Vigilante Justice

One of the nicer features about Poplar Grove in Shepherds Bush is the twin rows of trees that line the road.  Around this time of year, the cherry blossom bursts forth and the street takes on a magical quality.  At dusk, you can see the sun setting at the far end of the street, casting a pink glow over the cloud of feathery white which bows inwards to make a barely discernible arch that doesn’t quite meet in the middle.  At night you can hear the wind rustling gently through the branches and you know that in the morning there will be the gentlest scattering of velvety snow flakes covering the cars below.

“Oi, Shane, get yer facking hands off me arse, ya pervy bastard.”

Among the less pleasant features are the group of Antipodeans who stagger drunkenly past the bedroom window at three in the morning, shrieking flirtatious obscenities at each other in the way that only people who learned to drink in a poorly painted surf club (and are now overwhelmed by the comparative splendour of the Walkabout Shepherds Bush) can shriek flirtatious obscenities.  I know that they live somewhere up the road but I have so far been unable to discover exactly where.  The day I do discover it will also be the day I borrow a carnival float, park it outside their house and pump Rick Astley music and Arabic calls to prayer at earth-shaking volume right into their front windows.  I will continue this barrage until they are quaking and begging for mercy.  Never again will I hear the nocturnal belching and the VB can’s clattering as the boys play touch footie down the street.  Never again will their Sheilas scrabble their stilettos and squawk in the moonlight.  I shall teach them the error of their ways for I am a vigilante and this is what I do.

As we know from the movies, there are many ways to become a vigilante.  Some of them are frankly a little far-fetched - radioactive spider bites, gamma ray experiments going wrong, being the sole survivor of your home planet’s death… well I mean to say, really.  Others of course make perfect sense.  Look at the turning point for the young Bruce Wayne, standing in a darkened Gotham alleyway while his parents are gunned down by a notorious criminal (with a goofy smile).  It didn’t take him long to don the rubber cape, get his marketing people to design a nifty logo and begin kicking criminal butt. 

It all started with being the victim of a crime.

That was how it began for me, one fateful night in a darkened Shepherds Bush cul de sac.  We hadn’t heard much from the Antipodeans.  There had probably been some mishap that got them sent home early from the Walkabout.  Perhaps Shane had chundered in the wrong place, if there is a wrong place for chundering in the Walkabout.  The street was quiet - quiet enough for Liz to hear the sound of my breaking car window tinkling like angry rainfall to the tarmac beneath.  We legged it down to the street in time to be in the way when the window-smasher returned to rob the car. I may be guilty of a libellous assumption here so if you were the hoodie-clad gentleman in question and you just happened to be taking a stroll at five o’clock that July Saturday morning, I apologise profusely.  Perhaps, had you not turned around immediately on seeing us and disappeared back up the road, we could have sorted out the confusion at the time.

It was five am and we were due to leave for Stansted and a week abroad no more than an hour later.  Hank and Cowgirl, not remotely put out by such an early plea for help, took charge of the car for the week and had a replacement window put in.  It seemed that Liz’s quick reactions (a key vigilante requirement) had prevented the robbery and, barring a quick trip to Autoglass, that would be the end of it.  But none of us noticed until much later that one thing had been taken – the tax disc.

Life continued and being the victims of a crime gave us much to harrumph about and feel ourselves become just that tiny bit more middle class and middle aged.  We deplored the crime statistics and the modern age in which we found ourselves.  I began to glower at people wearing saggy jeans and showing their underwear on the tube (apparently in sympathy with their unknown brother gangstas on Death Row).  Perhaps my first steps as a vigilante might have been in protest of this.  One sweaty commute, the sight of so much greying Calvin Klein would have triggered the Michael Douglas in me and I might have taken direct action in what would have been less of a Falling Down and more of a ‘tugging up’ moment, grabbing one of these kids and wrenching his waistline upwards in a near wedgie while decent Englishmen around me applauded and began in turn to turn upon the other baggy panted misfits in the carriage and those that took fright and ran tripped over their own ludicrous unbelted pantaloons and floundered on the ground as they deserved.

This didn’t happen.  Well, it hasn’t happened yet.  But it might still.  Take note, those of you still pursuing your low-slung boxer-showing belt-less trouser folly.  While you read this, doubtless moving your mouths and stumbling over the more difficult words, the revolution is round the corner.  We will hoist your waistbands upwards to a sensible height.  We will finish what Simon Cowell started.  

It was while I was grimacing at people on the tube and composing angry letters in my mind ‘Dear Mr Hilfiger, allow me to draw your attention to an obvious design flaw that seems to afflict so many of your trousers…’ that I received a letter of my own.  Transport for London objected to my driving through the congestion zone without having paid my charge one weekday.  In return I objected to much about Transport for London.  I had objected to the Congestion Zone when if first started.  I then objected to their plans to extend it into Kensington & Chelsea.  I wore my NO C IN K&C t-shirt on many occasions, even under my shirt on a work visit to City Hall, planning on ripping it open and confronting Mayor Ken Livingstone with it should I run into him. 

I took part in a ‘march’ to protest in which a large number of us, perhaps misguidedly in hindsight, stuck stickers on our cars and drove around Westminster together trying to cause, well, congestion. 

It didn’t do much good (until years later when Boris Johnson became Mayor and abolished the extension) but it didn’t stop me objecting.

I also objected to their claim that I was driving my car in the congestion zone on a weekday.  Like all enemies of the saggy-trousered, I had a job.  I worked for a living.  I paid taxes.  I kept the state afloat.  I had no time to be driving frivolously around town.  TFL failed to see my point – “How come we’ve got this picture of your car then,” they countered, sending me a picture of my car on an unrecognisable street at an unidentifiable time.  It might as well have been a picture of me driving through San Luis Obispo at midnight for all it showed but the number plate was mine, the bonnet unmistakably that of a silver Audi A3 and the stamp on the photo claimed that it was taken in Central London on a specific weekday. 

