Tartsengrafs.

What to eat? What not to eat? Even things that are generally considered good for you will have somebody telling you they're actually bad for you. And things that are generally considered bad for you will also have their cheerleaders. I've got scarily high blood pressure and I read in some places that red wine and dark chocolate would help. Really? Who knows?

I wondered if an evening in the company of Canadian cardiologist Dr Christopher Labos would help out but, to be honest, I didn't really come away much the wiser. That's not to say his talk for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, Superfood or Supertoxic - How Debunking Food Myths Can Teach People About Scientific Skepticism, wasn't good. It was. It was interesting and it was funny although there were a lot of digressions which meant it wasn't formed into as clear a narrative as I'd like.

Dr Labos is not just a cardiologist. He's a lecturer, a columnist (for the Montreal Gazette), a podcaster, a proud dog owner, and, of late, an author. His book Does Coffee Cause Cancer? is both a popular science tome and a romantic comedy. A rare thing indeed. As Skeptics host Professor Chris French said it's the best book he's ever read that combines those two genres.

It's not quite as bonkers as it sounds. Dr Labos loves 'math' (which, as a Canadian, he calls it rather than maths) but he's aware that not everybody else does. To make his love of math fun to others, he mixed it up with debunking food myths, and to make debunking food myths fun to others, he wrote a book about it and threw in some romantic comedy. The chief protagonists will disagree agreeably about the health benefits of various food stuffs and the reader, it is presumed, will be persuaded not just what food is good for us and what food is bad for us but why the information we're so often served in newspaper, and other media, reports seems to differ so wildly.

Almost everything you can consume (and some things you can't) has been said to both cause, and prevent, cancer. From butter to corn, from wine to beef, from exercise to eggs, and from tomatoes to coffee. Some say it's best to eat a high-fat/low-carb diet, others say you should aim for a low-fat/high-carb diet. These contradictory headlines are confusing at best. At worst they create a climate of distrust in which charlatans like Robert F. Kennedy Jr (astoundingly, though not if you factor in who the President is, the current American health secretary) to thrive.

The nihilism inherent in this way of thinking can even infect the minds of previously respected medical experts. John Ionaddis is a physician-scientist, and Stanford University lecturer, who during the Covid lockdowns (of which he opposed) became a conspiracy theorist. He discovered that some of the things we'd been told about Covid were not true and came to the conclusion that, therefore, none of them were true. You may well know people who think along the same lines. I do.

Obviously, distorted truths and outright lies regarding medicine (and pretty much everything else) are amplified by social media and it was in an attempt, possibly a vain one, possibly not, that Dr Labos wrote his book. His view being you have to at least try to counter misinformation and it's a view I share (though don't waste your time feeding Internet trolls). No matter how much it might feel like banging your head against a brick wall.

During last night's talk, he obviously wasn't going to give away every chapter of the book and every piece of debunking but he did give us a couple of examples. The first being the idea that vitamin C can help fight the common cold.

It can't. Or at least it can't in the vast majority of cases. It does, studies show, appear to work for brief periods of time with people who are in severe physical stress or experiencing extremely low temperatures. The trouble is the tests that have been offered up as evidence were taken on a very small number of people. Most of whom were either Canadian soldiers, South African marathon runners, or young children who were on a skiing holiday in the Alps.

Not exactly a representative spread of the population. But a very clear example of a case where correlation and causation are mistakenly linked, either by honest mistake or by disingenuous actors, with misleading results. One humorous example of this came in a study that suggested ice cream caused polio because polio spikes in the summer and, guess what?, people eat more ice cream in the summer too.

There's a whole website (Spurious Correlations, by Tyler Vigen) devoted to such studies. For instance, if these graphs are to be believed the fact that people stopped buying margarine in such large numbers caused a 50% drop in the divorce rate in Maine, the decreasing popularity of the name Blanca caused a dip in robberies in Texas, and as Michael Schumacher's Formula One career started to wane the number of physicists in California grew accordingly.

One survey was done to test the efficacy of aspirin and found there were two groups of people it didn't work on. Those born under either the sign of Gemini or Libra. Some have said cell phones cause cancer but further tests found they don't cause cancer. They don't cause cancer in humans but tests on rats and mice showed that they don't cause cancer with either male or female mice and they do cause cancer in a small number of male rats.

It turns out the numbers tested were so small that the rats found to have cancer probably already had it. It's one of many good reasons, ethical and practical, why animal testing is wrong. Yet 'publication bias' means that flawed 'evidence' like this still gets published while results that are less sensational are ignored. Some of this flaky science gets spread around until enough people just accept that it's true.

