Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Editorial
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Why I won’t subscribe to your newspaper’s iPad app
My newspaper of choice, being a discerning liberal gentleman and having had my appreciation of the Guardian burned out of me after four years of working there, is the International Herald Tribune, i.e., The New York Times for people who wish they were reading The New York Times.
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The upper deck
I regularly use the bus to get around London on the grounds that the Tube is a place where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Tiring recently of the limited seating on the lower deck of the bus and the constant ethical dilemma about whether to stand for the elderly disabled pregnant woman or just keep on sitting like every other cold-hearted bastard Londoner, I risked a trip to the upper deck, a deck previously avoided because of the belief that you only sat upstairs if you wanted to be murdered by schoolchildren.
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This is how I go on holiday
It’s a mystery to me how anybody manages to go on any holiday, ever, given the range of destinations on offer. Aside from a few warzones — and even they will likely offer some sort of human-shield package tour — the budding traveller can go anywhere on Earth. How does anybody ever pick a destination? Literally the entire planet to choose from. I can barely manage to choose which loaf of bread I want.
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Spreading myself out
I’m experimenting with both Twitter and Tumblr at the moment to see if either of them will yield anything useful. For those that are interested, you can follow me on Twitter @paul_haine and can see my…tumbles? Is tumbles the word to use for stuff that’s posted to Tumblr? I’ve no idea. Sounds asinine so that’s probably it. Anyway, whatever they are, they’re at joeblade.tumblr.com. There’s also a feed of both on the front page of this website.
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London Underground
Too many bad experiences on the London Underground have given me cause to abandon it entirely; now I get around London via walking or bus alone.
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My first 999
I was once again near a traffic accident, though this time I’m not taking the blame as I wasn’t thinking about anything much at the time beyond the lyrics to Nancy Sinatra’s Some Velvet Morning. What made this accident notable, though, was that this time I was first on the scene. Aside from the victim, obviously.
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Furnished
Yesterday, after living in the same barely-furnished flat for nearly three years, I finally caved and bought an extra dining chair, two bedside tables and one coffee table. They don’t match, they’re as cheap as I could find from IKEA’s online store (the really cheap stuff demands a car and a personal visit) and I will happily leave them behind when I next move. Nevertheless, the decision to buy was one I agonised over for about a year.
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Covered in bees
Now everybody’s competently growing tiny lettuces and dismal herbs in their window boxes and smugly claiming that as ‘food’, the logical next step seems to be keeping livestock: pigs and chickens and the like. Lately, this has manifested itself as an interest in bees. Everywhere I look, someone is writing about bees.
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Viene la tormenta!
I wrote recently that I wasn’t a big fan of the summer but that I didn’t see it as a precious commodity that would be wasted if I wasn’t out roasting myself a shade of lobster red instead of sat on my sofa playing Fable 2. I’ve been reminded this weekend of another reason why I’m sceptical about the whole season, because in the UK, every sunny day seems to come with a big bastard storm attached to it.
I don’t much like storms. Some people do; some people get all fizzy at the prospect of hearing rain hammering against the windows, feeling peals of thunder shaking the ceiling and watching bolts of lightning flash-fry anyone unfortunate enough to be outside but not be near any conductive buildings. That’s not me. No, I play the role of the cowering, whimpering pet, the sort that they used to warn you to keep indoors on Bonfire Night. With all the dignity of a trembling, idiotic pug, I find myself pacing restlessly and unplugging any appliance that isn’t connected to a power-surge protector.
From start to finish, it’s as if we’re being punished for having the temerity to enjoy some sunny weather. Take a look at the following photos to see what I mean, taken only a few hours apart in the same region of London:
How fair is that? Just a few hours after enjoying the roses in Regent’s Park I’m stood staring out of my window at rain, followed by thunder, lightning, and even a hailstorm in the middle of it. Today, again, after a bright, sunny morning I’m inside trying to enjoy a few episodes of Heroes while the apocalypse noisily happens outside and girls in summer dresses run for cover, and it’s going to be like this all week, apparently. There’s no escape, and that would be fine if the presence of a storm didn’t render me incapable of concentrating on anything else but from start to finish, I can’t ignore it.
