When a pelican becomes a lemon.

The Pelican pub on All Saints Road has always been a bit of a lemon. Tucked away behind Portobello Road it managed to avoid attracting too many customers. It has had a history punctuated by misfortune; if it wasn't burning down it was being subjected to drug raids or being thieved from. It closed down a few weeks ago after an attempt to turn it into some sort of ersatz country gastro pub type thing failed.

The place has now reopened with a new name: 'THE RED LEMON'. Judging from the menu posted outside the place considers itself to be some kind gastro pub. We shall see.

This part of London has a strange relationship with its pubs, most of which have closed now. The public house was historically the refuge of what was once called the working class.  RBKC and the developers are systematically displacing the indigenous population in favour of wealthy incomers who will most certainly not be frequenting boozers, preferring the likes of the Electric or E&O which begs the question: Who is the Red Lemon aimed at?

Beer prices in pubs are now ridiculous, in the recently refurbished KPH on Ladbroke Grove, a pint is £5 making a trip to the pub a luxury for most ordinary people, leaving a small nucleus of dysfunctional barflies to prop up both the bars and the finances of what few pubs are left.

UPDATE: I wandered int the red lemon for a beer this evening at 7.45 and suddenly found myself in a local pub, you know, how pubs used to be, people talking to each other. How cool is that!

The beer is not overpriced, it is 80 pence cheaper than Vince Power at the KPH. The place has been painted out cooly in a way that has not been decided by the owners flowery wife and hooray, the emphasis is on it being a pub.

I haven't tried the food yet but will report on that when I have. It seems to be a great deal more inexpensive than the usual run of the mill places.


The new owner is a gutsy woman, Ali, who is determined to make it work and if she has the desire to stand behind the bar for a while and make it her own she may well succeed in giving the pelican wings… Or the lemon zest.

Harp in Moscow

Moscow tonight.

Cherished objects: Harp and tree.

Westway Development Trust getting into bed with Waitrose in order to promote the gentrification of Portobello.

Sickening news if true.

I learn today from a reliable source within RBKC that Westway Development Trust (WDT) have decided to let Waitrose open a store in the vacant bays adjacent to Portobello road currently occupied by the Pop up Cinema, the food market and the live music bar, collectively know as Acklam Village.

Crass nomenclature aside, the present occupiers of the site suit Portobello very well and the Pop up Cinema is an asset to be cherished, it is unique. The Music bar is great too; laid back, child friendly, slightly hippy and unpretentious.

If Waitrose do go in there it demonstrates that neither WDT nor RBKC have any interest in the needs of the market nor the local community who they claim to serve but every interest in the needs of their own greed and the needs of a gentrified Portobello which appears to be RBKC's ultimate aim!

If Waitrose go in there the hordes of bankers wive's chelsea tractors parked and double parked on the nearby roads will only exacerbate the already chaotic situation.

RBKC and WDT listen up. The wealthy incomers contribute nothing to the community apart from mayhem from their basement bunker building, traffic nightmares from their idiot 'look at rich me' cars and mayhem on the pavements outside their snotty schools for their doomed kids.  The last thing they need is more encouragement to venture into the last unspoilt part of Portobello.

Sort your shit out guys!

LOCO is back!

Brown rice and Joy. A vegetarian fairy tale.

Joy lived with her mum on the edge of the village. Joy was 13 and had a faint memory of a father who disappeared years before leaving her and her mum with a little cottage and a field of pigs.

Joy's mum tried to make a living as a pig farmer but it was difficult, most of the other villagers were vegetarians and didn't like pork and whenever her mum tried growing vegetables in the field the pigs ate them. Times were hard.

One day Joy's mum gave her the last of their money and asked her to go to the market to buy vegetables so that they could invite some neighbours round for supper.

On her way to the market Joy met a man leading a cow. The man with the cow asked her where she was going and when she informed him of her errand he said: 'Look no further young lady, I have just the thing for you.'