I was astonished.  I checked my diary and confirmed without doubt that I’d been in the office that day.  For my Psychology degree I studied some of what are known as the ‘Dissociative Disorders’ and had to admit that it was possible that I’d gone into a state of fugue and sleepwalked out of the office.  I could have developed an alternative personality which took control, went home on the tube and drove my car back into town for a quick joyride past the cameras before leaving the car at home (finding the same parking space on Poplar Grove, which NEVER HAPPENS) and heading back to work none the wiser.  Psychologically speaking, this could have happened, but it was pretty unlikely.  I mean someone at work would have noticed.

Unworthy suspicions popped into my head.  Cowgirl was insured on the car.  So, come to think of it, was Liz.  Was my flatmate coming home from work and using my car to flaunt congestion rules?  Did my girlfriend pretend to drive off to work, park her car around the corner and sneak back after I left to spend her days cruising aimlessly around the city in my car?  I made careful enquiries.  Neither of them had ever been part of an illegal weekday daytime street racing ring east of Marble Arch.  Both of them reckoned they had been at work on the day in question.  Neither reported any history of mental illness or blackouts.  It seemed too unlikely.

While I disputed this charge, my post box became fuller. Gradually a number of unpaid Penalty Charge Notices from parking tickets began to arrive, all claiming that I had been illegally parked in a resident’s permit zone in either Kensington & Chelsea or Hammersmith & Fulham.  Bizarrely, all of them were again on days when I was sure the car had been sitting peacefully outside Poplar Grove.  More bizarrely, some of them were for places where I actually had a valid resident’s permit.

I harrumphed about this in all directions and finally my mother suggested the answer.  “Darling, I should think you’ve been cloned,” she said on the phone one day.  It seemed ridiculous.  If there was an alternate version of me wandering around, surely I would have heard more about him than just his illegal parking exploits?  But she explained that she’d meant my number plate.  I did a trawl on the internet and it’s actually surprisingly common.  I found stories of people who’d been banged up for eight hours at a stretch on suspicion of driving their Mondeos in bank robberies three towns away.  Respectable people were being suspected of ram-raiding jewellery heists while their unscathed Land Rovers sat quietly in their driveways.  It looked like I had been cloned.  Moreover, compared to so many others, my cloners seemed to be singularly unimaginative criminals.

Like Bruce Wayne, I imagine, I went first to the Police for justice.  After a frustrating lunch hour in Savile Row Police station where I was told, despite the impassioned Rumpole-inspired presentation of my case, that there was no evidence of a crime being committed.  I fumed and dropped my folder and all over the floor spilled documents; affidavits signed by Hank, Cowgirl, Liz and my boss, stating firmly and indisputably how we were all at least physically present at work at all the times in question.  Arriving home, two more unpaid penalty charges awaited me and when I called Hammersmith & Fulham Council, I discovered that four more were on their way.

Liz and I were cat-sitting for friends near Heathrow at the time and when I was clawed awake by an excited ginger at 4am the following morning, I found myself unable to go back to sleep, stressing about these undeserved fines that I seemed utterly powerless to escape.  Having trusted the Police to protect me, I realised that they would be no help.  If I wanted to sort this out, I would have to take matters into my own hands.

When I spoke to the council the night before I had made a list of all the streets on which the parking tickets had been issued.  As all good detectives know, criminals are at their weakest when they get sloppy and patterns emerge.  According to this list, there were patterns aplenty.  Armed only with the list, I drove into London at 5am and began to tour the streets, looking for a car.  No.  Looking for justice.  And on Richmond Way, I found it.

Parked in one of the residents permit bays was a car identical to mine – a silver Audi A3 with an identical license plate.  I had found it.  I had turned vigilante and I had solved the crime.  Bruce Wayne had become Batman and the criminals had run round the corner and slap into him.  It was a sweet moment of triumph.  Of Victory.  Of Right.

I blocked the car in with my own and called 999.  I explained that I had solved a dastardly car cloning crime and had contained the evidence with my own car and would they mind getting the hell down there quickly and arresting the criminals before they could strike again.  I then backed away from my car and began to ponder the implications of this.

What would Mac Taylor do in this situation?  What conclusions would Gil Grissom draw?  Were Horatio Caine to push his sunglasses back and survery Richmond Way through squinting eyes, what horrific cliché would he consider appropriate?  People have accused me on occasion of watching too much CSI, (as if that’s even possible).  The laugh is now on those people because, were they to find themselves in my situation, how would they be expected to realise that crimes like this are most likely the work of organised syndicates?  My cloned car is just the tip of a vast groaning iceberg concealing a jagged underbelly of drugs, money laundering, contract murder and of course anything involving lots of guns.  There was probably a meeting of the five Shepherds Bush families going on around the corner and when it was over a couple of bodyguards of the Don in ill fitting suits with suspicious bulges would saunter round to collect his cloned Audi and might be somewhat miffed to discover that it had been blocked in.  They would look around for the perpetrator of this outrage and immediately seek reprisals.  Sweating, despite the chill of the early morning, I backed a block away from the cars and called Liz.

