Room Hunting

I have commented over the past few years how traditional modes of residence have come back into style as work in the UK has become more geographically concentrated, pay has fallen in real terms and the cost of accommodation has risen particularly rapidly.  I guess I am wrong to have ever thought that I should perceive what I think of as ‘old fashioned’ modes of living as such.  It is clear that they are, in fact, part of lifestyles of the 2010s and completely bury the myth of a ‘property-owning democracy’ that was once peddled in this country.  Thus, I guess it is unsurprising that as a man in my forties, I have lived with my parents: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/never-as-bad-as-we-had-it.html ; in a guest house: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html  and as a lodger: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/living-withas-lodger.html  Working in London I am again looking for accommodation, a process which is fraught with difficulty.  I am more alert to the hazards of 419 scammers in the market place for renting rooms: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/419-scams-connected-with-renting-room.html  and so far, this time round seem to have only encountered one.  This was a very low-key one without all the grandeur and fake photos of those I ran into back in 2013. 

One lesson I learnt back in 2009 is that there is no point in me responding to advertisements for rooms.  There are a number of characteristics which rule me out.  First is my age.  I am now in my mid-40s and for some reason people letting rooms seem to feel that there is something sinister about a man my age renting a room.  Even when they say in emails that they are happy to have me, meeting me they change their minds and I suddenly find the room has been ‘allocated to someone else’.  I accept I am overweight and unattractive, but I am clean and tidy and do domestic chores.  However, I clearly do not fit the image that people have of a young, dynamic businessman.  If I did, then presumably I would not have to rent a room. 

I think part of the problem is that they think that I will not tolerate poor things about the room.  I certainly think that if I am paying rent for a room, I should get all that is advertised.  Perhaps I am overly demanding in expecting cooking facilities and heating.  If you have a cooker and a heater, then they should work.  However, maybe this is too demanding and is what rules me out when there are others who will accept no heating or no cooking facility.  For me it is rather selfish because I know it is far more costly if I eat out every meal and I find I cannot stomach living on sandwiches constantly. 

The other key factor is that I am a man.  Around 75% of the advertisements I see specify that only women can rent the room.  At least people say this now up front, whereas in the past you had to ring or go there to find out ‘well, we’re actually looking for a woman’.  Yes, it is prejudicial, but I would rather see the prejudice before I waste my time.  Of course, no-one is allowed to specify ethnicity.  I am a very pale Caucasian.  I find that other people in that category do not want to rent to people like me because of the concerns about.  I get on far better with landlords/ladies who are South or East Asian.  However, not being from that background myself I am sometimes jumped over by someone ‘from the home country’.  This happens even when I have said I like a room and want to rent it.  Of course, in some cases it is just because they have met me and now the other negative aspects kick in.

One key negative aspect for me is the company that employs me and the fact that I now do administrative work.  For some reason there is a prejudice against people who do not work in making earnings.  Strangely I was told that people prefer a salesman on commission to someone who does a solid administrative job day-in/day-out.  Again, I think this comes down to the sense that an administrator renting a room must be a serial killer.  However, ironically, I am actually a better lodger as my income does not fluctuate and I certainly do not have alcoholic lunches and noisy celebrations the way some people in sales still do.  However, it is clear that it is better for me to lie about where I work and the nature of my work or run up against this prejudice.

The other thing is people’s sense of geography.  If I say that I want a room in North London, then clearly I will consider places in North-West London or North-East London and having a car and a parking space at work, I am not tied to bus, tube or train lines the way that many people are.  However, somewhere in South London or East London are of no use to me and it wastes my time to have to deal with these people contacting me.  Conversely, when I put an advertisement about being in a certain radius of work, I found I got no responses.  When I took this criterion off, I then had loads of people contacting me with properties precisely within that circle.  It is clear that, certainly in London, that people have little idea where their house is in relationship to other areas or even points of the compass.  I suppose if you travel just from home to work you do not gather this information.

I accept rent by the week.  However, there is now this common thing of accepting weekly rent and then after a period of time requesting the ‘make-up’ rent for the months which have passed.  This is because, aside from February in non-leap years, months have 2-3 days more than 4 x 7 days = 28 days.  Rent by calendar month appears to have disappeared and rental weeks that go over months also appear to be too difficult for landlords/ladies to work out, so you have this cluster of days, which add up to 29 days in a normal year, 30 days in a leap year.  Thus, you can suddenly be charged with an additional four weeks’ rent.  Storage places pull off this trick as well.  A key problem is that some charge you for it even when only four or six months have passed, so you have only tallied up a fraction of this additional month. 

I have now tried to rent three rooms only to have my application rejected or reneged on at the last moment.  I know the competition for renting a room is very high in London, but it is clear that my optimism that as when living in Exeter and Uxbridge that I would be able to find a place within a few weeks, has been entirely misplaced.  Though my income has fallen I did think I could rent somewhere at the same kind of level, with a 25% leeway, as I did last year.  It is clear that I need to accept that I am not going to find somewhere even within those parameters now and will have to put up with an unheated room or one with no access to cooking facilities if I want to rent for £4-500 per month.  Saying that, at this moment, I cannot even afford that.  I am not clear how I can go any lower in terms of finding somewhere to rent.  A job outside London or with higher pay is clearly necessary but is as difficult to conjure up than an affordable room as a lodger.

The Olympics Is Wrecking So Much Of UK Life

There was an article in 'The Guardian' on Saturday 21st July, by Caroline Davies entitled 'World awards UK gold medal in whingeing'.  It reported how foreign commentators have noted how irritated much of the British population appears to be at the Olympics.  I doubt that it is something unique to the UK.  I remember all the complaints around the financial mess which were the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the fact that facilities for the 2004 Athens Olympics were incomplete.  I certainly imagine Greece regrets the cost of hosting the Olympics now that it is so short of funds.

British complaints are not about the Olympics per se, but how they have been handled by the government.  You can certainly see enthusiasm for the games wherever the Olympic torch has been run around the UK.  People have been standing outside largely in pouring rain to watch a matter of seconds of a person running by with an Olympic torch, most of the time a person that they have no idea who they are.  Yet, they are still cheered on.  Tonbridge in Kent which was missed out by the incredibly winding route, had Dame Kelly Holmes a champion British athlete bring her torch (each of the 8000 runners gets to take their own torch home) to a specially organised event so that town did not feel left out.

Enthusiasm does not seem to be missing.  In the sport, I follow, cycling, the sense of anticipation following not only Bradley Wiggins winning 2 stages of the Tour de France and the race overall, but 3 stage wins by Mark Cavendish and one each by Chris Froome and David Millar in that race, given that these are 4 of the 5 men who will be on the Team GB road racing team, is at a very high level.  I am sure among fans of other sports featured, there is similar anticipation.  The problem for the average British person, whether a fan of any sports or not, is how badly this has been handled by the government.

The ticket process looked to be a shambles from the start and continues to be.  No-one seemed to know anyone who got a ticket.  The websites kept crashing at the time.  Yet, despite massive demand, it appears lots, literally hundreds of thousands of tickets have been left over unsold.  Thus, the view for fans is that they were somehow barred from getting tickets due to the process, with corporate buyers winning out over the average public and yet it has now resulted in loads of empty seats.  I do not know how it could have been handled any better, but there must be people who know.  Have the British not gone and talked to the Australians who ran the 2000 Sydney Olympics which are often rated as the most successful in recent years?  The way the tickets have been handled set the tone for what followed.

In the weeks running up to the Olympics, it has been as if there is an impending disaster is about to hit the UK.  I am sure that if it was known that a meteorite was heading towards Earth or very vigorous solar flares were anticipated, the information would be commuicated in exactly the same way as the approach of the Olympics has been.  Months ago there were warning notices at service stations and across London, about how companies needed to change their delivery times as they would not be able to get supplies into London.  Now ordinary drivers are being told to stay clear of large parts of southern England.  In a country where the train service is now often beyond the income of ordinary people to use, this simply adds to the sense that this is an event for the elites not the average UK citizen.  This is accentuated by the special lanes which have been carved out of London's roads.  Increasingly as a traveller in the UK you get the feeling that you are in a replica of medieval Japan where the ordinary people were expected to vacate the road and bow down in obeyance if a samurai wanted to ride by.

In Swindon in Wiltshire there are warnings about traffic disruption if you are going even in the direction of Weymouth in Dorset where the Olympic sailing events are being held, let alone trying to visit that town.  Swindon lies 142 Km (89 miles) from Weymouth, which suggests the vast area over which Olympic disruption is impinging on the ordinary public. South West Trains which runs the trains that go to Weymouth  have said that they cannot cope with the extra 80,000 passengers per day expected to use their services.  Contrary to the official advice not to attempt to drive to Weymouth and to use public transport, the train company incredibly is advising people not to attempt to use its service and to go by car instead! They have had years of time to prepare and yet they have failed.

