Quadraoptica

TROUSER WAR

2012-02-04T13:11:00.000Z

I wanttelepathic and telekinetic trousers now,

I wanttrews that can think,

I wantstrides that don’t shrink

Away fromthe intellectual effort

Of obeyingmy unspoken commands,

And thatclimb up my legs smoothly and coolly.

Without anyword from my mouth

Or tug frommy hands

I wantlegwear that’s always there

When I wantit

And neverthere when I don’t.

As a youthI never thought of trousers

In terms ofon and off,

But age andarthritis have changed the nature

Of the legcladding game

Gettingdressed and undressed

Is now aruthless fifteen round wrestling match,

As I curseand swear, and sometimes tear

At those obstinatetubes of cloth.

My feet getstuck inside them,

My knees gocrick and crack

I clutch atthe wall

In case Ifall

Like atortoise onto my back.

Buttortoises don’t wear trousers

They havemore sense than aged old apes

They goaround nude,

As perhapsI should,

Or wear askirt, a kilt or a cape.

Instead offighting my trousers

In a dailyattritional war

Which Ican’t win and neither can they

Until weboth exist no more

I’ll becremated in my trousers

Togetherflesh, bone and cloth will burn

Untiltrousers and I can both rest in peace

In atasteful funerary urn.

The Metaphorical Squirming of Horace Goolan

2012-01-24T16:53:00.001Z

As a schoolboy,Horace Goolan had learnt about the Reformation, the name that historians gaveto the change in the religion of most of north Western Europe from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism. Even now in his sixties, Horace couldremember a few key facts about it. In 1516, or ’17, or something, Loofah hadnailed his faeces to a door after living on a diet of Worms etc.

Another aspect of the Reformation thatHorace wasn’t too sure about was what might have been called, but wasn’t, theThirty Nine Articles. This factoid was the number of different positions that variousstrands of Reformation religious belief, (eg: Roman Catholic, High Anglican,low Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, Anabaptist, Erasmian etc), heldabout the status or nature of the bread and wine ritually used in the Christianmass.

These positions formed a kind of spectrum.On one end the wafer was the flesh of Christ and the wine was his blood. On theother bread was bread and wine was wine, and if one’s particular sectcelebrated mass at all, it might as well have done so with a turnip and a cupof cold tea, or find some other, or no other way of expressing whatever it wasthat mass expressed.

In between the poles of flesh and blood andnothing and nothing, there were ranged many intermediate positions, such as thebelief that the bread was bread and the wine was wine until Communion at whichpoint these things somehow, and for a strictly limited shelf life, “became”flesh and blood, specifically that of Christ. Others thought that Bread andwine were only symbolic or only symbolic until a priest touched them in thecorrect context, and so on, and so on.

It looked absurd to early twenty firstcentury eyes, or at least to that pair of them protected by the skull of HoraceGoolan; but in other parts of the early twenty first century world, people weredrawing up and strictly enforcing numerous edicts about male beard length, orhow much hair could show from under a woman’s scarf.

As Horace contemplated various emails,tweets, blogs and websites via his computer, he had begun to wonder if nit-pickingfanaticism was not actually an inherent, deep-wired tendency in humans which,if it couldn’t be focussed on bread,wine, beards or scarves; would get fixatedly focussed onto something else, suchas the precise attitude that should be taken towards a British South Coast towncouncil proposing to set an annual budget that would entail it in making cutsto the services that it provided to thepublic.

Most of the digital correspondents whosemessages Horace saw, disapproved of cuts to public services, but this was anattitude that, in terms of public pronouncements at least, spanned most of theBritish political spectrum, unlike the

USA

where some politicians wouldsay outright: “Damn the poor, let them starve!” early twenty first centuryBritish Conservatives might imply that although they found hurting the poor,distasteful, they had to do it. Indeed, some seemed to find it so distastefulthat, liked Victorian gentlemen debauching child prostitutes, they literallyfound that what they did was unspeakable.

Liberals and the British labour party, (which by 2012 could hardly call itself socialist any more), also said likeschoolmasters about to inflict corporal punishment; “I’m sorry it hurts, but itmust be done, so down with your trousers and out with your bum.” And thenothers further to the left and probably further way from any prospect of realpolitical power, floundered around mouthing like fresh caught fish in variousmedia. Those who had got elected to a South Coast town council on an agenda ofplanetary rescue, used devices like extensive public consultation to concealthe fact that they too were rippers in dark alleys intent on doing a swift bitof slicing before slipping away into a dense green pea soup-like fog, leaving the coppers to ask “Whodunnit?”

The messages coming out of Horace’scomputer suggested as many political stances in relation to this as there hadbeen Reformation attitudes to sacraments. Some called the cutting councillors“traitors”, advocated walkouts, mass resignations and setting “Illegal”budgets. Others said, in effect “condemn the sin and not the sinner” ie don’tbe rude to rippers and choppers as they are ripping and chopping because badcentral government is forcing them to rip and chop; once they had finished andput their bloody cleavers down, they would get on with doing all the nicethings, or at least those nice things that they had managed not to cut, whichhad been promised in their electoral leaflets and manifestos.

Horace dodged, weaved and vacillatedagreeing with as many as often as he could. He swam, squirmed and slimed likean eel through the tentacles and past the beaks of many, many, many octopi. Hewas not dead in the water but he felt pulverised by the positioning andcertainty of those around him, also swimming in the polluted seas of politicaldiscourse. They trumpeted and spouted out statements, jibes, attacks, pledgesand condemnations.

Would it all blow up? He wondered. Would acataclysm come, freezing and fossilising him and those around him in mud whichwould then be pressured into stone for museums, temples, ministries and palacesof some unknown future epoch? Or would it, like a squib, leave a trail of hotair behind, becoming like attitudes to bread and wine, a footnote of obscurepolitical history?

Mammoth eating Cousin

2012-01-11T19:55:00.004Z

Thomas Doolin had a cousin called Maura who lived by the sea. She had written novels and eaten the flesh of long extinct mammoths.

She managed the former by having a powerful DeValerian imaginary view of the world. You would have insulted her, or she would have construed it as an insult, if you had called her English, but England was the English name for the country where she was born. The Welsh called it Llogyr in Welsh, meaning the Lost Lands, or at least that was the name on some road signs, Maura would have liked that.

As to the second achievement mentioned above, Maura’s novels were not bestsellers and she worked a Secretary to the Royal Geographic Society. This august body once obtained a frozen mammoth from Siberia or Kamchatka and decided to eat parts of it in a ceremonial banquet. Maura had some; she said that it tasted alright.

When Thomas first met her, he was a small boy of eight or nine and she lived in a poky damp basement flat in West Kensington. Then looking back on it perhaps Maura was left a legacy, because she bought a bungalow in a sedate Sussex seaside town. She didn’t just buy the bungalow ready built; she had it built to her specifications in a large plot of land. There were rows of about ten brick pillars out the back with a trellis over the top. It was like a mini Roman villa.

Thomas went down to visit there on many weekends with his father, who might have been having some kind of affair with Maura. Thomas was then a young boy, who was unable to know, notice or understand this. Sometimes the three of them would walk along the seafront where waves shooshed and swooshed along the pebble beach lined with vari-coloured beach huts. Once, with no apparent provocation she cried out. A phonetic approximation of her cry is: “Nyaaa harrra ny-ny-ny hyar, eeyah,eeyah. Hwawrrragh!” Before anyone could ask her “Cousin Maura, why do you cry out so?”, she explained that she had just emitted a Spanish Muleteer's cry, but this was lost on the gulls that circled above her. No Spaniards or mules emerged from the sea, or came down from the Downs inland, in answer to her call.

Maura took her hispanophilia to the point of wearing rope-soled shoes as often as the British climate allowed. Another interest of hers was ancestry, the surname that she and Thomas shared was not uncommon but Maura concocted the theory that “Doolin” was in some way more authentically Celtic than “Dolan”. Her ancestral theorizations took various differing forms over the years, once she insisted that the surname indicated descent form Czechoslovakian gypsies.

