LMS, British Rail and Finglas.

LMS logo

When I was a little boy, around the same time as God was a little boy, my dad worked for the Railways. He worked for LMS which was the London, Midland & Scottish Railway Company which I thought, till today, meant the London, Midland and Southern but you can see how a life time of thinking one thing can disappear in a moment.

He didn't have anything to do with the trains as he worked at the goods yard at Lawley Street, Birmingham, and delivered parcels to all and sundry using a horse and cart; the horse's name was Bob and I know for a fact that my dad loved that horse in a way that grown men love animals and not in any modern thinking perverted Equus type of way.

My dad stayed at that job for most of his working life, even though he'd been a qualified barber in Dublin where he had a little shop. Business was so bad there that he used to sit my mother in the chair pretending she was a customer when anybody walked passed.

When he retired from the railways he was the boss of that yard and as to Bob? Dog meat or glue, I suppose, but he never forgot him.

My first job was in an Army & Navy Store in the warehouse and various goods were delivered via the back entrance to the Goods Inward where I would take them from the drivers of railway vans. I would say – my dad works there, and they would say – he's my boss!!

For some reason, and I can't remember what, my dad had to visit the place where I worked one day, on business and he came via the back entrance – it's my dad, I told my supervisor, who kind of trembled into the corner as he might have thought I had told my dad about him trying to reach for my back entrance when I was up some steps putting army boots and the like on to the shelves. I didn't tell my dad because he would have killed him and in any case, at the age of 15, I was quite able for the old 'perv' with a few kicks that he always managed to dodge. 

Yes it was always a world full of perverts and pranksters who blacked young kids' balls with polish 'just for fun' amongst other things.

In January 1948 LMS was nationalised and turned in to a part of British Railways but it didn't make any difference to us as we could still travel free on all railways, including those in Ireland, three times a year – so that's what we did. We went three times a year to Dublin on the ship and train – we could have gone to the Continent but went to Dublin and in the summer time we were left there with our aunt & uncle in Finglas.

When we went back to school in September we would have Dublin accents which lasted for a few weeks – it still happens today in Roman Catholic Schools in Britain, I am told.

One day my father brought home a pudding spoon for me; it was a spoon from the Railways and it was made by Mappin & Webb, a famous silversmith (even today). The spoon was from the railway canteen but it didn't have 'LMS' on it – it had GWR which was another of the private companies who were nationalised at the same time as LMS. 

GWR were known as 'God's Wonderful Railways' but officially as Great Western Railways and I believe they ran the famous Flying Scotsman which was the most famous train of all.

Sometimes, when our bikes had punctures, our dad would mend them and as he didn't have any tyre levers he would use pudding spoons – or dessert spoons as some seem to say – and one day a few of those spoons bent with the pressure. So in he came and took my spoon from the drawer. As soon as I saw this I screamed as I didn't want my spoon broken but the spoon was very strong and stood up to it.

For some reason that spoon came with me when I got married so I used it for my breakfast up to the time I went to live in America. One day, before my wife came across, the mail man came with a packet for me and it was my spoon; my wife had sent it.

I still use it now but only for breakfast such as porridge or corn flakes etc – never for pudding for some reason.

So I suppose the spoon will stay with me for the rest of my life; it has never been treasured or revered by me it just kind of stayed – here is a picture of it.

As far as I was concerned British Railways seemed to work okay; if you wanted to get a train to anywhere you would just show up at the station and buy a ticket. If you missed that train you would get the next one and so on.

It was very useful when I was working in London and living in Northampton; I would never know what time I finished work and sometimes would stay for a few drinks.

But since we came back from America things have changed – and not for the better. Now you have to nominate the train you wish to travel on and sometimes even book your seat. If you are caught on the wrong train your ticket is no good and you have to pay for another.

If you book a ticket at the last minute you have to pay an arm and a leg – it's okay if you book well in advance but . . . . there are so many railway companies these days; one company owns the track and leases the lines out to the others; private catering companies supply the food and drinks and when this arrangement first came into force the company that owned the track went bankrupt.

The present railway companies have to apply for the franchises to run their trains every so often and recently Virgin Trains lost their franchise to run their trains on a particular line – and then Richard Branson whinged and wept and moaned about the company that won the franchise and how incompetent they were and how they had submitted a dodgy tender, then lo and behold Virgin were re-awarded the franchise.

But isn't it about time we went back to British Railways? Why did people stand for it and why are we standing for what is happening to the National Health Service here now? And everything else – but there we are and . . . . here we are!

