Clissold Leisure Centre: We Waited Four Years For THIS?

Within minutes of signing up to a monthly direct debit “couples membership” with the lovely PC Bitseach, I could feel my blood-pressure rising. You see, they were happy to immediately take my money- and then explain that I could not use the gym (why I joined the godforsaken place) until I had been given an “induction”. Great, when can I come in? You woulda been so proud: I didn’t blow a fuse when they said TWO WEEKS, although I did indicate in a firm, yet tactful way, that it was a bit of a cheek to get me to pay two weeks subs for something I couldn’t use. Indeed, if I knew that was going to be the case, I would have postponed commencement of my membership to the day of my induction.

And the induction that I waited so patiently for? LOL! “Yeah, these are stationary cycles, it’s like riding a bicycle, yeah? Wotever. I’ve been to enough gyms to work out the equipment for myself.

Wait for it: the best bit was subsequently showing up, all signed off and with my little membership card in hand, only to be told that I have to queue up with all the other eedjeets asking questions and signing up for membership. “But I’m a ‘Wellness’ member”. Regrettably, at the CLC, membership has no privileges. Spending 15 minutes standing in a queue to access a gym I pay for on a monthly basis does not make this writer a happy bunny.

“Any chance of you guys setting up a swipe card system, like other gyms?”

“We’ve been overwhelmed with people signing up for memberships” the manager wimpered.

“You’ve had FOUR YEARS to prepare”.

“Oh, but that wasn’t US. I’m not going to ‘get into it’ with you”.

Dear Reader, you woulda been so proud. No fuss, no fits. Just a mental note that they are already on a yellow card.

Do we pull out the red and send these £90M nit-wits off? Read the far more stable than me PC Bitseach’s account and you decide: -

 Hmm… no pressure then. Yup we were among the first people to show up to join and couldn’t wait to hand over our cheque and Direct Debit authorisation slip. Oh boy, finally somewhere to go to try to shift the standard-issue WPC gigantic arse I’ve been growing over the past 4 years (thank Heavens I’m normally on foot patrol; if I was out in a car I’d be on “Fat Cops Can’t Hunt” or some old shite on BBC3 by now).

“So,”, I said on that first day, “When can I do my induction?”. “Ah well, no slots until after Christmas”

“???” “So what can I do at this place until then?”. “Well there is the pool”.

So I put my name and mobile number down on every day’s induction list in the hope of getting a cancellation, then sat for a week by the phone like a lonely old spinster waiting for a call, one way or the other. It never came.

In the meantime, I tried to go for a swim. On the first day, they couldn’t give me the proper card so I have this crappy cardboard one that I almost have to fold in two to fit into my wallet / warrant card but I thought, no probs, I’ll just get it next time. With my swimming togs and goggles, and all excited at finally loosening the old joints with a good swim, I showed up. There was a 10 minute queue but surely with my membership card they could buzz me through the gates - after all, everyone else seemed to be awaiting memberships. No, I’m sorry, even with a membership card you have to queue to be seen by the staff before you can even go for a swim. Hmmmph!

So I finally got to the front of the queue, said I’d like a swim, could they buzz me through. They took my shitty cardboard card, stared at it, did some one-fingered typing on their keyboards, frowned a bit, chewed their bottom lips, said, “Errrr….” a lot, then referred me to the special white-shirts on the other side of the barriers. Finally! This was it! I was through the gates!! And into another 10 minute queue. It was actually only a one-person deep queue but the blasted thing still took 10 minutes. Through gritted teeth, I hissed out, “There is apparently some problem with my card or membership. All I want is A SWIM!” fighting my annoyance. After a further 5 minutes’ pissing about on the computers, the white-shirt called the other one over and started to give her a lesson in what she SHOULD have done the first time and why there was no issue with my card after all. Hello? Can you sort out your training needs later, perhaps WHILST I’M SWIMMING??? Huh?

Well when I finally got there, the pool was lovely, a nice young man seemed to be keeping lane discipline and assigning us to empty lanes. This is an immediate improvement on the previous fuckwit lifeguards of the Clissold Leisure Centre who couldn’t have given less of a crap if some moron bloke with an ego larger than both his willy and certainly his swimming ability was allowed to clog up the medium or fast lanes, leaving a log-jam of frustrated fast swimmers like me staring up his shiny banana-hammocked arse and trying to avoid getting kicked in the face by his verucca-encrusted feet (yup, you gotta love municipal swimming!).

