Latest Essay: Actual Heights of Selected Notables

Latest List: Steve Horton's Commuting Gripes

Actual Heights of Selected Notables

There he was on the Tube platform at King's Cross, unmistakably himself: poised, well-dressed in that flamboyant actor manner, greying in a distinguished way at the temples, clearly self-possessed after a lifetime in the public eye, and indisputably, amazingly so in fact, SHORT. My God, what a shrimp: we're talking five-seven at the very best, probably five-six in fact! On screen and on the telly, well, you'd have always given him nearly six foot.

I believe we've probably all had a similar experience. Living in central London simply ratchets up the opportunities for spotting celebrities going about their business. I've occasionally spotted world stars (Liz Taylor in a wheelchair outside the Dorchester, Freddy Kruger actor Michael Englund on Carnaby Street, Lucy Lui shopping at Selfridge's) and less vaunted individuals just about every time I pop out for a few hours going anywhere. One can't move for the bleeders

And, boy, do they tend to have one thing in common, these famous folk. They're absolutely tiny. 

Lucy Lui was an insignificant dot of a person, seemingly so physically fragile and in need of cake that one could almost pity her all those Swiss bank account millions. Indeed I would one day like to pursue this correlation between success in the public realm and height deficiency, expecting to reveal some kind of demented publicity-addicted Napoleonic little man syndrome at work. We are told that extra height equates to greater lifetime earnings, more sexual partners, and higher social positions, yet this seems to break down completely among the glitterati.

In fact, there's more:

Beethoven (5 ft 3), Ghandi (5 ft 3), Khrushchev (5 ft 2), La Guardia (5 ft 0), Onassis (5ft 4),Marquis de Sade (5ft 3), Stalin (5ft 6), Hitler (5 ft 7), Picasso (5ft 4), Genghis Khan (4 ft 11),Alexander the Great (4 ft 11).........I could go on.

Imagine if you will Mayor La Guardia meeting Bill Clinton (6ft 2). We're talking cricked necks, giggles, cartoons.

If, like me, you're a solid average-to-tall 5 ft 10 and a bit and have stood next to a powerful men five inches shorter than you, the question inevitably arises: how on earth have these people managed to do it? You can't see them in a crowd, they have little hands, the top of their balding heads are always visible to most of the rest of us, it's lucky they've got plenty of cash because there's definitely nothing off the peg outside boys age 12 with an inside leg that small. Their will to succeed and determination to prevail must be off the chart, their talent all the more admirable.

And yet:

Lincoln (6ft 4), Howard Hughes (6ft 4), Lyndon Johnson (6 ft 3), Wyatt Earp (6ft 4), Mandela (6ft 2), De Gaulle (6ft 4), Bin Laden (6ft 4), Charlemagne (6ft 4), Idi Amin (6ft 4)

Imagine as well if you will, Wyatt Earp ever being played on screen by Kurt Russell (5 ft 8). Oh, he was. Shame.

And if, like me, you sometimes find it a little intimidating to stand next to a powerful men five inches taller than you, the question again arises: how on God's sweet earth did all of those other successful Munchkin guys manage it with all these giants blocking their way?

Somebody needs to do some research. For now, here is some of my own.

The average British man today is 5 ft 10 inches tall, the average Dutchman is 6ft, while the average Cambodian is just 5 ft 6. The world-wide variations are neither insignificant nor particularly surprising. China is a short nation, but is home to more 6ft plus individuals than the whole of Europe. The smallest man in the world is from mountainous Nepal (21.5 inches) and the tallest lives in mountainous Turkey (8 ft 1). American silver screen actor Alan Ladd was so short (5 ft 6) that his leading ladies walked beside him in trenches. Tom Cruise's height (5ft 8) is the most discussed in celebrity history. Most football fans will tell you that professional players regularly overestimate their heights by about two inches when reporting stats to Panini and the like (Michael Owen is down as 5ft 10: if you believe that, you'll believe anything). Conversely if human pond skater Peter Crouch is only 6ft 7 then I really am a Dutchman! Cary Grant was a tad over 6 foot but round shoulders took him below that mark and required the correctional assistance of a kind of girdle. Clint Eastwood was 6ft 4 in his Man with No Name pomp but comes in at a decidedly reduced and elderly 6 ft 1 these days. Hitler was the same height as Paris Hilton; put them together at a Berlin hotel bar in 1933 and the world might have been saved an awful lot of trouble. And anybody who has met the British Royal Family would encourage the view that they are doll-sized versions of the posh people regularly seen on TV.

Robert Pershing Wadlow, statistically the tallest man who ever lived at 8ft 11, was notoriously ineffectual with women despite obvious and unavoidable anatomical inferences, whereas Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (5ft 1) was known as the the 'teapot' by the girls in the brothel he inhabited for much of his life, so apparently blessed was he in the same respect.  

So maybe the height thing is a bit overstated.

And famous women? Freida Pinto's luminous screen beauty seemed sadly reduced when I encountered her in a restaurant in Islington and discovering that she was about the size of the average British eleven year-old. There are unexpectedly tall famous women beyond the obvious Uma Thurmans, Princess Dianas, Brigitte Nielsens, Sigourney Weavers, several supermodels and a few tennis players. Macy Gray is 6 foot for example, Carly Simon 5 ft 11 and Courtney Love 5ft 10. In heels, all these ladies would dwarf a chap like me (Alan Ladd need not even imagine such a thing).

And from history, the following remarkably tall women:....................................

That's right, there are none. Nothing. Not a single notable woman, from Cleopatra to Annie Oakley, has ever been described as tall, or being obviously taller than most. How curious.

However, if we were to list the ten most influential people in history, as proposed by Michael H. Hart in The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History to be: Muhammad, Newton, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Paul of Tarsus, Cài Lún, Gutenberg, Columbus and Einstein (no Darwin, Michael?) then we must draw a very clear conclusion. With the exception of the apparently tallish but hardly giant first century Palestinian Jesus of Nazareth, all of these towering cultural and scientific figures were by all reports corporeally rather average in height.

Maybe by avoiding the pitfalls that may come with either excessive or diminutive stature and the scrutiny of those others who would make an issue of such, they were they able to maximise the forces surging within them and go on to conquer their own worlds.

All ye of average height, rejoice!

William Ruby

Appendix: see www.celebheights.com if you want to find out which famous people share, or shared, your height. For me, these are: Robert Redford, John Lennon, Starsky, George Clooney, Rolf Harris and Mr T!


