from 'The History of Art in Legos': click to see more

In case you’ve ever wondered what poets do when they aren’t writing poems, this is it. Not making things out of Lego, though that would be cool, but finding random things on the internet. It’s a skill. Some poets are better at it than others. The poet who found this Lego Rothko and posted it on Facebook is particularly adroit. It’s as if he had been frequenting the Larrikin’s End Art Gallery and Bait Shop, and knew exactly what I was looking for.

Come to think of it, it reminds me strangely of his last book cover.

So it appears there is a poetry/Lego connection. I knew this already, actually. In a truly inspiring departure from the cultural hermeticism poets so often seem to display, the Canadian arch-experimentalist Christian Bök once even asserted in his work that the Great Order of the Universe resides in Lego bricks. (There is an elegant simplicity there, to be sure.)

Of course, once you’ve done it with the instructions, you then want to make one from scratch. So Bök went all Technik, in an historic attempt to embed the DNA code of a poem into a bacterium. It almost worked, too. Amazingly. But I’ve heard that the bacterium did what any responsible person would advise, and edited the code down to half its length (see paragraph 7). I gather he’s still trying to reclaim his beloved second stanza, with that image of the sun setting golden over the lonely Euphrates… that wouldn’t have happened if he’d just stuck to the basic set.

There may be yet others we don’t know of.

In the meantime, maybe we should tell them down in Larrikin’s End, and see if they can do a bit of YBA with some bait and picture wire.

Here’s a screen shot of a bit of serendipity in yesterday’s Guardian website.

And here’s one from just now:

Do you think they do it on purpose? Are the subs very good, or very bad? And if bad, do they have curls in the middle of their foreheads?

Or do you think I’m beginning to think of newspapers as giant found poems?

The state of things: click the picture to see the explanation

Right. We’ve got a busy week coming up. Teaching Tuesday. Teaching Thursday (dramatic monologues). Lots of emails and tutorials to catch up on, still. Plus other things, work, lots of it, and really the need to get straight. I lost a week plus with that virus. And I’m in a new group of poet friends who meet once a month and critique each other’s work: first time I’ve had that since, well, about 2005… It is a boon and a blessing, and makes me think, ‘Now have I got a poem?’ So that is happening tonight. Hurrah. And I have a poem.

Before that, in the afternoon, I was meant to be going to a meeting at my aunt’s house, set up by the psychiatric social worker, to get all the agencies together to talk about the care. But then on Friday I realised I had completely messed up, and I am spending this entire afternoon doing back-to-back poetry tutorials. Who can keep the days straight, it’s all just a blur. And of course Friday was a very busy day and I a) didn’t have a chance, and b) forgot, to call them and say I had double-booked. The fracas seemed more about one of the students having got the day wrong, and me feeling anxious about that… So I (will, by the time you read this) have emailed them with my Bulletpoints of Observation and will have to grovel in office hours. Damn it. It’s a real shame, because I’ve been yearning to get all these people together in a room. But whether I’m there or not it will do them good to actually talk to each other.

They’re mainly worried because ‘the money isn’t working’. But right now I can’t even begin to go into that. Suffice to say that I had a call from the agency yesterday to tell me there was no milk, and they couldn’t go get any, because ‘there was no money’. It turned out, after a slightly exasperating minute or two, that there had been no milk for four days. Well, there was some out-of-date milk, which would have been fine for her, as she has been legendary since time immemorial for her tendency to consume food so old it can read. But they don’t see it like that and she finds their scruples merely sort of observational. In the end I’m sorry to say I did snap slightly. ‘My aunt is more than capable of going to the bank, and getting some milk’.

‘Oh, is she?’

‘I’ll call her’.

