Late Night Burger Story

It’s that time when the birds in the Gardens start twittering and you wonder if they think it’s dawn. It’s not, it’s late, I’m heading back from college and my dinner is many hours back and I’m hungry. Hence the late night burger.

There’s a couple in the kebab shop and the man looks me over; the woman looks round only when she hears my voice. There is a mutual sizing-up as it is obvious to all that we are from different worlds. The couple quickly relax and, breaking the silence, the man asks the worker on the other side of the counter if there’s a pool table in the back room. The worker nods; it’s been there since 2005. The man: “You could smoke back then.” The worker, almost smiling: “Yeah.”

It is the woman’s turn to reminisce. “I haven’t been in here since the 90s,” she says. The couple start to talk about the people they used to drink with in the local pubs, and then it occurs to them to ask the worker if he knows the people too, and if he knows how they are doing. Soon I get to hear that Pat hasn’t been seen for a long time and might be dead, Frank’s dad is dead, Anna has another baby and another man. While the worker has his back to us there is a brief discussion between the man and woman about whether maybe the worker liked Anna; they ask him. “Sure, I like lots of the people who come in here,” he says, looking them in the face carefully. “Tell me if I said something wrong,” he adds. Holding up my burger he asks the woman if she wants salt and vinegar and she says yes; then, realising her mistake, she turns to me and apologises. The fourth wall breaks. “It’s because she’s too busy yapping,” the man explains to me. “That’s women’s job!” the woman replies. I laugh, say it doesn’t matter, and ask for salt, which the worker adds while continuing their conversation.

When I get home I fill my belly with chips salted with vigour.

king salami and the alright night

Recently I got into a debate with a non-British PhD student about the British use of English. She complained that she never knew what her British supervisor meant because he would always use “a bit” or “slightly” when he meant “a lot” or “very much”. I commented that the fact that she was making this point meant that actually she always did know what he meant, because she always understood he wasn’t using the language in the same way that non-British people might.
 
Tonight was “alright” which is, I believe, an Americanism…and what I mean to say is that it was passable, it went without a hitch; I don’t mean – following this PhD student’s logic – that it was brilliant. I finished my work for the day, got on my bicycle and cycled to Camden. Joined my friends in a nice blues bar. After chatting friendly-like for a few hours, an energetic but uninspired blues/rock’n'roll band started playing. Kind of good fun and lively, enough to get me dancing on the spot, but never really going anywhere interesting. L suggested that the singer had a rasp-throated persona that he used to keep us at bay from his inner self…and his only banter between songs was to recite like a litany that his bassist was a Japanese refugee with visa troubles, his guitarist was an alcoholic from Tufnell Park, and the drummer was a Frenchman on holiday in a fez; oh, and he kept reminding us, for no apparent reason, that the name of his band was King Salami and the Cumberland 3. Like that was the only joke he had. After getting a falafel wrap in a crowded takeaway place we went to another bar and I told the assembled group the joke I made up after christmas on an escalator at Liverpool Street station. What do you call a Cuban spaceman? A Castronaut. “How is that a joke? It’s not funny,” said B. “No,” I said, “but it does follow all the rules of that type of joke.”
 
In a similar way perhaps, this night was alright because it followed all the rules of what a good night might be expected to have. But the enigmatic spark was missing. This has all become too easy, and there is nothing new. It’s not that everything has become easy. It’s that the things that I’m good at doing have become easy to reproduce and replicate if I’m in the right mood, while the things I’m bad at doing remain out of reach. Perhaps a change of scene is needed?
 
Or…have you seen The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Presents Earth [1]? One of the things in that book is a comment on the Polynesians, who managed to populate tiny islands spread across a huge portion of the Pacific Ocean with vast expanses of water between them, all using only small canoes and what Jack Lagan calls “barefoot” navigation techniques [2]. Jon Stewart’s take on it is that the Polynesians did all this only to realise that you can’t canoe away from yourself.

References:

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/21/jon-stewarts-earth_n_731916.html

2. http://www.sheridanhouse.com/reviews/barefootnavigatorreview.html

mice

Sitting in my silent kitchen past midnight, with less than 30 pages of The Wasp Factory left to go, I hear the mouse. I crane my neck to see if I can spot it. It comes from the darkened hall and, moving with a speed that never fails to surprise me, darts into a hole in the door frame that I had assumed was too small for any creature to get into. It pays no heed to the poison I have placed next to the hole.
 