Latest List:

Steve Horton's Commuting Gripes

1. the "men" who have bags on wheels - for your summer jaunt to Benidorm: 
TICK; for your daily trip to the office: NO TICK
2. the tribe who crave hot food - cant you wait till you get home, stinker? 
3. the “cans” – they aren’t Dr Dre's; we’re hearing everything, idiot
4. the train walkers who congregate like sheep at the first set of doors in the first carriage

   as it reaches London  
5. the backpack/rucksack twat
6. the loudmouth mobile conversationalists – no filter, no class
7. last-minute barrier ticket-finder bollocks
8. impatient boarders……let us get off first, you cock monkey!
9. the family troop/part-time travellers…..how dare you get on my train?!
10.in fact the general public as a whole…lacking self-awareness, lacking deodorant, not giving up its seat to the elderly….you should be confined to your miserable suburban homes.

Latest Essay:  Done Good and Not So Good: TV Sports Punditry

Latest List : Most Over-Hyped British TV Things (2014 vintage)

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1

LATEST ESSAY:

Done Good and Not So Good: TV Sports Punditry

'Football's football. If that weren't the case it wouldn't be the game that it is'—
Garth Crooks

On 31 July 2012 Ian Thorpe, while working for the BBC on the London summer Olympics, spoke live on air without interruption for over two minutes on the subject of Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen's sudden controversial excellence. His tone was measured, his assertions were supported by both personal professional and anecdotal evidence, he told us things that most of us probably hadn't thought about, he posed apposite intriguing questions, he gently scolded us for our strangely persistent xenophobia. It was TV sports punditry at its very best.

Two months earlier, on the opening night of the 2012 European football Championships in Poland and the Ukraine, BBC's Robbie Savage was asked to comment on the chances of one particular nation doing well, and replied with giggles that he had forgotten which country he had just been asked about.

There is simply too great a range of TV sports punditry, moreover too little that is very good, and far too much that is trash. At one end, Thorpe: bright, insightful, challenging, witty, warm, on our boxes because he is the second greatest swimmer in history, and prepared to share an almost unique knowledge base with us without recourse to posing. At the other, Savage: a yapping monosyllabic Chauncey Gardner, on our boxes (on a wedge) because his playing career featured hounding, snarling, hair, japes.

So what is great TV sports punditry? Accomplishment would seem to be in the eye of the beholder. There are those who would hold up Savage's keenness to dismiss as forthrightness, and Thorpe has been accused of not only hiding a certain pomposity from the uninitiated under a skein of extreme civility but damaging Britain's relationship with the Antipodes through his repeated use of the sometimes condescending Aussi 'Look' to open sentences in which there will be opinion.

And yet there would seem to be a basic pot of qualities from which the great pundit should be able to draw easily and repeatedly. Vis-à-vis: infectious enthusiasm for the exceptional, technical insight beyond the common and garden, an ability to criticise constructively, and to pose questions that the viewer should ponder but struggle to find easy answers to. Add to this vim, occasional humour, some wrath when required, and a way with words (even given for example British association footballers' usual limitations) that is semantically sound and as free of epigrammatic forms and tired cliché as is reasonable to expect.

At no time should a pundit resort to the following words unless overcome by very rare moments of brilliance and drama, or indeed drink: 'unbelievable', 'literally', 'absolutely' (to mean 'yes'), 'awesome'. No sentence should begin with the words 'I mean'. Adverbs must not be adjectives! Sportsmen and women do not leave skills in their locker. We know he will not be happy with that glaring technical error—he's a professional on 200K a week! The crowd is never the extra man.

Here's a list of the great and good of contemporary TV sports punditry: Ian Thorpe, Michael Johnson, John McEnroe, Luca Vialli (part-time and maybe all the better for it), Brian Moore, Gary Neville, Stuart Barnes. It is a small list, an elite list.

And now, the reasonable: Alan Hansen, Roy Keane (better all the time), Gordon Strachan, Mark Lawrenson, Colin Jackson, Boris Becker, Jonathan Davies, Keith Wood, Graeme Souness, Graham Taylor, Tracy Austin, Danny Murphy (the coming power). They do no harm, there are plenty of them (many more not listed here), they played the game themselves for many years, they know more than we do, they are collectively that cliché the 'safe pair of hands'.

Finally, the incompetent: Jamie Redknapp, Mark Bright, Garth Crooks, Alan Shearer, Andy Townsend, Denise Lewis, Greg Rusedski (et al). They should not be paid, heard or seen, unless it is to provide the contrast we require with the elite group. They coined it in as athletes and are coining it in again as progenitors of broadcast dross. They should know more than us, but it often seems that they do not.

You should notice several things about these lists. There is far too much football for a start. My apologies; it dominates my viewing, it dominates our viewing. Thorpe has appeared for just one glorious summer, whereas Hansen has been sitting on that MOTD sofa for twenty years, with his Captain Scarlet looks, and his scar, and his grit and his determination, so big mismatches of that type are inherent. Certain TV sports are ignored (cricket, horse racing, rugby league, snooker, boxing) because I simply do not watch them (in the case of boxing, I do not watch it any longer). The golf commentators in particular has become a weird hybrid: part technical adviser, part amateur botanist, part apologist for the failings of the pros they clearly know personally, and rather too well to be entirely dispassionate about (okay, Wayne Grady is the best of them, if you must).

 And so on.

 Let us take the elite group first and dissect the anatomy of their brilliance.

Thorpe we have dealt with. Johnson distils gravitas and a deep commitment to the highest competitive standards in Morgan Freeman tones. His emotional intelligence is not high, so the analytical honesty is all the more pronounced. McEnroe continues to baffle; is he really the oafish daddy's boy of that long-ago time? A seemingly endless desire to tease and question pours from him. He is the enemy of cant and obviousness. Moore's Exasperation should be bottled and labelled as such, then sold as an elixir to cure common ills: blandness, reliance on platitudes, too much deference to underperforming players, coaches and officials. His crabby relationship with Eddie Butler is a joy.

Barnes has reigned supreme for several years now as the tactical analyst who tells it as it is. Many rugby followers do not like him, but there is no sport with more opinion than that of the oval ball, tanked up as it is with eight pints of Guinness and a Redbrick university assertiveness. Neville is the new boy on the block. Ignore the bluebottle Greater Manc drone if you can, and focus on the pith. One gets the impression that this man will record every single one of his televised appearances, and then punish himself with punches to the head for any utterance that does not take the viewer forward in his understanding of the movement and intentions of twenty-two men all together on a big green playing surface.

And Vialli, the sublime Vialli, seen so rarely. His performances during both the Italy-England and Italy-Germany matches at the 2012 Euros were pundit heaven, pundit perfection, so much so in the latter game that the always excellent Klinnsman (notwithstanding Germany's dire performance) appeared to be struck dumb in comparison. Vialli conveyed good sense, an understanding of tactical nuance, kindness (yes, kindness; Johnson, Moore and Neville would drown in two millimetres of the stuff), great enthusiasm and, ultimately, perspective in flawless English, managing to commiserate with his English and German co-presenters and pundits in a way that allowed them all to grieve their losses but still consider that positives existed. But I suppose that's what a very expensive Italian education gets you, plus the family millions.

