By ROYAL Appointment & FAKE NOSTALGIA

By ROYAL Appointment
Become a hamburger in Helmand
Or bolognaise in Baluchistan
Drive around in cloud of dust
Like spam in an armoured can

FAKE NOSTALGIA
I started off with psychedelics
And ended up with diuretics.

In brave young Technicolor days by the sea,
I saw the black cat that,
Did not cross my path,
Elongate itself into a multilegged curve,
like a black furred millipede,
as it turned a corner,
To avoid me.

Seagulls flew like biplanes
Over a deserted winter shingle beach,
And spirits spoke mysterious messages
From inside piles of folded deckchairs.

For sixpence we could make the
Laughing Sailor in the amusement arcade laugh
And he would guffaw,
Mechanically and maniacally
Into the teeth of a Channel gale

On good trips
I sometimes felt that I benignly controlled
The Solent with my solar plexus
And could by sheer concentration,
Calm the waves to rippling blue
And bring the Isle of Wight ferry
Safely into harbour.

Just as well since,
If the rumours, that I heard were true,
Half its crew,
Were on Acid too.

But now instead of waiting
To come up into a rush of revelation
I nervously await the onset
Of the urgent need to urinate
Oh, Froosemide,
I hate you so, you nasty pill
Punishing me
With enforced micturation,
For days by the sea
When drugs gave me visions.

EATLATINANDIE POETS at the Astor Theatre DEAL

REVIEW 29 OCTOBER

PERFORMANCE POETRY AT THE ASTOR

The poet Adrian Mitchell said: “Most people don’t like poetry because most poetry doesn’t like most people.” Not the case this evening! Four poets from the London circuit performed their work with exuberance, wit and drama, presenting a rich mixture of voices and themes shared with an appreciative audience.

Patric Cunnane read with passion about the Palestinian peace activist Rachel Corrie, told wry, funny verses about strangers on planes, and hilariously became reconciled with his comic book hero from the Dandy, Black Bob.

Zolan Quobble writes about what it is to feel alive. His verse was full of rhythms, about childhood, freedom, shamanism and people who die in prisons. A hypnotic and moving performance.

PR Murry gave us sad, funny and mysterious poems and songs about lobsters, eagles, launderettes and one about Tooting mutating, with extraordinary and blisteringly funny consequences.

Emile Sercombe presented surreal dramas, with an exploding potato, a royal Roman worm, a French werewolf and the ultimate folding bicycle. A breathtaking performance of absurd panache.

The first ever evening of performance poetry at the Astor. There is talk of the troupe returning in 2012. Can’t wait!

Nathan Lobb

Compered by Berni Cunnane Compere without Compare

Zolan Quobble first set

PRMurry first set

Patric Cunnane first set

Emile Sercombe first set

PRMurry second set

Patric Cunnane second set

Zolan Quobble second set

Emile Sercombe second set

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.

YOU CAN NO LONGER BE AS UNINVOLVED AS A TUNNELLING MOLE

It’s no good retreating

Into your shell like

An armadillo.

Shutting your small door

Or portillo, behind you

On the basis of some peccadillo

And sitting sipping the amontillado

Of which you are an afficionado

You can’t just shut yourself away in there,

You’ve get to out here.

Things are happening everywhere

Bif baf bof

It’s all going off

And it’ll come back down

Around all our ears, my dears.

Set get out of the cave Dave.

Get down off the hill Jill.

Get out of your shack Jack.

And back in the swim Jim.

You can no longer be as uninvolved

As a tunnelling mole.

So get out of your hole

Because worm eating is not the answer

Collective worm farming

Under democratic workers’ control

After the overthrow of world capitalism

Is.

The Concrete Lampost

One tooth protrudes 

From my lower jaw

And there’s no evolutionary reason

For it to be for.

It does not enable me to

Spear or shred

Some special food

And I am not a unicorn

Nor no narwhal neither

So my tooth does not protrude

For sexual display or foreplay.

What it is is

A small yellow ivory monument to mischance.

One day,

Maybe about

My thousandth one alive

I walked along

Looking about

At the brave new world

When a great big concrete lamppost

Leapt up through the pavement

I looked to one side

And it sneaked up

In front of me.

SMACK

My consciousness was impacted

By its very first fact.

The moral of this sorry tale

Is to crawl slowly and slimily

Like a snail

Don’t strut or run

Like an ape or an antelope

Or you will get smashed in the face

By a concrete lamppost

Like a hammer hitting a melon

Or a heavy goods vehicle

Running over a lemon.

THE DRAINING BOARD

I used to fly,

High above the world,

And float free of time,

Like some starwinged eagle;

But I was just

An ape opening an atlas

To see

Maps of the tides of history.

Tribes and empires;

Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, Alans

And Picts depicted

And printed on paper plans

Denoted and defined

By differing cross hatchings.

On each new page

A new era

Now I don’t even have

To open a book.

Whilst I wait for my tea kettle to boil,

I look

At the bloblules and globules

At the rivulets and dribulets

Of water in the indentations

Of a kitchen sink draining board.

Gravity and history make them coalesce and flow

Like tribes and empires,

One among many

May suddenly gain momentum

And surges on

A rampant conquering superblob
Absorbing all others
In its path,

Until it mostly careers

Headfirst down the plughole

Leaving scattered remanents behind

Like a kingdom

That once was

And now is gone.

I pour water

And some spills

Onto the draining board

So history starts up

All over again.

my radio is always lying to me about food

With deductive powers,

That would put Sherlock to shame

I looked out from my kitchen window

And as I heard the city coming awake

With its trafficflow starting

Making a sound like the sea

Washing through shingle on beach

And likewise thoughts

 Begin to flow in my head

As I sipped the tea

And realised

That my radio is always lying to me about food

“No” a farmer says "I could not live

Just by selling the meat and veg that I make,

The government must pay me.

People will not buy expensive food,

They’d rather buy computers instead.”

