TRIPOD

21/12/2010
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This could be a Christmas present list or a diagram of a family tree that has fallen, axed as intended, on its side. Or, for a mean man, it could be a huge number of potential gifts, pared back to a minimum and gleefully recorded, (so that no-one could know he had given anything at all), one minute after the wretched festive season was over, when no more expense was needed.

Also it’s all that got writ by one writer on a recent Xmas.

Yesterday he was a tripod, propped up on two human legs and one lightweight walking stick on a hilltop suburban driveway, somewhere cold, where the melting snow had refrozen into scabby patches.

An unskilled space alien observer who might be fantasised to be hovering over Dollis Hill in an invisible flying saucer might have supposed he was watching some strange solo golf-like game below.

This was because the man who leant on the stick used it as a support, without which he would fall, but he also used it when he could, when he was near enough, to strike a green oblong plastic crate, driving it up hill along the short driveway from the street toward his black wooden garage door.

Assuming that the invisible, imaginary, flying saucer pilot was an intelligent, empathic, pseudo-telepath, as all little green imaginary men are known to be; then this psychic flying pookah, this leprechaun of light years, this jolly clever sky jockey , (about whom little is known except littleness itself, ( and what does that mean? It depends how big your relatives are and how long your present list is)), might have been tentatively, or tentacularly on the basis of what could be observed taking place on the drive way below, beginning to construct rules to explain what Tripodman was doing.

His striking of the green box with his cane might initially, seem to fit a golf/cricket/baseball/ hockey /hurling type hypothesis, matching a category of games where things are struck with sticks. However, this supposition could already have been jettisoned, or have gone out of the flying saucer’s window, had the FS had one. Even if the hypothesis had blobbed out through a psychochemical barrier and suddenly appeared in the blue cold midwinter suburban skies, it would have immediately plummeted to earth like a hippopotamus falling off a hypotenuse, or a second only instance of Adams’ falling whale.

But the crash and splat of these twin impacts would not have echoed across the suburban hills on Christmas Eve. Galactic hyper war could not have halted the migratory tides of traffic. This year blizzards had come unseasonably soon to the South East of England, but even six inches of driven snow had tried and failed to stop the inexorable consumer flood.

Nor would the dropping of an ideal that had not been nailed on to the flying saucer’s wooden, space barnacled, hull have distracted the three legged green box not-golf player.

Several features could have helped to discern that he was playing not-golf, (or possibly even cheating at it): the use of a large green box instead of a small white pillock ball, and also the fact the ‘player’ had earlier on picked up the green box and thrown it up the drive.

For the box-thrower, this was literally a staggering feat, and he staggered. After throwing the box, he took faltering steps, extended his walking stick and repositioned his grip on it; seeking places where the grey concrete driveway showed through the re frozen, once-melted snow and the rubberized walking stick tip would hold firm.

Then, not having fallen, like a Martian invader, imagined by H.G.Wells, his brain, atop its tripod, Tripodman could pause, assess the signals coming in, plot possible courses of action, send out for further more detailed information pertinent to these. Then move one leg of the tripod, then another, then another, so that he maintained the up-driveway course that would bring him to within striking range of the immobile green box that he pursued, slower than a cheetah, but faster than slime-mould.

To go back up a bit and get imaginary, if the entity in the spaceship had been a wild life commentator, an alien Attenborough televising over the equivalent of the plains of Serengeti or the craters of Ngorngoro, observing and televising the migratory flows of wildebeest and associated others below; whether then he might have said: “…..for this is no mere game that is being played out here, it is a grim aspect of a Vast Eternal Cliché, repeating itself on different scales like a sub-atomic pattern…, etc,etc.”

He might have said this because the green box thrower and hitter was not undertaking plastic crate pursuit out of festive playfulness, in fact Tripodman shared Leni Riefenstahl’s apparent viewpoint that sport was essentially fascist. Tripodman had set himself a goal of putting the green plastic box into his garage before phoning for an ambulance, which he hoped would take him to hospital to be treated for the COPD that was seemingly nearly choking him.

The green plastic box had been allocated to Tripodman by the subsection of government that controlled him locally, Brent Council, so that he could regularly fill it with some designated types of recyclable rubbish, (glass bottles and jars, certain types of plastic and metal food containers, newspapers and discarded pairs of boots). The Council’s hirelings removed the box’s contents, (and that of all other such boxes in the borough), once a week: they threw back the emptied crates into the driveways and onto the front paths of households.

An empty green plastic box on a driveway hereabouts could denote things. It was a sign, like a lump of caribou shit on a tundra trail being photographed on telly and transmitted into an empty sub urban sitting room.

To unpick this metaphor, it is necessary to crouch down over it like bearded TV expert wearing khaki shorts and exclaiming excitedly whilst picking out filaments, fragments and fibres from inside it; “Look there’s one of them and that this means that …, etc,etc.”

And the main thread or fragment contained within this metaphoro-turd is that a potential threat posed by a be leaving an empty re-cycling box outside a suburban dwelling in early Twenty First century Britain, is that someone else, (usually someone else from that particular street who has not been allocated that particular box), might take it.

Re-cycling box rustling might not be very prevalent; armed gangs of machine-gun waving militia were not yet following Council green plastic box emptying trucks, eager to seize the newly voided crates, (almost in mid-air), as they are thrown back towards home-owners. It’s just that a box goes missing now and then; and Mister Tripodman is going to make dern sure that it isn’t his’n.

The risk that he runs in attempting to ensure this is small, but real. He has an unmetaphorical Wounded Knee, arthritis, diabetes, cellulitis and COPD too, so he can’t breathe or walk too well. On a slippery, partially snow-covered, driveway, he could easily fall and not easily get up again.

In broad daylight on a clear sunlit (but cold), Christmas Eve morning in a populated capital city suburb, there’s a good chance that a passer-by might see a fallen body form in a driveway and do something citizenish about it; (like call an ambulance or the police; as opposed to say, rifling the pockets or attempting to eat parts of the “corpse”.) But you might just freeze to death at nights, this year, even out here, and lie semi-concealed behind plastic dustbins perhaps, until the urban foxes came and maybe treated you the way that they treat rubbish bags left out at night with food inside on cold winter nights.

However, none of this happened or even got near to happening. The Tripod is a stable shape and in this case, retained its stability long enough for the green plastic box to be struck so that it flew up the driveway and hit the black painted planks of the garage door. The non-player of the non-game of “Whacking The Box”, showed some quality or other, (seriousness, obsession, stupidity?), by then fiddling about with frozen fingers to open the bicycle D lock that he had used to secure the garage door. Once he had unlocked it, he took out the crosspiece and opened the door; but being scared of fumbling and dropping the lock crosspiece on the frozen ground, he re-locked the crosspiece to the U shaped part of the lock that it had been detached from. The exertion expended in doing this almost cost him an overdraft on his under oxygenated blood, but it didn’t, so instead of fainting, he clung to the lock with both of his cold hands and leant his forehead on the black garage door.

He thus transformed himself from being a relatively slow moving, but independently moving tripod to an impromptu lean to, a  human shed appended to his own garage door.

Even though it was a degree or two below freezing, he remained static in this posture for minutes, save for the hectic pumping of his lungs as he regained his breath.

After this he summoned the strength to kick the box into the garage, stop and rest, unlock the lock, stop and rest, close the door, stop and rest, relock the lock, stop and rest.

The green plastic box was mow secure, no could easily remove it from the absent custody of Tripodman. No one could take it away when he went away, it was retained in his own black-doored garage, securely, he believed.

