Earlier this year, after the school shootings in Florida, I had a long discussion on Facebook with friends of American friends who were firmly convinced that gun control laws would have no effect on reducing the number of mass shootings that the United States regularly suffers from.

I was able to cite the relatively low number of deaths caused by firearms in the UK; and the complete absence of school shootings since Dunblane in 1996. It didn’t convince them at all; with some of them saying that seeing people “open carrying” (walking down the street with visible holsters) made them feel more secure. Oh dear.

But gun control laws are not the only issue, essential though they are. If you have a society, as we do, where the social infrastructure has been steadily worn away, social mobility is frozen, social insecurity is rife, inequality is becoming more rampant and visible; and the cuts to the police have led to a style of policing less and less rooted in communities, so the presumption begins to spread among the most marginalised young people not only that “there is no such thing as society” (certainly not one that gives a damn about them) but also that if you turn to criminal and predatory ways of being “aspirational” there is a very good chance that you won’t be caught – the uptick in stabbings and shootings is written into government policy even as they wring their hands over the consequences.

On Monday last there was a shooting incident at the Aces Dessert Lounge opposite Kingsbury tube station. There were three casualties. Two young men in their upper teens and a woman aged 30. No further news on what it was about. None of them killed fortunately. Aces is one of the places that some of the youth who have been riding mopeds without helmets across the park tended to hang out – not a lot of conversation going on, quite a few eyes that look a bit dead. The last time I walked through, they seem to have moved down to Costa’s, about ten yards away. If this is a defensive response it seems quite limited.

The police were all over the scene in the immediate aftermath and presumably got all the evidence they needed. The following morning, when I went past, everything was normal. Aces was shut but everything else bustled along as it usually does. In the afternoon, there were police tapes and some fairly heavy looking officers standing guard, while a couple of bored looking SOCOs made a desultory centimetre by centimetre double check on the pavement outside; but just walking slowly and looking down, not on their knees and fingertips. Why they’d be doing this after leaving the whole area uncordoned off all morning was a bit puzzling if they were seriously looking for additional evidence. probably just a case of wanting to be doing something having been deployed there.

With a prospect of a government increasingly wearing away our threadbare social safety nets and waging selective campaigns of social exclusion, i fear that this sort of thing is likely to become more common. I hope I’m wrong.

Beyond Putney Bridge the river starts to feel a little less urban.

A mosaic celebrates the Oxford – Cambridge boat race as the world’s longest running sporting event – from 1829.

Instead of vertical embankments, the south side has long concreted slopes. Houses start to have gardens that run towards the river.

On the north side the tow path is overshadowed by huge plane trees, reaching overhead and dipping their branches into the river as though they are drinking it.

Opposite the wetlands on the Barnes peninsular, a gulp of cormorants sits waiting on a jetty, some with their heads up hoping to summon the sun.

The Harrods Furniture depository by Hammersmith Bridge looms enormously with its twin domes and art nouveau lettering like a living fossil – as though you could walk into it and meet P. G. Wodehouse. It is, of course, now redeveloped into flats. None of them “affordable.” Its quite possible Wodehouse wouldn’t be able to afford one.

Rain looms in the moisture soaked west. Visibility begins to dim. We are walking towards three broad curtains of rain. If one of them doesn’t get us, the others will.

A Chinese family walk past leading a big curious dalmatian. Other pedigree dogs are walked in the park alongside.

The familiar shape of Wembley arch appears on the horizon in front of us. We are not sure whether to believe our eyes or not – because it means that we have walked all day just to end up closer to home – and far from heading directly West, at this point we were actually heading North as the river begins to meander quite wildly past Putney.

As the rain blew in we headed inland for food and landed in Hammersmith. Six and a half hours after setting off and we’ve done about 20 miles but are nowhere near Hampton Court. The map shows that we have almost as far to go again as we have covered already, so, as creatures of habit, we find ourselves in the familiar surroundings of the Hammersmith Nandos, which could be a Nandos anywhere, Playing safe on a journey of discovery, so I have something new on the menu to compensate that turns out to be extraordinarily bland; and serves me right. A tall and alienated looking family sits in the reception avoiding conversation and eye contact with each other. The son, who must be about 18 and looks determinedly grumpy, slouches back in his seat and has a Donald Trump style comb forward. “There were some gilded youths, that sat along the barbers wall. Their eyes were dim, their heads were flat. They had no brains at all.” A.B. Paterson .