Liz doesn’t watch nearly enough CSI – barely any at all – so wasn’t really aware of the very real danger I was in.  But, hearing the fear in my voice she got in her car, drove up to London and the two of us conducted our first stake-out, eyes fixed on the two identical Audis and awaiting reinforcements slumped down in the front seats of her Peugeot.  All that was missing was coffee and doughnuts.  Ninety minutes and three 999 calls later, a Police car finally showed up.  The Police were obviously rookies.  They had no fear of the immediate threat of organised crime and instead seemed more excited by the thought of two identical cars.  They checked the VIN number on the other car and confirmed that it had been stolen from Kew Gardens some time before.  Pinching my number plate was a cunning way to hide the stolen car and they would have got away with it if it wasn’t for us meddling vigilantes.  Perhaps they should have been a bit more careful with their parking too.

Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea, on hearing the news were only too happy to overturn the parking fines.  Transport for London were less keen but finally, after I’d sent them a three page representation showing the cars standing adjacent to each other with a minute analysis of the difference in screw position on the number plates and the precise thickness of the fonts used comparing both with their photo of the congestion charge breaking car, they capitulated.  I received a thoroughly begrudging letter saying that they’d overturn the fine but would reserve the right to throw the book at me should it be discovered that I was pulling the fast one they so obviously suspected me to be pulling.   All told, I’d been laid open to over eleven hundred quid’s worth of fines that would only have got bigger had I not managed to find the car.  Being a vigilante had been proved to make sound financial sense.

The Police refused my suggestion that they park a plain clothes car next to the stolen car and lie in wait for the thief, claiming that they had too much else to do.  I think it was a foolish decision – they could have made a clean bust (and eaten plenty of doughnuts in the process) – it’s what Mac Taylor would have done.  As it happened, they managed to place someone in the car through forensics, finding a set of fingerprints of a well-known offender on a baseball cap inside.  When questioned, he told them that a man had turned up on his doorstep one day and offered to sell him the car.  Hmmm.  I suppose it must have made a refreshing change from those guys flogging tea towels and dusters.  He was charged but, due to a lack of evidence, they couldn’t make a conviction stick and as far as I know, he went free and was never even pursued for the parking tickets (although I’m guessing some bounty hunter in the pay of TFL is scouring the streets for him like Inspector Javert in pursuit of Jean Valjean).  I’d love to tell you his name and that I’m sure he’s guilty as hell but I suppose he was found innocent and there are libel laws so all I can say is that his initials are O.J. and, if that reminds you of another obviously guilty person who somehow managed to get off, well I’m sure that’s no coincidence.

So OJ is free to walk the streets once more, despite the best efforts of the Metroplitan Police force and I have to tell you that the only thing that’s really standing in the way of the total anarchy caused by OJ (and people in silly trousers) is vigilantes - people like Bruce Wayne and me.  And maybe you.  Have you been a victim of crime?  Have you had a nice letter from those nice people from your local Victim’s Support Service?  I suspect that they are secretly a part of the Vigilante screening process and if instead of, accepting their counselling, you ask them where you can buy a cape and have a cool logo done, they might have a secret department that can help.  If not, just join the charge with the ordinary people like me, like my former sidekick Liz. 

We didn’t need costumes or martial arts training - just an early morning drive with right on our side.  But before we knew it, we were fighting crime and dispensing our own brand of vigilante justice before vanishing back into the obscurity of the mild mannered alter egos that many of you know.  You don’t know where we’ll strike again, where our swords of justice will thrust, but if you’re shrieking on the streets of Shepherds Bush or showing off your shreddies over saggy trousers, you’d better be afraid.  Very afraid.

Mandy in my Daydreams

Arriving at Bikram Yoga Chiswick I am greeted from all sides.  ‘Good morning, Nick,’ the lady levering her MBTs off her feet at the door says.  ‘Hello there, Nick’, the one parking her UGGs next to four identical pairs on the shelf agrees with her.  ‘Don’t worry, Nick. I know your name’, the pretty receptionist says when I offer her my membership card.  ‘Hi Nick’, a couple of half naked men chorus as I enter the locker room.

I can’t help myself from indulging in a little swagger as I don my gear and enter the stifling heat of the studio.  I am obviously the man.  At least as far as those fine people of Bikram Yoga Chiswick are concerned.  I am the new and popular hero, I tell myself, adjusting my mat and towel happily, while a couple more people shoot smiling nods in my direction.  In the ten minutes peace before the class, people - no, not people, fellow practitioners - limber up around me and I lie on my back and savour the moment.  They love me here, I tell myself.  They all know me.  How could I be anything other than THE MAN?  I’ll probably get free membership here as I’m so good for morale.  Maybe they’ll even name the studio after me.  After all, they know me here.

Then Mandy the instructor walks in and we spring to our feet and clench our hands together under our chins and pump our elbows very slowly up and down to synchronise our deep breathing and I realise why it is that everyone seems to know my name.  They’ve learned it from Mandy.

If I have a particular skill, one that separates me out from a crowd and will win me huge prizes on the weirdest ever episode of Mastermind, it is my extraordinary ability to daydream.  I have been violently yanked from a reverie by a school teacher calling my name more often than an academy of sumo wrestlers has had hot dinners.  I have instantly forgotten the names of 80% of people to whom I have been introduced socially as something about their appearance has reminded me of something like – no, it’s gone, sorry.   I drift away into my thoughts during speeches and sermons; conversations and car drives; television programmes and tandem hang glides.  I am not far off being able to do an entire yoga session on auto pilot.  I couldn’t do it well, mind you, but I could do it.  Unless it was a Tuesday morning and Mandy was teaching.

Mandy is one of the more experienced of the teachers at BYC.  She really knows her stuff.  I think she might be mates with Bikram himself too, from the way she talks about him.  Not that she brags or name drops.  There’s just a fond familiarity to her tone whenever he comes up.  It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they visit each other’s houses regularly for Friday night curries and Sunday barbeques.  They are probably godparents to each other’s kids and take summer holidays together. 