He was ready. “First things first” he always said, then, he dropped down dead.

TRANSPORTS OF FAT

I suppose, but hope never to know personally, a paradigm shift in human activity. I mean the sort of drastic change an IED or high velocity weapon might make to a fighter in one of silly wars now going on. Two legs to no legs say, just now wheels and levers and springs can restore some things, but you will not unlike some physically simple lizard, or see the like of that leg again. Not really.

I might have been unlikely to shear off a limb in my previous profession, lecturing, unless in the trowel trades, was physically very safe “most” of “us” aren’t usually expecting to die going to and from the 9 to 5.

Nowadays “it”, progressive decline in physical capacities and capabilities, is likely to creep on us slow, and we may not notice until we have to begin to make compromises.

Today, if I wanted to walk up the road that I live on and get a quarter of a mile up a suburban hill to the doctors’ surgery at the other end, I reckon that I’d have to stop briefly twenty times or so to rest, standing, propping myself against garden fences, pillars, bark peeling urban plane trees and other miscellaneous bits of street furniture. In May 2010 I could manage this modest promenade unaided, by September I would be nearly out of breath every time that I stopped. I would fear falling if I tried to push myself on even a few more paces before stopping.

It is now also tough for me to get back up to standing if I fall. I can roll over onto one side, get onto hands and knees but, without support to pull myself upright I’ m liable to stay down there amongst all them crawlers as if I had somehow unevolved.

Perhaps unevolution is what is happening, instead of sudden dramatic changes to some sort of human supremacy, a slow tide of blubber inexorably rises up the food chain and down again bringing an assorted flotsam of disease and unease with it.

Don’t mean to knock blubber though, it does suit several cetaceans fine and I’m sure lights and heats well planned fat festivals in the far far north.

There have also been artistic hymns or projects devoted to the benefice of that fat. I know of how to German artist Joseph Bueys portrayed and used the lard and felt that saved him after a plane crash in a Russian war.

Fat is fine as fuel, and how much resources of fuel to carry us is always a judgement call and many hikers and cyclists always carry a bit of food and drink just in case of bonk, injury, exhaustion or the weather closing down on the open moor. However only insane persons hike cairngorms carrying whole dead cows on their backs, they might experience a moment of warmth as the huge lump of dead cattle collapsed on top of them as their knees gave. And then be smothered to maggots’ meat under crows’ beaks.

If we’re carrying more fat that we can mobilise and use then we lose, but it’s tough if you don’t carry enough.

This slogan is for sale to passing lard makers.



TRAINSPOTTING IS OUT

Hospitalisation can reduce you to bus-spotting

This is not a hobby that I have followed since before my puberty

Then to demarcate my burgeoning character

Perhaps to establish myself as slightly, but “warmly” eccentric,

(Although not actually insane)

I refrained from spotting trains.

There were steamers in them days

Roaring out of London to Brighton on special occasions

Down the cutting out of Clapham Junction

Fire on the footplates and sparks in the sky

This was the dawning of the end of age of Cuneo,

You know that oil painter producer bloke

Who used to make depictions of such things as

“The Royal Constitution hauling a Pullman out of Victoria”

And he’d paint a little mouse sitting in

One corner of his vast throbbing steam engine porn canvas

Even then I knew

That It was much better to watch the

Ordered proletarian movement of buses

Than such Tory farrago

Mind you this predated the RMT’s

(Which Red Ken and new-fangled modernists depict as the traditional London bus),

Thinner knife like RTL's sliced down London roads

And a last herd of hissing clanging electric trams

Hung on in in the Finsbury park tundra

Like a herd of mammoths calling out subsonically to extinct kin

Whilst none existed nearer than Blackpool

Everything always reeked of nicotine

All parts of public transport

Were like moving human kipper factories

No wonder fifty years later

That my longs are shot

I used to travel around on that lot

And filled my tubes

On smoke filled tubes too

So now this is what I am reduced to

Bus spotting through a hospital window.



UNDERGROUND DISASTERS

Two disasters always come to my mind as I leave the surface grid behind and descend into the Tube. I feel that I should feel safe down the tube like most Londoners do. It’s our transport system; it was almost a womb where deep shelterers returned to sleep out fascist bombardments.

That’s a decade before my birth, of course and there have never been bombs since in quite the same way; the acts of attempted terror that there have been, have been almost random, aimed at symbolic impact and apparently directed by an ignoramus as though a surgeon was using a blowlamp to mend the circulation of a snowman.

No consolation of course if you or yours were one of the poor people next to the rucksack bombs, but there doesn’t, (thank god/s), seem to be any satanic will intent on exterminating us all forever. The tube is generally safe. Unsavoury but safe, yet two incidents stand out for me.

They are the Moorgate crash and the Kings Cross fire.

Nobody really knows what happened in the former

On 28 February 1975 a southbound Northern line tube train smashed into buffers at Moorgate station, in the tunnel end beyond the platform. The cars sandwiched, killing 46 people with 74 seriously injured. Some are still saying driver suicide, some argue for tiredness causing an industrial accident and there may be other explanations.

In the case of Kings Cross some would name the culprit as the ignited end of a cigarette or a match, but it could have been a burning pipe dottle or cigar butt. And whoever dropped the burning item is unlikely to have been responsible for accumulating several decades worth of grease, lint, shreds of paper and skin detritus that were left to marinade together under a wooden escalator a major railway terminus and interchange. In summary The King's Cross fire broke out on 18 November 1987, and killed 31 people. The fire started in an escalator shaft serving the Piccadilly Line, which was burnt out along with the top level of the deep-level tube station.

So why harp on about these two instances of terrible incompetence? why do I remember them? perhaps that it’s hard to like voluntarily going down a hole in the ground when the sun is shining up above? (or even when it isn’t?)

Or maybe that on the night of Kings Cross, a cyclist got rained off the road in a downpour and wished he had had the sense to leave his Dawes Super galaxy in the garage and also had parked himself on a warm dry train. That is he wished that until he stumbled sodden into a pub lounge and saw the news on the Lounge bar telly.

Wounds heal, but some Londoners probably still remember these meanings of Moorgate and Kings Cross. Another sky rises for survivors, who make whatever compromises that they can. Leaves grow again on trees, trees grow again in woods and some song birds sing some songs. Only in the case of London it was sometime around the 1970’s and ‘80’s that house sparrows vanished or began vanishing.

Being a really crap amateur ornithologist, much too fond of descending into tube tunnels in search of money and re-emerging dead drunk; the author can form no clear recollection of when he realised that house sparrows had gone. He penned a mawkish ode to this avian absence at some point in the 1990’s, but looking, back, realises that the little birds could have been on the way out long before that.

Father had a big semi-detached in the then posh end of Fulham, near Putney Bridge, Hurlingham, he annoyingly insisted in calling it. Before I left to train as a psuedo-marxist at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970, I can remember every late spring and summer, going round the side and back passages of the house shovelling up dead sparrow fledglings, broken eggs and nest fragments that had fallen from the eaves above. I repainted the whole house in about 1981 and can’t remember evicting sparrows then, but the annoying tory stock broker, who lived next door, had a nest of House Martins up in his gables. They left piles of excrement in his front garden as a practical per-cursor of eco-socialism. but I don’take this cheap political point merely in fishing around for some kind of link between House Sparrow disappearance and the unburying of Chilean miners in October 2010.

Ah, I know human caused climate change! There it is

Except that what I might have here is some sort of poetic analogy about re-emergence from underground into a different world and/or wandering about in a state of pissed self-obsession for a couple of decades, getting old whilst global eco-political tides don’t sleep.

