One of the benefits of doing a paper round, apart from the almost-too-much-to-spend income of £8-10 a week, was the feeling that Palmers Green was my kingdom. It was deserted as I walked (or for a while, roller skated on my disco roller skates) from street to street at 6am each day. The woman who was in charge of the newsagent shop would let me take a chocolate bar for free, and because Wispa was new and an ABSOLUTE REVELATION OF CHOCOLATE JOY, I’d always take one of these, have a bite every 5 minutes and avoid chewing it (applying the fruit pastille rule) to make it last the whole round. The only shitty thing about the job was when the tabloid newspapers introduced Sunday supplements. Those News of the World and Sunday Mirror magazines may have been full of crap, but they felt full of bricks once you squeezed them into my sack-cloth shoulder bag and attempted to stand up straight with it slung over my back. I walked around like a hunchback (and skating with that extra weight meant that each sloping garden path I got to, I’d end up slamming into the front door at 30 mph.)
Coincidentally, linking the paper round and hunchbacks, was a girl that my mate Darren and I cruelly (but secretly, because we’re not bastards) named Helen the Hunchback. Helen also did a paper round and my mum knew her mum. Before I even encountered her, my mum, in a desperate effort to land me a girlfriend, convinced me that Helen looked like Kate Bush, whose posters adorned my bedroom wall at that time, and suggested that I ask her out. This assertion may even have been the prompt that led to me deciding to take up the paper round. It wasn’t until I’d had several similarly encouraging mentions of this fabled beauty by my mum that I actually met Helen in the newsagent’s one early morning. All that she had in common with Kate Bush was her gender (and even that similarity wasn’t irrefutable). What she did have, wasn’t a hunchback (we exaggerated with the nickname slightly), but she did have a pair of shoulders on her that meant that she could have delivered the Sunday papers to not just Palmers Green, but the whole borough of Enfield, without feeling like that gargantuan bag weighed any more than a box of Kleenex, something she wasn’t ever going to have any teenage boys reaching for.
On the subject of reaching for teenage boys, behind our back garden was a mechanic’s workshop and the bloke who worked there was nicknamed Robert the Iron by my dad. (You’ll need to know your rhyming slang to understand that one.) My Dad’s evidence for suggesting that Robert was homosexual - and therefore (in the logic of the times) interested in touching young boys - was based on three factors: Firstly he was unmarried; secondly, he lived with his mother; and thirdly he was friendly towards us. Indisputable proof, your honour. That didn’t prevent Dad acquiescing when Robert asked if he could take me to an Arsenal game, it just gave him a lot of pleasure joking that I should watch that he didn’t sneak a touch of my bottom if Arsenal scored. As it was, unsurprisingly, Robert didn’t do anything of the sort, but he did stop outside the ground to feed an apple to a police horse and this was even more embarrassing, so I didn’t want to go to Arsenal with him again.
Sunday, 25 February 2018
Wednesday, 21 February 2018
Palmers Greek Part 2
Palmers Green Triangle was half a mile and two bus stops north of where we lived, so you’d never walk that far if you could help it. It was uphill too. I once decided that I’d look pretty fucking cool if I jumped nonchalantly off the 29 before it came to a complete halt opposite Woolworth. The subsequent stumble and unacrobatic head-over-heels - as my still-travelling body met a very static and very hard pavement - was neither nonchalant nor cool. Nor pretty.
There weren’t many reasons to venture to the part of Palmers Greek that I erroneously assumed had once been the village green. That assumption was based on its central location, the proximity of the train station and the Triangle itself, a concrete central reservation that bore no signs of ever having been a pre-industrial hub of the rural community. I think it just came into existence by accident, because of how Alderman’s Hill forked as it met Green Lanes, and having done so, a local town planner was thus inspired to exploit the space by plonking ladies’ and gents’ subterranean public lavatories there. Nothing else, just the bogs. Unlike aforementioned counterparts near our house, these were in use, but I never had recourse to take advantage either because I was good at holding it in or Broomfield Park was nearby or I equated public lavs with ‘perverts’.
(As an aside, ‘pervert’ was a wonderfully comfortable and even slightly cosy inclusive term for a plethora of sexual deviants, thus robbing us of the need to distinguish between paedophiles, cottagers, molesters, flashers, swingers, kinky sex participants, sex shop customers and your average user of porn, either actual porn or convenient substitutes such as the Gratton or - more desperately - the Argos catalogues.)
The only pull factors the Triangle held for us were Woolworth, Superdrug and an Asian off license. Woolies sold chart singles for under a quid. Superdrug stocked those cheap toiletry gift boxes that served every family member’s Christmas present need. The number of Brut Talc and After-shave sets I bought or had bought for me in the 80s would suggest that I was a significant source of income for both Henry Cooper and Kevin Keegan. And then there was the off license. The received wisdom of the time was that Asian shopkeepers wouldn’t ask your age if you wanted to buy booze, hence the choice of retail outlet for anyone well under 18 looking to enjoy a bottle of Woodpecker cider in the dark confines of Broomfield Park on a Friday night.