Come off it said Joy. If you think I am going to buy a few beans from you you are mistaken! The man with the cow explained that he had just traded his last few magic beans for the cow with a young lad called Jack but that he had the answer to all her problems.

He pulled from a sack a cage, in the cage was a small brown mouse.

I could spend an age describing the haggling that took place but you've heard it all before… Joy walked home with the mouse who she decided to name Regret.

Joy's mum was, of course, mightily pissed off and sent the girl to bed without supper… No hardship to Joy who was fed up with her daily intake of pork products.

The following morning Joy rose early and went down to her chores. she was surprised to find that all the pig scraps lying around the kitchen had been cleared up and that there was a pile of brown rice on the table. She scooped the rice into a bowl before going out to feed the pigs. The mouse slept in his cage in the corner.

When Joys mum arose she showed her the rice and declared that there was enough for a proper banquet for all their vegetarian friends.

The banquet of course was a success, a mound of steaming brown rice infused with herbs from the hedgerows and vegetables borrowed from neighbouring gardens had all of the guests singing its praises. The brown rice had a flavour previously unknown to them. It was magnificent. It was heaven.

By the end of the evening each of the guests has put in an order for brown rice which Joy's mum accepted while secretly wondering where it was going to come from. She need not have worried for the following morning there was a mound of brown rice waiting on the table.

Over the following weeks Joy and her mum discovered that the more pork they left in the kitchen the more brown rice appeared on the table the following day.

They made a lot of money from selling that brown rice to the village vegetarians and lived happily ever after apart from one small glitch when the inspector from the ministry of food tested the rice and declared it 98 percent pork and 2 percent mouse spit but by then it was too late, the village rabbi had already koshered it as fit for vegetarians.

And the mouse… Joy changed it's name from Regret to Regretta who lived long, fondly watching over her burgeoning family shitting on the kitchen table as it grew fat on pork products.

The eyes of Jarvis Trench.

I called at the house to view the motor bike. It was a 1967 Triumph Tiger Cub. I had owned a similar bike in my teens and fancied that it would make a project for the winter.
I was early. Mrs Trench answered the door in a flustered state but ushered me inside and led me to the living room. “You will have to excuse me,” she said. “You are early and it is time for my therapy but it won’t take long. Can I get you a cup of tea?”

The filth that surrounded her encouraged me to decline the offer. “No thank you,” I said.

She offered me a chair. I sat and looked about the room. It was littered with orange coloured objects I first took for balloons. I soon realised they were football bladders. There were perhaps 20 of them; each one sported a number of puncture repair patches. The patches on each bladder occupied positions on the same latitude. If they had been globes I would have estimated that they were on a line occupied by Stockholm. The patches circled the bladders. There were a number of deflated footballs, the old fashioned ‘lace up’ variety, and two or three repair kits. A professional-looking pump stood beside the chair she sat down in.

“Won’t take long,” she repeated as she took up one of the footballs and a bladder. There was an image painted on the ball but I was unable to make it out. She slowly and carefully fed the bladder into the ball, took the nozzle of the pump and inserted it into the bladder. With her right hand she worked the pump while steadying the ball with her left and her knees. As the ball inflated I saw that the leather was painted with a likeness of a man. He had bright blue eyes. She looked at me as the ball became tight and said, “I used to do the lacing once but don’t feel the need anymore.”

Gripping the ball between her thighs she took up two long needles then carefully and simultaneously forced a spike into each pupil.

As the needles entered she intoned the words: What are you looking at now, Jarvis Trench?

She then removed the weapons and laid the sighing ball on the floor beside the chair.

“The motorbike,” she said as she rose and I followed suit. “It is in the shed, it is not locked. Why don’t you go and take a look? It ain’t been used much. My husband only rode it to and from his camera club and he ain’t done that since the day he left his darkroom unlocked.”

Anti-Theft lunch bags.

What a good idea. don't know where they come from though.

