bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Ahoy there, casual lovers

I am over tired at the moment, and I know this because I happened upon the opening sequence of Bagpuss the other day and very nearly burst into tears.   Bagpuss is a genuinely warm and lovely programme, although I was always a bit worried about the sepia photards of Emily that appear at the beginning, as she looked to my undeveloped mind like the ghost of a dead child.   I also loved Pipkins, which featured a mental rabbit called Hartley the Hare, who looks like Basil Brush would do if he had been in the Happy Mondays.   He was a wreck, and in a permanent state of decline but I loved him, like Emily loved Bagpuss.   I once got very upset when I noticed that the Pipkins van had a dent in the rear door, having to be calmed down by my Auntie Beryl.

[You should do 'read more' now, and at the end I have put links to
both Bagpuss and Hartley the Hare, largely for the benefit of foreign
types who are unfamiliar with the English tradition of posh and/or gay
children's television characters. I draw particular attention to the
first link 0:58 - 1:47, in which Hartley claims to have 'beautiful
ears', a 'glorious nose' and 'wildly exciting eyes'.]

Watching telly only happened at my grandparents’ house, as we didn’t
have a telly at all.  We didn’t have a phone either, as where I grew
up was quite fail.  This explains why I was born on the upstairs
landing of a terraced house which had carpet off-cuts for curtains,
instead of for example in the Royal London Hospital like the other
urchins from my estate, sticky of face and scabby of knee and mostly
now in Belmarsh for armed robbery, fraud, or aggravated burglary.  The
problem was that although Mile End was an excellent breeding ground for
criminals, they didn’t at the time tend to be very good
criminals.   For example, I recall a story of two kids from my school
on the rob in a house in, I think, Hampstead.   Unable to find
anything worth stealing, they observed the ‘never leave with nothing’
maxim of the habitual housebreaker, and decided to steal a grandfather
clock.   I turned my back on a life of crime not because I didn’t think
it would suit me, but because I didn’t want to be dealing with the kind
of people who would steal a grandfather clock and be apprehended by the
old bill hefting it along Finchley Road at two in the morning like an
gigantic clanging coffin.   They were the kind of people who would try
to sneak a thoroughbred out of a racecourse by putting a collar on it
and claiming it was an alsatian.

Despite being a generally happy child, I always regarded the London Underground as a kind of escape route away from inexpert timepiece stealers and general fuckwittery, and this must be where my lifelong fascination for the tube network comes from.    And it really is genuinely interesting: for a start, Arnos Grove station, tucked away at the top of the Piccadilly Line, has a cat called Spooky living in it.   I think we all suspected as much, but I am now in a position to confirm the rumour.   It was also once claimed that the evil black fumes spewing from Great Portland Street could cure asthma.   This brilliant fib and fine example of defending a hopeless position was made by the owner of the Metropolitan and District Railway, which later became the District Line, against local residents who were about to get his station closed down as a result of soot, steam and filthy carcinogenic smoke billowing about all over the place.   As massive lies go, it is a good one, as yes the fumes could possibly cure asthma, in the same way that eating paper, wearing corduroy espadrilles or habitually dressing like Charles II could all possibly cure asthma, but probably won’t. Still, he got away with it, which is why you don’t have to walk from Baker Street to King’s Cross, and why life expectancy in the otherwise lovely Great Portland Street area was inexplicably low in the late nineteenth century.

I am knee deep in factoids about the tube as a result of researching the new wave of things we’ll be doing in the New Year.    This means I spend a lot of time curled up on comfy sofas and dunking plain chocolate digestives into mugs of Gold Blend, which is pretty much how I envisaged earning a living, rather than all that tiresome arseing about at Camden Lock.   Zena the Warrior Princess is on the telly very quietly, which makes me feel like a fat 90s lesbian, but other than that it is an idyllic caffeine fuelled scene.   On the subject of Camden Lock, it is worth pointing out that this coming weekend won’t be our last one there, after all.   I’ve been astonished that, for an announcement made here on a blog that no one reads on a website that no one knows about and a Facebook group that no-one ever joins, it did seem to generate an unusually large number of emails and phone calls and what have you.   So yes, while the good ship Griefjunkie is definitely leaving the East Yard in the near future, it won’t be this weekend. I reckon we’ll work through January, call it a day there, then come back in five years and do a reunion weekend, like Take That.

Right, those links, and a lovely merry Christmas:

Hartley the Hare at the dentist

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=70ayM2XqtFY&feature=related

Bagpuss, with the mice on excellent form 3:20 – 4:56, animated by the irreplaceable Oliver Postgate:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DzI_xAIrg0A&feature=related