Lessons of the past

I was thrilled to hear the news today that a group of camp survivors have been awarded honours for the work they do in raising awareness and educating people about the holocaust. For me, this is the most vital thing that someone can do if he or she has experienced, first hand, what happens when human beings get out of control. And it’s a brave, brave thing to do. Imagine standing in front of a group of strangers on a weekly basis and telling them about the very worst period of your life? A period so black that you’ve blocked most of it out for fear of what might happen if you remember? They should have been honoured long ago.

I heard a radio piece earlier in the week about the Rwandan genocide. It is staggering to think that this happened in the 1990s. There is a tendency in all of us to think that we’ve somehow evolved beyond behaving like animals, but the makers of the documentary were incredibly clear about how the genocide came to pass. Propaganda. Hutus turned against the Tutsi people after a century of mistrust and misrule, but they were galvanised by a radio station. Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, (RTLMC), played up-to-date music and had young, funky presenters, some of whom had honed their craft in more established radio stations outside the country. These presenters spread malicious gossip and told obscene jokes which whipped up the Hutu population into a frenzy to the extent that they thought killing their neighbours with machetes and brutally raping them was not just okay, but an absolute duty. What these presenters did has been viewed, in retrospect, as SO damaging, that many are now serving life sentences for the role they played. 

Can you imagine getting to a stage where you think it’s your duty to kill someone? Of course you can’t! Or can you? 

Sadly, the likes of Derren Brown have proven time and time again that, in the right circumstances, many of us would kill and maim if we thought we could get away with it, or were pushed into a temporary place of insanity where we felt we somehow had no other choice.

It’s why I worry about the press today. It seems we can justify any position simply by accusing someone else of supplying fake news. Two diametrically opposed sides of an argument will frequently use the same statistic to prove their point. Black can become white in a heartbeat.

For every atrocity there’s a conspiracy theorist waiting in the wings to say it never happened. I read an insane piece of junk today which claimed that the murder of military drummer Lee Rigby never happened. Or was it junk? A conspiracy theory gains more and more traction as it falls into different pairs of hands. How many times have I only heard the bit of a story I want to hear, or gone off on a rant as a result of reading nothing but a click-bait headline?

A lot is going wrong at the moment, both on an international level and a national level. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but many friends of mine seem to be very troubled on a personal level as well. Society is disintegrating. People are feeling less and less responsible for their neighbours. A gulf has opened up between rich and poor. Many of us perceive ourselves to be right at the back of every queue...

So now’s the time to ask one simple question: what would it take for ME to do something terrible? Ask that question right now whilst you’re secretly thinking that nothing in the world could make you dob in a neighbour for harbouring a fugitive or turn a blind eye whilst someone is killed outside your front door. But what if you’d been told this person is a paedophile? What if you’d been told he was a murderer? Would you turn a blind eye then?

The lessons of the past are everywhere and sometimes we need a little refresher course.

Sexy by comparison

At some point tomorrow, I am going to head into our loft and literally start throwing things wildly into a dustbin. Anyone with a loft will attest to the fact that piles and piles of stuff that would otherwise have been properly processed by those without a loft, get shoved into a loft by those of us with one! There will be boxes of CDs up there. Video cassettes. Tapes. Bags filled with cables which only fit items which were made in the 1990s. Years of tax receipts. Picnic hampers. Ten rounders bats (don’t ask). Old carpets. Cupboards Nathan made at school. Televisions. Tattered curtains. There will be things up there I don’t even recognise and can’t for the life of me work out how they got there. A lot of it will be water damaged. All will be covered in layer upon layer of brick dust. We have a mattress up there which friends used to sleep on. When the workmen ripped the roof off, they threw the old dormer windows onto the top of it. We’re not even going to attempt to rescue the bedding underneath...

There’s a little corner where we keep the soft toys from our childhood. I only have three: Panda, Horsey and Jemima. I will never throw them away because they played such an important role in my childhood. The first two belonged to my brother but Jemima was mine. She’s a rabbit and was once a lovely fluffy thing with beautiful white fur and a charming dress and pantaloon set made from an early ‘70s printed fabric.

These days she looks utterly horrifying. Anyone who sees her gasps. Her fur is matted. Her clothes are threadbare. At one stage in my childhood I thought she’d look considerably prettier with makeup. Obviously the horrific concept of testing makeup on animals was entirely lost on me, so I tried to make her look like Agnetha from ABBA, with great dollops of bright blue eye shadow, some fetching blusher and blood red lipstick. The effect was dazzlingly awful. Over the years, she’s got quite grimy, and her legs look like they’ve been broken in several places, so she resembles a murdered leporine prostitute, whose body has been dumped in a wheelie bin.