Thomas found, by trial and error, that it was difficult to disagree with Maura. Once she was charged with care of young Thomas, (his mother had died and his father was out), and Thomas had inadvertently uttered the word “bugger”, having no idea that it might be an obscenity. Maura was deeply offended and reacted with immediate severity, but instead of slaps, rage or shouting, she insisted on only speaking Spanish to Thomas for next twelve hours. It might not sound like much of a punishment in comparison to having your fingernails pulled out with pliers or something, but it induced psychological disorientation to have someone whom you had previously only spoken to in one language that you both understood, now only conversing in an incomprehensible tongue, inspire of all pleading. Looking back on this experience Thomas now though that it might have helped when he later worked as a teacher.

Later Maura somehow traced the “Doolin/Dolan” ancestry to Miltown Malbay on the west coast of Eire and she went there to die.

Thomas last saw her when he was about thirty, just before she left England. She was striding along the concrete promenade looking out across a steadily heaving sea under a grey sky perforated by shafts of sunlight beaming down to illuminate chosen patches of the Channel. Maura looked like she had already left England in her mind. Thomas did not speak to her; he was not sure what language she would use,

Over the years he got some postcards from her and sent some back. Maura's card messages were sometimes almost offensively ultra-Irish and Thomas was moving to a position of suspicion and distance towards questions of ethnicity and nationalism. He never visited her on the coast of Clare, but he could imagine her striding along the strand, uttering strange enthusiastic cries and fortified by an ancestral diet of Mammoth meat.

The tinkling teaspoons of the coast

2012-01-10T11:18:00.004Z

The sound of the future is the clinking of teaspoons against the sides of china teacups, just after the spoons have been used to create millions of vortices in the freshly steaming beige liquid within the cups. The background sound of the future is polite reedy chatter in which all words are annoyingly only half audible. The place of the future is the South Coast of England, or the more picturesque, bits of it at least,.The countryside of the future is nice flowery gardens with beds of neatly planted annuals and perennials. The food of the future is imported, it is all processed, it is grown and processed where labour is cheap or cheap labour can be imported to process it. The catering of the futures is carried out by polite immigrants.

Except that this is not the future, it is now. unless the future is just now but only more so, after all everything mentioned above has been going on and increasing for at least a century, may be more.

Then again different slices of now exist simultaneously in separate locations cut apart from one another by things like train journeys from the South Coast to the capital city. When Mauris made such a journey after only a week away on the Costa Geritrica, land of the tinkling teaspoons, he almost ended his journey home by emerging from the tube station that was nearest to his gaff, he was knocked metaphorically out with joy to see and hear all sorts, conditions and ages of people from all over the globe. He was happy to hear, within seconds of coming through the ticket barrier, about five different languages being spoken none of which he could understand and not all of which he could identify, even tentatively, But, it wasn’t just that, that cheered Mauris, most of the people here seemed to moving around with some purpose or aim in mind other than walking up the road to look at the sea and wait to die.

There are also other versions of present and future knocking around in the city too. Coming back from the supermarket, a day or two later, Mauris saw red and green banners flying proudly outside what had once been a small office and warehouse unit just off the Edgware Road. Mauris thought about what he would like this to signify; that a crazed vanguardist sect of eco-socialists, such as the one he belonged to, had decide to do a “Dublin post office job” to initiate the downfall of global capitalism.

Sadly for Mauris, as he knew all along, the flag fliers were marking an Islamic ceremony that was taking place inside the converted building. They seemed to be celebrating an eighth or ninth century martyrdom and perhaps their chanting could be the sound of the future, just as much as, if not more than, the tinkling teaspoons of the coast

PsyOps in the Civic Centre Carpark

2012-01-04T15:30:00.003Z

Leona Pippin reminded Norris of something on the day of the demo outside the Mosque. She stood on the back of a small flatbed truck that had been rigged up with a portable PA system to make a movable stage for speakers at the demo. She had a voice that was high pitched and clear. It carried and Norris could distinctly hear every word that she shouted into the microphone, but she was not shrill. She was fired up but she was not excited.

She just went on and on and on. She was unrelenting.

“The EDL are not welcome here. We are all assembled here because we don’t want the EDL in this borough. This is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic community. People of all religions and none live here and we all get on together. We don’t need the EDL coming here to start trouble. Go away EDL, go and crawl back into your holes. We are all united to oppose you and we are not going away until you have left the borough forever……”

At the beginning of the demo a large picket, two or three hundred plus, had formed up on the roadside directly opposite the mosque. That was where the lefties were, they were mainly, but not entirely, white. Across the road, outside the Mosque people were assembled who by their dress seemed to be mostly Muslims; they were mostly, but not exclusively South Asian men. It was difficult to quantify which group had the most facial hair, probably on balance, the Muslims.

Speeches were made by political activists and priests from the back of the flatbed, but it was all to the converted. The only persons in the immediate locality who might not fit into that category were the police who were corralling the demo and the pedestrians and motorists who passed it by with apparent indifference.

Then some how the word spread, “the EDL are here”, “There in the car park over there, outside the civic centre”.

The whole demo turned and began to move about an eighth of a mile to the left, focussing on a place where behind multiple lines of police who you just make out the tops of the head of about fifteen or twenty people, the EDL apparently.

Most of the demo moved across the car park and the flatbed truck went with them and Leona Pippin’s diatribe commenced. Only after she had kept going for about an hour did, Norris recall Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. In this fictionalised account of early medieval English history, a climatic battle between Normans and Saxon rebels takes place in the Fens near Ely that involved the Normans' use of an early form of what the Americans in Vietnam were to call “Psyops”. They erected a wooden tower with a platform on top from which a witch, hired for the purpose, hurled curses at the Saxons. Perhaps this was as much to boost the morale of the Normans as to spook the Saxons, after all a marsh is not the best place for heavily armoured cavalry to operate.

Whatever the historical case had been, Leona Pippin was now carrying out a similar function relation to an early twenty-first century struggle against English neo-fascism. However in doing so Norris thought that she fell into a trap called: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” At times she was creating a verbal picture of the suburb that she was speaking in, (which was not the neighbouring suburb where she actually lived), as some sort of multi-cultural heaven, where all sorts and kinds of people united together against the common neo-fascist enemy.

Norris doubted if he needed this romanticised account of a suburban shithole to impel his political action. Norris knew that the road he picketed against racists was also the road where men outside the Mosque were rumoured to spit at passers by who they deemed to be gay: they were probably not big on Feminism either.

The situation like Norris himself was a mass of contradictions. He decided that he was a multi-layered onion within a multi layered onion which rotated in an unknowable universe.

The Vindication of Ginger John

2012-01-03T18:44:00.003Z

Norris had come to realise that he owed Ginger John a retrospective and silent apology. Ginger John had been/was/is a performance poet from the “punk wing” of what was a decade or two ago, a movement to politicise and popularise an art form that had, like a hat made from an ornamental chicken, become simultaneously effete, over elaborate and dead.

Norris could only remember three or four things about Ginger John: he was big, he had cropped ginger hair, he wore army surplus olive green combat trousers and he performed a poem about the Falklands (Malvinas) War which had the refrain: “No Blood for Oil”.

Back then, just after the Falklands (Malvinas) War of 1982, there had been no announcement of any oil field in or near these islands. The war then looked like a political manoeuvre driven by the demented patriotism of Margaret Thatcher. Some say that then she was clinging onto power by manicured and varnished fingernails; and that if she had let Argentina have the islands, she might well have consigned the Conservative Party to at least a generation of political oblivion. Thanks to some expertly organised killing, it took her about another decade to manage that, and thanks to the preceding expertly organised killing of its own population by the Argentine Junta, her military adventurism made even elected government by crass monetarists preferable to an unelected government pursuing a policy of selective political genocide.

Anyway the point of this convoluted rambling is to assert that some British lefties, (Norris included), thought that Ginger John and his ilk were wrong when they alleged “Blood for Oil”.

Thirty years later, as a South American shipping Boycott kicks off against the Falklands over the issue of British claims to own South Atlantic oilfields because Britain holds the islands. Ginger John, who did seem like a moronic yob at times, now seems like a lost prophet equipped with incredible perspicacity and foresight.

Looked another way Norris and his ilk now seem very stupid and naïve. After all every twentieth century war and probably very human war ever, and even the Chimp tribal total wipe-outs recorded by Van Lawick-Goodall, were basically resource wars. Death-dealing weapon-penises may be lightly covered by fig leaves such as nationalism, religion, liberalism, fascism, humanitarianism, and even colonialist feminism, but they are all aimed at consequence-free imperialist resource-rape. And the more black, viscous and useful as vehicle fuel that the resource concerned is, the worse the wars are. It is and always has been “Blood for Oil”.

