Tag Archives: Phil Ryan

Londoners Life 6 by Phil Ryan

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Londoners Life 6 – by Phil Ryan

I see the London spirit of Christmas is unrolling now. Which brings me to the real growing spirit of Christmas. Spirit. You suddenly can’t move at the moment in London for drunks. It’s not just me. Even the local paper round here commented on it. Maybe it’s the coming second recession? Getting on the tube on a Friday night after eleven nowadays is like getting inside a can of Fosters with seats. You just breathe in and you’re intoxicated. And take a look at Leicester Square at 12.00ish on a Saturday. It looks like a rehearsal for a Zombie movie. Shuffling shambling weirdos staggering down every side street. Like children’s puppets on Calpol. Admittedly some are the Hare Krishnas but you can usually spot them by the drummer. And as far as I know they don’t drink. Well not when on duty. I often try to imagine the nightly parade up at Krishna Head quarters. Right lads were going out now. Keep a good formation. Plenty of Hare hare’s. Flog those CDs like your life depends on it. Vishnu you were off time last night. Get it together lad! It’s up on the first syllable and down on the next. The rest of you try and look blissed out of your faces. You know the enlightened look. And keep that constant shuffle going. But I digress.

Seriously the drink issue in London is not hard to see. It’s like the 11.30 guy. You see him every weekend. Unconscious on the Circle Line. A line of drool slowly escaping from one side of his mouth. He’s slumped in his usual I’ve got no idea who or where I am position. His snores barely audible. He’s always in a crumpled grey suit. His tie way off at an angle. He’s probably missed his stop four times. But he gets home. Eventually. Somehow. A bit like pigeons I suppose. Some instinct. A navigation device provided by nature. But as a drunk he has to overcome one huge and deadly hurdle. A true London hazard. The hot dog guys.

These charming creatures are usually shifty looking murderer lookalikes and dress in the oddest uniform. Beanie woolly hat. Leather jacket. Jogging Bottoms. And nameless training shoes. They all smoke. Furtively. Most are unshaven and have that curious blue stubble face like a cartoon. Presumably it all comes as part of their training package. Just part of The Hot Dog University of London’s student body elite. Make no mistake. This is food for drunks. But woe betide the innocent tourist they entrap. Their next view of London will be gazing down one of our finest toilet bowls. A view of their hotel they really weren’t expecting. But as I say it’s the drunks who must be their main prey. You’d have to be drunk to be lured into buying one. The noisy sizzling. The heady aroma of onions and rat urine drifting like an unheavenly cloud on the breeze. The hot dogs or unidentified waste product as they’re better known in Environmental Health circles all soaking in the year old grease (as they cook for the ninetieth time). Only the completely inebriated cannot resist. Wily Londoners know this. Drunken ones flock like wasps round a jam jar. And you can often see where after consuming one they have charmingly decided to eject it! I believe the vernacular has it as pavement pizza. Still it beats an enema.
But with the sudden explosion in health food shop/cafes in London that’s often taken care of for you. London seems to have suddenly stealthily filled up with little trendy looking delicatessens on every off high street location. All boasting a small café area inside. You can’t miss them. Everything’s wholemeal. Staff included. And they all smell like an old stable. The shops and cafes I mean not the staff. Usually a cute little bell tinkles when you warily step inside. Like an old fashioned shop. Nice touch. But beware. Smiley young staff in forest green looking aprons stand about trying not to burst out laughing when you ask the price of a titchy jar of Andulisian honey. Trust me. Don’t ask. It’s all pricey beyond belief. But kind of nice in a trendy sort of I have too much money sort of way. I’m sure it all tastes very nice. I’m thinking of applying for a loan this week to buy some Cornish artisan otter cheese and two loaves of Kentish granary and grit bread. Don’t get me wrong I hate supermarkets. It’s just this lot are the other extreme. Food as fashion and a statement about you. Honestly. They don’t seem to sell normal food. Even when you sit down for a cup of tea to get over the shock it’s always Burmese green tea or burlap, wood and dandelion infusions whilst the cakes look like Buffalo excretions dusted with Bear excretions. It’s all about grains. Apparently. Nuts. Seeds. Earth. Natural roughage. Hence the free enema point from earlier. This stuff passes through you quicker than the time a Camden traffic warden takes to ticket a disabled person’s car. But it’s healthy I’m told. Smaller independent shops (which I’m all for) selling locally sourced produce. Look around. They’re everywhere now. And do we buy it. Yes of course we do. It’s a London thing.

