Here are the photos…

Couldn’t sleep again last night. Must be wound up at some deep, pre-conscious level expressed as tension in the peripheral muscles. Twitching, scratching. So I decided to take an early morning walk from Croydon up to Forest Hill, have a look at the world and see if I can shake away a few cobwebs.

It crosses my mind, as I’m walking along St James Road (the mighty A222) that I’m slightly looking forward to hearing some of Michael Jackson’s music as the tribute shows and posthumous number 1’s roll out in the coming months. And then I realise that, if I took this too far, I might end up hoping that musicians I hated would live forever, while hoping that the musicians I liked met their deaths. Which is kind of the wrong way round, really. I should be wishing death on, and trying to bring about the untimely deaths of, the musicians whose work I dislike.

They should make the cross-section of the Victoria Sponge Cake the official flag of Britain. Its colours are similar to the George Cross at least – perhaps we should wait until Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all properly devolved and then united themselves and with Cornwall, surrounding England with a new Celtic superstate. Then, we could use it just for England. I think that, being based on a cake, it would project a gentler flavour of nationalism, wouldn’t implicitly tag England with a specific religion, and would still put us in mind of the glory days of the victorian Empire.

Containers / Flat

Two signs on a railing: “Storage containers for rent” and “1-bed flat to let.” Was “2 bed flat to let” – I’d want to see the flat before I put my money down, just check that it’s not made of containers, that they’re not going to sell off the one remaining bedroom.

Walking past a Shell garage, I realise that petrol prices are never stable. The prices on the billboards look static, but they’re snapshots – like still, individual frames in a movie. Change the frame 24 times per second, and the stills give an illusion of movement. Change the frame once a week, and the snapshots can give the impression that the price is more static than it is.

Aspects of ape behaviour that work themselves out in political behaviour: the cold war H bomb tests were chimps throwing sticks at the ground to freak each other out. They didn’t mess around in the 50s, though. They’d explode the equivalent of 26,000,000 tons of TNT on an atoll that probably doesn’t weigh 26,000,000 tons itself.

Map of Sickle Cell and Thalessaemia Genes

Croydon Sickle Cell and Thalessaemia Centre, on the corner of Saxon Road and Whitehorse Road. A large picture in the window of the countries of the world, clumsily painted by Year 12 Art & Design students of the Brit School. Big slice-of-pie device pointing towards African, another pointing towards India. Nothing pointing towards Croydon, suggesting that the Centre has been wrongly sited. Or that the year 12’s were too shitfaced on cocaine, as part of their “Being a celebrity caner like Amy Winehouse” module, to think straight when planning the image.

Impaled beer cans on the railings of the Church of St Alban, Martyr. St Alban was beheaded by the Romans, and I can’t imagine the Romans enjoying beheading someone but then missing an opportunity to stick their head on a spike. So perhaps there’s a parallel there, some homeless drunk historian of religion.

I walk past  Grange Park. The pavement’s sticky with tree sweat, the sky dusted with mackerel cloud. I see some trees and some squirrels and some parakeets. Fucking grey squirrels, they come to this country and take all our red squirrels’ jobs. British conkers for British rodents. Fucking ring-necked parakeets, coming to this country with their coloured feathers and eating all our British seeds. They should fuck off back to India where they belong. British seeds for British birds. Fucking trees, transpiring our precious drinking water with their so-called fucking “xylem tubules”. British water for British animals.

Still waiting for the morning sun to lift yesterday’s ozone from the streets. Raise the fox piss vapours, evaporate the fluid from the vomit of the drunks. Looking out from the hilltop across Croydon, the haze overlies the whole town. Perhaps that’s what’s doing my lungs in. Although perhaps not; perhaps I’m just pinning symptoms on unusual things I notice. And at this moment, off to the right, I catch my first glimpse of priapic analogue terrestrial television broadcast hardware:

Then I do it again. Emotionally destabilised by lack of sleep, I feel a tiny wave of sadness, pure and with no consciously discernable context. And at that exact moment, I notice a mains water stopcock plate in the pavement. And I actually think for a second that the metal plate is what made me sad. Pinning my emotional responses onto things in “the world outside,” not realising that even the visual percept of the plate is a construct of my mind.