Ode to a Nightingale.

Ode To A Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,---
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain---
To thy high requiem become a sod

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep? 

John Keats

Pouting lessons and Putin.

Rusty sent me an email from Lizard Bend. Idaho:

Hi y'all. Me and Babs have started little Morgan in a drama class, the first lesson was in pouting skills and nothing gets a little one pouting faster than sucking on a lemon.

Babs says he looks like Napoleon but I rekkin he looks more like Putin considering the gay situation!

Either way it's the same but different.

Roger Pomphrey. A celebration. Rest in peace.

Sadly, director and musician Roger Pomphrey has died.  He was far too young.

Every community is a family and every community, like every family, has its pillars. Roger was one such human being.

Known by practically everyone in this neighbourhood, liked by just about everyone, loved by many, respected by far more, Roger was truly a local character of note.

He had no time for authority, rules or any of that shit… He had a great deal of time for people (except the fools he did not tolerate) all of whom will miss him.

Roger and his guitar will be missed in every pub, bar and club in the neighbourhood for his blistering blues which was always full of passion and volume. He was an inspiration to a lot of us and was always happy to strap on his guitar and join in with extreme gusto.

Roger spoke his mind and took no prisoners… I once made a stupid mistake in a review which he pointed out. It was then forgotten, but I didn't make that kind of mistake again.

When I, perhaps misguidedly, decided I needed a guitar solo in a poem, Roger happily stepped up and made me feel a whole lot happier about what was a very dodgy enterprise (excuse the pun). He must have enjoyed it because he repeated the process a number of times.

Everyone who speaks of Roger has their own special story and I think that pretty much sums Roger up… He had time!

Kevin allen posted the following today:

 Roger the Dodger was such a distinctive man; a generous, sensitive soul. He was a loving, doting father and will be dearly missed by Tom and Caroline, along with his Brizzle family, of which he was so proud. He was a terrific, intuitive filmmaker with a great eye, recently shooting 2nd unit on a film I couldn’t have completed without his fantastic contribution and companionship. He was also an outrageously good musician. He was a passionate cook and loved good wine, sometimes turning into a lesser freckled cowboy-booted curly crested cormorant, with a hint of Bristolian turrets syndrome after only a few glasses. He was a credit to his local and his wider locale, contributing so much in opposition to the greedy, systematic gentrification of the Portobello Rd we cherished. He will be remembered as a much-loved son of that community and he’ll be sorely missed in the Tabernacle at Christmas time. 

How sad it is that he didn't have as much time as we would all wish.

Roger will, indeed be sorely missed.

ROGER POMPHREY'S funeral will be held at 10.30 am - Friday 7th Feb - West London Crematorium - Kensal Green, Harrow Rd, London W10 4RA. 

Noel Maclaughlin's Full obituary, without the Guardian's hack job, can be found HERE

Uncle Reg. He died for Valerie and golf.

Uncle Reg smoked 90 fags a day but they never killed him. Valerie did that!

Uncle Reg was in His Majesties Indian Army and took one for the regiment up the Khyber Pass. He liked to say that he took the bullet for King and country but wags in the mess often suggested merrily that, since he took it up the Khyber, he more than likely took it for queen and country.

Reg came back to England something of a hero and a few months later they gave him a medal and the medal had 'FOR VALOUR' engraved upon it.

Reg was an humble man and wanted no attention so he stuffed the medal in his kit-bag and forgot about it.

On being demobbed Reg went back to his dyslexic wife Sylvia in Streatham where he took up golf as a hobby.

The day that Sylvia cleared out his kit bag she confronted Reg in the kitchen as he was oiling his clubs.

"You've been carrying on with a woman called Valerie she insisted throwing the medal in his face before killing him with a single blow to the head with a sand wedge.

When asked by the Judge at her trial if she had any regrets, she replied: 'Yes! I now realise I should have used a number 3 wood rather than a sand wedge and that Dyslexia can be life threatening!'