by Craig Taylor
My first job was working for my father putting food on plates in the fish restaurant. I was 15, I hated it. I worked six weeks, made three hundred quid and bought myself a second-hand moped and a helmet. I got insurance and was buzzing around on this Suzuki 50cc moped. I knew a gang of others who had Suzuki mopeds and we used to be like a swarm of angry wasps buzzing around these streets. At night, five gears, a clutch and an engine capable of five horsepower, you could do sixty miles an hour. Balham, Clapham. We used to get up to some terrible things. One baking hot summer, somewhere around Kennington, Oval area, miles of council estates and there was a house with a huge man in his string vest sitting in his chair. He had opened his front door and his back door to let the air through. We went through his house while he was sitting watching television. Rar, rar, rar. We used to go out to Box Hill and hang out with the Hell’s Angels. But they’re a weird bunch. Later on I got in with the Hell’s Angels and I was mechanic for them. At 17 I was riding with a gang of Hell’s Angels. They’re not like the Americans. They mostly live with their mum and are dysfunctional people who live on baked beans and beer. They seemed to make most of their money from selling speed and as roadies and security for rock concerts, but most of the ones I met were a bunch of pussies really. They used to have axe-throwing competitions but they weren’t throwing an axe at anybody. They were so excruciatingly dull. They didn’t know anything about their bikes. I was really good at repairing their bikes and did many full-scale restorations of engines and gearboxes for them.
At 24, I had left engineering behind and got into electronics. I was building modular synthesizers. This is in the early to mid Eighties. I spent three years building a huge sixty-five-module synthesizer. It took up half the room. I realized I had no friends, no life, I had never had a conversation with a woman. I had never been to a pub, never been in a taxi, never eaten in a restaurant, never swum in a swimming pool, never been to the seaside. It’s like, I lived in central London and didn’t know anybody. All I did was my rat run, working in a factory and making industrial machinery and coming home and making more industrial machinery. That was it. I realized it was a substitute for life. I would go to sleep thinking about electronics and engineering and wake up thinking about electronics and working out circuits.
I went to work as a builder after the factory I was working in was asset-stripped. Just stumbled into building work with a guy I knew and became quite successful as a builder. Then, aged 30–31, I split with Helen after five and a half years. She was an opera singer. She was talking about marriage and children. I could do the sex. I was really good at it. I was really sensitive but I hated it because it just seemed so wrong. This intense, deep, nauseating sadness, just like nostalgia but absolutely overwhelming to the point where it’s almost choking you and it’s a dreadful grey misery of sadness that is all-pervasive when you try to become intimate with someone. Me being such a strong person I overrode it. But you get to a point where you think, is this how it’s going to be for ever? I can’t keep doing this for the rest of my life.
I was very good at dating, very good at being Prince Charming, opening doors, but that’s because I had created a male persona. I could create anyone I wanted, so I created the one I wanted for myself. There was about a dozen different Georges and he was a chameleon that would match a different face to a different situation. When I was with Hell’s Angels it would be like, Souf London geezah. Ya mate, I’ll sort that out for you. But there wasn’t one George. It was just a series of pastiches. It got to the point when you realize everything is fake. Everyone only sees a mask that has been stuck on. You’re constantly paranoid you’re going to be found out. It’s the nausea. The nausea of misery, having the wrong hormones. I just started taking hormones out of curiosity to see what it did to me.
I saved £23,000 in two and a half years from rickshawing, paid for my surgery, paid for my laser, paid for my hormones, paid for the psychiatrist, the recovery period, everything. I don’t claim benefits or anything.
When I transitioned, one of the things I found out was that about 80 per cent of male-to-female transsexuals have a background in electronics and engineering. I’m not kidding. It’s so freaky. One day at the psychiatrist – you have to see a psychiatrist for two years – there was a notice on the board in the waiting room. A self-help group had started up in someone’s living room. I phoned up.
‘Oh yes, if you do want to come around. You are trans—’
‘Yes, I am.’