On Church Road I spot a green plaque on the wall of a large house. It’s Admiral Fitzroy, Charles Darwin’s captain on the voyages of the Beagle. He also invented the Victoria sponge, I believe. The Queen was initially unimpressed: there are many fancier cakes than the Vicky sponge, such as the Schwarzwalder Kierschtorte, the Dobosch Gateau. She thought, I’ve enjoyed the finest examples of the greatest pastries the western world has to offer. I preside over a mighty empire on which the sun never sets, and a single British multi-national corporation privately runs the entire Indian sub-continent. I’m unimpressed by these sweet but plain layers of sponge, by this basic butter ice filling, by this preserved fruit. Is this the best that the pastry chefs of Britain can manage? Is this designed by the same baker that invented the Tottenham cake? The Eccles cake? I’ve got to have coffee with Austrians this week, you know.

But the Victoria sponge has a rich symbolism, which Fitzroy explained. The bottom sponge layer represents the lower class; the cream and blood-red jam represent the middle classes, crushed between the lower class and the upper class (the top sponge layer), and – right on top – the dusting of sugar representing the monarchy. The middle classes are squishy and stickily sweet. Intriguingly, the upper and lower classes are made of the same stuff – they both would like a life of ownership, acquisition, consumption and hedonism, it’s just that the upper class has access to that lifestyle in full, while the lower class can only dream and drink. And the sponge is full of bubbles, showing the vainglory, the folly, the unsustainability of Empire.

I seem to arrive in Crystal Palace more quickly than the last time (the first time) I took this route. I’ve probably shaved a few hundred yards off the walk, and perhaps I’m either less engaged with decisions about turns or more distracted with random and stupid thoughts. Cafes are just beginning to open up, I could produce an olfactory map of the intensity of bacon aromas.

Je rends visite a Cafe St Germain en Crystal Palace. Je prends un cafe et un croissant au beurre et confiture arome framboise.

I’m sitting at a table outside in the morning sun. The couple at the far table have a copy of The Sun, whose front page lists the drugs that Michael Jackson may or may not have been using in the months prior to his recent death. The headline reads:

Xanax, Prilosec, Vicodin, Paxil, Demerol, Soma, Dilaudid, Zoloft.

At the bottom of the page we’re promised “Jacko coverage: pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15.”

It’s not as catchy a headline as “Wacko Jacko.” I doubt people will adopt it as an everyday phrase, verbatim, in the same way: it’s more difficult to memorise; I sneak a cameraphone photo in a newsagents’ to record it. But I think it’s interesting, as it sounds like a similar list, or at least a similarly long list, to that of the drugs my granny Cosgrove was taking from her mid-80s until she died in her early 90s. She was a habitual singer herself, actually – and no slouch on the dancefloors of 1930s Manchester and the Isle of Man. Although she didn’t make the mistake of committing to 50 gigs at the O2 arena when she was fifty years old.

She used to moan about how pop records just fade out at the end – something which I think influenced me to get into techno, whose tracks typically finish with some definite crash or device of percussive punctuation. She also used to moan about how late 20th century electronic music was “all bass,” a development which I never succeeded in convincing her was a marker of genuine musical progress. My mum now has, and still plays, her old upright piano. Her work colleagues used to sit her on top of filing cabinets and get her to sing whatever songs were popular at the time. She knew hundreds, she was the original human juke box, she was a 512MB MP3 player in biological form.

Put another nickel in,
in the Nickelodeon,
all I want is loving you
and music, music, music.

A Moston twang and nasality to the vowels. Light, delicate consonants. Old school Moston, when people still relied on friends and neighbours to make music. I tried to get her into Ableton Live to lighten the long days in her nursing home, perhaps the occasional knees-up round the old MacBook Pro, but she’d have none of it.

The couple with the paper are talking to the woman at the next table; she’s obviously a friend. She leans across and says, “They say it was the pain relief he was taking.”

And I’m struck by how multiply redundant that observation is. What reason could she possibly have for thinking, for it even to flicker-flash across the hindmost corner of her mind, that her friends could possibly not already know what “they” think killed Michael Jackson? We’ve seen and heard precious little else, on 13 24-hour news channels, for the past 36 hours. I’ve heard that 46-character message about six hundred times now, in this newspaper on my table, on ITV, on BBC1, BBC2, BBC News 24, on Sky, on BBC Radios 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, on VH1, on Capital Radio, on Heart FM, on CNN, on NBC, by email, by tweet, on multiple discussion fora, on Google News, on Google Video, by phone, over the fences on either side of my front and back gardens, and mysteriously, in the pattern of raisins in a fruit scone two days before he died. It’s like culture is having an epileptic fit, short-circuited, the same half-dozen words burnt stroboscopically into the occipital lobes of every language-speaking brain on the planet. We know this rumour and  the rhythms of the manifold media by which it has been delivered so well that we’d be more or less able to write the next week’s editorial content of the top-selling half-dozen broadsheets and tabloids ourselves, now, on this napkin using chocolat from this pain au chocolat if we weren’t catatonic with prurient tragedy repetition overload.

