George Davis Is Innocent

The above appeared, clumsily spray painted on the wall of a dilapidated pub building in Leamington, a couple of months before Christmas.

At first, being ignorant of gangster lore, I assumed it referred to a local lad; some poor yob out misspending his youth who had found himself on the wrong side of a policeman’s taser. Before he could protest that he had just gone up that there alley for a quick Jimmy Riddle he’d found himself banged up for burglary with 500 other spurious offenses to be taken into consideration and escorted to a prison cell by a couple of uniformed officers who were slapping each other’s backs for singlehandedly improving Leamington’s clean-up rate over night.

His siblings, his mates, even his 85 year old granny with her dodgy hip and rheumatoid arthritis had taken to the streets of Leamo armed with cheap aerosol’s to protest his innocence on every wall, pavement and fence they could find.

Who was George Davis? That was the question that was rattling around my mind every time I walked past this enticing bit of graffiti. Who was he? What had he not done that he had been accused of doing?

In the end I Googled him. And lo and behold George Davis wasn’t a local lad done wrong by the local constabulary at all but a London mobster who was dodgily convicted for The London Electricity Board Robbery in 1975. He was released a couple of years later as a result of a campaign by supporters who protested his innocence before being later re-imprisoned for armed robberies that he did actually commit. So not so innocent after all.

Which must have been a bit of a kick in the teeth for Roger Daltry and Sham 69 who via T-shirt wearing and song-writing had come out in George’s defence. Stick to rock opera’s, Rog, your wrists are too subtle to divine the true realities of a man’s innocence.

So back to the graffiti of 2010. George Davis Is Innocent? Plainly the graffiti artist hadn’t done his research properly. I’m eagerly awaiting an addendum to the said piece of graffiti that starts with the words “Well, actually, ahem, the thing is...”

Or perhaps this is the first instance of “retro graffiti”. A celebration of famous graffiti from times gone by? Is the wall at the back of Tesco’s car-park going to shimmer with the words “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing” sometime in the not too distant future? Or shall I get ahead of the game myself and paint the side of my house with the legend: “Is there intelligent life on earth? Yes, but I'm only visiting”?

Hmm.

Answers painted on a brick wall at the usual address please...

Ring My Ding-a-ling-a-ling

Today has been a strange day.

I was off sick Thursday and Friday and returned to work today, brave soldier that I am, only partially recovered but prepared to stand and face the bullets of the French or the Germans or whoever it is we don’t like as a nation anymore.

And instead found something worse than bullets.

My desk was full of notes and messages – hastily scrawled missives from colleagues and work-mates who in my absence did their best to stem the inevitable flow of entropy and dissolution which is my daily bread and butter.

(Should any of you find yourself in Hell in the afterlife I guarantee you’ll find the entire place plastered with post-it notes...)

Among the lists of malfunctioning equipment and diabolical break-downery that hurt my brain this morning was a plea to recover a ring from one of our sinks. It seems some poor woman – let’s call her Joanna Public – managed to dislodge a bit of bling while scrubbing her dannies yesterday and was most eager to have it recovered if at all possible.

Well, I am always eager to perform acts of possibility and so set to work with a screwdriver and little else (though possibly a modicum of goodwill) and managed to remove the trap from beneath the sink that catches all solid matter – or indeed any matter that just happens to be heavier than the water that has washed it down there in the first place.

It wasn’t a pleasant job. The water was black and thick. Mucoid, if there is such a word (my spellchecker is questioning it with an angry red underline). It looked like Sigourney Weaver’s stomach lining after she’d been impregnated with one of them Alien thingies.

And yes I made the age old mistake of pouring the contents down the very sink I’d just removed the trap from so that the water splashed straight down to the floor. Doh!

But I did recover the ring.

Which upon closer inspection was disappointing. I was expecting gold. I was expecting silver. I was expecting a sparkly stone the size of Jeremy Clarkson’s chin.

Instead I got a rather dowdy looking blackened band of indeterminate metal with a dull, very opaque green stone set into the middle of it.