An hour later,

The radio reports from Africa

People are walking for weeks there,

Not stopping to buy

Even the cheapest computer

As they struggle across

The hottest desert on earth

Walking on and on

Or stopping to lie down and die

Until they reach the place

 Where they are given the food

That they could not afford to buy

Two hours later

It is time for another

Radio lie about food

A store manager says it is no good

Demand just will not restart

Try as he might

He cannot make

People want computers enough to buy them

When they’re spending all their money on food

And now and then or some other when

The sun comes up and warms a solar panel

In the cave mouth

So a radio turns itself on

To tell more lies about food

To a conference of human bones

That is being held amongst

 The ashes on the cave floor.                                          

The Imaginary vlogging of Norry Spinger

Norry Spinger bought a cheap video camera because he had discovered that it was possible to upload clips of video footage onto websites and blogs. He made this purchase partly because he had once entertained an idea, which he soon recognised as a Walter Mitty fantasy, of being a freelance video journalist.  Norry had not been an early adapter as far as this bit of technological innovation had been concerned. Once it had come into the range of Norry’s economic possibility, it also been within others’ potential grasp for a few years, so when Norry cottoned on to the idea of uploading some of the bits of video that he had shot, he was probably only the 100 millionth person on the planet to make this realisation.

Vlogging, like all the other discoveries of Norry’s life had been unoriginal for he had also not been the first person to think of, or practise, abstract sculpture, surrealism, performance poetry or collage. The unrecognition of his uninnovative ungenius was a possible explanation of his, at times, stroppy behaviour. Once recently, a man in an olive green waterproof had approached Norry as he was standing on the pavement near London’s Baker Street station. Perhaps this man had inadvertently crossed the wide invisible circle of personal space that surrounded every English person, just as grey green blue seas surrounded that shores of that person’s island. In fact the rainproofed clothed one had come some close that Norrie had been able to read the word “Marmot” written in about 15 point font, in bright green thread situated over the man’s left nipple on this jacket.

“You are not a Marmot.” Norry said, clearly and loudly but without raising his voice to a shout. “You are some sort of waterproofed tourist.”

As this remark coming almost from nowhere, was addressed to a total stranger was completely out of any usual social context, and almost certainly outside the parameters of the probable interaction scripts of tourist guides; it elicited at best a bemused semi-smile by way of response from Marmotman.

Norry didn’t stay to see or let the conversation develop; he vanished into the London crowd like a burst bubble on the top of a pot of boiling grey porridge.

He resurfaced at the Old Ethical Hall at the back of Black Griffin Square in Clerkenwell, lugging a heavy two wheeled cart behind him. This Chinese chariot, a lightweight soft metal shopping trolley frame, was the vehicle of choice for many London pedestrians in the twenty-tens. In its original from it had carried some sort of nylon sack, but Norrie had customised it, with other bags and elasticised bits of rope, (known to some as bungee clips), to carry his video camera, extension lead and tripod.

That morning Norrie’s Queen, Elizabeth the second, had smiled on him before he had set out from his home. Her image, on a ten pound note, had smiled above the rim of an empty yoghurt pot on Norry’s kitchen table, he felt blessed by this and the fact that he had harvested about half a pound of potatoes that he had been growing in a compost filled dustbin situated at the end of this back garden.

recipe of the Deep Deep Kitchen

Theories of slime

A hospital ward gives access to a special kind of night or of reality for that matter; especially on bank holidays and weekends when, in a hospital with hundreds of patients, only a few doctors might be available. It seemed they might be on call and not on the premises judging from the time it might take for them to show up in response to calls from the nightshifts of nurses who looked after the patients.

These nurses had plenty to do, the load could vary with how many patients there were in any ward, or on how many nurses turned up for a shift. They had to record measurements such as patients’ blood pressures , weights, etc. they might have their routines disrupted, if an existing patient had some sort of fit or crisis or if a new patient was admitted to the ward.

But all medical decisions had to be taken by doctoral demi-gods. Between decisions all else lapsed in to phosphorescently lit limbo and people moved in white formica walled rooms like fish plucked from rivers and placed in featureless holding tanks made from temporal chunks delimited at their ends by handover to another shift.

When patients were fished out of the tanks again, to become outpatients or even healthy persons, they could experience a cicada-like sensation as though they had crawled from underground chrysalises which had once been buried very deep for a long, long incubation and protection.

This illusion of metamorphosis might only last as long as the bus, taxi, car or ambulance took to deliver dischargees back to their previous environments where they had been people once upon a time. The luckier, usually the younger, the richer and the tougher might deinstitutionalise relatively rapidly and painlessly going back soon to who they probably would have been anyway.

Conversely, the older, the poorer and the weaker are more likely to retain reminders of how and why they had been hospitalised. Just scars, if they were lucky.

Peter K first went to hospital when he was ten years old, then, in Britain in the 1960’s, nearly all ten year olds had their tonsil surgically removed, and if Peter K’s memory served him right, he had had his adenoids taken out as well. Perhaps this because a scalpel-happy surgical tendency was then in the ascendant within the British medical profession, until those who asked what purpose this large scale paedomutilation was for and moment of scientific enlightenment stopped the practise, which did not seem to be doing much good .

About Forty years later Peter K became a hospital inpatient again and during this time his tonsular and adenoidal lack shad had no discernible effect on him. However the other several alter hospitalisations of Peter K left him well scathed in other respects. He hobbled out on arthritic knees and the perpetually swollen and painful feet of a diabetic and sadly he had not had a foot transplant, they were his own. Involuntarily abstinence had usually made him slightly thinner but on his latest discharge he was discharging too. He was leaving a trail of slime behind him.

It was a clear liquid that seeped, at times almost poured, from what had to be holes in his lower legs. Peter thought of the origins of the discharge in these terms, because although his leg skin felt and looked sore, he could not discern any evidence of a break or tear in it.

