Show time

I hope you'll understand that I cannot let the festival of the Lambeth Country Show – south London's premier faux-rural pageant, which took place last weekend – pass without some kind of post mortem. Long-term readers, of which there are at least three, will recall that during this annual weekend, I have met with both Triumph and Disaster. I couldn't really say that I treated those two imposters just the same. If I'm honest, I wasn't all that jazzed about the latter but, despite this, my enthusiasm for the show remains neon-bright.

With that in mind, perhaps you can guess how excited I was to have been swanning around the 2011 LCS wearing this:


Me. Performing. At the Lambeth Country Show.

I know what you're thinking. But no, it wasn't the renowned Miss Jones reggae sound system that I was bringing to Brockwell Park. Not while I'm still working so hard to pay for the speakers we blew out last year. And neither was I headlining the main arena with my dog display team who, I'm sad to say, were not performance-ready in time for this year's show. Lola the bichon frise remains reluctant to climb into the cannon.

No, it was as a proud member of my local choir. And I think that in the photograph below, taken just minutes before we went on stage, you can sense the sheer anticipation of the frenzied crowd (that's the stage – or 'home', as I call it – on the left-hand side of the picture).

Please note the rain dripping from the roof of the tent in which I am taking shelter. IT IS PRACTICALLY GLASTONBURY.

All I can say about the experience is that I now know a little about how Beyoncé feels when she is psyching herself up for a major gig. I, of course, like to take a more modest, back-row approach to performance than Beyoncé who, between you and me, is kind of a show-off. Maybe let someone else have a turn every now and then, B? Not everyone is here to listen to YOU SING.

Anyway, that's enough showbiz, let's talk about the art, as Elaine Paige often says to me on the way into our life-drawing class.

In this blog, which is now over three years old, I do seek to avoid covering the same ground – with little success – so I don't want to probe too deeply into the politics of the vegetable modelling competition, but let me simply say that this poodle (unplaced) was robbed.


Or perhaps it is not a poodle, but a cauli. A collie. A cauli. Ahahahahahahha.

Still, I think we can all agree that 'The Royal Vegging' was a deserved winner of the first-place rosette.

ALERT: Earnest gag-free Olympic self-indulgence, in which I can't decide whether the Olympics should be singular or plural

A couple of weeks ago, I found my new favourite view in London:

Waterloo Bridge From The Bus At Night Time is feeling pretty bloody second best these days, let me tell you. My new No 1 is from a cafe that overlooks the Olympic-park-in-progress. With my mania for all things Olympic, I don't know why I haven't been there before, but that is the joy of London. It's full of places you don't have to visit because they're on your doorstep and you could go and see them any time you want.

Beside what is essentially a building site with promise, an enclave of British Day Out seems to have cropped up. Parties of school children trickle past. Cyclists flit by at high speed, causing those of a nervous disposition – I am foremost among their number– considerable anxiety. Get off and walk, you hooligans, people are trying to drink lattes here. The hale-and-hearty post-middle-aged stride along purposefully, occasionally stopping to peel off their rucksacks and unwrap the kind of tinfoil-clad packed lunches that have yet to embrace the modish likes of hummus and home-made lentil salad:

I don't mind telling you, the whole spectacle swelled my heart, then almost broke it. I'm not totally sure why.

But I know this – and bale out now, cynics; seriously, go and read some nihilistic free verse or something, because here comes the syrup – the Olympics breathes the kind of excitement into me that I sometimes think I definitively and permanently exhaled during my teenage years. I feel as though it's always been there in my life, like my family, or my best friends, or a football team.

That's no twee overstatement. It's a simple fact. I'm a fresh-faced 37 and the Olympics are at least 2000. Of course they've always been there. Admittedly, once every four years is not a particularly great meet-up rate (I have cousins on the other side of the world who I see more regularly than that) but when it happens, it's like we've never been apart.

Cynics, don't make that face. I warned you.

I have a vague recollection of the Moscow Games, but Los Angeles in 1984 is the first I really remember. I was 10. There are phrases from the television commentary that I think will still be in my head even when my own name, my way home and the importance of personal hygiene is not: Carl Lewis taking the final relay leg to win his fourth gold medal ('And the big man has the baton!') and Daley Thompson's decathlon ('It's a better one... It's a better one... It's a better one... It's a better one!').

When London was bidding for the Games, I remember calculating how old I would be if/when they took place. I also calculated how old my dad would be. I always imagined if the Games ever rolled into my town, it would be him I would go with. Every summer, during my school years, he would drive my mum, my brother and I from our home in Norfolk to Crystal Palace, to the international athletics grand prix. I remember the agitation of being trapped in the 6pm south-London traffic on the way there. I remember seeing enormous bails of blank paper waiting to be news-printed in glass-walled presses somewhere north-east of the city on the way home. I now live incredibly close to the stadium that we used to drive three hours to get to, yet I rarely visit. (See paragraph two.)

When the games were awarded to London, on 6 July 2005, my colleagues and I stood around a TV set in the office, caught up in the excitement and blinking back Grade A Olympic Emotion* (me) or clutching on to an excuse not to do any work (some other, stupid people).

24 hours later, we were standing around the same TV set in the same office, watching Tony Blair give a hastily arranged address to the nation and frantically trying to contact friends and colleagues to make sure they weren't on that bus or those three tube trains.

Then, two months later, my dad died.

I don't remember too much about those weeks between the start of July and early September. Except I knew there was something different about that summer. You never see it coming, I don't think, but I'm convinced I could sense something creeping up behind me, waiting to shove me off the Precipice Of Pretty Much OK into The Pit Of Really Hard, Horrible, Grown-up Stuff.

