Lazy Blogging, Part 8.

Empire Of The Sun: We Are The People

Back In The Day

We're having windows fitted, which meant transplanting all my books to the other side of the house. One upside to this chore was finding a drawing book that I thought I'd lost years ago. When we lived in pre-gentrified Bethnal Green back in the 90s, there were a lot of "characters" knocking around, and I'd do my best to sketch them. Be gentle. I did indeed go to art college, but drawing from life was never my best subject.


"Outside the Carpenters Arms, Cheshire Street, playing for the sunday market. Unconvincing 'old soldier' outfit made from a bus driver's cap and bits of a a postman's uniform. Cap badge and medals made from tin foil "


"The glass collector at the Old George, Bethnal Green Road. The George is known locally as "Kempy's" after the guv'nor Tommy Kemp, the image of Chas Hodges. The glass collector is a grumpy ex-merchant seaman - and never grumpier than the night we saw him ejecting a group of drunk Russian sailors."


These are figures from Bethnal Green Road market - the figure at the bottom left was the perma-singing proprietor of the bag stall opposite the Old George. At the first sign of sun he'd whip off his shirt, revealing a large beer gut. The guy on the right was a body builder who I'd see waddling around almost every day. He had muscles in his face.


"Homeless man, clearly mentally ill. Sleeps in bus shelter on Bethnal Green Road. Holds long whispered conversations with his hand and spends his days around the Bagel Shop. Looks almost like a shadow or silhouette"


"Our neighbour, Reg [a lovely old diamond geezer if ever there was one]. He has a broken nose and is very dapper. He was born in a house on the very spot our flats are now on [I seem to remember his house was destroyed in the Blitz while Reg was in the navy]. I'd love to ask him how his nose got flattened"

1919-2009

It wasn't easy being a young biker in the early 60s. You might have a Norton Dominator with Rita Tushingham on the back, but good luck finding somewhere that would serve you a frothy coffee. Society was in high dudgeon over these leather-clad tearaways blasting past Middle England's Rover P4s on the way to Margate. As if that wasn't bad enough, Mods wanted to throw deckchairs at them when they got there. There were sanctuaries of course - Watford's Busy Bee café, on the "norf circ" there was The Ace and down in Hackney Wick, there was the 59 Club. This was founded - in '59 - by Reverend John Oates as the youth club of the Eton Mission. Somehow, Rev Oates persuaded Cliff Richard and Princess Margaret to open the club, which became hugely popular. Working at the Mission at the time was Reverend William Shergold, who in 1962 saw an opportunity to reach out to these bequiffed pariahs causing havoc on the nation's arterial routes. Rev. Shergold had been a motorcyclist since arriving in London during the Blitz, and on visits to places like the Ace was able to talk to the bikers as an equal as he handed out leaflets; "I just had a chat and invited them to my church". Soon ton-up kids were riding from all over the South East to visit the 59 club with its jukebox and coffee machine, but also for services at the Mission where there were blessings of both riders and machines. The bikers were welcome at the 59, not shunned. At one stage the club was the largest of its type in the world, with a three year waiting list. "Father Bill" (pictured above in leathers and dog collar) died on May 17th aged 89, no doubt happy in the knowledge that the 59 club is still going strong.

I may be a heathen, but riding a motorsickle along the Embankment on a deserted summer dawn is a spiritual experience indeed. And you just don't ever feel that in a car.

Missing Link

Last year my beloved Sprint Veloce failed her MOT, and shamefully I never got round to getting the work done. Apart from the engine being turned over every couple of months, Bella languished in a corner of our garden, sleeping under three waterproof tarps and a film of WD40. Neglect is bad for scooters. Water can settle on unused footboards, rotting the monocoque frame. The best thing is to keep riding them, so I finally got my ass into gear and booked Bella in at Scooterworks.

Pulling the covers off and wheeling the old girl into the road I mused that with Friday the busiest day of my working week, it wouldn't be the best time to break down. I needn't have worried. Despite me not even cleaning the carburettor, Bella awoke after a mere two prods of the kicker and a tickle of choke. The tyres were flat but soon sorted, and twenty-odd minutes later I was at Craig's untidy workshop in Bermondsey.

