Tom from next door told me he had been to the Brexit cafe and had a nice cup of tea and a figgie cake. He was delighted. We hadn’t planned on going to the Brexit cafe but we were staying out to keep away from the cleaning lady and still had another half hour on the streets, so we thought, all right then, so be it, let’s try out the Brexit cafe. I call it The Brexit cafe but it calls itself The Tea House or something like that. It only sells tea, no coffee. It writes No Coffee up on the door in a panoply of fonts.. And it’s full of union jacks. So obviously you put two and two together. We went in. There was a man sitting reading Henry James. So far, so consistent. I fancied a nice pudding. Apparently, or so we thought, they did basic builder’s tea, but when we looked at the menu it said Earl Grey £7/9 (£7 for a cup/ £9 for a pot as I harrowingly understood it), Figgie cake or pie or pudding or whatever they were calling it £10. There was still time. Quickly, silently, we extracted ourself from this place. About 300 yards away, on Black Prince Road, we found another cafe where the bacon roll was £3.20 and the teas were £1.75 each. My relief was palpable. Next time I get to see Tom it will be a case of let me tell you what almost happened to us yesterday, young man. Talk about close shaves!
Author Archives: paulbilic2003
October 22: on bobby charlton
When I was little I asked my dad, how much does Bobby Charlton earn? and he said £100 a week, which for me was about the most you could dream of. £100… every week. I asked that question because for me Bobby Charlton was the pole star. I sincerely remember wondering what I would do in some distant and unimaginable future when Bobby Charlton died. I could hardly imagine how life would go on. Well, he died yesterday and I suppose I can get over it. As I have said before, when a famous person who has marked your past dies or ages, the emotion you feel is not for them, it is for yourself, your own lost years, the time that cannot be brought back. Equally, the yearning for a simpler, more innocent time, or, maybe, and this is telling, a simpler, more innocent self.
October 15: industrious curiosity
As I have mentioned before, I am a great dredger of the past and of past people. I locate them, from five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty even, and contact them. I note they are often loathe to connect back. Of course, it may be that they want nothing more to do with me. Fair do’s. But I am sure there are a host of other reasons. Some people are unhappy to reveal themselves to you; they are older, fatter, balder, more failed than before. Maybe some are more successful and they want me to keep my dirty mitts off them. As you get older there may be a truth that we shrink into our tiny unit: the family atom; those who know you as you now are. Maybe the you as you once were needs avoiding because actually you were never like that, you just got pigeonholed that way and don’t want to be so again thank you very much. For me there is a difference between meeting old friends and acquaintances in a group or one at a time. Personally, I don’t want the group experience. And, to be honest, isn’t my desire to re-connect not much more than idle curiosity. Though, why is curiosity idle? It’s actually industrious.
October 4: so many pictures on a frieze
My girlfriend came home exasperated with one of her yoga workshops. People are so busy putting virtue emogis up on the whatsapp that it’s become a self-propagating site for self-congratulation (prayers, hearts, love in all shapes and sizes). But when someone actually needs a bit of love or empathy it’s a case of turn the other way. The desire to post up your identity in a series of pictures thrives and prospers in today’s bewildering world. Consider the tattoo. What a rich array of hearts, axes, plants and greenery in general, noble invocations in foreign often dead-language tongues, creatures of all shapes and sizes, greet you as you happen to notice the highly-inked arm of your neighbour in the coffee shop. So many pictures on a frieze. Whence this desire to offer a print-out of your personality to a stranger, or a PR version maybe? Can I not make my own mind up about you from conversation and observation of your behaviour, from actual social engagement? Or must you be immune to this? It reminds me of the business boasts. We are considerate constructors. Let me, the customer, be the judge of that. May I be permitted to ignore your frieze and just have a chat?
September 10: it trundleth on
One of the tasks required of all of us is to have at the ready an adequate and witty answer to the question you know will be asked of you any number of times in the day, How are you? For quite some years now my stock response to How are you? has been I’m as good as I get. As from yesterday I am reforming that response. From now on my response to that query will be It trundleth on. The it could be life or a third person presentation of myself. Trundle is an ok way to depict the slightly broken nature of my physical and mental state and the olde worlde ending to the verb gives it a cheery tongue-in-cheek narrative quality. What do you think? I’ll be trying it out over the next few days. It needs to be good because I’ll be using it every day for the next few years. I find repetition helps.
August 25: ghost visions
Walking down Brompton Road past the Brompton Oratory towards Harrods yesterday I experience one of those moments where the past associations of a place are stronger than the present experience. This is a phenomenon I have previously experienced in relation to places where I have lived when they are revisited. I go back to Paris to the areas I once lived in and find it difficult to be there due to the weight of the ghosts of the past. I find this to be true about Berlin also, even though I only lived there for a few weeks in my youth. Here I surmise that the weight of the pre-fall of the wall lived life just submerges the present, making it trivial in comparison. Experiencing this ghost feeling on Brompton Road was odd. After all, I still live in London and am still accumulating experiences here. My conclusion is that the older you get the more difficult it is to give weight to the present. The monster of the past becomes ever more voracious. The challenge to keep the present alive becomes ever more demanding.