I do know how lucky I am that nothing like that had happened to me before.

But something I do recall from that time, amid the isolated flashes of trauma, is a sense of disbelief that any of those extraordinary, enormous events were actually happening. At the time, the over-riding emotion I felt about any of them was that it was all just so... weird. For those months and quite a few immediately afterwards, everything was confusing and awful. But slowly, the Difficult Things become assimilated into your older, sadder self and you shuffle forwards.

The reality of the Olympics was probably the slowest concept to take hold. It pretty much got bumped, emotion-wise. But a couple of weeks ago, there was the evidence in front of me. The Games are growing three-dimensionally before our very eyes, in steel and brick and mud and access roads. Despite the skeptics, who seem to be positively willing the budget to be bust apart and the deadlines to be broken, they are Definitely Happening.

And seeing the stadium almost at touching distance (definitely at touching distance if I was, like, Mr Tickle – or maybe Peter Crouch), I couldn't help but think of Now and Then (the popular terms relating to time, not the coming-of-age chick flick with Demi Moore) – how life was before that summer, and what came after, and also what didn't.

My dad would have been thrilled by the Olympic site and its construction. He would have found any excuse to drive us around it, tirelessly seeking the best vantage point, revving and reversing until we were car sick, marvelling at the curved roof of the velodrome, watching the cranes, walking into places he wasn't meant to go, attempting to befriend frowning security guards in neon coats. Since he died, I've never had a strong sense of my dad being 'with me', like people who go on about that kind of thing always seem to. He's never appeared in a dream with the answers I am seeking – like the reason why the lamps in my flat keep fusing – and he's never apparated in front of me in TK Maxx, pointing the way towards a brilliantly bargainous and perfectly fitting Chloé dress. I'm five years stronger now, but at times like this, despite my excitement, my chest almost bursts with the sense of him not being there. Not scowling at the cyclists cutting him up on the path. Not eating a hard boiled egg unwrapped from tin foil.

And while I often imagined sitting in the stadium's cheap seats next to my Dad, I'm sure that on occasion I probably also imagined attending the Games with an adorable, curly-haired child or two of my own, hoping their tiny souls would absorb the privilege and the atmosphere, while I smiled beatifically, concealing how peeved I felt at shelling out £5 per branded Olympic ice cream and having to take them to the toilet just before some crucial lap or throw. While this is by no means biologically impossible, it's looking unlikely. I waited a long time for the Olympics to come to London – and they did. There's other things I've waited a long time for, and I'm still waiting.

But in my dad's absence, I visited the Olympic park with my friend Mrs G and my adorable curly-haired godchild Sonny – even if he's a little young for ice cream and he wasn't revealing his most adorable side on the day we visited. Instead, he rolled around on the concrete pathway doing angry crying for the best part of an hour and bellowing 'NOOOOOO!' at any attempts to mollify him, until passers-by started looking anxiously at us, wondering whether they should intercede.

Sonny is just another way in which things have changed since London won the Games. But a happy way. Ivy, his older sister, is another. She's 5 now, and I imagine she might have high-fived my dad on the way past him in some celestial Arrivals/Departures hall.

And then there's their mum, my friend, Mrs G. Like many of my friends, she was there before and since, and will carry on being there. They're Olympic, my friends – and yes, cynics, I am actually saying this. Not expensive and excessively sweaty and fond of ugly mascots. No. Constant, and getting closer all the time. And only a normal amount of sweaty.

* It is my intention, at some point in the future, to write a post classifying the various grades of Olympic Emotion. You probably know better than to hold your breath for it.

The Man With The Yellow Trousers

*WARNING* Contains shallow class-based generalisations

On Thursday morning, the man sitting opposite me on the train was wearing a magnificent pair of yellow corduroy trousers.

In this photo, the colour is not displayed in all its true and dazzling vibrancy on account of the glare through the window. But believe. Daffodils. Buttercups. Colman's mustard. Cartoon bananas. Yellow peppers. Yellow crocuses. Other things that are way yellow. That is the kind of yellow we are talking about. He had the yellowness turned up to yellowven. I'm sorry. I haven't done this for two weeks. Forgive me.

Being acutely aware of my recent period of non-posting, I thought I may have found the perfect way to break my drought. I would become for one day only – or possibly more if it went, like, really really well – a street style blogger (like this or this). Here is a genre that's really hit a peak since I began this blog three years ago, and there's nothing I like more than being slightly late to a party. As I travelled through the city that day, I thought to myself – all the way from Dulwich to Islington and back again – my trusty yet furtively operated iphone camera would capture the fashion flashpoints of all those idiosyncratic tastemakers that make London the coolest city in the world. Apart from Tokyo. And probably New York. And I should point out that I've never actually been to Split, so for all I know they could really be pushing the asymmetrically cut style envelope over there.

Two basic problems here.

Firstly, I kept getting distracted and failing to notice what people were wearing. Secondly, when I did remember, I didn't really see anyone else wearing anything so worthy of a double take. Really, people do mostly wear bland shoes and black and denim clothes. Although I did like these ladies with matching hair, who I saw while I was waiting for my lunch dates at Angel station.

So then I was left with a photo of a man in yellow trousers and a desperate need for a new blogpost.