Mandy is the sort of teacher that six-year olds accidentally call ‘Mum’.  She strolls the studio like a fierce but fond primary school Miss, congratulating good performances and correcting the wrongdoers.  Occasionally she’ll go off-piste with her own interpretation of a posture that might have a lesser instructor inhale sharply when they should be exhaling. She knows exactly what she is doing though and she takes the whole class with her, urging us on by name.  ‘Well done, Xen.  That’s great, Eric.  Antonio, arch your back a little.  Good posture, Lolly.  Don’t stick your bottom out like that, Nick.  Left arm up, Nick.  Nick, stop fighting it.  Yes you are, I can see that grimace on your face.  I want to see a smile.  Just enjoy it.  No - stop grimacing, Nick.’  She is amazing.  Nothing escapes her notice.  Parts of my anatomy that I have never heard of before are identified as being wrongly angled, extended or flexed and gently corrected.

It is helping.  My yoga is coming on in leaps and bounds.  I’m sure it should be smoother than that but it is improving and Mandy’s supervision is really helping that. 

I find it very difficult to daydream in her class as she spots and points out every position that I don’t think through perfectly and that’s how everyone else in the class has learned my name.  Who wouldn’t after hearing it that often?

‘Up on your tip toes.  Like a ballerina, Nick.’

The class continues.  We will spend ninety minutes, twisting and contorting ourselves as the clock ticks and the sweat drips. 

Mandy will guide us every step of the way and at the end we will lie exhausted in the dead body pose before gradually picking ourselves up and heading off to chatter in the changing room.

‘Suck your stomach in, Nick.’

People look at me in amazement when I tell them that we all talk to each other in the blokes’ changing room after class and that there’s nothing weird about it at all.  I don’t blame them.  I’m amazed myself.

I’ve been a member of several gyms over the course of my life – or at least rented their membership cards to pretty up my wallet and I’ve always hated that pair of execs who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time standing naked in front of a mirror combing their hair to perfection, one of them braying about markets and colleagues while the other agrees repeatedly with a forced manly timbre to his voice, the kind people use when joshing mates in the half time bars on football grounds (apparently).  He seems to be struggling to fulfil some unspoken challenge of remaining naked as long as his superior, like playing chicken with the last turkey. 

‘Nick, stop making that face.  You’ve got to smile - look like you’re enjoying it.’

I remember discovering myself in the same swimming pool as Tim Neligan, the MD of Zenith, on a regular basis at Cannons in Paddington (the third or maybe fourth gym that has been proud to call me a member but struggled actually to place me).  We didn’t stand and natter nudely at the lockers but he was always good for a friendly hello in the shallow end and would often start conversations with me over the water cooler about swimming.  I often wondered if this might perhaps be the moment when my career began to soar.  Tim was actually the person who officially made me redundant but he was awfully nice about it so maybe it was that extra length which helped. 

‘Suck your stomach in further, Nick.’

I have now become one of those people who talk in the locker room.  I suppose nothing bonds people like spending ninety minutes tying yourselves into knots together and my fellow overheated contortionists are often glad to exchange a grimace or a sigh or a comment on the arduousness of the class or the Hades-like heat of the studio or the excitement of the day that awaits us as we peel sweat-sodden clothing off and head for the showers. 

‘Stop lifting your chest, Nick.’

I do wonder whether it could be one of the side effects of spending much of my days on my own.  I’ve never particularly enjoyed my own company and perhaps this bare bottomed banter is my fault.  Perhaps the nice people at Bikram Yoga Chiswick used to maintain a respectful silence with one another.  Maybe they rue the day that I came to join their fold.  Maybe they are dying to tell me to shut up but being good yogis they are worried about the bad Karma.

Maybe I should test this out.  Maybe after this class I will stay stonily silent in the locker room and wait to see if anyone addresses me.  Perhaps there will be a relieved silence and peace will return to the locker room.

But I doubt it.  Bikram Yoga Chiswick is a friendly place.  Lots of people may know my name but I know theirs too.  I learned them from Mandy.  That ferocious focus isn’t just on me.  It extends to everyone and that’s how I know their names.  Mandy tells them to tuck their bottoms in too.  She’d do it to you too if you turned up there.

‘Well done, Clare. Touch the ceiling, Alex.  Arch your back, Elizabeth.  You too, Melody.  That’s a great posture, Catherine.  Hips forward, Otherworldlyone at the back.  Chin up, Philip.  Hold your hands behind your head, Brent, like the police are trying to search you.  That’s it.  No Paul, pretend you’ve got a million pound cheque between your buttocks.  Hold on to it tightly.  I’m trying to steal it.  You think that’s grumbling, Richard? I’ve got teenagers at home.  That’s not grumbling.’

You might say that Mandy is a great guide to anyone exploring Bikram Yoga for the first time.

‘Think of your nipples as headlamps, guys.’

I know that it’s time to focus.  We’re already at the floor stage.  If I don’t start paying attention, I won’t get the most out of Mandy’s teaching and maybe I’ll never be able to do the Triangle or the Camel pose properly and I won’t be able to reward myself with a nice Coconut milk from Francesca at reception and I’ll leave worrying that I’ve wasted the opportunity and when I unlock my bike from outside Sainsbury’s, I’ll be regretting my lack of attention but I should remember that I need to pop in to Sainsbury’s and get some food as Tony’s coming to lunch and I wonder how his holiday in Jordan went and I hope he’s brought the photos to show me and is Corkers ever going to reply to that email about meeting up later on and I wonder what it was that he said he wanted to ask me about and I must remember to ring the plumber back but above all I must focus on this before it’s too late.

‘Thanks a lot, guys.  Have a lovely day.  Namaste.’

Bugger. 