At the time there was only one local pub that you’d graduate to after outgrowing the park and that was The Fox, five minutes up from the Triangle and no questions asked about your age as long as you were out of nappies. Being served alcohol here at 17 was what distinguished it from the underground gents. It’s the only place where I’ve been in a team that’s won the pub quiz, and that says far less about our general knowledge than it does about what was lacking in the minds of the regular clientele. And I spent the final hours of the 1980s there on a New Year’s Eve piss up that was so enjoyable that at a quarter to midnight I pissed off to buy a pizza and sat eating it on someone’s garden wall as it quickly lost its warmth in the wintery night air.
Such was the retail and leisure attractions of Palmers Greek. In part 3, I will move on to explore some other tedious old shit about the place...
There weren’t many reasons to venture to the part of Palmers Greek that I erroneously assumed had once been the village green. That assumption was based on its central location, the proximity of the train station and the Triangle itself, a concrete central reservation that bore no signs of ever having been a pre-industrial hub of the rural community. I think it just came into existence by accident, because of how Alderman’s Hill forked as it met Green Lanes, and having done so, a local town planner was thus inspired to exploit the space by plonking ladies’ and gents’ subterranean public lavatories there. Nothing else, just the bogs. Unlike aforementioned counterparts near our house, these were in use, but I never had recourse to take advantage either because I was good at holding it in or Broomfield Park was nearby or I equated public lavs with ‘perverts’.
(As an aside, ‘pervert’ was a wonderfully comfortable and even slightly cosy inclusive term for a plethora of sexual deviants, thus robbing us of the need to distinguish between paedophiles, cottagers, molesters, flashers, swingers, kinky sex participants, sex shop customers and your average user of porn, either actual porn or convenient substitutes such as the Gratton or - more desperately - the Argos catalogues.)
The only pull factors the Triangle held for us were Woolworth, Superdrug and an Asian off license. Woolies sold chart singles for under a quid. Superdrug stocked those cheap toiletry gift boxes that served every family member’s Christmas present need. The number of Brut Talc and After-shave sets I bought or had bought for me in the 80s would suggest that I was a significant source of income for both Henry Cooper and Kevin Keegan. And then there was the off license. The received wisdom of the time was that Asian shopkeepers wouldn’t ask your age if you wanted to buy booze, hence the choice of retail outlet for anyone well under 18 looking to enjoy a bottle of Woodpecker cider in the dark confines of Broomfield Park on a Friday night.
At the time there was only one local pub that you’d graduate to after outgrowing the park and that was The Fox, five minutes up from the Triangle and no questions asked about your age as long as you were out of nappies. Being served alcohol here at 17 was what distinguished it from the underground gents. It’s the only place where I’ve been in a team that’s won the pub quiz, and that says far less about our general knowledge than it does about what was lacking in the minds of the regular clientele. And I spent the final hours of the 1980s there on a New Year’s Eve piss up that was so enjoyable that at a quarter to midnight I pissed off to buy a pizza and sat eating it on someone’s garden wall as it quickly lost its warmth in the wintery night air.
Such was the retail and leisure attractions of Palmers Greek. In part 3, I will move on to explore some other tedious old shit about the place...
Sunday, 18 February 2018
Palmers Greek Part 1
I’m reading a book sub-titled ‘Now that’s what I call an 80s music childhood’ and it inspired me to want to write my own short, blog-sized version of being a teenager with evolving music tastes in that wonderful day-glo decade. But then I changed my mind for several reasons, not least a premonition that it might bore you all rigid. But the need to nostalgically and sardonically reminisce remained. And so I hit upon a different unifying theme, one that really tied the decade together for me, and that was the fact that for most of that time we were living in Palmers Green, North London.
If you imagine North London as a Christmas cake, then the inner city is the fruit sponge, stretching from Camden to Wood Green, and the white (literally in those days) icing is the suburbs of Winchmore Hill and Enfield. In that analogy, Palmers Green is the layer of marzipan in between. The only undermining feature of this metaphor is that I really liked Palmers Green, but I’d rather lick the floor in a public lavatory than let marzipan anyway near my mouth.
Talking of which, if you walked out of our house on the North Circular Road in those days, and turned left in the same direction as the three lanes of traffic heading west with enough seismic power to constantly rattle the walls of our end-of-terrace house, then within 50 metres you’d pass first a petrol station (which sold porn mags), a disused public toilet (probably home to disused porn mags), a betting shop (filled with blokes with large collections of porn mags) and then a newsagent (from where I’d never buy a porn mag, because I did a paper round there. And was too young. And, er, didn’t buy porn mags, of course.)