So I kept thinking about the yellow trousers – and the man inside them. He had a certain air of well-to-do about him. Distinguished, I might say. You may be able to discern this yourself from the sturdy brown shoes visible in the photo. To me, they say, 'I'm just going to take a relaxed yet purposeful stride around my vast country estate', as well as, 'Then I will put on a striped shirt and a blazer and enjoy an evening of light orchestral music in the expensive seats of the Royal Festival Hall.' He is also carrying a classy-looking leather binder (just seen, as we say in the world of fashion-photo captioning), which may contain information on his portfolio of stocks and shares, or perhaps just a copy of The Beano or a cut-out crossword puzzle from the Telegraph.

It occurred to me that apart from the young, skinny and hip, the only other men I had seen wearing below-the-waist colours of this intensity were... well... a bit posh. I know this is a gross generalisation. You were warned. But a former neighbour of mine was a good example of this correlation. He was a lovely man, plummy but poorer than you'd expect, primarily as a result of spending his working life trying to make things better for people less fortunate than himself which, as it turns out, doesn't pay quite as well as one might think it should. I provide this information so you will understand how he was my neighbour, and thus living in a one-bedroomed Victorian terraced flat conversion in southeast London, and not, say, a glass penthouse in Chelsea Harbour. Anyway. I would often hear the front door slam and look out of the window to see him striding in the direction of the bus stop wearing a pair of pink or scarlet jeans, as bright as a tulip.

What is the connection between the posh and their lurid pants? I welcome your theories. I have three of them:

1) I wonder if it is related to the innate, achieve-anything confidence that often seems to come with what someone in a BBC costume drama might call 'good breeding'. "Who says that just because I am not technically young, skinny and hip, I can't wear these trousers? It is my BIRTHRIGHT! And now I will climb The Matterhorn! And then do some motivational speaking. And then I will buy a 6-BEDROOMED house in FULHAM."

2) The reason posh people have money is because they are deeply, and secretly, thrifty. They only buy clothes that are heavily reduced in the sales, which means they only wear clothes rejected by the majority of shoppers who – as I have established during my street-style blogging research – plump for black, brown and denim. Not yellow, green and hot pink.

3) It is some tiny act of rebellion against the charcoal and tweed, traditions and tedium, of their social strata. 'I may have lived a childhood of rules and repression at boarding school, and still feel the need to ask permission every time I go to the toilet, but LOOK AT MY TROUSERS. I'M SO ALIVE!'

Such Great Heights

This is the view from my working window on the 7th floor. (Please note the office strip lights reflected as UFOs into the sky.)


In the last week, we have moved from a different office space within the building, and let me tell you, this vista is a big improvement on the previous one, which looked directly into the windows of the highly corporate office block next door, where lots of men in pale blue shirts stared at computer screens. When it started raining REALLY hard a few weeks ago, both sets of employees – us and them – raced to the windows of our opposing buildings to look at the spectacle of a lot of rain falling on to the ground, but then we caught sight of each other and a frenzied episode of waving began and it was AMAZING. Be free to wave at your neighbours, drones! Yes, Blue-Shirted Finance-Industry Romeos! Reach out to your Peg-Trouser-Wearing Women's-Mag-Working Juliets next door! Dare to dream! Or maybe just go back to your desks as soon as the rain starts to ease off and never glance up in their direction again. Whatever.

Anyway. The new view. Perhaps you can imagine how excited I was at the sight of this crane outside the window. Or perhaps you can't. To clear things up: I was very excited.

If you have a crane outside your window, it seems compulsory to gaze at it for lengthy periods, pondering how tiny is your place within the universe. And sometimes you get to say to your colleagues, 'Look, it's actually moving. That is SO COOL.' And if you can also see the building site it is serving, it is the march of time that you are contemplating as you stand against the glass, looking up at the soaring new storeys. You remembering the days before the construction workers moved in, and what have you done with your life since then? NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. And they have built a WHOLE BUILDING. And you think how that new building will live on, long after you are gone. Then someone offers to make tea and you forget all about it till next time.

This crane excitement was particularly potent since, from my desk on the seventh floor – and it's not clear from this photo – I can actually see the man inside the little white crane cabin. I can see he is human, not a remotely operated machine. I can see him moving his arms. I can see his legs dangling from his chair. I can see his trainers, crossed at the ankle. Obviously you know there are people who do this job, just like any other job – wondering how soon it is until home time and what they might have for tea – but how often do you actually think about them? I think about them quite a lot, but even more so now. They wield such power. What could you do with that giant hook if you were in charge of it, and had a bird's eye view? Could you lift up some smuggo's sports car or 4x4 and 'park' it somewhere completely new? If you saw someone dropping litter from a hundred feet up, how satisfying to be able to swoop down and lift up the offender by the back of the coat and deposit him in a skip somewhere half a mile from where he started, while you shout 'THAT'S how you dispose of rubbish' in words that are carried away on the wind before they reach their target. In reality, of course, these machines don't seem to operate too swiftly, so your pray would be able to out-manoeuvre you quite easily while you bashed into buildings and trees as you crunched the levers frantically.

For some periods this week, there were two men in the crane cabin, or on the platform just outside it. I was intrigued. You would not visit that crane cabin unless it was entirely necessary – through my surveillance, I discovered the way to get up there is not to glide serenely upwards in some cherry-picker of a chariot, but by climbing up a LOT of tiny steps (I say tiny, admittedly perspective was involved). The fact is, though, that it is a brilliantly private meeting place. The isolated workers may have been plotting a construction-firm mutiny, but I prefer to think there was some kind of Brokeback Builders scenario going on, two men in fluorescent workwear living out a love affair hundreds of feet above the city, forgetting that through one-way glass, hundreds of office workers have discovered their secret. Naturally, any elaborate date arrangements are somewhat precarious, since if you forget something crucial, it's a long wait for your beloved while you 'pop down and get it'.

