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November 16, 2006
Lord Denning's Background To My Gargouillades
I thought we should have an update on the building work next door. Five months now and counting.
I e-mailed the owner to ask: is the house like the Tardis, with a Great of China's worth of Wall inside to be whacked with an entrenching tool? Or are the walls themselves like the heads of the Hydra – do an Anna Ryder Richardson on one and another springs up in its place?
No reply.
There was a positive last week. But like a Mayfly, it lasted but a day.
I was on my way to the Marylebone library to sneak back a CD of Faure's Requiem. A couple of nights before when I was renewing my items online, I saw that it was still on loan to me. I was sure I'd returned it. The next day I rang the library, told them I didn't have it, and asked them to check if it was on the shelf. It wasn't; and it was a week overdue. I went into a full yes, I'm absolutely positive I returned it, and it was on such and such a day at such and such a time, to the female librarian who looks like the man with the whip in The Willow Pattern looked at with a magnifying glass, and she said to me and I said to her and the world said and the consequence was.
I do this a lot at the library. Or on the phone to it. Sounding just like Lizzie Borden giving evidence.
Yes, I went out to the barn, so was in the one place that's out of sight of the house.
Yes, in over a hundred degree heat.
I went there to eat the pear that fell off the tree into where my father had thrown the contents of his potty that morning.
I was there for exactly the amount of time for someone to take the axe and give my mother forty whacks.
While the lunatic, who must have hidden in the cupboard at the top of the stairs for an hour and half, gave my father forty-one whacks I had gone out again.
To the barn.
Yes, the one place that's out of sight of the house.
This time I was looking for lead to make into a sinker to put on my fishing rod that I haven't used for ten years or even seen for five but suddenly remembered was sinker-less.
Lizzie Borden. Such an inspiration. Parents: you have been warned.
Lizzie got away with it. And found lesbianism. I found the CD. But didn't get away with it. Having sneaked it back onto the F shelf, I went home and rang the library to have them look for it again. They found it. But they said it must have been put back since the day before and couldn't have come officially through them at the desk as the security casing wasn't on it. They would take it off my card, but wouldn't waive the one pound twenty-five fine.
Oops.
I refused to pay the fine. It was the principal of it. I'm not wasting my Borden-esque baloney on people who think that skin that looks cheese-grated, egg stained cardigans and BO are bohemian. In high dudgeon I will hand back my card today.
Not that kind of Bag Lady, Bruce. Was trying to insult librarians.
Anyway, back to the May Fly analogy. Remember that? On the very day that I laid the fuse for Uncased Faure's Requiem-Gate to blow up in my face, I noticed that next door had put in some gorgeous distressed wrought iron curlicue railings. That evening, I came back to find them smothered in black gloss.
Next door have partially moved in now. Er? There are still dust sheets I spy making the first floor look like the ET dying in the medics' tent scene. All over the area at the front are gutting from inside wrapped in tarpaulin. Dumped by Northerners now instead of Poles. It's the last thing I see before I go to bed. Non-stop from eight till six we get the Ilkley Moor Baht 'At yabbering. No wonder I've had nightmares about Judgment Day at the Bronte Parsonage.
But still, they're half-in. Sadly, the half includes a kid that practises kick-flips on his skateboard outside until someone (yes, me) tells him to stop. And there's someone on the other side of the hardened-Reddy Brek thick wall from my room that plays the guitar until well past nine o'clock. I went round to complain.
The owner was just coming back from walking a chocolate Labrador so fat it looked like a basking shark on a stand. I made a mental note to ring the RSPCA.
"Please", I called up the front steps, "we have bang crash wallop all day every day and have had for months – and we've all really had enough now, really – so can whoever it is stop strumming on the other side of the wall from my bed".
"Which room are you in?"
"That one with the lights on."
"Well, it really isn't very late…"
"Yes, but as I get woken up every morning at eight by your builders…"
A practically toddler version of the skateboard kid looked out of an upstairs window. He was holding a guitar. And grinning.
You know those things that are never to hand when you need them? Policeman, taxis, remote controls, the end of the sellotape, car keys, Rizlas, working cash points, condoms, clean knickers, wet wipes and glitter spray guns, for example? Where at the mewling and puking stage of this grouting-faced, transported-eighteenth-century-whore-haired, bling bedecked, soya milk and peanut butter reeking, BUPA tooth capped, wannabe It Girl and Hobbit begotten freak was King Herod?
"Look", I said, turning to go, "I'm sorry and everything. But he has the whole of your house to play the guitar in. It doesn't have to be right next to the adjoining wall. I really have to have an early night."
Like Madame Butterfly going behind the Japanese paper screen, I exited left. And whiled away the two or so hours before the double-episode repeats of This Life on after Newsnight playing Klondike Solitaire on my pc.
But I'm still going ahead with the nuisance complaint against next door that I've lodged with Camden Council. A delegate is dealing with me.
Delegate.
Must everything not be what it is? Must shit shovellers be Faececal Matter Relocating Facilitatists? Must GNER guards' be, in the fairyland of their tanoi calls, trolley-dollies on Barbara Cartland Airways? Must my mate Maria be an undiscovered diva rather than a trog with tiny talent and an ego over-wheened on Betty Shine books?
Delegate.
But I'm listening, tell me.
The delegate says my complaint has to be law-bolstered.
I rang blond Andy Garcia look-alike barrister Daniel, who I bedded once because he was so turned on by wannabe dominatrix Sally being even more turned on by the thought of it. Or something.
