No Blow No Show:Narcos S1.

"Colombians say God made our land so beautiful it was unfair to the rest of the world. So, to even the score, God populated the land with a race of evil men" - Presidente Cesar Gaviria

"There's a reason magical realism was born in Colombia" - Steve Murphy

Initially aired back in 2015, many of you will have seen Narcos at least a lustrum back but, as established on a recent blog, I'm new to Netflix so I'm playing catch up. There's a lot on Netflix so it's hard to know where to start but (a) enough people had recommended Narcos to pique an interest which (b) was already there due to a love of history and world politics and (c) a trip to Colombia with my friend Chris back in 2015 in which we visited Bogota, Cartagena, Barranquilla, and even Pablo Escobar's old manor, Medellin.

In 2015 Medellin (and Colombia) was hospitable, fun, and beautiful. Judging by season one of Narcos, from the late seventies to the early nineties, it may have been only one of those things. It would have been inhospitable even for those that live there who'd certainly not be having much fun for the most part but it still would have been beautiful with the caveat that the most beautiful parts of the country would be equally as dangerous as the ugliest parts. Perhaps even more so. Drug kingpins preferring to move out of the poor barrios as soon as possible.

The ten episodes, narrated by Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) - an American drug enforcement agent embedded in Colombia, chronicle the life of Pablo Escobar, his consorts, his rivals, and the politicians that either bend to his will, try to control him, or try to stop him, as well as how Murphy and his friend and colleague Javier Pena (Pedro Pascal) in their attempts to bring Escobar to justice can't help becoming part of the story themselves.

Staying close to true events but taking a few liberties for artistic reasons , it's brilliantly done from start to finish. The action is tense and fast moving but characters, if they live long enough - hardly guaranteed in Escobar's orbit, are given space and time to develop and breathe and the feel of a country struck forever in the 1970s is hard to escape as the screen fills up with 'taches, quality Latino mullets, brown leather jackets, cars with walnut dashboards, people swigging from bottles of whisky and chain smoking in their offices, and, of course, bombs, drugs, and corpses. Some of which suffer the further indignity of being puked on, barbecued, or hung from a tree (along with a dead cat) for a photo op.

The music too is bang on the money. I was regularly having to pause Narcos to Google the names of Colombian salsa and cumbia bands like Fruko Y Sus Tesos, Orquestra Ritmo de Sabanas, and, Los Corralers de Majagual, Mexican rockers Los Dug Dugs, and Houston's psychedelic metal pioneers Josefus. Often the soundtrack is diegetic, played at nightclubs, bars, and in cars, and never is it intrusive or obstructive.

The story is too well told for that. Beginning in the pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone, pre-GPS era it starts with Richard Nixon becoming President of the US reminding us that this is a global story in which Colombia suffered most. Nixon hated Commies, which always helps when running for the highest office in America, and backed a coup d'etat on 11th September 1973 (9/11) which resulted in the democratically elected Salvador Allende dying and the dictator General Augusto Pinochet taking power.

Chile, at the time, was on its way to becoming the world's top cocaine exporter but Pinochet shut down the labs, had all the dealers arrested and then had them all killed. Except, it seems, one. Cockroah (Luis Gnecco) earned his nickname when the bullets missed him and he played dead so as not to give the firing squad a second chance. Soon he was on his way to Colombia where he zeroed in on Pablo Escobar (played brilliantly by the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura) who was already making a decent living smuggling cigarettes, booze, and marijuana in Medellin, Colombia's second city.

Cuca/Cockroach knows that together they can get rich in Colombia but Escobar's magpie eyes are on a far greater prize. Miami and the US cocaine market. Soon cocaine is smuggled around Colombia in trucks hidden under potatoes and on planes to the US swallowed by pregnant women (pregnant women, we learn, can swallow more yayo than non-pregnant women but if the bag splits inside them, which it sometimes does, they're in big trouble - they die).

As cocaine travels one way, money comes the other. Escobar's Medellin lab couldn't produce enough supply to meet demand so a further outpost was opened in the jungle and both the smuggling and the crime continued. In both Colombia and Florida. Between 1979 and 1984 there were over 3,000 murders in Miami alone but the US government wasn't particularly interested in drugs. Money was their concern and the drug enforcement agents on patrol were looking for hippies smoking marijuana more than they were gangsters pushing cocaine.

