I’ve simplified the blog and shifted it up a directory to www.benlocker.com.

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A phenomenally busy week, so I’m short on time. I’ll be back at the weekend, but in the meantime have a guess who this elegantly dressed fellow is. His whiskers should give you a clue…

Venichka doesn’t have a blog, but he has some rather nice pictures here and sometimes contributes to Harry’s Place. Anyway, as a Dagenham boy who now lives in Southend, what could be more appropriate than Billy Bragg singing A13 trunk road to the sea? Take it away, Billy…

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the okay road that’s the best
Go motorin’ on the A13

If you’re looking for a thrill that’s new
Take in Fords, Dartford Tunnel and the river too
Go motorin’ on the A13

It starts down in Wapping
There ain’t no stopping
By-pass Barking and straight through Dagenham
Down to Grays Thurrock
And rather near Basildon
Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea,
Chalkwell, Prittlewell
Southend’s the end

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the okay road that’s the best
Go motorin’ on the A13

[Photo taken from here]

I’ve never been a flag-waving patriot, and I don’t intend to start now. I’m quietly content that I’m English; but I’m just as glad that my heritage is fortified by relatives from earlier generations of Scots, Irish, Belgians and others. As I was telling a Welsh friend yesterday (as we shared a drink on St George’s Day and bemoaned some passing drunks who were sporting St George Cross hats and comedy underpants) my ideal of Englishness is probably embodied by Tommy Huggins (a.k.a. Monsieur Hougins) in A.G. MacDonell’s England, Their England. Huggins is a colourful, drunken eccentric whose insistence that he is Belgian conceals the fact that he bravely and sincerely fought for his nation - Britain - in the Great War. He’s enough of his own man to grow into his own form of Englishness without resorting to jingo or tribal bullshit.

It’s this wider understanding of Englishness - and the fact that he centres his argument on events in Hackney - that has drawn me to this article by Patrick Wright. He says:

It’s possible to be vigorously English without resorting to mournful elegies, or without having to prove your descent from the ancient Iberian or Celtic stock that Hilaire Belloc, writing a century ago, described as ‘the permanent root of all England’.

I like this thought: he’s talking about an Englishness that’s about “being” rather than “belonging”; something that’s defined by a person’s attitudes rather than their being part of an exclusive club. But what interests me most about his argument is the fact that he says the expression of Englishness comes to the fore when the local - and not just the national - is under threat.

..the England invoked in earlier times has often been thrown into relief by a burning sense of imminent danger. This is easily understood at times of war, when the threat is palpable. Yet it is by no means only at such moments of righteous emergency that Englishness has been a defensive stance. Even in peace time, being English can feel like a perpetual Dunkirk, in which everything that is valued is polarised against ‘encroaching’ developments that promise only nullification and destruction.

And what better place to see this in action than in Hackney? Citing the time he lived in the borough in the early 1990s, Wright says:

…there was one street above all that seemed beyond hope of improvement or recovery. It was spurned even by its own graffiti, which declared ‘Broadway Market is not a sinking ship. It’s a submarine.’

As anyone who knows the area will tell you, Broadway Market is now a thriving, busy, valued part of Hackney life. But it was achieved at a price, and in the teeth of fierce and soulless opposition:

What takes place here on Saturdays is as much a weekly resistance movement as it is a street market with an alternative, organic air about it. The revival has been achieved by local people against powerful opposition. The first enemy, as so often in these parts, is easily identified as Hackney Council, which, as the organisers claim, first tried to stop the street market happening and then, when it emerged as successful, turned round and attempted to take it over. The second is the developers favoured by the council’s officers as they prepared to sell off the street’s shops and buildings.

Hackney’s officials appear to have recoiled in dismay when local traders defied expectation by scraping together the resources and offering to buy their long-rented buildings. Their preferred buyers are developers of an absentee and sometimes also offshore variety: people whose manoeuvres as they assemble sites for demolition are even less encumbered by respect for local life. The campaign for Broadway Market has been accompanied by a vigorous defence of local traders faced with eviction. This time the graffiti has declared ‘We want our café not yuppie flats’.

Though only a local affair, the battle has gone into wide circulation as an encouraging story proving that the spirit of England is not entirely dead.

It’s an attractive thought. Could our other local battles be the furnaces in which Hackney’s communities forge a common expression of Englishness? There are plenty to choose from: the battle for Dalston’s future; the skirmish over Ridley Road Market; the war over proposed developments in Shoreditch.

I’d like to think so, but - given the tenacity and cold determination of local officialdom - I suspect I’m taking too poetic a stance. It’s a very English failing, after all.

I’ve been blog tagged by Scott Pack over at Me and My Big Mouth. To play, I have to list six random facts about myself and then tag six of you to do the same. So here goes.

