Stuck midway between Manchester and Birmingham, and acutely aware that it can’t challenge either when it comes to shops, clubs or cultural clout, Stoke-on-Trent just gets on with life; it might not have a Dry Bar or a bobbly Selfridges, but it knows the simple pleasure of a warm oatcake shared with a good friend on the grassy piste of a recently alpinised slagheap. That said, it’s not a place you’d want to get trapped overnight, so imagine my delight when, being a regular visitor to the city (don’t ask…), I discovered the existence of the Wrexham & Shropshire Railway Company and its promise of a Virgin-free route south. Yes, rather than grudgingly allying myself with Richard Branson’s witless plan to bring to the West Coast Main Line all the trappings of international flight – not by introducing hot-air balloons, as weekend schedules might imply, but by slashing window size, natural light levels, headroom and luggage space to 737-esque proportions, then pumping the resultant cramped space full of air so over-conditioned it’s gone completely frizzy – I could now, it seemed, potter down to Wolverhampton and intercept the 16:07 Shrewsbury-London service of the Wrexham & Shropshire, the only railway company with a Facebook page: they want you to be their friend, and would pop round for tea bearing Welsh cakes and lovespoons if only they knew where you lived. They have 277 friends. Which is, curiously, the exact number of people who, on average, prise themselves out of Virgin’s pendolinos wishing they knew where Richard Branson lived.

I had underestimated the power of the Bearded One. For, once you get to Wolverhampton, the screens in the ticket hall will admit no knowledge of the 16:07. Mention it to any of the loitering staff, and they’ll simply walk away, glassy-eyed. Persist, though, because, if you’re lucky, one of the older hands – perhaps his children have left home, or he’s retiring soon anyway – will lead you through a darkened subway and, on receipt of a small trifle, point at the blue and white coaches pulled up alongside the furthest platform behind a line of tape, several coils of razor wire, and two Virgin train managers with baseball bats. “This is as far as I can take you,” he’ll whisper, “but good luck. And thanks for the trifle – I’ll put it straight in the fridge.”

The 16:07 may well stop at Wolverhampton, but it’s not allowed to pick up passengers. It can put them down, but it can’t pick them up. Wulfrunians can take a meandering local train via New Street to Tame Bridge (near Walsall), get off, wait for the 16:07 to turn up, and then get on it, but they can’t get on it at Wolverhampton because Richard Branson won’t let them: a “moderation of competition” clause in Virgin’s franchise agreement says that services between Wolverhampton and London can be run by Him and Him alone. The 16:07 provides a fast direct route from Wolverhampton to Walsall, but hopeful passengers can do nothing but wave as it pulls away. Similarly, the 16:07 isn’t allowed to stop at Birmingham, Coventry or Leamington Spa, or pick people up in Banbury (quite sensible advice that, actually, but I mustn’t get sidetracked). Virgin staff at Coventry who have their attention drawn by frazzled commuters to the 16:07 as it slips teasingly through the crowded platforms are instructed to use the Vulcan Death Grip and then feign giddiness.

“Moderation of competition”. What a great phrase. So… our railways are privatised to encourage excellence through competition, but then the independent companies aren’t allowed to actually compete. Gosh. It’s as if a perfectly decent railway system was sacrificed to a political ideology which even its proponents knew wouldn’t work in practice.

Sometimes, for variety, you’re not allowed to leave the train. Next month, I’m off to Northampton, and though London Midland will sell me a ticket to Stoke, on a train which stops at Northampton, for £7, they won’t let me get off at Northampton. If I try, I’ll be manhandled back into my seat by London Midland bouncers in satin bomber jackets. If I buy a ticket to Northampton, then I can sit in the same seat on the same train and be welcomed by the Mayor of Northampton himself with a plate of buns. But it will cost me £22.80, despite Northampton being 90 miles nearer to London than Stoke-on-Trent.

Those of us who aren’t politicians or board members don’t, of course, care whose logo is on the antimacassars when we catch a train; we simply want our train to be as fast and as comfortable and to cost just the same as the next one. Much like we don’t, on being hit by a Samsonite Spinner falling from one of Richard Branson’s tiny overhead racks, care which hospital we go to; we just want to go the nearest, and to know that it’s as good as the second nearest. We only need “choice” if the system has failed; but it’s much easier to brainwash people into regarding “choice” as something positive than it is to mend the system.

One hot July afternoon some summers ago I was standing on a crowded platform at Marseille – in France, where the railways are State-owned and non-TGV journeys are priced per kilometre – wondering, somewhat queasily, how we were all going to squeeze into the already-packed Toulouse train that had just pulled in, when I saw, at the far end of the platform, three extra, gloriously empty carriages being shunted into place. Virgin don’t do ad hoc. They can’t. If there’s no stock or staff to hand, the train is cancelled. Even if empty London Midland coaches are idling in a nearby siding, Virgin can’t use them – they’re not theirs. And when, the other Sunday, London Midland cancelled all services out of Euston because no drivers had volunteered for overtime, I couldn’t help wondering – ignoring, for a moment, terms of employment and union issues – if some Virgin drivers might have been happy to step in, if only they weren’t obliged to regard London Midland staff as competitors rather than colleagues.

Meanwhile we, the public they’re supposed to serve, continue to wait on expensively rebranded platforms as empty coaches we’re not allowed to board depart in lavish new liveries for destinations we’re not allowed to know.

If, like me, you’re wont to spend your Saturday afternoons wandering up and down Victoria Street howling at bus stops, then you’ll already know that the first of London’s infamous bendybuses – the 507s that once happily buzzed back and forth between Victoria and Waterloo stations – have just been replaced by old-skool single-deckers. And the decrease in rush-hour capacity, not to mention speed of loading? No problemo: these new low-slung bad boys will be running at three-minute intervals. Or, to put it another way (not for clarity, just to let it sink in), every three minutes. That’s right: because 60-foot-long buses (with three wide doors) occasionally clog up box junctions, we’re replacing them at humungous expense with twice as many 30-foot-long buses (with two narrow doors) and paying twice as many folk to drive them. Why? Because that’s what people want.

God, I hate people.

This isn’t a political blog. Obviously I have my opinions, not to mention vague plans – currently on hold while I finish doing the kitchen – for some sort of benevolent dictatorship under which Londoners who disagree with the aforementioned opinions will be dealt with in a variety of amusing and imaginative ways and probably also in order of height, as my intention is to be a whimsical despot, but… politics isn’t really the issue. Boris is, after all, simply doing what he was mandated to do, having been smart enough to twig that pandering to the misinformed dimwit is always a vote-winner, and such cynicism is hardly exclusive to the Tories – Tories are just more likely to be chummy with the sort of people who can provide gratis gobbets of helpful misinformation on a daily basis via placards outside newsagents and tube stations during an election campaign. Opportunistic populism trumps utilitarianistic common sense every time – that’s old news. Most politicians, though, thankfully marry such populism with a shameful lack of integrity – it was a safeguard built into our democratic system when Magna Carta was drawn up – so we never have to worry about their promises bearing poisonously expensive fruit. Sadly, though, Boris not only lacks the sort of grip on reality (£250,000 for writing a weekly column in the Telegraph is “chicken feed”, he told us last week) needed to fully understand the whole bus-catching process, never having done such a thing in his life, but he’s also a maverick. So, not content with leaving wide-hipped commuters sobbing in the rain for at least 3 minutes on Victoria Street, Boris is also bringing back the Routemaster.

