Tales Of The City: Confessions of a poster boy

It was a tense moment. Jane Russell was sprawling before me in a hayloft, her clothing in sultry disarray. Her flimsy skirt had ridden up her caramel thighs, her not-terribly-enveloping yellow blouse had fallen off her shoulder and stretched, from elbow to waistband, across one mountainous breast. Although she was reaching up and tousling her hair in what seemed like pre-orgasmic abandon, her handsome face was set in a snarly pout and – rather more alarmingly – her right hand was tightening around a six-shooter. It was a classic case of mixed signals. She was apparently both horny and sexually up for it, but also seemed to hate your guts and was more than likely to plug you full of lead after, or possibly during, your act of blissful congress on the straw palliasse... Yes, it was frankly alarming to be confronted with a film hoarding that promised a re-run of Howard Hughes's The Outlaw, in 1965, when I was 12.

There's a major sale of vintage film posters at Christie's auction rooms this week. I'll be in the front row, waving my Visa card. But it's not just nostalgia for Ms Russell's bosom that will take me there. To the quaking kid prowling the London streets 38 years ago, film posters offered a brilliant, but confusing, education. On the wall beside the Clapham church where my family attended grim Catholic rituals every weekend, a film hoarding carried posters for new films that were almost exclusively nasty: Psycho, Peeping Tom, Dr Terror's House of Horrors, Repulsion. Some titles became wearily generic: The Curse of This, The Night of That, The Dark Etcetera. But their effect on my awakening conscience was very specific. The posters were like news on a TV screen, bringing weekly bulletins about a frightful world that lurked on the other side of town, where barmy old ladies with mad staring eyes emerged from the shadows to plot each other's downfall (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), where blood dripped down the screen and off the title, as if the words had been penetrated by vampiric fangs (Dracula, Prince of Darkness), and where the come-on line for Maniac (oxyacetylene torch killer, 1962) was "Don't go alone – take a brave, nerveless friend with you!"

I already assumed that horror movies were filmed in crepuscular darkness (with a momentary burst of stabbing light, perhaps, at the point of death) for a niche market of weirdos. Now, it seemed, they were aimed at ordinary people who dragged their more intrepid acquaintances along ("You're not very sensitive, Amanda. Will you accompany me to Maniac?"). Elsewhere, every poster advertising a spy film showed the same image – of a smirking rake with a smoking gun and bevy of concubines arrayed about him. Even non-spy movies featured a similar take-your-pick, male harem fantasy: Alfie, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Walk on the Wild Side, Night of the Iguana. From the posters, you learnt a simple lesson: the male hero does not win the hand of the heroine by his brave, world-saving enterprise. He's someone who simply deserves six girlfriends just because he's a successful man. This was a singularly unhelpful piece of advice: but no more useless than the news that words could be made to bleed, or that voluptuous women lying in haylofts might want to have sex with you and shoot you at the same time...

This fire's not worth putting out

Cardinal Richelieu used to tell his quaking associates, "Give me six lines of a man's handwriting and I shall find something in them to hang him." You could say the same, these days, about restaurant invoices. Every couple of months, someone leaks to a newspaper the bill from a posh London restaurant, showing how three merchant bankers blew a chunk of their annual bonus on a couple of bottles of claret at £15,000 each; then the leaker and the newspaper wait for the world to be outraged. Now, it's the turn of Andy Gilchrist, leader of the Fire Brigades Union, who recently dined at the Cinnamon Club with three friends and ran up a bill of £800. He was upbraided in the Daily Mail, patronised as a heartless sybarite in The Sunday Times and "asked to explain" himself by The Daily Telegraph.

Of course, there's more here for the anti-union newspapers to chew on than the simple revelation that Mr Gilchrist may be a champagne socialist, like the chronically fun-loving Clive Jenkins of the ASTMS union before him. You can see what may have upset some people. The sight of a strike-convening firebrand dining at the Cinnamon Club in the first place is enough to provoke apoplexy (it's housed in the Old Westminster Library, Great Smith Street, round the corner from Conservative Central Office, and is a favourite haunt of New Labour). The thought of the rough diamond Gilchrist scanning the menu and trying to decide between the stir-fried okra and the aubergine crush is enough to cause hoots of derision among the well-bred, as is the idea of this dinner-lady's son from Portsmouth sipping litres of Château Chasse-Spleen at £85. The fact that he paid the bill with a Co-op Visa card, provided by the union, sounded like the last word in Teamsters-style corruption (in fact, he paid the union back soon afterward). The self-conscious ornateness of the supper – its champagne cocktails, its pricey Médocs, its classic pudding wine, its single-malt digestif and the seven bottles consumed by four diners – could seem a kind of beginner's class of swanky-fat-cat behaviour; all that was missing was the Veuve Clicquot, the caviar and the Romeo y Julieta corona. For social snobs everywhere, the Cinnamon bill was like a musical score to be interpreted in a number of ways.

Such interpretations are terribly unfair. We have no idea why people spend money as they do. Trying to infer lifestyle choices from a bill is as foolish as examining a collection of cheque stubs and assuming they will tell you the truth about their owner (that he seems obsessed with paying parking-fines and has a fetish about Sainsbury's). One thinks of A J Weberman, the guy who used to go through Bob Dylan's trash, looking for clues to the meaning of "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" in discarded Coors bottles and Hershey's bar wrappers.

Perhaps Mr Gilchrist was celebrating some imminent good news about the conclusion to the firemen's dispute. Perhaps, like Iain Duncan Smith, he's had a novel accepted for publication (Captain Corelli's Brazier? A Passage to Acas?). But if he embarked on his 18 February beano just to celebrate the fact that he earns £82,000 a year and has been a burr in the Government's backside for four months, well, who could begrudge him that?

Wanted: toy evaluators for Hamleys. Sense of fun needed

Hamleys, the top people's toyshop in Regent Street, has come up with a cracking idea. It's endowing an award for the Best New Toy in several categories. There's the Most Original Toy (the winner will presumably be a spinning-top that morphs into an orc and attacks hobbits), the Twelfth Night Toy (one that's still being played with after the Christmas tree has come down) and the Most Ill-Advised Toy for Tube Journeys, which will be won by Mattel's spookily convincing Ricin Capsule – no, sorry, I made the last one up. In order to test out the fab-ness of the new toys in contention, Hamleys is trying to find guinea-pig kids. It's looking for a dozen families across the UK who will receive 15 toys in July and have a couple of summer months to see whether their little angels play with them, dismember them or feed them to the koi carp. Every age group will be represented: babies, toddlers, pre-school horrors, primary schoolers and toy-disdaining teenagers; the playthings under scrutiny will range from cuddly bears and self-pooing doll babies to Lego castles and bleeping hi-tech digital whatsits. If you fancy becoming a cutting-edge toy evaluator, write to www.thehamleysprize.com, giving the names and ages of your children and the kind of stuff they like. My only concern is that children, mine anyway, don't seem to play with toys any more, in the sense that toys are bits of extruded plastic got up as dolls or cars or soldiers. Over the past three years, the most popular childish-horseplay objects in our house have been a dartboard, a Nokia mobile phone and a trampoline.