I don’t have much experience of living with vermin, apart from one incident in India, that I won’t go into here other than to note that I was reminded of it when reading about the moment which changed Frank’s brother Eric. In the house I currently share with four other students we discovered we had mice a couple of months ago. We half-heartedly bought some traps and agreed to try to keep the kitchen more tidy. The estate agent replaced the flooring in the kitchen. We were reluctant to go for poison, imagining the stench of rotting mouse filling the house with us powerless to do anything about it short of ripping the walls apart to find the corpse. We needn’t have worried; the mice have displayed a total lack of interest in the poison I bought two weeks ago.
 
Our mice are like ghosts. They leave no droppings, and it is hard to see what they are eating. We see them scurrying – are mice the only living species to have a verb ideally suited to them alone? – but we seldom spot from whence they come and where they go; they appear and disappear. Our imaginations play tricks on us; we see them everywhere. The most concrete evidence for their continued presence is the gnawed furnishings and the stink of them.
 
Parasites that can bring down nations, but can also enable them to grow. My partner and I spent christmas with two fantastically off-kilter academics and their children; he, a Bengali professor of Economics, explained how the standard of living in Britain after the Black Death was much higher than in India at the same time, the latter facing far greater population pressures.
 
My thesis submitted, I am supposed to be spending my time hunting for jobs. My guitar-playing school friend Neil  recognises in me the restless uneasiness he remembers from the year after he finished university, the sense of cluelessness about where to apply my energies and how. Too many paths seem open to me at this point and it doesn’t seem possible to understand which of my aspirations are or are not compatible with which other aspirations. I am beginning to appreciate the extent to which I have put off thinking about any kind of a bigger picture of what I want to do, and have instead relied on collections of fragments of middle-class and working-class dreams which cannot be reconciled, in particular because I have the ridiculous idea of being a penniless activist who can somehow raise children with all the privileges my parents offered me.
 
Last night I sent an email to a PhD student who lives nearby and is due to submit her thesis for examination on 15 January. I met her recently and she told me I am lucky to have had my partner to cook meals for me during the hectic last month of writing the thesis. So I wrote to her to ask for her phone number so that when I happen to make too much food in the coming days I can take her a food parcel. She wrote back with her phone number, thanked me for the offer, and signed off the email “much peace”. My partner baulked at this as she read the mail over my shoulder; muttering something about “what is it with these people wishing others peace all the time,” she suggested. To some extent I sympathise with her baulking. I don’t see the world or progress in those terms; I see tension as productive. I recall the quote “the end of art is peace” even if Google doesn’t make it immediately clear whether I should attribute it to Yeats or Patmore.

hairdresser blues

Until the age of 26 I never had my hair cut by a woman.

At the age of 26 I discovered a hairdresser who cuts the hair of men and women, offers a student discount, and is conveniently located between the two campuses of SOAS. I will not name this hairdresser because she may not want everybody to know what I am about to write about her. To begin with I should note that I like what she does – I like the way she cuts my hair, but more than that I like the fact that with her the conversation doesn’t begin “So which team do you support?” and end there (because my answer is “Actually I don’t follow football”). We talk about all sorts of things – traffic in East London, Boris’s bicycles, why it is better to trim the back of a man’s neck ‘naturally’ rather than in a straight line. One of the things we spoke of today particularly interested me and led me to write this.

Today I noticed she had done some work renovating her shop and commented on it. She explained she had done so at her husband’s suggestion, because she was getting sick of the place as it was and wanted to move elsewhere – he said, “Try changing how the place looks and see how you feel, and if you still want to move then move at the end of the lease” (the lease finishes at the end of next year). The situation she is in is a bit complicated, and a result of the lease system she is in, which is something I had no idea about before (because I don’t know that many small business owners). She has a 9-year lease from the council, at the end of which she can renew the lease or leave. Her husband owns a shop on the other side of the road, and she wants to move there and set up a tiny chair and mirror in one corner – which is all she needs, and would be much cheaper for her than renting the current shop, which is bigger than what she needs. However, she only wants to move across the road if she is sure that there won’t be a new hairdresser working in the place she is at the moment, because she feels there is already enough competition in the local area.

