Tableware Migrates And A Call For Action

Crockery shop in Green Lanes Haringay, everything is imported from Germany.

Introduction

The wobbly brown pot, once much prized by aficionados of domestic studio tableware, has more or less departed. It has yielded to the prevalence of the wobbly white pot. If this is starting to sound like an investigation of the dominance of the grey squirrel over the red, well it’s not dissimilar. Time was when wobbly domestic pots were brown, stoneware and made in rural studios and industrial pots were white, straight, and made in urban factories. Now they’re all playing musical chairs and it’s a struggle to keep up, taxonomically speaking, with who’s doing what, where and why.

Still Alive

The condition of the British Ceramics Industry looks terminal and needs a revolution in design, in working practices and, above all, in the attitude of management and marketing to survive. There are numerous graduates of ceramics and / or design courses, many of whom are skilled in the kind of craft and design needed for industrial production or collaboration, but many, I suspect will end up working in either Germany or Scandinavia. Both Origin and the British Ceramics Biennial, (BCB), indicate that, although the making of tableware is not the dominant discourse in ceramic practice anymore, it is alive and well and there are many who work steadily producing ware that has that distinctively hand-made, uniquely studio look which is still immensely appealing to many of us – to me anyway. 

Feral Parrots: Urban and Rural
To wit: Stoke on Trent, once the beating heart of the industry, has become small-town and quasi-rural – it’s certainly poor enough to count as rural and it’s the only place I’ve ever found where the ATMs dispense the money in fivers. Moreover, if the BCB, which it hosted at the end of 2009, is anything to go by, then it’s rapidly becoming more ‘studio’ (rural), and less ‘industrial,’ (urban).  To confuse matters further, urban sophisticates now like to buy hand-made ware from urban studios, classed, by ‘The C Word; as ‘Terraced Industry.’ The latter now replaces the old ‘cottage industry,’ and those distant rural lands, once the home of the original, ‘cottage’ industries, have instead become home to an interesting clutch of quite exotic, almost colourful, stoneware makers, urban migrants to rural settlements who, like feral parrots, produce what Debbie Joy calls, ‘urban rustic.’  Step forward: Claudia Lis, James and Tilla Waters, Nick Membery, and Debbie Joy herself.

Claudia Lis with her work at Origin 2009

Parrots in Flight

Almost colourful – Lis’ work is very very sleek, almost-shiny-but-not-quite stoneware in a huge variety of luminous greys – ah yes, but not ‘Camberwell greys,’ forget Alison Britton, Lis makes grey into a highly complex colour. Think Corot and his 20 tones and you’ll be nearer the mark. J and T Waters also produce sleek stoneware for domestic use, also in colours, - a tad prim perhaps – but then urban stuff always is – that, after all, is what ‘urban’ means, now I come to think of it. Membery’s stoneware is a good tough colour and unbelievably well thrown. It’s what happened when stoneware, in the 60s and 70s sense of the word, went contemporary. He sells in kitchen shops – swanky ones, and you can buy on line too. It’s sort of butch but with added colour, definitely not prim, and it’s for POSH urban kitchens whose inhabitants want to look like they spend their summers in rural France and changed the colour scheme to blue, to remind them of the blue blue sky and the Med. When I say posh though, it’s not at all expensive. It’s brilliant value and looks fabulous. Debbie Joy makes a stoneware and porcelain mix, much chunkier than the work of the other four, but she dips it in glazes which look exactly like Italian ice-cream – there’s green, pink, blue and yellow - and then puts little bugs on in transfers. The overall effect is edible, child-friendly, and gorgeous.