A massive thanks to Max (aka Paul Heneker) for so expertly adding me in to all the studio scenes, when I was actually clutching a glass of wine round at his flat in my yoga kit.  If you’re looking for a decent photographer (or would like some photos faked to show you doing sporty things), here’s his site http://www.heneker.com/.

Arriba Arribada

‘Padre, Padre, me quiero confesar,’a Spanish man flings himself at my feet and begs me in slurred Gallego to hear his confession.  He is only the second drunk Spanish man to do exactly this today but it’s still the morning so anything could happen.  I smile politely, make a vague sign of the cross in the air and join the crowd jostling their way through the narrow streets.  I glance back to see him give a last entreaty before returning grinning to his friends and his drink.  Five minutes later, we are ambushed by another inebriated would-be confessor.  He grabs my leg, throws back his head and launches into the familiar routine, ‘Padre, Padre…’

I am in north-west Spain, just above Portugal, walking the narrow medieval streets of old town of Baiona.  My presence has not suddenly overwhelmed the Galician locals with pious guilt and filled them with the desire to confess their sins.  It is just that I am dressed in a monk’s habit (a Dominican Friar, I think) and am walking the streets of their town with two other similarly dressed men – Brothers Arj and Kirb, we’ll call them.  The three of us spent part of our formative years at a school in Yorkshire run by Benedictine Monks so you might be forgiven for assuming that we have grown up to become secret weekend missionaries, donning our brown habits and spreading messages of fire, brimstone and forgiveness among the Spanish heathen.  Although I can’t speak for Kirb and Arj with 100% confidence, I can tell you that I am no secret man of the cloth.  In fact, eighty per cent of the people around me are dressed in the garb of a similar era and the other twenty per cent, frankly, look a bit silly.  They are not entering into the spirit of Baiona’s Festa da Arribada.

Arribada means ‘arrival’ in Gallego, the dialect of nearly everyone around me.  The particular arrival that they are celebrating with this Festa is that of Martin Pinzon and his ship, the Pinta, one of the three that set sail with Christopher Columbus en route to discovering the New World.  Not only was the Pinta the first to reach it in October 1492, but it beat the others back to the Iberian Peninsula too.  On 1^st March 1493, Pinzon brought the Pinta into the bay of Baiona and announced the discovery of the New World to the people of Spain, scooping Columbus himself by several months.

He picked the perfect place for it.  I have no doubt that the people of Baiona, on hearing his announcement, would have stopped what they were doing and thrown the most enormous party to celebrate.  Even now, five hundred and eighteen years later, they are still celebrating.  On the first weekend in March every year, thousands of people flock to Baiona in all manner of medieval costumes and take to the streets.  Bars open all day and street traders wallpaper the old town with rough wooden stalls selling local foodstuffs and replica medieval weaponry. 

For the last three years, Kirb and I have joined in, using the weekend as an opportunity to catch up with Arj who has settled there with his Baiona-born wife, Maria, and two children.  Awoken by cannon fire each morning, we spend the weekend walking the streets in costumes rented from the little stone-fronted shops that open only for those two days in the year.  We trawl the stalls for delicious traditional food and gather outside bars for beers and sangria in clay bowls, serenaded by roving gaiteros bands. 

We bump into affectionate old friends and familiar faces from previous visits.  Arj has his cheeks squeezed by a jamonerie owner with jowls down to his collar bone.  Kirb is patted fondly on the back by the new barman at Portiko, our favourite Baiona bar, on whom he has already made an impression.  We find Ramon, veteran of many of our Baiona nights, being embraced by a thickly moustachioed man in a leather jerkin at his favourite bacalao (cod) stand.  Off the main drag we stop at a bar, sitting down on a stone wall while a mob of children play around us.  Whenever one comes within reach of an adult, they are scooped up and kissed and hugged.  Ramon, his wife Rebecca and their two children all wear perfectly matching costumes.  I find myself thinking of the Von Trapp family in their play clothes cut from the same curtains. 

We are joined by Pepa, the wife of Alberto, with whom we spent the previous night, dining on monkfish and gigantic gambones and drinking obscenely large whiskies in Portiko.  We are told Alberto is still in bed.  ‘Que flojo’, Ramon dismisses him, using what I gather is a fairly graphic term for a someone who can’t take their drink - the same one in fact that he used on me when I left the bar at gone one-thirty that morning.  Poor Alberto is obviously deeply affected by our Friday night together and misses the whole of Arribada, to his wife’s shame.  His daughter Teresa seems unphased by the loss of her papa and charges around the medieval playground with Arj’s daughter Mariana, having their faces painted, sitting in a giant swinging boat and gasping in delight at the display of geese, pigs and ponies by the waterfront.  Arribada is well set up for kids and they all come in costume.  I see Princesses, Maid Marians, Knights Templar, even numerous miniatures in my own Dominican Friar costume.  There is also a Spiderman.

We arrive at the main square in time for a performance by Peter Punk, a coxcomb-clad clown with an uncanny resemblance to Joaquin Phoenix.  He abuses the audience, condemns the government in a thick Gallego accent and rides around on a six inch bicycle, clown shoes splayed wide from the pedals.  He spends half an hour winding up a local woman before stripping to an old style swimsuit, vigrously rubbing his nipples and stepping in to take her place in a Heath Robinson contraption that empties two water buckets over his head and slaps him in the face with a spring-loaded foam hand covered in whipped cream.

Up the hill, we pause for pulpo.  A giant cauldron simmers with tentacles.  Beside it, a woman in a brown tunic lined with gold snips the octopus into bite-sized chunks, douses them in virgin olive oil and peppers them with paprika before dishing them up on wooden plates to the waiting queue. 
  

