Through A Glass Darkly

Along with discarded chicken boxes, vintage scooters, and Fiat Cinquecenti, I am unable to pass a seaside telescope without photographing it. Rusty, crusty one-eyed sentries looking out to sea, no matter what the weather. There all seem to be be made by small regional factories - the most prolific being the mysterious Roland Telescopes of Robin Hoods Bay of which barely a trace can be found on't internet. Although today 20p will get you a slightly blurred view of a dredging boat, these 'scopes are the descendents of ones set up to give cheeky Edwardian chaps a view of ladies emerging from bathing machines. Ding dong!

Lazy Blogging, Part 5.

Early morning? Illegal speeds? Paris? 1970s? Mon Dieu!

It's beyond irony that the world's dullest band used this film in one of their vids. I'll stick with the engine note of the Ferrari 275, thanks.

Just Fancy

I can't visit Scarborough without checking that John Werrit is still open. This shop always loomed large in our childhood visits to the town, with its mesmerising display of novelties (is this what is meant by 'fancy goods' - I'm never sure), each with a handwritten price ticket. The key, it is said, to a profitable shop is profit per square foot of retail space and literally every inch of the windows at John Werrit is selling something. Practical jokes, cigarette lighters, Princess Diana plates, risqué souvenirs, stickers, patches, bullet keyrings, postcards. The only obvious change since they were selling I Shot JR mugs is the new sign, which used to be a magnificent example of Stymie Bold Italic. God Save Little Shops, as the Kinks once sang.

Modern Times

Home this weekend to Keighley, the town where I was born, bred and buttered. I lived there until I was 21, when I left to become a media ponce Down South. It's a friendly place, where it is impossible to stand at a bus stop or in a Post Office queue without being engaged in a conversation with a total stranger. This person will acquire a pitying look in their eye when they realise you have the misfortune to live where beer costs almost four quid a pint and gets served flat in a gastropub with battered sofas and no beermats, full of other media ponces tapping messages into Blackberries to their spouse that they'll see in half an hour anyway and eating olives at three quid a bowl, and how much to get a taxi home? Blimey.

I can honestly say that I can think of more good pubs in the Keighley area than in central London, and even in most of the more ropey ones you can get a reliably decent pint. Of the good ones, Ossett Brewery's The Albert, a handsome embodiment of Victorian optimism, is a real standout with ten handpumps. Nearby are freehouses the Red Pig and the Cricketers, which always seems to have at least one of Moorhouses' sublime brews on. There are loads of others within a quick ride of the bus station - The Golden Fleece at Oakworth, The White Bear at Steeton, practically every pub in Haworth ... it's (almost) all good in the 'hood.

Two in particular - The Brown Cow and the Boltmakers - are among the best town pubs I've been in anywhere. These are owned by local brewing heroes Timothy Taylor, which has a varied pub estate in the town - from old-man-and-a-jack-russell to night-out-with-the-lads, and everything in between. All of these are worth a visit, and I've tried and failed a couple of times to visit every one on a pub crawl. I was in the Brown Cow on saturday night, and very happy to be there. Along with Taylor's Best Bitter, Golden Best, Landlord and Dark Mild were a seasonal from York Brewery and Suddaby's After Dark Coffee Porter. This was as black as a crow's eyepatch and full of brooding dark notes of toffee, liquorice and yes, espresso. Heavy, but highly drinkable and utterly delicious - it just slid down. They get some unusual guests ales at the Brown Cow. On my last visit they had Naylor's Craven Kriek which was baffling the regulars. I can only describe it as a pale ale with cherry juice in it. It was a lot better than it sounds, but it hasn't been back on.

Taylor's latest acquisition is the Lord Rodney, next to the Parish Church. This is supposedly Keighley's oldest pub, and it's certainly got a history - and not always a happy one. It is rumoured that a few of the local bobbies have rather nice conservatories paid with overtime generated by the Rodney. The pub closed a couple of years ago, and was snapped up by Taylor's who rebuilt extensively and reopened last year. The interior looks overdesigned to my cynical eyes - something that could have been dreamt up by Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen after having lobsters and gorgonzola for supper. They do "cocktails Created by Theme magazine's northern bartender of the year" (It says here). No doubt in the evenings they play 'chilled beats'.

