Niece and nephews

We get drunk, by accident, on Saturday and stay up chatting in the kitchen of our tiny flat until the early hours. The next morning Jack, aged 8, asks why everyone was shouting all night about voting.

There’s masses of pink blossom in drifts all over the tarmac outside our building. Ben, aged 5, inspects the area and says, “It’s nice around here. Like a wedding.”

Aaryanna, aged 2, stands in the doorway with her little muddy coat on, hood up. She has a woollen scarecrow doll under her arm and is ready to leave. She watches her brothers walk away, to go home to a different town, to their different Mum and starts to cry, “I miss my boys.”

Downtown

Tonight the sandstone steeple of the nursery looks starched against the pale blue sky above Shadwell. A flat up and down ironing board of a man with a tonsure and tassels of coarse brown hair combed forward to his eyes and ears stands outside the old Mercury building, hands on hips, surveying the drug rehab centre opposite.

This is where the Battle of Cable Street was fought in 1936, when the good people of London’s East End pushed back the fascist march of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. “They shall not pass”.

Two silver cyclists, all angry helmet and Lycra, bump over a discarded shoe sole. A madman bobs his head by the Doner kebab sign and tries to direct the traffic. Plastic carrier bags are stuck to the pavement by patches of rain, reminding us that this is April, not California.

And here now canvassers for the ‘Respect’ party tell the Muslim electorate not to vote for local Member of Parliament Oona King, a black woman, because she is Jewish.

Ducks in a row

My head is being pounded and disturbed by the weird and the woeful. A man in Essex gets his nose bloodied by a frozen sausage thrown in through the window of his moving car. A pretty girl writes about being hung by a chain around her neck for 80 days of rape and torture by a Belgian paedophile. Punchable nuns. Graffiti on a wooden board in Leman Street: ‘Minty Burger’ makes me smile. Kittyhawks. A majestic fuck. Pope Schmope. Hardliner. German. I don’t care.

My heart is on a big wheel soaring up above the lights of the fair until I go over the rise again and sink slowly down into the dark of the greasy, clanging machinery.

There’s a little blue and yellow striped school tie with grubby neck elastic lying on its back in the gutter next to a broken plastic fork on Woodseer Street, near where a shiny man stopped me to find out if he was heading the right way to Brick Lane. I wanted to ask him how he got to here and where had he come from and why was he going there and when had he first thought that maybe he was lost.

Leaving work, full of muddle and grief, I heard birdsong on the staircase and I don’t know how when there are no windows and the concrete and bricks of the office are flanked by more concrete and bricks of more offices and roads thick with diesel and commuter commotion. But there it was. Tweeting and warbling. Filling out all the crushed space in my chest with primal joy and colouring the empty magnolia walls with paradise.

Aye aye

I want one of these ...

Hee

My Dad, on the subject of the marriage of Charles and Camilla:

"I don't think it'll last."

Airports

Our returning flight from Nice landed at Luton Airport at 11pm last Saturday night. We had a good laugh about the fact that it is called ‘London Luton Airport’. Don’t be fooled, folks! Luton is way beyond the M25. To make things worse, the plane flew right over central London, tantalising the passengers with the beautiful giant circuit board of landmarks and neon and countless bustling lives. And it kept on flying… away from the bright lights, away from the bridges and the sparkle of the Thames, away from the intricate sprawl of the suburbs and into the dark emptiness of unpopulation.

No one really wanted to be arriving back in the UK at that time of on a Saturday night. We ached to be home on the sofa with a glass of wine and a bunch of happy memories. But as Tom Waits so rightly says, “if it’s worth the going, it’s worth the ride” so I dug deep to find the patience to enjoy the final leg of the journey.

I was panicking a little bit about the retrieval of our bags. We had suffered a small delay by being in a long non-EU passport queue for immigration control, on account of Matt being a Johnny foreigner and all that. I snuck him through with me though (oh the irony of demanding priority attention for the man in the wheelchair, who was actually the only passenger able to queue whilst sitting down… I didn’t notice us getting any dirty looks but I bet there were some) and rushed to Carousel 2 which was heaving and grinding its way around its own bends endlessly. I waited for a while, staring at nothing, shifting from foot to foot, rather grubby, increasingly eager to get to bed.