This was right on the big junction of the North Circ and Green Lanes and opposite the pub that changed names in that time from The Cock to The Manhattan to Legends (and much later, the Faltering Fullback and finally Polska Bar Sportowa, suggesting that the area should be referred to as Polskas Green now.) We called it Palmers Greek for reasons you can easily work out, although the town had at least as many Asian families living there, including Mr and Mrs Clark who owned the 2nd newsagents along and who weren’t really called Clark, we worked out, and who greeted everyone with either ‘Hello Friend’ (Mr Clark) or ‘Hello Sonny’ (Mrs Clark), which we found highly amusing as they drove a Datsun Sunny. Palmers Greek was grid-locked on a Saturday with Datsun Sunnys, Datsun Cherrys and many a second hand Mercedes.
From this crossroads we could travel anywhere we wanted to in the world, which tended to be northwards to school (29 to Enfield Town then some rural green bus out to St Ignatius), westwards to Arnos Grove (usually to the park there for football and failed attempts to find girls to ask out) or southwards into London (again the 29 with a Red Bus Rover illicitly shared between two.) But never east. East took you to Edmonton. Unlike Napoleon and Hitler, we knew that only misery and grim death would be the reward of going east.
That junction, which we stoically tried to keep referring to as The Cock, years after Manhattan had become the landmark pub’s name, held a few attractions for us other than the newsagents. Green Lanes Sauna, we innocently assumed was only a sauna, albeit one popular with short fat middle-aged Greek men, when they weren’t gambling in one of the nearby clubs. Other short fat middle-aged Greek men - who were not gambling or treating themselves to a ‘sauna’ - ran the numerous grocery stores along Green Lanes, a barber’s at the back of a hardware store (where you’d be better off asking the hardware store owner to take some cheap shears to your 80s mullet) and Hellenic Video, the Mecca of VHS films, both clean and electric blue in content.
These men were all called George, Andy or Nick and their daughters all wore heavy black make-up, black outfits and black leather coats, accessorised with gold jewellery, and their sons George, Andy and Nick juniors, spent their time in the snooker hall behind the Manhattan and the bus garage.
So you can see that far from feeling xenophobic in relabelling it Palmers Greek, we positively embraced Greeks bearing gifts, because those gifts included Greek food, dirty videos, cheap haircuts and snooker. It was only booze that we had to walk up to Palmers Green Triangle for; but I’ll leave that for part two...
Monday, 29 January 2018
The 70s were cool thanks to cigarettes
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? I vacillated between the noble aspirations of stuntman, cartoonist and actor (ideally with permed hair); but the only constant dream that I nursed was to be a smoker. I would have written to Jim’ll Fix It to ask for his help, but the renowned altruist had ignored my other pleas to play for Liverpool and with Adam and the Ants, so I thought bollocks to him. (Dodged a bullet there). Besides, I had easy access to cigarettes. It was ‘Fags R Us’ at our house. The lounge was like a Victorian pea-souper. We collected Embassy vouchers, we had hundreds, but fuck knows what we ever traded these in for, more packets of Embassy I suspect. And we had ash-trays everywhere, ash-trays bought as presents, ash-trays nicked from restaurants and pubs and places we visited and those posh ash-trays on stands with sliding panels.
And this is because in the 70s cigarettes were GREAT! They came in different coloured boxes with cool designs, not like today when they’re all in the same dark green packet with photos of diseased bodily organs on them. How can you tell which is which? Does Embassy even exist anymore? Oh, it’s the one with the mouth close up on it, the black-gummed, tombstone teethed health warning photo that no one believes because you never see anyone with a gob like that; because actually you’d have to smoke 300 a day to look that bad and no one has been able to afford 300 fags a day since the 70s when they were sensibly priced, and not much more than sweet cigarettes in those days in fact.
But I’ve read that these days it takes just one packet to make your teeth fall out and your gums look like toes on a tramp with trenchfoot. This is because they put all kinds of shit in modern cigarettes - rat poison, anthrax, talcum powder, toe-nails, pig’s eye lashes, paving stones, garlic, maybe even Pot Noodle powder. Back in the 70s, it was good old fashioned tobacco, tar and some pleasantly addictive chemicals. And you could tell the difference between fags as well. Silk Cut (Slut) were your starter pack - pretty bland and innocuous, like plain crisps. Then you might move onto Benson and Hedges, medium tar, bit more of a scratchy feel at the back of your throat, like Monster Munch. From there, you might go Rothmans, but that was like inhaling razor blades and you couldn’t regress back down to Embassy, because your mum smoked them and they were too short; so you’d go a bit exotic and plum for Camel with their mild dung flavouring.
Don’t get me wrong, my parents never encouraged me to smoke. Each time I went to shop to buy their fags for them, I knew I’d get into massive trouble if I smoked one on the way home. So, I had to make do with lighting their dog ends, fresh from the ash-tray, when they were out of the room. They’d never notice. It’s not like I’d smell any more like cigarettes, after all.