The Swiss cardiologist Franz Messerli produced a graph that showed that countries that eat the most the chocolate have won the most Nobel prizes. White chocolate is good for winning a prize in chemistry and it's dark chocolate for physics. It's widely held that Messerli's graph was an intentional bit of trolling to try to make a point about how these graphs can't be trusted.

For a start there aren't that many Nobel prize winners around so it's hard to do a large enough study, secondly Mars fund a lot of research into proving that chocolate is good for you, and thirdly - and most importantly - countries don't win Nobel prizes. People do - and there was no research into how much chocolate these actual Nobel prize winners have eaten.

I left thinking that dark chocolate probably wouldn't get my blood pressure down (though I still had a chocolate croissant this morning) and I left with the idea that the foods I had presumed to be unhealthy are unhealthy and the ones I had presumed to be healthy are indeed healthy. In fact, I learned a lot more about statistics and math (if you must) than I did food and nutrition but I left happy. It'd had been a good, if slightly around the houses, talk.

Thanks to The Plume of Feathers (and their pub cat), Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, Goddard's Pie & Mash (for feeding me beforehand - probably unhealthily but maybe not), thanks to Professor Chris French for hosting, thanks to Chris's dog Ted (who Dr Labos took time out from the talk to give a belly rub), and thanks most of all to Dr Labos himself for a talk that, rightly or wrongly, I left feeling quite hungry for more. 

Transmetropolitan:The London of The Pogues.

"Going transmetropolitan. From the dear old streets of King's Cross to the doors of the ICA. Going transmetropolitan. We'll drink the rat's piss, kick the shite, and I ain't going home tonight" - Transmetropolitan, The Pogues

The Pogues wrote about London as well as they wrote about Ireland. Or drinking. Or America. Or relationships. In fact, I'd say they wrote about London better than any band ever. Their most serious rivals, to my mind, are the likes of The Kinks, The Clash, The Jam, and grime artists like Skepta. So it seemed to me that a walk celebrating the work, and the lives, of The Pogues would be a fun thing to.

Of course, it seemed inevitable it would descend into a pub crawl and be slightly chaotic but that would be very fitting for a band who managed to bring as much chaos to their music (and their gigs, I remember a particularly lively show at the Southampton Mayflower back in the eighties) as they did beauty. It even had me riffing on how a lot of the music I like (The Fall, The Butthole Surfers, The Jesus And Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Pavement) is, in very different ways, a mix of chaos and beauty.

Transmetropolitan alone (the first track on the first Pogues debut album, 1984's Red Roses For Me) mentions Brixton's lovely boulevards, Hammersmith's sightly shores, Camden Palace poofs, lechers up in Whitehall, queers in the GLC, Surrey Docks, Somers Town, a Soho sex shop dream, a fried egg in Valtaro's, a Tottenham Court Road ice cream, Mill Lane, Pentonville Road, and Arlington House in Camden.

Valtaro's being the only London cafe I could find mentioned in one of their songs I'd looked into starting the walk there (it's near the British Museum) but it is, alas, long gone. So I opted for Waterloo's Fishcotheque which at least has been celebrated by another eccentric pop character:- Pat Fish from The Jazz Butcher.

I'd walked all the way from home to Waterloo only to find out the Fishcotheque didn't open until noon and we'd planned to meet at 11am. I had it in my head that I'd eaten there in the morning in the past and perhaps I have. More likely, when I was younger my definition of 'morning' was considerably more elastic.

I sent a WhatsApp to the gang just as Pam crossed the road and the two of us headed on to Lower Marsh where we looked at some impressive vintage vehicles (I was happy to recognise a Jaguar E-Type, admittedly not an impressive claim) and we took a window seat in Cafe Pedlar where Kathy, Roxanne, and Clive would soon join us.

I had a cup of tea and they asked if it had enough milk in. It did but it didn't have enough hot water in it. This was more than compensated for, however, by the huge and messy cheese, tomato, and rocket baguette they served me. A satisfying start to a day in which I was feeling, I have been a lot lately, positive and optimistic.

We passed round the back of the Royal Festival Hall, over the Thames on the Millennium Bridge, through Charing Cross concourse, and round Trafalgar Square and under Admiralty Arch (where some sort of work is being done) to The Mall and the doors of the ICA. As mentioned in Transmetropolitan. It's also where, on the 23rd of October 1976, an eighteen year old Shane MacGowan infamously had his ear cut. The pictures made for quite a sensation but over the years the story has become that he had his ear, or some of it, bittern off. If you look at a photo of him you can quite clearly see he has both his ears intact.

Pam took a photo of the rest of us in the "doors of the ICA" and we passed up to Piccadilly and Vine Street (a road you'd struggle to get a pint on if you're playing the Monopoly drinking game). Both locations mentioned in the brilliant Old Main Drag from The Pogues second album, 1985's Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash.

