Off’ written across her face, and flying off into orbit like an untethered Catherine wheel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am the only heterosexual man ever to have bought Faith by George Micheal, and I continue to like it despite the number of people who think it would be nice if they could touch my body dwindling by the year.  I’m already resigned to increasing reliance upon professionals in this particular arena, a process which begun in earnest with a memorable bout of dentistry last week.  It started reasonably enough in the waiting room with the usual reading of Build Your Home magazine while assuming that the extra mouth washing I had undertaken prior to coming to the surgery would reverse several years of eating almost nothing that wasn’t caramel based.

While reading, I noticed a bloke Windolene-ing the glass doors of some kind of dental cabinet, and it was only when our names were called at the same time that I realised he was in fact my dentist.   I actually held the door open for him as we went into the dentistry parlour, and asked for a show about Gary Numan to be put on MTV for me to watch while we got down to the matter in hand.   This is how I came to be contemplating Gary Numan’s dentistry skills very intently indeed in a happily successful bid to take my mind off the drills and pain and gurgling.   He certainly has what appears to be a dentists’ shirt on in the ‘Are Friends Electric?’ video, I reasoned over the smell of scorched enamel, although admittedly it does make him look like the kind of dentist whose clientele would be either daleks or thought criminals, or who is employed on the Death Star doing fillings for stormtroopers.

For all his admirable if baffling attention to waiting room tidiness, though, my dentist is a larf, and quickly saw through my clever ruse of putting ‘Dentist’ as my occupation on my new patient form in order to get preferential rates.  Before we got underway, he asked me ‘Are you nervous of dentists at all?’ ‘No’ I replied, quite truthfully. ‘Well you might be after this’ he said ‘As it’s really going to hurt’.   I raised my arm very slightly as I felt our easy and highly enjoyable familiarity would support a high five, but it became immediately apparent that he had stopped pissing about and had started to earn his money.

It’s all good though, really.   Going to the dentist is one of the few times I get to be called Mr Smith without being arrested first, for a start, and I really do need to lose my stupidly sweet tooth.   I have diabetes, although my chosen method of dealing with this is to simply assume that, actually, I don’t.   I have it only very slightly, which is fortunate, and means that I don’t have to worry about insulin or going without huge cakes and such or anything like that.   In fact, I am so enthusiastic about not going without huge cakes that if sleeping on my own I will keep a gateau by the bed for reassurance in case I wake suddenly from a bad dream.   My diabetes does, however, manifest itself in an ocular condition called keratoconus.  This isn’t nearly as grim as it sounds, but I wouldn’t look up if I were you as any description will probably include pictures of corneal surgery.   I would imagine that one of the few crumbs of comfort about corneal surgery is that at least it isn’t dental surgery, and a considerably larger four-course-dinner-with-coffee-cheeseboard-and-cigars banquet of comfort is that your eye takes a year to recover, during which time you can legitimately wear an eye patch if you fancy it.   In the unlikely event I ever have the surgery, I would consider myself half a man if, under those circumstances, I didn’t get a parrot, a cutlass, and fuck about on the Spanish main making scurvy dogs walk the plank.   Thinking about it, though, weird diabetes of the eyes might explain why a dietician would conclude that I can only see sugar based products when food shopping.

[Can I just point out to my old dear if she is reading that I am neither toothless nor blind nor obese.   It's all fine.   Everything's fine.]

Twitter After all this time, I am still undecided.

Facebook: Still 117.  Someone left, but someone else joined, so it all worked out.

One of my favourite sporting stories concerns Graeme Souness, ex-Liverpool archetypal midfield general, and, by 1992, manager of Glasgow Rangers. In this latter capacity, he went to scout Red Star Belgrade, who were at the time one of the greatest sides in Europe, and who Rangers were due to play in the third round of the European Cup. Arriving back in Glasgow, the team, squad members and associated personnel were assembled for a tactical overview of the Yugoslav giants, and were somewhat surprised when this consisted entirely of Souness unveiling a flip-chart upon which he had written the words ‘We’re Fucked’.