The failure of the companies which make millions in profit but provide a declining service makes up a great deal of the problem and a focus of complaints.  South West Trains are not alone.  The G4S scandal has already attracted parliamentary attention and I imagine they are not going to be the last company to be called to account.  However, the problem has its roots further back.  During the Thatcher era 1979-91 and under her successors Major and Blair, there was a faith that private provision would always be better than anything the state could provide.  There was a lazy assumption that companies are interested in quality of service as well as profit.  Yet, year after year and now decade after decade, in those semi-monopolies, we find that in fact prices rise and service deteriorates.  I quite expect to hear that the companies supplying water and electricity to the Olympic site will soon be saying that water and electricity supplies in the surrounding area will have to be cut in order to supply the games.  It is no surprise that G4S could not supply enough security staff despite 100,000 applicants and unemployment at the highest level for years.  Their services are appalling all of the time anyway, especially handling prisoners.  Giving them an expensive monopoly for the Olympics was not going to change how they approach business.  Too many ministers feel inhibited from challenging companies employed by the government, despite paying them so much to be inefficient.  New Labour would not do it, nor will the coalition.  They are all brain-washed by the Thatcherite view that 'private, for-profit is best' so mentally cannot handle the fact when yet again this actually turns out not to be the case.  The current government loves to monitor and direct all aspects of life apart from companies making vast profits.  You only have to look at the lack of ability to curtail the immoral behaviour of the Murdoch press to not be surprised that it keeps happening.

The security situation is a key one for the UK because we are such a paranoid, militarised state.  It has been noted by 'The Guardian' how much the military has come into the foreground of British society, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/where-did-uk-veterans-day-suddenly-come.html  In many ways it has always been there, but the British of the past have overlooked this because of our feeling that to be a militarised state is to resemble the Prussians.  The UK is constantly involved in wars, in a way that our neighbours in Europe generally are not.  To support such activity we have given the military a raised status.  The implication is that unless you blindly support whatever military action the government (or the US government) has decided on, then you are betraying the service people injured or killed in these conflicts.  Ironically, many of the people Help For Heroes and Military Wives support would not need such help if the government did not keep shoving them into wars that had no chance of any British victory particularly with decreasing numbers of soldiers available and chronically under-equipped for over a decade now.

Paranoia is patriotic in Britain something we learnt from the Americans especially during the Bush era.  If you do not rush around screaming about the potential, often simply imagined threats to your country, then you are not patriotic:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/be-patriotic-be-paranoid.html  This is a bitter development in the UK if you remember back to how much better we handled actual, regular terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s and is very ironic now that the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' slogan prepared for use in the Second World War has become such a fashion accessory.  That would probably be a better attitude for handling the Olympics that the various flavours of paranoia reaching from panic about traffic jams to the myths around people being excluded to attending events if wearing branded items not provided by the Olympics' sponsors.  The militarisation and the paranoia has nicely bisected with the fact that troops are now being used to fill the gaps left by G4S's inability to employ enough staff.  I do not know if anyone can tell me if there will be more troops in uniform at the London Olympics than there were at the 1936 Berlin Olympics or the 2008 Beijing Olympics; maybe we will only get the Bronze in that competition.  Do not even get me started on the missiles stationed on rooftops across East London.  Anything being shot down at that stage damage the area anyway.  I guess it is more about pushing the incoming missile towards areas of East London like Hackney or Bow or Stepney(of course not to The City or Docklands where too many elite people will be) or Barking or Dagenham, rather than Stratford, so as to cut down on the policing costs next time riots come to London.

So, what have the Olympics done for us?  Well, I have not even touched on the laughing stock that featuring the moronic buffoon that is our Mayor of London, Boris Johnson makes of absolutely everyting he is involved with.  I think we should have simply had him appointed Chief Jester by the Queen in addition to his duties and then have one of his sinister and less comic deputies appear as Acting Mayor of London.  At least then there would be a gramme of gravitas.  Even George Bush Jr. could pull off looking suitably serious at serious events even if he would fluff his lines; Johnson cannot even manage that.  The other thing that is worth criticising is the impact on the internet.

The impact on the internet and the consequences for British business were highlighted a couple of weeks back by the BBC.  It has not been discussed much partly because the coalition, as noted above, tries to pretend it is a government which actually helps business, and not simply those companies that contain its friends or give generous donations to the Conservative Party.  Yet, having been in areas where the Olympic torch has been passing, I know that even that impacts on the internet connection.  At first I thought it was an attempt to compel us to abandon our computers and get out to watch the parade.  I did that for the sake of the 10-year old who lives in our house and saw tens of metres of procession which simply summed up many of the problems I have commented on.  There were tens of police either in standard uniform on motorbikes or in the natty grey running kit; there were numerous corporate sponsor vehicles and then lost amongst all this was an individual carrying the torch.  It perfectly summed up paranoia and corporate greed all in one.  I did wonder about the runners.  They receive high level protection, with four police staff runing with them, but what happens once they have handed over the torch?  Suddenly they transmogrify back into ordinary people.  If they are such a target while running with the torch, why not some minutes later?  Again, to me this seemed to sum up how narrow the perspective has been of the organisers at every single level.

Anyway, we have been warned by BBC News Breakfast programme to expect a similar fall off in internet service during the Olympics.  It will be interesting if some econometrics specialist can subsequently tell us how much damage that will do to the British economy.  Every bank holiday we are told how many billions of pounds are lost because people have one day extra off.  I would guess, on the same scale that more will be lost through damage to the internet connections over two weeks than is gained through money brought into the UK.  There clearly is already a loss given that troops who already had a job are being used for security rather than 3000 unemployed people getting a job however temporarily.  Increasingly, it is apparent, that the disruption to the UK which is of a scale far greater even than the recent flooding, is going to damage it at a time when its economy and society are already at a low ebb.  Britain is not going to come out of the Olympics unscathed.  The legacy is pretty illusory.  Yes, some people might take up some sports they might not have done before, but you could have pumped the money spent on the Olympics into local authorities into reducing the charges at leisure centres to achieve that, without all the traffic disruption, missile sites and paranoia.

The best way for the UK to have handled the Olympics is to have held our hands up and said, 'no, we are incapable of doing this without disrupting the UK economy and having to try to terrify much of the population; we have no companies that can deliver what they are promising' and then in the spirit of international friendship offered to help Dublin or Paris or Brussels actually host the games with British troops (out of uniform given sensitivities) along with Boris Johnson, packed off to the new host city to run it all.  Then Britain could get on without the disaster warnings, the militarisation and the paranoia and without the damage to the UK economy which is going to follow in the wake of this fiasco.

P.P. 31/07/2012
Since posting this I have been reminded by people about how poor the logo for the 2012 Olympics was, almost entirely illegible and also that the 'mascots' were so alien as to frighten children, a major failure when you are trying to peddle millions of soft toys.  These things do not damage the every day life of most people, though may have had an impact on some retailers grasping for any sales in this recession.  The error over the North and South Korea flags was typical of Britain.  David Cameron must be the only world leader who has been compelled to apologise to North Korea.  Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for the US Presidency made an utter fool of himself, though apparently he has no foreign policy advisor.  Saying that even Michelle Obama made fauxs pas when she and her husband visited, but that was simply about the snobbery of the Queen, rather than what Romney has done, offend one of his country's prime allies and the only one which has stood by it when the last Republican President, George Bush Jr. decided to go to war.   You do wonder if there is anyone left in the USA who is white and works in business and has any brains.  Perhaps they have all emigrated; clearly they are not going into politics any more.  If Bush and Romney are the best the Republicans can produce you wonder what the men they beat are like.  The UK has been a close ally of the USA for over sixty years so to be able to offend it takes some really misguided talent.  The concern is, when he travels to countries who are more sensitive to such things and whose displeasure can have an impact on the USA, that he may actually provoke violent attacks, maybe even a war.  This may is a danger to world peace.

P.P. 03/08/2012
One thing that I was only alerted to recently was the impact that the Olympics have had on postal services in and out of London.  One form of special delivery has been suspended for the duration of the games and letters posted first class in London will now take a day longer than usual to arrive.  Despite this, the post office guarantees to make available stamps featuring gold-medal winning British competitors a day after they have won their medal and to paint postboxes close to where the competitor lives.  I do wonder about their sense of priority.

