Dirty women in a can.

Walking along the streets of Soho of a Wednesday night after a sterling Lebanese dinner, I was reminded of the depiction of Greenwich Village in Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. The main streets (Greek, Frith, Dean, and Wardour) which stretch away from Old Compton Street like tines on a fork, are festooned with sultry lights of myriad colours.Curiously, Soho is a lot less cluttered than I remember it being a decade ago. The Village in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was filmed largely on a soundstage (although partly on location in London including Soho strangely…) and perhaps this is what makes me make the link between the two locations. There is something stage-like about the restless avenues – as though the pavement has been set for the playing out of bizarre dramas. Every shopfront offers a different sideshow for your delectation.

I have always been struck by the strange adjacence of Soho’s opulent refinement and its meretricious abandon. You can look into a dazzling eatery, marvel at the fortune of its guzzling patrons. Then you notice that, but a metre away, the neighbouring establishment is a simple yet ominous door with a hand-written sign advertising: “model – young, curvy, and sexy” followed by an arrow pointing towards a rickety set of stairs leading down to the underworld. I imagine the girl at the end of the tunnel is being falsely advertised. It’s going to be “old, staunch, and angry”.

Anyway, we were strolling down the glittering streets last night, enjoying the wafts of espresso and the champagne cackles from the bars when we noticed this cool shop which was still peddling its wares at 9:30.  Its walls were dressed with antlers, clothes for aspiring nu-rave bands, and rakish interior-designers, whoever the fuck that might include. Coincidentally, they had a replica of the penis-statue from Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’: a nice touch by the proprietors.

As I walked in, I was aware that I was about to judge the shop by the music it was playing. Unfair, but inevitable. I was taken aback by how avant-garde the choice was. Dispersed chuckling and snappy interjections from a digitized male voice. I was about to aske the sales-assistent about his eclectic music-taste when I realized that he was busy chatting to his mate on Skype, which was being piped over the shop’s loudspeakers. Close thing.

Things took a pleasant if absurd turn when we were having a natter with the shopkeep. He brought his skype-mate into the conversation, who seemed to have some detailed knowledge about a certain pair of shoes we were perusing [we were actually sniffing it, because apparently it smelled sweet like a My Little Pony]. I could not tell if the man on the other end of the computer was bullshitting, though, because he was clearly very stoned.

Over the miracle of ip video telephony, he proceeded to show off his latest discovery – a perfume dispensed by an aerosol which stained you bright blue for about ten seconds, then faded to invisible. At that point I wondered if I had become stoned. Somehow. Maybe it was sniffing the shoes. He stood there spraying himself temporarily bright blue all over. I remarked that he must smell incredibly powerful. He said that some people pass out because they get so carried away with the spraying.

Anyway, I would reccomend Kokon To Zai on Dean Street for its thrilling shoes and conversation.

After more strolling, party-location scouting, and bumping into a friend of mine wearily awaiting an exceptional hamburger in Garlic and Shots, we caught the tube home.

I used to love Soho, then I grew sick of it, then I feared it, then I liked it again, now I love it again. Like Kubrick’s vision of Greenwich, it is a dreamlike place of weird frolics and fantasies, tingling incitements to the id. A fine place to sleepwalk.

I cannot believe that I never saw this till recently:

Now, I never thought that Parson’s Green and Sand’s End had particularly flourishing gay scenes. You are more likely to see pink pashminas than pink pride, blt sandwiches rather than l/g/b/t sandwiches. Perhaps the somewhat reserved status of these areas is brightening up a bit.

Perhaps they have some preposterously effective way of turning Tories there? I wonder how many local Telegraph readers amble in and wonder ‘Oh what might have been? Had that sunny day at Cambridge turned out differently… bollocks, they haven’t got the egg out of that properly’?

Check out this natty graf I found in the seedy back alleys of notorious Chiswick:

Text reads:

…And so his liver slipped away, ever distrusting,

He felt he would one day make his mark.

A prince of aesthetics, a creature

Of slim frame

Full of endorphin.

… BEHOLD JESUS

Make of this what you will. I instantly decided that I quite liked it. You can probably work out a lot about the author of this apocryphal text by the fact he uses block capitals (be they small and messy), aggressively crosses out his mistakes (wants to conceal his mistakes, and boldly applies the word ‘aesthetics’ in graffiti, spelled correctly. As we all know, all proper graffiti has to have spelling mistakes and references to private parts (eg ‘My cock smels of apples’ – see critique by Quentin Bumboy in Viz magazine some years ago).  However, all we get is internal organs. I think the ‘liver’ lets it down a bit. Perhaps ‘foreskin’ would have been more apposite. The author is clearly not worried about pushing the proverbial envelope.

