On the importance of small brown dogs and other assorted animalia ...

 

After almost a year of living under a 'stay local' lockdown, even Samuel Johnson might have become a bit tired of London. But then along comes a lovely easter weekend cycle, with animals as a general theme to make it feel a bit different, proving that there is still a lot to learn about this city. 

 

For a start, forget about all those images of rampant lions and unicorns; the English basically invented camp and baseball caps, and have an unnatural deference to royalty and swans, but they will also riot over the vivisectioning of a small brown dog (known, imaginatively, as the 'Brown Dog Affair'), build memorials for animals who died in war, and maintain farms in the middle of the city, so there's some semblance of equilibrium there.

 

 

Dr Johnson overindulged his cat and its still commanding way too much attention, but oysters used to be cheap as chips. Although thinking about the state of England's waterways back in the day, and oysters being bottom feeders, I'm pretty sure there's a negative correlation between the low price and the high chance of food poisoning.
 

 

Pigeons still have no redeeming features.

 

 

An impressive historical structure does not compensate for the incompatibility of cycling and cobblestones. 

 

 

 

And that for every venal politician there is a Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, a David Wynne, and a Dr and Mrs Salter, to remind us of something beautiful ....

I can find no answer to the question of why the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London charged 'three half pennies' for entry instead of the logical penny and a half, but that can just go on the 'eccentric English' pile.

Two hours of sitting still ....

I know it's a cliche of my impeding age as I morph into a grumpy old woman, but it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to get anyone to stay still for longer than it takes to check a twitter feed. My local cinema can’t run a 90 minute film anymore without at least three people having to go out to pee or get another drink. In a recent trip to the theatre, another 90 minutes without interval, it was all rustle and cough rather than rapt attention as I suspect Avengers fans had come in to watch Pinter’s Betrayal with Tom Hiddleston and were waiting for a fight to break out.

At a Sadlers Wells gig, featuring a no-interval, two hour solo performance of the full Bach cello suite accompanied by contemporary dance, the crowd was on its best behaviour to begin with, sitting up straight in perfect silence. But then edges started to fray somewhere around the half way point as backs collapsed and bodies leant forward blocking the view of people behind (the choreographer seemingly not taking into account the angle of the bleachers and sent her dancers too often too close to the front of stage so no-one in the circles other than the first row could see anything). Tersely whispered ‘please sit back’ started to reverb around the theatre, along with guilty explanations beginning with ‘but the person in front ...’. As the performance continued with the inclusion of sticky tape pentagrams on the floor, silent pauses, back projected shadows (which were pretty cool), ever more skipping and repeatedly throwing themselves on the ground, little plumes of light started flicking on around the dark as smart phones revealed just how much longer we had left.

Suck it up people! If it's art, suffer for it. If it's the Avengers: Endgame, sit still and pay attention to the pretty colours. Despite some warping ideas from quantum physics, time really will go no faster by checking your phone or fidgeting.

Notes to self for the New Year 2019

Always remember that miracles can happen ....
It‘s 1.30am NYE, and tens of thousands of people are trying to get home on a sporadic night bus service. But lo ... what is this I see coming towards me down the street ... Yes! A taxi with its light on. Now it’s a whole block away so I think there’s no way it’s going to reach us before one of the throng of thousands hails it down first. But it gets closer and closer and I start to edge inconspicuously up the street past the bus queue trying not to draw any attention to it as my heart starts to beat faster at the possibility of a ride home (or from the several cups of coffee I now need to stay up past midnight) until, with just 20 metres or so to go, I unleash the inner seagull (that taxi/chip is mine, mine, mine) and sprint, throwing myself in front, and while the cabbie jams on the brakes, grab the door handle (rules of London cabs - they who hold the door handle own the cab) and throw myself and the Navigator inside. We are not allowed to spend any money for the rest of the month in order to recoup the cost but it was worth every penny. 

With such a good start to the year, what could possibly go wrong ....

Encounters in my neighbourhood

My neighbourhood has an ability to absorb most collisions. At its worst there are occasional explosions of loud music, bitter argument and violence at which point discrete phone calls are made to police and the local council's ASBO team. But for the everyday grievances of difference we mostly just ignore, tut, or keep objections to the privacy of the home rather than the street.

There are though moments of choice when we have to decide which way we're going to go. For example, after a few weekends of aggravated tension on our street related to the selling of illicit substances, I came home to find the shop had opened, so to speak, literally on the doorstep to my building. Unfortunately, before rational thought took charge, my middle aged self stepped in to berate the young man as he made a sale to a car passenger, with an eye rolling 'Seriously! you're going to do that here, on my doorstop!'

The rational side of my brain finally caught up with me two seconds later as I made it to my doorway, just as the young man also caught up with me and said 'Excuse me Miss, what did you say?'