P.P. 05/08/2012
The detrimental impact on the economy of the Olympics, especially in London continues.  Shopping centres across the capital are deserted.  This is not really suprising as if you drive towards London, even 25 Km (15 miles) out you see flashed up on the motorway 'Avoid Central London until 15th August' as if there is some immense natural disaster occurring across the city.  These signs were up even before the games began.  It is in fact a great time to visit Central London, as many of the attractions are deserted.  'The Guardian' reported yesterday that you could get on the London Eye after only 10 minutes of waiting rather than the 1 hour of queuing which is usually the case and museums and other attractions are empty.  The British are excellent at panicking as was seen earlier this year when even talks about a potential oil tanker drivers' strike drove people to rush to fill up with petrol, often at risk to their health.  The strike never occurred.  With the Olympics, the organisers' assumption has been that London would be in chaos and the warnings that have been hammered into us for months now, have made many people simply assume London is a no-go area.  It has impacted across the locations.  I have noted above that there was an assumption that Weymouth would be a no-go area, so people are simply avoiding that town and the surrounding countryside too.  Apparently as a result, attractions in Weymouth are closing down due to insufficient people turning up.  By making it appear that the infrastructure of the UK was going to collapse under the weight of the Olympics, the government has insured that it will not simply by scaring hundreds of thousands of people away, at a time when the tourist industry actually needed a boost.  It is sickening to see how many empty seats there are at so many Olympic events, because corporate guests cannot be bothered to turn up.  They should simply go into the streets of Stratford and hand out tickets to people.  The people of East London have to put up with enough on a daily basis anyway, they deserve something free.  Even if they sell the tickets on, it will stimulate the grey economy of the region which is actually a key factor there.  The UK could probably not have run the Olympics any more ineffectually than it has.  However, it has shown that fear is a key drive in British civil society, constantly fanned by the government for its own purposes.  Consequently in this situation we are reaping what has long been sown.

Laund(e)rette Life

The demise of launderettes/laundrettes (the first 'e' seems optional and however it is spelt, it is most often pronounced simply as 'laun-drette'; apparently called laundromats in the USA) has long been promised, but they still seem to cling on.  I have spent a lot of my time in launderettes over the years both in the UK and in Germany and have a wide range of experiences in them.  They are a feature of many high streets in the UK and other countries and though their purpose is the same, i.e. to provide somewhere for people to wash their clothes and bedding, they vary considerably.  For someone, like me, who enjoys mid-20th century modernist architecture and typography, launderettes often have a wonderfully dated feel.  You certainly can have the sensation when sitting in one that little has changed from 1975 and, in some cases, 1955.  In contrast, some have become very funky.  The one I used to see in central London in the mid-1990s equipped with sofas and a pool table seems to have gone, but I passed one the other day offering coffee and a chance 'to chill out' and it is the second one in recent weeks that I have seen offering internet access while you launder.

The reason why launderettes persist is because many people live in small, jammed flats, bedsits and other facilities without a (working) washing machine.  With local authorities housing people in bed & breakfast hotels and other such locations there are many dependent on a laundrette to wash their clothing.  Though I know some universities have closed their campus launderettes, students living out in the town often still need them, because landlords/ladies are often slow to replace washing machines which are liable to break down quickly if five adult residents are using them week in/week out rather than a nuclear family.  In addition, even in family homes, having a washing machine can be a challenge.  I used to live in a well-equipped flat in Poplar, East London, but the kitchen had been designed to hold only a very narrow washing machine.  When this broke down there were no longer any washing machines on the market that could fit the slot in kitchen unit.  It subsequently turned out that the machine had been sabotaged by the plumber.  Upset at being chastised by the landlord when he found him lying in the bath smoking, he rearranged the pipes so they flowed upwards and wedged a sponge into the pipe for good measure.  The advantage of that was it only blocked after a while.  Anyway, before all this was uncovered I ended up using the launderette from which many of my stories come.  Even in the house I live in at present, the previous owners put the washing machine into the kitchen unit so precisely that it was impossible to remove when it broke down.  A lot of people seem to forget that the way to get a washing machine (and I have installed a handful) into a slot is to 'step' it, i.e. move it side-to-side as if it is walking.  With insufficient or no gap around the machine, you cannot step it out.  It is impossible to pull out a washing machine especially one that has been allowed to settle in its slot over months or years.  In this case we literally had to saw off the side of the unit before we could remove the washing machine and get a working one in.

So, as a student, tenant and home owner I have had recourse to use launderettes.  There seems to be an infinite variety, but if I outline some of the ones I have used over the past 20 years, I think it will give you a flavour of the kind of establishments you can find in the British high street.  I first regularly used a launderette when I went to university.  There was a spin dryer in my hall and an ironing room, but no washing machine.  Probably sensible given there were 20 people per kitchen.  The campus laundrette was a classic of its kind, built in the late 1960s it looked a decade older.  It was all linoleum on the floor and large, pale yellow, upright washing machines and vast hot dryers.  It was always very busy, but unlike launderettes in the high street its clientele were all of a particular age, usually 18-19 and 20-1 (1st and 3rd year undergraduates) with the occasional older postgraduate thrown in.  Many of these people were inexperienced at washing clothes.  Many got distracted while doing the job and it was not uncommon to find a full set of cold wet clothes left in a washing machine long after their cycle was over.

Living out in my second year, I started using a launderette at the end of my road.  It was small and the washing machines ran parallel to the street rather than at right angles as is common.  It was all dark wood panelling.  Nothing exceptional happened there.  It was near enough to my house that I could leave clothes there and go home so there was little time for interaction with other customers.  Back on campus in my third year, I realised I could save money by handwashing my clothes in my bath.  I was fortunate to be among some of the first students to have an en-suite bathroom.  These came in the late 1980s when universities realised that if they built accommodation like that they could charge conference attenders a daily rate that was the same as the weekly rate paid by students during term-time.  Business people do not want a student room, they want something looking like a hotel room, so some lucky students, me included (being slightly older than the average undergraduate I believe helped my luck) got our own bathrooms/laundry.

Moving to Norwich began my real encounters with the more eccentric side of launderettes.  I lived equidistant from three and went round and tried each out.  The first was quite small, but looked fine.  There were two attendants, it was bright and airy and had comfortable chairs to sit on.  It seemed that this would be a suitable launderette for me.  However, by the time of the second visit, I realised that a trip to that launderette would always be a lengthy one.  It was a place where the customer came last.  The two attendants spent all their time simply washing the clothes of their clearly very extended family, each huge bag was referred to by name and you soon learnt all about their various aunts, sisters-in-law, cousins, etc.  If you got a machine they would glower at you and hassle you to use a shorter cycle and trying to get a drying machine was impossible as they filled them with enough coins to keep them running for an hour.  I guess the owner simply made their money off these two women.  It may have been the time of day I went (early afternoon, which I had imagine would be a quiet time), but given that there were two other launderettes around I went off to try them.

The second one was in a strange little shopping centre with a flat roof and dark wood panelling that made it look like a ski resort from 1966.  The launderette here was run by a man.  It was immaculate.  The linoleum shone as did the stainless steel machines.  The walls were decorated with huge jigsaw puzzles made up and sealed behind plastic.  The man trouble was the owner who seemed to want to instruct you in minute detail about every aspect of his launderette.  If you spilt even a few crumbs of washing powder he would rush out and wipe it up all a terribly over-solicitous manner which made you feel guilty for dirtying his pristine establishment.  Everything worked well, but I found the experience so stressful that I never returned.

The final launderette was fine and was the one I used throughout the rest of my time in Norwich.  Some of the washing machines leaked, but it was clean enough and the attendants neither cared too much nor too little.  It had the bright blue style and big windows of the family-obsessed one, with more space and an 'L' of machines with the join of the shape facing outwards to the door.  You went in, did the business and came out.  It was in this launderette and inspired by it that I wrote: 'Sure Plays A Mean Pinball' - http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/04/sure-plays-mean-pinball-short-story.html  though I relocated it back to the West Midlands which I had just left.

After Norwich came Oxford.  A wonderfully richly wood panelled launderette, the shade of walnut veneer.  A standard lay out with a line of washing machines facing a line of dryers, perpendicular to the pavement.  It never seemed to have many customers and many evenings I would be in there alone.  I never saw any workers associated with that place.  It was just open and closed.  I once encountered two American women, students I guess from their age.  They asked me for change for the dryers, which in this time, all took 20 pence pieces, no matter where you were.  I kept a stack of these and was happy to give them the change.  They were surprised when I gave them five for one pound.  It turned out they had thought the 20 pence pieces to be 'quarters', i.e. 25p, just like the 25 cent coins in the USA, so had been taking only four of them in exchange for a pound.  I explained they should think of them as 'fifths'.  This launderette, once when I was walking past it going home, was the first place I ever saw anyone using a laptop computer.  A woman was sitting on the seat which was the sill of the main window, parallel to the window with her legs stretched out and had this computer on her lap.  It was to be another 13 years before I would get to use one.  It was quite incongruous seeing a young woman with such an expensive piece of computer hardware (this was 1992) and yet using a launderette.