So I went around. There are about eight sheepish-looking, ropy-looking transsexuals. And we’re all sitting there in someone’s living room. Things were a bit awkward. We didn’t know what to talk about. Someone mentioned in passing they were into electronics. I said I was into electronics. Someone said, ‘I started with this Ladybird book. It was called build your own transistor radio with a plank of wood.’ I said, ‘I remember that book. Use the OC71 transistor.’ Someone else said, ‘Oh yes and the OC45 for the radio frequency.’ All of a sudden everyone in the room was fighting – the same numbers like a trainspotters’ convention. It was like … It dawned on me. I mentioned modular synths and someone said, ‘What chip did you use for your Rodgers-controlled oscillator?’
‘I used the LM13700.’
‘That’s the preceding?’
‘That’s right because it had linearizing diodes in the input and non-dedicated diodes.’
‘That’s right. It can with an 11 fuel pin.’
All of a sudden it’s like [hums the theme from The Twilight Zone]. What’s happening? They all know the same code numbers as I do! I looked at them, they were all looking back and I realized they’re all really nerdy. Subsequently I went to so many transsexual clubs and I realized they’re all trainspotters. It’s not what I would have thought at all. Top ten most common characteristics – right at the top, electronics. Restoring old radios, old motorcycles, old cars. I used to go out with a transsexual woman. She’s the engineer who maintains Crystal Palace television transmitter. She also restores old cars and she also is a trainspotter and we went to Brighton one day. We pulled into the station and she said, ‘You see that train? It should have a little plaque on the side that said it’s the first train through the Channel Tunnel.’
And it did. And she’s a big Yorkshire bloke with a wig, heavy make-up, you know, dressing like someone’s mum.
I used to take these trans women out shopping and on trips and things because they just wanted someone to hold their hand really, especially when you take hormones you go through a female puberty which lasts quite a few years and is extremely violent. My goodness. That’s when I had the beard. I hadn’t had the laser yet. The laser takes three years. Months and months of extreme pain and violence of burning with a laser to get rid of the beard. I’m half-Greek. I had a dense, dark beard, really thick. And so, you know, I was in a queue going to a club. I was talking to this rather nice lady I’d met in the queue, just chatting about the New Romantic era. I had been a full-on New Romantic with baggy velvet suit, full make-up and everything. I remember telling her about this time. We were talking and a group of Essex boys came up. This is a hard-core electroclash club and what these Essex boys were doing with their fin haircuts is beyond me. This is about 2–3 years back. I’m in full dress, corset, suspenders, fishnets and heels. I don’t wear these now but I went through a period of experimenting with it, with ideas, like any teenager. I had all the make-up and everything, all the jewellery, fingernails, all the stuff. Goth. I’m standing there. You always get one who plays to the gallery and he’s like, he comes up, all with their alcopops and says, ‘All right, doll.’ And he goes to me, ‘All right, geezer.’
I’m already fifteen moves ahead. I say to him, ‘No, it’s doll.’
‘Nah, nah, nah, you’re a geezah.’
I pulled my breast out and squirted him full in the face with milk. He recoiled about fifteen feet.
‘Fackin hell, fackin hell!’
Because it really used to squirt a lot. I used to h
ave pads and everything. His mates were all falling about pissing with laughter and I turned to talk to this woman again. My gypsy antenna is twitching. I can hear the heavy clog wheels of his brain moving. Baby-milk-titty. He couldn’t figure it out. He came up to me and said, ‘Aw, my mistake, doll. No hard feelings.’ He puts his hand out. So I go like this. Slap it away. I give him my hand. He kissed it.
I’m back in the front room of the Balham squat with its ivy-green walls, painted that way to cover the graffiti left by a bunch of roving Spaniards. The floorboards are white and scuffed thanks to all the bikes. Most of the current tenants of the squat are couriers. A Taxi Driver poster is affixed to the wall.