Sadly, the soft toy from our childhood which seems to have vanished without trace is a giant lump of a soft sheep. I suspect any jokes anyone reading this will be tempted to make about the son of a Welshman being given a sheep to play with, will be exacerbated by the knowledge that we named said sheep, “Sexy.” I kid you not.

I know, I know! How were we allowed? How did we even know that word? To make matters considerably worse, I had a chronic lisp as a kid, so he was actually called “Thecthy”. To my retrospective great relief, I was never tempted to make Sexy sexier by daubing him with makeup, like I did Jemima, but I do remember at one stage Brother Edward and I being encouraged to changed Sexy’s name to George. But George never stuck. Sexy wasn’t a George. Sexy was Sexy.

But then, one terrible day, Sexy the Sheep simply vanished...

Now, if I didn’t know that my parents were fine, upstanding, decent human beings, I might suspect that they’d played a part in Sexy’s disappearance. They had, after all, given us the chance to change Sexy’s inappropriate name, and we had singlehandedly failed.

I suppose it could have been worse. Some parents name their children the most awful things. Sarah Cox’ son is called Issac, for example. Brad Pitt’s son, Shiloh, is perfect for a Spoonerism. I went to school with a girl called Hoo Flung Dung, my godson has a classmate called Shittage and there was a girl in my mate Matt’s class called Fuquenisha. Her name was banned by teachers and everyone had to call her Nisha.

...Sexy, by comparison, seems rather tame!

abandoned car

I parked the car yesterday on the little spur road which runs parallel with Southwood Lane. We’re currently in the somewhat unenviable position of not having a permit to park on the streets around our house. This is mostly because we’re about to move, but also because it took the DVLA a pathetic 3 months to send a log book through when we changed cars. Our last car literally fell apart at Pease Pottage Service Station in a scene reminiscent of The Wacky Races! One apparently can’t have a parking permit until ones log book is sent through. You can’t get road tax either. The more I go through life, the more I realise it’s fuelled by Catch 22s!

The good news is that, about ten minutes walk from us, there’s a street which doesn’t have parking regulations. And in London, these days, that’s like finding the Holy Grail. Sure, it’s in the middle of a wood, and most evenings one of the cars parked down there gets broken into, but free parking is free parking and our car isn’t exactly criminal bait!

Of course, you can only find a space down there at night time because, during the day, it’s full to the rafters with the vehicles of cheap-skate commuters who drive into London from their lovely houses in the country and pick up the tube at Highgate.

So many people who live in the countryside are so vehemently smug when it comes to issues surrounding the protection of the environment. “I have a vegetable patch and I grow ALL my own food in the summer.” Then they get in their enormous, gas-guzzling four-by-fours, drive into the city, making the air us city dwellers breathe more choked-up, buy their plastic bottles of water, throw the layers of plastic wrapping from their Pret lunch into London dustbins, and then drive back to their rural idylls, complaining that people in the cities are being outrageous by suggesting global warming is anything other than a problem generated by the cities themselves! The same people then get somewhat aerated when you suggest that we may need to build more houses in their villages and are very fast to talk about the need to fill brown field sites in cities first. Yay! Strain the infrastructure even more!

Anyway, that rather lengthy digression took me away from the point of my story, which is that, when I parked up on the spur road, I noticed that a car had been dumped, somewhat unceremoniously, in the middle of the road. It wasn’t parked. It looked a little bashed-up. The spur is a cul-de-sac, and the car was right at the top, so it wasn’t blocking anyone’s access apart from the people whose houses were at the very end of the road.

I went over to the abandoned car for a closer look. One of its tyres had blown out. The wheel arch had caved in. A few little labels had been attached to the back windscreen which said “police aware.”

As I was staring at the vehicle, I became aware of an old lady looking out of the window of a nearby house. She signalled for me to wait and then came to her front door and told me I was looking at a stolen car which had been dumped there the Friday before the Whitsun bank holiday, and that one of her neighbours had heard a loud bang, and had looked out of her window to see a group of lads in hoodies running away from the now abandoned car. She was in a real pickle. The car was entirely blocking access to her house.

The police had decided it wasn’t their responsibility and had passed the buck to the council, who, in turn, had told my new friend that there was nothing they could do because they couldn’t get a pickup truck down the narrow road.