It’s about as constructive a contribution to contemporary world discourse as saying, “my thin lips are moving up and down, and a reedy sound is being emitted from my windbox as I blow air through it with my lungs.” The culturally-transmitted aspects of our human consciousness are at the point of collapse from a lack of narrative biodivesity. Human society could go down unless we start talking about a sufficient number of other things to sustain the linguistic transactions on which it depends. We don’t need to hear this message again, from her, while we’re trying to caffeine-punch through a fug of insomnia, or relax out from under a hangover with our wife at eight o’clock on a  Saturday morning in Crystal fucking Palace.

Or maybe she was talking about her uncle Keith rather thanMichael Jackson.

I leave for Forest Hill, passing one of those strange, headless things, like bulked up street lamps with the top removed, that crop up around London. I like to think of them as Fart Vents, venting the noxious vapours of the old sewers.

The shrine to Michael Maloney on Sydenham Hill has been redecorated. The candles have gone now, replaced by solar-charged LED garden uplighters, although how well they’ll work in the bushes I can’t tell. Pictures of the baby Jesus, a statue of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, pictures of Mary, pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus, pictures of the crucified Jesus. Pictures of Michael Maloney, pictures of Michael Maloney’s son, who as far as I’m aware wasn’t killed in the same accident as his father. The father, the son. I imagine his mother trying to decode the shrine for him:

Now that’s Michael there, your poor earthly father, and he’s in heaven now with Jesus, Mary and God, who’s your heavenly father. No, he hasn’t risen from the dead like Jesus. Well, he sort of has risen, but only his spirit, not his body. Jesus… when Jesus rose from the dead, his body rose up, too. And Michael won’t be with us any more, although God is always with us, because God is everywhere, and God will always love you, although he did allow your father to be killed, so to what extent and how he expresses that love in terms of interventions in earthly affairs I haven’t quite worked out myself yet. So probably the closest thing to imagine is that… daddy is Joseph, and mummy is Mary, and you’re the baby Jesus, and God is Himself. Well, you’re not the baby Jesus, and Joseph wasn’t really Jesus’s earthly father, was he, because Jesus was conceived of a virgin, by God’s power. Joseph was like… it was a bit like Joseph adopted the baby Jesus. I think it’s probably a bit like IVF with a mystery sperm donor, do you know about IVF, like your auntie Teresa and your uncle Geoff had? No, Teresa didn’t have a baby with God, they fertilised one of her eggs with semen from an anonymous donor. God’s sperm… no… God’s like… he’s a mystery spiritual father. God loves us in a fatherly way. Imagine fatherly love, and that’s what… God gives us. No, your poor daddy’s not God, he’s with God. God the father, God the son, God the Holy Ghost. No, your dad’s not a ghost. Your dad’s… your real father… it was his sperm… well… well, you look much more like your dad than Colin at your mum’s work. Your poor daddy Michael had a smallish nose, and you’ve got one too… Michael had spiky hair, and you’ve got a spiky haircut, Michael had two… legs… about the only trait you’ve got in common with Colin is the one green eye and the one blue eye. God is all around us. God flows through everything. Imagine God… almost like physical law itself, the ongoing, endless, tumbling flow of matter-energy… except, that doesn’t work because… then God is nature, not supernatural. There’d be no difference then between a godless universe and a universe full of, composed of, God.

Dead bee

Just along the road from the Maloney shrine, a dead bee lies on the pavement. If bees are becoming extinct, that’s a frightening thing and we should be put ting up memorials to individual bees.

Whatever you pray for tonight, try to give God some notice. God’s omnipotent, but for the past 2000 years he’s been intervening only in ways that could also be explained by the laws of godless physics. So he has to be very, very subtle in the way he sets things up. He has to use very subtle chains of causality. Say you’re driving round a corner looking for a parking space and you pray that there’ll be a parking space in the next street. Well… don’t leave it that late, because God’s options for intervention in the granting of your prayer might be limited and in fact quite dangerous. For instance, he can’t intervene to make a kid change his mind and steal a car from the street in which you want to park, because he’s given human beings free will. Similarly, he can’t make a meteorite veer into the Earth’s atmosphere and crash into a car, removing it and leaving a shallow crater for you to park in, because then the path and acceleration of that meteorite would look suspicious to any astronomer who had been tracking it. That leaves him with options like snapped handbrake cables or explosive gas leaks, both of which might look natural and untraceable if imlpemented well, but which would jeopardise the safety of passers-by. Give God some notice in your petty, selfish prayers.