Norris found the dead fox in his back garden

2012-01-02T19:49:00.006Z

The day before Norris found the dead fox in his back garden, he had entered his own version of dreamtime whilst sculpting in his garage. As he had sleep apnoea, which meant that his fat neck sometimes closed his air passages and sent him, briefly to sleep, this was easy to do. Once in a while he was awakened from a momentary micro-sleep by the clang or click of a chisel dropped from his inert paw onto the concrete floor of the artistic garatelier.

But sculpting engaged physical routines and motor controls, which counteracted boredom, the psycho-active bit of Norris’ apnoea, and meant that he seldom lapsed in total unconsciousness. He could dream shapes into the wood that he has on the work bench before him and then he could try to define and suggest them with chisel cuts.

Norris spent about 3, almost 4, hours doing this, he could put this time aside because he had to come downstairs and sit in the garage to let in a plumber who might come to unblock the drains.

Norris thought that he achieved quite a lot this way, but, he might come back the next day and not see the patterns and schemes in wood that he had seen the day before. What he definitely had were numbed hands that felt like claws. He had never got the hang of holding the chisel properly and also, he consistently hit too hard, or sometimes he missed, or partially missed, the chisel and whacked his left hand. So when the Dyno-rod engineer came and unblocked the drain, Norris was glad was glad to stop being so creative, before managing to totally paralyse his hands.

He then locked up his garage, went into his suburban semi-detached and when inside and rebaked baked beans and dreamt again, with others, through his computer.

The next day he embarked on a series of his bus journeys around London. These bus journeys were assuming a quasi-triangular character, in that he seldom returned home, from wherever he went, by the same route which he had taken to get to the apex or notional destination of the journey; aka “there”. This triangularity of movement was a function of several factors: a disabled person’s bus pass, almost constant pain from arthritic knees and diabetic feet, and a relative lack of pressure of time. These, factors were in some way multiplied or divided or somehow influenced by the patchy nature of disabled peoples’ access to London Transport tube stations and bus stations at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

So on a bright, warm, sunny mid-winter’s day, Norris began his voyaging by turning left and uphill at the end of this cracked concrete front garden path. An unusually large flock of twenty or so parakeets flew over heading in a straight line to the north-west, squawking to one another.

Leaning on garden walls, every few yards or so, Norris took about twenty-five minutes to arrive at one of the two final houses at the uphill, northern, end of his road. This building was converted into a GP doctors’ surgery. Here both of Norris’ lower legs were redressed, which involved being washed with anti-bacteriological fluid, smeared with some sort of paraffin-wax based ointment and rebandaged with several layers. Norris conversed with Nora the Nurse who was doing these things to his limbs, they spoke of Bournemouth.

Leaving the surgery supplied with some extra anti-bacteriological fluid, and bandages, to see him over the Christmas, Norris lurched across the road from the surgery to the nearest bus stop, towing a blue tartan shopping trolley. The bus arrived and took him across the rolling hills and dales of North-West London suburbia to massive shed which was full of things arranged in piles and ranked in aisles. Crowds of people flowed like fluid through this retail maze with wire trolleys and baskets; they were aurally bombarded with cheesy carolling. Frequently their anxiety was raised by authoritative tannoy announcements about alleged offers and bargains which might go away forever unless immediately purchased.

Part of the vast shed was set aside as a café for the shoppers; Norris cowered there for a bit, ingesting a potion of sugared grease, as the entire zeitgeist of the place pressured him to consume more. He was able to disobey this because, in an amazing paradox, his own diabetes, itself the consequence of many previous episodes of over-consumption, came his rescue.

This particular mega-store happened to be situated in a pit dug out of a hillside. To exit it and get back home, Norris would have had to haul himself and a laden shopping trolley up a slope with an arm that ached from yesterday’s sculpting, on swollen feet, stressing the few ligaments that remained in his arthritic knees. It was far easier, for once, not to shop, to pull a light, almost empty trolley up the slope and across a dangerously busy road to a bus stop. Anybus could take him to another supermarket, after all, that was the only place where anyone wanted, or could ever want to go. As he came out the mega shed doors Norris felt that he had surfaced after a swim in a swamp full of mad reptiles.

At another supermarket, Norris, emerged frombus onto the forecourt that was jealously guarded by the retail company to prevent any of its customers and/or potential customers having any contact whatsoever with any political ideas purveyed by vagrant pamphleteers. Here Norris met a colleague, candidate who perhaps wanted to be a Green Party Euro MEP. The candidate beamed around and was unusually affable, whilst his eyes were flickering and searching for the camera persons and journalists who wished to depict and publicise him, smiling. There were none there, so they parted, one going north for publicity and the other, east to another supermarket.

Here, unsurprisingly, the noise blitz of Christmas yammered away at consumers incessantly again. Words like “mince”, “pies”, "reindeer” etc, were dredged up from the bottom of some sort of Dickensian estuary, where most of London’s excrement was dumped out of the hinged hulls of sludge barges. These words were sucked to the surface like some sort raw emotional ooze or pus, then they were reconstituted into signifiers of jollity and sprayed over people in a torrent of seasonal slurry. Grim faced shoppers crouched behind their trolleys and then loaded up their vehicles in the rainswept car park. The attempted brainwashing often left people empty hearted and with an increasing tendency to petty viciousness and avarice, as if they realised that as they consumed more and more they were getting less and less.

Why, just recently some turd had stolen a £35 Donegal tweed cap off Norris when he had nodded off on somebus or other. So when he completed this particular triangular odyssey and went down his back garden to load up his compost heap, Norris was not entirely surprised to discover the rotten corpse of a fox next to the massive clump of pampas grass which the defining feature of this little patch of suburban savannah. Reynard looked flattened, it had hide but most of the flesh seemed to be gone and some bones were starting to show through. Norris initially thought it just be a road kill that someone had thrown over the garden fence , but it could just as well have got there of its own accord and laid down to die, or there might have been a bit of fox-on-fox violence .

The remotest possibility of all was that secretive urban pagans had sent the fox off to ask the sun to come back again after it had run away for the winter solstice.

By ROYAL Appointment & FAKE NOSTALGIA

2011-12-21T17:18:00.005Z

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

2011-11-03T11:27:00.015Z

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

2011-10-21T08:51:00.000Z

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

2011-10-20T10:03:00.001Z

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

2011-09-16T00:43:00.004Z

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

2011-09-16T00:02:00.005Z

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

2011-08-31T11:39:00.003Z

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

2011-08-09T09:52:00.001Z

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.

Logging, 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

2011-06-27T07:32:00.000Z

Theories of slime

2011-05-29T17:00:00.001Z

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

2011-04-05T09:51:00.000Z

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

2011-02-07T13:38:00.005Z

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 themeeps and whoops of emergency vehicle sirens and klaxons.

Several clues told cockneys once that they had arrived a the seaside, the smell of salt water and ozone with a usually less powerful undertone of sewage than he 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.

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

2011-01-26T19:54:00.001Z

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 unsuited 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

2011-01-26T19:44:00.001Z

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

2011-01-26T19:25:00.004Z

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 Cordoroy Pisser

2011-01-21T20:21:00.000Z

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 time 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

2011-01-21T15:21:00.001Z

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.

TRIPOD

2010-12-26T21:21:00.004Z

21/12/2010
Dredger                                       1

Au                                                2

Carapace √

Trishan spam                                3

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’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

2010-11-03T22:51:00.005Z

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 hand s 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

2010-11-03T20:03:00.001Z

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

2010-11-02T23:12:00.001Z

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 one.

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

2010-08-11T19:59:00.001Z

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 in one of 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, 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 feared dogs 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 potable 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

2010-06-11T06:47:00.001Z

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

2010-06-02T14:23:00.002Z

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.

2010-04-03T10:14:00.003Z

A salad day of Fatty Rentamob

2010-03-31T15:28:00.008Z

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 and swore with bits of attire as he donned them but seldom a s 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 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 occasional, 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.

