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.

Lashed to the grille of a cultural juggernaut careening towards the grill of an entropic meatgrinder.

Chill out in our heated garden!

18kW of heating for three cunts smoking fags outside the pub.

If I sit near an air conditioner, I crisp up. They burn my skin. Cold, dry death pours from them. 3kW pumped into the atmosphere to cool the Firetrap concession in the men’s clothing department of House of Fraser.

The resource wars of the 2020s were hilarious: they were fought definitionally because we were running out of exactly the things we needed to build technologically advanced weapons, it was decreed by those in social strata high above the melee that the fighting should be fought with rusty old crowbars and blunt knives. And as we had plenty of people, but little energy, the dwindling spoils would go to the side with the largest army, the most aggressive warriors. The solution was personnel-intensive and exciting to watch, if you could afford not to fight and to own a television.

A group of schoolchildren young enough to wear that “disproportionately large brain casing” look flow past the window of the cafe, onto the pavement of St Johns Hill, mingling with passers by, walking past newspaper hordings: Joesf Fritzl pleads guilty; Jade Goody’s mother breaks down in tears outside her daughter’s house; Jade Goody’s eyes sink into their sockets. This is the age of high-definition, high-speed data that hoses continuity of thought, washes the wisdom from our collective mind.

We’ve been pumping entropy out of our stupid boat, and we’re about to be broadsided by a huge wave.

The ego is a self-perpetuating, self-defending language-tornado, an autopoetic complex of ideas about What You Are – although the ideas aren’t really about You qua You at all, they’re about each other. Self-supporting threads of illusion from which a straw man self-weaves. The ego is a spinning-together of an ecosystem of linguistic thoughts. Our raw, animal consciousness/awareness is infected, and often obscured, by the linguistic ego: we bocome aware of ideas, not of the present moment. Perhaps a major part of the responsibility of a parent is to ease a child through the development of the ego: to help it deal with the suffering that can so easily result from linguistic identification of self with ego, with ideas.

“You are so naughty,” says a mum to her daughter, dragging her by her arm away from the sugar station.

It’s us or the air conditioning. Destroy air conditioning.

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.

Do not think that, just because you claim to have no faith in a god, that you are a free thinker and dwell in the realm of reality and truth, because the faith system of religion has simply lost some of its influence to the faith system of the democratic nation state.

We believe that the best way to run a country is by voting for representatives of three long-standing political parties every five years; we believe that, if we work and save hard, we will be comfortable in our retirement; we believe that the Police will protect us if we are good and punish us if we are bad. We believe that a deadly influenze pandemic is about to roll like a cloud of mucal death over our civilisation; we believe that we are in more danger walking on the pavement than driving in a car; we believe that the best way to deal with climate change is probably to buy an air conditioner.

I edited out the clause “we believe in climate change,” because I really do believe in climate change.

Religions are being partially displaced, in the minds of some, by other systems of myth; but they are myth. Britain – the political, emotional, relational Britain that we seem to care so much about – doesn’t exist, has no intrinsic existence, or exists only as a simulated spirit, spun together by ten million daily incantations in the staff canteen, the smoking area, across the desk partition. We chant Britain into near-being, like the religious chant God.

As an atheist, as an agnostic, you are in no way free of faith until you no longer believe in your nation, the expertise of your doctor, yourself.

Word of the day (used by Maplin staff member, describing behaviour of a colleague able to appear and disappear without others noticing):

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.

What anything means to you is the associated images, words, memories and stories that flow into your awareness when you think about or perceive it.

So a percept or a concept’s meaning, on a personal level, is the mode into which your mind flows in response to it.

Is it valid to generalise a little and suggest that meaning is precisely the flow of your “state” of mind from one moment to the next? Every moment of awareness is the result of your brain/mind interpreting patterns of sensory stimulation or memory; working out what patterns of light on the retina mean, what a memory means. Meaning isn’t something inherent in the things or scenes we think we perceive; it’s literally what the brain does, what the mind does. What the mind does next.