And now those others. I will lump them together in one giant, amorphous, nightmarish paragraph.

Jamie Redknapp: so many reasons to ask 'why?' Why a pundit in the first place (he was about 23 when he did his first slot, a baby, distracting himself from a playing career already punctuated with injury); why still apparently a pundit who is there for females to look at when most of them cannot have failed to imagine he will turn into his twitching spiv father, indeed can already see the signs; why allowed to sit beside the sublime Neville and the sound Souness to pundit; why not advised years ago to stop using the asinine double adjective 'top, top' (top, top player, top, top goal, top, top game, top, top reason to smash the TV screen in); why still after so much practice singularly unable to disguise the way he checks out his co-pundits' opinions before offering abridged version of them? Mark Bright is just thick. And closes his eyes to speak. And stammers over about 45% of his words. And employs the worst kind of already-out-of-date neologums like 'they were playing lastminute.com there, Mike.' Dreadful. There is a pompous ball of a man in football punditry; he detects profundity in the mundane, clearly believes his longevity in role has bestowed gravitas upon him, and has perhaps the most cushy job in England (hence the fat). He is Garth Crooks. If you want to know why Alan Shearer is so bad, do two things: Google 'Shearer' and 'Ben Arfa', then replay in your mind that series of weird irrelevant grins he deployed in his pitch-side interview with Jake Humphreys before an England game at the 2012 Euros. You will have all the evidence you need. Andy Townsend: can you remember anything he has ever said? The nation's men are grateful to Denise Lewis for her lovely derriere, displayed to great effect when she bounced up and down on that chair when Mo Farrah won the 10, 000 metres at the London Olympics. Michael Johnson clearly despises her every opinion, running contrary as they do to his exactitude and his superior learning. And so we condemn her too. The voice is also difficult to deal with: squeaky, not black enough. 

Finally there is Greg Rusedski, the worst pundit of all time. He is the worst not because his opinions and insights differed so much from McEnroe and Henman and the others at SW11, but rather because of his schoolboy over-eagerness, and the way he wanted so obviously to be all controversial and funny like big Mac but then couldn't manage it, and the ridiculous Canadian college boy delivery that he should have softened years before in trying to convince us he was British, and because he is just one recently stopped playing the game, I'll get me a nice bit of easy cash talking shit about the game because most of the mug punters at home haven't got a fucking clue anyhow too many.

And truly, that remains the problem with TV sports punditry: too much from within, not enough from without. The health of any species relies on reproductive diversity, and well-informed members of the audience—journalists, bloggers, fans, people who have spent their lives investing in their sports, loving their sports, poring over their sports, developing opinions and ideas about their sports that are vibrant and alternative for the very reason that they are standing at a distance--are almost entirely excluded from the process

William Ruby


LATEST LIST: Most Over-Hyped British TV Things (2014 Vintage)

                

                 Stephen Fry Polymath (permanent member)

                 Sherlock

                 Doctor Who

                 Poverty Porn 

                 Food shows (permanent member)

                 Miranda Hart

                 Benedict Cumberbatch

                 Idris Elba

                 BBC sports trailers (Winter Olympics, Six Nations Rugby)

                 Poor copies of Scandinavian noir crime shows 

                 

                 

                 

                 

                  

                 

               

Extra New Essay  Brief Encounter With a Comet: Amy Winehouse

Extra New List:: Best Male Rock Voices


My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1

LATEST ESSAY

Brief Encounter with a Comet: Amy Winehouse

Our twins were stillborn at twenty weeks and their ashes scattered in the Children's Garden at Golders Green cemetery. The coffin was a tiny white box for two. There was mist and drizzle that day—it was February 2011—and later, on Tottenham Court Road, some species of confidence trickster got in our faces and there was a scene. It is the nearest I have ever come to attacking a stranger in the street. My wife Kaye pleaded with the man to go away. 'We've lost our children,' she said and he disappeared.     

Six months later, the ashes of another child—a much older child, a famous child, a comet—were on the ground in that same place. We had followed the path of that comet over the previous seven years from a fairly close place. It burnt brightly, and briefly, and was extinguished too soon. Our lives had moved on so little in the time it was in the sky.   

The comet was a singer. We encountered the singer on the way up. The first impression left by the singer lasted, despite all that followed.    

The singer was Amy Winehouse.

September 2004 at the Cross Keys pub on Endell Street, the quiet thoroughfare that gets ignored on the way to Drury Lane, and is sometimes mistaken for it. The Cross Keys nearly burnt to the ground a few years later, survived, has maintained its impressive mane of creeping ivy and hanging baskets.  Kaye and I were on the way in when I spotted the girl, the singer, the one I'd been reading about and listening to, the one whose surprising voice and illicit lyrics and muscular jazz sensibility had so recently grabbed me. She was standing by the road and clearly waiting for somebody. Looked a little anxious—maybe even great talents have people not turn up. And I swear I liked her immediately, warmed to her, took to her just standing there looking vulnerable in a way that was beyond the feeling you get for celebrities spotted in public--that gratitude because they have briefly entered your life.     

Her hair was only part of the way to being heaped then. Her cheeks still had that ruddiness that was later vanquished. She had curves too, edging indeed towards voluptuousness on a tiny frame, and despite the famous bird-like legs. Trainers, so no tottering on high-heals, a then limited catalogue of body illustrations, the facial hair she unusually (and pleasingly) never eradicated, a hard-to-judge balance of hazel and olive in eyes that seemed to reveal constantly shifting things, certainly shyness, some cheek, maybe the realisation that she was an ordinary girl already plunged beyond expectations and not sure how best to enjoy it. A slightly larger jaw than her face deserved already prevented her being beautiful, but it was the most beautiful she was ever going to be.     

Amy's friends arrived—all young men, music industry types of various stamps I guess; it was clear Amy was romantically inclined towards one of these chaps, and this chap bore all the signs of a the young cad who has been there, done that, is with his mates, is not going to show affection even for a starlet—and the drinking began in earnest. The pub was small and seating was limited. Amy chose at one point to sit on a radiator with a wooden cover which acted as a little resting place for beer. My left hand was on the radiator cover and Amy sat on my hand.      I have been apologised to before by relatively famous people. Peter Hooton From the Liverpool band The Farm knocked my kebab to the floor in a Sheffield takeaway just after I'd assured him his band would never have a hit (All Together Now broke a couple of years later). He apologised but we were two pissed blokes in a kebab house, and both from Merseyside, so sarcasm ruled. And Zoe Wanamaker collided with me in the polling station on the Bermerton estate in Islington a year or so ago and said 'sorry'. Her strangely pretty pug dog face was a mask of quiet alarm at the time; the Bemerton is not a place where the Islington glitterati will feel comfortable, being very much on the wrong side of the Caledonian Road, our side. But when Amy Winehouse apologised to me it felt like a real apology—sincere, embarrassed, amused at herself and the situation.    