I ring and she is exasperated, which I know is partly the Alzheimers, as she often thinks things are exasperating when they’re just normal. (Funny, so do I.) She says the carer makes the tea, and the way she puts it is: ‘she’s had no milk for four days’ – an interesting distinction, and one not without merit. She says she told the carer she could go get some milk, but of course said she had no money. She says this even when there’s £30 in her pocket. She can’t see the difference between them using their money or hers. But why didn’t they call me until four days later?

Last month I had £40 secreted in a drawer – that’s another whole account, really, and is one of the reasons for the meeting, the time she ran out of food and I heard about it only when they had run out of things to give her, and they called me during the Orwell Prize shortlisting, ie in the evening, to tell me she was having nothing but tea for supper. And when I got there the next day there were ham and cheese in the fridge, and two unopened packets of spaghetti on the worktop?!? They said, vaguely, ‘But there was no bread…’

And during all the phone calls I had had with people in the two days previous to that, no one wanted to know about the £40, because they aren’t allowed to handle or apparently even mention money. At least two people from different organisations knew the money was there – but not my aunt, as I didn’t want her to lose it. Fat lot of good that did. But in theory, when there is no emergency, they all say wouldn’t it be great if I could only just leave some money in the house.

Anyway, she says she’s going to go get some milk tomorrow.

She doesn’t see what the big deal is. Mostly we were talking about some opera programme she was watching, with I forget which soprano, but who she said is a very funny woman, ‘and a very beautiful woman, too; and that’s what we need in opera’. And a tenor she had never heard of, who was tall and ‘has silver hair’, and was ‘quite good’. And a pianist who was ‘about twice the size of the soprano’, but she played very well. (‘That’s what she’s there to do’, I said; my aunt replied: ‘Absolutely!’) She kept saying, ‘Can you hear it in the background?’ It sounded good, and like her, and very nice, actually. There have been newspaper reports and so on recently, all about how ‘the music they remember’ can reach Alzheimers patients. My aunt is not as far gone as all that, just far gone enough to criticise the pianist for being fat. It’s good that she’s paying attention.

Then I caught up with the blog of my lovely old friend who has moved back to Australia, the erstwhile Debbie Harry of Hackney – Ms P of That’s So Pants, now cooling her heels in a place fictionally called Larrikin’s End. As ever, her latest post is lucid, entertaining, a bit out there, and informative. Elucidating, in fact. Not only is she lucid, she can make you so. In this one she dishes the sense on Mark Rothko and the American Abstract Expressionists:

But it’s mostly because he was a big, American male. There was a time when a particular kind of American man felt it his duty to answer the big questions of  life. Some of them made a decent stab at it – like Hemingway for e.g. It was a big call with a big price and they both paid it in the end.

Then, in the bath, I was reading an essay by Stephen Burt and (switching gear slightly) discovered what I had never known before: namely, that John Ashbery has written a cento – that is, a poem made of the lines of other poems, as in ancient Rome a warrior would make a cloak of patches of the cloaks of heroes – called, brazenly, ‘The Dong With a Luminous Nose’. I’ve found it. I had thought from the essay that it was made up of lines from Edward Lear, but on reading it I can see that the lines come from everywhere. It’s like one of those (now very old-fashioned) radio dial experiences. (I’m not sure  if I like this better or if I’m a little disappointed; I think I was looking forward to seeing what it would be like, made up entirely of lines from Lear.)

Anyway, it’s beautiful, if a bit scary, and it’s a bit like talking to my aunt.

Obscurest night involved the sky
And brickdust Moll had screamed through half a street:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
Every night and alle,
The happy highways where I went
To the hills of Chankly Bore!”

Edward Lear was born 200 years ago this very day, in Holloway, only a stone’s throw from where I sit, the 21st of 22 children of a stockbroker. But his father’s fortunes crashed when he was four, and he was raised from then by his sister. From 6 years old he suffered frequent epileptic fits, and his depression – which he very descriptively and characteristically, I think, called ‘The Morbids’ – started around then too.

