A cold wind blows from Woodberry Down

It's the same every morning. At the end of the tree-lined bank that used to carry the New River, as you turn vaguely northwards towards the fenced off no-dogs area, the temperature all of a sudden drops. A cold dry wind hits your face, whirling in from the direction of Woodberry Down. Narrow your eyes and try  you can see that you're on the slopes of a very gentle hill.

A can of Kestrel Super  lies at the side of the path. A possible sign that a shamanic specialbrew energy diviner has been in the area, mapping the lines between Stoke Newington and Highbury. That or a lazy drunk.

Football Kid

On Lordship Road a thin figure walks slowly along the pavement bouncing a leather football. Occasionally he does a few juggles on his knee and feet and I think to myself this is good, this is what football is all about. He then kicks the ball onto the trunk of an old tree on the other side of the road, narrowly hitting a white van that is speeding past. Further up he confronts a group of Jewish women standing in a group and threatens to kick the ball at them, while making strange Lon Chaney gurning faces at them. Then he stands in the road kicking the ball in the air. A car brakes suddenly and the driver leaps out of his car, shouting and swearing. 

Arsenal

I always hated Arsenal. With their in your face Knights Templar style strip and their fast, over-eager and efficient football and their holier-than-thou attitude to wage structures. Part of me will always presume that George Graham is Arsenal manager and Tony Adams still has his arm in the air. But another part of me likes Arsenal. It’s partly that they now play football like everybody’ second favourite team. But I miss living near the ground. I miss the sound of the matchday roar (though it’s not really a roar, is it - more an excited mumbling) and miss the strange stalls selling pencil sketches of Perry Groves or obscure programmes to obsessives with too much disposable income. I miss the smell of fried extruded meat products. I miss the thrill I always got seeing European fans walking up and down Blackstock Road with confusion on their faces thinking “Is this Arsenal?” I miss being close to the human heartbreak of supporting a team like Arsenal. The suffering of being brilliant yet brittle.

Maybe I don’t hate Arsenal now because I know that, if we go back, my kids will become real Arsenal supporters. My daughter stopped being a Leeds fan when she was five, in the season they were relegated and Arsenal went undefeated in the league. I told her I’d live with it but that’s it - she wasn’t allowed to change again. In a few years Leeds will be in some obscure part of the non-league structure so any memory of them being rivals will be long gone.

The Stauntonian Theory of Possibilities

Football, like life, is all about possibilities. About finding a route and following it. But what if you're good at lots of different things? Which path should you choose?.

It's a problem currently facing Irish fooball supremo Stan "Stephen" Staunton. This football polymath is equally good at various activities, such as:

1) throwing or kicking water bottles
2) shouting and screaming at the fourth official
3) Going quiet at press conferences and interviews
4) Getting a round in at FAI events

There are other activities he's also tried a couple of times:
5) Coaching the players
6) Picking a team
7) Trying to analyse and solve tactical problems

His wise old assistant Sir Bobby Robson says "Stephen has a special talent" . He thinks Staunton will eventually end up as one of a new breed of special teams coaches, solely responsible for screeching obscenities into the fourth offical's face late in a game with the team trailing.

As for Staunton, his football philosphy can be summed up in a simple equation:

Football = Lads+Fire+Passion+Guts+arresting all journalists - talking - tactics

Q: What are the chances of the Football Association of Ireland dropping a big redundancy package from a tree and it landing on Staunton?

The Arsenal Tavern

Mountgrove Road/Blackstock Road N4

An idiosyncratically rambling old men's playpen or dark and fist-fight-friendly cavern? Depends on your attitude. It is a shambles, though, with a few wine-bar style high tables tacked on at some point in the mid 80s. I like it. Best place to watch Irish sports if you don't want to walk all the way into Finsbury Park. Regular gigs include mulleted 'Man from Mullingar'. Name allegedly changed in the 30s by Arsenal boss Herbert Chapman when he did for Gillespie Road tube.
(original review in The Smoke November 1999)

Now had all the detritus - pots, pans, signs, boots, bikes, pictures, brasses, landlady with arms like hams - cleared out, along with any kind of structural connection to a Victorian pub. Unfortunately they also chucked the spirit of the pub into the skip as well. Now it's a huge antiseptic lager swill barn kitted out for match days . It's possibly been renamed The @ Bar (though that's so terrible I'm thinking it's probably a young person hipster injoke designed to annoy the over 40s).