But adults were role models and back then there were some clear cultural norms in relation to how men and women should hold their cigarettes. Women had to gently pinch a cigarette between the tips of their elongated fingers and hold their hands up so that the fag was at head height, swaying in time with the rhythm of their speech. Men shoved the cigarette down low in the fingers, near the knuckle, hand half clenched, ideally holding something manly like a pint, a tool or their penis. And when you needed two hands to manipulate any one of those things, you’d let the fag hang limply from your lips, eyes half closed to look cool, whereas in fact you’d be squinting in response to feeling like you were having a napalm eye-bath.
And what was lovely about smoking, was that no one gave a shit about you doing it. Nowadays, you could take a dump on someone’s lap on a train and everyone would look away too polite to comment; but light up a cigarette in a carriage and you’d get a chorus of excuse mes and do you minds. Remember how before the mid 80s you’d NEVER see anyone smoking on a train? That’s because there was so much smoke you’d never see anything. A tube would pull into a station with smoking and non-smoking carriages and it was the latter that had all the available seats, because most people were crammed somewhere inside the smog of the smoking ones. In a token effort to cater for the sensibilities of ‘non-smokers’ (or poofters as they were sometimes known in those politically indifferent days) buses and aeroplanes sectioned off areas where you weren’t allowed to smoke. They overlooked the fact that smoke tends to travel and often it only had to travel a few inches to expose the whole absurdity of non-smoking sections.
For the record, my first cigarette was when I was about 8 or 9, sat on a garage roof with my mate Brett (hard bastard, made his Dad blind by throwing sand in his eye), sharing a pack of John Player No. 6. Then at school in science we’d roll a piece of paper, set it on fire from the Bunsen burner, blow it out and quickly inhale through the tube the little bit of smoke smouldering from the end. After that, it was as I said, the final vestiges of a discarded dog end when your mum punctuated her own smoking with a quick pop to the lav.
Like I always say, the 70s were a better time. A time when culture demanded that we share cigarettes (you never saw anyone open a packet and not make an offer to others, helped by the fact that the cost didnt work out as 50p a fag); a time when people didn’t get their knickers in a twist over the fact that you were making their clothes smell or giving them lung cancer just by smoking in a confined space with them; a time when non-smokers had to fuck off outside a building and stand in the cold to indulge in their minority habit.
And best of all, cigarettes make you look cool. Much much cooler than a battery operated metal toy that emits clouds of strawberry smelling vapour, anyway.
And this is because in the 70s cigarettes were GREAT! They came in different coloured boxes with cool designs, not like today when they’re all in the same dark green packet with photos of diseased bodily organs on them. How can you tell which is which? Does Embassy even exist anymore? Oh, it’s the one with the mouth close up on it, the black-gummed, tombstone teethed health warning photo that no one believes because you never see anyone with a gob like that; because actually you’d have to smoke 300 a day to look that bad and no one has been able to afford 300 fags a day since the 70s when they were sensibly priced, and not much more than sweet cigarettes in those days in fact.
But I’ve read that these days it takes just one packet to make your teeth fall out and your gums look like toes on a tramp with trenchfoot. This is because they put all kinds of shit in modern cigarettes - rat poison, anthrax, talcum powder, toe-nails, pig’s eye lashes, paving stones, garlic, maybe even Pot Noodle powder. Back in the 70s, it was good old fashioned tobacco, tar and some pleasantly addictive chemicals. And you could tell the difference between fags as well. Silk Cut (Slut) were your starter pack - pretty bland and innocuous, like plain crisps. Then you might move onto Benson and Hedges, medium tar, bit more of a scratchy feel at the back of your throat, like Monster Munch. From there, you might go Rothmans, but that was like inhaling razor blades and you couldn’t regress back down to Embassy, because your mum smoked them and they were too short; so you’d go a bit exotic and plum for Camel with their mild dung flavouring.
Don’t get me wrong, my parents never encouraged me to smoke. Each time I went to shop to buy their fags for them, I knew I’d get into massive trouble if I smoked one on the way home. So, I had to make do with lighting their dog ends, fresh from the ash-tray, when they were out of the room. They’d never notice. It’s not like I’d smell any more like cigarettes, after all.
But adults were role models and back then there were some clear cultural norms in relation to how men and women should hold their cigarettes. Women had to gently pinch a cigarette between the tips of their elongated fingers and hold their hands up so that the fag was at head height, swaying in time with the rhythm of their speech. Men shoved the cigarette down low in the fingers, near the knuckle, hand half clenched, ideally holding something manly like a pint, a tool or their penis. And when you needed two hands to manipulate any one of those things, you’d let the fag hang limply from your lips, eyes half closed to look cool, whereas in fact you’d be squinting in response to feeling like you were having a napalm eye-bath.
