Daniel Ruiz Tizon, a man on his fifth nose, is, he’d like the world to know, Available, and dissecting the minutiae of everyday life.
Monday 16 October 2017
Our little-heard host is unimpressed with the minuscule slices of cake sold in a charity-bake off and on Friday 13th, runs into the Urinating Man of SW9 in the café (not to be confused with the still AWOL Urinating Dwarf of SW8).
Daniel Ruiz Tizon, a man on his fifth nose, is, he’d like the world to know, Available, and dissecting the minutiae of everyday life.
Our little-heard host is unimpressed with the minuscule slices of cake sold in a charity-bake off.
Full show out tomorrow.
Daniel Ruiz Tizon, a man on his fifth nose, is, he’d like the world to know, Available, and dissecting the minutiae of everyday life.
Thursday 12 October 2017
Episode 179
Our little-heard host is a travelator hero and carries out an intense post mortem of his haircut.
The full episode can be downloaded from any of these links:
iTunes: ow.ly/tLWBq
RSS: goo.gl/GUKbD3
Website: goo.gl/hRxaBt
A curious dream.
A peanut had taken my regular table in a cafe.
Not my cafe, you understand.
But I had the sense in this dream that this was a regular dream cafe and as is my habit stretching right back to childhood when I had to sit in the same corner of the room during my music classes at Primary school (much to my teacher's chagrin), I had a favourite table in there.
I was taken aback to find the peanut sat at my table.
We looked at one another.
I couldn't be sure whether the peanut was looking right through me.
In front of them was a broadsheet.
I caught sight of a headline.
'Sent to Coventry'.
Thrown by the peanut's presence, and unable to settle for sitting anywhere else in the cafe, I left.
But I kept circling the cafe to check if the peanut was still sat at my table.
I must've looked a dozen times.
The peanut showed no signs of leaving.
Was the peanut waiting for someone?
Was it, I wondered, waiting for me?
I stepped back into the cafe and disappeared into its gents downstairs in the basement, where I found myself being sick.
Still, I had enough about me not to touch the toilet bowl when being sick, as you see people doing in films. Sure, I was thrown by the peanut's presence at my table, but I still had the presence of mind to make no contact with the bowl as I was sick.
I sorted myself out, splashing water on my face before heading back upstairs to check on the table.
The peanut was still there.
I didn't want to leave the cafe again.
I made my way cautiously to 'my' table.
I looked at the peanut.
The peanut looked at me.
We looked at one another for what seemed like an eternity and with great sadness.
And then the peanut rose from its chair and left the cafe.
I sat down at the table.
I looked at the newspaper.
'Sent to Coventry'.
The podcast returned earlier this month for its annual Christmas Countdown. Twice-weekly until Christmas Eve, the show comes out every Monday and Thursday.
Listen to Ep 179 here.
Daniel Ruiz Tizon, a man on his fifth nose, is, he’d like the world to know, Available, and dissecting the minutiae of everyday life.
Thursday 12 October 2017
Our little-heard host is a travelator hero and carries out an intense post mortem of his haircut.
You can find the latest run of shows on my website here Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available
Or alternatively, download them from iTunes ow.ly/tLWBq or the RSS goo.gl/GUKbD3
The show makes a low-fi return on Monday 2 October with a new run of little-heard shows as the Christmas countdown begins.
Subscribe on iTunes (and please rate and review) or alternatively, listen via this website.
This website currently averages between 150 - 200 visits a day, which is encouraging.
Thousands of hours of work have gone into the content you will find on here, with over 500 live radio shows and podcasts available for download.
If you do enjoy what you hear on this site, a different voice and original content, a stark contrast to mainstream radio and podcasting, please do consider supporting the website with a donation via Paypal. Just click on the Paypal button below.
Donations go towards the annual maintenance of this site and bandwidth costs.
Thank you for your support.
Daniel
My dad disappeared 15 years ago this week.
This short excerpt is the story of my search for the man in black in the summer of 2002, as told live at Big Green Bookshops in 2015, where I performed The A to Z of Me and My Dad.
With Brooks Livermore as my dad.
Running time: 05:26m
Regular readers/listeners will know poor butter coverage on toast, even sandwiches, is something of a long-standing bugbear of mine. I don't see any reason for the corners and curves of your slices to be dry. Few things disappoint me as much as dry toast in the morning. This month I have been tweeting regular shots and analysis of my morning toast and asking people to tweet me their pictures of their own toast, so I can see what kind of butter coverage they're getting.
Below are some toast shots of what I've received so far. If you'd like to tweet me a shot of your own toast in the mornings, you can tweet me @1607WestEgg #TweetYourToast
A shot of my own toast this morning. Decent butter coverage until I got to the final slice which was a little patchy.
Portuguese Toast, as big a part of SW8 as tobacco, CHICKEN, custard tarts and coffee.