Trying to picture London: the bowling green in Clissold Park

Today I'm trying to picture London. It's now almost 6 months since we left and images are obviously in the process of being moved from short to long-term memory tanks, because I can't see them. To compensate I've been flicking through Wonderful London (Ed. St. John Adcock), a three volume set from 1926. This is the bowling green before it stopped being a bowling green and became an teen alcopops awareness centre. If this picture was taken now there'd be a mad-looking bloke with a bull terrier striding towards the camera shouting obscenities.

The text with the photo says:

"STOKE NEWINGTON IN SUMMER-TIME: THE BOWLING GREEN AT CLISSOLD PARK
A long journey through the dreary Kingsland Road and on through Stoke Newington brings one to Church Street, a curious survival in the surrounding villadom. There are old houses and a small sixteenth-century church, mellow with years, and farther on the fifty-two green acres of Clissold Park, through whose ordered lawns runs the New River. Beyond the bowling green is the spire of the modern parish church, built by Sir Gilbert Scott to replace the old one which was put up when the congregation was that of a country village."

Don't know about the copyright situation with pics like this. The photo was credited to someone called McLeish.

The Wind Bucket

We keep a big dirty plastic cement bucket in our back garden to tell us which way the wind is blowing. If it's up near the gas tank we know it's a westerly. If it ends up at the edge of the gorse then that means cold northerlies. My father in law is away for a couple of weeks. When he gets back I know the first thing he'll say is "Where is my big dirty plastic cement bucket?" and I'll point to the centre of a mass of gorse bushes and shout "Northerlies!"
I've taken to thinking that each wind has a different accent. South westerly is a Corkman and northerly a strong Ulster voice. "There will be NO playing in the garden today!" says the Rev. North Wind.

Leeds United/Seasonal headache

It's Sunday. Which means the wind has changed from south westerly to a freezing, biting North wind. It's like mid-December. The family of hares has wisely decided to move to warmer climes. Even the blackbird has moved down from his electricity pole and can be seen scrabbling around on the lawn shouting "Where's the fecking summer gone?" The icy blasts coincided with the onset of one of my seasonal headaches, after which I cannot move for up to three hours. Then again it might have been minor depression brought by falling for the old trick of thinking my team (Leeds United) might actually win a competitive knock-out game. The Championship Playoff Final was a dreary affair and Leeds basically rolled over and let Watford tickle their tummies for half an hour or so, then went to sleep. They need some pace in midfield. I heard myself shouting that to the rest of the family. "I said, they need some pace in midfield!" They all carried on ignoring me. Luckily my heart is now covered in protective scar tissue when it comes to football and I recovered from the drubbing quite quickly this time. But this TV is already showing signs of being unlucky. Maybe I'll watch the World Cup up in my father in law's spare bedroom.

The compost bin lid incident

Yesterday morning the lid of the compost bin disappeared. The big plank of wood that keeps it in place was lying on the ground next to the compost bin, but there was no sign of the lid. I immediately suspected corrupt anti-recycling faeries, perhaps in the pay of big agri-business. Or maybe it was faeries who were after something in the compost bin, such as rhubarb leaves and coffee grounds. Or maybe they wanted to use the lid as a little boat so they could sail over to the Aran Isles.

“Or maybe you didn’t put the lid on properly and it’s blown away.” said my wife.

I eventually found the compost bin lid at the bottom of a large gorse bush a few yards away. The mystery deepens.

The old tin box factory on Blackstock Road

In my post-pub dreams the old deserted tin box factory on Blackstock Road was going to be turned into something exciting. Any day now. Over the years it has been the site of:

1) A writers' retreat with running water and personalised minibars
2) A cafe for nymphomaniac jazz chicks
3) A zoo for put-upon grey squirrels
4) A cinema for stay-at-home dads
5) A swimming pool for people with dodgy knees
6) A museum of cheese

Unfortunately I always dreamed these things but never did anything about them. Now the bulldozers have arrived and the old deserted tin box factory on Blackstcok Road is now just a few piles of browny-yellow brick.

So which of my ideas will become reailty? Or will it become just another shite block of modernist flats?

Avoiding the sailor

On days like this when I’m really busy it’s essential that, when popping out on errands, I manage to avoid the sailor. Whenever I bump into the sailor he tends to take up a blocking position that is impossible to counter. And I am stuck.