James and Tilla Waters: Origin 2009
It’s interesting to note that none of these five makers are living or working in England now. Three are in Wales and one in Scotland. Studio rents are considerably cheaper and both Scotland and Wales take an enlightened view of supporting ‘rural ‘industries.’ (sic)

A Tale of Three Cities
Back in England, meanwhile, Chester and Bristol - which is almost Liverpool and Bristol - each have a domestic tableware potter: Rachel Holian and Hanne Rysgaard.  Liverpool, Bristol and London were the three cities which hosted the development of blue and white ‘delftware’ pottery, particularly tea sets, in response to the expansion in commodities, - tea, coffee, chocolate and sugar – in the 18th Century. These two ‘heritage’ cities probably support more than one tableware maker each but these are the two whose work I’ve encountered. Both might be considered, ‘rustic urban,’ urban in essence but with a rustic tilt, rather than, as with Joy’s work, rustic in essence but with concession to urban desires. They reference industrial ware – it’s white and uses transfers and has much added colour, but the work is hand-made, complete with the all-important wobble. It seems apt that these cities, inheritors of innovation in tableware, should now be supporting the same.

Left: Hanne Rysgaard's milk carton and bottle jugs and wincyette teapots


Holian says she has difficulty selling in Chester itself. It’s very much a tourist town and a county town for horsey types who, in my experience, want either an ‘authentic’ wobbly brown rural pot for their chunky, stripped pine, kitchen table, or a proper Spode or Wedgwood dinner service for the mahogany dining table. The sort of bisexual, transnational, bi-lingual smart-ass stuff that Holian makes demands a slightly more, dare I say it, aesthetically heightened consciousness.  She sells in Liverpool instead. The same is true of Hanne Rysgaard’s work. Rysgaard’s forms much more obviously reference industrial production – the carton jug is a fine example, but similar reference can be found throughout, from lustre rims on the ‘china-ware’ through to the teapot that looks like a reshaped winceyette nightie.

Terraced Industry: The Theory
So, if the ‘uban-ware’ is made in the Scottish and Welsh mountains and the ‘trans-ware’ in middle England, what’s happening in London? The clue is in the first paragraph. While the uban potters have migrated to the countryside, the rural potters are thriving in the heart of the metropolis. Akiko Hirai, Kaori Tatebayashi, Sophie MacCarthy, Linda Bloomfield, Chris Keenan, Louisa Taylor, all form a part of the complex of Terraced industries which can be found in all manner of side streets and olde cobbled courtyards across London.  Two more – John Butler and Yo Thom have scuppered this neat little theory by escaping the city and settling in rural areas – although, to be fair – both are users of wood kilns so, arguably, need the extra space and appropriate planning laws which will accommodate such equipment. John Butler is a lesser-spotted maker of proper, warm toasty brown, wobbly wood fired pots. Yo Thom’s work is tawny in essence, but she has indigo tendencies, and her tableware, though splendidly wonky, has a little chic urban touch to it.

Terraced Industry: Who’s Who
In the urban terraced, classic studio model, The Chocolate Factory N16, which really was a chocolate factory and now has a courtyard, geraniums and studio cat, you can find the great-crested Sophie MacCarthy who makes elegant patterned table ware, stupendously well thrown and turned, (the latter is a rare thing these days) and Akiko Hirai – a gas kiln user, who dwells in a twilight cave of a studio and makes magnificently glazed stoneware which the cat treads on from time to time, adding new and unexpected wobbles to the plates. Linda Bloomfield works in shed at the bottom of the garden in Chiswick, and makes ‘rural pottery’ in every sense, except that it’s all pink underwear and satin petticoats. Her tableware is certainly more milkmaid than noble peasant but, happily, this is a milk-maid of extremely dubious moral virtue.  Kaori Tatebayashi  works in Wandsworth making what one of her galleries describes as ‘artfully wonky’ tableware – whose aesthetic is an oddly successful mix of Habitat and William Morris reproduction with Japanese ‘authenticity.’

Linda Bloomfield: Origin 2009

Chris Keenan produces ‘genuine’ habitat – his work is all thrown tableware and celadon glazes – more proper than this it doesn’t get. He designed a set for Habitat and makes very perfect ware, no wonkiness here – but he can get away with it because he is a rare user of the notorious Tenmoko glaze – the shiney black one, which is one of the original, authentic-wobbly-brown-pot-glazes. Most people’s work looked like big shiney turds, but Keenan makes his look like it wasn’t just a ghastly accident. It has an earnest frown to it, but at least you can take it into the kitchen without calling the environmental health.