The next launderette I used was the one I was with for longest (1994-2001) and is probably the most famous one I have been in.  It used to feature in the title sequence of the British police series, 'The Bill', in the late 1990s.  If a bus had not pulled up at the stop at the precise moment you would have seen me standing watching the camera crew from the pavement.  It is also passed in a scene in the movie 'Secrets and Lies' (1996) when a car drives down Mile End Road - Bow Road.  Knowing the area you know that when the shot switches from the driver to the passenger and back again, what is in the background is not on corresponding sides of the road. 

The laundrette was located in Bromley-by-Bow (which as the name suggests is next to the district of Bow and not the Bromley in Kent).  I used it first when living in Poplar to the South and continued going there once I had moved to Mile End to the West.  Sometimes, especially in London, it is difficult to find laundrettes tucked away down small streets so a prime reason for using this one rather than one nearer to where I lived was because I found it when cycling around looking for one.  I could have easily ended up using the one opposite.  There was a launderette nearer my room in Mile End and the Afghan man who ran it, did wonderful tailoring on the side.  He sewed a pocket in a suit jacket for me which looked so good you would have believed it had originally come with the jacket.  His boss always tried to get me to come to his laundrette, but I explained my loyalty to the one I had been using for five years by then and he seemed to understand.  The launderette was narrow but long with a single row of washing then drying machines down one wall and the seats facing them.

Over the years I got to know the two attendants, Liz and Lorraine very well, to the extent that they would make me a cup of tea and give me biscuits whenever I appeared.  They would also tell me their problems and I would try to counsel them.  When I first went there they earned £1.80 per hour [equivalent to £3.14 now]; they were earning £2 per hour in 1999 [equivalent to £2.85 now] when the minimum wage was introduced and their pay rose to £3.60 per hour [equivalent to £5.12 now; current minimum wage is £5.80 if you are over 22].  Their employer never paid national insurance for any of his staff but used to whine to me who he saw as an educated man who (he thought) would support his views, that the tax rate was so high that it prevented entrepreneurialism (he owned a chain of laundrettes and drove a very expensive car).  Until the minimum wage the woman kept the additional money paid for service washes, usually around £1.20-£1.40 per time.  When compelled to pay the minimum wage he started keeping this money himself.  The spending power of the women with the minimum wage immediately rose and you really saw the impact on the shops around the area.  The women could afford daytrips to the Blue Water mall in Essex from then on. They could not afford to buy anything and took sandwiches with them to eat, but the trip out to look around the shops brightened up the day of people who usually did not travel farther than 3-4Km of their home and to whom me going to Covent Garden, less than 30 minutes ride on the underground, was like me going to Paris. 

The big difference was that they could pay their television licences month in/month out.  Non-payment of television licences at that time (and it might still be the case now) was the most common reason why a woman would end up in prison in the UK.  There was a real fear when the monthly payment could not be paid (and at that time there was an additional charge for paying monthly rather than annually).  I remember one of the attendants who could not pay that month ringing the licencing company and being told to unplug and move her television into the centre of her room and to cover it over until she could pay, in case an inspector came round.  She did precisely what she was told, worried she would get caught out.  The harshness of publicity about the penalties of not paying the licence, it is unsurprising, terrified the woman.

Service washes are not a feature of all launderettes, but are present in many.  Basically you pay extra money and the attendants wash (and sometimes iron) your clothes for you in their machines.  Even for people who have their own washing machine, this feature is appealing.  As a consequence, this laundrette attracted customers from the Bow Quarter, luxury gated community that was close by.  I would chat with people who worked for a Swiss bank and regularly with a retired doctor who used to travel out to Vietnam for a month each year to help with children who had been mutilated by mines left from the war or were mutated as a result of the use of Agent Orange.  A whole host of characters came through that laundrette.  People used to say that the laundrette shown on the soap opera 'Eastenders' bore no relation to reality.  I rarely watched the series, but certainly can confirm there are launderettes in East London precisely like that often with all the drama that you would see in a soap opera.  Theft, violence, drug and drink problems could all be see in or around the launderette.  The other well-known cultural reference to launderettes was 'My Beautiful Launderette' (1985) in which a polished up launderette (or laundrette given the title) is the location of a gay love affair between a young Pakistani man and a member of the racist National Front, with Daniel Day-Lewis in one of his roles in which you find it difficult to believe he is the same actor you have seen in his other roles.  Nothing that exotic went on in any launderette I knew, but I guess it is possible.

Certainly there were more comic moments that I experienced in launderettes too.  I remember a man pulling up on a long motorbike in what appeared to be his shorts. It was only when he went over to the drying machine and pulled out the jeans that were in there and put them straight on that we realised he had been motorbiking in his underpants. This was reminiscent of the very well known Levi's jeans advertisement of the 1985 in which in a 1950s US launderette a man comes in and simply strips down to his boxer shorts [sparking the 1980s trend for that style of underpants] and puts his jeans and some rocks into the washing machine to achieve the 'stone washed' look to the tune of Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine'.

I remember two teenage boys coming in with huge bags of washing.  They put them through the process and not for a moment in all the 45 minutes did they stop talking, often across each other.  By the time they left me and Lorraine were exhausted.  I have no idea how they managed to sustain their speaking for so long.  Another time, a French-speaking black female nurse (for some reason Poplar and Bow have a lot of Francophone people from the Caribbean and from India [though I knew the French had owned Pondichéry I had never realised India had so many people with French as their language; from a quick search I find there were over 200,000 people in India under French control at the start of the 20th century] and it was common to hear French being spoken).  Unfortunately, the only word of French that Lorraine spoke was 'oui' ['yes'] and she got great delight saying 'oui, oui' repeatedly.  I used my poor French to ascertain what the woman wanted and it turned out she had lost her nurse's uniform and wondered if it was in the launderette.  To every question, Lorraine said 'oui, oui' utterly confusing the situation.  Ultimately I had to keep repeating 'pas d'uniform' and tried to usher Lorraine off to make some tea.  The other memorable incident were the preparations for a service for travellers at a nearby church.  There was a travellers' site in Bow and you would see whole families dressed up in their finest outfits in the hours leading up to the evening service.  Many would pass by the laundrette.

I did a lot of reading (more than once having to have my book rescued from the washing machine by Liz or Lorraine when I had left it in with the washing) and met a whole host of characters in that launderette.  By the time I reached Milton Keynes, where there was no washing machine in my flat, until I bought one after over a year, I had service washes.  This was partly due to the distance to my nearest launderette.  The 'new town' Milton Keynes is very zoned and being in a middle class district there was no provision for a laundrette as it was assumed that everyone would have their own washing machine; my landlord did not provide one.  I had to cycle for 15 minutes to the Netherfield district which had been zoned for the poorest of Milton Keynes and the disabled (the district sits right next to the hospital).  In many ways it was like a slice of Bromley-by-Bow dropped into a wood.  The laundrette had the usual two rows of washing machines facing dryers and was staffed by women who looked sixteen.  They did a reasonable job, but one night left a dryer running overnight and the launderette caught light and was closed for months.  I tried going to one in Bletchley, an old town asorbed into Milton Keynes, but it was only open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. so it was useless trying to go there before or after work as I had done with the Netherfield one and it was an even longer cycle ride to reach, ruling out going there during the lunch break.  I was compelled to buy a washing machine and that ended my contact with launderettes and a slice of British culture.  Given I see having this house repossessed sometime in the next few months I imagine a future return to using launderettes lies on the horizon.  Perhaps I will pick the one that lets me 'chill out' and surf the internet rather than simply watching my shirts spin round.

Waiting for The Man - Short Story

Looking back my collection of short stories in order to post them here, I was surprised to find that I had entirely lost one story, it is nowhere to be found. That is a shame, it was a companion piece to 'Neck on the Line' being written in another of genres that the writing course intially banned, in this case, namely historical romance. I remember the outline and will see if I can re-do it. In the meantime, I found that a story I thought was incomplete had a actually been finished. I started thinking about this story while I was living in East London but only began writing it when I moved away. It draws heavily on things I experienced while living in London but adds fictional elements. As I wore a raincoat, unlike all of my neighbours, I was often being mistaken for a drugs dealer. Eight-year old children would try to scrounge cigarettes off me too (I do not smoke) and disliked it when in response to their complaint that no-one smoked any more I told them that there were good reasons for that, namely poor health. Anyway, out of these incidents and other things I saw moving around East London eventually came this story. It was written later than the others set there, but I have included it here now because it comes from the same source as those.