The prophet must have had this particular wall in mind – it is black like a school blackboard, so he must have especially made sure he had some chalk in his back pocket before he left the house. Unless he was transporting some for an unknown reason and was spontaneously inspired. Was the school reference intended? If he had planned this graf, I would not be surprised if he had pre-written the message, which makes me feel he does not have much else on. Says the guy writing the blog about it.

Is Christ risen as a nu-rave trendy? Has he taken too much pill and his liver gone for a walk? Is he still Jewish? Is it hard being called Jesus in this day and age, or does it help him blend in with the Hoxtonites all the more?

I think if anything have proved that this is a work of deep complexity and originality, shocking us into action with the morbid grasp of our own zombie-ish conformity. It therefore must be a Banksy.

The streets of London are sprouting tomatoes now.

I imagine the fruit will taste like drains but I shall try it nonetheless. At least that is if the local foxes/raggamuffins/parakeets don’t get there first.

I spend a lot of time looking at the ground. It is more interesting than it sounds. You see lots of scraps of life dotted around, and the street beneath always makes for a poetically bereft backdrop.

However, when I saw this on the ground recently I didn’t know whether to laugh or vomit poetically. Obviously a local fox hates Capri Sun

I am in a room at an hotel in the vicinity of Gatwick. I am not looking forward to dragging myself onto the mercilessly early flight in a few hours.

This hotel is gorily corporate and large-scale, as though every little detail had been decided in planning meetings a couple of decades ago by jaded yet experienced hotel designers.

The smells in the lobby, corridor and room are weirdly familiar. The cleaning staff must have administered some sort of essence of international hospitality venues: stale, clean, inhuman, reassuring.

I shudder to think how many escorts have plied their trade in this room. It feels like the sort of place.

Did the planners all agree on the strange and probably quite useful bathroom fixtures? Yes, that is a bottle opener on the door frame. And no, I did not find any poo on the khazi-phone.

I walked past a bin man this morning who had just collected my rubbish. He smelled like a duty free department. I wonder if he was wearing aftershave which some wastrel had thrown out. They do tend to enjoy abit of the old grotty dip.

I cannot tell which is more odd- a bin man sticking on some aftershave he had found in the garbage for a laugh, or a bin man deliberately musking himself up before work. He might as well have gone the whole hog and donned a white silk cravat. Was he trying to impress his co-binmen? Perhaps he sees a particularly fanciable commuter leaving for work at this time every week on this route, and he wanted to impress her? Does she notice the heady mix of rotten celery and CK Be, and perhaps ask herself: ‘Who is this enigmatic civil servant? Does he see my longing?’? Are you that commuter? Could you, would you?

On second thoughts, he probably was just wearing it because his wife cannot stomach the tangy reek London waste. Or he moonlights in a perfume laboratory.

What’s this then?

I shall spare you an excruciatingly protracted pop quiz. Checkout the big daddy in the room…

Yep, of course you guessed it: the famous, full-scale model of a blue whale at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I still remember the first time I saw it when I was a kid. I was staggered by the scale of the animal, it being thirty metres long and me being only the size of a pint. I remember wondering if this marvel was a real animal. Well it is just a model, young Tom. You fool.

Our spontaneous jaunt to the NHM was a way of constructively filling a Sunday evening. Relaxing and productive we thought. But it was a faintly weird (though highly enjoyable) experience. For starters, I don’t think I have been there since my school days. Secondly, I think that a lot of it has not changed since then.

The board of the museum surely had a meeting in the mid eighties where they decided that informational exhibits were too stuffy and unappealing to kids. They must have decided that the only thing to do was to jazz them up with buttons and  cutting-edge information technology. Which is to say lots of little lights and printed plastic. They don’t seem to have had another of those upgrade meetings since.

I think it is a great idea making displays interactive and fun for kids, but they might have been pushing it a bit on occasions:

I would love to know the thought process of the curator who mocked this little Damien Hirst up. “We need a display about rhino horns for kids > What sort of horns are kids usually interested in? > The sort that goths stick on their heads before going out to rebel”. Ughhh.

Of course most of the kids will run straight to the big animatronic T. Rex which has been displayed with much dramatic effect. You have to go there to see what I mean. The skulls and skeletons are pretty cool too.

