Joe Strummer

My favourite newspaper story this week was the one about the man who had been complained about by a woman he was sitting next to on a train. According to this lady, the chap had been, under cover of a newspaper, pleasuring himself whilst breathing heavily and emitting a series of disturbing noises. I had always wondered, up until now, what the "Metro" was actually for. Anyway, this man ended up before the Beak, with an ingenious if somewhat credulity-stretching, explaination for his behaviour. It seems that he was an enthusiastic banjo player, and, in moments of absent-mindedness, given to strumming movements. He produced a video of himself, playing the banjo, as evidence. His ragged breathing was a result of his having contracted a respiratory ailment, and he had obtained a note from his GP to this effect. He got off, without a stain, so to speak, on his character. Various things occured to me as I read this account.One was that I would have given much to have been a member of that jury, who,it is reported "giggled". Another was that I should liked to have heard the conversations between said fellow and his GP, the arresting officer; and most of all, that which took place between the strummer and his wife.
The least remarkable aspect of this incident is that it took place on London Transport.
I don't know what gets into people when they have to do with LTR. I lived in London for thirteen years, and the most peculiar things used to happen to me on both Under and Overground trains. Not only me, I hasten to add, all my friends and colleagues had pervert/madperson stories,too.
And yet... I didn't ever feel nervous or threatened. Perhaps I was stupid, but I was entirely confident of my ability to extricate myself from any situation involving people. Machinery is different, and I was terrified of the mechanical aspects of the Tube, particularly automatic ticket dispensers. They would work perfectly well for every single person in the queue ahead of me, but would go rogue when it came to my turn. I never even dared try the chocolate machines, as no-one could work those. You could see enraged people bearhugging them, trying to kick them onto the tracks, or just weeping and banging their foreheads on the glass panels, trying to dislodge a trapped Twix.
Regular Tube users develop a particular expression. It is a nice blend of bland disinterest and blase weariness. The more exuberant British passenger might allow themselves a tut, or an exasperated "For God's Sake!" when there is a body (always described as "An incident" ) on the line, or  a convincing-looking conflagration in process. I have been on trains where people tried to make other people, where an entire carriage was so independently drunk that they all fell off the end seat every time the carriage did a bend, then all scrambled back on again (STILL no-one spoke). I have seen flash mobs, flashers, and Flamenco dancers in full flood. My friend Marie sat opposite a man on the way to the Isle of Dogs, who waited until she and he were the only people left on the train,and then undressed down to his socks under cover of the Guardian. When the train drew in to the last stop, he calmly replaced his clothing and alighted. I said "So what did you do?" She replied "I took his Arts Supplement".
This sang-froid is admirable, but makes me wonder if British Loons feel that they have to try harder as a result. A current television programme about the Tube revealed, after some anecdotes from the lost luggage department staff, that it is quite usual for people to travel with a bag of live eels. That would be my defence, were I a chap accused of unseemly wriggling. "I had a bag of live eels which I have since lost the run of" would stand up better in court, I feel, than all this malarkey about playing the phantom banjo. An expression, incidentally, which I now intend to circulate as a euphemism. I do hope it catches on.