Waiting for The Man

It’s not a bad bit of Poplar that I moved to when I split with Jackie. I didn’t have much worry when it was Steve’s weekend to stay with me. We could go into the small park behind my low-rise block and kick a ball around without being troubled. In a couple of years I’d let him go down to the shop and buy his own sweets. The couple than ran it the Veenas were a great couple, packed into the back of their crowded convenience store, trying to clamber further up the ladder and in the meantime selling pretty expensive packs of ham to the locals.

In East London people litter with a vengeance, they throw the rubbish at the street with a force, not just drop as people tend to in richer parts of London. Yet, the clutch of streets around my flat were not too bad, only the odd crisp packet blown into the corners along with soggy brown leaves from the trees by the swings on that other bit of grass. Yes, it was off the main route to the Chrisp Street market and few families had cars, and half of them were painters’ vans. There was the one blue BMW convertible, but everyone turned a blind eye to that. The lack of cars meant the streets were probably little different to what they had been forty years before. Children could chase the ball across the road without too much danger and old couples could sit out the front, him to the left of the doorway, her to the right. They could be there all day gazing at people going with fixed toothless jaws like they were some kind of ornament, bookends I suppose. Well, no traffic meant they were not covered with an inch of dust by the time they went inside.

The neighbours on my level were a nice bunch. the small Spanish woman whose name I could not pronounce; Mrs. Hardy whose daughter and son-in-law lived on the floor below and Mary, who I would often go and pick up fags for from the Veenas’ shop. Of course I never told any of them that I was a copper. If they asked I worked in security, and I changed out of my uniform at the station a few more stops up the District Line.

So it was not a bad place. I suppose, looking back, people were poor, on a copper’s wages I was the wealthiest man for streets around. Too many of the children, mothers too, might have looked clean enough, but it meant that their skin had that lifeless pale grey colour, that you can see in any big city, too many meals just of crisps to keep them filled up, too few vitamins I guess. We’re not as badly off as a hundred years ago I suppose, no real smog and I haven’t heard of anyone with rickets round here, but TB’s back in the neighbourhood for sure.

Then one day The Man came, he must have moved in one day when I was at work. The Man, somehow the kids called him that. I don’t know where the name came from, but I guess it was because he stood out. Most people round here wear tracksuits and puffa jackets, but he would set off in the morning and come back in a suit and a raincoat, not seedy mind, just smart. I heard from Mrs. Hardy that he worked at the college, about quarter of a mile away down the Mile End Road. I don’t know how he ended up round here, but I suppose it was a bit like it was for me, a decent place to live, handy for work. Anyway the smaller kids, afraid of nothing, used to cluster round him pestering him for fags. They asked me for them too, but I just ignored them and walked on, The Man came back at them, trying to change them. The chat would go:

“Got any fags?”

“No they’re bad for you.”

“No they’re not. Have you got any?”

“No.”

“No-one has any fags.” One boy would moan.

“Well, why do you think that is? They’re bad for you.” So the thing would go round until he reached the security gate to our block and got out of their reach.

So this went on. The kids, as I said, were fearless. So much for not talking to strangers, these, well anyone under the age of fourteen I suppose, anywhere East of Aldgate would do the same sort of stuff. Just a few examples. At one end of the trouble they caused round my way, there was trying to get money out of the phone boxes with ice lolly sticks, that was just annoying, though most people were getting mobiles then, so I suppose that was less of a problem than it would have been a few years ago. Then there was the three morons nicking the temporary bus sign, put up when some joyrider crashed through the old one. I shouted from across the street at the three of them, trying to make them see how stupid they were being. They were a sight anyway, the two smaller ones at either end and the bigger one in the middle all with this bus sign under their right arms. Then they stopped at the top of the road and pushed the sign over the wall into that dingy engineering place by the railway bridge. Why they did that, I have no idea.

Then there was more serious stuff, well the swing was not criminal just more madness. They strung it from the second floor passageway of the block across the road from me. There was nothing on the first two floors so fire engines could get through to the big courtyard behind it. So anyway they get on this rope with a bit of wood tied on it and swing down, probably thirty feet, over concrete all the way. Why not one of them ended up in a pile of blood on the ground I’ll never know. They weren’t like monkeys so much as like those gargoyles you see on churches, but they were sitting on the slanted roofs of the lower blocks, still thirty-five, forty feet off the street, and occasionally they would be over those roofs and in through an open bedroom window even broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon, one time. That’s what happened to Mrs. Poulter and her daughter. Most of the flats round my way had very little cash in them, and there’s no way you can get a telly back with you. They nicked small change and an earring, just one, from the Poulters and they had to go back the way they came, because the doors round here all have deadlocks, so there was no way out the front door for them.

Anyway, I’m getting off my story which is about The Man. Just to fill you in, he was about thirty, six footish, fair hair, glasses sometimes, probably contact lenses the rest of the time I suppose, maybe he just needed them for reading. He always had a black shoulder bag, always looked like it was bulging, probably books given that he worked at the college. It was late one afternoon and I was popping over to the Veenas’ shop for a copy of the Standard and I see The Man coming down the street. There are the usual kids about but they’re not following after him asking for fags. For the moment I guess they’ve tired of that game. They’re all over on the steps of the old library, the only bit of that square which survived the bombing by the way. They’re looking at The Man and muttering. I wonder if he’s thumped one or something, though if he had I’m sure I’d have heard some furious father stringing him from one of the balconies. So I go into the shop and by the time I get out The Man is over by the steps with the kids around him. I can’t be fussed if he’s finally given in and is handing out fags, though the youngest can’t be more than eight. I knew boys at school who were smoking ten a week by that age. But no, it doesn’t look like fags, no-one’s lighting up, they’re all creeping into corners, by the swings and that rough bit of trees and bushes. My mind comes up with all these explanations now. I can see The Man buying ecstasy tablets off his students to supplement his lifestyle by selling them on to these kids at a profit. He’d even stayed away from the teenagers, who could do him over if they didn’t like his prices. The younger kids seemed happy enough, the drugs, the dealing, made them feel grown up.

I walked back to my flat thinking it over. I should be calling up the local nick and getting him taken away, I could testify straight off. I could drop a few words in ‘The Bricklayers’ Arms’ saying he was a pervert, tempting kids with stuff. He’d have the shit kicked out of him and his flat torched by the end of the week. I liked that power, I had so many choices to pick from. I knew I had to pick something that kept me out of it. I was not keen for my neighbours to know what I do for a living, I like the quiet life. Too much of what goes on around here relies on the dodgy economy, knocked-off stuff, nothing serious, but fake stuff, stuff off the back of a lorry and having a copper around scares a lot of that off, and I know they’d resent it even more. So I had to think of a way. I needed to get a pusher off my patch, especially one pushing to kids.

Anyway, my chance comes soon enough. I’m on duty at Upton Park, not that I do it that often. Fortunately most of the footie fans round my way support Man U or Chelsea, rather than West Ham, though you see the colours enough around Poplar too. I always think I’m probably safe, as kitted out in my uniform I look different enough from Alan the security man in his jeans and jacket, for no-one from my street to know for certain. I see The Man coming out of the stands with some bloke, fifty something, with a beige raincoat and a strange flat cap, waving his hands around as he talks. You’d think he was the Hammers greatest fan, fired up about the match, even though it was a draw. I walk casually over to them, and realise I do not know what to say. I don’t know his name, I doubt he’s carrying any ‘e’s on him at the moment, but somehow it’s all started and I’m going through the motions.

“Excuse me sir. Would you please come this way?”

I can say this for him, he doesn’t look worried, probably thinks it’s personal service, we’re telling him we’ve found something he’s lost on the tube, I don’t know. He comes without complaint, the older guy following along.

“What’s this about?” The Man asks, but not nervously.

“I think you know.” I try.

“No. Has my flat been broken into?”

“No, it’s not that.” I look over to the older man, for some reason I’m more worried about him, but he’s chatting away to an old couple. “It’s about your business, I’ve seen you. I’m not having any bastard pushing on young kids on my patch. Do you understand?”

He seems to get the message. “Oh yes, well it was a joke, I didn’t think it’d do much harm.”

I just laugh bitterly at him.

“I want to see it stopped, I want it to happen now. If I see you doing it again, you’ve got a choice between being taken in or me dropping a word to some of the thugs round my way.”

