Park Life

Walking along Walworth Road I feel like a night walker stuck in the wrong time frame. The fresh morning air engulfs me, and I feel clear headed though my eyes are still adjusting to the light. The street is a ghost town, only the emaciated and scruffy old men furnished with their Special Brew roam in these early hours of Sunday morning, well, those and the ubiquitous morning runners, who litter the usually crowded pavements.

I walk along leisurely, enjoying the cool morning air and plan to walk to the park and sit by the lake, feed the ducks, what a romantic image. As I pass the mass of closed consumerism, very few of the insidious neon signs still aglow, I round the corner near the park and stumble across Mary's Cafe. I often pass the place on the bus, and it had been on my list of places to go for a while so I figure there's nothing to lose by venturing in; I abandon my park plans.



Inside the walls are covered in blue and yellow vertically striped wallpaper, and tables in various primary colours are dotted around, adorned with black wooden chairs which remind me of a school room. An old woman stares at me listlessly as I walk across the tiled floor to the counter, where a man with a grey moustache jovially greets me and says "Thanks, sweedie", as he takes the £3.80 I proffer for my breakfast special number one, which I read fresh off the chalk board.

Taking my cup of tea in the pleasingly rounded canary yellow mug, I retreat to a pastel yellow table to the middle left of the room, next to a wall. The sound of a can opening pierces the air as the woman wearing gold hoop earrings adjacent to me opens her tin of ginger beer as she waits for her black pudding. Two old men sit by the window in front of the devoid 'Merry Christmas' sign still lingering from years earlier; their faces decorated with glasses and wrinkles; they mirror each other taking gulps of the two cups of tea in front of them. One gets out his TV guide and eagerly reads out the program for later on in the evening, the other leans forward to listen whilst outside a red double decker bus is visible, most of its passengers in their Sunday best.



I loop the handle of my cup and drag the tea towards me, before clumsily measuring out two heaped tablespoons of sugar, which I pour from the sugar shaker nestling on the table amongst the other paint palette of condiments. Stirring in the sugar slowly and deliberately with my thumb and index finger steering the spoon I suddenly feel the urge to smoke a cigarette, which is impossible seeing as a) I have no cigarettes and b) smoking's not allowed here.

I unfold my newspaper onto the table and start to read it in vain, soon realising props here are not necessary, and I follow the old womans lead and unashamedly drink in the scene around me. The gaffer wanders from table to table, cracking jokes and making general banter with the regulars and I wonder if this is what I'll be like in sixty years time, devoid of any real pressing matters (perhaps), time stretched before me to peruse at my leisure. I think of my Gran, and how she'd have been at home in a place like this, if she was still around I would've brought her here.

My breakfast arrives and I tuck into the bacon egg beans tomatoes and sausage I have been anticipating. The old men at the window carry on with their conversation, the old women near the back of the cafe carry on theirs with the gaff. The radio starts to play and I feel like I could be in another era...until I turn my head to one side and am greeted with the panoramic widescreen tv screaming the message "Should human eggs be for sale?".

Reality zones back in and I realise I have been sitting in my spot for nearly an hour. I make a resolve to come to the cafe every sunday morning, and muse that maybe old lonely people don't have it so bad afterall. Then again, what do I know, I'm just a phoney regular at least twenty years too young.

Aberystwyth

I wanna go back.



Mainly so I can see this crazy lady again.

Screw all the phonies.

cultural collective

In the last couple of weeks or so I've had a quite few friends/familien visiting, and therefore have played the role of tourist visiting numerous attractions/galleries etc. Here are some highlights:



This badass mofo is a lion fish, they have a ton of them at the London Aquarium, and loads of other underwater critters that were pretty cool. Don't make the school boy error of going during a school holiday though, hideous children EVERYWHERE.



This is a print by Japanese woodblock print maker Tsukioka Kogyo, whose work is exhibited at one of my favourite museums, the V&A. His works depict scenes of traditional Japanese Noh Theater, and focus on the decorative costumes of the performers, as illustrated above.




The Natural History Museum was okay, if you're into rocks and taxidermy and things like that. The dinosaur skeletons were pretty impressive. Again, don't go during a school holiday.




I spent ages pouring over this exhibition by Ed Kienholz at the National Gallery. An installation piece called 'The Hoerengracht', it recreates the red light district in the 80's. Having been to the red light district recently I found it paticularly interesting, and really felt I could identify the messages Kienholz was trying to get across.

feel sick and dirty more dead than alive

Staring down at the loose turquoise and navy threads of my dogtooth jacket I felt distinctly listless. I felt as though my life was spinning out from under me at a dizzying rate and I needed to come up for air.

I think (as I always do on the northern line) about the way that you can only see the torsos of people in the reflection on the windows, everyone truncated and interchangeable, like a rubix cube of mass humanity. Lovely.

Black Cat White Cat

One cool summer evening at a festival I met a hippy with blonde dreadlocks and an admiration for my Gogol Bordello hoodie. Her name was Amy, and as we sat and smoked under the crooked umbrella of the gaff, which was inhabited by a flock of mostly attractive foreign men dressed as old women, Rachael just having finished her Double Decker, we talked amongst other things about a shared love of gypsy swing music and she recommended a film to me called Black Cat White Cat, by Emir Kusturica. A year or so later and I've finally got round to watching it, and I'm glad I did.

The film is about two gypsy families and their connected lives in Serbia by the Danube River. It consists mainly of farcical portrayals of the gypsy community and includes hilarious characters such as Ggra Pitic, a retired gangster who speeds around the countryside in a bizzare looking wheelchair drinking whiskey and making outlandish requests (pictured above sporting his snazzy gold glasses and gold tooth). Meanwhile the two romances within the storyline unfurl, the story all the while accompanied by a sprinkling of music from Emir Kusturica's famous travelling gypsy band. Highly commendable.

Here's a taste:

Topless Sprinkle Cakes & Cupcake Umentionables

Were mine and Ixchelt's burlesque monikers...a pretty good double act oui, though I prefer a name with 'von' in it I think. So anyway, off we trotted to the Shoreditch high st penthouse studio for our very first burlesque workshop.

Our teacher was Miss Glory Pearl, an extremely confident and curvacious woman who proceded to lead us through a series of bump and grinds (somewhat different to the type littering r&b music videos) shimmy and shakes and pin up poses with gusto and a large dollop of good humour.

The routine we perfected within the hour and a half workshop involved titilating teasing with feather foas, slow and seductive stroking of limbs and a striptease starting with our skirts and ending with our brassieres, which we eventually removed (so that the audience, had there been one, could 'say hello to the girls').

Overall it was an eye opening hour and a half and most importantly a real laugh, and despite not rushing out to buy nipple tassels after I would thoroughly recommend the experience to anyone, though maybe not the faint hearted...

birdseyeview

"Poetry...is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

- Allen Ginsberg