Is the Meaning of Life… what Life does next? Ongoing metabolism, ongoing ecological relationships, more life?

Is the Meaning of It All… the universe flowing into its next moment, according to its history and its laws?

There are some photographs on the wall; it’s not clear whether they are for sale. Graham Lewis of Rowan House Services, Wivenhoe, specialises in photographs of chinese people who look how you might expect chinese people to look if you had little experience of, but strongly prejudiced views about how chinese people look: two of his four subjects are wearing coolie hats.

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.

Press ‘Unlock’ then *

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

This is a transcript of something I spoke into my mobile late the other night, walking along Stanstead Road just east of Forest Hill.

Hello. I just had an idea for a song then, called “I almost dare stand up,”  which is about someone who’s either getting ready to stand up, or getting ready to stay kneeling on the floor.

That’s interesting, isn’t it, the idea of standing up or kneeling on the floor: standing up to the reality of your surroundings, your situation, your life, or kneeling down – submitting to the spell of language. Wow: submitting to the spell of language. Kneeling. Erm… in the beginning was the Word: it’s written in the Bible, know what I mean? Language infected the human… the raw ape consciousness of early human beings, and, er…

Language is scary. Language itself is scary. Voices in your head: the human animal is the ape that hears voices in its head; it is actually an act of faith to believe that they are inside your head rather than outside. I think… it’s something we presumably need to learn, to have these fully-formed, linguistic voices inside your head, thinking about things when you’re imagining other people’s conversations… that’s quite deeply human… born with no language, everyone is born pre-linguistic. Over the first few years of their lives, language invades their consciousness… we assume the quicker, the better. We assume, as a society, that the more quickly you learn specific forms of language, the better, the cleverer you are. The more quickly you learn specialised forms of language, such as… knitting, or… calculus, or… Feynman diagrams, or… I don’t know, the probability distribution function of Schroedinger’s equation, or… the essential non-linearity, non-predictability of the world…

Wow. Western culture.

Would there have been a time when women found language sexy? Women do find language sexy, something about language. Maybe it’s the intonation curves of the language that they find sexy, maybe it’s not the content. There’s an experiment there – Barry White singing songs about performing biopsies on giraffes…

Today I read about a reggae musician who walked through a tunnel in Greenford, East London, and he was attacked and had his throat slit, and here I am in a tunnel, and… there’s some really bright, colourful graffiti. It’s fantastic, looks really great. … I’m now coming out of the tunnel… I’m spiralling in on where I want to be… in eight minutes’ time, unless I’ve got the times wrong. In the acceleration, to catch the train I’ve forgotten what I was talking about.

Kneeling to the spell of language. You have to submit to other ways of talking to communicate more widely in the network. You have to learn different behavioural and moral protocols to communicate with different parts of the network. Can we communicate? Can we communicate?

Erm… where am I? I’m holding my phone like a microphone, and I’ve no idea whether the microphone’s at the bottom or the top, you know, who knows which microscopic gap in the casing is the mouthpiece. Who knows, who knows. Perhaps… what I’m worried about is… communicating with my child when I’m gone? Perhaps that’s what drives me. How do I communicate with my child? Well, you probably could start by giving it a hug.

There’s a small television or radio or… phone mast at the top of Forest Hill. It’s not as tall as the mast at Crystal Palace. It’s just up the road from where my grandparents used to live: Ringmore Rise. Even now I’m obsessed with having sight of Crystal Palace masts. We used to drive in from Chilton, Harwell, in Berkshire. I always remember the Schumac tree, the bush that had purple in the bud. We’d drive in along the M4, and coming from a small village in, past the jagged assault of office blocks… it wouldn’t have been so high-rise in those days, the early 70s. I remember an animated Lucozade bottle on the side of a factory. I remember the bottle tipping up and glistening bubbles in light bulbs, advertising carbonated water, glucose, food colouring.

Did I use to love it or was I always angry with it? That first hit of London when someone who lives in the country comes to the city. It’d be interesting to trace the psychological city walls of London: where does it assault you, where does London first challenge you? How far out from London Stone, in any given direction? How far out before you feel you’ve left London? Now that’s an interesting idea for a walking project: walk out radially, see how far it is before you feel you’ve escaped London.