Now at this point a few scenarios where trying to make there way around various neuronal passages in order to come to some decision on the best possible course of action to take at this point, influenced by the following confounding variables:

1. I was carrying my cello and therefore couldn't actually run very far, very fast.
2. I was almost in the block door but there was only a few feet and an open gate between the young man and me.
3. He was actually being very polite.

So my eventual response: 'I was just saying, have a nice evening', as I disappeared into home. 

The shop's not been back since but I somehow don't think the withering eye rolls of a middle aged cello carrier wearing hand knits and doc martins would really have had any impact on that decision. 

Adventures in London's musical underground ...

Having introduced Dingo Baby to Midnight Oil I felt compelled to accept his invitation to a night with Mac de Marco, if for no other reason than to experience the Coronet, a legendary sticky floor venue in Elephant and Castle, before it is inevitably knocked down to make way for more unaffordable apartments built for overseas investors to rent out to Londoners at exorbitant rates (read here the litany of injustice involved in this demolition of communities' and people's futures from Southwark Council and Australian developer Lendlease).

A quick tour through Youtube and I discovered that Mac de Marco's style could best be described as stoner or slacker rock so I was expecting mostly stoners and slackers to be in the audience. It's always disconcerting when expectation and reality don't meet so it took a few moments to adjust to being surrounded by a crowd of young, preppy, posh accents seemingly engaging in their own version of cos-play for a few hours, i.e., a mass sing-along of not particularly subversive lyrics wishing they too could be swigging beer and whisky from the bottles lined up on their speaker stacks.

Maybe after years of dance tents and stadium gigs, or the fact that I was just sipping on burdock and dandelion soda, I was also struggling with the repertoire of three minute pop songs ... just when you think the song is going somewhere, it stops. It was only in the second half that some of the music started to get more interesting but by then the state of mind of the band was starting to disintegrate along with the cheese sandwiches and other food stuffs being thrown at the stage (which was pretty funny). It was also funny to watch Mac de Marco (clearly a talented musician who will not age well) replace the drummer who then came to the front to sing; only he can't sing so it started to be largely unfunny after ten minutes. With long pauses and occasional guttural screaming, the jackass-ery finally came to an end with a five chorus version of 'I'm Henry the Eighth', lyrics substituted for something vaguely comical but I had given up caring. Apart from a freestyle long version of an instrumental somewhere at about the half way point (which was exceptional), my vegan souvlaki from the Greek cafe in the neighbouring BoxPark was the best thing from the evening (and the ride home on the night tube;  always guaranteed to be ethnographically fascinating).

I recognise that as the oldest woman at the gig, with a penchant these days for 'been there, done that' eye rolling,  my opinion on these things is doubtless considered worthless, but I would counter with the following vignette ...

This morning, on the way to a well earned recovery brunch in E20 (because dandelion and burdock soda can take it out of you), we crossed the no-person's land of Hackney Wick warehouses still to be demolished, to hear the ever louder pulse of a techno rave being illegally held in a squat. As the grinding bass lines reverberated off derelict walls and the houses of suffering neighbours, we started to see the late morning wreckage emerging, blinking, into winter sunlight, sitting in gutters with cans of beer, crashed out on nearby benches, digging holes in the ground for no particular reason, grinning maniacally in baggy cargos, hippy tie-dye and dreadlock splendour, make-up smeared down sweaty faces, in desperate need of a shower and sleep, weaving their way down the street beneath the ever encroaching cranes of gentrification to the overground station. And this was the vanguard of early leavers .... the hard core still had another eight hours of partying to go.

Now that, fans of Mac de Marco, is proper stoner/slacker behaviour, although debates on its authenticity are irrelevant if you have to live next door to it and I suspect neither the ravers nor their preppy brethren nor Mac de Marco were feeling particularly spritely today, and that, as I smugly sip my  dandelion and burdock soda, is a waste of a beautiful winter's day.

Meeting the neighbours

All happening in Homerton this evening ... traffic collision outside the block turns out to be our suspected local dealers trying to execute a handbrake turn in order to get away from a police pursuit. The driver missed the turn and hit a neighbour's car instead, which then rolled into another neighbour's car. The driver legged it leaving his girlfriend to deal with the police, two of whom ran after the driver eventually tackling him on the green. They've just brought him back kicking and screaming ... literally. 
Meanwhile half the street has come out to watch the performance and piece together what happened, swapping notes and perspectives from our various vantage points, having a laugh at the poorly planned escape attempt and commiserating with the car owners. Conviviality in action! It may not be pretty but it works.

Season's greetings ...

