Gyro Bubbley

Gyro Bubbley

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Went for a canal side stroll from Paddington Basin, through Regents Park and Camden Lock, over to King's Cross yesterday. The first half of the walk was quite pleasant until we reached Camden. In the 1980's Camden Market was the place to buy shoddy, but trendy, fashion goods. All over London the same conversion would take place in countless offices every Monday morning:
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Person A - would plonk their latest acquisition in the middle of their desk
Person B - 'That's an interesting bag/ pair of shoes/ tobacco tin/ posing pouch'
Person A - 'Yes, I got it a Camden Market. It only cost a fiver'
Person B - 'Wow! You're so cooooool'
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The market stalls are still there, and so are the hordes of 20 something tourists in search of Gothic chic, but the atmosphere isn't what it was and nothing costs as little as £5 any more. The real hardcore trendies moved over to East London; Hoxton, Shoreditch, Dalston, years ago. Like Carnaby Street, Camden Market only survives because of the countless successive waves of tourists visiting the place on the basis of long out of date information, taken largely from old Clash album sleeve notes. Camden Market is just plain sleazy now, the kind of place where sensible people constantly pat their pockets and gangs hang out looking to amuse themselves by hassling or stealing from naive Italian language students. It's only a matter of time before Camden sees its first drive-by canal barge shooting. 'It all happened so quickly officer. The barge came up next to him. Someone fired a gun then it speed off towards Holloway. It was all over before we could do anything'.
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Let's face it, canal boats are silly; as a means of transportation and most definitely as somewhere to live. Half the boats we saw in permanent moorings along the canal clearly weren't in use; the initial appeal of a Bohemian water-borne lifestyle rapidly shattered by the reality of an existence in a smelly and decrepit wheel-less caravan with a chemical toilet and a kiddie's water pistol for a shower.
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We didn't photograph very much during the day. The most interesting thing we saw was a fairly posh looking old lady sitting by the canal. She was clean and well turned out except for the fact that she was wearing men's shoes. She didn't look homeless as such just eccentric; she was sitting under a huge umbrella, even though it wasn't raining, and her bicycle was festooned with bunches of empty beer cans held together by string. What caught my eye was that, amongst the beer cans, was a handwritten label with the words 'Gyro Bubbley'. What did it mean? Did the gyro refer to the bike? Did the bubbley refer to the lager the cans once contained? I'm still pondering that one. I also grabbed a few shots of signs saying 'Canal Cruising' and will edit out the first 'C' in Photoshop at some point, when the weather gets cold and the evenings draw in.
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I'm not having much luck taking pictures in town these days. At the start of the walk, in Paddington Basin, I was taking a few snaps of some office buildings and noticed that all three of us were being stalked by a kid in a fluorescent jacket with the word SECURITY emblazoned on the back. After about five minutes of stalking he approached me and said:
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'Excuse me Sir, you can't take pictures of that buidling as it's private property'
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He was no older than 20, he had a strong South African accent, sounded retarded, was blessed with appalllingly extensive and moist acne, had just been consulting with someone on his radio and was talking nonsense. All of these things annoyed me intensely. I basically told him that he was talking cobblers and should check back with his boss and tell him someone said so. He explained he was only doing his job and moved off sideways, still keeping an eye on us and fingering his radio. I'm still kicking himself for not reminding him that the dopey security guard is ALWAYS the first person to be taken out in action movies.
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Five minutes before I had been admiring an East African traffic warden working his way through a line of parked cars outside St Mary's hospital. Serves those swine right, I thought, for having the audacity to think that they could drive over to visit their sick relatives and park their cars along a quiet sidestreet on a Sunday afternoon. Those criminal vermin deserve those £90 fines.
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I was also buoyed up by the thought that soon the whole process of paying recent migrants to hassle British citizens taking pictures in public places or visiting cancer patients will be so much enhanced once the new ID cards are forced on us. Think about it. We'll be obliged to offer up our cards on demand to all sorts of intrusive idiots dressed in ersatz uniforms who can barely speak English. Then they'll be able to swipe our cards on OCR machines and our fines will be automatically deducted from our debit or credit cards in seconds. I can't wait. The future will be marvellous.
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