'What's all this?'

'Oh, I just thought I'd make us a picnic. Oysters, strawberries… And these are some handmade chocolates I tempered myself…'

'Wow! That's amazing. I can't believe you've done all this. And what a view! I'll open the wine, shall I? Where's the corkscrew?'

'...'

Ciao Bella

I walked past this poster during my lunch hour the other day. Lost pet posters always hit a minor chord on the frayed Jones heartstrings. Not because I am a pet person. I am not. I don't want to pick up my own shit using an inside-out plastic bag, let alone anyone else's.

But something about the hopeful words and faded photos finds a way through my anti-animal flinch reflex and makes me hope for a reunion of that vulnerable, dependent creature and their pet.

Bella's journey, as described in the poster above, is particularly intriguing. How exactly did she find her way from Hackney, where she disappeared, to London Bridge station? The number 48 bus is the obvious answer, but given her nervous disposition, that seems unlikely. The bus is never the first choice for the timid traveller – it's so tricky knowing where to get off. You have to be aware of exactly when to ring the bell. If the bus is busy you can't see where you're going through the windscreen and god forbid you might actually have to ask someone. Factor in the burden of not having the ability to ask someone, and this is looking unlikely.

Of course, she could have been taken to London Bridge by someone, an abductor for instance. If so, they were pretty dumb not to try to disguise her in some way. A false moustache and glasses. At least a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes with two holes cut out for her ears.

Let's assume she made it to London Bridge station of her own accord. But what was her plan? Potentially she was getting on the south London line that stops at Battersea Park, where she was planning to visit the Dog's Home to stage a breakout of some old friends from the racing circuit. Or maybe she was bound for the seaside. Brighton, perhaps, or Hastings. Given her anxious nature, I'm wondering if she was contemplating a total lifestyle change, far from the noise and hysteria of the capital. The sea. The fresh air. A clear view of the horizon. The wind in her fur.

Send them a postcard, Bella, won't you? Just a sandy pawprint to say goodbye.

The Night Swatch

Last weekend I was walking the elegant avenues of Blackheath on the way to visit my friends Mr and Mrs S-P when I saw this house:

How community-spirited of its residents to invite neighbours and passers-by into the discussion of what colour to paint the front door.

Exactly which tasteful period-perfect bullet-grey shade should replace the current tasteful period-perfect bullet-grey shade?

Decisions, decisions.

Cashpoint cocktails

Welcome to South London. Would you care for a highball with your cash withdrawal?

How did you know I needed you so badly?

I wasn't having a good day today. No big drama, just regular tiny pieces of hell.

Then, this evening, three steps to heaven.

1) A financial haemorrhage in the Gap and Whistles sales.

2) A new Gareth Malone TV odyssey.

3) Then [press play on taped recording of celestial choir singing Hallelujah or similar], picking up an inauspicious A5 envelope off my doormat and seeing this glide out of it:

You can read about my love of the Lambeth Country Show here, here and here.

This booklet details all the competitions you can enter at the 2010 show – floristry, fruit modelling, baking and beyond. Below I have listed my two particular favourites from this year's themed categories, and if the very thought of them does not fill you with joy, then you can just walk away now. We may pass each other in the street from time to time, but we will not speak. We will be strangers from this day on.

The Scarecrow competition 2010: Stars from film, music and stage.

Floral art exhibits on the theme of the Olympics. Class 65: Synchronised swimming

Three hours, forty-five minutes and fourteen seconds

Maybe your brother's running his first marathon. Maybe you're terribly excited about it. Maybe some of the finest athletes in the world will be running right past the spot where you're standing. You love athletes. Maybe you and the city in which you live, whose future together is far from certain, what with your capacity for antagonism and mutual recrimination, will be having a really good day. This, then, would be the perfect time for you to leave the battery for your camera at home in the charger, where you'd remembered to put it the night before, and head out for the day with an empty, powerless camera in your bag, thus surrendering yourself to the inferior photographic skills of your mobile phone.

Excellent. Well done on that, Jones.

Young Miss Jones the Elder played the technology slightly better on Sunday, stationed in front of the computer at home like a pre-teen Uhura, carefully monitoring the digi-chat between the magic timing chip attached to her father's shoe and the internet, and reporting back to the rest of the family at their stations around the course.

Remember when I said I love athletes? I love athletes. While I was waiting to shout enthusiastic non-sequiturs at my brother at the 11-mile marker, I saw the elite men run past some time before him. At least, I think they were running. I couldn't swear to it. Pretty much what happened, I think, as it seemed to me, is that the rest of the world stopped and held its breath, and they floated past in a state of serene composure and physical perfection. It may be that I became incrementally a better person for seeing them, but I wasn't moved to buy a composter on the way home, so maybe the effect wasn't that dramatic.

This kind of thing has happened to me once before, about 12 years ago, on my only visit to Wimbledon (the tennis tournament, not the suburb – although actually, yes, both). We had seats on court number one, where Pete Sampras was playing. My friend was on Centre Court, thrilling to the lawn gymnastics of Becker (I think – it may have been Agassi), so I was sweating pure resentment when 'Pistol' Pete and his fuss-free competence walked on to the court. And then he started playing. That shut me up. 'You know that thing your soul rattles around in all day, the thing with the arms and the legs and the all-over skin?' Pete Sampras imaginarily said to me, in my seat far back in the stands. (Imaginarily, Pete Sampras has a really loud voice. Also, imaginarily, 'imaginarily' is an OK word to use.) 'Well, this is how it really works.'

