Meanwhile, here in the UK, people are paying top dollar for broken lights attached to broken toys. Reclaimed luminaires.

So, what’s the difference? Where’s the joke? Is there a living to be made by importing amusing jerry-rigged duct-tape designs from India to the West? Is there a class of Indian who’ll pay crores of rupees to buy a piece of weird machinery knocked together in a backstreet out of trash?

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.

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.”

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.”

Seen while out walking in Thornton Heath, north Croydon: an advertisement for Fosters Scuba, canned lager containing a compressed gas cannister which introduces bubbles into the liquid – ironically, like coming up too quickly from a deep dive would give you the bends, gases released from dissolution in the blood.

I once had a dream in which an old-fashioned aqualung, which looked something like a fire extinguisher, was forced into my throat. My face was battered to pieces, rags and flaps of bleeding flesh. The top of my head was pushed back and back, my jaw dislocated, then broken. Through my skull, the sound and feeling of my neck vertebrae crushing and cracking. The caustic electricity of visceral panic, which in real life would be silenced by death. Metal gouging gullies in my larynx, my lungs torn and pulped. Gargling, spraying blood and mucus, bone fragments driven through tubes and membranes, ribs splintering.

The morning after, I wondered whether I’d been lying on my back, felt some compression in the back of my neck, fantasised a violent misexplanation of those feelings and been carried away with the imagining. But when I asked a dream analyst about it, some time later, he suggested that the dream represented a self-imposed terror of fellatio, that I was programming the suppression of homosexual urges.

Fosters Scuba: slips down like a dream.

Have they decided to level Croydon? They’re doing something horrible on a large scale, and they’re doing it at night.

There’s a conveyor belt. Twelve feet wide, the width of the machine. Unconscious bodies thrown onto the pitted, slimy rubber, disappearing into the mouth of the machine and chewed to gritty paste by its appalling metal teeth.

Drunk kids stumble out of bars, cops tase them. Bang. Stun them, beat them about the head until they lose consciousness, throw them onto the vulcanised tongue of the machine. Zero tolerance finally implemented. Burn them to tar, to carbon. Plumes of outrageous vapours whipped away by the wind.

*****

If you’re ambivalent about having children, or taking a job, or making your way in the word, that’s a revolutionary stance and is exactly what the world as a total biological system desperately needs.

“I was going to go to the bookshop and get something to read but… I can’t really be bothered. I was going to recharge my phone to talk to my friends and family…”

The world needs failures now, the world needs human failure on a global scale. Fail and be proud. But not too proud, because that might motivate you to do something.

“I was going to set up a record label and a fashion label, but I thought, probably wouldn’t get very far so I thought, just stay home. And the kettle’s broke, and I couldn’t really be bothered to fix it, because I thought it’s probably complicated, so I just… well, I turned the tap on, but then I thought, allow it…”

THAT’S THE SPIRIT. THAT’S WHAT THE WORLD ACTUALLY NEEDS FROM US RIGHT NOW AND IT REPRESENTS A REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.

In the clothes shop they’re playing house music, disco samples of orchestral strings suggesting soap operas about rich people. House music, the music of preening and consumption.

Ninjarous

Saw a poster in the Whitgift shopping centre men’s toilets for an organisation called “Autism Mothers”. Subtitle: “Succeeding where governments fail.”Picture: about half a dozen madeover, skinny women aged between 20 and 50, looking businesslike/defiant, steely/blank stares, all wearing black. All very definitely wearing black… not wanting to wear anything different. Not wanting to rock the boat, more comfortable with routine, order, consistency. All skinny. Obsessed with weight, control over body shape. The body as deterministic machine, a system whose components can be understood, analysed, controlled. It annoyed me that their organisation exists to agitate about absolutely all currently trendy diagnoses… ADHD, Aspergers… what do you expect kids to behave like when they can pick five different kinds of university course to tell them how to manage a gymnasium? When they’re hosed with conflicting bullshit 18 hours a day, every day of the week? They’re going to NEED to simulate autism just to get to the level of specialisation required by our lunatic jobs market, and of course they’re going to look like there’s something wrong with their attention span because they’re being forced to filter through the equivalent of a tennis court sized area of microfiche full of garbage to get to any information remotely worth having.

