A singing clown and a Dalek
The Duke of Uke
In the Lorelei in Bateman Street, Soho on Saturday night. This place is great – though to my mind it doesn’t quite measure up to the splendour of Pollo (now sadly deceased). They have a sack of about 10 bags of flour next balanced on a chair next to the door, a fabulous mural of a mermaid with splendid tits, an outdoor loo and pizza for less than a fiver. Not bad. You also bring your own booze, which just slashes the cost of your night out.
Sarah from The Rocks was wearing a miniature harmonica, with four reeds and eight notes, on a chain round her neck. They’re pretty cool, you can play tunes on the little fellas. Sarah said she got the thing from the Duke of Uke on Hanbury Street. Well, the following day there I was near London’s trendy Spitalfields Market, walking down Hanbury Street. �Hey, this is where the Duke of Uke is� I exclaimed, and sure enough there stood a tall thin man with a white-painted clown’s face, a squirty flower in his button hole, and a straggly ostrich feather sticking from his battered trilby. �Come in� he said, �a small performance is just about to start�. Admiring his pink feather boa, we went in and bought tickets – which we then exchanged for bottles of beer.
With a rasping roar our clown friend burst into song, accompanied by �Blind Willy’ something or other with a bowler hat, shades and cowboy bootlace tie in ukulele. The band had introduced themselves as �The Lonesome Cowboys from Hell’. It was a little disturbing, they sang songs on McDonalds (a large thick shake and how you want it, find it disappointing, and still want another), the post post-modern blues, and a tribute to their old band mate – John E. CashMoney, who died last week. Blind Willy Bloggs, or whatever his name was, was all the while changing instruments from squeeze box, to guitar, mandolin and back to uke. Imagine an English clown Tom Waits, back on dodgy booze, trapped in a Hackney Cash Converters.
Walking down the road afterwards I thought perhaps I should buy one of their �20 Ukulele’s (including carrying box) hanging in the window. As the scary clown said �Culture is what they do to you; Art is what you do�; get creative, boyo.
Bob’s Dalek friends
Leaving the creative buzz and crackle of the London Borough of Hackney for the quieter, bourgeois comforts of East Finchley it’s good to know that the rickety Northern Line can at least throw up some surprises. It was pretty rammed, there was one free seat half covered by a man with the top half of a Dalek. He moved it to one side and asked me to sit down.
I couldn’t help it: �Where have you been with a Dalek costume?� �I’ve just run the marathon.� �Wow�, �Yes, it took me seven hours, so I’ve missed the coach back and now we’ve got to try and fit it into the car.�
�It’s pretty impressive� I said, �I started building it in November and finished last night. Look the laser gun flashes.� He’d built a small maglite type torch into it. �The yellow flashing lights used to work, but the batteries were so heavy so I cut them off, plus you couldn’t see them in the daylight� �How did you build it?� I enquired, �well, to do the skirt I had to use CAD� Looking at the top, I could see an immense amount of work and finely crafted joinery had gone into it. Apparently he had used an Action Man sized model as a basis for his labour of love, which certainly involved lots of complex engineering jiggery-pokery.
It turned out my travelling companion was a man named Bob Johnson, he was 47 years old and although he had run 2-3 marathons about 20 years ago, he started again in 2001 when he hoped to get in under 3 hours – he didn’t manage it that year but did the next year. I was thinking how could an ordinary mortal build such a wonder of engineering skilfulness. It turned he was an engineer, �I’m a techy� he said. He ran his own company called DAMT and was currently working on nose cones for jet aircraft.
This wooden replica of intergalactic evil didn’t look like it would hover. �How much does it weigh?� �37lbs� he said, apparently he had run the first 16 miles (when he was outrun by a 85 year old) then walked the rest after he realised he’d missed the bus back with the rest of the Milton Keynes Running Club. There were no rollers, it was entirely carried by Bob himself.
Bob was running for The Willen Hospice, a hospice in Milton Keynes for people with terminally ill cancer: �A friend of mine died there, he was only 41�. But he said that the day was great fun, the children really enjoyed it. His daughter who was 12 said that she was inspired to something similar when she was grown up. �It’s good for kids to see that they can have old-fashioned, simple fun� Bob added. The Dalek had been in the Sun however and he had been interviewed earlier in the day by Five Live. Today his picture was in most of the national daily’s.
I left Bob-the-Darlek with his steely will; a determination that had carried him over five months of construction and 26 miles of London streets. He was good humoured though and told me that if I wanted to donate, I just had to go to justgiving.com. There we were, back in East Finchley – eat, drink, sleep, work, finch, as they say.
Also, I want to send a shout out to Tom Lloyd who also did a heroic effort in completing that affront to good sense (good lazy sense, anyway) and healthy knees to finish the Marathon in a very respectable 3 hours 15 minutes - well done you spiritual superhero, you! Tom was running for Arthritis Care