Her problem is that the council has a say in what kind of businesses operate in the properties they lease, and they have decided they want a hairdresser to be where she is. They say this is simply because her shop is in a line of four shops and they don’t want two shops offering the same product to be in the same line of shops. But this doesn’t make sense as a rationale for the council’s decision, because she has had an expression of interest from an estate agent, and none of the other four shops are estate agents. Still the council says “No, we want a hairdresser”. In this situation her only option is to argue her case at the end of the lease – thereby putting her in a situation of uncertainty about whether she will able to move in to her husband’s shop without a new hairdresser working in the place she is at the moment. What was most interesting to me in all this is that across the road there are three shops offering an identical set of products: all of them are off license/grocery stores, and within less than one minute’s walk from each other. Why is this possible? Because those properties are owned by a private landlord, not the council, and private landlords do not have a say in what kind of business operates from their properties.

Anyway that’s what she said, or what I understood her to be saying. By the end of this conversation my hair was shorter and neater, so I left.

The Expendables

So before I even begin on this (and don’t worry, I intend to be brief and not waste much of your precious time), let me quote Bill Hicks talking about Basic Instinct:

But you know I saw this movie this year called last year called er, ‘Basic Instinct’. Okay now. Bill’s quick capsule review: Piece-of-Shit. Okay now. Yeah, yeah, end of story by the way. Don’t get caught up in that fevered hype phoney fucking debate about that Piece-of-Shit movie. “Is it too sexist, and what about the movies, are they becoming too dddddddd.” You’re, you’re just confused, you don’t get, you’ve forgotten how to judge correctly. Take a deep breath huuh, look at it again. “Oh it’s a Piece-of-Shit!” Exactly, that’s all it is. Satan squatted, let out a loaf, they put a fucking title on it, put it on a marquee, Satan’s shit, piece of shit, walk away. “But is it too, what about the lesbian connot.. ddddd.” You’re, you’re getting really baffled here. Piece-of-Shit! Now walk away. That’s all it is, it’s nothing more! Free yourself folks, if you see it, Piece-of-Shit, say it and walk away. You’re right! You’re right! Not those fuckers who want to tell you how to think! You’re fucking right! Sorry wrong meeting again. I keep getting my days mixed up. tomorrow, it’s the meeting at the docks. Tonight it’s comedy entertainment with young Bill. Horrible film. And then I come to find out after that film. that all the lesbian sex scenes, let me repeat that, all the lesbian sex scenes were cut out of that film, because the test audience was turned off by them. Ha. Boy, is my thumb not on the pulse of America. [1]

I am quoting Bill here because The Expendables could be given pretty much the same review (I mean the Piece-of-Shit review, nothing to do with lesbians. But in case you were wondering, there are no lesbian sex scenes, or indeed any sex scenes in The Expendables. But there is quite a high bodycount).

I went to see The Expendables because I wanted a break from thinking about my thesis, and a friend wanted to go. So I went with him. I humoured him; humour me. The reason I am writing this is twofold: first, the same reason I went to see the film, and second, because the film tells us all sorts of interesting (but not particularly surprising) things about American masculinity in 2010. Viewed through this lens, the plot can be summarised as follows: Man 1 (Stallone) is doing his job, and encounters a damsel in distress (Itié). After trying to rescue her, he retreats. Man 2 (Rourke) explains to Man 1 that unless he rescues the damsel, he will be cursed to not be a real man for the rest of his life, and spend his days regretting, and having unfulfilling relationships, doing drugs and tattoo art, painting guitars and crying. Man 1 resolves to rescue the damsel. His mates rally round him, including a Chinese man (Li) whose role in the film is to get into situations where he needs to be rescued by big, white American Man 1 and his big, white American buddies – much like the role of the damsel, in fact – and a black man (Crews) who has a much bigger gun than any of the big, white American men. In the end it seems that if the big, white American men can rally round and look after each other as friends, and provide a space in their little group for a black man with a big gun, then it is possible for all of them to not only rescue the damsel and the Chinese man, but their wounded egos too.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, they get to defeat some enemies of America too: a rogue CIA agent (Roberts), who must be bad because everyone knows the CIA defends America’s interests, and General Garza (Zayas), who manages to represent three phantoms at once: not only does his position as a Latin American dictator make him a representative of Chavez, Morales, Castro and all those other leaders in Latin America who are refusing to play ball with the world superpower, but his name indicates that life would be so much easier if those Palestinians would just quit complaining and let Israel wipe them off the map completely, and the fact that he also looks a bit Mexican indicates how we are supposed to feel about- oh, hang on a minute, Stallone has publicly attacked the idea of a wall separating the US and Mexico [2], so maybe this theory of mine doesn’t work so well.

