[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.

Not learning from the idiocy of scheduling women-only swimming sessions that debarred women from swimming with their children (and excluded all men) during peak weekend times, Clissold Leisure Centre has now been barring access to its pool to most of the community by reserving the pool to Muslim men on Sunday mornings.

I wish Hackney Council put the same effort into fairness and leadership as it does into target-hitting. It would not only look less ridiculous, but the tragic results of inhuman, bureaucratic single-mindedness might finally be avoided.

Another day in Hackney, and the council sends letters to everyone in my street threatening them with a £100 fine if they don’t keep their wheelie bins off the pavement. Of course, no-one thought to send a polite letter first: civility has no place in the council machine.

Meanwhile, over the Hill on the Hackney side of the Haringey border, the roads have been taped off and the place is teeming with police, detectives and bystanders. I ask a policeman: “Was it a bus incident?” He replies: “I can’t say”.

But the bystanders have got word from somewhere. “Someone got stabbed.” “Someone got killed”.

Two more policemen arrive on the scene as I leave (I’ve been buying fruit from Fresh ‘n’ Fruity). One says to the other: “What use are we going to be to anyone here?”

Perhaps they could be investigating last week’s murder?

UPDATE: Yes, it’s yet another teenage murder on the safe streets of Hackney. Expect Diane Abbott up here for a publicity stunt in the near future.

UPDATE 2: The murdered teenager has been named as Devoe Roach. Two other teenagers were murdered on the same day - one elsewhere in London, the other in Birmingham. More details here.

Note: I’ve posted the other camera-phone photos I took on Hackney Lookout.

When Tory peer Lord Mancroft criticised the standard of care he received at Bath’s Royal United Hospital, he not only stuck a rusty scalpel in the nursing profession, he twisted it:

The nurses who looked after me were mostly grubby — we are talking about dirty fingernails and hair — and were slipshod and lazy. Worst of all, they were drunken and promiscuous.

Until he emerged as a nurse basher in this way, hardly anyone had heard of Mancroft; and the fact that he turned out to be a former junkie and - worse - one of the ninety remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, meant that it was too easy to dismiss his point out of hand, and too politically dangerous to defend him.

That’s why, with barely moment’s delay, the Royal College of Surgeons lost all sense of proportion and accused Mancroft of hurling a “sexist insult about the behaviour of British women”; why Health Minister Ben Bradshaw used the episode to trot out a lot of statistics; and why Tory leader David Cameron quickly lanced the abscess in his party by asserting “My experience of the NHS is 100 per cent completely different”.

Personally, I’m quite certain in my own mind that there are plenty of nurses who (like doctors) drink too much, and probably more than a few who have dirty fingernails and poor hygiene. But I also think that the wider point of Mancroft’s rather ill-judged outburst was contained in this explanatory remark:

You see, if you are a patient and lying in a bed and being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you’re not there.

In that, he’s absolutely spot on. Frankly, I wouldn’t care less whether the nurse giving me a bed bath had a hangover (though I would prefer her nails to be clean); but I would have little faith in any carer who treated their patients as though they didn’t exist.

It sounds prissy, but I’ve seen what such attitudes can do. Back in the mid-1990s, during some of my university vacations, I used to work as a care assistant in various old people’s homes. In the best-run one, staff would have been genuinely shocked if you accused them of not giving being up to their jobs; but the fact was that almost all of them routinely treated residents as though they were invisible, almost never used quiet periods in the day to talk with the people they were supposed to care for, and always - always - assumed an exaggerated and (sometimes) false veneer of concern and affection whenever a relative showed up to visit.

Worse still, staff would take shortcuts and - more dangerously - make decisions on behalf of residents who were powerless to resist them. Carers would pretend not to hear old people they regarded as ‘troublesome’, and would even quicken their pace in certain parts of the building to avoid encountering them. I remember one old man who could walk perfectly well with a zimmer frame one week, and who had been taken off his feet the next - never to walk again, and soon to die.

Those carers weren’t bad people: they just worked in a culture that placed more value on appearances than on the best interests of vulnerable people. The manager was keener on making sure the beds had valences (a sort of linen pie-frill that hangs off the base) than in making sure her staff learned to take pride in improving every aspect of residents’ lives - not just in keeping them fed, warm, dry and as compliant as possible.

