Diary: July 2018

5 July 2018, Hackney
At Headway Y said something S had told me before: that having memory problems makes it impossible to think about the future. I will ask them one day whether that means the future is suspended or postponed, rather than it simply no longer exists.

6 July 2018, London
“Theresa May secures approval from cabinet to negotiate soft Brexit
PM proposes creation of ‘UK-EU free trade area’ and matching food standards”

I am starting the think that having a government on the edge of a knife is not such a bad thing. It means that a robust opposition can actually do some work in shaping policy. More and more these days, it is work at select committee level of government that is having the greatest effect. This is how a healthy parliamentary democracy should work.

6 July 2018, London
A bunch of Henley knobheads have just got on the train at Paddington we are getting to Cholsey. One of them is wearing a white long-sleeve linen shirt with a grey-beige paisley tie and matching “handkerchief” in the shirt’s top left-hand pocket. Now they are joined by another set of noisy hoorays. A cork just popped and a blonde woman in a silver pleated skirt and pink high-heel sandals is guffawing obediently to the greasy overprivileged smarmos sitting opposite. Pimm’s in cans now. A navy like men blazer with pink chalk stripes is hanging by the window. I can feel the urge for a class war coming on.

6 July 2018, Cholsey
Remembering what Y and S had said about the future, is this what it is like as you approach the end of your life? Do you decide it is pointless to keep thinking about the future? Or does any concept of the future just slowly recede?

17 July 2018, London
Email exchange with M at the Guardian Education Centre.

Hi M
I just thought I ought to mention something weird that happened in yesterday's workshop. One of the pupils at the back table on the left was a bit stary. She gazed at me in an intense way. One of her fellow tablemates saw her do it and pulled a face of disapproval. Stary Girl then told me I had "lovely eyes". I replied, "Thank you, my wife says they are the best thing about me."

I thought nothing of it and carried on. When I returned to that table later, Stary Girl stared at me again and asked, "Sir, where are you from?" I told her I was from Liverpool and again carried on, but afterwards consciously avoided that table, which was a pity because the rest of the pupils on it were really quite bright and switched on.

I know this probably amounts to nothing, but I also know it could be seen in a less innocent way, so I thought it best to let you know.
Best regards
Billy
***************

Hi Billy
Thanks for mentioning this. I think I know who you mean - she had long brown hair. She was trying to be disruptive throughout the session, and on the whole the teachers and us kept a check on this. Really sorry this happened to you and that you felt uncomfortable - you did the right thing by avoiding that table. We have had no mention of this from the school and we got an email today saying thank you for a great session.

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. The school have been before and are from Cornwall - the teacher is on our advisory network.

Thank you for your amazing work and support. The students and us gain so much for you input into the sessions and your superb advice.
With many thanks
M

27 July 2018, London
Email to Cris Vidal at Headway regarding our recent involvement in the Science Museum Lates project for the 70th anniversary of the nhs.

Hi Cris
Sorry we didn't get to talk yesterday. I had to catch a train to Liverpool for a big family reunion. 

My feedback on the Lates event is this: it was difficult to tell how successful it was as I was so close to the centre of the action. It seemed well attended and the space we were in was ideal, a perfect match. The interactive collage workshop/table was outstanding and can be adapted for lots of other projects in the future. It's a winner.

The element I was involved with was not a success for me. I had planned my questions for Yoki in the belief that the title of our conversation was 'You Must Remember This'. I arrived to find that the title was in fact 'Am I My Past Or My Present?' I tried quickly to rewrite the script to fit this title, but did not want to tell Yoki because she was very nervous and we had agreed there would be "no surprises" in our presentation. In other words, I was winging it.

At our talk, I thought it was going OK until a latecomer, who maybe hadn't heard the introduction, heckled me, accusing me of not allowing Yoki to speak. No one tried to calm him, so I had to deal with the situation. Eventually, Thomas stepped in. I regret the way I spoke to the heckler as Phil Symes told me later he believed him to have brain injury. I maybe should have been more sensitive to that possibility, but in the moment I was more sensitive as to how the commotion would affect Yoki.

