Don’t take my word for it.

Do you know what really annoys me? Apart from chavs, idiots on the night bus, engineering works on the London Underground, people who can’t use a ticket barrier, over-attentive shop assistants and Slough, that is? Urban legends.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true. I love urban legends. A good ghost story or conspiracy theory is generally pretty entertaining, even if it is utter hogwash. There’s a specific type of urban legend that really does make me facepalm in frustration and mutter “Christ almighty.” The type in question might broadly be defined as the “scare rumour.”

I came across an example of this on Facebook on Sunday. One of my friends, who shall remain unnamed and also doesn’t read this blog, had this as her status:

WARNING TO PEOPLE OF SOUTH LONDON…tip off by south london police…two major dog fights are being arranged…small dogs and cats are being stolen for blood baiting…please warn all areas

Terrible, right? I mean, it’s hard enough to get meat on a budget without some bastard stealing the dogs and cats. I’m not going back to fox, that’s for sure.

But if you’re remotely analytical, you’ll have spotted a few problems with this apparently well-intentioned warning. Notably, it’s very vague. “Tip-off from South London police.” Which police? Any names? Where in South London? I live in Colliers Wood, I’m often abroad in other parts of London that may be called “South” (and god damn I do not want to hear yet another person whining about where South London begins and ends, there’s an S in my postcode and that’s good enough for me), yet I have never heard about this. Maybe it’s only taking place in some part of South London that I don’t visit very often – but in that case PC Nameless is being unnecessarily vague.

Let’s do a bit more research. Let’s Google “South London dogfights.” Nothing. Well, nothing relevant, unless you count an advert on Gumtree. Given that Gumtree has been known to advertise apartments in Mayfair for £100 a week from non-existent estate agents, I think we can safely discount them as a reliable source.

So, a policeman or the police in general have given out a tip-off. Presumably they want people to know about these dogfights. Yet they have not gone to the press about them. Now, do not tell me the local press wouldn’t be interested in a story about cute widdle pussy-cats and puppy-dogs being kidnapped by nasty men, they’d leap on a story like that. It’d fill people up with righteous fury, sell loads of papers.

Taking that line of questioning further, how do the police know these dogfights are happening? There’s been no news of any recent busts, any caches of dogs and cats, any people running to the police in horror to say what they saw. All we have is that dogs and cats are being kidnapped. How do we know that they’re being kidnapped, as opposed to merely going missing in that way that pets are wont to do? Have a larger number of small animals than usual gone missing?

Now, I responded to said friend’s status by pointing out that it sounded like an urban legend. And Oh My God you should have seen the uproar. Now, yes, I can understand the desire to defend your friend’s honour (whatever that is), but the apparent wish for this rumour to be true verged on the disturbing. One chap kept posting links, none less than two years old, saying that dogs had been kidnapped at some point in time and space, that dogfights happened at some point in time and space, that dogfighters might use small dogs and kittens for bait and that one time a dog had gone missing in South London. Another pointed out that, no, I could be wrong, because sometimes these things happen and they don’t get reported (presumably the police are hiring psychics these days).

Notably lacking was any evidence that linked all these factors together to give us the terror mishmash of the above warning. For the sake of sating this morbid desire, I have posted a picture of a kitten being mauled below.

Assuming my picture researcher has done his job (I pay him in the moonshine I brew under my desk at work), that should satisfy some of the fearmongers.

But in all seriousness, why do people come up with rumours like this? I can understand those public information films that scare the living crap out of you to warn you of a particular danger, and even those commercials that do so in order to sell you something. But how does it benefit a person to come up with a scare story such as this? These rumours won’t net them any glory or credit, for the most part the inventor won’t even see people getting freaked out by them.

Anyway, here is my simple guide to tell whether a story is true or an urban legend:

1. Is there a reliable source?

I don’t want to diss your friends, but unless they work for some sort of journalistic organisation (as it happens, several of mine do), they might not be best-placed for all the facts. So if you hear some remarkable story, check it out for yourself. If there’s some sort of terrible ongoing crimewave, it seems unlikely that it would be known to everyone except the news.

