When I first moved to London the rhythmic singing and clanging of bells that could only be the Hare Krishnas always made me smile. Like an establishing shot in any film about a major city, the presence of the Krishnas and their little Madonna style headsets were a sign the place was alive.
Recently, all is not well with the local Krishnas. Their song has gone, they’ve lost their way. Literally. I am beginning to think they took a wrong turn at Oxford Circus and are now somewhere in the north because apart from one lone Krishna, they’ve gone missing. Their whole conversion plan has been left to a single devotee who claps his bells together solemnly, like the warning toll of an old house cat. How can that bring people to religion? It can’t even get them to move out of his path.
Recent Posts
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The Lone Krishna
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End of Polaroid
Recently some pretty weird stuff has been happening in my life. I was thinking about how I’d like to chronicle these events through photographs. While I have a digital camera, I thought a Polaroid might be more fitting and ultimately more satisfying. It’s been a few years since my last Polaroid camera, but I still remember the weight on my wrist, the clunky whirr as the camera spits out an image and the anticipation as the photograph develops.
I was sad to learn that Polaroid stopped producing instant film back in February. They’re now working on a little instant printer, due sometime in 2009. Not the same. However, I looked through some of the Polaroid photographs I own and suddenly they seemed far more special than before. A nice piece of history, never to be added to.
A few days after all this, I came across an article about a man who took a single Polaroid shot daily to record his life for eighteen years, until his death from a brain tumour on his 41st birthday. His name was Jamie Livingston, a New York artist. The full collection of his images, posted by his friend Hugh Crawford, can be viewed here.
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You think your job sucks
Over the last few days I read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, an American journalist who tries to survive on wages of $6 and $7 dollars an hour, documenting the results. Ehrenreich works in turn as a waitress, hotel chambermaid, house cleaner and finally an employee of Wal-Mart.
I knew a lot of the book from a friend who’d read it over and would often quote passages at me until I was compelled to read it for myself. It was amazing. Some of the tales I recognised from my own early working class job experiences, or that of family members, other elements were shocking - like the women who take home salaries so low, they wouldn’t cover the cost of food to replace the calories they’d burnt doing their jobs (cleaning houses), let alone anything else.
I even snuck off from my own comfy office job to sit in the loo and read a chapter. When I finished Nickel and Dimed, I began Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, the next in the series, focusing on the white collar workers of the middle class. However, after tales of Americans sleeping in cars and skipping meals, it’s hard to feel anything for those suffering endless career coaching, networking and another day in front of the laptop, surfing job sites.
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Death of a stranger
For a long time I was part of a writing group. We met once a week to read our novels to each other and offer feedback. It was an open group, advertised on the internet and because of that we got a lot of different people. Stories of the freakish Londoners who turned up are still rolled out at every social gathering. Generally these weirder characters would appear once or twice and then just drop out. You didn’t expect phone calls, email or any courtesy. No one asked questions. It was part of the deal.
For a while a young, wiry guy came to the group. My strongest memory of him is watching his body shrink when I mentioned Christianity. He had all the hallmarks of someone raised by the Church who had then grown up and left it all behind. He knew a lot about faith and spoke articulately but aggressively about why he felt all organised religion was wrong. I asked if I could make a guess - that he was raised Catholic and had abandoned his faith during his teens. He nodded that I was right. The hatred of his upbringing consumed him and once I’d acknowledged it, he spoke more and more about why he couldn’t stand the Church and less about his book.
The regular members of the group discussed if this was a problem and we decided just to let it run it’s course. He came for a few more weeks, then stopped. We didn’t think anything of it when he left without warning, writing groups tend to have members for either years or weeks. In many ways it was a relief.
Six months later, I got a mail from his sister. She’d found our address in his contacts and she was informing us he had died. At first I couldn’t connect the name to my memory of him - I only realised who it was when I saw the invite to the funeral at the local Catholic Church.
The fact that his funeral service was somewhere he disliked almost seemed sadder to me than the knowledge that he’d died. The only thing I knew about him, other than his writing, was his feelings about his faith.
Shortly after that I stopped going to the writing group and I hadn’t thought of him until a news item reminded me about it today. I think it’s important to remember that not only do we have no control over our own deaths, there’s nothing we can do about what happens to us afterward either.
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The car you always promised yourself
Get ready to flick some water on your face, I have something sad to tell you…I never learned to drive.
That’s right, I can’t drive, although I did once turn a very difficult corner of an empty Sainsbury’s car park in a Nissan Almera. Shortly after that monumental event, the aforementioned Almera was written off in a tragic drunk farmer incident, we moved to central London and my driving career came to an end.
Although there’s something slightly shameful about a twenty-five year old that can’t drive, I don’t generally dwell on it. This weekend was an exception when we rented the best car in the world* to go to a wedding in the Lake District. The car that changed my life? A blue Peugeot 207 CC.
The two seater made for a perfect rental - we were able to politely yet legitimately refuse to chauffeur any guests, while smugly driving through the fresh country snow with the top down, playing Ella Fitzgerald to scare the cows.
Before I get hate mail, the Peugeot is only my second crush on a car. My first was a rusty purple Ford Capri: the car you always promised yourself** so my tastes are improving.
*According to a 25-year-old woman, who can’t drive.
** I am still promising myself a Capri, just I’ve promised the DVLA I’ll get a licence first.