Hyde Park

Sunday lunchtime at Speakers' Corner and the crazies are already set up. A Goth looking woman is shouting out passages from the Bible that depict hell and damnation. A working class socialist is giving his idealistic view while being baited by public school boys. A woman in a Little House on The Prairie dress is spouting racism. A small grey bearded man is drinking strong lager and heckling everyone. 

Further into the early afternoon warmth of Hyde Park lads play football. Over on the steps opposite the Albert Hall a band who all seem to be playing clarinets play a rendition of 'When The Saints go Marching In'. An American couple ask for their picture to be taken by the pond in Kensington gardens. By the fountains the stall sells delicious chocolate ice cream. Over at the Serpentine the roller skaters are out in force. Kids ride scooters down the pathways. Behind iron railings a squirrel eats pizza.

Back at Speakers' Corner the Goth woman is still shouting about damnation. A Christian is arguing with a Muslim. A man dressed all in white with big afro hair is chain smoking and explaining how the west is stupid and falls so easily for America's lies. He argues that Bin Laden is dead and if they'd wanted to catch him they could have done easily, but he's better currency if people thinks he's out on the loose. Everywhere people are shouting.

Two lads and a girl are wearing signs offering free hugs. I like this approach. It's simple and positive and there's nothing to argue about. The guy in white may have fair points to make but the kids stood behind him with the hate in their eyes are putting me off. We collect our free hugs and get on our way.

Career Opportunities

It is July 1986. Holding Back The Years by Simply Red is at number one. Crocodile Dundee and Big Trouble in Little China are at, or heading for, the cinema. We sit in the cab of the truck eating sandwiches and listening to the radio. You can smell the black plastic of the dashboard heated up by the sun. The dashboard is full of cigarette packets, crisp packets, petrol coupons, invoices covered in dirty fingerprints. Neil, my mentor hasn't washed his hands before eating so neither have I. I don't want to look like a gaylord.

     "Don't worry, you get used to eating concrete sandwiches in this job," says Neil.

This job is my first job; a trainee bricklayer. I left school a month before, managing a whole four hours of revision. I haven't been back to the school to collect my results, there's no point. I have failed. Fortunately I won't be needing them. I'm training to be a bricklayer and when I'm older, say nineteen, I'll build my own house in the country. 

My mentor  switches on the ignition, steps on the gas and we head towards the next job. It's my second week here and I'm already proving inept at the job. Infact, apart from the weekly brown pay packet the only thing I'm really enjoying is the driving round to the next job.  The inbetween bit where you stare out the window and take in the summer breeze. The work itself is proving too much. Mixing cement, loading and unloading tools and bricks from the van, running up wooden planks with wheelbarrows of rubble. I'm using muscles that have never been touched before and I'm aching from head to foot before we even start work. The one thing I did enjoy, was the breezeblock wall I built as part of an extension in Gordon road. I feel a brief flicker of having achieved something.

It's been downhill ever since. As I prove increasingly inept to do the job, my mentor tries to rise me out of my state by constantly having a go at me. The jobs get worse. One morning I have to spend shovelling rubble into a skip. All this for £55 a week.  The boss calls me in, ostensibly to help him, but really to lecture me telling me he doesn't expect blood, sweat and tears but he does expect effort. As a motivational talk it's an F. He's had blood, sweat, tears and effort.

I start dreading going into work. I sit in the van and work it out. Twenty days holiday a year. Forty-nine years till I can retire. I'm only sixteen. I have to get out of this, but how? At school they'd drummed into us the importance of getting and holding down a job. The importance of supporting yourself and standing on your own two feet. There was mass unemployment out there. I should be grateful. Maybe I could get someone else to build me my house in the country?

I seal my fate a week later. At the Salvation Army place on Rushams road, I bang a load of nails into the suspended ceiling missing the wooden beams underneath, so when the boss comes to inspect my work he sees a load of nails hanging uselessly through the ceiling. 

Five weeks after I start my first job, my career as a bricklayer has ended. It is the start of an uneasy relationship with full time work. I walk home through the park, my wages and my P45 in my pocket. I feel bad; I've been sacked from my first ever full time job. I also feel massively relieved. Getting up at seven am to have people having a go at you all day long is no way to spend your life. The sun is shining and I have nowhere to go. I walk home with a spring in my step.

A few days later my parents drive me to the school to collect my exam results. I have four CSEs and no O levels to my name.

     

The Circus Man

Late Saturday afternoon over on the Southbank near the Royal Festival Hall we, the crowd, gather round to watch a circus man in striped trousers as he attempts to get his whole body through a tennis racket. He knows how to play the audience. If we don't clap loud enough he makes us do it again and we dutifully clap louder. He gets us to clap in time to his animated footsteps and we try and keep in time as he runs on the spot. He's a great entertainer is the circus man.

