We drove back from France, back to London, to Battersea and the Wine bar.

Here nothing had changed. The posters, photographs, cartoons and mirrors covered the brick walls and high up, far from acquisitive fingers, my collection of hats, ringed the room.

Our pleasant and conscientious staff served the usual assortment of customers. The journalists,  the authors and the ticket touts. The professional communist, the photographers, the cyclists, the drunks and the detectives, the police and the Rastas. And the actors, the mechanics and the boxers, the butcher, the estate agents, the pseuds and the solicitors and the Australian, each and all of them boasting,  baiting and bullshitting each other. It was, as always, good to see them.

The familiar aroma of smoke from burnt chips and fags, and hamburgers, mixed with the sour nose of spilled wine was  blended by two ceiling fans and fed into the growling air filter. This created the very essence of the Bar. A homely smell.

We had learned, some time ago, that noise made for a busy bar. People liked to be where there was a buzz. The noise from the air filter made customers speak up, so it only needed a handful of people to create a din similar to that of ‘Question Time’ at the House of Commons. And when Jenny, our shapely manageress, blond and much desired by many of the habitués  DJ’ed  the music, she made sure it was played loud and that the choice was beaty.

The neccessity therefore, of having to speak up led to a dryness of the throat and to the customers therefore, being forced into increasing their need for liquids. So as these party people became drunker and louder and thirstier so the need for Joe’s Wine Bar was self perpetuated.

We had bought the bar in the mid 80s when it was called Saws, after old Ma Saw who had used the premises as a haberdashery and who had left her mark on the entrance step in mosaic.  ‘SAWS’ it proclaimed.

We toyed with idea of changing the name to Zits or Blackheads before finally stumbling on ‘Joe’s which was much easier as it was my name.

The bar itself was a long slab of dark, polished mahogany. It was crowned with an overbar, half of a Victorian billiard’s table supported by two rotund and turned legs. This overbar had originally been designed to hold and display glasses and bottles but because ‘it was there’ had became ‘The Bar Museum.’ It bacame home to client’s postcards comparing everywhere in the World with ‘Joes’, other postcards warning of some clients’ imminent return and yet others stating why they would never be coming back and with instructions on what we could do with their unpaid bills.  Handy too was the ‘Traffic Warden in Sight Warning Bell’ and a baseball bat, centrally positioned, should there be need to reinforce a point of order.

There were wine lists, packets of Pork Scratchings, music tapes, the tip jar, cracked but still ever-so-useful. Lost and found wallets, a selection of discarded books, mostly of a sexual content – it appeared that people who came here found what they were looking for – hair slides, rejected engagement rings and opened cigarette packets – their contents long since grown stale.  And in a position of prominence, proudly displayed, our most prized possession, a cricket box mounted on a plastic plinth, awarded to us as the winning team in the Cheater Series engraved The Boozers v. ‘The Rest of the World’ and which was now ours to keep as we had ‘won’ it three years running.

Behind the bar hung a large old pub mirror to which were stuck photos of the owner/proprietor in different dressy outfits, and which smokily reflected the clients as they became more and more out of order. It was interesting to note that some looked more their reflected selves than they did those behind the bar.

London’s Capital Radio had once broadcast to its millions that they had found in Joe’s “the original wine bar” ( which resulted in attracted two new but fleeting clients). They also remarked on the content of our Gentlemen’s Lavatory saying that it was, without doubt, the most intriguing bog in Battersea, a cornucopia of knowledge, they said, the very center of all gossip within the vicinity of 33, Lavender Road, Battersea.

Some graffiti adoring the walls were: – ‘Free the Indianapolis 500′, ‘Things went from Bed to Nurse,’ ‘Toupee or not Toupee, Hairline’s the Question’ and ‘Racial Prejudice is a pigment of the imagination.’ Women like the simpler things in life – like men, Drink wet cement and get really stoned, The grave of Carl Marx is just another communist plot, God is not dead but alive ands well and working on a much less ambitious project, Death is natures way of telling you to slow down,
and Nostalgia is all right but not what it used to be.

The banal got wiped out. We had a selection committee.

I was proud of these walls and spent time studying and learning from them. But, as so often happens, one client went a little too far and every stroke of every felt-tipped mark of philosophy, each superbly drafted image, the whole collections of snidery and suggestion had to be painted over.

However before this remarkable set of graffiti disappeared we recorded the best and produced a poster in memoriam to these famous walls and which we sold with some success.

With our praised pissoirs and our address on Lavender Hill, we became known as Joe’s Lav-on-the-Hill though some others preferred calling us, maybe somewhat unkindly, Joe’s Swine Bar.