The sailor’s favourite topics of conversation are:
1) The speedbumps in the road that lorries drive over and keep him awake at night
2) The inevitablity of the UK become a Muslim state
3) Women and how he doesn’t have much luck with them

A while ago I rushed out to the corner shop to buy some herbs for some fish I was cooking. The sailor must have been hiding in undergrowth in his front garden for he suddenly popped out in front of me, took up the blocking position and started to tell me about his relationship with Michael Flatley, the Riverdance bloke. He even had a photo of the two of them in his jacket pocket.

ME: Got to go. I’m in a hurry.
THE SAILOR: You’re always in a hurry. You need to relax a bit more.

And it's true. I only ever seem to meet the sailor when I’m pushed for time.

Now and again I will try to predict where I’ll meet him. I’ll change direction at the last minute, but there he’ll be. He must have some kind of high tech sonar equipment built into his fedora.

“In 15 years time we will all be Muslim, you know.”

Supporting Eric Random and the Bedlamites

I'm at a time in my life right now in where I'm asking one of life's important questions. What should I do with my Eros Les Paul Copy? I bought the guitar when I was 14 years old and it's hard to imagine getting rid of it. But we're about to move away for a year or so and I've been chucking out all kinds of stuff that I haven't used for years - I've given away my Wem Copycat and Electro Harmonix drum machine and lent out the Korg MS-10. But I can't face getting rid of the Eros Les Paul Copy.

The last time I used it was at a band practice in 1994. I'd just had it serviced at Fiddles and Sticks on All Saints Road and the bloke there had told me that it was probably a late 60s issue and worth a couple of hundred quid so I thought I'd try and get back into it again. By this time I was in a countryish band and the eros Les Paul Copy sound was just not mellow enough, being better suited for 1234 barre chord thrashes. I'd assumed the guitar was new when I bought it in 1979. I'd saved up for months to get it, and had convinced my parents that I could just plug it into the wall socket and play without any amplifiers.

DAD: Great. So it won't be loud then.
ME: Ha ha. No. The sound gets diffused into the wires of the house and feeds back into the National Grid.
DAD: So it's the mains socket, then. You definitely won't be buying an amplifier.
ME: Won't need one, dad. Got the mains plug.
DAD: Excellent.

I ended up taking my grandfather to a big music warehouse in Bingley, where he helped me choose a little practice amp with a tremelo feature.

DAD: What's that? Is it an amplifier?
ME: Ha ha. No, Dad. It's an early prototype of what's called a 'personal computer'.
DAD: Why is it making so much noise?
ME: That's the computer's memory.
DAD: Why is your guitar plugged into it?

The guitar saw me through the glory years of various bands - Heart Attack, Easy Listening, Boys at their Worst, The Brezhnev Brothers, The Gifted Children and the Fat and Lazy Jazz Experience. The high spot was supporting Eric Random and the Bedlamites at Nottingham's Ad Lib Club. It was to be the culmination of lots of practice and hard work. Then Eric got ill and the gig was cancelled - we ended up playing a rubbishy Kazoo set for an 18th birthday party at Glentham Village Hall.

Parkland Walk

A slow walk with my daughter to Park Walk on the western edge of Finsbury Park. It's on the route of an old railway line which the Victorians built to link Stroud Green to the Winchester Hall Tavern on Archway Road. Commuters would leave the Finsbury Park area in the eary morning then get massively drunk at The Winchester and roll off home in the evening.
"Did you have a good day at the office, dear?"
"God it was tough. Took ages to get served."

Kestrel Dowsing Overview

This afternoon I spotted a can of Kestrel Super K on the route of the lost Hackney Brook. I've noticed over the last few months that Super K has been making inroads into the Clissold Park scene (formerly a Tennants Super hotspot). I would have done some compass readings from where the can lay, but I was in character - I was King of the Dragon Pirates and we were escaping to Narnia via the track on the north side of Clissold Park, being chased by Giant Pirates. Giant Pirates are bad and Dragon Pirates are, generally, thought to be good - at least in the world of 6 and 3 year olds.)

You had to be there.

Too scared to open the packet

Greetings fans of Grumman Wildcat models. If you're like me you've long ago given up making models of other planes, boats and tanks and are now concentrating solely on the Grumman Wildcat. At the moment I've got two Grumman Wildcats but I haven't made either of them yet. One is a 1980s Revell kit and the other is an early 70s Frog set. I've had them both about a year. At the moment I'm too scared to open the packet.