2. Details?

Every crime has a victim (except murder, in which the victim is dead). Are there names for these victims? Or for any party involved? Are there dates and times? Where did it happen? If the warning came from the police, the police where? Vague and missing details make for an unverifiable story, which makes me stroke my beard suspiciously.

3. Has this happened before?

There are such things as copycat crimes, but it makes me twirl my moustache quizzically when I hear a rumour of something dreadful, only to hear that the exact same story has played out somewhere else, a few years ago, and similarly not made the news. In the case of email forwards, the story might even have the exact same wording. It’s my experience that when you point this out to people, they say “Well, yes, it was fake there, but this time it really did happen!“

I’ve met people from three different universities who are adamant that the story about the student killing themselves with a couple of pencils up their nose definitely happened in an exam at their uni. The truth is, of course, that it happened at the uni that I went to.

I’m joking.

Holy craps, Tom, there are no reliable sources, no names and it’s happened fifteen times before!

Then, my friend, you most likely have an urban legend. Glad I could help you with your problem there. Anyway, I’ve got to run, I hear there are dwarf pirates terrorising the canals of Brentford. I heard it from a friend of mine, who got it from an email.

Further Reading

Inevitably, a link to Snopes. If you hear a stupid rumour, it’s probably on here.

Fly, my pretties

Even the most die-hard anti-global-warming  Jeremy-Clarkson type would have to acknowledge that humanity, as a species, has had a severe effect on the ecosystem. I need not mention such obvious examples as the dodo and the passenger pigeon – in the eighteenth century, it was actually considered a noble thing to make as many animals as possible extinct. Apparently it was something to do with establishing how great we were.

But not only have we been responsible for wiping certain species out, we’ve also put quite a lot of animals into places where they had no business being. Rabbits are a major pest in Australia and wallabies may be found wild in Derbyshire of all places. On occasion, animals end up in odd places due to no direct intervention on the part of humanity. The urban pigeon springs to mind. A coastal bird, they found city buildings to be a most agreeable substitute for their natural habitat in craggy cliff faces.

The other day I saw a couple of examples of some of the more recent arrivals to make their home on our shores (watch out, Daily Mail readers). Unfamiliar birdsong caught my attention, and upon looking up I saw two of the feathered chaps you see above left. As regular viewers of this blog will know, I live in South London, where this species is becoming increasingly common.

They are rose-ringed parakeets. Your boy the rose-ringed parakeet is a popular choice as a pet, being able to mimic human speech. It’s also very adaptable, explaining no doubt how they were able to establish a population here.

They are believed to have originated in South Asia. There are estimated to be about 10,000 in Britain. Exactly how they came to roam wild is unknown, but it doesn’t take an ornithologist to come up with an educated guess. They most likely escaped from captivity, though when and how many escaped is unknown. One rather romantic albeit perhaps unlikely story has it that they are all descended from a pair released by Jimi Hendrix.

They are most commonly sighted in the suburbs of South London, and have been dubbed “the Kingston parakeets,” though Twickenham, Chessington and Richmond have all laid claim to them and they have been sighted as far North as Hampstead. Well, further, too, but beyond Watford is mostly wasteland as far as I can tell. There are believed to be colonies along the South Coast. Further afield, there are also flocks – unrelated to the British ones as far as anyone can tell – in Belgium and the Netherlands.

The parakeets are believed to bring luck – apparently two in your garden is a sign of favourable weather coming up. Less fortunately, there are fears among conservationist-types that, as with the pigeon and the grey squirrel, these green fellows may threaten native animals (not literally, although the concept of a parakeet mugging a sparrow at knifepoint is worth consideration) and eventually have to be hunted down, thus resulting in widespread Monty Python tributes.

Oddly enough, given that they are thriving over here, in their native South Asia they are under threat. Their popularity as pets has resulted in huge numbers being captured and treated in ways that are not good. As a result, the conservationists over there are trying to discourage the pet trade.

[Incidentally, a similar situation exists with the Syrian Golden Hamster, a popular pet that is almost extinct in the wild.]

Of course, if they’re that worried about losing their parakeets, I’m sure we could let them have some of ours. No doubt it would result in a hilarious culture clash as the sophisticated urban parakeets try to get to grips with life in the jungle.