This flamboyant entry is from Ireland's @curtainqueen. She tweeted: This is my (french) toast. No butter, I go straight for lemon & sugar. #TweetYourToast
Impressive butter coverage from @steevbishop whose enthusiasm for my podcast last winter single-handedly kept it going through those cold months. Steve tweets: Having toast especially for @1607WestEgg’s #TweetYourToast. Always try to get full spread coverage.
I once tried to get @katchapman on my podcast. I failed. Several years later, I did manage to get her to #TweetYourToast. She tweets: "For me it has to be real butter, has to be completely melted, and has to go to the edges. I favour a Polish half-rye half-wheat loaf."
Want to see your toast here?
All you have to do is tweet me @1607WestEgg #TweetYourToast
A sample from 'The A to Z of Me and My Dad' recorded live at Big Green Bookshop in 2015, featuring myself and with Brooks Livermore playing the role of my dad.
This is an extended version of a series of tweets from 16 June on the Grenfell Tower disaster. I felt compelled to put it together because it’s not often I get affected by something in the news, for reasons I explain at the outset.
It took, I feel, a disaster of this magnitude, something this horrific, in the richest borough in the country, for so many to finally understand just what a different life the poor lead. And that’s my take on it. This is about the chasm that exists between the classes and my experience of being on the wrong side of that chasm in London and the way in which poverty and bad housing impacts on your life.
Do me a favour. If you retweet this, please don’t call it a ‘Long Read’.
Since the crash of ’08, hundreds of thousands of Londoners have existed on bread and water, cut adrift, struggling through the days, working harder than ever to make ends meet only to see little or no change in their personal circumstances. It took me some time to realise not everyone in London had been affected by the crash. Cab driver friends would tell me how they were still taking the same old people out to their usual restaurants and glitzy bashes and I slowly became aware of a widening class divide in the capital. My own experience, the way my life came apart during the crash, changed me as both a writer and a person. I had long blocked out my horrific housing experiences that stretched back to growing up in the seventies and kept turning out work that was bought on a regular basis by TV broadcasters, work that rarely touched on the unusual circumstances in which I had grown up. There was the occasional housing-related piece for Radio 4 in the mid-noughties, but I only ever revisited that life in my work occasionally.
In 2010, finally, two years after a pilot, with my TV career going tits up, I launched a podcast with my childhood friend Micky Boyd. The first episode was in fact my last week in my latest privately rented flat fifteen minutes north of Clapham North where I grew up. The next 30 odd episodes came from a bed and breakfast I had to move into for six months (I finally got out on Christmas Eve 2010), and then I recorded from two different homes where I lived with friends until I was back on my feet. For the last 7 years in my radio, writing and podcast work, I have documented the struggles, in an often light hearted and original way I feel, of being on the wrong side of the class divide. The final (live) radio series of Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available on Resonance FM in October – December 2015, had community and change as its themes as I looked at the impact of gentrification on my neighbourhood. You can find that series on this site, here: goo.gl/5neDqD
It took several years to understand what had happened to my life but I also used that time to speak to many other people who had also seen the quality of their lives decline markedly since the financial crash, though I’m not sure how many of them had given serious thought to buying a 36-piece Smart Price cutlery set from Asda in the lost summer of 2011. So many people had their own stories and I always made time to hear them, hoping it might help me understand my own story better. Everyone I spoke to had made mistakes along the way and many like me had found it hard to forgive themselves the errors that had set them back years in their efforts to recover the heights of their old lives.
In recent years, I have tended to be something of an automaton when it comes to tragedies. The post '08 austerity and belt tightening did that. You can become absorbed in your own daily struggles and the dread of watching the cost of the All-Butter 29p LIDL croissant rise and rise. But in the Grenfell community I have seen coming together on the news in the aftermath of something that I hope will change things for the better in this country, has been a blast from the past for me. In those people I see the various communities and faces I grew up with in southwest London back in the day.
My old neighbourhood of Clapham, where I spent my first two decades, has long not been for me. Brixton in southwest London, more of which later, has also changed. In the early noughties, the balance was right. The market was still vibrant, the old community was still there, the influx of middle class newcomers unable to afford Clapham was yet to overwhelm the area. It was that rare case of a southwest London postcode having the balance right between the classes and it worked for the most part. Now of course, northbound, heading towards the river, it’s the same story in Vauxhall. So much of Vauxhall’s history has been lost in the last two or three years as old buildings make way for hideous glass-heavy luxury builds that exist cheek by jowl with the numerous council estates that seem to occasionally check the advance of the cranes.
Grenfell is a horror the like of which was far more common decades ago. It’s only been two days but it seems longer to me already. That’s the thing about disasters. I was at school when the King's Cross fire happened but very quickly it seemed like the horror of King's Cross had been there my entire life. Zeebrugge. Hillsborough. Paddington. The Clapham Junction rail disaster. They all feel like that and I’m sure Grenfell will join that cast of horrors.