And what was lovely about smoking, was that no one gave a shit about you doing it. Nowadays, you could take a dump on someone’s lap on a train and everyone would look away too polite to comment; but light up a cigarette in a carriage and you’d get a chorus of excuse mes and do you minds. Remember how before the mid 80s you’d NEVER see anyone smoking on a train? That’s because there was so much smoke you’d never see anything. A tube would pull into a station with smoking and non-smoking carriages and it was the latter that had all the available seats, because most people were crammed somewhere inside the smog of the smoking ones. In a token effort to cater for the sensibilities of ‘non-smokers’ (or poofters as they were sometimes known in those politically indifferent days) buses and aeroplanes sectioned off areas where you weren’t allowed to smoke. They overlooked the fact that smoke tends to travel and often it only had to travel a few inches to expose the whole absurdity of non-smoking sections.
For the record, my first cigarette was when I was about 8 or 9, sat on a garage roof with my mate Brett (hard bastard, made his Dad blind by throwing sand in his eye), sharing a pack of John Player No. 6. Then at school in science we’d roll a piece of paper, set it on fire from the Bunsen burner, blow it out and quickly inhale through the tube the little bit of smoke smouldering from the end. After that, it was as I said, the final vestiges of a discarded dog end when your mum punctuated her own smoking with a quick pop to the lav.
Like I always say, the 70s were a better time. A time when culture demanded that we share cigarettes (you never saw anyone open a packet and not make an offer to others, helped by the fact that the cost didnt work out as 50p a fag); a time when people didn’t get their knickers in a twist over the fact that you were making their clothes smell or giving them lung cancer just by smoking in a confined space with them; a time when non-smokers had to fuck off outside a building and stand in the cold to indulge in their minority habit.
And best of all, cigarettes make you look cool. Much much cooler than a battery operated metal toy that emits clouds of strawberry smelling vapour, anyway.
Sunday, 28 January 2018
All in the mind, somewhere
I’ve done some reading about how the mind works and discovered the difference between the subconscious and the unconscious, but I haven’t been able to apply this new knowledge to the curious phenomena that is best described as ‘starting to shit as soon as you know you’re on the way to the toilet.’
This sense of wonder emerged once again recently as I was walking home from the station after a day’s work needing a poo. (Perhaps I should have restructured that sentence so that you don’t think my job is to need a poo.) It’s a 23 minute walk. I’d wanted a poo since leaving work, a 30 minute train journey and 15 minute walk the other end previous to this walk. So you can imagine how long it was patiently resting in the tube. However, once I started towards home from St Albans station, the unconscious or subconscious part of my mind - I’m desperate to know which - sent a message to my bum to the effect that a visit to the toilet was imminent. It wasn’t. It was still at least 20 minutes away; but, you know, the tug of war team starting pulling too early, the eager athlete was out of the blocks before the gun, the tortoise stuck his head out before hibernation was up, the guests arrived for the party before the dips were on the table. It kind of slowed me down clenching that in as I walked.
This sub or un conscious part of the brain has always fascinated me, ever since I was old enough to get blind drunk and discover that it was possible to find your way home no matter how dysfunctional your conscious mind was. It’s not completely fool-proof though. The subliminal message that jerks your drunken body into action as you approach your stop on the night bus or late train home is pretty reliable except perhaps when you’ve just moved house. This happened on my first night out in London after moving to Borehamwood, when I was completely let down by a uselessly dormant (or maybe, more kindly, untrained) subconsciousness, and I woke up in Bedford, no return train due and only one mini cab outside, which charged me £40 (a ransom in 1997) to which I very consciously responded with an indignant ‘fuck off’ before apologising and accepting the offer, only semi-consciously aware of some poor sod from my carriage who had suffered the same misfortune and who I should have shared the cab with. My brain let us both down there.
I’m assuming the conscious feeds information into the unconscious and the subconscious retrieves it when it feels like it’s needed. For instance, my conscious mind has decided that people who barge in front of others to get on a train deserve some kind of retribution or at least a message to the effect that they are being selfish and impolite. So every time it happens, my foot automatically flicks out to kick or trip the perpetrator, dangerously just before my conscious mind has had a chance to ascertain my chances of avoiding physical harm in the event of a violent response from the aforementioned rude bastard. I’ve no idea how I’ve escaped ever being punched.
This intriguing part of the brain might be linked to intuition, but my intuition isn’t particularly useful. Now that I reflect on it, I can only think of two things that I ever have a strong premonition about. Playing darts, I know as each dart leaves my hand whether it’s going where I want it to or not. That’s one example of successful intuition. The other is when I fart and think to myself, ‘that’s going to smell’ or not. (Though to be fair, a hot sensation between the cheeks usually gives it away.)
Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve provided the sort of intellectual and comprehensive psychological analysis that Freud did in his lifetime, but perhaps he would have been even more useful if, rather than pervily banging on about how sex unconsciously impacts on all our conscious thoughts, he provided a solution to that more pertinent question of why a poo starts coming out when you know you’re not far from a toilet.