Nurses and Doctors who had looked more closely spoke of “pin-holes”. They called the liquid that came soaking out of the bottom of Peter’s trousers, sometimes filling his shoes, “exudiate”. It was clear, it looked like water, but maybe did not flow quite as fast. When it soaked into cloth and dried, it could make it rigid, as a starch might. It smelt slightly sometimes like an old wet dog or faintly fishy cat food.

Peter K posited three possible explanations as to why he exuded exudiate. These were:

a) Genetic determinism
b) Paranoid conspirationalism
c) Zombific metamorphosis

The first, genetic determinism, involved conflating two mythically true facts. That Henry VIII’s legs leaked, (probably lots of other people’s legs had too, but Peter had never heard of it). Henry VIII might be descended from King Arthur. Peter K’s exudiate was therefore conclusive proof that he a descendant of and probably heir to the last true High King of Britain. However he hid his light under a bushel, and hid his exudiate inside rubber clogs and underneath shopping trolleys wherever possible. However one the stuff really got flowing, Peter K left a trail of wet blobs behind him. This trail leads to the next category of explanations.

The central tenet of the Paranoid conspirationalist explanation was that some person, agency or entity had caused Peter K’s leg to leak. Depending on which version of this multi-faceted explanation was examined, various possible motivations for this could be posited. Knowing that Asian bears were on the verge of becoming extinct, a Chinese traditional medicine cartel, or perhaps, a single sinister practitioner might have made Peter K into the subject of a genetic experiment which enabled humans to produce a medically efficacious liquid from leg pin holes that could be a substitute for Bear bladder gall.

It seemed likely that this experiment had failed since no one seemed to following Peter K around attempting to collect exudiate. Peter therefore guessed that he could have been a semi-successful or unsuccessful prototype of the “human gall bladder bear” who had been allowed to escape, or thrown out of hospital, because his exudiate had not had the medicinal properties required of it. Even now other unfortunates could be being farmed or harvested for what was coming out of their legs.

The Zombific metamorphosis theory indicates that Peter K was dead but hadn’t noticed.

A shirt that you hate deliberately

There are times when it is better,

To wear a shirt that you hate,

Than to wear a shirt that you love,

To wear a shirt that fits you like a glove fits a snail

Or that is made from a fabric

Which makes you feel that

Millions of minute and tiny nails

Are continually being driven

Into your skin.

Or a shirt made from cloth so thin

That blobby old skin  shows through

A shirt that does not camoflage the real you

Or a shirt where the colours and patterns

Are so strange

That they make you look like lumps of fresh bloody reptile blubber

Shaking on a plate

And then there are times

When you don such a horror

Realise that you have done it

Go out And the door slams behind you

Its too late mate

But there are also occasions to wear

A shirt that you hate deliberately

When you are going somewhere that

You should never have gone to begin with.

Where the premises are wrong

But you have to have to go along

Uttering words without meaning

That just move phlegm around inside your mouth.

That is when the hateful garment

Speaks truth for you saying look at my shirt and see

How I really think and feel

It is not me, it is not real

I am just wearing the shirt

Andy Ogram and the Seagulls

For some patients sleep in a hospital can be a problem posed to routines kept in a bodily or subconscious way that people did not even know they had or even had learnt so long ago that they’d forgotten how they’d got them. Things like being sober or drunk or drugged regularly in certain ways and at certain times.

Night time noises and silences are different. Traffic can sound like a sea washing in and out on a shingle beach, which may account for why city citizens like seaside holidays, they can feel unease trying to nod off in inland rural quiet. They may be spooked by sudden owl and fox calls. But things are changing now and that’s the only thing that isn’t.

Humans aren’t the only species to re-locate. Dog foxes’ barks or the crazy yatterings and chitterings of fox cubs at play have now become as much a part of British urban night noise as the meeps and whoops of emergency vehicle sirens and klaxons.

Several clues told cockneys once that they had arrived at the seaside, the smell of salt water and ozone with a usually less powerful undertone of sewage than the tidal Thames. Another dead give away was the crazed laughlike bickering of seagulls, sweeping across above along the wet slate rooftops. One bird might start up and a couple of others might echo and more would follow, like kids shouting “Fight” in a playground until a teacher or dinner monitor came to disperse the twenty or so who were shouting it by now. Only it was never clear who dispersed the swirling gangs of screaming gulls, perhaps they were blown apart by the wind.

Nowadays, not like the good old days of awaydays on trains, you wouldn’t even look up you heard such a racket split the air above a city street. Not even up on the valley side hills above the Thames. Hay meadows, dairies and orchards once were up here and their ghosts haunt on in the names of avenues and lanes.

Now a brick, breeze block and concrete tsunami has rolled over the hills making the unwaved ocean of outer London. Or another analogy might be a tree with roads for veins and cars for corpuscles. Speeding and keeping these corpuscles moving is all that seems to matter by the early 21^st century. High streets and shops are out, hypermarkets and carparks are in so hubbys can come to retail parks in hatchbacks to get their flatpacks, their knickknacks and their own little piece of the world of leather.

And so the sheds spread; you could be reminded of Joni Mitchell’s line about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot except whatever Essex and Middlesex may have been (ie mainly boring downs and fetid swamps), it was not the Garden of Eden.

Nobody can be arsed with expensive Victorian retail palaces any more, concrete a couple of fields, slap in prefab shed big enough for the artics’ loading bays and the for the forking fork lifts to fork about inside, and there you are:

Consume, retail, consume, expand.

Consume, retail, consume, expand.

Consume, retail, consume, expand.

And continue until the planet is used up, die out, be replaced by rats as the dominant species.

Meanwhile sheds spread across the land like scabs and spots growing from pus eruptions spattered out of the Great Wen. From above they might look like white flat topped rocks standing in  grey-brown sea. And if I was a seagull, what would that mean to me?