By the way, last week I went to the movies to see The Master; good enough movie and a superb performance from Joaquin Phoenix. I thought I was going to see it at The Curzon Cinema in Soho but when I got there they told me it was showing at The Curzon Cinema in Mayfair; so I went to Mayfair and waited for my companion.

I was chatting to the man on the door and he said that a lot of people went to the Soho theatre by mistake sometimes and sometimes it was the other way around. He had a kind of Irish accent so I asked him where he was from – Dublin, he said, Finglas.

Finglas, the place we would go to as children all those summers ago. 'I know Finglas' I said, 'we went there for the summers when we were kids.' 'What about that?' he said. 'Mellowes Road' I said, 'number 11.' 'Ha ha', he said, 'I lived at number 15.' 

I think his name was Wally MacDonald!

NW by Zadie Smith

I have just read NW by Zadie Smith; in fact I have just read it for the second time. I watched the first in the series of FILM 2012 on the BBC and when they reviewed The Master the reviewer said I loved this film and when it had finished I wanted to watch it all over again; well with a book you can do that quite easily: you go back to page one – or back to 101 as they say in Los Angeles – and this is what I did.

I always knew Zadie Smith was a wonderful writer by reputation and I saw a dramatisation of her first novel, White Teeth, which I think was made by Channel 4 when I was in America.

I was attracted to it by the reviews; they mentioned that this novel could be put in to the same bag as Ulysses as it was written with the 'stream of consciousness' technique which James Joyce was famous for; he was also renowned for not using inverted commas to denote when someone is speaking; he used a dash; for example – Come in, he said.

Zadie uses them sometimes, uses the dash at others and sometimes doesn't use anything at all as in this passage:

The rain got heavy. They stopped in a pub's doorway, Jack Straw's Castle

  Them shoes are bait.

  They're not shoes, they're slippers.

  They're bait.

  What's wrong with them?

  Why they so red?

  I don't know. I think I like red.

  Yeah, but why they got to be so bright? Can't run can't hide.

  I'm not trying to hide. I don't think I'm hiding. Why are we hiding?

  Don't ask me.

  He sat down on the damp stone step. He rubbed at his eyes, sighed.

  Bet there's people that live in them woods, blud.

  On the Heath?

  Yeah. Deep in.

  Maybe. I really don't know.

See what I mean; it's quite easy to see who's doing the talking without the inverted commas or the dashes. I think James Joyce called them 'perverted commas' when the publishers of his first novel put them in. He ordered them to be removed by the 'sergeant at arms!!'

As well as Joyce calling them perverted commas they are also called quotation marks or speech marks

As I mentioned I was drawn to the novel by the reviews and I know that part of London a little bit, the part with the NW postal code: Willesdon, Kilburn, Notting Hill and the novel is about a few people who come from the Caldwell council estate and the lives they try to make for themselves in the nearby suburbs.

One of the leading characters, a black girl called Natalie who looks like Angela Basset, has become a barrister and in that passage above she is wandering, towards the end of the book, with Nathan who came from the same estate and is high on drugs and homeless.

He was a charmer when he was at school with a lot of girls fancying him.

Another character called Felix is a tragic character; we know what's going to happen to him before it happens but we have forgotten that we have been told so when it does happen it comes as a bit of a shock but . .. that's up to you to find out.

There is also the mystery of Chapter 37 – it comes between Chapter 11 & 12 and is on page 37. It starts off - Lying in bed next to a girl she loved, many years ago, discussing the number 37. Dylan is singing. The girl has a theory that 37 has a magic about it, we're compelled towards it.

It goes on to say that the number 37 is used in movies and poetry etc and that web sites discuss it (I don't know I haven't looked) and then, later in the book, she skips from Chapter 36 to 38 – the 37 bus also runs through NW by the way.

It isn't like Ulysses at all as it's not so dense or nearly as long; Ulysses is about 720 pages and NW about 295; but Zadie does write in a stream of consciousness as I think many writers do these days.

It's a kind of interior dialogue and the reader will know what the character is thinking all the time and once in a while the stream of consciousness will be interrupted by some external dialogue as someone might pass them in the street or they might order a pint in a bar.

You have to concentrate when reading it as you can miss bits – which I did about Felix the first time I read it – but if you are at one with the author it's a great experience in reading.

NW is set in the time leading up to the Notting Hill Carnival which is a Caribbean celebration that takes place once a year. There's Caribbean food, reggae and dancing but it also attracts trouble and the metropolitan police haven't quite learned how to handle it yet.