Almost everyone I have ever traded with in any market in London had their first Souness-like moment of clarity shortly before realising that they were going to have to trade in a market in the first place, and has typically had several subsequent ones on an almost daily basis, leading to an outlook which, now I come to think of it, essentially consists of one long pep talk prior to an upcoming game with Red Star Belgrade, which never actually arrives. In fact, for anyone connected with this particular company, it is as if Graeme Souness is hiding behind every apron and leaping out of every storage box, eternally tapping his motivational flip-chart in a knowing manner.

This gives rise to one of the most clearly noticeable features of market life: that no one running a market stall set out to run a market stall, and they have only arrived at this point via the most ridiculous and unlikely route, like a coin falling through one of those RNLI collecting boxes you see in chip shops.   It isn’t like being an accountant, for example, or a doctor, where all of your colleagues trained to be accountants or doctors and have therefore had much the same educational and career path.   I made a list while trading today, and found that it contained jobless actors, ex-politicians, disgraced headmasters, former Israeli special forces operatives, wide boys on their way up, wide boys on their way down, the homeless, the helpless, the hapless and the toothless, the semi and fully insane, alcoholics by the dozen, ex-cons by the score, revolutionary Communists, sleeper cell anarchists, the illegal, the vaguely legal and the trans-legal, dreamers, schemers and has-beeners, idiots, shamblers, idlers, derelicts, stealers, dealers and geniuses of every variety and persuasion, united by little other than the rather salient fact that they are almost entirely unemployable in any conventional capacity.

As you might imagine, with a population which closely resembles the patrons of that pub in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker stops whining long enough to buy a van off Han Solo, all manner of unlikely alliances are forged.   Us and Tony last year, for a start, and the unfortunate one between my former East Yard sparring partner Pikey Dave and his long term Chinese right-hand-man Win.  Win had come over from China especially to look after his sister, and was therefore quite furiously uninmpressed when Dave shagged her in a variety of imaginative positions and locations, including, brilliantly, in the rear storage area in the Rear Storage Area at Camden Lock.   She was, I am reliably informed, both filthy and insatiable.   I said that yeah maybe you should have told Win that, he might have been a bit more understanding, and not fucked off back to China with half your stock.   I also pointed out that he was literally in a No Win situation, to which he pointed out how much he would like me to piss off.    Come to think of it though, there was some consolation for Dave as, like Glasgow Rangers during their eventual 4-1 defeat by Red Star Belgrade in that far off European Cup tie, he lost the game but did at least manage to score.

Twitter: Over capacity I should think.

Facebook: 117 in the Facebook group.  Been the same for a while now, which is nice, as everyone is obviously getting on with each other nicely.

I visited a hospice recently, and it had a merchandising department. I was quite intrigued by this, having already contemplated making my Auntie Mavis, of whom I am inordinately fond and who is actually in the hospice, a t-shirt with ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Live Here – But It Helps’ on it, but was dissuaded by my old dear. However, the merchandising in question was actually very nice – pens and all that with little sailors and such along the side, it being run by the Royal Naval Benevolent Fund, and not as I had hoped bumper stickers with ‘I’ve Been To Pembroke House, Apparently’ on them or ‘I Came For The Food And Stayed Because I’ve Forgotten Who I Am’ commemorative plates.

Auntie Mavis and I have always had a very close bond, and I am well qualified to state that I have known her with considerably more marbles than currently seem to be in her possession. She had very little idea of where she is or why, a fact brought to my immediate attention when she took me aside and whispered urgently that “I’m not sure I should be here. I like these people but some of them are really ill.”

By way of conversation as I wheeled her round the corridors and gardens of Pembroke House, I mused aloud that hospices were, in many regards, like pleased-with-themselves early 90’s indie wankers Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. I had never been in a hospice before, and so I assumed that my Auntie’s was a good one. If you have never heard any form of musical expression any time in your entire life, and then someone played you some Carter USM, you would similarly – and, of course, wrongly – assume that they must be quite good, simply by virtue of the fact that they exist in the first place.