For the MOT Bella needed a new fork link pivot pin (me neither), the replacement of which has made not the slightest noticeable difference to the ride which remains as joyously tooth-loosening as ever. I hope we get a scooter summer this year.

Harp and Harp

I was lucky enough to be at the press preview of Terminator Salvation last night. The film looks great, with a pumping first half. However, the plot has holes big enough to park a battleship in, some wincingly corny scenes and Christian Bale trying to be all gruff and serious, but coming over as a bit sulky. Oh, and there's a submarine with a Jack Nicholson impersonator in it. The fact that the director calls himself "McG" doesn't help matters. By the time the credits rolled I was glad it was all over, and dying for a pint. We went down to The Harp where I got stuck into a fresh, fruity and hoppy St Edmunds, a beer that gets a bit of stick in some corners of the blogoshire, but I like it a lot. Head and shoulders above the rest of Greene King's products.

In one of those perfect London moments, my District Line carriage home had a girl in it playing a full-size harp and singing in a voice as clear as a Leica optic. Even the hoodies at one end of the car took their earphones out to listen.

Enjoy The Silence

William Castleman's time-lapse film of the Milky Way rising over the 2009 Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, USA.

If It Had To Be Done

Here we go again - Eurovision time. The yookay entry this year is Jade Ewen with It's My Time, which sounds like the national anthem of a new Baltic state. I know the British have nothing to prove about song writing and it's all a bit of a laugh, but our entry is rubbish. We deserve to lose.

The French, contrary and sensible as ever are fielding actress Patricia Kaas, who's also a multi-million selling chansonnier in the Francophone world. Her Et s'il fallait le faire is a breathy and mature song worthy of Edith Piaf or Marlene Dietrich. Tomorrow we're having a Skype-enabled Eurovision party with mates 300 miles away - I know who i'll be cheering.

Behind The Green Door

Every town has a pub that nobody seems to visit. Nobody is ever seen entering or leaving. Nobody knows anyone who's ever been in. The Lamb is Bideford's example. For the twenty-odd years I've been visiting Devon, I've wanted to visit this pub. It's in the middle of a row of Victorian terraces above the Pannier Market, an example of the fast-vanishing simple backstreet boozer. When we were down over Easter, I got my chance. On my way up Honestone Street I noticed that the faded Whitbread sign has aquired a new neighbour since I last walked past - Beck's Vier, so at least it was still trading. Bideford's pubs are in the main disappointing, as I have lamented here before. Maybe The Lamb was an undiscovered gem? The beery equivalent of finding a Shakespeare Folio on an Oxfam shelf stuffed with Jeffrey Archer?

Gingerly pushing open the door I was met with a tired 80s refit and keg beers - was one of them really Trophy Bitter? The locals round the bar were a friendly bunch, discussing darts and horse racing rather than the dead-eyed hermits I half expected. I glumly perched on a buffet and supped my freezing cold Becks before heading back to The Kings. Oh well. Nice window, though.

Hello Sailor

Considering it was the original reason that the city grew, the Thames is a criminally underused feature of London. Nowadays most shipping gets no further than Tilbury, though the odd cruise liner ties up next to HMS Belfast by Tower Bridge. Modern river traffic is pleasure craft, tour boats, the River Police and tugs pulling the city's waste to be incinerated at Chatham, so it's always enjoyable when something substantial can be seen. The aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious - known to her crew as "Lusty" - is moored at Greenwich until monday, celebrating 100 years of Royal Navy aviation, so I went down early on saturday to have a look. The ship's enormous - all but 700ft long - though scale was difficult to judge until a tourist boat chugged into view. As I clicked away for the stock library I supply, I couldn't resist a shot of my '81 PX 'Dino'.