“You’re Alan Young.” The Man says, pleased that he’s seen through me. “You live at number 11, don’t you? I didn’t know you were a pig.” He seems to be oblivious to what I have been telling him.

“Listen you prick. Stop the dealing or you’re out one way or another.”

He smiles and I want to slap him. “Okay, I’ll bring the stuff round to yours tonight, you can deal with it all.”

“I don’t need it. Flush it down the bog or something.” I am getting irritated with this moron.

“Everything alright?” The older man has come over now.

I look at him seriously, but he starts off on a story, dropping in names of supers and a deputy assistant commissioner I’ve heard of. He’s doing it with cunning, but he’s trying to scare me off. I let him, I think I’ve got what I want.

“No, we’re just neighbours, back in Poplar. I didn’t know you were a Hammers fan.”

“Not me, Peter’s the one who comes regularly, I just tagged along this week.”

“Oh right.” I say, my voice cheerful, matey. “Better get back to business. I’ll see you around.” I say, conscious that I still don’t know The Man’s name. Anyway the two of them smile and walk back towards the tube station.

As I walked home at the end of shift, I thought how much I had mucked this whole thing up. I should have put what was right ahead of a quiet life in this neighbourhood. I should have pulled him over and arrested him straight off. He had enough gear on him to make it stick. I decide that I’ve got to get back in control of things, and I head straight for his flat. I’ll confront him and get it all sorted, whatever problems it causes.

I expect him to be out when I ring the door, despite the lights being on, but he appears and lets me in.

“I know what it looks like...”

“Yes, you selling e’s...”

“Es, Bs, Cs, some iron, some zinc. You get it all in these multi-vitamins.” He says as he walks off into the kitchen.

“You’re having a joke.”

“No, here it all is, my stash.” He says pointing to a few cartons of vitamins on the kitchen table.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“Ask the kids. This is what I’ve been selling. Anyway, have you ever seen a ‘e’ that’s not printed with some logo. These are smooth, red, vitamins. You see the kids round here, there’s no way they get enough. They look half dead. You can search the place, no need for a warrant, I’ll not resist.”

I thought he was an arrogant sod, trying to pull a fast one, but he certainly didn’t sound like any drug dealer I’d met.

“But you make a profit.”

“Most of it goes back on buying these, they’re not cheap you know.”

“What about the rest?”

“You know that charity shop, the one on Roman Road, ask in there, I bring them a donation every week. They know me, go and find out.”

“I don’t know whether you’re taking so much piss or you’re for real, but either way, you’re making trouble. It’s an easy step from buying ‘vitamins’ from you to buying crack from someone else. You understand?”

I snatched up the tubes of vitamins and stuffed them in my jacket.

“You understand?” I said louder. He nodded, it looked like I had scared him. “You understand?” I repeated, stepping closer.

“Yes.” He said looking embarrassed, maybe scared. It was the last time I ever saw him, in a week the flat was empty then went to that Chinese couple.

I said nothing else. As I walked back to my front door, I heard a bunch of kids yelping as they ran through the courtyard my block surrounded. They looked energetic, their cheeks seemed rosy, you know how they look in those drawings, Peter and Jane, Janet and John or whatever they were.

Anyway, are you interested in these vitamins? They’re dead expensive in the shops, they do you wonders, especially these ginseng ones.

Roman Road Market - Short Story

I wrote this, a description rather than a story, for a writing competition, if I remember correctly, run by the BBC. The composition had to be about an area of London which interested you. Having written this, I realised the competition was aimed at ethnic minorities and being white I was unlikely to win. Anyway, I hung on to this as it describes an interesting location of East London, which unlike Brick Lane or the Columbia Road flower market has received little attention. Michael Moorcock does have a character go to a pub down this street but does not describe the market that fills a large chunk of it on Saturdays. As with my other writings of my time in East London, everything in this is as I saw it. It might not reflect the Roman Road Market today, but it is an accurate depiction of it any time 1994-2001.



Roman Road Market, Tower Hamlets.

I lock my bicycle to the thick railing by the old pub on the corner. There is no way I could wheel it any further, through the market. I step off from the pavement into the press of the crowd jammed in between the stalls. I am always amazed how different it is cycling down here on a Sunday with almost every shop closed and the street empty of life. But now it’s midway through Saturday morning and the market is solid people, filling the channel created by the stalls. Progress is slow as I try and edge towards my objective. I advance a few steps, then have to stop, move forward again, dip into a gap between one family and their pushchair and the next. I pass the stalls of yams, of mobile phone covers, of non-laddering tights, of shiny night clubbing outfits, moving on. I pass the stall that always has such a crowd of women around it that I have never found out what they sell. Moving on is like swimming against the tide, and I try to catch the occasional current of a couple or a group of kids going the same way as me, but then they get distracted and check out the stall packed with CDs. As I move slowly along the crowded road, different sounds get louder and fade away as I walk on, replaced by others.

There are the voices of the stall holders parading in front of their goods, shouting out the bargains, mixed in with music from the CD stall or one of the shops further back. Every step I take there is conversation, bits and pieces about what is being sold, what mum watched on telly last night, kids asking, demanding, complaining, old people laughing and moaning about the council. As I reach the bit near Safeways where there is a break in the stalls, you get new sounds. The man bellowing out about God, a worn black bible in his hand competes with the Socialist workers with their stall in black, white and red, shouting out about Blair. Supporters of each of them tries to give me a leaflet, I take them and shove them in my jacket barely stopping. Now I am getting amongst the end of the market where there are sweets and opposite the man with toothbrushes and toothpaste packaged in South Africa and now laid out on a table in East London. I am in sight of the cluster of bedding stalls, household goods stalls, pots and pans. But I turn off. I am level with the building society. I stepped through the door. Inside there is a queue, people standing quietly, the noise from the street muffled, though the chunky bleeping sound of someone typing in their PIN number into the cashpoint is clear inside. I shuffle forwards until it is my turn. Breaking with tradition I chat with the young woman with braided hair, dressed in nice dark blue denim about the law course she is doing and how her family’s opinion of it.

Soon it is over, I hand over my cheque and plastic and get a receipt in return. Then I am back outside. This time I go along the pavement, made shadowy by the plastic sheet backs to the stalls. It is easier this way, though people come and go from the shops with their doors propped open, there is none of the chaos and far fewer bodies than in the road between the stalls. I poke my nose in a pound shop, but I have a enough spanners and placemats, toilet rolls and shoelaces. I walk passed the pie and mash shop, so traditionally East London, you cannot believe it is real. It is full of families and I am looking for something different before I get back on my bike, some American import, coffee and a muffin, either cherry or blueberry I think.

Cooking - Short Story

Following the success of 'The Trap', I decided to write more about my exploits in East London and this was the second story based on real people and incidents. Who knows if I had continued down this line maybe I could have come up with my own version of Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' (2003), a street not that far from where I lived, where I would go for delicious Bangladeshi fish meals. Anyway, in this story, the people and settings are genuine, I have just altered the names to avoid embarrassment. I lived in this rented room for two-and-a-half years and it gave me a certain pride, that no-one I knew lived in such squalor. I could not afford anything better. It did reveal to me that running alongside the better looking bits of London hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people in London live in conditions that fall well below decent standards. I am just glad that I was able to get out.



Cooking

“You English, you cook so fast.” Robert observes suddenly. I grunt a reply.

Robert is sat at the table by the window. He is nibbling and sipping at his pre-dinner dinner. I am far from being an expert at West African cooking, but from sharing a kitchen with Robert, I have learnt that his particular brand consists of chopping up fish or red meat into hand-sized chunks. These are then dumped into an old pressure cooker, doubling as a cauldron, and fine curry powder is poured on top. The whole concoction takes hours to stew and to sustain him through the cooking time, Robert has to have another, simpler meal. This usually, as it does tonight, involves Guinness and bread.

My own efforts may be far quicker than Robert’s, but seem quite time consuming compared to Pete’s: simply remove a microwave meal from the freezer, put it in the microwave, heat. Do the same with some rice and then you are done. I suppose for Robert that does not even qualify as a meal. My own preparations, which involve chopping a range of meat and vegetables and using my own favourite cauldron, a well blackened wok, seem to involve sufficient effort to pass Robert’s criteria.

You might think that living above a fried chicken restaurant as renowned as City Fried Chicken on the Mile End Road, would mean residents had little interest in cooking. By simply walking to the foot of the heavy carpeted stairs and slapping on the cream, very sour cream, coloured door you can make a man appear to provide you with chips, or chicken, or chicken and chips at cost price. However, this service is rarely used, and certainly not by myself. Having been the slayer of three mice in my room, perched over the takeaway, I do worry whether the rest of the rodent family actually live among the fryers themselves.