The Newspaper Dilemma

On days like this when I'm really busy playing Operation with my daughter I'm faced with a dilemma. Do I go to the nearest newspaper shop, where the head guy doesn't really speak English (apart from 'hello' and 'yes boss') or go a bit further away - in fact, cross over the border into Hackney borough, on the other side of Mountgrove Road, to get my papers from Dursun. Dursun and his family are interesting talkative types. But his shop is about 30 yards further away.

I used to go to Dursun’s all the time but now I try to save time by going to the shop that’s nearest. What I think I’m going to do with this saved time I haven’t really considered. It's only about an extra minute. And I only buy three newspapers a week these days. That’s three minutes a week, 156 minutes a year. Could I write a novel in the time available? Yes, in theory. In 156 minutes I reckon I could do around 1500 words. So for a shortish 80,000 word novel, it’d take me 53 years. So I’ll have finsihed it by the time I’m 93.

It seems ridiculous but I think it's a worthwhile project and soemthing to keep me occupied when I’m an old dodderer. I’m going to give it a working title of The Newspaper Novel. One minute a day.

By the way, today I persuaded my wife to get the paper as I didn't want to leave the house. Some of the plastic bones from Operation have gone missing and I needed to do a scan of the living room. I think they’ve been deliberately hidden because my daughter knows they are my lucky bones.

Running for buses

I've always prided myself on my ability to catch a bus. It doesn't usually matter how far I have to run, I always make it just in time. But yesterday I was defeated. Near the Kieser Training gym, at Mornington Crescent, I saw a 29 coming down the road and started a slow jog in preparation for the big sprint to the bus stop. Maybe it was because this was a bendy bus that I got it wrong - but I left the sprint too late. When I got to the bus stop the doors had closed and the driver ignored my 'palms out' gesture of possible negotiation.

As the bus pulled off I suddenly felt old. This just doesn't happen to me. Then I made a crucial mistake. "I'll wait for a 253" I thought to myself. But the 253 comes down from Euston along the parallel road next to the tube. By the time I'd worked this out I'd been waiting for 15 minutes. I decided to run down to Camden High Street to the next stop. But my legs had gone.

Arsenal v Portsmouth

Winter is closing in. The tits in our back garden have almost run out of nuts and the mice are so starving they've taken to eating from the box of mouse poison that's been in the cupboard under the sink for the last year. It always gets cold in the days just after Christmas. Which is why I haven't left the house all day.

My friend Mark phoned and asked if I was doing anything tonight.
No, I said.
Fancy going to see Arsenal v Portsmouth.
No, I said.
Er, OK then. Bye.

Instead I cracked open some beers and watched telly with my wife. There was one chocolate left from the really fancy box and I said she could have it.

Hackney Brook and Bayern Munich

Coinciding with a massive hangover, the Hackney Brook appears to have resurfaced on Blackstock Road, just south of the Arsenal Tavern. Not caused by heavy rains this time but a large yellow JCB, which has dug a huge hole in the side of the road. Water shoots out of a pipe and into what's becoming a quite decent sized pond. My little boy Seánie is well impressed. "Digger!" "River!" He dances up and down on the pavement. We go to the Gunners Fish Bar for lunch, where we meet a group of Bayern Munich fans in town for tonight's Champions League game. They have come for some hot Pukka Pies. Blackstock Road is certainly at its most beautfiul for these visitors - shit weather, grey skies, soggy chips. and huge puddles in the road.

I suspect an Arsenal plot, some kind of pitch waterlogging thing must be going on here. I notice that one of the Germans looks like Nigel Winterburn and mention it to Seánie. He is not impressed.

Which reminds me of that poem, 'Arsenal fullbacks try to change the world in a night':

Lee Dixon came to our local pub
And tried to convert us all
To the cause of International socialism
"You're too late mate," said the landlord
"We had that Nigel Winterburn in here last night.
We're all Buddhists now."

Return of the New River

The New River has returned. I feel a bit confused. Part of me wants to leap up and down with unrestrained joy, splashing about in the clear waters shouting "Look kids, let's catch fish!". My more sensible side is eager to phone Thames Water to come and sort out the problem.

Our street as two burst water pipes, a little spring at each side of the road sending the water cascading down the hill. Actually, that would make it the New River for about 30 yards then a tributary of the Hackney Brook the rest of the way.

God, I need to get out more.