Let’s put all this buck-passing nonsense into context. Firstly, broken windows syndrome dictates that any street which becomes a dumping ground for bashed-up cars, will, inevitably, go into decline. The message this abandoned car sends out is that this is a road which is not cared for. It’s a road where gangs of young people might decide to congregate to smoke dope. If the road is considered not to be monitored by police, then a gang member might decide to chuck a stone through the window of a local house or set fire to the abandoned car... and so it continues.

More to the point, the lovely lady with whom I was speaking was 92 years old. She’d recently got rid of her own car because she no longer felt safe driving it, but was utterly reliant on her driveway for carers, deliveries and taxis, so the abandoned car was actually stopping her from leaving her house. She’d been frantically calling people but felt no one was listening. As I left, she said, rather pathetically “what if I need an ambulance?”

Obviously I took to Twitter, because, tragically, negatively shaming people online seems to be the only way that anything gets done these days. I angrily tweeted Haringey council with a photograph. I angrily tweeted my MP with a different photograph. She responded and asked for more information.




And low and behold, this afternoon, I noticed that the car had been removed. Ah! The power of social media.

London tut

I spent much of the day today not knowing if I was sweating or covered in rain water. It was muggy in the extreme, everything smelt of wet dog, my suit got soaked through, and the world seemed to be in a very bad mood. You could see everyone getting particularly frustrated with each other on the tube. The London Underground is not air-conditioned like its New York counterpart, and it gets very hot down there. I’m told there are now species which have evolved in those darkened tunnels which you’ll find nowhere else in the world. I think I’m right in saying it’s the only place in the UK where you find scorpions. That might be an urban myth before anyone starts to panic...

I’ve seldom heard as many London “tuts” as I heard today. You know the London tut? We specifically do it to people who don’t know the etiquette of our city. Someone will inadvertently stand on the left hand side of the escalator so we give them a London tut. Someone pauses for a moment before getting onto an escalator, because he or she is slightly wary: We tut. Someone stands too near the door on a lift and the door doesn’t shut. Tut. We hear that a train is delayed because there’s a suspicious package at Bank. Tut. Person under a train? Tut. Terrorist attack? Tut... You can put so much feeling into a tut. Sometimes if you do it to someone’s back and they turn around, you can smile sweetly. Usually you scowl. Other Londoners look at you proudly. “Yes, that behaviour definitely deserved a tut. If you hadn’t done it, I’d’ve had your back!”

I went to the amazing Wilton’s Music Hall today. It’s a stunningly beautiful building. For those who don’t know it, it’s one of, I think, three surviving Victorian music halls in the UK. One of the others is the Leeds City Varieties, which is where Brass premiered.

They’re amazingly intimate spaces, with wonderful acoustics and interesting stages. The one in Leeds still has its original passarale, which is a little walk way extending from the stage into the audience. But whilst Leeds is beautifully opulent with gold fittings and wonderful seats, upholstered in the same red velvet material as its giant curtain, the Wilton’s Music Hall is exactly as it was found, all shabby chic, with plaster tastefully falling off the rag-washed walls. It’s absolutely brilliant.

I was allowed to stick my head into the space, as a group of actors were teching a show, and I couldn’t believe how atmospheric it was. It is steeped in authenticity. You could put anything on that stage with a little bit of lighting, and it would look perfect. I felt ashamed never to have been there before, but excited to be discovering it.

£2

I went to the Hornsey Central hospital for an ENT appointment today. I’ve been having issues with a cough which won’t clear and they suspect I’ve got a form of acid reflux, which, bizarrely, is potentially linked to my hyper-mobility, which, I’m told, is the new term for double-jointedness.

Anyway, in true Haringey Council style, the fancy new hospital building I was in today - all glass atriums and steel - doesn’t have a single water fountain. Not one. I went to the woman behind reception and asked where I could get some water and she said, somewhat nervously, “you could go to the cafe and buy some.” I’d actually walked to the appointment and genuinely didn’t have my wallet with me, so buying water wasn’t an option. Furthermore, in an ENT clinic, which deals with matters of the mouth and throat, I think you might expect some sort of water fountain, particularly if patients are being asked to sit and wait for their appointments in a hot atrium with the sun pounding down through a glass roof. Frankly, shouldn’t all public buildings have access to water? Is it even illegal not to?