OK. Routemasters, let’s be blunt, are loved only by people who never used them, but quite liked to see them pottering about in a colourful fashion, probably going to Carnaby Street or the Kings Road; the sort of people who go on about “classic caffs” in articles cobbled together for the Sunday supplements over brunch in the local wi-fi’d-up gastropub, articles in which the fact that the owners of said caffs are no longer allowed to work a 16-hour day for a pittance just so the writer can have her 90p Maxwell House in a chipped mug once a year when showing friends from abroad The Real London is loudly bemoaned. “It’s all about freedom,” they chirp, “the freedom to jump off an open platform.” Or the freedom to hospitalise an unsuspecting cyclist, as those of us who’ve spent years twelve inches out from the kerbs of Central London prefer to mutter. At least with a bendybus we know where these dizzy idiots are: locked-up safely inside.

Anyone who ever had a choice – anyone living, shall we say, just off Kennington Road, along which the 3 and 159 ply identical routes to Brixton – would, until 2005, always plump for the 3 (one-person-operated) over the 159 (Routemaster), because the 3s had space in which to mooch about and sit comfortably, and enough doors to let you get off without becoming unexpectedly intimate with someone you’d only been sharing your passage through life with since Oval. Obviously if you were trying to ride for free, you’d pick the 159, as bunking a trip was dead easy on a crowded Routemaster – you just kept your head down or feigned sleep, and half the time the conductor would never come round anyway. Fare evasion is a problem, but it’s solvable – you just have a little machine by the door which beeps when a valid Oyster Card is held in front of it. Obviously you could also employ someone in a shiny cap to walk up and down the aisle with a little machine slung round his neck which beeps when a valid Oyster card is held in front of it, but – that would be foolish. As every other European city realised years ago. It’s called progress. We also now have automated in-bus announcements and digital displays telling us where we are – we don’t need to have it shouted in our ear.

So why is Boris bringing back clippies? Why is he not only spending fortunes on unnecessary new buses but also planning to double staff levels (or maybe we’ll just have half as many buses)? Because it was in his manifesto, because that’s what was demanded by people on the street – or, more precisely, by people on the avenues of Zones 5 and 6, where nobody would dream of catching a bus anyway, because buses are dirty and unsafe and unpunctual and full of unmarried binge-drinking immigrant hoodies wielding knives and using mobiles to sell crack very loudly… or so they’ve been told… by Boris and the placards outside newsagents and tube stations…

Relentlessly insisting that buses aren’t safe for ordinary decent people isn’t a great way to increase public transport usage, but that’s not really the point of an election campaign. And if what you say actually degrades the lives of those you aim to represent (if no one uses buses, then they will become less safe and less frequent), so what? You’re not exactly going to meet any of these people, are you, unless you happen to leave after the cleaner arrives. I don’t know: Margaret Thatcher once told me I was a failure for using public transport at my age (not to my face, she was speaking generally, and obviously I wasn’t my age at the time); David Cameron’s told us that we live in Broken Britain (despite most folk on the new one-person-operated 159 actually seeming quite pleasant), and presumably we’re the ones what broke it, because there’s only us here; and now Boris Johnson is telling me I need someone to look after me on the bus. I don’t know whether to feel angry or… just insulted.

But then I think about how much money is being wasted which could actually be spent on properly improving things and – that helps me focus.

I’ve also just realised that all three of those politicians are Tories. So, because this isn’t a political blog, can I just provide a bit of balance by saying that I really don’t like Hazel Blears? And not just because people that small are really creepy.

So, anyway, there I was, re-checking my watch for the hundredth time with the last Piccadilly Line train still not even a timid glimmer in the moonlit distance, when suddenly, out of nowhere, this gigantic spinning disc appeared, strobing and whooping away like some impromptu aerial disco some thirty feet above the footbridge. Eager for reassurance that I wasn’t going completely doolally – frankly, I’ve had a tough few months – I quickly scanned the lengths of both platforms, but it was as I’d suspected: I was alone. South Harrow isn’t the busiest of stations at the best of times, and on a wet Tuesday night in March its rain-spattered asphalt clearly held about as much appeal for the local populace as sharing a B&Q jacuzzi with Peter Mandelson.

Which is probably why no witnesses have yet emerged who can confirm that, shortly after being spotlit by a slanting shaft of blinding light, I was lifted off my feet and sucked slowly and obliquely through the cold night air towards a small oval aperture in the pulsating underbelly of what was, they would now have realised, some sort of spaceship, before being propelled at high speed along a soft-walled flume within the body of the craft – obviously they wouldn’t have seen this bit – and deposited on what I can only describe as Boris Johnson.

“Crikey,” Boris said, picking himself up and rearranging the creases in his suit. “Sorry. Gosh. Should have remembered to stand out the way. Don’t get much warning, that’s the thing. Damn light comes on” – he pointed at a small bulb just above the furry mouth of the tube down which I’d lately slid – “and next thing you know, boof.”

Blinking in the pale greenish glow, I desperately tried to order my thoughts. Behind Boris stood banks of computers and flashing VDUs. Above him, running in mazy lines across a ceiling composed entirely of what looked like egg boxes, translucent pipes hummed softly. My mind was a mess. So many questions. Where did I begin???

“Why did you veto plans to pedestrianise Parliament Square? And where are we? Answer the second one first.”

He harrumphed, and combed his fingers through his fringe. “Well, golly, I’m afraid I’m no Bo-Frangle the Navigator but, at a rough guess, I’d say we’re just passing Betelgeuse. These new ships are pretty nippy. As for – what was it? – Parliament Square, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I think you might be confusing me with the Mayor of London.”

“But… but… you are the…”

At this moment, a door in the far wall shooshed open, and Boris Johnson walked in, accompanied by Boris Johnson. Seeing my slack-jawed confusion, the hindmost Boris sought to reassure me.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “all members of your species look alike to us too. Except for Bernie Ecclestone – we don’t understand how he fits in at all. But, once you get to know us, you’ll soon get the hang of it. Now, would you like a doughnut? It’s three hours till we land.”

***

And, you know what, he was right. It took time, and a lot of practice, but soon, whenever crowds of eager Borises pressed their podgy faces to the glass of the large cabinet in which I was exhibited, I found I could happily distinguish not just the wary from the excited, and the contemptuous from the deeply moved, but also – with some 90% accuracy – the male from the female. Not that any of the Borises understood my fascination with the latter distinction, as it turned out they were essentially an asexual race, who reproduced via the occasional explosive release of thousands of spores, each of which would quickly develop into a full-size replica of its parent within six weeks. The only time that the Borises felt the need to differentiate between male and female was when queuing for buses, as here strict and highly complex chivalric codes still pertained. Except, sensibly, during peak hours.

“Deep down, we’re really quite an old-fashioned lot,” confided my keeper as he explained all this to me one afternoon – each day on the Borises’ planet had two afternoons, and the first one was nearly always pretty dead in terms of visitors.

“But… if each… um, sporing?”