Even when Ronald and Nancy Reagan start their 'Just Say No' campaign, Escobar continues to expand his empire and increase his ridiculous wealth. The planes he charters into America now take pit stops in the Bahamas and often there's a wild party full of hookers for those in senior positions within his organisation. Escobar himself treats himself to boats, private jets, and a personal art gallery of Picassos and Dalis.

His vanity was such that he even had designs on becoming Colombian president and when he started to have so much money that he started to hand it out to the poor of Colombia (other times he literally buried huge wads of cash in the ground) his popularity was such that it didn't seem impossible or even particularly unlikely.

To many, he was their Robin Hood. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor. But unlike any version of Robin Hood I've ever heard of, he had his rivals tortured and murdered and kept the vast majority of the wealth to himself. Hacienda Nopales, the luxurious estate Escobar had built for himself and whose gardens he filled with zebras and hippos, is, admittedly, architecturally very pleasing and some of the cars look like they've come out of a set of Top Trumps.

Stephanie Sigman (who plays Escobar's mistress Valeria Velez) is none too shabby either but she is more than that. She's an important pivot in the story as a journalist who also sleeps with Pena. Velez has an agenda beyond sex but so do Escobar and Pena. A group with a different agenda to all these three are the M-19 Marxist militia group. Led by Alejandro Ayala (Rafael Cebrian) and Elisa Alvarez (Ana de la Reguera), M-19 were a guerrilla movement who wanted to use terror to open up Colombia to democracy (go figure) and stole the country's liberator Simon Bolivar's sword from a museum as a political gesture in 1974.

When M-19 kidnap Marta Ochoa (Carolina Gaitan), the daughter of one of Jorge (Andre Mattos) and a nominal rival of Escobar's on the Medellin drug trafficking scene, Escobar sees this is as a chance to form the Medellin cartel with Jorge, his brother Fabio (Roberto Urbina), and the unhinged Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha (Luis Guzman - the Puerto Rican character actor you may have seen in Boogie Nights and other Paul Thomas Anderson films).

Under the rule (of course) of Escobar, the man who made Colombia bleed, and his cousin Gustavo Gaviria (Juan Pablo Raba - who in a show that features some very natty threads gets to sport the best schmutter of all) the Medellin cartel begin to exert so much power that when a court announces an extradition it's the judge that has to wear a mask to protect his identity. The cartel are soon making more money a year than General Motors and Escobar's property empire expands to the extent that at one point he has eight hunded houses. Though nowhere he can truly call home as he lives as if permanently on the run.

When the Nicaraguan Sandinsita movement create an opportunity to link drug trafficking with communism (incorrectly - Manuel 'Pineapple Face' Noriega was an opportunist with no genuine political affinity and interested only in self-advancement like his modern day analogues Trump and Johnson) the US government starts to fund the DEA officers in Colombia and the deadly game steps up yet another level.

Escobar bombs an Avianca jet killing 110 people in November 1989 but fails to get his intended target, presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria (Fabian Mendoza) was not on the plane. According to Narcos, Murphy had warned Gaviria not to board. Hmmm. What's more certain is that his attempted assassination created a tidal wave of support for Gaviria and he won the election for president by a landslide.

Other atrocities carried out by Escobar, his accomplices, and his toadies create terrible tragedies and we start to see the tide turn, in Colombia, against Escobar but, as Murphy points out, the closer you get to Escobar the more dangerous he becomes and I won't spoil the enjoyment of the show for those of you who have either not watched it nor read any news in the last thirty years.

Needless to say the 'warnings of drug misuse' that appear at the start of each episode are superfluous and if you want to see people brutally murdered, rich drug kingpins partying around pools and ordering the death of their enemies you'll not be let down by Narcos. But there's far more to it than that. As with shows like The Wire it's a meditation on how power corrupts, how good and bad are relative concepts, and, like The Wire, it doesn't show Escobar as an aberration in society but something, someone, formed by a cruel and inhumane society.

It shows how the war on drugs is always lost before it starts because drugs are a health issue, not a military one. But Narcos, at least season one of Narcos, offers no simple solution to this. Instead it shows what a fucking mess it all is. Among the classic clipboard mugshots, a waterboarding of a renegade priest that even Graham Greene may have ruled out as a little too elaborate, and the digressions into Liberation Theology and the bizarre Latin American fetishisation of Nazism (which I'd assumed was more Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay than Colombia) we meet characters who are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Torn between doing the right thing and doing the safe thing.