There area gaps in this and possibly small colonies of house sparrows still around in London live in them. I can think of a couple of places where I can regularly expect to find them which don’t seem markedly different to most of the places where I don’t, unless I am being subjected to systematic deception by very similar Tree sparrows that are unassociated with the Chilean mine disaster of 2010, which, as a piece of conceptual art was something else.

Most of the TV footage was actually of a winch-wheel revolving on top of a steel tripod again a background of barren Atacama mountainside.

I have a really short attention span as far as really conceptual art is concerned. Say: “this is a Pipe”, or “this is an Oak tree” and can undefinitely respond immediately “Yes/no, On/off” just like a cat in a box.

If someone had made a video installation of the Chilean mine rescue and stuck it in a corner of the Tate Modern or somewhere, I doubt if I’d have managed even to pay three minutes attention to it. I’d rather look out of the window at the barges on the river Thames, and think about shit.

Having observed and conceptually considered these vessels I could then compare and contrast them with the events which fascinated me when I watched the Chilean mine rescue on TV.

In both cases I can see containers, carefully made and designed to be strong, secure and not to break, fracture or leak; being transported with the aim of keeping the contacts in tact to a place where the way in which these contents exist, physically and socially, can be changed.

The cargoes of those Thames barges that being towed seawards is literally being rubbished, that decision was probably made for most of it when Londoners threw it away before it even got to the barges, but somewhere up the estuary, east of Canary Wharf the barge cargoes may get uploaded and sorted, some of them end up in the holds of freighters with opening bottoms, built especially so that Londoners can take a collective dump somewhere out in the North sea.

In hospital waiting rooms, pubs and cafes along the Edgware Road (the old Roman Watling street, a major artery of London), I watch the Chilean wheel turning, slowly. Had a Goldsmith’s artrepreneur devised this as artwork, there might not have a continuing long stream of not quite inconsequential verbiage about such things as mining in Chile and South America in general, who was President of Chile, who was President of Bolivia etc, etc. Then there was a change and what the winch was hauling up came up out of the Shaft. A long thin metal cylinder, which was, (according to the commentators, or an interviewed expert), just wide enough to take a man inside. An external diameter of just 54 cms (21 inches) according to the Telegraph on line , a factoid that made me, a fat man up on the surface fearful.

Maybe on the first couple of ascents, the TV did not show actual rescued miners emerging, but once it seemed clear that the the winch was going to bring the men out alive, then they were shown.

Their journey and destination was the opposite of the Thames barges. They were being de-rubbished. They had been buried in the ground, were found and were now being resurrected. It was not just upward physical, but social, mobility as well. They went down the pit as ordinary miners who no-one particularly knew of or attended to and emerged as celebrities who might never have to work again.

Sadly a piece of conceptual art is a bit of a one-trick pony, (as opposed to conceptual art as a whole, probably initiated by Magritte and/or Duchamp and then repeated by ignoramuses uneducated at Goldsmiths in the early 2oth century). The idea of burying chambers full of people under the Tate Modern for a month and then winching them up one by one to be the focus of some sort of ceremony would be a winch winder and maybe a money spinner. Participants could perhaps be awarded something for not striking by Margaret Thatcher or more likely by Jordan.

ZIMINICHE

Some human societies seem to create bureaucracies in a similar way to that in which ants, termites wasps and bees make their swarm cities. Human bureaucracies can correspond with physical locations, but as Max Weber, who originally analysed them, pointed out, they are maps of social positions.

In their physical and pyscho-social forms they always entail niches, cul-de-sacs, temporarily blocked off short cuts, footbridges over railway Branch lines and back passage connections that are often too narrow for any passing police car to chase down.

Sometimes such locations are made to facilitate resistance to control. Accounts of Victorian London Slum rookeries tell of ceiling, loft and cellar walls knocked through between adjoining houses to create rat-runs for thieves.

But many of these odd bits of topology are not always so sinisterly and subversively made. Things can exist because of almost unintended consequences, because we always cut through the allotments here, or we put in another space, shed or street because there was some spare room here which could not be let left waste when money or some kind of accommodation could be made.

I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think that I know the name of the hospital or at least the name that most people round the area call it, if, say, they want to get a bus there.

However, you can never be too sure since at various stages of growth and/or contraction, bureaucracies may graft bits of themselves onto or into each other, like mistletoe onto oaks. So you could think that you’d been sitting in the General Ward of Central Teddington Hospital and you could be, but the chair and workstation that you use could be part of the Community Outreach Unit of South East Essex trust, or something.

You can never be quite sure where you are, what you are going to do, or what you are supposed to do, let alone why.

Further layers of medicinal and /or psychotropic confusion may be added then disorientation can easily result, I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think, and when I came out of sleep it took me quite along while to figure out that this was so. The walls are grey and featureless, the room is sectioned off into areas partitioned from each other by greyish pale plastic curtains which are probably washable and carry some sort of pink repeated design.

Each section contains an expensive mechanically adjustable bed with some chairs and tables placed closely by, so it is a holding institution of some kind, maybe? Most of the room’s occupants are male, but a woman enters wheeling a metal tripod trolley that carries electronic devices. She wheels it between curtains into one of the alcoves to stand over a supine male who is lying on one of the beds. One of her machines makes a loud metallic click.

“Three point seven.” She calls out.
“That’s low.” Someone else replies.

You can wake to dawns and wonder where you are.

“You” may be spark out, but your body monitor can be ticking over and maintaining your position, jerking your head back every time that it has slumped forwards. Practise this skill well enough and you could be able to sleep on your feet. Maybe if you swam like a whale you could sleep in the sea, (drifting off the Azores between squid hunts); but you ain't, so you can’t.

And then again holding the orientation of a semi-conscious body is about positioning a physically real object in physically real space and time; but we all also use mind-maps, dredging up the flimsiest associations between strange places where we are now and strange places where we might once have been.

You can wake believing that you are on a wide stone terrace, with beds laid out on interspersed stone buttresses, and creepers growing up and around the masonry. Everything is oriented to face the same way, which is contrary to some “badness” and for some “good” facing in the opposite direction.

You awake in the last echoes of a cry or chant that you feel that “nearly everyone else” (of who?) has been singing, as they were despatched somewhere, to ‘fight the good fight’. I in fact, you have no idea who “they” were or “where” they went or why. You only know that it was Very Good; they set off gleaming and courageous.

They may have been the “Few” and it could be that you have just missed “Our Finest Hour” and that this omission caps a career that has been devoted devotedly to inept and precisely timed inadequacy.

You can’t quite believe in yourself, you feel that you could have been preparing for this moment for all of your life. You ask someone who is standing there where you are.

“Where am I? I am totally disoriented.” You say.

“I am the sister in charge of the Intensive Care Ward of South Twyford Hospital. You are a patient on the ward, you were admitted yesterday.” She replies.

It all shrinks back, the creepers, the bastions, the battlements, the Mission have all gone. You are in an untidy ground floor grey formica building with plastic curtains with faint pink stripes on them.

Memories of last night return, you spent a sleepless night on a ward bed between two noisy old men who both repeatedly spoke words in languages unknown, (not phrases or sentences, just words and pairs of words). They bubbled their breath through the saliva that they are expectorating so that it accumulates in the curves of transparent plastic tubes, sometimes sounding as loud as boiling metal porridge pots.

You are a number in a med shed and you hope that you have a lot of waiting to do before you start singing the song of the sputum stew.

The Song Of The Sputum Stew.

