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.

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