So in a week we have a spate of acid attacks in the neighbourhood, a riot brewing on Kingsland Road following a death in custody, a man beaten up on a local cycle path, and dealers now taking up residence on it. It's an odd, angry summer, this one. All thunder storm and gusts of wind out of nowhere. Anything unmoored is being buffeted into a gutter, and the rest of us cling on to our umbrellas and find the nearest wall to stand with our backs to. Youth workers talk of withdrawing from some streets because, like fake news, and alternative facts, and trolling, and Brexit, and Jo Cox, and shrapnel at a kid''s concert, the borders have shifted.

Seeing Red

It is confession time. Yesterday, I actually found myself uttering the words 'you posh hipsters', in public, directed at a resident from that part of the street that is all Victorian terrace on the outside and undergoing constant renovation within. 'Uttering' is perhaps too demure a verb to use in this instance. It was more yelling in a crazy woman kind of way at a man who, when I busted him using our bins for his overflow of waitrose leftovers, made the mistake of justifying his behaviour by saying 'I pay my taxes, I can put my garbage wherever I want'. No, sir, no you can't.

In the past when I have found people fly tipping on my doorstep I have employed all the non-violent communication and buddhistly skills I have been trained over the years to deploy. I've taken their hand, introduced myself, quietly and calmly explained the obvious situation - that if they keep putting their garbage in our bins then the bins overflow and we have rats and foxes spreading germs and half eaten babies' nappies all over our front yards - and then I have watched them smile and continue to put their garbage in our bins. Probably, I suspected, because they think it's a scummy estate and they pay their tax and can put their garbage wherever they like, or at least anywhere but in front of their own heavily mortgaged homes.

Enough is enough. It is time for outrage and justice. It is time for some name calling and yelling in the street, in front of everyone. It is time for Luther and Alice to kick some butt!

Now I know that I also shop at Waitress most of the time (actually I get it home delivered - an obvious sign of gentrification when delivery trucks with kale or blueberry paint jobs feel comfortable parking in your neighbourhood). I could possibly earn more than the man I called a posh hipster. I am petite bourgeoisie from my toe nails to my hair follicles. And I know that yelling at the man in the street will probably only increase his desire to place his garbage on our estate (and he did at least separate out his recycling and put it in the bin rather than leave it lying on top or on the ground as so many others do). But I have to also confess that for the few minutes it took to berate him for his selfishness, no matter how lacking in coherence and logical argument,  it did feel pretty good.

Ultimately though this madness is a symptom of the housing crisis that leads to middle class residents buying tiny two bedroom Victorian conversions for a sum, on average, 16 times their London salary according to the National Housing Federation; a space in which they find it impossible to store themselves, their kids, their flat screens and their garbage if they miss collection day, which perhaps leads them to say things like 'I pay my taxes and can do what I want'. It seems the only leverage they have is to piss on down the hierarchy. Private renter activists like DIGS highlight the growing resentment felt by this squeezed Middle that must spend too much on a basic necessity that has become part of an artificial market created by previous governments who now keep it propped up by transnational mobility and investment. Parts of this Middle, with few rights in the face of absent landlords and short term leases, look at the low rents and charges of social housing with an aggrieved eye and seemingly little comprehension that we're all of us, private tenants, leaseholders, freeholders and social housing, living with a precarity of ideological making. Where we put the garbage will be the least of our problems if the politics of London and nationally with regards to housing don't change.

East London Life

Cheerfully pedalling to work this morning, enjoying a modest summer's day along the canals, I was slowed by a 'Divers at Work' sign in the middle of the towpath. As I passed I cheerfully waved at the divers and cheerfully asked:

'Hello lads, lovely day for it. What are you looking for?'.

They responded, somewhat lacking in cheer:

'Murder weapon'.

Not such a lovely day then for some poor bugger. And I cycled on.

The Wickly News

I now own a piece of London. It's just a little piece; an ex-local in a yet to be gentrified part of Hackney, with the traffic hum of the Eastway between us and the lights of the Olympic Park. Given the eye-watering rents in London, and the historically low interest rates its probably a good thing to engage in generating debt I hear you say, sensibly sounding like an elder relative.

But there is only one good reason that I can think of for buying my own space .... The chance to spend days putting flat pack together! I love flat pack almost as much as I LOVE my new Bosch. I love the fact that I made the bed I sleep in, the wardrobe where I hang my clothes, the table I eat off and the chairs I sit on (not to mention a desk, an office chair, a lounge chair, a bedside table, and a bathroom caddy).

Now I know the real craftspeople among you will be rolling your eyeballs - ikea is not exactly artisan - they also need to rethink their tax policy and what's in their Swedish meatballs (refer to recent horse meat scandal sweeping Europe). But it is about the only opportunity I get to justify owning power tools. And there is something awesome about the scale of the place, and, perhaps only to those of us who are compulsively organised, about being able to count every nail, screw and allen key in each pack.