If you’re mercifully unfamiliar with Carter USM, they essentially made a career out of shouting ‘Look how clever we are!’ through megaphones at posh kids in bad clothes who snort when they laugh, which they do a lot, at everything, and who as far as I have been able to ascertain form their entire fanbase. Jim Bob and Fruitbat – for that is what the members of Carter USM call themselves and yes, I let out an involuntary appalled scream when I discovered that, too – might as well have had the phrase ‘Can You See What We Did There?’ at the end of every single line of every single song they ever wrote. Annoyingly, it is impossible not to like Jim Bob – I’ve seen him being interviewed on telly shows (about other people) – but the real crime of Carter USM is that although they do undoubtedly have their moments – I am listening to a Best Of as I write this and unhating it – by the time you’ve noticed you’ve beaten your knuckles to a bloody mess against the floorboards in a blind, furious rage. I think I have adequately aired my feelings on the matter.

Anyway. I relayed the above to Auntie Mavis as we bumped around an ornamental lawn, and she said “I don’t know what you’re saying but I love to hear your voice”, an experience which I confirmed was pretty much the same for me, too. Regressing to her twenties later on, she attempted to arrange the sale of new curtains to one of the nurses, via my long-gone grandfather’s long-gone stall at Petticoat Lane. I found this eye-pricklingly touching, as I felt I was seeing someone at their prime and on their way out, as if trapped in a time machine that you hope against hope they still have the warranty for. We watched the World Cup for a while and then as I – her nephew – handed over for a visit from my old dear – her sister – she confided in me that the gardens were beautiful, the food was delicious, everybody was lovely and that all she really wanted now was a visit from her family.

…or so they say.   However, even if I had traded all day on Saturday with my eyes tightly closed, I would still have known that there was a framed Pac Man tube map prominently displayed behind the stall because of the relentless waves of highly excited people rushing up to the pitch and shouting ‘Oh my God! Space Invaders!’ at it.

This was, however, only one of several irritations on what was an annoying weekend.  I had commenced it slightly later than I would usually like, a fact stridently announched by Jimmy who sells ho-hum artwork by the entrance.  Jimmy is one of those people who is ‘a bit of a character’, and his voice and demeanour suggest a strict diet of Highland terriers and tartan headscarves.  ‘Yes,’  I replied while hastily hefting storage boxes about, ‘but I would rather be late than Scottish’, which seemed to keep him quiet.

Such was the pace of the ensuing day that I was able to ascertain that a half full storage box, if kicked with the correct amount of force, will precisely replicate the opening of the theme music to Grandstand.  I got Keith to do the little twiddly bit that immediately follows on the stall frame with pens, which gave us a passably good first two seconds of the tune, although we struggled after that as it is very difficult to do the rest with coat hangers and bits of cardboard in place of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Len Stevens.   Nonetheless I was happy with our efforts, especially considering the poor quality of available materials, and made me quite certain that if we had been among the prisoners in Colditz, we’d have been the ones making the glider in the loft.

As the day wore on, the phrase ‘That’s a bit expensive’ was being uttered erroneously by many bored representatives of the general public who wouldn’t know quality if it whipped its cock out and slapped them round the face with it.  I’m afraid I’m simply not at home to this kind of thing, and have found that the enterprising stall holder has a number of counter responses at his disposal, which can be chosen according to mood.  My  usual tactic these days is to simply pretend that it isn’t my stall and I’m just looking after it for someone else.  This will also deal with another common assertion, which is that I ‘couldn’t have thought of all this stuff’.  However, the most pleasing way I have found of dealing with the ‘That’s a bit expensive’ punter is to stop them and say ‘Yeah sorry, this is going to sound a bit weird, but can you say that last sentence again, but with the words ‘…for me’ at the end’, and then, once they have, say ‘Yes I thought that’s what you meant’ prior to asking them to leave immediately. 

Twitter: Useful if you are just too fascinating to keep your thoughts to yourself.    

Facebook: Still holding at 117 in the Reluctant Facebook Group, although we are kicking our long term confederate and drinking partner Chris out this week to see how closely he is following things.

