Laura Craik on unexpected house callers

Plus why Idris Elba should just be cast already, and speaking the truth about knife crime in London
Answering the doorbell may surprise you
Laura Craik14 March 2019

We’d just sat down to Sunday lunch when the doorbell rang.

‘FFS!’ I hissed, automatically ducking behind the window. I shouldn’t have been vexed: it was only cheese, meat and crackers, a dish that couldn’t exactly get cold, even if faced with the most loquacious Jehovah’s Witness. But as any Londoner will attest, the doorbell has a propensity for ringing at the most inconvenient moments: mid-shower, mid-s*** and even mid-shag, or so I hear. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t automatically switch all the lights off and fall flat on the floor every time that bastard rings.

"As any Londoner will attest, the doorbell has a propensity for ringing at the most inconvenient moments"

Laura Craik

My eight-year-old answered it, as she is yet to be jaded by life. ‘Mum!’ she shouted. ‘There’s a man at the door.’

‘Hello,’ said the man. ‘I’m here to ask permission to take a photo of your coal hole.’

This was a new one. ‘It’s very rare,’ he continued. ‘You don’t see many like it.’

My husband came to the door. ‘Now then,’ he said, for he can smell a fellow Yorkshireman at 10 paces. Soon, they were discussing the depleted mining communities of the Dearne Valley as I stood there wondering whether to start with Port Salut or Brie. ‘May I?’ said the man, removing a wire brush from his rucksack. He crouched and swept the coal hole (which, for the uninitiated, is a decorated iron cover to a coal bunker), before whipping out a camera. I took a photo of him taking the photo.

‘Mum, you’re invading the man’s privacy,’ said my daughter.

‘Well, technically he’s invading mine,’ I replied. ‘He rang my doorbell, after all.’ She looked at me blankly.

All in all, it was a beautiful moment: a charming interaction between a lone coal hole fanatic, a Yorkshireman, a pedantic child and a woman desperate for her lunch. If I had time, I’d spin it into a three-part BBC drama, to be aired on Sunday nights, although I never did find out what made my coal hole special. Maybe we should all answer the door more often. It’s not always an Amazon delivery.

Dead hot Elba

When your dog starts playing with another dog, it’s only polite, after a while, to ask its name. ‘Idris,’ said its owner. This got me to wondering what it’s like to be Idris Elba (left). I bet he never answers the door. No sooner has Britain’s Best-Loved Actor finally shaken off stories that he will be The Next James Bond than up he pops again, this time as The Next Deadshot — slated, if rumours are to be believed (which they often aren’t), to replace Will Smith as the deadly assassin in the sequel to Suicide Squad. Come on, directors. Just cast him already. Everybody loves Idris. They’re even naming their dogs after him.

The ever-popular Idris Elba
Dave Benett/Getty Images for Lou

Speaking truth to power

‘Why don’t they ever get anyone on who knows what they’re talking about?’ we were ranting at the TV, as yet another suit spraffed spurious theories about knife crime. And then Akala (below) came on Channel 4 News, calmly pointing out that the social indicators of violence — poverty, domestic abuse, lack of education — have remained identical for 200 years. ‘Almost half the people in prison today were expelled from school as children, versus 1 per cent of the population as a whole. Around half the people in young offenders institutions were in care at some point,’ he said. Asked whether gang violence was a race problem, he pointed out that ‘there are 1.2 million black people in London; in a bad year, 50 of them will kill someone — less than 0.004 per cent of the black population’. It was George Orwell who said that during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. Akala’s book, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, is out in paperback next week. It tells the truth.

English rapper Akala
matrixpictures.co.uk

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