by Alexei Sayle
‘SHOP TO LET, ENQUIRE AT SHOP NEXT DOOR’
I’m actually something of a connoisseur of closed-down or closing-down restaurants, because you know it’s somebody’s dream, isn’t it? I’ve noticed that when a failing café is completely empty, a waiter will always go and stand in the doorway looking up and down the street with an incredibly mournful expression on his face. I reckon if you want to get the punters flocking into your eatery, then stationing a manic depressive in the entrance isn’t the right way to go about it.
And, finally, when the place does inevitably go under and they put a handwritten notice in the window saying something like: ‘Restaurant closed for redecoration/refurbishment – grand reopening in three weeks’, the notice will still be there, yellow and withered with age, several years later.
I don’t know why these owners put up the little notice. Is it some pathetic piece of self-delusion or is it, as seems more likely, a feeble attempt to put off all their creditors for a couple more weeks? Either way, nobody pays any attention to the sign. Unlike two rather effective little handwritten signs round the corner from my house. In the Gray’s Inn Road there is a stationery shop that has gone bust. In the window is a notice written in felt-tip pen on an old envelope saying: ‘Shop to Let – Enquire at Shop Next Door’. The shop next door is a halal grocer’s, which has also gone out of business. In its window is another note in felt-tip saying: ‘Shop to Let, Enquire at Shop Next Door’ and an arrow that points straight back to the empty stationer’s. Several times I have seen potential lessees stuck like wasps against a window, buzzing backwards and forwards from one sign to another.
Now my imaginary sandwich bar is in the Gray’s Inn Road and shares a building with Channel 4 News and ITN News. I’ve noticed that whenever these news programmes do vox pops – you know, going out onto the streets and asking the public their opinions on pressing matters of the day – they only ever go up the road a bit ’cos I always recognise where there are. In fact I’m often in the back of the shot making wanker gestures. But they’re powerful, these vox pops, because even though it’s only a few random people, there’s a sense that they somehow represent the wider public. I’m not the only one to remark on this. So a few years ago I noticed these shops opening in the Gray’s Inn Road with names like Taliban Shoe Repairs and some very keen prices. And then I’d see these vox pops on Channel 4 News and people would say things like, ‘Well, I profoundly disagree with the Taliban’s medieval and repressive version of Islam but they did replace the soles and heels on my black brogues for a very reasonable £6.95 . . . so, you know, swings and roundabouts, really.’
Or, ‘Well, I went to Vladimir Putin’s Oak Furniture Land and though he is clearly running a foul kleptocracy that falsely imprisons and murders its critics, there is no veneer used in any of his products, so he can’t be all bad.’
You know, people say to us comedians, ‘You’ll mock evangelical Christianity and you’ll take the piss out of Zionism, but you’ll never ever really criticise fundamentalist Islam. . .’ Of course not! Those people are bleeding crazy! It’s a very overrated virtue, bravery.
CUT-PRICE DUDE
I met my wife Linda just before I left Liverpool to go to art school in London. After we’d been going out for a few months I felt I had to tell Linda about my career as a drug dealer. At the age of sixteen, still at school and obsessed with the idea of forging myself some kind of hipster identity, I’d noticed in the pubs, coffee bars and drinking clubs where I spent my evenings that the person with the coolest aura seemed to be the guy selling the dope. He would suddenly appear, then glide about as if on wheels, speaking to his clients in intimate whispers, with all the time hanging over him this romantic, lawless, outsider mystique, and everybody always seemed really pleased to see him.
I was not alone in thinking that drug dealers were the epitome of all that was trendy and hip in the late 1960s. In the film Easy Rider the two heroes, role models for a generation, make the money for their doomed motorcycle trip to Mardi Gras from a massive cocaine score. The drugs are hidden in the Stars and Stripes petrol tank of Peter Fonda’s bike. This was not seen as a bad thing. Indeed, the influence of this, outlaw drug movie was so far-reaching that the children’s bicycle, the Raleigh Chopper, with its enormous chromed handlebars, tiny front wheel and two kilograms of white powder hidden in the frame was clearly based on the Harley-Davidson motorcycles ridden by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the film.