There’s a process to the entire shebang. First of all, there’s the preamble, the prologue if you will, where the muggy air and the high pressure makes me feel like someone has sat on my head. This can go on for hours as the clouds roll in, a boot stamping on my face, forever, and the air gets that distinctive odour to let you know you’re in for a big one. Then the rain comes, and I’m going to get drenched if I’m caught outside because even though I tend to carry an umbrella, there’s no way I’m raising it when there’s lightning on the move; might as well stand there screaming up at the sky “Come on, you bastards! Try and hit me! Give it your best shot!”
The thunder isn’t too bad, though I could live without it; it’s the lightning that eventually reduces me to a quivering wreck. Sheet lightning I can almost bear, but fork lightning? What’s to like about that? Here’s a form of weather than can reach down from the clouds and hit you with one billion volts, burn the surrounding air to a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun and it’s not like you can dodge out of its way. Bolts of lightning aren’t fun! It may as well be someone shooting at you, except that the someone is Thor, and he’s pissed.
It’s not like I feel any safer being inside, either. Sure, I’m dry, I can mask the sound of the thunder with some phat tunes, some choice beats, but the lightning, that’s harder to ignore. Every single flash says to me “You might think you’re safe in there, boy, but the next bolt is setting fire to your roof so I hope you’ve packed an overnight bag and have your running shoes on.”
On the plus side though, from my vantage point yesterday I got to watch the storm pass over Crouch End, and there was something strangely satisfying about watching that lot get lightly toasted.
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Staying in for the summer
It seems that in England, summer has arrived in force, with not just days of warm weather ahead but rumours of entire weeks of it. This seems to happen every year — almost seasonally — and with it comes the inevitable telling off I receive that I am indoors and not outside enjoying the sun.
People seem surprised when I say I spent my sunny weekend, say, watching four Coen brother films in a row, or playing Super Mario Galaxy, or working on my website. But I like doing all those things. I don’t stop liking them just because the temperature outside is higher than 20°C. Wandering around in parks just becomes another thing I can do with my time — it’s not as if all these indoor activities were just tedious filler, something to fill my days with while waiting for that glorious moment when I could walk outside of my house in just a t-shirt and jeans and leave my electronics behind me.
What am I expected to do instead? I don’t have a family of my own to take out to, I don’t know, The London Eye, or to Regent’s Park for a Tesco sandwich picnic or a trip to the seaside or whatever it is families do in the sun. I don’t have dogs I can walk. My friends are scattered all over the country so I won’t be attending any impromptu barbeques and I’m not in Oxford any more so there certainly won’t be any punting. There’s really a limit on the things you can do as an anti-social single man who doesn’t enjoy museums or art galleries. Eventually you just have to go to the cinema, which is fine, because I like going to the cinema even more when everyone else is roasting in the sunlight.
The English have this — probably well-founded — attitude that sunlight is a finite and scarce resource, and that if you’re not out absorbing as much of it as you can, you’re wasting it. In this country it’s probably fair enough to think that, seeing as in a few weeks time the summer will have passed and we’ll be facing six months of grey drizzle, but still, I can happily enjoy the sunshine even when I can only see it through my living room window. I like a sunny flat; I like not having to have three layers on, or have the heating on, or having to worry about hot water bottles. I like that I’m successfully growing bonsai strawberries in my kitchen window.
It isn’t as if I avoid the sun completely; I’m not Darkman. I do usually spend some time in it, even when I’m not walking from one indoors to another. I’ll get told to go and take a book to a park and read, so I do, and what happens when I reach the park is I find the shadiest bench I can find, read for a bit and then get irritated by a nearby heatstricken, ice-cream coated infant, or some teens playing ‘music’ on their mobile phones, or a group of muscular young men in short haircuts playing with a frisbee or football. If that doesn’t drive me off then I’ll start fancying a coffee or needing the toilet and I leave and that’s the end of it. I’m just not built for serious, long-term, outdoor lazing. If I’ve been out in the sun for at least an hour then I’ll feel that my solar obligations have been more than fulfilled.