In two years, London will be full of incredible people like this, and if you don't think this is very exciting you either a) don't live in London or b) would not endear yourself to me at a dinner party if this subject came up in conversation, causing me to sulk through dessert, snapping at accusations I was 'quiet this evening', and lie my way out of attending subsequent dinner parties I knew you would also be attending.

Anyway, at some point between the elite athletes and my brother (which is not such a big distance as you might think, not at 11 miles in any case) were the brilliant but mortal. One of them fell right in front of me, slipping over in the wet, his skin rasping across the tarmac. It was awful. No one knew what to do as he hauled himself up, furious and sore. The terror of saying something idiotic, so insultingly inane and unhelpful was paralysing. The very people who you'd think might have been up to the job, four St John Ambulance persons, remained rooted to the spot, dumbly brandishing a giant tub of Vaseline. Perhaps they are schooled not to approach an elite athlete in peril, in case they set about their finely-tuned muscles with excess enthusiasm and too-heavy hands. I hope that's the reason. I don't know what to say about them if it's not.

It feels hollow and all sorts of wrong to shout 'You can do it!' to someone who probably can, but not the way they want to, when you know that that difference means everything. I felt a bit like this afterwards with my brother, who did brilliantly but not brilliantly enough for him. I am counting on the attrition of congratulations and impressed faces he encounters over the next few weeks to convince him otherwise.

Customer service

It is Saturday evening. I am in Marks & Spencer at Victoria station. I am weary. It has been a wearying week. I am buying approximately £7.50 worth of slightly overpriced but reassuringly high-quality groceries. The cashier scans the contents of my basket.

'That'll be £500 please,' he says, delighted with himself.

'Wow,' I say. 'That is so reasonable.'

We have a little bit of a laugh together, and I pay the £7.50 and get on the 185 bus home.

It is Sunday morning. I am at the Bagel Factory concession in Paddington station. I am weary. It has been a wearying week. I am buying approximately £2 worth of barely toasted bagel and honey. The cashier punches some buttons on the till with his rubbery-gloved fingers.

'That'll be £150 please,' he says, delighted with himself.

'Wow,' I say. 'Is that all?'

We have a little bit of a laugh together, and I pay the £2 and get on a train to Oxford, imagining the memo that went out to all service employees of mainline train stations.

'Your customers are busy working professionals. They may be tired, worried, or just really really hungry. Brighten their day. Create a rapport. Try a joke. Share a moment together. People will come back for more.'

But are staff at Paddington stealing jokes from staff at Victoria? Is there a bitter dispute about whether Caffe Nero at Kings Cross or Monsoon at Waterloo have bagged the exclusive rights to use 'My assistant manager's got no nose...' Will the staff at WH Smith at Euston be taking it in turns to wear a false nose and glasses?

This may only be the start of it.

Wheels on fire

Look. Mobile libraries are cool again. They must be – this one was parked between the Tate Modern and a branch of Leon.


Admittedly neither of these places would pass for cutting edge in certain parts of Berlin or Brooklyn, but open the I-Spy Middle Class Cool book and they'll be right there next to The Big Chill and a Riverford organic vegetable box.

It seems strange to think of a roving library stopping off somewhere so urban. This is not a location that would strike me as culturally barren. But in the rarefied atmosphere of the Southbank, perhaps this van provides some kind of vital lowbrow lifeline, where punters can borrow a Dan Brown, no questions asked, and tuck it away in their fashionably sloganed canvas tote bag, just beneath their Malcolm Gladwell.

With Borough Market just a couple of hundred metres away, the mobile librarian probably does a roaring under-the-counter trade in Ginsters Pasties and Liebfraumilch too.

Square dance

My friend lives on Trinity Church Square, just off Borough High Street, and I visited her there for the first time on Friday night. It is a beautiful place, and I have passed within metres of it thousands of times without realising it was there. Now I can add it to the mental photo album that I flick through whenever I think that living in London is just pigeons and tutting and dropped kebabs and the hour it seems to take to get from anywhere to anywhere within the city.

If you like to imagine you live in a period drama – and which of us hasn't fantasised about a lifestyle of malnutrition and grossly compromised mortality – I'd say there weren't many better places to don a home-sewn Regency gown and affect your best consumptive cough under a generically olde-fashioned streetlamp.

On Friday, I was particularly excited because Rupert Penry-Jones and Phil Davis were also there filming.

The main cause of my excitement was that for a short time I believed they might have been making the long-awaited second series of Leeds-set legal drama North Square, which my friends and I think of with the same rosey-lensed nostalgic glow as we do the fruit crumble at our university refectory and the days when we could get through a dinner together without an extended discussion of fertility in the over-35s.

I was so excited I trod on a sandwich, which I failed to see in the darkness, and was then thrilled to discover wasn't a dog turd. It had that familiar sense of give-and-skid under one's foot.

Luckily, my penetrating reportage skills were to the fore, and I captured these images for you.

(V.I.G.s = Very Important Gilets)

What I haven't captured is the moment when a passer-by asked my gawking friends and I if it was OK if he walked through the filming area. 'Oh yes,' we replied authoritatively. 'You're fine, go ahead.' We were thrilled by this. We did not need a fluorescent gilet to conjure up the impression of insouciant authority and TV gravitas.