White means guano yunno, glowing like a pub sign in the dark to be apprehended by a thirsty fat boy. This is the place to fly in, to meet your mates, give the pinions a rest, put the webbed plates down on terra firma , and stand around in a crowd screaming mindlessly. And then you could even mate with a mate and rear a gull family to scream mindlessly at.

Actually, as any attenborough will tell you, gulls are birdbrained, but their vocalisations in the context of their flocks, are not  mindless. They demarcate collective territory warding off potential scavenger competitors like the crows, and they also establish and challenge claims to individual screaming places, roosting and nesting sites.

Put any species in proximity and one way or another, such conflicts tend to be acted out. Put four men in a  bedroom off a ward and such disputes can sometimes happen. Especially, if alert to its duty of care, but bowing to the pressure on beds and hoping nothing will happen, the hospital houses a psychologically disturbed semi-vagrant with a Russian criminal.

When you are recovering from the recent insertion of a wire into or near to your heart via a small hole cut in your groin, as Andy Ogram was. Or when you are fasting in preparation for surgical procedures prior to undergoing a heart by pass, as the man in the net bed to Andy was.: it is not restful to see and hear someone provoke  someone else almost to violence. It is difficult to sleep knowing that this is like hot ashes that will again and again be blown back into flame. Throughout the night the sound of spitting and cursing will repeatedly reawaken Andy. The person who provoked the spitting and cursing will indignantly and loudly defend themselves, declaring that they are the only person in the room so they can behave however they wish, even though they are actually sharing the room with three others, one of whom they are engaged in shouting at.

But as all the seagulls, who circle above the hospital in the morning know, worse things happen at sea and a shed in London is the place to be, whether you’re being warehoused inside for the sake of your health or roosting on the roof. 

A Bureaucratic Crevasse

The sensation of having fallen down a crevasse between two medical departments in a hospital, (let’s call them the “Lungers” and the “Hearties”) can seem acute at about 5.30 am on a Tuesday morning in January when there’s nearly three hours before the feeble sun might start practising at being springtime.

Ian Patient can hear a hacking cough from another section of the ward, and the sound of a night nurse shuffling papers and clicking them into folders. A distant sounding radio is faintly playing pap pop and Ian Patient can almost but not quite, recognise some of the tunes.

In front of him Ian Patient can see two china teacups placed on the edge of a porcelain sink. These are the only purely white objects around apart from a bit of the corner of a bedsheet that Ian can see out of the corner of his eye. Nothing else; walls , polystyrene ceiling tiles, formica panels covering piping, bed, plastic blind strips hanging in the window ( with a gap in the middle), is wholly quite white. It is all pale grey or sickly green, or in the case of the floor lino speckled with dark grey flecks. Bits of the chair and bedside cabinet are beige wood, the steel rubbish bin is mushroom coloured; the most colourful object in the room is a yellow plastic sharps bin fixed halfway up the wall that Ian Patient faces, not quite on a level with three grey plastic light switches situated in the same wall.

Ian shouldn’t complain he’s doing a cheap, quasi-voluntary health cure in the poor man’s Priory. He has a room to himself with en suite facilities (the grey lavatory door is just to his left). Ian hopes that he is not ungrateful and then immediately wonders what he should be grateful for. He’s paid taxes in every one of the thirty eight years of his working life and still some since; but that’s for the facilities and skills of the NHS and its staff. He is grateful for the care and patience shown to him.

“Money can’t buy me love” as Beatles say.

Ian feels some satisfaction to know that business executives and the like probably pay more than he’s ever earned to get hospital rooms to themselves, albeit ones with flowers and probably more interesting décor. But, then again, he wagers that these fatcats have a way whereby they don’t personally pay and somehow working stiffs are subsidising them. Ian wasn’t even a working stiff any more, he got an occupational pension awarded on the basis of ill health and even that was less Tax. The thought was working in Ian up into an enormous, lefty frenzy so that he was ready to gnash his morning Weetabix with the fangs of righteous proletarian fury.

This was what sensory. deprivation was doing to Ian, and myriads of other intelligent beings everywhere.

Earlier Ian caught himself sitting on the loo, picking little flakes of dead skin off his toes and for a moment stood outside his present self, as a former younger self, looking in through the bars at London zoo. He was then almost on the point of getting ready to take a couple of puffs of his inhaler, as he was supposed to every morning, but he thought and planned his journey across the room to the bedside cabinet carefully so as to make this experience last as long as possible.

One of Ian’s keepers, nurses, a tall young Filipino, comes in to take Ian’s blood pressure, temperature etc.: he looks like Cochise in a Hollywood western but does not address Ian as “Kimo Sabe” or suggest that he has a forked tongue; he says “he early bird catches the worm.”

“Yuh” Ian says in a grunted non-committal reply past the thermometer that had been placed in under his tongue.

When Cochise was gone, Ian set off on the inhaler quest and then a far longer safari along the grey corridors where the phlosflorescent light is mixing with dawn. He was aiming to discover if there was a three pin electric socket in the Patients’ “Lounge”.

Les Noises d'Antan of Steve Allendripp

All hospitals are haunted; they are locations of long wakefulness, hidden sleep, comas, drugged states and all other stations on the Circle Line, (from the cradle to the grave, (with careful record keeping)).

Sometimes the machinery on some hospital Wards can sound like it was designed by a man who spent many happy years next to some slough, listening, thrilled, to the trilled mating calls of its amphibian inhabitants. He was probably zonked out of his head on laudanum so he didn’t get the Dengue and didn’t feel it as the mossies drilled their probosci into his swamp-hardened hide.

But it could have been a woman who found the repeated chirruping vocalisations of frog testosterone comforting. In any event, whoever it was seemingly wished to impart the solace that they derived from such amphibian racket to others; perhaps more than anywhere else on Intensive Care Wards, where one can hear the peeping and beeping of the various electronic monitors that track hearts, pulses and intra and extra bodily fluid flows of many sorts.