I really wanted to gain some of the allure of the drug dealer for myself. My feeling was that I had the clothes and the long hair but the only thing that I didn’t have was the cheap drugs. From watching movies such as Easy Rider and The French Connection I understood that one important – indeed crucial – aspect of being a drug peddler was that you had to have access to reasonably priced narcotics. You got these narcotics from a connection further up the chain, who sold you your product at wholesale prices, and you made a profit from the difference between the price paid by the dealer and what you charged your clients. It was simple Marxist economics, really. My only problem was that I didn’t have this connection with a wholesaler, didn’t know how to go about getting one and in fact, didn’t want to, since I suspected that people further up the chain might be very frightening indeed.
Then it struck me that if I didn’t care about making a profit or indeed if I didn’t mind sustaining a small loss, then I would be able to sell marijuana or acid at the same price, or maybe even cheaper, than anybody else on the scene. So what I did was, I would buy drugs at the ordinary street price, usually from some guy up the coast in Southport that my friends back in Liverpool knew nothing about, then I’d sell these drugs to people in Liverpool, in the Maoist group I was a member of, or to friends from school, at a price about 15 per cent less than I had paid. I didn’t think that Karl Marx in any of his works, not even his Grundrisse of 1858, whose subject matter included production, distribution, exchange, alienation, surplus value, labour, capitalism, the rise of technology and automation, pre-capitalist forms of social organisation, and the preconditions for a Communist revolution, covered my particular form of capitalist exploitation, which contradicted every known form of Marxist thought, since the retailer – me – was in effect extracting surplus value from himself. Nevertheless, when customers asked me how I got my drugs so cheap, I’d just look all mysterious and say, ‘Hey, I’m like connected with The Man. Know what I mean, dude?’ And they’d nod and say, ‘Yeah, I understand, man . . . cool.’
When I told Linda about my cut-price drug dealing, expecting her to be impressed and maybe even a bit horrified at my lawlessness, she said it was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. I replied, ‘Yeah, sad if you like having lots of great friends who cost you less than three pounds a week.’ But over time I began to suspect that she might have been right.
WHO DARES WINS A COCONUT
Karl Marx wrote, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’ And though much of what Marx predicted hasn’t come to pass, there was still a lot of wisdom in his work. For example, he wrote in the essay ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, then an hour later it’s repeated on ITV4+1 starring a very young-looking Lewis Collins.’
GOLLUM’S GRANDAD
Newspapers used to have an enormous amount of power to form opinion, didn’t they? Particularly columnists. As somebody who doesn’t believe almost anything said by anybody about anything, I used to have an inordinate amount of respect for columns and columnists. The journalists who write them always seem to speak with such certainty. One columnist would thunder, ‘Being left wing gives you cancer!’ and I would think, Oh yeah, that’s right, I think it does. Then another would say, ‘Being right wing gives you cancer!’ and I would believe them completely. Then I noticed after a while that it was the same columnist who was saying both things! A few months apart! And I realised they were just pretending to have al
l these opinions because they have to knock out three columns a week. They are completely insincere; it is all just a pretence.
I was also strongly influenced by critics, particularly those who wrote such things as, ‘This film marks a stonking return to form by Woody Allen.’ Which is why I’ve seen so many shit Woody Allen films. ‘Oh like, this one, oh right this one, is about a seventeen- year-old girl who falls for, like, a ninety-year-old man who looks like Gollum’s grandad. But this one, it’s set in Rome.’
Then I thought to myself, Boris Johnson was a columnist, wasn’t he? For years he was a columnist on the Telegraph while Michael Gove was one for The Times and Michael Gove’s wife was too and they are just people for whom words mean nothing. They change their opinions at the drop of a hat and they never admit that they once pretended to believe the exact opposite of what they’re pretending to believe in right now.