Alone with two companions,
I must make
The passage that I can and must
Through small grey hours
Sat in a hospital ward
Next to an empty car park.

Under a red metallic sky
That echoes back miles of urban light,
Like an upturned frying pan
And there’s no sound to break the still of the night
Other than
The bubbling sound of human breath
Being percolated through the spittle
Collecting in the bottom of a curve
In the plastic tube
Doing and old man’s breathing
Through a breathing machine.

Detained by illness and poverty
I sit too
With Robert Burns and William Blake
Contained in slim volumes
Who now assist
me to make a fist
of coping with this long, long occasion.

“Mind forg’d manacles” William reminds
Are the strongest kind and the ones that keep me here.
But he doesn’t bring his Tyger
To melt the Hospital linoleum and
Warm my cold cracked feet.
Which do mean fear now
For into the carpark, I won’t go
To lie like a beast with nest overturned
By plough blade
I could be homeless
And lie shivering
Not sleeping like a policeman
Waiting to be taken in the warm at A&E.
Unless a zealous consultant came by
With his not quite chorus
Of not quite totally eager medical students
To whom he could expound
A homily on the virtues of thinness
over my lardy body
Proclaiming “yaY!”
“yaY, People “yaY!”
“Get Barry,
Get Barry
Get Barry
Atric today!
If you don’t do this
Then you will be as I portray
And get as obese as this
Fat bastard here
Who just sat on his couch
And digested himself
To cubby heaven or hell
Whilst we the thin live on
To fly like camels through needles’ eyes
Until we become
Tightly clenched hairs
Round a thin saviour’s bum.”
 
5 Flocks: Pigeons, Seagulls, Finches, Parakeets, Mallards

As Phillip Zimbardo, showed when he ran his famed simulated Prison experiment in California; it doesn’t take much in the way of social labelling and reinforcement to drive people stir crazy with instutionalisation.

I've seen five flocks over the wasteland and car park outside my ward window since, by seventh day in the general ward of this hospital and I’m starting to get the creeping Zimbardos.

One indication of this is the ornithological notes that I have written and append below.

Others are that I feel that I am detained here, under slightly false pretences and by slightly disingenuous means, (although I believe that I might be able to discharge myself against medical advice if push came to shove).One reason that I tell myself that I am staying is that some of my personal valuables are, apparently, irrevocably in the Hospital safe for the duration of this weekend, which makes it just too much hassle to do a runner and come back, especially if it could, as some events detailed below suggest, involve entanglement in the bureaucratic barbed wire trap of discharging and re-admitting myself.

I’m beginning to show analogies to zoo cage pacing bear behaviour and obsess about gowns and masculinity.

I go over to the lavatory to get some tissues in order to go back there and throw them away again; I repeatedly don and divest myself of my fleece jacket and waistcoat, moving different objects between different pockets so that I can lose them after I’ve found them.

And then there are the gowns. I am a fat man wearing two hospital gowns because one isn’t big enough for me. They hang loose from my gut down to half way up my ankles. At least the ones that I currently, wear, unlike a previous pair that I have some got onto my house, do not have the word ‘Hospital property’ emblazoned all over them, in a small blue font repetitively. They are merely spotted all over with a tiny repeated logo which makes the provenance of the garments very obvious.

According to currently dress conventions and parameters set by physical possibility, trousers can be super imposed over gowns or sub imposed under them. Or gowns can be worn without trousers or trousers without gowns.

Gowns may have been macho and a high social status in cold flag-floored Tudor palaces, to indicate to FatKing HenryWales which prelate or divine to decapitate next; but as Phil Zim grasped, they are now suitable twentieth or twenty-first century signifiers of masculinity for wear in suburban London Supermarkets.

When Zimbardo wished to dress the simulated prisoners in his experiment in a way which might speed the undermining of their pre imprisonment senses of themselves, he dressed men in gowns. When he wished to experiment with enhancing the macho authoritarian aspects of the guard role that he allocated to some in his experiment, he dressed his ‘guards’ in black and gave them shades to hide behind.

When it comes to the way in which humane, human rights respecting rules of a twenty-first century British general hospital are enabled and enacted by guards, who could have been coutured by Zimbardo himself, may attempt to prevent a patient trying to hide his gowns, (and the symbolic undermining of the feeble bastions of his masculinity), beneath his trousers; from shopping in a local Supermarket.

The whole exercise was justified by some spurious urban myth about drug dealers rushing to whack cannula wearing patients straight the veins via the cannulas taped and plugged into their hands and forearms instead of spending more than £40 worth of vouchers in the aisles.

So fulminating about the privatisation of public space and a tendency for, Supermarkets to impose crass and petty censorship of political expression in the verges and car parks that they now claimed to control it is possible to stare at birds through ward windows.

And see five flocks

1) The pigeons, (or to be pedantically accurate the feral rock doves), seemed to form a loose and shifting coalitions numbering maybe fifteen birds maximum. The mainly walk pigeononically, with sudden and frequent bouts of head-nodding and bobbing down to peck at something on the carpark tarmac. What can his be? Is someone leaving grain out for them in just the top north east quadrant of the car park? That’s where they mostly are and that’s where the mostly seem to head toward and walk towards. There’s no fence or organised pigeonherders around them, and they can move at will, (or to human eyes, seemingly at random), but this is their predominant pattern of movement. Sometimes there are only a few in the car park, maybe a half-dozen or so: others may fly over and then land to join them. perhaps due to a deep political flock fissure, a smaller sub flock can sometimes split off and fly away, but the flock as a whole seems to comprise a pecking coalition, always moving along the ground, always pecking pecking pecking, never reneging on the eventual triumph of international urban pigeondom.

2) Seagulls, probably urbanised herring gulls are the most beautiful flyers here. Some glide over from the south east maintaining a height of about fifteen feet, inclining aerodynamic bodies and knife-like wing tips and beaks so that individuals each pick up new and differing air currents that t sometimes turn back in the direction that the flock is coming from. This means that the flock interweaves round on itself quartering and re-scanning ground it has passed over, scouring for food. Nothing today, so no unseeingly screaming white fathered vortex forms pecking over the remains of a discarded take away. The flock silently flies on.

3) Finch flocking, (as I now nominate it), is strangest of all. I had no bins (binoculars), so could not see, what all the little birds might be, in their rapidly changing crowds moving like breeze-blown smoke. Probably a mixed bunch of seed eaters: long tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, green finches, gold finches; whizzing at speed across suburban gardens, road verges and along canal edges. This time of year (late autumn, early winter) fifty finches in a flock can descend on berry bushes, feed quickly and move on, leaving stones skins and shit stains and uneaten fruit and no stragglers for any hawk to hunt. It may be an anthropometric explanation, but these guys aren’t top of any food chain; round here it’s gulls and crows fighting to be top flying dogs of overlapping food niches. And I wouldn’t say that finches live in fear  but they don’t stop around long enough to fight or pray to be a hawk’s breakfast by day or an owl’s supper at night.

Their flocks whirl like smoke against pink London sunset and suddenly change direction like a sheet or a sail wrapped around a pole by a blast of high wind. Almost all of the finch flock seem to cotton on and follow instantly or maybe they all simultaneously all forge the same lead at once. In a new direction they can all swoop down to be birdstream inches above the rubbled surface of wasteland before rising high up again as though a living sail had been whistled to another boat and was hoisting itself up a new mast.

A man with a throwing net and some cages to sell songbirds in might cope, if he was fast and made some lucky throws. But any avian predator round here would be onto a bum steer. The chances of catching an individual finch from the rapidly twisting flock are zero minus. The whole flock would probably easily twist and turn away and the hawk, that wasn’t here any way, would survive unfed.