Grenfell has really rattled me. Fires were not an uncommon sight in my childhood. I remember a big fire in Brixton in the early 80s, opposite Mothercare. Less than ten minutes from Brixton, still in SW9, two West Indian girls my sibling and I used to play with as kids died in a house fire on our road one Saturday night. Moreover, it wasn’t unusual to see burns victims your own age, horrifically disfigured kids. I often wonder what happened to them because it’s rare these days to see similarly disfigured adults so where did these young burns victims disappear to?
My dad really feared a fire in the slum we grew up in and was constantly on the landlord's case about the wiring in the building. My dad bought this rope from Bon Marche in Brixton that he hoped would save our lives and used to run weekly (tiresome) fire drills, an event recalled in a very early episode of Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available in late 2012.
We lived on the top floor of a death trap. We would not have survived a fire, even though it was a long rope. My dad would tie the rope of hope around each of our waists and we'd all amble over to the window and after that, there was no plan. I think my dad thought it’d be like an episode of Batman where the recently departed Adam West and Burt Ward (Robin) would scale a wall, holding a normal conversation as they went about their business and everything would go smoothly.
Fast forward three decades and in SW8, ridiculous glass towers are crowbarred into what’s left of a large working class community that has been gradually pushed out since 2008. Big 4 by 4s, often with personalised number plates, have started to appear on the roads. There are tooth whitening clinics and high end CHICKEN shops. Gyms seemingly on every corner. Young professionals exit the gated new builds, yoga mats slung over their shoulders or with rucksacks on their backs as they run to work. Others unfold their Bromptons. Hardly anybody seems to walk to work these days.
Old familiar faces began to disappear from the community. Sometimes you hear they've moved to the end of the Northern Line. Sometimes you just hear nothing as in the case of the still AWOL Urinating Dwarf of SW8 who hasn’t been seen now since 2013. There are more streets that no longer feel like they're for you. Gated developments continue to spring up wherever there's any space left to build. High vis vested builders are everywhere and I often wonder if they’re ever curious about the negative impact of their work on the community. Very little of the new builds and businesses seem to serve or interact with what was there before they arrived.
Old cafes and bars you drank in turn into hotels. Tourists now walk through the streets you played on as a kid. Streets that aren't even in central London. Believe me, it is strange to hear Vauxhall described as Central London. It isn’t. And I have yet to find a new build in Stockwell and South Lambeth that doesn’t claim to be just ten minutes from Oxford Circus. You could live for a thousand years and drive every day from your new build to the West End and you would not get there in less than ten minutes.
The media are up in arms when they discover the type of super wealthy people buying up the glass tower penthouses that have overwhelmed the south side of the Thames. The people on the surrounding estates, the Wyvill, Mawbey Brough, they had an idea. They knew it wasn't people like them that would be moving in. London post ’08 is Ivor Lott and Tony Broke, the old Cor!! and later Buster comic strip. And that divide just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You keep, as a close friend often says, 'biting into the pillow so hard you're ingesting pillow foam'.
You vote at the Election all the while knowing your life has long reached a point where you know whatever the outcome, it changes nothing for you.
You're on Bread and Water, along with hundreds of thousands of Londoners. You keep battling away, working harder than ever. Longer hours. Less sleep.
But nothing changes for you.
Nothing changes.
Nothing changes.
Nothing changes.
And that for me is the story of life in London.
Which of the people who make the decisions that run the country know what it’s like to be able to see the bathroom regardless of where you stand in your tiny studio flat? At least these days I don’t have to leave the flat to get to the bathroom.
I grew up in an absolute slum of a place with no hot water. We all, a family of four, slept in a single room. The bathroom was shared with 13 people. This wasn’t for a year or two until we got a council flat. We lived like this for 24 years. That squalor, the damp, the cold, the lack of hope, broke us as a family. Only two of us lived to tell the tale, my dad disappearing two and a half years after my mum passed away. Both parents were the youngest in their family and were outlived in both cases by siblings twenty years older. My dad was a very strong and fit man.
It was the poverty and the absence of hope that our circumstances would change that did for them.
Poverty kills.
Poverty kills.
Poverty kills.
That place will never leave me.
I wake up so many nights and I am still there in that place. And a part of me will always be there. So HOUSING has always been a THING with me. And I never understood why it was ignored by the media for way too long. Bad housing will change your life forever. Bad housing will always leave you having to work harder than other people. General Elections would come and go and really by the 2005 Election, I thought housing would be a big issue. And it wasn’t.
I had returned to the country in 2003 after a brief time abroad to begin looking for another flat anew and began to see that you now got less for your money. Unless you were going to share, the housing stock, and this is private rented accommodation I’m talking about here (despite 35 years in my home borough, Lambeth were never going to house me) was getting noticeably poorer. Bereavement meant I no longer felt inclined to stay in south London so I looked all over the capital and the poor quality of housing was the same all over the city. I saw many awful places, like the one I saw in Baker Street where there was a standalone shower cubicle in the kitchen, right next to the fridge, that took years to forget about. That one was just under £700pcm.