I am writing this on a train.  I travel on trains a lot, and on the whole I enjoy it.  I almost always travel First Class – I think the nation expects it of me – and in any case reading on trains is one of my favourite things, and it is nice to do this in a usually silent carriage.  Very often, I write stuff while on the train too, and one of these occasions is, as we have already established, now. 

The reason I am writing this now is that I have just been to the buffet for tea.  I like to get suitably provisioned before the journey starts in earnest, and when I arrived, the buffet wasn’t quite open.  While I was waiting, I noticed a heterosexual man in a pink shirt also waiting, just in front of me.  It takes a certain type of heterosexual man to carry off a pink shirt confidently – I tried it once with a Fred Perry, and binned it after being called a bender all evening – but this bloke was one of those people, and we acknowledged each other in the Unspoken Language of Men as we waited.  He then nipped off for a second, perhaps to check something at his seat.  At that moment two things happened: the buffet shutter opened, and a Third Man appeared, leant on the counter, and ordered a cup of tea. This constitutes queue jumping, which is a crime against civility, and therefore, perhaps the worst kind of crime there is.

I was happy to let it pass because neither me nor the Man in the Pink Shirt were near the counter itself, but merely loitering in the vicinity at the crucial moment that the Third Man arrived.  As the Third Man’s tea was being prepared, however, the Man in the Pink Shirt reappeared.  I beckoned him to go before me, thus preserving our queue, as I considered that the Third Man had no case to answer, being that there was no tangible overall queue in place when he arrived, and he had the general demeanour and deportment of a decent chap.  The Man in the Pink Shirt said ‘There’s no hurry, after you’ and allowed me to stand in front of him.  He then noticed the Third Man being served and said, very firmly ‘Excuse me – you’ve just pushed in in front of this gentlemen, who, like myself, has been waiting here for quite some time’.  The three of us, strangers hurled together by an unwitting breech of social etiquette, had clearly arrived at a key moment.  The world held its breath.

‘I’m so sorry’ said the Third Man, visibly embarrassed, ‘I didn’t realise there was a queue’.  I wasn’t entirely sure what to do, so I waffled a bit by saying ‘Oh really, it’s fine, I wasn’t paying attention, just looking at the sunshine – nice to see it for once, if only from inside a train’, despite there having been glorious sunshine in southern England for the previous nine straight days, interrupted only by nightfall.  ‘Could you take for this gentleman’s tea as well?’ the Third Man asked the nice auntie type lady behind the counter ‘I’m afraid I accidentally jumped the queue ahead of him’.  I quickly put aside any sneaking suspicions that I may have become the bitch in this curious menage a trois, as after all the Third Man was merely atoning for an entirely innocent and minor breech of social protocol.

I thanked him profusely and wished him good health as he paid and realised that, hang on - the Man in the Pink Shirt was now third in a queue he had started and robustly championed, which didn’t seem right.  ‘In the spirit of things’, I said, ‘I will pay for the Man in the Pink Shirt’s tea’, as I felt this would redress the balance.  This was welcomed by all as a splendid idea. ‘I know’ said the Man in the Pink Shirt, ‘Seeing as we did all get served within about a minute, and I am now the only one not out of pocket, I shall buy some biscuits, as they are roughly the same price as a cup of tea and there are six of them, so we can split them, two each’.  The nice auntie type lady gave each of us a napkin to wrap our biscuits in, and, bidding each other a safe journey, we all went back to our seats, better men than we had previously been.

Twitter: Superfluous social networking medium for the very self indulgent.

Facebook: Holding steady at 116 members in the Facebook group. We’re going to start deleting a person every week until we find someone who notices.

The churchyard of Christ Church Spitalfields, near the market on Commercial Road, was at one time inhabited by tramps and vagrants so verminous and lice ridden that it was locally known as Itchy Park.  Fact fans, trivia buffs and tittle tattle afficionados will be interested to learn that this ‘Itchy Park’ was the inspiration for the Small Faces’ 1966 hit – which for some reason I just don’t get on with – Itchycoo Park.