4: Parakeets: About twenty flew across the cat park from North West to southeast, straight line in a flock which could have been splitting with a wing of twelve leading I line and a bunch of twelve following, fast, straight and low, maybe to roosts in big tress in the parklands along the Thames valley.

5: Mallards: The fifth flock, about fifteen mallards making an s –shaped tracked flight about fifty feet above the car park from north west to the east, maybe broadly following the canal along towards Little Venice basin.

HUTCHED

The airport workers are hutched in rows around the outskirts of Gatwick in southern England and some of these rows are arranged round big spiritual sheds, built large enough to house small airliners.

Weddings can be launched to heaven from these buildings. Up into lower middle horizons; complete with sunsets, palm trees, parakeets, sandy strands and fluttering, cherubically winged, cherubic babies, (usually allocated at a rate of 2.5 per (usually heterosexual) couple).

It was a wet day throughout, initially, the strangely suited man could not find the correct shed for the marital lift off that he had been invited to attend, even with satellite assisted assistance from a local taxi driver.

He shuffled around across the rear lawns of the spiritual sheds attracting rain drops to his person from recently planted orange and red leaved ornamental trees. He crept into the latecomers’ area at the back of the congregation who were just rendering “Amazing Grace” anaemic, having realised that they mostly lacked the conviction to sing it and did not know the words anyway.

British Methodism and Low Church Anglicanism, have honourable, once vigorous traditions of hymn singing. The strangely suited straggler could remember his aunts and uncles belting it out, their very souls vibrating with religious fervour, their personal pieties melding into One Lord’s brass section, which did not need electronic amplification or borrowed traditions.

The unsuited suited one did not find a jigsaw slot in the congregation to fit him, as he was neither Methodist nor Anglican (at any level), but rather an anarcho-syndicalist eco-socialist with several other silly principles as well and a big hollow mistake in the middle of his life that had coincided with the 1970’s. Then he had youthfully and enthusiastically charged as part of a quasi-generational peace jihad against what some then took to be the sex and drug taboos of the then ‘developed’ world.

The unsuited suited witnessed the marital unity of his Methodist cousin with someone else's Anglican cousin, and thought he saw all around him , the suited ones’ attempt to reknit their community that actually worshipped ornamental garden plants and politeness more reverently than any force of creation.

He never had anything against a decent whistle and flute himself though, but Oxfam had been one of the few tailors that he could ever have afforded.

Those who had hired and those who had had their clothes especially made for them on this occasion sliced, glued tied and bound the bride and groom together by means of ritual, psalm, unguent prayer and apparent attention to sermons.

The “youngsters”, (contemporaries of the splicereeroons), had formed themselves quite a nice tight little soul/gospel combo, (bass, drums, organ and keyboards, lead and rhythm and two young female soprano singers neither of whom had one sixteenth the lung power of Aretha Franklin) which sang the suited out onto wet autumn municipal lawns.

And taxi flotillas and lifts from cousins and two single decker hired buses came and took guests to receptions.

Unsuited suited was left regretting his life at a bus stop as the summer came and cried because it had just died. Indeed he might have regretted it more had he not learnt in the course of casual conversation with passers-by that he was on the wrong side of the road, for the bus to the station for the train to the Smoke.

And the when he had got himself sorted out, (gottonabus, gottoffabus), finding that his Old Age Pensioner’s bus pass worked out here where the airport workers are hutched with their hatchbacks. His breath was then so short in that decade of his life that he then could barely walk ten yards on the level and he entered the suburban station via a sloping series of wheelchair ramps and having scaled this low grade pyramid was, he was accosted at its almost apex by a local junky lady cradling a balding leopard skin print bag.

“Err I know this is a long shot..” She essayed, perhaps it she being new to the role of the medically mendicant and it being a middle class suburb.

“It is. No. I’m not giving you any money!” He snapped back projecting the fire pain of his diabetic feet at her.

And thus having established his petty bourgeois credentials he commuted back to London from his cousin’s wedding, unbothered, since he slept as the train pulled into Victoria station terminus, which was then terminally busy with the coincidence of tourists, day time town shoppers returning and people coming in for a night on the town.

A slow moving pensioner in this was a bit like an alien species dropped into a swarming confluence of army ant columns by sadistic small boy. Though he moved slowly and deliberately a nature cameraperson would have sought him out for focus and described him with commentary:

“Here is the diabetic pensioner slowest denizen of this swarming confluence of persons and traders, paraders, travellers and tourists. These massing, crossing tides of human fish, these clouds of commuting plankton swirl over around and through each other like twisting mackerel driven to shoal upwards in tighter and tighter gyres by the pointy jaws and unrelenting maws of the marlin that herd them from beneath. The pensioner plods on through this maddening moil, frequently stopping to lean stop and rest, like a timeless tortoise, an interminable termite, a five-legged tarantula or a barely mobile spatula, he grogs on regardless supporting and supported by his shopping trolley seeking out the concrete promontory long laid out in his traditional DNA by his traditional genes. That grey sacred seeming pillar that has long been the halt of the number two omnibus en route to Stockwell. Here like crabs, claw waving in tidal froth would- be travellers cling, amass and congregate and as each bus arrives the clump off to surge on to its decks, using elbow, knee and even gut-barge to secure travelling niches.”

The rain has now set in as a steady wet black background to everything that night. The air is almost water and the water is almost air. And when a slow moving pensioner gets off the number two in Stockwell he almost gets underwater there.

Wet blobs spread on parts of his unsuitable suit seeping round the edges of, or even straight through the seams of an inadequate waterproof. So with strides almost as small as to be monopodal like his night speed buggy pal, the slug, he crawls along sodden pavings and over sodden concrete north off the big back doors of Stockwell bus garage. He plods and pauses, plods and pauses, along iron railings, over two side roads and under dripping pane trees to the ‘garden’ of the Union Arms where subversive nicotine addicts are huddled under umbrellas, resolutely refusing to get married and conversing about anarcho-syndicalisms eco-socialisms as a northern hemisphere year could be beginning to end badly for them.

He has a drink or two, cracks a joke or two, learns a thing or two and maybe; but cannot settle. He can still see the rain , feel the rain, taste the rain, drink it in, spit it out and hear it fall again, (and again). There’s no way out but the crippled pensioner’s walk to the bus stop.

Later it transpires that there was another way out, to a dry party, which in this context meant a party where alcoholic drink was served on weather-proof premises. However he did not know that then and did that wet walk back again. The bus back to town, when it came, was more like the inside of a fisherman’s bait can for maggots crawling the wrong way in the rain, than a conveyance forming part of a twenty first century transport system, BUT it got you there unsuitable suit and all. It also got you to two more places where you had to wait in the rain for another bus again.

And by the time the bus was lurching up to the final stop, unsuitable suit wanted a spiritually alcoholic edge to cut through the last damp hour of the damp day and its mildewing memories. So when he could have ridden on one more stop, he got off where there was a 24 hour supermarket open. He walked in, got his wire basket and let its five to twelve hammerhead sharks take him for twelve quid for a litre of orange juice, a hunk of cheese a loaf of Polish sliced bread and a half-bottle of good old English vodka.

One more two stop bus ride, one more furlong up hill on his suburban road in the still unceased rain, resting every ten yards, leaning palm on damp slightly abrasive concrete pillar, on wooden fence post releasing a slight odour of wood preservative in the incessant dam damp.

