Lee and Lance

With recent 'youth' activity focusing heavily upon burning, raping and pillaging particularly amongst the greater spotted urban youth I thought I’d reminisce about two entrepreneurial young men who lived near us in London.  

We first encountered this dynamic duo when they were posting homemade leaflets through doors offering their services to clean cars to earn some pocket money. This was long before the days of drive in hand car washes and also before mobile phones were as ubiquitous as they are now in the UK.

What really caught our attention was Lee himself. He had all the patter and the charm of an East end market trader. Confident and a bit cheeky Lee introduced himself to us like he was a used car salesman with 30 years experience of ducking and diving, he also introduced us to his friend whose name we instantly forgot.

Harry Enfield was riding high in the comedy firmament, so these two young fellahs became known as Lee and Lance. They can’t have been more than 12 or 13, and they really looked like 12 year old boys, all skinny arms and legs and sticky out ears. In comparison the girls they were at school with would have seemed like Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. The telly characters of Lee and Lance were a couple of Londoners who had hidden talents and were barstool philosophers as the videos below will show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_O_HrEuhEY

The thing that really tickled us was the contact number on their promotional flyer, it wasn’t even theirs, they’d used a neighbour’s mobile number and hoped he wouldn’t mind – classic risk taking devil may care attitude from Lee and his partner in commerce.

They were instantly commissioned to wash my housemate’s car, a rather lovely 2CV, but were too small to carry the water bucket when it was full so we had to do that for them, but they did a good job and charged a reasonable price. They even waxed the car under the critical eye of its beady eyed owner.

Lee had explained that he wanted some extra money to contribute to his share of a family holiday or a computer game, and that seemed like as good a reason as any so we were happy to offer them odd jobs.

They were nice kids showing a bit of initiative and that deserved to be acknowledged and encouraged. Over the next few years we watched them grow up enough to be able to carry a bucket of water without adult supervision, lose teeth (this happened once whilst washing the 2CV, there was blood and there was panic; tea towels and kitchen roll were brought into play, but they still finished waxing the car – committed and professional to the last) and then they began to diversify into weeding gardens, washing windows and other useful odd jobs as they got older and taller.

Lee and lance were the acceptable face of trick or treating and carol singing, on one occasion after they turned up and mumbled the first chorus of “We Wish you a Merry Christmas”, like every lazy and undeserving carol singer does, though if I remember they also appeared in November which was a little premature, we told them that if they came back much nearer Christmas, sang three carols in full, and with enthusiasm we’d give them a fiver – an amount not to be sniffed at for carol singing in 1994. They did indeed return much nearer Christmas and they sang three carols in full, enthusiastically, if not harmoniously, and they were rewarded fairly as agreed. The shine was slightly taken off when they turned up the next evening in disguise for a repeat performance, we were not fooled and we sent them off with a friendly telling off, it was all good natured and as always we had to admire their initiative.

In comparison to the youthful, and not so youthful, rioters in the news recently I think it’s important to recognise that not all young people are scum, there’s a lot of positive behaviour out there, but it’s not sexy and it doesn’t sell papers or get headlines to report on nice kids doing nice stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrI4--a7oUA

Letters of note

After a very quiet couple of months with very little happening, hence the lack of posts recently, I've received two letters in as many weeks from the Leeds City Council.

The first politely informing me that I would be fined if I left my bin out on the street after bin day, as apparently this is becoming a huge problem in our little community. The second telling me that any remaining metal work left in the binyards attached to the remaining empty homes would be removed to stop our area being targeted by thieves.

Now I don’t like to be snippy but hang on a minute let’s just take a small step back. I’m going to address the second letter first. As someone who actually videoed the last gate on my street being nicked from a bin yard over the road from me about 11 months ago, I would suggest that this is a little like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.

Reasons of safety, crime prevention and recycling are quoted as being the main drivers for finally removing the few remaining bits of metalwork, though I would have thought that the collapsed walls that block the pavement and are just ripe for a small child to be trapped under would be as much of a motivation. Also removing the metal work whilst most of it still remained would have made better economic sense, but hey ho hindsight is a marvellous thing.

wall kicked over to remove metal work

And my little snipe about the bins being left out on the street, I’ll admit it winds me right up too as I always bring my bins back in but come on . . . . when this

A room with a view.

is the view from my house, and has been for over a year I’m not sure Leeds City Council are in any position to make demands about abandoned bins. A couple of them have been slung into the road of late, either by stormy weather (Lovely British summer) or by what the press would more recently refer to as yobs, I would call them bastards or little shits.

This for me raises the issue of blanket warnings, like those incredibly insulting messages about pirating films at the beginning of legitimately bought dvds that you can’t fast forward through. It’s like buying a bus ticket and being slapped in the face by the driver, just in case you decide not to buy one next time. I don’t leave my bin out all the time (sometimes when I’ve been away on holiday or for work I’ve had no option if I’ve wanted my bin collected, or I don’t put it out at all). I’m probably overreacting and I do understand that it’s better to give people a warning before you go in guns blazing, but it still puts my back up.

 I strongly suspect that some of these bins belong to the now derelict houses on the other side of the street, houses that belong to Leeds City Council. And yes it is annoying to have to step out onto the street to walk around someone’s pizza box stuffed wheelie bin that resides permanently on the pavement, but is it any less annoying than jumping up to your window every time an unfamiliar noise rings out down the street and your first conclusion is that it’s yet another scrote in a hoody kicking the door in of a derelict house on your street.

At least the bin yards seem to have been cleared of any recent fly tipping – the standard mattress appeared a couple of weeks ago on a parallel street, but at least the massive plastic jug of cooking oil that the kids were playing with in the street a couple of weeks ago seems to have been dealt with by what I can only assume was a biohazard team. Anyway, rant over for now. I’m trying to organise another community meeting for late August early September so we’ll see what news there is on the demolition front. It can’t come soon enough for me.

broken window