Charm School

My generation didn't really think we were going to age. We firmly believed that either Time would pass over us like a hot iron, or that we would all prematurely fry in a nuclear war. One of these things is now definitely not going to happen. There is a massive, noisy youth culture, of which we are now not a part. Some of us have children,mostly as a result of not reading the instructions properly. Some even have grandchildren; and we learn shattering new things every day as a result of our exposure to them, and to other young people who swim into our ken.  We learn words like "nang", and "bare", although of course we must NEVER use them.Previous generation had the luxury of being allowed to retire, both literally and figuratively, from the fray. My lot don't. Due to advances here, and progress there, we are now required to be productive economically, and as aesthetically pleasing as we can manage, for an extra decade or three. I was toying with the idea of becoming a Crone, the other day, as some of you may have read. But I don't think I am ready. I have developed a few prejudices, though. One is a firm belief that no-one under 40 can spell, and the other is that hardly anyone knows about manners. I do not think that young people are more deficient in natural grace than any other generation. Human beings are exactly the same as they have been since the Launch. But they haven't been taught. I used to teach in a lively "vibrant"  area of London, and my students were often very large black boys with elaborate hair and unusual trousers. They would hail me cheerfully in Wood Green High Road, where they would hang, and I would shop. One day a group of them ran into me and my Mamma, when she was on one of her shopping trips to London. We didn't  have a great many homeboys in Fazackerley, and I could see her looking slightly wary as this selection of loping lads approached, pushing each other and using inexplicable slang. Anyway, up they trotted and I made introductions. Gosh, I was proud of them. They all beamed at her,  practically bowed, and then produced snippets of conversational small talk suitable for use at a Buckingham Palace garden party, albeit with less formal grammar.  Not so much as an "F" word did we use, a wild departure from  their general application of it as a verb, adjective and noun. Mum went away convinced that my moaning about their boisterousness and general ability to be trying was completely  unfounded. "They were CHARMING", she enthused. And they were. Because they all had access to a grandmother, often of a redoutable nature. They knew what you did when you met an elderly lady . One  point here is that this small incident gave my Mother a permanent and indelible impression that Tottenham's black male youth were generally a Good Thing, as a result of her sole encounter with one sample. However, she is still dubious about the Spanish, due to an incident with a handbag in Barcelona in 1981. Another is that knowing how to behave in particular situations with specific people is an essential life skill, and requires considerable input from parents, grandparents, and other elders. So I may spend my autumn years setting up a Charm School, instilling polite and considerate behaviour into Yahoos and Hoydens. I shall recruit a number of Barbadian grandmothers, and possibly Dame Maggie Smith.

The Woman In Blackler's

That wise and wonky gentleman, Oscar Wilde once said "I am not young enough to know everything". He may have been spending too much time with the Lower 6th ,which would make one understandably acerbic. I find it fascinating how the Giant Boy knows everything. He does know quite a lot about things of which I know nothing, I admit. And he has skills that I can only marvel at; he can open a door with a key at the first attempt. He knows what wires mean, and can read a meter. I am relieved about that because I was worried that he might have inherited my congenital idiocy. Even people who love me dearly find it trying when I start fumbling, peering,  dropping keys and flailing around generally. The gentler souls keep quiet,and adopt a forebearing expression. More robust types start screaming "For Christ's Sake! How long have you lived here? Why don't you get a torch/miner's lamp attached to your head/guide dog, you silly shortsighted BINT!", after about ten minutes. Less if it's really cold , wet or they are in urgent need of a wee.  Of course, the milder folk are thinking the same thing. Just not saying it. Isn't it a good thing we don't have thought bubbles coming out of our heads, like in cartoons? Satan would only have to arrange this for a week or two and the entire human race would have wiped each other off the planet.
So the GB knows IT ALL, whereas, as Seneca remarked "I am not wise, and never will be". But I am consulted by my friends on a number of matters, hardly any concerned with plugs. Scarcely a day goes by without my views being sought on some matter or another, and in fact, I am now an Agony Aunt, dispensing arch and mannered advice in a monthly magazine. I can only suppose that the human race has reached a sorry pass if I am regarded as a Wise Woman. I may work this up a little, though. As it seems that we are all supposed to work until we drop,our pensions being dangled for ever just out of reach like the grapes of Tantalus;and yet no-one over fifty can get a job, to avoid utter destitution, I may become a Professional Crone.
Every community needs a Crone or two. Soap opera specialises in them, along with Battleaxes, two perfectly good role models for the older woman. Battleaxing isn't really me, too confrontational and shouty, but I think I would make an excellent Crone. I will need a curly grey wig, and will camp it up with latex warts and so on. But stop me if I go for a hump, won't you? Cackling I can do; all the women in my family cackle.
We are generally civilised ladies, even refined, in some cases. But we all laugh like dockers on nitrous oxide. I went to see "The Woman In Black" the other day. Now, there was a super Crone. She had it all going on, from the ominous appearances as a reflection over the right shoulder of Harry Potter, to the hurtling down corridors shrieking into one's face. They say (whoever They are) , that women over fifty become invisible. Not literally, of course, although that might be fun. In Liverpool at least, this has hardly been the case. Everywhere you went was ruled over by women of a certain age with ,shall we say, DECIDED characters. They all shopped in Blackler's. For those of you who , perhaps, inhabit a remote corner of Paraguay, Blackler's Store in Liverpool was the Mecca for Crones. Sadly it is now a Weatherspoons. But in its glory days, you could buy underpinnings of a style and type now as extinct as the farthingale. For the more robust Crone, there were directoire knickers in knitted cotton that went up to a 56 inch waist.There were fleecy-lined Liberty bodices,with and without boning, underskirts in Germolene-coloured Winceyette, and vast flanelette nighties  which boasted their resistance to fire, and also probably a full-scale nuclear bombardment.  You could buy navy-blue lisle stockings, if you were a Staff Nurse, or beige ones if you planned permanent celibacy. My Grandmother used to take me with her when she went to purchase a corselette, or some new suspenders. It was Heaven, and I was allowed to go and ride on the rocking horse, whilst Nan was measured by a woman with a tapemeasure round her neck and a chin for every day of the week.
Blackler's appealed to small children and elderly ladies, but did not attract the all-important 13-19 demographic, and so it died. Had I gone first, I would have haunted it, frightening off the new owners as a useful public-spirited spirit should do. I would have materialised , bawling my head off, in Fabrics, as "The Woman In Blackler's;  floating above "Zips, Buttons, and Haberdashery", and loomed spectrally out of the cheval mirrors in the  Hats section. I would have made that rocking horse go like the clappers every time a shopfitter passed by. And Crones all over Merseyside would have blessed me.