Londoners Life 5 by Phil Ryan

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Londoners Life 5 – By Phil Ryan

Winter is here in London. It’s official. The clothes say it all. And right now you can clearly see the London tribes. Clear and defined. In cloth, leather and appliqué. The Hoxton and Camdenite trendies. The monied Sloane’s of Kensington. The shady street dealers of Shepherds Bush. From the ludicrously large Fur Trapper hats and skinny jeans, to the silver and gold Puffa jackets plus obligatory bling. The thigh length Cossack boots to the new Paul Smith stripy scarves. Postcodes struck in wool and leather and nylon as clearly as an assay mark. A friend once remarked that the onward march of the chain clothing store would eventually destroy all individuality in style terms. But be that as it may, just like the swallows flying south each year off to Capistrano following nature’s imperative, the winter looks are as clearly and definitively ingrained at a genetic London borough by borough level.

In Whitechapel it’s the portly types in the Primark Gangster collection crossed with JD sports sale items. In Chelsea it’s the slim model like folk in black Yves St Laurent mixed with Yamamoto. London brands its citizens by fashion and by income so very clearly at this time of year. I’m surprised it’s not on their passports – a second picture of them in full seasonal look. Oh the customs officer would say peering at the small image of them dressed head to toe in Burberry check. You’re from Stratford. Through you go.

And as certain as the winter fashions the other London winter signs are gathering pace. The chestnut sellers are back from wherever they go in the warmer weather. You’ll find them at every piazza or open space. Traditional London winter prices at about 90 pence per charcoal blackened cremated chestnut. Or to translate – £3.00 for three grudging half mouthfuls once you’ve discarded the charcoal and eaten the non burnt bits. And of course the ever perennial pre-seasonal dodgy perfume sellers. Honest guvnor’ this Calvin Klein is genuine. Just a litre for a tenner. The crowds swarming round them like hyperactive bumble bees on Ketamine. Sadly without the sense of your average drone. Stolen or not – no respectable crook is going to give four bottles of Chanel no 5 away for nothing. So come Christmas they’ll watch in baffled dismay as poor Auntie Vi’s face falls off into her soup or the smell from the bottle attracts Zombies from as far away as Peru seeking dead flesh. A little bit of Del boy mixed with Jeffrey Dahmer. Typical. You just can’t trust criminals eh?

But London’s street people are changing. The old perennials giving way to more foreign imports. From Romanian pick pocket gangs to increasingly rabid street preachers. I saw two the other day on opposite sides of the street. One a Yemeni Muslim the other an American Christian Evangelist. Both completely barking mad. Yelling weird slogans about saving us all. Finding our way to their truth. My immediate thought being what and turn into you two nut jobs?

Just like my last column I’m sure I could be missing something here though. Did they have a spiritual truth? But the answer is in fact no. I’m just not convinced my path to eternal salvation starts outside the Car Phone warehouse. With people unburdened by the pressure of sanity. Although, if it has to start somewhere for me, there has to be cakes. And in London right now there’s a new cake shop explosion. I of course refer to the new muffin places. Time was you’d be lucky to get a chocolate one. Now there’s a plethora of new places offering every type you could think of. I saw Passion Fruit and Peanut butter muffins the other day. Although, this could have just been the first day for the new guy. He’s off the medication now and his doctors are hopeful he’ll soon be able to live a normal life. Muffins I ask you. A new fashion. Who’d have thought it? £4.00 a pop or £1.50 per tiny micro mouthful. But I’ve been to five separate boroughs recently and they’ve all got these trendy looking new tea rooms. Or Café’s de The as they like to poncingly call themselves. It’s a studied look. Coolness and kitsch in one. Brushed Oak and steel benches next to pictures of polka dot pinnies and old posters of apple cheeked children at a gas stove.