Having sat down, the prospect of getting up again is not attractive. Agreeing to walk on to the next Bridge as an act of futile bravado, we have barely taken a dozen steps before I realise that my feet just aren’t up to it. This is a salutary, if slightly depressing, reminder that our bodies have limits. In 1983, on the People’s March for Jobs, I could do twenty miles a day carrying a banner (and singing sometimes) then get up and do it all again the next day, but not now.

On the principle that you should always listen to your feet, we decide that Jamie will go on to Barnes Bridge in a final gesture of defiance, while I beat a retreat to Ravenscourt Road tube and head for home, via Asda (as a sort of air lock back to domesticity).

To be continued…

 

Along Chelsea embankment there’s a life size statue of Thomas More where his house used to be, sitting looking pensive to show he was an intellectual, made in  a strange bright yellow material that is probably meant to indicate Catholicism and saintliness but only makes him look as though he’s got a metallic form of jaundice.

Ranelagh Gardens – the great Eighteenth Century pleasure gardens – haunt of Regency bucks and many a ripped bodice – is now closed off and rather run down as part of the grounds of Chelsea Hospital, suitably retired. The Hospital itself, a wide, solid and handsome building, has a line of Napoleonic era artillery in front, perhaps in case any of the hoi-polloi make a dash across the lawns, or perhaps to combine the twin messages of being both military and vintage.

Driven away from the Thames side walk by hunger we went looking for a cheap but decent cafe and found ourselves on the Kings Road. Not promising territory. An old friend of mine once said that some people vote Conservative but other people just are Conservative. Jamie said he thinks of Chelsea as not really being London. “Where are the chicken shops?” All the restaurants had a sort of social class force field around them, so we walked on getting hungrier; passing cream fed, floppy haired young men in clothes that look both expensive and well worn and whip smart, impeccably presented young women running for appointments with tiny clicking steps. Emerging at the far end of the road we were saved by a Co-op that felt more like home and provided us with crisps and sandwiches and croissants to eat on the end of a pier overshadowed by some brutal looking red brick tower blocks that looked a bit like a 1970’s version of Red Vienna.

The tow path in Fulham is not continuous or direct. There should be a warning. Detours have to be made around new developments and the Hurlingham Club – where they play polo…in London, with its high walls and metal spikes to detour urban explorers and devotees of parkour. These detours can be quite substantial and for a time it seemed like we would never escape from SW6. We walked past a school with one of those banners – “where every child matters” – as opposed to all those other schools where we only bother with some of them.

Back along the tow path through another ultra modern and uber posh housing development. Most of these seem to have very expensive and exclusive looking restaurants on the ground floor – all shiny glass and polished surfaces – and just one or two customers having hushed conversations while their cutlery echoes in the emptiness. Outside a hotel, a semi circle of Mercedes saloons and mini vans, all new, immaculate, black and polished like a Presidential motorcade in waiting. Security staff standing watchful and aloof. Lonely and soul less.

The old Lots Road Power station is being remodeled to be the heart of a new “Chelsea Waterfront” development. The power station is huge and handsome in that confidently functional Victorian way that made factories like cathedrals. A group of bored and slightly angry looking construction workers standing by the entrance in hard yellow hats waiting for the machinery to gut the structure and get to work building apartments that will start at £1.7 million each and none of them could dream of living in. “It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

My son’s plan to walk through London along both banks of the Thames was one that appealed to an innate sense of pilgrimage in me, so we decided – on the basis of a cursory look at a very large scale online map, and in denial of any common sense appreciation of the distances involved – to start at Tower Bridge and strike west for Hampton Court as a first stage – before turning back along the south bank and seeing how far we could retrace our steps before it got dark. As plans go, this was on the optimistic side.

It was possible to walk from one side of Roman London to the other in less than half an hour and the tourist leg down to Westminster was sunny, busy, studded with statues, well known historical buildings, montages of memories from hundreds of family trips (and demonstrations that assembled on the Embankment) and was almost too familiar.

Beyond Westminster – on the roads less traveled – odd places in Pimlico, like Dolphin Square, emerged in all too solid reality from stories in the papers and Le Carre novels. In Le Carre, Dolphin Square is a place where “the service” retains a number of flats for use by agents. The advantage of this is that it is a huge anonymous looking slab of 1250 expensive, but brutal, 1930s flats, ten storeys high and covering a large acreage; so its easy enough to be obscure in –  and handy for HQ. The disadvantage is that they’ve been doing this for more than 60 years; so you might assume that someone will have noticed – “Mr Bond? Oh yes, he’s a regular” – even if they don’t read Le Carre.