This sense of wonder emerged once again recently as I was walking home from the station after a day’s work needing a poo. (Perhaps I should have restructured that sentence so that you don’t think my job is to need a poo.) It’s a 23 minute walk. I’d wanted a poo since leaving work, a 30 minute train journey and 15 minute walk the other end previous to this walk. So you can imagine how long it was patiently resting in the tube. However, once I started towards home from St Albans station, the unconscious or subconscious part of my mind - I’m desperate to know which - sent a message to my bum to the effect that a visit to the toilet was imminent. It wasn’t. It was still at least 20 minutes away; but, you know, the tug of war team starting pulling too early, the eager athlete was out of the blocks before the gun, the tortoise stuck his head out before hibernation was up, the guests arrived for the party before the dips were on the table. It kind of slowed me down clenching that in as I walked.
This sub or un conscious part of the brain has always fascinated me, ever since I was old enough to get blind drunk and discover that it was possible to find your way home no matter how dysfunctional your conscious mind was. It’s not completely fool-proof though. The subliminal message that jerks your drunken body into action as you approach your stop on the night bus or late train home is pretty reliable except perhaps when you’ve just moved house. This happened on my first night out in London after moving to Borehamwood, when I was completely let down by a uselessly dormant (or maybe, more kindly, untrained) subconsciousness, and I woke up in Bedford, no return train due and only one mini cab outside, which charged me £40 (a ransom in 1997) to which I very consciously responded with an indignant ‘fuck off’ before apologising and accepting the offer, only semi-consciously aware of some poor sod from my carriage who had suffered the same misfortune and who I should have shared the cab with. My brain let us both down there.
I’m assuming the conscious feeds information into the unconscious and the subconscious retrieves it when it feels like it’s needed. For instance, my conscious mind has decided that people who barge in front of others to get on a train deserve some kind of retribution or at least a message to the effect that they are being selfish and impolite. So every time it happens, my foot automatically flicks out to kick or trip the perpetrator, dangerously just before my conscious mind has had a chance to ascertain my chances of avoiding physical harm in the event of a violent response from the aforementioned rude bastard. I’ve no idea how I’ve escaped ever being punched.
This intriguing part of the brain might be linked to intuition, but my intuition isn’t particularly useful. Now that I reflect on it, I can only think of two things that I ever have a strong premonition about. Playing darts, I know as each dart leaves my hand whether it’s going where I want it to or not. That’s one example of successful intuition. The other is when I fart and think to myself, ‘that’s going to smell’ or not. (Though to be fair, a hot sensation between the cheeks usually gives it away.)
Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve provided the sort of intellectual and comprehensive psychological analysis that Freud did in his lifetime, but perhaps he would have been even more useful if, rather than pervily banging on about how sex unconsciously impacts on all our conscious thoughts, he provided a solution to that more pertinent question of why a poo starts coming out when you know you’re not far from a toilet.
Saturday, 6 January 2018
Reality TV did exist in the 70s
In my admittedly unreliable and predictably rose (or perhaps beige) tinted memory of the 1970s, there was only one TV programme that purported to be ‘reality TV’ and this was ‘The Family’. The premise was no more complicated than a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a family from Reading. Later, I lived in Reading as a student and coincidentally we also had numerous flies on our walls (and once I even had some Walls on my flies - that was when I dropped an ice-cream onto my lap.). There was no angle to this programme. This was years before Channel 4 existed and the family in question were not fat or gypsies or fat gypsies; they weren’t first dateable or undateable; they weren’t filthy rich and fucking stupid, nor were they piss poor and fucking stupid; and they weren’t all doing an everyday job that involved dealing with members of the public that other members of the public find entertaining to watch. Channel 4 wouldn’t have touched them.
On reflection, when you’re a kid in the 70s then EVERYTHING is ‘reality TV’, because everything on TV was REAL. Take Rainbow. That’s your nuclear family unit, that is. A mixed-species homosexual couple who’d fostered two one-armed children with learning difficulties. (Channel 4 would certainly have touched THAT family). Wrestling on World of Sport. Every male in the 70s stripped down to their y-fronts for a wrestle with another male on an almost daily basis, that’s what you do when you don’t have computer games. (I still do it now if my phone battery runs down). And most realistic of all was the documentary about life in a department store, Are you Being Served? Anyone going into a John Lewis or C&A or somewhere similar would have noted the superfluous over-staffing (5 shop assistants for one customer every half hour); and John Inman was a real gay man playing a gay man. Arguably he was only implicitly homosexual, but up until then films and TV had been full of gay men playing straight men and straight men playing gay men - and Millenials think that THEY invented the concept of being sexually non-binary. No more so than they invented ‘gender fluid’ (as we know, that was Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough.)
There is an argument against all this, though. In contrast to the above, programmes that claimed to have some kind of gritty authenticity actually proved to be far from realistic. Grange Hill started before I went to secondary school, so I was duped into believing that I was on the verge of experiencing similar escapades to those of Tucker, Benny, Trisha and co. Two years later I’m in secondary school and wondering why the pupils in Grange Hill didn’t use tits and willies and poo as the fulcrum around which ALL their humour was centred. And The Sweeney showed coppers beating up criminals, using politically incorrect terminology, drinking scotch for breakfast and tellling women to put their knickers on and make the tea - but my Dad was a copper in the 70s and he had Frosties for breakfast, so that’s at least one thing that wasn’t quite authentic.
