Camden! I was talking to someone the other week about how when you’re in your early teens, Camden Market seems like the most amazing place in the world - remember the sensory overload when you turned right out of the tube station and headed up to the market? It felt kind of dangerous. Edgy. And there were goths. In fact, I’m starting to feel that the Brick Lane area is becoming a bit like it; maybe it’s the influx of an element of society I recently overheard being described as “all those crustie Euros”.

Of course, there still remain a few good reasons to go to NW1: the Jazz Cafe (though I try and boycott it on principle owing to their greedy ‘booking fee’), Primrose Hill - the hill not the terribly precious conurbation bit - and there’s a pub I quite like on Delancy Street, a road name I’ve long been a sucker for; though having also been to Delancy Street in NYC, while I appreciate Lorenz Hart hasn’t felt any balmy breezes blow there or indeed anywhere else recently, it sure ain’t fancy any more. On that theme I did go and have a Chinese meal on Mott Street and while I wish I could say it was incomparable, I just remember the menu being somewhat tricky to navigate.

Anyway, I didn’t go to Camden this weekend, but I did go to the Camden Town Group exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s great. And isn’t all ambiguous if disconcerting scenes of the artists’ charladies in drab bedrooms, though there were plenty of them. Indeed, appropriately enough considering last week’s blog, there were also several of Walter Sickert’s famous if somewhat murky paintings of the clientele and the stars of London’s music halls.

Outside of his paintings Sickert is probably best known today because of the American crime writer Patricia Cornwall’s theory (and book) about him being Jack the Ripper. I read that book - for sale in the Tate shop oddly enough - very quickly while on holiday in Paris and it is worth a look though I was somewhat underwhelmed by her evidence. I think it is safe to say that she really, really wants it to be true.

I’m going to see Arsenal play Blackburn Rovers now. Not in Miami, Hong Kong or Tokyo either. Not yet.

Oh, and as *insert ‘first signs of spring’ cliché here* I found myself humming the old standard ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’ this morning on the way to work; a lovely song whoever does it (though Mark Murphy does it the bestest) and particularly loved by me for the inspired couplet which rhymes “College girls are writing sonnets” with “but I’m up on the shelf with last year’s Easter bonnets”.
More next week.

Nostalgia, as the joke goes, is not what it was. I spent most of Sunday morning listening to old time Music Hall records - not the first time some of these would have been heard in London E2 I’ll warrant. And needing to go to the shops anyway, I strolled up to where I was led to believe Bethnal Green’s Foresters Music Hall had been, but there wasn’t really much to see there anymore. Of course not.

For some reason I struggle to understand that previous eras could be nostalgic for their pasts in the same way as we are, but that’s stupid - in the 1950s the Music Halls would be packed with people singing along to the very same songs I was listening to preserved on scratchy 78’s from the twenties and thirties, almost equally disconnected from their life and times. And what songs they are! To name but two I particularly enjoyed - Leslie Sarony’s ‘Ain’t It Grand To Be Bloomin’ Well Dead’ is a curious concoction; the narrator cheerfully imagines his funeral, obviously without any aitches : “Look at the flowers, bloomin’ great orchids, look at the corfin, bloomin’ great ‘andles - ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!” The way Sarony sings “grand” with a distinct emphasis on the “a” seems to crystallise an entire era in one syllable. And sounding very contemporary today is Lily Morris’ ‘Don’t Have Any More, Missis Moore’ - warning against binge drinking and unprotected sex no less, with the prescient advice “Double gins give the ladies double chins”. Great fun.

I suppose this stuff has a resonance for me as my parents used to sing some of these songs around the old joanna when I was a child, though I’m not actually in my seventies, despite the impression this might give. Amongst many, I remember ‘Loves Old Sweet Song’ - a genuine Victorian ballad as opposed to some of these later songs and in particular, the awesomely lachrymose ‘Ticket To Heaven’ - I can’t find the lyrics on the interwebs, sadly but can try and sum this masterpiece up: man is knocked over while working on the railway and thought dead. His child (perhaps bringing him lunch) arrives on the scene to hear that poor Bill (I think it was Bill) has gone to heaven and proceeds to the ticket office and the tremendous chorus arrives:

Give me a ticket to Heaven, please.
That’s where Dad’s gone, they say.
He’ll be so lonely without me
Travelling all that way.
My mother died when I was born, Sir.
And left Dad and me all alone.
So give me a ticket to Heaven, please,
Before the last train has gone.