Saving grace is that they sell some fairly unusual bottled beers along with the full range of Taylor's ales (Be warned - Mr and Mrs TIW Snr had the worst pint [and half pint] of Landlord they've ever had here - I can only hope this was a freak aberration.). They've got Orval, Kwak, Brugs Zot, Westmalle Dubbel and - new to me - Christoffel Blond, all at prices that don't make you want punch yourself in anger. Orval and Westmalle have long been favourites of mine but the Christoffel I had yesterday was like falling in love with beer all over again, a banana yellow, zingy and spicy Dutch delight that felt like a lot more than 330cl. Where had it been all my life?

Taylor's are moving with the times and there's a place for the Rodney as well as their more traditional pubs in Keighley. It's not my kinda place, but It's a decent pub to drop by if you want a break from the norm. And I think we can all be thankful that they didn't decide to call it The Lord Rodney Lounge.

When You're Getting On A Bit.

Yorkshire in the 1980s wasn't all corrupt coppers, serial killers and striking miners, despite what David Peace thinks. There was also the immortal Shackleton High Seat Chair advert, which ran on Yorkshire TV for years - at least until the early '90s. I defy anyone over 35 who grew up in the YTV region not to know every word by heart. Apparently this advert is famous in the trade for being one of the most cost-effective commercials ever made. I bet the old dear didn't charge the Equity rate, anyway. Rumour has it that she didn't even have arthur-itis.

Parky

For a place that makes driving so difficult, central London certainly has a lot of multi-storey car parks. Soho alone has about eight - including this one on Poland Street. On the rare occasions that Mrs TIW and I drive to the West End, this is where we park. I'm always glad to see two old adverts at the bottom of the ramp - one for Regent Remoulds and the other for BP Energol. They've been there, I would guess, since the early 60s when there must also have been a garage on the premises. Just the place to drop off your E Type for an oil change while you nip round to Lord John. However, passing by today I noticed that a sign had been crudely nailed over the Energol one announcing that the car park is due to be 'upgraded' which will doubtless mean the end of these bits of everyday history.

New Coat

The North Star - Leytonstone's best pub by a mile - has had a rough time lately. Some bureaucratic glitch prevented their licence being renewed, leading to about a month of forced closure. There was also a bizarre and unwarranted hate campaign on Beer In The Evening (warning - there's some bad language on that link) and to cap it all, some jackass smashed the fine etched-glass door to the main bar. Last night we had our first visit since the reopening, walking up Browning Road with some trepidation after being tipped off that the pub had been "refurbished". My experience with refurbished pubs has not been a happy one. I appreciate I am probably alone in loving wallpaper with an inch of sticky nicotine on it and chipped formica tables, but a lot of my favourite pubs have chucked the baby out with the bathwater when they've had the decorators in. What I liked about the North Star was the tatty charm of the tongue and groove panelling and the low key lighting. I was fully expecting to see a skip outside full of the pub's soul. I needn't have worried. All that's been done is some fresh paintwork and replacing the 25-watt bulbs with brighter ones, a good dusting and some new curtains. Apparently, much of the decorating was done by the pub's many loyal regulars. The main bar's door was boarded up while a replica of the original is being made. I did make a mental note of what was on their six pumps last night, but trying to keep up with my father-in-law means I can only remember Bombardier, Adnams Bitter and Broadside. There might have been a Woodfordes. It was a long night.

Lazy Blogging, Part 4.

The stupendously foliaged Bonnie "Prince" Billy, I Am Goodbye.

On the Bus

In our increasingly sterile countryside, it's getting quite rare to find one of those houses or farms that always have a number of rotting vehicles in their gardens, along with an angry dog on a ten-foot chain.

The picture above (taken with a pinhole camera) is of the enigmatic 'Seafield' perched right on the edge of the cliffs at Westward Ho in Devon. It was built in about 1860 and has been variously a home, B&B and a wartime billet for army officers. The locals call it 'The Russian House'. It looks abandoned, but occupancy is given away by the curtains which twitch if anyone gets near all the junk - including an Allegro 1500 estate and a small fishing boat - they have spilling from their front garden onto the coastal footpath. Whenever I see these sorts of places, the suspicion gnaws at me that forgotten in an outbuilding is a dusty Vincent Black Shadow, Lambretta Rallymaster or a dismantled Spitfire.

