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Blue Room On Toynbee Street
May 11th, 2011
Dear Rachel,
I often visit the AMT coffee outlet on Liverpool Street Station, which enables me and the Chinese girl with brilliant hair who works there to enter into our own special Wild West shootout, which she always wins by telling me what my order is before I have had a chance to tell her. My order is not difficult – white coffee and four Welsh cakes – but nonetheless she is endearingly pleased with her feats of memory and customer recognition. I congratulate her on remembering who I am which – and this is one of our little jokes – I won’t be able to do for myself until I’ve had my coffee. To extend the jollity a bit I sometimes ask if her telepathic skills extend as far as knowing where I’m going and where my phone is and so forth, and it’s all very pleasant.
Our brief conversations also help set the scene for the second trick of the transaction, which is this: my order is actually white coffee with sugar and four Welshcakes. It would be disappointing to say ‘Oh yes actually I like sugar in my coffee after all’, as she will know I have been indulging her for the last year or so. Therefore, I have to steal the sugar and a wooden stirrer during the few seconds she is focused on stuff behind the till, shove them in my money belt, and sort it all out when I am out of sight, as I don’t like to spoil her moment of memory glory. What I might do next time is say that on the advice of my dentist I’ve started taking sugar in my coffee, as this will hopefully enable her to be just as delighted to remember this whole new order in future. I could just get coffee from somewhere else, I suppose, but that would be poor form.
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Keep Calm And Marry On
May 5th, 2011
Dear Rachel,
Early summer can be a tricky time in casual retail, and as Steve Gemstones and I discussed this over one of the recent Bank Holidays, he mentioned that he usually has a flat spot, mid year. I said I thought Mid Year was the bloke who did Live Aid with Bob Geldof, but before he could reply, Keith arrived, waving a card for us to sign. I worked in an office for a large telecoms company for quite a while and there were always cards going round for various things. I would write ‘Thanks for everything, Paul xx’ in every one I ever signed, no matter who it was for or what the occasion was – birthday, marriage, leaving, retirement, or funeral – and no-one ever questioned it. I saw no reason to change tactic on this occasion.
It’s unusual to find yourself signing cards for fellow traders, as significant events are usually well known around the market grapevine and marked with an awful lot of drinking. However, after signing in my usual manner, I handed it back to Keith, who it transpired also had no idea who it was for, and who therefore didn’t know who to give it to next. I explained that if you just pass a greetings card on randomly you’ll be rid of it forever, unlike what he thought would happen when he got AIDS, and amid some retaliatory swearing I lost track of it.
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Exile On Dean Street
April 27th, 2011
Dear Rachel
While I understand that a phrase like ‘Power To The People’ has a simple goodness and rightness about it, it’s probably worth spending a bit of time among the People first, before being absolutely sure you want to Empower them with anything more complex than a rotary washing line. For example, the average reading age of an adult in the UK is reckoned to be between 9 and 12 years old, which is an extraordinary achievement for a society which somewhat fancifully claims to cherish education above all things. Worryingly enough, that last sentence – which is hardly complex – would simply be beyond the literary grasp of most of the adults you’ll pass in the street today as you go about your business. In fact, come to think of it, it might be useful if twelve year olds taught reading and comprehension to classes of adults, as statistically such a measure is likely to result in a net literacy-based gain, and doing things the other way round doesn’t really seem to be getting us anywhere.
Be that as it may, I’m not sure what the national age for miming words is, but I’m sure you’d need a pretty high one to mime a word like ‘phonetic’. I think we’ve already touched upon the subject of words that are hard to mime somewhere among these posts, and I’d like ‘phonetic’ to be added to that list. Not that I’ve actually had to, but I did consider it as a response to someone who looked at our phonetic tube map for about forty seconds – which is a long time to look at something which is a pretty straightforward, concept-wise – before saying ‘This map. What’s phonetic about it?’ Another tricky word to describe is ‘Cryptic’, which appears on the Cryptic Crossword tube map. The word ‘Disturbing’ is easy enough to cater for, as is the word ‘Determined’, however, pointing out that what the person is looking at is not a ‘Slightly Determined Map of the London Underground System’, after – and it’s very important to remember this – they have demonstrated that English is their first language and have enjoyed a considerable length of time to study the map undistracted and in thoughtful silence – accounts for my well known tactic of pretending to be either Polish or claiming to be looking after the stall for someone else in order to avoid boring conversations with disappointing people.