By 16 he was drawing for money. As a young man, he was employed by Lord Stanley to draw all the animals in the menagerie at Knowsley Hall. It was while he was staying there that Lear began to make up limericks to amuse the children…

But Lear was, certainly at this stage, not a nonsense poet: he was an  ornithological artist. His first publication at age 19, was a collection of his watercolours of parrots, which are extraordinarily beautiful.

I have to tell you something here. Edward Lear painted the parrot that sits on Marie Antoinette’s bonnet, at the top of this page. Eye patch by me, I’m afraid. And unlike other people, who resorted to shooting, taxidermy and museums, Lear went to the Zoo and asked a keeper to hold the parrot still so he could get its good side.

And the rest is history. Everybody, in some corner of their being, loves Edward Lear. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t always wanted to eat mince with slices of quince, or to have their dinner with a runcible spoon. The rootless optimism of the Jumblies! The patient longing of the Dong. And the unfortunate man of Peru: can you even imagine the world without limericks?

Lear’s nonsense – with its intrinsic sadness and humanity – never takes the easy way out. Look at the top limerick above. His poems are full of people who got smashed in some way for being different, in some way. His nonsense drawings practically quiver with movement and life. There is never any escape into decorum. Even without his sweeping landscape paintings, and the parrots and other watercolours, these drawings would be enough to make people love him.

…

PAUSE…

…

So, with all that in mind, last night I was at my second launch of the week, and it was for an exhibition at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EDWARD LEAR is organised by Andrew Baker and Linda Hughes and hosted by the Poetry Society, and has really beautiful work by over forty artists including Glen Baxter, Peter Blegvad, and John Vernon Lord (who, as well as looking very like Lear himself, illustrated the Complete Nonsense Verse, which is due to be reissued by Cape in October). The show is quirky and wonderful and a real homage to Lear. If you’re in London, I recommend a stop in Covent Garden for coffee and to see the pictures. And if you go very soon, before it rains again, you might still be able to see a procession of Lear animals in coloured chalk, dancing up the pavement to the door of the café.

There is a small Happy Birthday Edward Lear website where you can see more images.

Well, I’m just about recovering. It was a very convivial evening. But my advice to you is that if you’re going to drink with tube enthusiasts, remember that they come from a different world. They’re like the jaded hacks we remember who smoked indoors and had three pints for lunch, who slunk shadowlike in that pre-sunshine London, happiest in places with a bit of a fug, happiest when the facts are checked, equally at home in archive, train depot, saloon car, saloon bar, wine bar – people who somehow just know everything, and have done since before Wikipedia. If you’re going to drink with these people, make sure you get some food in you.

It was the launch of Andrew Martin’s history of the tube, published by Profile Books. (Andrew is also the author of the Jim Stringer novels, a series of Edwardian railway mysteries published by Faber.) Underground Overground is a stylishly produced thing, I should say first: look at its vintage-tube-picture cover. A friend at the launch party (at indie bookshop Clerkenwell Tales,  in conspicuously tube-free Exmouth Market) did exactly what I had done when I first saw it. He ran his hand over the front and said, slightly awe-struck, ‘It’s embossed…!’ (This friend is also a wine blogger. I don’t know. If you’re going to drink with tube enthusiasts and wine bloggers…) When my review copy arrived in the post a couple of weeks ago, I got another even more pleasurable surprise: opening it to read the press release, I found, nestled inside, a matching Oyster card holder. Apparently they’ve only made about 70 of these. I laughed out loud with sheer happiness, and am ridiculously pleased to have it. The book has beautiful endpapers in the iconic moquette (though printed a little on the red side,  unless there’s a red one I didn’t know about, which would seem odd).

In other words, the thing is as carefully made, as user-friendly, as design-conscious, as well thought through, as London Underground itself used to be. Even the trains were beautiful.

Don’t make me talk about those new ones on the Victoria Line, that are made of plastic, and rattle.