But on the whole, 70s TV was far more authentic than reality TV these days, which presents to us people who are not representative of the population, but instead come from the narrower demographic of vain exhibitionists desperate for attention (or, in fewer cases, vulnerable people who find it hard to fit in). These unremarkable but irritating non-entities who saturate our screens are worthy not of TV celebrity status, but instead a Sweeney-style whack.
On reflection, when you’re a kid in the 70s then EVERYTHING is ‘reality TV’, because everything on TV was REAL. Take Rainbow. That’s your nuclear family unit, that is. A mixed-species homosexual couple who’d fostered two one-armed children with learning difficulties. (Channel 4 would certainly have touched THAT family). Wrestling on World of Sport. Every male in the 70s stripped down to their y-fronts for a wrestle with another male on an almost daily basis, that’s what you do when you don’t have computer games. (I still do it now if my phone battery runs down). And most realistic of all was the documentary about life in a department store, Are you Being Served? Anyone going into a John Lewis or C&A or somewhere similar would have noted the superfluous over-staffing (5 shop assistants for one customer every half hour); and John Inman was a real gay man playing a gay man. Arguably he was only implicitly homosexual, but up until then films and TV had been full of gay men playing straight men and straight men playing gay men - and Millenials think that THEY invented the concept of being sexually non-binary. No more so than they invented ‘gender fluid’ (as we know, that was Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough.)
There is an argument against all this, though. In contrast to the above, programmes that claimed to have some kind of gritty authenticity actually proved to be far from realistic. Grange Hill started before I went to secondary school, so I was duped into believing that I was on the verge of experiencing similar escapades to those of Tucker, Benny, Trisha and co. Two years later I’m in secondary school and wondering why the pupils in Grange Hill didn’t use tits and willies and poo as the fulcrum around which ALL their humour was centred. And The Sweeney showed coppers beating up criminals, using politically incorrect terminology, drinking scotch for breakfast and tellling women to put their knickers on and make the tea - but my Dad was a copper in the 70s and he had Frosties for breakfast, so that’s at least one thing that wasn’t quite authentic.
But on the whole, 70s TV was far more authentic than reality TV these days, which presents to us people who are not representative of the population, but instead come from the narrower demographic of vain exhibitionists desperate for attention (or, in fewer cases, vulnerable people who find it hard to fit in). These unremarkable but irritating non-entities who saturate our screens are worthy not of TV celebrity status, but instead a Sweeney-style whack.
Friday, 29 December 2017
Male fashion farces
Continuing with the theme of male attire, it would be remiss of me not to pour scorn on some of the fashions that British men have ascribed to over the years; after all, my jug of scorn is never empty and this particular feature of social absurdity is a fertile field, ever-thirsty for more watering.
I look around these days at your average stereotypical hipsters and I feel privileged not to be a millennial. But then I remember that even when I was 14-24, I never signed up fully to any clothing or hairstyle trends, so I’d be unlikely to adorn myself with the indignity that accompanies a look that is essentially cartoon Mumford and Sons ‘twattire’. I’d probably grow a beard, I have nothing against beards, except of course my face for most of the year, but I’d stop well short of one of those oily pubic bibs that hangs off a hipster’s chin like a clump of dung stuck to a buffalo’s arse. I might favour a short back and sides, but not that more extreme cut that, when accompanying the beard, conjures up images of late Victorian, sepia-toned photographs. I’d avoid both the nu-folk tweed that your proper Mumford twats choose as part of the affectation as much as I’d avoid the skinny jeans that are so skinny that they look like tights. What worked for Max Wall certainly doesn’t work for a top-heavy hipster, whose torso is either too fat or too gym-inflated muscly to sit atop a pair of splindly legs without looking like the love-child of Bluto and Olive Oyl.
When I was young enough to be tempted by the styles of the day, I only went about a quarter of the way along that fashion spectrum. My mid-80s mullet, while being long enough to have me sent home from school to have an inch cut off it, never put me on the same barber shop wall as members of those communities whose caravans perch behind barricades of bin bags on A-road sidings outside of Hatfield. I liked to think that I looked like Bono, I certainly have the same nose:height ratio. It didn’t do me as many favours as it probably did for Bono though.
And then when the whole Madchester scene swept the nation as I turned 19, my jeans may have had some give in them, but could hardly be called baggy, because there has to be a line. Yes, I styled my lengthening fringe into curtains flanking a centre parting, but there was a mathematically calculable point at which the slack in both trouser material and hanging fringe made you a quantifiable dickhead. (I had enough dickhead tendencies not to exacerbate things by trying to look exactly like Shaun Ryder).
