Here comes Life with his leathery whip.

"Heavens to Betsy, The Man's out to get me."

 

EVERY WEEK FOR FOUR MONTHS

I don't drive. I know that seems crazy, but I lived in major American cities for the better part of a decade and in metropolitan areas in other countries, even in the easily-mocked and slowly crumbling USA, it is much cheaper to get around without a car, and in many cases easier/faster as well. If you don't need to commute far, and you don't make a ton of day trips, there's usually an affordable all-services transit pass that will cover 90% of your needs.

In Glasgow that is an absolute fucking joke, but I didn't know that when I moved here. And being from the car capital of America, and having known how to drive since I was 14, I just plain refuse to pay the extortionate fees and give up the ridiculous amount of time required to get a license just to deal with the traffic on Pollokshaws Road every day.

For years I solved this problem by having my mother in law do the supply runs with me once a week. Unlike most people, I really liked my mother in law, and right up until the end of my marriage she liked me too. It was a nice little bonding day. Two hours or so, talking shit, bemoaning the decline of the British work ethic, and trading industry stories (she used to run a sort of roll shop/dairy and a cafe out in Paisley for the majority of my wife's youth). 

When my wife and I eventually split up I relied on Sam #1, one of the best employees I've ever had, and his very dependable 'nightshade' (not purple; not black) Qashqai. We bought supplies on Mondays, prepped them on Tuesdays, and life was breezy. Then Sam moved to Dundee, and I went back to the internet, where I met a series of one-off, pleasant supply runners, including Jim, the Most Interesting Man On Earth, whose exploits I still follow with interest,  until settling into a lockdown groove with Sam #2 and his small but sturdy Nissan Micra.

This lasted until Sam2 came off furlough and was recalled to the "real" workforce, leaving me once again at the mercy of the internet. Thankfully, I hired Jake somewhere in there and also bought a very nicely maintained 2007 Nissan Note for our mutual business needs. Jake had a license but no car, I had a car and no license, and together we were freewheeling, mobile men with matching bikes who spent 18 out of 24 hours with each other for the better part of a year. Totally normal story. Happens all the time. Then Jake also moved, not to Dundee but to Yeovil, which people tell me is even worse. 

I hear it has a bar called The Bullet, though, so it cannot possibly be all bad.

Once again I found myself at the mercy of the internet, only I thought it would be much easier now since I actually had a car so all I needed was a licensed driver who was free between 9:30am and 12:30pm on Tuesdays (a category I would imagine would include almost every resident of this city) so every Thursday for four fucking months I would make a post and/or story asking for a driver to help get the food that NANIKA needs to function. 8500 followers. Regular DMs every day/week/month. And yet somehow, and despite the fact that this is a paid job, for money, I got either no responses at all or FAR MORE ANNOYINGLY was left standing at Nanika from 9:30 until 10:15am not once, not twice, but three times by three different people who didn't have the courtesy to even let me know they were not coming, nor why. So much for that amazing "community" you're always seeing little posters and stickers about.

(Jonathan, a customer we all love, who has a 9-5 job and is thus usually unavailable for the supply run has nonetheless done an amazing job of doing the supply run quite often these past few months, and I would like to take this opportunity to say that without him we would have definitely closed down several months ago, so thank you Jonathan)

So I have been making a three hour, easy round trip that I used to make weekly with a variety of fun, friendly people, by myself, on buses and in taxis, for the past two months or more, which takes something like eight hours over two days (those two days being the only ones I have off every week) because nobody with a license wants to do a three-hour circuit around Glasgow where the actual time spent driving is probably under 30 minutes and the rest is just sitting in parking lots reading books or walking through Asian markets touching weird vegetables. 

Do I have an explanation for this phenomenon? Do I fuck.

At the beginning of lockdown I couldn't sleep for the constant pinging of my phone because everyone and their cousin wanted to know if I wanted a delivery driver, so I am fully aware that there are hundreds, likely thousands, and if we're being honest a couple hundred thousand people who could do this job. If you know why they aren't, go ahead and share that reason with me, because now that GlasGo cabs has bought up all the smaller companies I literally cannot get back to the shop with the supplies every week.

The restaurant will close down, permanently, if I cannot get supplies. It's not some abstract concept. If I cannot get the food I cannot cook the food. Point A to point B, in a nice straight line.

I can think of thousands of reasons why people wouldn't want to work in the hospitality industry.