Yet somehow they get away with it. When Boris Johnson was editor of the Spectator, his office was in my street and sometimes he used to stop and chat to me, and Boris exuded such upper-class charm, he had such a smooth manner that even I used to come over all proletarian in his presence. I used to start speaking in a weird overawed voice saying, ‘Ooh Mr Johnson, ooh yer hair, ooh yer beautiful golden hair, oooh insult me in French, Mr Johnson. Say something in Greek, Mr Johnson. Something profound in Greek that you learnt at Oxford, Mr Johnson. . .’ And I began to develop this fantasy about me and Boris. I began to fantasise that we were soldiers together in the First World War. I was a humble squaddie, a simple private but with a nice tanned muscular body and I think a kind of ambiguous sexuality. And Boris would be an officer, I think he’d be a good officer; he’d make sure his men had decent boots and reasonable food and he’d make sure that all the poets had fresh pencils.
So it’s late 1917, dawn, just before the big push in my fantasy. We’re in the trench all lined up and Boris is in the front and we’re all behind him and then a flare goes up and explodes in the sky – ‘Poof!’ – turning night into day and Boris blows a whistle and we go up the ladders and over the top and Boris is leading and we’re following, then the German machine guns open up and the bullets are zipping past us, but Boris is leading we’re following, even though our comrades are falling to left and right then the whizz-bangs start exploding in the sky and the shrapnel is ripping the flesh of our fellow soldiers but Boris is leading and we’re following, then the heavy artillery starts coming down and there’s great gouts of mud and flesh and bone but Boris is leading and we’re following and then we get to the barbed wire and at the first opportunity I shoot him in the back and I try and defect to the Soviet Union!
Chapter Three
PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, MID-THIRTIES
When you are doing publicity for a book or a radio series, one of your tasks is to answer questionnaires in newspapers and magazines. These have names such as ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Five Minutes With. . .’ or ‘My London’ and the answers are often given over the phone. Over the years I have, perhaps mistakenly, tried to be funny in these questionnaires. This is from the Telegraph a few years ago:
Question: Which of your possessions would you be unable to live without?
To which I’ve replied: My kidney dialysis machine.
Then question: How would you describe yourself in a Lonely Hearts column?
And I’ve said: Professional woman, mid-thirties, interested in being taken to all-you-can-eat buffets in the West Midlands area.
Question: Do you believe people can achieve anything if they set their minds to it?
Answer: No, you can’t even get somebody to take you to an all-you-can-eat buffet in the West Midlands area, no matter how hard you try.
Question: What's the best way to mend a broken heart?
Answer: Taking a nice, slightly hairy professional woman to an all-you-can-eat buffet in the West Midlands area.
There was one of those questionnaires I did for the London Evening Standard and I was asked: How do you escape?
And again trying to be funny I replied: I knot some sheets together and I climb out the window.
However, when the piece was printed they’d changed the question to: How do you chill out?
One of the standard enquiries they make around Christmas time is: What is your New Year’s resolution? I always reply: United Nations Resolution 242, the one that calls for a homeland for the Palestinian people. I sense the poor intern on the other end of the line rolling their eyes as I say this.
There is a story I heard about the British ambassador in Washington in the 1980s. On Christmas Eve he was rung by a TV station and asked what he’d like for Christmas. Worried about bribery and corruption and accepting gifts from a foreign TV network, he replied, ‘Ooh, um, er. . . just a small box of chocolates.’ On Christmas Day the ambassador was watching the news and at the end of the main TV bulletin the newsreader said, ‘And finally we asked the ambassadors of several countries what they wanted for Christmas. The French ambassador said world peace, the Soviet ambassador said an end to hunger and the British ambassador said a small box of chocolates. . .’
But making a New Year’s resolution is something I have intermittently tried to do. The resolution I have adhered to the most over the decades since I made it in the 1990s is to wave at more people. I am a big fan of waving. I was first introduced to waving by my father. As a child waiting on a railway platform with my dad I’d be urged to wave at the train guard of any express or freight train that went past. The first hint of the complexities of adult nature came to me when I suddenly realised that Joe, my father, was a train guard himself! Then I wondered if all train guards didn’t have a pact to encourage their sons and daughters to salute them, perhaps as a part of their ongoing war with train drivers, who they thought were very up themselves.
