For the past four weeks I’ve been learning how to teach English as a foreign language in London, where despite UKIP’s opinion, it isn’t even vaguely. But London was foreign to me and I used to live there.
I lived there once for six months when I left university and it was crap. You could still smoke on the Tube in those days and people did. Entering a Tube carriage on a damp, dark November evening with your shoes soaked through to inhale 20 stranger’s Picadilly smoke was a budget version of Hell. A car I was trying to repair in the street fell of the jacks I had put it on and nearly fell on top of me. I helped save someone’s life when they walked straight off a station platform and fell onto the tracks one boiling afternoon when three trains had been cancelled trapping hundreds of us all trying to go home. It’s a lot further down to the tracks at a railway station than you think it is. Or rather it’s a much longer way back up, especially when you’ve got someone’s legs end and you’re trying to heave her back up to the platform while someone else you don’t know does the shoulders end, hopefully before the train gets there. Obviously as I’m writing this, we did. The other person was wearing a suit; I was wearing a leather jacket. He got thanked by the crowd. I got ignored.
I had a crappy flat off Westbourne Grove where one night a woman I’d never seen before knocked on the door and asked me to take her to hospital. She said she’d been in an accident. I’d just been to the launderette, so I was free. I called an ambulance because she was talking in a strange way. Within 20 minutes of meeting her I was seeing the X-Rays of her fillings and the size of her brain; they assumed I was something to do with her. I sort-of was a bit, after that. For a week or so, the way things went then.
I left, then I came back again, then twenty years ago I left for good. And I don’t recognise huge chunks of the London that was there then.
It was sunny this morning. I’d almost got enough sleep. I put the new flashing pedals on my really nice bike, the ones I got on Ebay for £9 instead of the £35 they ought to cost, and rode it down to the paper-shop, four miles away through the empty lanes. Then up the back road past the Old Vicarage (no, not that Old Vicarage, the one in my head, the one in Not Your Heart Away, that would be altogether too perfect, even for today), along a lane past the big weekend houses with huge name plates on their doors, probably so the once every month in the summer and probably at Christmas this year dependings (yes of course with a hyphen) can recognise their own house when they go there. And then into a place I’d never been before that somebody told me about yesterday, an ancient little wood full of bluebells and wild garlic, a perfect place I would once have loved to walk dogs in with someone gone, where the centuries sleep deep.
And from there to the boot sale where I managed to buy a huge old terracotta wine cooler and some geraniums to put in it, and on to the well, let’s call it an objet trouve market at Snape Maltings, where because nobody else wanted it I bought the shirt I saw there this time last year for £7 because it had the wrong label on it I’m pretty sure, where I had a chat with a nice woman about lamps made of old film projectors, then on up the back lane to home just as the rain was starting and managed to get the washing in before it got soaked.
“Yes, that’s mine. Are you sure you wouldn’t mind driving? I’d be really grateful…”
Then asparagus and scrambled eggs for lunch and polenta made for dinner which will be that and partridge breasts and inevitably at this time of year, more asparagus, bought for £6 as ‘Kitchen Grade” for about 2 kilos in a big plastic bag so it’s not straight but tastes brilliant from a huge barn on a deserted farm I’m not telling you where. But near here.
The asparagus soup is ready for the freezer, and the tea is in a mug next to me, and I know what I’m doing with this training course now after the best and worst week doing it. I spent half an hour telling myself I was packing it up on Wednesday night. Then I spent rather longer telling myself to stop being so stupid and get on with it. Result: best marks on the course so far.
Small things
But nice things. And things to be grateful for. Plus I bought a really good Gunter Grass I haven’t read yesterday, for my coat pocket for the week, still thinking that one day I will go into the perfect place that doesn’t exist and someone beautiful and kind and totally not deranged or with someone will finally say ‘all my life I’ve been waiting to meet the other person who likes that book. My car’s outside. Would you mind driving, because I have this not-at-all serious thing that affects beautiful and sensitive people who can’t be arsed to drive right at the moment. And anyway, you’ll enjoy driving it. In fact, you could drive me to my place in the Cotswolds if you like. Were you doing anything for the weekend?‘
Stranger stuff than that has happened in my life before. Much stranger. And until it does I’ve still got a cup of tea and stuff to do that I can do. And Ali Smith’s The Accidental to read as well, which is making me smile. A lot. This is a nice weekend.