How about finding what appears to be a mid-60s Vespa VBB (GS or Sportique) in a bus, in what looks like deep American countryside? The chainsaw he uses to chop the trees back is undoubtedly more powerful than the Vep's little motor.

Old Skool

I'm not the first scooterist in my family. Here's a photo of a fashionable and youthful TIW Senior on his 1957 Lambretta LD150, in about 1960. The picture was most likely taken by his mate Mal, who bought an LD at the same time. The late 50s/early 60s were of course a time when many of these new 'teenagers' were earning decent money, and could afford their own transport. Dad doesn't have particularly fond memories of his Lambretta: "It was pretty unreliable - and it even broke down when I took the motorcycle test." It can't have been all that bad - he kept it for three years until he could afford his first car, a Reliant Regal, which could be driven on a bike licence as long as - bafflingly - the reverse gear was deactivated. The scoot went to his newly wed brother, who until then had been getting around on a WW2 surplus Welbike. At last, Dad and his mates could arrive at the Bradford Mecca or Batley Variety Club without having to check in a dripping wet Belstaff Roadmaster and an Everoak lid. Good job he got rid of the scooter, or he might never have met my mum.

Many Green Bottles

I got the power

Plonking around our capital on Ten-Inch Wheels, you get to be very aware of the state of the roads. On a Vespa you feel each and every bump and depression. In the last five years, I have noticed that potholes are getting bigger and deeper and the general state of London's roads is getting very much worse. On my daily commute I negotiate at least four wheel-swallowers, one of which is so deep that a set of ancient cobbles can be seen in the bottom. The daddy of all potholes is the one on the westbound stretch of the Bow Flyover. This is a jagged rut, at least a hundred feet long, several inches deep and about 4 inches wide that stretches from almost the bottom of the flyover to just over the apex where it abruptly terminates with a series of neat repairs. This is the point where the Newham and Tower Hamlets council boundaries meet. Tower Hamlets have fixed their bit of the bridge, Newham haven't. Of course, a major road bridge isn't the reponsibility of one single authority. The idea! Riding over this bridge can be terrifying - especially as only 3%* of drivers in the East End have actually passed a driving test. Being tailgated by a BMW (it's always a BMW) is quite enough without having to avoid a road defect that could have been designed especially to trap scooter wheels.

Ever since I tried to get an ID card when I lived in Munich, I've done all I can to avoid dealing with local government. There, my dour and pessimistic colleagues informed me that if I got patted down by the Polizei and found to be an 'alien' (yes, really) with no identification, I would certainly be sent to Colditz and put in an iron maiden. Securing the card involved stalking endless, echoing corridors of a great many buildings in search of obscure offices where a sour-faced chainsmoking hermit would grudgingly stamp one of my dozens of gaudily coloured forms. This went on for several weeks. At one point I had to get a form from a department in a former mansion in the Bavarian countryside. When i presented myself at the front desk, a visibly amused member of staff informed me that the place had been converted to a hotel a couple of years earlier. I still don't know if that was some sort of German joke at my expense. I gave up after that, and took my chances with the cops.

However, reporting the fault to Newham Council was relatively painless. I spent fully half of the conversation reassuring the bloke on the other end of the line that I really did want to report a fault in Newham, even though i don't actually live in Newham. He said it will be investigated within 48 hours. We'll see.


* probably.

(image from diamond geezer)

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

Everybody loves the Monroe lines of a classic scooter, most famously those of the GS model. Among the last of the curvaceous largeframes was the Rally, and the Sprint Veloce (my own beloved example 'Bella' is pictured here on a visit to North Weald Aerodrome), phased out with the introduction of the distinctly chunky P Range, from 1977. The P Range was the last manually-geared Italian scooter and continued in production until it was taken round the back of the EU Emissions office and shot by The Man in 2007. The Vespa range nowadays is a line up of excellent automatic transmission future-retro scoots, most of which take their styling cues from the Vespa's sixties heyday. Given the numbers that they sell, there's a huge demand for stylish retro scooters.