She stands near the fireplace reading out expiry dates of the evening’s haul – May 2nd for the Muller Lite is too late, May 6th is too late for the vegetarian lasagne. It is the final hours of May 9th and most of the stash is on the knife-edge, good or bad. The bog roll is fine. The cheese? Well, says Sarah, some cheese gets better, doesn’t it? She holds out some quiche. I remember the moment she uncovered it at the bin. It paled in comparison to the shrieks of joy that accompanied the discovery of the upscale puddings that hadn’t made it too far past expiry. I ask if we should heat the quiche. ‘You don’t eat quiche hot,’ she replies. ‘You have to appreciate its fine subtleties, the sautéed mushroom taste.’
Her memories, she says later, have become feminized since her change. She views the world in a feminine way, even films from her past.
‘How would you have viewed Star Wars?’ I ask her.
‘Before, I would have had a crippling fascination with the technology.’
‘And now?’
‘My memories of Star Wars now are to do with the love story in the middle. Princess Leia and whoever that guy was.’
‘And London?’
‘London was about systems, about circuits, connections, roads. It was an emotionless place where things simply operated. They moved from place to place and did their job.’
‘And now?’
‘After the change,’ she said, ‘London is an emotional place. I feel the flows of emotion. I see the sadness of buildings, the sad gorgeousness of light on the streets.’
JOHN ANDREWS
Angler
Fish have been swimming in the canals and rivers and ponds in London since before Roman times. And when you catch a fish, it’s not radically different from then. Broadly speaking, the types of fish you catch are the same that the Georgians would have caught, that the Victorians would have caught. Chubb and dace you’re only going to get in a river, not in still water. Roach, pike, bream you’ll get in both, carp you’ll get in both, gudgeon you’ll get in both. Barbel you’ll get in the rivers, bleak you’ll only get in the rivers, on the tidal stretches you’ll get flounder coming in, eels. Bass you’ll get coming in on the tidal stretch. If they’ve got ponds in Buckingham Palace – which I’m sure they have – they’ll have carp in them. There’s carp in the Serpentine. All through the Thames, all through the Thames tributaries.
Everywhere is alive with fish. You could fish down at Rotherhithe, you could fish opposite the Houses of Parliament today and catch fish. So why go fishing? Well, if I gave you the chance to walk down a London street and go through the door of a house and suddenly be transported to a different era and a different time, wouldn’t you do it? I think for a lot of anglers, it’s that mystery that draws you in.
There’s always been a massive angling culture in London. If you had to choose a golden age, it was 1820 to 1960, 150 years or so. When leisure time was created. Before that you would have gone off and fished for an hour here or there to catch your supper, or you would have poached a bit, but it was the creation of leisure really that allowed people to fish. People got money, because of the development of industry. So they would go fishing on Sunday or after work on a Saturday. Trains arrived, took them to places they didn’t used to be able to get to. So a lot of these guides sprung up because you had gentlemen who had made money out of industry who could afford to buy subscriptions to fish the really posh places. And then workers would go and spend their wages in the little time they had off, on the trains or the paddle steamers and get a day ticket at those places and a subscription to the waters, and fish. What you’ve got to remember is that people then kept fish to eat, so as well as the sport, they were eating fish.
In the late 1800s there were probably about 200 tackle makers/shops just in the square mile of London. The tackle industry fed that need and then it grew and grew and formalized itself into the growth of clubs. And they formed associations, so they had some form of political power and leverage. If you go to the British Library and you get a paper out from 1880–1890, it will have four or five pages with just the notes from each angling club’s meeting. Somewhere like Kentish Town would have had five or six clubs between here and Camden all based in public houses. So you know where Angler’s Lane is, there’s a Nando’s restaurant? There used to be the Angler’s Arms pub there, with a club. And in Stoke Newington they had something like eight clubs. Because everyone had their local pub, and fishing was a mass recreation.
It kind of mirrored the changes in society, so you had a big working population in the Victorian era. A lot of people angling on their half a day off. They might fish on a Sunday but a lot of people go to church on a Sunday. There were a lot of people who were no longer working age who fished, and a lot of kids who fished.