"A Charlady's Car"*

The Mini is 50 today. Apart from a flirtation with a Renault Clio, Our Lad's always driven Minis. He kicked off at 17 with a kumquat-coloured Mark III, and followed that up with a couple of Coopers in which we explored a great deal of Northern England, feeling each and every bump, stone and flattened rabbit on the road the ten-inch wheels went over. The footwells of the Mark III had to be baled out every morning if there'd been rain. In Cooper 2 we pulled away from the chip shop, heard a crack, and watched open-mouthed as the offside front wheel bounced down the road away from us. Still, we always forgave the minis, smiling as you might at the antics of an errant but loveable friend. Our Lad now drives the ruthlessly reliable BMW future-retro version after holding out for several years in disgust at the original's demise.

*Mini designer Alec Issigonis. Cinema's best-ever car chase was still a decade away.

Madchester

If you live in Manchester, you can now pay £30 to have your fingerprints taken - yes, exactly like a criminal - at a Post Office, along with 49 other types of information and stored on a central government database.

Presumably, the crooks, terrorists and illegals can carry special ID cards with a red edging.

The Streets Of London

An update: At the beginning of March I blogged about the state of the Bow Flyover, with its alarming wheel-trapping ruts on the westbound stretch. It was a very dangerous place to be on two wheels, especially the smaller ones of yer typical scooter.

After reporting the fault to Newham Council, Tower Hamlets Council, Fixmystreet, Transport For London and even London Bikers the road has been fixed. Well, I say fixed - the worst holes have had some tarmac dropped in them - but it's much better than it was. Given that nobody I spoke to had any idea who looked after the flyover, it's a minor miracle that anything's been done at all.



(pic from the Great London Rideout 2006 - which takes place on June 14th this year)

Lazy Blogging, Part 7.

Flight Of The Conchords: Business Time

New series next week!

Spooning

There was a time when I would never set foot in a JD Wetherspoon. In my early years in London I was on a Junior Designer's salary, and without getting all Four Yorkshiremen on you, the Camden Head JDW in Bethnal Green was one of the few places in the capital I could afford a few pints without ringing the bank to tell them why I was about to get 20 quid out of my account. (I'm not kidding - the Carlisle Midland Bank watched new graduates like hawks). When we first started going there it was new, well run, and full of bright, shiny people. Over the next couple of years the pub got tatty, service became indifferent and the punters became a ragged soup of crumbling old men and alcoholics with their flies undone. It was a similar story at the Moon And Sixpence in Soho - and in fact, any others I visited back then. I avoided JDWs for the next decade.

The next time I visited a 'poon was when the Livery Rooms opened in Keighley in 2004. I dropped in to have a look with my mum and dad - it was a bit of a surprise, with ten real ales, quick service and a clientele with good personal hygiene. Five years on, it's remains a decent place to visit. It might be that the competition from Timothy Taylor's excellent pubs keeps standards high. A JDW will never be my first choice for a pint, but these days I don't jump on the bus home if someone suggests a swift half at a Wetherspoon.

On saturday I was at the Penderel's Oak in High Holborn for their bit of the "World's Biggest International Real Ale Festival". This is about the best JDW I've been in - and it's round the corner from the very worst pub (and I've been in a lot of bad pubs) I've ever set foot in: the Shakespeare's Head JDW on Kingsway.

We tried (In their dinky 1/3rd glasses - so one out of every three drinks was - in effect - tax):

JW Lees Hopping Mad (Thin but decent with a lot of liquorice coming through)
Marston's Single Malt (Overly mellow - somewhat tasteless)
Moorehouse's Old Boss (Bitter, fruity - full of zing)
Flying Dutchman Wit Bier (Spicy, refreshing)
Thwaites Double Century (Fragrant, delicious)
St Peter's Golden Ale (First time I'd tried draught - prefer bottled)
St Georgen Brau Keller BIer (Nutty, hoppy)
Sinebrychoff Porter (molasses, espresso complete with 'crema'-like head)

All the above were in good condition. The real standout was the Double Century - a lot of orange notes up front. Full of malty goodness, It just burst with character. Like a good film, you know you've had an outstanding pint if you're still thinking about it almost a week later.