My first thought was: Christ, I hope it wasn’t the water in the trap that did that. But, upon further examination, I suspect it may have been the ring that did that to the water. However, there is no accounting for taste and I am sure the sentimental value of the ring completely outweighs any snobbery I may harbour towards its true monetary value.

Well, it had better. I’d hate to think I’d swilled my fingers through watery vomit for something that fell out of a Christmas cracker alongside a plastic comb and a tiny plastic spinning top that refuses to spin.

Oh what do I care, really? The job was done and I was just glad to be able to ring (ha ha) Joanna Public up and say that I had saved her ring from a fate worse than missing. It isn’t something I get to say very often, after all, and I made sure I relished the opportunity.

A happy ending.

Unlike the hours I then spent reviewing our CCTV footage to catch two middle aged women setting fire to a bin bag dumped outside the building last night for no other reason that it appeared to amuse them.

The resultant fire wasn’t huge and thankfully a staff member happened to spot the blaze and douse it with a good old fashioned bucket of H2O.

I have then spent the rest of the day wading through conversations with police, staff and alarm engineers who have all given me the distinct impression that I am pouring black, vomity water down a sink without a trap onto my own feet once more...

With no ring this time – dud or precious – to make the activity seem at all worthwhile...

*sigh*

Where’s Frodo Baggins when you need him, eh?

The Cock Tree

This newest of Leamington landmarks appeared, proud and ready erect, sometime in the run-up to Christmas.

One morning the tree was inoffensively asexual and passive and the next it was unmistakably male and “up for it”.

The worst thing about this most unimaginative bit of graffito is that it lies (stands?) smack bang in the middle of my route home from work and is absolutely unavoidable unless I take a detour of several hundred miles (a bit of an exaggeration) in order to avoid the accusing stare of it’s malicious helmet.

When you are on foot after an exhausting day at work such a detour is, quite frankly, unpalatable and so I inevitably run the gamut of the helmet and find myself tutting at it every single time.

Lord knows I’ve tried to see the funny side. I mean graffiti can be entertaining. Even educational when it’s produced by someone with a brain cell that can rub its shoulder up against another one.

Maybe there is some hidden pagan quality about this site that I am in complete ignorance of? Maybe it is a site of extraordinary virility like The Long Man of Wilmington? Scores of barren women come to this tree by night, drop their camisoles and sit praying meditatively for a patient and cold buttocked half hour on its gnarled and horny roots (steady!) in the hope that the old gods of the forest will make their wombs fruitful and overflowingly productive?

Maybe this graffito is an emblem of an all male secret society that I have patently not been invited to join that celebrates the leaping vitality of the male member in various (inevitably) homo-erotic rites that would, to quote Morrissey, make Caligula blush? They meet by night, swigging bottles of Diamond White and cans of Special Brew, and there by the light of the full moon they sing carousing songs of maleness, pledge allegiance to Old One Eye and prove their devotion to the cause by dropping their hoodies to reveal their... er... hoodies...

Sadly I suspect not.

Sadly I suspect the real story is that a rival gang from one of Leamington’s neighbouring towns – Warwick or Kenilworth perhaps – decided to make a foray into enemy territory late one night and tarnish the reputation of us resident Leamingtonians by implying, pictorially, that we are all great big nobs. Let’s face it, it could even be the handiwork of a disenchanted and disenfranchised local boy who, tired with his lot, tired with the fact that his own town refuses to see his celebrity potential and burgeoning star quality decided to hurl his overlooked artistry into the cold, uncaring faces of all those who lived and worked around him before hurling himself, aerosol can in hand, onto the train tracks at the back of Flavel’s factory, there to be squished under the locomotive wheels of the 9.25 to Dorridge.

This penis could be his final testament. His last will and willy to the world.

Oh who am I kidding?

It’s just no-good, scruffy, bored kids isn’t it? They’ve disfigured what was a very beautiful tree just for the sheer hell of it and I have to look at the damned thing every time I go home from here to sodding eternity and there is nothing that can be done about it – no cleaning agents that can remove it without damaging the tree, no way of eradicating the graffiti short of felling it’s living host. Curse them. Curse them and their amoral can of plebeian aerosol paint!

They’re great big cocks the lot of them.