Even more interestingly, it was on the jukebox of the adjacent and dearly beloved (by us) Duke of Wellington public house during my two hour stint as de facto landlord, on March 7th this year.  Vinny, the actual landlord, had nipped out for a while, and the only other punter in the place was a bloke in his twenties reading Byron.  I know he was reading Byron, because when I asked him what he was reading, he showed me the cover of the book for half a second without saying anything or moving his eyes or head at all.  I got the impression that he was really reading Byron, in a way that someone like myself simply could not, even if I chose to try.   It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he dressed up like Bryon in order to further enjoy the book, but unless Bryon wore Pink Floyd t shirts like some sort of twat I don’t think he had on this occasion.

The Duke of Wellington has a nice, comfortable, lived in – or rather, given its age, died in – feel, and attracts a pleasingly varied clientele.  This includes booze shamblers such as ourselves, who will sit at the table by the dartboard and drink until they realise it is 3 in the morning and the Northern Line has shut down, to itinerant Bens and Barneys and Joshes and Sophies, who are the inevitable result of the Ben Heaviness of inner city London that we observed here.  Once, the Duke was so Ben-heavy that me and Louis and Gary had to sit in the garden in the cold for ten minutes, until Vinny the landlord came out and said ‘Gentlemen, your table is ready’ and guided us to the one by the door under the picture of the Duke of Wellington himself – my favourite one, actually – which he had cleared by saying ‘Excuse me, can you lot fuck off and stand over there’. 

Anyway.  What struck me as strange about the man was not so much that he had gone up the pub to read Byron – why shouldn’t he, after all – but the manner in which he was reading it.  He sort of looked heroic, as if he had arranged himself in a manner specifically designed for someone reading romantic poetry.  The later evening hours at the Duke are no stranger to me arranging myself in the manner of someone who has consumed a great deal of snakebite, so while I am in no position to criticise, it did seem like the sort of thing he should be beaten up for.  Not too badly, just generally slapped about to make the point, and then left to think about himself for a bit. 

Contemplating the man reading Byron in the pub, then, was how I spent the evening of March 7th 2010.  I ended up quite hammered, and in the mood of indulgent self celebration which is the only and ultimate purpose of alcohol consumption, I decided it would be a good idea to write 7/3/10 on a plastic disc I had about my person and place it in an empty Johnny Walker Black Label case on the window sill, where I should think it still is, awaiting discovery by future civilisations.   It’s not that I don’t get out much, but that these days this is about as exciting as it gets when I do.

Twitter: Always fascinating.

Facebook:  Someone else has simply had enough, so we’re down from 117 to 116 members this week.

Keith inadvertantly struck a public sector worker in the face with a banana at Greenwich Market on Sunday. If you’re reading this outside the UK, the public sector is a thing which either employs three people to do one person’s job, or one person to do three people’s jobs, and whose main role in wider society is to provide secure employment for terminally but non-specifically unhappy women. It’s cats, yoghurts, and crying at desks, basically, and we quickly knew that this woman was a public sector employee because she said ‘I’m a social worker, you know’ a bit angrily, and is probably just settling in to a couple of years off work with depression as I write.

In case you aren’t aware of who Keith is, he sells photographic art in our section of the market, and if a picture of him in shorts in the ’80s is to be believed, is eight inches on the slack. The catalyst between the public sector worker, the trouser proud photography vendor and the accidental fruity missile is Danny, who sells jewellery opposite my usual pitch. When bored, Danny will throw leftover foodstuffs onto the top of Keith’s stall, in order to attract pidgeons who, if everything goes to plan, will relieve themselves all over Keith’s stuff. It’s a remarkably successful ploy, and never one to be outdone, I’m thinking of putting a meadow in the market roof, to see if it works with cows.

