There are some photographs on the wall; it’s not clear whether they are for sale. Graham Lewis of Rowan House Services, Wivenhoe, specialises in photographs of chinese people who look how you might expect chinese people to look if you had little experience of, but strongly prejudiced views about how chinese people look: two of his four subjects are wearing coolie hats.

One of his pictures reminds me strongly and specifically of a tiny old woman we saw when we visited China in 1997. She sold bananas to backpackers in Yangshuo. At the time I estimated her age to be somewhere in the region of two hundred years. The face in the photograph reminds me unambiguously of her, but the print is dated 2007. Perhaps she’s now 210 years old, and fitter in many ways than she was when she was 160. Or perhaps he took the photo in 1997. Perhaps he was one of the kids at the next table in Two Brothers backpacker cafe, joking about whether, if they bought all her bananas (liang kwai each; eight bananas, shi liu kwai), she’d overbalance backwards from the weight of her hunchback.

The recognition is feels similar to the sensation I experienced when my friend Joe told me he’d been taught by a teacher called Miss Pooley when he was a pupil at Stillness Primary School, Honor Oak Park, South London, in the 1980s, ten years after I had been taught been taught there by the same woman. I was certain, as a primary school pupil, that Miss Pooley must be beyond retirement age. My dim memory of her is mixed up with memories of a woman called Miss Pope, a supremely old lady befriended by my grandparents at a Methodist Church in between Croydon and Forest Hill: Anerley, perhaps?A silver moustache. Thin, grey hair pinned in a bun. Heavy shoes. Clutching a handbag as though it were a flotation aid, as though it helped her balance, perhaps acting as a counterweight to her hunchback. Hats. An infinitely intricate chinese sculpture in cork, under a glass dome. Slow, precise comments about uncontroversial topics. A room in a Home. Basin in the corner. Powerful central heating. Radiator and teacup noise between clearly punctuated sentences.

Miss Pope, however, was benign, while Miss Pooley was malignant, happy to detain a whole class to write lines as their parents stood waiting outside because of some undetectable misdemeanour probably linked to excess lunchtime sugar consumption and tedious post-lunch subject matter.

I was shocked at Joe’s news that ten class 2P’s after mine had been subjected to her tweedy bitterness. It seemed incredible that she was even still alive; that she hadn’t, as I’d thought, been seventy years old when I was her pupil, that she hadn’t last ovulated when it was illegal for married women to teach.

The basement of Sacred Cafe, Ganton Street. Sacred Planet, the title of the photographic exhibition: images of people from across the globe doing primitive things that suggest spirituality, but really mean flogging bananas, and which reinforce your view of yourself as belonging in the elite upper strata of a globalised, technocratic society. And a shot of some seagulls. Powerful central heating, oppressively hot if you commit the idiot sin of dressing for February streets. Toilet in the corner of the room; through its partially open door I can see the basin. Coffee machine noise, coffee cup noise.

A flawlessly beautiful Korean girl with a sexy mouth. On the stereo, Jumping Jack Flash is, apparently, a gas. I’m sitting almost directly underneath a cold water pipe attached to the ceiling and running the length of the wall to my right. Steam rises slowly from our overheated bodies, condenses and drips occasionally from the pipe. A drop falls on my right wrist. A point of cold, a tiny and precise jewel of immediate experience in the distracted fug of my Londonised consciousness, like finding an unsugared berry in an over-sweetened cake.

Fragments of conversation: men discussing a printed diagram of a simple, linear, theoretical business process.

“What I don’t want to happen…”

“…wait for the dust to settle…”

“…sort it all out…”

Slate grey suits, blue shirts. Brightly coloured socks. Men in their twenties. Language-heavy egos, executing business plans with passion and due diligence.

At the back of the room, an alcove. A statue of a Buddha in meditation posture, a candle in his lap. Asian stuff, Maori-looking carved stuff. Ethnicknacks.

The Korean girl’s boyfriend examines some 35mm film negatives, looking through them at halogen spotlights suspended between parallel 12-volt electrical cables.

The 35mm film camera. The halogen bulb. The Italian-American-style coffee shop. Oppressively intense central heating. The free wi-fi internet connection. Thinly rimmed glasses. The Bic Crystal medium tipped biro. The fruit smoothie. The plastic bottle. The mobile telephone with twomegapixel camera and MP3 music player. The Dune shoe shop. Massimo Dutti. The purple Adidas trainer with yellow trim. The Fujitsu air conditioning unit. All these things will pass, says the Buddha. Fleeting patterns of other fleeting patterns in an unknowable, unbroken stream of simultaneous becoming and decay. There is no cork bobbing down the stream; the cork is also stream. The infinitely detailed chinese sculpture in cork. The bright cyan Gola trainer with yellow trim.

Yes this space is available to hire! We can organise all your catering and bar needs to Give Matt a call….. 07818 445540.