In the novel various people are getting ready for the big weekend, planning what they are going to wear and who they are going to dress up as and the mood of the novel reminded me of The Trouble With Harry by Jack Trevor Story.

It's a long time since I read it but that novel seemed to be set in the sun and NW seems to be too, even though it is set in London.

London gets very humid in the summer months and there is a pregnant woman on the tube who is sweating and in other scenes people are sitting out on their balconies playing music. A haziness and laziness is there all the time and now I'm going to put the book away and hoping to read it again one day.

Starbucks II

Here I am writing about Starbucks again; there are a couple of comments from the last time and I have had a few private emails too; I didn't know Starbucks stirred up so much passion.

So this is a short post as a kind of retort!

I have no problems with Starbucks at all and I don't blame them for not paying their corporation tax either; I am not going to be the one to throw the first stone. If the government here wait till now to question the leaders of the big international companies about their shortfall in tax payments they are even more stupid than I thought.

I don't know how long Starbucks have been over here as I was living in Los Angeles but when I first went there in August 1994 they were very well established.

In a country which doesn't look after its citizens – health care wise – it was good to know that there was a company which gave their employees free health care!

Starbucks is not well liked by everybody either here or in America; it is thought that it is a bit snobby and expensive.

In America the coffee is very cheap – maybe about 60p a cup - and you get free refills. It's very annoying to get back here when you go out for breakfast and you have to keep ordering your coffee and paying for it as you eat. The waiters hover with 2 pots of coffee – the orange one is decaf – and they refill as they pass your table.

In Starbucks you pay for each cup – unless you have proper filter coffee which is what I drink - even here I get free refills; that's only for the proper filter coffee I reiterate. But the staff are very nice; they are friendly and try to please. I know there will be branches were you will meet the opposite but I haven't found any yet.

Over here I have been to a Starbucks at Liverpool Street Station where, if they moved out tomorrow, you wouldn't know they had been there. All the fixtures and fittings in the old building are still in place.

Before I went away Wardour Street was the film centre in London; there were film companies, cutting rooms, post production houses etc and then they moved out and the tee-shirt and souvenir shops moved in – now I am back there is a Starbucks and loads of other coffee shops and sandwich bars which I prefer to tee shirts.

I go to Starbucks every day here – well nearly every day. One of the days I noticed an old man who came in, ordered his drink, then sat down, took his newspaper out, and did the crossword; 20 years ago he would have been in the pub taking a drink.

They never kick you out of Starbucks for not buying drinks. Students and school children come in and use the free wi-fi. The other day a woman came in, bought herself a drink, curled herself up on one of the armchairs and read her book. She had dropped her child off to a birthday party and waited in Starbucks in the warm and comfort.

There are also sofas scattered about so it is a new experience and a comfortable way to drink coffee.

Before I went to America it was quite possible to buy a good cup of coffee here – sometimes they would call it 'drip coffee' but since coming back proper coffee is hard to come by.

For some reason the Italians have taken over the expertise in coffee drinking; I read the other day that no Italian would take coffee after a certain hour in the morning – so what? The largest coffee drinking nation is the United States and they drink coffee all day.

In Britain there is a company called Costa – they don't serve filter coffee so I don't go there. They serve Americano which I won't bore you with again but they are a British Company owned by a brewery – Whitbread. They have branches in 30 countries, including Britain, but none in the United States whose national drink is a cup of joe (coffee) and I wonder if they pay local corporation tax in those countries?

By the way the coffee taster at Costa has his tongue insured with Lloyds of London for £10,000,000. Apparently he has 10,000 finely tuned taste buds. Here he is:

Gennaro Pelliccia

Starbucks.

Last month it emerged that Starbucks had paid nothing in UK corporation tax over the previous year, despite making sales worth £398 million here – that's about $597 million. There are other companies here which I don't have to name, but I'm sure you know, who haven't paid their full share of tax either. This is because they have their headquarters in another part of the almighty Common Market, known to the rest of the world as The European Community, where the rate of Corporation Tax is lower than here.

Places like Ireland and Luxembourg.

I know big companies do the same in America; credit card companies tend to be based in Delaware and Starbucks themselves are based in Seattle, Washington; that's Washington State, for my pals over here who don't know, and not the capital Washingon DC.

There are other companies, corporations or just firms who don't pay sales tax in America but collect it and don't give it to the government. They do this because the local government want them in their vicinity because they create jobs which means they pay wages into the community and the people that receive the wages spend in that community and so stimulate the economy.

