4. From Eel to Eternity: William Morris and the Saxon – Viking duopoly

      • Dagenham Brook – the Lea to somewhere in Walthamstow

       Seasonal Affective Disorder – the Danes and Saxons (what they represent), Saxons’ ego, Danes’ id, sensible and crazy – the river near Stevey’s flat – flood plains – oh no, it’s not the Ching – depression vs. positive thinking – William Morris – Dagenham Brook – walk it – go for lunch – look for source of brook – the Beard Brothers – Leyton Orient v. Blackpool – space eels

      From the upstairs window looking down over Finsbury Park (the old Hornsey Wood) the sky is a sickly yellow-grey, prickling with TV aerials like broken winter trees. As a kid I used to love winter, the tranquillity and the hard feeling of cold brittle air in my sensitive asthmatic lungs. It gave me energy, as if I was sucking on a can of pure oxygen. Summer seemed frivolous and shallow. Plus it had cricket (sadistic PE teacher whacking a hard ball at you from about 5 yards away) and athletics (running while being shouted at by sadistic PE teacher). Now it’s the other way round. Winter is never-ending, annoying and wet. Maybe we are entering not an ice age but a new crap weather age … (three dots … leave it open … ‘Blimey’, says reader … ‘profound thinker!’ … )

      In February, people scowl at each other. It’s bad and it’s called SAD. Sad Arsed Downer. Slobbedout And Drunk. Stoned And Depressed. Shit At Daytodayliving. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sunlight disappears and people skulk in doorways. Mice shit on kitchen work surfaces when they’re supposed to be in the expensive trap that’s baited with peanut butter – ‘It’s what mice crave,’ said the expert on rodent trapping from the local hardware store. Maybe mice prefer smooth. Pricecutters on Blackstock Road only had crunchy. (Wasn’t the different consistencies of peanut butter the basis of Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse?)

      Now I’d ‘done’ two rivers, in the sense that I’d walked them and drawn some pictures of local fat people, but I was already feeling a bit shagged out and worried that hanging around underground streams might be unhealthy. Research has shown that they can cause allergies, disease, poltergeist activity, madness and premature death. Or even spots. The next stream I was due to research was the River Ching in Walthamstow. The thing was, the Ching hadn’t really gone. However, I spent three and a half years living in Walthamstow and I’d never heard of it. And seeing as I never knew it existed, it counted as lost in my book.

      For a laugh I take my daughter to a local music workshop, where a large-boned crazily grinning lady sings ‘Kumbayah’ and the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ while bashing away on an acoustic guitar like she’s trying to smash ice with a chisel, while the kids stare with terrified eyes. ‘Dance!’ she cries, ‘DANCE, YOU LITTLE FUCKERS!!!’ Back in the park we take it in turns to look for amazing things. Cathleen likes nature (‘Leaf!’ ‘Tree!’ ‘Pussycat!’ ‘Baby!’), while I’m into celebrity spotting. So far, we’d only managed to see a woman who looked a bit like Helen Blaxendale the actress, but I couldn’t be sure. Similar nose, but she looked much smaller in real life. Famous people generally tend to hide away from me. In thirteen years of living in London the only other famous person I’d seen was Derek from Coronation Street in a toy shop in Covent Garden. He was buying a cardboard build-it-yourself puppet theatre.

      Of course, Cathleen doesn’t recognize as many famous people as me just yet. Except, whenever we pass a construction site she thinks she’s seen Bob the Builder and forces me to sing the programme’s theme tune with her while she jumps up and down in her pram.

      Walthamstow is on the north-eastern edge of London. Actually, it’s Essex really, even though it’s got a London postcode. The name suggests that it was a Celtic area – Wal meaning ‘foreigners’ (Wales is the Saxon word for ‘foreigners live here – let’s buy second homes next door to them’). Another, perhaps more likely, interpretation is that it is a derivation of Wilcumstow (Welcomesville). In this area, at the River Lea, lay the boundary between the Danelaw and Saxon Wessex, a psycho-geographic buffer zone with crazy blond blokes in the east with mad expressions and sandy-haired sensible blokes in the west with bored complacent expressions. Positive thinkers in the west, melancholy downbeats to the east. The Saxon ego and the Danish id. Happy sad happy sad happy sad. People still dye their hair to look like Vikings – it’s part of an ancient folk memory which basically says, ‘Don’t kill me! I’ve got relatives in Copenhagen!’

      In 894 Alfred the Great successfully fought the Vikings on the River Lea. ‘Alf’ ordered the river to be blocked up and did this – or rather told his men to do it – by cutting many channels in order to reduce water levels so that when the Vikings came back they were surprised that the river had virtually gone and they couldn’t get any further. To celebrate, Alfred burned the cakes. Were they hash cakes? Walthamstow is now an enigmatic dead zone where London ends and Essex begins. It’s cheap housing, big skies, teenagers with expensive clothes hanging around the shopping centre, burglaries, pie and mash shops, video stores, a thirties town hall that looks like a cockney Ceauşescu palace. Walthamstow Market is the longest in Europe, with stalls selling three-year-old fashions, batteries, Irish music tapes, training shoes, football wristbands, pots and pans, kitchen knives, fleeces.

      I like it a lot. I lived in the Stow for three and a half years. During that time many amazing things happened.

       The Amazing Things That Happened in Walthamstow between 1988 and 1991

      1. We had dead pigeons in the water tank.

      2. Tiny freshwater prawns once appeared in the cold water.

      3. Dukey pinched a glamorous local barmaid from a geezer boyfriend with a fierce dog.

      4. I did a Jackson Pollock rip-off painting on an old door in the garden which Dukey then gave away to his glamorous girlfriend while I was away.

      5.