Sherry@teatime

My darlin Sherry Pops was here, leaving the icy wrath of Conneticut to be with me in the limey land of teatime, teletubbies and tube trains. After a delayed rendezvous, and the fear of being ‘stood up’ a la New York, the Pops finally arrived in a car with her folks. She had driven straight to Park Royal tube station from the Cotswolds, and had gotten a trifle lost. Luckily a friendly Londoner (no, I didn’t believe in them either, next someone will tell me the toothfairy is real!) saw their plight and drove to the station so they could follow on.

The evening was spent in a quaint little bar near the station, where I introduced her to my animated housemate, James Wondercow. We drank the shiney black Guinness, and played fan roulette, betting on the number the ceiling fan would stop on when turned off. (We lost)
As an extra special treat, we went to ‘Phae Tingo’s’, a seedy pub with a tragic band and the largest assortment of male white trash you have ever seen, tracksuit bottoms, white trainers and mobile phones. The mere sight of a girl and the ‘romeos’ all make a stampede towards her in the hope of a cheap nights fun.(In this place, most of the girls oblige......repeat after me: What’s a dirty slapper?) Fortuitously this joint is redeemed at 1am when the ‘band’ dies and they wheel out the disco music, man did we boogie!

Naturally our legs became a casualty of dance, so the next morning our aches were primed for a days strutting around the big city.

Via tube the first gap we minded landed us on Oxford Street, amidst the sweaty swarms of London life, all out in force to strip the shops of their merchandise and the gently walking public of their strolling dignity awash a bustle of sidewalks, burnt pizzaetic aroma and bus fumes as red as their source. Incidentally a new term was coined this day. The tacky Diana souvineers, commemorate her death with a cheaply made mug for comforting tea drinking, only Ł6. The term for such classy items is now officially: Dirtchendise.

In a break for freedom, we swung down a sidestreet to the tudor embrace of Liberty’s department store. This marvel had a fully authentic interior with five floors towering above an open middle, making ascent to the top floor, and taking pictures of your friends on lower floors a must. It also had the joy of the invisible door. We walked from one department to the next, only to find on our return a wall had appeared from nowhere and we had to get a butch store detective to pry open the wall for our release!

Soho became our next port of call, amidst the proud rainbow banners and purveyors of fine PVC serving the joyfully twisted bohemians of our city, we found a delightful coffee shop where our chocolate and caffeine fixes were shot up with a foamy headed Mochaccino and a passive smoke in the downstairs lounge.
Our fix gave us dutch courage, and we ventured into kinky shops where I tried on a gimp headpiece ‘just for fun’. It was a little tight and sweaty, and I didn’t see the point of having a zip across the eyeslit, how would the wearer see where they were going? At least the designer considered the thirst inspired by the heat, and kindly made a large open hole in the mouth for putting ice lollies in.

Discovery of the day was on Cheryl’s part, when she finally found out Jesus’ middle name after a lifetime of curiosity. The ‘H’ in Jesus H. Christ, actually stands for Holy. I must confess to having a period when I thought it was Horatio.

Covent Garden was really a little tame, (having had to ask directions from French toursits, the shame..) so I shall skip the tale and lead you to the vaudefest of Picadilly Circus where we joined the Japanese throng and took photos of ourselves and Eros and got the Japanese tourists to take photos of us with a large contoured advert for ‘Coke’ high behind us. I love coke, though it makes me sneeze.

With full bladders and empty-ish wallets we swept our feet into the Rainforest cafe, solely to use their washroom facilities and not to eat (though witch hunger had her pointy hat on). The whole place was a (Ok fake) rainforest, with real parrots real (Ok fake) animals that made animal noises and moved like, well... anima(tronic)ls. The vines and steam coupled with dripping ceiling and dimly lit atmosphere was the perfect spot to go visit the little Tarzan and Janes room.