In fifty years’ time will Matt still have a mobile phone? Will mobile phones still have numbers? Was anyone here taught by a Miss Pooley? Since 1990? In fifty years’ time, will I be able to get a free wifi internet connection in this basement? Will there still be a coffee shop on Ganton Street? Will there still be a street?

I want to say Maori, but perhaps they’re more Malaysian. In Kuala Lumpur there’s a whole district where the only industry is carving those things. Bigger than headboards. Halfway between grimacing, Haka-faced masks and celtic knots.

The Korean group are talking in English. Two have middle class, mildly southern accents; the third sounds camply Northern. Northern English, not North Korean. They are expensively dressed.

The oversized individual portion of sugar in the plasticised paper tube. The low voltage halogen lighting system. The laptop personal computer. The final year design project. The university graphic design course. The Americano coffee. The brown Gola trainer with orange trim. The polo shirt. The polytouch-sensitive screen. The flush toilet. The wood-effect vinyl flooring system. The cubic leather seat. The cocktail shaker.

Press ‘Unlock’ then *

I use my mobile phone to take a photograph of the photograph of the old Chinese woman. Sacred, Ganton Street. Opposite Zebrano.

This is a transcript of something I spoke into my mobile late the other night, walking along Stanstead Road just east of Forest Hill.

Hello. I just had an idea for a song then, called “I almost dare stand up,”  which is about someone who’s either getting ready to stand up, or getting ready to stay kneeling on the floor.

That’s interesting, isn’t it, the idea of standing up or kneeling on the floor: standing up to the reality of your surroundings, your situation, your life, or kneeling down – submitting to the spell of language. Wow: submitting to the spell of language. Kneeling. Erm… in the beginning was the Word: it’s written in the Bible, know what I mean? Language infected the human… the raw ape consciousness of early human beings, and, er…

Language is scary. Language itself is scary. Voices in your head: the human animal is the ape that hears voices in its head; it is actually an act of faith to believe that they are inside your head rather than outside. I think… it’s something we presumably need to learn, to have these fully-formed, linguistic voices inside your head, thinking about things when you’re imagining other people’s conversations… that’s quite deeply human… born with no language, everyone is born pre-linguistic. Over the first few years of their lives, language invades their consciousness… we assume the quicker, the better. We assume, as a society, that the more quickly you learn specific forms of language, the better, the cleverer you are. The more quickly you learn specialised forms of language, such as… knitting, or… calculus, or… Feynman diagrams, or… I don’t know, the probability distribution function of Schroedinger’s equation, or… the essential non-linearity, non-predictability of the world…

Wow. Western culture.

Would there have been a time when women found language sexy? Women do find language sexy, something about language. Maybe it’s the intonation curves of the language that they find sexy, maybe it’s not the content. There’s an experiment there – Barry White singing songs about performing biopsies on giraffes…

Today I read about a reggae musician who walked through a tunnel in Greenford, East London, and he was attacked and had his throat slit, and here I am in a tunnel, and… there’s some really bright, colourful graffiti. It’s fantastic, looks really great. … I’m now coming out of the tunnel… I’m spiralling in on where I want to be… in eight minutes’ time, unless I’ve got the times wrong. In the acceleration, to catch the train I’ve forgotten what I was talking about.

Kneeling to the spell of language. You have to submit to other ways of talking to communicate more widely in the network. You have to learn different behavioural and moral protocols to communicate with different parts of the network. Can we communicate? Can we communicate?

Erm… where am I? I’m holding my phone like a microphone, and I’ve no idea whether the microphone’s at the bottom or the top, you know, who knows which microscopic gap in the casing is the mouthpiece. Who knows, who knows. Perhaps… what I’m worried about is… communicating with my child when I’m gone? Perhaps that’s what drives me. How do I communicate with my child? Well, you probably could start by giving it a hug.

There’s a small television or radio or… phone mast at the top of Forest Hill. It’s not as tall as the mast at Crystal Palace. It’s just up the road from where my grandparents used to live: Ringmore Rise. Even now I’m obsessed with having sight of Crystal Palace masts. We used to drive in from Chilton, Harwell, in Berkshire. I always remember the Schumac tree, the bush that had purple in the bud. We’d drive in along the M4, and coming from a small village in, past the jagged assault of office blocks… it wouldn’t have been so high-rise in those days, the early 70s. I remember an animated Lucozade bottle on the side of a factory. I remember the bottle tipping up and glistening bubbles in light bulbs, advertising carbonated water, glucose, food colouring.

Did I use to love it or was I always angry with it? That first hit of London when someone who lives in the country comes to the city. It’d be interesting to trace the psychological city walls of London: where does it assault you, where does London first challenge you? How far out from London Stone, in any given direction? How far out before you feel you’ve left London? Now that’s an interesting idea for a walking project: walk out radially, see how far it is before you feel you’ve escaped London.

This is my train, I think I’d better go.