South London to New York

Here’s an odd little bit of info I came across while browsing the Net. It seems the classic “Noo Yawk” accent is fading, as is the case with so many accents and dialects in the mass media age. What I found particularly interesting, though, is that apparently the New York accent ultimately comes from South London. Dropping the R at the end of words like “furniture” or “doctor” is pretty normal over here. The R only seems to be retained, off the top of my head, in West Country accents.

In America, however, the R is a precious thing. The old-skool New York accent is quite unusual in that regard. It turns out that the reason it was adopted here and not elsewhere (for the most part) is due to the fact that New York (and various other East Coast cities) were settled by South Londoners at a time when the Cockney accent was starting to gain prominence in Britain.

So now you know. Yer actual Cockney and yer actual Brooklyn are practically cousins.

Smile, darn ya, smile!

If there’s one thing the Internet has revolutionised, it’s the urban legend. Time was when you’d have to work for your insane rumours. These days a good story can be invented, spread round the world and debunked by Snopes by lunchtime. How did we ever manage without it?

I was recently reminded of a London urban legend that predates the Internet – or at least, widespread use of it. It seems to have originated in the 1980s. I heard it as a schoolchild in the mid-’90s. I am speaking of the Chelsea Smilers.

The Smilers, so the story goes, were a gang of football hooligans. Depending which version of the story you hear, they would either roam the streets of South London, travel around in a blue Transit Van or – if you looked particularly easy to scare – would go door-to-door.

Details varied, but the basic essence of the story was this. The Smilers would confront you and ask you if you supported Chelsea Football Club (soccer team, for the benefit of any United Stateseans who may be reading). Possibly they would ask you a series of trivia questions to prove it. In the version I was told, they would then slice the corners of your mouth – upwards if you said yes, downwards if you said no. Then they would punch you hard, so you’d scream, thus ripping your mouth into a permanent smile or frown. Some versions would add that they would then pour something on the wound, usually vinegar, so the scars wouldn’t heal properly. I’m surprised no one suggested ink.

The Joker supports Chelsea.

There are a million variants on the story. Some say that they only cut you if you don’t support Chelsea, and then only in the form of the smile. Some say this was only practised by criminal gangs in Chelsea (presumably they march around in tailored suits, terrifying onlookers with their white-collar fraud and cold-blooded acts of insider trading). To be honest, while I don’t deny that such crimes may have happened – such scarring is known as the “Glasgow smile” and, so says the Daily Express, a case is treated every day by Scotland’s hospitals. But I’ve yet to see any real evidence that the Chelsea Smilers exist.

Still, I went to school in South-West London and it was a damn fine scary story. And that’s what’s important.

Stupid things to do with your Sunday

The hell I just walked thirteen and a half miles. See, I was supposed to be doing something this Sunday which didn’t appear to be happening, so I figured, on a whim, that I’d head up to Shadwell. There’s some stuff there I wanted to photograph for a little project of mine, and heck, it takes about three quarters of an hour to get there by Tube and DLR.

I got there and took the photos I wanted. Then I wondered how long it would take me to get from there to Minories, a place I’d briefly been yesterday. Turns out not long at all. As I had my camera (I basically always have my camera), I figured I’d have a look around St Katharine’s Dock and take some snaps there for future reference. There are a few Thames barges moored there. I can’t say I like the dock as a whole, it’s just a bit too uppity for my taste.

I also needed some photos of warehouses, so I decided I’d have a look at Butler’s Wharf, crossing Tower Bridge. I took what I needed and had a bit of a wander, eventually finding myself at Bermondsey. While there, I saw a sign for Elephant and Castle. Now, this was a little unexpected. I’m used to thinking of London in terms of little islands. Elephant and Castle, to me, is on a little island that also includes Lambeth and Kennington. Bermondsey, on the other hand, is on the little island that includes Wapping and Canada Water. The idea that there might be a land route between the two was a little confusing, but I figured I’d have a look. If nothing else, it would put me on my branch of the Northern Line for a swift Tube ride home.

It wasn’t actually very far at all, once I got on to the New Kent Road. I didn’t know there was a New Kent Road, or what colour it would be on the Monopoly board. I got there after passing what might be the ugliest blocks of flats in South London (which is a level of competition akin to the Most Misanthropic Estate Agent Contest).