The book begins, as did How To Get Things Really Flat, Andrew’s quietly brilliant book on housework for men, by firmly placing it in context, amid memoirs of his early life. He describes his railwayman father, early trips to London with free travel, and his sheer interest in the tube as a series of railways. So as well as following the story of the tube, you are accompanying Andrew Martin on his lifelong interaction with it. And this is what brings the book a level above other books on these kinds of subjects: because the tube is so personal, is so deeply ingrained in Londoners’ lives, it’s through this personal viewpoint that its mysteries can be revealed. And Andrew is a funny, moving, and authoritative guide.

The early chapters, which are as far as I’ve got, are fascinating in their descriptions of mid-Victorian London’s expansion and the beginnings of the underground, on the Metropolitan Line. The vision! The engineering! And, as today, the fundraising and speculation…! Then there will be tunnels, and ghost stations, and maps and typefaces and (apparently) the only really scary ghost story on the underground. This is something you do want from Andrew, who also wrote Ghoul Britannia, a book of true ghost stories (including a couple of mine).

I think the later chapters will be depressing, with the underfunding, terrible service, Public Private Partnership, the enforced transition from ‘passenger’ to ‘customer’, that we have all been living though for years. The fare increases that have taken tube travel away from poor people again. We are living in tumultuous times, and no less so in the tube. This Olympics year will be massive in the future history of the underground: the tube is literally being reshaped right now, and we shall see whether it’s being reshaped for us, Londoners, to improve our lives and our relationship with our city – or whether it’s just being gussied up to show off to the tourists. We’re already being told to make ourselves as scarce as we can in August. It’s been hellish for years, with ‘improvements’ indistinguishable from the usual disruptions, and often whole lines closed for whole weekends – so we shall see.

So it’s good to learn that  the tube really is more overcrowded than it used to be. I mean, you do just imagine people decades ago having a little more space to stand…

But the main thing we forget is that the tube really was liberating. It literally enabled poor people to travel. And get work. And also get out of town. We think of it as an enclosing thing, a hellish ordeal – but it was built to give us freedom. That is its romance. Even now, Andrew says, he will ride to the end of a line just to see what it’s like, enjoying the stations, the names, the associations, his fellow passengers, the experience.

It’s also good to know at last why an omnibus is called an omnibus. It’s nothing like the reason I’d always thought!

Finally, a note on the writing. It’s beautiful. It’s just really elegant, effortless, perfect prose. ‘Which’ means which and ‘that’ means that. (This alone is worth the price of the book; this particular little over-correction is getting more and more prevalent, and drives me nuts.) The punctuation is inconspicuous and graceful because it is correct. Just what you’d expect from an urbane, perfectly turned-out man who knows how to iron and likes to ride on trains.

I’m so upset. More tomorrow. In the meantime, here is the New York Times.

This is an illustration from Higgledy Piggledy Pop! Or, There Must Be More To Life, 1967. Suffice to say I still have my first edition, inscribed by Santa Claus in neat printing.

Here, for those of us in the UK, is something to ease us into the Tuesday-after-a-bank-holiday. For everyone else, it can just ease you into life.

This reminds me of two of my favourite things ever. One is one time long ago in the 80s when I was flying home for a visit on an early Virgin plane, or maybe it was even Freddy Laker – or what was that other one – anyway, it was one of the ones where you got a basket with a roll and some crisps in it to eat. But as it came to touch down in Newark, suddenly those first thrilling strains of the Blue Danube. Such a sense of occasion.

The second is really my first: Ingmar Bergman’s film of ‘The Magic Flute’. This film introduced me not only to Bergman, but also to Mozart. I mean, not only to Mozart, but also to Bergman. As such, it’s massive.