More importantly, anyone into flat pack instantly gets what some of the most densely written concepts in social science are on about. Take 'assemblage', for example, one of the popular A's (others being Affect, Affordance and Actor network theory). There are bits, we put them together generally according to a plan usually derived by someone else. Sometimes there may be bits left over or bits that don't fit quite correctly and require a degree of pressure, or a hammer, to get them into place. Affect is the sensation you get when you realise you should have bought two of the wardrobe door packs (damn you ikea) or when you can only get to an ikea on a Sunday afternoon along with the rest of London, and realise an embodiment of Dante's seventh circle of hell. And the interactions between human and non-human on such occasions, between people, and more people, and trolleys and prams and cardboard and aisles and soft and hard furnishings, are all you need to experience to really understand Actor network theory. A theory for exiting ikea without feeling claustrophobic or developing rage would be handier.

The new home is also a great place to engage in some ethnography of hipster led gentrification. Cross the Eastway and you enter a space where a shop, run by a man who shaves only half his face, survives by selling just one type of bike - fixed gear. Next door the shop sells only 12" vinyl. In the cafe, a woman enters wearing a towering flowered head dress and no one blinks. And everyone, from the bike shop to the laptop repair shop, serves espresso with their goods. Between the Eastway and the Peanut Factory is a Cash & Carry and book warehouse. Next to the White Building, with its trendy micro brewery, pizzeria and performance spaces, is a swingers' club with blacked out windows. Dotted among it all are squatted dross-scapes, warehouses and artist studios. And binding it all together is the smell wafting from Mr Bagel's and the German bakery across the road. Welcome to Hackney Wick.

pleasure

There is a certain species of Londoner that appears at this time of year ... gaunt, pasty, bags under their eyes, starting to develop rickets from lack of sunshine, usually seen wandering around Leicester Square and Curzon cinemas with a moleskin notebook in hand. They are a seasonal reminder that the London Film Festival is on.

Much as I love movies, I am a lightweight in comparison to these seasoned film buffs. First there is the tricky process of selecting which films to see. It used to be that I could throw the programme up in the air and let the fates decide by booking whatever was on the page that was open when it landed. Now I actually have to trawl through webpages which means that any film starting with the letter 'P' onwards is unlikely to get my attention as by that stage my brain hurts trying to decide if the Romanian documentary on water skiing will be more important than the 'dark and gritty' realism of another British film verite. Secondly, I only managed to get tickets to three films. Actually getting any ticket to the festival is in itself a triumph so three isn't bad, but I do wonder how early I have to get up to get a seat that isn't  either so far out in the wings or so close to the screen that there is a need for orthopedic support.

But such discomfort is more than made up for by the pleasure to be had in skiving off in the afternoon to see a film, especially when it is Nadine Labaki's 'Where do we go now?'. Sitting in a warm cinema, with a few hundred others (film and cultural studies departments must just close down for two weeks in October), falling in love with a small village in Lebanon, laughing out loud while eating steamed buns from Chinatown, pondering other scenarios where the judicious administration of hash cookies could bring about peace and good will among men (you have to see the film), and then walking out, smiling, into a soft autumn day with that feeling that only comes from knowing that you have shared something special with a small section of humanity who are, at this moment in time, content.

Running Amok

Yes, we're all fine. We haven't been burnt out or had anything stolen, and still have beds to sleep in. What to feel is the big question as the smell of a singed city wafts over my Hackney  balcony ...

Basically, I feel tired. I'm now tired of dissecting what happened, especially when it involves hearing comments like 'they have such low IQs'. I wish I had a bar of chocolate for every time, over years of research, I've heard social conflict dismissed by the fundamental attribution error of assigning low IQs or 'uneducated' to an other. Besides, the guerilla tactics, the out-manoeuvring of the police, the coordination, would seem to suggest among some of these young people at least a high degree of strategic ability. 

I'm tired of 'law and order' arguments without any acknowledgment of the role of poverty, inequality, boredom, gender, rampant consumerism, unemployment, seeing economic and political elites who have done a fair bit of pillaging in recent years getting away with it unpunished, funding cuts, lack of space, opportunism, catharsis. As a young man in Birmingham said on the news last night ... 'People are tired of struggling'. In Tottenham, unemployment among young black men stands at around 50% (Runnymede Trust). Youth services across the city, particularly in the poorest boroughs, have been slashed and burned. And the youth clubs, as daggy as they may be for some young people, were at least, according to one source, a means to avoid being 'stopped and searched' on the streets. One 'stop and search' too many was the catalyst for Hackney's contribution to 'the riots'. It is reprehensible to burn people out of their homes, but these riots were not necessarily senseless or irrational.

I'm definitely tired of seeing TV news images of young black men looting and neat white women cleaning up afterwards.

I'm tired of people who have never had to face a barrage of missiles and hate saying the police are not doing enough. The water cannon and rubber bullets they demand will not make them any braver or any more in control.