My left hand has been famous at school ever since. 'Sir is it really true Amy Winehouse sat on your hand?' has become a mantra there.     

Amy did different stuff over those same years.

So that voice, what was it? To the experts it was contralto grit with never fully explored falsetto strengths, a rare Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holliday cross from a white vocal range. Presciently, to Zach Baron of The Daily it was 'an alto croak that suggested damage she hadn't yet done to it', while the New Yorker fixated on her unique transitions and unmatched weird phrasings. Amy had the toughness, and the vulnerability, and the street sense, and an always overlooked mothering instinct of the working girl in that voice. There was cotton dust and Dixie there, too, along with the sex. So, for this listener at least, it was the voice of a world-weary Alabama whore who had sold her soul to the devil. A black whore too, for inward-looking America heard her that way before it clapped eyes on a skinny white girl from London.     

And the devil did have his day.

Frank is a better album than Back to Black. There, it's down on the page. I know you won't agree. Most people discovered Winehouse through her second—huge, influential, vaunted—album, so I'm on pretty safe ground in asserting this. And tuneful, retro sixties girl group pop-soul trumps sometimes discordant pop-jazz, right? Singing about the central failings of your adult life—addiction, the causes of addiction---trumps sometimes flippant late teenage sexual discovery, yes? Even if Back to Back is only thirty-five minutes long (the artistic output was clearly already waning) it's got Love is a Losing Game, see, and everybody knows that's like the best sad love song written since Yesterday. Plus there's all the Grammies, and the iconic new image, yeah—all those tattoos, the little dresses, the hair, the awkward performance ticks, the slow living death—that seared her into the collective consciousness. It's the biggest album of the Noughties, man!     

You make very good points, but you are wrong. Please indulge me: let me take you through the highlights of that first album. When indeed was the last time you listened to it?     

She basically says 'I'm different, aren't I?' in Intro. It is a bold move. She is right. Then there's Stronger Than Me, in which she slips for the first time into her career theme: the fatal attraction to weak men, but does it with the scathing humour we have never encountered before, not like this. For the first time we hear those weird phrasings and singular transitions in You Sent Me Flying, a gorgeous echo of Sarah Vaughan. Listen to this track, and then listen again if you don't get it, for God's sake! No British female performing artist has ever sounded like this—so good, so aware of what her voice is about, so accomplished so young. Plus we've got Fuck Me Pumps, in which new things are expressed in new ways. The observation, the sarcasm, the sheer unalloyed bitchiness she brings to the work is breathtaking (no contrived little rich girl Lily Allen bullshit here). In My Bed was the first single, the first sound, with that sinister muffled percussion, and the cynical weariness that became the mantra of an artist finding her direction. Amy was 'so fucking angry' in Take the Box that she kicked him out. Beyonce would never cuss like that (certainly not in church, but maybe a bit, with Mr Carter, after martinis) but the tenet of her break-up song On the Left seems remarkably similar, similar but incredibly anodyne in comparison, at least to my jaundiced ear. And there is What is it About Men?, where the Winehouse whore tells Amy the girl about the repeated disappointments to come, but does not tell her to stop.     

It is an album about others; it is not just about Amy. Her life was not yet the self-indulgent sideshow to the music. Her unhappiness was not yet her muse. It is as good a British debut album--in any popular music genre at any time--by a solo artist writing most of the songs, and sounds all the better today because we know that so much silence was to follow.

By the time the Beatles split in 1969 George Harrison had thirteen albums under his belt. He was twenty eight years-old. When Amy Winehouse died in July 2011 she was the same age. Albums: two. It is a comparison that some find unkind, but it is nonetheless necessary to make it. Her beloved Camden, and her beloved Blakey, and her million pound performances for Russian oligarchs, and her bloodstained deck shoes, and the emphysema, and those final dreadful, destructive live performances, and the weaknesses that we shouldn't seek to blame those around her for--not really, not when the girl was so wilful--are both testament to and explanation for this shortfall. Lioness I do not listen to. The later recordings on it remind me of playing hack-about five-a-side football with an ageing former football pro many years ago. The evidence of his failing powers was only too obvious to me, his opponent, so I can but imagine how it screamed out to him and spat in his eye. At least the girl never got to hear her final album as it comes out through the speakers. At least she has that.     

And the title, this 'Lioness'. What the fuck is that? Am I alone in believing the girl would have hated that?

From October Song:

With dread I woke in my bed
To shooting pains up in my head
Lovebird, my beautiful bird
Spoke until one day she couldn't be heard
She just stopped singing

On the morning Amy died I was alone at home. It was the first day of my long summer break. I thought of the twins and lay on the bed wrapped in brief sadness. It simply came and went, as is the way with me.    

The news came through late in the afternoon. We had lived just a mile or so apart, but separated by whole worlds. My niece Shannon came down from Southport for a visit on the Monday that followed and we visited the shrine that had sprung up opposite Amy's home. Shannon ended up on Sky and I on CNN. People actually texted to say they had spotted us.     

I have found myself upset. It's not like me. People have grand lives—the lives of comets—and then they don't. My life is a pale grey shuffle in comparison but I do not ask for what these others have.    

But we shared space and time, Amy and Kaye and I, and she lies on the ground with those closest to us. I will return to the Cross Keys one day soon, and see if she is still standing on the pavement there waiting: anxious, lustrous hair, safe yet from our awful attention and from herself.

William Ruby

Latest List:

Best Male Rock Voices

Ozzy Osborne
David Coverdale
Kurt Cobain
Robert Plant
Paul Rogers
Don Henley
Don Burden
Alex Harvey
Jim Morrison
Caleb Followill

Today's essay : Fifty Shades of Shit: the Nadir of Our Cultural Life
Lists: The Greatest British Novels of the 20th Century


See also:

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1

LATEST ESSAY:

Fifty Shades of Shit: the Nadir of Our Cultural Life

There is a small but incontestable set of criteria to mark one out as a cretistine, that singular combination of philistine and cretin. These are:

• taking the Daily Mail for news and reviews
• not being totally bored of Adele yet
• owning all of The Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs
• believing We Will Rock You is great theatre
• reading Fifty Shades of Grey

Of these, an affinity with, fondness for or intimate knowledge of Fifty Shades… represents the ultimate—the categorical–testament to a person’s irredeemable level of cultural idiocy.

At the risk of falling on my own drawn dagger by actually knowing of them (I got them from other websites, honest), here are some quotes:

'Mentally girding my loins, I head into the hotel’; ‘'Her curiosity oozes through the phone';     “My subconscious has reared her somnambulant head. Where was she when I needed her?”; “My subconscious nods sagely, a you’ve-finally-worked-it-out-stupid look on her face”; “I gaze at my mom. Her earlier jubilation has metamorphosed into concern”; "Christian, you are the state lottery, the cure for cancer, and the three wishes from Aladdin's lamp all rolled into one"; "My inner goddess fist pumps the air above her chaise lounge’.

