Sunday 28th February 2010

Pump tyres, back wheel valve is jammed and all the air squirts out. Catch a lift with RS down to Camden and walk up High Street toward the Market. It’s grim, why do people want to come here? The only people standing around are community cops, everyone else is on the move. Case the Market, developers have wrecked it, there are almost no Londoners to speak of. I aim to draw UK residents only, legal or otherwise, this is a petition to the UK Government. So draw stallholders, all men and they lead me one to another, they are very surprised but modestly amenable. One says he occasionally goes to prostitutes and he is always open about this. He also said that he doesn’t particularly like it, it’s just a thing he does. He went to Amsterdam and thought it was a good set up. He is French, the kind of person you could happily have a thoughtful conversation with. His neighbour was a burley Scot, I love the drawing of him, it is very delicate. “Shepherd Market he said, Ah yes, I used to go there meself. Thirty years ago, half the houses parliament were down there of a night.’

Camden Market has become a shit hole and I doubt I’ll go again. Gorgeous (my daughter) has moved on to more interesting pastures. I am freezing and hungry. On the main road draw a female banker (cooperative, she says defensively) and her friend. Then go into The Oxford Arms. It is full of blokes. Most are watching the match, I go up to a guy sitting alone who is not watching TV and ask him if I can…I am disrupted by a voice from behind the bar, a woman, perhaps 28. There is no broaching her ‘Not in my pub you don’t’ she says. The pub opposite is nicer, but I cannot see whom to ask.

On the next Corner in an anomalous mock timber framed building surrounded by ominous modernism is ‘The Hobgoblin.’ This is a haunt of bikers and Goths, affiliates of the dark. It’s like stepping into the ‘Leaky Cauldron’. Real London drains away. I go to the bar to ask the bar maid whether I may draw. She wears black. Her hair is very dark, her skin, very pale. She has elfin eyes, arched brows and full, agile lips. She is from Transylvania! She says many girls from Hungary come over to work as prostitutes, she doesn’t know any personally but it is not unusual.

I join a girl at a table, she wears black, she has come down from County Durham in search of work. She is perhaps 19. She just wants to get some work. She is a good worker. She has GCSE’s including English and Maths and went to college but could not afford to continue. An Arab man has let her a room in his house at a reduced rent and she will help his son with English in return. She was attacked by a group of men back home, simply for being different: wearing black clothes and dark make up. It led to depression. Her mother tried to sabotage her flight south out of concern; she knows no one in London. She was at least in a warm and friendly place in this pub. The guy opposite her was cool to be drawn for the cause and I draw him asleep.

I return to the bar and talk with an even more striking bar maid. She has a strong, confident presence. She agrees to be drawn and tells me that she had a friend who worked in a Soho brothel for two years from the age of fourteen (she looked older). I ask whether this friend was an addict. “Yeah” she said. “An addict to Christian Dior, not drugs.” She said she had been very concerned for this friend and therefore accompanied her when she worked on the streets. They had been beaten up; it was scary. The experience had made her a racist for a while. She had been caught by the police holding her friends bag with all the condoms and the lube, she was terrified, she spoke truthfully to the police giving her name and address, but her friend had lied and she felt her liberty was in the balance. The police decided to let them off. She distanced herself from this friend and moved on in her life. She was self assured and clear about the issues. She said she would not do sex work herself for emotional reasons; boundaries, it was not for her.

Back at the bar I ask another man who turns out to be a singer songwriter whether I can draw him. He says he used to be in the Liberal camp on the issue but following a programme on Women’s Hour last November, he changed his mind. However, he agreed to be drawn because what I am doing is good, opening up the subject for debate through art. He cautioned me that as an artist I should stand back and remain a detached observer. My friend EW said the same in an earlier discussion. But I am not only an artist. I am a wife, a parent and live in society, all of which compels me to take a stand. Is it the role of art or artists to simply observe from a position on a fence?

Next I draw a strongly built man (in black) with long gingery hair and an imposing beard. He is wearing mirrored glasses that keep the light out his eyes. He did not like light. I drew him in charcoal on a larger piece of paper, when he took off his glasses, I suddenly realized he was ten years younger, not ten years older than me!

The final couple invite me to their table and ask how much I charge to draw a couple together? He is wearing black. She is wearing some green. She is a designer and has worked for a number of sex-workers, including a French lady (size 14) who now in her mid forties sees her six former clients (one for each day of the week) as friends as they too are older now. She lives in Mayfair where one of them bought her a four-story house.