But it can’t be all about wishing we were in Denmark, or thinking they really know how to do things in Scandinavia. I had a slightly similar experience the other week in grotty old north London. Sometimes I get off the bus at the very unprepossessing junction of Green Lanes and – er – that awful road on the bad ley line that goes to Manor House station, and get in the tube there rather than going to Finsbury Park (which has the added draw of a Costa coffee next to it). And sometimes someone at Manor House Station plays classical music over the intercom system. And one day it was the overture to ‘The Magic Flute’, just getting going as I got into the station. It was a sublime secret, a secret that somehow I could share, though I had the feeling it was my own personal soundtrack to the ride down the escalator… It somehow revealed the other people more than the usual silence or announcements. It made the station beautiful, gave it excitement and even a seedy glamour, instead of its usual dismal blah.

I just hope the person at Manor House knows how happy their music makes people.

You either know what this is or you don't. Click to see.

Well. Coming out of a five-day haze of flu and dizziness, brainscatter and just uselessness, to say nothing of a kind of pernicious, achy, systemic exhaustion. Welcome to what I am referring to locally as ‘Mlle B’s virus’ – one of those London viruses that isn’t quite a flu, isn’t quite a cold, and knocks you out for days.

So having lost a week, and of course consequently accrued a week’s worth of things-not-done, I’ve been thinking about time. (And Things.) (And Energy, frankly: where does it come from, and how can I get it?) Here are two items I’ve stumbled across in my aimless, fretful clicking.

First, maybe time for a rethink of good old Arnold Bennett. (When’s the last time you thought about Arnold Bennett?) This is from the beginning of his How to Live on 24 Hours a Day – a book I certainly feel I could do with reading all of, if I had the time.  It’s coming over very fresh for 102 years old.

Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!

For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:–”This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness–the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!–depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money”! Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.

If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more–or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

Arnold Bennett by Oliver Herford, 'Confessions of a Caricaturist': click image

Now, this is very true, and in places actually rather thrilling. A fresh bank balance of time every morning! (But it isn’t like you can get up late and then have a splurge: this is where both the analogy and human nature break down.) Still, the overall message is sufficiently stark to be believable.

This morning, rallying to the extent of not feeling dizzy, I’ve been going through my inbox, and actually answering some emails. I got to the one called  ‘Inside the May Issue of Poetry Magazine’ (which I hope I will get to see; it looks like a cracking issue, but whatever the problems is with my subscription seems never quite to have resolved itself…) and clicked on ‘A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook’, by Anna Kamienska, a Polish poet who died in 1986. I was reading along through her gnomic and revealing aphorisms and observations, and then came across this:

Misfortune, personal disaster stops our inner time short. Objective time moves on—but we spin in place like straws in water.

Clearly, the two observations occur in completely different registers; Poland in midcentury doesn’t compare with Edwardian London literary life; but this doesn’t stop them both from being equally true. And, where in the context of her notebook Kamienska is speaking of a different scale of disaster – the death of her husband, the dregs of a life, as it were – what she says is equally true of my flu, and indeed in some senses of the entire period since 2008, frankly. A good idea, like Time, can shrink and expand to fit the exigency.

And on that note, have a lovely bank holiday weekend! I think there might be some light struggling through the cloud. I’m going to struggle out for some good old Floradix and a coffee, & take Mlle B her lunch at work, and then probably crawl back into bed.

'Scale of the Universe' by Cary & Michael Huang

Here’s one for election-results-day, sent by Maman Baroque; she loves all that universe shit. Click the picture to find out the relative sizes of  Everything. Boris & Ken not included, but then it was only local elections…

On the other hand, last night I pulled myself up from a mini viral collapse to go and deliver Session One of a five-session course on dramatic monologues. I had to stare the essential element in the face: after dithering with places to begin the discussion, I succumbed, and gave them ‘My Last Duchess‘.

