For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Being overheard (27.09.11)

Watching the new series of Downton Abbey I’m struck by people’s lack of discretion when within earshot of modern cabbies and the similarities with the butlers of Edwardian England. We may not be as erudite nor have the manners or sartorial elegance of Carson superbly played by Jim Carter but we are just as invisible, for at the dinner table the Granthams discuss the most personal aspects of their lives, quite oblivious that the butler waiting at table can hear their intimate details.

When driving the cab it’s impossible not to hear snatches of conversation and the adage “to keep one’s own council” would seem apposite for the more verbose of my passengers. Some of my colleagues once would brag about making money on the Stock Exchange after overhearing City dealer’s conversations, no doubt they are now losing money by being so indiscreet. While only last week in my cab I had two women and a man discussing their drunken exploits and sexual conquests in graphic detail, and quite frankly I don’t need this during my working day.

It wasn’t so long ago that our vehicles weren’t fitted with internal rear view mirrors preventing the driver from even looking at their passenger, let alone listening in on their conversation by way of the intercom.

An openness to one’s thoughts has now become commonplace with e-mails which are as private as a McGill holiday postcard; Twitter; blogs; and Facebook broadcasting to the entire world a person’s life and innermost thoughts. My father’s generation was told in the war that “careless talk cost lives”, but now anybody who travels on public transport is subject to the minutiae of strangers’ lives as they chatter incessantly on their mobile phones.

Now award-winning poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw has recognised this chatter that surrounds us all in the modern city can give inspiration to writers and has created Audio Obscura a new sound work, conceived for the public spaces of St. Pancras International station. Audio Obscura is an aural version of the camera obscura, giving a heightened reflection of the passing world and its snippets of conversation. The audience can listen to the work on personal headsets while wandering amongst the crowds of the Lower Concourse. Listeners will hear concentrated fragments of interior worlds drawn from monologues that glance off one another, listening to these many different voices it is hoped will enable visitors to engage with the connections, a process that Mark Mason has used with effect in his recently published book Walk the Lines. Audio Obscura is intended to remind people of the potency of the “fragment” and aims to explore our compulsion to construct narratives, to impose meaning, and to seek conclusion; the experience is not one of being told something but of becoming conscious of what we do with what we listen to, a bit like my colleagues who dabble on the Stock Exchange.

We’re surrounded by other people’s conversations and while many of us try to block them out, for CabbieBlog fragments of overheard talk have been a valuable source of material for the blog and have even helped me get over a case of writer’s block.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

My fifteen minutes (16.09.11)

Recently I was contacted by the BBC London Arts Unit with a view to my contributing to a documentary they were making to be transmitted in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. Entitled “A Picture of London” the assistant producer/researcher explained to me over the phone that they wanted to feature a number of people who work and live in the capital, who would relate their favourite places in London.

Meeting with the documentary’s producer in of all places the Museum of Childhood – would that be a reflection of childhood memories – he explained over a cup of coffee that they were filming about nine individuals and some would eventually end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.

Filming was scheduled for a Sunday evening a week or so later to rendezvous in a car park near Tower Bridge. My cab had a camera mounted on its bonnet by the grips man Garth (I had always wondered what grips were) and after about half an hour we were driving to Battersea via Tower Bridge.

One of my favourite spots in London is the beautiful Georgian church of St. Mary’s perched above the Thames in Battersea. It is said that Turner painted some of his rivers cape studies of light from the vestry window of the church and was rowed over every day by his servant in order that he might paint.

While taking numerous zoom shots of the cab approaching the water’s edge we were scrutinised by the River Police inquisitive of our intentions. It was explained to me that this was an occupational hazard of film units and they had already been stopped more than once that day.

Next was a drive across the capital with a camera pointing into my left ear with I trying to negotiate London’s traffic while commentating of what life was like for a London cabbie, not as easy as it looks with everybody cutting you up.

On arrival at the London Zoo (where both my father and grandfather worked), it was pitch dark but that didn’t stop them from taking another round of rolling shots of the cab, which again drew the attention of this time the Zoo’s security staff, hardly surprising as the main entrance by now was illuminated by their floodlights. A short piece of commentary by me as an audio recording rounded off the day.

Would I be contacted again by the BBC? Could this mark a career in broadcasting? These thoughts ran through me, by now, exhausted head.

Two weeks later I picked up a copy of our trade’s newspaper, there inside was a full-page article written by the doyen of cabbie journalism – Al Fresco – writer, raconteur, sometimes editor and a cabbie of some 40 years, describing how on a Sunday morning recently he was filming for the BBC.

How could I compete? There was an erudite part-time journalist, old fashioned Jewish cabbie who had more tales of London’s East End after the war, a place where most of the cabbies hailed from at the time, featuring in a documentary entitled A Picture of London.

Oh well! My Andy Warhol moment will have to wait.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Maidens without midriffs (05.09.11)

Travelling along one of London’s busiest roads it’s easy to miss St. Pancras Church, which when built in 1819 cost £76,679 and at the time was the most expensive house of worship built since the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral some 100 years previously.