And then everything that happened in the twentieth century killed it. The two world wars, social changes that they brought about, the arrival of the car, the arrival of television, massive pollution on the Thames, people taking water out for building houses and agriculture. The volume of water in the rivers was reduced by half. Less water, less fish. And what has the last fifty years been about except individualism, really? People didn’t need to be in clubs any more, where it used to be a sociable activity, much in the same way as you’d go to the dog races or watch the football. The decline in angling in London mirrors that in dog racing. We used to have a dozen if not more dog-racing tracks and now we’ve got one or two. Fishing is the same. We used to have twelve good rivers or more going into the Thames, but a lot of them have been built over, polluted, ruined. All those little places, havens where you could have fished, completely over-populated and polluted. And then angling just went out of vogue, really.
Carp were brought by the monks in the twelfth and thirteenth century from continental Europe, bred in stew ponds, then introduced to the wild. They were wily old fish, hard to catch. They were very big and powerful so even if you caught one they would break your tackle, even if you had them on the bank. In the 1950s and 1960s you had this growing body of anglers who just fished for carp. By the Eighties and Nineties, the people who were happy fishing for small species like roach and dace and perch started being overtaken by people who wanted to catch bigger fish, mostly carp. That grew into a massive industry. In London you had a lot of waters that were neglected, the municipal ponds like Highgate Ponds, Hampstead Ponds, stretches of the Thames, Bushy Park, Victoria Park. All of these waters held carp. They were in there from medieval times. The locals would put them in there and they’d breed and then they’d take them out and eat them. Some of those fish bred on, they lived to a very old age, they got very big. People went back to fish for them.
So now if you go and walk round Highgate Ponds when the fishing season’s on, nine times out of ten they are fishing for carp. That’s a massive movement within angling, and it has destroyed the old culture of angling where you just fish for lots of different species. It’s an obsession with size, speed, power, modernity, synthetic baits, imported fish. It’s angling gone mad, really. So a young kid coming into fishing now, is he going to want to float-fish for a smaller roach or a small perch? No, he’s not, because he can buy a cheap bit of kit and go carp fishing with a synthetically produced bait and probably catch one first time he goes out. It’s like saying, do you want to ride a bicycle or do you want to drive a Formula One car? Mo
st kids will say, I’ll go for the Formula One car. And then what happens is most kids do it for a few years and then they get bored of it and give up.
Against that you’ve got a renaissance movement where people are going back into the older forms of angling and fishing the waters that were neglected by the carp brigade. They are returning to old ponds and bits of river where there aren’t any carp, and fishing for the other species. So the modern angling landscape now is totally different to what it was a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago I’d say that less than 1 or 2 per cent of London’s anglers fished for carp. Make that the reverse now.
If you want to make a correlation, carp fishing is a bit like satellite television. It’s very similar. You’ve got all the basic analogue form of media – television that exists quite happily alongside radio and print and all the other things – and everybody dips in and out of each one and then satellite television comes along and says, I’ll give you everything bigger, brighter, cheaper, instant, it’s a full-on experience and you can have it on your own. Modern carp fishing has brought the experience of catching a carp. It’s like instant coffee. I would say that there is a struggle for the soul of angling that exists between carp anglers and everybody else. Everybody else is desperate to keep all the other forms of fishing alive, recognized, available. The carp angler would say, ‘I only want to fish for carp, I’m not interested in other forms of fish,’ which they call nuisance fish. So they might catch a fish that a normal angler would be quite happy to catch, like an 8-pound tench, they’d be like, ‘Shit, I don’t want a tench.’ That’s the modern landscape.
There’s still a real passion for fishing and angling in London. You’re connecting with what lies beneath as it were, a whole different world which is completely untouched by human life. A stretch of water is as tangible as a building. It’s as constant as a building. It’s always been there. It’s a body of water, it’s like a building but it’s just in a different form. It’s got its features. It might have gravel baths or deep holes or weed beds or patches of lily pads. A lot of these places nature just replenishes them so they keep going. And because it’s water they don’t necessarily get built on, so they don’t get destroyed. I mean, you can’t touch the Thames. And because of the law that Henry VIII passed it’s free for any Englishman to fish on the Thames as far as Staines. You need your rod licence, but no club or individual can control a stretch as far as Staines. So you can go and fish it.