I'm afraid that the veneer of civility that holds it all together has been shown to be painfully thin and suspect many others who have been waiting patiently for something to trickle down to them may be thinking that perhaps they too should just go and take it.

And I'm puzzled by those who say they are disturbed because there was no 'politics' involved, no cause these young people were fighting for, no way of defining these actions into either Left or Right. And yet it was, first and foremost, all about power. And for a few nights at least, the estates had it ... petrifying the rest of London.

A fine day out

At the risk of sounding completely bo-ho, it's been a fabulous London weekend. Saturday was spent walking to Southbank with the weather remembering what it's supposed to do in summer. Okay, it's only 22 degrees but leave me with my illusions. It's warm enough to sit outside and sip my Pimms and that's all that matters. We even have our own urban plage now ... two inches of sand on reclaimed sidewalk next to the Thames. It comes with a replica Chowpatty Beach (Mumbai) cafe, where they serve sides of poetry. And along with these visual memorials to hot days in the past comes auditory reminders of joy ... of the squeals of kids running under the hose pipe in the backyard, chasing the dog and getting scratched from razor sharp kikuyu grass ... although at Southbank there is no dog or lawn but never is there so much squealing as when the dancing fountain is turned on.
 
To these pleasures can be added two seminars at the London Literature festie. The first, a talk on 'London as a Satellite City' with Rana Dasgupta (author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo) and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (author of What if Latin America Ruled the World?). The second was Owen Jones (who looks all of 16) discussing his book on Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. There is an absolute hatred held by some in the UK for those who must sell their labour for a living and have no control over what they do once engaged in that labour. It is an indigenous version of social cleansing based possibly on the fear of retribution for the violence of the industrial revolution. 

On my way back home, pondering this hatred, I realised I must now be a Londoner as I could give correct directions to everyone who was lost along the way (although I'm worried the young ladies at Liverpool Street station, heading to Southbank, may not have made it given their lovely high heels had 50 minutes of walking to do).

Home in Hackney, being 90 minutes walk or another world away from Southbank, is having its own festie at the moment: Create (the Hackney Fringe Festival). In an old WWII bunker at the back of a theatre in Dalston, Sukhdev Sandhu created a performance piece of Night Haunts, scenes from the underside of London. I'm not sure I really needed to know that the men who unclog the Victorian sewers of the fat of a 21st century city occassionally eat what they find down there (okay it was an unpeeled orange but really ...!).

The bunker, creating the dark and dank smell of London at night, also provided shelter from the random monstrousness that is a rapidly regenerating Dalston that I pottered through on the way home, just in time to round off my day with the David Hayes vs Wladimir Klitschko heavy weight title fight. It's amazing how watching boxing on a 50 inch high definition plasma screen with slow motion replay can improve one's appreciation of how much it must hurt.
  

Day One

I'm slothing in my jim-jams with a cup of coffee close to hand to bolster the happy new year's day-after effects. The Hip Hop party on the de Beauvoir Estate on one side of our street finished up about 5am I think. The party in the Gastro Pub on the de Beauvoir Town side of the street finished up about 2am. The in-house DJ played the occasional Hip Hop track so we could wave our hands in the air and bump and grind a bit, but he was mostly a 1980s-1990s pop man (I am comforted that still the youth of today can dance to 'Groove is in the Heart'). I doubt the two sides of our street will ever have a collective street party, and the every-other-day-of-the-year spatial inequality isn't really made any more equal by gut-vibrating sound systems, but at least on the upside our collective 'blase indifference' to each other meant everyone seemed to be having a good time. That has to count for successful urban navigation in some way.

Happy New Year!

City Space

My Number 3 New Neighbours have moved in upstairs this weekend, sequentially representing the dilemma of contemporary urban living ... navigating diverse spaces crowded with bodies and noise, not only 'out there' in London streets, but in here, my home, my sanctuary. It's always a period of trepidation ... will they be 'nice', will they be quiet, will they not leave furniture in the front yard, will they recycle, will they not kick footballs into the fresh washing on the line, will they not hold religious ceremonies including singing, chanting, clapping and/or speaking in tongues before 10am on a Sunday morning. Please, we pray silently to whichever goddess we choose to believe in, let me not have to go through the endless rounds of negotiation and outright bribery ('chocolate cake in return for good behaviour') again; please, we pray, let them be just like me.

Utopia: a city created in our own likeness.
Boredom: a city created in our own likeness.

Ambient London

Shunned, the second level cello class at the Mary Ward Adult Education Centre is exiled into the wilderness (along with all the rest of the string ensemble). Banished by the neighbours no longer able to put up with two hours of practice each week and neo-liberal education that would rather have 30 language students than 5 cellists taking up a classroom. I'm blaming the violins ... two years worth of lessons and still they can't hit high C without scaring away cats and potential students.

