Feeling My Age

Pic: taken with Instagram

A team of chuggers with collecting boxes emerging from the tube onto Oxford Street ready to take up their stations for yesterday evening’s rush hour.

Urban Dictionary‘s top definition of “chugger” is scathing:
Paid “charity” street worker (read: student) who has been trained to believe they are improving peoples’ lives by conning Joe Public out of their money for this week’s Good Cause. Usually an agency worker – where the agency takes a hefty cut of the hourly rate the charity in question has paid for – while at the same time selling on details of those foolish enough to actually stop and sign up to said Good Cause.  If you really want to support a charity, do it through their website, not a chugger.

*the term first appeared in print in the free London newspaper Metro in its SAY WHAT [New Words Around Town] column by Keith Barker-Main on 26 June 2002.

Centre Point is another iconic London landmark and was the subject of a long-running property scandal in the the mid-1960s.

According to Wikipedia London County Council bent its own rules to allow a developer called Harry Hyams to build this unusually tall office block (32 floors) in the heart of the West End. In return Hyams agreed to provide a new road junction underneath it, which the council itself couldn’t afford to build.

With property prices rising Hyams made so much profit from it simply standing empty that he had no need to let it out as office space – and for many years the vacant building towered over the skyline as a symbol of capitalist greed. Perhaps it’s appropriate that when he did finally allow the building to be used in 1980, it became the headquarters of the Confederation Of British Industry.

“What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?” [taken with Instagram]

By way of an update to last December’s post Business As Usual, our local Barclays staged an official Grand Re-opening last month. In addition to an extravagant display of helium balloons and giveaways of corporate-coloured candy, staff were required to dress up in silly clothes and get the attention of passers-by.  They responded (see above) with varying amounts of enthusiasm.

Jonathan Miller: In England, particularly, there’s always been a deep suspicion of Thoughtfulness – and the idea that The Life Of The Mind is what pretentious cissies go in for. When you go to somewhere like Canada… one of the reasons why I went to McMaster to do this was that there were cross-disciplinary meetings where we could talk about ideas from many different disciplines. You can’t do that so easily in England and you’re regarded as a pretentious pseud.

Interviewer: Well, you increasingly in the 80s made a habit of airing these kind of ‘state-of-the-cultural-nation’ views. Here you are on the Anne Robinson Radio 2 programme in 1994:

Robinson: You’re not very fond of the English when it comes to them as an audience, are you?

Miller: They’ve changed a great deal. I think that there was a rather solid world of… well-educated theatregoers, who liked the language of the theatre, who didn’t particularly want strong sensations for their own sake. But I think that television and pop videos and ‘style’ and magazines like The Face and so forth have a great influence subverting young people’s ideas about what in fact is entertaining in the theatre.

Robinson: But in London, I think you’ve been quoted as saying “there is Attila The Tourist” so that all the London theatre is geared…

Miller: …well it is largely geared for the tourist, but it also is geared for people who are internal tourists who simply come up from the provinces to see the big musical or the traditional star-studded West End production: the old HM Tennant ‘Distinguished Evenings In The Theatre.’ That’s awful stuff as well – middlebrow half-timbered nonsense.

Interviewer: I’m wondering whether you’re simply just biting the hand that feeds you there, because so much of your work in the theatre…

Miller: But it’s fed me very little…

Interviewer: But it has been funded by the public purse and therefore those ‘half-timbered masses’ that you refer to are enabling you to work in opera, in theatre, at the BBC…

Miller: Well yes, they do – and the work that I’ve done in the opera is financed partly by The Arts Council and so forth, that’s perfectly true. But it’s become increasingly hard to do anything unless in fact it is presented by what is now called ‘a celebrity’ and that is not what seemed to happen in the old days.

Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, Peter Cooke & Alan Bennett in 'Beyond The Fringe'

Taken with Instagram

A life lesson for all of us: when driving an expensive and ostentatious vintage car in slow-moving traffic around the West End of London, don’t pick your nose.

City Of Westminster traffic warden writing a parking ticket for a City Of Westminster street cleaner’s handcart. Only doing my job…

Click image to zoom in…

Ideals of physical attractiveness are bound to change from culture to culture and generation to generation. Strolling through Berwick Street market in Soho this afternoon, I happened across these wares on display in a shop window – to see the individual pieces in closeup click here.

For someone of my generation it’s hard to imagine most of this stuff being anything other than excruciating to fit and deeply unattractive once in place. Which brings to mind John Travolta’s immortal question in Pulp Fiction:

Lance: Hey, whattya think about Trudi? She ain’t got a boyfriend. You wanna hang out, get high?
Vincent: Which one’s Trudi? The one with all the shit in her face?
Lance: No, that’s Jody. That’s my wife.

A view across the rooftops of Mayfair from the restaurant of the John Lewis department store, with the London Hilton on Park Lane towering above its surroundings in the distance. The Royal Household kicked up a stink when it first went up in the 1960s, as the top floor gave the public a clear view into the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

West End Central police station in Savile Row. In the late 60s some of the guys who turned up at the Priory had been habitutués of The Dilly – either as rent boys – or as purveyors and consumers of hash, acid, methedrine and heroin. Or both. In any case any teenager regularly loitering around Picadilly Circus was pretty much certain to end up sooner or later at West End Central. My friends reserved a particular fear and loathing for the building and its officers. Once inside you were utterly at their mercy which – by their account – was in short supply.

Read a sobering piece today by Jake Wallis Simons on the slow recovery of iconic gay socialite Philip Sallon after a savage, unprovoked attack in Piccadilly Circus that could easily have cost him his life…

As Jake says, a general rise in intolerance means that any man perceived to be gay – and unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – may be at serious risk on the streets of central London. Back in the 70s queerbashing was a routine hazard of metropolitan gay life.

But as Jake says in his piece: “Although homophobic crime overall dropped by 3% in London last year, in the West End it increased by 20.9%. This is symbolised, perhaps, by the fatal homophobic attack on Ian Baynham in 2009.”

At least – compared to the 70s – the Met seems to be taking anti-gay hate crime a lot more seriously. They also seem to be committing a lot less of it themselves.