“We say spuming. It sounds ruder.”

“OK, if each spuming produces thousands of young, why isn’t the planet over-run?”

“Oh, they cull us. The young acquire this murderous rage after about three weeks, which completely disappears again three weeks later. We call it adolescence. Silly word, I know – I’m not sure where we got it from – but there you go. Anyway, during adolescence, they can kill as many of us oldsters as they like, no questions asked. We just learn to keep our heads down and stay away from bus shelters after dark.”

I used to enjoy these afternoon chats with my keeper. He was a nice chap. But then one day he woke me with some intriguing news.

“We’ve decided to breed you,” he said.

I stopped midway through chewing my breakfast doughnut.

“Breed?”

“Yes. Partly for scientific purposes, partly to stop people gossiping, and partly because we’re trying to pitch to a younger age group. Not sure if I approve of that myself, but – it’s not up to me. So, anyway, we’ve been back to Earth and got you a mate. We were thinking that maybe you could mate every evening just before closing time, to keep the crowds from leaving early, with perhaps a matinee on Saturdays. What do you think?”

“Well, it sort of depends on who she… I mean, mostly it wouldn’t be a problem, but…”

“Really? How extraordinary. But, then, it still beats me how you distinguish. Well, let’s just keep our fingers crossed, eh? Oh – here she is now. Don’t stand too close, or I’ll never tell you apart. Better still, wear this hat.”

As he’d been speaking, another Boris had appeared, leading my new companion on a short length of rope.

“What do you think?” asked my keeper nervously.

I sucked reflectively on my doughnut.

“I think it’s Tony Hadley,” I said. “From Spandau Ballet.”

“Is that a problem?”

I looked at Tony Hadley. And Tony Hadley looked at me. And then he looked at the plate glass wall that fronted our display.

“Could we maybe have curtains?” he said.

***

Once I’d explained to the Borises where they’d gone wrong, they were aghast.

“Crikey,” they all said.

A high-level meeting was quickly convened, and it was decided that either me or Tony Hadley would be returned to Earth and a more suitable mate found for whichever of us remained. Because I’d already been there a while, and some visitors were apparently complaining that I’d become repetitive, it was decided that I should be the one to go back. I was actually quite sorry to leave, and even Tony Hadley seemed a bit emotional when the day finally came for me to depart.

“What’s that odd gurgling noise?” I said, as he hugged me manfully beside the taxi.

“That,” he said, clearing his throat awkwardly, “is the sound of my soul.”

I was so glad we’d never got those curtains.

***

I arrived back on Earth at the end of May. But it’s taken me a while to readjust. Also, to stop them making the same mistake again, I offered to show the Borises likely places to pick up women who might be willing to mate with Tony Hadley. I really don’t know why I did that. I’m a fool to myself. I also never realised that every All Bar One has an emergency button in the ladies that links direct to the local police station.

So, in conclusion, that’s why this blog hasn’t been updated since February. But I’m back now, so – let’s give it another go, eh? Oh, and here’s a tip: stay clear of City Hall in April 2011, as it seems that’s when our Boris is due to spume, and by all accounts it can be quite messy. Like a really big sneeze, apparently.

And make the most of the next couple of years.

Cocking a gummy ear to the 7.25 sports round-up on the Today programme this morning, I found myself being informed that David Beckham still had great respect for the Galaxy. Even in my semi-somnolent state, such open-hearted generosity struck me as being just so typical of a man who, let’s face it, has had to take some pretty unjustifiable stick over the years nearly everywhere he’s gone. It also contrasted starkly, I couldn’t help musing, with Craig Bellamy’s recent assertion that he has complete and utter contempt for the Crab Nebula. Obviously it soon became clear that Beckham had been referring merely to his current employers LA Galaxy, whom he didn’t wish to upset even as he hankered after a return to proper football with AC Milan or one of the big Spanish clubs – Racing Santander, perhaps, or Prancing Bilbao – but that’s not really the point.

The point is that Beckham – or David, as I like to think of him – can do very little wrong in my eyes for one simple reason. He is, like me, a Leytonstone boy. We might, for all I know, have shared the same games teacher (I mean pedagogically, not sexually), might even have played with the very same balls (ditto). And, just as Boris Johnson felt unable to say no when his Old Etonian chum Darius Guppy requested help with having a News of the World journalist beaten up (“It was all a bit of a joke. It was – just Darry.”), I reckon us products of the Waltham Forest secondary school system have to look out for each other. If it works for Eton, then it can work for Leyton High School. Which is why I refrained from criticising my fellow LHS alumnus Jonathan Ross over the Andrew Sachs affair. 

The other reason I refrained, of course, is that I don’t think cold-calling is actually a crime – if it was, Kitchens Direct wouldn’t persist in phoning me every day at 5pm. And nothing Ross said was factually inaccurate, so we’re not talking slander – it was just an easily deletable message on an answerphone. Oh, all right, it was more than one message, but – again, m’lud, I cite the case of Kitchens Direct vs The London Phone Book. Sadly, the tabloids decided to get outraged on Mr Sachs’s behalf, and took it upon themselves to remind him persistently of the awful fact that his grand-daughter is a bit of an exhibitionist who once had sex with Russell Brand, which does seem a little cruel, even for the News of the World. Beneath the contrived indignation, though, their only actual arguments seemed to be that (a) Andrew Sachs is getting on a bit and (b) the F-word, even when used to mean what it actually means, is “offensive”. To which the only sensible retorts are (a) stop patronising him, as frankly that’s far more insulting than anything Jonathan Ross did – Mr Sachs is only in his seventies and seems perfectly compos mentis – and (b) don’t be offended.

I’ve never quite understood why people get offended, or even what it really means. Lots of people say and do things I disagree with or find distasteful, but that’s because they’re not me. If I’m in the mood, and perhaps some sort of reinforced perspex box, I might tell them I don’t share their opinions and try to explain why, but it wouldn’t cross my mind to get offended, largely because I’ve no idea what it would involve. Would I need to splutter? Turn red? I really don’t know. For most people, being offended seems to involve writing to the BBC or the newspapers or walking through the streets with a flaming torch, but that seems a bit of a weird way of carrying on. The thing is, if no one got offended – and it’s a choice, you don’t have to do it – nothing could be offensive. And the world would be a much happier place. Whenever, for example, I hear Christians getting worked up about those atheist buses (you know, the ones with the posters telling us there’s probably no god), and claiming that they’re “offensive”, I just want to say no they’re not – they’re simply expressing an opinion you don’t agree with. You lot do that the whole time – look at all those posters for the Alpha Course that have been littering our public transport for years – but it doesn’t offend me, because I choose not to take offence. You could do that too. Then we could go on a picnic and have buns.