Do You Stack Or Are You Gentry?
From Camberwell to Deptford and to the studio of Louisa Taylor, winner of the BCB batch award and a maker of impressively eccentric looking lego tableware. Taylor is concerned with stacking. Everything, even the Teapot, is stackable, which must make storage considerably easier and adds an interesting twist to the matter of display – which, let’s face it – is all part of the hand-made tableware aesthetic – how it looks after you’ve washed it up or even before. Taylor’s work is clearly rooted in rural, hand thrown studio tableware but, like Holian and Rysgaard, references industrial concerns. She too has taken the white option and her concern for functionality, such as the stacking, reveals a holistic interest in design for living.  Taylor’s work is somewhat ‘straighter’ than the potters of Chester and Bristol though.

Crockery shop, Green Lanes, showing tea sets,samovars and assorted domestic china

Back To The City: Tableware Migrates

Talking of design for living, I’d like to return to North London, to Grand Parade, Green Lanes, Haringay. Here is a kitchenware shop – not the swanky King’s Rd type where you’ll find Nick Membery’s work, nor indeed the ‘aga saga’ kitchen shop of the Shires, this is a down at heel, semi-suburban, dinner sets, tea sets, saucepan sets and samovars outlet. Run by a Turkish family, with the various Turkish speaking communities of the area in mind, this shop thrives on the sales of matching dinner services, tea glasses in multiples and all things food-related which extend hospitality and help define an identity in terms of ethnicity, class and family values. ‘I have arrived, I have made my way in the world, I have a ‘normal sized’ family; a very big family when you put us all together; and a vast community of friends,’ it says. This is what is used when family or important visitors come to visit. This is middle class immigrant Wedgwood, except that it isn’t Wedgwood. Every last piece of china in this shop and numerous others like it has been imported from Germany. The ‘original’ English tea set, (or European tea set) did not include tea glasses with matching double-story teapots of the sort required for Turkish, Balkan, Eastern European, (sometimes), and Middle Eastern tea.

Turkish tea glasses, made in Germany, selling in London 2010

Meeting Migration
Edmund de Waal commented on Wedgwood’s long history, ‘not only of creating markets but also of incredible social commentary,’ in Crafts Magazine (217: 17).  The five contributors to this article suggest that a combination of weak marketing and a failure to recognise the changes in the shape and behaviour of the ‘British family’ are two reasons, among others, why the company failed. The argument was that these changes meant that the multiple-piece dinner service was no longer relevant. This does not appear to be the case, it’s just that the giant family dinner service for special occasions has ‘changed hands.’ It is intensely frustrating that a company, like Wedgwood, with socially progressive origins was so unwilling to recognise and respond to the enormous changes in demographics that have occurred in this country over the last thirty years. The people who migrated here in the 50s, 60s and 70s have settled, prospered and developed their own brand of ‘British middle class,’ These cultures are still family - orientated. The family does come round to dinner and matching dinner-ware is expected and produced. Moreover people who migrate understand both price and value. They are not going to pay ludicrous prices for domestic china for family dinner. As the example of the Turkish shop above so amply illustrates, German industries seem to have cottoned on to this and produced the required goods at the right price in the right locations.

Engish tea things, made in Bristol by Hanne Rysgaard, selling in London 2009

What Happens Next And a Call To action

Of necessity, studio potters are responding to their markets. I am anticipating that the hand-made, ‘local potters’ will mainly be concentrated in urban centres, with the large centres such as London and Birmingham being able to support numbers of them, working out of sheds, as Bloomfield does, and supplying their locales. I would imagine most of these will be mature adults pursuing this craft as a second career. As long as the work is made and the desire for such ware is met, it doesn’t matter much who makes it. It does matter, however, that they tap into all their potential markets. We need ‘china,’ either factory or hand made, for Chinese New Year, Pesach, Ramazan, Rosh Hashana, Eid, Diwali, Now Ruz, the list goes on and on, to say nothing of accoutrements for shisha pipes, handsome receptacles for vodka and other delightful dalliances. Both the industry and the craft sector need to bring in new designs and develop new markets accordingly and they need to do this by noticing who lives here and what we use. In the case of the industry, I just hope it does so while there is still and industry left to respond.

