Peckham Perspective (or how World Cup fever worked)

WHITE HORSE

A pub where the interior decor is like a greenhouse with hanging succulents and skylights, lifting that heavy dingy pub atmosphere. You can breathe in here. The average age is 24, in fact it’s the most healthy and nonchalantly dishevelled crowd I’ve seen. Stylish ironic sports caps worn askew, and frayed backpacks that look like hand-me-downs from war veterans at Dunkirk. A vegan burger is over £10 and doesn’t come with chips - that are handcut by the way. The football is playing on one screen at the end of the room. It’s the England Vs. Colombia Round-16, I’m not very familiar with football but I’m here. Leaning across the bar with splayed elbows to cool down, at least I can see the ball. With my glasses on I can also see everyone else. Around a third of those watching care about the game, but the rest are hanging out with their tribe in a chill environment sipping on their locally brewed beers. Even in the height of summer dark ale is being supped. Once, the ball grazes the side of a goal post and skims off the pitch, people clap and give a single shout that feels like a pat on the back.

NAG’S HEAD

An England flag hangs under the telly. Tacked to the wood panelling with drawing pins, stamped in. The white of the St. George’s Cross is stained by nicotine and time. There's clenched fists and pint glasses filled with lager - lager - lager - you can even buy tinnies in here. The guy sat alone at the back with the sideburns and mullet is draining his can right now. He leers at the girls on my table like a maniac and grins with no frills and broken teeth. Everything is brown in colour, mauves and maroons seep through. Upholstery like the carpet of a forgotten ferry, docked in the shipyard since the late 1970’s. Around the island of tables in the middle of the pub are Great White Sharks. Big Fat Lads with Bald Heads. Bellies.

Gawan my Son
Not laaaaaaikely
Playin’ like bollocks
Take it daaaaaan tha liiiiiine
BOLLOCKS!
Keep ‘old of it son
Take your time, son

The match is being played over three screens. Every man is steaming, shouting, seething at all angles. I see spittle and raw joy, incensed blokes who look like they’re having the time of their lives but are about to explode. Slurs and You Wot!? Chucked at the Colombian shirt wearing cunt, perched like a pile of meat skewered to a stick on his stool. Jeering. Eruptions of laughter. You can’t take a joke? 

It’s what we call an Old Man Pub but I feel more raw energy in here than a playground. A fruit machine flashes wildly against the wall. When Colombia scores the mood gets cut. Silence like a soldier got shot. The guy in orange hi-vis punches the door and walks out on to the street, where we go next.

It’s Extra Time as we walk the length of Peckham High Street. Every window, in every shop is playing the Game. Hairdressers, chicken shops, John the Unicorn, newsagents. We peer through panes of glass at the scores staying static. We walk on through the quiet and empty street. The summer heat hangs heavy with pressure over the tarmac, and the traffic lights change colour to no oncoming vehicles. 

PECKHAM LEVELS

A converted car park with a good heavy-handed lick of paint, since I last saw it. I remember a bare building with you know those holes between the car park levels, between floor and ceiling. Because you know car parks are concrete slabs made for sheltering cars not people, though sometimes skaters use them and homeless people. Well let me tell you! Now there are windows! And fluorescent tinted tubes and industrial sized fairy lights, and wacky chairs and a working bar and proper toilets, the works. They’ve got a big screen playing the match and now it’s on to penalties. Groups of thirty year olds in tight polo shirts and arm bulges, wearing espadrilles, share a jug of beer and gesture with boyish excitement. Boho chic, tussled hair, the ambient mood-lighting is flushed with pink, setting off the sunset hues dissipating over the city scape outside and damn - this is so Instgrammable. England scores! The room erupts and hushes. Colombia misses. The room claps and hushes. The final kick is coming. The ball is soaring. England SCORES!!!!!!!! 

Field Notes from an Anthropologist: There are three pubs in Peckham filled with three types of people. I’m part of it. The hipsters, working class, and yuppies. There are invisible barriers that exist between the pubs and their clientele but the footie breaks them down. Because when you are all sharing in one activity (you could call this common activity a ritual), you can be different but it’s okay because you are all doing the same thing. 

Moving Eastwards Moving On

It was nice to see them both. My two friends from the good past who live in different lands: New York, Berlin, London (that’s including me). Oh sure, we’re jetsetters. It’s where history has flung us all - out - so that today we can sit on a Friday afternoon amidst the Notting Hill yuppies in a pub sipping £5 ale. It’s no big deal. We’ll pretend that this occurrence is normal, nothing special about it, just so happens that we’re all here in the same country in the same public house. Talking drinking, spouting nonsense, finally. Like the not so recent past… what has it been 3 or 4 years since we all lived in the same town house in a part of the world called Jericho? Where the bricks are made of sand; stone has been bleached by the oddly bright sunlight for southern parts of England and the streets are broad or winding; pubs pop in to view when you turn down a lane or continue to walk along the grassy meadows. I remember herds of cows galloping. Today we all shirk responsibility that has to do with growing up, I notice, but we all deeply care. The affected and ineffectual bunch. You hope we’ll make a good impression on the world. I listen and I listen and the thoughts of Annina are great and grandiose and matter. She makes them matter to anyone who listens and I wish I had her sense of striking passion, and I love her and I listen. And then Owen, the master of sciences, looking rather more worldly donning urbanite-upgraded Woody Allen specs and shabbier, longer hair. They’re both a pleasure to look at and to share time with, supping our rusty-coloured pints and dusk falling, dinner is next on the cards.