 

A lady in green velvet adjusts the brocaded bonnet of a toddler in a pushchair.  A cobbler is hand-making shoes while tourists pose for photos in a giant pair beside the stall.  A beautiful girl passes us in a wimple and aviator sunglasses.  A squire in doublet and hose wields an enormous digital camera.  A knight with a pierced eyebrow watches a leather-aproned blacksmith hammer a metal knife on his anvil before thrusting it into a fire which his cowled assistant keeps hot with a six foot pair of bellows.

A frenzied beat approaches as half a dozen minstrel drummers escort a pair of lurid stilt-walkers through the streets.  They swoop down on unsuspecting mothers and gather up their children or snatch sun hats from the heads of Knights of the Crusades.  ‘A baixo’, one of the drummers urges us to the ground and we all drop to one knee as the walkers march up and down until the beat gathers and forces us to our feet as one and we follow the stilt walkers off towards the main square before Maria is distracted by a marrucho stand where the crepes are supposedly the best in Galicia.  There is a Cardinal standing there holding a beer and chatting up a serving wench and a witch.  Feeling outranked, we friars slink away.

On the beach we watch a display of jousting and general gallantry.  Boldly coloured horses and their riders thunder up and down the beach, spearing hanging rings with their jousting sticks and hurling spears into targets in front of a bursting grandstand.  The crowd gathered around are given coloured napkins to wave for their favourite knight who returns triumphant to his chosen corner to enjoy their cheers after each feat.  ‘El Caballero Negro’ the black rider is putting up a strong fight but ‘El Caballero Amarillo’ (yellow) is obviously in serious difficulty on a huge and skittish horse, plunging with alarm in every direction but the right one.  Unconcerned by the danger, the Spanish crowd laugh at the sight.

At the Boquerie, we discuss marriage and beards over beers while the kids play with my camera over the fountain.  Arj keeps us supplied with plates of tortilla, churrasco de cerdo (pork ribs) and criollo (chorizo sausages) barbequed a la plancha. 

Over the road a beautiful woman with a garlanded brow is juggling with sticks on a cord and off towards the beach all we can hear are the bubbling whistle of dozens of bird callers.  Men in tunics and jerkins cluster around upended barrels and drink Estrella.  A jester in faded technicolour juggles three equally faded technicolour balls then bares a set of hamster teeth and offers his cheeks out for a kiss.  He looks crestfallen as children shy away from him.  A man in an owl mask with a pinched beak plays what looks like a wind-up violin.  He nods a greeting to a man in thick leather gloves with an owl sitting malevolently on one wrist.  A stilt-walker returns and siezes an inflatable mace from a knight in a black cape, pretending to lay about him with it. 

As the dusk looms, Brother Arj, Brother Kirb, Maria, Ramon, Rebecca and a small swarm of costumed children wander down to the sea front, hanging exhausted over the railings.  Hoots, whistles, drum beats, cannon fire and excited Gallego chatter echo over the water.  In the harbour is moored a fully seaworthy replica of the Pinta.  It is now a regular tourist attraction all year round.  A sailor in a white smock hangs off the rigging and points towards Baiona.  I like to think that it is Martin Pinzon, enjoying the party that he and Columbus started so many years ago.

Mountaineer’s Lungs

I’m always surprised by how silly some people can look when they are smoking.  After all, when you’re doing something as cool as smoking, it should be difficult to look silly.  But lots of people manage it - my friend and fellow mountaineer Bruce for example.  For Bruce smoking involves holding a cigarette awkwardly between the tips of two fingers of a flattened hand.  He allows it to hover just north of his mouth and takes the occasional pouty lunge towards its filter from beneath with his eyes shut.  If you took the cigarette away he would look like a blind man blowing rather camp kisses to a balcony above.

I have mocked Bruce’s manner of smoking frequently but it is not fair of me.  If my friend Daniella’s opinion is anything to go by, my own smoking technique doesn’t really pass muster either.  ‘Nick-nocks,’ she would roar, being the introducer of that particular nickname, ‘you look so funny.  No one smokes like you do.  Let me do an impression.’  And she would reach across the table, pluck the cigarette from my mouth and inhale it gustily, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs with a sharp sound like a vacuum cleaner hose coming free from a sofa cushion.  She would then purse her lips into an exaggerated moue and blast the smoke over our heads like the sloping stroke of an exclamation mark, dot it with a small ring and relax her mouth into a bow of pure pleasure.  It looked quite sexy when she did it but apparently, on me, not so much.  It just looked silly.  She would pass the cigarette, my cigarette, up along the wing and the various impersonations of me would continue, always with the sucking noises, always with the obvious enjoyment and always always with the lips.

I’m sure that there are plenty of politicians that would tell you the same thing but it’s not much fun seeing people do impressions of you.  Especially if you suspect that they are right.  This may be why no one has Knighted Rory Bremner or Jon Culshaw and Alistair McGowan doesn’t often get invited round to Richard and Judy’s house.  This was 2001 and public smoking was still legal in the UK, although San Luis Obispo had been smoke-free for eleven years by then.  Nowadays if you wanted to do an impression of me smoking, you’d have to usher everyone outside and huddle in a doorway which would probably kill the joke somewhat.  Then it was much easier and it happened all too frequently, particularly around Daniella.  I began to fear that this was how I would become known.  My career as a novelist was still a little way from starting but would (inevitably I felt) take off and make me something of a public figure.  When this happened, what if the funny smoking became the thing they focused on?  Bremner and Culshaw and McGowan would compete with younger impressionists to do the louder inhale or the make most frightening mouth.  I would be approached to endorse cigarette brands, by their rivals.  My waxwork at Madame Tussauds would be holding a cigarette and, when I went to its unveiling, I would hear a small motor start up and realise that they had wired the mouth up to a smoke machine which blew a steady plume over the heads of PG Wodehouse, Salman Rushdie and the Spice Girls.