Possibly the imaginary swamp margin dwelling computer noise designer , (or designers), had a Swiss colleague whose childhood joys and comforts came, not from proximity to fetid marshlife, but from the cool clean air of high summer alpine pastures, replete with leather-clad yodelling cattle herders herding leather-clad cattle, that had bells round their necks.

Swissperson gave bell-like sounds to the ECG machines attached to some patients in some wards. Each one like, the bells of the mountain kine, might ring with a different note from others or ring at a different pace to the others, depending on what which patient’s body did.

Above all the bells and frogs, in most adult wards, most patients seemed mostly silent save for the occasional cough or groan, but there often seemed to be those who had something to shout like:

“ADADGA! A BADGER! A GADGE! AGGAGGA! AAAA! AAAAAAAA! A DAGGER! A WEEEA! A WEEEA!”,

or:

“WADEED! WADEEED! WADEED! WAAAADEED! WADEED MY DAUGHTER! WADEED MY DAUGHTER!

MY DAUGHTER WADEED! MY DAUGHTER WADEED! “

Some, old schoolers, merely shouted:

“NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE! NURSE!”

The more innovative also caused their Helvetic cowbells to sound whilst keeping this up and sometimes adding loud requests for such things as dry cornflakes, the name of the hospital that they were in, the location of their money or another blanket to replace the one that they had just thrown off the bed.

One polite old man shouted out

“EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME!

Another slowly but loudly enunciated:

“URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS! URINE POTS!”

Steve Allendripp had once taught in the schools and colleges of the ILEA, (Inner London Education Authority), in the long lost days of municipal socialist internationalism. Then there were reckoned to be two hundred languages spoken in London.

Municipal socialist internationalism may slumber now, in the deep cellars of County Hall, next to the sweet Thames, but it will be more insomniac than King Arthur and his nighty knights. It will spasm into life like a fresh Frankenstein cobbled together from barely feasible alliances amongst the chronically fissiparous British left. It will be spawned by nuclear waste traces in the river drifting downstream from some weapons research station unmarked on any map of Berkshire.

Municipal socialist internationalism will rise like Godzilla tearing upwards through the tanks of the aquarium above, smashing water tank walls and sending thrashing, gleaming, hydrodynamic sharks to shatter the windows of Coffee Shops and Noodle Bars and decapitate themselves a last meal of Tourist’s Head Soup before diving into the river.

Municipal socialist internationalism will quadrifurcate tourist hotels from within, a kilometre tall larva of future exploding out of a rotting marrow. Municipal socialist internationalism will march across the Thames to more wetly realise the fiery ambitions of Fawkes the papist Taliban. It will smash the four giants, (Poverty, Squalor, Ignorance and Disease), who are pandered to by suited parasites in the medieval shack on the north bank. It will do for Gog and MaGog too.

“FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE!” It will roar and pigeons will spiral up in dense grey flocks like clouds of smoke. Urban seagulls will squawk and fly off for awaydays by the sea; jets will fall out of the sky.

In the meantime as Steve Allendripp gets older and his dreams get madder, globalisation don’t stop and the jets still fly “Theyboris” want to build a new airport even on the mudflats of the Thames estuary which will eventually eat it. London sucks in cheap labour like a belching plughole together with babies, bathwater and anything else it can get. So by the early 21st there must be more than two hundred languages spoken in London, and fewer than ever understood.

Some Psychiatrists reckon that there is a window of opportunity in child hood, when, given some sort of multi-lingual environment, it is possible to speak and understand more than one language truly fluently. People can learn languages later but will still probably retain their older accents and maybe continue to think and dream in their mother tongues.

Steve Allendripp’s parents, particularly the Da, were Francophiles. Not surprising, when SA thought about it; Father had been born in 1902 and almost lived into the Nineties. Thankfully, he had not been into gung-ho heroism, lying about his age and volunteering for the Mincer; and Hitler had been stopped at Dunkirk; so he had been too young for the First and too old for the Second. However, he’d known enough of rationing and culture, and he’d been to Paris as an art student in his twenties, (when, legendarily, he didn’t have the twenty quid to buy a Gauguin print), to want what the French had i.e.; better weather, better cooking, and a more direct appreciation of sensual beauty perhaps (?).

Although Steve Allendripp’s parents were Francophiles, they were not Francophones, but they tried to remedy this by sending five year old Steve to the Français Lycée de Londres in South Kensington.

It seems that the sash cord on Steve Allendripp’s window of opportunity was well frayed by then, if not completely cut. He remembered a bleak brick walled playground hemmed in by tall buildings; being given dead white worms to eat and strange golden globules of oil on the soup. As soften in later life, people shouted at him in a language that he did not understand and then shouted more when he did not understand them.

Later on real Francophones told him that he had a decent accent; but either the slang of his contemporaries or anything more complex than a present tense, lost him. He did become a Francophile, (for much the same reasons that his parents had), but otherwise he was a monoglot clot.

Had he been born a decade earlier he might just have ended up in one of the messy wars that marked the end of the British Empire.; but instead of being sent off to shout at foreigners, they came to him London Schools and colleges to be shouted at, because the British Empire and succeeding neo-imperialist British foreign policies had made the nation behave like a hungry star fish, in that it had vomited up its stomach in the general direction of the rest of the world and then re-ingested this organ together with whatever it had managed catch in it.

F. Ransome- Kuti, the Nigerian politico-pop star had once reputedly harangued an audience in the Brixton Academy with words to the effect that: “No wonder they abolished slavery, you packed your suitcases and came over here on your own accord.” As any sensible study of migration will state, there are “push” and “pull” factors.

So, often there are old people on 21st century British hospital wards, scared of pain, in a strange place surrounded by strange people, bells, frog noises lights and machines. They get upset, very upset and some of them shout and shout, because they don’t know what the nurses and doctors mean and their children have brought them here and then gone off and left them.