Notice if you will that I have avoided any of the really bad dirty bits. They are beyond parody, beyond sensible analysis. Even without them the quality of writing here would deserve some acute degree of censure and corrective surgery were it offered up by a GCSE English student with a new thesaurus. The synonyms alone would appal a Kentucky trailer park shit-kicker. It is the English language at its very worst: riddled with egregious self-harm, shorn of its beautiful simplicity. Such prose should be sought by nobody, or quarantined within its tiny literary niche, or condemned to the shredder.

Instead, it has been read 65 million times around the world. Sixty-five million times!

That’s twice as many times as To Kill a Mockingbird has been read, four times The Grapes of Wrath and six times Catch-22. The greatest English language novels of the last two decades—Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace—have between them garnered a tiny and almost insignificant readership in comparison. I can think of few more depressing literary statistics. That the average published writer of highly readable prose earns less than ten grand a year for their tireless efforts while the ‘artist’ who produced Fifty Shades..is now able to live the life of Marie Antoinette is something I prefer not to pursue too avidly for fear of a violent convulsion.

And not so much simply wrong, this rather is a clear indicator of the new low level of things in western artistic culture. Fifty Shades.. has become totemic of our steeply declining artistic sensibility in a world dominated by big brand obviousness and a crass neglect of personal individual taste. There are other culprits: Harry Potter, the Twilight series, The Da Vinci Code, Simon Cowell, the aforementioned Adele. They have all played their insidious part; but not like Fifty Shades…, not so harmfully, so obviously. The notion that books should be read and films should be seen simply because others are reading them and seeing them is the very least of the motivations for choosing art; instead, it has become the primary—indeed sometimes the only—reason why we read or see them.

Our narrowness has become alarming. We are lazy, and derive pleasure from things in an almost incestuous manner. It is art as inbreeding.

There are those who would claim that the legitimate significance of the book’s huge sales has been some kind of contemporary sexual liberation of a multitude of bored or misunderstood women that has been neglected by its men-folk and by its own erotic timidity. This is crassness upon crassness. Were Christian Grey a fat, balding fifty-five year-old photocopier salesman, then one might argue that the book’s readership was seeking assurance that their own amorous existence could be so, with the men in their lives capable of accompanying them on a new journey to fulfilment. But Christian Grey is a superlative millionaire Adonis, unreachable, idealised, symbolic of age-old fantasies and no more. Were Christian more recognizably a man of the real world as lived by the women imagining him, then these same women would be forced to act on their suggested new impulses and actually make the naughty bedroom thing happen. The fact that most will not—will not in fact actually want to because they see it for what it actually is, porn, ephemera—is the very clearest evidence you could ever need that these women are in fact more sensible of a simple modish event than the patronising promoters of the imagined importance of Fifty Shades..would give them credit for.

They read it because it is rude and harmless, a giggle, something akin to raking fingernails down a male stripper’s buttocks in a pub full of other briefly liberated women.

And were all of the millions indulging in this idiotic nonsense at least cognizant of their postponement of good sense then things would not be so bad. On the contrary I fear that Fifty Shades..will appear for some years to come in a multitude of ‘Top Ten Best Books Wot I’ve Read’ nominations, not least because its salacious nature may have kick-started a habit for reading fiction that had been dormant or near-extinct in a depressingly wide range of folk. People like Fifty Shades.. because it is memorable; memorably bad but stored forever in the very forefront of the frontal lobes of the simpleton, like a red rubber dress is on display in an Ann Summers shop window because more tasteful , hand-stitched cotton will just never do the same trick.

William Ruby

March 2013

Appendix

Oh, if you insist….here’s some of the crap sex bits:

• Anal: ‘I’d like to claim your ass, Anastasia.’
• Oral: ‘He’s my very own Christian Grey popsicle.’
• Bukkake: ‘I open my eyes—I’m draped in Christian Grey.’
• Indeterminate sexual activity: ‘His finger circled my puckered love cave.’

       ENOUGH!

William Ruby

LATEST LIST:

                   Decline and Fall   by Evelyn Waugh

             A Clockwork Orange   by Anthony Burgess

             Animal Farm   by George Orwell

             Midnight’s Children   by Salman Rushdie

             Titus Groan   by Mervyn Peake

             1984   by George Orwell

             Brighton Rock     by Graham Greene

             The Wind in the Willows   by Kenneth Graham

             To the Lighthouse   by Virginia Woolf

             I, Claudius   by Robert Graves

Today's essay : What Travel Has Taught Me
Lists: Overrated and Underrated Holiday Destinations


See also:

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1

LATEST ESSAY:

What Travel Has Taught Me

In childhood

That you are supposed to be scared of nature. I got lost in a pine forest near our caravan site at Lowther in Cumbria. It was evening, darkening. I was about nine. The trees got taller as I wandered, then taller still. They were threatening; looming and sinister. They didn’t want me to be there. When I found my way out of the forest I was thrilled: by my escape and by the cold reality of the natural world. That day, I learnt to respect it

That some of the best fun is illicit. My father and brothers fished perch from Coniston Water for countless hours one day. Nobody stopped them; we knew we shouldn’t have been there. The multi-coloured fish were livid and jewelled in the late afternoon light. I looked out at the lake and tried to imagine a blue machine arcing to its doom.

That some of the people you meet briefly are incredible. On St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I was near to her for maybe an hour; like me, she was with her parents, tourists. She knew she was lovely and she knew that I was transfixed by her. Then she was gone. Now I have no idea even what she looked like.

In youth

That if you are a young European student and you go into a Native American reservation bar in Phoenix, Arizona, and get into conversation with middle-aged prostitutes who want to introduce you to their ‘daughters’ back at trailer parks outside the city, then you’re asking for trouble. Likewise if you take a short cut through the roughest neighbourhood in New Orleans to save a bit of time. And hang around New York’s Port Authority bus terminal too long back in 1987. Oh, and sit next to a guy with a kitchen knife in the back pocket of his jeans on a Greyhound bus heading to Baltimore, particularly if he is foaming at the mouth.

That people of other nationalities will infer certain things about you simply because you are English. The little Spaniard beach attendant at Lloret de Mar had a quite obviously set view when he accused you of inventing Concord and living in Buckingham Palace but being totally unable to put up a ‘fucking umbrella’.

That people doing menial jobs in the tourist industry do not have to like you. I only told the young Algarve waiter that one of the legs of our table was too short. He thought I meant one of his legs. The tight-lipped sarcasm and long-suffering I saw in his subservient smile has been memorable to me ever since.