The other point, of course, is that Ross apologised. Unlike Carol Thatcher, who refuses to accept that she did anything wrong in referring to the black tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga as a gollywog; it was, she says, “a joke”. (Non-UK readers might like to take a deep breath and read that again, because this really has happened, in 2009 – and, yes, we are talking about the daughter of our former prime minister.) Well, Carol, I don’t think it’s really your call, to be honest. If black people – people who’ve almost certainly had direct experience of being called wog and other much worse things – say that it’s insulting, then I really think that you – a middle-class white woman – just have to take their word for it, apologise, and promise to be more thoughtful in future. And let’s not get distracted by etymology and literary history – all that matters is what connotations the word has NOW. I don’t think you’re racist, Carol, any more than I think that Prince Harry is racist for referring to an army colleague as “our little Paki friend”, or that his father is racist for calling the solitary Asian member of his polo club Sooty. I just think it’s desperately sad that, in 2009, some people still live in such otherworldly bubbles that they genuinely can’t understand what they’ve done wrong.

Back at Leyton High School, intake was split roughly thus: 25% were kids of South Asian origin (Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian and expellees from Idi Amin’s Uganda), 25% West Indian, and the rest “White”. And, all these years later, it still makes my stomach lurch to think of all the playground “jokes” about Pakis being dirty and smelling of curry and about how you’d catch “Paki Fever” if you touched them (they were all “Paki”, whether they were from Dhaka or Delhi, Karachi or Kampala); or of the Sikh maths teacher who had “Leader of the Paks” scrawled across his door for everyone to read; or of the Black vs White football match we organised amongst ourselves on the frozen playing field when the games staff loitered too long over coffee and fags in their cosy cubbyhole (and the Black vs White fights organised by others outside the school on summer evenings); or of the day when Nigel, the small, sweet-natured West Indian kid I used to sit next to in French, suddenly burst into the classroom brandishing an iron bar because he’d finally had enough of people calling him names like… gollywog. You probably didn’t come across any of this stuff at St Paul’s Girls’ School, did you Carol? 

All that was years ago, of course, and I thought we’d moved on. And, by and large, we have, because of that wonderful thing (no irony) called (though only by its detractors) Political Correctness – you know, the social manifestation of those changes in the lawbook which gave women the right to vote, stopped homosexuals being gaoled for falling in love, and punished landlords who refused to rent rooms to darkies. It’s also because of PC that I knew it was wrong to make a joke about Victoria when I mentioned David Beckham having to take some pretty, unjustifiable stick everywhere he goes, and so didn’t.

Although that’s not actually true, of course, as the whole point is that it’s fine to laugh at someone for something they’ve done, but not for something they can’t help. Laugh at them for having a stupid haircut, by all means, but not for having stupid hair, because they’ve probably being crying themselves to sleep every night over that ever since they hit puberty. It’s a cruel world. And we don’t need people like Carol Thatcher and her “PC-gone-mad” mob making it crueller.

A month or so back I was talking to the manager of a well-known London bookshop. I was about to tell you which one, but I think, on reflection, it’s probably best if I keep shtum, and refer to my man only as The Nameless One – not because he is the corporeal manifestation of some diabolic metaphysical evil and uttering his actual appellation would cause him to revert to his true malignant form (i.e. this isn’t another piece about the Kennington Bookshop), but because he is a pleasant fellow and I don’t wish him to be garrotted on his way home from work by outraged and affronted troupes of effete sonneteers. For the subject of our conversation was poetry. Or, more precisely, poets, neither of us having any gripes with poetry, but both of us having plenty with poets. 

His shop never used to have a poetry section, he said, as it seemed needlessly divisive; any poetry was simply filed alphabetically amid the fiction, to encourage such serendipitous and pleasantly discombobulating discoveries as, say, Simon Armitage snuggled up between Jeffrey Archer and Margaret Atwood. But then one day a Local Poet spotted this and was not only outraged and affronted but quite overcome with a fit of the vapours. Poetry is a fragile and precious thing, he asserted feebly, once smelling salts had been brought, that needs to be partitioned off from the rough bonhomie of common prose by at least two solid plywood uprights. And so, in the joint interests of Art and Commerce, a pact was struck: The Nameless One agreed to instigate a clearly demarcated poetry section, and the Local Poet agreed to organise regular in-store poetry moots at which his fellow urban rhymers would become so helplessly intoxicated by the thick possety richness of the English language and the gratis ruby debouchments of a cheap Tesco’s wine box that they would find themselves unable to resist purchasing many slim volumes of utterly unnecessary verse.

Thus, one Wednesday evening not-too-long after, a ragbag collection of beards and berets and half-moon glasses assembled behind the closed sign, settled themselves on borrowed canvas chairs, and passed the time that each of their number took to nervously read what he or she had composed in the preceding week by sipping politely at a refill or two of Pinot Noir and silently seeing how many anagrams they could make from the phrase “one-day ordering service”. And then, once everybody had read, they went home, leaving the slim volumes untouched in their plywood corral. “Because the trouble with poets,” The Nameless One ruefully reflected, “is that they never f***ing buy anything.”

Smoke gets sent a lot of poetry, but we rarely print any. Partly because most of it’s written by people who think that what makes a poem a poem is the fact that the words don’t go all the way to the right margin – or, more wrist-slittingly, that deep emotion can be expressed only by vigorous use of end-rhyme – but mostly because it’s usually clear that the writer hasn’t ever bothered looking at a copy of Smoke. Which supports the findings of The Nameless One that what makes a poem a poem is actually the fact that it’s written by someone who expects other people to read their work despite they themselves having absolutely no intention of reading anyone else’s.

We went through a phase of receiving lots of sapphic erotica from Canada. This was often eye-opening, sometimes eye-watering, occasionally instructive – there are ways of keeping warm in a snow drift on the outskirts of Winnipeg, for instance, that really just hadn’t previously occurred to me, and I speak as a man who was once on good terms with an extremely frisky husky – but ultimately just bewildering and a bit insulting, because it was clear the writer’s only aim was to be published. Anywhere. It also betrayed a certain stupidity: if you want a magazine to print your work, then surely it makes sense to check you’re not making a fool of yourself by, say, hurling a bit of free verse about free love in Saskatchewan at a magazine whose tagline is words and images inspired by London. But then we often get people asking what sort of stuff we’re looking for, and my standard gritted-teeth answer of “stuff like the stuff we usually publish” genuinely seems to floor them. So maybe it’s just me.

Many years ago, I used to run a record label. And, whilst pigeonholing is generally invidious, I’m happy to say that we didn’t release any blues-based heavy rock, believing – perhaps naively – that blues-based heavy rock would soon be made illegal, along with folk dancing and leggings. Despite this, we still used to get sent demos by an awful lot of blues-based heavy rock bands. More bizarrely, we still do, usually with a note attached to the effect that the band really love what we’re doing and would love to be part of it; which, given we’ve now not done it for ten years, and rarely gave the impression of wanting anyone to be part of it when we did, is not a statement that comes wreathed in an aura of sincerity; and call me a cynical old tosspot if you like, but – I can’t help feeling the same about the people who tell us how much they love Smoke before asking us to print a 10,000 word extract from their forthcoming novel set in Manchester.