Until February 13th 2010, Contemporary Applied Arts is showing, Domestic Contemporaries, 'focusing on the functional aspects of tableware within Ceramics.'

Links to websites of featured artists or sites with images and contact details:
Claudia Lis  Debbie Joy  James and Tilla Waters,  Nick Membery John Butler, Yo Thom Akiko Hirai   Kaori Tatebayashi Hanne Rysgaard Rachel Holian Louisa Taylor Sophie MacCarthy  Linda Bloomfield Chris Keenan

Belly Dance Congress, September 2009

Middle Eastern dance, popularly known as ‘bellydancing’ suffers from all manner of image problems in the West. Firstly, ‘Middle Eastern dance,’ as such, doesn’t exist. There are hundreds of different kinds of dance and, although you will hear people speak of ‘Turkish’ dance, ‘Egyptian’ dance and so forth, it should be understood that these various ways of dancing are really more associated with regions than national borders and even more strongly associated with culture - culture shaped by communities – by their language, religions, occupation, history and relative mobility.

Dance Migration
The extent to which various population groups have migrated, and also the extent to which they themselves have acquired new populations and influences, has had as great an impact on dance as it has had on language, religion, cooking and all other forms of social and political discourse. Thus the traditional, folkloric dance of the Egyptian Camel herders of the Nile region, ‘Saidi,’ for example, will be categorically different from the ‘Mwahashat,’ an Arab/Andalucian court dance. Technically though, they’re both Middle Eastern dances or ‘bellydancing.’ To add to the confusion, they may share some characteristics depending upon exactly which Arab population it was which colonised the Andalucian region of Spain and when.

Restaurants and Cabaret
Bellydancing, in the West, is often considered to be an embarrassing episode in dodgy restaurant at best and, at worst, a form of strip tease. It certainly counts as ‘cavorting in an unseemly manner in public,’ whichever way you look at it and it’s almost always considered to be amateur. So professional dancers in this discipline have their work cut out. Not only do they have to dance better than anyone else if they’re going to have a ghost of chance of being taken seriously and getting paid for what they do, they also have to ward off the prurient interest, entice those with a genuine interest in dance and then, after all that, create opportunities to perform. That bellydance has never, to my knowledge, received any public funding, also speaks volumes, especially when compared with other kinds contemporary dance.

Orientalism and Authenticity
Further complications are added by those who consider the whole business to be an exercise in post imperial Orientalism of the most insidious kind. True this would have to come from someone largely ignorant of the history and culture of the dance and somewhat naïve politically but it shows what serious exponents of this dance are dealing with. If it's 'authenticity' you're looking for, you may need to look elsewhere - if not, take a look at the last video on this post featuring Fifi Abdo dancing at a wedding surrounded by christmas decorations in Egypt. If that doesn't disrupt every last vestige of concern with the 'A' word, nothing will.



From Hollywood to Hip Hop
In the 20th Century, Cinema, especially Hollywood had a huge influence on the Urban dancers of Cairo and Cairo duly returned the favour to Hollywood and particularly to 1970s American pop. Ballet seems to creep in all over the place and I have no doubt that Hip Hop is mixing it up a storm with Saidi and a tinge of Flamenco somewhere – London probably – or Surrey – that beating pulse of the Bellydance Universe - Oh yes! For it was in deepest, darkest Surry that we convened in sequinned apparel to shimmy, camel and undulate our way through three glorious days of sunshine and dancing.

What Happens at a Belly Dance Congress
Bellydance Congress sets aside all these anxieties, raises the calibre to the heavens, and summons the assembled deities of the dance to come and show us the real thing in all its variety and complexity. Congress brings in the megastars from all over the world and devoted fans and students who came from as far afield as the USA and Russia to attend master classes, workshops, and take a once in a lifetime opportunity to see some of these people perform.