In fact I am spoilt for choice of takeaways in the neighbourhood and with these other outlets at least I can tell myself that they are run to the highest standards of hygiene. Large tracts of the Mile End Road are given over to takeaways. Fried chicken is the prime food, followed by kebabs and there are always Chinese restaurants and curry houses with signs in the window ‘food available to take away’. The density is so high that they compete to grab your attention. One is famous for the two life-sized bronze-coloured statues of Asian women out the front and another though resembling a taxi office from the 1970s, allows you to surf the internet while waiting for your jalfrezi.

The greatest concentration of takeaways of all is where Burdett Road bisects the Mile End Road less than two minutes’ walk from my home. Neighbouring doors lead you into pizza joints, to Thai food, to fish and chips or to the best kebab house for miles. A1 Kebabs has the usual misshapen brown lump of meat revolving slowly in the window like a hundred thousand other places in Britain. However, like many fewer inside you can select from a whole range of kebabs, unknown to the usual consumer. Delights such as the halib or the adana kebabs take longer to make than simply shaving off slices of grey-brown lamb for a doner. Creating them is a chef’s art with chopped pitta bread forming a base in a tin foil trough on to which layer upon layer of meat and salad is piled. This is the connoisseur’s kind of kebab. The other outstanding feature of A1 feature are the burgers, not pressed down on a hot greasy sheet of metal, but grilled over charcoal. The slightly smoky flavour is so far removed from the usual takeaway fare that it guarantees many return customers. As a regular, added to that I only have to say ‘the usual’ for a fresh disc of beef to be slapped on to the charcoal and my particular tastes catered to with crisp chips, fresh salad and a chilled diet coke as accompaniment.

Man cannot live by takeaway alone, though many in Mile End do. The average b-and-b has no cooking facilities. Every evening in any of the larger outlets you see skinny, grey fleshed couples on the hard plastic seats huddled over their chips. Those of us who live upstairs at Mirza’s are blessed in comparison: we have our kitchen, the only communal area shared between the half dozen residents. I do not think it has ever seen better times. The fittings are of sticky dark brown wood with drawers that either slide open of their own accord of need a crowbar to access. The yellow window frames have warped so much that the windows themselves have to be lashed closed with carrier bags. If one of the residents burns something there is a rush to disentangle the Tescos, Sainsburys or unmarked corner shop bags to let some smoke out and some fresh air in.

Of course there is the extractor fan; or in fact, the place where an extractor fan once was. The previous owner took it with him leaving us a slanted circular hole to the outside. That is fine in summer, but come winter more carrier bags have to be pressed into use to prevent the rain running on to your head or into your frying pan as you cook. These are hazards Delia Smith has never had to face.

Cooking facilities consist of the gas hob and the microwave. Where the oven has gone we have never found out. For me the hob is ideal, for proper wok cooking you need flames that lap around the side, and with half of its metalwork missing there is nothing to stop this cooker’s fiery tendrils reaching for the ceiling. Occasionally I do turn to the microwave, positioned, as in so many East London houses, on top of the fridge-freezer. Like many of our neighbours, the residents upstairs at Mirza’s do not question why the freezer never needs defrosting, or in fact why water often runs out when you open its door. However, the microwave stays where it is and continues its job, providing a full meal for Pete, defrosting frozen items for me.

My thoughts return to the job in hand. I splash Chinese five spice over the chicken and beansprouts. Its slightly oil texture mixes with the copious quantity of oil I have used and sticks to everything as black greasy crumbs. The vapours invade my nose and eyes. I step back from the smell and the heat. On the hob diagonal from my wok Robert’s cauldron bubbles and stirs as it comes to the boil. A white steam with a familiar reek emits from beneath the loosely fitting lid. Robert has branched out, tonight the dish is tripe. These days the house probably has more tripe cooked in it, than when it was first built over a century ago. The smell is pervasive. It does not makes your eyes sting like the hand-powdered spices that Mirza’s nephews use, instead it seeps into you, into the walls and the carpet and then hangs there. It is a grey smell, a bitter, lonely smell, and now it overpowers anything more exotic I might pour out.

Robert stands slowly, taking a last sip of his Guinness as he walks to the cooker. I turn down the flames under my wok, the light engineer stepping back to give the heavy industrial worker free scope. He pulls the lid from the top of the pressure cooker. His dinner emerges, it literally emerges. It is a whole stomach of something, like a kind of grey bagpipes, bulging in the middle and tapering as fleshy tubes at either end. I am a man who has stomached andouilette sausages and smiled. They resemble industrial tubing shoved into a brown sausage skin. However, even I find it hard to face seeing a cast member of the next ‘Aliens’ movie appearing in my own kitchen.

I snatch at my wok and saucepan of rice. I pour out the former and rapidly drain the latter on to my large plate, careless of any fragments of food left behind. I have to get out of there, back to the security of my own room.

Robert pokes the large wooden spoon, as long as his forearm, through the steam to prod at the creature.

“It’s taking too long.” Robert mutters.

“I’m not surprised.” I say without sympathy. “It’ll never cook like that, it’s too big.” I explain as I back towards the door. “Chop it up, you’ve got to chop it up, or it’ll take until tomorrow.”

Robert hesitates, uncertain whether to take advice from the Englishman who hurries his cooking so much and will not put a fried egg on top of his spaghetti bolognaise. Then he sees the light: it will taste the same even if chopped. I watch as he heaves open one of the sticky drawers and pulls out the communal chopper. He grabs the stomach by its neck, or some other piece, my knowledge of sheep anatomy is poor. He slaps it down on the work service and proceeds to slice down with the chopper. He creates a series of rings of grey flesh, some narrow, some with the diameter of his palm. He gathers them up in threes or fours and throws them back into the pot. He puts the lid back on and returns to his beer, satisfied.

“That’s better.” I say. My relief is forced, the smell of tripe more pervasive since my own cooking has ended. The only consolation is that the smaller chunks mean that Robert’s dish will be ready in hours rather than days and the smell might be gone by the weekend.

“Yes. I never understand you English, you cook so quick.” He repeats, glances at his watch and then returns to gazing out the window.

I escape the kitchen pushing the heavy door behind me with my foot. I walk up the eight steps to my room, ducking my head to avoid the low ceiling and the pipe at the turn. With my elbows I lever down the door handle and push through into my room, my sanctuary. I put the plate down on the former white dressing table. It is no longer white and now acts as a combination of desk and dining table. I go in hunt of the television remote control. I am always surprised how easily things disappear in such a small room. Finding the remote, I return to my food, but it is too late. Carelessly I have positioned the plate on the wrong part of the table’s camber and I cannot reach it in time before it slides to the floor. Toast may occasionally land butter side up but a plate of food always shows its underside when it lands on the carpet. I scrape up the hot chicken, vegetables and rice, ensuring I get every grain so as not to feed the mice for free. I grab my jacket and carry the plate back to the kitchen. Robert watches in disbelief as I dump the still warm food into the dustbin. I pull on my jacket and head down the stairs. I think this evening is a good evening for ‘the usual’ at A1 Kebabs.

The Trap - Short Story

For some reason when I moved to London in 1994 I stopped writing short stories, well certainly ones shorter than 15,000 words, which I know to some people still counts as a short story, but I imagine is verging on a novella. Anyway, my work and my focus on the Beckmann stories meant little time for shorter fiction. Living in different parts of East London, first in a very nice flat and then in the more grim surroundings featured in this story, was very inspirational for my writing. As noted in this story I did a variety of jobs, including drawing on my half-baked teaching skills. I think the inspiration came from simply the number of people around there and the often odd things they got up to. I witnessed people swinging from second floor (third floor if you are American) balconies on ropes; children clambering across roofs; boys stealing a bus-stop and the range of debris you would find in the streets, I came across an ironing board, a kitchen sink and a newspaper produced by the NPD a German neo-Nazi party of the 1980s. The way the new, old and ancient things were jammed right alongside each other really struck me too as it has other authors like Michael Moorcock. Then I moved to Milton Keynes in 2001 and it was so incredibly bland, so lacking in substance or inspiration (it regularly reminded me of the town featured in the Jim Carrey movie, 'The Truman Show' (1998)) that I was thrown back on my East London experiences which by now were coalescing into a form in which they could be used for fiction.