I can think of almost none why they would not want to drive around and drink coffee and hang out in the SeeWoo parking lot while I buy kecap manis. Especially when they don't even have to use their own goddamned car. But there are many things I do not understand in my old age, like why over-watering and under-watering plants causes the exact same symptoms, or why companies that have been stealing and selling your data without consent for years are allowed to say "we care about your privacy" when trying to make you accept advertising cookies, or why anyone ever liked Mrs. Brown's Boys, etc.

A world of mysteries. 

Keeps you on your toes.

 

Always, and forever, hiring.

Structural Decline: A Case Study Part II

The fact that we collectively went through two-plus years of a global respiratory pandemic requiring the disinfection of various surfaces to the point where people were bleaching their produce and somehow 'Sanitise Me' by Os Noctambulos was not a radio chart smash speaks volumes to our decline as a civilisation, as well as the stranglehold corporate interests have on the public's listening habits.

LET'S TALK ABOUT GOVANHILL.

A while back I was ... incensed ... by an infographic in the Greater Govanhill magazine, which purports to be the voice of the neighbourhood. It was about why a cup of coffee has to cost £2.75 or more according to the guy up the road who has the second most expensive espresso machine ON EARTH, three cafes operating within a six block radius, and who markets almost exclusively to yuppies and idiots who absolutely love spending their disposable income on things like £4 lattes.

As I was, at the time, selling lattes for £1 with the purchase of a £5 sandwich (£2 on their own), I took offence. I often take offence when someone lies to the public for priofit. It's a real character flaw I am not working on and never will. My beans cost me £14/kg from a local Paisley roastery, and I was still making a 700% profit selling coffee at £2, so for someone selling it at almost twice that to claim it HAD to cost that much was, and remainds, bullshit. Bulllllllllllllshit. Shit from a bull.

I suppose if you want the public to subsidise your insane expenditures and allow you to open a weird Starbucks-model cluster bomb of businesses in the same neighbourhood to kill off all the other local competitors, then yeah, you need to have a £3.50+ latte. But it definitely does not have to cost that much in general. I also used to own two coffeeshops in Michigan back in the early '00s, which I had for about six years, so I definitely know what I am talking about. I am not just comparing vague business costs because I own a southeast Asian restaurant. I specifically know coffee.

So I wrote a little 3500 word retort for Greater Govanhill magazine, complete with a breakdown of costs and a short history of coffee pricing, with an explanation of different business models and their financial and ethical merits. A counterpoint to the full-page infographic advertisement and accompanying article SLB got, and was informed that the magazine does not print "negative" things. It's a pro-Govanhill publication, so it will not be a true or accurate Govanhill publication. In other words, as long as you frame it positively, you can lie to however many thousands of readers they claim to have, but if you want to just refute what you know to be lies, even with a boatload of facts at your disposal, and speaking from a place of knowledge and experience, that would be seen as "negative" so you can't.

Great.

(er Govanhill).

But then where does the average resident go to discuss the actualities of living here? With its sky-high crime rate, opportunistic junkies, and almost incomprehensible litter problems, there are certainly issues that a COMMUNITY (a word people who only go to the same six all-white, all-yuppie establishments on the same six very safe streets and then talk about the diverse, exciting south side loooooove to toss around) should and probably must talk about, but nowhere for those discussions to take place.*

Which brings me to the litter:

That's a photo from Sunday morning. If you look closely you will see the wheels of the trolley I push up and down Victoria Road every day I work because I don't drive. It is resting in the doorway of the food service establishment I own and operate. So this photo is of the pavement directly outside my little steamed bun takeaway. Absolutely none of that litter is from said takeaway. It was there on Friday, not picked up, and by Saturday had been attacked by seagulls (and probably rats, at night), and strewn about, and then the Saturday night crowds always leave a car's weight in their own shit strewn up and down the road as well, so by Sunday ... this. Every week. Even the weekdays look like this. This is Allison Street, every day.

There are only two streets which allow you to pass east/west through Govanhill. Calder Street if you are going west, Allison Street if you are going east. That's it. The whole neighbourhood is only more than a kilometer from its north to south boundaries if you're driving down Aikenhead Road. So that photo is, if you consider Victoria Road to be the main thoroughfare of the neighbourhood (which of course is wrong; it's Cathcart road, but most of you reading are white so we'll say it's Victoria Road) the intersection of the two main cross streets in the center of the neighbourhood.