Further on, along Chelsea embankment, there’s a long stretch on both sides of the river which have been redeveloped with the sort of buildings that look like they belong in a Dan Dare cartoon strip as the sort of place Venusians might live in. Although some of them seem to have been “sold” there was a distinct absence of people – and a feeling that real people would just spoil the clean, unused – still in their cellophane – feel of the buildings – at least as far as their property values are concerned. An enormous amount of effort and capital is going into building neighbourhoods that exude hostility to neighbourliness. On one street there was actually a  manned checkpoint keeping out cars without permits.

A fable for children

There was once a king who loved gold.

He had gold plates and spoons, gold curtains and cushions, a gold bath with gold taps – even a gold toilet.

He wore a gold wig.

He bolted his name in giant gold letters on the tallest buildings; so everyone could look upon his works and be jealous.

He had more soldiers and tanks and rockets and battleships and bomber planes than all the other kingdoms in the world put together and laid end to end.

He was very rude, and like to squash visitors hands for a long time when he shook them and called people names through megaphones.

But the trouble was that he had bullied people for so long that he could never tell whether anyone actually liked him; or if they smiled at him and told him how wonderful he was because they were scared. He secretly thought that his gang liked his gold more than him.

So he wanted people to be scared of each other. And some people were, and thought that wanting to be like him was the best they could hope for. But because there was actually only room for one person like him in the world- they joined his gang instead and marched and shouted with torches and guns – calling everyone else “losers!”

But the “losers” were many, many more than them. All sorts of people, at home and overseas; and they started to reach out to each other and shouted back. And the shouting got very loud. You could hear it everywhere – all over the kingdom and all over the world.

So, King Krump wanted to build a wall in people’s hearts to keep more and more of the “loser” people out.

He tried to build it with straw – but it blew away when the people breathed.

He tried to build it with ice – but it melted when the people smiled.

He tried to build it with stone – but it fell down when the people danced.

He tried to build it with words – but it was drowned when the people sang.

He tried to build it with fire – but it fizzled out under an avalanche of snowflakes.

He tried to build it high – but the people jumped higher.

He tried to build it deep – but the people dug deeper.

Every time he tried to build his wall, more and more people found each other across bridges that he couldn’t see and that they had never known were there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Putting out the rubbish and I hear a slight controlled scream from the street. Looking up the path between the hedges and a girl of about 7 glides edgily past on a pair of inline skates with a look of delight and panic on her face – the most danger and excitement you can have at one and a half miles per hour.

My Conservative voting neighbour – who still has an election leaflet in her window – comes out to inspect her bins on collection day; opens the lid, gives a proprietary glance in and down, with a face that expects disappointment, and an appraising sniff; just to see if standards are being maintained.

In Kingsbury, May means mangoes. Buying a box from a teetering pile on the street and the bloke offers me a plastic bag. “No thanks, I’m trying to give them up.” I find that this line gets a smile and the message across.

Whenever I use the cash point at the local Sainsburys I am haunted by the ghost of a horrible incident from last year. Bit of a queue. An old lady fumbling a bit with her card and the buttons and a very aggressive woman started shouting at her to get a move on or get out of the way. Everyone just looked – the way people do – while the woman looked around for approval because she was obviously doing us all a favour by harassing this inconvenient woman out of our way. So when her eye contact landed on me I told her to leave the old lady alone and have a bit of respect and care for the elderly. Quite reasonable I thought. A volley of abuse ensued. The word W*****r prominent as she stated her firm belief that the future belonged to her. This put the old lady off her stroke even more and she went off shocked and grumbling, despite some encouragement from me to stick her ground and take her time. The upsetting thing about incidents like this is always the way that people just stand and look and allow bullying to take place, even if they disapprove.

At the bus stop opposite the Magistrates Court on Sunday, a small team of young Eastern European men; clean cut, wearing (non matching) neat clothes and shoes, stand and have earnest conversations while carrying enormous black bibles zipped up in leather covers like filofaxes of the latter day saints.