MacGowan's protagonist first comes to London when he's only fifteen, he goes to 'the dilly' to check out the scene, he's "beaten and mauled" between "the metal doors of Vine Street", and in Leicester Square, which we'd soon pass through, he is "picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls". Which, to be fair, does sound a fairly accurate description of police procedure from that era. I know. I got punched in the face for a copper because he thought I was gay.

On Moor Street, we looked at where the Centrale once was. The Centrale was a great little Italian cafe where you could get a reasonably priced, tasty, and filling plate of pasta but it also cropped up, along with - to me - the more mysterious Kardomah, in The Pogues' London Girl from 1986's Poguetry In Motion (EP) where you can also find A Rainy Night In Soho, The Body Of An American,. and Planxty Noel Hill.

A Rainy Night In Soho didn't feature in the walk because that song is set in Soho, New York and not Soho, London. In Soho, however, we did stop for a while in Soho Square to look at a bench commemorating Kirsty MacColl who died, just 41 years old, in a terrible accident off the coast of Mexico in 2000. She, as you'll know, shared lead voacls with MacGowan on 1987's deathless Fairytale of New York. A song only kept off number one by The Pet Shop Boys covering Elvis. We asked the couple who were sat on Kirsty's bench if we could take a photo and briefly tried to explain to them who she was. I'm not sure how interested they were. Soho Square was pretty busy.

 

 

We left Soho into (quieter - at least once past the British Museum) Bloomsbury, pondering en route how such a large umbrella shop manages to stay in business. Especially as it's quite rare to see people with umbrellas these days. Russell Square, a good spot for cruising apparently, had some Michael Craig-Martin sculptures on display and a nice little cafe and looked far less hectic, and more autumnal, then Soho Square.

On Woburn Place we stopped to look at a plaque to those who were killed in the atrocious terrorist attack on London on the 7th July 2005 before turning into the delightful, almost Dickensian, Woburn Walk and on to the very quiet Burton Street where once lived several members of The Pogues at the time of the band's forming. At numbers 5, 30, 32, and 34 it seems.

Shane, Shanne Bradley (who was in The Nips/Nipple Erectors with Shane and went on to co-found The Men They Couldn't Hang), Spider Stacy, Jem Finer, and James Fearnley. At the time they called it South Camden and though it's still in the London Borough of Camden it's hard to really consider it Camden these days.

Nearby was a pub that got a mention in The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn:- "in The Euston Tavern you screamed it was your shout. But they wouldn't give you service so you kicked the windows out". The former Euston Tavern, on Euston Road, is now an O'Neill's chain bar. A dwindling faux Irish pub chain though that one, I can attest from personal experience, still does good business.

I don't know but I imagine The Pogues would not be fond of faux Irish pubs so we gave it a miss and headed, via the pleasant crescent of Cartwright Gardens (flanked by hotels) to a pub far more relevant to their history:- The Water Rats on Grays Inn Road.

 

 

 

The Pogues, then called Pogue Mahone - an Anglicisation of the Gaelic for "kiss my arse", played their first ever gig at the Water Rats when it was still called The Pindar of Wakefield (cue much discussion - and in Kathy's case much research, about what a pindar is and why there was one in Wakefield, it's all online if you want to investigate further) on October 4th 1982 and filmed a video for Streams of Whiskey there.

It was pretty quiet yesterday afternoon but I enjoyed a couple of premium Spanish lagers, Pam a gin'n'tonic, Roxanne and Clive some unusual looking cans, and Kathy a lime'n'soda while we looked at the pictures on the wall of all the famous people to have played, or had links, with the pub. Oasis played their first London gig there in 1994, Bob Dylan his three decades earlier, and it may be the only place where Toyah can be seen rubbing shoulders with both Lenin and Marx. We'd pass Lenin's former house on Percy Circus on leaving the pub. Marx, however, was a far more regular patron and is even said to have briefly lived above the pub. No blue plaque for him though so maybe not.

 

 

On leaving the pub, we looked at Lenin's plaque, talked about Prince Andrew losing his title of the Duke of York (and it really couldn't have happened to a more deserving and sweaty nonce), and headed to the former site of Filthy McNasty's on Amwell Street. Once one of MacGowan's favourite pubs - and one Kathy had spoken to him in a few times - it's now The George & Monkey and it appeared to be hosting some kind of event, a wedding reception or something.