Noise leaks. My back neighbours sit outside on a warm summer evening and laugh. Across the road reggae pumps into the street from an open loft window. It competes with Alicia Keys and Cheryl Cole downstairs (you can always tell when X Factor is back on TV as the teenagers gather to practice their dreams of stardom ... a practice which feels vaguely familiar). Kids toss coins and kick their ball ... thump ... doof ... Mr Chopin's piano and Mrs Boccherini's violin are practicing somewhere in the street. The Mary Ward String Ensemble, for now, will be silent.

Negotiating Notting Hill

Each year after Notting Hill Carnival there is debate in media columns and talk back radio about whether the Carnival has outgrown its current site. ‘The streets of gentrifying Notting Hill can no longer accommodate Europe’s largest street party’, is one argument. ‘The Caribbean community has moved on and so should the carnival’ is another. On reflection, there are perhaps two deep seated fears being presented in these arguments: first, fear of the crowd, its sheer size and unpredictability; second, the fear of the stranger and his/her ambiguity.

The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s sense of transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.

Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel a sense of transcendence. There is at first a sense only of discomfort. There is a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.

According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown. (…) It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.

The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.

Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.

On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.

Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.

Subterranean Blues ...

Dingo Baby is determined to show me an underground London, in the sense of a rave culture rather than the inner workings of the Tube. There is perhaps a justifiable pride in rave's history in the UK. In its hey-day in the 1980s, illegal gatherings and squat parties were a means to rail against Margaret Thatcher's oppressive ordering of society and privatisation of everything that moved, except dancing. But there is a debatable question as to whether it was a political movement that generated a space of equality as everyone took off their weekday wear, whether a suit or overalls, and put on baggy jeans and t-shirts, or whether it was just another form of pointless hedonism. Personally, much as I love a good dance, I don't think the Conservatives or any other bastion of law and order should be too worried about the impact of raves today. They are for the most part in line with Thatcher's denial of society ... individuated experiences, now legal apart from the substances consumed to get the party started; underground but not subversive. This is not Notting Hill.

To be fair, there are some remnants of an ideology left. A recent event in the cavernous bowels of London Bridge's arches was billed by the organisers as 'a magical indoor festival combining musicians, DJs, VJs, performers and artists from all corners of creativity, joined by various proactive NGOs and charities with the expressed aim to make a difference'. At this event not only could I dance to some brilliant psychedelic trance and world music, I could draw what I love, learn to make a seed bomb, model endangered species in clay, undergo various healing and alternative therapies, or get a cup of chai and just sit and chill while listening to talks on climate change. In the 'inspiration hall' area, some of those involved in the early rave days 20 years ago talked about its impact and the state of 'the scene' today. There was some talk about spreading love with the music and bringing in people from different faiths. I wondered how much love would be in the room of mostly white party-goers if a group of young people arrived to dance who happened to be black, Muslim and wearing hoodies ... how much love and how much tension. Ironically, a young man was shot and killed the next night outside the same venue. There was debate on what to call the event with the standard interruptions from a man of indeterminate age but who probably left his personal growth and social skills in the 1960s. 'It's a gathering'. Okay, it's a gathering, and I wondered how much love was being extended his way or if people were getting irritated (okay, maybe not 'people' per se, but I for one was getting annoyed and was going to have to get my chakras cleaned again in the healing area). I also wondered on the irony of why it was that he who bore the hall marks of a 'new age lifestyle' as an alternative to capitalism's privatised, industrialised, mass-produced society, in fact reproduced characteristics of the very thing he was protesting about, a system that is crippled by a lack of social skills, empathy and tolerance. It came down to Paradox, 'a one-legged existential stand-up beat poet' to put it all into context with his self-referential piss take on 'tribalists' who take it a wee bit too seriously and then take the glow sticks out of their hair when they put their suits back on to go to work in the city on Monday.

Perhaps rather than indulge in gazing at 'the scene's' navel and getting nostalgic for times past that were probably not as bold as a drug induced haze has made them out to be, I suggest we just love it for what it is and go home as the sun rises (or in my case as I'm getting old we could only make it to 5.30) because that is a brilliant time to see the city waking up, and think about important questions such as why do British men dance better than Australian men, why do some of them wear thick wool beanies while dancing inside in a hot room, and why it's so difficult to find a bag small enough to be able to dance with it over the shoulder but big enough to put a can of deodorant in. As for bigger questions on political, economic and social change, perhaps the best we can hope for is to create a moment of collective energy and good-will that impels the converted to keep going.

Notting Hill Carnival, 24-25 August 2008

The Carnival: ... that which can't be held, can't be repressed, can't be organised into neatness. The fear of politicians everywhere: the crowd in the street; the uncontrolled, uncontrollable display; the random, unpredictable event that punctuates the facade of normality, the facade of power (A. Jach,1999, The Layers of the City, Sydney: Hodder Headline, p 91).