And at last, after fumbling with house keys on neck ribbons under an undry fleece. Through two doors to privacy assured, up the wooden hill that he had bought and paid for to sit at the computer that he had brought and paid for, subscribing to the internet service that he had brought and paid for by watching repeats of TV programs that he wouldn’t have watched if he hadn’t been able to do so for free.

And it was not that he wanted a drink as such, he had a couple of cans of cider in, if it had just been that. He wanted his whole day back, or life back come to that and the vodka from the 24-hr rip off store seemed like a clean sharp blade that could cut him out a chunk back.

He was not attending a religious ceremony that he sympathised with, but did not wholly agree with. He was not making journeys around to places and through mad crowds that he might not otherwise have made. He was still wearing some clothes that he would not otherwise have worn, but at least he wasn’t getting wet any more.

British Vodka doesn’t taste of much, except, in the instance of the particular half-bottle, its orange mixer and though, (if he thought back in perspective, which he didn’t just then), he was a selfish bastard who usually sorted himself out in petty regards, so what that drink tasted of was self-control, like an action being done by a doer who does wanted to do it. Dah do Ron-ron-ron.

But, but, but; it all bit back. He drank the vodka probably until about 5 am and then he slept or perhaps passed out. The liquids worked their way around his body; and then maybe an hour or so later, sort of woke him up perhaps.

And perhaps this gets retrospective here; parts have to be reconstructed from local logic and a bit of domestic archaeology.

For instance, it seems sensible to suppose that to have fallen down, probably slipping and/or tripping and descending in a rapid involuntary knee-slicing kneel that made a one inch deep gash across left leg just below the knee cap, that the person who inflicted this on themselves dunnit from a standing or walking position. They done this by coming downhard without possibility of volition or control.

Who knows? He did not see, but what cut the cut, but the cut was done. Blood vermillion from warfarin and vodka splatter a square yard of suburban flooring and growing. Subcutaneous fat was visible round the edges of the cut and in the middle of the blood mess on the floor, an intact empty vodka half bottle lay mocking the newly wounded man.

He ignored its taunts, he knew what to do. Cloth clamped across the wound, (an Arab head cloth was first to hand), phone an ambulance, come as soon as you can, I’ll be sitting in the street on the doorstep wearing a Harris tweed jacket, wrapped in an old blue blanket waving feebly and bleeding copiously.

Wounded, get down the stairs to the street by crawling on this arse like an upended weevil to be inspected by the dawn of a relatively dry late autumn day. Light rising over suburban rooves, sure he could hear a first bird song, one note, surely not a house sparrow, they’d all long gone from London.

He had long enough to sit there and watch the light rising. Long enough not to watch his blood puddle spreading down the front garden path reach the edge of a flower bed. Long enough to wonder when to make a second emergency call, but a yellow and green motorised watermelon, a London Ambulance Service Ambulance rolled down the road.

The crew took him up and took him in; cradle to grave, accident and emergency.

Three sightings

Three sightings of the devil are not things to be described in writing flippantly or frequently or in the “other interests” sections of a c.v. sent out cold to allegedly potential employers.

Pedro thought this last activity futile, since even employers who were recruiting during a recession, were unlikely to want to take on disabled men in their late fifties. Mention of encounters with symbolic manifestations of evil were unlikely to change this.

He could put them in one of his quasi political blogs, but the superstition would not be welcomed, even if the paranoia was, assuming anyone read it that is, but he ploughed on anyway

Chronologically the first devil sighting was aquatic. One summer off the tip of the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, Pedro saw an iron orca, which was a unsubmerged submarine, sliding up the Clyde silently. In the sunlight with the clear air and the bright water, it could have been a beautiful streamlined marine beast. It could have been beautiful unless one thought, as Pedro did, of what it could have been carrying. It might have been carrying nuclear missiles; sailing around a world that it could end.

Chronologically Pedro’s second sighting was on land, England’s green and peasant one, somewhere between the southern end of the Malvern Hills and Tewkesbury. In the another summer, in an early morning when Pedro was riding a touring bicycle through the back lanes. He turned a corner onto straight stretch of road with flat fields on either side, and about half a mile on, a farmhouse on the right. Pedro cycled on towards this building and saw what he thought was a big black dog sitting upright, mid road.

Pedro had feared dogs ever since a black tongued chow barked in his face when he was a toddler. Whatever deep seated fears might be involved, dogs running out of houses by country roads were a menace to cyclists. They might knock you off your bike or make you suddenly swerve out to avoid them. Pedro sometimes kept a heavy pump or D lock to hand. He kept meaning to get a pot of ground pepper or one of them ultrasonic things to keep in his handlebar bag. However he never deployed or used any of these deterrents.

When dogs came at him barking and snarling, he barked back, shouting and swearing at them or even, if they got close enough, kicking out. The last imperilled a cyclist’s stability and Pedro felt a right twat cycling along shouting, swearing and attempting to kick dogs.

That morning he just wasn’t in the mood for it, the sun was burning mist off the fields but the air was still cold enough to be refreshing. He was not resenting cars yet, since he had yet to see any that day and has blood sugar levels had not yet fallen enough to make him stroppy.

He stopped short of the farm, hoping that someone would come out of it and/or call the dog in. The dog sat immobile. It was black , featureless a silhouette. Pedro it was facing him and looking at him to he was too far off to descry its eyes.

Noises came from behind the farm and a large green tractor drove out onto the road from behind the farm. The dog ran off to the left across the fields, away from the building.

Pedro watched it run, its motion was not like a dog’s, more fluid, less rigid, As the beast ran it was possible to see its tail, which was as long as its body. The beast held its tail in a long curve behind it with the lowest point just above the furrows of the field but with the tip raised and pointing up in a sort of C or J shape.

At the time Pedro thought no more of it than that the dog had gone and that he could cycle on.

It was only about a week later that he replayed what he had seen in his memory and he could see the dog running in the clear air across the field away from the farmhouse, away from the building that any true dog would wish to guard. The long tails behind it with the tip curved up was an appendage that did not belong on any dog’s arse. The shug seen in the clear air was no true dog. Pedro concluded that a big black wild strange cat had crossed his trail.

Chronologically the third sighting was high in the sky. It came almost two decades later than the first. Pedro cycled no more. Arthritis had eaten the tendons inside his knees and no known number of Glucosamine tablets could put them back. Nostalgia and wishful thinking made him keep two bikes in his garage, where he also kept garden tools, a portable combined saw horse and vice, half a sawn up tricycle , four tarpaulins, a wooden dining table tripod, paints, rags and about thirty assorted chunks of timber and stone. Therefore the garage was cluttered. It was also dark and murky because of its corrugated asbestos roof. To let light on or to go out into the garden himself, Pedro had to pen a back door and to do that, he had to wheel out on of his bikes, usually the green painted Dawes Galaxy, and prop it up against the garden fence.

He did this one spring a few days after a volcano had erupted in Iceland. The ash from this volcano had drifted in a huge high invisible cloud over Britain. Fear of the ash cloud and the crashes that it might cause, made all airlines cancel their flights. Millions of profits were lost and as the skies emptied, the radio waves filled with the whingeing of airline entrepreneurs.

The day that Pedro wheeled the bike out was just when some authority had just judged the swifts’ road safe again. So after he had propped up the bike, he looked, to see if he could see the vapour trails again. There were a few beginning to weave a blue and white tartan across London skies again.