The natural world (ahem) was swiftly electrocised by the pink glowy girth of Sega World and it’s escalator to the roof through hoops of blue light and 2001 space oddities. Of course the rapid ascent is in severe polarisation of the delayed descent where those evil Sega dudes make you walk past every arcade game available in a bid to bleed you of your pounds. We won.
The vertical plummitting cage that people sit face down in, landed just next to an Old tyme photo store, Cheryl and I laughed at the pure trashyness of the poses. They may have awesome costumes and props, but when your subjects are a metre apart with only a stifled touch of the shoulder and smile to caress their souls, where is the hope? Smugly we left, knowing how great we were at Riverside Park in that perfect summer of 1996 , and how the husslers there should go back to serving cold fries.

The National gallery sucked us in for a float around her oily aisles, Van Gogh and Renoir watched us cackle and sit not only on the chairs to stair at their wares, but to alleviate the heavy paths brushstrokes on the canvass of our soles. The dreams of hiding in the gallery at night wove a magical and eerie moonlit fantasy within, before hunger broke the spell with a casting of her own.

The Kansas house finally crashed down on witch hunger in Leicester square, where “bloatiness is bliss” became our watchword as all you can eat pizza became our new internal organ, resting quite heftily under our lungs in the little space once known as stomach. Mmmmmmmmmm.........pizza.

With the zeal of the condemmed and the eyes of eternal wandering we tubed on home, where we whisked up Wondercow at jostled off to a funky little nightclub in Ealing, where the night was truly danced away surrounded by a better class of dirty slapper and some odd roman statues which surely one day will end up either in some museum or skip. True the queue for coats at 3am became lame as we decided that to be qualified as cloakroom attendants in this place you needed to have been refused a job at the spam pounding factory , (where they pound spam for the spam hungry masses) in order to be so retarded that it takes three slappers an hour to find 8 coats. At this rate we nearly decided to camp out in line, but fortunately coats came our way, and all that was left was the black carriage of taxiness to swallow us into the night........................

Oh my god, that’s quite the email, and if it were to turn sideways it would surely have someones eye out!!