Anyway. Danny had placed the banana above Keith’s stall some hours earlier, and it was by the magic of failing to hit Danny when he lobbed it back that Keith hit the social worker instead. It’s always a shame when a civilian gets caught up in bored market traders trying to piss each other off for a larf, but that’s the way it goes in the ghetto. Anyone who’s been here for a very long time will recall the Great East Yard Fued at Camden in the summer of 2008, which saw me largely engaged in distracting Pikey Dave long enough to set fire to items on his stall in response to having all my storage boxes floated out onto the Grand Union Canal with my stock in them. I was reminded of all this on a recent visit to Camden, when Dave pulled me over and said ‘Yeah those Hello Kitty handbags I had the other year. I sold a load to Irish Bill a couple of weeks ago, and now he’s getting grief from punters because in every single bag someone’s put a sheet of A4 paper which has a big cock with all spunk coming out of the end drawn on it. Did you do that?‘  I said no, because I felt that it was probably a good moment to do a bit of lying.

Twitter: Superfluous social networking site for bored people.

Facebook: No change this week, so we remain on a nice round 117 members.

I have been looking at expanding our lavish kitchenware department recently, and I know a man who knows a man who knows a man who can cut toughened laminate glass. It isn’t his main line of business, but we are usually dealing with people who are doing things that aren’t their main line of business, or else their main line of business would be as ramshackle, haphazard and defined by endless grinding poverty as ours. Anyway. One of the properties I find most pleasing about toughened laminate glass is that, at a thickness of 40mm, it will stop a bullet. This appealed to me greatly, as I thought it would be a bit of a larf to produce a bulletproof chopping board.

Last week, I headed west to Acton to see the prototype. It had ‘Lovely Chopper’ on it, which I’m afraid was the best I could come up with design-wise at short notice, but otherwise it was very Anne Boleyn, which incidentally is London market slang for ‘well executed.’ It did look a bit on the thin side, though, and as the pair of us stood in a long and rather rusty open sided corregated iron shed, which I suppose at some point in the distant past was probably a repair depot for railway rolling stock, I said ‘Yeah it’s nice, but bollocks is it bulletproof’. My astonishment at what happened next – that our new kitchenware manufacturer took out a Glock automatic pistol and shot it, with a bored air more suited to someone examining a wine list in a restaurant they didn’t like but were resigned to eating in – was matched only by my astonishment that I had miraculously not shat myself.

The minutes that followed this remarkable turn of events were very good ones for freestyle swearing. I raised a number of key concerns, which I am not ashamed to admit that I conveyed at the top of my vocal range, in something approaching a scream. I am a gentleman who prides himself on a collected manner, I explained, but then I am also a gentleman who does not associate with fucking mentalists who fire live ammunition at kitchenware in order to answer questions of practical durability. He countered this by saying that it was a party trick he used to demonstrate stuff to clients, to which I responded with yeah, I’m lucky I snapped you up before Ikea did, and does your existing client base include Bonnie and fucking Clyde and Butch fucking Cassidy and the Sundance bastard Kid. Repeated sentiments in this general vein led to me being advised to keep my ‘fucking dress on’, as it was only meant as ‘a little surprise’, which in turn led to my exhortation to be given the ‘fucking shooter’ so that I could surprise his arse with it.

On the tube home I contemplated how unfortunate ‘Bollocks is it bulletproof’ would have been as a choice of last words, and tried not to reflect in quite so much detail what someone who habitually works with bulletproof glass and carries loaded firearms about their person actually does do for their main line of business. However, as I exchanged the Central Line for the Northern Line under Tottenham Court Road, I reflected that although I have a largely glamourless and disfabulous existance, I have at least seen a man shoot a chopping board in a dilapidated railway building in Acton, which is a proud claim that not many people can make.

Facebook: Several thousand visitors to the site searching for Glee Club references in the wake of our being ripped off by the writers of that otherwise very good hit show resulted in not a single new member, so we remain at 117. Facebook groups forming as a tribute to Dolphins Are Gay Sharks – the bit of our product range to which the Glee Club writers took a particular shine – typically have several thousand members and counting, none of whom have the faintest idea who we are.

Twitter: Mainly we use this as an uninstant Instant Messenger these days, like most people.