And it’s not just the writers and artists. I seem to have ended up on the mailing list of Canongate Books, and used to feel guilty about this, because it costs money to post hardbacks and I don’t particularly want to be responsible for anyone in the book trade going out of business, other than the Kennington Bookshop. So when Canongate’s publicity department rang to check my address, I did the decent thing and pointed out that Smoke is a magazine that is (a) about London and (b) entirely free of reviews and extracts – why, after all, should we publicise Canongate’s books in Smoke if Canongate doesn’t publicise Smoke in its books? It makes no sense. And you would know all these things, I almost added, if you actually looked at a copy of the magazine. The next day, a brand new package of books arrived. But, once I’d opened it, I stopped feeling guilty; because surely anyone who publishes a novel with the opening line “Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love” (The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson, £16.99) and thinks that hyphenating the word “sister” across two lines is acceptable typographic practice needs to be stopped by any means necessary, don’t they? There you go, Canongate – badly written and poorly typeset – it looks like we do reviews after all. So send us more. Though no more copies of The Bird Room by Chris Killen, please, as you’ve sent us three already and I’m sure Mr Killen will want his royalty rate revised if he finds out.

Occasionally, of course, it just gets a bit surreal. Some PR woman rang up the other day and asked to speak to our reviews editor. When I pointed out that we didn’t have one as we didn’t do reviews, she wanted to know why on earth not.

She really got quite indignant.

OK, OK, so the banking industry is collapsing and by December we’ll all be taking turns sleeping on Alistair Darling’s sofa and scientists are building a black hole that will suck the entire universe into Switzerland as if Geneva was some bottomless cosmic plughole (which actually it is, I’ve been) and the USA is toying with electing a woman who doesn’t believe in dinosaurs or rocks and thinks all moose are Al-Qaeda sympathisers who must be taken out one-by-one and these are all fascinating subjects for debate and discussion and all that BUT – people, people, let’s get things in perspective, shall we, and address a somewhat more urgent question: just what the hell is going on in those Magnet Kitchens adverts?

You know the ones – they’ve been in the papers for months now. At first, I assumed it was going to be a series but, no, the scene is always exactly the same – only the cropping changes. Clearly, Magnet reckon the kitchen experience portrayed is universal, one we can all relate to, whether we be broken banker, megalomaniac scientist, or eerily fecund slayer of moose. “What happens in your kitchen?” runs the tag, to which the only sensible retort should be nothing remotely like this, thankfully, but I appreciate your concern.

The thing is, though, advertisers aren’t idiots. They send people out with clipboards and biros and they make cold calls. They know their target audience, and they know what that target audience gets up to. Magnet’s desire is for each and every one of us to believe that this Cubista Walnut kitchen range has been especially designed with us in mind. And that’s what’s so scary: Magnet thinks this scene is archetypal. Which is why my fingers are gradually slowing on the keys: if Magnet are right, then a good percentage of you must, even as I write these words, be engaged in activities not too dissimilar to those depicted in the ad, and… I really wish you weren’t…

I mean, are you the blonde with the cocktail shaker? Because, if so, then what sort of sad, spinsterish, sexless life must you lead if the cock-legged concocting of a Singapore Sling can bring such untrammelled, unipedal joy? Or are you her best friend, the pop-eyed brunette on the left? If you are, then please let me know whether you genuinely believe that this demented display of alcoholic juggling – I imagine the psychotic hopping being accompanied by bursts of hysterical laughter teetering into the hypersensitive-canine end of the audible spectrum – is the most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen, or whether you’re simply desperate to be distracted by any activity that doesn’t involve the shiny-bonced guy in the louche suit who, whilst leaning casually on the Urban Citrique granite worktop with built-in modular hob behind you, has just been deep in conversation with your cleavage, and now appears more than a little miffed to have had his spec-heavy discourse on in-car entertainment systems rudely interrupted by some over-exuberant drink mixing. See that lecherous sneer and that killer’s glare – he’s annoyed, he’s contemptuous, he’s thinking about fake leather trims. God, is that who you are? Are you him?

Actually, this seems to be the image’s recurring motif. The woman on the right – the one whose hair looks like small Pacific sea creatures spent 10,000 years dying to achieve its bizarre spongey mass – is clearly uncomfortable with her suitor’s concept of private space. His left hand isn’t visible but, from her grimly cross-legged pose, I think we can all be pretty sure that, in the words of Alan Hansen, contact has definitely been made in the area. My God – are you him? No, not Alan Hansen, I’ve just seen him on the telly with Lineker and Lawrenson – no, the man who thinks it’s OK to continuously touch any woman he’s speaking to, as long as he’s doing it in a stripped pine kitchen rather than a strip pub? The man who, even if he looked round, would have little sympathy for poor old Courtney Cox in the far corner there as she flashes a desperate open-mouthed grimace of despair across the room, searching for female solidarity whilst politely turning down insistent requests for a threesome from the two open-necked lads who’ve pinned her against the quartz crystal sink with integral colander rest?

Are you her? Are you him? Is this what you people get up to when you’re not reading Smoke? Couldn’t you, I don’t know, just walk out, do something else… bring down a bank, or a moose, or a hitherto meek and unsuspecting universe – because surely anything is better than being trapped inside this bleakly tasteful monochrome vision of hell, with its… hang on… I’m just peering more closely, and… 

Is that definitely a cocktail shaker? 

The more I look, the more it seems like it could be… well, an urn.

Oh. My. God. Suddenly, it all starts to make lot more sense. Somewhere, just out of shot – or perhaps at the back of that Cubista Walnut space-saving corner cupboard – is the bloodstained Le Creuset cast-iron skillet the police somehow missed, so embarrassed were they by the obvious distress of the keening widow as she sobbed and hopped around the flat. 

This would, it has to be said, explain everything.

And you people really do need help.

[editor's note: this won't make sense unless you know it was written just after the end of the Beijing Olympics... hopefully you now do...]

Well, now it’s all been and gone and we’ve all had a chance to calm down a bit, maybe it’s time for a spot of serious reflection; what conclusions, if any, what hopes for the future, should we draw from our sporting heroes’ endeavours in that strange and faraway city? My own thoughts – and I speak as someone who was actually there in the stadium – are that we more than held our own for the first 45 minutes, were unlucky to concede just before half-time, and shouldn’t have taken JJ Melligan off as he was about the only one who seemed capable of getting round the back of the Peterborough defence. I’d then probably add that, even if we did lose 3-0, being able to watch the debacle unfolding whilst leaning on a proper behind-the-goal horizontal railing, rather than squashed up beside a fat bloke with a two word vocabulary, was a definite consolation, as that’s not something you’ve been able to do at Brisbane Road for several seasons now – not since the Orient boardroom elected to bulldoze the North Terrace in order to build some more flats. For a football club, the O’s are very fond of building flats.

Another thing that struck me, as I stood there flicking idly through the programme in a vague effort to distract myself from striker Adam Boyd’s clearly under-rehearsed ploy of trying to disconcert the Peterborough defence by engaging in a series of sub-David Bowie mime routines – man-pacing-fretfully-outside-tube-station-wondering-where-his-date-has-got-to seemed to be his favourite – was that the match was sponsored by Peterborough City Council. And I couldn’t help feeling that this summed up an important difference between London teams and their provincial rivals: outside of the capital, cities and towns take pride in their clubs – particularly in one-team towns like Newcastle, where every other person strolling round Eldon Square Shopping Centre on a Saturday morning seems to be wearing black and white stripes, or Hull, where City’s elevation to the Premiership seems to have revitalised the entire town in a way not seen since the invention of the herring. On holiday in Spain last month, I even found myself feeling slightly envious of the way that the whole city – indeed, the whole of the Basque country – seems to identify with the fortunes of Athletic Club Bilbao, whose stadium at the far end of the Gran Vía de Don Diego Lopez de Haro looms over the rainy latticed streets of the Ensanche much like St James’s Park looms over Gallowgate.