Per Calendar Month. Landlords and Lettings Agents love that term.
Just under a decade later, in the midst of another intense flat hunting period, and something again covered in an early episode of my Available podcast, I viewed an absolute dive in Tooting Bec, SW17. It was a top floor flat. I’m a top floor kind of guy. I noticed the garden below was in a very worrying state and while I wouldn’t be using the garden, the garden told me everything I needed to know about the place. As we headed out of the building, I vented my disgust about the state of the place at the lettings agent who had even arrived late. As we reached the front door, an Asian guy peeked out through the door of a room on the ground floor and I caught more than a glimpse of another seven guys sleeping on the floor of that room. That’s London. And that was just a few months after London 2012, a two week sporting feast I did not buy into from the beginning, so much so that I came off twitter that summer so as to avoid it. Five years on, we can see there was no 2012 legacy. The country’s appetite for fried chicken is if anything stronger than ever and rent prices in East London rocketed, pricing out much of the pre-Games community. How is that fair? But hey, the masses need to share in an experience. They had their experience. Look where the city is now.
Up until that summer, living in a block of flats in Stockwell, I had fought tooth and nail with a landlord on repairs and out of my own pocket, regularly replaced the batteries in the faulty smoke alarms on all landings that prevented me from sleeping. Inevitably, I still had money deducted from my deposit on my checkout inventory.
From 1976 to 2000, I’d have to leave the family bedsit to get to the bathroom. The night-time anxiety was always considerable because I didn’t want to be having to leave the bedsit, especially in winter.
The morning of my mum’s death may have been the most confusing day of my life. I awoke in my fold up bed of the last 11 years in the room I by then just shared with my mum (my sibling was by then abroad after university and my dad, well, he’d taken another bedsit a floor below, but that’s another story). I got up, folded the bed together, went to Soho, signed my first television deal which gave me hope that I’d finally be able to get us out of the squalor, only to find my mum dead in the flat in the early afternoon. She had said to me not long before that she would die in that house and it will always haunt me that I could never get us to a place with hot water, our own bathroom and heating which would’ve extended her life. However, despite the hardship posed by living under those conditions every day, there was a real sense of community there and I remain in touch with those neighbours still alive. They are some of the greatest people I have ever met. What I learned a while back about those without money is they are the ones who give you everything they have.
Despite that very difficult opening chunk of my life, to this day I do not give a monkey's about owning property. I never got that national obsession. My ambitions lay elsewhere. I just wanted to live somewhere I could be happy and sell my writing. To this day, the former remains a problem and the second is very much up and down, making the former I suppose near impossible.
It was never easy selling work to broadcasters who often didn’t know the world I was writing about. I still remember the Head of Comedy who commissioned one of my pilots asking me “What happens on council estates?” I knew then it would be hard for that show to go the final step towards being made. And now, almost a decade later, it’s even harder to sell work because the commissioning editors and agents are about fifteen years younger than you, and still have no clue about the world you’re writing about. They are of course normally still white. It’s hard to see that changing in the media.
It bothers me that we have only just started talking about the Housing Crisis in the last few years when it's been a problem since the early 00s. When I used to do the nightly housing tweets last year, I'd get tweets from people telling me they had no idea the housing crisis was so bad. And I've got to say, that took me aback. If I’m a poor person that knows there are very wealthy people out there (indeed, my mum was one of many Iberian maids that cleaned the houses of the super rich in Belgravia for a quarter of a century so I was exposed to that world early), how is that there are well off people who have been clueless for so long about how those on the other side of the divide live? Incidentally, those housing tweets stopped because a paper blew them up into a story and dismissed 4 years’ worth of work as a ‘rant’.
Small things stay with me about the old family bedsit. Like always, to this day, washing my hands with cold water because for 24 years, I had no hot water. Like sleeping under a ton of bedding because for 24 years we had no heating. I can remember the way the grain changed on the curve of the bannister as we reached the top floor landing. The way the floor creaked as you entered the front room. I remember the all-too brief arrival of the Ascot Water heater in September ’89 which pleased my landlord who, much the way JFK had predicted the US would have a man on the moon before the sixties were out, had promised us hot water before the nineties arrived. Within three days, the water heater had blown up and British Gas had placed a Do Not Use Sticker on it, a sticker which the landlord duly removed.
I think that's why Grenfell for me goes beyond even the horror of the actual fire and the terrible sadness and the lifelong nightmares likely to plague the survivors. It really bothers me that there are so many people out there who had no idea that this is how so many people live. I have spoken about this for years.