Slut's Corner

The other morning, it struck me that I considered it perfectly normal to be drying a pair of the GB's giant socks by wrapping them round the kettle. He needed to be in school in dry socks, and they had thrown themselves  off the radiator in the night,so were still soggy. I briefly contemplated putting them in the microwave, but some dim recollection of a flaming tea towel and cross firemen held me back. Keeping the GB spruce is a task which requires Jeeves and entire servant body of "Downton Abbey" AND "Upstairs, Downstairs". His enormous canoe-like shoes are covered in mud ( why? how?) when no rain has been seen for weeks. Great flapping shirts go out white in the morning and come in at 4pm caked in grub, bedizened with red Biro  and tattered as to the armpit. His trousers..Oh God, his trousers..
What do they DO at that school? When I visited recently there were no visible signs that lessons were conducted in the trenches of WW1, I saw no septic tank, nor did anyone rush at me with a red pen and scrawl all over my face. Admittedly it was Parent's Evening, so they  mightbe restraining themselves, but I am not sure that anyone else's son comes home looking like they were on their way to a Halloween party. I suspect foul play.
Perversely, when he is not at school, he aspires to the standards of self-presentation of a male model in Italian Vogue. Trainers must be immaculate, frighteningly costly polo shirts are ironed with the deftness of a Japanese paper flower maker, and his hair is a sculptured confection of wonder.
Now, I am a slut, borne of a slut and a neatnik. I rise from a chaotic rubble of single stockings knotted inexplicably round hairbrushes, lost contact lenses, drooping hems fixed with Blu-tack, and missing buttons. Some of my best friends are also sluts, and I must say, they are by far the most relaxing folk to be around. I have lived with neatniks and we drive each other mad. My offices have tended to be untidy, with collapsing piles of files and drawers crammed with spare shoes and half-empty perfume bottles. A dear neatnik friend with whom I worked used to visit me in my office from time-to-time. He would stand chatting to me, all the while tidying  my desk; arranging pens and straightening folders, filling the sellotape dispenser, and removing my lipsticks from the drawing pin holder. I once caught him at home arranging  all the tins  in his kitchen cupboards in alphabetical order, the labels all facing outwards.
I probably should say that I am oddly fastidious when it comes to actual dirt, and that most other sluts are too. We can be utter fashion plates and our personal hygiene is generally irreproachable. You can safely stand next to us on the Tube. However, we have left behind us scenes of ruinous chaos, which we regard as no-one else's business. All the world is a stage, and the slut will strut upon it looking marvellous and trailing clouds of Chanel.However, backstage does not bear close investigation.
So the GB may have Neatnik as his dominant sign, but with Slut Rising. He informs me that it is an immutable law of Nature that I should be his personal attendant... "Until I am eighteen, it's Your Job".   So I quit.
Of course, he will inevitably marry a Slut; people do want to, oddly enough. They are attracted by the air of Bohemian disarray and the unlikely prospect of ever having a conversation about which sheets to buy. This is all very well if fun is what you are  after. There will be plenty of unruly exits from bars, wild laughter, and good-natured drunkenness. But Oh, beware, my son...there will also be many many lost keys, broken heels and visits from glaziers. And while love, which we are reliably informed by Micheal Ball and other modern thinkers, changes everything; there are some things it is powerless to alter. You can love a Neatnik to distraction but still want to lunge over a table to stop them folding Kit Kat wrappers into a tiny, even square.