Cake stands with frilly lace overhangings next to a sleek black ipod docking station. Earl Grey tea caddies next to Red Bull cans or those weird energy drinks you’ve never heard of with extract of ginko root and killer whale ears. And the people who run them? All the owners all look like successful architects with a hint of mental illness. The women. Prada meets a lady factory worker from the fifties. And the men all look like Bertie Wooster meets Karl Lagerfeld via Oxfam. The rest of the staff doe eyed eastern European beauties working for the minimum wage. Of course the word home-made figures prominently everywhere. As does organic. As do eye watering prices. But hey ho. It’s cute. It’s retro. It’s wildly overpriced. But do we mind? No. It’s a London thing.

Londoners Life 4 by Phil Ryan

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Londoners Life 4 – By Phil Ryan
It’s a given that in London you see odd things. City things. Things you don’t see say in the countryside. Urban things. And though they’ve been around a while I saw a thing in town just now that left me speechless. A large man. Standing on a main thoroughfare. Outside John Lewis. In a dayglo boiler suit. An almost radioactive lime green reflective material. The words Computer Sale written all over him. Up each leg. Along his arms. On his chest. On his back. And adding indignity to indignity. On the large sail like top hat he was wearing was an arrow. Pointing to presumably the place holding the computer sale. A human billboard. With a pocket thing. Full of leaflets.

Sadly my initial thought was what must the job interview be like? That said. Oh my god. Who came up with this idea? There used to be guys holding giant signs on poles. They were always listening to something on headphones. Presumably the words “don’t kill yourself” on a constant loop. But the pole was a tangible thing. It said I’m a signpost to the golf clearout. The guy has to hold me or I’ll fall down or blow away. But the suit sign phenomenon. A black hole for human dignity. A nadir in exploitation. It’s just a few steps away from children up chimneys isn’t it? Yes I’ve seen people in costumes before on the streets. There’s a party place near where I live. They do fancy dress. Fireworks. Novelty stuff. Every now and again there’ll be a guy in giant teddy bear costume outside holding a bunch of balloons and dancing around on the pavement. He waves to the cars. We toot our horns and wave back. He waves back. We all smile and feel a little better. Of course I could have this wrong and it could be some earnest protest about the exploitation of bears in circuses. Maybe the balloons are just symbolic. Maybe the party place hires out endangered bears. Perhaps the Giant teddy is begging us to help stop this. His little dance and wave actually blind fury as we smile and wave and drive on. He’s not waving he’s shaking his fists at us. Thoughtless swine. But I like his Teddy bear suit. It’s very nice. Friendly. Evocative of childhood. Whereas the dayglo guys just look frankly naff. And conjure up slavery and low wages. Damn I can’t stop thinking about that Teddy bear now. But as a Londoner my conscience is pricked about ten times every hour.
There’s the smiling young people with clip boards. Fresh faced. Innocent. Optimistic. Students I’m guessing. Saying hello. Giving you a thumbs up. They wear little tabards saying Christian Giving. Starving Children or Africa it’s awful isn’t it. Apparently it’s called chugging. Which is shorthand for charity mugging. They try and stiff you for two pounds a month or someone will die. And secretly they hint it’s your fault. Then there’s the misery tables. Usually the pasteboard ones you buy at B&Q to paper the downstairs lav. But now covered with pictures of beagles having a fag. Monkeys wearing makeup which I thought was quite cute until the earnest young woman put me straight. I gave her a quid. But one truly unique London thing is the anti regime tables. Solemn looking people holding books of people who have disappeared. Down with the nasty regime. They want you to sign a petition. I always do. But of course I can’t help thinking A) I’m not sure the nasty regime is going to be bothered by a petition.

 Especially from a load of concerned Londoners, as currently they’re happy killing people who probably need a bit more protection than a petition but the B is the more worrying. Maybe I’ve now upset the regime by getting involved. Plus now they’ve got my name. Sometimes my postcode. Maybe they’ve got Google Street map. These guys kill people. Uh oh. But that’s another issue for another time. I guess the point is that the streets of London are now covered in stuff. Year on year. People in your way. Stopping you getting where you are going. Don’t get me wrong it’s all generally good. Big Issue. Great. Salvation Army. Fantastic. Red Poppy appeal. Marvellous. But I have to say finally there is one group of London street people that just baffles me. The Hare Krishnas. Uh? A load (sorry make that four to six) of people in thin orange pyjamas shuffling along banging a drum slightly out of time (very annoying if you feel like grooving) and repeating themselves in a sing song voice. And always two of them who don’t have all the orange gear. I saw one the other day with the orange shirty thing but wearing leather bondage trousers covered in zips and high heels. His friend had the orange pyjama bottoms but was sporting a rather fetching pink Puffa jacket with the legend Street Fighter embroidered across it with matching Ugg boots. Clearly they were half krishnas. Not quite fully orange. Trendsetters if you will.

