A riot going on

Having spent last night listening to a continual wail of sirens and alarms, this morning on my walk to work through Oval, Kennington, Elephant & Castle and Borough there was no evidence of civil atrocities.  Not a surprise - the real local action last night was in Clapham Junction and Walworth Road.  But on Borough High Street there was a police van parked next to a coffee shop.  The rozzer in the passenger seat was fast asleep.  His colleague stood outside on the phone, rubbing his unshaven cheeks and looking haunted.  The two guys in the back were both staring blankly through the window.

They must have had a rotten night.  This video of Clapham Junction says it all.  I once visited the fancy dress shop there to hire a Henry VIII costume with a preposterous codpiece.  It was an old-school costume place: higgledy-piggledy rooms and a range of stock that showed the fickle nature of fancy dress trends, with Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mingling with Ali G and Austin Powers.  Last night it was burnt to a cinder, having first been looted for its masks.  The fire also destroyed the residential flats above and the record shop next door.

As I walked home last night the staff of Everfresh, my superb local corner shop on Brixton Road, were standing outside the shop, watching the street.  The nearest disturbance was a couple of miles away, but they were still visibly panicked, and rightly so.  If the idiot mob had (or do, tonight) come that way they may have destroyed on a whim their entire livelihood, a business to which they have devoted every day of every week for years.

That’s the absolute, overriding madness of this all.  It is local communities turning inwards and wrecking their own amenities and local economy.  The cackling lemmings streaming in and out of the smashed Debenhams, waving trainers and cheap perfume, have no agenda or cause.  They just want free stuff now, regardless of the cost in the end.

I have no idea what will happen tonight, and I think my part of South London probably has too few consumer goods shops to smash up to be too badly affected.  But I don't think that will be any comfort to the guys at Everfresh, and it certainly won’t be to the owner of the fancy dress shop.

Porklife

Am off work this week and bloody loving it.  I even took a jog around Kennington park this morning, accompanied by the steady hail of local squirrels dropping their breakfast nuts in disbelief.  Three startled pigeons slamming into tree trunks and an inadequate number of laps later I strode out of the south gate newsagentwards for my morning milk and Guardian.

Disaster, though - my favoured shop on Brixton Road had the former but not the latter.  I was forced to try the shop known to me and my girlfriend as Dog Piss Onions, after we reported to the owner that an enormous Alsation had just widdled all over his fresh produce and he responded with barely a shrug.  Rationalising that a similar attack on the newspapers would be easier to detect I braved it, and strode in brandishing my milk from the previous shop.

Me: "Just the Guardian please"
Dog Piss Onions owner: "I'll have to charge you for the milk as well"
Me: "You wag.  Here's the quid for the Gaurdian, cheers"
DPOO: "No, really.  You need to pay for the milk"
Me: "I just walked past you while holding it.  This plainly isn't your milk"
DPOO: "Sir, I NEED to charge you for the MILK!"
Me: (hotly) "You REALLY don't!"
DPOO: "Ha ha! I am joking of course sir.  You have a good day now"

This country.

Talking of this country, I spent last week in a totally different one.  The missus and I vacationed on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy, sharing our hotel with Germans wearing unironic moustaches and a frankly weird amount of lesbians.  Having accidentally booked a package holiday on lastminute.com we received a cultural overview of Italy on the coach from the airport ("Now, to order what I think we'd all call a "real" coffee...") and were given a welcome pack which included a definition of bolognese ("a meat and tomato based sauce").  Unfortunately the translations page omitted the Italian for "Thomas Cook are incompetent pricks", which would have been useful when we discovered that they'd taken our money and not told the hotel we were coming.  It's a real larf changing rooms three times in seven days, let me tell you.

Luckily the rest of the holiday was excellent, thanks for asking - sun, clear water, tasty food, foxy Italian wo many areas of historical interest.  And now I've got this week off too.  And a bank holiday weekend.  Lovely stuff.

The grief-driven news cycle

Having covered Newsnight recently I avoided writing about the recent Jon Venables-themed Question Time discussion.  There's only so much bragging about watching high-brow TV (albeit while covered in breadcrumbs and flicking through insane Red Dwarf tributes on You Tube) that one blog can sustain.  If I had, I would have mentioned the contrast between Will Self's humane common sense and the soon-to-be Baroness Vorderman's shrill tub-thumping.  As Self twittered shortly afterwards, "I'll have an F and a U please, Carol".

David Mitchell is very good in the Observer today on the public fascination with Venables' crime and the citation of it in any wider debate:

The Venables case is so horrifying, unusual and unrepresentative, such an outlier on the graph, that making it the focus of a discussion about how convicted criminals should be treated not only perilously weights the debate against clemency but is logically absurd.  You may as well cite Adolf Hitler as a reason for not encouraging children to paint.

I concur.  I also think it is alarming that the grief-scrambled pronouncements of Denise Bulger are being treated by the mainstream media (current BBC headline - "James Bulger's mother calls for commissioner's sacking") as proposals worthy of ministerial debate.  As the person whose life has been most forcefully and permanently ruined by James (never Jamie - that was a newspaper invention, as if his victimhood needed any more emphasis) Bulger's death, she is also the least qualified person in the country to have a say in the handling of his killers within a legal system built on impartiality.  Yet whenever the case seeps back into the headlines she is rushed onto breakfast TV to rail against her son's killers, which is then reported as if it should have bearing on judicial process.  Surely it is the greatest kind of cruelty to repeatedly give her such a platform, and so the expectation that her wishes will be carried out, when they can not and should not be?

Anyway, I doubt this sort of thing is what you're here for. Somehow this blog has found its way onto a site called Bloggapedia, where it is disdainfully described as covering "a range of fascinating and essential subjects such as [my] domestic cleaning habits, proudly obscure musical tastes and endless British social hang-ups".  I supposed that's fair enough.  Expect posts in the coming weeks on my dysfunctional relationship with Windolene, the underappreciated genius of Baader Meinhoff and why I find the whole nod/smile/avoid eye contact dynamic tricky when walking towards someone you know down a long stretch of office corridor.

Oh, and the Kennington Park laboratory experiment made an unwelcome return on Friday morning.  I intend to invest in some bolt cutters.

Parklife

Every morning I walk through Kennington Park on my way to work. It's usually quite pleasant - the squirrels scampering, the joggers huffing and puffing, the council estate devil dogs tearing across the grass, weights dangling from their necks as they train for their next cage fight.

Unfortunately whoever opens the various gates each morning has set up his own version of the laboratory experiment where a rat has to sniff out some cheese in a maze. The gate in is always open, but it's become a lucky dip as to which gate out will be unlocked. On Wednesday, already late for an early meeting, I was blocked at two exits and and ended up doubling back half the length of the park.

I assume I was being watched by a park keeper wearing a lab coat and perched on a tree branch, making notes on his clipboard. "Subject 17: grows increasingly panicked and kicks a pile of leaves in frustration. Other active subjects openly amused by this display of effeminate rage. Note: tomorrow, see if Subject 17 is fooled by fake Exit sign pointing towards pit filled with dog crap".