1. I nearly once killed the family dog by tying its lead to the collar of a caravan propane cylinder. When I next saw it, the animal was trying to escape from a high-pressured gas hose whilst tied to a huge iron canister. The next year I left it outside the local shop for six hours. It didn’t like me very much.
2. By the age of 15, I had lived in two houses in Leicester, one in Lincoln, and ten houses in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Five of the latter were council houses. I don’t remember any house with affection, but I know and love the latter town intimately (even if it was a phenomenally boring place to be a teenager).
3. I was confirmed as a Roman Catholic at the age of 12. I took the confirmation name of “Francis” after St Francis of Assisi; but only after I’d bottled out of taking the name “Maximilian” after Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was a Franciscan and a great admirer of St Francis. That’s why I chose that name. I am now a very lapsed Catholic, but I admire both men greatly.
4. My son has just vomited all over his mother.
5. I am listed in Debrett’s. It is considered extremely bad form to mention this fact, but it is one that has the power to irritate a lot of people.

So, there you go. Now I have to nominate six of you. I choose:

• Bill
• Dave
• Katy
• Lord Giltwood
• Annie
• Rivergirlie

Sorry if you’ve had to do this before. If you decide to play, you need to:

• Link to the person that tagged you - i.e. me.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Write six random things about you in a blog post.
• Tag six people in your post.
• Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
• Let the tagger know your entry is up.

Oh, and my sixth fact? I once played tiddlywinks for my university. Badly.

And as it’s Wednesday, who better than the elegantly dressed Max Raabe singing Klonen Kann Sich Lohnen (”Cloning Could Be Worth It”).

I discovered Raabe last week, thanks to August sending me a link to this fine performance by the Bratislava Hot Serenaders. A couple more hours of browsing and I’d uncovered the witty, dry - almost serpentine - Raabe, and laughed my face off to his 30s-style covers of Britney Spears’s Oops I did it Again, and Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb.

So, August: thanks. This week’s EDW is for you.

Even this isn’t as amusing as Guido’s piece on how to manipulate the street sign elsewhere on the site (it’s very easy).

“I swear to God I heard someone moaning low.”

A fitting tribute to the man behind Trollied Tuesday. He could “swallow a small fridge” without blinking.

I think it’s the sort of week in which to say “thank you” to those of you who not only endure my prating, but also come back for more.

First out the box: Glamourpuss. This video’s for you.

The new London Mayoral Candidates Booklet is full of hidden messages. Here’s the third in the series.

Lindsey German: Vote for me and I’ll overrule Parliament by bringing our boys back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The bourgeois capitalists in their plush palace at Westminster will of course tell me to f*ck off, but that won’t stop me. Why should I have to settle for the limited powers of the London Mayoralty when revolution is just round the corner? I’ll gather whatever comrades haven’t that day stomped off to form their own ideologically-discredited, Leninist-Stalinist, or Trotskyite-Kalininist-Galwegian splinter group, get them behind the wheels of Leninstone’s exploding bendy buses and go and pick our brave, brainwashed troops from the Middle East. At least, we would if any of the troops wanted to come back. And if we could convince the RMT’s members not to strike over the additional duties of training us to drive. Traitors. When the troops do get back, the RMT will be first up against the wall. Though we’ll need some of those troops to help us in our armed struggle against capitalism defend civil liberties. Vote for me. It’s time for me to have a massive ego trip equality.

He may be reminiscent of Inaction Man, who appeared in The Idler about a decade ago; but Ennui Man is definitely the doll for me.

Hat-tip to A Man in the Desert. Illustration by Nick Dewar.

Time for my nonchalent saunter.

The new London Mayoral Candidates Booklet is full of hidden messages. Here’s the second in the series.

Ken Livingstone: “I might fancy newts, swig whisky during the working day, have told a Jewish reporter he’s behaving like a concentration camp guard, accuse Brian Coleman of behaving like Goebbels, insist that Ariel Sharon was a war criminal, be embroiled in allegations about Lee Jasper’s alleged mismanagement of funds and dismiss media coverage of 27 teenage murders in a year with the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads”; BUT, if anyone realises that I belong to the same party as Gordon Brown, I’m completely f*cked“.

The new London Mayoral Candidates Booklet is full of hidden messages. Here’s the first in the series.

Richard Barnbrook (BNP): “Vote for me. Tall bigots are better than short bigots. At least I don’t have to get photographed whilst standing on a box of bananas. Just look at that bloke in the dark suit - he’d never have got his elbows in the picture if he hadn’t been standing on a box of Doles. Even so, we believe white people shouldn’t be on the Doles. Oh feck, it’s my party leader Nick Griffin… Why does no-one else in this booklet have to stand next to their party leader? He couldn’t be more disastrous if he appeared in a dirty film. Oh. Erm. Did I ever mention I used to be a teacher?”

Tomorrow: The Christian Choice explains why shed loads of money and a younger wife will help Londoners pass through the eye of the needle.

Everyday people…