Absolute Zero

It was Worldwide pinhole photography day on saturday. I'm a big fan of low tech cameras and it doesn't come much lower tech than something which is literally a box with a hole in it. Diehard pinholers (like the hugely inventive Justin Quinnell who makes them small enough to go in his mouth) make the cameras themselves, but I've got a Zero 2000, a teak and brass beauty made by Hong Kong craftsman Zernike Au. It's such a gorgeous object that it's a work of art in itself. Modern digital cameras more or less guarantee perfect results but a pinhole forces you to slow down and think. The Zero 2000 doesn't have a viewfinder and exposures are calculated by guesswork or handheld meter (in my case an ancient Weston Master). It's very refreshing to use a pinhole after blasting away all day with a DSLR. You never know if you'll have anything worth printing, but that's part of the fun.



(I missed pinhole day - I was beer tasting with me brother - so here's a Zero 2000 image from a trip to Instow a couple of weeks back)

Lazy Blogging, Part 7

Inspired my neighbour - he's French, goes jogging in a business suit and has spent the last five years doing up his house with the curtains drawn - Tom Waits' What's He Building?

Closing Time

Most towns have one. Some have more than one. Some unfortunate towns have nothing but them; rough pubs. I don't mean the type celebrated by tongue-in-cheek guides, with a meat raffle, a copy of the Racing Post left on a buffet and Karaoke on fridays. I mean the ones with a tangible sense of threat, like an unexploded bomb. We have one of those in Leytonstone - it's called Lincolns. Opened in 1872 and originally called The Elms, Lincolns is a handsome building about halfway up the High Road between the railway bridge and the parish church. A lot of the older community have fond memories of the Elms as a decent pub, but it's had a varied history. In 1983 - as the newly renamed Lincolns - CAMRA described the place as a "Young people's musically orientated establishment. Loud music in main bar". In the late 80s it was briefly renamed "Big Hand Mo's" and i'm sure it was a precisely as good as that sounds, especially as it was selling Webster's Bitter, perhaps the least-missed Yorkshire ale of all time.

In recent years there were complaints by local residents of blatant drug dealing and customers openly urinating and defecating in neighbouring streets. Vomit, used condoms and discarded tights became an unwanted feature of many a local garden. There was at least one stabbing and even rumours of firearms being waved around. A midnight punch-up could be witnessed at least once a week. There were some very intimidating characters hanging around. I'm no coward, but I often used to cross the road to avoid them and their stocky, snarling dogs.

The local Police have been proactive about this charming establishment, and spent some time quietly gathering evidence. What finally cooked Lincolns' goose was a copper actually being told on his undercover visit that he "looked like he might enjoy some coke" and that the dealer had "just popped out" but would be back. He was later offered counterfeit DVDs and treated to a lock-in. A court appeal revealed that the manager was actually too scared of his clientele to confront them about their behaviour. To the delight of everyone except the hoodlums who came from as far away as South London to make merry on our doorstep, the pub is boarded up. It doesn't end there though - the pub will reopen in autumn as a rebranded, renewed "community pub" selling real ale. Leytonstone could definately do with a couple more decent pubs - and I really hope that this will be one at last.


I haven't got a picture of Lincolns - so here's a supremely hoppy and fresh pint of Skinner's Betty Stoggs I enjoyed at the Bush Inn, Morwenstow, last week.

On The Lam

Cats and dogs. Apples and Oranges. Lambretta and Vespa. Sort of the same, and also completely different. I love walking, but when I set off on a ride, I don't want to complete the journey on foot or sit in the kerb waiting for Carole Nash to arrive. That's why I own Vespas.

A Lambretta rider will invariably be wearing a pair of walking boots and the facial expression of someone expecting bad news. It's not that they are inherently unreliable, just that they demand a lot more TLC than a comparable Vespa. Consequently, there are far more vintage Vespas on London's roads than their Milanese cousins. Last night I stopped to help the rider of a smart Series One who had pulled up on Mile End road. His spare wheel, fitted inside the legshield, had fallen off and he was strapping it to his carrier with a clutch cable. "I ride it every day from Camberwell to Chigwell" he beamed; "It never lets me down" - ignoring that fact that it it er, had just let him down. Perhaps more than any other vehicle, Lammys inspire an affection and loyalty bordering on the psychopathic. That's why there's a Lambretta Museum in Weston-Super-Mare, which we visited after Ilminster.