Amazing. And before you can barely read on through your tears, I can point out that in the final verse it is revealed that “though injured, he has not been killed” and father and child are reunited. The Victorians and Edwardians just loved this kind of sentimental stuff, bless ‘em.

There are also a couple of recordings by comedian George Robey on the record I was listening to - the so called Prime Minister of Mirth. And waxing nostalgic, the Sir George Robey (named after him) was a horrible pub in Finsbury Park which held dub nights when I was a teenager (the Proustian aroma of these events is not similar to the smell of Madelines) and years later - when the place was briefly run by the folks who owned Hoxton Square’s the Blue Note club - I remember playing records there and literally emptying a room full of people with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘Theme De Yo Yo’. Should have stuck to the man himself.

Anyway… I know that there is another popularity contest going on in the US at the moment (I write this on ‘Super Tuesday’) but the return of American Idol is obviously good news, even though it’ll struggle to beat some of last year’s contestants: beatboxing pixie-boy Blake, no necked and strangely sex-less belter Melinda Doolittle and of course, pony-hawked Sanjaya - should have put when he made that girl cry as one of my highlights of the year. It’s only once they go to Hollywood (”baby!”) that it gets interesting so I still have a few weeks to persuade my colleague Nik Dowlet to write an American Idol blog for the site. Here’s looking forward to that, dawg.

More next week.

8:05am - Leave the house in high spirits, full of Coco Pops and January optimism. Step on a dog-turd. My luck holds, it’s long since hardened.

8:10am – Through the use of colourful language and a sharpened stick, I battle my way to the 20 square centimetre area of the platform that I KNOW my usual set of train doors will pull up to. Proceed to hold/beat back the thronging, briefcased masses like a Spartan at Thermopylae. But with less beard.

8:20am – Train is late. And my spear arm is nearly spent.

8:22am – Watch in abject horror as the “whimsical” train driver decides to sail onwards an extra six feet today. Cue an almighty free-for-all for pole position by the time the doors open. All chances of finding one of the few remaining seats in the carriage rapidly evaporate. Utter, utter bastard.

8:30am – Silently curse the seated masses from my vantage point squashed face-first against the Perspex partition. A fat man in a polo shirt is simultaneously playing a game of Patience and watching an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on his laptop. Make a mental note to hurt him grievously should the chance arise.

8:33am – Only at Herne Hill. Torturous. Through a Herculean effort, manage to extract my book from my coat pocket and elbow myself enough room to read “The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe”. Perks me up a bit.

8:35am – Imagine the fat Trekkie strapped down in the vault from “The Pit And The Pendulum”, awaiting his agonising doom. Chuckle evilly, and unexpectedly loudly. Some odd looks from nearby passengers.

8:40am – The Phantom Farter. As with every other day this week, someone lets fly a silent but devastating air-biscuit between Elephant & Castle and Loughborough Junction. At close quarters, there’s no escape. My fellow commuters look furtively around with a mixture of total horror and grudging admiration at the sheer audacity and pungentness of the deed, but once again the culprit isn’t apparent. I’m keeping a closer eye out tomorrow. This reign of terror cannot continue indefinitely.

8:50am – We pull into Farringdon station. The whole train collectively braces itself.

8:50am + 03 seconds – All-out carnage as over a hundred designers, suits and advertising creatives run hell-for-leather for the alcove leading to the staircase, fully 2.5 people wide. I grab a small elderly woman who was dithering fatally, and pick her up for use a makeshift shield and battering ram. With an improvised battle-cry of “Have some, chuckleheads!!” I ascend as quickly as the carnage will allow, stepping on as many toes, faces and groins as are necessary to proceed. A smug-looking designer with preposterously tight jeans and an “eccentric” haircut spots an opening and tries to beat me to it, but is quickly felled by a roundhouse blow with the old lady. The top of the stairs is in sight.

8:51am – As the smoke clears, I exit the station in a cheerful frame of mind, pausing only to set the old lady on her way and punch a Free Paper Provider in the face. Onwards to another busy day.