I don’t know what the Liberal Party is about. I avoided running over Paddy Ashdown this week who seemed pleasantly surprised that a bicycle was stopping to let him cross on a crossing, and he seemed a straightforward-enough sort of person. Given the deranged style of riding of most cyclists I’ve encountered this week I’m not hugely surprised, the same way I’m not now when I hear about cyclists in London being killed, but that’s another story. Keep going through red lights, treat one-way streets as advisory, overtake up the inside and generally act like an arse might work in a car but sooner or later when you haven’t got a tonne of steel around you, you’re going to say ‘ouch’ just once. And not for very long before your brain gets squashed between your teeth.
Be that as it may, the liberal consensus was what people used to call pretty much anything they sort-of liked a bit. The liberal consensus is that not stealing stuff is a good thing. Not killing people. Not beating someone around the head because they contradicted you. Not going to work, not being paid for it and being sold to someone else without any say in where you live, what you’re paid or who you’re going to work for. The liberal consensus then was that the Human Rights Act, the thing the Tory government want banned in the UK, was alright. Obviously, it’s got to go. The campaign against it in The Sun will start within days.
A Good Thing.
These are the fundamentals of this evil, dangerous, subversive and ought-to-be-illegal thing. Let’s have a good look at how wicked it is. Starting at the start, obviously nobody should be allowed to live without the government’s say-so. That’s what a right to life means. Without the express approval of the government, you don’t have a right to be born or to carry on living without their approval.
As for torture, ha ha ha!!! Of course you shouldn’t have a right not to be tortured whenever the government feels like it! I mean, look at all those people in Guantanamo who were kidnapped, taken half-way around the world, tortured and gave us all that Grade A intel. Oh. Well ok, bad example, because they didn’t have any secrets to tell anyone and if someone says they’re going to kill you unless you start talking then you just start making stuff up. You see? The government said they were all liars anyway! OK, so over 90% of them hadn’t done anything against the law anywhere. But bad example or not, you obviously don’t have a right to walk down the street looking the way you do without the right to have a bag stuffed over your head, get bundled into a van and held down while someone pours water up your nose. Who the hell do you think you are?
Poundland is going to have to start paying people if you have a right to be free from forced labour, so that’s out of the window. You don’t need a right to liberty, because the government obviously wouldn’t lock you up without a good reason or at least one that suited them. Just the same way that the police wouldn’t have arrested you if you hadn’t done it, would they? Stands to reason, do you see? They’re very busy you know. They haven’t got time to make things up.
It’s only funny on TV.
As for Article seven, the right not to be punished for something which wasn’t against the law, that kind of hippy nonsense would stop decent, hardworking people like Ian Duncan Smith from retrospectively changing legislation.
You do not need a right to the government not being able to root through your Facebook account or your mobile phone records or your bank statements whenever they feel like seeing if you really do know that person or not and how often. Whoever they are, with or without the egg whisk.
You certainly do not need to able to think whatever you like, or decide whatever you think is best. There’s no limit to some people’s effrontery, is there? All this “I can think as I please” nonsense. You’ll think as you’re damned well told, and like it. That’s what the British media is for now.
I remember all that silly nonsense we used to have where people used to talk the most absurd nonsense. Some of them even had different opinions to the ones the government gave them. ISIS is good. David Cameron wants us to fight with them against the government of Syria. ISIS is bad. David Cameron has sent the RAF to blow up one of their jeeps. Which seems quite an expensive way of getting rid of a Toyota LandCruiser, but you have no right to that opinion, there are no contradictions here, Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia and apart from Who’s That Girl nobody can remember anything they did anyway.
The right to freedom of assembly. No. Sorry. You may well have booked the Village Hall and paid the deposit, but you’re not coming in here talking about whatever you want without it being checked first. A what? An evening of people training their dogs? To do what exactly? No. They could be terrorists. The US Navy trained dolphins to carry bombs you know. I can see the connection even if you pretend you can’t. No, no and no.
Nobody needs the right to marry whoever they chose. If your uncle can’t find a decent person for you to marry then I’m sure the government can do it. Someone blond and Aryan and quiet, maybe.