*

‘See you at 11AM at Royal Oak tube station’. And right on time Annina, the girl I call the sphinx, strides up the Underground stairs with a bagel wrapped in white paper in her hand ready to be part of the crew. Today is the “big boat move” that Mer has been planning for the last fortnight. Since we’ve now moored all over the western regions of the canal, seeing off Harlesden, Kensal, Little Venice and Paddington we have to move on eastwards, and to do so we must first take the top and sides down from the boat and drive it through the low Maida Vale tunnel. There’s no telling that we’re all excited but first Mer, the captain of the crew, gives us a solid debrief about not getting our limbs trapped swinging out the side of the boat and thus getting them ripped off. You see, important orders from the captain. A small fairground has been set up beside our mooring spot for a children’s day, so as we push off the banks and start to set sail innocuous bits of bunting wave us off. Bye bye West.

The tunnel is low and dark and dank and drippy. When we enter it, the 5 strong crew all go silent for a while, one pokes their head out over the roof to go under again, I crouch in the shadows with a large stick to fend off the sides incase the arse of the boat gets too close to the walls, and the sphinx kneels-on looking straight and forwards. When the entrance recedes and becomes like the pupil of an eye only letting the essential light in to reach us, the passage looks longer and more indeterminable. I got the impression of pirates and caves and Hades and the air tasted stale and sweet, as if the old cold stones sweated. Looking forwards, at first the exit was a small semicircle of brightness and as we slowly approached it light began to filter down, like ink on blotting paper and soon and slowly we were drenched in white light, as the nose of the boat broke the seal from the underworld to the real we all clapped or whooped and Mer told us to calm down.

The new world we had discovered was green and Arcadian. Great willows bowed low and grand as if welcoming hot summer heat and a tweed-jacket wearing frog, huge greco-roman buildings (surely, not houses) with white colonnades stood firm and ruled atop the banks. Then out of nowhere a huge avery filled with cranes, storks, exotic birds and a few wayfaring pigeons appeared and you see all of winged-colourful nature flying and hawking above your head and you forget about the city and imagine a crusade. Epic scales guys, that’s where boat tripping’s at.

After cruising past a floating red pagoda weighed down by frilly lanterns, the scenery changes again to one of grunge and iron. You see more young ones in peaked caps sitting on the canal side with their Red Stripes and a foray of unsurpassable tramps shouting fucks and twats at the passerby. It’s Camden Lock and there are too many tourists. Having never done a lock before I have to learn, but it mostly involves people jumping on and off the boat and running around over precarious bridges, which are actually the lock gates. Depending on what gate is open or closed, the water level rises or falls within the lock. The aim of the game is to get the boat from one side of the lock to the other. And the pressure is on when the sun’s beating down and children and parents of all nationalities are swinging their heads from side to side, licking ice creams or taking selfies right next to you as you sweat. Lock gates are hard and then heaving them open requires a whole other sort of strength, pushing with my legs for leverage, my whole body sprung out at almost 90 degrees shoving against an iron bar, ridiculous posturing from me I suppose.

The crew made it happen though, Annina and Aidan were the hero couple opening and closing locks as if there was no tomorrow, Mer shouting at us to jump on board or off, the others keeping steady hold of ropes so the boat wouldn’t kilter off to the side or end up mashed by the lock gates. There are a total of 3 locks between Camden and where we wanted to be, as such there was a lot of work to be getting on with. As we were inside the final lock, people took tea breaks and I dished out some chocolate bars and we filled up the water tank. 200 litres of water the tank holds, I wonder how many showers I can get out of that beauty? The sun was past the zenith but still in full swing, English July is surprisingly warm and it was certainly louts-with-shirts-off weather. 

The vista that opened up before us was sweet and impressive. King’s Cross, a skyline filled with cranes and brickwork. Two white swans with their 7 cygnet babies filed past our boat, in streamlined ordered parade; they looked regal and seemed to know it by law. The geese honked and the coots scurried and parted out of their way, whilst our boat headed eastwards to find a mooring a space nearby. 

*

After the long sun-drenched day my muscles ached and I had an unquenchable thirst. The sphinx lay languid on my cabin bed and I played with my newly acquired boustrophedon disk around my neck, it was brought to me from Crete and I’m very fond of it. We talked about nothing and everything and ate biscuits over tin plates and when the sun finally decided to leave the sky alone, we strapped on our shoes and went in search for pizza.

Photo courtesy of Annina Lehmann