So all-in-all, what my review amounts to is that the film fits well with the conservative siege mentality that means that not only does something like the Tea Party movement do very well in contemporary America, but a Piece-of-Shit like this film will probably do fairly well in the Box Office.

Anyway, whatever. I have a thesis to write, and it won’t write it by itself. Er, let me try that again: it won’t get written by itself. Especially if I come out with garbled sentence constructions like that one.

Peace.

References:

1. You should read/listen to/watch more of Bill’s stuff. I got this particular quote from http://www.gavinsblog.com/revelations.htm?seenIEPage=1

2. “Stallone attacks Mexican Border Fence”, www.breibart.com, http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8MF698O0&show_article=1

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

A friend showed me a book the other day as I sat in room 301, SOAS’s torture chamber for PhD students. I glanced at the cover image of a map that includes on it the location of my Homerton abode, and flicked through a few pages. My first enlightened thought was wtf. I think Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report probably has that initial effect on a lot of people (1, 2). I think I will have another look at this book during the next few months, when I will be brooding in self-imposed exile in nearby Harringay (actually not self-imposed, but imposed by the downstairsers) and plotting my triumphant return to that rose-red empire.

In the meantime, however, back to the tortured process of thesis writing.

References:

1. Guardian review of the book http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/21/sinclair-hackney-review

2. Amazon reviews of the book http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0241142164/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

“I feel sorry for you for the first time”

I am woken from a dream about marriage by a fart, a snigger, and the downstairsers lighting their first cigarette of the day. It’s ok; enough sleeping has been done, and I don’t feel trapped any more now that I know that one way or another I’m out of here in less than a month. I close the window, pull on trousers, and get the coffee going; fingerpick a song on the guitar sitting outside the kitchen door. At the end of it there is applause from above; I look up and D is grinning at me out the studio flat at the top of the house. I grin back. I will miss him when I go, despite my dislike for some of the things that come out of his mouth from time to time.

He comes down and I give him the news. He tells me the smoke from the downstairsers reaches his window too, but inevitably a smaller amount of it than what I get. Looking at how close my window is to where the smoke comes from, he says “I feel sorry for you for the first time”.

I say, “There’s nothing that can be done about it. I’ve checked with a friend who works for the council in Environmental Health. Only thing we could do is give them access to our garden, and they could go down and smoke at the back. Perhaps we could put a ladder in and they could climb up.”

D shakes his head. “They would be in our garden the whole time. They don’t just have one cigarette and then go back inside. They sit down with a pack. Some people have TVs for entertainment; these guys have cigarettes. And I don’t want these cheeky Romanian cats having access to our garden.”

(He didn’t actually say cats.)

“I’m sure we’ll get a chance to catch up again before you go”

Funny thing is, this is the first proper conversation I had with G in the seven months I’ve lived here. And I started the conversation by saying, “I’m moving out.”

G works for the local council. She and her husband live in the biggest room of the house, and the rest of us see them rarely. I decided to initiate this conversation because we were both in the kitchen and no one else was, something that has possibly never happened before in the whole seven months. I wanted to break the silence, because we haven’t spoken at all since I threw a party three or four weekends back without telling G and her husband first. Since the party occupied the kitchen from 6pm to 2am and they wanted to cook in that time, they were not best pleased. I apologised.

Anyway this is all beside the point. “Why?” she said, when I told her my news. I explained that new people have moved into the basement flat immediately below my room, and they smoke beneath my bedroom window in a little basement light shaft they have. Even with my window closed all the smoke comes into my room, and I am asthmatic. I have no legal basis to get them to stop doing it. I have asked them nicely. They smiled back nicely in response, and took another puff. So yesterday I handed in my one month’s notice. “Fair enough,” she said.