The opening-out of that poem keeps happening no matter how many times you read it, or teach it, or discuss it: its claustrophobic moment, its tightly controlled couplets, open into scenes whose dreams give onto vistas which endlessly spread out over everything. The voice of the Duke is the voice of the early Renaissance, and also of money itself, of power, of purchase; and Browning spoke directly to him, over the heads of the Romantics, by speaking through him, and spoke to us at the same time, by becoming him. It was ping-pong balls, leger-de-main, curtains and glimmers and echoes and pocks. A bough of cherries holds in it all of pinkness and springtime, both blossom and fruit, and youth and optimism and sweetness and little red spots of joy and a vista of time and beauty, broken off the branch… And can a seahorse be bigger than Neptune? Browning and his Duke together transformed us through our experience, so that we became the hapless emissary, like a reverse theatre where the job of the audience is to be the play – and the crisis of the poem – the ‘critical moment’, the horror, the necessity – was both his and ours.

Is this experience, the Powave wavelength, bigger than the interior of a hummingbird’s egg? or can it only be held inside something minute? Should I be zooming in on the droplet of mist?

Or maybe it was the Lemsip.

As an aside, this Scale of the Universe website is very relaxing, it sounds like a yoga class.

May the 4th be with you.

As usual, I arrive at the party halfway through the conversation. I was hanging around outside having Facebook conversations…

Today, for those of you who can possibly have escaped the debates, is local elections day, and the London populace is being asked to consider its choices for Mayor of this city. It does, alas, come down to a choice between a rock and a hard place. When it all started up in earnest I realised sadly that the sensation I was experiencing was, in fact, a sinking feeling. At the thought of Ken Livingstone being mayor again.

Now, I’m not knocking Ken: he did get lots more 277s on the road just when I needed them badly, and back in his GLC days in the 80s he was necessary. But there is more to life than buses (I know: just forget I said that), and what we needed in the eighties isn’t what we need now. ‘Red Ken’ is no longer a deep enough concept. Post-Blair, the old oppositional party-politics model appears (to me, okay, and what do I know: I’m a flipping poet) to miss some of the important points, which we may have forgotten since the crash. I’m thinking of the big anti-Iraq-War coalition of lefties and hardline Islamists.

So the talk of the past few weeks has been about how ‘Ken lost the Jewish vote’. He did this by being ‘anti-Semitic’. Tits and tats fly as people discuss whether this or that jibe was serious evidence of ‘anti-semitism’ or was it just something he said. Articles have been written. Jewish friends are either not voting for him, or not not-voting for him.

But the thing is, right? A few weeks ago, I had a bit of a shock, when Ken decided to go spread the word of his Muslim-friendliness, not to some nice moderate mosque of multi-cultural human-rights-campaigning Muslim families, but to the Finsbury Park Mosque, of Abu Hamza fame, a notorious nexus of hate-filled Islamist teaching, right next to where I get on the tube.

What follows is one woman’s personal story.

Back in the day, when I was working on a local regeneration programme in Stepney, I had a shock. Well, the whole thing was great, I loved the job, I loved the place: I spent seven years in Tower Hamlets and only left because I was made redundant, and I was really, really gutted. I loved it not only because the East End is so vivid and vibrant and full of history and big characters and great buildings, but partly because of the shocks, of which there were so many. I learned there how the world really works. Not our little world, but Big World.

The pro-Bin Laden posters over the shops, for example. It was early 2002 when I started there. That summer I told a colleague, a prominent young Bengali guy, I’d be away visiting my family for three weeks, and when I answered his pleasant, smiling, ‘Oh, that’s nice, where are you going?’ with an equally pleasant ‘New York’, he was struck dumb – literally – he was covered with confusion. He stuttered, and mumbled, and  said, ‘Oh. Sorry.’

One day maybe a year or so after that, I was was on an empty 25 bus going back to the office, and outside the Whitechapel Mosque the bus filled up with young men and boys. All in long white robes, all with little white crocheted prayer caps, and all came up the stairs, sat down, and opened up a magazine, all to the same page. Along the bus, up and down, were eager young people, all clustered over this page, repeated up and down the bus like a funfair mirror, whose two-inch high headline ran, in bold block caps: WHY HATE AMERICA?

