There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline. Pete May
all over London in search of a story. CDs, videos, books, T-shirts, computers and numerous over-packaged consumer durables are relentlessly promoted over free beer, Chardonnay and nibbly things served by waitresses in black and white uniforms. My flat is full of freebies. And through Time Out I get to review every new Doctor Who video. My collection of fifty Whovian titles is filed chronologically in a new video stand I’ve just purchased from the Virgin Megastore.
James Brown and Tim Southwell are plotting a new men’s magazine to be called Loaded and I’m called in for consultation meetings and subbing shifts. With my pals Denis and Andrew I’m attempting to sell to publishers a book idea called The Lad Done Bad, detailing sex, sleaze and scandal in football. We think it perfectly captures the Zeitgeist, to use the current buzz word so beloved by media-prats wearing trendy narrow glasses.
There’s regular work writing the London Spy column in Midweek magazine, numerous features to be written about fat balding blokes playing for Sunday league football clubs in FC, a magazine that specialises in Sunday league football, and my column in the West Ham fanzine On A Mission From God – all enough to keep me in Dr Martens shoes, Gap chinos and a navy-blue bomber jacket with orange lining. Another factor enhancing my writing prospects is that everyone in the media is now affecting an Essex accent; only I don’t have to, because I’m the real thing.
Much of the 1980s and early 1990s were spent in a peripatetic tour of London, among dodgy gaffs and even dodgier landlords at Turnpike Lane, West Kensington, Hammersmith, Parsons Green, Fulham Broadway, Camberwell, Neasden, Westbourne Park, Victoria and now Elephant and Castle. I’ve reached my thirties without owning a home or getting coupled up and my parents are probably convinced that in London I lead a secret life of the Julian Clary kind. They’re probably already saying to their neighbours, ‘It’s funny how he never married’.
They’re retired and living up in Norfolk now. When I ask my dad, a former tenant farmer who received a nice little earner when the M25 sliced through his farm, why he’s still worried about the price of a pint he replies, ‘But I’m a cattle dealer!’. My own finances, based mainly on passing large sums of cash to satellite dish, CD and VHS video manufacturers plus brewers and curry houses, must be a deep disappointment to him.
Still, there’s been a good run of form with women recently, even if they do tend to wash and go with the regularity of West Ham signing journeymen strikers. To my great joy, women in their thirties are suddenly much less choosy who they go out with. My back pages from the nineties contain a probation officer with two children, a teacher, a charity worker, and a literary bird with a daughter. Nothing that’s got beyond mid-table mediocrity or flirting around the edges of Europe, but there’s always another pub and party, another can of overpriced Stella Artois, or another freelance sub to pursue.
As Billy Joel might have put it, I’m living in a white bread world. A downtown guy waiting for an uptown girl, who then usually goes off with some poncy TV person with their own car. But then, my flat isn’t exactly a GQ or Arena-style pulling pad; it’s more Men Behaving Badly.
My life is not all work and socialising in London. I’ve been on the road with Jack Kerouac twice in recent years. Travel is the right of my generation. I retreated to Australia and New Zealand for lengthy periods in 1989 and 1992. Flying is exciting and helps create the illusion that I’m the last of Morrissey’s famous international playboys. Internal flights, flights over Ayers Rock, flights to the top of Mount Cook, the more the better. The backpacker generation wanted to booze their way around the world; I’d travelled twelve thousand miles to discover that Kings Cross was in Sydney and full of English people. But it didn’t matter; I’d fallen into spinifex at Ayers Rock with a woman from Camden and snogged a Surrey girl on Sydney Harbour Bridge. Beer, CDs, videos, women, freebies, flights, football – the world is truly my lobster.
But then something happens which might just mark the end of my carefree, live-for-today-for-tomorrow-may-never-come existence. I meet a girl. Another of my jobs sees me sub-editing two days a week at the New Statesman. It’s a boozy sort of place, with long pub meetings preceding the days before it becomes the Blairite house journal. Editor Steve Platt is a mate of mine from Midweek days and a big Port Vale fan.
Prime Minister John Major is suing the Statesman because the mag has written about rumours he’s had an affair with a cook. Major claims the magazine was not correct about this matter. Years later we’d discover that he had, in fact, been rogering Edwina Currie, an image that still makes most people of a certain age feel queasy. The girl I meet is fund-raising to help our case. Nicola organises lunches among Lefty types to raise money and stop the magazine being bankrupted by this pernicious prosecution.
Nicola isn’t my usual sort of babe. She cycles to work and wears an exhaust-stained Gore-Tex jacket, a peculiarly ethnic brown waistcoat covered in reindeers and snowdrop patterns, black drainpipe trousers and scuffed Kickers. It’s hard to tell her form, if any, under the packaging. She has Ben Elton-style big brown glasses and twiddles her dark hair as she speaks. Linda the chief sub says that Nicola likes me.
Our eyes meet over my red pen and a page proof of a Ken Livingstone article. Her accent is BBC toned down to lefty Estuary football-speak for my benefit. We chat by the juddering old filter coffee machine in the utility room. For the previous two years Nicola has been working as a VSO volunteer in the Solomon Islands. She’s come home skint and says she wants to be an environmental writer and is taking an MSc in Environmental Management. Despite having no idea what this is, I try to sound impressed. A carbon footprint is something my old manual typewriter used to leave, and the closest I’ve come to recycling is trying to go out with someone else’s girlfriend.
But Nicola does have something. Will she be interested in the Elephant man, though? It’s worth a try. Having at times dated Red Wedgers, social workers, Labour supporters, Socialist Workers and women in black polo-neck jumpers, an environmentalist will surely be easy to cope with.
Several months after that first meeting we go on our first sort-of-date. Well it might be a date, or it could just be a friend asking another friend to watch a football match. That’s my reasoning, just in case she has no interest in penetrating my ozone layer and it all becomes embarrassing. Nicola has read Nick Hornby’s best-seller Fever Pitch and is now interested in football, she keeps telling me in the Statesman’s utility room. She’s even seen Arsenal play; she lives in Highbury, close to the ground. The new middle-class interest in football is all a little bemusing to me, having spent years trying not to mention the sport in intelligent circles or in front of women, because they treated football fans like some sort of rabid, racist sub-species. Still, why not use this new-found love of When Saturday Comes and soccerati writers…
My photographer mate Dave Kampfner has invited a group of mates over to watch the Holland v England World Cup qualifying match. Dave accuses me, probably quite accurately, of ‘always sniffing around Lefty women’, usually with various degrees of distress. But as Dave and myself know, concerned, caring women are often extremely attractive and up for a raunch-fest with downwardly mobile writers too. And in 1993 you don’t get too many babes at Young Conservative meetings.
‘Is Wrighty going to play? You can see at Arsenal that he’s so much quicker than the other players,’ says Nicola as we open pre-match cans of designer lager.
‘I think Taylor should play him. But as long as Carlton Palmer doesn’t play I’ll be happy,’ I reply, ruminating upon Taylor’s turnips, as the Sun has dubbed his side. Football coverage was becoming much more fanzine-like in its blokey humour. When England had lost to Sweden, the Sun came up with the unforgettable headline of ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’.
It all goes wrong. England hits the post, then Ronald Koeman brings down David Platt but the referee doesn’t send him off. Graham Taylor is haranguing the referee in the style of a very irate grocery shop owner. ‘Taylor’s lost it,’ says Nicola. Correctly ascertaining that Taylor ‘had lost it’ impresses me. However, she does insist on referring to the England players’ kits as ‘uniforms’. Deflated by a familiar England defeat we take the Tube back and depart for our separate lines, still unsure if we’re friends or potential lovers.