It’s surely a coincidence of course, but there are people who get ghosted. Sometimes Steve Allendripp would sit and sleep in the sticky oilskin armchair that had been placed next to his hospital bed, because, when he laid down his head on the pillow he had only the thickness of a plastic curtain between himself and one of the noisy elderly.

As well as, but associated with Steve Allendripp’s parents’ Francophilia, had been settling as middle-class pioneers in a borough called Fulham in West London. Fulham is on the river and is bordered by some beautiful sweeps of the Thames; Father dreamt of painting some Impressionist views of these and indeed did so.

If you really want to know what “middle-class pioneers” means in the context of twentieth century London, you could read Mayhew or Rowntree, compare with the Chicago school of ethology, and see that London and Chicago, (and maybe New York too?), have urban differing “ecologies”, seemingly formed under the same pressures of globalisation driven migration

To a London based reader or film viewer, Chicago and/or New York can seem rigidly ethnically segregated in contrast to the fluid pussiness of the Great Wen. Maybe the market drove? When Steve Allendripp was a boy in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s, one end of his street had been dead posh with cabinet ministers, and other dross, living in luxury riverside apartment blocks situated next to an exclusively priced tennis club and private park of what had once been a Victorian grandee’s mansion. The other end of the street had had a dairy with stables for its horses and a large commercial laundry, both with their attendant steamy stinks. There was a nearby noisy railway line; and a hundred yards further on, on the New Kings Road, there were fish and chip shops and a scrap metal merchants, with blackboard painted walls so that the latest prices of various types old iron could be chalked up. So homes at the north end of the road were cheaper, but each had three bedrooms and large private gardens, they attracted middle middle class families, who came displacing owner occupiers and the lonely old who had hung on in there. In price terms, the area became marked as ‘upcoming’ by Estate Agents and the whole borough got nicknamed ‘South Chelsea’ and the Invisible Hand pointed a shining path out to suburbs beyond the North and South Circulars and even the orbital motorway for whelks, cloth caps, dropped aitches, eel, pies mash and green liquor.

So Steve Allendripp spent a largely happy childhood in a home that shook from trains, stank from factories, (especially if the wind ever blew the whiff of Price’s candle factory in Battersea up the river), came to be underneath a jet flight path into Heathrow airport and on winter evenings sometimes echoed to the foghorns of the tugs towing trains of barges on the river; then it might be like being inside a gigantic bittern booming in a fen.

Given such early aural socialisation, it was perhaps unsurprising that as a hospital patient teetering on the brink of an earlyish old age, having an older person shout and scream repeatedly and incoherently inches away from his ear was something that Steve Allendripp, soon became able to sleep through; whereas the low concerned mutterings of night nurses and duty doctors might disturb him.

He might wake because the shouting had stopped. Ambulance persons and/or porters might be wheeling a bed out of the ward or wheeling another one in. A shouter would be transferred to another ward and the electronic amphibians would resume their futile mating songs. Cowbells would ring again in the high pastures of heaven.

But Steve got ghosted to another ward when he hadn’t made one peep out of line, but this was because he did not understand the nature of medical crevasses or the pressures and organisational soreness brought on by beds.

The architectural criticism of Uriah Rhinepotts

The hospital itself was a TV star, especially the long, clean curves and arches of its main atrium. It would have had, in a better climate than a British winter, sunlight streaming down through it, as opposed to an occasional urban seagull dropping spattering on its windows, as another grey churning gale blew in more pointed winged scavengers in search of the discarded fried chicken cartons which were even easier find on the streets and pavements of early 21st century London than over-quota fish being thrown off the back of a seagoing trawler.

In the late 20th and early 21st century British and US TV loved detectives and doctors. Contemporary meritocrats who diced with death cheaply because they wore their own clothes, (mostly), and did not need to be adorned with spurious togs, togas, top hats and/or wigs. The tecs and docs did not need elaborately built sets or especially chosen locations to frown with actorly angst at the allegedly intense dilemmas concocted for them by scriptwriters: but scripts usually demanded longish sequences of walky-talking, and the atrium was just the place.

“….then Hartenheim was right-handed! He couldn’t possibly have used the secateurs…” One actor might explain.

“..and that means that Ealing roadway could be a red herring all along!” Another sage thespian would noddingly acknowledge, before a cut away to their grinning telegenic visages. Sooner or later, a chunk of synthetic but oozing, allegedly human liver, brain or lights will be shown in some television simulacrum of a ‘scientific’ laboratory signified by smoked glass panels and gleaming chrome. Once in a while you even got a scalpel shot with some gore splatter.

Some say that older British hospital buildings had more character and some say that they are more crowded and unhygienic and needed a large, poorly pad labour force to be available to clean nooks, crannies and other built in dirt traps.

The smooth linoleum floors of the post-modern TV star hospital are cold on the feet of poor old arthritic diabetics, such as Uriah Rhinepotts, and needed a smaller, contracted out, more poorly paid workforce.

So-called post-modern architecture is, Uriah has read, eclectic, almost arbitrary in its referencing of past styles, and the TV star hospital showed this characteristic markedly.

The airy atrium in some ways resembled the entrance hall of a large railway station or of a small airport; except that it had balconies and glazed interior windows overlooking it like a simulated Victorian shopping street in a theme park or a museum.

Whether airport, station or fake shopping centre, the atrium was different in atmosphere to the real interiors of such built locations. It took Uriah Rhinepotts some time to work out why, but eventually he cracked it. It was the only place that he had ever been where people behaved like the matchstickoid beings often depicted in architects’ drawings.

They moved slowly, (no matchstickoid ever went faster than a straight-baked normal walk, they seldom used crutches or wheelchairs in the architects’ drawings they, in the messier real TV hospital, they might employ such disability aids). They moved individually or in small groups in a criss-crossing pattern of purposes. Their conversation was a silent amorphous background hum of calmness, (no doubt brought on by the magic healing properties of the architecture). They were calmly and measuredly going about some business that they knew; not uncertain, hurried, anxious, alienated, anomic, atomic and individualistically pushy and ruthless like any normally, collectively psychotic, big city crowd.