I’m the only woman on the bus. I’m the only non-Bengali. I’m from America. I’m from NEW YORK. Er, and I have just as much of a right to be there as they do?

When I got back to the office I mentioned it to my next-desk colleague, a very jolly fellow. ‘Oh GOOD!’ he said, beaming. ‘They’re reading it!’ Then he goes, seeing my confusion, ‘That’s the magazine I was telling you about, that I edit’.

Now, this fellow was also overjoyed, a year later, the day after Ken met with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. ‘Do you remember that great teacher I was telling you about, we were all so excited he was coming to London? Did you see him on the news last night with Ken, at City Hall? This is great news’, etc etc. Total political validation. (The preacher is banned, for instance, from France. Don’t get me wrong. I really liked my deskmate, he was a warm, funny, very bright, personable guy. I’m sure he can’t really be a fan of female genital mutilation and some of the other things al-Qaradawi has advocated.) (Mind you, when we finally got an equalities officer in, he and the other Bengali managers were at huge pains to tell her there are no gay people among Bengalis. None. So she wasn’t going to have to do anything for them, see? No mental health service link-ups or information campaigns or counselling.)

So then, a year after that, in July 2005, Ken issues a message to the tube bombers: ‘Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail’. That’s fine; and a few weeks after that, asked how he squares recent events in London with his ealier ‘hoodie-hug’ of al-Qaradawi, who has endorsed suicide bombers in Palestine and elsewhere (though not explicitly in London; hasn’t Ken ever seen a Shakespeare play?) Ken explains that, ‘while Israel had fighter jets and tanks, the Palestinians “only have their bodies” and no other way to “fight back”.’

I don’t know about you – but to me, that looks unclear thinking supporting an ideological position.

I’m not sure that will help us to foster a vibrant, world-class, multicultural city. As London Mayor, why is it even his issue? Isn’t his responsibility to the Jews, Palestinians, other Muslims, moderate Muslims, Muslim intellectuals and activists who are fighting for human rights, homosexuals, women, and indeed everyone else, even including Israelis, who lives in London?

So, unfortunately, when Ken chose to deliver his message of friendship direct to the Finsbury Park mosque, something in the hairs on my back did snap. For days afterwards, people were attempting to interpret the meaning of his message about Mohammed’s last speech, and detecting possible traces of irony or a hidden message, etc etc. But really? In an election campaign?

I think you can tell a lot about someone by who they want to play with.

Boris, on the other hand, I’ve been assuming would one day burst his carapace and reveal horribly that, although he has looked human all along, he is really an intergalactic Doctor Who baddy with scales on his back, horrible slobber, a burning need to Destroy London, and an old school tie.

Beyond the buffoon level, I warmed to Boris early on when he wanted to get something going in London along the lines of El Sistema – the Venezuelan children’s orchestra – where poor schoolchildren are taught real, stretching, world-class classical music and how to play an instrument and be in an orchestra. I thought that was much more egalitarian than inner-city rap and graffiti-art programmes. It is, in fact, radical. (Mind you, it didn’t happen.)

But then Cameron came in, the Big Disaster, and you can’t help worrying that ‘Race will Out’. But yesterday I read this fascinating (though quite long) article by Nick Cohen, and I saw that Nick may well be right. Later in the evening, I was talking to Mlle B about it, and when I mentioned the Doctor Who baddy to her, she said: ‘No, no. You’re wrong. There’s nothing underneath. I really think that with Boris what you see is all there is’.

I’m not saying I could bring myself to vote for a Tory, under whatever circumstances; and also, the one thing Boris & Ken probably share is that it’s their ambition that’s important to them, rather than us. So we can’t, by definition, rely on either of them.

What I am saying is that, where Ken is concerned, I think we’re all Jewish.

Welcome to the Mayor Day party! Dinner is served.