Classes and Stars: Leyla Jouvana
I attended two three-hour classes with Leyla Jouvana, one on layering of techniques and moves and the other on dancing with two or more veils to a mixed ability class. I did a technique class, also three hours, with Caroline Affifi, a tabla solos class – that’s dancing to a solo drum - with Kay Taylor and I had the exceptionally good fortune to be facilitating a class with Randa Kamel. In principle I was facilitating one of Leyla Jouvana’s classes as well, but she did not teach in a way that required it so I was able to do the class in full. Jouvana (Germany) and Kamel (Egypt), are major stars and rarely in this country so the opportunity to do their classes is a rare, extraordinary and invaluable privilege. Jouvana’s rigour and attention to detail accompanied by careful, precise explanations make her an exceptional teacher. She is accompanied by her husband, Roland, on the drum, so the music is always exactly as she needs it.

Randa Kamel
Kamel’s class, the one that I facilitated, was for dancers in grades 3 and 4 and I know from experience that these grades at international level are much higher than is appropriate for my experience. ‘Facilitating’ in this instance means that I had to ensure that the rows of dancers in her class were rotated regularly so that everyone had a chance to be at the front. Even now, remembering being at the front of her class, so close to her that I could see clearly every move that she made and exactly how she did it, brings tears to my eyes, it’s a chance I don’t really expect to be repeated and I shall not forget it soon. Hers was not an easy class to follow and many of the students clearly struggled in spite of my best endeavours to ensure they could all see, but the truth is, many were just not up to the level she expected of them.

The Mighty Fifi Abdo
This year’s Bellydance Congress was dominated by the legendry presence of her Imperial Highness, (massive drum roll), her Royal Magnificence, the Astounding FIFI ABDOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Gasp. Now I get it. Now I understand why everyone talks of this woman. I talked at length in this post about the problems that Bellydance faces in the West. One of the results of this is that we now have a collection of dancers, excellent dancers, who produce highly polished performances, virtuoso displays of technical perfection. And, yes, they make you gasp, but after a while of seeing one after another after another of these displays, one can start to lose the will to live. The intense focus on technique really can be a bit soulless and where you have a dance whose exponents often rely on cabaret to build up experience, it seems we lack a demanding dramatic repetoire that might serve as a training ground for evolving performance dancers.

The Horse, The Hurricane and a Touch of the Divine
Fifi Abdou whirls through all this like a hurricane. Her dance has a kind of roughness and raw edge to it which is wholly unexpected. She struts about on stage like she owns not only the stage but the audience too. She tosses her mane like some demented dervish horse and twirls and shimmies simultaneously punctuated by deep bowing twirly things – we call them ‘breaks.’ No one dances like this without close attention to detail and careful learning in the early years, but technique, practice and training alone will not bring it either. She’s an immensely expressive, intimate dancer, bold and brash in her gestures, there’s almost a touch of aggression, but combined with her own unique equine grace it all results in an electrifying stage presence and performance.

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.