In the last 15 years or so there have been several pretenders to the Vespa's curvy crown. Notably there's been the very decent Aprilia Habana ridden by Jamie Oliver and the Italjet Velocifero. The Velocifero was much loved by the likes of Oasis at the height of Britpop but suffered from spares availability of almost zero and comically priced accessories. Passenger seat pad? That'll be £100. Get a few scooterists down the pub, and sooner or later someone will ask why nobody's producing a GS replica with a modern engine in it. It seems so obvious. Well, now someone has.

This here scoot is apparently the prototype 'Venti', a project by an American company which specialises in Chinese-made off road vehicles. It's clearly heavily influenced by the GS. According to 2strokebuzz it's a plastic body over a tubular frame, rather than the steel monocoque the Vespa is famous for. It certainly looks the part, or will with a few modifications. There's some speculation that the automatic motor is a 150cc unit, either Indian or Chinese. The Venti was on show at the Indianapolis Motorcycle Show this month, so it looks like it might actually be a goer, unlike the 'new' Lambretta rumours that were knocking around a couple of years back. There are at least four companies that claim to own the trademark for Lambretta (quite apart from the clothing company of the same name) two of which have launched scooters. Both of these turned out not to be the beautiful near-replicas promised by teaser images, but bog-standard far eastern auto mopeds rebadged with the famous name, like this insult for the American market, or this slightly nicer one for the Italians. Ugh.

Watching The Watchmen

I've been looking forward to the release of Watchmen since last year, which doesn't get its UK release until 6th March. A phone call. It's my mate Stuart. Stuart has miraculously snagged two tickets to the press preview that night. Would I like to go? Would I? I don't get frothy about anything much, but it was all I could do to stop myself running around the office like Daffy Duck.

Sitting among the film reviewers and junketeers at the Odeon, I steeled myself to be disappointed. I'm still dripping mental bleach into my mind's eye to erase the memory of the last Alan Moore adaption I saw, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. However, it was three hours of brilliant cinematic spectacle. To be fair, the story is weak in parts where the graphic novel (OK - comic) hasn't translated too well, or Zack Snyder has changed the story a bit, but I didn't leave the cinema with the overpowering urge to hire a hitman which I did after the LOEG. It's a film that credits the viewer with intelligence, and it could have been so easy to make it into Hollywood grey goo - which nearly happened. There was a plan a few years ago to have - God 'elp us - Arnie Schwarzenegger as Dr Manhattan, and for the film to be standard helicopter-blowing-up pap. There's a lot of scenes which are almost frame-by-frame replicas of the original, and overall it's pretty faithful. Is it as good as the book? No - but then, nothing really could be. And for something that has been called 'unfilmable', it's very good indeed. Well done, Mr Snyder.

More Lazy Blogging

Flight Of The Conchords, 'Foux Da Fa Fa'.

Red Brick Dreams

A google for Len Deighton's London Dossier - inspired by a recent post on Unmitigated England - turned up a page about Rowton Houses. These were hostels created in 1892 by philanthropist Lord Rowton. His idea was to create a cheap, clean place to stay for working men as an alternative to squalid cheap hotels and flophouses. George Orwell stayed in them during the period that later became Down And Out In Paris In London. He liked them a lot:

"The Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and the only objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules against cooking, card-playing, etc. Perhaps the best advertisement for the Rowton Houses is the fact that they are always full to overflowing"

Things must have improved since Jack London stayed at the Whitechapel hostel in 1902, describing the place as full of "life that is degrading and unwholesome". Lord Rowton himself claimed his hostels were "fit for an archbishop".

There were six Rowton houses in London, built more or less to the same plan. There was a barber, dining room (with provision for self catering), a smoking room, library, cobbler, tailor and post room. The bedrooms were a private cubicle with a chair, bed, a chamber pot, good ventilation and "plenty of blankets" according to one account. Only one of the hostels is still in use, Arlington house in Camden (above, when newly built), which by the 80s was run by the local council. The other Rowton Houses have been demolished or converted into flats, like this one in Whitechapel - imposing doesn't even begin to describe the presence of the place, which in its heyday had 816 beds. Despite Rowton's best intentions, the hostels became associated with dossers, a reputation still prevalent in the 60s when Deighton wrote his London Dossier. In 1967 - five years after the Kings Cross Rowton House was converted into the Mount Pleasant hotel - the owners of the Mount Pleasant successfully sued Deighton for claiming in the Dossier that the hotel was "too expensive for a place that used to be a hostel for down-and-outs".