That you need to sometimes just stand and stare. You’ve taken a group of your pupils to Crans Montana in the Switzerland, and are excited about skiing for the first time. You realise that you aren’t going to be much good at it and you sulk a little (you are twenty-five). You begin to wish you hadn’t agreed to come but then discover an incredible thing: the snow-capped Alps in April sun: Monte Rosa, the Matterhorn, and the Mont Blanc Massif. You have seen wonderful sights since, but nothing better.

That landscape has a character that has to be learnt. Endless ambulation along the paths and lanes of Lancashire’s Hodder Valley and Derbyshire’s Manifold Valley over many years of helping teenagers earn Duke of Edinburgh expedition awards has lent an appreciation of nuance, detail, the love of familiar things that the casual observer might find mundane. Still today, I have a stronger feeling for farming landscapes than I do for wildernesses. Wildernesses are to be admired, feared, left to their own sometimes ferocious devices. Farming landscapes can be wild places still, but are clipped and neatened by the loving hand of man.

That were Scottish midges ten or twenty times their natural size, they would rule the earth.

That you truly can’t understand a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, even if it is on holiday. The paleness of my skin drew attention in Kenya on more than one occasion. I was studied unceremoniously, and I felt the eyes upon me. Briefly I was that proverbial ‘Man Who Is Everywhere’, abused on the street in Nairobi by men who would never know me. When my shorts came off in the Indian Ocean surf (an accident!) at Mombasa and those African mothers covered their children’s eyes, I could surely be forgiven for detecting that they may have been sparing their offspring the offence of my colour, along with obvious other things.

That you will delight in the unexpected. The mountains of central Turkey were at least a match for any of its glorious coastline. The fact that we weren’t supposed to have seen them this close was an added bonus. We will gloss over the standard of our minibus driver’s road skills; indeed, all of the travel arrangements. Suffice it to say: fuck me.

In relative maturity

That food enjoyed on holiday will become increasingly important to you. Those pasteis de nata delighted you in Lisbon, and then that steak in Calgary was the best you ever tasted. You survived (just!) the eating nightmare that is Cuba, only to soon after discover foodie heaven in Madrid through the ornate doors of the Mercado San Miguel. Here, for example, is to be found lots and lots and lots of pata negra, God’s ultimate gastronomic gift to Man, courtesy of the humble acorn and some fat black pigs. Travel, eat, live.

That you will tap more and more into atmosphere rather than spectacle. The melancholy of the still bullet-ridden Jewish ghetto in Budapest is counterpoint to good-natured Euro-centric love-ins to be had in Hamburg pubs during World Cup matches. So too the regret so keenly felt in autumnal Krakow when contrasted to sun-drenched Dubrovnik cocktail bars; war touched both of these places, but the former wants to bottle the awful memories that the latter seems to wants to let go.

That you will search for and keep unusual souvenirs of your travels: a shiny white cobblestone from a Lisbon street, a paprika-stained restaurant flier from Hungary, the cork from a bottle of 1999 vintage Penfolds Grange from Australia, a very poor sketch of oneself on a paper napkin, by a beach urchin in Hawaii. You look like Harold Lloyd in it. You will keep all of these things in a little box of memories.

That you will also start to revert to a form of childhood on your travels, revelling in occasional non-conformity and mischief. This might include getting yelled out for touching the marbles of the Parthenon or getting yelled at for touching the apron of the pitch at Real Madrid’s sacred Bernabéu . It may even manifest as a nudge from a knee into the small of the back of a particularly brattish and noisy American child on a cruise ship heading to Athens (or was it Split?), particularly if his parents are not watching and it means he ends up face-first in his own ice cream.

That you will begin to realise that time will win and you won’t get to see everything after all. So you will plan your travel destinations even more assiduously, anticipate your travel with a keenness that can still surprise you, savour its significant moments all the more calculatedly.

And finally………

That you may discover relatively late in life that travelling somewhere simple and enchanting (say, the English Lake District in early spring, with snow still dusting the fells and a crisp light illuminating all its beauty) is one of the greatest pleasures that good fortune and opportunity can bestow, particularly if love has travelled with you to that place, and these pleasures are shared.

Latest Lists

Overrated Holiday Destinations

Hawaii
Ibiza
Barcelona
Australia
Thailand
Cape Town
Vegas
Florida
Amsterdam
Dubai


Underrated Holiday destinations

Lisbon
Lanzarote
Marseille
Non-coastal Turkey
Vancouver
Northumberland
Bruges
Monetenegro
Madrid
Winchester

Latest Essay: George Osborne
Latest List: Best British Prime Ministers

See also:

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1


Latest Essay:

The Most Hateful Tory: George Osborne

Let me assert from the outset that I dislike Tories. I dislike the gimlet eyes and ragged teeth, the barely-thwarted misanthropy, the evangelistic devotion to an inherently flawed politico-economic construct of capitalism (with or without its oxymoronic 'caring face'), the shuffling discomfort in the company of foreign people and black people. A belief in the infallibility of the private sector (in some peoples' experience five blokes standing around a hole in high-visibility tabards while one bloke in a high-visibility tabard works in the hole) is as alarming as finding out that really very clever Rowan Williams actually seeks ineradicable truths from racially inaccurate plaster representations of rural Middle Eastern folk who don't even know they've become famous over the last two millennia.

And I do not mean to include all politically conservative or right-wing people in this diatribe, but rather the singular fusty beast called the English Conservative Party Member, in particular that rare breed generous enough with their time to rise to the level of Cabinet Minister and heal the nation. I rather like, or liked: Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Gore Vidal. I enjoyed the late-flowering of Christopher Hitchens' dalliance with the American Right, and I am fascinated by the right-wing voting habits of little Ronnie Corbett.

I do not like, have not liked, in fact I find hateful: Margaret Thatcher (possessed of a legendary personal charm that was carried to its death by the tsunami of her grotesque policies), Winston Churchill (the rampaging class war bully, not the so-called Saviour of a Nation), Cecil Parkinson (fop), Michael Howard (the personification of a vampire bat staring menacingly through your front windows), John Redwood (because of that Welsh national anthem horror show: political judgement sub-educational special needs), Robert Peel (started it all, him), Stanley Baldwin (fop), Anthony Eden (fop), Harold McMillan (exponent of gross misjudgement of the popular mood Sine Pare), Jeffrey Archer (where do we start?), Enoch Powell (racist fool), Nigel Lawson (privilege and oil somehow perfectly blended), Edwina Currie (spiteful, bedraggled usurper of the cuckolded Norma Major), Michael Gove (sinister drooling Pinocchio).......should I stop now?

They are, or were, awful, every one of them, stamping their England with an identity too easily recognised and derided around the world as Blimpish, haughty, reactionary and cold.

And yet they have a modern champion who has risen beyond them all—a conduit to the chastening Tory waters if you like, vaunted and corporeal, a golden calf of the Right, a man who embodies so many of their collective qualities in one turtle-eyed, moist-lipped, alabaster-skinned, big-bottomed package. None can match him.