Under such conditions, it was little wonder that most staff took the easy option and put their own interests ahead of those they were supposed to be looking after; and it was massively to the credit of the small number of carers who did the opposite.

Where you have a culture in which staff inclinations take precedence over patient care, then the quality of that care is bound to suffer. After all, Lord Mancroft isn’t the only person to have witnessed this (however clumsily), as this succulent quote selected by NHS Blog Doctor, Dr Crippen, shows:

A nurse who wanted to see her cardiologist gets fobbed off by a nurse:

A very rude nurse- who was all dressed up in a suit, decided she would speak with me, but refused to answer any of the questions I had other than “its not dangerous,” and then make assumptions about my mental state. “You’re a bit stressed aren’t you, Love. Maybe thats why it happens eh?”

Piss off- you’d be pissed off if you’d travelled half way across London for an appointment to discuss results and not only have they cancelled your appointment without telling you but the consultant who fucked it up isn’t even there to take a battering!

Turns out the receptionist had taken it upon herself to cancel my appointment based on the consultants letter to my GP which said that I don’t need anymore follow ups. Yes- follow ups after we’ve been through all the results and my questions you fucking… monkey.

Faith Walker at The Oracle

A classic example of I-know-bestism that reduces the patient to nothing more than a target, to be disregarded at the earliest opportunity.

I’ve seen it at first hand too. In the months leading up to the birth of our son in late 2006, my wife amassed an impressive collection of forms and paperwork, including a detailed birth plan. This bit of paper details all the mother-to-be’s preferences about the manner in which she wants to give birth, the pain relief she will accept and so on. The idea is that, when you arrive at the hospital in labour, the midwives, doctors and others can see at a glance what the plan is and act accordingly.

At least, that’s the idea.

When my wife and I rolled up to Homerton Hospital in Hackney at 1.30am and handed over the birth plan to a midwife, we might as well have handed her a piece of paper reading “do whatever the fuck you want.” Because that’s pretty pretty much what she and her colleagues did.

First choice in the plan was a water birth. We assumed that, on reading this, someone would have started running the taps. That was foolish: the Homerton method was to wait until labour had progressed exactly far enough to say “There’s no time to fill the birthing pool now.”

Other choice moments included the midwife pissing off for an hour-long break and leaving us alone, telling us to let the deeply uninterested woman in the corridor know if we needed anything; me fetching the deeply uninterested woman, who put her head in the door and said: “She’s not pushing hard enough, is she?”; the original midwife realising she was way out of her depth, and fetching the doctor; the wonderful rigmarole as they strapped my wife to a machine that monitored the baby’s heartbeat, only to send her into a complete panic every few seconds as the beeps continually flatlined; and the refusal to give her any pain relief when asked because it would “make the birth even more difficult”.

Within three hours we had seen our agreed plan of a supportive water birth exchanged for a get-on-with-it-and-do-as-you’re-told procedure, which ended up with the baby nearly strangling on the umbilical cord, foetal distress, epesiotomy and a newborn who needed to stay in hospital for 24 hours’ observation.

That was the easy bit. At 3pm the following afternoon, we were told we could get packed and get ready to go home. It then took me nine hours of pleading with the ward staff before mother and child were finally discharged half an hour before midnight. We walked off into the night anonymously - another statistic heading for the safety of home.

Of course, it would be as unfair for me to complain as it was for Lord Mancroft to grumble about the care he received. Crap service doesn’t - contrary to the evidence of my own eyes - translate into poor standards of safety. When maternity services at Homerton Hospital were recently slammed as being amongst the worst in the country, the Healthcare Commission Chief Executive, Anna Walker, reassured us all by saying:

“Being put in the least performing category does not mean that a service is unsafe.”

Yet another healthcare professional who knows best. Quite how her remarks square with the fact that infant mortality is significantly higher than it was ten years ago is quite beyond me.

So, what to do? When it comes to medical matters, I can’t pretend I know best. But from my observations of how organisations are run, how they prosper and how they fester, surely some of the following points are worth considering.

