#4

HAVE YOU HEARD THE ONE ABOUT....HARLESDEN?

I became a denizen of the Dens (Neasden, Willesden, Harlesden) 17 years ago, enticed by the prospect of love and more children. Let me quickly say that the love was already on offer: it's not necessarily the first area you would explore if you were still looking for it ("Ah yes, I want a partner of great beauty, intelligence, wit, culture, accomplishment and a respectable bank balance. But where shall I find such a paragon? Well Neasden, of course, where I might stick a pin anywhere in the electoral roll to find a plethora of these attributes"). 

I knew a little about Neasden: I had driven past it on many occasions and wondered about the effects of heavy metals and particulates on Young Neasden's IQ scores, given the visible dusting of pollution everywhere, impure as the driven grey snow. That is principally the fault of the North Circular Road: Neasden is the diamond, in its ring, so to speak.  Somewhere along the way I learned that it had been the birthplace of Lesley Hornby (a.k.a. Twiggy) and David Baddiel, so it can't be all bad, I surmised. Anyway, being on the North Circular and near the start of the M1 is its main redeeming feature: it means you can get away to somewhere else remarkably quickly. Except when it is gridlocked, when the fumes could be harnessed by a local Dignitas. The other view of Neasden was cultivated for many years by Private Eye, who blessed the area with a mythical football team, Neasden F.C. whose only supporters were Sid and Doris Bonkers, and starred Wally Fawkes, the one-legged custodian of the net (i.e. goalkeeper). To the Eye public schoolboy writers, it was quintessential suburbia, and they were entitled to satirise it; but they were wrong, and if you lived in real middle class suburbia, as I had, you knew that Neasden was one or two steps down from that, and felt that they shouldn't kick a suburb when it was down, and out.

I'm not quite sure if I had even heard of Harlesden, until I first went to The Comedy Store and heard this gag:

"Well there was this geezer who lived in Harlesden and he was right hacked off with getting his car nicked all the time, and it was obviously lazy locals because he only ever had to pick it up from a few streets away. Anyway he gets a new car and he decides to get a Doberman to guard it while he's off shopping. So one day he's gone off to buy some stuff, left the dog on the back seat, comes back an hour later, and finds the car's gone - but the Doberman's  chocked up on four piles of bricks!"

You get the picture. But Harlesden is much changed now from its high crime era. Gentrification seems to have followed me from Finsbury Park. Now it's full of BBC executives who work down the road, journalists, website Michelangelos, and modish architects: blackspot to new black in 10 years.

I live in Willesden, started off renting near the posher bit

(Willesden Green) with its very nice conservation area, but when it came to buying it had to be north Willesden - trying very hard to call itself Gladstone to associate it with the lovely Gladstone Park, and delineate itself more firmly from neighbouring Neasden. It won't work, unless there is a Berlin-style wall. 

Willesden has one distinction: until Sainsbury's planted a 'Local' in it, it must have been the only High Street in the British Isles with no national brand or chain, or franchise or name of any kind, except betting shops, just faux KFC chicken shops, payday lenders and countless small, all-purpose grocery-fruit-veg shops with the produce stacked on the pavement. It is a high street for Dismaland. WHSmiths opened and closed, Costa is trying its luck near the tube station.

True that Willesden is not everybody's cup of Earl Grey: the I-heart -Willesden t-shirts didn't sell very well. However, I like it, very much. It suits my tendency to inverted snobbery. OK, so it's a slight step down from the Hampstead plan but those ambitions don't survive divorce and the eye-watering process of losing most of your assets. I suppose that in the historical context of the law favouring men, it is appropriate that the pendulum should swing the other way, but no-one stopped it at 'equal and fair' - hard on those of us who never benefited from its previous position. As luck would have it, I have landed in a good place: nice house, nice road, nice park, and friends and neighbours who are friendly and neighbourly, as well as being interesting, creative and increasingly 'distinguished', from accomplished photographers, through Zoo-based academics, to National Theatre people (via several crotchety people in the Music Business). Yes, it's becoming a middle class idyll.  Home at last. And unlikely to move unless I write a hugely successful book (or more probably, win the Lottery). And that's fine: Hampstead's full of  hedge fund managers and advertising executives who undoubtedly vote for Cameron, because he will make them even richer. No more the bohemian socialist republic. All quinoa, private everything from schools to medicine and 4x4s on the school run. The great intellectuals who gave the place its character and distinction, are long-gone and revolving slowly in their graves. Fings ain't what they used to be. Change is good? Not necessarily (unless it's a change of government). Haste the day!

BRUVVAFROMANUVVAMUVVA  (special football edition)

   Robbie Keane

                                                                                             

 

Gary Cahill                                                                                                                                          

  POST OF THE WEEK

QUOTE/UNQUOTE FOR VALENTINE'S DAY

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

                                                                                                                      W. H. Auden

You can't blame gravity for falling in love.

                                                                                                                                   Albert Einstein

FIRST LOVE

    

17 years old and definitely smitten.
53 years later she finds him on Facebook and sends this photo....

Now read on.....

LOVE POEM?

In Cardiff, I had a friend, Gary R from the year above me. He was a lovely bloke, who had something of the Alan Bennett about him though from somewhere near Birmingham, not Bradford. I think it was Bournville, which for me conjured up a landscape of dark chocolate houses and carefully sculpted white chocolate figures (with quite a few milk chocolate ones as well). One day Gary gave me a sheet of paper which carried a poem, allegedly by Philip Larkin, but unpublished. A Larkin expert, Craig Raine, did not know of it when I called him many years later.  In fact he was rather dismissive to the point of being rude, possibly because he had just finished a biography of the poet, and this new discovery would require some re-writing. Also I was also a mere grubby Polytechnic professor and therefore well down the evolutionary ladder from him, he imagined. Fifteen or so years on I have Googled it,  and it turns out that it is indeed Larkin’s work, and a handwritten version was sold at auction at Bonham’s quite recently for several thousand pounds. The pain for Raine could drive a man insane.  Ultimately its provenance is less important than simply whether you like it or not. I do, and through repetition it has been committed to memory, the only poem that has achieved that giddy status, albeit accidentally. Here it is:

The difficult part of love

Is being selfish enough,

Is having the blind persistence

To upset someone’s existence,

Just for your own sake,

What cheek it must take.

And then there’s the unselfish side,

Who can be satisfied

Putting someone else first

So that you come off worst.

My life is for me,

As well deny gravity.

Yet, vicious or virtuous,

Love still suits most of us.

Only the bleeder who

Can’t manage either view

Is ever wholly rebuffed

And he can get stuffed.

Philip Larkin, 1962.

TYPICAL. Its a lovely day, full of roses and gifts and sentiment and undiluted lurve, and I have to spoil it with Larkin's world-weary cynicism.   Ignore it and have a lovely day. And if you don't have a Valentine, have you thought of re-creating the St. Valentines Day Massacre? Just thinking out loud.