The Portable Bouncing Playground

My youngest has become very excited at the new portable bouncing playground that's been installed at the western end of our street. Since its introduction, he's had no desire to visit the swanky modern play zone in the park. Every school morning he rushes up the road and starts to bounce up and down, shrieking and laughing. Sometimes other kids join him. I've tried to explain to him that the portable bouncing playground is actually just a temporary installation and that it won't be there for ever, but he doesn't want to listen.One afternoon last week, after I'd picked him up from school and was watching him have his regular bouncing session I overheard another parent complaining about the PBP."That old mattress has probably got fleas. Why doesn't someone just take it to the recycling centre?"

"In Your Days"

I'm walking through the park with my eight year old son. He's asking lots of questions at the moment. The main thrust of all this is that he can't believe how old how I am."Dad - in your days did you ride those funny bikes?""What do you mean by funny bikes?""Those ones with the big wheel at the front and the little wheel at the back.""Ah, Penny Farthings.""Yes!""Those are from the Victorian era.""When things were black and white.""Well, the photos were black and white. But I wasn't brought up in the Victorian era. That was over 100 years ago. I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s.""Oh. But it was black and white then, wasn't it?""Not really, no.""So did you have a colour TV?""Er, no. It was black and white."He goes quiet and looks at me. He's thinking... "My poor dad is so very very old."

That Book Girl

Review of A London Country Diary by That Book Girl ("Reviews, vlogs, rants and a general lack of consistency.")

My Favourite Tree

A work in progress - video based on one fo the entries in A London Country Diary.

A walk in Clissold Park

Had a great walk out in the rain yesterday morning in Clissold Park, during which I outlined my four point plan (or is it seven?) for fully appreciating your local area. Brought along one of my sketch books and a few copies of my latest dodgy hand-drawn map. Various people did readings from my book A London Country Diary and we discussed  important topics such as how to decode discarded beer cans, when to break into parks and why magic trees talk in Yorkshire accents.

Walking in the Rain

A film version of one of the passages from my book A London Country Diary.(Music by the Highbury Vale Electronic Music Studio)See also Rain.

Slowboat - book review

I’m not in the habit of flagging up reviews – once a book is out there I have tended to take the view that it has a life of its own and I try to let go of it. However, I thought this write up in the Slowboat blog ‘got’ what I was doing to such an extent that I feel duty bound to mention it.See review here.

Hand-drawn Maps

My North London hand drawn maps have been mentioned in  Londonist. The big A2 versions have been on sale at Stoke Newington Bookshop. 

Lots of People In A Bookshop

It was great to see friends old and new at the book launch at the Stoke Newington Bookshop. I talked about some of my motivations and influences - such as Julian Cope, Iain Sinclair and the Wonderful London books. Then Stewart Lee read a very funny, subtlely pared down version of his introduction and I did a few pages from the book, before inviting friends to read out certain bits (which seemed to work better than me doing them). Thanks to everyone who came along and for injecting so much cash into the Stoke Newington pub system afterwards.Read here for a more objective and detailed view of the evening. 

A London Country Diary

My new book, A London Country Diary, has been published by Icon Books. It's a collection of sketches, doodles and diary/journal observations (many from this blog) that I started back in 1999 around the time my daughter was born. Much of the 'action' (ha ha) takes place in and around Clissold Park in the Stoke Newington/Green Lanes/Highbury border country. If you wonder about stuff like how to de-salute magpies, what's the best kind of tree and where the Clash recorded London Calling, this might be for you. There's a website for the book at alondoncountrydiary.co.uk - with some fun downloads.You can buy the book here.

Rain

It’s sheeting down with rain. I’m walking, at a decent clip, in the direction of Holloway Road, though, of course, I could go anywhere. There’s a slight sadness – I lost my really good waterproof jacket somewhere not that long ago. This new one hasn’t quite bedded in yet.I like walking in the rain. I take it one step at a time – in the sense that I actually notice my steps. With the water stinging my face, it feels like a good day.Somehow the rain stops you thinking about the future. I am fully in the present and feeling alive as I pass the Greggs on Holloway Road then cross over near the closed-down insurance office. In the distance I can already see the lollipop lady at the endof Liverpool Road.The sound of the rain is calming, like white noise, blocking out the rumble of traffic and the chatter of things I have to do. As the rain gets heavier, I feel like I’m moving forwards – making the future come to me. And getting really wet thighs because this new waterproof is just a bit too short.

