Crazy Nottingham

Well, it’s definitely not like living in Nice. I haven’t been blogging because there has been so much disturbance in my life lately; my family live here and so do my friends, and I bought a plethora of hard to get hold of nutrition books from Amazon as soon as I got back to the UK, so this is how I’ve been spending my time.

Hen Triangle

We started calling Nottingham “Crazy Nottingham” about a week after moving in. In the four or five years since I lived here, Nottingham has changed a lot. There was some case law apparently, and it’s set a precedent. There are more pubs and clubs than ever, all with late licenses, and they are bussing people in from Birmingham, Derby, Leicester and Sheffield to fill them.

We’re living on Theatre Square. To our left is the notorious trouble-pub Long Island, eighties bar Reflex and seventies bar Flares, ahead is Mode, (who recently installed the most annoying outdoor strobe light), the Theatre Royal and the Concert Hall (where only two nights ago all hell broke loose with the visit of a big time boy band), behind that Rock City, and to our right are several karaoke pubs and The Cornerhouse building where pikey teenagers flock to watch Hollywood blockbusters.

In short, we’re in the direct epicentre of the entire Midlands Stag and Hen triangle. It’s like a blast zone. Every Friday and Saturday night a series of black or white limousines pull up outside the Concert Hall and let out hordes of staggering slappers dressed in L plates, wedding veils, nurse’s uniforms and devil horns. Different groups of hens get into fights with each other, pecking and flapping and squawking. We have a friend who lives in London: he came to visit us in Nottingham and he was shocked. He has never seen anything like this. They queue for miles here to be let in to the late-license bars. Groups of shaven-headed men on the prowl leer and jeer at the blubbery mountains of exposed thigh and cleavage, and take photos on their picture phones. J. has taken to staring out of the window in disbelief at the crazy folk outside. “Scum,” he mutters under his breath at irregular intervals.

The Displacing Foods of Modern Commerce (another rant)

Every time I get a decaf (the coffee drinker’s methadone) in Café Nero or Starbucks, I lose a little more hope. I watch a succession of mothers with buggies feed their children atrocious pieces of carbohydrate: low fat “skinny” blueberry muffins, sugar coated Danishes, pain au chocolat, fake-apple pastries (the gelatinous chunks are actually made of agar-agar from seaweed). One woman fed her boy an entire bag of chocolate coins followed by a muffin, which he threw on the floor. Another fed her boy low fat high-sugar yoghurt followed by a piece of chocolate cake. Jesus Christ, and they wonder why their kids are screaming. This didn’t happen in Nice. Children didn’t go to coffee shops; they went to brasseries where they were fed real food. Children were quiet in Nice, and if they weren’t, they were invariably the children of tourists. All of these children I see acting up in the coffee shops have the same features: poor bone structure, underdeveloped jaws, narrow faces, big foreheads. They look malnourished. It’s because they’re not getting enough fat-soluble vitamins. When these kids grow up they will need orthodontics to correct their poor facial development. Feeding your kids junk foods means they literally grow up ugly; undershot jaws, big foreheads, stub noses, asymmetric features, stunted growth. Contrast this to the Adonis-like beauty of the native Niçoise on their fat-and-vitamin rich diet. No it isn’t down to race. Ever wondered why the upper classes are so much more beautiful than the working classes? It’s all down to childhood diet. But no longer, now the entire nation is living on poverty food on the sad, outdated advice of the government. These poor kids will all grow up gawky or overweight, with the same personality traits: sugar addiction, moodiness and fatigue. These health-conscious mothers would shudder at the thought of feeding their kids a fry-up, but for all their fear of fat, they would be no worse off slumming it with the pikeys in Maccy D’s or BK. It all turns into sugar anyway.

Diabetes and Denial

I saw my friend K. the other day. About six months ago I told her to watch her father like a hawk, because he was an obvious candidate for type 2 diabetes. He has the family history, the classic diabetic belly, and a variety of other telling symptoms. A couple of weeks ago he was diagnosed with diabetes. I woke up with sweats in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep: the other person I told her was a candidate was my own father. He has the family history, the classic diabetic belly, and a variety of other telling symptoms. The difference is, my Dad refuses to listen to me when I tell him to get his blood sugar checked.