And I’m not one of these that wilt in the sun after 30 minutes; I don’t burn easily, I don’t find heat oppressive, I don’t suffer from hayfever and I don’t sweat any more than the average overweight IT professional. I just think warmth and sunlight are both simply other forms of weather, and I don’t really ever want to be out in any form of weather for an extended period, at least not without carefully staggered espresso bars and lavatories along my chosen path. It’s why I’ll never be a hiker, or a camper, or a wandering minstrel.
Avoiding the sun is also not without its advantages. The gaming, film-watching and general internet pottering are actually made even more enjoyable because everyone else in the surrounding flats is out doing all those things we’re supposed to be doing, leaving me with nothing more than Mario’s infuriatingly chirpy jumping noises. Plus, you know, there are suns in Mario Galaxy. That counts.
Also, as I write this in the recently mentioned Sable d’or, the place is practically empty. There’s me, there’s a quiet couple by the window and there’s a large Irish man chatting up one of the Polish waitresses milling around without much to do. There are none of the babies, teenage girls or other irritants I’ve come to expect. It’s peaceful and I don’t find my bile rising whenever somebody nearby declares to their partner that they really ought to buy some more sun-dried tomato oil, so perhaps my search for the perfect writing cafe was only ever a seasonal problem instead of a geographic one. What I’ll do in the winter, I have no idea; perhaps just migrate to the south of France and have done with it.
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That damned, elusive Grand Café
Here’s a surprising fact; having lived in London for more than two years, I only began taking my laptop to write in cafés about a month ago. I’m not sure why, though it might go some way to explaining why I haven’t been writing at all for about two years. It seems that for me to be really prolific, I need the ritual of leaving the house, sitting somewhere free of internet distractions yet not free of eye candy, venting my spleen for an hour all over my laptop, and then fucking off home again. I just can’t find anywhere around here that quite fits what I need.
It’s all mothers and babies and smug couples around here. I find it hard to consult my muse when I glance up and see some young mother reading the Guardian whilst absent-mindedly burping her baby over her shoulder right in front of me. Have you ever tried to enjoy a coffee and carefully craft a bon mot whilst a miniature Winston Churchill blankly coughs milky sick over a ‘Designed exclusively for Habitat’ baby burping cloth right before you? Well, probably some of you have, but I hadn’t, and it’s not an experience I’m likely to seek out again. It kept staring at me, defiantly, daring me to act like it was just a regular thing.
But don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying the mother was wrong to be burping her baby, nor am I saying that the baby was wrong to need burping; I was the one out of place in the scenario. If I approach a pub or restaurant or film screening and find there’s a ‘family friendly’ notice on the door, I’ll avoid it, yet here I am in Haringey: Highgate, Crouch End, Muswell Hill and so on, an entire fucking borough that’s family-friendly, so long as that family is willing to name their child Maximilian.
The best place I’ve found in the area is an indie place called Sable D’or in Muswell Hill that’s pretty good in a rustic way, serves decent coffee and those colourful little macaroons that everybody loves and even has some sturdy, laptop-friendly tables. Unfortunately it also seems perpetually filled with pushchairs and toddlers and always at least one table taken up by a group of talkative teenage girls who think that peppering their sentences with the word ‘random’ makes them wacky, interesting characters and not, in fact, frothy bits of jailbait.
He is so random. She is so random. We too shall have been so random. Oh my God, that was, like, so random
So, I need to find a regular spot somewhere away from where I live, somewhere that will preferably sell me coffee in a pot and not a series of mugs, somewhere attended largely by the sparkling and quick-witted, or some attractive arts students if the former are unavailable, and not people on their way, say, to a garden centre. Somewhere that isn’t family friendly. It’s harder than you might think.
Anywhere in central London is out of the question; I’ve had to forbid myself from going anywhere near Zone 1 on weekends because I worry that the murderous rage I find myself in as I bounce, pinball-like, from gormless tourist group to gormless tourist group will eventually give me an ulcer or a criminal record. Central London is not a place to go to while away an hour with a laptop; it’s a place to go to while away an hour in a sweaty, stupid crowd whilst someone steals your laptop.