But be careful. If you catch their eye they’ll immediately stop and try and flog you a book with some bloke and a blue elephant on the front. Or sometimes a weird looking CD. So the pavements are filling up. But do we care? Really. Does it bother anyone honestly? No. It’s a London thing.

Londoners Life Part 3 by Phil Ryan {Opinions}

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Christmas is coming. It’s November but to London’s shop keepers the herds of shoppers are easily spooked. Like hunters, they are carefully baiting their traps, staying downwind of the easily confused consumers but they are readying their weapons all the same. The window displays are slowly turning into confusing artworks. A stick-thin model girl nailed to a reindeer with glitter pouring out of her knees. It’s where the window display merchandisers in large department stores get to show what they can really do, although it seems much of their festive season output resembles a badly planned acid trip.

For the less fanciful shops, Santas and snow scenes seem to be appearing on every aisle. The sponsored lights are going up in Bond Street,  now, in November. I’m not sure what this year’s theme is – probably celebrating the miraculous birth of our Lord Jesus Christ with a tasteful The Three Wise men at *insert-generic-store-name-here theme. Each bringing those well known biblical gifts, an Xbox, an ipod and the ‘scream and then watch me vomit’ little chav doll from Mattel. That’s not the Mattell Toy company by the by that’s from Dave Mattell from Dagenham ‘Toys r Cheap and Cut price Booze’ store.

Like the anxious shopkeepers you can smell the money in the air, or at least the expectation of money. Recession? What recession? ‘Tis the season to be exploited. Sad really. It’s really not quite as Dickensian as it could be. But the snow is forecast. And London will do its best. So look out for rosy cheeked pickpockets operated by eastern European gangmasters, feisty chestnut sellers pushing crack and Scrooge as played by the local Councils closing down old people’s homes and care centres. Tis the season to be jolly spend thrifts. Courtesy of MasterCard or Barclaycard presumably.
Barclaycard. These are the same people who are sponsoring the newest fad in town. The Boris bike. The easily accessible bicycle you can ride around town on. No more smelly and hot tube trains. Just leap onto a Boris bike and away you go! Zoom through the parks. The little back streets. They’ve settled in rather quickly I must say. Everywhere you go centrally in London at least. I note that places like say Kidbrooke or Stonebridge Park appear to have been missed out in the locations of bike docking stations. Mainly because the bikes would be in a skip fire or more likely on a container ship to Liberia within hours of deployment. In a way you could say it’s a kind of new classism by bike. But still, you’ll see them weaving and wobbling in out of traffic around Trafalgar Square, the City and Kensington High Street with those type of people you just somehow expect to see on them. I’ve not tried one myself. Death has never appealed to me. Clearly there is a hidden agenda though. It just occurred to me I must be missing something. It’s not a class thing at all. Perhaps it’s a new job creation thing. You can just see the meeting, City Hall, midnight, written on a whiteboard in red.

How can we create job places in a crowded job market? Answer; Put lots of professional people on unwieldy heavy bicycles, take some money from them and then hurl them like baby ducks into friendly London traffic. A nightmarish concoction of rumbling huge lorries, confused mini cab drivers, belligerent black-taxi drivers, Kamikaze Pizza bike delivery boys. Fiendish eh? But I shouldn’t carp. Here in London we are innovators, we pride ourselves on it. Take our restaurant scene for example, where else are you able to choose from dishes whose descriptions are so pretentious you can see the waiter smirking from thirty feet away? In my area it’s rife. Who writes this stuff? “Jus of spring mint and beagle shattered with lemon butter and fresh wild Ecuadorian bong berries lovingly smothered on apricot battered tender codlet tarragon peppered steaks fried au on nuit”. Uh? Then like an infant it either has to be explained to you by some show-off out of work actor. (Nothing wrong with being an actor – Editor) Meanwhile you sit like some Alzheimers patient nodding and smiling still clueless. Or you take a chance and hope it doesn’t taste like fried baby vomit in a glove. Don’t get me wrong, I like creativity and I like food. Just tell me what it is. I’ll order quickly, honest I will.