Too many still think a housing crisis means not being able to buy. For me, a housing crisis simply means not having a place to live. It’s not about buying. I never grew up thinking I ought to be able to buy. As I say, I just wanted a home and with my history, I had more reason than most to fear dealing with landlords.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that finally we’re talking about housing and how we need to drastically improve the housing stock. But we got talking about it too late. A generation of professional twenty-somethings found they couldn’t buy, they got angry, the media started talking about it and in a way, it’s good that we are. But if that hadn’t have happened, was anyone ever going to start highlighting the often dreadful housing conditions the poor have long been putting up with? It was always going to be the middle classes that brought the housing crisis into the public arena because they have the influence but we are deluded if we think the housing crisis is a recent thing. And of course, the working class, my people, were seduced by Right to Buy. They bought their council homes, taking vital housing stock away from the council, and in many cases sold at the earliest opportunity. Their communities lost erstwhile pillars. Ex council stock fell into the hands of Buy to Let landlords and the remaining neighbours lost track of tenants moving in and out every six months. A community can’t survive like that.
Bad housing makes it near impossible for people to achieve the dreams they have for their lives. Those pictures on Thursday morning of Grenfell were ****ing shocking. And shocking too is that too many in this country are shocked by how the poor live.
I walk my streets every day like a really crap version of Batman. I know them inside out. I see a shop open for business in my community and I'll always tell people why I think that business will not survive in that area. I’m never wrong. It's about knowing your community. Two years ago, a bespoke tailor (also selling sofas) turned up in South Lambeth. I knew he wouldn't last. Six months later, he was gone. That bespoke tailor, had he waited until now, he'd have flourished because SW8 is close to full gentrification The tooth whitening clinic that opened last year on South Lambeth Road displayed perfect timing. Had it opened a year or two earlier, it would’ve stood no chance.
Entire communities are disappearing, just as my own, the Spanish community of southwest London that arrived in the sixties, all but vanished in the late nineties. The communities that manage to cling onto their postcodes are often struggling to make ends meet. And that is London 2017. It is not the greatest city on earth. Far from it. And I've said it all along.
On Wandsworth Road, 50 metres from the new Nine Elms Sainsbury's, within sight of the glass towers, there often sleeps a homeless man under a tree. He has a mattress now. And a kitchen chair. This is not even a class divide. It's a f***ing chasm. Cans of Kestrel Super Premium dumped by the Stockwell War Memorial are these days likely to be Brewdog Punk IPA.
We hear all the time that we have to eat better. How? We work longer hours on often bad money. Our commutes are longer because we’re getting pushed out to the suburbs. Rents meanwhile continue to rise. Who has time to cook good food? Our diets may shorten our lives but hey, how many of us are going to have the money for the care home years? Let’s be honest.
At best, you're surviving. I remember speaking to an ex-prisoner who by then was my latest landlord, in 2013. This latest landlord had told me what he hated most about his new life was that he was just 'surviving'. He did not yearn for his former (high profile criminal) life but he felt empty inside. That conversation resonated with me.
We need as a country to get past this obsession with home ownership and start properly addressing the dire housing situation. People need to stop obsessing about the value of their property. Live your life, I say. Make it a home. Build memories there. Be happy. Even though I grew up how I did, I was lucky enough to have had the love of two good parents and to grow up too in a close community. A community of different backgrounds and languages. A noisy, lively community that reminded me of the Richard Scarry ‘Animal’ books I loved as a small boy where so much seemed to be going on. That’s what the southwest London I grew up in was like.
There were loads of Irish people, there were the Mediterraneans with hairy chested men who could never have anticipated that chest hair would fall from grace so dramatically at the turn of the century. There were Africans and West Indians. There was always noise and life. I remember earlier this year being on a bus in Brixton and hearing a racket outside of the bus that got my head turning and I saw two Nigerian women talking on the main road. And I thought, ‘What’s happened to me? I grew up with their Francophone tones. Now all of a sudden, I hear that and I’m struggling with the noise.” That’s gentrification.
You just rarely hear that kind of life in south London any more. Pretty much everywhere you go it’s bar after bar catering for the white middle class, many of whom seem oblivious to the resentment among the few pre-2008 locals who have managed to cling onto their post code to see their markets and favourite independent businesses closing down as the generic high street chains arrive en masse to offer overpriced coffee inadequate in every respect to the far cheaper coffee offered by the Portuguese and Italian cafes in SW8 and SW9.
I miss that about post '08 London. The noise. The different languages and dialects. I don’t fear change. I just resent change always meaning the same thing. The CostaStarNero. The Sainsco MetroLocal. The wanky faux Mexican restaurant. Can we really not do better? Everything I know, everything I love, has either disappeared or is in danger of disappearing. I’m bracing myself for the day I lose the Portuguese café where I have been a daily fixture since August 2001. Is there nothing that people like me love that can be kept in this new, froth-heavy London?
