Saturday, September 20, 2008

The self-scuppering life

When I'm feeling negative, I'll tell you why Freight Train by Helen and the Horns wasn't a hit.
Meanwhile, a built-in self-scuppering device is at work. No sooner had Amazon re-posted Poetry and Rhyme, they re-posted it with not the wrong title this time, but the wrong name. I couldn't work out why it wasn't there and for the sake of it did a search under the title, and not my name. They have called me Helen McCookery Book, and there it is.
I could try to get them to sort it out yet again, but then they'd probably call me Hellen instead of Helen. Just anything, really, to make any activity to do with my stuff difficult.
Did I say I wasn't being negative today? Oh yes!
Good things... good things..
I had a wander round East Street market in Walworth yesterday on the way to see Joan Ashworth's film, which is getting better every time I see it. It's a funny market with its own logic. One stall sells Christian fundamentalist items, including a 'lulla-bible' CD to make sure your infant grows up straight and proper, right from the cot. There are amazingly cheap yellow and green jewelled jeans (6 quid) lots of trashy and fantastic jewellery, and I bought two bunches of perfect pink roses for Joan for a fiver.
It used to be the Saturday-morning-shopping street when I lived in Camberwell- there were bread shops, cheese stalls, fish stalls, vegetables... it's gone a bit patent-handbag now, but it's still worth a look. Down the road is Baldwins, which has been done up. Baldwins is a health food store that used to sell sarsaparilla on tap, like a pub. I one saw Ivor Cutler there on his bike, a wraith-like fellow with a strange gleam in his eyes.
Once when I let a giant grey-haired Rastaman with loads of gold rings go first when we were queueing for a sarsaparilla and I'd got distracted by a bottle of fancy bath essence, he treated me to a glass of the delicious sweet froth and we stood for a while in companionship like two old geezers down the pub

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My grandmother used to shop in East Street once a week when I was very small and lived with my grandparents in SE1. There was a stall just in from the Walworth Road end with odd looking creatures called skates, which had no wheels, and eels that lay in smudges of red.
Near King & Queen Street was another stall that would have colossal cubes of ice stacked next to it that looked like leftovers from igloo building.