The Lambretta Museum started off as Weston Scooter Parts, run by Nigel Cox. Cox had been buying up Lambretta parts, memorabilia and even the stocks of whole dealerships since the early 70s, when nobody really wanted them. At first it was just as a collector, but he opened up as a dealer in 1986, with his collection on display in part of the shop. He retired a couple of years ago with the shop's stock going to Marco and Steve at Scooter Emporium and the museum being sold to local boys Scooter Products. It's now the largest collection in the world - literally every inch is cluttered with parts, stickers, ephemera, posters, point-of-sale displays, badges and of course, scooters - a couple of dozen of 'em - including my favourite Lambretta, the Dennis The Menace-esque Rallymaster.







A lot of the scooters here are ultra rare, many with zero mileage or fitted with hens-tooth accessories. Cox had the foresight to hoover this stuff up in the days when Lambretta scooters were seen as anachronisms and parts and accesories were being scrapped, burned, buried or even dumped at sea by the ton. He was one of the first to visit Italy in the dark days when Lambretta dealerships were closing and could pick up a whole shop's stock for a song. Originally, there was at least one example of each Lambretta model from 1947 to 1971 - including the very last one to roll off Innocenti's production line in the days when it was owned - of all people - by British Leyland. Apparently, Cox kept this one and a few other models for himself when he retired - can't say I blame him. Despite my earlier comments, I'd love a Lambretta to sit alongside my Vespas - and if Waltham Forest council hadn't dumped a third wheelie bin on us, I might have actually had the room.

Being Served

One of the joys of visiting somewhere new is finding a shop that is still trading just as it has for decades. On our way to Devon we wandered off the A303 and found ourselves at Ilminster, a place neither of us had visited before. We parked opposite the beautiful St Mary's Church and stepping out of the Wheelerwagon were transfixed, open-mouthed, by the sight of Dyer's Drapers And Outfitters.



The store started as RP Wheadon And Son in 1870 and the doorways still bear the original custodian's name, as do the magnificent etched-glass doors. RA Dyer took over in 1937 and ran the place until the 1990s. The two-floored shop is now in the hands of the Speke family who rescued the store when it suddenly closed in 2005. It seems to be doing well. An elderly couple we spoke to outside told us how proud the town was of Dyer's, and what a fine place Ilminster was to live "... even though we've now got a Tesco that nobody wanted".

The staff were mostly big-haired ladies of a certain age with half-moon glasses hanging round their necks on gold chains. They were a delighful bunch and very indulgent of me poking my camera lens into the original wooden cabinets and fittings. Captain Peacock must have been round the back having a crafty Woodbine.

Folk Law

The people of North Devon are an independent lot. It's not exactly The Wickerman out there, but if they run into a problem they like to fix it in their own way. I was once on a bus that was trundling down a narrow lane. We encountered a Lexus who for reasons only known to its beachball-faced driver refused to obey local convention and back up to a passing place just behind him. Our driver jumped out to have a word, but being ostentaciously blanked by this fool, got back in his cab to ponder his options. And there we might have sat for the rest of the day - if a farmer hadn't appeared on a quad bike, complete with dog on the back. The farmer had a short chat with our driver and trotted up to Lexus Man - who was by now standing in the lane with his arms folded, still grinning smugly, and wearing sunglasses despite it being almost dark. After a brief but animated chat the farmer punched him squarely on the jaw. Lexus Man picked himself up and hurriedly reversed back to allow a bus full of cheering and jeering passengers on their way.



Most of the pubs (and quite a few houses) in Bideford have distinctive floor tiles, like here at the Kings Arms. These came from an Italian ship which ran aground on The Bar - the notorious reef at the mouth of the Torridge Estuary. In order to be refloated the ship had to have its cargo temporarily brought ashore. Not all the tiles she was carrying made it back to the ship - whether this was legitimate or not depends on who you ask - but it was good news for the publicans of the town who never need to buy a carpet again.