West London might be nicer; there are surely some good coffee houses in the affluent Chelsea area and I might be able to collect Gwyneth Paltrow for my celebrity chess set, but to get there I have to go through central London, so now we’re talking about up to an hour on the tube each way, and that’s only likely to find me writing every time about how much I hate the tube. A journey that long almost makes it a day out, albeit a day out where you spend most of the day underground and very unhappy. It’s the equivalent of me sitting in Oxford and saying “I think I’ll just pop to London Paddington for a coffee”, and to get there I have to go via a working tin mine.
Then there’s east London, which is either the trendy, gentrified area of Shoreditch (though it’s possible that the recession has bankrupted most of them) or the stabbing, shooting area of, well, the rest of it. Neither seems appealing though if I had to choose, I’d probably go for the tiny-scooter, large-tie Spitalfield Market crowd than the cast of Eastenders (would be a tough call though). Finally in the south, my travel tolerance sadly only reaches to the BFI Southbank, as previously discussed. It’s a shame the place rubs me up the wrong way as much as it does as it has a genuinely nice café/bar, but I’m not sure I could remain calm enough for it to become my regular haunt.
If I’m to find a replacement for Oxford’s Grand Café then I’m going to have to work at it, though I worry that eventually I’ll be spending so much time and money to reach this mythical place that I might as well have done with it and commute to Oxford every Sunday.
Actually that’s probably not a bad idea; might help my mood.
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Cause and effect
Since moving to London, I have witnessed precisely two motorcyclists being knocked off their bikes by oncoming cars, and both times I have felt at least partly responsible, though thankfully not for any reason that could see me in court. No, I operate on a more philosophical plane.
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Celebrity chess
This morning I saw Paul Whitehouse jogging in Crouch End. This was a disappointment, because having seen him once before on Tottenham Court Road, he no longer counts toward the celebrity chess set I’ve been working toward since moving to London. If it had been Harry Enfield, for instance, I’d be up to ten pieces; as it stands, I remain stuck at nine.
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Every time I eat a sun-dried tomato I die a little inside
So, I’ve spent the last year living in Highgate, having felt my time in Archway had come to a natural conclusion when December arrived and the house I was living in had no heating, no working oven, no functional lighting in the kitchen, 90db Hip-Hop at weekends and a mouse infestation so chronic that the other tenants had taken to approaching the kitchen with heavy footsteps, to give the mice a chance to run away; out of sight, out of mind, you see?
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The Man in Brown
So, apparently, the last thing I wrote here was a rant about GAME; I suppose the experience must have been pretty traumatic, as it happened over a year ago and I’ve only just recovered enough to write something new. I’d like to say that I’ve spent this gap year doing interesting and exciting things, but I’m afraid that mostly I’ve been dithering, faffing, and generally otherwise mooching.
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That Student Life
As happens often — probably more often than is strictly healthy — I’ve found myself fantasising about what I might do if I was suddenly offensively, disturbingly and disgustingly rich. This fantasy varies; sometimes I think I’d end up living in Italy, perhaps owning a small espresso bar; other times I imagine I might end up back in Oxford, where I would spend my days lounging in the QI Bar discussing, I don’t know, Anthony Eden’s handling of the Suez crisis, or whatever’s happening in the world these days.
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A Newcomer’s Guide to London
So I’ve now spent three weeks in London and I thought it would be helpful to anyone else thinking of moving here if I passed on a bit of advice, based on what I’ve learnt so far, to help you avoid culture shock or finding yourself in an embarrassing social faux pas.
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That Was the Oxford That Was
About two years and two months ago I arrived in Oxford from Canterbury (via a few months in sunny Weston). Today, I arrive in London, which I’m going to assume is a lot like Oxford, except about 100 times bigger, a bit dirtier, and full of knives.
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Everything Must Go
A problem with moving house is that you have to sift through all the crap you’ve been happily hiding away for months. For the most part, this can be quite cathartic, as you mercilessly cull anything with more than a millimetre of dust on it, casting out vast sacks of rubbish into the gaping maw of the recycling bins, but there’s always a few things that need thinking about.
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Dazed and Confused
I apologise in advance if this week’s thrilling momentary diversion is a little disjointed, because the last 12 hours has seen me slightly unstuck in time. This is because last night, at 2am, the clocks changed, and while I thought they were going forward an hour, it turned out that they were, in fact, going back.
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