As it turned out, she was brilliant. It has been a pleasure to work with her. Every time we did our 'conversation', her answers became richer and richer. I never wanted to plunge her into the unknown, but that is one of the risks at public events. All in all, our bit was a mess, and all I could hope for was that not many people noticed.

Billy

Column: July 2018

I stand accused of timidity. At a social event on the estate last month, one resident said what she thought of this column: “You sit on the fence, you’re too diplomatic”. I offered a puny response, saying my intention is to write about the richness of life here on Golden Lane and what a great place it is to live, etc, blah blah. None of it sounded very convincing.

What she wanted to say, I suspect, is that I don’t stick the boot in on the City Corporation: its poor record on repairs, its culture of non-communication, its institutional blindness to residents’ needs over business interests, that sort of thing. It might be true, but there’s another reason I don’t take potshots at the council. The Golden Lane Estate is in the City of London residential ward of Cripplegate and it has nine, yes NINE, elected members on common council. Many of them rarely set foot on the estate. Only one is seen regularly and works tirelessly for our residents. Two of them I have only ever seen once, at an election hustings, asking for votes. Add to those nine our member on the London Assembly, Unmesh Desai, and our MP in Westminster, Mark Field, and here is a football team of people tasked to deal with voters’ issues. These are the people who should be kicking the council. 

A case in point is the concrete repairs rolling out across the estate. Expert residents (we have a lot) have let fly a barrage of angry emails detailing the works’ shortcomings with regard to listed building guidelines, heritage repair methods and paint colour-matching. The argument is unlikely to end soon and, meanwhile, scaffolding has gone up at Crescent House for decoration and window replacement work. It’s long overdue and residents have often moaned that their heating bills are sky high, all because routine maintenance and improvements dropped down the City Corporation list of priorities. 

I’m glad to see Crescent House being spruced up. I have an irrational fondness for it, even at its scruffiest. Its glorious iconic sweep along Goswell Road is the public face of our estate. I imagine it as a hotbed of radical non-conformism. It’s residents are not afraid to speak their minds and Crescent House is the only block in which I have seen people dancing naked in their window, in full view of the tennis players outside. 

So if do I sit on the fence it is because it’s a good place to watch what’s going on. The event described  above was a sun-kissed two days of activities for Open Garden Squares Weekend. The finale was a performance on Hatfield House lawn by the London Metropolitan Brass Band (with Golden Laner Tom Martin on tuba) and I sat on the fence (concrete) watching residents and visitors revelling in the sheer pleasure of Summer in the City. I also learned that a Basterfield House resident once refused the offer of a dance from Bruce Springsteen.

Open Gardens marked the start of party season. Wimbledon is underway, the World Cup is reaching a climax and today is 4 July, US Independence Day. If you dash, you might just catch hordes of crazy Americans overdosing on mustard at a hotdog-eating competition at the Blues Kitchen in Curtain Road. 

The school holidays begin soon, the local children can smell freedom, and on 15 July the Whitecross Street Party (WSXP) guarantees endless fun. Resident involvement in this year’s event has been a top priority and activities will centre on a number of “Rooms”, each coordinated by local groups – art, music, children, performance, pottery and virtual reality are among the themes.

The day before, 14 July, is more important though, because after an absurdly long delay, the newly refurbished Golden Lane Community Centre opens, with a whizz-bang party promised. The overlords at the City Corporation are very excited, but I am not so confident. At a recent meeting to discuss ideas for activities on the day, I gave a pompous lecture on 14 July being Bastille Day, a celebration signalling, in 1789, the start of the French Revolution. London will be throbbing with Gallic euphoria, I said. Paul in Liverpool Street are said to be dishing out free glasses of fizz and macaroons. To stand any chance of measuring up, I argued hysterically, the Golden Lane party, should include two things: a Wellie Wang on Basterfield lawn and a second outdoor game, in which children decapitate life-size effigies of their parents.

The assembled group looked at me in disbelief then broke into nervous laughter. You see, reader, that's the problem with these straight-laced council people. They can’t even spot a winning idea when it jumps up and bites them. 

Billy Mann has lived in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate for 24 years. He is a City of London Community Builder and blogs about neighbourhood happenings at basterfieldbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com.