Swan Song

The telling of the Swan story began, oh who knows, years ago probably. It began for me, as a migration story, about those ‘other’ Romanians. The ones who aren’t us. Who aren’t ‘real’ Romanians. We always argued about that, if we had the energy. Anyway, let’s go back to January. I’m feeling desolate because some kind soul just kicked me in the teeth over a funding application. My new Romanian friend, Vali,’s feeling the same because he’s been abandoned by his housemate and is now homeless. So he turns up at 1.00am, direct from Budapest, with a 2 litre lemonade bottle of plum brandy, and some truly gross-looking sausages. I supplied the bread and the spring onion, and somehow, the depths of self-pity and despair were transformed into a pretty good-natured swapping of scurrilous tales. The next day and at least 150 pictures of his girl-friend later, still in the first week of January, the sun shone warmly, no sign yet of the late snows or frosts that would soon annihilate my jasmine buds, we went for a walk in Finsbury Park. Vali was captivated: ‘We just don’t have places like this in Romania, we don’t have “parks”.’ ‘These birds, just look at all these birds,’ he repeated, endlessly, genuinely amazed. ‘What do you call those ones, those white one?’ ‘Swans’ I said, ‘with a double-u, suuaans.’ I didn’t know if Romanian had a ‘w’ sound. ‘Swans,’ he repeated, faultlessly, as though he’d been discussing them with the queen all his life.
‘You know when Romanians first started going to other countries, Austria was the first we went to, in large numbers. Well, some Romanians went to Vienna, and they have these big parks there, full of birds like here. Well, those Romanians, they started hunting the birds. One day, they hunted, and caught and ATE a Swan.’
‘No’ I shrieked, peels of laughter,
‘Yes, well, you can imagine how famous we were after that. Oh my GOD.’
‘But they taste disgusting,’ I say, still laughing, ‘they taste fishy.’
Vali looks at me, quizzically, frowning, ‘You’re laughing, Claudia. You think it’s funny?’
‘Well, yes,’ I say, feeling slightly guilty now, ‘ok, so it’s hard luck on the Swan, but… yes…’
Pause. ‘The Austrians they did not find it so.’
With utmost confidence I assured him that English people would find this story uproariously funny and would be impressed with the enterprising Romanians bringing their rural skills to the city.
I hadn’t, of course, reckoned with the Haringey Independent, The London Evening Standard, or the Daily Mail, all of whom suddenly developed not only a sense of humour by-pass but also, in the case of the latter, an unusual lapse of memory concerning the ‘right’ of people to hunt. A week or so ago, I found a copy of a Romanian free newspaper, its front page graced with a picture of a swan, and inside, the full story reprinted not only from the Haringey independent, complete with RSPCA phone number, but also the Austrian story. Whether there has ever been any verification that Romanian migrant workers really did eat the Viennese Swan, I have no idea, but the idea has certainly caught on to the extent that most Romanians believe it, but with one important caveat.
We were contemplating the reasons why the Austrians didn’t find the swan-eating saga funny, and I was cheerfully explaining that the English secretly admired a good hunter, when a teenage boyfriend-girlfriend couple with a dog walked past. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ I muttered, ‘But what the hell is she doing with HIM?’
‘That’s EXACTLY what I was thinking’ gasps Vali, ‘EXACTLY.’ We’re looking at the beautiful young woman, with her scrawny, seriously unappealing boyfriend. ‘He looks like a gypssssy,’ hisses Vali, ‘Bloody swan-eaters.’


‘

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 original rural-urban migrants

So these are the swan-eating immigrants we've been hearing about. Torrid reporting in the Haringey Independent: "The Killing Fields", it snarled, with its customary caution and reserve. More on this in a later post. I have inside information. Coming soon.....
Meanwhile, enjoy this luscious beast who graced my garden at 4.00pm yesterday, and whose magnificently foxy image I managed to photograph from my bedroom.

Yes I KNOW I need to mow the lawn. That's coming soon too.

Under the Floorboards: The C Word’s Most Loathsome.

Spring glanced at the garden this week, brought out the plum blossom, magnificently white and sweet smelling, and the ‘pond’ filled with amorous frogs, shrieking, giggling and splashing ecstatically at all hours of the night and VERY early morning. Now it’s rumoured to be freezing again. Apple blossom still shy, but I remain optimistic.
Such is the miracle of even the most hesitant moments of spring because along with the ecstatic frogs and absurdly pretty plum blossom came the most horrifyingly appalling infestation of flies. Some tiny and creeping, crawling into and on to and under and inside things I didn’t even know had an inside or an underside; some enormous vast and loathsome, mutating monstrous beasts, lumbering along the walls and carpet like the vile progeny of sexually disturbed helicopters.
Then I remembered. Something, I thought, had died. Some weeks ago this was, but not so long that I couldn’t remember the nauseating stench of what I suspected at the time was a dying or dead rodent, somewhere wholly inaccessible and invisible: something for which I chased and searched and hunted and stalked, until, eventually the stench became a smell which became a distant memory and finally vanished. Then came the flies. Whatever it was is producing these creatures at rate equalled only by our esteemed government’s capacity to turn refugees into criminals. Could it, horror of Hitchcockian horrors, be the rotting corpse of the The C Word’s most loathed, his Royal Loathsomeness, the Minister for Immigration, Borders, Detention camps and the Gulag: The Miserable Byrne. Had someone finally done for him, and in some unspeakably cruel twist of fate, dumped his vile twitching remains under MY BATH? Was it now my task to count his crimes which swarmed pitilessly around my bathroom and kitchen, yea unto the very fruit bowl containing the garlic meant to ward off such hideous evil?
Well, the refugees running the shops down the road provided all manner of toxic spray, the migrant workers running the shops in Green Lanes came up with the most viscously sticky fly papers imaginable, unspeakably disgusting but highly effective, and the asylum-seeking dancing-pal came and blocked up the holes in my bathroom thus excluding further invasion by the vile progeny of Byrne.
Who shall we expel, the Home Office Minister or the Immigrants?
No contest really.