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Kitchen Kommandant
April 21st, 2011
Dear Rachel
If you were to unlock my smartphone by drawing the security pattern, then dragged the Google bar out of the way, then flicked across a couple of pages and dragged my Spotify icon around to the bottom right, then got distracted by something else so that the screen timed out and went blank, then left the phone in such a way that the light fell upon the marks left by your fingers as they moved across the screen, you’ll find – as I did when I carried out this sequence of actions on Tuesday afternoon – that to your considerable and horrified surprise you’d traced an almost perfect swastika.
Another way of having a swastika about your person is to have one tattooed on your arm, in the manner of a Nazi I had at the stall a few weekends ago. Well, I say he was a Nazi and he might not have been I suppose, although having a swastika tattooed on your arm is an entirely different league of ill-advised playfulness to having, I dunno, a cheeky devil tattooed on your arse, so I don’t think I’m running away with the idea too much. He asked for a couple of quid off the somewhat Germanic ‘Kitchen Kommandant’ apron, which I felt was probably fair enough, what with him actually being in the Third Reich and everything, and therefore probably qualifying for a staff discount or, I dunno, being able to write if off as expenses for tax purposes.
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I Once Laughed At Something
April 14th, 2011
Dear Rachel
The recent census must’ve been tricky for for habitual online daters, as I should think old habits would’ve kicked in and they’d have taken a few years off their age – thus rendering themselves fraudulent – and in the case of the ‘race’ section would’ve ticked everything in order to maximise their chances.
I myself have never internet dated. I was going to go speed dating once, curiously enough with my girlfriend at the time, at the National Portrait Gallery. Our logic was as I recall that we both fancied seeing what all the fuss was about – speed dating was big news in 2005 – the National Portrait Gallery is a nice place to hang out, and if we didn’t get a date we’d still be winners. If one or both of us had got a date, it would’ve been awkward as, looking back, most of the best dates I have ever been on would not have been so good if I’d shown up with my girlfriend.
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Free Tribet!
April 6th, 2011
Dear Rachel,
I thought Tibet was one of the Wombles until China invaded it. Subsequently finding myself trading next to the Free Tibet marquee at WOMAD in 2005, I decided to test the mettle of the middle class petition-signer by stating that all t shirts – our main line at the time – were a tenner, but if you wanted to pay more I’d give the extra to Tibet, whereas if you wanted to pay less, I would make up the difference and give it to China. In the end, Tibet won by something like £255 to £17, which was a huge victory for those concerned about human rights in Tibet but not, curiously enough, in China. I also discovered that the people staffing the Free Tibet tent never tire of correcting you if you call it ‘Tribet’, which I did for the duration of the weekend. They just say ‘Actually, it’s TI-bet’, while smiling nicely, over and over again, in the kind of ‘there, there’ manner more usually associated with a nursery school teacher attending a soiled and weeping infant. Eventually, I whipped them up some ‘Free Tibet – It Won’t Free Itself!’ t shirts, which I should imagine are collectors’ items and worth thousands of pounds each by now.
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Here Comes The Cavalry!
March 24th, 2011
Dear Rachel,
As Britain slides with gathering pace and certainty towards some kind of oblivion or other, the role of what’s known as the ‘creative private sector’ has become crucially important. The creative private sector is the only branch of the economy that actually generates new money – it also creates new tax revenue and new jobs, and is able to kickstart the economy on both a local and national level. It’s also populated by people like myself, Danny, and Keith, and the battlefields upon which the nation’s economy will be saved are places like Greenwich Market. Admittedly, I’m not sure how confident that kind of information is likely to make anyone feel.