The future humans re-program terminators to go back in time to kill people who buy a puschair that won’t fit their car, so buy a new car.

We went to a car boot sale – Hayes Farm – last Sunday. I was struck by the number of enormous and expensive-looking cars: BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus; we followed a huge Lexus 4 by 4 along the dirt tracks out to the farm exit at the end of the sale.

Today I was eating my lunch, sitting on a low wall in St George’s Walk, Croydon. The Council wanted to close it down, and beam in a new development, called Park Place, to be designed and installed by Minerva. But, with lots still vacant in Croydon’s other shopping malls, the Whitgift Centre and Centrale, the project stalled. By this point, many businesses in St George’s Walk had closed down, so the place has a sort of ghost-town look. In theory, the Council’s trying to support small businesses with low rents and, nominally, with a bit of promotion (which boiled down to a temporary sign one weekend saying “there are some shops in here”) . But Croydon shoppers are snobbish, aspirational. They drive Lexus 4 by 4s, BMWs to their car boot sales.

As I sat there, a crushed napkin blew, tumbleweed-like, down the mall, followed by an empty sugar sachet. It reminded me of a passage I read a while ago in a pop science book, about how vortices dissipate their energy into smaller and smaller vortices, until the energy’s lost to entropy: we stop thinking of it as energy, because we can’t capture it, can’t make use of it. So… the tiny gusts rolling the sugar sachet down St George’s Walk are… what, energy dissipated down from huge flows of warm air around the atmosphere? I’m not sure whether I understand it properly, to be honest – I’d personally like small gusts to be able to cause large air currents, but… there you go, I’m not a professional.

I’ve started buying lunch and coffee from the Madeira Deli, and today I bought a broom from DIY Den, but I don’t think that’ll be enough by itself to save them in their competition for hearts and minds with B & Q, the national and transnational crap-vortices of the big brands. So is there a sense in which St George’s Walk is a small vortex of transactions, dissipating mater-energy out to people who drink the coffee, or let it go stale, or use the broom, wear out the broom? Dissipate the value of the broom, the coffee, to entropy, to dust and smelly piss?

I’m sure that car boot sales, jumble sales and charity shops can be viewed as small vortices of transaction and of goods, of matter-energy, relating to the world of transnational commerce and high street retail in the same way little eddies of wind relate to intercontinental cyclones.

On Sunday at Hayes Farm I watched a woman try to sell a dress. “I want £5 on it love, It’s Oasis, I spent £100 on it. No, can’t take £3, I spent £3 getting it dry cleaned.” Her voice had a confessional edge to it, as though she was ashamed at having spent that much money, making back so little. If you sell your stuff for 2% of the price for which you bought it, you’ve dissipated its value. You’ve taken that item from a high-value to a valueless state. Is there a sense in which she’s literally dissipated energy, created entropy where there was order before? BMWs depreciate quickly. If your lifestyle involves buying BMWs new, then selling them after three years, are you dissipating a lot of transactional value?

Not much to report – I didn’t take my dictaphone – except:

I was test-driving a new haircut today, and am pleased to report zero teeth-sucking from passers-by, in stark contrast to my experience on the South Circular over the weekend, when my barnet looked like something out of the original Charlie’s Angels TV series (and I’m talking about Farah Fawcett, not pockmarked hispanic-looking hood).

I also decided that people drop food packaging litter in the street to protest about the poor quality of their food and to provide work for street cleaners. Similarly, perhaps people drive everywhere because they know that if they walked, society would be turned absolutely inside out within three months.

Here’s the route (if Gmap Pedometer’s working still).

Zoos aren’t entirely free of philosophical problems. Every information card at London Zoo now carries a statement of how fucked is the particular species to which it relates. On at least the larger cards, all possible values are printed, greyed out apart from the value that relates to the species in question, which is highlighted in red. The possible values are:

1. Not currently threatened
2. Threatened
3. Endangered
4. Critical
5. Extinct in the wild

The cat 1’s all look a bit humdrum, the average score seems to be about 3.5, and it feels like the cards are suggesting that all species are ratcheting up through the categories. There are a good few category 5’s, including a species of Cichlid fish that seems to have been a 4 the moment it was discovered and a 5 within about twenty minutes. I assume that the naturalist who first ID’d the fish got over-excited and accidentally kicked a can of creosote into its stream while dancing with scientific triumph.