Step forward Right Honourable Gideon George Oliver Osborne, BA, MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

You are TMHATO: The Most Hateful Tory.

Some facts about Gideon:

     • Gideon's first and only job outside politics involved typing the names of the dead into an NHS computer

     • He once folded towels (presumably sneeringly, and with a moist mouth) in Selfridges

     • He is godfather to Dave's kids

     • Dave is godfather to Gideon's kids

     • His 15% share of his father's Osborne and Little wallpaper company is estimated to be worth £4 million

     • His mother is called Felicity Loxton-Peacock. It is not known if she shops at Iceland.

   • He is descended from the Irish aristocracy—the 'Ascendency'—and heir to baronetcies in both County Tipperary and County Waterford

     • He edited The Bullingdon's own Isis magazine at Oxford whilst almost certainly throwing bread rolls around. This was a few years after Dave and Boris had thrown similar bread rolls around the same restaurants

     • He claimed £47 from the public purse for two copies of a DVD showing his own speech on 'Providing Value For Taxpayers' Money', part of a suggested (but never proven) £55,000 enjoyed in this way over some years before the expenses scandal broke

     • He has not paid £55,000 back into the public purse

     • George Osborne was a character in W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Gideon Osborne was not.

     • Gideon is married to a writer, The Hon Mrs Frances Osborne, née The Hon Frances Victoria Howell, daughter of former MP David Howell (and now Tory Peer, Baron Howell of Guildford). Her novel Park Lane features class-divided members of a substantial Mayfair household in suffragette-age London discovering that class is actually no divide really if you put your mind to it.

     • Gideon once 'passed the ice cube' to ginger pop Royalist Geri Halliwell during a game at a party. We cannot reveal how exactly the ice cube was passed, but we shudder anyway.

     • Ok, it's not a fact but most observers maintain that it was Gideon's indebtedness to discredited News of the World editor Andy Coulson for downplaying dominatrix Natalie Rowe's expose about Gideon, cocaine, and her, that landed that particularly discredited wordsmith the job of political adviser at Number Ten.

     • No investigation ever took place of Gideon's reported illegal request of a very large sum of money from a billionaire to back the latest Tory election campaign, in what came to be known as 'Yachtgate'

     • Gideon changed his first name to George because he didn't really like Gideon (and it's truly the best decision he ever made)

As an itemisation of Tory Evil, the above list might not seem particularly exceptional, certainly so in the context of the current cabal of salivating millionaire dogs that make up the Coalition cabinet. Indeed it is marginally innocuous—a bit of nepotism here, a dash of hypocrisy there, shaken not stirred with the silver spoon of privilege.

No where Gideon stands alone is, as it maybe should be, in politics and the personal delivery of those politics. He is the most political of Chancellors and—maybe because of it, maybe not—starting to look like the worst of Chancellors. It is not only his (apparently highly influential) ideological commitment to the never-quite-explained 'shrinking of the state' that appals those who are respectful and admiring of the state's long-standing central role in a liberal free nation like Britain, but the impression he manages to give in every appearance in the House, in every interview, in his every utterance, of a smug amusement at the idea of the state—which is not the public, but rather less than that; an idea millionaire Tories cannot seem to grasp--being shrunk and the public not liking it. Not only does his faintly autistic, limpet-like adherence to internationally discredited deficit (but not debt) reduction plans make one feel constantly slightly ill, but the smug and dismissive way in which he defends his continual failure to resuscitate the economy is a bitter pill indeed.

There has seldom been a politician who appears so much to think of politics and high office as an intellectual game. Thatcher was the polar opposite: a zealot to Gideon's smarmy Devil's advocate. The twenty thousand pounds-a-night public speaking appearances that will flow in after he is removed from office will be easily scripted; one fears that Gideon is already using his experience of playing with our lives to provide the grist for that particularly lucrative mill.

The City thinks Gideon inexperienced, over-promoted, self-satisfied. Its enemy the public does not demur. A son of Notting Hill—that most socially divided part of London--he is an urban Tory, and therefore intimately aware of how the spiralling inequality his government's policies are creating will have real impact on those who live just yards away from his childhood home, and in a way that his shire county colleagues simply cannot. He is vindictive then, and as empathy deficient as the highland Laird who watched impassively as his poorest neighbours were pushed to the sea.

David Beckham's early career grin was a shy, endearing defence. Am I alone in noticing that it has mutated into an over-rehearsed 'Here I Am Again!' rictus in more recent times? Gideon's smile never changes whatever the lie of the political land. Look again and spend some time with it. You will see what I see in the small, dark, intelligent eyes and in the pursing of those rather sensual Botticelli lips: some malevolence, great amusement barely held at bay, and the coldness that accompanies a life of effortless calculation.

William Ruby

Latest List:

Best British Prime Ministers (positive impact on the nation)

               Grey (Reform Act, abolition of slavery)

               Campbell-Bannerman (free trade, Irish Home Rule, free school meals, support of unions)

               Atlee (NHS, nationalisation of public utilities, state welfare, decolonisation)

               Pitt the Younger (facilitating the move from the ‘old’ to the’ new’ worlds without revolution)

               Churchill (but only for the war years, otherwise he was a nasty Tory reactionary)

Latest Essay: People of the Cally
Latest List: The Best Things About London

See also:

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1


Latest Essay:

People of the Cally

Despite the best efforts of the millionaire club of white men currently running the country inner city London remains just about the most socially and racially diverse place on earth. And I live in the most diverse bit of this very diverse inner city; reportedly over two hundred languages come through the gates of my local primary school each morning with the children (an unofficial world record). However, before any disorientated Daily Mail reader out there starts to froth and vent about the coming of Sharia Law and the apparent End of Times, I think it timely to assert that London English (Longlish, we should call it) rightly still prevails within this very rich local linguistic brew. Innit, boss. You get me, fam?

When I pop down to the shops on the local high street I am rubbing shoulders with people who owe their origins to societies and cultures from every inhabited continent, whether they be first, second or third generation immigrants, or indeed are of the mongrel tradition that has given a grateful world the white Englishman. The social and class status of these people vary greatly; no inner city--not least London--is complete without its bohemian colonists and its inbred and incorrigible dregs. I sit in Kigi's cafe having Turkish grilled chicken, chips and salad with TV producers and transgender pamphleteers, market stallholders and muggers.

I live on the Cally. That is Caledonian Road, King's Cross, Islington.

It is a remarkable place. These are its people.

There are the Turks who own a very large minority of the shops and cafes and stalls and minicab firms between the railway bridge near Pentonville Prison and Copenhagen  Street, the true heart of the Cally. These Turks are in the main friendly, hard-working and fierce, if roused; it is perhaps no coincidence that Turkish-influenced areas of the city were little-visited by rioters in the summer of 2011. They stayed up through the night in large numbers to defend their livelihoods at all costs (the rioters clearly had some sense). Among their number is Uncle Eric, former Cally kebab shop manager turned cabbie. He told me recently that London is his home, Turkey a memory. After thirty years away from Istanbul he went back to visit family there and was mugged in a busy street. Rob a Turk on the Cally and you may suffer a legion of insistent visitations.