Unless there were counter demos or unless sometimes 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, demos were basically big social events. 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

2010-01-08T18:16:00.010Z

“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

2010-01-08T15:56:00.003Z

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

2010-01-08T15:32:00.000Z

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

2010-01-08T12:54:00.000Z

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

AERON

2009-12-15T01:40:00.001Z

Aeron, you wrote and spoke so well,
Your own words and your father’s
I have no more than a footnote, that I can add,
I am no actor so I would make
Only a bad parody
Of your words and your father’s words
In my cynical, nasal voice,
So given the choice,
I only write and say my respect
For the words that
You and your father set down
That don’t need to be strangely rendered
In the doggerel of a cockney clown.

Doors and furniture

2009-09-24T03:14:00.001Z

pilled up

2009-08-12T10:17:00.000Z

Gettup in the morning
Take me Metformin
Then I take some Perinodipril
Oh oh-oh oh-oh
I’m all pilled up.

After that I take
My Digoxin
Put some Omeprazole
Into my cakehole
Inhale some Spiriva
Then I’m ready
To go out

I got more pills inside me
Than there are in Burkina Faso
Can’t you hear them
Rattling about
Oh oh-oh oh-oh
I’m all pilled up.

So I forgot to mention
Biosodiprol
Amolipine and the Warfarin
Oh oh-oh oh-oh
I’m all pilled up.

I take more pills
Than all the Who ever used to
Or than the entire
Population of Moldova
So I don’t die whilst I get old
I’m all pilled up.

When I go down the street
They shake around inside me
I sound like a can full of tin tacks
But I been years paying all my taxes
So now I’m now getting them back
Oh Yes o yes oh yes
I’m all pilled up.

2009-04-16T17:00:00.001Z

When the president’s Helicopters fly over & IN LENINGRAD

2009-04-03T11:51:00.001Z

When the president’s Helicopters fly over

When the Ruler of the World comes to London
And his iron chariots thunder, up in the red night skies
He slices his air with the rotors
And my semi detached residence
Trembles volelike beneath.

I don’t respect him,
I didn’t elect him,
I don’t want him,
And I didn’t invite him.

But when a convoy of Chinooks and
Other associated night-riding heli-hags
Slice across ordinary north London suburban air
I’m down with the people in Dollis Hill,
Shaking in my boots,
Whether I want to or not
And a splash of coffee leaps from my cup
With what could be shock
Or be awe.
My beverage may wish to grovel on the floor,
But I do not.

IN LENINGRAD

In Leningrad
A diabetic pensioner dies.
He once was a teacher,
But now cannot pay,
Enough to keep
His killer at bay.

The prices of his medicines have flown
Higher and higher
Away beyond his reach.
like migrant swans,
they’ve well gone south
Down to warmer lands
Where the fat boys play on the beach all day
And where their parents pay and pay
For pizzas, burgers, fries and fizzy drinks
And metformin and insulin.

All of which are beyond the scope
of a Soviet teacher’s pension
So I hope
That there’s a workers' state up in the sky
Since the one on the earth couldn’t cope.

drawins drawn 2008

2008-10-22T00:11:00.010Z

3 pomes

2008-09-13T15:32:00.002Z

I am an ironing board

I am an ironing board
I can be hot and flat
I can even get very heated at times,
But, I feel no emotions
About this or that
Things get laid on me
Things get straightened out
I am an ironing board
This is what I am about

I am a Tiger
I am a Tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night,
Or in the day, and in the shade, lying, watching in a glade
Where golden light is stripeing down
Through green foiliage and leaves,
Me almost invisible
Except for my
Unbliking eye
Which only the dying should see
I am a Tiger and
I once heard a philosopher teaching, he said
“Philosophy is like searching for a black cat in a darkened room at night with a
brown paper bag over your head. It is totally out of court. It is just not cricket.”
I thought that this did not concern me because,
I am a Tiger, not a black panther,
But lest some roving forest gypsy passing by
With a handmade flintlock gun made out of an old gas pipe
Should descry my unblinking eye
And shoot me through it
In order to sell my powerful powdered penis
To give another Chinese millionaire
A hard on that he doesn’t really need,
I stir myself
And pad out across the jungle floor
Yes I think I’ll eat a philosopher tonight
Knock of the back off his head with one swipe of my paw
Lick all the knowledge porridge out of his skull
With my abrasive tongue
So that I then might know
What he was talking about
Or I could like my northern brothers
Up in the snow
Go for a Siberian
But that might just be like
Drinking a gallon of vodka.

LEADER
Waking up in wet November
Crawling into clothes
Crawling into types of transport
That take you where you don’t want to go
To spend a day
Doing what you don’t want to do.

That is depressing.
Or hearing the radio, early in the morning
State the date
When that day is the day of the exam
Or the day when the dentist will drill your gob down to the nerve
Or the day when the bill hits the doormat
Or the day when the shit hits the fan
But nothing is more depressing than
Hearing a crowd enthusiastically applauding
A leader’s speech.
I’d rather be a shepherd
Stuck up some celtic shitpile in the rain
Hearing the bleeding sheep, bleeding bleating
Again and again and again
Than ever have my aural orifice offended
By the happy clappiness of humans surrendering their humanity
To some blonde political phantasy

Oh, leader, leader
Take it all away
Take us up to heaven today
Where sweet sky pie is free
And we never pay
And all our headaches have gone away
Because all our thinking is over and done
It’s all all over
Because you are the one
Who bathes us in smiliness like the sun.

So clap, clap, clap
You vacuous creeps
Your public grovelling makes me weep
Smack me up, send me back to sleep
Let me die and rot and feed a tree
Because political compost is what I’d rather be
Than ever follow a leader.

The entirely appropriate Reginald

2008-08-01T09:18:00.001Z

This poem is entirely appropriate,
because it is called Reginald.
And because it is a bespoke poem,
Not ready made
And especially tailored for this moment only.
It is exquisitely crafted
And contains words like
Voluptuluminate
And arquebusphosorounderdrome
Which cannot be found elsewhere.
Some of its vowel sounds and consonants
Have been washed by the spume of atlantic gales
and the soft rains of peat bogged coasts
they have been carefully collected from
The utterance of gnarled Hibernians
Who ply their age old craft by speaking softly
In sail lofts and crofts
Pieces of their speech
Have then been cut, sewn and woven
To make this entirely appropriate Reginald
With all its subtle and softly
Unspoken undertones.

The whimbrel whines

2008-05-25T19:01:00.000Z

The whimbrel whines in the gale gnarled gorse
A curlew rises piping feebly
Silhouetted above the ancient drizzle stained edge of moor’s blunt blade
This piffling avian is blown away,
Like a drug addled scribbler
Tatters of scudding cloud
A wind howling through time has blown
All vacuous vapour away eastwards
Away from old hills
To piddle on flat midlands
In this wereweather three men stalk across eons
Rising dripping from peat hags like polished bog-oak
Three men from Porlock some say
Although the place that they come from
Has had other names
Some once uttered in long lost langues
They were even once alluded to
By the ice people who some now call
Neanderthal
With brow ridged grunt and crude gesture of flint adze
Hirsute the mammoths trumpeted mournfully
And avoided their gaze
The three haul huge monolithic concepts in our time
Heavy and absolute as any henge pillar
The three brought the ideas that inspired the antler pick miners
And the hewers and haulers of
Massive granite shards and blocks
With fire water rope and slave
But mound and ancient Temple are
Only passing representations sketched in stone
Of infallible inevitable and immutable rectitude
Ponderous super heavy weight thoughts
That pulverize all other ideas
And pointless poetic drivel
Like an tank track crushing
A poppy into paste
This then is their mission
They did not choose it
But being the determined determinators of determination
They must enact their duty.

squid pic

2008-05-11T18:43:00.000Z

THE KRAKEN HAS INSOMNIA!

in an

Incredible tentacular spectacular

P.R.Murry’s artwork:

“The Big Squid”

has re-emerged from

the Dollis Hill Abyss

to display itself in the
Brent Artists Register Spring Show 2008
at Willesden Library Gallery
(Willesden Green Library Centre,
95 High Rd, Willesden,
London NW10 2SF
tel:8298 1421,
email info@brentartistsresource.org.uk).
The show will be open to the public
from 13th May until 5th June 2008.
X
Private View 22nd May 6.00-8.30 pm.

