To the Old King’s Head! [again] …on Thursday evening to examine the SELF.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, etc.

Hello?

HELLO?

The South East London Folklore society [aha!] was holding its regular informal monthly gathering. Transpontine types, seasoned storytellers, Welsh druid revivalists - all were present in the upstairs function room under the watchful gaze of… the Old King’s Head.

Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.

Or something.

I had my own beheading of sorts back at base before the nazel gazing of the SELF. ‘Urban Legends’ were on the agenda for later in the evening; I’m not stretching it *too* much Comrades when I say that the cutting off of a body part goes down as LEGENDARY within these hyper-hyper-hyperlocal SW8 Transpontine surrounds.

Cheese was to become a recurring theme later in the evening when the good @OneEyeGrey introduced me to a new Transpontine post-Festive parlour game. My own mad scramble to cut up half a pound of cheapo Lidl cheddar led to me losing the top half of my thumb.

URBAN LEGEND, etc.

Ahh, but fact or fiction?

What do YOU think, Comrades?

It all led to do a do or die (um…) decision ahead of the short Brompton ride down the Clap’ham Road, around The Elephant and then up towards London Bridge.

Should I stay at home and nurse what was left of my falling off thumb, or should I think FUCK IT - I’ve bloody well booked my place with SELF. It would take more than a severed limb with cheapo cheese caught up in the crossfire to keep me away.

I made the right decision of course. A trail of cheddar and blood currently paints the route from Sunny Stockwell over to London Bridge. Half a bog roll of blood stained bog role is now buried away down some London Bridge back alley as part of the evidence.

Still following the URBAN LEGEND theme?

I most certainly was when I arrived at the Old King’s Head and tried to take up a space for the talk by Scott Wood, co-founder of the London Fortean Society, Transpontine and author of London Urban Legends: The Corpse on the Tube.

I need to add in the disclaimer that I cycled, rather than adding to any bloodied dairy products on the Bank branch of the Northern Line.

Scott may have been interested in my own slight stretching of the story as part of his historical look at the urban legends of London. What fascinates Scott - and everyone else in the over-subscribed room at the old King’s Head - is the way in which a local story develops legs and takes on a new twist as it crosses territories.

Somewhere up in North London and there is a bored bedroom blogger bashing out a semi-believable tale about how he sliced off his knob whilst trying to chop up some ethically sourced salami as he was running late for a meeting of the Hackney Hipsters Hand Bell Ringing Happening.

Ding dong.

Scott’s latest publication looks at folklore and how we attach personal tales to the physical world of stone. It would be a theme that I would return to twelve hours later in the day job, trying to explain to a LOVELY Year 8 class the difference between human and physical geography.

Best keep the cheapo Lidl cheese analogy out of the classroom.

Much of the Transpontine folklore that fascinates Scott is associated with ideas that are outside of the Church and the State.

We heard how American academic Richard Dorson first coined the phrase folklore. Dorson debunked the myth as to how it is actually healthier to live in the city than to be stuck out in some countryside backwater.

Back over in Blighty and British writer Rodney Dale added to the folklore urban licence with his Tumour in the Whale observations. That well-known attributable source of a friend of a friend was identified by Scott as the main authorative source for any urban folklore.

At least I think that was the claim; it’s what the bloke downstairs in the boozer told me after I ordered five pints of cherry black and cider with double chasers to try and anesthetize the falling off thumb.

Adding our own personal insights to an urban legend is key to how we interpret and communicate shared, false experiences. It is something, which is happening right now in South London with the wonderful weekly growing urban legend of watching Dulwich Hamlet.

It is genuinely quite remarkable how a non-league football team stuck out near Dog Kennel Hill has rapidly become the social and political rallying cause for the old (and new) South London anarchos and Commies.

The urban legend has spread across digital social platforms, but you can’t deny that there is a very definite and traceable offline cause behind the Dulwich Hamlet Transpontine legend.

Is this a case of the urban legend entering into the realms of reality, or is it simply a situation where the substance was always buried deep below the topological fault lines of Champion Hill, just waiting for some urban storytellers to come out of the woodwork and spread the message?

Back in the Old King’s Head and it was like drawing blood from a stone with the repeated tech failures of the PowerPoint presentation. My blood almost became a pint-sized problem, just as Scott started to delight us all with tales of the legendary London Stone.

It is to the tremendous credit of Scott that he managed to continue with his presentation, just as Mr PowerPoint was trying to poo poo the operation. The personal passion of the topic carried the momentum, even if the online images of a big slab of stone placed inside an anonymous Cannon Street branch of WH Smith was trying to stall the evening.

Similar myths about the ravens in the Tower of London were explored and debunked. For raven read lion, with a Victorian poster suddenly appearing in PowerPoint inviting guests to witness a Washing of the Lions ceremony at the Tower of London.

I still LOVE the story of the Surrey Cricket Lion. Transpontine urban legend gets a little lost at source here. Any second hand resource that involves an afternoon on the piss in the Peter May is always going to lead to confusion and not clarity.

The story goes however that a lion was once kept outside the entrance to The Oval. Here’s where we supposedly get the Surrey Lion mascot theme. Here’s where we also get numerous generic sporting teams associated with a lion or some other non-human variation.

They use to breed dinosaurs down at Arsenal during the Woolwich days.

Scott then pressed all the correct magic PowerPoint buttons and we were soon eyeballing a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

uh-oh.

A suitable time period has now passed for Londoners to feel at ease with all the counterfactuals involving the capital and the Fuhrer.

What if Hitler had come to live in London following a successful blitz campaign? Why is Nelson’s Column still standing in a post-war reconstructed London? And how would Adolf have commuted between his London base at, um, Bow and the art decor splendor of Senate House?

All of these questions are answered in Scott’s London Urban Legends: The Corpse on the Tube associated reading material. You can also find out about the political gargoyles of Camberwell and the former Queen who drank brandy out of the Royal teapot.

It was at this stage of the SELF evening that I ran out of bog roll to stop the bleeding, not to mention feeling slightly peckish for some cheapo Lidl cheddar that I had not yet managed to neck.

Scott left us with the message that you can move ideas, but you can’t move the physical world.

Flesh and blood however has no fixed place. Not even when you are trying to spin out the urban legend of the bloody blogger who thought that his thumb was made of cheapo cheddar.

You can buy Scott’s brilliant book over here.

SELF meet every month upstairs at the Old King’s Head. Ta for accommodating the Brompton underneath the table.