And there’s a subtext, unprinted, to every card: TOO MANY PEOPLE. And in this regard zoos are especially conflicted. They do best when they get plenty of punters through the gates, but their deep message gets sadder and sadder the higher the human population rises. David Attenbourough has spoken out recently about the dangers of human overpopulation, that there are three times as many people now than there were when he first started broadcasting. And this is where we have to start thinking about what the world needs rather than what we need – we very much need to start thinking further outside the box – because what the world needs is for us to get the fuck sterilised. They should be handing that leaflet out at the turnstiles, offering the operation for free under local in a small white building on the ticket piazza. “Got children sir? Can we clip your sperm ducts?”

Because I think, if there was a way for them to coordinate themselves, a way for them to understand the issues and evidence and be empowered to seek solutions, that the rest of the animal kingdom would definitely be considering a deep cull of the human population at the moment.

“The problem is that they’ve got language, they’ve got this learnt system for dodging Malthusian limits on their population growth. It’s just not a level playing field. So we were thinking about culling them down. Not right to extinction, just to levels that we can all deal with, maybe a few tens of thousands. We were thinking about trying to limit them to a few mediterranean islands.”

“The problem is, if you look at the population spread models here, that they’ve got a load of written instructions for travelling around really fast, exploiting loads of different environments, and we think that if we leave enough of them, in sufficient numbers and in a rich enough environment, they’ll just break out and we’ll have a pandemic again.”

“We’re hopeful that, given how fucked the world is in general, if we can smash them into small groups, perhaps around a dozen, perhaps twenty or so at a push, and focus hard on keeping group size down around that level, they won’t be able to organise into social structures within which roles are sufficiently specialised to support written language, or indeed many of the specialised vocabularies and dialects they use now, so that might be a way to go: very small groups, total population of around twnety thousand, something along those lines. The question now is about how we organise all this without the tragedy of a huge boom and bust in the populations of carrion predator species, too.”

Today I walk the South Circular road – London’s asphalt smile, a forced grin in tarmac.

On the way to the tram stop. A bloke walks past carrying a box which contains a chair with in-built loudspeakers, designed to seat you low and vibrate you with the clumsy explosive bass of games, movies and music. He’s talking to his girlfriend, paying plenty of attention because he realises that it’s a clunky, male-hind-brain, pile-of-shit purchase that’ll encourage him to sit in his room, pissed and stoned, being vibrated by the graceless rumble of trash culture.

On the tram. Mr Phipp didn’t build the bridge, nor did he claim to own it. The bridge was very old, and it was named after Mr Phipp because he would sit most days atop its cobbledy arch and fish for his supper. And, when he caught a fish in his silken net, he would stroke it gently behind its gills until it became so perfectly contented that it simply made deep, quiet, cosmic sense for the fish to slip away into a peaceful death-sleep, so that Mr Phipp could cook it for his tea. And the bees bumbled, warm and unhurried in the brambles and the buttercups and the pale, perfect roses. But, Oh! – Mr Phipp, look at what they’ve done to your bridge. The stream, now criss-crossed by the shadows of high-voltage power lines, is long-choked with broken chunks of cement and hard core aggregate; rusting components from burnt-out motorbikes; spray-paint cans; the compressor motor of a fridge-freezer; the soiled underwear of a drunken slut or a rape victim; junk food packaging, surplus plastic sheeting and many other items of trash too vile to describe in electronic print. And the bridge carries a metalled road now, along which bucket the stolen hot-hatches and the hen night stretch limousines and the tank-like 4-by-4’s of the angry, confused, bitter zombies who live in the shitty flats constructed of plastic-coated metal sheeting, tear-marks of rust beneath airgun pellet dents. When we were looking for a house in South London we signed up to view an ex-council semi not far from here and the estate agent told us directly that people like us shouldn’t live in an area like this. He couldn’t sell us a house within a mile of Phipp’s Bridge. Poor Mr Phipp.

In Putney there’s a noodle bar called They East, or The Yeast… its sign looks like TheYeast and it’s impossible to tell how to read it, and why the owners would ever choose to name it either way. So unintelligible independently-designed business signage is going strong in Putney as well as in the zones further south. I visit the Putney branch of Gregg The Bakers, and it’s staffed by elegant Japanese girls – the products are the same (cheap sarnies, lumpen buns, flaccid sausage rolls) but the atmosphere has as much in common with that of a Kyoto temple tea house as it has with that of the Gregg’s by the station in West Croydon.

