Wood Green Looting

Coming home to Wood Green in the early hours of the morning is rarely dull. There's always a flurry of activity on the main road: kebab shops serving food 'til all are fed, Mr Bagels providing bagels 24 hours a day, the random club on the high street that people still seem to be queuing for at 4am... One might think the constant bustle would be intimidating, but I've rarely felt safer wondering the streets of London at night as I have done during the last 12 months, where I've lived on a road just off Wood Green High Street. Far from finding other people's presence alarming, I tend to think I'm far less likely to be unpleasantly accosted while there's still life on the streets. 

Yesterday afternoon, perhaps 10 hours before all the reported (and unreported?) looting had taken place, I walked out of the back of the Morrisons store to the sound of the Banjo Busker Man - a somewhat regular feature during weekend shopping trips - playing Pretty Woman, his banjo bag a collection of tips, his demeanour clearly reflecting his desire to offer nothing more than some simple musical pleasures to passers-by. I found myself feeling an almost anticipatory sense of nostalgia at the thought of my impending move away from Wood Green, and away from all the weird and wonderful people that shape this community - from the Banjo Busker Man, to the man who stands outside Morrisons talking to everyone as they pass by, and the guy with the crazy eyes who always asks me if I "have any spare change, brother?", the whole hordes of unrelenting charity volunteers with their collection buckets [some of which I'm not quite convinced are actually working on behalf of a registered charity!] and, of course, the countless mothers and their children who try to convince me every week with brightly -coloured leaflets that the God-shaped hole in my life - which apparently I've been trying to fill with sex, drugs & money - can only be filled by God and his love.


Tonight, as I reflect on the last 24 hours and listen to the screaming sirens of what I assume to be the police on their way to Enfield, I mourn for this community and for the damage that last night’s looting of the High Street has done. The smashed shop windows will be fixed, and new stock will again sit on the shelves of Argos and JD Sports, but people in Wood Green are largely shocked and hurt that this has happened on their doorstep. The lootings of retailers like HMV may be understandable in terms of the high price of items on sale, but mindless smashing of places like Brook Street recruitment agency and Vision Express is something altogether different. Amongst the various independent shops that were hit, the worst-off ones were those selling suitcases - since looters were more than happy to use these cases to cart their stuff to and from their parked cars. The road that I live on was basically a car park for looters all through the night, and even into the morning. I spoke to the neighbours at 6am, whilst two helicopters circled overhead, and a guy in his 20s walked past looking right at us, carrying two skateboards under each arm. Some looters had obviously made multiple trips to and from the shops, and then subsequently to and from wherever they were dropping off their goods.

There is widespread condemnation of Saturday night’s looting and rioting - and rightly so. But I can’t help but wonder how many steps away I or one of my friends could be from indulging in that behaviour. If I didn’t have a job, and if I hadn’t gone to university or a decent school, if I wasn’t brought up with a set of boundaries and a level of respect for others around me, perhaps it would be a different story and perhaps I wouldn’t think it such a big deal to wander off the street into a newly-broken shop window and walk out with an Xbox. It’s easy to sit here and think to myself that I don’t have the capacity for such destruction, and it’s easy to paint the looters and rioters in a demonic light, but I really struggle to believe that everyone who walked away with a pair of trainers from JD Sports is an evil person. Many people believe that the actions of the rioters and looters are not representative of the hard-working individuals and businesses that form the fabric of our communities. And whilst that is invariably true, it is equally true to say that the troublemakers themselves are also part of our communities and wander down the same streets that we do.

Far from wishing to sound empathetic, I’m only trying to make the point that there are obviously some very disenfranchised people in our communities. I recognise that the looting and rioting of this weekend is in no way some significant response to actual political issues, but surely rather than calling for the ‘scum of the earth to be shot’ (or some other similar phraseology that some Tweeters are employing), we should be focusing on rebuilding our communities and working out how to better integrate those who feel themselves standing on the edges. If it’s true that some of the looters were as young as seven [apologies to a link from The Sun, but scroll down half a page to just above the picture of Comet], then maybe we really do have some deeper issue on our hands.

As a closing note, I’d just like to add that I’m finding politicians’ reactions to this weekend particularly irksome. Kit Malthouse (London’s deputy mayor) seriously thinking that Boris’ coming back from holiday would somehow legitimise the disturbances and be “kind of rewarding” to the criminals says more about how out of touch he (and Boris) is(/are) with Londoners than anything else.