1) Nurses, as individuals, are no more beyond reproach than anyone else. If someone says they have not been treated as well as they hoped by one or more nurses, this does not constitute an attack on an entire profession.

2) Many human beings have a tendency to go with the flow, and to take the easiest options. If the culture of a hospital allows nurses to get away with putting their own preferences before the needs of their patients, then some nurses (though not all) will do exactly that.

3) Targets need to be qualitative as well as quantitative. If a hospital is penalised for failing to meet targets, and those targets can be more easily achieved by providing sub-standard care, then they need to be scrapped and re-thought.

I certainly believe that nurses, midwives, care assistants and the rest all have to do a very difficult job, for relatively little pay, and in difficult conditions. We just need to recognise that things won’t get any better for them until we can accept that no individual is beyond reproach, simply by virtue of their profession or standing.

And that goes not only for nurses, but peers, MPs and even the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Once again, a bunch of enterprising folk have spotted the gap in the market between the Hackney Gazette and the council-run snoozepaper, Hackney Today. They’ve filled it with the Hackney Post.

It looks promising and propaganda-free - rape, sex clubs and pneumonia are on the front page as I write - though it could probably lose a bit of the self-referential stuff like the video interview with the editor (”it’s a challenging role” apparently).

I wonder, though, whether the new rag is any relation to this Hackney Post, which vanished last year? And where does it leave the Hackney Mail, which seems to have fizzled out after one story?

Anyway, good luck Hackney Post. Tell it like it is and may your questions be ever awkward.

I’ve been deeply amused by my local council’s reaction to the news that the Government wants to shut down 2,500 post offices, including seven (for now) in Hackney.

Even though it’s the Labour party that is ramming through the cuts, local councillors from the same party have been running about desperately trying to look like the good guys. So much so, in fact, that councillors from the De Beauvoir ward - who don’t have a post office of their own to save - have been dashing over into Islington to preserve the big branch on Essex Road (this one, for convoluted reasons, can actually be blamed on the Lib Dems).

But the thing that really made me laugh was the coverage in Hackney Today - the council’s propaganda rag - which you can see above, counterbalanced by a bit of news from the Press Association. The council knows how to turn out a carefully-worded article, sure enough, and the photo of mayor Jules Pipe is charming; but anyone reading the words would have no idea that the party that runs both the country and the council are the ones that condemned the post offices in the first place.

Well, fair play to them if they think it’s the best use of local taxpayers’ money and they can get away with it.

Not that getting away with it is hard. As the BBC pointed out a couple of years ago, many residents have “no idea” that Hackney Today is produced by the council; although that didn’t stop some commenting on its “lack of real news”.

But, as always with these in-house rags, one has to be so careful not to overstep the mark. That might - shudder - attract accusations of impropriety. Satire, such as this, is all very well - but to stand accused of actual wrongdoing…. well, that would be, wrong.

That’s why I’m simply going to offer one recommendation which, I am sure, will make Hackney Today a newspaper that residents will be proud of: ask Jules Pipe to stand down as mayor and become a sub-editor once more.

I’m sure that Jules’s grip of local government regulations and his keen eye for detail, as acquired on the Sunday Telegraph, will enable him to spot errors and contradictions such as this one from slipping through the net.

Naturally, as mayor, he would be familiar with the “Code of recommended practice on local authority publicity” (snappy title, available here), which states that

Publicity should not be, or liable to misrepresentation as being, party political.

Knowing that, surely a keen sub-editor wouldn’t allow the three Labour councillors of De Beauvoir ward (email: debeauvoir@hackney-labour.org.uk) to use the pages of Hackney Today to publicise their website at debeauvoircouncillors.blogspot.com in every issue.

After all, this is a website that has the strapline “News from your local Labour Councillors” and jolly, partisan remarks like:

Unfortunatrly [sic] Islington’s Lib Dem run council dealt the first blow to the Essex Road Post Office by selling the building

and

Labour’s Alan Laing, Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods, said: “Hackney Council aims to attract and increase the number of female cyclists within London

and

By the end of next month, there will have been even more new trees planted around the Borough as part of Labour in Hackney’s commitment to plant 1000 new trees by 2010.

and

The Green Party in Camden are now using Labour run Hackney as an example of good practice.