And that was not the end of the wonders of the atrium. There were bridges across it and horizontal porches above doorways, which one could see from above, (if crossing one of the bridges in an orderly, well-mannered, fashion), were filled with shingle.

These suspended beaches might have some ergonomic reason behind them, as they could hardly be a geological tell tale of differing past sea levels, but when you put the whole lot together, including several huge polished wooden pseudo-abstract humanoid sculptures, the whole mishmash fried Uriah Rhinepott’s cultural circuits ’til they frazzled.

A potentially underwater shopping mall and art gallery that doubled as a passageway to waiting rooms, other limbos and , ultimately, death?

Yes, that’s what it was. It would ultimately fulfil the cynical archaeologists’ dictum that if you can’t tell what it’s for, it must be religious. This saying was now being partially reversed as some archaeologists were now guessing that Stonehenge was possibly a Neolithic hospital and/or healing shrine, rather than solely a straightforward temple.

In any event, when the robot diggers had mined the crust of urban seagull guano from about the remains of the TV star hospital and reached the layout of wards, corridors, lavatories, laboratories and many, many, many rusted machines, (perhaps with some plastic sinews still intact), another intelligent species might send its archaeologists and forensic scientists to ascertain what this sprawling edifice could have been.

A hospital? Or a healing shrine? Or a temple? They might guess: but probably never surmise that it was a TV star, even as the cameras roll on the actors, who are much more glamorous than the real docs and tecs, walky-talking about it.

The Yellow Rubicon of Corduroy Pisser

Life changing internal revelations, such as St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, can be ccompanied by potentially public events such as great claps of thunder and flashes of light.

Urinating uncontrollably inside a pair of beige corduroy trousers was not so spectacular for passers-by, especially as this took place on a crowded city street at night, but subjectively, to the corduroy trouser wearing urinator, it marked a significant aspect of lack of control, that he had not managed since completing potty training, some fifty four years ago.

Gripping part of a Victorian park railing, fashioned like an ornamental spearhead or a stylised flower; the urinator involuntarily let fly, or at least, did not resist the inception of a strong trickle. His stout beige pantaloon cloth and the urban darkness hid the micturation and nearby pedestrians were probably only able to see a fat man, possibly drunk or breathless, leaning on a fence, so they walked on by, not knowing that Corduroy Pisser was doing inside his clothes what he should have been doing behind a bush or a hedge, or in a public pissoir preferably.

Corduroy managed to bluff his way through the long bus journey back to his house somehow. Perhaps no-one was interested enough in his self-induced wetness to jeer at it. The wetland in his trousers was not a site of Special Scientific, or any other, interest. Bitterns had not yet started to breed in there.

Once he got off the bus, he had to stagger uphill along several hundred yards of suburban side roads. Every ten yards or so, something kept failing, his heart, or breath perhaps, his will-power certainly. So he stopped, leaning on plain fence posts, brown and creosoted, or square brick pillars. Each time he stopped, he pissed himself a little bit more.

This pissing was by no means was by no means unprecedented or unexpected, he had, after all, spent that evening beering in the central metropolis. This event, and the commuting that it entailed, had become increasingly common for him, and many others over the past decades as the price of housing had risen and blown localised groups of friends apart in migrations to the periphericity, leaving them atomised like lumps of debris scattered around a crater or a shell hole.

A past tactic to prevent uncontrolled pissing had been stop-offs at places like isolated garage doors, hypermarket hedges and other such locations that permitted a concealed Jimmy Riddle in the night. But tonight geography and circumstances had betrayed him. Busses and bladder had not coincided in such a way as to enable a covert al-fresco, therefore inside leg watering took place instead.

Afterwards, on drier days, Corduroy wondered if a solution might not have been carrying a collapsible portable Hansom carriage which could be whipped out and assembled at moments of need. A solution which would only work in London, assuming the truth of the urban legend that it was still legal for a male person to piss on the back wheel of such an antique vehicle

However this insight was not the one that accompanied the original pissing like an unheard thunderclap. Corduroy had realised that he could be drinking too much alcohol.

But did crossing the Yellow Rubicon of shame mean that there was no going back again? Sadly Corduroy doubted it. Arriving at this micturatory torrent had been a lifelong journey which had involved reaching, crossing and forgetting many of the tributaries of the Great Yellow One, (cradle of civilisations in beige cloth plains, home of vast hydro-electric schemes and tiny species of almost blind squeaking river dolphins). It certainly had involved a capacity to lie or at least, be diplomatically economical with the truth.

A string of counsellors and doctors had been fobbed off with unlikely estimates of how much alcohol Corduroy consumed regularly. Had any of them ever been true, his bladder control might not have worn out.

There were religious and medical people on both petty bourgeois sides of his family, so he tried, as a general principle not to lie too much, but, when it came to stating truthfully how much he drank, the truth always slipped away or perhaps a slight small cloud of mist drifted over it.

Education and literature were false friends here. If someone is taught a little bit about making philosophical evaluations of truth claims, a bit might rub off, in Corduroy’s case, this meant suspecting that all truth was debatable.

Also adolescent admiration for the work of William Burroughs did not encourage veracity in the presence of Doctor Foster or any other medical practitioner or pseudo-professional. The centipedal carapace of Burroughs’ slime-pile of work had been the necessity of doing the necessary to feed a habit and therefore telling a doctor whatever.

Doctors were inconsistent anyway, a possible co relation seemed to exist between their head scarf wearingness and propensity to issue absolute prohibitions against alcohol, rather than saying; “You’d better cut back a bit, old chap.” when the latter could mean five as opposed to six cans of strong cider a night.

With their close allies, the symptoms of age, the symptoms of alcoholism spread slowly, like a guerrilla army that controls most of the countryside at night, retreats in the day, but controls one square inch more territory every day. On a computer in a General’s office, one pixel lost might not look too bad, but territory once lost, was never given back.

