I’m at Hampstead, lying here thinking how lucky I am. I met a pair of people who make things and they want me to make things with them. I met them just down the road in The Magdala pub. I chose the venue. It’s where Ruth Ellis shot her lover. He probably deserved it. But she went on to be the last woman to be hanged in the UK. Bad timing for her life. Good timing for her legacy.
She tracked him down in an infidelity. How the hell did she get hold of a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson Victory Model revolver? Thank God we don’t have guns in this country, generally. She had one though, somehow. And she chased him round his car with it as he came out. The first one missed. The second one knocked him down. Six bullets in total. Three, four and five went into him at closer and closer range, just to make sure. The fifth one burnt his skin. Number six jammed, and ended up in the pavement. She kept clicking until the bullet came out, even though her purpose – to kill him – had been served.
The wall outside the pub used to have bullet holes in it, but apparently a random actor discredited them. Rather than let us all have a bunch of holes where we could contemplate a woman desperate and angry enough to take things into her own hands like that, he used whatever contacts he must have had to say that he’d heard the landlady concoct a plan to drill the holes in 1990 in order to impress a bunch of Japanese tourists. Maybe the landlady enlarged existing holes, maybe not. I don’t know. I like stories though.
Reading the articles, the name of this nothing actor is larger than anything else in them. It’s HIS puff piece. It’s like he pulled his one big favour on the “fake bullet holes” story in The Sun and in The Camden New Journal when his career went to the tits. He never realised that actually the world would be more interesting with the fake bullet holes in the pub wall than his first name last name in The Sun. Maybe he realised too late that he had made the world smaller by making his name momentarily bigger. Who knows. I’m not gonna say his name. But don’t worry. You’ve never heard of him. Like me, he’s just some tit.
But this tit writing now at least sorted out what he’s doing for Halloween, and in the run up to it. Spooky stories. North London. More about ghosts and less about guns. But hopefully I’ll be presiding over some delightful nonsense in October. Let’s see.
Meanwhile I’m at my friend’s place in Hampstead, knuckling down for an early night and an early wake…
AlBarclay 