Nonetheless to this day I remain very keen on waving. I still salute passing trains but also passengers on river boats, racing cyclists, police officers on horses (but not ordinary police officers) and airline pilots waiting on the stand to start their engines.
Over the years I have done a lot of motoring journalism and one summer I was testing a new car with a long drive down to the South of France. As we passed through a small Pyrenean village there was a man standing on a corner and the driver in front of us, presumably a local, tooted his horn at this man who waved back enthusiastically, so I did the same and again the man waved back with vigour, a big smile on his face, then as we neared I saw a look of confusion cross his countenance. I think about this man often. I wonder if he remains unsettled by the fact that he knows somebody who drives a 2006 Kia Magentis on UK plates but he’s never found out who they are and this makes the world feel a much more frightening and insecure place.
One vehicle I’ve found out it is a bad idea to salute is that sinister black-windowed van that ships prisoners to and from the law courts. You’d think the people in the back of those things would be glad of a friendly wave as they begin a long sentence, but some of them turn out to be very bad-tempered individuals indeed, with surprisingly loud voices, enabling their disturbing obscenities and violent threats to be heard clearly through the walls of the van.
MY GIRLFRIEND
(Just to give you a warning, this section may contain words that try and replicate the sounds of flash photography.) Susan Sarandon, the American actress and activist who’s starred in such films The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Thelma & Louise, The Witches of Eastwick and The Lovely Bones, was in my shop for her regular bacon roll with a side order of another bacon roll.
She’s my girlfriend. Except I think she’s been cheating on me with Liam Dutton, who presents the weather on Channel 4 News. Scrircht! Kaflash! Whoomp! Maybe I’m not treating her right but I’m trying. Last week I took her to see Jethro Tull, not the 1970s psychedelic band but the eighteenth-century agronomist, horticulturalist and inventor of the seed drill. Man, he rocked! Then we went to a concert, a performance of the 1812 Overture with real cannons but also with real cholera and real flesh
wounds.
(Just to break the fourth wall for a moment here. It is true that I live in the next street to Channel 4 News and I do sometimes see Liam Dutton walking towards or leaving the building and I am often tempted to shout at him, ‘Oi you, Dutton. Leave my bird alone!’ But I’m not sure if he’s heard of his part in my radio show; he might just think it’s some kind of racial or anti-weatherman incident.)
BOINGIO
Now you will have noticed from a lot of my replies to that questionnaire that I have something of an obsession with all-you-can-eat buffets. This is because I think all-you-can-eat buffets are a very good metaphor for capitalism. With capitalism we are encouraged to believe that it’s not any of the things we already own that will make us happy but it will be the very next thing we buy that will tip us over into a profound state of bliss. The next phone or flat-screen TV or hideous disfiguring tattoo or dangerous dog, that’s the thing that’s going to make us endlessly content. So when I’m in the Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet, I’m not thinking about what’s on my plate but instead about the next thing I’m going to eat, so my mind is going, Oh yeah, these barbecue ribs are good but those Vietnamese paper-wrapped prawns I’m going to have next, wow, it’s going to be like there’s a lavish party in my mouth and Sir Philip Green isn’t invited!
Now, I do this terrible thing when I’m in a Chinese restaurant. I can’t speak Chinese, but I don’t want to be a tourist, an outsider, I want to seem worldly wise and sophisticated, so what I do is I put on a Chinese accent. It’s not a racist accent, it’s the accent of an older man from Guangzhou Province, a wealthy individual, sophisticated, owner of an electronics company, educated at a Western university, MIT or UCLA.
So I’m looking at the menu and I’m going, ‘Ahhh . . . gimme the mixed-meat fried noodle and ahhh . . . the hot an’ sour soup . . . the boil rice, an’ uh yah, I’ll have the roast duck on the de . . . boil rice . . .’