So we didn't go in. We didn't even hang around long as one chap was stood outside making very loud, and annoying, foghorn noises while wearing what looked like a leather cowboy hat. The Lexington looked more inviting but we were not to make a stop there either. Instead we passed down Pentonville Road (as mentioned in both Transmetropolitan and NW3:- "at the top of Pentonville Road, I saw the sun setting") and past KX station, near my work, and along the canal by the gasholders, bridges, and leisure boats. A probably racist St George cross that had been graffitied on a wall near The Constitution pub (where I had my last works Xmas dinner, for fans of irrelevant trivia) had been amended to be more welcoming and that pleased me.

Camden itself has somehow managed to both change and stay the same. I'm not sure you can buy poor quality bootleg cassettes there any more but the market is still thriving even if it's more of a boxpark these days. Camden reminds me of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Long past its heyday and its attempts at being countercultural looking more heritage than cutting edge. Yet it's still popular, still lively, and certainly brings in the Eurogoths.

We made our way to the goth pub The Devonshire Arms (or The Dev) where The Pogues used to hang out. The Internet suggests that if you're not dressed in gothic or 'alternative' attire (whatever that is) you may be turned away but that really didn't seem to be the case. Roxanne and Clive departed us here but Pam, Kathy, and I grabbed a seat while the pub's Iron Imperivm festival (a gig with three bands really) got underway.

They were selling merchandise which included such unlikely things as coffee and tank tops but perhaps best of all they were blowing up inflatable swords and it certainly amused Pam and myself when Kathy asked some death metal dude if she wanted him to blow up his sword.

More euphemistic behaviour came when Conrete Age from Russia (as I've since found out they were) took to the stage and we noticed that the singer could best be described as a growler. Pam was in the loo when the growler started growling and I'm not sure if Concrete Age are supposed to sound scary or funny but we could hardly stop laughing.

I'd have happily stayed for another but I've been doing these walks a long time now and I can recognise when people are done for the day or need food. This time, it was food so that meant I'd not take Pam and Kathy to see the other sites, or former sites, that I'd noted down for the walk's spiel. Rock On Records where Philip Chevron worked and met Elvis Costello (later the band's producer), Chiswick Records (whose roster included The 101'ers, The Nips, and The Radiators From Space - Philip Chevron's pre-Pogues outfit.

The line "the last day time I saw you was down at the Greeks" (from The Broad Majestic Shannon on 1988's If I Should Fall From Grace With God) can either refer to the Marathon kebab place near Chalk Farm station (where Shane MacGowan and Steve Earle once attempted a twenty-four hour drinking session) or Andy's Greek Taverna on Pratt Street. A much more high end dining experience and one that I used for the UXD seven years back. Then there's The Good Mixer which became the band's pub of choice when The Dev got busy and is, of course, more famed for its role in Britpop lore though it's not just Blur that drank there. Nick Cave, Suggs, and Morrissey have too and MacGowan once played there as part of The Earls of Suave with Dave Vanian.

Then there's The Roundhouse where Shane MacGowan and Spider Stacy first met. At a Ramones gig in June 1977. Or The Electric Ballroom where the owner Bill Fuller once cooked The Pogues a steak dinner. Further afield we could have visited Albert Bridge (Misty Morning, Albert Bridge), The Barbican (Shane's sister, Siobhan, lived in one of the towers), Westminster School (where Shane was expelled for drug offences), Dalling Road in Hammersmith (from Dark Streets of London), or even the Boogaloo in Highgate where I once spoke to Shane at the bar. I told him I loved the song The Old Main Drag and he told me he'd "never heard it".

After a brief debate on where to eat we opted for the Temple of Seitan where, after a confusing interaction with the computer used to place an order, I had a very tasty Nashville Hot burger and a can of lager. There was time for one last pub stop and The Dublin Castle seemed a good call. Kathy had three bottles of water in her bag which she had to leave at the door but she was allowed to take her 'emergency yoghurt' in.

Emergency Yoghurt sound like the sort of band that play The Dublin Castle but last night it was Woking Calling who play Clash and Jam covers (see what they've done there) and if tickets hadn't been a rather steep £15 I might've been tempted. Instead I had another brace of Spanish lagers, Pam had a solitary Beavertown Neck Oil, and Kathy another lime'n'soda and we chatted and enjoyed the pub blasting out Madness's Wings of a Dove and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird

They even played some songs that didn't have avian themes. Then we headed back down to the tube station. Kathy went north (of course) and Pam and I south. On the tube we solved the Guardian crossword and were amused to see a lady sat opposite us trying to do the same and not being able to not hear us shouting the answers out.

That's probably not the way a night out with The Pogues would have ended and it didn't end up in the carnage I'd equal parts feared and craved but it was a lovely day with four lovely people. Thanks to Pam (also for the photos as ever), Kathy, Roxanne, and Clive. London, you're a lady.