A ROTTEN POEM

2008-05-04T11:49:00.000Z

I am the compost
I rot in a heap
I rot when you wake
I rot when you sleep

I have no body
Nor brain instead
I am the living
That lives on the dead

Potato peelings
Garden cuttings and teabags
Or a philosopher’s head
Wrapped up in a sack

It all came from compost
I bring it back

All organic transformed
That’s what I do
I am the compost
Soon you’ll be too

the men of porlock

2008-04-14T18:01:00.000Z

the men of porlock

present

PR “Tooting is Mutating” Murry

Zolan “Some Birds Fly So High” Quobble

& Emile “That Adja Goin Dinit” Sercombe

at the Poetry Cafe
Betterton Street, Covent Garden on
Saturday May 31st 2008
Doors open at 7.30 - Show starts at 8
£6 and £5 concs

“Incredible! I was struck dumbe!”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poetraie Nowe

“True heirs indeed!”

Elizabeth Forbes-Knottley - Horse and Home

Vampires and cough

2008-02-17T23:26:00.001Z

VAMPIRE BATS

Vampire bats could be called

Primitive communists by an ignorant man

A very ignorant man

Who does not have leather winged night flight

Who cannot ride out over dark lands

On rising thermals from

Cooling desert and scrubland

Following the red scent that remains

A trace on the air

And vampires don’t sniff after spilt blood

Like stupid sharks

They smell it live

Still pulsing through veins

They smell it and swoop down to it

Their scalpel sharp incisors slit

The man, horse, cow or mule

Feels nothing

As the bat drinks a batful

Spits a little anti-coagulant in the wound

And leaves on leather wings

Up into the night skies

Back to bat roost

Where it gives blood

Not just to its own babes, kin and co-genetics

like some tight arsed dawkins

But any bat of the commune may share

Any who is needy may drink

What is batmine is batyours

And then sophisticated communists sleep

The sleep of the just

All day upside down

under leather wings

I COUGH IT UP,

I cough it up,

Hweeerrargh Kuh

The flob globule launches

Severs the phlegm strings

That moored it to the back of my throat

Phwerrapperaurgh

It is in flight now

Becomes aerodynamic, mini mucus zeppelin

Flying through broken battlements of teeth

And into open air

Spit rocket crosses

A small trajectory of bathroom airspace

And spaltlands sinkside

Flattened by its own impact

Against white porcelain cliff

And ambivalently slides down

Is it live or is it slime?

It was once part of what I’m

But now

After it has flown once

It slides down hill all the way

To the plughole

Where swirled by tapwater vortex

It twirls round into oblivion

Like a galaxy into a blackhole

And is gorn, gorn, gorn

Odd's Dice

2008-01-29T15:34:00.000Z

There's a giant asteroid shaped like a potato
Plummeting towards us through the soundless void
Say what you like, it puts things in perspective
We whinge about wars
Ethnic cleansing, global warming,
But, to say the least,
our perspectives might be altered
And we would get the mother of all shocks
If we were all
To be exterminated
By the massive impact of a spud-shaped rock.

The Final Squit of Sir Pemberton Hamilton-Extractor

2008-01-24T12:28:00.000Z

mmodru108

2008-01-24T12:24:00.000Z

modrew108

2008-01-24T12:20:00.000Z

DREW08

2008-01-24T11:32:00.001Z

DRAW 1/08

2008-01-24T11:27:00.000Z

DRAWINGS JAN 08

2008-01-24T11:15:00.000Z

Adam Smith's Sock Problem

2007-11-14T17:13:00.000Z

Sock, Sock, Sock, emergency
There are no Socks upon my feet,
There are no Socks that I can see
Socks Socks Socks immediately

Woke up in the morning
Birds are singing in the tree
But I see toes in front of me
So I seek Socks with great urgency

Sock, Sock, Sock, emergency
There are no Socks upon my feet,
There are no Socks that I can see
Socks Socks Socks immediately

My Socks are vermin dirty or
My Socks are soaking wet
But I gotta wear them or go barefoot
I got a marked absence of hosiery

Sock, Sock, Sock, emergency
There are no Socks upon my feet,
There are no Socks that I can see
Socks Socks Socks immediately

But am I gonna sit here
Til my feet grow fur?
No! I’m gonna get up and get going
Be a Sock entrepreneur,

Sock, Sock, Sock, emergency
There are no Socks upon my feet,
There are no Socks that I can see
So I gonna start up a Sock factory

Gonna raise up some capital
Gonna go it alone
Get them third world kids knitting
Inna Free trade zone

Sock, Sock, Sock, emergency
There are no Socks upon my feet,
There are no Socks that I can see
Make more Socks immediately

Now I’ve started moving, I ain’t gonna stop
Like a shark in the water,
I keep swimming or I drop
I won’t let anyone else make any socks

Yes it’s Sock, Sock, Sock, emergency
You all gotta buy your socks from me
I wiped out all competition, so now you see
I gotta Sock, Sock, Sock, monopoly

Giant Mad Catfish Attack on Izzak Walton's descendant in Sea of Suffolk

2007-09-03T11:10:00.000Z

B.sQUID

2007-09-03T11:08:00.000Z

I am writing this with a mouse that has just eaten my brain (open letter to Quobble)

2007-08-30T11:26:00.000Z

As a dead critic I am writing this with a mouse that has just eaten my brain and I would like to deplore the directionless neologism so typical of the neo-modern so called 'bloggospheriglobe' now displayed in the trite tractor-stewn pages of the so called shiny new shopping precint style zolan quobble website http://www.zolanquobble.co.uk/.

You can cast your pods as far as you like and stick your feeds right up your RSS. What we need are the old classics that we used to ignore while drunk in upper rooms of Croydon pubs, some of these are sights of special scientific ignorance in their own right.

eg The Quobblishads
The Epic of Quobblamesh
The battle of the immovable leaf covered quobbles
Beoquobble
Quobble's Cattle Raid
The Quobblignion
If you gave me a car

My name is Albert Ross,

2007-07-08T22:56:00.000Z

My name is Albert Ross,
I live up in the sky,
There is no where for me to land
I fly, I fly, I fly,

I glide above the ocean waves
Tween Antarctic and equator,
I estimate, I caculate,
I am a navigator.

I search and then I’ll find an isle
I’ll land and then I’ll dance
I’ll clack my beak.
I’ll reproduce
And when my young are full of fish
I’ll glide away again

I fly, I fly, I fly, I fly
Away, away again
touching wavetops
with wingtips
Tween Antarctic and equator,
I’ll navigate, I’ll estimate
I fly into the future

TOM ANT 19 5 07

2007-05-19T16:40:00.000Z

I am an ant
I love a mass,
but I am not
adam ant
my name is Tom
but that is not my name,
There is no me,
you see, I am ant
I am not an ant
There is no I
There is no me
I am just a part of a colony
It follows from
This that
I am not Tom
I am just a Tom
So I am Tom ant
A tom in a mass

some new poems march2007

2007-03-06T14:08:00.000Z

THE LAST TRUE MAN

The last true man looks out over the plain,
The thick hair on his brow ridge
Keeps the sleet out of his eyes
As a squall blows over.
Its cold wind is as sharp as a flint flake,
But he sits as still as a brother to the boulders
That he sits among.
His gaze goes out level with the eagles, hawks and vultures
Drifting round on the thermals
Coming up from the flat lands below.
Sometimes the birds cluster
And one or two drop down at first,
Then more and more follow
Like a slow feathered tornado forming.
He knows that here will be fresh meat down there
and remembers the days when he dared to go down to get it
with his fathers and brothers and sisters and mothers
but now he fears that arrows will meet him
as so many met so many of them
swarming like stinging bees from cover
stinging bees that sting forever
so he sits up on the mountain
his family now
are only the boulders that he sits among.

THE SALMON OF GOWER STREET

Rushing like salmon maddened by a need to spawn upstream
Each lone individual calculates
Without thinking
which piece of pavement to move to next,
Who to overtake, who to brush past,
who can almost be pushed aside,
When to swerve, when to accelerate,
even when to stop momentarily,
Step off the kerb into the gutter
Or seeing a gap in the traffic
To dash across the road.

