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.

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