Tonight:
5°c
Unless there is a waiting list for the job - and I suspect there might be - when I am old in I shall harangue the stationary traffic at the tricky junction at the bottom of Putney Hill. When I lived in the area, some years back, an elderly lady used to do this on a routine basis and it was pretty obvious that a captive audience and a daily release of invective put a spring in her step.
I'd rather be a Jenny Joseph old girl - though not in purple - than a dull Prufrock with rolled trousers. Our city is full of magnificent Joseph eccentrics, all of whom live long and productive lives.
My favourite is the grizzled black man who carries a wooden cross over his shoulder symbolising - I assume - the sins of mankind (I'm only guessing because he doesn't inflict his beliefs on anyone, he just quietly and stoically bears his burden). The cross at least is hinged, so he can get on the bus or Tube at the end of his working day without provoking ungodly rage in others.
I hadn't seen him for ages and worried that ill health might be keeping him indoors until I spotted him from the top of a bus on Kensington High Street the other day; he was looking older and yet more grizzled but still purposeful. It's good to see him back; if ever an area needed the burden of its sins carrying, it's Kensington.
Then there's Matilda - or so I think of her. When I first came across the old girl at a bus stop in west London some years back she looked as if she'd just stepped out of a farm kitchen and still had flour on her hands, with a scrubbed pink complexion and pure white hair in a neat neck bun. I helped her load her eight carrier bags onto the bus and I'll swear they were full of lead.
Nowadays she pitches up at Hammersmith Bus Station with mad hair and neat hospital bandages on tortured feet. The bags are fewer; she writes in a dog-eared notebook in tiny print and rages at the "bloody noise" of Vivaldi on the station network. I think she is not well.
The best known London eccentric of all was Stanley Green, who patrolled the Oxford Street area with a small blackboard on a pole over his shoulder extolling the virtue of abstinence: "Less passion from less protein: MEAT, FISH, BIRD: EGG, CHEESE; PEAS (inc lentils); BEANS; NUTS AND SITTING" - the punctuation was all his own work. To add weight to his written philosophy he intoned the message sonorously. I doubt he was married but if he was, I'll bet he had to do his own cooking.
Sadly, Stanley died a few years back; eccentrics are a diminishing band. I'm not yet quite old enough to be a member of this distinguished group but it's never too soon to get into training. I can do the swearing at the traffic bit already - it's just finding a plausible philosophy to go with it that's going to take time ...
WILD ABOUT YOUR GARDEN, WEDNESDAYS, BBC1, 8.30pm
It's a bit Ground Force but if anyone can get people to turn their gardens into wildlife havens, it'll be blonde stunna Ellie Harrison.
Reader views (1)
The cross-carrying gent lived on the Peabody Estate in North Ken and may be part of a family profession. I remember that grizzled black man as a child some 45 years ago. It's hard to believe it is the same person.
- Les, Scottsdale AZ, 04/12/2008 09:44
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