The first time I ever came to London was a school trip in 1980, to see England Under-16s play their Irish counterparts at Wembley. The things that remain with me from that trip are: The shock that our national stadium was less comfortable than Keighley's rugby ground, the unanimous disappointment at the size of Nelson's column and a trio of very camp men dressed as Adam And The Ants that shocked even the gobby hard lads of our group into terrified silence. The other thing that I vividly remember was where we stayed - the Mount Pleasant Hotel. Despite the refit our rooms were still effectively cubicles with a chair, bed, and a cupboard with a radio bolted into it. There was no longer a chamber pot, but there were still plenty of blankets. 26 years on I agree with the Deighton asessement, though I have stayed in very much worse places since.

(pictures from workhouses.org/)

Lovers Lane

On sunday we paid our first visit to Brick Lane Market for about 4 years. My goodness, it's changed. Until we moved to Glittering Leytonstone we lived in the environs of The Lane for the thick end of 12 years. My first visit to the market was with my then girlfriend (now Mrs TIW) and her dad, early one autumn morning in 1992 - a year or so before we moved to the area. The market to my companions was nothing new, they both grew up in the East End. To a wide-eyed boy who'd been in the capital for only two months it was almost like walking into a modern-day Dickens novel. The streets back then were swarming with geezers, chancers, wideboys, barrowboys, preachers, feral kids, mock-auctioneers and card sharps. If I'd seen a fakir doing the Indian rope trick I wouldn't have been a bit surprised. There were walnut-faced crones in headscarves, wheezing old men, blokes who looked like Mike Reid eating rollmops with their orange wives, circling pickpockets and a knot of big-eared skinheads selling neo-nazi hatezines. Alongside the official stalls flogging fruit, boiler suits, padlocks, damp books, live crabs, toys, hammers and brushes were the amateur pitches selling junk of every flavour. Betamax video recorders, bike parts pinched from the West End, headless Barbie dolls, musty curtains, 80s top shelf mags by the pile. There was one old boy selling bent, rusty nails and an oily towel. If you knew who to ask you could buy a monkey from a nervous Italian in a pub.

The whole area was dominated by the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard, a solid redbrick complex of switchyards and warehouses which was originally built in the 1840s. There's a massive redevelopment going on as the site is to become the new Shoreditch overground station. A new bowstring bridge has been placed over Shoreditch High Street, with a smaller one over Brick Lane which slices through the old arches on Grimsby Street. It has all the grace of a park bench dropped onto a model village. Hideous, and on sunday I wasn't prepared for it at all. To me, the railway arches were a large part of the areas unique appeal. It was also somewhat sad to find that some of of the old stalls had gone, replaced with empty spaces, a van selling pies and even a couple of blokes selling tourist tat. Health and safety legislation seems to have done for the 'fly' traders along Bethnal Green road, although you could still buy your stolen bike back on Sclater Street. The Coppermill plant, where bales of old cotton pyjamas were sorted on the first step to becoming banknotes had been part demolished with the site earmarked for - sigh - flats. You can't expect the past to be preserved in aspic, but some of the developments going on in the Brick Lane area seem to be killing off what made the area so appealing to me and many others in the first place - the effortless grimy charm of it all.

It was good to see that two old stalwarts remained - Blackman's (Buy Your Boots Where Your Dad Got His) is still shoeing the workers of the East End and the salt beef bagels from the Bagel Bake tasted as good as ever, even if the cabbies and elderly hardmen in the queue have been replaced by self-facilitating media nodes and their tiny Japanese girlfriends.

The Right Stuff

There aren't many boozers anywhere that tick all - or most - of my boxes, and only a couple in That London. One is the Harp, this is the other. The Old Mitre can be tricky to find even if you know where it is. Thoughtfully, on Hatton Garden there's a sign on a lamppost showing the way to happiness. The alley leading to Ely Court used to be part of Cambridgeshire, and the pub still gets the odd letter addressed to 'Cambs' . This is a hangover from the days of the Bishop of Ely having his London palace on the site. The pub itself grew organically out of the servants quarters, and dates roughly from about 1546, though the Mitre as it is now was built in 1772 and the dark panelled interior is from a 1920s refurb - I think we're all glad it wasn't done in the 60s or 70s. I'm sure a purist would have something to say about those heavy oak Hollywood-Arthurian thrones in the front bar. A lot of the interior is original though, and the place is creaking with a genuinely old patina.