An edited version of this column appeared in Edition 077 of City Matters newspaper.

Picture: Didcot

From a satnav image of Didcot, Oxordshire

Picture: Earthslice1

I did this ages ago and Michelle just dug it out and hung it on the "clothesline" in the studio.

Diary: June 2018

2 June 2018, Brighton

Spotted outside the Taj Middle Eastern supermarket

6 June 2018, London

Something magical happened today. Because I am cheap, I use Spotify Free, rather than pay the £10 monthly subscription. The thing is, the curated collections in Spotify Free only allow you to play songs on SHUFFLE. So you don’t know what you are getting next. It’s random, sort of. I was obviously overjoyed when Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ came on, but imagine the ecstasy when the next song was Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’. OK, you had to be there. Two fantastic love songs (in different ways) and two songs that have such a powerful piano voice.

7 June 2018, Hackney, London

At Headway today there was a difficult interval with P. P is a bit of a food fascist and believes everyone but himself is ingesting poison in the form of the everyday meal. The food at Headway is cooked fresh on the day, but today P saw fault where innocent mistake was probably the real case. The “savoury bread-and-butter pudding with green-bean and red-onion salad” was the victim of his rant. While most of us just got on with eating this bargain meal at £2.50, P told his table (loudly) that we were suffering a systemic disgrace in silence. We were lapdogs to a food culture that is not only degenerate but evil. At some point, P2 said something along the lines of “OK, we hear what you are saying, move on” and he went mental (“Go back to Ireland, Irish girl). Yes, the bread-and-butter pudding was slightly overcooked and very crunchy; the salad was actually more of a salsa, but P targeted P2 and, when coordinator James tried to pacify him, he switched into full-blown psycho. I sat there wondering what kind of training enables a Headway staffer to bring this fragile situation under control. I thought about setting off the fire alarm, but instead merely got out of my seat and moved away. By this time, P is actually enjoying his bad behaviour, swearing, threatening physical violence and acting like a totally unhinged dickhead. I was outside by now, but somehow the staff managed to usher him out to the arch (art studio). This meant the arch was unavailable to other members to use and that studio manager M, who had not witnessed what I had, was tasked with defusing the bomb. My heart went out to her. This was all witnessed by a man from the borough of Newham, who was checking on HEL’s performance. He told me later how impressed he was. Members who spoke to me later about the incident agreed that brain injury is no excuse for being a tosser. For that, I loved them even more.

7 June 2018, London

Sitting in the Two Brewers enjoying a pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord ale, listening to Neil Young on my earbuds and reading Sherlock Holmes ('Sign of Four'), I come to a pause. On removing the earbuds, I notice that Neil Young's 'Harvest Moon’ is playing on pub sound system. That is the song I was listening to on my earbuds.

12 June 2018, Islington, London

Peggy Ennis has two interesting ways to describe dementia to those who know little about it. In the first she likens the inner wiring of the right side of the human brain to a set of fairy lights that are not performing at their peak. Some of the bulbs are dim, some are flickering. Others have packed up altogether. It all means we are no longer quite as bright or as flashy as we used to be.

In the second description Peggy uses the metaphor of the bookcase. Imagine, she says, a bookcase made of plywood. Each of its shelves are full of books; each of the shelves represents 10 years of your life; all of the books on each shelf are your memories of that decade. On the bottom shelf are your earliest memories, on the top are your most recent. Push the shelf slightly and it will sway; push it harder and the books on the top shelf will begin to fall off. More pushing and the books on the other shelves will do likewise, but the books on the bottom shelf (your long-term memories) will only fall off after an almighty shove. As you try desperately to put the falling books back on their shelves, many of them will get mixed up. In other words, you become confused. This is what dementia is like.

Now imagine a bookcase made from solid oak. The books on the top shelves might fall, but the stability of the unit will hold many of them in place, allowing the displaced books to be re-stacked on the shelves with some sense of order. This, Peggy says, illustrates the importance of “brain fitness”. Keep your brain exercised and nourished and the effects of dementia can be eased. She has a slogan for this exercise: “a healthy heart means a healthy head”. In other words, regular exercise keeps your mind in tip-top condition.