And above them all, crossing the sky diagonally, white doughnuts on a rope, a vapour trails higher than and unlike all the others, one that Pedro had only read about in obscure magazines devoted to obscure subjects like sightings of things that could be the evidence of secret aeroplanes. The main part of the strange thing that Pedro saw was a line in the sky like other vapour trails, but along it , at seemingly regular intervals were circular white clouds and in threaded through the middles of them. It was superficially pretty, looking like a child's necklace across the sky and maybe round the world. but what Pedro suspected about it made it seem less cute than it looked. He suspected , and his computer later confirmed this, as far as he was concerned, that it could be the trail of a pulse jet. This powered a plane, his computer told him the most powerful nation in the world could use to show it things which its space satellites were unable to detect. So why was it Flying over London? Was it only flying there today, or was it only visible today because there were fewer airliners than usual making vapour trails below it. Pedro shivered as his brain bathed him in paranoia.

However Pedro might have seen angel once in the form of wild European lynx beside a motorway near Gothenburg when he woke from sleep on the hard bed of that road’s hard shoulder.

INVIGILATOR

INVIGILATOR

Enter an empty room,
put out all the papers
on the desks arranged in rows
write words on a whiteboard
and invite the exam candidates in
cheerily greet them by saying,
“Put your bags at the back,
And turn off your mobile phones.”
Start the exam
And stare And stare And stare
For three hours
I am the eye of authority
For a pittance
I have hired my gaze out
To enforce exam regulations
Exercising petty power
As bureaucratically stipulated
Only allowing one person at a time
To go to the lavatory
After they have put their hand
to request this privilege first
Thus bladders are subjected
To principles of academic freedom
And proper rigour.
And part of this important authority
Is the power to end the exam
Which I do promptly
And collect the papers,
Wipe the whiteboard
and leave the room
Empty again.

Mary the Mare and Billy the Beaver

Mary the Mare lived in a cottage with flowers round the door,
Or she did, until she ate all the flowers.
She asked her friend Billy the Beaver round for tea,
but she had no tea to give him.
So he ate the door
All the way from the ceiling to the floor.
Well he would wouldn’t he?
Because it was wood wasn’t it?
“I hope there’s not too much varnish.” Mary said.
“Nah” (chomp,chomp), said Billy
Then he spat out the hinges and the handles,
And went off leaving a trail of sawdust turds behind him,
Ready to be made into MDF kitchen units.
Mary stared at the world through the empty space where the door had been,
She didn’t even have half a door left to look over,
Thanks to that greedy beaver,
So she felt all unstable,
Suffered from a sudden loss of confidence
And fell over.

The moral of this story is
That we must all pull together and use good British commonsense
Because that’s all we’ll have left soon
Apart from sawdust turds.

someARTWORK2011

A salad day of Fatty Rentamob

Life was like a salad now; once it had been meat and two veg, meat and two veg, meat and two veg, meat and two veg, fish on Fridays and roast on Sundays. A stodgy but nutritious routine of working 40 + hrs a week, 5 out of 7.

Reconsidering this gastronomic analogy, he thought his working years could be compared to the career of a farmed goose in south-western France. Initially he had felt relatively unconstrained. He had had quite a convincing illusion of freedom. He had been able to eat well and they even gave him holidays; but slowly the price that he paid in his labour and freedom for the sums of money regularly going into his bank account increased.

He became more and more discontented, but he had previously worked in shops, factories and on building sites, so he knew that relative to workers in those places, his conditions were good. Sometimes he could just about make himself believe, that as he taught Economics, or Psychology, or Politics: he could be contributing to a counter culture or even, if really deluded, that he was fostering some sort of revolutionary consciousness amongst his students,

When he taught word-processing or some of the gimcrack pro-capitalist garbage that went under the banner of “business studies”, or “world of work” or some other such bullshit name; it was then he knew that he was a wage slave in the wage slave training industry. Over the twenty years that he worked in the College, it was the latter type of work that grew whilst, the former shrank. So to return to the analogy of the French goose, he was still being stuffed with salary stodge, but he had now noticed the funnel down his throat and the fact that his feet were nailed to a board.

Like a force fed goose, he got ill, but unlike that of mature geese, mature human liver was not yet a saleable delicacy so he got ill health retirement instead of being pateed, preserved and tinned.

Since then he had ceased to have a routine. Sometimes bits and pieces of casual employment, or the need to travel, could induce him to pitchfork himself of bed early, even before dawn in the summer if need be. Sometimes electronic bleeping that he had programmed, or more often and urgent need to piss could get him up. He usually wished that he could resume the conversation that he had been having with a great crested grebe in the urinals of Buckingham Palace. Sometimes if the bleeper reached him whilst he has elvisly enthroned asleep on his not tropical hardwood toilet seat, he would open his eyes and his entire flat would seem to move through forty five degrees when realised that he was looking down at his feet which were not sticking out of the end of his bed.

Seizing the time and a tube of athlete’s foot cream from the window sill, he would anoint himself between the toes with this white fungicide. An operation which usually reminded him that human toes were a useless evolutionary dead-end, like the vestigial legs of slow worms. He wrestled with  and swore at bits of attire as he donned them but seldom as much as he did when he took them off again in the evenings.

He seldom went anywhere without a bag ever, but recently his brand new ones had wheels on since his arthritic knees meant that he had to use the shopping trolley that he dragged behind him as a sort of walking stick. He packed this contraption with whatever he thought he might need that day, sometimes if hurried screaming “ Get in the fucking bag!” at recalcitrant objects.

He limped and lumped, down the stairs, the downloaded essential junk out the front door, over the step, down the cracked concrete drive past an urban foxturd. Out the front door turn left, turn right along uneven pavements to the bus stop. Sometimes he returned and made the journey again, if he remembered that he’d forgotten something, like the memorised memory stick that he’d once forgotten that he hadn’t got.

If it was early morning, cold or raining or all three, the people at the stop would often be morose, some almost asleep on their feet and /or conversing softly it languages that he could not understand. On anyone one of seven weekdays, the bus was likely to be full. London had a voracious and continuing appetite for servants to consumers, it sucked in waiters, house painters, cooks, shop assistants, security guards, clerks and all their line managers, like crabs, flatfish and strands of kelp into the blades of a tidal turbine.

Usually he only went has far as the maw of the nearest tube station, he might buy an unhealthy breakfast of biscuits and canned drink, to digest: he also was digested by a metal travelling worm to be cast back onto the surface into a demo, a meeting, a computer room, a library or some other assignation.

On a political day he might end up holding a placard or banner outside some ministry or multinational HQ, or even the Prime Minister’s official residence, often fenced in, by the police portable sections of metal fencing into a sort of political pig-pen. But the political activity he most enjoyed was the start of a big march.

Here he could behave like an extra in a sickening sentimental musical based on a sickening sentimental novel by Charles Dickens.

“Placards! Placards! PLACARDS!” he would shout.

“Git yore Placards, ‘ere! Green party Placards! No demonstration is complete wivaut a PLACARD! Heverey political hactivist needs a PLACARD!”

Sometimes he made up a little song to the tune of “My Way” as sung by Frank Sinatra. His lyrics were quite simple.

“Placards, Placards- Placards,
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh achards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards,Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh achards!”

In the course of all this singing and shouting, he handed placards to those passing by who were assembling for the demo occasionally, he attempted to foist them on bemused tourists. Sometimes people wanted to take them, Sometimes they didn’t. It seemed to go in phases and he could feel like a loud-mouthed angler standing on the bank of a fast flowing river, filled with migratory fish that would suddenly, and for no apparent reason, voraciously bite bait.

At some point either the placards or the people would run out and his shouting would cease. If the march was slow enough, (and nowadays it seldom was), he might go on it, but usually he took some kind of short cut to its end. This often turned out to be a paved square or an area of grass trampled into flat mud in a park where there would be speeches and pigeon shit.