Phrases that gain a little too much in the translation dept. In VBs off Kingsbury Circle – an Asian Cash and Carry that has settled in an old garage, with the feel of a barely refurbished factory where you can buy hundredweights of rice or flour, jaggery in jute sacks, gallons of mango juice, industrial quantities of ghee in huge tins and every spice known to man and then some – and I’m looking for Kashmiri chilies. Time was that my social anxiety was such that I would wander around for hours looking rather than actually ask someone. Its odd that I can stand up in front of quite large meetings full of people I don’t know and make a speech, but asking a worker in a shop if they have some produce has always been a struggle. Reflecting on how daft this is, I take a deep breath and ask the woman stacking bags of lentils if they have Kashmiri chilies. “They are in the bottom,” she says; which sounds a bit painful to me.

 

On election night I was in our neighbouring, less safe, ward knocking on the doors of Labour promises; and approached a house that had a taxi parked on its hardstanding, 3D hologram style Jesus last supper postcards on the door and big pictures of the Royal Family with small Union Jacks stuck across each corner, and a copy of our local candidates leaflet peeping shyly out amongst them. A plump middle aged guy came to the door and proclaimed “Labour? Yes! Jeremy Corbyn. I love him!” and blew kisses into the air. M’wah! Mwah!”

Either side of the Edgware Road a colossal amount of building is going on. Old art-deco factories, DIY stores and their attendant car parks give way to blocks of shiny new flats – some of which seem to have more gyms than people. Dusty old pubs are replaced by Care Homes – though this has been going on long enough for some of the signage to drop off, as if they were slogans on the backdrop at the Conservative party conference. Ashton Lodge has become Ashto Lodge – which is altogether more exotic. The old Hendon police College site is now a massive sea of mud and foundations. Very few of the swish flats that are being built are likely to be “affordable” in any real sense. At the Welsh Harp one bedroom flats cost £250 000 and two bed flats rent at £900 a week. What kind of slick holograms are coming to live amongst us and how long will they tolerate our company?

Nadhim Zahawi’s defence of being at the President’s club dinner last week

1) that he saw nothing untoward and

2) that he left because he felt uncomfortable

begs the question of what he felt uncomfortable about if he saw nothing untoward. Reminded me of Billy Bunter. “I didn’t eat your chocs, and I didn’t hide behind the armchair when I heard you come in.”

Flocks of seagulls soar over our road and settles on the roofs opposite. Seagulls have become much more common in recent years as they have moved inland to scavenge, but with the prospect of a 20 metre sea level rise baked in to the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere; it feels like a premonition of when the view out of our window across west London will be filled for the most part with a mile or two of dirty khaki water lapping up against Shoot Up Hill and drowning the West End.

Taking senior moments to extremes I left my bag on the bus this morning. A bag with all my planning and assessments, my all areas school pass, my phone charger and school diary and (possibly most important) lunch and flask of coffee.

Tuesday, of course, is the day that I don’t have a minute to breathe. Teaching from the off, playground duty, then more teaching until lunch. The lost property dept at Arriva buses does not open until the point I was supposed to start teaching.

Squeezing out a bit of time between lessons I manage to get through to a voice recognition software labyrinth which was a bit like being in Phonejacker.

“State clearly the number of the bus that you lost your property on.”

“2 – 5 – 3”

“Did you say..1-6-7? ..say yes or no.”

“NO!”

…and so on for another dozen variations in which the closest it came to what I was saying was 255. But I think this was just a tease. It struck me that, as firms record messages for training purposes, this might be a fiendish practical joke designed to get recordings of people in a state of gradually escalating exasperation. Its hard to believe anyone ever gets through, especially because every time it got it wrong the option to revert to “the operator” just took you back to the beginning of the labyrinth to have another go.

“TWO FIVE THRRREEE!

“Did you say N528?..say yes or no.”

“AAAARGH!”

“I didn’t understand what you said….”

Luckily there was a general enquiries email contact somewhere on their website, which responded quickly and gave the address of the bus garage the 253 ends up at. Phoning that was a joy. Straight through to a friendly, slightly sardonic human being at Stamford Hill, who asked me to describe the bag and told me he’d got it. Blessed relief. He was waiting behind his rather cosy, old fashioned bus office desk – a bit like ticket offices used to be  before they went all slick – with a big smile on his face when I went out there after school. I asked if they had a lot of lost bags…”all the time, I’ve had two more since you called”, and held them up like a pair of dead pheasants.