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.

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.

I’m considering adding a “breast milk” entry to my list of blog categories… Continue Reading »

So tourists are drinking wine from baby bottles now, and Hooters has arrived in the UK. Meanwhile, we’re drinking less tea and more italo-american style coffee, its bitter shots sweetened with steamed milk, sugar and syrup.

I think there are some dots to join here: are all the sweet, fatty things we love so much (chocolate, ice cream, Starbucks Caramelattes) actually replacements for titty milk?

Continue Reading »

It must be the wrong question. Continue Reading »

So anyway, I’m walking down the passage that runs through Allders, connecting George Street to North End. A primitive retail intestine, splattered with symbiont bacterial concession stalls that facilitate the absorption of cash into Allders’ corporate self. Continue Reading »

Bring back the adverb! Continue Reading »