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ogm!!111! its teh germans!!111
Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 2:06 pm | Write a comment
Ahoy there, casual lovers
I was on the quiet carriage of a train the other day, reading the Downing Street Years – which, incidentally, is the most grown up thing you can do – when a slight mishearing of a tannoy announcement lead me to believe that there was a Nazi trolley service passing through. The phrase ‘at seat’ (which to my relief was what the trolley service turned out to be) when uttered in a lumbering and neanderthal northern accent sounds like ‘Natzee’, as opposed to the correct and melodious southern ‘Nartsie’, and the announcer was from somewhere in the north. Bolton, Sheffield, I dunno. Somewhere.
In any case, I would probably have have been in the clear, racially speaking, if it had come to checking documents and bloodlines, as I am descended from at least six generations of undiluted total fucking idiot, employed in Chatham Dockyard in Kent, or the Port of London, in London. My grandmother walked to Chatham from Whitechapel, where she is from, to get work, met my grandfather there and married him on the basis that he ‘had a nice hat’. Their courtship was romantic, and involved lots of walks in Victoria Park in Mile End, during one of which they adopted a stray dog called Mickey. They also named all their subsequent dogs Mickey, and many of them enjoyed far more success and prosperity than any of their human descendants.
The Second World War very nearly put an end to the dynasty. This was not due to direct enemy action, but rather that my grandmother quickly realised that being married to my grandfather was far more annoying than being bombed by the Germans. The British army had wisely declined his repeated applications as he had gunned one of his ears off by accident while hunting rabbits on Hackney Marshes, thus imparing his hearing, and demonstrating a clear lack of prowess with firearms, although not with hat wearing, as we have seen. He was instead a firewarden, and when he wasn’t on the roof of a warehouse in Rotherhithe, would shelter under the kitchen table with my grandmother, who was pregnant and didn’t like huddling in Bethnal Green tube station with the other Cockneys more than was strictly necessary. It was not this cavalier approach to risk assessment that nearly put paid to the House of Griefjunkie, however, but the front door knocker, which would rattle as bombs and houses fell all around. With each rattle, my grandfather would say ‘Don’t answer it, love – it might be Hitler’, which is a pretty good gag under the circumstances, but yeah after the thousandth repetition in an already stressful situation would get a bit trying. Eventually, my grandmother threatened to divorce him and walk out of the house, firestorm or no firestorm, pregnant or not, unless he just please shut the fuck up. I would imagine there was also quite a lot of ‘Who’s that, calling at this hour?’ and ‘It’s probably just trick or treaters, pretend we’re not in’ and other such lines also being delivered under that kitchen table in Morgan Street, Mile End. The endless hours of bombing must have flown by.
Having survived the war and kept his marriage together by presumably having his mouth taped shut for large portions of the day, my grandfather listed his occupation as ‘boiler maker’ during a census taken in the 1950s. I can only assume that ‘boiler maker’ was contemporary east London slang for someone who repeatedly and enthusiastically steals curtain material from freight ships at what is now Canary Wharf and sells it down Aldgate on a Sunday morning, because this was his actual job, as far as I could ever make out. Some say that if you listen carefully in the small hours of a misty night his rallying cry of ‘Come on ladies! All nicked, nothing legal’ – with which he would attract grateful benefactors of crime to his pitch – can still be heard on a ghostly breath, echoing around the empty stalls and brownfield tobacco warehouses on Petticoat Lane.
Nov 1st, 2008
1:00 am
A friendly greeting Mr GreifJunkie,
though i’d make a checkup on how everything’s been since the last blog… Good? Great!
Speaking of ‘Nice Hats’ I’ve taken a liking to wearing young Mistress Grace’s Bowler Hat – it being the only hat that will ever suit me, i though it a good idea.
I would also like to go about asking how yours truly would go about setting up a real, proper and more real website, all to myslef. One that doesnt start with ‘www.myspace.com/’ or ‘freewebs’. I thought you might be able to help – because you have one…
help?
Hoping to come to your ‘happy camden home’ very soon
Nick
(sorry it was so long)
Nov 1st, 2008
9:55 pm
That Grace. Honestly, there is nothing she won’t stoop to, hat wise.
Setting up an actual website is really easy. I would love to say yeah, it’s very hard, you need to be Stephen Hawkins or Spock to sort it out, but just get a domain name and you can pretty much build it yourself from there. Get Frontpage or something (you can probably download it) and that will sort it out.
I got this site built by our excellent friend Gary from Retro GT. And we still owe him quite a lot of money for it, come to mention it.
Nov 2nd, 2008
1:09 am
I reckon i can do it on the whole building it up site
i was just wondering where to get the domain name?
Nov 4th, 2008
10:32 am
A quick Google search revealed over 35 million matches for ‘domain name’, so I can’t see it being much of a quest. I think we used 123-reg, but I can’t remember.
Nov 6th, 2008
10:08 pm
a nice hat is a much better reason than many there’s been, i’m sure…
(also look i am reading the blog and will continue to do so, honest! have a lovely day)
Nov 8th, 2008
7:07 pm
Ha yes. I am going to name drop you in the next one, which I would post now, if I wasn’t sitting in a net cafe in Camden with quite a nasty chesty cough.