August 20: the pied piper of Hameln
“To think we buy cloaks lined with ermine
For folk that can’t or won’t determine
What’s best to rid us of our vermine…”
It’s the ‘Pied Piper of Hamlin’ by Robert Browning and I could go on, having memorised much of ist charming rhymes as a child. The story of a piper who rids a town of its rat infestation, only to be cheated of his reward and so takes vengeance by ridding the town of its children. From Hanover, where we were staying, Hamlin is a simple hop on the train, about 20 miles. It turns out that the legend may very well be based on 13th Century history where swathes of young people were lured away from this area of Northern Germany to work in newly acquired territory to the East by honey-tongued work agents.
We went vainly round looking for remnants of the legend but were unable to find even a decent statue of the piper to be photographed next to. Of all the cities and towns we have visited on this trip (many) Hamlin, or Hameln as it is in German, is the dud. The whole town has been set up to respond to its 4 million a year tourists but no real traces of the story are celebrated in the public art. The only statue of the piper depicts him as an innocent-looking adolescent, as if the sinister nature of the legendary figure has to be bowdlerised to disnify the tale for the modern tourism industry. As in the legend the town corporation has again swindled the piper of his worth.
“A thousand gulders! The mayor looked blue.
So did the corporation too!”
But the town continues to exploit the legend. This year they are preparing a production of ‘Robin Hood’ at the local theatre, no doubt re-using the Medieval costumes so often deployed in pied piper pageants. A nice little earner for the mayor and corporation.
August 19: a mostly lovely time
This year’s summer trip took us to Northern Germany, having no desire to endure the Great Heat of the South. In Hamburg and Luebeck we stayed in youth hostels. Youth hostels these days are strange time warps where nuclear families wear NASA tee-shirts and the bright primary colours and bold geometric shapes popular in 1970s clothing. In Luebeck we witnessed an odd involuntary social experiment where the youth hostel was peopled by two main groups: a set of French children from a small town in France that was twinned with Luebeck and on a summer trip there, as well as a large group of adults with learning difficulties on their summer outing. Mixing with the peculiar group that is the youth hostel habitues, this was at times a fascinating and challenging intersection of skills and cultures.
The big bright Venn diagram seemed to function smoothly enough. There was no evidence of any problems. The learning difficulty adults were innocent and sociable; the French schoolchildren respectful and interested in their own little world. The youth hostelers kept their distance, lining up at the tables near the window in a huddled group.
Coming back from a day in the Old Town we saw one of the school children crying and one of the learning difficulty adults being hugged by a group leader and carer. No connection. Just two little dramas. The usual trials and tribulations in the lives of people. Just a a bit more expressive than we youth hostelers. In the end everyone was having a mostly lovely time.
July 28: need for chaos, nostalgia for danger
A visit to two private art galleries in London today. Marcin Dudek in Fitzrovia has a clapped out smashed up graffiti-ridden bus with Steua Bucharest football insignia all over it. You enter the broken bus and walk down the aisle past the ripped-up seats. Dudek is a former hooligan recalling the glory days with a set of exhibits of daubed violent pieces accompanying the headliner bus in the window of the petite gallery on Little Titchfield Street. The other side of Oxford Street in Mayfair an exhibition of photographs by Thomas Struth of the chaotic inside of the Cern Collider in Switzerland, a hotch-potch of wires, tubes, concrete bars and cable trays. Chaos is pleasing to the eye. We need it, which is why a complex forest is so relaxing. This is a less interesting exhibition than the Dudek collection, but it is interesting (isn’t it?) that our contemporary hyper-controlled world needs a bit of the dark side, escape from the deep facile-virtue channelling we are constantly sujected to. I have nostalgic thoughts about the central Manchester of my youth, a dangerous place of slum clearance and broken bottle-strewn wasteland. What is now the Manchester Exhibition Centre and before that G-Mex in those days was the gutted skeleton of the old central station, a looming gothic presence to a 17-year old. The area was fraught with menace with the isolated pub stood upright on the bleak terrain and so-called clubs which were dingy dives where you could drink after hours. It was a threatening and dangerous place to knock around in. I have a lot of nostalgia for it.
July 24: too thoughtless to put out
On Friday I read a columnist in the Evening Standard where the journalist, in an avuncular, supposedly comic style, gave out the opinion that people from London are more glamorous and attractive than people from Manchester. This being an avuncular and supposedly comic style, there was no analytical element to his pronouncement, no explanation that money and class plays a huge role in this random observation. The columnist himself was from Manchester, which makes the bald naivety of the statement perhaps even more offensive. Making a statement like this is the equivalent to saying that black people are more criminal than white people without considering that some of the areas where black people live are the most under-privileged in the country. Imagine the outcry if he had said such a thing. An editor should look at his piece and say, sorry, this is just too thoughtless to put out.
peoplearerubbish 