Back To The Shop: More Adventures In Philip Lane

Things are hotting up considerably at the corner shop these days. The marching songs still embellish the police sirens in Philip Lane and the price-war continues, happily for the customers. I’ve more or less abandoned Yasir Halim now, in favour of Euro Stores and Mr. Ocean. I interrupted a tumultuous row the other day, arguments being bellowed from one side of the Ocean to the other, ricocheting off the fennel and back to the beer, then up an aisle to the carefully arranged sheep heads and back to the pasta and round again, taking in the grape-seed molasses on the way. Bewildered, I announced that I agreed with HIM and waved towards the tallest, in gold chain, who grinned from ear to ear. Ah-ha, muttered the lad at the counter, checking the change, so you ARE a communist.

They’d been arguing in Kurdish so I hadn’t understood a word. I clearly wasn’t going to be served unless I demanded attention and that seemed the best way to do it. Gold Chain was clearly delighted at my declaration of partisanship. ‘We just need to bring back communism and everything will be ok,’ he announced, beaming beatifically. I wondered when it was that Philip Lane, or Tottenham, or perhaps it was the whole of Haringey, had been a communist enclave. Had I missed something? Counter lad explained that Gold Chain was ‘going back to the mountains to fight.’ He seemed confident that I was now a fully paid up, card carrying member of Gold Chain Communists Inc and that I would repair at once to my cave and make ready to join the march.

I can barely carry a Kalshnikov, let alone fire one, but I will admit to having once had a go. I shot a collection of beer bottles in the mountains outside Dogubayzit, on the Turkish Iranian border. Mr. Siam Shahin, who runs Murat Camping, a tourist camp-site close to Ishakpasha Palace, had taken me there to show me his eleven, glistening smuggling horses. He was a kind of Kurdish God-Father figure, who smuggled alcohol into Iran on horseback, and brought back electrical goods and people- at vast cost presumably. He told me he ran schools for Kurdish children in the mountains. He’d been proudly displaying his gun collection to me and others staying at the camp-site. I admired the Kalashnikov and foolishly remarked that I’d always wanted to fire one. ‘I’ll teach you,’ he offers. You don’t refuse a man with four guns, so I went into the mountains for my first, (and last), fire-arms lesson. It weighed about 25 kilos and jolted back into my shoulder every time I fired it. I did hit a couple of bottles, but not the ones I was intending to hit. Satisfied I’d be a hopeless freedom fighter of the armed variety, I retired to nurse my bruised shoulder.

I just want to make it absolutely clear this was not a ‘training camp’ of any sort. Shehir enjoys very cordial relations indeed with the Iranian Consulate in Erzerum and I had gone there to see if he could extract a visa for me. To say that he was, and presumably still is, an extremely unsavoury character would be an understatement - the more so, somehow, for being so thoroughly personable. It took me about four days fully to realise and then accept exactly how unsavoury he was. The Kalashnikov story sounds like one those cheerful little travellers tales. On the face of it is, but it involves some of most toxic characters I’ve ever met in my life. The people he was bringing over the border, I subsequently found out, were women that he sold to the hotels in the area to provide sex to Russian traders. I hope Gold Chain’s just shooting his mouth off. If not he’ll find himself involved in one the main trades that funds the PKK. I’d rather he just tried to ‘bring back’ his communist enclave in Philip Lane any day.

Philip Lane: A Tale of Treachery, Protection, Cucumbers and Marching Songs.

Cemal calls round last week. I haven’t seen him for ages. He’s been keeping a low profile in a charming northern city somewhere, railing against the lack of proper Turkish supermarkets, giving up smoking, complaining, nay mewling, about those other Kurds, those ‘Iranian’ ones, who turned out to be Iraqi, but also enjoying a good moan, breathing cleaner air, and getting very attached to his local, premier league, football team.