Plants I Don't Know the Name Of: Some Herb Seeds I Scattered Around The Place

A few years ago I read a book about medieval herbalism and, as I am wont to do, afterwards decided to make it a part of my life. I could be a herbalist! So I sent off for a load of seeds from a specialist shop and when they came, rather than sticking them in a drawer like I usually do, I scattered them all over the garden. All kinds of different seeds. Over the years various plants have come and gone but one seems to thrive but I don’t know what it is. It’s either Crimson Parsley, Herb Robert or Feverfew. Or a mixture of all three. The problem I have now is that, whereas Parsley is good for cooking, and Herb Robert is OK, Feverfew is, I think, poisonous. This is complicated further by the fact that there is no such thing as Crimson Parsley.

            I’ve got be honest. I would be a really shit herbalist.

Squid Noodles

Squid noodles

I had been dreaming of baby squid for over twenty years. 

(As a matter of interest, they’d come to me on hot summer nights - when my sleep was fitful - dragging me down beneath the waves at the behest of their mermaid queen Winona Ryder, who communicated with them using a series of high pitched whistles…)

Anyway.

Back in the early summer of 1990, while travelling around Portugal with a girlfriend who looked like Audrey Tatou (she really did, although she wasn’t French), I had the meal of my life cooked by a bored looking chef on a rusty looking pan over an outdoor stove at a little roadside shebeen near Tevares, in the deep south. 

The heat of the midday sun was in the 90s and so, like typical Northern  Europeans we’d been walking for a couple of hours after initially trying to relax on a beach, strolling inland over dry scrub and rocks, bickering ever so slightly about whose idea this had been (the trip to the Algarve, the walk in the unattractive countryside, the relationship as a whole) but also thrilled at our adventure. We were, after all, dicing with death. If we didn’t soon find a nice little three course lunch with wine we would, well, get cross with one another. And we weren’t dressed for the beach. In those days you didn’t. We were kitted out for lounging about and drinking beer and meeting intresting people. Swimming trunks and suntans were for kids and old aged pensioners. 

Hold on, there is no place in Portugal called Tevares. That was a late mid American soul band. I must have been thinking of Tavira. ‘Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel’. And ‘It Only Takes A Minute’.

We hadn’t travelled together before, at least not properly. I had jacked one of my many jacked jobs the year before to go inter-railing and had – having got off with her at a party just before my journey – had invited her meet me for a few days in Italy, where we did Pisa and Florence and held hands a lot. But travelling to Portugal was a different experience.  Hotter. Less obviously glamorous. And with more pressure for it to be a success because we were now ‘going out’ with each other.

After tramping through dusty scrubland a couple of miles from the nearest tree, we headed back to the road and saw in the distant heat haze a little group of buildings – a garage, a couple of houses, and a café.  Inside, briefly free from the smell of baking, melting tarmac,  we nodded at the corpulent locals hunched underneath the one vintage rotary fan, drinking beer and picking at little plates of meat and bread. A flickering TV on the wall showed football. Ignoring our already uncomfortable sunburn we sat at one of the two little outdoor tables covered in blue checked cloth and ordered some beers.     
    
I’ve had Sagres a few times in the UK and the result has always been an anti-climax – slightly chemical flavoured industrially brewed bland tipple with a light fizz. But at that roadside café, the effect was electric. For a start it was the same temperature as the water in the Antarctic just underneath the ice, where David Attenborough and his film crew did some amazing shots in that recent series. No one in Britain has a fridge clever enough to do this to Portuguese beer. I finished one and ordered another before my girlfriend – let’s call her Audrié Tatou – had got a third of the way down hers. I knew very little Portugese but had enough to understand what was their special of the day. Baby squid. They had been fried at intense heats, possibly with a flamethrower, with garlic and possibly a bit of white wine and black pepper by specialists in protective clothing. Even now I can smell the exquisite aromas of those frazzled bits if protein.

I sometimes think what would have happened if that magic café hadn’t appeared out of the semi-desert near a deserted highway. Possibly my girlfriend and I might have found another café. Or had a huge row brought on by heat exhaustion and gone our separate ways. But thanks to the fat bored chef, the cold Sagres and most especially of all the baby squid, we had such an intensely fantastic experience together that we went out for another eight years. 

Anyway, fast forward 22 years. A few weeks ago some friends were due to pop round for a bite to eat so I bought some baby squid at Steve Hatt on the Essex road and decided to give it a go. I had a wok on and put the squid just before the oil caught fire. I had to fry them for longer than I expected due to the squid’s inherent soggy squidgeyness (only just realised where that word must come from). Just before the end I chucked in a large glass of Pinot Grigio. It was, as the cliché goes, a taste explosion. And I had to fight back sentimental tears of joy – possibly the rest of the dinner was ruined by my endless boring recollections of Portugal in 1990.