Many of them pay with their lives, many more, in seasons two and three, no doubt are still to do so. The story of Pablo Escobar's reign is a terrible, deadly one and few come out of it well. Luckily the telling of Pablo Escobar's story, for me, at least so far, has been handled fantastically and seemingly with meticulous attention to period detail and such wonderful performances all round that to single even one out would be an injustice to any of the others. If nothing quite like the injustice that Pablo Escobar brought to bear on his home nation. I'll be back on season two before long. This Narcos stuff is quite moreish.

"Pablo's turned into a saint" - Horacio Carillo
"Claro, he sends people straight to heaven" - Roberto 'Poison' Ramos

Perambulations on the Perimeter of .... SE15:The Ballard Berkeley Of Peckham Rye.

The second walk of my solo Perambulations on the Perimeter series, around the edges of SE15, may not have been that major a walk (though 25,688 steps in a day's not too shabby) but I thought I'd still nick the name of the man who played The Major in Fawlty Towers and mix it with the Muriel Spark novel as it mildly amused me - and the way I've been walking lately, following a bout of gout, has something of the doddery old codger about it.

The struggles were never as real as last Saturday's Capital Ring walk from Richmond to Greenford but, nonetheless, there were times I wasn't as comfortable on my feet as I'd have liked to have been (there's improvement to be done before TADS hit the Wye Valley next weekend) which was, to be fair, the only minor concern during what turned out to be a rather pleasant afternoon and early evening's walk.

Much like my previous perambulation around SE23 this walk took in very familiar, close to home, sights but also took me out of my comfort zone and into parks, roads, and whole areas I'd, remarkably, never visited before. SE15 is more urban and more central than SE23 so, along with the parks and views, there were tower blocks, traffic, and, best of all, a highly photogenic gasholder but, before any of these things, my first priority was food and though the Parkside Cafe, strictly speaking, is in SE22 it was on my route and they do cheese omelette and chips exactly the way I like it.

Of course I had bread and butter, tea, and a can of Cherry Coke with it and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere of one of my all time favourite greasy spoon restaurants. After lockdown it'd be hard to say my eyes are bigger than my belly but I left a few chips just so I didn't feel too bloated during the walk. Which immediately took me in to Peckham Rye Park, a place I've known for decades but have started to know almost religiously during these last few months of not leaving London, barely taking public transport.

It's just as well it's a rather beautiful spot. Spacious too. I've been having ice creams and even the odd pint in there these last few months as well as reading, sunbathing, exercising, and taking phone calls. I've also been regularly checking up on the coots, moorhens, and pigeons in and around the lake. Occasionally they've been joined by large fish and even the odd rat but the waterfowl and pigeons had the area to themselves yesterday.

I took in the American Garden, the Sexby Garden, the bowling green that looks like it hasn't seen action in years, and the Japanese Garden with its large barnlike shelter, a cooling spot on a sunny day which yesterday would, on occasions, be. Peckham Rye Park opens up on to the wide expanse of Peckham Rye Common where people barbecue, play rugby, play Aussie rules football, and even play music. It's a relaxing spot and I relax there often but this was a walk so I cut a diagonal line through it and made my way to the William Blake and Gustav Klimt inspired totem pole (unlike the one in SE23, almost definitely not made by a Tlingit Alaskan) and headed down East Dulwich Road to Goose Green, a green space where an off duty policeman once questioned me about my resemblance to a Bulgarian beggar who'd been hassling people outside ATMs in East Dulwich.

I passed the dangerous 24/7 off-license (if I'm going in there it's probably not a good sign), the far healthier Balfe's Bike shop where I bought a bike and go to have its tyres pumped up, and the sight of the now gone Flying Pig pub before looking across to the former entrance of the Dulwich Public Baths. One I used to use but has now been replaced by a more modern, less Victorian, affair on nearby Crystal Palace Road.

Crossing Goose Green I noticed, not for the first or last time during the walk, of how many leaves had been blown out of the trees during recent windy weather. The autumnal look belied the sunshine I was feeling on my face.