So we stroll out in the morning frost to investigate Philip Lane which, I realise, has completely changed since his departure last year. Now, he used to work at Aksu, little Aksu, the veg shop on the corner of Kitchener rd, that’s where I met him. Then the bigger shop by the bus stop, big Aksu, committed an act of unspeakable treachery. It started to stock vegetables too, not as well kept as those on the Kitchener rd corner, but veg nonetheless. The upshot was that little Aksu went 24 hours, then closed and was sold, unable to compete with its treacherous neighbour which now sold alcohol and veg. Little Aksu didn’t have room for alcohol and anyway Hussein’s wife was observant and didn’t really approve, so Hussein went and got drunk at the Turkish tea shop at the back of Botany Bay pub opposite and gambled away the shop’s meagre profit.

So, the ever stoical Cemal migrated over the road to work at Ocean Stores, another Turkish supermarket. We had only two so naturally a third was necessary. Mr. Ocean must have been a bit loaded so he bought up little Aksu as well and turned it into a butcher. That lasted less that a year, and was bought by Mr, Tea-shop-at-the-back-of-Botany-Bay-pub, affectionately known as ‘the Trafficker,’ on account of the alarmingly high turn over of Lithuanian women who worked at the bar in the tea-shop. So the Trafficker buys out the butcher’s shop and turns it into – yes that’s right – another of his lovely tea shops, because we’ve got only fifteen of them in Philip Lane / West Green road so, clearly, we need another.

Well then Mr. Ocean buys up the Turkish hostel at the back of Ocean Stores where my friends Cafar, Bilgen and their children used to live (in one room with the children in a bunk bed under the stairs in a corridor - happily they now live in a nice big flat at the back of Tescos opposite Seven Sisters), and where Cemal used to live, ‘bunking up’ with his mate, Rifat, and he, Mr. Ocean, extends Ocean Stores to include the butcher again. It’s now a pretty substantial supermarket. He even thoughtfully drops the price of soya milk from £1.29 to £1.19, having noticed at long last the Big Aksu has been selling theirs for £1.19 ever since they committed the cucumber coup.

Then what? Well, Botany Bay Pub was closed down and sold off around Christmas last year. Lately there’s been much activity and buying in of shop fittings and I ask the nice young woman at Ocean Stores what’s happening. Ocean Stores by now has doubled up as the local recruiting agency for the PKK. If you go there at the right time of day, there’s now a very chatty lad who plays, ‘communist marching song’s’ according to him. ‘I’m not supposed to,’ he confides and then starts trying to interest the hairy English anarchist man behind me, sporting ginger beard and desert fatigues, in joining up. He looks at me and boldly asserts, ‘there are almost as many women in the PKK as there are men, you know.’

I’m interested in more mundane matters though and, as the nice young woman counts my change, she informs me that Botany Bay is to be another supermarket – a really big one. ‘What sort of supermarket, which supermarket?’ I demand, dreading the onset of Tescos or similar. ‘Another Turkish family,’ she growls, and flares her nostrils for added emphasis.

Thing is, I cant see either Big Aksu or Mr Ocean going down without a fight and, given Ocean’s affiliations and Aksu’s protection racket which, according to Cemal, he started around the time of cucumber coup, I’m not sure if the sheer size of Botany Bay will be enough. The C Word’s prediction for 2009 is local skirmishes breaking out on the borders of N17 and N15, (BB is N15, Aksu and Ocean N17 – Philip Lane is the border,) resulting in possible all out war later in the year.

Maureen at the Laundrette on the corner of Philip Lane and Clonmell rd offers the best vantage point for anyone interested in observing from her splendid, full-size, picture windows. It was ideal for observing the fights at the pub and I’ve no doubt she’ll offer front row seats, tea so strong you could tar the road wit it, and a plentiful supply of her own unique Irish wisdom for all patrons in need. She also does a very fine line in second hand books. I wonder if there’s one about the battles of Broadwater Farm. Ah, now there’s another story. Thelma at the flower shop over the road can tell you all about that.