There was a tannoy announcement to say that the luggage from the Malaga flight would now be coming out on Carousel 2 as well. Passengers from genteel Nice convulsed and shrank as the lumpen masses swarmed towards the conveyer belt.

A woman standing near me, who had – by definition – just returned from a foreign holiday (in the French fucking Riviera no less), who was obviously well-dressed, who was with friends and/or family, who was well-spoken (and presumably educated to a reasonable level), who looked healthy, who was clearly not starving or being bombed or tortured, this woman actually had the nerve to say out loud, “This must be what hell is like”.

I have said many, many such stupid tasteless offensive things in my middle class life but that did not stop me from despising her with every fibre of my hypocritical sleepy being.

I befriended the beleaguered father next to me. We had spotted him in the French departure lounge and joked about him being tranqued to obliviland in order to deal with the stresses and strains of having five rambunctious children. He and his wife appeared to be very indulgent parents putting up with all kinds of shenanigans from their brood. In person he was more pleasant than I had expected, although I did cringe inside when he encouraged one of his daughters – who looked about ten – to try to work out the speed at which the belt was moving so that she could calculate the distance it would travel in one rotation. It was nearly midnight, for fuck’s sake! As the time dragged on, it became clear to me that this poor guy was hanging on by a thread. Completely worn out, struggling to keep his wriggly family in one place, worried about leaving bags behind, concerned that his children were tired, as desperate to get home as the rest of us and all the while he was determined not to get grumpy. So, my heart went out to him when his little girl looked up at his wan, puffy face and said, “Daddy, what’s a world war?”

A dedication

Jez has a head shaped like an anvil. He combs his hair with a pork chop.

Jez is quite handsome and always dresses immaculately.

Jez tries to be cool and show off about carrying condoms but he muddles up his slang and calls them ‘jimmies’ instead of ‘johnnies’.

Jez once got whiplash when someone flicked a raisin at his forehead.

Jez recently explained away the strange fridge odour by telling the entire office that it was down to his ‘salami deodorant’.

Jez needs constant attention.

Jez can eat six inch long cream cakes in one mouthful.

Jez had an Uncle Pod and an Auntie Vim.

Jez sent me the only text I got on the day of my godfather’s funeral, saying that he hoped things would go as well as could be expected.

Jez shakes constantly. He blames the caffeine but is quietly terrified that he has Parkinson’s.

Jez doesn’t get drunk, he gets ‘sloshed’. He uses words like ‘twerp’ and reads first edition romantic literature in the noble savage tradition.

Jez fancies Sandra Bullock and listens to Boney M.

Jez went out with Dorothy a couple of times. On their first date, she announced in the pub that she didn’t want to drink her pint because she thought the bar staff were trying to poison her. Instead of dismissing her as being totally doolally, he offered to swap drinks and let her have his pint, which touched her beyond words.

Jez has mental health support needs that I am not qualified to work with. I think he may have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Jez’s Mum died when he was little. He makes jokes about it but misses her terribly everyday. His computer passwords are always variants of her name.

Nice

I spent fucking WEEKS trying to find a cheeky last minute deal holiday that guaranteed being suitable for Matt. It was a pain in the arse but that's another story [and one which has resulted in us deciding to launch a website for travellers in wheelchairs - more about that later.]

Planning the trip with our dear friend Jobi, we all agreed on some basic requirements:

Being able to have a drink outside without freezing
Being able to roll around without having to resort to cabs or public transport
Being somewhere photogenic

And Nice delivered all that and more by the shedload. What a gorgeous, surprising place it is. Full of art and energy and all the best things about France.

Some of my photos are here in the Cote d’Azur gallery.

Now that we are back, I am trying to get organised to write a bit more regularly. Apologies for all the big gaps, if there is anyone out there still visiting Thunderglades.

Damn my whorish highly-paid day job with its constant and unreasonable demands.