Speeches at English political demos in the early twenty first century were, as far as he was concerned, empty rituals, usually as irrelevant as biblical psalms, but never as beautiful. Much as he purported to despise the prevalent media driven sound bite culture, he was incapable of listening attentively to even a two minute speech.

Demos were basically big social events, unless there were counter demos or sometimes unless a shadowy powerful person or committee deemed that some sort of symbolic threat to capitalism was being posed via the smashing of a bank’s plate glass windows or the scratching of expensive cars so that roboid cops in riot gear were deployed and push did come to shove. Usually during the speech, the listeners were rather than continuing to struggle, vowing not to give up the fight or keep marching until something or other, deciding which pub to go to and therefore also which ones not to go to.

If the demo was anywhere near central London, the pub was crowded the drink was expensive, the journey back to suburb or province cramped, so the sword went back to sleep in the shopping trolley, the clouds did not unfold and capitalism stayed to be smashed on another salad day.

Dead Harvestman

“I am Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper.” Sean said one midwinter morning.

These were the first words that he said after awakening. He said it because awakening was the nearest he ever got to rebirth. In the time between waking and the time when his regular identity was reconfirmed, usually when he logged on to his computer for the first time of the day, he could briefly be, or pretend to be, someone else. Therefore his first utterance was often a self renaming.

He soon forgot his temporary morning identities. There were many, he did not inaugurate one every morning, but he often took one on.

So it was as Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper that Sean went that morning to his bathroom to urinate.

He unleashed his steaming yellow stream, (not literally, you understand, as he seldom tied his foreskin tightly or indeed at all). Once he had done this, he cleaned the pan; then deciding that the lavatory cistern was dusty, he wiped it with a piece of toilet tissue and in doing so, he disturbed a spider that had been sitting it its webs that hung beneath the cistern.

The spider was a harvestman, a species of arachnid unlike others in these parts, but if some sadist had pulled its legs off , it would have resembled Sir Nigel since its body was almost perfectly round. Its legs were long, long, long, and longer.

Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper was surprised to find it here, he admired its toughness. It was as enterprising as any of the human refugees who frequented this part of London, Sir Nigel thought. He guessed that it was born and raised back in the old long green grass jungle of the back garden, uncultivated as an insult to suburbia.

Here, in the summer it had presumably thrived, eating whatever thrips and droots were a harvestman’s customary fayre. As it sought its harvestman’s lunch, it had moved through the middle reaches of the high grass stems balancing and manoeuvring on its extremely thin limbs, no wider than a technical draughtsperson’s pen line.

Actually it could have been a harvestwoman, and bearing in mind the propensity for spousemunching in some spider species, female might be the more likely spidergender to survive.

Sir Nigel thought that it must somehow have flown to reach the underside of the lavatory cistern in his second floor flat in midwinter. Perhaps fierce autumn gales had picked it up as it clung on for an involuntary hanglide beneath a websail of made its own silk. This flight had, Sir Nigel presumed, taken the harvestman to the ventilation fan in the small shitroom window whence some of the acrid odours of his excretions were wafted and diffused into the suburban atmosphere of this part of North London.

The sight of the live spider under the cistern in midwinter aroused almost contradictory emotions of jealousy and admiration.

He was jealous of the spider, because he wished that he could make a web of strong adhesive silk, but he did not have the necessary glands or metabolism. Had he been able to do so, he might have exuded a vast parachute that could have carried him to the Algarve to drink gallons of gin by the sea in warm weather.

Sir Nigel also surmised that, if he had had an inbuilt web-producing facility, he might have been able to avoid shopping trips. He could, theoretically, have hung a vast web from his kitchen window to the forty foot tall poplar tree that grew at the end of his back garden. However that might have meant subsisting on a diet of pigeons, crows, magpies and the occasional passing seagull. Further more extracting such birds from the web would surely end up being as labour intensive as dragging a shopping trolley to a supermarket.

He guessed that the harvestman ate the small black flies which hovered around his lavatory. When his reflexes were sharp, and a flies reflexes were blunt, Sir Nigel sometimes pulverised one of these insects against the boghouse wall with a swift blow of a toilet roll. He now felt guilty about doing this as it deprived the brave harvestman of a meal.

Why did he anthropomorphically attribute the quality of bravery to the spider? He wondered; it had just blown in and survived a bit, like most other living things round here. Rewarding the spider for the bravery that he accorded to it was, in any case, beyond his scope; after all, pinning a medal to its “chest”, would most likely, be fatal to it; and anyway he had no medal.

He enjoyed such stupid rumination, but it was futile, he had something else to do, he had to log on to his computer and check his emails. This involved consciously taking on the “real” identity of Sean which was the name on his birth certificate, driving license, cheque card, library card, Party membership card etc, etc. As soon as Sean thought of himself as Sean, before he even touched the computer’s keyboard, Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper ceased to exist. Sean became Sean and Sir Nigel was erased and totally forgotten.

In future Sean remembered the spider and he knew of his early morning habit of temporarily assuming personas who had silly names, but he could not remember what the names had been. So, as far as Sean was concerned, it could have been that Sir Nigel Underwater Pocket-Walloper was Leornad Spinggy-Pitshanger.

Two weeks later, when the days were imperceptibly longer but perceptibly colder, the Archmandrite Merlot von Liquitab found the harvestman dead, hanging legs up from the tattered web remains beneath the lavatory cistern.

Merlot felt a grief twinge, as he regarded the tiny shrivelled body. He hoped that out there in the ex-lawn beneath a six-inch snow carpet, more spiderlings or eggs survived, perhaps buried or attached to the underside of a leaf or stem. He had no idea how harvestmen overwintered.

Then in May when the grass grew tall, new harvestmen could foray out again to feast in suburban jungle.

A phone rang and the Archmandrite vanished.

Jet necklace

Why did I deserve to see
All the towns and cities and major roads of Italy
Stretched out miles and miles beneath me
Sparkling like the jewellery of a goddess
Against a black velvet night?

And could a poor wage slave scholar
Have ever crossed the mountains and seas
To add pictures to his albums and memories
Of the sun rising from the sea at Skyros
The gardens of Granada,
the Oracle at Delphi,
or the elephants of Sri Lanka.

It has been done once,
But it shouldn’t be done again
To jet a fat fool in an aeroplane
From here to there and back
If the cost of spending a Christmas in Spain
Is drowning and deserts and dying

So fly on fartbags, full of gas
Or travel by sitting on your arse
On the whizzing worm of a high speed train
So walk if you can
And bike if you like
But never fly on a jet again.

Stinky the dolphin

Stinky the dolphin’s come to play
He washed up on the beach today,
And on the strand, he rots away,
Whiff, Whiff, Whiff, Whiff, Stinky.

Stinky the dolphin’s come to play.
He used to frolic in the waves
But that’s no way for a corpse to behave
So now he decomposes.

He used to click and squeak in the foam,
As all around the seas he’d roam
But above the tideline is his new home
He’s become a seagulls’ restaurant.

His bones are exposed as he turns to slime
He could outswim the tide, but he couldn’t beat time
And as I hold my nose, I wonder when I’m
Gonna be joining stinky.

Fair is worth fighting for

WE are the big eyed puppies

Who frolic in the sunny forest

Where the flowers are Bright and pretty

And we play with soft recycled arsewipe

When the Loggers come with their chainsaws

To slice the sunny forest

We run up to them eager

Wagging our tails and panting

To lick their steel toed boots