I posted this photo to Instagram (I know, I know) and received a flurry of responses over the next 24 hours. They ran the entire gamut of righteous indignation, and laid blame at every conceivable source, or called for the heads of every party who could possibly be responsible for its removal. From bloody immigrants to Gregg's, from the scaffolding guys to Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland herself, no subject was safe from the wagging finger of scorn. And in a way, each person had their point. There is always blame to go around, and in a society where middlemen now outnumber everyone else a thousand to one, it's always someone else's problem to fix, if that is how you choose to look at it.**

So, for those that are unaware, allow me to explain some of the things which contribute to this very visible local problem:

1. Bloody immigrants. I'm kidding, of course. I'm a bloody immigrant, bringing down the property values, sponging those sweet, sweet sovereign benefits you all fought so hard to break free of the EU for. That being said, the sunflower seeds absolutely are almost 100% from the Turkish weed dealers, and if you're one of those people that hates weed then you would probably consider drug dealing the larger crime (but I assure you, it's their goddamned sunflower seed addiction). If you all stopped buying illicit substances you could probably cut that part of the dirty street problem out of the equation, but then you'd just be raw-dogging reality in 2022, so maybe we can all learn to live with the admittedly biodegradable trade waste from our local herb dispensaries.

2. In 2019 the geniuses at the GCC decided, without so much as a letter of warning, that having a trade bin on public property was illegal, despite the fact that well over 50% of Glasgow businesses do not have private property on which to house a bin. The Victoria House for instance has nine retail or hospitality businesses and a couple of studios in it and exactly no place for even a single bin to be stored. So my 1100 liter fully-enclosed, vermin and public-proof waste storage unit, which was across the street in front of an empty lot that remains undeveloped three years later, was slapped with a sticker that said it had to be removed within a week or it would be confiscated by the council. This was supposed to be to "improve the look of our streets" but really it was so GCC could then demand that you place bags of waste out for collection, and lo and behold, you could BUY THOSE BAGS from the Council themselves! Who would have guessed?!
The way it was explained is that either the council or your collection agency of choice would come by at a certain time each day and pick up the waste, so you would have bags on the street for an hour at most, and the city would flourish and be more instagram friendly without those unsightly bins cluttering up the pavements everywhere. Of course the reality is that you can't legally nor ethically store waste overnight inside a food service establishment without flies and mice and rats flocking to you by the thousands, and council services in Glasgow are an absolute (unfunny; probably criminal) joke, so what you actually got was the past several years of bin bags piled to the gutters outside every business willy-nilly, open to attack by vermin of all kinds, and prone to that bizarre psychological affliction of the Glaswegian public where they see trash bags and go "Oh, I can throw my shit on top of that," knowing full well the bin collectors will just leave any unbagged waste lying on the ground. So you've got 36 solid months of increasing seagull activity, waste that was formerly at least guarded from animals and humans now sitting on the pavements, even less sightly than the wheelie bins of old, and scenes like the above photo happening all over town when it didn't used to.

3. Bulk uplift charges start at £130 from ... you guessed it ... GCC, so anyone moving into or out of a flat, or remodeling, or just buying a new TV stand from Ikea, will wait until the cover of night and then just chuck that shit into the street because buying a new TV stand for £50 seems like a reasonable expense, but when you add the uplift for the old one that flat-pack bad boy is not remotely worth almost £200. So hey, fuck the neighbourhood. Nobody is going to pay the Council that already doesn't pick up the regular bins a third of their monthly rent to get rid of an old mattress.

4. Nicola Sturgeon is apparently, according to my DMs, personally responsible for the Gregg's milk cartons piled in front of my door. How can we expect Independence to be successful when she can't even look after her ward? And look, I do firmly believe that all local politicians should have to live in the areas they claim to represent. I do. It's only fair. I want to see my MP at Lidl buying chicken and I want him/her to have to dodge the same twenty homeless people I do every day to buy it (except you, weird old gypsy lady outside Gregg's that I used to give cigarettes/sandwiches to; I love you and I would never not say hello to you). It would definitely make accountability significantly more possible. That being said, I understand that Ms. Sturgeon has more important matters of state to attend to than my doorway, so I am slightly less enthusiastic about her political ruin than some of my neighbours.

5. Gregg's. Those bastards. Apparently I should email Gregg's HQ and complain, much like I should publicly shame Nicola, drive out the foreigners, and tweet at the council. And yeah, that is definitely mostly Gregg's bin bags, and the contents thereof, alllllllllll over the pavement. And while I do wish they wouldn't pile their shit right next to my shop, you should reread point number two because a couple years ago it would have all been contained in a large (if unsightly) wheelie bin, and this wouldn't be an issue. That does not excuse the staff, who could easily sacrifice a smoke break to clean up their mess, but they would just blame Gregg's HQ for not paying them enough, or the seagulls, who are unfoirtunately out of the reach of the long arm of social media shaming, or the people who throw trash on their trash, or Biffa, who didn't pick it up on time, etc etc, ad infinitum, and in the meantime ...

