Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

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.