The white, working-class population that likes to imagine it is the indigenous elite of the Cally lives chiefly in the area to the West of the road, massed particularly in the Bemerton Estate and its outrigger apartment blocks. The Bemerton enjoys levels of socio-economic deprivation almost unmatched across the city. People walk slowly here, or not at all, on crutches and Zimmer frames, or in bad ways on bad feet in ill-fitting clothes. I see little resentment for the 'new people' writ large among the white Cally folk who never moved out to the city's suburbs, but one still senses its existence in glances and gestures and poor jokes overheard in passing.

Dave Elvis, who changed his name by deed poll from Dave something-else, can often be encountered in Joe's Cafe or the Tarmon pub performing Memphis classics (the pub has karaoke as a conduit for Dave's singing, Joe's does not). He even made it through one round of X-Factor a few years ago. A skeletal local eccentric in an outsized white jump suit and huge shades, Dave has no idea how bad he is, and few are inclined to tell him. His localness insures him against ridicule and censure. He is at home.

In many ways of course, I am not at home. One old-timer told me I would never be of the Cally because I'd not been born of the Cally. I would have got the same sort of answer from a Maasai warrior herding his cattle on the Mara.

To the east of the Cally lies Barnsbury, the expansive tree-lined area centred on Thornhill's original Georgian model estate. Got a spare two million and you can bag yourself something modest up on the hill (or more likely the lower slopes nearer the Cally's grime). Four million and we're really talking. Tony Blair once lived up there, as today does half of the BBC and a fair smattering of the maybe less reactionary City banker type (Gerrard's Cross is just too far away from Cornhill and Le Coq D'Argent you see, and it would be nice for the kids to get a sense of living in the city with, well, you know, normal sorts of people and black people and stuff). This upper middle-class gentrification has long been in the making but is still nonetheless astonishing given its close proximity to the urban blight and poverty just across the road. There are incursions onto the Cally by the posh people but they are undertaken briefly and in plain clothes. Luxurious Upper Street sits hubristically on top of the hill like a Siren calling to them from the shore.

A small but significant West Indian population has been here since the 1970's and is very well-integrated. Young grandmothers with braided hair talk proper north London cockney in loud voices while herding large groups of small children about. Gentlemen in vests stand drinking cans of Red Stripe in the doorway of betting shops. Everybody's Friend (as I call him), a genial guy who is never without a black bandana on his head and who works in the Clockwork Pharmacy takes his seat outside Kigi's every lunch time to bestow kisses and largesse on absolutely everybody who walks past. I have never encountered a single other human being who knows so great a range of other people by name!

Trundling slowly onto the Cally from the Bemerton in a mobility vehicle is the elderly Trinidadian man who greets everybody as his brother, male or female. I have pushed him off the cobbles outside the health centre on several occasions. He broke wind loudly once during such an operation and claimed it was an explosion up at Holloway.

Northern and eastern Africans are increasingly in evidence: on street stalls, in pound shops, in Ethiopian and Eritrean cafes and in halal butchers. The Menelik restaurant right opposite Kigi's features occasional late-night shenanigans with machetes and is avoided by polite society (or at least the Cally variety). I am informed that old tribal grievances are only very reluctantly confined to history. One north African guy occasionally works a fruit and veg stall whilst clearly in the grip of Tourettes Syndrome. You can get more than your change from him if you play your cards right. He potters around outside the Kennedy's pub but is never allowed in. People glance out through its windows to see him barking at them. He appears to have no home.

Undeniably the Cally has been known for crime. Which area of inner city London has not? Gangs made the area their home a long time ago. Gun battles were being conducted in the Copenhagen Street area well before the First World War. The Cally was a Mecca for the fencing of stolen goods of all kinds from the 1920's through to the 1960's. By the 1950's it was the loosely affiliated White family bossing affairs on the local streets, by the 1980's it was the even more notorious Adams family (and that's no joke).
Bemerton Street gained a reputation as a particular no-go area for the police after the second war, a stigma that lasted until maybe twenty years ago. In 1955 a cache of IRA weaponry was discovered at number 257 Caledonian Road, just one incident in a long-running history of London-based Republican 'safe houses' in the area, and evidence of a much larger Irish population at that time. Stray King's Cross prostitutes were still occasionally conducting business in the little gardens on Bingfield Street within the last decade.

Quite a few dangerous prisoners have escaped the high cream battlements of Pentonville and merged with the local landscape. Their infamous executed fellow inmates--Crippin, Cristie, Heath et al--were dispatched within the prison grounds and are buried behind the wall close to the road. I wonder how many people passing by actually know this.
Today the nefarious nature of the Cally appears to be waning. There has been the odd shocking, high-profile crime in the area in recent years but one does not any longer get a sense of tiptoeing through territory that has been staked out for generations by feudal scumbags. The feared and hated Naish Court flats are now long gone. The grey joggers of the young street drug dealers are harder to spot, fewer car windows are being smashed in the night, fewer sirens heard. One can only hope that the children playing at the Crumbles Castle adventure playground do not grow up with the same unlawful intent of so many of their adult cousins, their dads, their granddads.

Students abound now. Central St Martin's College and swathes of newly built (and highly unattractive!) accommodation within the gigantic King's Cross regeneration scheme have seen to that. I spot these young eastern Asian students walking blithely down Bingfield Street on trips to the Cally: nonchalant fish-out-of-water types who wouldn't know a Terry Adams from a Terry Wogan. I wish them well; I hope they will invest at least a little sense of belonging in their new home. I'm not sure many of them know how lucky they are. 

Indeed some of the less lucky ones end up housed in Andrew Panayi's lightless underground rabbit warrens (he featured as the Rackman-like villain landlord in the BBC's excellent recent documentary The Secret History of Our Streets). I suppose though that their time here will be brief, their apparent privations soon ended.

There are other people of the Cally who will never live anywhere else.

I too will be leaving this place soon. It will be a huge wrench to go. These recent years have been both rich and fraught for me, and the Cally has figured very large in them. When one grows up in a quiet down-at-heels suburb of a fading northern seaside resort, a community like the Cally offers a variety of unimagined experiences. I am unlikely to ever live in a place like it again, but I will remember it--and its people- with a fondness that has always surprised me. It is my sort of place.

As Dave Elvis would sing,

I don't need a mansion on a hill
That overlooks the sea

William Ruby


Latest List:

The Best Things About London

Look Left, Look Right signs
Free museums
Anonymity
Vastness
Food variety
Diversity
The Thames
Public transport
Street markets

History