Footnote: 
The Guardian has a great live feed about current goings-on here.

Glastonbury 2011

Now that the dust has settled back onto my wellies for another couple of years, and I have finally managed to finish hydrating myself, let me just say that Glastonbury Festival 2011 was probably one of the best experiences of my life!

To be fair, I had two hopes for this year - 1) that no one would die and 2) that I wouldn't (accidentally) smoke a crack pipe. Neither of those things happened so, just by virtue of their absence, this turned out to be a pretty good week!

Unlike (Glasto and non-Glasto) festivals of previous years, I had no real agenda of bands to watch or things to see. I was quite keen to catch a bit of U2 and Beyonce, and I would've gone to see Coldplay too if I hadn't been on shift, but the music this year didn't appeal to me as it had done before. (Ray Davies are you reading this, please come back for 2013!) In any case, come Friday night I was roaming round the Pyramid stage crowds trying to find my friend before U2 so that I had someone to lean on in my drunken stupor. I seem to recall going to and from the 'cider bus' carrying pints of a delicious hot and spiced refreshing beverage and being positively overjoyed upon seeing a sign that said 'Baby Spice - hot cider + shot of Brandy £4.50'. I couldn't at the time understand why they were calling it Baby Spice, but thinking back, I think the sign had two more Spice Girls' nicknames on it and two other shots of liquor... No, I'm still failing to make the 'Spice Girls + Spiced Cider' connection.

So, due to my inebriation for U2's performance, coupled with the fact that I left about a half hour before their set ended, I cannot possibly provide a critique of their performance. I think, standing in the rain with a belly full of warmth next to my friend on one side and a really hot (Jake Gyllenhaal-lookalike) guy on the other, mixing lyrics up at the tops of our voices, was probably the best way to have spent that Friday night. Without it, I probably would not have been able to get through the mammoth 1am-6am stewarding shift...I spent most of those 5 hours shivering and spotting smokers lighting up in the 'bar' we'd been assigned to, and asking them to leave the comforting cover of the gazebo and please stand outside, since this was a no smoking area, even though it was covered on top, because the sides were open. It was a bit like Minority Report, only I didn't make any arrests - but I did time my walk over to the perpetrators for precisely the right moment when they'd just lit their cigarette and were taking the first drag. That is some mad skillz, right there!

The stewarding was mostly uneventful ... in fact, one of the more entertaining aspects of the shifts was talking to one of the security guys who, as I put it at the time, was probably one of those people who 'hadn't quite evolved with the rest of the human race yet'. A bit harsh, perhaps, but here are some snippets of conversation:

Security Guard 1: Are you religion?
Security Guard 2: ...what?
Security Guard 1: Are you religion?
Security Guard 2: ...I am religious, yes. I am Christian.
Security Guard 1: Oh. Are you religion?
Me: Am I religious? No, not really.
Security Guard 1: What, never?!
Me: Well, my grandma's Catholic, does that count?
Security Guard 1: What type of Catholic? There's different types, ain't there... Catholic... Roman Catholic... Help me out, man!
*silence*

No smoking!

And the classic

Security Guard 1: Where are you from, then?
Me: London
Security Guard 1: Your name though, that's not English.
Me: No, suppose not. I'm from Croatia.
Security Guard 1: Oh. Close to Brazil, innit.
Me: What is?
Security Guard 1: Your place. Costa Rica.
Me: No, Croatia - that's in Europe.
Security Guard 1: Same thing.
*silence*

One does wholeheartedly despair, sometimes.

One did not, however, wholeheartedly despair at Beyonce's performance. She closed off the whole thing on Sunday as the headline act - the first female headliner in 40 years! I find that a little shocking! Starting off strong with Crazy In Love and Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It), the crowd were absolutely loving it! Upbeat, fun, firey (very literally, there were a lot of pyrotechnics set up on that stage - at one point the fireworks cleared and there was just a whole heap of smoke rising into the air that I did for a split second think something had caught fire). However, the middle section dragged on a bit, from where she sang Happy Birthday to her friend Steve (who's Steve anyway? What kind of a name is Steve?) and two relatively unknown numbers - Best Thing I Never Had and End Of Time, and the crowd did start getting a bit edgy. If I Were A Boy and Sweet Dreams provided a sort of temporary pacifier, but she lost us again after that and didn't fully command our attention until Irreplaceable and the subsequent Destiny's Child medley. Her performance would only be called 'solid' were she performing to a crowd of Beyonce Knowles fans who had turned out specifically to watch her in concert, but the majority of revelers at the Pyramid stage that night weren't die-hard Beyonce fans, and I think she failed to pick up on that fact, that not everyone would know every line to every song. It was, in essence, what one of my friends called 'over-indulgent in the American sense', and I did have a bit of a chuckle when B pronounced disbelief at playing to a crowd of 170,000 people - 'Er, love, they're not all here to see you, you know, some have gone to Queens of the Stone Age!' I don't think she heard me.