How bored we used to get front of house during Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Dan worked at Covent Garden during his law conversion. And, co-incidentally, attended Dawn Oliver's lectures.
I knew Dawn from Aldeburgh. Dan was able to verify that she did, yes, treat the new intake each year to the same two jokes.
"When I mention the crown, I mean that in the sense of the prosecution and not in the sense of what a queen might wear on her head."
Thank you.
"And when I mention the cabinet, I mean the highest ranking people other than the Prime Minister in the government, and not something in the corner of the sitting room with sherry, napkins and Kerplunk in it."
Thank you again.
From what Daniel said having heard my case, my getting anywhere officially with it is sounded as likely as a Royal Marine Commando playing murder ball neither naked nor wearing a tea gown.
But I thought back to when Daniel and I used to sit on the sofas in the Royal Opera House foyer. He would read accounts of trials to me and I would have to apply my Miss Marple brain to guessing what Lord Denning's ruling had been in each case. Just typing the words Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking [1971] 1 All ER 686 (CA); Central London Property Trust Ltd [1947] K.B.; and 130 George Mitchell (Chesterhall) Ltd v Finney Lock Seeds Ltd [1982] 3 WLR 1036 (CA) is making me moist.
One of the cases was about some people "coming to a nuisance". Lord Denning ruled that the plaintiffs, people who had moved to live beside a cricket field, aka "to the nuisance", were not entitled to compensation for smashed windows because the land, aka cricket pitch, had always been intended for such use, i.e. for the playing on of cricket, and therefore it was reasonable to assume that balls might be hit for six and if the aforementioned windows of the aforementioned people were in the way of the flight of the ball, tough titty.
I may have paraphrased there.
"Out with the interlopers. Rest for the wicked", he might say.
Technically, we're dealing with "derogation from grant" here, do you see that? I'm armed now. I shall get next door on "derogation from grant" of South Villas dwellings being intended as bed-sits for the illicit liasons of bankers with ballet girls.
Which they were. Okay, mostly were. But they were definitely not intended for whole-house use by a single family. Next door have "bought a nuisance". Said nuisance is detrimental to the efforts of a present day ballet girl to uphold the intended South Villas lifestyle. The raven croaketh.
An Edwardian city boy installed his ballet girl mistress in the bed-sit I rent today. He hopped on the five nineteen out of Euston via Hampstead Garden Suburbs, hopped off at Camden Road, hopped on his bun-headed beauty, hopped off back to Camden Road, hopped on what would by then be the six nineteen out of Euston and home.
Convenient (s)natch?
I look out of the same second floor window as he did while (I imagine) he was combing his hair or checking his clothes for whiffs of her perfume. The view would be the same, other than for the electric street lighting and modern blinds and curtains.
In the room itself, she would have looked in the same mirror as I do today, and switched on either one or both bars of the same Belling heater. And from the look of it before I finally talked my landlord into replacing it last year she might well have got burns from the same carpet.
I'm continuing history. In all sorts of ways. Take the reason I moved in in the first place.
My landlord, a great opera and ballet buff, rented the top floor here in the 'forties. Through a sitting tenancy agreement, a death and an emigration he eventually acquired the whole house.
"But I felt it just wasn't right. When we pulled everything out to put in what is now your fitted wardrobe, we found an odd tight and a jar of the stuff they used to spit on to use as mascara. I felt it was anti-tradition not to carry any of that on."
He put a card on the notice-board outside the Royal Opera House staff canteen, and brought on the dancing girls, one after another over forty odd years, passing the room down. And here I am. (Lis, before me, was a contralto aberration. Ignore her).
I perform in the regional theatres my Edwardian forebear would have done – the Sheffield City Hall, Leeds City Varieties, the Theatre Royals at Margate and Bury.
As she would, I save money by staying in B. and B.'s run by the type of landlady people wistfully and mistakenly think has died out. .
I always hankered for a fur diva coat. Out of the blue, the Galina fan who ran the Sue Ryder shop in Aldeburgh handed me a bin liner hissing that I was not to open it in the shop in case her over there rifling through tops that wouldn't fit round one arm let alone anywhere else had a fit. Inside was a rabbit fur and it was in just my size. I hope the city boy gave my girl a fur.
I've worn mine to strut onstage at Club Kabaret, Bush Hall and the Cobden Club, where over years I've danced ballet solos as part of variety bills. As she would have.
And walked home to save cab fare.
So, getting home in the early hours lungs sanded down, left calf throbbing, feet bollocks'd, would you wish on either of us being woken at eight by builders employed by a man who wears brown cords and a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches? Married to a woman that I feel sure baited her husband trap with Laura Ashley under Crew Clothing, Lady Penelope hair and no defining points anywhere from knee to ankle, wittering on about being an executive in fund-raising to conjure an image of her power dressed behind a desk the size of Newcastle with Lesley Garrett's people on hold, whereas the true picture is one of her on the wheelchair access slope outside Budgens sticking flags on people’s lapels? With children that you want to make justify out loud you their reason, when they're attending minor English prep-schools, for styling themselves like Harlem pimps?
You wouldn’t.
So, wish me luck with the Drag Ballerina Edwardian Hoofer Throwback v. Building Bricks of Society Bods (2006. DV)
Hm…not so moist now.
And while we're at it…where's my city boy?
Does he look minted enough, do you think?
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