I used to think that Sydney’s Mardi Gras was the pinnacle of parties … at least 12 hours of dance-fuelled hedonism culminating in the pleasure of sliding between thousands of smooth torsos at 9 a.m. in the morning, staggering outside to see the sun already up and doing its worst to make you look like a hag now that the eyeliner has washed down the face to mingle with the glitter and the sweaty hair that has fallen out of the ‘do’ it took hours and half a can of spray to create.

But I have to reassess …

Dingo Baby seemed especially keen that I come with him to Notting Hill Carnival and being up for anything remotely resembling the reoccupation of public space by the public I thought it sounded like a good idea. Notting Hill is not far from my place and the impending excitement was palpable in the street the night before. Diversion signs and barricades had been going up for well over a week beforehand. And those barricades were not just the usual crowd control metal gates but, as it turned out, the entire boarding up of shops and houses along the main parade route and all the way up Portobello Road. This was clearly going to be no ordinary party.

Notting Hill Carnival is overwhelmingly massive. It is noisy, messy, dirty, chaotic and sex on two dozen sound systems. It is a street party for two million people over two days. The entire suburb becomes a dance floor. There is a parade that starts around 12pm each day which is basically made up of trucks with sound systems on them with any number of dancers, some in costume, some just following on behind. It takes all day and into the evening for the floats to get around the route. Then dotted around the suburb are sound systems which are basically a DJ dwarfed by stacks of speakers: ranging from the highly professional, commercial outfits such as the darlings of the Ibiza set, Sancho Panza, and Good Times with the legendary Norman Jay, MBE, to the local DJ who seemed to have found the money to get together a few mates to rig speakers up outside his block of council flats. It is surround sound music at full decibels cranking out until 7pm. And once the music is shut down you can wander over to the parade route, find a truck you like and join in there till late in the evening.

There is reggae, there is house and all its derivatives, there is trance, techno and drum and bass. There are steel bands and most importantly, there is soca music and if you’re blessed with a big arse you can wind it for all it’s worth with thousands of other beautiful women similarly blessed with big arses. 

By the end of the day you will be covered in sweat, glitter, chocolate, someone’s cocktail and/or mug of beer, and a layer of smoke from joints and jerk chicken being BBQ’d on the thousands of improvised stoves in every second front yard that has become a mini-store for the weekend also selling cold drinks and the use of their toilet from £1 to £5 depending on how far you are from an official one. I’m not sure how many chickens, pigs and salted fish gave their lives for the weekend but I’m sure they think it’s worth it.

It does get edgy when the sun starts to set. Everyone is drinking and smoking something, even your grandmother. As we started walking home on the second evening down Portobello Road, a group of young men ran past, one or two with faces covered by keffiyeh. Moments later a group of police also ran past and Dingo Baby and I made it home just before the fighting took off. Buses from south-west London were stopped before they could unload any more young men to do battle with each other.

I’m wondering if we’d be much better off if all young men were given The Dangerous Book for Boys, or better still were made to dance all day behind my favourite float oozing soca and the mantra ‘no knives, just chocolate’.

Instead there is the constant buzz of the ‘eye in the sky’ police helicopter, and homes and offices are co-opted for use as CCTV stations manned by police with binoculars and laptops. Being spied on is not a comfortable experience although I’m glad there is a strong police presence on the ground, most importantly for silently and unobtrusively directing people into other routes when one street becomes too crowded. Many seemed to be having a good time of it as well and in a crowd of two million people I don’t think 330 arrests is too bad; up on last year but violence was down.

The ‘criminal’ factor is given as one reason why the Carnival should be shut down or moved to somewhere like Hyde Park where it can be suitably controlled, patrolled and ordered. For our safety, for the safety of residents, and fair enough, I’m sure it’s a pain to board your shop or home up for a few days a year and come back to find people have pee’d against your fence. But I’d probably argue that it is dereliction of cultural norms and borders that is even more threatening and discomforting for the Carnival’s opponents. Given its size and what it represents, a celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture, it is inevitably going to be a battle ground of class, culture and gender; between mixo-phobs and mixo-phils (thank you Zygmunt Bauman); between the newly gentrified set from the movie of the same name, and the estates and tower blocks that somehow never made it into the film; between release and restraint, order and chaos.

The different crowd at each sound system is a demarcation of the city: it is mostly white and middle class arm waving in front of Sancho Panza’s DJs but get closer to the floats, the frenetic heart of the Carnival, and it’s a sea of Afro-Carribean. Kilt wearing Thais dancing to reggae music and selling jerk chicken are going to confuse anyone’s sense of order as may 80 year olds who are still dancing to Drum and Bass, and heaven forbid in this god-fearing Christian civilisation where they still give out the Bible on Desert Island Discs as one of the books you have to take (BBC Radio Four), loads of flesh, cleavage and the strong whiff of sex that lingers in the lyrics of the music and on many bodies. And yet despite all this, on Portobello Road two days later the straighteners had been through and it was business as usual, spic and span. So to those who find it all too much, I beseech you, for the greater good, let there be a few days of discomfort, let there be disorder, let there be noise, let there be release, let there be carnival. It will all return to normal soon enough.