Forty breathless lengths later I got out. In my excitement at going swimming (think 8-year olds being taken by their parents to the wave-machined pool on a Saturday morning) I had forgotten my flip-flops, but now, tired and with head drooping, I looked down at the floor of ladies’ changing. Oh. Bloody. Hell.

Tip-toeing wasn’t enough to avoid the mud and hairs on the wet changing room floor. In fact even if I’d been en pointe I couldn’t have avoided the muddy hairs (or hairy mud - I couldn’t tell there was so much of it). And it was at this point that I realised that no, we didn’t get our 20p back from the changing room lockers. Er, thanks people, haven’t we paid enough to build the fucking place twice over and then in our membership fees? [sigh]

Still no inductions available. Still no means of getting a real card. Every time I’ve tried, their machines aren’t working. Or they aren’t picking up their phones. And some of us, despite living in Hackney, HAVE JOBS and all and can’t spend all day knocking on their doors and hanging on the telephone trying to organise an induction.

Finally I get a day off work and I reckon I’d try again in person. Nope, computers aren’t working, still can’t do you a card. Oh and we shut at 5pm at the weekends. FIVE PM AT THE WEEKEND? What helling use is THAT? Okay, calm, Bitseach, calm, serenity now…that’s better. Okay well what about an induction date? Yep well we’ve already shut down the booking system for the day so we can’t do it now. Oh and the current wait is 2 to 3 weeks. But I joined in December, I’ve tried many times to be inducted, I’ve held my YMCA gym instructor’s certificate for over 5 years, for fuckssakes to have to wait for some straight-out-of Sink Estate Academy Community School who’s learned this shit 3 weeks ago to show me how to do a bicep frigging curl! 

So now I have a phone number to phone again for cancellations, no card, no nicely defined muscles or trimmer figure, grinding teeth and high blood pressure to show for my membership. By the time I get an induction, if I EVER get one, I’ll have paid for a month and a half’s membership. For a couple of swims in a filthy environment.

Can you imagine if all the Church Street businesses acted like this? If I went into the Spence or the Tea Rooms for a cup of coffee and a nice bun, and they said, “yeah that’ll be £2.10 for the coffee and bun but you’ll have to wait 3 weeks for it because we’ve had a lot of people asking for coffee and buns and somehow this becomes your problem not ours, but in the meantime we need the money up front”????

The staff are pleasant but untrained - apparently still - after their extensive training process (hmmm…) and weeks of operational experience. Nice but useless, in the way that chocolate is nice, but in the form of a teapot….?

So I hope you will now all join me in a song. The tune will be quite apparent. Everybody now:

On the first day of membership the Centre said to meeee… “thanks a lot fo-or all your mon-eeeeeey!”
On the second day of membership the Centre said to meeee…. “No we can’t give you a card, but thanks a lot fo-or all your mon-eeeeeey!”
On the third day of membership the Centre said to meeee…..”Can’t get you inducted, can’t give you your card but thanks a lot fo-or all the mon-eeeey!”
On the fourth day of membership the Centre said to meeee…..”Can’t get you inducted. It’ll take a month now. Still don’t have your card yet. Thanks a lot fo-or all the mon-eeeeyyy!”
On the fifth day of membership I fucking left the useless bastarding fucktards to it, cancelled my membership and went for a run around the delightful Clissold Park. I’d like a refund o-on all the mon-eeeeyy!

PC Bitseach.

Take note local mag: as with everything else on this site (c) Kris, 2006-2008.

Why I Hate the Candy Bar

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKES!! Could somebody please explain to me how the hell you get turned away from a lesbian bar for what you’re wearing??!!!

It happened to me when I first came out about 10 years ago. A gay-guy friend and I queued up at Kitty Lips for about 30 minutes. We were next to go in when the chief sour-puss bouncer looked me up and down and said, “Not tonight, love”. “Not tonight”! Do you know what that feels like?! Praying to God that no one you know (or want to date) has just witnessed the mother of all humiliations?! Oh the sheer ignominy of being turned away when you can see chicks who look like truck drivers inside having a drink! Free to be whoever you are?!! “Not tonight”! What a load of bollocks! Free to wear the uniform, more like! Didn’t you know? Why didn’t anyone tell me that you were supposed to pick a team and shop accordingly!