Knitwear news

Winter is creeping in. How do I know this? Because it's a) cold, b) dark and c) because you start seeing pavement-kill knitwear hung up on walls, hedges and fences - like these gloves, which I saw on my walk to the station one morning last week (What is more sinister than a belted glove? I will tell you: a leather belted glove. Brrr):

Most days, you avert your eyes from the woolly carnage. You turn the other rosy winter cheek. You've got both your gloves, thanks, your hands are nice and warm and you aren't that interested in a damp, trampled child's mitten. But on another day last week, I saw this:

Wait, hang on… that looks like… is it…? Yes. It is. It is a Jo Gordon scarf. A beautiful Jo Gordon scarf. Precisely the kind of scarf, in fact, that I have coveted for years. The kind that is four times as expensive as the usual scarves I buy. Also, I really like stripes. Look, here are some of my other scarves:

Soon, my brain was grappling with the politics of keeping the pavement-kill scarf. Firstly, given its obvious superior quality, it had clearly been lost, not abandoned. Its owner had simply failed to notice it being lifted away by the breeze, so intent was she (I'm assuming) on pedalling the bicycle-cum-wheelbarrow that steel-thighed middle-class mums now like to transport their brood to school in. Or it had been mangled under the wheels of a pushchair. In picking it up off the wall, I would, to the passing and curious, look like a) a thief or b) a vagrant. Unless… I picked it up with a kind of fabricated whoop of relief, a Surprised Face and a cry of, 'Thank God, it's found. My scarf! MY scarf. I've felt so worried! And so poor because it's really expensive. And also stripey.' To be honest, this was a tall order for my GCSE in drama.

Anyway, whichever way I chose to appropriate the scarf, it was a high-risk operation given the insularity of Dulwich's middle-class hangouts. I could never relax and enjoy a roasted vegetable and tapenade sandwich in one of the area's lifestyle cafes, or join the snaking queue outside the organic butcher, for fear of someone tapping me on the shoulder and saying apologetically, 'Excuse me, I think you might be wearing my scarf..?' In which instance, I would obviously have to say, 'No! Of course not! What on earth do you mean? What's that? A name tape? Oh yes. Yes, that's my name. Oh, it's yours too. What an ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE COINCIDENCE.'

I did not take the scarf. The next morning, it was gone. But a little further down the road I saw this:

A banana skin, on a narrow wall, under a tree. So, maybe that scarf had been left out in the cold to make me look like an idiot if I couldn't help but take it. And now, someone was trying to play one of the neighbourhood squirrels for a fool.

In which I demonstrate that palaeontologists are cruel and unfeeling

When you are returning to South Kensington tube station from the Royal Albert Hall late in the evening, after they have closed the tunnel that promises to be a short cut, yet never, ever feels like one, you walk down the side of the Natural History Museum. Last night, I noticed that the palaeontology boffins had left the lights on in one of the back rooms – yeah, big up our planet with your all-singing, all-interactive exhibits, boffins, but at the same time, KILL IT with your profligate attitude towards energy usage.

Anyway, through the window I saw this:

There, abandoned on top of some lonely cupboards, like a broken tennis racket or an ugly, inherited suitcase, was a small diplodocus*†.

Jesus, palaeontologists, show some respect. She's 150 million years old. She lived every day in mortal fear of the Tyrannosaurus rex** so you could dick around at university for the best years of your life.

* or effigy of

† possibly

** probably not. Diplodocuses are notoriously dim, so she probably lived every day thinking, 'Woh! My tail's really long. Cool!' and also 'Mmm, delicious foliage.'

Beware the Dreadlock Of Unusual Size

There are a great many Things about London, and one of those Things is that on any day, a day that may start just like all the others, you can suddenly notice a person in the street that you've never seen before. And then, the day after that, you might see them again, and you wonder how this should be, and why they've suddenly arrived in your life, and where they've been up until this point, and what the men who sit in the high, high cabins of construction cranes above the city who, as everyone knows, orchestrate everything that goes on on the streets beneath them, have in store for the pair of you.

And then you never see them again and the drudge consumes you once more, and you forget any of those thoughts that went before.

Yesterday, on the short journey between London Bridge and Southwark Street, I found myself walking behind this man and his… well, I would like to call it a mono-dreadlock, but it was not working alone. However, its considerable girth far outstripped that of its siblings. In keeping with my ongoing fad for allusions to the icons of 80s light entertainment, in the dreadlock Roly-Polys, this one was definitely Mo.

Then, this morning, I found myself following the same man and his prolifically unwashed hair once again and I was gripped by a chilly terror – that the end of that dreadlock would rear up towards me like a furry, unwashed cobra, and two beady red eyes would open, and a terrible, tiny jaw would unlock, and a set of pernicious, pointy little teeth would come right for me. I am slightly scared to go to bed tonight for fear that this is a portrait that will have been painted inside my closed eyelids. It is the night of the living dreadlock.

Jack your body

I was buying my lunch in M&S at London Bridge on Friday when I noticed a girl, early-20s but it's hard to tell (when I was in Norfolk recently, a bus driver asked me if I was UNDER 19 and it was the greatest moment of my life), roaming the aisles in black and white face paint.

In my usual open, non-judgmental way, I assumed she was on her way to her first Glastonbury, and demonstrating to all the stiffs staying in London exactly what an anything-goes time she was going to have down there.

Then, when I was queuing up to pay for my Mexican three bean wrap and half-price cherries, I found myself standing right next to her. In a way that was both sheepish and slightly attention-seeking, she shouted to her friend who was being served, 'Will you wait for me? It makes me look slightly less weird.'