Unfortunately the chav behind me doesn't agree. He keeps shouting, "get a job" and thinks his comments entertaining. He also refers to the tennis racket as a cricket racket. It's funny because I thought the circus man was working and doing his job well. And I wonder what kind of job the chav fool does, a man so intelligent he thinks cricket is played with a racket. His shouting "get a job" brings it back to me why it's good not to get a 'proper' job. It shows a lack of imagination. Mind you having a job means I can put some money in the circus man's hat after he gets his dislocated shoulder through the racket and wriggles his way into getting the racket right down to his feet. 

It reminds me that it's better to be a part of something than standing on the sidelines snearing. It's 2009, cynicism is on its way out my friends.

Where does everyone go for Easter Monday?

I went to view a flat earlier. Not a proper viewing, I just drove past to check out the area. I saw this flat, where you stump up 70% of the costs and then when you sell it 30% of the profits go to the company who built the flats. I had it all worked out, I'd be totally broke but I'd be able to swan around my own modern and tiny flat.

I think this crazy line of thinking has something to do with me turning 39 on Saturday. I had a great birthday, but 39 is a scary amount of years to have watched run over the hill like wild dogs. I decided I needed to buy a piece of England's green and pleasant land.

Anyway I drove round to check out my new neighbourhood. However the streets were full of scary kids staring into my car and there wasn't a tree in sight so I turned around and drove home, my mind totally changed about buying that flat the moment I conned a mortgage out of the bank.

Funny, because on Monday I walked lost around Muswell Hill and there was hardly a person in sight. I thought everyone in the whole area had gone away for Easter Monday. When I took the tube home in the evening I had a whole carriage to myself from Highgate to Camden. 

Hair

Down the hill in Chalk Farm I'm waiting for Valerie to cut my hair and feeling sorry for the Chinese hairdresser. Everyone is requesting Valerie cuts their hair. The woman with a child who is just a big ball of hair huffs when she is told Valerie isn't available. She begrudgingly agrees the Chinese hairdresser is to cut her hairy child's hair. The Chinese woman maintains a dignified air of bonhomie. As she sets about cutting enough hair to reveal the face of  the huffy woman's child, another customer comes in and requests Valerie. I sit in my chair feeling guilty that Valerie is going to cut my hair.

I always choose the moment I'm sitting in the hairdresser's chair, her with scissors at the ready, to decide my hair looks great as it is and plan my escape still wearing the hairdresser's cape if necessary. I always ask for not very much hair to be taken off at all but ask for it to be more choppy. Whether this means anything to Valerie or not I don't know, it's just a term I picked up in a Liverpool hairdressers.

She tends to wet my hair down so it looks as terrible as it can and then puts it into a side parting when I always have it forward and I worry she's going to ruin it. But then a few minutes of chopping later she's drying my hair and it looks blonder than ever and a thousand times better than it did before I entered the shop. Hairdressers always style your hair so it looks tremendous. A haircut never looks better than in the Hairdresser's mirror. 

I walk up the hill a happy man, happy with his hair. I could never get a good quiff though. Not like Ringo with his Rory Storm and the Hurricanes look. I keep walking up the hill, keeping Ringo's quiff from mind, refusing to check my hair in the reflection from car windows, concentrating instead on the blond image left in the hairdresser's mirror.

Liverpool 1, Fulham 0

Usually outside the post office on Finchley road a lone woman stands and says in a soft voice to passers by, "Good news, Jesus loves you". Today there are four of them to tell me this. I kind of like this but I walk by quickly. I like christians much more than atheists. Christians get up on sunday and socialise with one another, singing songs of praise. What social events have atheists ever laid on for us? Because of christians we get a nice break at easter. Where's our free plane ride over to the Galapagos islands to see the big tortoises, Mr Dawkins?

This weekend I'm in London. I've had a good few weeks either going away or meeting up with friends, but this weekend I'm doing little and the weekend is threatening to ground to a halt. A few weeks ago I went to Liverpool, where I met up with all of the people above. (Can you guess which one is a DJ?) I lived in Liverpool for years and I think of it as my second home. I had a kind of love/hate relationship with Liverpool, I've had some of the best times of my life in Liverpool, but also some of the worst. 

The train to Liverpool is never ready to board until about two minutes before it's due to leave. And then everyone swarms onto the train. Once on the train I hear the homely sound of scouse voices talking enthusiastically. The train from Euston is now superfast and I've barely time to drink my two cans of lager before I arrive in one of England's best cities. It used to take between five and seven hours to get back from Liverpool, but now they've stopped with that nonsense and you can return to London in two and a half hours. It's funny now I don't live there, I love the place almost unreservedly. Back in London I spend my weekend listening to the Liverpool games and the Coral.