Brisbane Road, it has to be said, doesn’t loom over anything much. You could easily walk past Coronation Gardens and not realise that the ground was a mere 100 yards away, a minute’s trepidatious shuffle from the High Road between rows of Victorian terraces. Even the spindly old floodlights which used to glow through the mist on Hackney Marshes on winter evenings have shrunk to modern lo-lighters. And I suppose my grumble is that Leyton, or the London Borough of Waltham Forest, never seems to take much interest in its team, never gets behind it in the way that Newcastle, Hull or Peterborough get behind the teams which – whatever you think about football – represent those cities to the world at large. I dimly remember shopfronts decked with red bunting – and a special red-rimmed souvenir edition of the Waltham Forest Guardian - in the spring of ‘78, when the O’s had their moment of glory by reaching the FA Cup Semi-Final, but I don’t think the council had too much to do with it. Just like I don’t think the council would rally round if the club was in trouble – they even had the temerity to veto our plans for more flats.

And I don’t think the people of Leyton would rally round either, and that’s sad. At school, the only team anyone ever went to watch was Orient, partly because it was cheaper than Arsenal, Spurs or West Ham, but mostly because all you had to do was walk down the road; you didn’t need to get the tube, you didn’t need to get your dad to take you. But no one ever said they supported Orient; in the playground on Monday, the talk was all of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Dirty Dirty Leeds. (Not so much Manchester United, who weren’t much cop back then, and even spent one season down in the second division with the O’s; on the morning of our match against them, all the shops and pubs on Leyton High Road covered their windows not with bunting but with hardboard, because – in those dark days of cattle-truck football specials – we feared United’s travelling fans far more than the team. We lost 0-2.) 

People even supported West Ham, despite West Ham plainly being an Essex club, whose true rivals are Southend and Colchester, and nothing at all to do with East London – nicking the O’s East, East, East London chant (about as primal a declaration of love as you could wish for, surely?) is just showboating. Orient’s first ground was in Clapton, on the London bank of the Lea – we were Clapton Orient up till World War II – whereas by the time you get to West Ham you can practically smell the shellfish and white shoe polish. 

There just seems to be this attitude that the big clubs in London can look after themselves, and the little clubs…. can look at Sky Sports. Which is why the little clubs keep disappearing. The days of being able to watch Leytonstone triumph over their Isthmian League rivals simply by leaning over the moss-topped wall on the elevated Westbound platform at Leytonstone High Road station ended when, having merged with Ilford to begat Leytonstone & Ilford, they sold their ground for housing and merged with Walthamstow Avenue to begat Redbridge Forest… who merged with Dagenham to begat Dagenham & Redbridge… who now play in League Two, which is nice for the strange stunted folk of Corned Beef City, where the ground is, but not so good for the sensitive and lissom people of Leytonstone and Walthamstow, who have been left bereft of fifth-class action. But no one cares, because we’re all supposed to support West Ham, Tottenham or Arsenal, and if you see a kid in a red replica shirt on the streets of E10, it almost certainly has Rooney or Gerrard on the back, not JJ Melligan. Given the choice, even JJ Melligan would probably choose not to have JJ Melligan on the back of his shirt.

But maybe this is about to change. Because there are – seriously – plans for Orient to take over the Olympic stadium in 4 years’ time when all the pointless running in circles and jumping over things has finished. 5,000 people rattling round in a stadium that holds 25,000, and separated from the pitch by a running track, doesn’t sound like much fun, so if it happens that’ll probably be the end of London’s second-oldest football club (only Fulham are older). Or, maybe more likely, the club will be sold to investors with no interest in football or Leyton and rebranded as AFC London Olympic, and marketed with popcorn and cheerleaders, and we’ll play our games at breakfast time so that Hong Kong betting syndicates can watch us live at 3pm, and no one will ever again complain about not having a lid for their Bovril. 

On the plus side, we could finally get our own back on Man United for that 2-0 defeat.

According to the Cadogan Guide to Spain, the city of Vigo – up there in the Celtic north west on the wild and rocky coast of Galicia – has, throughout its history, received many unexpected visits from Englishmen. And, loath as I always am to mention myself in the same breath as Sir Francis Drake (who went there in 1585), I can’t deny having recently helped maintain this tradition (I went there last Thursday).

I’ve never had too much sympathy for those who complain about Ryanair; the lack of frills is, after all, why it’s cheap. With its check-in charges and almost colonial disdain for national boundaries, you obviously need to keep your wits about you – if you don’t, they’ll make you check them in and charge you – but essentially you don’t get what you don’t pay for. However: whilst accepting that in-flight food, entertainment and leg-room might be sacrificed to reduce costs, it wasn’t until I’d spent three hours gazing out at the empty tarmac beside Gate 10 at Santiago de Compostela airport last Thursday afternoon that it began to occur to me that Ryanair might actually regard “an aeroplane” as a frill, a frippery, an outrageous luxury that could easily be dispensed with if only everyone would flap their arms vigorously in unison whilst strapped to a plank.

Here’s the story. Because of heavy rain, the incoming plane that morning – the one that was supposed to do a handbrake turn on the tarmac, ditch its load, and then head back to Stansted with us on board before the engines went cold – had been diverted to Porto. I’ve got no problems with this; when we’d arrived at the airport shortly after breakfast, we’d barely been able to make out the terminal building through the bus windows, and had briefly assumed we were simply stopping outside a random phone box in order to pick up a pot-bellied middle-aged man wearing a beret and carrying what looked suspiciously like a small pig in a hold-all (after two weeks, we were used to Galician buses) – I certainly wouldn’t have fancied trying to spot a murky runway from 30,000 feet. By mid-morning, though, planes not belonging to Ryanair were happily landing and taking off in hazy sunshine, so the repeated assurances from Ryanair’s Representatives on Earth that the pilot would be returning “soon” from Porto seemed perfectly believable, if unnervingly vague – believable enough for us not to let the empty rows of comfy chairs tempt us from our place in the queue. (Ryanair’s belief that allocating seat numbers is but one small step removed from issuing each passenger with a free magnum of Krug and a magic kitten means the only way to get a decent seat is to queue.)

Hours passed. People arrived from Barcelona, and departed for Madrid. People arrived from Madrid, and departed for Barcelona. And then, in the first official announcement we’d had all day, the tannoy informed us that the London flight was cancelled.