There’s a certain gentility of haircut and wardrobe in this part of town. Still very martial though, sometimes: khaki tee’s and combats, like you’re just back from Iraq or Vietnam. Jeans, combats, the clothing of our imperial masters; men in drag, queuing for the ATM near Shakalaka South African restaurant. Across the road, a man who looks like Dom Joly walks just ahead of his pregnant wife, his trailing hand resting on her pregnancy. She’s thinking, does he love me for anything other than my baby-making qualities? Is that to be my role, inter-generational glue in the chain of his family’s bloodline, as he fucks a succession of twenty-year-old interns at his advertising agency? He looks like Dom Joly, big-jawed, and the men in dresses also have big jaws, strong jaws. There’s no bladed weapon I could lift that could cut through those jawbones, I could sling a battle-axe at his head, it’d just bounce off, I’d hurt my wrist. There are significant architectural and engineering problems that could be solved with bones like that, if only we had a pair of those pneumatic roof-cutters that firemen use to cut their way into crashed cars. If only we could jemmy the jaw from the 30lb Boer skull. The skull of the germanic invader, the warrior skull, the wrecking-ball brain case. A man’s mind feels confident and at ease, riding around in a skull like that. My head, by comparison, is like the egg-shell of a calcium-starved chicken, and it’s the same with my sould, my heart. My heart is marbled with arterial fat; I wonder if I’ll live long enough to benefit from Lycopine pills? What shape is the boundary between your life and the death beyond? How far away is that boundary? Can you probe it with your hands, with your fingers?

Yia Mas Greek restaurant. Or is the Y a wine glass? Or an omega, twisted to look like a wine glass? If it is an omega, how would I look it up in the Thompson directory?

Equestrian voices at the bus stop, £200 jeans walking out of the newsagent. Manic grins on the signage of the Ethicare Dental Practice.

What is the South Circular, anyway? It’s not a road – today I’ll walk along Upper Richmond Road, Stanstead Road, East Hill, Battersea Rise, Waldram Park Road. It’s not even a road number: here I am trying to work out whether I’m on the A205 or the A3. It’s a traffic flow, it’s a directional tendency, it’s London’s thin-lipped hidden grin. Two horseback policemen guide their steeds into the flow of traffic, tooled up with truncheons and electric spaz-sticks. A tiny, East African-looking traffic warden walks round the corner, lost in his uniform. I ask myself whether the Rambo franchise might have developed differently if the violence aesthetic of Rambo 4 had been applied to the plot of Rambo: First Blood.

A cluster-mall: Cineworld, GAP, Agos, Next, Waitrose, Boots, a Steak chain I’ve not heard of before – Spur Steak Ranches, “a taste for life” is its motto. Cows farting greenhouse methane into the atmosphere, a taste for life; levelling the Amazon to grow beef, a taste for life; my arteries marbled with heavy animal fats, a taste for life; the bolt-gun through the brow, the multi-lobed guts spilling on the abattoir floor, a taste for life, a taste for life. I wonder what’s the tightest cluster of shops, what do we need now in the city? The nuclear mall.

A black kid in a baseball cap walks past with his girl, sucking his teeth, thinking, I bet that cunt’s going to walk past, and he’ll leave it 50 yards because he half-thinks I’m going to turn round and attack him, and then he’s going to say into his dictaphone, a black kid in a baseball cap walks past with his girl, sucking his teeth. See, I’m the sly, whinging cunt who’s physically weak, who hasn’t invested any energy or effort in his physique, I haven’t got any flows, although I make annoyingly good beats. I’m not a warrior though, my jaw literally weak, no protection, no use as an engineering component, I stick to the main roads, relying on the threat of racist police violence for my protection. He’s a warrior, he eats meat, he works out, he’s an afro-futurist warrior. I haven’t even got any fucking bars. If I had my way, the music industry would be torn apart, all industry would be torn apart, the whole cultural ego-generating machinery of modern capitalism would be ripped to shreds, and then there’d be violent chaos that would sweep me to my instant death, and result in human extinction, and I need to be careful not to take a wrong turn and end up anywhere real, the real city, Walworth, Peckham.

And the traffic wheels round the A205, and the city breathes the traffic in, and the city breathes the traffic out, and it’s almost like a cycle, except there are no cycles; there are diagrams with what look like circles, but there are in truth no cycles. And here we are, somewhere between Wandsworth, Battersea, Clapham, places I’ve travelled through wondering if I’m on the wrong bus, on the way to somewhere I’m glad I recognise.

My grandfather thought our family had Huguenot roots. Here’s a Huguenot graveyard, now a public garden, Mount Nod.

Here rest many Huguenots who, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685 left their native land for conscience’ sake and in Wandsworth found freedom to worship God in their own manner. They established important industries and added to the credit and prosperity of the town of their adoption.