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Hiding In Your Car
March 11th, 2011
Dear Rachel
The element of surprise is a powerful tool, as Keith and I discovered last Sunday as we were putting our stock away following a dreary day’s trading. As I walked back from the container in which I secure my stuff during non-trading days, I noticed him putting boxes and such into his car via the front passenger door. I quickly calculated that I could also put myself into his car via the open hatchback without him noticing, which I duly did, partially concealing myself among some blankets and other standard back-of-car paraphenalia. By bursting forth with my arms outstretched and shouting ‘Hello!’ in a rough approxamation of someone with a moderate to severe speech impediment at the appropriate moment, I was able to use surprise to make Keith involuntarily leap to a height of perhaps two feet and very nearly soil himself.
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You Talk So Hip, Man
March 2nd, 2011
Dear Rachel
My old dear is the kind of person who says stuff like ‘I’m a firm believer in strong tea‘, ‘You know me – I must have an airing cupboard‘ and ‘Debenhams make a lovely trouser‘. She would probably go on to assert that Clarks make a lovely shoe and, I dunno, Dennis make a lovely fire engine. With only a limited insight into contemporary High Street fashion, however, she is unlikely to say ‘Superdry make a lovely turnpike hood‘. This is perhaps slighly sad as the currently massive clothing brand’s first UK outlet was would you believe a market stall on Petticoat Lane – an area with which she is highly familiar – and as such they qualify as barrow boys made good.
For those of us still struggling with the ‘made good’ part of that equation, these are interesting times. The first quarter of every year is traditionally when alliances are made, dissolved, or renewed, as disparate traders join forces in all manner of unlikely combinations in order to stave off bankruptcy for another few hours. While it would obviously be imprudent to go into too much detail in front of – as it were – the children, there is all manner of plotting and scheming afoot. I have for example found myself in detailed negotiations with a t shirt vendor with gold teeth from Greenwich called Pete. Pete was recently the centre of considerable scandal when, jilting his boyfriend of eleven years (whose t shirt business it turned out to actually be), he eloped with another trader, Michelle, who also happened to be the girlfriend of his top man at Greenwich. This I feel can be discussed in front of the children, as he made a point of discussing it with absolutely everyone else. I really do mean everyone, too: Danny said to me that he’d ‘never seen anyone so c*ntstruck‘, and I’m inclined to agree. Ironically, it was never discussed in front of Michelle’s children, as she ditched him six days into the relationship. Anyone who can go from gay to straight, lose a boyfriend, a girlfriend, and a livelihood in the space of a week is likely to fit in very well aboard the good ship publicgriefjunkie, and so who knows what, if anything, may come of it.
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Think Again, Graham P.
February 17th, 2011
Dear Rachel,
I didn’t think people actually wrote unsolicited reviews of pubs and such outside of adverts for smart phones, but I recently happened across Graham P’s account of our very own Duke of Wellington, Toynbee Street, London E1 on www.welovelocal.com. The Duke of Wellington, he states, is ‘an ugly little pub with a rather unpleasent clientele‘. He also mentions that it reeks ‘…like an old man who’s been left in a skip full of cabbage leaves for forty years’ and that ‘although the bar staff are charming enough to look at, they aren’t what you might call super competent’.
Leaving aside the ‘old man in cabbage leaves’ jibe – which, apart from being simply untrue, I should imagine is only included to justify half an hour of workstation metaphor tinkering by Graham P himself – the pub is not ugly. It’s a bit careworn, certainly, and everything appears to be covered in dust even though it isn’t, but it’s not ugly as such. It’s a boozer, is what it is. It has no olives on the bar, or pub quizzes on a Wednesday, which is doubtless what Graham P looks for in a drinking establishment. It also had, for some years, an abandoned wardrobe in the beer garden (it had been slung over the fence for reasons unknown) and there are no tiles whatsoever in the gents’ after they were memorably stolen by enterprising tile thieves posing as plumbers. It’s ridiculous, certainly, but not ugly.
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