Govanhill looks like this. And everyone is right about who to blame. Because it is everyone. It takes a community to ruin a community. And as long as everyone is happy to just pass the blame and/or tell you who to call to (not) have the problem solved, and nobody picks up a goddamned broom, then this is the neighbourhood we will have and it's the one we deserve.

I made a little poster to help illustrate my point.

You just have to do it. There's no use moaning at the corrupt council. There is no grand clapping like you're a frontline NHS worker during lockdown. You might even get a weird infection from rat urine, and I promise that a bunch of the same assholes that throw Lucozade bottles out their car windows will go, "You're mental mate. It's just gonna look like that tomorrow." But if you don't do it, nobody else will either, and you'll be stuck inside reading my bullshit because you won't be able to open your front door for all the sausage roll wrappers and abandoned prams blocking the thing.

And, much like people who don't vote, you don't really have a leg to stand on when it comes time to complain about things. If we all took care of what the Council did not then we could all, collectively, demand a reduction in Council Tax because we would have done what we were supposedly paying for. But if we don't do shit, how are we any better than they are? It's laziness and selfishness that causes people to litter, and it's those same things that prevent people from cleaning it up. If we all just took care of the pavement in front of our own flats there would be nothing left to clean. And if you say that that small patch of pavement isn't your responsibiltiy, then don't claim it as your 'community' either. You can't have it both ways.

Having said that, I will personally beat you close to death if I see you litter in front of my shop or anywhere else. While I believe changing the public attitude toward litter should be the result of a national campaign of education and community action, there is something to be said for getting several of your teeth punched right down your throat as a sort of fast-track to re-education. Knock it off.

* If anyone knows where/when these actual conversations are taking place and between who, please let me know.

**When Qualcosa was open, I used to sweep the entire pavement, Monday to Friday, from the corner of Victoria road to the alley just past Desi Curry Palace. And I mean sweep it. As in nothing left on it that could be considered litter, and no sunflower seed shells, no bottle caps, no dirty needles, nothing. No offence to our brave old boys with the push bins and the dirty brooms that pick up a receipt or two and leave a dead body blocking the door like, "Eh, good enough," but as I am constantly trying to explain to new-hires there is a difference between "cleaning" something a la "going through the perfunctory motions of the cleaning act regardless of outcome" and CLEANING something as in "it is clean when you are done". I still sweep the pavement when I work, as I do up at Nanika, although the fact that I'm working 70 hour weeks primarily by myself and have a case of tennis elbow so bad I can't open my real restaurant does hinder my street cleaning somewhat. Nonetheless, I do my part. In the community, you see. Because I consider the community all the things we share. The streets, the parks, the pavement, etc. Just going shopping at trendy places near your flat is not participating in your community. Everyone does that. That's just part of living somehwere (anywhere). You should do something that improves where you live, not just go through the motions of being a resident (which is a lot like the cleaning thing I was just trying to explain).

Structural Decline: A Case Study

I find it unfathomable that an episode of Stranger Things can get Kate Bush back in the pop charts after a couple decades off but we managed to have a multinational (don't get me started) Black Lives Matter/anti-police movement and Sound Of Da Police did not experience a resurgence. I blame the decline in "edutainment" standards and I am sure KRS One does as well.

"I really am not liking any of this."

Freedom from the known.

Well, we have finally reached the point in internet history where there is no forward progress that does not serve malicious interests. Being old enough to remember the two-robots-locked-in-a-death-dance sound of the very first dial-up modems I can assure you that it took less than 30 years for the greatest invention of the modern age to go from its precocious we-are-all-one-community roots to something that would make Orwell shit directly into his pants and then puke, were he still alive to see it. And so, like the people currently playing Snake on a 2022 replica Nokia brick phone, and in line with our one-page Geocities emulator website (the only website NANIKA has ever had), we are on goddamned Blogger (née Blogspot) because Instagram, formerly the least offensive of the social media channels, is now a place for people to make something worse than Vines in an attempt to maintain user engagement long enough for invisible interests to scrape the last of your private data from the corpse of your digital body.

It's great. This is like LiveJournal all over again, which we used to have for our coffeeshop way back in the wild early '00s. I give it two years tops before someone finds out this platform is still sitting here like some sort of dew-dappled field after a long trek through an overgrown, ad-filled forest, and subsequently shits all over it.

We are a noodle and bun bar located in Glasgow. There are no noodles right now, but they'll be back. Like Blogspot, you know? You just need some patience.