Blog: Inveresk Street Ingrate

A plus B means that someone's stolen a march on Private Eye this week : Hat tip to some wag over at Urban 75 for the picture.

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Did I ever mention on the blog that Coronation Street's Stan Ogden was supposed to have been an International Brigader? By the time Ian Walker wrote this article in 1980 all memory of The Street's radical past was long forgotten. " . . . sentimental Labour Party nationalism" , indeed. The Street where they live by Ian Walker An old man sits in the Rover's return, saying nothing. A few yards away, in Elsie Tanner's living room, Len Fairclough is confessing [...]

"I know the Spartans, that's my old club, have been using the track evenings for training to help it settle. Plus there's the workmen putting finishing touches. Plus people using other bits of the Plezz could easily stroll in here. Shouldn't you concentrate on who's got access to the spare keys? Can't be too many of them." Oh dear, thought Joe. Like a good princess, she wasn't going to be shy about telling the help what they ought to be working at. He said, "Got your key handy?" She passed it over. Joe moved [...]

Another piece from the Ian Walker New Society archive. It dates from November 1979 and, to be honest, it is not one of his better articles. I think it initially caught my eye because of the mention of Brian Hayes . A long time ago a couple of SPGBers insisted that Hayes was strongly sympathetic to the SPGB's politics. I never knew if there was any truth in the claim but it was the case that the SPGB members did regularly appear on LBC phone-in shows in the first half of the eighties. Maybe Hayes was [...]

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You see Get Leo? Again, a pause and Linda saying, Wait a minute. You're Chili Palmer? You are you were on Charlie Rose at least a half hour. He got you to admit your name's Ernest, and I recognize your voice. I've read all about you the interviews, the ones that asked if it's true you were a gangster in Florida? Or was it Brooklyn? Both. I loved Get Leo, I saw it twice. The only thing that bothered me, just a little. The guy's too short to be what he is? [...]

Regular readers of the blog will know that I have a longstanding admiration for the late Ian Walker. A campaigning journalist for The Leveller, New Society, The Observer and the Daily Mirror in the late 70s up until the late 80s, Walker combined radical politics with a wonderfully fluid writing style. (Sadly, the two don't always go hand in hand.). Thanks to SJW, I have been able to secure photocopies of a number of Ian Walker's articles from his time at New Society and, over the coming months, I'll be posting these articles on the net [...]

"Yeah, he's all right," Louis said. "I'm waiting there about two weeks in Brownsville, McAllen, finally I said fuck-it, I'm going home. But by then I didn't have any money for gas. So I said okay, I'll go out and pick melons for a few days, maybe a week. See, the only reason I was down there I was fucking desperate and this grass was gonna make it, get me a stake. So I sign up at a place, Stanzik Farms, go out and start picking and they call a strike. Actually the strike was going on and I was [...]

Woody was one of the few who lived with his real dad. Barrett had christened him 'Luigi' after calling round one day and finding him wearing the coolest sunglasses he'd ever seen. The rest of his apparel was strictly dads' stuff of corduroy trousers, patterned cardigan and Hush Puppies. The glasses, though, were straight out of The Godfather. Carey recalled that Luigi had driven them to their first proper concert - Hawkwind at a large concert hall. On the way there Luigi spoke gravely as though they were preparing for war: don't talk to anyone; [...]

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Blackburn was surprised that it was so easy. He hadn't thought he would be able to shoot another man. But here was Number Two trying to pull on his pants. The man was big, and his footfalls shook the telephone on the nightstand. A hole in his stomach pumped dark blood. The blood glistened on the man's skin, on the bedsheets, on the floor. The woman on the bed was screaming. She scooted back against the headboard and stuffed part of the top sheet into her mouth. She screamed louder. "Don't do that," Blackburn said. His [...]

A lot of people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might ask: Why didn't he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady would be so much of a better target? Mouse was just doing what came natural to him. But there's a reason I wasn't angry then, why I'm still not angry and why the people of Pariah didn't rise up and kill that woman: It's what I call the 'Sacred Cow Thinking.' Miss Dixon [...]

The army seemed the least unsatisfactory alternative, although my friends laughed hysterically at the idea of me as a soldier. They didn't think I'd last five minutes in an environment where I had to take orders. The British Army was the first extreme right-wing organisation I ever joined. Patriotism, or rather a narrow, arrogant, Rule-Britannia, God-save-the-Queen jingoism was rammed down our throats at every opportunity. And, like the other far-right groups I later encountered, the forces of the Crown didn't seem to care too much about the presence of criminals in the ranks.

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These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived. They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk. They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting [...]