The receptionist very kindly filled a mug with water and handed it to me, apologising and telling me there wasn’t a water machine because no one would take responsibility for it! But it felt very strange. There were “hygiene stations” everywhere for patients to “decontaminate” their hands, but you can’t drink that gel stuff! Or can you? ;-)

Whilst I was waiting, I became horribly aware of a very high-pitched beeping. It was like the sound dial-up modems used to make in the late 1990s. It was right on the edge of audible and it made me incredibly confused to the extent that I went to another receptionist to ask what was going on. She merely shrugged. When I returned to my seat, I asked the man behind me if he could hear it as well, and he nodded, confused. It was at that point that a woman sitting on the front row of chairs turned round and said “it’s his hearing aid.” She pointed at the old man sitting next to her. I looked at her, “oh crumbs. Does he hear all that awful noise as well?” “Yes, it drives him mad!”

We went into Muswell Hill for lunch and went to various banks to pay in various cheques. I had to stand in a queue at Barclays for about twenty minutes. The middle-aged woman in front of me broke my heart. She wanted to pay £2 into her account. It struck me that this is the sort of money I regularly spend on a cup of tea which I gulp down in seconds, and there she was treating two pound coins like they were the most precious things in the world. There are so many layers in society.

I went to the gym, and then we went to Kwik Fit to get a new tyre fitted, having a little walk on Hampstead Heath whilst waiting for the work to be done.

I came home and spent the next six hours taking every single book down from the loft. Our loft has become a fifteen year dumping ground for anything we can’t think of anything else to do with! I have thrown 100 books away - mostly those which were utterly destroyed by building work over the summer, and created a pile of some 600 to take to charity shops. I have kept about 100, all of which are really special in some way. Many of them were filled with little drawings done by friends of mine in the 1980s. Some were the annotated scripts of plays and musicals I’ve directed. Others had photos and postcards stuffed inside. There were some beautiful messages on the inside sleeves. Others as good as broke my heart, including some of the books that Arnold Wesker gave to me. Quite bizarrely, he once wrote a book of erotic stories, and the inscription he’d written inside said, “Dear Ben, I’m not quite sure why YOU should want to read these, but here they come with my best wishes for 1999. Love ‘Nold.” He always liked that I called him ‘Nold...

I’m quite shaky as I go to bed tonight. Emotionally drained as well as being quite physically damaged by all the heavy lifting of books. I am not much looking forward to this move. It’s gonna be exhausting. More reason to chuck everything away!

Bin bags

I went for a very lovely walk on the heath this evening. Some sort of weather front is rolling in, to take all the glorious sunshine away, and a fresh wind was blowing fairly keenly. The trees were roaring appreciatively, saying “look how beautiful our leaves look in this glorious breeze.”

Nathan and I have been throwing stuff away today in preparation for our big move. We’ve filled bin liners with clothes which we’re never going to wear again, each with its own set of very particular memories. Punting trips, sunset walks, picnics, laughter. The jacket pockets are stuffed full of theatre tickets, back stage passes, mucky extra strong mints, grains of sands and impossibly large bits of fluff! I found the jacket which I’d last worn as I walked the length of the River Nene. I was moved to see that I’d worn an AIDS ribbon throughout, a full six months before Nathan became HIV positive.

Of course, cleaning out ones belongings is a deeply therapeutic thing to do. There are hugely positive benefits: you feel lighter and more able to tackle the world. But every little object which has stayed with you for any length of time can also generate a “what if?” 

We very nearly didn’t move to Highgate in the first place. I was working as a casting agent with Shaheen Baig in the flat below and when the landlord first approached her to ask if she knew anyone who might like the flat upstairs, I immediately said no. 

The journey to our accepting the flat is a story in itself. Nathan and I were living in Tufnell Park in a lovely little flat with a hugely eccentric lay out. It was situated over three floors. Our kitchen was on a half landing, so people living in flats above would traipse past us whilst we were cooking or cleaning our teeth! The bathroom was even more bizarre. It was on the ground floor - right next to the back door - so to go to the loo or have a bath, we had to go down two flights of communal stairs. It was a nightmare in the night, and we’d sometimes bump into our neighbours wearing nothing but a towel.

Anyway, we only had a bath and a loo in the bathroom. We washed our hands in the bath because there was no sink. It was, however, a fine, enamel-covered, really deep bath. One of my great joys in life was lying in it on a summer’s evening with the window to the back garden wide open and the cooling air tickling my face.

Nathan was always more of a shower man, and one day asked the land lady if we might have a little shower unit fixed above the bath. She was curiously obliging and immediately said that she didn’t see why not.