I have to say, I did go to gay department at Selfridges, got kitted out, and quite enjoyed my subsequent visits to said venue. (Sadly, KL is no more and the loathsome Candy Bar is the supposed heir to the lesbian club throne. I can’t abide Candy Bar: it’s smoky, tacky, claustrophobic, the staff all have attitudes, the drinks are vile and cost a fortune and the girls need to be seeing that American commercial with the fried eggs.

PC Bitseach has always been a bit bemused by my KL story and my loathing of Candy Bar. Maybe because she is cooler than me. Not anymore! Ha! Enjoy the following: -

“Okay, so let me start by saying that the Candy Bar was nobody’s first choice. It’s the sort of place that would make most right-thinking lesbians running screaming back into the closet. 

Not an ordinary closet either; more like one of those horror film refrigerated rooms where there is no handle on the inside and no means of getting out again and you slowly die after half an hour or so of clawing at the inner skin of the door until there are bits of horror-film bloody fingernails all over the scene. Except in this Candy Bar-induced closet you have run in voluntarily, turned around before the door shut, CHECKED that you had no means of getting out, then gave the door an extra hard tug behind you just to make sure it was snug. THAT sort of closet.

My heart sank when I heard that’s where we were going (due to all the other places we actually wanted to go in Soho being packed full or closed). But a good friend was going to be there and it was her birthday and I hadn’t seen her since before Christmas so I figured I’d make the sacrifice. Besides, it couldn’t be as bad as I remembered it, after all, I was a fresh-faced “baby-dyke” back then, daunted by all the doyens of the 1990s scene.

Now rewinding to this morning when I packed my bags to go to work, I was aware that there was something I had to remember - oh yeah, gym kit [don't want to end up with the Job "arse, WPC, standard issue, XXL" like so many of my colleagues after all]. I also knew that on Thursday night I was going to go out and see Angie, my old friend in Soho. The thing that didn’t register was that today was actually Thursday, and I needed to wear something other than motorbike protective clothing which I also needed to pack and take with me.

I am therefore clumping towards this foul venue in thick denim jeans, a casual polo shirt, trainers - not the trendy kind, mark you -but my gym trainers as I can’t walk for more than a few hundred metres in my motorbike boots, and the rain-proof inner to my motor-bike jacket, certain that the crypto-fascist door staff would understand wearing a waterproof, you know, given that it was pissing with rain and all. Oh yeah, and with hat-head, having been keeping London safer all day on foot patrol with London hotter than the surface of the fucking sun. Angie informed me by text that her party was downstairs and I made it past the outer Nazi guard. So far, so good.

I went to go downstairs, saying a pleasant, “excuse me” as I went to go past a ‘wombyn’ guarding the stairs. It was only when she looked me up and down briefly and went, “No” that I noticed she was actually wearing a Candy Bar T-shirt. “No, what?” I sweetly asked. Perhaps she was new and not bitter enough to take this crap seriously, but she was the most AWFUL liar. She fumbled something about the downstairs not being open and looked terrified when I said I’d just been texted by my friends WHO WERE ALL DOWNSTAIRS!

I phoned Angie; Angie came up the stairs, immaculately coiffured as usual and had a word but I couldn’t resist a smiling, “oh goodness me, there WERE people downstairs after all! Silly you!” as she relented and let me down into the jewel in the hasbian scene [that sort of thing only works when you have a perfect shit-eating grin - mine is A+].

Now having been a shy probationary lesbian in the 1990s this encounter would have absolutely crushed me; I’d have wanted to run out fighting back the tears, but what the hell, years in the police inures a person to all negativity [ooh, you'll complain if I don't jump to your every fatuous suggestion? oh no, please - I might actually fall asleep standing up. Oh horror, you'll get the Happiness Gazette on your moronic case that would serve no purpose other than making you feel important and colossally wasting my time? Well then I WILL stand outside your flat for 168 hours of the week, being your personal police beyotch!! - well you can see how we end up cynical] [words of praise or a thank-you, which I occasionally overhear when I'm patrolling around hell on my ice-skates, are a different matter entirely. Blushes... erm, well yes thank-you, erm - cough - well just doing my job and all that, escape! escape!!].

Well I couldn’t really fault them on quality control - I did look like fright-night. But then I saw the raddled shells of the aged crack-whores they had actually let downstairs: people for whom “coke” was not a soft drink and hadn’t been since about 1984; combat shorts for Chrissakes, worn with a dress shirt, every tired old lip-stick lesbian whose one attempt at modernity was a faux “retro” Cindi Lauper-style back-comb, and 20 cadavers who apparently hadn’t eaten one good meal between them in a decade and whose main sustenance was apparently sniffed off a toilet seat. These, my friends, were the favoured few, the beautiful ones that made the reputation that the Candy Bar strove to protect.