Collectively, or each alone,
I doubt if they’d care
If a gargantuan grizzly bear
Standing on top of the hotels and universities of Gower Street
Swiped down with a massive paw
Impaled some poor commuter on its claw
And lifted the screaming wretch
Up into the sky
I reckon one or two might look up
Shrug and rush on
For their work awaits
And debts must be fed.

THE 5 ODES OF THE BORED BARMAN

1
I can’t think of anything but
How much my feet hurt
They feel like they’re being
Simultaneously squashed, sandpapered and grilled
As I slave for the minimum wage
By leaning on the wrong side of the bar waiting for someone to ask
For another fucking cappuccino

2
If that bloody woman
Comes on the video jukebox again
Yowling, screaming twitching and howling
It’ll be the fifth time that I’ve seen and heard
Her damn video today .
I have no idea what her lyrics are saying
or failing to say
But it is undoubtedly inane
And I hate her more and more
With each slowly passing second of each
slowly passing minute of each
slowly passing hour of each
five year long working day.

3
I got the job as barman,
Just after the bar had been refurbished
The first customers blew in that very day
They flew in on slight, barely visible gossamer wings
Little black moving arial things
That did not go away
When you stopped rubbing your eyes
Yes, the regulars were already here
Ready to die for a drink
Prepared to drown in fine blond Cuban rum
Or even the brown slops of Bombardier bitter
And every day since that I’ve worked here
I’ve served them politely whether I wanted to or not
Because the customers are always right
Even if they are barflies.

4
This job only appears to be unskilled, you know
It actually involves the cutting edge of intellectual effort
Like deciding exactly when
To fill up the paper cup on the bar in front of the coffee machine
With wooden stirrers.
This action has to be precisely timed
And performed with a view to possible management surveillance
So as to signify
A productive and eager operative
Able to act on his/her own initiative
Then there is the related question of
Gauging precisely the right amount
Of wooden stirrers to put in the paper cup.
Personally, I do this with a kind of instinctive Zen feel
Hand feels, but eye does not see
As I grope in the wooden stirrer box in the dark barside cupboard
Hand almost always emerging clutching
The right amount of wooden stirrers
It is a skill that I will carry with me to my grave.

5
Green leatherette chairs, stools and sofas
Now featuring a cigarette burn here and there
Beige angular tables
Like parts of a Stonehenge made of shiny laminated wood.
A billiard able that seldom works
A quiz machine beloved of a coterie of librarians
Four plasma video screens
Strategically positioned and constantly on
So that no-one can escape from fun
Clear glass Bulgarian ashtrays
Sensibly and centrally placed on each table at the start of trading each day
Then chaotically rearranged by an anarchic and unstable clientele
These are the barman’s horizons
Which sometimes extend
To pigeons perched outside the window
These birds seem smug to the barman
Since they know that they can fly away to
Horizons that he cannot see.

ANOTHER TRIUMPH OF BRITISH BIOMETRICS?

2006-09-09T19:20:00.000Z

CLIMATE CHANGE BRINGING STRANGE VISITORS TO OUR SHORES? Or ANOTHER TRIUMPH OF BRITISH BIOMETRICS? THE EMERGENCE OF A SELF INTEROGATING WORM("goodcopbadcop")

THE remains of the personality of one of the scientists who worked on the creation of ("goodcopbadcop")

spatula of sporrington

2006-08-17T23:28:00.000Z

the stain on a squid's underpant

2006-08-17T23:20:00.000Z

consequence of lemur

2006-08-17T22:55:00.000Z

I am still ingesting Ipswich

2006-08-17T22:48:00.000Z

lady in shedside glade

2006-08-17T22:44:00.000Z

lady o & sir bratby throbbing in rurality

2006-08-17T22:41:00.000Z

kilburn breakfast

2006-08-17T22:39:00.000Z

the drear entrails of pict

2006-08-17T22:34:00.000Z

a scargill

2006-08-17T22:25:00.000Z

thus I Ingest Ipswich

2006-08-17T22:16:00.000Z

OARFISH & CUTTLEFISH SELDOM CONVERSE

2006-08-17T22:13:00.000Z

a certain cormorant

2006-08-17T22:10:00.000Z

NEXT I WILL EAT NORWICH

2006-08-17T22:07:00.000Z

2006-06-30T22:40:00.000Z

pond beast

2006-06-27T20:53:00.000Z

27/06/2006

Dear friends,

You have sent me an image

Of a strange, strange beast,

That visited your idyllic

Garden pond

In London’s south-east.

As this image, I descry,

I opine that it could be

A caddis fly,

Having flown in, on a seasonal jaunt,

From its probable native haunt

In the marshes of estuarine Thames;

But, in opining, I hesitate,

Since one should never

Be overcome with haste

In assigning labels and names

As flora, fauna,

And all phenomena, are each unique in every instance in time.

But I’ll tell you one thing,

It’s not a slime

Mould, old crawling monster, neither meat nor veg.

Neither is it a rush, nor is it a sedge,

For that is what it perches upon.

I doubt that it is a sea-cow, manatee or dugong

Or a skunk that emits a fearful pong,

Or a pig pulling sausages in a wagon,

Or a griffon, a phoenix or a dragon.

Since these last three are creatures of myth,

And thith, is another thing that it is not.

‘snot a polar bear, a snowy owl or an arctic fox,

For it was too hot

When your photographic shot

Was taken,

In fact, by the standards of the time and clime,

It was bleeding baking.

So this might be a tropical beast,

Which has extended its usual range

Due to the exingencies of climate change.

But, it’s not an okapi and it’s not a giraffe,

Nor a humourless kookaburra, that’s lost its laugh.

Not a meerkat, an aardvark, or an orang-utan.

Not an alligator, crocodile or a caiman.

It’s not an elephant, a termite or even an ant;

Nor eater of ants, whether small or giant,

Or armoured like pangolin or armadillo

Nor snake that’s crept in through small door or portillo.

Nor mitten crab transported in bilge of ships,

Nor lamprey hanging on with carnivorous lips.

It isn’t a toad.

It isn’t a frog,

Nor a stag beetle bred in a well-rotted log.

I can tell you that, because it has no antlers,

And it’s not spotted like civets’, leopards’ or panthers’,

No, it is not spotted.

It is not striped.

But, it’s a wonderful specimen of its type.

A beast that comes, uncalled from beyond,

And visits a normal south London pond.

It’s strangely symbolic like the Greek letter sigma

And I’ve no idea what it’s called.

sold commodity

2006-04-21T08:14:00.000Z

2006-04-16T07:51:00.000Z

2006-02-16T23:18:00.000Z

Captain walsh falls over (fragment)

2005-08-18T15:42:00.000Z

They weren’t to know it, for true history had long ago been unknown to them, but the attacks that they made on the farmlands to their south were no longer against yet another of the small tribes or statelets that now patchworked the whole island with their small territories.

One of the Brazilian explorers, who later made a big academic reputation with a book about the island, suggested, unoriginally enough, that the attacks were like sticking pins in an elephant. The elephant might ignore one or two pinpricks, perhaps even ten or fifteen of them, but beyond that, at some inexactly defined point, the slightly perforated elephant would respond with massive force.

Actually this analogy was not quite right, what was happening down on the fog shrouded island in the estuary marshes, was that a blasted hacked and long-ago burned organism was, after a lengthy period of comatose recovery, starting to grow again. Like a buried tree stump putting forth new shoots, but only a little bit like that, because it was a matter of people re-inventing their history in the light of a new understanding of themselves. This owed much to previously ignored or forgotten understandings. It was renaissance and reformation.

There wasn’t much sign of either of these when the Lootinluton burned down a barn, having first stolen a horse and cart from it. They had loaded this vehicle with as much food, drink and other transportable plunder as they considered compatible with a swift escape back to the north. They were scarpering in this direction promptly because they wanted to be in the forest before pursuit could be organised. Once concealed by trees they could easily hide and, if necessary shoot up or down any band or farmers’ militia or even border guards sent after them. Out in the open fields they were nervous; a couple of them mounted on the fastest looking of the ponies that they had recently stolen were stationed behind the main group as a rearguard. These two looked back to the south as the dampish thatch of the burning barn caught properly and began sent up a churning black-grey column of smoke. They looked back at the dead man who they had left lying in the mud just outside the barn doors, as if expecting him to get back up and start raising an alarm. He didn’t, he was well dead, but he might as well have done, because the uprolling, swirling column of smoke would now be visible for miles around, proclaiming what the Lootinluton had done as clearly as any bell or siren.. In fact both the rearguards wondered why they had set the barn alight, but neither voiced this thought, since farm and other rural building arson was what one did when was in the Lootinluton. They faintly heard shouts and a bugle or horn blowing, so they trotted off along the route taken by the stolen cart.