Unfortunately, it informed us in Galician. We knew something was up, as a third of the queue immediately packed up its bagpipes and ran off down the hall towards the word SALIDA, exit, but we had no idea what: maybe they’d just announced an impromptu folk festival, or found a small pig in a hold-all. So all we could do was watch, with some puzzlement, as, having reached the SALIDA sign, our former fellow captives all turned as one, like a shoal of fish or a wheeling flagellation of starlings, and dashed back the way they’d just come. The reason for this odd behaviour did eventually become clear - the SALIDA sign pointed at a blank wall -  but only once the announcement had been repeated in English; an intermediate Spanish version simply compounded our confusion, as half of our already-reduced numbers duly performed the same mad double-dash, with some of the more prompt Castilian-speakers on the outward leg colliding with some of the more tardy returning Galicians. This just left the Anglophone contingent – I speak a little Spanish, but the Tannoy dialect is beyond me – us, a group of Irish lads, a nice middle-aged couple from Aldershot, and what seemed to be a family of thirty-nine from Liverpool, whom I was determined to keep my distance from, as they’d earlier infuriated me by being lengthily affronted when the check-in girl had told them that what appeared, beneath its bubblewrap and gaffer tape, to be miniature trampoline, didn’t qualify as hand luggage.

Having reclaimed our baggage, we joined the queue at the Ryanair enquiry desk. Here, two – yes, TWO – young women were trying to find alternative flights for the several hundred disgruntled people standing in front of them – a somewhat hopeless task, as Ryanair operate just one flight a day from Santiago, and have no spare planes (it seems pretty obvious the pilot of our plane had made no more attempts to land, but simply flown empty back to Stansted, in order to maintain later schedules). The composition of the queue reflected the linguistic ordering of the cancellation announcement: at the front, much loud and heavily gesticulated debate was taking place in various Iberian dialects, embellished by the odd bagpipe blast when required. At the English-speaking rear, meanwhile, the couple from Aldershot were quietly suggesting we take it in turns to “go and have a listen” to what was happening at the front.

Two hours later, word from the front line was that people were being offered flights four days hence. By then, we’d moved forward barely five yards, and there was clearly no way we’d reach the desk before nightfall. The time had come for action. Behind me, seemingly abandoned, was the small trampoline. I climbed on board, and coughed. “People,” I said, as loudly as I could, “would bold Sir Francis Drake, that red-blooded Englishman, have meekly queued, waiting for some Spaniard to tell him where to go? No, he damn well wooogh…”

Yes, stamping my foot for emphasis was a bad idea, and my impromptu forward-roll dismount scarcely Olympic standard, but no matter: my point had been made, and made well. The great (and bold) Sir Francis Drake wouldn’t have stood for this; he would have taken one look at the queue and then, pausing only to sharpen his beard, organised the despatch of two dozen fire-ships into Dublin harbour, or wherever Ryanair are based. But after that, I like to think, he would have done precisely what we did: catch a train 50 miles south to Vigo, where rumour had it that an Iberian Airlines flight to Gatwick was due to depart in 2 days’ time, and was still looking for passengers. As we pulled out of the station, we gestured triumphantly at the bright, chubby words on the sign beside the autopista: Santiago! they said, you’ll find it hard to leave… 

I feel inclined to clarify something here. Although Santiago de Compostela is, of course, the end-point of one of Europe’s most infamous medieval pilgrimage routes, running 500 miles from the French border, we were just there for the architecture. I’d assumed that all the mad pilgrim nonsense had died out by the Enlightenment, when people got Enlightened, and it was actually a bit of a shock to find the roads lined with knobbly-kneed Catholics brandishing utterly unnecessary designer knobbly staffs, and Santiago full of healthy young Christians in shorts sublimating forbidden sexuality into vigorous mass hugging, or simply stomping around self-righteously with ostentatious rucksacks, getting in everyone’s way. Obviously – what with me being Enlightened an’ all – this isn’t really my area of expertise, but I can’t help feeling that any worthwhile god would be rather more impressed if these folk had spent their summer working in Oxfam, and maybe donating the price of a knobbly staff to charity, rather than going on a hiking holiday. Especially a hiking holiday to glorify a saint nicknamed Matamoros, slayer of Moors. I just feel it’s something we should, you know, play down a bit. The Muslim-killing stuff.

A shame, really, as Santiago is really rather beautiful, full of quiet arcaded squares and towering granite buildings softened with moss and lichen – a cross between Venice without the canals and Oxford without the public schoolboys. It also looks gorgeous in the rain, though I’d happily have settled for not knowing that.

Vigo is good too. The Cadogan says there’s nothing actually there, which there isn’t, other than a slightly scary Old Town which still seems inclined to cater mostly for the needs of frustrated sailors, but I think it knows that, and is all the better for it. Much like Stoke-on-Trent knows it’s not Birmingham or Manchester, so doesn’t bother competing. That said, Vigo has clearly decided to make a go of selling itself, and the Tourist Information Office offers several free guides. The one I have in front of me is divided into three sections: feel the call of history; feel the call of the city; feel the call of nature.

No, it really does say that. I’m not just scoring cheap xenophobic points. I did that earlier.

Vigo also has an excellent bus service. The 9A takes you to the airport.

Increasingly, I’m toying with the idea of writing a semi-autobiographical novel about independent bookshops. I already have a title: “Waaaaaarggghhh.”

A while ago, a new independent bookshop opened here in South London. The last issue of Smoke had been out for a bit, but I thought I should at least introduce myself, smile at them sweetly, flutter my ears (it’s an old party trick) – you know the sort of thing. Then, however, a fellow editor mentioned that said shop had been less than enthusiastic – I can’t remember if he actually used the word “contemptuous” – about stocking his own small publication, and… well, I wibbled. I sucked in my cheeks. I stuck a thermometer between my toes and watched the mercury shrivel. The thing is, you see, I’m really not a salesman; to the extent that I often wonder just how on earth I actually ended up doing this job. But then I remember that I used to wonder that about my previous job too, and so conclude that I must just be really bad at making career choices: is, for instance, selling CDs and T-shirts in a pitch-dark corner of the Birmingham Barrel Organ (it’s a pub, not a… well, barrel organ), and then standing in a deserted car park in Digbeth at 1 a.m. with eight hundred quid in notes stuffed in my pockets, waiting for a car to appear out of the mist and drive to me to Nottingham, really the best use of a degree in physics? Some would say not, and not only out of jealousy. Where was I? Oh yes. Basically, I’m sure it must annoy many bookshop managers when I turn up out of the blue demanding counter-space for something just because it’s damn good, rather than just because HarperCollins have used Rupert Murdoch’s money to secure a place just to the left of the till and a dump bin by the door, but – it’s not much fun for me either.

Not much fun, but these things have to be done. So, spotting the manager alone in the shop one afternoon, I went in, unleashed my spiel, rolled out my pitch, reeled off the names of shops I thought might impress… and waited while she hummed, and hawed, and said no thanks, before – a small glimmer of hope? – adding that, if I wanted, I could e-mail her when the new issue came out. Now: my problem is that, after five years of doing this, I’ve developed a keen eye for small glimmers, a deaf ear for euphemisms, and a strange taste for Sainsbury’s Harvest Crackers, eaten dry. Basically, three of my five senses are shot to hell, and there’s not much I can do about it. And thus I decided to make a spontaneous gesture; we’re all in this together, after all, publishers and booksellers alike; we need each other. Also, I like making gestures at bookshops – I’m adding new ones daily, many involving both hands. So, I gave her 10 copies for free. And one of our plastic stands to put them in. I knew she’d have no trouble selling 10 copies and that that, surely, would convince her to order plenty of the next issue?

