Spark and Byrne

Here’s my book FECKHAM PECKHAM displayed in the shop window of Review bookshop -- best bookshop in Peckham -- close to Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye. What an honour! 

Sharing the love

Just what is it that I love about Peckham, excluding words like: exuberant, colourful, crazy, thrusting, energetic, in-your-face, unpretentious? Apart from those qualities, it’s the notion that all life is there. Some bit of ‘all life’ can be found there doing its thing… often with attitude.

Take a butchers

Rye Lane in Peckham must have a dozen butcher shops. Now, there’s a new, trend-setting boy on the block. Note the modern (boudoir?) wall-paper! This butcher sells only red meat: beef, lamb and goat. The place is stream-lined and the background music is contemporary. All the other butcher establishments, except this one, sell a range of goods from parrot fish to plantain; peppers to yams. All of them sell chickens that can only be described as scrawny, except this one. No chickens. 

Skulduggery

Posters on the underground photographed while I waited for the tube to Piccadilly Circus and from there a short walk, sunny in a chilled way, to the Royal Academy, or as Brian Sewell calls it, the ‘grand old whore of Piccadilly’. Indeed there is something unbridled about the place as if at any moment it might lift its skirts and reveal polka-dot pantaloons. On this occasion, it was bronze sculpture that had the place heaving.

Santa sighting

A blog is rather like a baby. ‘Feed me!’ it demands. Sometimes one doesn’t feel like it. Still… unlike a baby it won’t die of starvation. Or perhaps it will. To make amends and, quite against my usual principle of ignoring Christmas until it is imminent, I present a shot taken this weekend of Santa on his sleigh launching skyward from a garage roof in Nunhead. Look closely and you’ll see that Santa is wearing ill-fitting glasses. 

Evergreen

Derelict yet dignified, this old phone box is a reminder of a time when making a phone call was a bit of an occasion. But who needs public telephones nowadays when everyone has a mobile into which they intone: ‘I’m on the train’ or ‘They’ve only got the low-fat one’ or ‘Love you’? It’s good to talk, I guess, but we appear to have become insanely fond of disembodied chatter, much of it inane. 

A mad, mad, mad world

SIX BILLION dollars was spent on the US election campaign… to achieve political status quo. There’s got to be a better use for the money. But, hooray, Obama is back. A man who can dance has to be a better bet than a man who can’t.