That was the pinprick; this is how a message was sent up nerves to a brain.

About forty eight hours after the barn was burnt, a tired man put his hired horse in a stable nearby. He wanted to clean himself, to have a meal and to sleep, but before he could do any of these, someone brought him a message, a summons in fact, that he thought that he had to obey almost immediately. He stuffed a cold sandwich into his face, whilst getting a fresh horse. Then he set off again, almost as quickly as this narrative has described it. The ride that he was now commencing was much easier than the previous one. That had been a hurried rides across country which progressively became more wooded treacherous and dangerous. It had basically been a futile uphill ride and he felt fortunate that he and his companions had returned alive.

Now he was heading down hill and southwards mostly along clearly defined and well maintained tracks. The fresh horse more or less knew the way itself and he could doze off into half sleep as he rode along. In fact he was glad that there was a slight cold edge to the breeze which blew just enough to stop him nodding off totally and falling from the saddle.

As the tired man dozed and daydreamt atop the less tired horse, the countryside through which they passed changed. It became tamer, there were more houses and villages, there were more other people about; and after a few gentle rolling descents they came towards the wide marshy flood plain of a dirty old river. The air began to smell watery and slightly salty. The calls of sparrows, pigeons, thrushes and the like were supplemented by manic gull cries and the sandpiping of small shore fowl. There were willows, streams and ponds about, the road that the man was now riding down got muddier and wetter, the horse splashed and splattered down it into a hamlet of about ten single storey wooden buildings. At the end of this small street one such was slightly better kept than the others which had one glass window. A path beside it led to landing stage where punts and rowing boats of various sizes were moored.

The tired man dismounted and tied the reins of his horse to wooden railings set there for that purpose. Others came and spoke with him, a boat was arranged and a crew for it was found, a fee was paid and now, sitting in it as others rowed it down the creek to the main river, he let himself sleep at last, to the distant almost unregistered sound of a bittern booming in the reedbeds.

The tired man embarked is dreaming, of vast grey granite faces, of vast greygranite sheer slabs of rock and limestone and flint broken into differing patterns as it piles up high to the skigh. Of strange niches in the face of the slabs where some pines have rooted and grown, where wolves might still survive. He does not know the name of what he sees in his dream. He has always only been conscious in relatively moderate flatlands, where wrens flit between bushes and bitterns boom over the necks of their empty beer bottles. What are these high grey things stabbing the sky? His grand uncle once told him something about them, mountains he called them, ravens, choughs and eagles fly about them. Recalcitrants herd goats on their slopes and they have glinting windows too. And these ants, these small insects on the slopes and running in and out of the openings. Where had he seen them? He could smell the full tang of the sugar and dirt mixture used to sweeten the acorn coffee, and the rain through the thatch and the fug of unwashed clothes in grand uncle’s hovel. Back then there was still one solar panel in the village, made in one of wrecked palaces on Hay lane, but like everything else up there, it had eventually got burned and/or looted. The panel, when it was their turn to use it, could power one ancient DVD player and a flickering screen. And when the disc ran (only for about ten minutes max), it showed bomb blasts around some flat roofed and domed buildings in a dry sandy land. “Hah, hah.” His grand uncle had cackled.

The sleeper did not know what it meant, in dreams sometimes people who he had never met before spoke about the urgency and size of Royal Doulton urinals. “And now wash your hands!” a fringe faced, leaf eared bat flew directly at him screaming.

“Watch your hands, mate! Watch your hands!” Someone was really saying, a bearded man, one of the boat’s oarsmen. “Don’t puttem in ther watter, like vat! Crocs an’ big fucking pike rahnd here!” the gnarled boatswain explained. The now awakened sleeper now knew, he could feel the wetness between his fingers, and, though he no more knew what Crocs or pike were than he understood his dream, he took his hand back on board.

There was a slapping splash from the grey water near where the sleeper had, inadvertently, let his hand trail.

“Vicious fuckers!” the wizened inshore mariner opined, “Snap orl yore fingers orf and then stick vere eds aht and arsk for fucking custard! Heh, heh, heh!” he cackled at his own joke, but the wakened passenger did not appreciate it the seasoned salt’s humour as he glimpsed a broad scaly back or side turning just beneath the water where his hand had been. However he was distanced from these real or rumoured perils, as with a series of shouts, the boat was moored to a stinky green and black landing stage.

He was, sort of, helped ashore by the wrinkled but tanned coxswains , i.e.: they attempted to ensure that he slipped or plunged into the brown river, apparently by accident, when it seemed likely to them that he had no intention of tipping them. Although he wore riding boots and spurs, their attempts failed, and he was still standing upright as they rowed the boat away again into the powerful Thames current to collect another fare. He did however, fall over when he was almost at the landward end of the jetty, by then the boat men could not see him fall, and know that there is some justice in the world, because, even if there is, tossers like the almost senile waterboatmen should not know that it exists, otherwise how could they savour the tang of justified grievance, which although, strictly speaking salty and vinegary, was almost the only sweetness possible in their drudge lives.

A landward functionary helped the Captain to his feet, “Are you alright there ..er…Sir?” the guard anxiously asked, (he had been about to say “mate”, but his social stratification radar took in the fact that, although bleary eyed and travel stained, this man carried some middle-status weapons and gear), Furthermore, if one such individual was ferried here and came voluntarily, (as opposed to shackled and under armed guard), someone important must want to see him, he might therefore also, temporarily at least, be important himself.

“I’ve, ..er.. got an appointment, my name is Captain Walsh of Fryent.” The traveller said whilst attempting to brush some riverine slime from his trousers.

“Captain Walsh of Fryent!” the doorman bawled respectively. He was half-turning his head so that the sonic force of his shout was mainly directed almost backwards over his shoulder through the doorway of the vast, creeper festooned edifice behind him.

“Yuuuw!” or ”Wuuuw!”, a vague and indecipherable reply came to the Captain’s ears from inside.

“Go in Sir, report to the reception desk” was the interpretation that was given to Captain Walsh, he complied with it. And entered a shadowy, wetly pungent, cool space. It took several seconds for his tired eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the building and, for someone who seldom went into any building larger than a barn or a village temple, to the strange interior proportions and arrangements of this building. Its doorway was small, Walsh, though only 5ft 10ins tall, had had to bob his head slightly to enter through it: its floor area was probably about 29 yards square, although the shadows in the further corners of the room did not allow the Captain to discern whether it was actually square in shape or even straight edged. For some reason he suspected that it wasn’t and , looking up, he saw it was high, very high, over fifty yards perhaps, with beams of sun light crossing it in places from windows , or cracks and holes in its sides.

“Here, Sir!” a man called and turning towards the voice, the Captain saw a heavy stone or perhaps dark wooden desk in front of him, behind it a hooded Human (?) stood. The Captain walked up to the desk.

“You will be having an interview with the Marlon in the presence of Man Agingdir Hector the Nine Hundred and Fifty Eighth.” The hooded Human sombrely announced.

The captain was awestruck, such an important event, as he had heard, could lead to Death or Glory. He had never himself seen this Marlon, The Four Hundred And Twenty Ninth, and he was just beginning to describe himself as ‘middle-aged’; his father and grand father and two of his uncles and seen him/her/it in earlier incarnations. They had not described their experiences in detail, but they had told him about it when he was a boy; they seemed almost too overwhelmed to recall anything specific about the event, although they stressed its great importance to him. All his ancestors had explained to him the importance of the Marlon to the regeneration of the City. So he was not entirely surprised when his journey to the place where the meeting was to take place was elaborate, partly ritualised and deliberately confusing.

Initially the cowl-clad receptionist picked up a small rectangular carved piece of Portland stone. The Captain could not quite see all the detail of it as it was partly concealed by the functionary’s hand; but it seemed to be carved into a series of small regularly spaced squares, each with several tiny characters scribed into them. The Hooded human took a small wax taper, lit it from a candle that was on his desk and inserted the taper in a hole in the Portland stone so that it burned there.