I visited my aunt yesterday in the Stockwell Tower block she’s lived in since 1993. The tower has been part of my life since I was born as the ground floor houses my doctor’s surgery. So I know it extremely well. When I was a kid, anything above the ground floor was a no-go. A fire in the early nineties changed everything. The story was an old couple on one of the top floors got burned alive. Arson. 25+ years later, I’m less clear on the facts but whatever happened, Lambeth Council turned the tower and its two accompanying towers around, employing 24-hour concierges and life in the towers became much much better. In recent years, austerity has kicked in. The Towers are now managed by a well-known housing association and managed badly. The heating disappears in the winter and often doesn’t come back on until after Christmas. The concierge hours have been scaled back to a third of what they were and in the wake of Grenfell, as my aunt and uncle argue about how many fire escape routes there might be in a building they’ve been in for 24 years, the Housing Association have put these Stay Put posters up in the communal hallways.
I can’t recall seeing sprinklers, extinguishers or hoses in the communal hallways but maybe I wasn’t paying too much attention. Meantime, my aunt has had calls from people in Spain who can't believe this has happened in our city in 2017.
Next time we bang on about how great and wonderful London is, remember this is a city that doesn't look after all its people. And I personally will remember that took a disaster that none of us will ever forget to get me feeling something because this city has sucked the life out of people like me.
Most days, the fact my book is selling well in both Romania and The Philippines is enough to keep me going. Not today. Today I’m thinking about the greed. The constant cutting of corners. The regular spike in price of the LIDL all butter croissant. The greedy councils and property developers. The Buy to Let Landlords. Yes, we all have to make money somehow but being a landlord is not a nice way to make it. It says something about the person, in my view. They like their money a little too much. The regular attempts to close down the few community centres left and the libraries where so many locals, who’ve seen so many of their haunts disappear, and the fight to keep those places open, wears you down. It’s that constant fight to keep the little that you have left that robs you of the little energy you have left. Today I’m thinking about Grenfall.
To the wealthy Londoners I say, get out of your 4 by 4s and walk your streets. Take your kids with you so they can see what you’re seeing. Take them with you so they don’t grow up ignorant about the other side to this city. Get out there and see how those people in the tower blocks and on the estates are living. Understand that if you see them hanging out on the streets, it’s often because the shops and bars and community centres they perhaps visited have been closed down.
Grenfell happened as we already know because corners were cut. Corners were cut because this is/was a poor community. Would these corners be cut when building the big near-empty towers now pockmarking the London skyline?
I’d like to add that the original tweeted version of this piece was put together in a vest with a barely digested £1.25 Sainsbury's pizza.
Lastly, as David Lammy said when he spoke his beautiful words for an entire city, “we need to live in a society where we care for the poorest and the vulnerable.”
My current temporary assignment has seen me plunged into the worst work toilets situation I’ve encountered in years. The company, a start-up, has a large open plan office, which given my fear of stomach rumbles in confined office spaces was the decisive factor when it came to making my mind up whether to take the job or not.
As a rule, when I go along to job interviews, rather than finding out what a job entails, what my duties are likely to be, what team I will be working for, so on and so forth, I tend to put more emphasis on studying the office layout. How are the desks set up? If, for instance, they’re set up in banks, getting to know new colleagues is likely to be far more difficult. The chances are in those first few weeks that you’ll only get to know people either side of you. I look too at whether the desks have modesty screens, or whether they’ve opted for a 'big table' configuration, which tends to encourage free and frequent communication between a team of four to eight people. The latter set-up makes it far easier to get to know people. I also look at whether management sit with their team or hole themselves up in separate offices elsewhere on the floor. Is there a canteen? If not, where do staff eat their lunch? And, where are the loos? Soon as I show up in reception, I’m looking out for all of these things, especially the loos, trying to establish in my own mind whether I can work in that environment.
In this instance however, I slipped up, failing to notice that both the gents and ladies, located about thirty metres apart, have entrances that are highly visible to the rest of the floor. In fact, there are few blind spots, if any, in this open plan office. In my experience, and my long and troubled nine to five work history has seen me work for over 100 companies, work toilets tend to be located in discreet corners of the office or in the corridors alongside the lifts. The latter can mean people are often engulfed by horrific smells as soon as they step out of the lifts. In this place, while that’s definitely not the case, the set-up means everyone can see who’s going in and who’s coming out. Everyone knows where you’ve been. It’s easy, well if you’re like me - and admittedly, few people are – if you pay attention to these things, to conclude, depending on how long someone has been in there, just what colleagues have got up to in the loo. I time people’s visits all the time. I can’t help it.
It’s my great misfortune in this place to be sitting right opposite the ladies. I get to see who’s going in and who’s coming out. If a female colleague spends more than five minutes in there, I’m horrified. The steady flow of traffic to the ladies is, for someone who likes the opposite sex to retain as much mystery as possible, a real problem for me. On approaching their washroom, a number of them do that looking into the distance thing as they reach the entrance before going in, as if they’ve spotted someone they know 20 metres away, all the while failing to note I’ve made a mental note of the time they’ve gone in there. To be fair, that catalogue model looking into the vista thing is a good pre-WC entry visual. The slowing down a little before going in through that door is also something I like to see, conveying an air of someone that’s not in such a desperate need to go that he or she really should’ve contemplated calling in sick. I like to see people in control of their bodies.