The right not to be discriminated against? Don’t be disgusting. I’m trying to explain this sensibly, but if you’re just going to take this tone then I won’t bother. In a minute you’re going to say that people have a right for the government not to come along and take their things any time it suits them, aren’t you? Well?
You see, if you’d paid for an education to a school outside the evil clutches of the NUT then you might have a right to be educated. As it is, I’m sorry, but I can’t see any reason to believe that you’re entitled to send young, impressionable children, children for heaven’s sake, to be indoctrinated with the beleif that it’s perfectly normal for adults to wear beards and glasses, have leather patches on their sports jackets and say things like “Yes, there was homework – quiet!” or “it’s your own time you’re wasting.” You have no right to this at all.
I like a laugh as much as the next person and it always makes me chuckle when people talk about a right to a free election. It’s not as if ballot papers ever go missing, or the printing somehow forgets some of the main parties or the barcode isn’t on the back of the ballot papers so they’re invalid. Then that wretched Naomi Wolf woman starts banging on and what the Daily Mail is even thinking of repeating this nonsense I don’t know. If you do still have free elections it’s no thanks to Rupert Murdoch, who can tell you who to vote for if you still need to be told. Perhaps we’d better check your phone calls to find out.
As for the abolition of the death penalty, everyone knows they jolly well don’t do it again! Including the people who didn’t do anything in the first place.
Look. I’m trying to be reasonable about this. If you pay for a decent lawyer like a normal person none of this is going to be a problem for you, is it? Until then you can just shut up and do as you’re told. It’s not as if the government would ask you to do anything that wasn’t the right thing, is it?
Once upon a time in a world long ago, everybody loved Gary Glitter. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Parents hated him, but they didn’t know they had a good reason to and not the one they thought. He was everything you wanted in a rockNroll star. He had ludicrous shoes. He was dressed all in glitter. Geddit? He had shoulder pads that made the girls in Abba and Dynasty look as if they weren’t even trying. He had stupid hair and bulging eyes that made him look either hyperthyroid, perpetually amazed or very possibly both. And his lyrics and tunes were simple to the brink of moronic. What more could you ask for in a budget version of Meatloaf? We had simple tastes back then.
Paul Francis Gadd as he answered to in court was once a dustman, drank a bottle of vodka before he got out of bed, and did the warm-up stuff to get the audience going on Ready Steady Go. I just know, ok? I didn’t see it. More importantly, he fronted the Glitter Band.
They were literally unreal. A big tenor sax blast, a really simple drum-heavy beat and guitar-work that wouldn’t challenge – well, I was going to say somebody with two fingers, but given that includes Django Reinhardt it hardly counts. We used to call it RockNRoll whichever part it was, as the man himself did, but it was a made-up RockNRoll, more Cozy Powell drum-fest than anything Bill Haley ever dreamed up.
It didn’t matter. If you were down the Friday Club school disco with a bottle of cider and some aspirins, standing in your high-waist bags and platform soles, freezing in your sweat-soaked clothes outside in the dewy field, the collar of your v-neck t-shirt layered over the collar of your v-neck jumper layered over the collar of your tartanesque sports jacket, trying to get one last snog in before whoever it was’s Dad floodlit the pair of you with his Volvo headlights outside the cricket pavilion you’d know exactly who Gary Glitter was. If you want to pretend you don’t, Craig Brown described him as like ‘an oven-ready Terry Scott.’ And you do know, anyway.
Got it now? Good. He was the leader. He was the leader. He was the leader of the gang.
Yes, ok. Alright. I know he’s a paedophile. Everyone knows that now. But we didn’t know it then. And he was great.
That said, when I was reading an English grammar text today that declined the verb ‘to love’ two thoughts came to me.
The first, in what is clearly pre-senile infantilism, obsessive memory or just plain silly was to continue the declension “I love, you love” with the inevitable “my only true love,” as Mr Gadd taught us all, somewhat more memorably than anything the crew of ex-Spanish Civil War International Brigade recruits who were dragged out of retirement to teach me Latin ever managed. The second was more prudently: ‘Don’t. Just utterly don’t. Ever.’
Don’t sing it. Don’t play it. Certainly don’t mime it. Not even at a Christmas party. Even twenty years ago Blur said modern life is rubbish. (Did that hurt, Xers? Sorry. A bit) It’s certainly a lot duller than it used to be, sometimes.
