Moheard's Blog

Do you remember the old exchange numbers used with dial phones? They resonate in plays from the Forties, or in the pages of Fifties’ novels. But, hurrah, you can still find the information on the net. GERard for Soho, FLAxman for Chelsea; Paddington numbers were AMBassodor. All so much more romantic than the clusters of digits we have now.

When listening to Desert Island Discs, I bet everyone imagines what their own one luxury would be. I feel a bit silly with this confession, but it does corroborate the evidence for my predilection for lists.

I imagined (many, many years ago of course!) that my one luxury would be the four fat London Telephone Directories (and lots of paper and pens.) Think about it: the combined directories were huge respositories of names, addresses, numbers – list after list! Whiling away the time on a desert island you could draw maps of streets pinpointing the names of the residents, you could do a lot of maths, counting how many people lived in the streets or had unbelievably peculiar names, or creating occupations for those listed. Hours could be spent working on anagrams. I think the London Directories would fill your time on a desert island with ‘facts and fun!!’ – wow! Imagine the surreal telephone conversations you could write — drama, comedy, rudery.

Oh look, there’s B. Shillingsworth! ‘Hello is that FREmantle 5520? Bertie darling! You must come to our Friday Soiree. Bubbles will be there with that snooty old queen … you know you’ll love the chance to quip and tease. What? …. Max is up before the Beak for ….? Well, I knew it of course, such a dark horse, and him declaring to us all that he was engaged to Fifi. Say you’ll be there Bertie and come with that new beau! Kiss, kiss. Toodle-pip!’

Three months on and no rescue from my isolation in sight, I might start to compose a book of short stories using the telephone numbers as chapter headings. The people answering the phone might be robbers confirming a heist, lovers on the verge of breaking up, a dying relative — and the funniest would be the ‘wrong number’. Do you remember hearing that brilliant sketch where a young Jewish woman calls her mother, complaining that the car won’t start, the house is a mess, the kids are sick, and she still has to make lunch for her Hadassah meeting? The mother says not to worry – that she will come over, clean the house, start lunch, and take care of the kids. The daughter, grateful, thanks her while the mother explains in an exasperated tone that she doesn’t mind taking the subway to the Long Island Railroad, change to the bus, and then walking the fourteen blocks. Finally, the mother asks how her daughter’s husband, Sam, got to work if the car didn’t start. (Brief pause.) “My husband’s name is Paul… Is this Tremont 7-1166?”

“No, this is Tremont 7-1177.”

Pause. “Does that mean you’re not coming over?”

I had always lived in London until I moved here to the South Coast in 1999. I remember that when I was very small I loved poring over the London bus map – emptier than the sort you see now – following the red, meandering lines of the routes with my finger, out to suburbs I’d never heard of. I had the unfolded map pinned up on the wall next to my bed. What was it that attracted my young imagination?

Googling for images of the older bus maps, I came across a terrific visual List which shows all the London bus number (1-100) destination boards filling the screen.

http://www.busesatwork.co.uk/routes

Maps and destination boards can thrill with the thought of journeys to places unknown. But strangely, I am no traveller, preferring to cling to the familiar. Did the familiar burrow so deeply into my memory, that when I recall my whimsical childhood environment, the recognition delights and comforts? My culture is that of a distant London childhood. I belonged once, but no longer.

Which is why I rabbit on about all this inconsequential stuff about London. But I love it! Is there a book on London Trivia?

And here’s more:

Do you know the code for the original London postal districts? SE1 started nearest to the centre of London, then the rest went more or less alphabetically — SE2 for Abbey Wood, SE3, Blackheath and so on. Woolwich is the last alphabetically (SE18), then come the outer boroughs from SE19 (Norwood) to SE28 (Thamesmead), the last to be added. As I lived in south east London I knew all those areas but it works for others too. Check out the locations of SW1, NW1, N1, E1, EC1, W1, WC1 etc. There is no NE in London, as that is the code for Newcastle.

I shall be thinking about those delightful old London telephone numbers later …

I recently went through all my clothes to pull out those I no longer wear — or have never ever worn. How much money have I wasted on impulse buys? Several journeys to the charity shops resulted from this drastic thinning out, and now that the clothes are no longer hanging in the wardrobe I can’t even remember what they were.

However, there are still some old things (items mouldering away and which I still don’t wear — of course not! — what do you take me for?), which I’m convinced will be perfect gear for an end-of-the-world situation. The frayed, shapeless sweater; the baggy cardigan; the paint-stained trousers; the tattered shirt with the missing buttons; moth-eaten scarves. I’ll be thankful for them when the heating’s gone, and scavenging for food is a daily, dangerous enterprise. The thing is of course, that these rags are too scruffy for the charity shops now, but I know that they’ll ‘come in handy’ one day, so I just cannot throw them away. (Some have of necessity, already become dusters*.) My imagination has me wrapped in this sartorial dross and I feel comforted at my foresight. Also, my piles of smelly, scabby garments will be cover for my hidden hoard of tinned sardines, packets of jelly cubes, and bottled water stowed away out of sight from the predatory eyes of the marauding gangs. Cue for creating a Survivors LIST of Essentials (which naturally would include thousands of pain killers and several first-aid kits), but I would also make room for safety pins, books on how to trap, kill and skin a marmoset for the barbecue sort of thing, boxes of Kendal Mint Cake, fly spray, wind-up torches, matches, binoculars ….. you see how thrilling it is to write a List! So, go on, create your own! Enjoy the buzz and twitch of your thought processes for the end-of-life-as-we-know-it scenario.

…. cake tins, black bags, Sellotape, rope, tin openers, pea shooters, fireworks, glow-in-the-dark plastic necklaces, loo rolls, jumbo joke books, vegetable seeds,  casserole pots, OS maps of England  …

We could compare notes and bet on who might last out the longest in the apocalypse, should we want to indeed. But that’s something else.

Survivors-type novels and stories set in dystopian futures, can enthral but also repel. And it’s not only these tantalising portents of our impending doom; you can find dystopian fiction that shows previous times of violence, lawlessness, and stark battles for survival. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is set around the inhospitable border between Texas and Mexico in the 1850s. The vast terrain and the savage degradation are primeval to a horrific degree. But what a fantastic read!

* I don’t do much housework, and I think that living in an apocalypse will mean I shall do even less.

Leo likes to write Lists. I too write lists, but delight in reading them more. When an author has incorporated a paragraph of lists into his or her novel, I experience a frisson of alertness, my brain twinkles with recognition. A list creates a visual landscape with words. A list on the page slows down our reading, we can picture each object without the distraction of indefinite articles, or the author’s descriptions.

A lot of people found Georges Perec’s massive book Life A User’s Manual, hard-going; but to me the pages of lists were mesmerising. For example, Chapter 33, Basement 1, covers two and a half pages of the contents of a cellar.  ‘A place for every thing, and every thing in its place, nothing has been left out: …’  Then comes the list of provisions stacked on the shelves …  bliss!

Jane O’Brien writing an online article for BBC News [March 2010] about an exhibition in Washington on the art of list-making, considers the psychological aspect of those artists who were obsessive list-makers. The accompanying catalogue To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Archives of American Art is available from Amazon. Even the title is a feast on which to gorge.

Do these list-makers need control of their lives? O’Brien asks what lists tell us about the personality of the list-maker, and says that the exhibition ‘reveals the obsessive and controlling sides’ of some of the world’s greatest artists and architects with their idiosyncratic designs. In chapter one I mention that Leo does a few doodles on the paper before composing a list; I wish I’d asked Val to recreate Leo’s artwork!

I love my Collins Thesaurus in A-Z Form. A book of Lists! A book of words!