They didn’t leave France for conscience’ sake, the whinging cunts, they couldn’t hack the Catholics sucking their teeth at them, that’s why they fucked off to South London and died on the A205.

I wonder how old is too old to patronise Larry Flint’s Hustler Club in Croydon? What if you’re old enough to be the father of one of the girls? What if one of your daughter’s friends works there?

Next to Hustler Club is Walkabout, a bar whose stated theme is “the awesome spirit of Australia.” This evening, as I walked past, a handful of pissheads looked glum as they watched soccer on an LCD television.

I’ve not been sleeping well recently. Tonight I woke from dozing at 1:30am, convinced I needed to organise the donation of a three-piece suite of lounge furniture to a youth centre. It took about twenty minutes for the conviction to die down, and during that time I was convinced that I’d been obsessed by this fictional furniture for about 18 months.

The girls in the T Mobile poster are excited: they are obscure individuals lost in a crowd, but they are grinning because the camera is on them and they have been given a microphone. Grin it up, girls. Sing along with Pink. Pink is being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds; you’re being paid fuck all; T Mobile will recoup millions, from you and your mates.

Beyonce Knowles, meanwhile, advertises Trident Chewing Gum.

Figure 1: her feral alter ego, Sasha Fierce, is pictured having broken into a dark building, shitting on the floor.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The following preview has been approved for all audiences:

Perhaps the shot of Megan Fox draped over a motorbike with her arse up in the air is an image that people of all ages and ages can agree is beautiful. But… the movie seems designed to raise the bloodlust and horn of teenage boys, with a combination of Megan’s arse and giant, energy-guzzling robot berzerkers who deal out ultra-mechavoilence, then mutate into petrol-driven road vehicles. Wind the kids up into an erotic, martial lather and then deliver to them images of sports cars. Should we approve flows of imagery such as this for the fourteen-year-olds of today? Shouldn’t we be cutting images of cars and motorbikes together with images of unattractive women? Shouldn’t Megan Fox be draped over a compost bin?

Uffa Halal Pizzas, a member of www.just-eat.co.uk. Sullen people waiting for a bus. An argument at the reception desk of the Candy Health and Beauty Centre.

A signpost for the BRIT school.

“….The BRIT School is an outstanding provider of specialist education and training in the performing and visual arts and media. As one year 11 parent commented, ‘The school is unique – it provides opportunities not available elsewhere’……..” (OFSTED)

Recent alumni include Amy fucking Winehouse, for fuck’s sake. Which course modules did she take? Would it be alright if my child didn’t take those modules, or are they mandatory requirements of the course?

I remember reading a quote from someone like Mark Ronson, saying something to the effect that Amy broadcast her pain so that her listeners might be eased in theirs. Which is a little bit like comparing her to Jesus Christ: a bizarre, unspoken, unsigned but binding contract whereby Winehouse kills herself by hoovering up drugs, freeing us from our own chemical and emotional addictions. I can’t help thinking that, viewed from the Buddhist perspective, Amy isn’t a saviour but a victim of an unsustainable ego: habits of mind, flows of intention, affect, behaviour and consequence that drive her round and round in a tornado of high-entropy pain. Perhaps it’s difficult to live with knowing that her vocal style is an imitation of 60s Motown stylings, that she’s essentially a fraud; perhaps it’s difficult to live through constructing not only a private ego but a public myth, that society and media drive on, force her to live out. Her career is based on simulating something that she isn’t, in public. A tiny Croydon girl making money simulating the music of black 1960s America.

We pass some crumbling terrace blocks, derelict businesses.

Figure 2: Originality is no guarantee of success.

I start to climb up into the Hills of South London, the geological city wall: Grange Road. Past some cans of superstrength lager, upturned, impaled on the iron church fence. Past a park, drunks with pale, ultra-purified cider; a girl pushing a pram, a grandfather with his two grandsons who are fascinated by tree stumps; he’s happy to be ahead of them, he knows they’ll catch up, they’re basically good kids, they just need a nudge in the right direction once in a while.

I pass a kid who’s walking along with headphones in, rapping: I try to work out if he’s talking on a phone, rapping along to a song, or a fucking nutter. He’s saying, “I’m walking along on a broken foot in my fucking jeeeans.” I pass a graveyard (grave of a woman called Januaria) and he passes me, having cut through the church yard, and he does look like he’s limping a little: perhaps he’s rehearsing, writing lines. “Better daaaays,” he says, expansive arm movements, loping along past the big houses of Upper Norwood.

If we turned off the air conditioning, the temperature might go down.