For these squid noodles I used the leftovers from that night, that I’d chucked straight into the freezer. Not quite so hung up on having them crispy, I did them gently in a frying pan with a load of garlic and red onions, then added peas and egg noodles at the end. This would normally be a breakfast dish, but we had it for tea.

Ingredients

Some baby squid (pull out the tenticles – go on, you can do it! – then cut into rough strips)

Four cloves garlic

2 small red onions

some peas

Two bunches of egg noodles.

Black pepper.

Glass of white wine – but at the last minute don’t put it in. This dish, being more subtle Vietnameish than smacking-your-tastebuds Portuguese, doesn’t need it. Drink it instead.

Fry it all up on a high heat, while listening to the football or a programme about the financial crisis.

(In the mid to late 70s I preferred Heatwave to Tevares. Just sayin’…)

Café Vintage, Mountgrove Road, Highbury

Most people, if they pray, pray for material things – cars, houses, holidays, cash – or stuff like getting
someone nice looking to love them/world peace. I’ve always prayed for one thing (and when I say prayed I mean hoped really hard with my eyes closed) – that a really good café would open up just down the end of my road. As in George Orwell’s essay The Moon Under Water, about a mythical perfect pub, there are  several key factors for it to be a good café::
1. Great coffee
2. Excellent bacon sandwiches
3. Run by cool women who are into jazz and poetry or interesting/funny blokes who like
football and/or experimental electronic music
4. Quiet/good/no music
5. Near to your house
6. A selection of interesting brown sauces for the bacon sandwich
7. They also sell tweed jackets/suits 
8. They have a few old books to read.
9. A working Wi-Fi
10.  Friends will drop in unexpectedly
11.  They have hats you can wear on sunny days.
 
So imagine my delight when I discovered Café Vintage had opened in the old premises vacated by
Tatran/Slovak Café  (the Expert Milky Coffee Makers), Run by two sisters who look like they might have been in a band, they sell tweedy clothes and play jazz at a decent level (how many cafés have you been to where they’re arguing about where the Miles Davis CD has gone?). The coffee is great – especially the Americano. You won’t be able to walk properly for several hours after the bacon sandwich. The men’s clothes are the sort of thing you used to see in your Grandad’s wardrobe when you were in his bedroom looking for pipes to nick for WWII fighter pilot games. The women’s clothes look like you’re your granny’s Sunday best. And as for hats, they have Sergeant Pepper era German military band peaked caps, to keep  the sun out of your eyes when you’re tapping away on a laptop.

(A Hat on a sunny day)

The Crazy Modernist Building At The End Of Our Street

For years we looked at the crazy modernist building at the end of our street and said "What a fucking dump!" (It's not exactly Nikolaus Pevsner, I know.) It was either sheltered accomodation or an athletes village for a joint East German/British Olympic bid in 1972. A few people lived in the crazy modernist building - walking past at night you'd hear crackly garage radio blaring out from an open window, or shouting coming from another window. But nobody ever went in or out.
    A few weeks ago the crazy modernist building
began gushing water like an incontinent cow. Then a wooden wall was put up around it, which usually means demolition time. I asked a hard-hat bloke what was going up in its place.
    "Dunno mate. I only started today."
    So, looks like there will soon be a crazy free improvised building at the end of our street.

A City Walk

Had to go into the City on Monday - around Mansion House - and was reminded how beautiful the old streets can be. You have to look along the curve and twist of the lanes, squint, then try to ignore many of the most modern buildings and attempt to see the City as it once was. Some new projects seem to be trying to obliterate the past with agressive bombast, like the 1990s No.1 Poultry, which was ugly (but not even good modernistly ugly) to begin with and has not improved with age, its creator perhaps obsessed with Battenburg Cake due to a moment of Prousian recollection with his sketch pad.

I worked in the City for brief periods in the late 80s, including a stints temping at Warburgs, the Financial Times, BP and a couple of others whose names I can't remember. As a computer input drone my mind was free to explore and after work I could drift anonymously around the alleyways and lanes, imagining, then sit in old pubs and try to guess which era particular people would look best in.

I love the 60s/70s building at 30 Cannon Street. Although bursting with crazy 60s humour it gives a substantial nod to medieval architecture of the past in the way it seems to get bigger the higher it gets. There's something edible, biscuity and Italian about it. (for more info see http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/United%20Kingdom/London/30%20Cannon%20Street).