Having said that, the descriptions dazzle most people long enough for them to not notice the price tag. Which is the whole idea. Normal food at eye watering prices with undecipherable descriptions. But it’s not about the food, so I’m told, it’s the place, the ambience, the vibe and most importantly what it says about you. Vacuous? Empty? No. It’s a London thing.

The Londoner Life Part 2 October {Opinions}

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The Londoners Life – October – By Phil Ryan

If there’s one thing that vexes the average Londoner it’s the state of public transport. Mainly because it doesn’t actually work often. It sort of nearly functions. I marvel at the regular announcements on the Underground. Today we have a good service. Two things always strike me about these announcements. One is they are setting me up to get ready for the bad service days by alerting me to the fact that to every equal there is an opposite. And the second is the thought why announce that the system is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. That’s like walking into a restaurant and the waiter coming over and announcing they have plenty of food. That’s the point isn’t it? But once you’ve managed to actually struggle around in the day on our crumbling and ever fragile transport infrastructure the next even more pressing problem is the late night options. And these can be summed up in three words – The Night Bus.

These are effectively large slow moving vehicles designed to contain as many drunks and werewolves as possible. Sprinkle in the few members of the occasional psychotic street gang, the unconscious guy who smells of vomit, and the elderly man wearing a tin foil helmet singing in a curiously low mumbling voice and voila – you have an average Night Bus passenger manifest. Where it says destination they might as well put Narnia. As the doors open the smell of alcohol and chips hits you, you nod at the driver cowering behind his bulletproof glass, he shrugs and off you go. It’s like buying a lottery ticket. And interestingly offers the same complete element of chance. I once got onto a Night Bus in Camden Town. It was packed. So I made my way upstairs onto the top deck. It was full of silent people all dressed in Gorilla suits. I went back downstairs. London. With its unique social fabrics. Difficult to fathom.

Just like asking people for directions. No matter what area you are in, if you pull the car over and tentatively call to a passerby they will do one of three things. Run in terror. Blatantly ignore you. Or smile and say they are not from round there. It’s guaranteed. I now believe that every morning everyone in London goes to a completely different area. Everyone. En masse. They walk around. Fill the cafes. Sit in the offices. Thus guaranteeing nobody is from anywhere local ever. A month back I was in Balham. Somewhere. In a friend’s car. Late and lost. First I tried the obvious approach of asking people walking by. They displayed the three standard characteristics I mentioned earlier. Then I went into a shop. Three guys behind the counter. Sorry mate they chorused. We’re not from round here. It was a 24 hour shop. When did they have time to be anywhere else? A conundrum. But paling into insignificance compared to the new phenomenon that I now struggle with. Re-cycling confusion.

I now have four bins. I used to have just one. But now I have two yellow bags. A brown bin. A blue bin. A green box. Four collection days. And a handy explanation guide from the Council. Written by a dyslexic gibbon. It’s the new thing. Re-cycling. In reality it means stuffing your home with small piles of waste. Rotting food. Great stacks of paper and cardboard. It’s like living in a well furnished refuse facility. The only thing missing is a flock of seagulls and a bunch of those weirdos who turn up in orange boiler suits on weekends. The ones that find a broken chair and reclaim it. They carefully fix it up until it looks just like a broken chair covered in gaffer tape. Coincidentally one lives next door. My next door neighbour is a pinched face woman. She wears one of those knitted Peruvian hats. Her dog is called Krishna. A keen re-cycler she once told me. I’d commented on her orange boiler suit with ‘This is my Planet’ stencilled on the back. And I made the mistake of asking her to explain the new system to me. Sadly she explained it. For an hour. I went back inside. I’d been doing it wrong. I’d been mixing paper with plastics. Food with waste. And batteries with old nuclear warheads. It was ridiculous. I felt bad. I was destroying the planet singlehandedly. But then that’s the whole idea. To put you off balance. As they guilt trip you they can now charge little bits of extra cash. For special waste bags. To pay for new trees in the area. To keep the park nice. To mow the verges. To stop the icebergs from melting. To save the Patagonian purple booby hawk. A Green levy they call it. To pay for things your Council tax used to pay for anyway. I once met my local Council leader. He smilingly told me they ship all my rubbish to China. Very green. Ten billion gallons of diesel and a filthy old cargo ship chugging from Camden to Shanghai. Oil slick trailing behind it. I hate my Council. I have to. But all Londoners do. It’s a London thing.