It's not a pub for a quiet drink on your own - it's almost always rammed with loyal regulars and the odd tourist with a good map, squeezed into three small rooms. Despite the crush, service is quick and the beer always on top form, served up with old-school slickness and banter. The bar area is so small that the pumps are double-clipped. On our last visit you could have chosen Deuchers IPA, Adnams Broadside, Adnams Bitter and the Beartown Brewery's Snoopy Special. This was a new one on me, and was a fruity, tangy, hoppy delight with a tight head that laced the glass down to the last delicious drop. It travelled well from Cheshire. The Mitre's one of the few places in London to have a 'real' cider always on offer, typically from Thatchers, if you fancy a change. Hungry? Have a toasty, a sausage roll or a pork pie. That'll be £1.50, please squire. If you need the gents, they're outside in the yard, sir. No music, no TV, just the murmur of conversation, the squirt of the pumps and the thud of full glasses settling on tables. To tick all my boxes, a pub has to have a dog. The Mitre doesn't have one. or so I thought. Just as we were leaving the guv'nor was leading his spaniel out for a late night walk round Clerkenwell. Tick.

This is a classic pub - one of the best anywhere. Get to the Mitre and leave London behind. If you can find it.

Years Of Living Dangerously

The public perception of the scooterist is of a bloke on a Vespa or Lambretta with so many mirrors and lights that it looks like a Christmas tree. This image is due in large part to pictures taken by the news photographer Terry Spencer, who covered the "battles" between Mods and Rockers during the 60s. The 'Christmas Tree' scooter was - apparently - a short lived fad amongst a group of South London Mods. Short lived I would imagine, because covering an underpowered shopping bike in acres of heavy chrome is plain daft. Daft unless you want to travel everywhere at 10mph worrying about rust. However, Spencer captured the fashion at its peak and the 'Christmas tree' became an icon copied the world over.

Hollywood couldn't invent Terry Spencer. He was born in Bedford in 1918 during a Zeppelin bombing raid. Joining the RAF in 1939 he was twice made a POW and at one time held the record for surviving the lowest parachute jump in history - 30ft over the Baltic Sea after his Spitfire exploded, the blast opening his 'chute for him. He was also the first pilot to use the wing of his aircraft to flip a V1 flying bomb in flight, which caused it to crash. This got him the lifelong nickname 'Tip In Terry'.

After the war he flew a single-engined 'plane to South Africa (without a radio or even proper maps) where he started an aerial photography business and flirted with diamond smuggling. He started to work for Life Magazine in 1952, and over the next 20 years photographed troublespots like The Congo, Nigeria (where a request to try and visit the Sultan of Kano's harem prompted him to send the telegram: “ONLY WOMAN PHOTOGRAPHER CAN ENTER HAREM OR POSSIBLY EUNUCH STOP NOT EVEN FOR LIFE MAGAZINE AM I PREPARED MAKE SACRIFICE NECESSARY FOR LATTER STOP”), Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia, and Cuba where he covered a disastrous CIA operation to rescue defecting Soviet agents. In 1963, Spencer was persuaded by his teenage daughter to photograph an emerging band, The Beatles, which became a feature in Life just before the band's total conquest of the USA. Spencer's time with the Beatles amounted to almost 5,000 negatives, some of which were published in 1994 as It Was Thirty Years Ago Today. When life folded in 1972, Spencer became a freelance, continuing almost until his death on February 8th this year. His wife of 62 years, Lesley, died within 24 hours of him.

Spencer claimed that after surviving WW2 he never worried about his personal safety. Indeed, he was only ever hurt when attacked by Paul McCartney after discovering his secret farm on the Mull of Kintyre, years after their first meeting.

Boxing Day

Here's a plug for a new Flickr group, The International League Of Matchbox Stuffers. In short, see how many things you can get into a standard matchbox. My effort is above, with a piffling 19 items, though it did give a new purpose to the Captain Webb box I picked up at a flea market in Hebden Bridge.