Someone walked past me saying, “T.K. Maxx,” then someone walked past me saying, into a mobile phone, “I think I can see you.”

Newspapers become more constrained in terms of what they can print as their content co-evolves with a readership that learns to trust what the newspaper has to say, and in fact starts to invest self-esteem in thinking in accordance with the newspaper’s values: if the newspaper changes its mind too frequently, it’ll haemorrhage readers.

So… human beings are very tribal, so very keen on allocating each other to social groups and deciding on that basis whether to behave in a hostile or friendly way to each other. Maybe that tendency also impacts on how we categorise non-human objects: people like to categorise because of their very tribal nature. We have this… very objecty, very categorisy wasy of looking at the world because of our past as an species whose members organise themselves using the sounds they make, not just techniques of tearing each other’s nuts out with their teeth.

There’s a TV in the Sony Galleria in Centrale, offering the smoothest picture ever. Rolling, repeating footage of a guy playing keepy-up, and gobsmacked onlookers with their eyes bugging out and their jaws on the floor at the quality of the motion interpolation, up to 200Hz refresh rate. The Panasonic shop’s showing BBC HD preview footage of a guy with rhubarb-and-custard skin making a documentary about people playing violins and singing in a Regency stately home. Interested to know whether there are conferences at which broadcasters, network providers and technology companies decide the timebase and order of rolling out all these changes, one by one, a new TV every year, £1000 per year to keep up.

I would like to define “grown up” as being in control of my mind: being free of the influence of the media or others’ opinions; of the influence of symbolism. … Wow, Swarovski watches!

I was in Maplins, and I was distracted at the time because I wanted to buy a USB voice recorder (achieved), but in the background – in fact in the foreground, because it was quite loud and pumped-up, and the music wasn’t particularly delicate music, it was thumping, side-chain compressed electro-techtonic-trance-dance bollocks… on a radio station. Which played an interstitial which went: “All the best tunes, no egos, just music and celebrity gossip.” The problem’s knowing where to even start, to be honest.

One of his pictures reminds me strongly and specifically of a tiny old woman we saw when we visited China in 1997. She sold bananas to backpackers in Yangshuo. At the time I estimated her age to be somewhere in the region of two hundred years. The face in the photograph reminds me unambiguously of her, but the print is dated 2007. Perhaps she’s now 210 years old, and fitter in many ways than she was when she was 160. Or perhaps he took the photo in 1997. Perhaps he was one of the kids at the next table in Two Brothers backpacker cafe, joking about whether, if they bought all her bananas (liang kwai each; eight bananas, shi liu kwai), she’d overbalance backwards from the weight of her hunchback.

The recognition is feels similar to the sensation I experienced when my friend Joe told me he’d been taught by a teacher called Miss Pooley when he was a pupil at Stillness Primary School, Honor Oak Park, South London, in the 1980s, ten years after I had been taught been taught there by the same woman. I was certain, as a primary school pupil, that Miss Pooley must be beyond retirement age. My dim memory of her is mixed up with memories of a woman called Miss Pope, a supremely old lady befriended by my grandparents at a Methodist Church in between Croydon and Forest Hill: Anerley, perhaps?A silver moustache. Thin, grey hair pinned in a bun. Heavy shoes. Clutching a handbag as though it were a flotation aid, as though it helped her balance, perhaps acting as a counterweight to her hunchback. Hats. An infinitely intricate chinese sculpture in cork, under a glass dome. Slow, precise comments about uncontroversial topics. A room in a Home. Basin in the corner. Powerful central heating. Radiator and teacup noise between clearly punctuated sentences.

Miss Pope, however, was benign, while Miss Pooley was malignant, happy to detain a whole class to write lines as their parents stood waiting outside because of some undetectable misdemeanour probably linked to excess lunchtime sugar consumption and tedious post-lunch subject matter.