The names of the streets around here are magnificent. Old Jewry. Ironmonger Lane. Poultry. Cheapside. Walbrook. Garlick Hill. They give you the sense of rapidly changing environment, something London can still offer in pockets. Old Jewry is now slabs of concrete, expanses of glass, but a vision of the past can be found in an old plaque embedded into the wall telling of the synagogue that stood until the late 13th Century around the time the Jews were expelled from England.

And one suprising thing is the amount of small, old fashioned shops in this part of the city - tailors, cobblers, cafes, galleries, old restaurants, hats, umbrellas. Everywhere you look, fragments of the past are still woven into the fabric of the streets. Tiny churchyards. Old houses next to office blocks. Ancient coats of arms peeing out from the roof of a bank.

Workers Café, 740 Holloway Road

 
There are seven tables in the workers Café. Apart from me there is just one other customer, a little Irish lady called Mary sitting in the corner eating meat and two veg.

My coffee comes – it’s weakish and very milky. I haven’t had coffee like this since I was on an internal flight in Venezuela 20 years ago. Café con leche.  I remember nearly shitting myself when the pilot flew much too close to some mountains and that parts of the internal structure of the plane were held together with string.  So the coffee brings back exciting memories. And it is the same temperature as the molten core of the Earth.

The bacon sandwich comes and it’s your normal basic rasher in thin white sliced bread. But its USP is that it’s neither straight cut nor diagonal but a mixture of the two – is that a trapezoid?

What sets the Workers Café apart is not the grub, honest though that is, but the ambience. In the space of about 5 minutes the place is full. It’s like a little Irish village in here this evening. Next to me are two Irish lads in their late 60s/early 70s. One of them orders pork chops the other chicken curry and rice.

“I’ll do a runner now,” says the one with the massive grey beard, “and make ye pay fer the lot ha ha ha ha.”

The other bloke laughs weakly.

Another Irishwoman comes in and sits down at a table on her own.

“Alright Mary.”

“Alright Jean.”

A tall thin old man enters.

“Alright seamus,” says the bearded one.

“Johnny.”

“You’re a hardy man where you come from up in the hills ha ha ha.”

They all chat about football and the GAA and how in the 60s you only got 10 minutes for breakfast on a London building site.

“Now it’s half an hour, 40 minutes. Luxury it is.”

There’s a silence for a while then Johnny says

“We’ll never go back now.”

“No.”

“It’s just misery there now.”

“Aye.”

Before you get too excited about visiting a part of Irish culture from 40 years ago I should point out that this time last week I was in and the place was completely packed out with Eastern Europeans.

Starbucks, Highbury Corner

As usual on a Saturday late morning I’ve dropped 7 year old off at football then rushed to grab a coffee and continue my ongoing Great Lincolnshire Novel. But I can’t get a seat anywhere. It’s Arsenal v Spurs today , starting early at 12.45. So everywhere round here is packed, even the coffee bars. How did I not know this? There was a time, not that long ago, when the first page I turned to in the papers was the Sport. Then the news, then international news, then the sport again to check if there’s anything I’d missed (not motor racing, horse racing or tennis, though, of course – but proper sport like football, rugby, boxing, cricket).

But now I have to read the Review section first, find out about the latest short story collections, history books, kids’ stories. This morning, rather than checking to see what the opinion was about the North London derby, or talk about the upcoming Ashes series, I’d turned first to Maggie O’Farrell’s short piece about the late poet Michael Donaghy in The Guardian. Sport isn’t like ‘’Finance’ or ‘Work’ sections – it doesn’t get used for cleaning boys’ football boots or clearing out the ashes. It’s also still not on a par with ‘Travel’ or ‘Family’, which are put in a ‘saved’ pile to read on a rainy day. But when the rainy day comes, we’ll cook soups, watch a film or look for pianos on Ebay or just stare out of the window.

I queue up for ages at Starbucks behind noisy  fans buying skinny lattes then edge my way down the back where the fans disappear and it’s just mums and dads with prams and Guardians or students with laptops.

It’s a latte with an extra shot, with a BLT. It’s obviously not a proper bacon sandwich. For a start, the bacon is cold. How could it be otherwise when it’s covered in tomato and lettuce.  They should have a big pan of bacon on the go at all times. The bread is good – tastes like granary Hovis. Too much mayonnaise on it though. And of course there’s no brown sauce. The coffee? It’s OK, but there’s just too much of it, and even with the extra shot it’s drowned in gloopy hot milk.

Is that Frank and Nancy Sinatra singing “I Love You’ on the speakers? No, it’s the rubbish Nicole Kidman and Robbie Williams version. The sound of muzak, jetplane woosh of the coffee machine and general hubbub makes me hear an extra layer of tinnitus, like a water rushing through a weir in my eardums. Brown sauce might have made it go away.