The location of the toilets would be very different here if I’d been involved in overseeing the office layout before the company launched earlier this summer. Only men would sit near the gents and only women near the ladies. It’s too late for this place. It is what it is. But architects involved in designing new workplace layouts from scratch should consider getting in touch with me for advice on where to station the lavatories, because I find the notion that the layout here could be replicated in yet to be constructed workplaces, unacceptable. I don’t want anyone else having to suffer this striking lack of privacy. If one day I was given the opportunity to work with architects on this and I really do hope I am, I’d propose three possible options for making the work toilet experience as clandestine as possible.
Option One: This is quite a simple one and the cheapest of my three proposals. The loos are located behind a high wall; similar to the one Rapunzel’s dad had to scale to get his wife lettuce from the garden of the enchantress. There will be no scaling here though. Access would instead be gained via two low-key, dimly lit side entrances at opposite ends for each of the sexes, affording everyone the utmost privacy.
Option Two: A mini bus with blacked out windows would collect colleagues in the habit of making long bathroom trips at work. This bus would turn up four times a day during work hours. These habitual offenders would then be driven off to some wasteland at least five miles away – in what literally would be toilet trips - where they do what they need to do in rundown portaloos designed to discourage staff from making their visits long ones - before being returned to the workplace. Obviously, this is going to necessitate a flexi-time system, but it’s doable.
Option Three: This final one is by far the most ambitious, some might say extreme, of my three proposals. Workplace loos should be buried deep in basements, as far down into the bowels of a building as is possible, like a time capsule say. The basement would serve as a buffer between the workplace and the disposal of the staff’s waste. These toilets could only be accessed via a goods lift. You would arrive on the toilet-specific floor to find the lights dimmed. Picture it for a moment. A fog machine emits a dense vapour that makes it hard for you to see more than five metres in front of you. Early New Order – The Peel Sessions - is piped through speakers. This is a bleak and desolate landscape fit for only one purpose. There is giant flora and fungi everywhere. As you near the bathrooms, that early New Order is faded out, replaced instead by the frightening audio of wild animals. Big cats. Elephants. Hyenas. This is the closest you’ll ever come to experiencing what Early Man went through every time they had to answer nature’s call, never knowing if they would return to their loved ones from some of man’s earliest toilet trips.
Night vision goggles are given to staff to help them locate the toilets. Gimp masks are mandatory, collected at the entrances soon as you step out of the goods lift. No one will be able to recognise anyone. Ideally, the bathroom etiquette followed by all too few people will be observed here. No small talk will or should be made. Everyone knows why they’re there. Of course, you always get one or two work colleagues who think nothing of stopping one by the urinals for a chat, a nightmare for someone like me. To counter the possibility of running into those people, attached to the gimp masks are vo-coders that will distort everyone’s voice in case they run into any of those tiresome bathroom small talkers en route. Everyone will remain unidentifiable unless he or she choose to reveal his or her identity.
But I can only dream. The reality is no architect out there is going to approach me and allow me to show myself to be the workplace toilet visionary I claim to be. I remain sat opposite the ladies. My ‘vantage point’ is killing me. I’ve asked several colleagues to swap with me but they’ve refused, one going as far as telling me that I need to deal with my toilet hang-ups. I wish I could stop time so that when these women re-emerge from the loos 20 minutes later, oblivious to the fact I’ve timed their latest bathroom visit, I’d believe they’d only been in there for a minute.
If the loo layout of every office were set up like those in my current job, the mysterious quality of the opposite sex would be shattered. When you take into account how many couples tend to meet through work, courting stats would fall dramatically. 50 years from now, there will have been a significant drop in the world’s population figures.
Meanwhile, one female boss here just doesn’t seem to stop going to the loo. Her frequent toilet trips during working hours undermine her authority in my eyes. The only way that’s going to be redeemed is if I hear from some other party that she suffers from some medical condition like the Urinating Man of SW9. Our conversations keep breaking off abruptly. I’m never sure what to do upon her return and find myself on edge as I wonder if we just pick up the dialogue from where we left off? She comes back as if nothing has happened. I’m thinking, “I know how long you’ve been in there. It’s pretty clear what you’ve done.” I do wish she wouldn’t talk to me either side of her toilet visits.
If she came back to resume our exchanges an hour later then that wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be clear that there was no way she could’ve been in the toilet all that time. But when I’m seeing her coming out of the loo 15 minutes later and making straight for me to pick up where we left off, I’m left wondering whether as she’s sitting down in there, she might be thinking specifically of what else she needs to tell me.