I started smoking because I didn’t drink coffee.  It sounds ludicrous but let me explain.  At boarding school you often feel you need an excuse to visit people’s rooms.  You can’t just show up with no apparent agenda as that is what earns you a reputation as a ‘loomer’.  Looming is a serious social crime when you are essentially squatting in someone’s room, taking up space that they might need for other things and contributing little to the social niceties.  I think it’s a bit similar to being a ‘lurker’ on Twitter but tweeters are less vocal in their objection to this than boarders are to loomers.  It’s easy not to be a loomer though.  All you need to do is suggest a reason for the visit.  ‘How about a coffee?’ you might say, or just ‘fancy a tab?’ that northern word for cigarette that got me into so much trouble when I started using it down south.  The trouble is that you have to actually deliver on one of these things.  You can’t come in and just watch other people do it as that’s a bit weird.  It was a choice between coffee and smoking and as I think coffee is disgusting, a highly addictive, foul smelling and extremely expensive habit which gives you terrible breath and appalling nerves, it had to be smoking.  That’s why I started smoking.

Okay, you’re not convinced are you?  Well you’re right.  The truth is, I started smoking because I wanted to be cool.  As we all know, smoking is cool.  Think of the Marlboro man.  Think of those dudey guys in leather jackets in Grease, the ones who fill their Zippos with petrol and are too cool to sing much.  Think of James Dean.  If smoking isn’t cool, then it’s time travel back to the fifties. 

But smoking is cool.  We all knew it, despite what our parents were telling us, despite what our teachers, our doctors, dentists and hygienists not to mention those increasingly terrifying health warnings all said.  Even our swotty cousins and Superman himself said it.  But we knew they were wrong.  It had to be cool.  What was the point otherwise?

I continued on the assumption that smoking was cool for seventeen years.  I learned all the things you can learn to add to your cool when you smoke - things like being able to open a Zippo lighter a dozen different ways with a single snap of the fingers or to light it by clicking your fingers on the wheel.  I learned to blow smoke rings and to let smoke seep out of my mouth while inhaling through my nose – the French Inhale or the Irish Waterfall.  I could roll and light a perfect cigarette blindfolded or a very messy one with just one hand.  My friend Kirb and I spent a week perfecting the cross lateral mouth/nostril combination move from Lethal Weapon until we were better than Mel Gibson himself.  If you have any idea what I’m talking about, you’re as sad as we were.  Gradually I built up every possible weapon in my arsenal of cool; an arsenal that began with smoking.  I evolved my technique until the world around me was left in no doubt of how much I was enjoying my smoking, how much I was enjoying being cool. 

But despite all that, chinks began to appear.  I started to doubt.  Did smoking really make me all that cool?  More and more people were banishing me to balconies and doorsteps.  It was costing me a fortune and an evening would come to an abrupt halt when I ran out of smokes.  The occasional bout of bronchitis was a bit annoying and there seemed to be less and less evidence that it was actually cool.  There was even a guy who drank in the Castle, Johnny, who dressed like a fifties rocker in black leather and jeans with a quiff that would have been the envy of Elvis.  Johnny was cool and he smoked.  But, as we got to know Johnny, we realised that he wasn’t really all that cool.  He was a bit boring and perhaps trying a bit hard.  Not only that but despite my smooth-handed Zippo tricks and smoke rings, my smoking was no longer drawing admiring glances and was actually causing people to openly mock me and do impressions.  Perhaps the cool of smoking was all a myth, I decided.  Perhaps it will never be proved to be cool.  Perhaps I’d better give up.

So up I gave.  I would never convince those around me that smoking was cool and when I finally stubbed one out for the final time at midnight on the eve of my thirtieth birthday it was with the defeated air of someone who has lost the same argument too many times.  For eighteen months I turned my nose up at all smokable items, filter cigarettes, roll-ups, hookah pipes, anything at all that I knew would give me that delicious feeling of drawing down smoke into my lungs.  If I ever got involved in heroin, I told myself with twisted logic, I would have to inject it as I knew that chasing the dragon would make me lose the fight and in no time I’d be a smoker again.  ‘I’m winning,’ I said to myself and I was.  I only dreamed about smoking every week or so.  I no longer spent entire afternoons outside on cold days, trying to blow rings with my breath.  I owned at least three biros that hadn’t been chewed to death and I had pretty much stopped going into McDonalds to steal straws to suck.  I had managed to quit. 

Bruce was still claiming that he wasn’t a smoker and still lighting up every Friday night.  He once bet me that for every cigarette he smoked after 2006, he would donate £10 to the Westminster Lourdes fundraising efforts.  If I hold him to it, this year’s trip will be free for several hundred people and Bruce will be bankrupt.  However, he’s been very supportive of my efforts to give up so I may let it lie.  It was Bruce who suggested that becoming mountaineers might be a good way to celebrate giving up smoking, so together we signed up to climb Kilimanjaro and began training in earnest.

One of the things that training for Kilimanjaro taught me, aside from how to pay unnaturally close attention to the colour and consistency of my pee (‘It must always be clear and copious’), concerned smoking.  Bruce and I learned this by the fireside of a guest house at the foot of the Pen Y Gwryd track up Mount Snowdon.  Bruce and I were not the only mountaineers to whom the guest house had been home.  They told us that our colleague Sir Edmund Hillary and his gang had spent a decent amount of time staying there while training for their Everest attempt.  I had to commend them.  We had, after all, had the same idea. 