The Londoners Life, October. By Phil Ryan.

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The Londoners Life. October.

To be a Londoner. It’s strange thing. A kind of love hate relationship. The underground round here seems permanently closed. Most weekends at least. The chilling signs of doom proclaiming that fearful message. Replacement bus service. What this means is some bloke who doesn’t know where he’s going takes you on a long and slow mystery tour. You get to your station. Just four hours later. But you learn to accept these things. It’s part of being a Londoner. A bit like being a Satanist really. You know it’s crazy but it works for you. And as my out of town friends say. It’s a London thing.

A bit like the mad prices. I work on my tea and cake index. To judge an area, simply find a café and have tea and cake. If you’re in Hampstead or Chelsea say it’ll be the price of a full meal somewhere else. But then again the somewhere else could be a charming greasy spoon on a crack dealing run down sink estate. In the parade. Next to the launderette. Kebab Shop. And Pound Shop. Tea and jaffa cakes. Two quid mate. Oh and d’you need any blow? Gun perhaps? Alibi? Fake passport? Exotic snake? Very London.

My favourite recent experience was flat hunting. My old lease expired and they sold the building. And being London you get two months to vacate. How terribly reasonable. So I hit the estate agents. Rentals. The desperate home of lies. I can see why people hate estate agents. They don’t listen. And I met Richie. Smiling lying Richie. His accent indeterminate. Sharply dressed. Blackberry glued to ear. “I can find you exactly what you need”. So onto my fifth dank dark and damp lower ground floor flat (basement) with a handy bijou garden (with the look and feel of an abandoned child paupers grave) We went down the lower ground floor steps. The house from the outside resembling a poorly constructed mental asylum. I watched him enter. Then I followed. The damp smell almost making me gag. Richie? No expression. Constantly receiving texts. There was a stain on the floor. A large bloodstain. I looked at it. He didn’t. I turned sideways to enter the half size bathroom door. I looked at the bath. Ideal if you were a hobbit. He said. Compact and easy to clean. I pointed to the fact that the kitchen had a service hatch into the bedroom. Handy for midnight snacks he instantly answered. I thought of the bloodstain. I fancied adding another. His.

And of course the costs. Eye watering deposits. Security deposits. One months rent in advance. And then the paperwork. “It’s just a formality really. But we’ll need the following”. Bank Statement. Credit card Statement. Savings account statement. Mobile phone bill. Passport. Tax bill. Council tax bill from last property. Letter from an authorised person. Letter from another authorised person authorising the first one. Letter from the Doctor. Birth certificate. Car registration papers. School reports. Screenplay for an unfinished film. Plan for ending world poverty. Directions to Atlantis.

I looked at countless other places. Toilet in lounge place. Place without windows place. Top floor so high you looked down on aeroplanes place. Strangely decorated in mirrors everywhere place. Place that smelt of death place. Richie was replaced by Steve and Harrington. All congenital liars. And congenial liars too. Pleasant but ultimately in control. “You’ll have to act quick, we have ten more people looking at the place” And they did. I met one couple. We arrived at the same time. The girl who resembled an elk in a duvet cover looked at me suspiciously. Her partner a small man with receding legs grinned. “Lovely eh?” I looked at the rust covered windows. I smiled. “No it’s a rat hole”. His face brightened. “It’s perfect for us” he said without a hint of irony. She glared at me. I left them to it.
I found somewhere. Through a business colleague.

But this is London. Not a city but another country. Things work differently here. We have theatre. Art galleries. Clubs. Quick break down. Theatre can mean two women in black leotards in a room above a pub shouting in Czech as a Britney Spears CD plays at half speed. Art gallery can mean people with piercings and curious hair standing around in an old warehouse drinking cheap white wine as the walls appear to be hung with the daubing of a hyperactive chimp. Clubs. Well could be a basement so packed and hot and loud people are paying to leave. But it’s cosmopolitan. Apparently.

Next London life report: Important questions answered – Why are night buses like moving mental health communities? Are you getting into re-cycling difficulties? And why nobody you ever ask for directions ever lives in that area?

Phil Ryan.