So, when the next issue is ready, I go back. The manager is busy with the window display, and her colleague is busy with a nice young couple who aren’t capable of gift-wrapping their own presents. I wait politely, toying with buying a guide book to Spain as we’re off there on holiday and, well, it’s better to give your money to your local independent than to Waterstone’s, isn’t it? But then the manager emerges from the window and I seize my moment.

“You’d better talk to the owner,” she says, indicating the man behind the till.

The owner? This rather throws me. It’s a bit like discovering that Dr No and Goldfinger were actually just doing a 9-5 on behalf of someone else, some Higher Evil. But… the nice young couple have now departed, so I approach the counter. He looks up and smiles; I must have the aura of someone who wants to buy a book.

So quickly I run through my spiel again, culminating in the observation that they’d obviously got rid of the ten free ones I’d left.

“We might have lost them. That’s the trouble, things like that get lost.”

Not ordering things because you think you might lose them seems an odd sort of business plan for a shop, but – I decide not to baffle him with logic. Instead, I try a different approach, listing other shops in South London that successfully sell Smoke.

“Crockatt and Powell…”

“We’re a very different sort of shop…”

“The Clapham Bookshop…”

“We’re a very different sort of shop…”

“Review, the Riverside Bookshop, Crow on the Hill…”

“We’re very different. I’m not saying we’re better, but…”

Basically, he wouldn’t take the new issue. Or return my plastic stand (they cost four quid, you know), because it had somehow gone astray. Oh, maybe he’d just decided he didn’t want Smoke cluttering up his counter – which is fine, it’s his shop, but… he could have phoned to ask me to take them back, and they’d have been gone within the hour. My number was on the stand.

Smoke is offered to shops sale-or-return. No money upfront, no risk. Obviously no shop owner should sell stuff they don’t want to, but… if an independent bookshop isn’t prepared to support independent publishers, and to stock the quirkier, more esoteric items… then I’m not quite sure how exactly they differ from Borders or Waterstone’s, other than by having a smaller stock and a greater contempt for their customers. It’s that rudeness that really gets me. Sometimes, it’s jaw-dropping: the bookshop manager in Clapham (not the Clapham Bookshop, I’d better clarify, who are lovely) who refused to even touch the copy of Smoke I was offering him, but just kept telling me it wouldn’t sell; or the one in Shepherd’s Bush who, again without touching it, told me there were plenty of newsagents in Shepherd’s Bush for that sort of thing; or the one in Victoria who – no, really – walked off while I was in mid-sentence…

I think I’ve probably done. This post is dedicated to all the good independent bookshops of South London. To Crockatt & Powell, Review, Riverside, Clapham, Crow on the Hill and Kirkdale Books, and to the memory of Index in Brixton, Wordsworths in Camberwell, and Tlon in the Elephant & Castle shopping centre, which was repossessed last month. Yup, another one gone; and as I stood peering in through the glass, at the books scattered across the floor beyond the darkened till, and the unsold Smokes on the counter, I couldn’t help feeling that there wasn’t much justice in the world. 

And not just because Marek still owed me £75 for issue#11.

… of course, unless you’re going round and round the Circle Line with a big daft beatific grin on your face, the average tube journey just doesn’t last long enough to get drunk; if someone is drunk on a tube train – or, indeed, is going round and round the Circle Line with a big daft beatific grin on their face – it’ll be because they were drinking before they got on. Banning alcohol on public transport will simply mean that people stop and drain the can that was meant to last them all the way back home to Ealing Broadway before flashing their Oyster, rather than after; and then, somewhere near East Acton, when the effects of necking 500ml of lukewarm Fosters Export in 30 seconds start to kick in, and fellow passengers begin to politely object to having their shoes doused in lagery vomit while the vomiter, now emboldened, is thinking what-the-hell, and popping open another, things will get a bit tasty, and some poor LU bluejacket will have to step in. Or, more likely, just hold the train in the station to wait for the cops. But, given the only other thing Boris has done so far is decree that Rise, Europe’s biggest anti-racism festival, should drop all the anti-racist stuff in case people get the wrong idea (Pride will also now be rebranded as a celebration of the freedom to wear sensible shirts and trousers so as not to make people feel uncomfortable), we should probably just count our blessings. At least there’s no sign yet of that most invidious of manifesto promises (I use the word “manifesto” loosely) – the reintroduction of the Routemaster bus.

I was reminded of this on Saturday lunchtime when, crawling up the Mile End Road – on a slow-moving Number 25, I hasten to add, I wasn’t making my way back to Stepney Green station on my hands and knees after being told by the man at the ticket barrier that I wouldn’t be allowed on the District Line with the two bottles of Chilean merlot I’d just bought at Cambridge Heath Road Sainsbury’s (on the grounds that a screw top counts as an open vessel) – we were passed by a scarlet procession of antique open-platform buses. Each bus was laden with middle-aged men, and each middle-aged man was laden with a camera and an expression that middle-aged men generally only possess when unexpectedly confronted by an underdressed au pair on the landing, or perhaps a bowl of treacle pudding and custard on the hostess trolley – or, indeed, any permutation of these things. 

Back home that evening, I did a bit of research, mostly involving googling the words “antique” and “buses” – and then, just for completeness, the words “au pair” and “custard” – but failed to turn up anything that I’m prepared to discuss here. I can only suppose it was one of those events aimed at people whose way of coping with modernity is to curl up with a copy of the Ian Allen 2008 Handcart Handbook - in which the very barrow we’re all going to hell in has been neatly ringed in green biro.

Unfair? I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong but, wistful middle-aged men aside, I can’t help feeling that Routemasters – cramped, uncomfortable, unable to deal with any item of shopping larger than a small tub of yoghurt – are mourned mostly by people who’ve never actually used one, but who’d still like to see others using them. People who’d employ the word iconic and not expect anyone who didn’t have the contents of a hastily downed can of lukewarm Fosters Export in their stomach to vomit over their shoes when they did so. Not, in short, people who’ve ever waited in the rain on Kennington Road as 159 after 159, each replete with its full complement of five yes FIVE standing passengers – and a grim-faced conductor standing arms-folded at his pole like a particularly grumpy exotic dancer who’s still sulking that all the nurse and policewoman uniforms had been taken – splashed by. Or who’ve ever floundered like a nervous toddler in an overfilled IKEA ball pit in order to secure exit over the laps, shoulders and bags of fellow passengers. Or who’ve ever ended up bruised on the pavement after some idiot exercised his or her right to step randomly from the back platform in front of any passing bikes. Though they almost certainly are the people who complain about old-style classic caffs closing, adamant that if they didn’t write letters to Time Out demanding that some poor sod should work 16 hours a day just so that they can occasionally slum it picturesquely and buy a mug of tea for 50p, then a valuable part of London’s classic social heritage – slums, rickets, low life expectancy – will be lost.

No, sorry, but in the bendy vs Routemaster argument, the only real problems with the bendies are that (a) they take up too much space, (b) the views are rubbish, (c) selfish people ride them for free (which was actually pretty easy on a Routemaster too, especially if it was busy and you kept your head down) and (d) the whole spontaneous combustion thing.

But, then, the whole spontaneous combustion thing has always been a bugger, as my Uncle Eric once commented, sadly eyeing the wisps of smoke that were starting to rise from his hips.