July 2011
1 post
The posh schools have already broken up for the summer and driving through Dulwich Village it’s very quiet. I wonder if the college has a Specials tribute band? They should for the Summer at least, and Autumn and Christmas and the New Year skiing season.
February 2011
1 post
At a wedding in a 12th century church in Suffolk
I am wearing my Paul Smith suit.
Bored during the prayers, I reach into my inside pocket and pull out the order of service for my father’s funeral two years earlier.
January 2011
1 post
Listening to Dub Housing, Pere Ubu
Crossing the road in the dark at a set of traffic lights, I am surprised by a tug on the arm.
Is daughter in dead grandmother’s fake fur coat and DMs.
Bottle of wine under her arm.
August 2010
1 post
So I get in a cab at the bottom of the hill.
I want to go to the top of the hill and down the other side.
Sorry, I’m new, the cab driver says, I only started yesterday.
It’s a straight line, I say, from here to there. Three miles max.
But I can use my Tom Tom, he says.
July 2010
2 posts
Just cycled past a guy
sitting in his car, engine running, window down, hands cupped to his chin, whistling elegant birdsong to a house across the road.
This morning I went swimming with a bear and a...
The bear tried to race me and I tried to race the speedy Rastafarian.
The speedy Rastafarian came in first and the bear came last.
Yes.
June 2010
1 post
Two women
both wearing pink cowboy hats, standing outside the pub across the road, Race For Life numbers still pinned to their chests, smoking as if their life depended upon it.
Later, one of them falls over, flat on her back.
May 2010
2 posts
An East Dulwich answer.
So I went to pick Willa up from her friend’s birthday party.
In the car I said, ‘so what do M’s parents do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but her dad had one line in a Harry Potter film.’
was almost run down
by a man driving a people carrier who was, perhaps, taking the GIVE BLOOD sticker in his back window a little too literally.
A minute later I passed a personal trainer walking very slowly.
I knew he was a personal trainer, because it said so, in Helvetica,
on the back of his sweatshirt.
Which made me think of Gerard Depardieu as Mann mit dem T-Shirt in The Left-Handed Woman.
April 2010
3 posts
To maintain a healthy lifestyle, we recommend...
It says, on the side of the packet of supermarket own-brand pasta.
And you just know that there was a focus group.
And that the head of the table has been sleeping with an intern.
And that the guy charged with writing the words has a weekend coke habit that is out of control.
It is axiomatic, as our friend Valya is want to say.
I'm talking to you, but I'm looking at your teeth
which are wonderful in the way that they spell
I didn’t have that completely middle class childhood thing going on.
No braces for me.
Guy has a beaten up face
A cut above his eye.
Smells of cigarettes.
Has made his way down to the back of the shop and is standing in front of the Biography section.
All right mate? I ask him.
Yes thanks, he says.
Need any help? I ask him.
No thanks.
Only the last few times you’ve been in here you’ve either nicked things or you’ve tried to, so can you just get out now. Please? I say, expecting a...
March 2010
4 posts
I was travelling back from Victoria on the train...
It was five o’clock in the evening. She was listening to The Kooks on her Nano and I was listening on my iPhone to Lou Reed sing about Fool for Love by Sam Shepard.
We stopped at a station and a girl dressed in black with a corporate name-tag pinned to her chest, got on with her boyfriend and sat opposite us.
Smoothing her blond bob, the girl checked her reflection in the train window,...
I was driving Freddy to school
Across the top, by the television transmitter, when a van towing a compressor cut in from the bus lane on the left without indicating.
I hit my horn.
A young guy lent from his cab to address me.
Just fuck off. Fuck off. I don’t fucking need this, he said.
In my mind I got out of the car and walked over to him in the stationary traffic and through his open window, punched him in the face....
I went for a swim
at the Crystal Palace National Sports Center.
They were holding the Public Schools’ Fencing Championships in the gym.
I felt like I had a walk-on part in the movie IF.
And I thought about Lindsay Anderson at the top of the hill in 1953. Acting in James Broughton’s film The Pleasure Garden. Playing a ‘toff in a top hat.’
Outside, in the park, two bitter-faced women...
I was at the John Cale concert at the Royal...
And somebody came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you The Bookseller Crow?’
And I said, ‘Yes.’ and we talked for a moment and I thought, ‘Wow, fame, I could get used to this.’
And then Bobbie Gillespie walked past us with his bodyguard.
February 2010
1 post
On a crowded bus from the Victoria and Albert...
Travelling back to Victoria station. A young South African chap asks his tall work colleague, ‘So, are you doing anything special for Pancake Day?’
Hemingway would be so proud.