After all, publicising a website like this in a council publication only weeks before a mayoral and LGA election might, for all I know, contravene this other regulation:

Particular care should be taken when publicity is issued immediately prior to an election or
by-election affecting the authority’s area to ensure that this could not be perceived as seeking
to influence public opinion, or to promote the public image of a particular candidate, or group of
candidates.

Anyway, as I suggested, the trick is to reissue Jules Pipe with his blue pencil; and if he can cut some of the crap like “good practice” whilst he’s at it, then so much the better.

At last, some news about a Hackney resident that will appeal to all my readers: TARZAN FLASHER SWINGS INTO TROUBLE.

View from a tower block on Bethune Road, near me. I only had my crappy camera phone, but it was amazing to capture a new perspective on my area. If only you could pour the same amount of hope and carefree grace into the heart of the building itself, rather than locking it behind reinforced doors.

Sunday afternoon in a Church Street bar. It’s my round. The girl at the counter has slender grace, wavy copper-gold hair and marble cheekbones.

“Half a Guinness, a large white wine and a pint of Beck’s.”

She pours the stout and reaches in the fridge for the wine. There’s not quite enough in the bottle for a whole glass, so she takes out a fresh one. It has a screw cap. She grips the top and twists hard. Nothing happens.

She puts the unopened bottle back in the fridge and picks out another one. Again, she grips the top and twists. But the cap won’t budge.

“Can…,” I begin. She takes the bottle by the base and tilts it so the neck is pointing at me. I take the wine and screw off the cap, but it’s a near thing. I hand it back to her.

“Hasn’t she got beautiful eyes?” asks a dark haired woman, sitting on a stool next to me.

“She has very beautiful eyes,” I agree as the barmaid’s cheeks dapple with crimson. “Very beautiful.”

I can’t say I like the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) any more than the many countries that list it as a terrorist organisation. But I’m glad we still live in a country that allows its supporters to protest if they want to. Something tells me, though, that this demonstration won’t convince Turkey to release Abdullah Öcalan.

More camera-phone photos are here.

Monday: Launderette

Monday morning in the Launderette. One lot of clothes on warm. The other on hot. I’m sitting by the tumble dryers reading The Times.

The door crashes open. A red headed man lurches in with a self-assured woman. He’s swigging from a can of Kestrel super-strength lager. She’s carrying the washing.

“‘Ere,” shouts Lager as he pitches forward towards the service counter. “You got any washing powder?”

“Don’t shout,” shouts his companion.

“I’m not shouting,” yells Lager.

They get the washing in and woman leaves. Lager sits on a ledge and drinks. I get on with the tumble drying.

After a while he gets bored and leaves. Twenty minutes later he’s back, without drink. I look up to see him draped over the top of a large washing machine. There’s a strange whirring noise, as though he’s using a small drill to chip sludgy powder from the tray.

It’s not a drill. It’s a toy hamburger. He winds it up again and again and drunkenly watches it hopping on its plastic feet. Now and again he reaches for his mobile phone and puts it away, muttering “Fucking woman. Where are you?”

Wednesday: Newsagent
Queuing to buy a magazine. Two teenage girls in front of me. Cheap jewellery and clothes permeated by the smell of fast food. Two Orthodox Jews pass us from behind. The girls look at each other.

“Cccccnnnnnggt,” splutters one like a pig blowing its nose. She makes corkscrew gestures at the side of her head, tracing the line of imaginary peyos.

“Ffffnnngggtt,” snorts the other and they laugh.

They reach the head of the queue. The first, piggish girl addresses the shopkeeper whilst texting on her mobile phone.

“Child travelcard.”

“Do you have ID?”

“Don’t have no ID”

“Then I can’t sell you a child travelcard.”

“Fucking cunt,” yells pig features and she and her friend storm out.

“Did you hear that?” the shopkeeper asks me.

“Yes.”

“She called me a fucking cunt.” It’s all part of a normal day for the shopkeeper, but he doesn’t see why he has to put up with it.

“I know. I don’t see that you can do much about it, sadly.”