Towards the big mast. Radio comes out of it. It’s not the radiation per se that we love, it’s patterns of modulation, modulations in the frequency and amplitude of the radiation. We like patterns of change. We like patterns of change.

Crossing the road in that empty moment just as the lights change against me but before the cars can accelerate – like the moment between the out-breath and the in-breath.

The Crystal Palace. A theme park so fucking amazing that Queen Victoria went. They had it in central London and it stunned everyone in the world, then they moved it to South London and it burnt down. Some kids set it on fire, probably. In South London we can burn glass.

Walking along Sydenham Hill past a shrine to Michael Maloney, who died on the road here. The memorial itself is just off the pavement, in the large garden of a large house; but the wire mesh fence has been deliberately pulled down to let relatives tend the shrine (with candles and flowers). I’d love to know how the relationship’s going between his relatives and the owners of the house they vandalise in the commemoration of their dad.

Figure 3: Michael Maloney

Try to do local things, community things. And try to forgive yourself if you fail. Because, while you might be somewhat justified in claiming that the world needs community rather than corporations, the truth is that what the world needs, more even than a profound shift in power from corporate to community organisations, is human failure. The failure to organise, the failure to persist. Embrace your failure, human failure is now nature’s keenest need.

What have you got if you live out here? Connected to Croydon or Elmers End by the 239 bus, and that’s your lot, unless you own a car which you can drive along the A222, making subtle, nuanced decisions about whether to drive to Bromley, pay over the odds for a parking space and shop in the high street shops there; or whether to drive to Croydon, pay over the odds for a parking space there, and shop in Croydon’s high street shops. It doesn’t make sense to pay to drive to Croydon, park, then buy a TravelCard to go into London for the day – fuck it, might as well drive into London and cop for the Congestion Charge.

Bushes, civic weeds, pumping stations, electrical substations. Civic bushes like pubic tufts on the concrete skin of the urbanised world. Mammal smells, animal fuckstinks, territorial beast pheromones.  Nature as dirt, as mess. Nature is unwholesome in this context. Wax the city. Nature as unwashed minge. Shave your armpits, London.

Magnet, DSS, HireCenter, Timber Experts, City Plumbing Supplies: this is the Triple-2 retail park on the A222 between Croydon and Beckenham. On the way to, in the zone of administrative influence of, Bromley (twinned with Neuwied, Germany).

Decking products are in stock.

Put down a layer of thick, black plastic. Cover it with gravel. The plastic stops the weeds from coming up. Suffocates the earth. Our style is pre-biotic, abiotic. Life’s a beach. Deck the garden, deck the beach. The beach is an extension of your house, the garden is another dining room. Sit outside, thinking about how hot it is, gravel and black plastic.

Bathroom Plumbing Superstore, The Big Yellow Self-Storage Copmany, Screwfix open seven days, Penfold’s Vauxhall dealership, B & P, Arc Car Wash £2.10: another retail park across the road, somehow less enticing to me, as though it’s more for tradesmen, like a reflection of Triple-2 in a tarnished, distorted mirror.

A Tesco store, open 24 hours, constant streams of traffic in and out.

Petrol – Cafe – Cash – Bakery – Delicatessen

In that order: Beckenham’s Maslovian hierarchy, Beckenham’s priorities for living.

Beckenham itself – the old village centre, a patch of lawn: the hamlet by the river Beck. Local shops with signs that are difficult to decode. An indian restaurant: Rasai or Rasoi, I can’t tell because the cursive font is graphically ambiguous. Fleurs bar. Or cafe, it’s hard to tell. Could be either, or both – a small bar somehow without intimacy, or a cafe that’s too dark. Another sign, on the door this time, bears an extra word. Hazelnut Fleur’s? Fleur’s Hazelnut? Cake Expectations is the exception that breaks the rule: it’s a cake shop. Local girls’ wedding cakes. Across the green, a shopthat might be calles Plumbing Supplies, or might be called Decorating Supplies, or both, or neither, or might be two shops who clubbed together to negotiate down on a sign-writer’s prices. You are not meant to find these shops on the Internet, you are meant always to have known them, to have had friends or relatives who own or work in them. Cartridge Inc.

Albert Parr & Sons, Funeral Directors.White gothic font on black. Can’t show the merchandise, can’t display coffins, certainly not with dummy corpses lying in state; nobody wants to see that. Cut flower memorials and candles instead: the flowers, rootless, are dying; the candles burning down as they glow. A memory of a recording of a black American preacher from the 1950s, steeling his congregation for protest and sacrifice: “As it burns, the candle is perishing. Everything shines by perishing.”