Having said that, maybe next time she's touring I may well be tempted to learn all her lyrics and go watch her down at the O2 because she really does put on a good show...but I'd also expect her to sing a fucking swear word if it's in the song she's performing (/written?!) - or otherwise not do it at all! I've spent an hour trying to work out which of the songs she sang had the word 'motherfucker' in it, because I found it really annoying that she would only say 'mother-----'. You can only go two ways on this really, you either use swear words or you don't. And if you do, then you have to actually sing them! Unless it's pre-watershed - but Glastonbury Festival is definitely a post-watershed type establishment, no wimping out of cursing here please! We are not a Presbyterian parish!

It's taken me two hours to write up this review, and I hardly feel like I've shared anything... which is probably just as well, because the residing motto - as discussed and agreed in the minibus back - of 2011 is: what happens at Glastonbury, stays at Glastonbury.

Testing, Part 2

Go on then, have an image.

Testing, testing

I'm just doing some experimental blogging using my iPhone - emailing my blogger 'Email Posting Address' from my normal email - as apparently this feeds right into my blog!

Waterloo Station

It's a Monday morning and what that typically means is that I'm on my way to work via Waterloo station.

There's nothing strange about that in itself - I do the Wood Green - Waterloo - Feltham thing at least once or twice a week, it's basically the only time I get any reading done.

What does amaze me, every time, is the particular smell Waterloo station has - specifically, the smell as one goes through the ticket barriers and through the ticket hall and up the stairs to the train platforms. It is so unique and hits you just as you set foot on the escalators. I wouldn't go so far as to call it acrid, but an increase in strength of about 35% would definitely put it into that boundary.

Waterloo escalator (from here - thank you!)

The only way I can think to describe it is by likening it to the smell one might get if one cooked a kilo of dust in a steamer per person to go through Waterloo, then sprinkled it with a generous helping of iron filings, and added some essence l'aluminium to boot.

It saddens me to think that the benefits I've gleamed through (just about) giving up smoking are probably outweighed by passing through Waterloo station a couple of times a week.

"Maybe the universe was born out of a Universal Chicken."

Watch the video below, please. Brilliant!

Sean Carroll: Distant time and the hint of a multiverse

Pretty in Pink

The inner 80s child in me reckons this song should've got to the top of the charts and stayed there for multiple weeks.

The film of the same name, released in 1986, stars 80s teen movie queen Molly Ringwald.

That is all for now. I just wanted to share!

Wi-Fi (not) on the line?

So thanks to the fact that lately Twitter has been my major source of info anything-related, it's come to my attention that Transport for London are planning to introduce Wi-Fi services on the London Underground. All well and good, thanks very much. But, given that they're not going to be introducing it on the actual trains, does beg the question - why? If you're using the tube at rush hour, it's never more than 2-3min wait for the next train. How much googling/tweeting does one expect to do in that time..?

However, I acknowledge that it would be especially beneficial to have an outlet for commuters' anger when tubes are delayed/evacuated/too packed.

Though I'd also imagine that pretty soon they'd have to mock up some TfL advisory posters, along the lines of "I will not unwittingly hit into people in stations and on platforms while I've my nose buried in my Wi-Fi enabled device."

(Photo found here - thank you!)

Four weeks with...China! [Part 1]

Given the fact that I've not blogged since returning from China, you'd be forgiven for thinking I was still on that train from Weihai to Beijing. Alas, my oriental adventure is over and I am back to all the things that I left behind.

