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.

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