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Questionable Heckles
May 5th, 2010
Dear Rachel
‘All nicked, nuffink legal, take it orf me ‘ands’. Wise words there from my own grandfather, who as some of you may recall operated a reasonably successful curtain material business from a stall at Petticoat Lane for many years, before, as he put it, his supplier went bust. Or, as everyone else would put it, the London docks closed, causing a catastrophic decline in the number of warehouses you could steal curtain material from. He may well also have been responsible for perennial crowd pleaser ‘English Cox – a lady knows what’s best’ from my uncle’s fruit and veg days, and was in any case a big fan of selling things he hadn’t actually bought in the first place.
With genetic material of this quality locked into my DNA, it is unsurprising that I have an ear for a heckle. My current favourite is ‘Do you have eczema at all, madam?‘ which is the deathless gambit of the handcream stall in the centre of Greenwich market. It’s a bold challange alright, and if they would just follow it up with ‘On your elbows perhaps? Or your minge?‘ it would make me laugh uncontrollably for, I would imagine, about twenty five minutes.
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Middle Class People Can’t Say ‘Mate’.
April 28th, 2010
Dear Rachel
Middle class people can’t say ‘mate’ properly. They can say the actual word alright, but it sounds a bit implausible, in the same way that you could feasibly meet a man called Jim Membership, but you probably won’t.
Fortunately. the internet – along with rugby, festivals, voting, picnics, hypocracy, blogging, and lesbianism – is an almost exclusively middle class hobby, so while we’re here you might want to try speaking aloud your half of an imaginary conversation with a member of the working class – be it a removal man, plumber, or slag. The chances are you’ll fall down by pronouncing the ‘t’ in ‘mate’, which really you need to fold away into the roof of your mouth with the back of your tongue when you say it, so that it doesn’t escape and make you look like a tourist. Linguisticians refer to this escaping ‘t’ sound as a ‘Fuckwit T’.
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The Horse Botherer
April 23rd, 2010
Dear Rachel,
I was talking to a bloke on Nelson Road the other day, who was at odds with his horse because, remarkably, he felt it was sarcastic. I was fairly taken aback, as you may expect, and took him up on his offer of a closer look. The horse – Barry – did have a slightly quizzical air about him, I suppose, but so would you if you were a large equine quadroped with a market trader of murky repute looking at you and saying ‘Yeah he probably just wants some crisps’.
I am, however, in an excellent position to judge the mood of horses and other mammals as I like to talk to them and do their replies back, mainly for the entertainment of small children, but also if I have nothing else to do of an afternoon. Because of this, there is a large part of my mind that is entirely at ease with the idea of horses having bank accounts, schools, library cards and putting on hats and false moustaches in order to buy Pringles and Kit Kats from local retailers, and while my conversations with them over the years have revealed them to be kind hearted, wise if somewhat ninnyish, and fond of practical jokes, I can’t really imagine one saying ‘Oh yummy – Greenwich again! Fanfuckingtastic! You really have made my happiness perfect, complete, and infifuckingnite’ or whatever. On that basis, I clear Barry of all charges of sarcasm.
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Pin Dropping Moment At Greenwich Market
April 12th, 2010
Dear Rachel
I haven’t blushed since 1994, but I did on Saturday at Greenwich Market after I asked a lady at the stall how far along she was, to which she revealed that she wasn’t actually pregnant. For a gentleman retailer such as myself, whose livelihood pretty much depends on saying inappropriate things to strangers, I’m quite surprised I’ve avoided this classic pitfall for so long. The fact is, she did look pregnant, but this wasn’t as significant for me as the other, subsequent, fact, which was that her and her boyfriend were too nice to leave the stall indignantly like normal people, but just stood there for ages looking at aprons and discussing which one would suit which of their friends, and so on, while I blushed so much that I gave myself a slight headache. Even my teeth were blushing, and I had that thing where you get a roaring noise in your ears because there is so much blood charging towards your blush nodes.
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Further Adventures In Greenwich
March 26th, 2010
Dear Rachel
On a Saturday morning, Danny, who trades opposite me at Greenwich Market, usually likes to show me bleak iPhone footage of, I dunno, dogs shagging women, dwarves shagging ponies, the disabled shagging tennis rackets, stuff like that. Basically, things improbably shagging other things in ways that, later on when you are at home, make you want to cry in the bath.
Thankfully, there has been less time for these spirit-jading episodes recently as I am now running a double pitch, with the new prints and such, and it takes much longer to set up. At Camden, as I think I said before back in the Myspace days, setting up was easy: I would discuss the footie with Barry the Cakes over a custard doughnut, then have a second by the canal while chatting to a lady called Jenny, who used to run along the towpath every morning, and then wander back to the East Yard contemplating how advisable my breakfast choices really were for a diabetic, by which time Martin would have everything sorted out and ready to go.�
Read the rest of this entry »
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Daffodils In SE10
March 17th, 2010
Dear Rachel,
Non violence never solved anything. It would, however, have prevented me playing unlikely mentor to a bunch of young nightbus stabbers from Stratford at Greenwich Market on Sunday, because if they hadn’t spent their GCSE revision time recording petty crimes on their phones, they a) wouldn’t have been caught and b) wouldn’t have found themselves selling daffodils from a market stall at seven thirty on a Mothers’ Day morning.