Given the thought, prompted by friends' comments, that I had given to whether I was a 'vampire' of people's lives and whether it was wrong for me try to write about anything I had not experienced personally I produced 'The Trap', a story in which everything was true and had been experienced by me. The original version had all the real names, but I realised that when I entered it into competitions it might lead to my landlord having his takeaway closed down if people found out there were mice running around the rooms above it. He was a good man and I did not want to bring him any harm. There are scores of friend chicken restaurants all over East London. Chicken is the meat that only offends vegetarians no other faith. Tower Hamlets council even recognised the contribution to employment that such outlets brought to the borough. So, all the people and their histories, the events and settings in this story are true, all that has been changed are the names.


The Trap

I awake and shift on to my back. The room is too dark to see the ceiling, the overlarge heavy curtains stop the orange light of the streets penetrating into my room. In seconds I remember where I am, closed in the box of a room on the fourth floor of this slice of the Victorian era. ‘Upstairs at Eric’s’ we have jokingly named it, though in fact it is upstairs at Mr. Mirza’s. He owns City Fried Chicken on the ground floor and the narrow five storeys above it. There are at least seven of us jammed in here, from Pete the Vietnam veteran and his lovely ex-wife from Thailand on the second floor, up to the two Chinese men packed almost into the roof with the woman who sometimes squeezes in there too. Weeks back I had to help the landlord saw off the corner of their bed to allow it up the even tighter staircase to their room. Directly below me lives Robert’s replacement. Robert was the Nigerian security guard. At first he was a good friend of the landlord, they shared Guinness, but eventually he could not pay the rent and their arguments echoed through the house. The weekly blank cheque for £50 had proven too much for his meagre income and the last we saw of him was a forlorn figure carrying his still inflated purple armchair West along the Mile End Road. My thought had been, ‘where do you go when upstairs at Mirza’s becomes too expensive?’ Now the newcomer, the Romanian woman, has taken his room. She scatters rose petals on the stairs and sobs to East European pop music, but for the moment even she seems silenced.

I listen, but no-one is stirring. This is uncommon, the house is rarely at rest, there are only three hours when everyone is asleep. I get up at five-thirty for my job, an eleven hour shift in West London, with an hour-long tube ride each way. A friend of mine likened it to self-flagellation, but that never paid so well. I rise only three hours after Mr. Mirza’s two nephews go to bed. They work in the shop below. It shuts at two in the morning. It is one of the many fried chicken takeaways on the Mile End Road, but probably the most successful, wedged between the college, the late-opening pub and the tube station. Even taxi drivers from Tottenham know the renowned City Fried Chicken; its resplendent red and yellow. The nephews’ room is on my floor, but I have never seen inside and only occasionally does the sound of the vacuum cleaner or Asian music spill out from behind the door.

It has to be that quiet time between the takeaway shutting and my clock radio springing into life. The noise that woke me must have been something unusual. After a year I am used to the sounds around me including the Central Line trains that pass right beneath the building shaking it with a rumble. The shriek of sirens, so common in this part of East London, even the rush of the water that bypasses the lock on the canal a short way from my window, they have all become familiar enough for my sleeping brain to ignore.

The fact that it is quiet now means that the disturbance was quick, over in moments. I discard the theory that for the second time this year we have the police pursuing someone through the house. Though the thick Victorian walls insulate us from the noise of the neighbouring pub, occasionally fights spill over from its doorstep. A couple of months back, pursued by the police, a man had vaulted the counter and finding no escape from the back of the shop had burst through the connecting door into our house. His thumping footsteps as he jumped up the stairs followed by the even heavier tread of the two police in pursuit had resounded through the building. Kept awake by the pains South-East Asia, Syria and Lebanon have inflicted on him, Pete was quickly at his door to investigate. Fortunately the first room you encounter coming up the stairs is the huge bathroom and it gave the man his way of escape. Neither of the Chinese was sitting there in the dark lit only by their cigarettes, as is so often the case. He was free to power through, lift the sash window and clamber on to the flat roof. The police were close behind, but once he had dropped off into the park behind the shops, they gave up the chase and came back through the window clutching the crash helmet he had left behind. The next morning we could all see the floor the landlord bleaches so assiduously scarred with a range of muddy footprints.

The disturbance has to be closer, probably in this room. A breeze outside the window sucks on the clingfilm taped to it to keep out the draughts. It flicks back and forth for a second and then rests. That is too insignificant to have roused me. The old fridge, my roommate, shudders and settles, but that too is a common sound as it wakes and quietens regularly throughout the night. Then I know. I know what has woken me and my mind jerks to life. I know there is an intruder. It was the trap which woke me. It has always proven more effective as an alarm than actually killing anything.

Now I lie dead still, my breath held in my lungs as I work out my response. I resolve that I can do nothing in the dark. I have to get up and switch on the lights, the situation may be resolved, the decision removed from my hands as he escapes from the room. I throw back the two duvets in a rapid move and, dodging the pile of shoes on the floor, lunge for the light switch. The large neon light dazzles me for a moment as I look to the corner between the desk and chest of drawers. Amongst the mass of wires for the computer, the television and the fridge I see him sitting. For the second time the trap has done no damage. Then I see his nose is bloody. He has the arrogance to sit there, by the trap, nibbling the chocolate. They get more intelligent each time. The chocolate is wrapped in foil so that they spend long enough at the trap to trigger it, naked chocolate is just snatched away too easily.

The fact that the mouse does not run makes my decision harder. I had bought the 90p trap late last summer. Back from holiday I had found something had nibbled through the outer plastic wrapper of an eight pack of Tunnocks Caramel bars, then shredded the foil round a single bar before licking off the chocolate of a whole corner. I had felt violated, the knowledge that the black bits I found on the carpet were droppings had been confirmed. Humane traps had been recommended but that seemed no solution. How far would I have to take the prisoner, where could I release it, how could I stop it returning? No, it had to be something that killed, something that removed all decisions from my hands.

Well, that had been the plan. The first victim was pitiful, it had caught only its back leg. The mouse had hauled the trap behind it, trailing blood across the carpet. Killing it had been mercy - a crippled mouse would have died slowly and painfully. The second and now this third were more trouble. The trap just woke me and presented me with the decision to kill or reprieve. It had shirked its responsibility. The second one had been quick. A shoe heel twice to the head had left it unmarked, it had lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse.

The arrogance of its successor drives me on. It has to die. I reach slowly for the same pair of heavy-heeled shoes whether I have the right or the left one I do not notice. I step forward slowly, now not wanting it to flee, but as I close it breaks. Rather than escape through the wires to the holes in the walls it comes towards me as if to challenge. It hesitates at the corner of the desk. There is cover to its left. My highlight of the week are Fridays when I escape long shifts in London to teach in Luton and piled here are marked students’ essays. Most are wrapped in plastic sheaths, but I fear that the one on the bottom is just bare paper. I imagine a traumatised student taking their marked essay with the bloody outline of a slaughtered mouse imprinted on the back page. I am reprieved but the mouse is not. He turns right and runs over the open floor, crossing the wine brown stain of the first victim’s dried blood on the dirty yellow carpet.
This is no clean killing. The heel misses the head and strikes the mouse’s middle with force. Its stomach erupts from its mouth. This is the worst of the killings, the messiest. Fortunately there is no twitching. I stay still for a few moments, bile in my throat. The mouse is dead and the Romanian woman sleeps on undisturbed by my sudden thump.

I hurry to the kitchen and snatch up the dustpan and brush. I have no desire to touch the corpse with its guts on display. I sweep it into the pan, dabbing at the blood on the carpet. I leave it in the kitchen as I always do, for Mr. Mirza to see, to prompt him into action. Despite his like of bleach and his belief, often repeated, that I am a ‘good man’, he seems unable to resolve the mouse problem. In the year I have known him his English has not improved an iota. That, and the fact that this address on the Mile End Road appears on no council tax list, probably explains why he has not called in the pest control officer.

Returning from the kitchen I stop in the small toilet tucked beneath the Chinese men’s room. It is long and narrow with a slit window at eye level. As I wash my hands I can see through the window across the park. It is never dark in Mile End. The innumerable streetlights create a hazy orange dome in the sky and you can never see the stars. It is comforting in some ways as if you are never truly outside. The grimy window, peculiarly hinged at the bottom, blows in and bangs down onto the sill. Now I can see more clearly. In the near distance, equivalent to four or five streets away, a railway track defines the edge of the park. A train passes along the track. The light shining from its square windows make it look like a small strip of film running through a projector. One day I am going to write that image into a story.

I dry my hands on my pyjamas for want of a towel. As I walk back to the heavy door to my room I hear muffled voices from my clock radio. It must be five-thirty, time to get up. Now I head back to the toilet to splash water on my face. It might still be dark, but the night and its incidents are over, morning has begun.