We had a moment of catching each other's eyes, and she did a bit of eye-rolling and 'I'm so embarrassed.' I told her what I had surmised about her kerazee Glasto get-up, but she shook her head and said glumly, 'I'm Jack The Ripper.'

She worked at the London Dungeons, as it turned out.

'It's alright for her,' she said, nodding at her friend. 'She's a plague victim.'

I can confirm that the friend did look dramatically, and terminally, fake-ill.

'She gets a costume,' Jack said. [She was right. Plague Victim was working a generic olden-days skirt, and a dowdy blouse item.] 'So everyone knows she's playing a character. I just have to put a big coat and hat on over my own clothes.'

I was interested in the gender politics of a woman playing the prolific murderer of prostitutes. Obviously I didn't say that. I just went, 'But you're a girl. Cool.'

She explained that since she was pretty much covered up, with a scarf across half her face, she could loom out of the shadows and slash away with drama-student abandon, and no one would know that under her coat she had been concealing not just a knife, but also breasts (two).

[Has anyone ever written a horror film set in a chamber-of-horrors re-enactment experience? I went through one at Madame Tussaud's a few years ago, when I was there in the evening for a work party. I honestly thought that was the way I was going to die. Incidentally, the evening ended prematurely after someone spilt red wine on Wax Madonna's white suit. A couple of years before that, I had been to a record launch there [Moments Where My Life Sounds More Exciting Than It is No 64] and the management became quite distressed when one of my colleagues pulled Wax Alan Titchmarsh's trousers down. But really, what do they expect?]

Anyway, I was excited by my brush with grim-faced wearers of horror facepaint. However, not everyone is so easily impressed. We ended up paying at adjacent tills, and her cashier looked her up and down, before saying in a voice of sighing and ennui, 'Who are you today, then?'

It's the most wonderful time of the year

This has been the most important weekend in the south-east London calendar. For this weekend it was the Lambeth Country Show, which is exactly what it promises to be – a country show just a few hundred yards from Brixton. Hay-on-Wye has books and Mariella Frostrup in wellies; Sussex has Glyndbourne; Goodwood has, like, Goodwood, which is apparently glorious. We have sheep-shearing, falconry displays, an eardrum-corroding sound system, owls, and the Labour Party selling bric-a-brac.

Where else would you see children milking a simulated wooden cow? Or hard-faced, shorn-skulled army cadets with tattoos on their necks enthusing over a stall selling fudge in all the colours of God's beautiful rainbow? All this at the same time as you're enjoying a wholemeal bap bursting with farm sausages.

Every year, I have two favourite attractions at the LCS. The first is the aforementioned display of owls, beatifically enduring their less-than-desirable working conditions… 

…except for this one, my favourite, and clearly the old lag of the troupe. I love the way he looks so entirely full of contempt, quite as if standing on a plinth and being stared at by people ambitiously dressed in shorts is so utterly, utterly beneath him.

I think the owl concession may have changed hands in recent years. All this year's owl wranglers were kindly elderly men. In a previous year, I swear I remember a satanically red-faced 50-year-old barking at a toddler to stand back because 'THIS BIRD COULD KILL A CHILD.' I think he was let go.

And then there is the tent where you can thrill! at the best onions in show, gasp! at the first-prize bonsai trees, swoon! at the most superior baking and cross-stitch, and – best of all – be amazed! by the finest fruit and vegetable modellers in Lambeth and surrounding area. Let us begin with the children's class:

The tiny tortoise family on the left of the frame was declared the winner, but if you ask me, this penguin was swizzed.

 

Meanwhile, first place in the grown-ups' classification went to this effigy of a modern-day icon:

It beat this ambitious recreation of The Magic Roundabout:

I can only assume the sculptors lost points for painting on Zebedee's features with Tipp-Ex.

Sleeping with the lights on

Meeting of the Secret Society Responsible For Giving Children Nightmares

'Thanks for coming, everyone. Help yourself to Garibaldis. They really are squashed flies inside them. At least, that's the party line. Now, let's begin. We all know the Society is in trouble. Children these days aren't scared of anything. I read it in The Daily Mail. Authority, prison, ghosts, daleks – they're just bouncing off these kids like fruit gums. They hardly ever even show Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on TV any more. So can anyone actually give us some good news? Clive?'

'Well [shuffles papers proudly], yes, actually. I'm quite excited about this one. There's some truly excellent work being done in the Dulwich Village area.'

'Dulwich Village? Where the mere idea of a bus running down the main street is so inharmonious to the overall vision they've been banished to the outskirts?'

'That's right, Keith. That's what makes this so exciting. Just look at this incredibly sinister dummy wedged in a tree in the playground of an infant school.'

'God, that is really horrible. Simple, sure, but devastatingly effective. Firstly, they've taken the battle to the target's very own play area. Secondly, they've really gone back to basics. Dummies, guys, mannequins – all fantastically disturbing. We've really been caught napping here. The primitive approach is a masterstroke. Carry on, Clive, carry on.'

'Well, I particularly like the way the head droops to one side at such an angle as to make it look exactly like an asphyxiated corpse. It's just so… haunting.'

'Like the bit in Jesus Christ Superstar when Judas hangs himself, which I'm not too big to say I found very traumatic as a child?'

'Yes, Keith, exactly like that. And allow me to draw your attention to the emaciated, prisoner-of-war-style flesh-coloured stick leg. Of which there is only one.'

'One! And is it…? Yes! Footless too! Quite, quite brilliant. Oof, I don't mind saying, I think someone just walked over my grave. Shall we break for lunch?'

