Thumbs For Hire

I appear to be on a one-woman mission to make every young actor hate me…

I don’t understand the appeal of strip clubs.

Ejaculating orange notes for two foot-smelling, badly-carpeted hours, just to watch a woman in bum floss, out of reach, jiggle around to chart hits. Call me old fashioned, but for less money and less moral eczema couldn’t you just go to a normal club, dance with a stranger and, maybe, if she wants to you, dance against her thigh and, eventually, buy her breakfast?

The power balance between those on stage and those paying to watch the stage is a tricky one, in and out of the strip club. A successful comedian told me on Sunday that she would never date someone who approached her after a gig because the status imbalance is immediately off.

But the dynamic I want to talk about here isn’t about sex. It isn’t even necessarily about power. It’s about fun. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis (it’s okay – he’s too dead to object) fun things are funner than unfun ones. And by gawd is there some unfun theatre out there. Harrowing, poignant, affecting, intriguing, scary and clever, sure. But not fun. Which is all well and good – too much cream makes a diabetic, after all.

However, the kind of unfun play that really gets my goiter is that which is so clearly, so unapologetically, so shamelessly more fun for those on stage than those in the audience. Long plays. Indulgent plays. Plays that are little more than a sexually-charged children’s party game with us, the paying audience, playing the patiently bored parents thinking about what we need to pick up for dinner on the way home and if we’ve paid the council tax….   READ THE REST HERE

Just look at it.

On Saturday me and my rather tall, rather fit, rather well-equipped-with-a-brand-new-bike friend John decided to cycle to Hastings. I was, needless to say, dressed like a lumpy orthopaedic nurse with a semi-ancient bike originally built for a 6′3″ manbloke.

Things were going fine until ‘Royal’ Tunbridge Wells. I say fine – I was most definitely holding John back and starting to worry that it might rain the whole way – but my bike was still rolling. Until, that is, I hit a rather steep hill, threw my bike into a rare and clunking gear and – hey presto! – the entire rear derailleur hanger thing (i’m a little sketchy on the names here) threw itself into my spokes like hari kari.

Which meant walking all the way back to Tunbridge Wells, to a lovely bike shop where a very kind man got the hanger back to roughly the right area. He then said something about ‘not being suitable for the roads’ and ‘really wouldn’t advise cycling this’ and ‘it’s miles too big for you’ but he then followed that up with phrases like ‘I can’t physically stop you’ and ‘please just be careful and don’t change gear.’

I gave him a fiver, a lifetime of gratitude and a hysterical laugh, before once again hitting the road. At this point I noticed that half of my front tyre had leapt off the wheel and was bulging like a hernia. Which meant making John stop, again, letting down my tyre, putting it back together, pumping it up and trying to get further than a mile out of town before something else went wrong.

“I’m sort of expecting to look round and see your bike, like, on fire or something,” said John once we’d got pedalling again.

And so there I was, with no gears, a possibly explosive front tyre, sticking breaks and more squeaks and clunks than a Miles Davis album, for the fortysomething miles to the seaside. Still, at least I found Nigel Farage’s house:

The rest of the journey was beautiful. We spent about 10 miles of it on a converted train track called the Acorn Way, which was glorious, before slipping onto the winding back roads that eventually led to the sea. Here is John, on the Acorn Way, clearly having the time of his young life (Continued)

This took about six minutes in total

Here’s an article I wrote for Vice about all the lovely Hasidim in my neighbourhood and their giant cars…

Two types of people drive big cars in Upper Clapton; drug dealers and Hasidic jews.

While the former tend to have large, raised, black Chryslers and Cayennes, the latter are usually seen revving and clunking around the streets of North London in patched and pitted motorwhales called things like Space Wagons, Espaces and Space Cruisers. Space, it would seem, is the final frontier in Jewish transport.

North East London, you see, is not a community; it is a marble run of parallel communities, sliding alongside each other apparently unseen or, at least, unregarded. Young black teenagers are shot in London Fields, while young white professionals play ping pong less than 200 metres away; West African evangelist churches gather in industrial estates, while Polish families shop at the cash and carry next door; Turkish grocers play pool in social clubs while illegal Vietnamese immigrants sell pirated DVDs beside their vegetable racks. But of all the satellite communities, orbiting around the E5 and N16 postcodes, possibly the most remote, the most insular, but most readily identifiable, are the Hasidic jews. And their juggernaut cars.

Almost every tall, rounded, space-hogging car in Clapton is driven by a man in white shirt, smart black coat and kippah, with ringlets and sensible black shoes. White stockings are, it seems, optional. But why do the Hasidic dads of North London love these unfashionable, unfeasible motors? Is it their inconspicuous antiquity? Is it their laughable acceleration uphill? Is it the fact that you could fit all the members of Funkadelic inside and still have room in the boot for snacks?

Talking of boots, just what do Hasids keep in the back of their car? What music do they listen to on long journeys? Did they pay more for a specific colour of car? What’s in the glove box? Once these questions enter your mind, they’ll itch like a cheap wig under a polyester headscarf.

Which is why I decided to clamber, awkwardly, determinedly and publically, over those invisible, sliding social barriers to do that most uncommon and unrecommended thing; ask… (Continued)