Occasionally Corduroy Pisser had, as it were, “announced” things to himself and if really pushed or determined, he might make an “announcement” in the presence of witnesses; these “announcements” sometimes involved “turning over a new leaf” in some way, usually ineffectively.

About the most determined Corduroy had ever got was to attend some alcohol counselling interviews for about three months. But more often he devised some magic formula, known only to himself, whereby some types of alcoholic drink could be classified as “not really counting” as being alcoholic. He ratified such decisions by referring them to the SCPCP (Special Committee of Personas of Corduroy Pisser) and they had the satisfying consequence of enabling him to buy and consume alcoholic drink whilst, at the same time, giving it up. However adept though he was at self deception, it did become clear to him that when he drank the “not-drink” was actually what it was.

He had beaten an addiction once, almost by accident he had become unhooked from tobacco. He had got hold of little plastic dummies which could have nicotine cartridges put inside them and be sucked instead of cigarettes. These devices worked, for CP, because they looked, quite, but not very stupid. Had they been fashioned to look as though the device-user was, say, blowing up the arse or sucking the backside of a Little Grebe, not many people would have used them. However they just looked like someone had a short plastic tube in their mouth and in middle-class English society that was sufficient to cause conversation, which was embarrassing enough in and of itself. To avoid giving brief talks to strangers, friends and acquaintances about the short white plastic tube, tactics such as concealing it in a furled palm, furtively and rapidly whipping it out of a pocket , into the gob, and returning it , could be used. Eventually to was simpler not to use it at all.

So tobacco unaddiction had not involved declarations, decisions and rubicons, just a way of making the addict look silly to continue with the addiction. But if publically pissing yourself in a street would not do it, what would? Trouserlessness perhaps.

The Revolting Door of Brian Edfour

As he worked his way from the status of “revolving door” patient, into the rarer “spin dryer” patient, Brian Edfour wondered what badges or emblems should adorn such medical recidivists, and whereabouts on their bodies these marks should be tattooed.

Perhaps a medical-type serpent chasing its own tail might do? Images of revolving doors or spin dryers themselves could, all too easily be totally non-descript or come to resemble dustbins; and either image could give authoritarians in authority bad ideas.

Possibly from such a perspective, it might be more appropriate to award the title of “revolting door patient” instead. It might well apply to Brian, and probably thousands of others, who each time they were discharged from the pristine(ish), servile(ish) and definitely over-regulated atmosphere of the British 21st century public hospital, passed through a door that was indeed a putrid portal, ghastly gate or adipose aperture granting ingress to illness.

Metaphorically, it was probably originally of a sickly bilious green colour, but its paintwork has been chipped, patched and scratched. Streaks of red, orange, purple and white undercoats, (or older topcoats), showed through.

The revolting door was stained, dented and smeared with boot-sole rubber and mud where it had been kicked or wedged open with feet. It had stains of liquid and perhaps even solid, or semi-solid excretion on it. It carried chisel and knife scarring around its lock, handle and frame. The letter box, if there was one, might well be painted over and nailed shut; or it might be a blatant oblong slot cut out of cheap, almost cardboard, wood.

This door provided notional concealment and privacy for Brian Edfour’s bad habits, the respectable populace passing by, might well hazard guesses at what went on behind it but did not want to pass through it and know.

Hospital was one of the few environments that Brian had ever found where other people would fetch and carry for him, however they seldom fetched or carried what he really wanted since he had no taste or craving for catheters, canullas, CAT scans and diuretics. Behind the revolting door, Brian fetched and carried more or less what he wanted for himself: which was alcohol in glass bottles, alcohol in plastic bottles, alcohol in cans and pies in foil trays, packaged in colourful boxes depicting deceptive deliciousness within.

Brian wanted alcohol and pies; although their packaging often attracted him that was not what he wanted. Once he had extracted the active ingredients, he hurled the containing components all around his dwelling until his diet hospitalised him again.

In hospital, they sometimes gave him pies, but only small ones and only occasionally. Alcohol was employed only as a cleaning agent and for starring roles in Brian’s dreams where beautifully packaged bottles of Bourbon cavorted around his subconscious singing enticing ditties about what they ought to taste like, but probably didn’t. Cheap cider and/or Rosso D’Origine Dubioso was usually what Brian’s budget would stretch to.

Long strong drinking had turned Brian’s very Id into an alcoholic consumerist. Short hospital stays lost him a bit of weight and afforded him some relief from the physical disabilities associated with his crap diet, but only temporarily, so he almost crawled out of the revolting door and in through the revolving door, more and more frequently.

Just as the pie/booze diet encrusted Brian Edfour with pustules and fat externally it also seemingly encrusted him with stuff internally, but no one seemed sure what this was. Brian fell unerringly into one of the bottomless crevasses that separates medical specialities and sadly for him it was not the narrow canyon between Pieology and Boozology. So when he went through the revolving door, he was sampled, swabbed, tested, prodded, poked and probed.

Tiny cameras were sent on fantastic voyages deep into the bowels of Brian from either end, as though safaris of Victorian explorers were seeking his source. Brian gagged and farted reflexively, but he could not keep them out or expel them and they shot footage of strange moist red things.

More and more such expeditions were proposed and sent and if the Respiratory guys had sent one then the Cardiac chaps would have to cap them and send another, poking something into a vein in case moist red things were up there too.

So Brian Edfour, the sort of addict, became, through some fault of his own, an exemplary consumer, an experimental pincushion and an awful moral exemplar, all at once. He ate and drank his way into becoming part of the tax burden on those who had to pay for his heath care, but in doing so gave these puritans a fat straw man to sneer and jeer at. He also thus stimulated demand, enterprise and inventiveness in the pharmaceutical industry and its close cousin, industrial food processing.

Thus Brian deserved a shiny medal of a steak and ale pie, gleaming with golden gravy, not some poxy tattoo of a dustbin.