I found this particular display enlightening. It shows the proportion of air in the lungs which is renewed in a single breath by a human (left) and a whale (right). I can really see the point of all those Yoga exercises where you try force as much stale air out of your lungs as possible.

The strange thing about this admirable museum is that it is supposed to teach you about the wonders of nature (and it does) but the place has a curiously stale, fusty air about it. There are sections you walk through which feel like administrative corridors of a university (I quite liked that actually – it made it feel nicely academic); a lot of the displays, as aforementioned, need updating; but, most of all, it is filled with plastic and stuffed animals many of which have been there since the earlier part of the 20th century (including the big fatty blue whale which I so love).  I mean, is this not a curious sight?:

As I walked around the stuffed elephants and yaks, I could not help but think these taxidermic specimens just a little bit inappropriate for the cause of conservation. Perhaps the airfix blue whale sums up the place quite well: big, out-of-date, a bit dusty, weird, fascinating, loveable.

It was nice to see that the kids were just as fascinated with the buttons and lights as I was when I was a youth. And like young Tom they were only interested in triggering the flashes and sound effects, not the informative captions about baleen and spermacita. Subjects which I find fascinating now of course.

London is an aspirational place.

Londoners live tough lives, I would say. Costs are high. Public transport ineptitude is high. Tension is high. We have a lot of civil servants on our cases, from commissioned traffic wardens to bicycle police. We are squeezed for space. Houses are expensive. Food is expensive. Beer is really expensive.

But Londoners for the most part do not give a shit. Brits and foreigners alike flood here en masse year after year, raising the temperature even higher. Why? Because the streets of London, though we scoff at the sentiment with supersubtle irony, are paved with gold.

We desire so much of our lives in Britain. London is the ground zero of desire. Of course the dream comes in many different flavours. Perhaps one wants tabloid celebrity and to live in a fat mansion in Hampstead or Chelsea. Perhaps, if one feels they are above commercialism, one wants to be adored by broadsheets and live in a ramshackle bohemian mansion in Stoke Newington. If New York is the Big Apple, then London is the Fat Pie, and everyone wants a slice. It is probably an eel pie.

Londoners spend so long crammed inside small flats dreaming of expansive gardens and parties to have in them. Lacking an estate, the many parks of our fair capital take the brunt of our exterior relaxations. And when the sun comes out it is fucking war.

Some Londoners regard a nice spot in their local park as a subclause in the tenancy contract of their home. They do pay an extra £500 a year just to be five minutes closer to the park, so perhaps they have a point. People can get a bit tetchy over space in some parks.

Parsons Green used to be a pretty quiet sort of place. If you watch the old west London police dramas from 20-30 years back, you will see Fulham as a somewhat deprived working-class backwater. Now the area is full of blond young lads and lasses looking for a taste of the good life, hoping to follow in their parents’ footsteps up the golden ladder. Parsons Green addresses are a big part of that good life. If you live there you have on-your-doorstep access to the wealth of exorbitant cafés, outrageously priced gastro pubs, deliciously good schools, and of course the rolling expanse of Parsons Green itself. Well, it is actually quite a small park, but this fact seems to have escaped the hordes of sunbathers and boozers who descend upon it as soon as there is a hint of a shadow. [I have to add that there is a poncy pub on the edge of the Green,  known unofficially as the Sloany Pony, which sells mediocre grilled burgers to park-goers at extortionate prices. I am sure they use organic meat.] 

There is of course nothing you can say against people looking for a nice bit of greenery  and fresh air. But this park becomes as crowded as a nightclub. It is about as peaceful and relaxing as a visit to casualty. People just don’t want to miss out. 

Free festivals cash in on this impulse to seek out big outdoor spaces. I have myself attended two of these this Summer: The RISE festival (Finsbury Park) and Stokefest (Clissold Park). They are fun but perhaps could do with being a little bit less completely overrun.

When you think about it life is going to be tough, or at least take a lot of effort, in a city where people even relax intensely. 

Anyway, here is a list of things I have seen people doing in parks this summer:

1. drinking from a leather hat

2. laughing purple as their dogs fought brutally

3. giving away holy books

4. simulating sex

5. singing Oasis improbably loudly. It really was impressively voluminous

6. playing cricket with a traffic cone and a (half full) can of beer

7. lying down, drinking, talking, and generally relaxing

8. flyfishing (see below)

I think the black plastercast completes the image nicely.