The joint is jumping...  it's really jumping... 

I'm working class, too.  But from a family which valued a certain amount of autodidacticism.  My dear old Dad would have been puzzled by Woody Allen.  He wore Ivy without ever realising it was Ivy (or 'Ivy').  He simply picked up whatever he took a fancy to whilst mooching around Hartford.  He introduced me to L.L. Bean, via a catalogue.  He favoured Italian clothing in the 50s and had a long love affair with Satchmo.  That side of the family came from the Derbyshire/Notts border country, my mother's from Middlesex.  I had a lovely, lovely conversation with a Londoner in a swish place in South Audley Street last week, a second with another Londoner in a pub quite close to Chiltern Street.  Neither of them were/are remotely geezerlike.

Kingstonian - who is a sound chap - sometimes talks about 'Geezer'.  He is London.  I was back in my old neighbourhood yesterday.  It was rough but respectable in the 50s and 60s.  Now it just looks a bit run-down.  Where there used to be a fancy goods shop there is a takeaway with a massage parlour above.  I had a shufti at my old school and at the Methodist chapel where we went on a Sunday afternoon to colour in pictures of Jesus and to give our parents a bit of P and Q.  I expect my old Dad used to go and play a bit of Ben Webster.  People looked out for you in those days.  Not so sure about now.  I live in a leafy conservation area, with woods and a stream at the back of my garden.  You could live and die here and no-one would notice.

What does London do to a person then?

The ironic thing about so many of the 'Londoners' I have met, and my definition here restricts itself to those of white skin, working class background, and normally in suburban areas, is that they live in one of the world's great cities, an amazing, fascinating, unknowable mass of all expressions of humanity, yet they have the most closed minds you could ever come across. Always decrying the way the city has 'gone to seed', often accompanying this comment with underlying hints of racism, keen to move out, get to the seaside, or some anonymous town in the middle of nowhere with a mere smidgen of non-white occupants. They don't engage with what's in front of them, don't feel the buzz and energy of this incredible city. And then, the most ironic thing of all, is that they get all puffed up and proud of being a 'Londoner' when their relationship with the city is one of barely disguised hostility. Robert Elms, often as big an irritating professional geezer as you could find, did say something astute on this topic. His theory is that being a Londoner is a choice, you elect to belong. Many are born here and are never Londoners. Many move here and become Londoners - they embrace the unique dynamic of this often difficult city. I am very much in the latter camp which is why I find the geezer types so incredibly tedious. I used to go and watch Everton in London grounds but stopped going as I was becoming too irritated by all the pseudo-cockney bollocks around me and all the moronic 'get a job' stuff. Thankfully I believe the Danny Dyer types are rapidly becoming part of a dying, discredited way of looking at the world - one in which Kingstonian's mantra "everyone wants to be white, ideally with blue eyes" is laughably, hilariously off the mark. London is no longer the white geezers' playground mate - wake up! Hallelujah!

French Quarter - you are right. I know lots of lovely Londoners, from the same working class background as me. I just get wound up by that ignorant attitude I sometimes encounter and Kingstonian's stuff often brings that mentality to mind. Up the Toffees!

Jesus, the toffs are worse than the geezers.  I love London - far more than I love, say, Dublin or Paris; almost as much as I love Rome and Pisa.  As soon as I walk out onto the Euston Road...  marvellous...  I love walking in cities: looking for the overlooked and neglected.  A favourite walk is from Ray's to Camden High Street, then around into Parkway to an unassuming Italian.  I must see if they open at lunchtime.

Same with NYC, Hep, I should have thought.  (See the relevant article within 'The Syllabus').  It's about total atmosphere - or, for us, recapturing a moment and feeling via the imagination and using borrowed images from art, film, jazz, magazines etc.  Soho retains a bit of magic, though, and the area around Chiltern Street is pretty interesting.

^ A great book, on my shelf together with Fletcher, Nairn, Banks et al.

Geezer is an important alternative to 'frayed' which also gets much love on here. No, I do want threadbare collars.

The generation before me could remember hand-me-downs and 'make do'. People used to be glad to get out of their working clothes and put on some glad rags.