Lots of love,
wherever you are,

John. H. Kerswell


Teatime with Sherry Pops- March 1998


	My darlin Sherry Pops was here, leaving the icy wrath of Conneticut to be with me in the limey land of teatime, teletubbies and tube trains. After a delayed rendezvous, and the fear of being ‘stood up’ a la New York, the Pops finally arrived in a car with her folks. She had driven straight to Park Royal tube station from the Cotswolds, and had gotten a trifle lost. Luckily a friendly Londoner (no, I didn’t believe in them either, next someone will tell me the toothfairy is real!) saw their plight and drove to the station so they could follow on. The evening was spent in a quaint little bar near the station, where I introduced her to my animated housemate, James Wondercow. We drank the shiney black Guinness, and played fan roulette, betting on the number the ceiling fan would stop on when turned off. (We lost) As an extra special treat, we went to ‘Phae Tingo’s’, a seedy pub with a tragic band and the largest assortment of male white trash you have ever seen, tracksuit bottoms, white trainers and mobile phones. The mere sight of a girl and the ‘romeos’ all make a stampede towards her in the hope of a cheap nights fun.(In this place, most of the girls oblige......repeat after me: What’s a dirty slapper?) Fortuitously this joint is redeemed at 1am when the ‘band’ dies and they wheel out the disco music, man did we boogie! Naturally our legs became a casualty of dance, so the next morning our aches were primed for a days strutting around the big city. Via tube the first gap we minded landed us on Oxford Street, amidst the sweaty swarms of London life, all out in force to strip the shops of their merchandise and the gently walking public of their strolling dignity awash a bustle of sidewalks, burnt pizzaetic aroma and bus fumes as red as their source. Incidentally a new term was coined this day. The tacky Diana souvineers, commemorate her death with a cheaply made mug for comforting tea drinking, only Ł6. The term for such classy items is now officially: Dirtchendise. In a break for freedom, we swung down a sidestreet to the tudor embrace of Liberty’s department store. This marvel had a fully authentic interior with five floors towering above an open middle, making ascent to the top floor, and taking pictures of your friends on lower floors a must. It also had the joy of the invisible door. We walked from one department to the next, only to find on our return a wall had appeared from nowhere and we had to get a butch store detective to pry open the wall for our release! Soho became our next port of call, amidst the proud rainbow banners and purveyors of fine PVC serving the joyfully twisted bohemians of our city, we found a delightful coffee shop where our chocolate and caffeine fixes were shot up with a foamy headed Mochaccino and a passive smoke in the downstairs lounge. Our fix gave us dutch courage, and we ventured into kinky shops where I tried on a gimp headpiece ‘just for fun’. It was a little tight and sweaty, and I didn’t see the point of having a zip across the eyeslit, how would the wearer see where they were going? At least the designer considered the thirst inspired by the heat, and kindly made a large open hole in the mouth for putting ice lollies in. Discovery of the day was on Cheryl’s part, when she finally found out Jesus’ middle name after a lifetime of curiosity. The ‘H’ in Jesus H. Christ, actually stands for Holy. I must confess to having a period when I thought it was Horatio. Covent Garden was really a little tame, (having had to ask directions from French toursits, the shame..) so I shall skip the tale and lead you to the vaudefest of Picadilly Circus where we joined the Japanese throng and took photos of ourselves and Eros and got the Japanese tourists to take photos of us with a large contoured advert for ‘Coke’ high behind us. I love coke, though it makes me sneeze. With full bladders and empty-ish wallets we swept our feet into the Rainforest cafe, solely to use their washroom facilities and not to eat (though witch hunger had her pointy hat on). The whole place was a (Ok fake) rainforest, with real parrots real (Ok fake) animals that made animal noises and moved like, well... anima(tronic)ls. The vines and steam coupled with dripping ceiling and dimly lit atmosphere was the perfect spot to go visit the little Tarzan and Janes room. The natural world (ahem) was swiftly electrocised by the pink glowy girth of Sega World and it’s escalator to the roof through hoops of blue light and 2001 space oddities. Of course the rapid ascent is in severe polarisation of the delayed descent where those evil Sega dudes make you walk past every arcade game available in a bid to bleed you of your pounds. We won. The vertical plummitting cage that people sit face down in, landed just next to an Old tyme photo store, Cheryl and I laughed at the pure trashyness of the poses. They may have awesome costumes and props, but when your subjects are a metre apart with only a stifled touch of the shoulder and smile to caress their souls, where is the hope? Smugly we left, knowing how great we were at Riverside Park in that perfect summer of 1996 , and how the husslers there should go back to serving cold fries. The National gallery sucked us in for a float around her oily aisles, Van Gogh and Renoir watched us cackle and sit not only on the chairs to stair at their wares, but to alleviate the heavy paths brushstrokes on the canvass of our soles. The dreams of hiding in the gallery at night wove a magical and eerie moonlit fantasy within, before hunger broke the spell with a casting of her own. The Kansas house finally crashed down on witch hunger in Leicester square, where “bloatiness is bliss” became our watchword as all you can eat pizza became our new internal organ, resting quite heftily under our lungs in the little space once known as stomach. Mmmmmmmmmm.........pizza. With the zeal of the condemmed and the eyes of eternal wandering we tubed on home, where we whisked up Wondercow at jostled off to a funky little nightclub in Ealing, where the night was truly danced away surrounded by a better class of dirty slapper and some odd roman statues which surely one day will end up either in some museum or skip. True the queue for coats at 3am became lame as we decided that to be qualified as cloakroom attendants in this place you needed to have been refused a job at the spam pounding factory , (where they pound spam for the spam hungry masses) in order to be so retarded that it takes three slappers an hour to find 8 coats. At this rate we nearly decided to camp out in line, but fortunately coats came our way, and all that was left was the black carriage of taxiness to swallow us into the night........................ Oh my god, that’s quite the email, and if it were to turn sideways it would surely have someones eye out!! Lots of love, wherever you are, John. H. Kerswell

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