Tottenham Icons

“All Iranians have pictures of the Shah,” says Reza, shuffling through a collection of black and white images on one of his numerous phones. Reza’s a Christian convert, and along with the Iranian royal family, has a couple of particularly florid Jesus Christs, one rising up to Heaven, one on the cross. He’s the only one of my Iranian friends that has religious iconography, although most of their mums have a picture of Emam Ali somewhere about the house.
As to the Shah, I’m certain that none my hard-core-Marxist Iranian buddies has any such thing. Quite the contrary. Ali has a fetching selection of iconography carefully placed on his book shelf, just above eye-height for a tallish man. Two images arranged in classic diptych formation, on the left, Emam Karl Marx, on the right Emam Che Guevara. The latter it seems is the safe bet for all disenfranchised, and disenchanted lefties with awkward cultural and political affiliations. Bilgun, who’s Kurdish, saunters past on his way to the shop, sporting, yep that’s right, a Che tea shirt, pretty new-looking I’d say. He’s virulently anti PKK, equally virulently anti Turkish army, well they did torture him, so hardly surprising, and vitriolic in his condemnation of the AK which he considers a threat to the secular state. So what’s to be done? He’s another one waiting in the Gulag for god knows when. Immensely inconvenient when Kurds have real politics and the Home Office cant just tick the PKK box and hand him the visa, which is what they usually do. The shop in question also displays a fine iconographic selection. Above the counter, again just above tall-man-eye-height, are three images: Emam Ali, all feminised and surrounded by pink flowers and cute children to the left, in the centre, baby Jesus, pink and pudgy, and on the right, Diana Princess of Wales. “You know, people just don’t care,” mutters Hussein, carefully polishing Diana’s face. He’s the seriously unpleasant gangster-heavy who owns and runs the shop: “You call the police and they’re back on the street in three hours.” This apparent non sequitur turns out to be a reference to our lovely local pimps, a particularly choice set of crepuscular vermin who clutter up main drag at dusk and duck in and out of the ‘pound shop’ which has no discernible icons unless you count the skunk, whose image might as well be hanging over the door, for all the effort they make to hide the fact that this is in fact the neighbourhood dealing den. They don’t even bother trying to sell anything else, pound or five pounds.

I’m starting to feel a bit left out of this Icon business. But who would I place in Icon position in my hallway? There was a shop in Green lanes for a year or two which had its icons hanging in the window, one on either side of the door. These were an adaptation of the form being fashioned from acrylic tufted carpets. They too went for the transcultural pairing of Emam Ali on the left, and Emam Princess Diana on the right. So it seems you can choose from religion, royalty or bandana’d freedom fighters. I might just go for Phoolan Devi then. She’d certainly make short work of the pimps and, you never know, even the Loathsome Byrne might finally dematerialise under her steely glare. Article on Phoolan Devi by Arundhati Roy part 1 here part 2 here, more comments and pictures here and here. Beautiful blog here with picture of Phoolan under 'women's lives' section, link here.

The Workhouse

Next in line for reintroduction, also with a nice flavour of the mid Eighteenth Century is the Workhouse.
I live in Tottenham, an unlovely part of the North London Borough of Haringey. I love it, because I like my neighbours. But it is bleak. It has no centre and little soul and fairly bristles with workhouses. People migrate here from numerous different countries, but in the lattice of streets where I live, the population is mainly Kurdish, from Central Turkey. They are not PKK and need asylum as much to escape unwelcome and violent attention from that organisation as from the equally violent and unwelcome interference from the Turkish Gendarma, the military police. A mixture of studied ignorance and institutional brutality from the Home Office has resulted in large numbers of what can only be called Ignored Asylum Seekers. These are the ones who cannot be deported because their case for asylum is too good. So the HO has instead adopted a policy of first ignoring them and then criminalising them by refusing to allow them either to work or to claim benefit. They have to survive, so they work illegally and are exploited to the limits of their endurance.
So we have in Tottenham a critical mass of criminalised workers, who, as my friend Jamal did, work standing up for at least 14 hours a day with no break, (stop and think about that for a second), no day off and no holiday. He worked like this, without a single day off, for six years, rarely seeing the light of day, because mostly he worked nights. He is one of hundreds, possibly thousands. Jamal worked at the front of the shop, he met the customers; we all knew him. Most of the women, however, especially in the kebab and pizza shops, are at the back, in the kitchens. You wont see them. Our local economy is more or less dependent on these people. Remove them and we lose our entire local community. Welcome to Britain’s workhouses.