What usually happens in America is the local government will give the new company a free ride for ten years to give them a chance to build up the business then hope they will start to pay taxes after the ten year period is up and not move away.

Well that is in America and this is Britain; this is another country, unlike America who have different tax laws and rates in different states. In fact they have different laws and, would you believe, I don't think murder is a federal offence and neither is a hate crime. If they were federal offences they would all have the same punishment – such as the death penalty. You will know which states still carry out the death penalty – they're the ones with the most murders!! So where's your argument about a deterrent now??

In Britain, plans are afoot this week to occupy Starbucks coffee shops throughout the high streets of the land.

The idea is that because Starbucks do not pay corporation tax – or very little - they are causing some of the cuts to the economy; the campaign is being led by an activist group called 'UK Uncut' whose activist Sarah Greene said: “It is an outrage that the Government continues to let multinationals like Starbucks dodge millions in tax while vital services like refuges and rape crisis centres face the axe. It does not have to be this way.

"The Government could easily bring in billions that could fund vital services by clamping down on tax dodging, but are instead making cuts that are forcing women to choose between motherhood and work, and trapping them in abusive relationships.”

The UK Uncut group plan to fill the Starbucks shops with women and their children as crèche facilities have been withdrawn through cuts, the homeless, as shelters have been closed due to the cuts and women in need of help who are in battered relationships.

Crèche facilities are usually supervised services and so are the others; are they going to provide the personnel?

This is all because of the cuts the Chancellor of the Exchequer and The Prime Minister have introduced because of the recession/depression and here is a photo of the Prime Minister taken yesterday - 

 

as you can see he is really tightening his belt!! 

Whoops!!

Maybe he needs to tighten more than his belt!!

Let me just say that Starbucks is one of the few places here where you can buy proper filter coffee!! They sell the dreaded Americano too but at least I don't have to drink it!!

China/USA.

Now what do I know about China? Well, not much really; but, as I have said before, when has that stopped me?

'China' in Britain has always been slang for your friend; - Hello, my old China, you'd say. China plate = mate. Cockney Rhyming slang, it is, and it seems to have spread to all classes and places like Ireland and Australia and is far better than the modern slang.

The main reasons for a lot of slang was to either speak in code to your China, or make the meaning clearer.

Making the meaning clearer is when there is a lot of noise and you lengthen the word the same as you do on the phone when spelling things out. 

I think the Americans got that wrong, by the way, when they were giving clues to letters over the phone; for example in Britain you would say 'B for Butter' but when I got to America they would say 'B as in Boy.' The problem with that is that 'Boy' is one syllable and could sound like 'T as in Toy' but Butter has two and gives you a clue when spelling things out; of course it's B-Beta, these days.

The other slang of years gone by was the butchers' back slang so that they could talk to each other in front of customers in confidence. They used a lot of curse words such as sipffo!!

A lot of people these days won't use the rhyming slang for secrecy maybe because everybody knows it. I could have said, instead of people, the younger generation or youngsters, but it seems those are phrases are not used anymore.

I don't think the modern slang will last that long. Some of the sales/estate agent types use things like SPOC – he's my spoc, for example. Spoc = Single Point Of Contact!

But the 'in slang' in North West London use words like 'long' meaning late and 'bare' meaning 'a lot of;' I'd only recently got used to 'bad' meaning good!!

Anyway back to China – I have no idea why I went on about slang!!

They say – and who are they – that China is the fastest growing economy on earth and that by about 2030 it will be larger than America; the economy that is; but China, the country, the place, is a strange anomaly isn't it? It has a population of 1.3 billion; that's an American billion, by the way but in British terms it would be one thousand, three hundred million – 1,347,350,000 – as a British billion is one million million, a trillion is a billion billion and so on.

Because of the huge population, they tried to control the birth rate by only allowing couples to have one child, so one wonders how what the population would be now if it had been left alone.

What is certain is that it would be a more balanced society. At the moment there are many families with just one child; that one child will have to look after its two parents later in life and four grandparents. If you multiply that by how many families there are, you can see that there might be a problem in a few years time. 

This is because in a modern society the younger generations have to support the older ones. They do this through taxes and that is how it works; there will be a larger than natural older percentage of the population which will increase the tax burden.

They are supposed to be a communist country; that's what they call themselves, in fact there are people in America who still call it Red China.

But it's about as far from the philosophy of Karl Marx/communism/socialism as you can get; like the USSR used to be.

