Bagasand - 13/12/06
I was down the pub the other night – a fairly rare occurrence with two small kids – and I heard something new. The two fellows at the next table were discussing a friend, one who evidently had landlord problems.

‘So I said to him, surely you can get hold of a bagasand.’
‘Right, yeah.’
‘I mean it’s got to be better to pony up a bagasand than lose your flat, right?’
‘Oh yeah, right.’

The ‘pony up’ gave me the clue that it was money; even a first-generation Scottish immigrant like me knows that much. Of course, he was saying ’bag of sand’ which I brilliantly worked out is rhyming slang for ‘grand’.

Going down the pub round these parts is not what it us to be. For a start, there’s fewer pubs. When most of Notting Hill was built, in the later part of the 19th century in response to the arrival of the Hammersmith tube line with a stop at what was then called Notting Hill Station but now is Ladbroke Grove, there was a pub on practically every corner.

This reflected the fact that for many people, crammed into overcrowded conditions, the pub was the only living space they had; homes were strictly sleeping quarters. Not to mention the fact that the inhabitants of this great nation of ours, then as now, liked a drink or two.

You get a flavour of the dire overcrowding from the the 1911 census when the population of Golborne Ward (the little bit of Notting Hill I live in) was an astonishing 27,180. The 2001 census put the population at just under 8,000.

Many pubs have been demolished or converted into flats and offices. Others have been gutted and turned into miserable gastropubs a la Clerkenwell, or worse, DJ venues. I know I’m old, but why do you want to go to a pub where the music is so loud you can’t talk?

The Warwick Castle (now The Castle) on Portobello Road used to be my favourite. I was part of the pub quiz team there in 1994 when we won the Guinness West London region league. One of our team members could only play away fixtures because he was actually banned from the Warwick. Another could only appear when there were no teams of angry Hells Angels scouring the neighbourhood for him because he owed them money on a drugs deal. Eventually, they got him. He was in hospital for a month.

In the face of stiff competition, Steve Ogsden was probably the most outstandingly weird fellow on the team. Steve Underground he was known as, since he worked for London Underground, or Steve Underpants because he once came into the Warwick Castle with yesterday’s pants still unwittingly tucked into the bottom of his trousers. They slowly emerged over the course of the evening.

Steve was a decidedly unpopular fellow, mainly because of the extreme right wing and racist views he purported to hold. I used to think he was deliberately winding us up.

He claimed that he’d been out in Rhodesia as a youngster during the civil war and had fought for the Selous Scouts, a special forces unit in the Rhodesian Army fighting the black nationalists. Nobody believed him. So, to prove it, he brought in a book about the Scouts and pointed to a grainy black and white photograph of a Scout platoon, insisting that one of the characters in it was him.

The quality of the photo was so poor, it was hard to dispute this – one skinny white lad in baggy khakis looks much like another. But one of us, Pearce, noticed he was holding his rifle left-handed – and Steve was right-handed. ‘They’ve printed the negative back to front,’ Steve said, without missing a beat. Pearce was just as quick-witted. ‘So that means the rest of your 12-man platoon were all left handed then.’ He never mentioned the Selous Scouts again.

I once saw him, completely pissed, fall backwards from a high barstool and land smack on his head with a thump like a wooden mallet hitting a coconut, a blow that might have killed another man. He stood up, shook his horrible, long greasy hair and carried on drinking. Another time, legless again, he puked into his pint glass then passed out. Twenty minutes later he woke, took a long draught from the glass, puked again then sank back into oblivion.

He was an early internet adopter and made friends with a variety of American gun nuts. In January 1998, on a visit to one of them in Texas, in circumstances I’ve never been quite clear about, he died on a hospital operating table of a heart attack. He was only 42.

They shipped his body back and there was a funeral at Kensal Rise Crematorium. One way to guarantee a good turnout at your funeral is to die relatively young. That didn’t work for Steve; I wasn’t kidding when I said he was unpopular.

There was me and about six others, plus his wife, who was wearing an implausible blond wig for the occasion. Then, at the last minute, 10 others arrived, all colleagues from London Underground. And you’ve guessed it – every last one of them was black.