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.

The Slum Landlord

Hogarth would be proud of our next candidate: The Slum and its cohort, The Slum Landlord. This comes complete with Gin Lane, or, more accurately, Cider Close.
Our local newspaper, ‘The Haringey Independent,’ excelled itself on Friday march 7th, ‘Migrant workers’ slum cleared out,’ it howled. Turned out a bunch of Polish men had set up camp under the arches next to the car park near Seven Sisters Tube station. The paper said about thirty people had been there for four weeks, but a small number have been there for some months, certainly since last summer. Directly related to this is the reintroduction of Lord Land-Scumbag, or The Slum Landlord. These are the buy-to-let vermin who bought up properties on the cheap, and let them to ‘asylums’ and migrant workers at extortionate prices. In order to pay the COLLOSSAL rent, a two bedroom flat, such as the one next door to me, will house anything up to twelve people. Two in each room including the living room, sleeping the day shift, and another two in each for the night shift. The charmless Goksun Guest House on the corner of my street also does this. After he’d finished his shift at the shop opposite, Jamal went to his bed which had just been vacated by Mehmet, only minutes before. Mehmet would then come downstairs to do the day shift.

The Servant Class and The Criminal Class

So we have the peasant, the slum dweller, the pitiful immigrant and the pitiless landlord. We are carefully reconstructing a labouring class from the people who have migrated here from the EU, and who work under restrictions. Romanians and Bulgarians can do only labouring work, no matter what their qualifications. ‘You keep the good jobs for the people from the rich countries,’ scowls Tavi, ‘You want people from the poor countries to do your shit work for you.’ We seem to have created a whole new ‘servant class’ from the Eastern European countries. These are the ‘respectable working class’ now. Those from outside the EU, with slightly darker skins and dodgy religious practices, like Jamal and Mehmet are the criminal classes. They’re the lucky ones though, relatively speaking. They have family here, and can avoid the worst excesses of Home Office Enforcement.

Consider Hasan, 20 years old, from Uzbekistan, here on his own, and without proper legal representation. Now electronically tagged, (a form of post modern leg-iron), he and his housemates are subject to relentless ‘visits’ from the Home Office at strange times of the night. Yet they wont deport him, or Samira, from Iran, who has so far managed to avoid the tagging, but only because she does have a good lawyer and a very politically aware brother to defend her. They both work the endless hours, and they’re both stuck forever in the Eternal Waiting Room while the HO also waits- to see who’ll blink first. Utterly guileless, Jamal is mystified by the refusal of his asylum claim: ‘I think the Home Office just don’t understand,’ he puzzles, trying to defend this institution of the democracy he loves. They understand alright, that’s why they make no active attempt to detain or deport him. They’re just trying to starve him out along with the others. I do sometimes wonder if ‘the workhouse’ is really the right word for this, in bleaker moments it seems more like a ghastly parody of the Gulag.

Strangers in Citizens

The obscene spectacle of a LABOUR GOVERNMENT adopting a policy of restricting some workers, criminalising others, recreating a ‘servant class’ and a ‘criminal class,’all to stop those frightful foreigners from coming to England to do the jobs no one else wants to do, was adopted to please the editor of the Daily Mail, who apparently, oh, you’re going to love this, REPRESENTS THE REST OF US AND OUR INTERESTS. Do you feel represented? Thought not. Taking action starts
Here. Strangers into Citizens has a pathway to citizenship proposal which would enable the Ignored Asylum Seekers to work legally and pay taxes and eventually to apply for citizenship given good references and so forth. S to C are working on a shoe string at the moment, and need help with their website among other things... if anyone has a few hours to spare....in the summer perhaps, that would be the business and The C Word will love you forever.