Edgy electro pop music is kids’ music with swearing, X-rated playground chants, skipping songs with Tipper stickers.

Walking north along London Road, I’m tailgated by a man in a brand new Shoprider Deluxe electric wheelchair, protective plastic film still on the headrest. He’s not been driving electric wheelchairs for very long, he still drives impatiently, angrily. After a few minutes I slow down and drop away to one side, pretending to look at the vegetables stacked outside a caribbean grocer’s shop, allow him to pass. Almost uncomfortably close to a display of cassava, yam, ocra, aubergines. He glides past and I notice that he’s had a hydraulic system fitted, so that the front of the chair can be raised and lowered. He bumps it up and down a couple of times, rolling down the street, smoking endo, sipping on gin and juice, laid back, with his mind on his money and his money on his mind.

These are the end times. No rubbish worth nicking in the skips, it’s all toxic: MDF, chipboard, PVCu.

An ambulance with smoked glass windows pulls out of St James’s Park, rolls eastward along St James’s Road. Gently, symbolically, linguistically, guided around the corner of Hogarth Crescent by the markings and the signs. Tinted windows; transporting shady emphasymics, 40-year cannabis veterans. What tales to tell, tales to tell of the ends; what tales to tell, tales to tell of the ends.

On the wall of a derelict pub, last signed The Oakfield:

To the thieves. This building has been broken into 6 times. There is nothing left to steal.

Break into the church opposite instead. Stel their sound system, their drums, their synthesisers. Nobody around here can afford to drink in a pub that can charge enough to cover the decoration pubs need to be attractive to human beings: computer-generated neo-flock wallpaper, pork belly bistro meals, steak and oyster pie, home made, £11.50, served in a floorboarded, high-ceilinged dining room.

Some blows leaves with a petrol-driven hairdryer machine; blowing leaves from the concreted front yards of the houses in the shade of the mega-tree they’ve been pruning. He looks a bit antsy, because he can tell what he’s doing is wrong: why hasn’t he got a broom? How is it more effort to sweep the  leaves into a pile, for composting? Why does it take less energy to blow the leaves away from… everywhere… than to sweep them into one place? Why is it more cost-efficient to dissipate the leaves with a £300 blower… why could his company not buy him a Twix, and tell him that it will provide him with the extra energy he’ll need to sweep the leaves into a composting heap? Is it his pride? “I’m not just a skivvy, I’ve got a machine like a Robocop machine-gun prosthetic on my arm, gas exploding at high speed from the nozzle hundreds of times every minute, nature scattering before my power.” Is that somehow more palatable in terms of pride to someone raised on first-person multi-player shoot-em-ups? FPMPSEUs. I’m not just some cunt with a broom, I’ve got a gun built into my forearm. What you see is leaves being blown, what I see is me shooting your ribcage through.

I pass a sex shop, Pillow Talk. A dummy in the window wears knickers that are a little bit loose, like they’ve got enough capacity to be worn by men or women.

The Leslie Arms, another shell of a pub with Pan-like demons’ heads carved above the doors, CCTV cameras attached to the walls. “Grip Fast,” says the heraldic motto in the sign. Hold tight to your dream, to your ego dream of what you are, because that means that you require stuff. Require the stuff, you idiot. Stuff to sustain your idiot dream.

Beefy Boys cafe. Fat Bellies, Big Bellies.

Where does binge drinking come from? From having an ego dream so obviously wrong, so never right, that part of you wants to smash it down, even while part of you struggles to maintain it.

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