Some people say Docklands is 'soulless'; excuse me, what does this mean? How on earth can a place have 'soul'? How can you find 'soul' in bricks and mortar, building and streets? And, even more interestingly, what sort of soulless booby insists on his environment having 'soul'? It's people who are meant to have soul; if we're for some reason incapable of this, its going it a bit to try and pass the burden onto our poor insentient neighbourhoods. It's like those people who insist on wearing slogans on their t shirts, yet they haven't got two thoughts to rub together. People do; things are. I may be more of a visual person than a verbal one, but even I've got that one worked out.
So Docklands is as good a place as any for me to live. Its got good shops, and to me that makes it a neighbourhood, though unfortunately Ive got neighbours too. But my life, like most peoples I know, is the room where I work and taxis and the wild west end. You'd be suprised how much of London, real, inner London itself, is actually a collection of dormitory towns. people live where they can afford to live, and play elsewhere; this is just as true of an alleged part of London like Stoke Newington as it is of an honest to God dorm like Ilford.
When I used to voice my dreams of coming to London as an innocent teen, my mother and father would mutter about the 'loneliness' and lack of 'community spirit' extant in our fair capital. Ofcourse, the cretins couldnt see that this was red rag to a bull time to any solitary, embarassed adolescent worth their salt. (whats that mean?) The sheer, moletn, golden joy of not being known! not being watched! Being born again just the way you wanted to be! the perfection of loneliness!
In fact it didnt turn out that way. Before I took up wit Jill the Knife and moved out to me riverside palazzo, i lived in a broom cupboard over a shop in Southampton Row. Now you look at Southampton Row; its shops isnt it? its shops with traffic in the middle. its central, its commercial, its solitaire heaven.
Wrong! above those shops are hundreds of apartments, great and small. Now your neighbours are easy enough to keep at arms length; you just stiff them. You dont need anything from them , do you? But the shopkeepers, thats different. You do need stuff from them, obviously. I mean, I can live without the milk of human kindness any day, but I definately need something to stick in my coffee when I awake. I was young and healthy, for goodness sake; I needed cigarettes, vodka, pot noodles and all other basic provisions. So I had to have some sort of relationship with local shopkeepers.
When I say relationship, I meant like 'please' and 'thankyou' and the occasional smile. Did I ever have the wrong number! I dont know if you've ever watched postman pat, this kids puppet show, but it was very popular when I was at school and we'd smoked too much dope. Anyway postman pat lives in this mythical English village called Greendale, so ofcourse everyones real tight with everyone else: Mrs Goggins, Alf Thompson, Miss Hubbard, Major Forbes, Mrs Pottage, the Reverend Timms.
Excuse me, did I say 'mythical'? Well, I was wrong! Because, within three weeks of moving into what I thought was my own padded cell in the asphalt jungle, London West Central, in the roaring traffic's boom, I discovered that I had in fact moved to Greendale! Yes Postman Pat himself was on a sabbatical, and the faces here were of varied hue, and not the queasy putty pink of the puppets. But hot damn is that community spirit, that friendliness, that (some would say) pushiness wasn't thicker on the ground than Hubba Bubba.
Item: cute young girl at a newsagents next door asks me if im a model. Yes I know!1 i couldnt believe it either. goaded I let slip im an art student. For some reason, this lights the touchpaper and from here on in the comic genious of Carla and her six co-workers lnows no limits. Routinely, infront of up to twenty paying customers Im asked if I've cut my ear off yet. Im asked with mandatory leer, if I 'do nudes' and if so where do I put my brushes? One of the brighter employees seems particularly interested in 'action painting' and repeatedly enquires, like twice a day, whether I am wont to strip off my clothing, cover myself in paint and roll about on a large sheet of paper. Just passing the shop, I am regaled with cries of 'Oi Picasso!' I end up in the surreal position of walking through three streets to get a pint of early morning milk rather than go next door and become part of the living, breathing London story.
You might say, 'Oh, they were just being sexists! Harassing a single man!' But they weren't. Three of the gang were men, and two of those were black. And besides, I saw this routine pulled with so many people, most of them women. Exhausted young doctors were mercilessly teased about cold stethoscopes and being struck off for sexual misconduct, Earnest young lawyers suffered through light years of banter about 'briefs' and exactly what the ywore under their gowns. I once saw a vicar vomit on the shop floor from sheer nervs after a sustained campaign of insinuation vis-a^-vis the Virgin Birth. there was a shocked silence before they sent out for sawdust, and i realised that this apparent tormenting of certain customers was actually meant as a compliment. We were regulars, in a city of randomness, and this constant reference to the hilarity of our professions was a rather manic, but basically well-meaning, gesture of recognition. In a small community, such incessant harping on our individual identity wouldnt have been necessary; here, for some reason, it was.
Somewhere around the fifth day of sobriety, I was queuing up to pay for my booty when i sensed something about to blow, and big, with this troupe of too-long frustrated comedians. David and Claudine her main feed, kept catching the others eye, then looking towards one of us punters with one united gaze. Then they'd snap out of it and glare crankily at eachother, like illicit lovers blaming the other one for putting temptation in the way.
I really thought we were safe when a young nurse from middlesex who I knew by sight from seeing her in the shop came in. i dont know if you've seen people who've been up all night on drugs trying to go out and function the next day; well, it doesnt matter a bit whether theyve brushed their teeth, combed their hair and shined their shoes - they're different. The texture of their skin is different, their eyes are different, their movements are different. they seem not like a person, but like an alien pod trying to pass as a person.
Thats the way this young nurse, gita, looked. but she hadn't been on drugs, She'd been doing life and death, and it showed. I don't know if she'd been working on a birth, or an abortion, or a painful death. but her wild eyes, and the purply sheen in her brown skin, signalled one thing: that she'd been out there the night before to a place where most of us won't go until we're forced there. And even when we're there, giving birth or dying, we won't really know whats happening because people like Gita will be doing our dirty work for us, and we'll be flying high on morphine. Well, she'd been there stone-cold sober, looking at the whole horrifying thing for twelve hours non-stop, and you could tell that it had driven her a little mad. but mad in that utterly selfless way that only nurses can do; all she wanted was a cup of tea and she'd be ready to go all over again.