I find myself in these situations quite often, and the first thing to do is to de urbanise the retail experience. This is Mothers’ Day, I explained, not Baby Mothers’ Day. People tend to respond poorly to eight hoodies behind a six foot market stall saying yeah yeah buy a flower and sucking their teeth. Sucking their own teeth, I should like to point out – sucking a customer’s teeth is, if my experience is anything to go by, very tricky indeed. I further explained that as I’m not a social worker, it wasn’t my job to identify with them. It was, in fact, their job to identify with me, a process which could start immediately by fucking off to Greggs and getting me a large Americano and a Belgian bun.
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Knitters With Attitude
March 5th, 2010
Dear Rachel
Wedding reception music is brilliant, and I refuse not to dance to it. For me, the genius of the genre is that even though I rarely own any of the tunes being played by DJ Barry or whatever, it’s like Phil Collins or Jive Bunny themselves have been placed inside me through a zip on my spine and are now trying to dance themselves to freedom.
I am at a difficult age, though, when it comes to social gatherings such as these, because I am too old to be dancing in my own right and not old enough to be sitting things out by the buffet. I therefore regularly find myself chaperoning Small Girls In Pretty Dresses or Lovely Old Aunties – the pre teens and pre Wars, as I have latterly taken to referring to them – and always, it seems, to You Can’t Hurry Love. I’d love DJ Barry to drop Straight Out Of Compton in – if only because I could then refer to my more senior partners as Knitters With Attitude – but this seems unlikely. Thinking about it though, I might have that at my own wedding, assuming I have one, and hand out semi automatic weaponry before the service which can be discharged into the ceiling as a salute to the radiant new Mrs Griefjunkie as we leave the church.
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Coping With Jazz
March 1st, 2010
Dear Rachel
I am by nature deeply mistrustful of people who signal the impending start of songs by clicking their fingers and counting in French. You’ll therefore understnd my nonplussed stance last week at the Duke of Wellington when I learned that Vinny not only has a twenty piece jazz band living upstairs but that they are doing live music nights every forth Sunday. This information was presented to me in ambush format when the air suddenly filled with clicked fingers and numbers en Francais as I was minding my own business at the bar. I just don’t know what possesses a person to do stuff like that – the bloke wasn’t even French – except an overwhelming desire to be thrashed across the face with a fire extinguisher again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jazz, in case you didn’t know, is a musical art form consisting of 1% genius and 99% please just fuck off. However, by eavesdropping on two jazz people at the bar, I did learn about a conversation one of them had recently had, in which someone who presumably wasn’t as uberjazzvolk as them had asked if they liked Kenny G. No, I don’t know who Kenny G is either, but the answer you give in this situation – and you might want to write this down in case you ever find yourself wanting to come across like someone who knows a lot about jazz – is ‘I haven’t heard any Kenny G for a while – but then again, I don’t get in many elevators these days!’ They both considered this simply splendid, and I really thought that, when they stopped laughing, they might catch each other’s eye, lean in together, and have a really long kiss.
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All Change On The Intertubes
February 22nd, 2010
Dear Rachel
If you can smell paint fumes and bubble wrap while reading this, it’s because we have at last launched our new site, and, unless you are getting this via email, you are looking at it. It is very very new, so don’t get too close to the screen as it is still wet in places and may well come off on your hands and clothing.
Astonishingly, it has taken three years to arrive. For the lives of the principle people involved with publicgriefjunkie, those three years have contained two weddings, one divorce, two bankruptcies, four changes of address, several arrests, a death, two major fires, and a baby. Come to think of it, if you put all that to musical verse, it would resemble the Twelve Days Of A Christmas You’d Rather Not Have.
Anyway. Better late than never, and now that the new site is finally among us, it’s like a huge waiter’s been lifted off our shoulders. It has been quite hard work, especially over the last couple of weeks, with an awful lot of awfully late nights, and my eyes feel like I have been trying to blink myself to death with them.
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Coughing Up A Storm
January 29th, 2010
Dear Rachel
There is a primary school report of mine somewhere in which my teacher, Miss Spickett, writes ‘Paul has been poorly for much of this term, and describes his cough as ‘like a clown leaping from a wardrobe’, and I must say I agree with him’. This is a description I stand by to this day, although I’d possibly add that it also sounds a bit like a shark trying to cough up a seal.
It doesn’t, you know, produce anything, or anything horrible like that, it just comes as quite a surprise sometimes. Coughing runs in our family, as my old dear and I established the other day while talking about my grandfather. My old dear always wistfully mentions that he ‘had such a desire to be a teacher’. This is true, and, as I usually point out, if only it was as strong as his other desire – to repeatedly steal curtain material from warehouses in Limehouse and sell it at Petticoat Lane market – a lot of things might have been very different.
[HItting read more now will reveal all manner of lung related rambling]
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