My last week in China was mainly spent in true tourist style, ambling round places like the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven, in complete wonder and awe at these magnificent structures and their painstakingly detailed features (taking a total of 204 photos in 5 days). I don't think my descriptions of these places would do them justice, but there was a distinct sense of grandeur about all of them that I've never quite come across before.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony

The Forbidden City is right in the heart of Beijing, just behind Tienanmen Square, and a portrait of Chairman Mao welcomes you in if you're entering from the south side. It's basically a city within a city - a moat and walls enclose it from all sides - and it was the home of Chinese emperors for almost 500 years. It's comprised of various ceremonial buildings, officials' quarters, the Imperial Garden, and even a concubines' courtyard. I was pretty determined to walk round the whole thing and I spent a good five hours in there, but I'm still convinced there was more to be seen.

White Dagoba

A short walk from the north side of the Forbidden City is Beihai Park; (I assume) it's most famous for the White Dagoba, a Buddhist temple, which has been built on the highest point of the island in the lake (which covers more than half of the park). There were still lots of decorations up in the park marking the 15-odd days of the Spring Festival. It was a fairly tricky walk up to the dagoba, the snow had left a treacherous layer of ice on many sets of stairs and during the descent I did wonder if I'd make it out the park alive...

Mounted speaker

...but I discovered a few days later that, actually, the Temple of Heaven was definitely the most dangerous of all the places I'd visited, since many of the stairs were made of marble and ended up being incredibly slippery in icy conditions. They'd been covered with a sort of string mesh to provide more grip but even this mesh ended up freezing itself into the ice, so I found myself silently praying to the gods of the Temple to allow me to live beyond that particular day.

Imperial Vault of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven is a collection of Taoist buildings, gates and temples mainly dedicated to prayer for good harvest. It's set in lush greenery and along the pathways there are mounted "speakers" playing quiet, tranquil music as you walk past. For me, the best thing about the Temple of Heaven was the Echo Wall, which surrounds the Imperial Vault of Heaven, and has the incredible feature of reflecting sound along its surface -someone stood speaking at one point along it can be heard by someone else stood at another point. I learnt a fair bit about Chinese music and instruments in the Music Administration Building, which is a fairly new addition of buildings, and I found the Palace of Abstinence - where the emperor would go to fast prior to a ceremony - particularly peaceful as no other visitors were around; it was a pleasant and welcome change.

Wednesday 8th February, 9.15pm, Train from Weihai to Beijing

We've just set off on our train journey back to Beijing. By stark contrast to our first train journey, we have "soft bed" tickets and are sharing a compartment with a girl who is also going to Beijing. We should be arriving tomorrow around lunchtime... so in about 13 hours!

The five days we spent in Weihai were mainly marked by copious amounts of alcohol; the Chinese really know how to make an occasion of drinking! When with a group of people, toasts seem to be the customary way of drinking your beverage. When someone toasts to you, you down your drink. When you toast someone else, you also down your drink. When a general toast is made to everyone, you again down your drink. So it comes to pass that more often than not you end up with with some rather staggered walking and slurred speaking post- lunch and dinner.

As a consequence, I've spent three out of the last four mornings waking up at 6am with a parched throat and have had to (drunkenly) stumble round the flat to find some water.

Last week we spent Chinese New Year at Keer's grandparents' place in Zibo. Dinner was a family affair (+ me!) where I got to sample the delicacies of - amongst other things - sea cucumber (very rubbery), pig's skin, pig's face, duck's tongue (surprisingly boney), ... Chinese restaurants are great - in most you can get a private booth and often on the table is a massive disc on which the food dishes get put, and they everyone is free to spin the disc as necessary to help themselves to what they fancy. I think I prefer this way of dining out. You certainly get to indulge your tastebuds.

Year of the Rabbit - me and my zodiac sign

It's traditional to burn yellow tissue paper in remembrance of one's forefathers on NYE, and indeed you couldn't walk more than a few meters down the road without coming across someone's ancestral fire.

The live TV countdown was basically on for the whole of the day (and the night) and there were so many entertainers they could easily put anything on BGT to shame. That was quite interesting to watch, and although I couldn't tell anyone apart, Keer informed me there were lots of groups that were representing the various ethnic minorities in China.

For the last week there's not been a day or night go by where there haven't been some fireworks set off in our vicinity. I don't think they stopped at all on NYE, 'til about 6am on NYD. In fact, yesterday as Keer and I left the flat we managed to walk right into someone's firecrackers which predictably started exploding while we just stood there screaming from shock.

Keer and I have treated ourselves to body massages the last two days at this blind masseurs' place...except not all the masseurs are blind. I'm not sure how I feel about this massage business - it's rather painful and I wonder if the benefits truly outweigh the pain. My bones feel quite sore.