On Oglander Road I passed the former Oglander pub (now, of course, flats) which used to host reggae nights until 5am. Me and my friend Justin (who, sadly, I've not seen for over six years now) once attended and it got pretty blurry towards the end.

Oglander Road leads into Maxted Road which leads into Bellenden Road (yes, everybody has a laugh when they first see it but us locals have become inured to it by now) where there are, roadside, black and white photos of historical happenings in the area including one of the former Oglander pub in its pomp.

Bellenden Road is a lively little area. The Victoria pub is great, The nearby Albert exists very much in its shadow, Codfellas does chips as well as it does puns, and The Begging Bowl serves tasty and slightly offbeat Thai food. I've only had the pleasure once, some time ago with another friend I've not seen for the best part of a lustrum - Tamsie, and I'd like to go back one day.

Still full from my chips and omelette, today was not the day so I passed a bit of street art inspired by Jacob van Ruisdael and John Constable's windmill paintings and made by Rochdale's Walter Kershaw. This took me up to another great eatery that I've not visited nearly enough times - the South Indian Ganapati.

If I go again I won't have the drumstick though. I didn't get on with that. At Ganapati I turned off Bellenden Road and, via Holly Grove, made my way to Warwick Gardens, a small park fenced in the middle presumably to keep one side free of dogs. The sun was properly out now but with a gentle breeze it felt absolutely lovely. I decided to have a lie down and I nearly fell asleep. Instead my mind drifted and I thought of all the good things in life. I felt very happy.

So much so I even took a selfie. I'm not scrubbing up too badly for my age (52 on Friday) all things considered. I don't expect other people to agree but I have to like myself at least a bit. It's not like I can escape myself. No matter how many of these walks I take.

Dipping briefly into SE5, I strolled proudly along the tree lined Talfourd Road and when I saw oleanders growing in someone's garden My Old School by Steely Dan instantly become my earworm until at least the first pit stop of my tour which was still the best part of an hour away.

Talfourd Road brought me out on to Peckham Road, the stretch that links Peckham and Camberwell and the Oliver Goldsmith Primary School, the South London Gallery (or part of it), the Peckham Pelican (closed but hopefully just temporarily, it's a good place), and Kennedy's Sausages (closed for as long as I can remember).

A quick right and a quick left had me on Southampton Way before taking a right into Charles Coveney Road, a pleasant housing estate, and the massive and fun looking slide in the none too green Central Venture Park. Large concrete pillars demarcated the space but I am as wise to as why as to who Charles Coveney is. Even the Internet, it seems, can't help me.

Calypso Crescent was a name to conjure with but, for the most part, this was a pleasant and unremarkable stretch. That all changed when I reached the formidable Burgess Park. The overwhelming majority of which is in SE5 but whose walls form much of the SE15/SE5 line so I felt justified in including it in my walk.

Burgess Park, less so than Dulwich or Peckham Rye, proved a good friend during lockdown too and so it did yesterday. I entered by a boarded up bridge that would once have carried pedestrians over a canal but now goes over another path. A small group of Latin Americans, possibly Ecuadorean - there's a large Ecuadorean community in the area, were playing quoits, drinking Fosters, and setting up a kid's birthday party. Nearby there were running races, a man shouting into a mic about "Nigerian soup", and some Egyptian geese half-heartedly escaping the attention of a curious hound.

I wandered down to the lake and got in among those geese and the other waterfowl that share the lake with a large array of fish. At least if the fishermen who line its bank are anything to go by. At this point I experienced a little rain, the only drizzle of the day, but this was no problem as there's a fairly dense wooded area on a bank by the lake which I passed through. Stopping to take in Sally Hogarth's Silent Raid sculptures, models of houses which once stood here before World War I bombing destroyed them. When the bomb damage was cleared up they built Burgess Park and named it after Jessie Burgess, Camberwell's first female mayor.

Towards the Old Kent Road end of the park younger Latinos had gathered to guzzle San Miguel and listen to Spanish language hip-hop and, of course, further waterfowl only added to the gaiety. The juxtaposition between the relaxed vibe of Burgess Park and the hustle, bustle, and traffic of Old Kent Road was marked but my most pressing concern at this juncture was that I needed the toilet - and a number two as well. I hadn't done a poo out since March and was understandably apprehensive about how this could happen.

