Lording it on a pediment in Peckham

1

So I’m out with my cousin on a Saturday night.
It’s alright.
This is how they do it.

Sister’s 30th

Part 1:
dinner by the funkified Regent’s Canal;
an ‘eclectic’, ‘vego-synthesis’ of ‘Greco-Roman??’ fodder
served up in a jus of discordant registers and poor spelling
at non-denominated prices that ascend in
healthy pentadecimal increments.

Part 2:
funk/soul/rare groove n’ Motown night
in Peckham.
Peckham? What exactly is Peckham? I waver.
But it’s my birthday, and I want you to come.

2

We cross the town in her Fiesta.
Full car, girls and me;
Chaperone/routefinder/objet de ridicule.
Gray’s Inn Road
Clerkenwell
-- They get ogled --
Farringdon

Oh by the way, we’re having a drink first in this place.
What place??? Where?
Just by the party place, down the road.
So I can walk from the drink place to the party place?
Yeah of course!!

Abducted and held hostage.
U-turn on Moorgate
London Bridge
Borough
The Old Kent Road
I lose my bearings as we descend even further.
Terraced houses on a south London street,
suburban and quaint.
We stop and park up, and it really is time to get out,
but I’m three boroughs out from Belsize Park.

3

But it’s alright.
The air is warm and
I feel swaddled.
Vacated workyards by the railway line
now urban squats for upstart YBA’s,
commandeered without gratitude, tradition cast aside.

I’m thinking:
‘What redeeming feature can there be
in a person
who seeks to make a statement
out of a congregation
underneath an archway
in some back room once used
by honest tradespeople
during an era
when this country
blossomed off the back of
good honest toil.
Even worse, he who bandwagons with someone who seeks to make such a statement?’

They strike diffuse, gaunt, anaemic, alienated poses.
One girl nurses a forehead gash. Precious and uppity.
There is no more to their slurping of Tyskie and Red Stripe
than its face value: sipping
lager from cans at unstable wooden benches.
Souls consigned to the eighth circle for the sin
of pretence and spurning independent thought.
I subdue my urge to cast them all asunder
with a Dom Joly manoeuvre.

And it leads to couched misery, lassitude.
I don’t know that they even see me.
And here comes our antagonist: lech, boss, landlord
the man, faded black T-shirt, grainy stubble,
resigned pseudy weather-beaten,
and he’s got something to say and to show,
and what unseemly things
come to this old lech’s mind, I don’t wish to know.
Across the cobbles to the gallery.
Big formal sign says: Alice Coleman Art Gallery,
but there’s no art, just another bar
and more waifs and strays.
This younger generation is rootless and stupid
and I’m losing patience…

I’m going to sister’s thing now, do you know where it is?

Bussey Building she points half-arsedly, and
he’s right there next to us, witnessing, prying,
manifesting a judicious and ominous silence.
So I ask him straight if the direction is right.
And out it pops.

4

Do you know what a pediment is?

Remember I had no idea that this was what was coming.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT A PEDIMENT IS?

A pediment.
I do not know what a pediment is.
I really do not.
And I’m guessing that you do.
And I do not know.
And you are pointing this out.
All these years I have not known; I did not know.
So this is embarrassing but
I should probably just be grateful.
How could I have existed?
You knew this, so why didn’t I?

And now, because I have looked it up,
I know that it is the low-pitched triangular gable in the
Greco-Roman style that sits on a horizontal entablature
at a building’s façade. I will never forget.
And what of all the other things you know that I don’t?
And that I don’t know that I don’t know?

Still.
It’s only a pediment in Peckham, so why did I lord it?