 

After a long day’s climbing and a delicious dinner we sank into a couple of chairs around the fire, letting out the kind of manly sighs as we did so, that only mountaineer’s lungs can make.  Much like Sir Edmund, we sat with our feet up and told mountaineering tales.  Bruce and I were comparatively near the beginning of our climbing careers and so had rather fewer tales to tell than those around us.  For the main part, we were content to listen as our hosts regaled us with tales of Hillary and the gang.  Bruce got overexcited and began to smoke, bobbing up and down like a thirsty sparrow on the filter.  The sight of Bruce smoking is always a tricky one for a newcomer and I was afraid that our hosts might look askance on this, particularly as we were discussing such supreme feats of fitness.

But to my surprise, they viewed his smoking warmly.  It made him one of the boys.  ‘All the best mountaineers are smokers’, they told us, explaining that as long as they didn’t actually lug their Marlboro Lights up the mountain with them it actually helped a climber to be a smoker.  ‘Think about it’, they answered our amazed expressions, ‘who better than a smoker to be used to training and exerting themselves with limited lung capacity.  Who better than a smoker to be able to handle that terribly thin oxygen-starved air at the summit?  Who better?’  It made so much sense. 

If all the best mountaineers are smokers then surely smoking must make you a better mountaineer.  You don’t get much cooler than a chiselled, rugged mountaineer.  A man who can make an assault on a lofty peak and brave the elements to conquer it.  A man who can take on a mountain.  A very cool man indeed.  A smoker.

Finally, this was the evidence for which I had been searching - the proof that makes smoking genuinely cool.  Smoking makes you a better mountaineer.  Do you hear that kids?  Nick-O-Teen was right.  Superman was wrong.  We should have listened.  Smoking is cool.  Smoking has purpose.  Smoking is good.  Smoking helps you climb impossible mountains and may even get you knighted, like Sir Edmund Hillary.  It was as if the Marlboro Man had been reincarnated and was dancing a triumphant jig.

But it was too late for me.  Eighteen months too late.  My smoking days were over.  I had gone through too much to quit ever to want to do it again.  Just as smoking became cool, I became a non-smoker. 

Bruce took another drag of his cigarette, nibbling at the tip like a nervous goldfish trying to French kiss another nervous goldfish.  I knew what he was saying.  ‘You had your chance, ex-smoker.  You could have been cool and you blew it.  I’m the real smoker now.  I’m the real mountaineer.  Me and Sir Edmund.’  I slunk away, foiled.  To those who stood around it might have seemed like I was gnashing my teeth in impotent rage.  I was actually chewing gum, my nineteenth Wrigley’s Extra, having managed to get myself down to two packs a day.  But inside I was gnashing.  And I still am.  Limited lung capacity?  Harrumph.

I wonder if limited lung capacity is an extra benefit of my recently acquired bike accessory.  After a couple of irritating bouts of tonsillitis over Christmas, I decided that my tonsils had now qualified themselves as excess baggage’ and as part of my California-inspired drive for leanness, suggested that a doctor might like to whip them out as I no longer had much use for them.  He explained that although your tonsils are pretty near to your wisdom teeth, you can’t just saunter in to the surgery, have a quick injection and waggle your eyebrows in mute disapproval while strange hands yank them out, stitch you up and send you home in time for a delicious lunch of mashed banana.  It’s considerably more serious than that and perhaps I might to better not to be so profligate in getting them infected in the first place.  This seemed like a tall order to me.  After all, I’m not exactly rubbing my tonsils against loo seats or the hand rails on buses.  What else can I do?

‘Well it probably isn’t helped by the cycling’, he told me.  I am no longer cruising carelessly through San Luis Obispo, breathing in the sweet scents of orange blossom, cabernet grapes and the contented dispositions of thirty thousand sunny citizens.  Instead I barrel daily down Chiswick High Road, dodging smoke-belching dustcarts and dusty white vans.  Idling engines at traffic lights leak fumes into my nostrils and the harder I pump the pedals the more pollution I breathe.  Not a good state of affairs.  I ponder idly about using it as an excuse to head back to SLO but think that the Immigrations guys may not share my concerns about my tonsils, however much I open my mouth and go ‘aaah’ for them. 

Instead, I invest in a mask, a becoming black thing that velcros around my face and stops me breathing in the fumes.  I have been trying it out over the last week and am not sure about it.  The doctor told me that breathing in the London air I may as well be smoking several cigarettes a day and I think, ‘well at least that would make me cool’.  The facemask does not make me cool.  When I am wearing it, I look like a mugger or someone who thinks he is a ninja.  When I take it off, I look far worse.  Breathing inside it is a moist affair and you tend to dribble a bit.  Not much but enough to need to wipe if off when you take the mask off.  There is a metal thing that clamps over your nose and I may have got the setting on this wrong as it squeezes my nose tightly and again tends to make it dribble a bit.  Not much.  But enough.  I’m also not sure I’ve got the hang of actually breathing through the thing yet either.  I have to labour so much harder to suck the air in but that’s probably because it’s being so amazingly filtered and I’m now breathing pure oxygen or something.  So when I arrive somewhere on my bike and whip my mask off, I am dribbling and panting heavily and in serious need of a tissue.  It won’t be long before I am arrested or at least shepherded kindly back to a nearby mental institution.

I am half tempted to start smoking again.  If I develop mountaineer’s lungs (as the packaging should be promising you) I will be able to breathe quite happily in the London traffic with no ill effects whatsoever.  I will suck those fumes in with satisfaction and blow delicate rings with them on the way back out.  But I went through too much to quit and I’m not going back now, however rugged and desirable smoking has become.

I suppose I will have to console myself with the slogan of the wannabe ultra fashionable.  ‘I used to smoke,’ I will tell people, ‘before it was cool.’