This is my train, I think I’d better go.

When I was learning how to mix music, I went through a phase of boosting this and that, adding more bass, pushing the top end, adding more reverb, cranking up the compression… and the music ended up sounding plastered against the ceiling and generally a bit crap.

It took various people and many years to convince me that you do most of your work on a mix by taking things away, not adding them.

“Subtractive EQ” means cutting frequencies from a sound rather than boosting them, and results in a more laid-back, less distorted sound that’s easier to mix with everything else. And I’ve learnt to enjoy turning things down – now, my mixes typically have one or two sounds up front, then a much quieter layer of sound off in the distance.

And of course there’s classic analogue synthesis, which is also subtractive: your oscillators typically make huge, wideband sounds which you filter and chip away at until you’ve sculpted, revealed, the (lesser-yet-better) sound you want.

I’m now convinced that this principle applies to the rest of my life, too. I won’t become happier by eating more food, or if the food I eat is richer; I won’t become happier by watching more TV, or seeing more films, or reading more books – by consuming more culture. The best solution to a cold winter might not be simply to turn our central heating constantly on and high.

Perhaps I should be looking for subtractive solutions. If winding myself up with films and music hasn’t made me happy, how about seeking some silence? If 3000 calories, three lagers and seven coffees a day haven’t made me blissfully satisfied, what would happen if I ate and drank more simply and sparingly? If working 14 hour days and preparing every night for intensely agenda’d meetings the next day didn’t bring me wealth or pride, what would happen if I sought a simpler job, one which paid less than the last one? Which aspects of my life could be improved by consuming less, by seeking less, by doing less?

Because… when I try to meditate, I struggle with too many thoughts, too much mental chatter, too many distractions. That means I’m suffering from having too much, so the key question is what I can give up, not what I can gain.

Components don’t make sense outside the context of a Whole. And the Whole is a persistent network that persists because of the way its components interact.  There’s probably a discussion here somewhere about a bench, which is nothing more than the ongoing interaction between nuts, bolts, washers, planks and bars.

And if there isn’t a clumsy dumbing-down of Gerald Edelman’s ideas about consciousness as a beautifully structured and complex re-entrant tumble of activity in neural pathways in this blog already, then that’s a glaring omission which I’m sure will be corrected before too long.

And obviously, this project is literally all about the string: seeing the world as emerging from the spinning together and the unravelling or fraying of… entities which themselves emerge from the spinning together and unravelling of other entities…

So tonight I was at a Buddhism discussion session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre. The session focussed on Ethics. There was a quote in the reading material for the previous week about ethical living tending to generate conditions which help improve the quality of meditation, and ease the path to the gaining of wisdom. I was reminded of it tonight, and it felt quite powerful, and I had a quick mental image of ethical progress feeding into progress in meditation, which then led to wisdom and conditions which made ethical decisions easier in the future.

The vision was quite abstract: slightly like a celtic knot, but always in motion. Like porpoise acrobatics, three dolphins tumbling around each other. But… it was saying that progress towards a Buddhist style of improvement emerges from the interaction of ethics, meditation, and insight. Each drives the other on. I’m very tempted to call it a virtuous cycle but that would be to impoverish this vision of how the process flows, because I think it might be exactly the same process that Edelman describes when he talks about the spinning-together of consciousness from recursively stimulating, pseudo-cyclic, tumbling, rolling neural activity. And if we accept the claims of atomist chemists and physicists – that interactions between objects are based on interactions between atoms, between electrons in orbit around atomic nuclei – then, at a sub-atomic level, the relationships that hold a bench or a chair together are also mediated by tumbling, intertwining electrons and nuclei.

Which means that, when you study one aspect of a whole Thing, or topic, you’re probably studying a thread which tumbles around and facilitates or hinders or becomes other threads; and that it’s the total interaction of those threads that spins the whole Thing together.