LETTER FROM NOTTING HILL MARCH 21st 2015

Well the solar Eclipse was something of a non-event in London. The sky just grew a little darker,- it being dark already. Walking from the Post Office in Notting Hill gate, the gloom suddenly intensified, street lamps and car headlights came on and we all pretended that the end of the world was not happening.

This was all in stark contrast to the last eclipse in 1999. I was then working in Dartmouth Street, close to St James Park. Just before the event we all, office workers, civil servants, and even some politicians, poured into the park to participate in what felt like a communal event. People actually talking to complete strangers.

'Don't Talk, Don't Touch

The propensity to keep oneself to oneself is particularly marked in London and is at its most comical on the Tube, a desperate desire to avoid physical let alone emotional contact.* Although London is an even more cosmopolitan city than when I arrived in 1983 this does not seem to have had any impact on this ‘don’t touch, don’t talk culture,’ if anything it has grown even more entrenched. The waves of Polish, French, and a multitude of other diaspora absorbing this very British stand- offishness. Though perhaps this is the way with all large cities now. Still this means that when the barriers do break down, as they also can as a result of tube strikes, life becomes all the more interesting.

It used to be held that British Public life was cleaner than most, not that corruption didn't exist, but that it was isolated and the exception not the rule. We are now being exposed to a very different reality. Now it seems that any child growing up in the sixties and seventies was seen as fair game for every celebrity or establishment paedophile and sexual predator, safe in the knowledge that there would be no consequences. A quiet word in the right places and all would be smoothed over.

Children in care seem to have been particularly targeted. I’m afraid the Saville/Cyril Smith affairs have lifted a stone on something grotesquely unpleasant. We are I’m afraid going to have to live with both the stench and implications for quite some time to come. Things can never be the same again.

Grant Shapps 

Private Shapps

For comic relief we have had Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party Chairman adding a new phrase to the political lexicon. Caught out lying about his business past he explained that he did not lie, but merely ‘over firmly denied.’ Well try that out on ‘My Learned friends’ and see how it works out. This is not the first time the spiv like Mr Shapps, - who would have made a good Private Walker in Dad’s Army only he lacks the charm, - has been caught out. He will of course ride out the scandal, it is the way things are done now, openly lying and threatening to sue a constituent who exposed the lie, not considered a resigning matter. It used to be said of tenured university professors that the only way you could prise them out was if they were caught ‘buggering the bursar.’ It seems that it will take an equivalent act to get rid of a sitting MP.

Overheard in Portobello Road, “It’s what I did and I can’t change it, I have to live with the consequences every day.” Intrigued I wanted to know more, what was it that she ‘did. However apparently it is not the ‘done thing’ to break in and ask for clarification. So I had to move on my curiosity unsated.   

Apropos of which I have just finished writing a piece about my schooldays, which I will upload shortly. This has left me feeling somewhat ‘spaced out,’ as we used to say. It now occurs to me that the only way we can really shift our perceptions of the present is by viewing it through the prism of the past. Which is interesting, but can be disquieting.

*Though it is even worse in New York. In London people will at least give you directions. I once emerged from the Subway in Lexington Avenue, due to attend a meeting at a venue I was having difficulty locating. My very British “Excuse me…” met with blank stares or averted eyes.