Tragic Dina

And then there’s Dina. “Excuse me, thank you for not ignoring me,” she says as I walk past her on Clumber Street. I know this is Dina’s begging line, because I’ve heard about it before. She doesn’t know who I am; she doesn’t know I know her name or her life story. She used to be a model. She’s pretty, with long dark hair, but her skin is ruined. Her parents are rich and live in a big house, but they don’t talk anymore. Dina is on heroin. She lives on the streets with her homeless boyfriend and his two dogs. I see Dina around Nottingham quite a lot. J. saw her from the window a couple of weeks ago involved in an altercation on Theatre Square. A man was following her, and she kept screaming at him that he was a thieving bastard, but he kept on following her up the street. Then her boyfriend appeared and set his two dogs on him. The result was a cartoon-like struggle and chase.

Smells Like Nottingham Spirit

We’re renting our penthouse from the poshest woman we have ever met. It has an old brick fireplace that smells like the fabled caves of Nottingham: musty, damp, sandy. Maybe it’s a particular strain of mould? The kitchen cupboards are too low and every time we bend over the cooker or the sink we bang our heads. There’s a place on the living room floor that springs like a trampoline when we walk over it (it’s getting worse). But apart from that, the flat is very nice. Shame about the location, and the neighbours.

Not a Pretty Woman Story

Two weeks after we moved in, a woman moved in downstairs. I first met her when we were woken at two in the morning by screaming, clattering and sobbing in the fire escape just outside our exit door. We could hear a man using his fists. We called the police. The police laughed when they saw her, because she was drunk or on drugs and staggered around in her high heels in the street. Her denim skirt was what my mother would call a belt. The police laughed because they thought she was a prostitute. This was how we met our new neighbour, KH.

KH is a kept woman, and she’s kept by the man who came around to beat her up. Her arms are covered in bruises, she has a terrible squint. She’s a pikey and she’s slim not from healthy eating but from malnutrition. Sometimes she’s as scared as a mouse. Sometimes she’s noisy and obnoxious and plays her R&B music late into the night. She has a habit of having loud, porn-star sex twice a week and keeping us awake. Sometimes she’s ultra-paranoid and knocks on our door asking if her quiet music is too loud, and claiming that she never has it on after nine o’clock. One night a woman came to visit her, and KH screamed at her from ten that night through to six the next morning. She leaves her pink frilly knickers hanging in the window.

A man stays who isn’t the man who keeps her. She has two boys who, after six or seven visits are still too dumb to figure out they can get out of the front door by pressing the button marked “press”, and that if KH doesn’t answer the intercom, it means she’s not in, not that they should spend the next three hours banging at her door. Are they expecting to find her in there? A man in a business suit and dark glasses called on our intercom asking for “Marteela”, or some other made up name. KH let him in. She giggled a lot, which seems to be her way of being charming. Then there was the party where KH had loud, porn-star sex (twice) while half a dozen men were in her flat. She was the only woman.

For the last two weeks, everything has gone very quiet. No music, no sex, no parties, no men. Not a peep. A couple of nights ago the police came. They said KH was in custody but they couldn’t tell us why. Just that they needed to search her flat. They debated breaking down her door. Now there is unopened mail lying on the floor for her downstairs; hand written letters from the inland revenue, a letter from Fletcher’s Solicitors (slogan: it’s never too late). I wonder what she did?

Update: The Rest of the KH Story

It turned out that KH was arrested for driving whilst high on cocaine. That’s why the police wanted to search her flat. We only saw KH once more; at least, we heard her and saw her television on the stairs. She was doing a runner.

A couple of weeks later we had a visit from a Mr G., who turned out to be the owner of the flat, rather disappointed to have discovered his incompetent staff had let it out to her. Apparently the flat was completely cleared out. She never paid him any rent at all. Her sugar-daddy abuser must have reneged on his deal. It turns out he has a wife back at home in Long Eaton.