Standing on the corner of Euston Road and Upper Woburn Place covered in grime thanks to the traffic hurtling past, with vagrants sleeping under its spacious Ionic portico it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like in its prime when its architects William and Henry Inwood returning from Athens with measured drawings under their arm based their building on the Erechtheion of the Greek Acropolis.

On the side facing the Euston Road are three caryatids, copies of a purloined original on display in the British Museum nearby thanks to Lord Elgin – was there anything he didn’t take that wasn’t screwed down in Athens?

Now I don’t want to appear unchivalrous, but tell me don’t the beautiful handmaidens supporting the projecting alcoves, look, how can I describe it? Dumpy.

The statues were made of Coade artificial stone, a formula which had been lost but has since resurfaced on Wikipedia, taking the sculptor three years to make. They were brought to the church looking dainty until they were ready to be put up into place, Mr Charles Rossi, their creator, found that the measurements were a little out. He presumably had been working to metric while the builders of the church chose imperial and try as he may he couldn’t get the Greek goddesses to fit the recess. With a large crowd bemused at his misfortune Rossi needed to act rather quickly to regain his self-respect. He performed a miracle operation with 12 inches being extracted from their midriff, their draped Grecian gowns helping to conceal their stunted torsos.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Chubby cherub blamed (02.09.11)

As any fireman will tell you there is a myriad of causes attributable to the origin of a fire and in the aftermath of The Great Fire of London dozens of theories were put forward. We blamed the French – as always – in the guise of a deranged silversmith, Robert Hubert, who confessed and was promptly executed, it was discovered afterwards that he had arrived in the country two days after the conflagration. William Lilly, a famous astrologer, was next in the frame having predicted a major fire in the previous year; he only just managed to save his neck by persuading a special committee of the House of Commons of his innocence. Next, the Catholics were accused, they were always a popular whipping boy since the Reformation, and no doubt the Jews were also held to blame.

Now we have strayed into the blaming culture for one simple reason, this week, based on around 20 years of historic data, a study published in The Lancet claims that by 2030 as many as 48 per cent of British men could be obese. Why you might ask has this anything to do with a fire nearly 350 years ago? Well bear with me on that one.

As you might imagine the City Fathers thought long and hard about the fire’s cause and the destruction of their city and decided to erect in Cock Lane, which it was claimed was at the western limit of the fire’s destruction, this little statute. The Boy on Pye Corner was deliberately made fat (although by modern standards he appears just a little chubby) to add emphasis to its inscription:

The Boy on Pye Corner was erected to commemorate the staying of the Great Fire which beginning at Pudding Lane was ascribed to the sin of gluttony when not attributed to the Papists as on the Monument.

So there you have it, junk food was to blame.

Curiously the original building on this site, which was demolished in 1910, upon which the Boy was placed, was a pub called The Fortunes of War and was favoured by the resurrection men who sold corpses to the anatomists at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital opposite. The corpses fresh from road, river, grave and hangman’s noose or just murdered were exhibited in an upstairs room by the landlord, labelled with the finder’s name and presumably with a suitable price attached.

The name of the alley – Cock Lane – was first recorded in 1200, and probably signified a lane where fighting cocks were reared and sold. In the late Middle Ages Cock Lane was the only place north of the Thames where brothels were legally sanctioned, handy is if your cabbie refuses to go south of the River.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

The New Centurions (23.08.11)

Now before you start reading today’s little missive I must add a cautionary note. If you haven’t reached your thirtieth birthday my words of wisdom will have no relevance in your life and I suggest you just chat amongst yourselves for the next five minutes.

According to the latest research, no doubt funded by the insurance companies who stand to gain from its results, one in five of us currently living in Britain is likely to survive beyond the age of 100. That should mean if purchasing term life insurance your premiums would be lower – which they’re not – and if you are a silver surfer your pension annuity would give you less – which it does.

I didn’t sign up for this kind of nonsense, my granny lived to be 97; when she was a young woman the Wright Brothers made their first flight and before she died had watched a man land on the moon. In her day the “experts” regarded 67 as your life’s expectancy, but many of her generation died in the trenches of the First World War and many more had their lives shortened by their experience of warfare, so much for their sixty-sevens worth.

The biblical notion of three score years and ten might have had some relevance in the Middle East 2,000 years ago (my bet is that most workers just managed one score year and ten), but today another score should be added to our longevity prediction.

If in 2047 I were still active, independent and financially viable (all three, of course, two out of three is not acceptable), then I suppose I could live with it, but that possibility seems increasingly unlikely.

Politicians have realised this and deferred our pensions, at the same time reducing the number of years they need to clock up to receive their own full Parliamentary pension.

With NHS resources stretched to the limit, let alone when we baby boomers become octogenarians or older, is extended old age something we will have to live with in the future, or will future administrators decide that in global terms resources are being wasted on the old and corrective measures are necessary? The realities of Soylent Green and Logan’s Run are beginning to seem less outrageous as the years march on. I can’t see myself in 2047 negotiating London’s streets in my cab, mind you I’ll be lucky to find my way to the toilet at 100. While most of us without gold-plated pensions will find they’re minuscule after 35 years of retirement.

So 20 per cent. of us will get a letter from the King (or Queen you never know), but will be unable to reach down to the doormat and pick it up?