On not talking to strangers

It's all too easy to criticise another person's efforts to find a mate. Let none of us glass-house-dwellers feel too smug – all of us have been, are, or will be at some point involved in wild gestures of self-abasement in an attempt to stave off the dreaded loneliness.

But with that caveat firmly in place, you have to conclude that, sometimes, people aren't really helping their cause.

I was having lunch at the weekend and a friend was telling me that a few days earlier she had been walking down a local street when a van stopped suddenly in the middle of the road, impeding the progress of the cars behind it, who had to begin manoeuvring around the now stationary vehicle. The driver got out and sprinted over to my friend, alarming her slightly from the off, and asked her for directions to Sevenoaks. My friend is the very epitome of goodness, so she started to respond as best she could, but soon his more amorous intentions became apparent, and he asked her out. As I'm typing this, I feel that it's in danger of sounding almost romantic – you're walking along and a man just has to stop and talk to you. It's like the Impulse ads of the 80s which I considered, at my impressionable age, impossibly romantic. But let me first say that my friend is in her early-mid 30s, could easily blag mid-20s, and hot. Her suitor was in his mid-40s, could easily blag mid-50s and, well, not so much. In addition, him telling her 'Don't worry, it's not an assault' may not have carried the reassuring warmth he was hoping for. Further more, having grown up in the heyday of public safety information films, a strange man in a van propositioning you is maybe not so much the answer to your wistful, girlish prayers as just quite weird and creepy.

I know this because it also happened to me, a couple of years ago. Again, a street; again, a van. He wound down his window to talk to me – but not to ask for help, as I'd thought. Oh no. He wanted to enquire whether I would go out for a drink with him. I know he was not the same character as my friend's admirer as he was a much younger man, but he had also armed himself with a verbal disclaimer – 'I know this is a bit weird but…' – guaranteed not to make you feel safer in any way.

I must make one thing clear at this point. Coyness aside, the mere sight of me trundling along a pavement is unlikely to make anyone slam on their brakes, and believe they hear a celestial chorus starting up. Which led me to wonder just how long he'd been cruising the streets of south-east London looking for not so much The One as Anyone. My suspicions of premeditation crystallised when he produced a scrap of paper with his name and number on it, without taking even a second to scrabble around for a pen and something to write on. Was there a stash of them, pre-written, in the glove compartment, all set for the moment when a lone female should wander across the crosshairs? How many had he already given out? I would have been borderline impressed if he'd had a pad made up of them, ready to tear off and hand out, like the world's least rewarding raffle tickets, but that would have been more about my enthusiasm for stationery than his caramel-smooth moves.

It's not that I don't believe in love at first sight. I might do. I don't know. Do I? Maybe. I do know very happy couples who met on public transport and struck up conversation, no doubt ignited by physical attraction, but realised in a more genuine, spontaneous and, oh, I don't know, healthy way. These three-door kerb-cruisers, though, seem to be scuppering their own plans by the heady scent of desperation they've splashed on all over, an apparent lack of discernment, and their insensitivity to women's concerns for stuffy old-fashioned values like personal safety. But I'm curious. Do these tactics ever really work? Really? 'Well, I was on my way to Sainsbury's, but stuff the Nectar points. A drink it is. Should I just get into the back of your van now? I could bind and gag myself if it will save you the bother. Just let me know where you keep your gaffer tape.' And it is hugely unlikely I would ever go out with a man who sat next to me on the bus and opened our conversation with 'You have boyfriend? You come with me? I make it real good for you.' Also a true story.

Certain members of my family are probably reading this and thinking 'Well, lord knows you're not getting any younger. A nice offer like that, and him with his own van. You could do a lot worse.' But I'll take the shepherd's pie for one and the promise of not appearing posthumously in a Crimewatch reconstruction, if it's all the same with you.

Trolley pash

Today I was in the branch of Starbucks that nestles (or should I say Nestlés) inside my local branch of Sainsbury's (big up, you tiny local businesses) doing some work and minding my own cappucino. I wasn't working for Sainsbury's or Starbucks, although I am precocious in my grasp of the self-checkout. 

Before too long, an elderly couple came and sat opposite me. There was nothing remarkable about them, clothed as they were from the conventional over-70s lookbook of tartan, quilting and the darker neutrals. There were no wedding rings on display, so I took the view that they were on a shop-date.

Given that they had plumped for the sofa directly opposite mine, rather than the many, many vacant chairs and tables all around us, I wondered whether Mr Silver-Haired Shop-Date had chosen that particular side-by-side seating arrangement as groundwork for the classic 'yawn, arm-stretch, lateral-embrace' courting sequence.  But of course it was nothing so vulgar. Perhaps they had simply chosen the sofa for its proximity to the window, and the conversational aid provided by the view (as small talk can be taxing on such occasions). The rain, he correctly surmised, was holding off. 

They each had a cup of tea, of course, and shared a cheese sandwich on white bread which, with admirable daring, they had brought in from Sainsbury's itself (rather than buying a modish Starbucks wrap) and conspiratorially opened up the packaging under cover of a plastic bag.

Charming, of course, but soon my eyes were drawn to a far more romantic spectacle – their tartan shopping trolleys smooching together beside the table. Here they are, in all their erotically charged glory. To the left of the frame, you can see the lined notebook I was furtively using as a shield for my cameraphone. 

Tea drained and sandwich eaten, they trundled out of the shop and away across the car park. What with it only being 4pm, it wasn't exactly into the sunset, but aptly, they walked under a grey, overcast sky with the faint promise of some sunshine.