I think the giant Tesco on Old Kent Road has a toilet but I felt confident I'd find somewhere better. Once I'd passed the fire station (which I seem to recall has some link to David Bowie but could not find out what it was) I reached The Lord Nelson pub. A grotty and unfriendly looking place (there's often a sign outside telling people that toilets are for customers only) I had no intention of using for either a drink or a plop.

Just before Asda, on Ossory Road, I saw a sign to The Paperworks. The promise of food, drink, music, and, surely, a toilet. Once I'd been through the necessary rigmarole to sign myself in and ordered a plastic pint pot of Estrella the music lived up to expectations. The Upsetters and Eek-a-Mouse and with the sun out and the beer cold all felt well with the world.

I read the obituary of the fantastic Venezuelan artist Luchita Hurtado (99, a good innings), had a look at the crossword, supped up, and then dropped the kids off at the pool in a portaloo far cleaner than any I've ever seen at a music festival.

I felt a couple of pounds lighter as I continued down Old Kent Road past Wazobia (a Nigerian restaurant), the spectacular gasholder number thirteen, and churches of so many different denominations and boasting so much bunkum that it starts to get amusing. If God is smiling on the people who go to these churches it's not converting into either money or decor.

It was a fairly decent stretch before I took a left into Ilderton Road. Passing tower blocks, yards full of tyres, and clutch and exhaust garages it was not the most auspicious part of the walk and when I turned down Surrey Canal Road the pavement was so full of abandoned car tyres and overgrown shrubbery it felt like nobody else had walked down it for months.

Maybe they hadn't. But so near to The Den (previously The New Den), Millwall's ground, that seemed unlikely. Passing under the Overground line as it wends between Surrey Quays and Queen's Road Peckham I turned back south and soon found myself climbing a short and steep incline into Bridgehouse Meadows. A green space with nothing but green and space in it and one I'd never been to before. With better parks nearby, its main selling point is probably its impressive views in all directions. To The Shard, Crystal Palace Tower, to the City, and to Docklands.

Passing along some quiet side streets I soon found myself on Avonley Road which, near The Montague Arms, reaches the Old Kent Road just as it changes its name to New Cross Road. I've never been in The Montague Arms (at least I can't remember doing so) but it's quite a legendary joint and my friends Mark and Natalie would regale me of tales of the old regulars wheezing through karaoke versions of Elvis songs interspersed with regular puffs on asthma inhalers. It looks to me like the pub, sadly, is no more. It's all boarded up and there's weird portraits of bumfaced, treble chinned people on the blacked out windows.

I was on the home stretch now and quite fancied one more drink before I got back into overly familiar territory. Kender Road, Queen's Road, Lausanne Road, and Mona Road took me to The Telegraph at the Earl of Derby. A pub I'd visited once, many years ago, with my friends Dan and Gareth and one that was almost completely empty. I signed in, bought a pint of Litovel, and sat in a large and empty back room nursing it and listening to Lou Reed's I'm So Free. My only company was my Guardian and a large, and highly distracting, map of the fascinating and fantastic world we all live in. I mapped out the furthest points I'd visited. Peru, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brazil, Washington state. All of them seem as realistic destinations as Venus or Middle Earth right now.

On leaving the pub I passed down to Nunhead and near to the place where my friend Virginie used to live. Black Lives Matter banners and placards had accompanied me from windows as surely as NHS rainbows had all day so I felt I needed to capture one for posterity. Not everyone's on the same page though. Along the lovely Ivydale Road, and not far after the tempting looking Waverley Arms - another day maybe, a DANGER OF DEATH sign had been 'decorated' with swastikas and SS graffiti.

FFS! For a more mindful assessment of death I could have visited nearby Nunhead Cemetery but I was running too late and, anyway, there's always my blog about their open day in 2016 or the one about a walk I did round there last year for those that want to read more.

Instead I followed Ivydale Road until it became Athenlay Road, walked (as so many times before) through Brenchley Gardens, popped into Jonathan's for some supplies, and headed home. Weary but pleased. By the time I got in my phone was down to 3% but luckily I still had some energy left in my tank and that's just as well because on Saturday it's the return of TADS and that two day walk in the Wye Valley (leaving England for the first time in TADS history) will probably be a little more challenging - and a lot less urban. SE15, however, was good to me. It always has been.