And then my brain shut down, and whatever mechanism had taken its place suggested I walk on. All the way home. After all, it reasoned, I’ve walked from Waterloo to Balham before, and from Balham to Colliers Wood. And at the end of it, I could say that I walked from Shadwell to Colliers Wood. Whenever people talk about the East End, I could scoff and say, “Pff, walking distance.”

Well, by Oval my knees were complaining, by Stockwell they were suggesting I might like to lose some weight and by Clapham Common they’d stopped bending in the right direction. I also received a call from a friend saying hello. He asked what I was doing and, upon saying out loud “I’m walking from Shadwell to Colliers Wood,” I realised that actually this was an insane plan.

Still, that didn’t stop me. I walked on, and on, and on, and at last – at long last – arrived back at Colliers Wood. My feet appear to have become disconnected, although feeling is returning to them, worse luck. Man, I’m going to be sore in the morning.

Bijou post-ette #2 – Sinister goings-on in SW17?

Here’s a shop that’s always puzzled me.

It’s located on the approach to the bridge that marks the border between Tooting and Colliers Wood, on the Tooting side. Now, is this a case of misleading advertising, or has the twenty-first century finally delivered on its promise of awesomeness? I suppose it doesn’t matter, as the shop appears to have closed down… or has its interior merely dematerialised?

I suppose the existence of this shop goes some way to explaining this anachronistic visitor from Morden:

Going down to Lonesome Town

I stayed in on Saturday through a need to save money, due to my landlord’s entirely unreasonable demand that I pay a certain amount of money each month in order to live in his property. Every month!

While sitting around, being bored, I heard the song Lonesome Town by Ricky Nelson (actually I heard a cover by the yummy Zooey Deschanel, but you know). And this prompted me to research something that’s been bugging me for literally years. See, I live in Colliers Wood, in South West London (not North, as many people seem to think), and have done since 2006. When I first moved there, as I like to do when moving to a new area, I had a long walk to get to know the place. I did find myself getting horrendously lost somewhere around Mitcham/Streatham, which is an awful place to get lost. Having lived north of the river, I’d heard some terrifying stories about South London. They say the people of Streatham have no Tube lines at all!

What really creeped me out, though, apart from the presence of what appeared to be an abandoned and boarded-up school, was the discovery that the place I had wandered into was called “Lonesome”. I mean, nowhere is called Lonesome outside of Gothic horror movies. I decided to basically just keep going along the road and not ask for directions at any dilapidated petrol stations, isolated farms, castles etc.

Not Lonesome, but you get the idea.

I rather put it from my mind (repressed memories?) until a few hours ago, and I thought I’d look into just what the deal was with this scary-named place.

Well, turns out it genuinely is a spooky nineteenth century village, very possibly cursed. This area was, for a long time, a pretty vile place. It was wild and more than a little damp, haunted by highwaymen, cutpurses and probably werewolves. The Merton Historical Society notes that the area had remained largely unchanged until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the medieval fields still in place.

The only structure in the area was Lonesome House, about which I’ve been able to find no information other than the fact that it’s not there any more. From the mid nineteenth century onwards, there was some industry – a chemical works, a fireworks factory owned by a gentleman named Pain, a farm owned by one Mizzen and some lavender fields. And some gypsies.

 Then someone had the bright idea of constructing a residential village there. Out in what was still rural countryside, next to the Pain factory, in a district called Lonesome. This was the result:

As you can see, it’s basically what you’d get if the Blair Witch decided to go into town planning. None of the sources of information I’ve been able to find mention if these abandoned houses were haunted by hatchet-wielding serial killers, but I think in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I’m going to assume they were. Better safe than sorry.

Since then, it’s been absorbed into Streatham and largely forgotten by the outside world, mostly commemorated in a few street names and the name of the local primary school. Most of the pages Google comes up with relating to Lonesome belong to estate agents, who have a peculiar affinity for cursed ground. They probably describe it as “an exorcist’s dream!” It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

And now the name. I’ve consulted several books and a handful of websites, and nobody seems to know whence it originates. We know the name dates back a long way, pre-dating accurate records. All anyone can suggest is that the area got its name by being, yes, lonesome…