My friend Tammy was staying with us at the time, and we came home one day, horrified to find my precious bath, in pieces, dumped in the front garden. We went into the bathroom to discover that a horrible shower unit, built from flimsy plastic and chipboard had replaced it. I hate having showers, so our exit from the flat was almost immediately assured. To make matters worse, the landlady hadn’t thought to give us a sink. It was one thing washing our hands in the bath after using the loo, but quite something else having to turn the shower on, risking getting absolutely soaked if the shower head hadn’t been pressed against the cubical wall.

It was a nightmare. I immediately went back to Shaheen’s landlord, and asked if his flat was still available. Astonishingly, it was. It was at least a month since I’d turned it down. In those days (2005) it was really easy to find flats to rent. Everyone was buying, because houses were much cheaper.

So that’s the story of our little flat in Archway Road, and the biggest “what if” of all is wondering what might have happened to me, to us, had we stayed in Tufnell Park. The flat we’d lived in there came up for rent again at the start of the year and I made an enquiry. The three self-contained rooms we used to have as two bedrooms and a sitting room, had been turned into a one-bedroom flat, with a bathroom and kitchen crammed into the old living room. I was staggered to discover that it was on the market for just under three times the amount we’d paid for it when it had twice the number of bedrooms! London is a very different place 15 years on...

I suspect I shall be feeling increasingly nostalgic as we get closer and closer to the move date.

Fairfield Hall happiness

I found myself on the Central Line yesterday, in my own happy world, trying to pretend I wasn’t on a highly-crowded tube. I was standing in the area where the seats are and suddenly became aware that someone was shoving me from behind, whilst angrily shouting “excuse me” as she sat down in the empty chair in front of me.

She was probably in her thirties. Very well dressed. She had some sort of accent, maybe Brazilian, with a tinge of American. She was carrying a nasty fluffy dog in a basket. She came across as entitled and spoilt, like someone who’d never really been challenged in life. She huffed and blew and shot a few evil looks in my direction.

The next thing I knew, she’d stood up again and was leaving the train. I heard her, yet again, saying “excuse me” really angrily. And then I was aware that she’d shoved a young Asian lad really hard in the back, to the extent that he’d fallen out of the train and onto the platform.

The lad suddenly started pointing at his ear and it became clear he was wearing a hearing aid. He was deaf and hadn’t actually heard the woman talking. Instead of instantly backing down and apologising profusely to the man she’d pushed, Little Miss Entitled just shouted more loudly and angrily. People on the tube were utterly aghast as the woman stormed off down the platform, still yelling. I hope the fluffy dog bit her. 

The deaf bloke was plainly really shaken. He got back into the carriage and made himself as small as possible, like a wounded animal. It was a really upsetting sight. I tapped his arm and asked if he was alright. He could plainly lip read because he nodded, looking anything but alright. “If it’s any consolation,” I said, “she was horrible to me as well. She’s obviously having a really bad day.”

And then I got thinking. Plainly she’d felt it was okay to push two men out of her way. Dishing out a bit of violence against two men is okay. They’re men: they must be bullies, they deserve it, and, besides, a woman can’t bully a man etc etc. But the fuss that would rightly have be made if I’d pushed a woman out of a tube carriage is not worth thinking about. Certainly someone would have chased me down the platform and given me a piece of their mind. In a world where we’re all searching for equality, we really need to learn that there shouldn’t be one rule for one gender and another for the other.

On a far more pleasant note, I was given a tour of the newly-refurbished Fairfield Halls in Croydon yesterday. It opens in September, and there’s plainly still a lot which needs to be done but it’s very exciting. I was provided with steel-capped boots, a hard hat, hi-viz and gloves which made me feel very masculine. Sadly I also had to wear a pair of enormous plastic goggles, like the things we used to don during science experiments, and suddenly I was a massive geek! 

What is absolutely clear is that the building is going to be sensational. Everything has been thought through so carefully. There are cafes, roof terraces, studio spaces, theatre spaces, and, of course, the famous concert hall which is known for its almost perfect acoustic. 

Designed by the same bloke who did the Royal Festival Hall, the Fairfield Halls opened in 1962. I was very pleased to hear that they’re stripping the building back to how it would have looked when it was first built: that fusion of space-age glamour and no-frills modern brutality. These buildings, as I recently learned on a trip to Coventry, are much better understood with the original signage, fonts, and, more crucially, those amazing coloured tiles: usually duck egg blues, crimsons and light purples. When you strip away the 1980s gaudy plastics, cheap melamine and wood-chip counters, everything suddenly makes perfect sense, and you find yourself looking at a style icon rather than a tatty, weatherworn disaster zone.