London Tales by David Edward

Another wander into the library and another title picked on a whim, this time London Tales; a collection of short stories and little vignettes from the city, which are thought provoking and troubling at the same time.


In the story Adult Education, a conversation takes place between a young woman, Sabrina, and her employer, Lindsay. Lindsay, in her thirties and a heavy drinker, is just about to go away and Sabrina is finishing her last day at work, although the nature of that work is never made clear:

The living room door opens and Lindsay walks in with her handbag sandwiched under her arm and dragging two wheeled suitcases behind her. Sabrina watches in silence as she leaves the cases in the middle of the room and steps over to the wine rack in the corner... Lindsay examines the label on a bottle of wine. It’s the third she’s opened in a couple of hours.

Lindsay appears to have acquired the drinker’s habit of putting the world to rights, and she decides to tell Sabrina how things tick:

“Thirty-five years old. Three ex-husbands in six years; childless; a tendency to drink more that any sensible person should – take more risks than any sensible person should. But one thing I do know – one thing I’ve found...” “OK, here it comes.” “...is that, while constancy to causes may be a good thing, sometimes – just sometimes – constancy to individuals, especially young guys, seldom leads further than the bottom of a JD bottle. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Divorced and currently single, Lindsay needles Sabrina about her relationship with her boyfriend Cyrus. Lindsay it seems, is hedging her bets on the bottle:

Lindsay gives up on the selection in the wine rack and heads into the kitchen. She returns with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a full glass in the other. She slumps on to the sofa and, with her free hand, she opens up her handbag.

She is now determined that Sabrina should join her on a last night out together before she leaves. While Sabrina tells her that she won’t go, Lindsay bets that if she were alone with Cyrus, she could seduce him in seconds:

“You started drinking too early. I’d better go.” Sabrina rises to her feet. “Yep. Best to run perhaps.” Sabrina checks her phone and lets it fall into her leather tote bag. She moves slowly to the door. “You seriously think you can get my Cyrus to go for you?” she asks, with a teasing lilt in her voice and casually turning to Lindsay. Lindsay gives her a fixed stare. “That’s clear.” “What’s clearer is that you’ve been on the sauce too long.”

Sabrina reluctantly agrees to put her boyfriend to the test and sends him a text message to tell him to come around to Lindsay’s house. She leaves Lindsay, looking like a geriatric stripper as she ladles out the snorts, and hides in the back room. Cyrus arrives and is offered a drink by an over accommodating Lindsay:

She says nothing for a while, but saunters back to him, glass poised between her fingers. “The moment’s all we have in life,” she eventually says. “Just the moment.” She hands him back his drink, this time with ice. “You’ve got to grab it.”

He certainly makes a grab for it. And as Sabrina comes into the room to remonstrate, things get more than a little out of control...

Capital by John Lanchester

It’s been an interesting few years since the wheels came off the world of finance. An atmosphere that lends itself to apocalyptic predictions develops and everything is freighted with a feeling of ‘the last days’ or ‘the end of’ rather than another variation of the same old plod which sustains us through quieter times. The same atmosphere also gives writers the idea that they have to capture this spirit of the age on paper. Sebastian Faulks got in first with his disappointing A Week in December. I’m pleased to say that Capital is a much better book.


Like A Week in December, Capital features a host of different characters whose station in life holds a certain grip on the public imagination: the banker holding out for his £1,000,000 bonus, his awful wife, the premiership footballer, the asylum seeker who works as a traffic warden, the young man getting mixed up with Islamist firebrands. Another character is Zbigniew, a Polish builder and decorator who shares a room in Croydon with his old friend Piotr, both over in Blighty for a few years so that they can save enough money to take back home and help their families.

Zbigniew has got himself mixed up with an English lady who with all charity, can only be described as an emotional boa constrictor. He decides to tell Piotr all about it, a confession made a lot easier with a drink in hand:

At the Polish club in Balham, Zbigniew sat with a bison-grass vodka and a bottle of Żywiec beer, waiting for Piotr... Piotr came in, looked over, saw what he was drinking, made a sign with two fingers pointing up in curls at the sides of his head – their private gesture for bison, therefore for bison-grass vodka – and came over from the bar with two more vodkas and two more Żywiecs. They touched glasses and downed the vodkas and then took a shot of beer.

Zbigniew explains the situation, only for Piotr to get on his moral high horse and inform him that he has trapped the lady into falling in love with him, and that it will only end in trouble.

Zbigniew, because he had not been expecting this, and because much of it was right, felt himself become very angry. His head filled up with blood; he was exalted and exhilarated by rage. “You say this because you are a priest? A priest hearing my confession, or giving a denunciation from the pulpit?” Piotr got up and walked out. And that was that. Zbigniew sat there and drank his beer and vodka, then another round, then another, and went home drunker than he had been for a long time.

Still, he’s in the right place to get pissed. He reflects on this the night when he finally gives Davina her papers:

The bar was crowded for a Tuesday night – but then it was always crowded, like everywhere else around this part of town. If Zbigniew had to sum up London in a single image, there would be a number of candidates: a group of young Poles sitting in a flat watching television in their socks; two dustbins outside a house, with a plank of wood balanced between them, to reserve a parking space for a builder’s van; the Common on a sunny weekend day, with exposed white skin stretching to the horizon. But the winner would be the high street on a busy evening, full of young people bent on getting drunk – the frenzy of it, the particular pitch of the noise, the sex and anger and hysteria. Zbigniew had once had a sense of the British as a moderate, restrained nation. It was funny to think of that now. It wasn’t true at all. They drank like mad people. They drank to make themselves happy, and because alcohol was and end in itself. It was a good thing and people want good things, want more and more of them. So, because alcohol was good, the British wanted more and more of it. With drink, they were like Buzz Lightyear: to infinity and beyond!