London: In Progress

I live in a council block which, despite an apparent egalitarian upbringing, took a while to get used to, especially its trademark smell of forty years worth of ciggie smoke and cat pee that now impossibly infiltrates the concrete. But my little council block is a mirror of this city. There is a Somali family upstairs, a single mum and a pensioner downstairs. B. & M. across the landing have been here forty years and J., who I swap morning coffee, haberdashery and cherry tomatos with, lives below them. S. on the bottom floor lives with his wife and three young kids in the same space I do. There’s a quiet man on the top floor who’s name I don’t know.

From the window I see red roof tiles, chimney pots and the Heathrow flight path. The neighbours across the way have a roof terrace with a gentrifying water feature and a Buddha bust among the pot plants. In the street there are three dry cleaners, a chemist, an off-license, two corner stores without corners, a restaurant, a pizza take-away and a greasy spoon. I think they are all owned by one man who parks his Porsche outside the greasy spoon each day.

My neighbourhood is wedged between Holland Park, Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush with its rapidly rising mega-mall. Cross one street to the right and I’m in Holland Park; one stop from Kensington and some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Cross another street and I’m in social housing estates, high rises and dross-scapes. My block, street, neighbourhood reeks of the juxtapositions of wealth and cat piss; the contradictions of a global city marked by the ebb and flow of human movement. The heritage of Caribbean to Iranian to Somali to Punjabi to Arabic all embedded in faded, painted over, signage.

London is a dense city, shifting its identity from one street to the next, and you need all your senses to navigate across it. You need to bend with the buffeting of rush hour commuters and high street shoppers. You need to hear how close the buses and taxis are to your cycle lane. You need to smell the sweet apple tobacco in shishas to know when you’re on Edgeware Road. You need to make sense of the flicker of hoardings, departures and arrivals boards. You need to remember to never confuse a Scot for an Englishperson even if they have an English accent (although I'm not sure why someone at a Buddhist retreat would be so worried about identity). At another time, so relieved to get a call centre in ‘England’ I expressed my gratitude to the operator who then pointed out he was in Wales. Identity politics is virulent in this United Kingdom.

Unexpected things happen in this city. Oblivious, on the bridge from Embankment tube station to Southbank, headphones on, two couples tango, silently, deeply, intently and completely engrossed in the movement of a toe, a hand, a neck. A silent disco also involves headphones plus two DJs. Unexpectedly, I realise that dancing is actually a very communal, visual act and if your dancing partner suddenly switches to the other channel with a completely different beat then you experience instant arrhythmia. It’s also very difficult to snog someone when you’re both wearing industrial sized head sets.

Only in London would World Wide Knit in Public Day coincide with International Naked Cycle Day AND the Queen’s Birthday. Only in London could I row across the top of a building into the sunset. This ‘demented playground’, this ‘wanton happening’ created by the Austrian art collective Gelitin (Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery, London, July 2008). Only in London would I get a ticket for cycling in Holland Park by the Parks Police. What anti-social behaviour are they expecting in Holland Park that they need two parks police on patrol one superb summer’s morning – someone popping their champagne cork too loudly? Or worse, putting their champagne in the wrong glass? Unexpectedly, far from the madding crowd of Kensington and Chelsea, in the middle of the dross industrial landscapes of north London are a series of canals lined by wild flowers, herons, cyclists, joggers, fish, plastic bags and barges.

And you need all your senses to make sense of things like Piccadilly Circus with faux New York Times Square neon signs now surrounding the statue of Eros, and where Macdonald’s proudly announced ‘Coming soon: a new sign from MacDonalds’ (22 July 08). Is that a piece of post-modern simulacra I see before me?

I spend quite a few days engaging in psycho-geography, or putting it another way, wandering around the city. It’s for research, okay! For example, Saturday mornings I cycle to Borough Market through Hyde Park, past Buckingham Palace, Westminster and the London Eye, then into back streets along Southbank until hitting the cobble stones behind Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. And somehow I know all these places from every nursery rhyme, post card, BBC serial shown on the ABC that I’ve absorbed since the time I could read, or be propped up in front of the television. Borough Market has become the end goal because it has some of the best food in London although the best brownies EVER are to be found at East Dulwich Deli (because a girl cannot live by bread alone, even when it’s hand made by artisans and sold at Borough Market). The best greasy spoon in the world is E. Pellici in Bethnal Green. Not for the faint hearted or light weight. Disengage all sense when you enter and allow your senses to take over.