“She called me a fucking cunt!”

“I know. Never mind.” Pause. “Have a nice day!”

We laugh. Thankfully not everyone’s a fucking cunt.

Wednesday: Bus
Lower Clapton. Top deck of the 254. Three girls and a mother. Phone rings. Mother answers, speaks, ends conversation.

“That’s Leanne. She’s just got her phone bill. Two hundred pound!”

“No way.”

“Yeah. Two hundred pound.”

“Does nan know?”

“Yeah. She’s not happy.”

They get out somewhere on the Upper Clapton Road. I look round and the man opposite is leaning out of his seat, with his head and shoulder dangling into the aisle. He’s about to tip over, and as I reach out to grab him he’s caught by the pregnant woman sitting behind me. She is beautiful.

“Are you all right?” she says.

“Aye,” says the guy, in the tones of central, eastern Scotland. “I’m sorry. I hasn’ae slept fae two days.”

At that he falls asleep again. The pregnant woman and I take it in turns to catch him.

“Why don’t you lean over the other side?” I ask, after about the fourth awakening.

“Aye. It’s so fuckin’ embarrassing. I got off a tube. Fell asleep and woke up in fuckin’ Uxbridge or somewhere.”

He falls asleep again. We reach Springfield and the pregnant woman, child and husband get off.

I catch the sleeper one more time.

“How far tae Manor House?”

“About 6 or 7 minutes.”

“Walking?”

“No. About 15 minutes.”

“I need some fresh air.”

He gets up, walks to the front of the top deck and peers out the window. He sits down again and falls asleep.

Someone else catches him as he tips into the aisle and it’s time for me to leave.

With an ass to the right. Taken in Stamford Hill this morning.

An email via Flickr:

Hi

I work at Hackney Museum. We’re working on an exhibition about independant shops in the borough and hope to include a projected slide show of pictures of shops that have caught people’s eye. Could we include this one please?

Definitely. And this one too.

The exhibition will be at Hackney Museum from 20th March to 7th June 2008.

Now it would appear that someone has been trying to blow up some of my neighbours who, next week, will be welcoming Satmar Rebbe Shlita from Kiryas Yoel (pictured, right). If the ’suspicious device’ was indeed a bomb, I hope that those responsible are traced as soon as possible.

I am now going to find something a little more heartwarming to write about.

[Photo from Yeshiva World News, here].

I am so angry.

Today I read over at Dave Hill’s blog that Hackney Council had been awarded - as it confidently expected - a three star rating for its services.

I bit my tongue because, yes, I have noticed a bit of an improvement recently. There’s a lot wrong round here, but I’ve been hoping the good will take root.

And then, just now, I read this:

A pensioner who died after being evicted by police had refused to move from his squalid council flat into the refurbished flat next door, it was revealed today.

The man, named locally as John Wise, was found collapsed in the street minutes after officers forced him to move from his home.

Police, bailiffs and council staff arrived at the Kelshall Court estate in Brownswood Road, Hackney, east London, yesterday morning with a court order to rehouse the 77-year-old. When he refused to allow them inside they forced entry and removed him.

He was 77 years old. Seventy-seven.

I used to spend my summer breaks from university working as a care assistant in old people’s homes. Every week I would be coaxing schizophrenic OAPs, moved from Rauceby Mental Hospital (now closed), from bedrooms they had no business to be in. Or I’d be following people with Alzheimers as they escaped and headed towards houses they’d lived in decades beforehand, encouraging them to come back with me. It took a bit of tact, a bit of charm, a bit of failure and a lot of time. And above it all it took reassurance.

What none of those people needed - ill, or frail or not - was a crowd of bailiffs, officials and police. It is inexcusable that a council terrifies and treats vulnerable people in this way.

And what the poor, dead man certainly didn’t need was officials passing the buck over his corpse:

A Hackney Council spokesman said the properties concerned are owned by the authority but managed by Hackney Homes a separate not-for-profit company, wholly owned by the council, that is responsible for its residential properties.

The spokesman said: “This is clearly a complex case. We await the outcome of any official investigation and will be assisting Hackney Homes in its internal review of this incident.”

Shame. Utter shame.