London is quiet for a moment. I love this stillness. No sirens. No helicopters. No cars. No drunks. No buses. No lorries. No foxes. No aircon.
The fridge hum is all I hear. It can’t last. It won’t last. And as I type, I summon the sirens, the cars, the buses and the rest will surely come. For a moment though, beautiful, calm stillness. In my beautiful, beloved London.
No news breaking and entering into my serenity. No TV. No radio. No mobile phone. No email. No IM. A moment that I didn’t know I ached for until it came and as surely as a mayfly must die, the moment must pass.
I have just watched “Last Orders”. Sometimes, reason must be abandoned. Reason told me to go to bed so I can go to work rested tomorrow. I flicked on the TV for some post-closing-time company and it was on. A quiet London pub in the morning with Bob Hoskins and some company. An old clock on the wall with roman numerals and hands with adornments. I wanted to know why his character was having a quiet pint in the morning.
I watched it till the end. I had to. Every time I see a flashback to a London I grew up in, I ache. Every time I see the camraderie of older Londoners portrayed so candidly I see my father with his mates. White, black, oriental, Greek, Italian, integration patron, that was my father.
That’s why I love The Avengers because you get to see an old British car driving through empty London streets in the middle of the day, with almost no parked cars and absolutely no yellow lines. And certainly no cameras….
Caine’s character was dying in hospital, joking with the nurses, visited by old friends. That was my father. Of course I felt sentimental. Not just for my dad though.
That ache for a time and a place and land that can never be the same, but was promised to me, that was handed down to me and then snatched away, stolen, mugged and discarded. Chatham and the war memorial and I am not Anglo-Saxon but that was the war I was raised with. Canterbury Cathedral, I am a Muslim, but all those in caskets I saw as a child and that was my heritage too, because nobody told me it wasn’t and yes, I was there as a child.
And Margate. Dreamland. The sandy beach. I went to Dreamland with my friend Albert when we were what, 13? We had a fiver each and we spent it in Dreamland. Do you even know what Dreamland was? I hope some of my older readers will remember. Oh but you see, it was not pretentiously named. With its Space Invader machines, slot machines and rides and stalls, it was a dream land to me.
I wanted to take my kids there back in 2004. I looked online by chance and found to my anguish that it had been closed down. I had always wanted to take my kids there. It was my heritage. It was my pocket watch to pass down the generations and it was taken from me.
Like the freedom to go about unmolested. To drive without getting photographed a thousand times an hour by humanity-free machines that issue fines through humanity-free computers that pass on orders to humanity-free bailiffs who will soon be able to break your door down and take everything you ever owned because you drove a car in your home town.
The freedom to protest. To assemble. To hold up slogans. To be free. To talk freely. To breathe freely. But to breathe freely, with others, is literally, to “conspire” and so anybody who discusses any idea with anyone else, like I used to as a growing teen, is a conspiracist and what worse thing to be called than a “conspiracist” or even “conspiraloon” by a bunch of evil bastards masquerading as freedom-fighters who are actually litigators and stalkers and liars and worse. Except maybe, to be called Muslim.
It didn’t matter before. To be Muslim. When I was a kid, my dad took us to Bourton-on-the-water to see the model village in the model village in the model village and it was our country, our place, our heritage. I took my kids and everybody looked at us like we were vermin.
London in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, hell, even some of the 80s before it all turned to shit. I love my kids, I love my wife, but London is the longest love of my life. The air was different then. The buses were certainly different. And of course, the air on buses was different too, there was cigarette smoke for starters. In a few weeks, I won’t be able to enjoy the pleasure of a cigar anywhere except my own home.
I can’t say everything I want to say on this blog, or anywhere else, certainly not TV, or I will be mistaken for a terrorist-sympathiser, or one step away from that. As I have been, by people much closer to me than I ever thought possible. In days gone by, I might have been called a Jew. Or a Communist. The enemy changes. The fascism remains the same.
My dad played pool with Peter O’Toole. I would have loved to have seen that in a smoke-filled pub. He handed down my hard-won integration. He worked so hard at that. Me and my sister chucked soil over into our neighbours’ garden by accident when we were digging up tulips one day, not knowing that the bulbs were meant to stay in the ground because they’d grow again the next year. My dad came back and went ballisitc. In the dead of night he went into their garden and cleared it up. We watched him sweeping. I’ve always found the feeling of wanting to cry worse than crying. Yet I rarely cry. It’s like nausea. Nausea is worse than vomiting. And the nausea of sorrow before tears is the worst ache. I ached that night.
I don’t let my kids throw anything on the streets. I don’t put my feet up on seats - no matter that every other scumbag does nowadays. Of all colours. That was the integration my dad taught me. What’s yours? Is that part of being Muslim? Naah. It’s part of how I grew up. Those were the values I was taught. Are these values Muslim values? God yeah. So who is integrated? Respect for your neighbours, that’s what my dad taught me. They repaid us by beating us up, throwing shit on our door, smashing our door down, smashing our car, beating up our guests and knowing that they’d get away with it, because by then, my dad had been divorced. We never retaliated. Our revenge was me, 9 years later confronting the mob and by some miracle, making them stop for good. So who is integrated? And whose values are better?
That’s what we were taught. Respect. That’s what we feel is right. Justice.
Now our politicans are more bent than ever. Now, our fathers are discarded by evil women who know the state has emasculated just about every man, the media has emasculated just about every man to the point where manhood is not even a desirable quality. Can you say “metrosexual?”
Do you know what unrequited love for your city, your country, your past, your heritage stolen is like? It is a nausea of the soul. It is tears welling up not in your eyes, not in your heart, but at the top of your lungs, where you take your very first breath in this world. Your life’s first breath halted, constricted, pushed back, suppressed and held forever.
I felt great happiness walking back home from the bus stop this evening. I tried not to let the Ethno-Purebred-English girl with her feet up on the seat of my favourite bus, the beautiful, fast, useful 52 upset me. I succeeded. I comforted myself with the fact that my parents were better than hers.
I was recenty on another bus, a 98, where the Ethno-Purebred-English-Grammar-School-If-They-Still-Existed-Blonde mother with her Aryan son of about 8 was babbling into her mobile for almost the whole journey while the boy had his trainers up on the glass, leaving marks. She briefly interrupted her conversations to talk to her son about an unrelated matter. Not once did it occur to her to tell her son that what he was doing was wrong.
I comforted myself with the fact that despite my parents being immigrant pakis, they raised us better than that and we are better than that and we respect this country and its institutions and its services and the social space better than these selfish, fraudulent inheritors.
When I was a kid, the whole bus would have stopped him. Well, someone would have. Usually the mum, with a slap. Now the little bastard would be calling the misandrynist family destroyers of the NSPCC (multi-million pound ad campaigns to demonise innocent fathers, but nobody on their emergency lines what does that tell you huh) double-quick if someone so much as said boo.
So I felt that wrench in the place where my first breath came when I watched “Last Orders”. Because while I loved every character and their beautiful stories, I couldn’t help, but to compare that to what has been taken from us now and the hell in which we now live and to wonder when Last Orders were served on the land of my birth.
I love you London.