Then I explained to her my deposit issue. I signed my contract with an agent who was advertising the place on Gumtree. I paid a deposit to that agent. After that it became impossible to contact the agent. I spoke to University of London Housing Services, who told me that because the deposit was not protected under one of the three Deposit Protection Schemes operating in this country, the landlord is responsible for making sure I get my deposit back when I move out. I know the deposit is not protected because each of the DPSs has confirmed that they are not protecting it. “He’ll make sure you get your deposit,” G said.

Famous last words?

R comes home

I’m back from university late but still feeling clear-headed and awake, and someone has done a great job of tidying the kitchen/dining room of the house, so I decide to sit there and mark some more of my students’ essays until I feel tired enough to sleep. It seems like everyone in the house is sleeping, but after I’ve been sitting there for 10 minutes R comes through the front door. I can see that he’s drunk as he walks in, and we share a laugh about how easy it is to tell he’s drunk from the way he walks and the fact that a big smile is plastered right across his face. ‘I’m smiling but I’m sad,’ he tells me. I ask him why. He tells me, and I decide it’s time to start this blog.

R is a migrant worker from Romania. When I moved into one of the rooms of this rented house 8 months ago after seeing it advertised on Gumtree, R was a self-employed handyman working with one of London’s big construction companies. He was working 7 days a week on a big project on the other side of London, leaving here at 5 or 6 in the morning and returning at 10pm every day. He has shown me photos of that project; it’s done now, finished. Today he explained to me that the way the construction company functions is by getting its managers to form relationships with groups of self-employed workers. This means that when a project gets finished, the manager shifts to a new project and takes his workers with him. At present the construction company has lots of projects, but R has no work because his manager hasn’t got a new project yet. His manager has promised him a new project in August. That promise was made in April.

R doesn’t have savings. This year he didn’t take the opportunity to go back to Romania for christmas because he was trying to save up to buy a car. That was the trade-off: a holiday or a car. He bought the car. Back to having no savings. So how to survive April to August?

The landlord of the house where I live is also Romanian. He’s doing well; he has a lot of properties in and around London. So he offers R a job renovating one of these properties. Great: R gets the work that will keep him going until his manager gets him onto a new project. Except there’s a bit more to it than that: the landlord gets R to do a job which R estimates should pay 2000 pounds, and pays R 1000 pounds. R doesn’t complain because he’s grateful to have that much and a roof over his head.

I have a theory I’m developing here. I am fairly sure the landlord is involved in a few dodgy bits of business, and the way in which he has got R working for him sounds like it might be one of them. So who benefits from it? Well, the landlord does. But so does the construction company – R remains in the country and on hand for whenever they need him to work again, and with his head just above water financially. The construction company is not doing anything wrong, as such, insofar as they are probably abiding by all the labour laws. It’s just that the labour laws in contemporary Britain fuck over the little man, putting him in a position of precarity where he is at the beck and call of the employer.

And no one feels it more than the migrant worker with limited English. When I ask R why he is sad, he says ‘It’s nothing. It’s everything. It’s the system’. He tells me why he is so worried right now. In the last place he lived he had a contract which had all bills included. After he moved out he received a notice from Thames Water asking him to pay the water bill, which was in his name. He spoke to them to ask how a bill could be in his name if he had never had anything to do with the water supply contract; he showed them his contract as proof. They apologised for the inconvenience and told him it was sorted. Less than a month later a debt collecting agency had written to him explaining that this matter was now in their hands and that if he didn’t pay up they would take him to court. He spoke to them to ask how a bill could be in his name if he had never had anything to do with the water supply contract; he showed them his contract as proof. They apologised for the inconvenience and told him it was sorted. Two weeks later a second debt collecting agency wrote to him. Now he tries to get a second bank account because he has reached the overdraft limit of his first one. Barclays says they won’t give him one because his credit rating is too bad. Why is it bad? Because of this water bill. R feels trapped in a web which he can’t get out of because his English isn’t good enough.

There’s not much I know how to do here. I told him to contact the Mary Ward Legal Centre, and offered to go with him there for an appointment. Hopefully they can help with the water bill at least.

Aside from that I decided I had to start this blog. I have wanted to start it for a while, in fact I first got the idea for it soon after moving into Homerton and starting to learn about how life is lived here. So here is a first blog entry for you to chew on. Welcome to Homerton.