In the dementia awareness training Peggy delivered to a small group at St Luke’s Community Centre, she then spoke about the left side of the brain and the importance of the emotions. Quite often, she said, we will forget what people told us, what their names were, where we met them and what time they arrived. But we will remember how they made us feel, so using our emotional recollections rather than our factual ones is a good way to compensate once dementia and/or memory difficulties set in. Happy, sad, angry, disgusted, frightened or shocked: these are the experiences we can use to put those books back on the right shelf.

Peggy told us how people with dementia can appear a bit confused, bonkers even. To someone with dementia a polished vinyl floor might look like water; a black rubber slip-mat outside a supermarket door might look like a hole in the ground. This took me straight to a film idea, ‘Dementia Tour Of London’, a kind of funny/serious travelogue in which offspring and parent with early onset wander the capital’s streets seeing everything from a demented point of view.

14 June 2018, Hackney, London

Two SLT revelations at Headway today. Sam joined the band we have with Music Therapy student Sam. She is our  token 'girl singer’, was brilliant, and I believe she got a lot out of it. She steamed through the lyrics of Steely Dan’s 'Do It Again’ fearlessly. Then she took on the job of banging the cymbal at the end of the chorus WITH HER RIGHT HAND (Sam is left-handed). Song-singing as an alternative to reading practice must always be worth a try. Inhibitions fall and confidence rises by having a band - albeit a crap one of me, Stuart and Barrie - to support you.

The second revelation came at Pat’s touching memorial in the arch, led by Michelle and Ben (who told a funny story about meeting "Jackson" for the first time and falling for the prank that his name was "Michael Jackson") Member after member (Cecil, Tony A, Errol), many with acute speech difficulties, lined up to talk fondly about Pat, driven by pure emotion and the will to do the decent thing. Others ad-libbed cheeky comments (special thanks to Eddie) and we all sang Elvis’s 'Always On My Mind’.

14 June 2018, London

I am becoming more and more convinced that in Abraham Lincoln’s determination to establish an American government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, the Corporation of London saw an opportunity to translate it to government “of the people, by the rich, for the rich”.

20 June 2018, London
Being on regular medication can be quite daunting, and not just for the patient. Ahead of a recent holiday to Spain, I visited Portman Pharmacy in Cherry Tree Walk to request a regular repeat prescription. The idea is that the pharmacy contacts your GP surgery and, hey presto, two days later, your life-saving medication is ready for collection.

Twice in a row now, this seemingly simple and streamlined process has crashed. In the most recent case, having made my request to the pharmacy on a Friday and told the medication would be back for collection the following Wednesday, it wasn't there. What's more, the chief pharmacist mined new depths of bad manners and arrogance to tell me, first, that the GP surgery was to blame, and then that it was MY fault because my “expectations are too high".

I turned and left, then made the journey to my GP surgery, the Neaman Clinic, was treated with great courtesy, collected the prescription and got my medication from another pharmacy. Endov Portman Pharmacy, hello Boots New Change.

21 June 2018, Hackney

Cecil on his 80th birthday.

23 June 2018, Winchester

“If the real point if the European Union is to achieve an ever closer union among the people's of Europe, the British have never really wanted a place in it."
Helen Thompson
LRB, 21 June 2018

28 June 2018, Murcia

In a tapas/enoteca restaurant in a place called Baños y Mendigo (Baths & Beggar) we watched England go down 1-0 to Belgium. At the end there was some speculation as to whether England manager Gareth Southgate was being strategic in trying to come second in the group (he made 8 changes to a team that had won 6-1 in its previous game), but that sounds very risky to me.

29 June 2018, San Pedro Something Or Other, near a La Manga, Murcia

About 50m from the sandy beach is an inflatable playground, with slides, trampolines, climbing frames, etc. The water here is still and quite shallow, so this is an ideal spot for such a glorified bouncy castle. It's best feature is a vertical climbing wall in the shape of the grand upper deck of a cruise liner. What would have been portholes on the cruiser are toe holes for the climber to scale straight from the sea to the top of the deck, from which they can then slide back into the sea, and so the joyous, safe process repeats itself.