Also, and how could I not have mentioned this earlier, we had pole-dancers! That would certainly explain the straight men who were down there, downstairs, in the lesbian club, let down there by the very same stair-Nazi who tried to deny me entry - nothing creepy about that then! I don’t know who these men were, but they looked around the room with the dead, soulless eyes of Roman Abramovitch’s less amiable brother. The dancers actually weren’t bad; they certainly appeared to have very well-developed forearms to hang on to the pole the way they did. However I really don’t feel comfortable watching that sort of thing - despite the post-modern consensual revisionist view, I can’t fight the feeling that it’s somehow exploitative. So I sipped my half-cola/half-water slush that was pretty much the only soft drink they sold which, even for a “Wonderbar” mixer was dilute - it was like a homeopathic version: “memory of cola”, and spoke with my lovely, dear friend, and her lovely friends and had a good time despite the Candy Bar’s best efforts.

In the shrunken world of the London lesbian scene, the Candy Bar is an anachronism. They protect their image from people like me so that the walking dead in lipstick can feel as special as they did in the 90s heyday. The result may be an embarrassing joke, but it’s a funny joke nonetheless.

Still take you home? Don’t think so, love.

What PC Bitseach Really Thinks About My Blogging

Hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Bullying Or Racism in the Big Brother House? How About BOTH?

God bless Shilpa Shetty. She is the only contestant of substance in that zoo. Extremely composed and classy.And the little slags that have been slagging her off? Judge for yourself.

First of all, Jackiey or whatever YOUR name is, I wouldn’t date you if you were the last one-armed lesbian in the world.

Danielle Lloyd, Teddy Sheringham’s no doubt ex-girlfriend, lads’ mags pin up, before you opened your trap and ruined it, I thought you were a nice girl. Boy was THAT a mistake. You, Jade Goody and Jo O’Meara really are poisonous.

Oh, they’re poisonous - but NOT racist? Do me a favour!

Let’s look at Gordon Allport’s five stages of prejudice: - avoidance (will not talk to, sit next to, look at etc the object of their prejudice), anti-locution (bad-mouthing), discrimination (where prejudice is put into action), physical attack (on people or property), extermination.

These first three have all happened to Shilpa - and why do you think she was being targeted? Solely because she is successful and has a brain, or because she is the only one there with any manners or breeding? Of course her ethnicity comes into it. The proof is when she’s referred to, not by name, but as “the Indian”. And when “the Indian” - SHILPA [for fuck's sake it's not exactly a difficult name to get your tongue around!] - is slagged off for doing nothing extraordinary at the same time, that’s when it begins to look like racial bullying.

What make me laugh is that Channel 4 say they aren’t going to intervene because Shilpa herself hasn’t complained and because it’s only girly bullying rather than racist bullying.

Why is Channel 4 letting this continue? Hey, Channel 4’s got form! Remember Jason and Victor? Channel 4 didn’t care about assault so why should they care about a little racist bullying? So long as the ratings keep up as people tune in to see exactly how hateful little Jo, Jade, Danielle and that prat Jade’s dating (does anyone but Jade even know his name?), Channel 4 could not care less.

The reason so many of us find this so utterly repellent is that we’ve ALL seen this before, and ALL been there before. Watching (in horror) Jade’s latest foul-mouthed childish rampage, then seeing her moronic sidekicks, D’oh and Spanielle, giggling, saying, “I really enjoyed that”, bolstering Jade’s confidence. Seeing the apathy of the other housemates in not actively standing up to the racist bullies - standing passively by whilst this all goes on… I had flashbacks to the school playground. But even the bullies at my old school grew out of this bad behaviour (once they passed their tenth birthdays, mainly). Back then, I stopped these bitches bullying weaker members of the class - it seems that “celebrities” don’t have the stomach, or the balls, or the backbone to do similar.

Jade, Jo and Danielle: the ugly face of modern Britain. No manners, no class, inverted snobs, foul language, a lack of regard for anyone but themselves, obsessed by their personal drunkenness and wearing all their inner ugliness like a badge of pride.

I think I may move to India.

UPDATE
Glad to see Jade has shown a bit of contrition. I think she should accept the Indian Tourist Board’s offer of a visit to India. Hopefully, this time, she can just smile and keep her trap shut.