Perhaps I need to make light of the number of loo visits she’s already made that day. Or maybe she’d like me to acknowledge her frequent trips to the toilet in a humorous fashion. It could be she’d respond to that favourably and I’d have to accept our relationship would be more scatological than professional.
This manager is not the only one whose lavatorial habits I’ve noted. Today, one female colleague went into the loo talking on her phone. What’s that all about? She emerged 12 minutes later, still on the phone, a handset she continued to use throughout the day at her desk and which as far as I could see had not been wet wiped at any subsequent point.
Seeing all this, I try to persuade myself there must be a simple explanation behind these numerous lengthy toilet visits made by female colleagues. They probably only have one cubicle serving 50 odd women. Yes, that must be it. They go in there, pick up a ticket, sit down and wait their turn. Fights, I tell myself, are probably commonplace, as frustration at waiting for the one cubicle to become available spills over. There can be no other explanation.
I shouldn’t look. I do my best not to. I don’t want to know how long they take, but sometimes, I’m just drawn to the appalling spectacle. That’s the type of person I am. When I arrive in the mornings, the same twenty-something girl goes to the ladies soon as she’s scanned her ID card on the door entry panel. I can’t be the only one seeing this but my other colleagues seem nonplussed by the visual.
I’ve got into the habit of leaving my desk when she arrives and making to the kitchen, or ‘breakout area’ as they call it here, an Americanism I try to avoid vocalising at all costs, to increase my chances of not seeing her exit the loo and knowing exactly how long she’s been in there. There are mornings though when after making my coffee, I’ve returned to my desk and found I’m halfway through it before she’s re-emerged and actually started doing any work.
I feel like going up to her and saying, “You don’t have time to do that at your house? Why not get up earlier?” I’m even contemplating swapping numbers with her so I can give her a daily alarm call in the mornings to spare me the sight every morning.
Today I’ve raised the monitor of my desktop PC to obscure my view of the ladies, but every now and then, I find I’m still catching a glimpse of the top of a girl’s hairstyle that I’ve come to recognise. I convince myself they’re not doing what I fear they’re doing. I watch as they return to their desks with their tops tucked in differently to how they were when they went in, and I tell myself they have to sit down in there anyway. The altered back of the shirt visual on a woman isn’t going to give you the same kind of information you would get from seeing the altered back of a man’s shirt after they’ve come out of the washroom.
I’ve nabbed a couple of reams of A4 paper and raised the monitor even higher this afternoon. It’s a significant improvement. In the absence of building high walls inspired by a fairy-tale, or driving colleagues to wasteland to go about their business, or even entombing the loos in a basement, this is as much as I can do in this place.
You can read more of my work in 'Me! Me! Me!', available on Amazon for just £1.99.
If you're a fan of this website, please be aware it is due to be renewed for another 12 months next week at considerable cost. There are now roughly 400 radio shows and podcasts hosted on here that I have recorded in the last 7 years, as well as writing and videos, and I continue to turn out, on average, 50 episodes a year of my Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available podcast.
If you're able to support this work, you can make a secure donation via Paypal here.
Thank you for supporting this work.
Email your mp3 pronunciations of 'URINAL' to my Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available podcast ahead of this Monday's (9 January 2017) podcast, ep 162.
Is it 'ur-eye-nal' or 'u-ri-nal'? Record your own pronunciation on your phone and send through your mp3 (telling us who you are and your twitter handle if you have one) via drtavailable
Your recording will be played on Monday's show.
More details on ep 161.
Also looking to get your thoughts for Monday's show on the 'interrobang'. What do you make of it?
Email drtavailable
And any other business welcome on the show.
With Christmas fast arriving, it’s time for listeners to choose their Christmas TV programme submissions for this year’s ‘Channel Christmas’, the once a year, 24 hours only Christmas Eve channel.
Appearing on Christmas Eve only at 00:00hrs and running through until 23:59hrs (Christmas Eve), you can submit film choices, or TV programmes of any running length and your preferred time slot - what time slot do you think will do your choice justice? I’ll do my best to accommodate your selections. And tell us why you’re choosing that particular TV show/film.
Channel Christmas has proved popular since launching on 2014’s Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available Bumper Christmas Annual, in Ep 81, which was recorded live in front of an audience. Ep 81 is held up by some to be the single best episode to date, elevated to greatness in their eyes by an almighty live on air clash between The Kid and Micky Boyd. You can listen to that ep here: goo.gl/sSPtoq
Meantime, last year’s Channel Christmas was presided over by Micky Boyd himself and rather predictably when my lifelong friend and mid-eighties school sprint champion is involved, didn’t go to plan. You can listen to 2015’s Bumper Christmas Annual here: goo.gl/1XUg2J
Meantime, email your submissions through via: drtavailable@westegg1607.co.uk
Or tweet them to @1607WestEgg #ChannelChristmas
Deadline: 22 December 2016
The full Channel Christmas schedule will be unveiled on next week's Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available Bumper Christmas Annual 2016 episode.