They are a Capitalist Society run by the government – Government Capitalism - and the only people that seem to benefit, as far as I can see (and what do I know?), are the American Companies, the Chinese Government and a few very privileged people.

The economy, which is still growing, is only based on a relatively small percentage of the population as there is a vast rural society where people are starving. Even the middle classes can't afford to buy a house and are living from hand to mouth.

So what's going to happen there?

China are America's bankers; they will make a lot of money from the USA as America will continue to service its debt. If America switches its debt elsewhere, China will be in the soft and smelly and if America, when the MAD president is ever elected, decides to welch on the debt all bets will be off.

At the moment the USA are an asset to China; companies, such as Walmart, run a lot of the economy by giving them lots of business and controlling the terms.

Walmart, for example, have a workforce of 2.2 million worldwide but not many in China; a lot of companies in China manufacture only for Walmart and if Walmart turn off the tap???? Soft and Smelly!! 

The Chinese Companies manufacture their stuff for as little as 1 cent per item and the Americans nickle and dime them so that the only way they can deliver the goods is by paying slave wages.

So don't ever feel sorry for the Americans with their debt to China. The USA produce 15 trillion dollars worth of goods every year - every year - and they are too big to fail – it's not going to happen - so we need to get over it and deal with it; there's not going to be a revolution there, no Arab Spring type of uprising just the same old same old.

If Obama wins on Tuesday he will have the same hard job getting things through Congress as he has had in the past four years as the Republicans will try and thwart him every step of the way which is why he didn't get the health care system he wanted and why he couldn't close Guantanamo Bay - but he did save the Car Industry (yes he did) and he has improved the standard of living for the middle classes.

That would be a strange platform to stand for in Britain – the middle class; despised by both the working class and the upper class; they both hate the bourgeoisie.

Talking of Britain, a man call IDS, who is some kind of one man band Conservative Think Tank Commander, who was once the leader of the party (one of the many who tried and failed to oust Tony Blair and New Labour) wants to abolish Child Benefit after the second child. One more than in China.

Surely they are getting it wrong; when I did sociology, many years ago, it was estimated that with loss of earnings, general upkeep, schooling, nursery fees and everything else, it cost, on average, £80,000 to bring up one child to the age of eighteen.

I'm sure that figure is much much larger by now! May more like £250,000.

Then you have the cost of University – or Uni as it is now called.

When that child is ready for work everybody chases it. First the banks – because they know that there is a potential one million pounds worth of business there. If 10% of them never work the other millions will kick in, as many of those will be worth more than a million and the banks can always bother the ones who owe them money for the rest of their lives for their student loans and put their debts down as assets so they can raise money against them.

On top of that the children will pay taxes.

So why restrict child benefit?

As soon as it gets spent it puts money in to the pockets of the exchequer. 

In fact instead of trying to trim 10% off the welfare budget they should double it; yes DOUBLE IT!! the extra money will make the recipients feel better and they will spend money in the shops who will pay their workers who will pay tax – sometimes even the big stores and companies will pay corporation tax; sometimes!!!!

But then we have the 6,000 pound gorilla in the room; the deficit.

Da da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

What the hell is the deficit? They keep talking about it; John Stewart got mixed up with America's debt and the deficit recently in a mock debate, but a deficit is the difference between what you pay out and what is paid in; and that is for the last year. If less is paid in than what is paid out it is a deficit!

Some people live on a deficit for years; eventually they will go broke – unless they have a nest egg; as this country and the USA have; so why can't we have a deficit some years? It's all business; Britain lent the IMF £10 million a few months ago; we send aid to countries; we spend money on the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and any other place we want to invade and as soon as this lot is over we will have to find some other place to invade or the arms industry will go broke.

What Eisenhower said in the fifties is true when he spoke of the Military Industrial Complex; we can't make money without war so why be surprised by it?

The Greek debt, for example – and try to find out how much it is – is far less than the USA's and Britain's debt. Under George W Bush the bailout to banks was $750 billion; one quarter of that would have done Greece very nicely, thank you; I'm not suggesting that the USA should have bailed out Greece but . . . ..

Not my problem – but do you see what I mean, my old China?

Something else is going on and we're letting it happen.

But back to America - the good old US of A and the election tomorrow: in Britain we are miss reading what's happening in America; over here we see Obama as a 'shoe in' and should easily beat Romney but what we don't realise is a lot of people over there don't want health care; they don't care that much about their fellow Americans and see the introduction of health care as the road to socialism and their country turning in to Soviet Russia. What was that HL Menkin quote I used recently?