Booze, bad banking and bad relationships. It’s only going to end badly...

London and the South East by David Szalay

I picked up David Szalay’s London and the South East on the strength of a review of his latest novel, and once again I am grateful that the vagaries of the library catalogue meant that I had to choose this one instead.


Paul Rainey is a dissatisfied ad salesman, hurtling into middle age and incipient breakdown, aided and abetted by the booze and cannabis that he uses to keep himself going through the day. When he gets an offer of a much better job from his old colleague Eddy Jaw, he finally thinks that things might be going his way. Unfortunately, it would appear that the salesman has been sold down the river. When he turns up late and hungover for his first day of work at Eddy’s company, Delmar Morgan, it quickly becomes apparent that the whole thing was a setup to lure Paul’s sales team away from their present company. Without Paul.

Alcohol drinks as a way of life started for Paul, he supposes, in the Northwood days. Simon was a serious drinker. They would get drunk at lunchtime every day, and then go back to the Cheshire Cheese after work. That the pub was so quaint made it seem unserious somehow. And everything was going well – money was being made – the boozing was exuberant, not morose. Now when he is sober, there is always a sense that he is waiting for something. Walking out of Delmar Morgan, Paul’s first thought had been of alcohol drinks. It was eleven, and the pubs had just opened. In truth, part of him had started thinking of alcohol drinks the moment Eddy had said, “There isn’t a job for you here, Paul.” And a part of him had – if he is honest – even been pleased to hear those words. He had immediately felt licensed, permitted, almost obliged, to go out and drink until he was very drunk. There was nothing to stop him doing that anyway, of course – he had money – but he was not the sort of uninhibited alcoholic who pours beer, or mixed a Bloody Mary, first thing in the morning. He did not have – as George Best was said to have had – a wine bar by his bed, so that waking in the middle of the night (probably still in his clothes, lights burning silently all over the house) he could top up his blood-alcohol level before passing out again. Paul’s alcoholism still operated within limits – very substantial limits – but limits nonetheless, and to exceed them he had to have, he insisted on this scrupulously, a reason. Of course, he could always find a reason – and he always did – but it was nevertheless a sort of luxury to have a real reason; and terrible misfortunes, disasters, vicious setbacks and disappointments, were superbly fit for purpose. His shock and humiliation, his stunned sense of collapse as he walked down Victoria Street, were entirely unfeigned. His legs were trembling under him. He felt awful, weepy, as if he’d been beaten up, and he entered the first pub he saw, which was the Albert.

It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. He now has Christmas to get through...

Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

I have been enjoying Jeanette Winterson’s books for half my life now, but have somehow not got around to reading Oranges are not the Only Fruit, her award winning debut and arguably her most famous book.


Based very loosely on the author’s upbringing in Accrington, the book follows the childhood and adolescence of Jeanette, a young woman adopted as a baby by a couple who are stalwart members of the local Pentecostal church. Jeanette’s mother takes her religion very seriously, and is quick to point out the wrongs of others. Especially those living next door:

“Drink,” said my mother grimly as we stepped out past their house. “That’s why they buy everything from Maxi Ball’s Catalogue Seconds. The Devil himself is a drunk” (sometimes my mother invented theology).

Even so, despite holding forth on the evils of booze, Jeanette’s mother is no stranger to licensed premises:

During the first year my mother had gone into all the pubs and clubs urging the
drunkards to join her at church. She used to sit at the piano and sing Have You Any Room for Jesus? It was very moving, she said. The men cried into their tankards and stopped playing snooker while she sang. She was plump and pretty and they called her the Jesus Belle.

Problems start to appear in this regimented lifestyle when Jeanette is forced to go to school (a breeding ground) and as she becomes older, realises that she has fallen in love with another girl called Melanie. She urges Melanie to come along to the church. It’s a special occasion; a visit from Pastor Finch who has turned up in a Bedford van decorated with damned sinners on one side and saved souls on the other, and HEAVEN OR HELL? IT’S YOUR CHOICE painted across the bonnet:

After we had all admired the bus for long enough, Pastor Finch led us back into the church and asked his choir to sing his latest composition. “It came to me from the Lord, just as I left Sandbach Motorway Services.” The song was called You Don’t Need Spirits When You’ve Got The Spirit. The first verse went like this...

‘Some men turn to whisky, some women turn to gin,
But there ain’t no better rapture than drinking the spirit in.
Some men like their beer, others like their wine,
But open your mouth to the Spirit, if you want to feel fine.’

The choir sang this and the rest of the verses, six in all, and we had a sheet to join in the chorus, which was accompanied by Pastor Finch on the bongos. The chorus went like this...

‘Not whisky rye not gin and dry not rum and coke for me,
Not brandy fizz but a Spiritual whizz puts the fire in me.’

Melanie stays, despite the peculiar nature of the service, and Jeanette’s love for her blossoms into an affair that sees her exorcised and finally forced to leave home and church.