A fashion that I steered completely away from was the early 80s wedge, that leviathan fringe of high-lighted hair that enabled boys and men to look like middle-aged housewives. What was the hairstyle of young men for two years became the hairstyle of their mums for the next twenty. Watching the video for Wham’s Last Christmas makes me recall a one-time best mate - a fellow devotee of Madness, with whom I’d bus it down to Stiff Records in Camden every time a new single came out - who I lost to the cult of Duran Duran. Yes, he got a girlfriend as a result of his transformation into a beauty salon Frankenstein, but he had to listen to shit music as a result. No girlfriend could be worth doing that to your hair and then swinging that glamorous wedge to The Reflex.
It’ll be interesting to see what fad in men’s fashion comes next. Perhaps male grooming will run its course and the term will revert to it original 1970s BBC Disc Jockey description. Perhaps men who aren’t nonces will reclaim moustaches back from the men who are. Maybe the next line of sports casual wear - after the constipated era of grey tracksuit bottoms for every working class white lad - will build on the gentrification that spawned the look of the Max-Wall-legged minge-faced hipster and reignite a love for Alan Partridge Pringle jumpers and diamond patterened socks in pastel shades. Who knows? The only self-evident truth is that those who go the whole hog, only serve to stand out as the clowns in the whole fashion circus.
And if you’re wondering what propmted this rant, then it was a visit to the barber for the same hair-cut that I’ve had for twenty years and his offer to do my eye-brows while he was at it. Obviously I declined - that’s one bit of male grooming that I have to do myself.
I look around these days at your average stereotypical hipsters and I feel privileged not to be a millennial. But then I remember that even when I was 14-24, I never signed up fully to any clothing or hairstyle trends, so I’d be unlikely to adorn myself with the indignity that accompanies a look that is essentially cartoon Mumford and Sons ‘twattire’. I’d probably grow a beard, I have nothing against beards, except of course my face for most of the year, but I’d stop well short of one of those oily pubic bibs that hangs off a hipster’s chin like a clump of dung stuck to a buffalo’s arse. I might favour a short back and sides, but not that more extreme cut that, when accompanying the beard, conjures up images of late Victorian, sepia-toned photographs. I’d avoid both the nu-folk tweed that your proper Mumford twats choose as part of the affectation as much as I’d avoid the skinny jeans that are so skinny that they look like tights. What worked for Max Wall certainly doesn’t work for a top-heavy hipster, whose torso is either too fat or too gym-inflated muscly to sit atop a pair of splindly legs without looking like the love-child of Bluto and Olive Oyl.
When I was young enough to be tempted by the styles of the day, I only went about a quarter of the way along that fashion spectrum. My mid-80s mullet, while being long enough to have me sent home from school to have an inch cut off it, never put me on the same barber shop wall as members of those communities whose caravans perch behind barricades of bin bags on A-road sidings outside of Hatfield. I liked to think that I looked like Bono, I certainly have the same nose:height ratio. It didn’t do me as many favours as it probably did for Bono though.
And then when the whole Madchester scene swept the nation as I turned 19, my jeans may have had some give in them, but could hardly be called baggy, because there has to be a line. Yes, I styled my lengthening fringe into curtains flanking a centre parting, but there was a mathematically calculable point at which the slack in both trouser material and hanging fringe made you a quantifiable dickhead. (I had enough dickhead tendencies not to exacerbate things by trying to look exactly like Shaun Ryder).
A fashion that I steered completely away from was the early 80s wedge, that leviathan fringe of high-lighted hair that enabled boys and men to look like middle-aged housewives. What was the hairstyle of young men for two years became the hairstyle of their mums for the next twenty. Watching the video for Wham’s Last Christmas makes me recall a one-time best mate - a fellow devotee of Madness, with whom I’d bus it down to Stiff Records in Camden every time a new single came out - who I lost to the cult of Duran Duran. Yes, he got a girlfriend as a result of his transformation into a beauty salon Frankenstein, but he had to listen to shit music as a result. No girlfriend could be worth doing that to your hair and then swinging that glamorous wedge to The Reflex.
It’ll be interesting to see what fad in men’s fashion comes next. Perhaps male grooming will run its course and the term will revert to it original 1970s BBC Disc Jockey description. Perhaps men who aren’t nonces will reclaim moustaches back from the men who are. Maybe the next line of sports casual wear - after the constipated era of grey tracksuit bottoms for every working class white lad - will build on the gentrification that spawned the look of the Max-Wall-legged minge-faced hipster and reignite a love for Alan Partridge Pringle jumpers and diamond patterened socks in pastel shades. Who knows? The only self-evident truth is that those who go the whole hog, only serve to stand out as the clowns in the whole fashion circus.
And if you’re wondering what propmted this rant, then it was a visit to the barber for the same hair-cut that I’ve had for twenty years and his offer to do my eye-brows while he was at it. Obviously I declined - that’s one bit of male grooming that I have to do myself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)