I was shocked at Joe’s news that ten class 2P’s after mine had been subjected to her tweedy bitterness. It seemed incredible that she was even still alive; that she hadn’t, as I’d thought, been seventy years old when I was her pupil, that she hadn’t last ovulated when it was illegal for married women to teach.

The basement of Sacred Cafe, Ganton Street. Sacred Planet, the title of the photographic exhibition: images of people from across the globe doing primitive things that suggest spirituality, but really mean flogging bananas, and which reinforce your view of yourself as belonging in the elite upper strata of a globalised, technocratic society. And a shot of some seagulls. Powerful central heating, oppressively hot if you commit the idiot sin of dressing for February streets. Toilet in the corner of the room; through its partially open door I can see the basin. Coffee machine noise, coffee cup noise.

A flawlessly beautiful Korean girl with a sexy mouth. On the stereo, Jumping Jack Flash is, apparently, a gas. I’m sitting almost directly underneath a cold water pipe attached to the ceiling and running the length of the wall to my right. Steam rises slowly from our overheated bodies, condenses and drips occasionally from the pipe. A drop falls on my right wrist. A point of cold, a tiny and precise jewel of immediate experience in the distracted fug of my Londonised consciousness, like finding an unsugared berry in an over-sweetened cake.

Fragments of conversation: men discussing a printed diagram of a simple, linear, theoretical business process.

“What I don’t want to happen…”

“…wait for the dust to settle…”

“…sort it all out…”

Slate grey suits, blue shirts. Brightly coloured socks. Men in their twenties. Language-heavy egos, executing business plans with passion and due diligence.

At the back of the room, an alcove. A statue of a Buddha in meditation posture, a candle in his lap. Asian stuff, Maori-looking carved stuff. Ethnicknacks.

The Korean girl’s boyfriend examines some 35mm film negatives, looking through them at halogen spotlights suspended between parallel 12-volt electrical cables.

The 35mm film camera. The halogen bulb. The Italian-American-style coffee shop. Oppressively intense central heating. The free wi-fi internet connection. Thinly rimmed glasses. The Bic Crystal medium tipped biro. The fruit smoothie. The plastic bottle. The mobile telephone with twomegapixel camera and MP3 music player. The Dune shoe shop. Massimo Dutti. The purple Adidas trainer with yellow trim. The Fujitsu air conditioning unit. All these things will pass, says the Buddha. Fleeting patterns of other fleeting patterns in an unknowable, unbroken stream of simultaneous becoming and decay. There is no cork bobbing down the stream; the cork is also stream. The infinitely detailed chinese sculpture in cork. The bright cyan Gola trainer with yellow trim.

Yes this space is available to hire! We can organise all your catering and bar needs to Give Matt a call….. 07818 445540.

In fifty years’ time will Matt still have a mobile phone? Will mobile phones still have numbers? Was anyone here taught by a Miss Pooley? Since 1990? In fifty years’ time, will I be able to get a free wifi internet connection in this basement? Will there still be a coffee shop on Ganton Street? Will there still be a street?

I want to say Maori, but perhaps they’re more Malaysian. In Kuala Lumpur there’s a whole district where the only industry is carving those things. Bigger than headboards. Halfway between grimacing, Haka-faced masks and celtic knots.

The Korean group are talking in English. Two have middle class, mildly southern accents; the third sounds camply Northern. Northern English, not North Korean. They are expensively dressed.

The oversized individual portion of sugar in the plasticised paper tube. The low voltage halogen lighting system. The laptop personal computer. The final year design project. The university graphic design course. The Americano coffee. The brown Gola trainer with orange trim. The polo shirt. The polytouch-sensitive screen. The flush toilet. The wood-effect vinyl flooring system. The cubic leather seat. The cocktail shaker.

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I use my mobile phone to take a photograph of the photograph of the old Chinese woman. Sacred, Ganton Street. Opposite Zebrano.