Then he went (i.e. he ‘said’); “Pee-pee-pee. Peep.Peep-ee, Peep-ee, Peep-ee, ee-Peep.”

Whilst making these micelike noises, he was poking at different squares on the stone with his finger in a sequence that he appeared to have memorised. After a few seconds, he stopped poking the stone, and then exhaled as though he had just completed a complex and finicky task; however his exhalation extinguished the small taper in the stone.

“Fucking vegetarian cyclist!” he swore in a mutter just audible to the Captain, then turning his head to face as far behind him as he could manage, he shouted; “Message Abort!”

From somewhere in the interior darkness another voice replied repeating his words and adding; “Please Resend!”

Hoody relit the taper and went through the finger pointing handjive again and repeated the high-pitched “peeping" squeaky chant, but this time after he finished it, he managed to exhale less violently than before, so that the taper in the stone in his hand stayed alight.
Now he made an even stranger chant:
“Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Der….”

“CLICK!” Someone else shouted out of the darkness. It seemed to the Captain that it was the same person who had called out earlier when the hooded human’s taper had been extinguished.
“…..derr” the hooded one briefly continued and then his brain registered the reply.

“CLICK!” he then bawled. “Please send the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager, a Captain Walsh of Fryent to audience the Marlon. CLICK!”

“CLICK!” was the reply.

“He’ll be ‘ere in a sec sir” the hooded said, turning to the Captain.

“er,… thanks” Walsh answered not knowing what else to say as the man before him seemed to think that he had done him some kind of personal service, although Walsh was not sure what it was.

At no time during their meeting could Captain Walsh of Fryent see the hooded man’s face so when the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager arrived, the Captain was almost surprised to see that he had a face. It was very, very pale, pointed hairless and angular. This man, who stood about 5ft 8½ins tall wore lensless and often string repaired spectacle frame and had a desiccated dead magpie strapped to the top of his scalp. Small whitish flies flew about him in a cloud. He was clad in yellowing cabbage leaves and stank. He held a flickering, spluttering light on a thin stick in his left hand.

“Foller me, foller the lie!” he said and without waiting to see if Walsh was complying, set off back the way that he had come.

Again the Captain realised, he was about to comply with the instructions and assumptions of others in a situation that he did not fully understand, nonetheless he followed the light held by the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager away from the daylight, which he wished that he could have looked back at, but being scared of getting lost in the dark recesses of this place, did not.

Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager, led him to a corner, and then, he thought, down a corridor. The DACCFOM was a slinky, (albeit stinky), and fast mover; so Walsh did not feel that he had time to stretch out his hands and use his sense of touch to confirm the fleeting impressions of his eyes and other senses that walls were closing in around , above , below and beside him. He followed the DACCFOM’s light for probably only two minutes at most although it seemed much much longer to him.

The DACCFOM stopped and they were in a small space, but a room rather than a corridor, although in the light of the DACCFOM’s taper. Walsh could yet again not surely discern its true dimensions. Two smooth metal doors were in front of the Captain; actually they were the pocked, pitted, scarred, battered and scratched remains of what once had been two smooth faced metal doors.

“This is the lift.” DACCFOM announced. “Captain, I have to ask you a question before you can use it” he continued.

“Yes?” Walsh responded.

“Have you eaten recently?”

This question was more difficult than it might at first seem for the Captain to answer. He ‘rewound’ his memories; what had he been doing when he had been asked to chase the Lootinluton? He remembered some tea and biscuits on a mosaic tray, but was it then or was it at the stables after he returned? Being obliged to participate in a sports team, being asked to ceremonially urinate on the compost heap of a new village school, needing to hire a ratcatcher, needing to regrind his pikeheads. These were all interrupted activities that he remembered from the recent past, but he had no idea what order they had taken place in relation to his call to martial duties regarding the Lootinluton, or where in the sequence the ingestion, or attempted ingestion, of foods and drink fitted in this. He came to the conclusion that, although he did not actually feel like it, he had probably not eaten or drunk for about five hours, apart from the odd drink of water or dry biscuit, he felt in his jacket pocket. Crumbs, only crumbs.

“No”. He said.

“How unrecently?” The DACCFOM asked.

“About five hours.”

“You have to have beans and cabbage” The DACCFOM announced. “sorry about that,” He apologised.” But you’re a Captain of Militia and I am sure that you understand that you have to emit methane under these circumstances.”

Again Walsh did not understand at all, but as some sort of deference appeared to be being paid to him, went along with it.

“Yes” He said.

“One moment, please. “ The DACCFOM produced a small wooden stool and gestured for the Captain to sit down on it. “I’ll pray for you. “He told Walsh, who sat and watched his produced a wad of white woolly textile from under his clothes which he inserted into his mouth. The cabbage clad man began speaking, perhaps praying, Walsh could not tell for the cloth wad inside the man’s mouth made it impossible to discern any single word that he said. Eventually he finished by uttering the sound “Urrrgh!”

Whilst he had been muttering and mumbling the DACCFOM had been rummaging around putting some beans and cooked cabbage in a bowl, and putting this bowl on a small wooden tray with some condiments. He spat out the textile wad from this mouth at the end of the prayer and held out the food to the Captain who took it.

“Season to your taste.” He was encouraged.

“Ta” he replied. “Spoon?” he asked

“Spoon? Spoon?” the DACCFOM mocked, “You are a Captain of Militia and you can’t even provide your own eating utensils!”

This insolent bollocks was too much for Captain Walsh. He carefully put the food down on the floor, then suddenly stood up, sweeping out his trusty glistening razor sharp blade and with one swipe cutting the dead magpie off the DACCFOM’s head.

“I wield a sword not a spoon!” Walsh yelled ferociously.

“H-hh-here’s a spoon sir” the trembling sub-bureaucrat whined as the deathly sharp point of Walsh’s weapon pointed at this throat.

“Thank you toe-rag.” The Captain said in tones more emollient than his recent actions, “Now let me eat this shit and do the necessary with no more lip form you, sonny, or I’ll have your guts for garters!”

He resheathed the sword ‘Yobcutter’, took a stained plastic spoon from the DACCFOM, resumed his seat on the stool, and ate the nasty vegetable broth.

Whilst Walsh ingested this mess of pottage, the DACCFOM went to corners of the room and dragged several life sized scarecrow like figures out to prop them next to the steel doors. These homunculi were symbolic of humans in a very rudimentary way; a hoop for a head, a stick for a spine, arms a simple crosspiece fixed on with string, legs a V shape. On these basic skeletons tatters of variously coloured clothes hung. The DACCFOM started mumbling again, perhaps to himself perhaps to the stick people.

“….one middle manager, a female secretary and a janitor,..oh…and three other nondescripts, they could just be passers-by. I don’t have to do that you know, strictly speaking a Captain of Militia only gets two nondescripts and it doesn’t specify middle manager….”

Although he felt like saying; “Just fucking shut up and get on with it!” Walsh did not utter these words, now that he had established some sort of top-dog butchness over the DACCFOM, he could afford to be patronising to the muttering sniveller.

“Thank you, I’m sure that you know what is appropriate.” He proffered a paltry coin to the cabbage clad one who he had recently threatened to kill.

“Your Honour.” The recipient of the fake charity falsely grovelled.

Walsh finished the cabbage and beans. The DACCFOM, levered open the lift door inserted the simulacra of employees into the small shiny chamber. The Captain joined them; with painstaking pushing and shoving the lift doors were closed.

“PPPPrrrpttttppFRRRPPPPPTTTTT” Walsh farted and without waiting for the DACCFOM to open the lift doors, clawed thrust, and pushed them open; perhaps fearing that in view of the earlier altercations, he might be left shut up in there.

“You out now, Captain.” The DACCFOM said. “The lift is out of order, I’m afraid that you will have to take the stairs. Doorway to your left.” He gestured to a doorway that had the letters ‘MRGN Y RS’ on a sign above it, Walsh walked through it.

It was a long climb and a hard one. Walsh was, in truth, not a fit man, he preferred dozing off on the backs of horses and sleeping boats bobbing on tranquil waters to the exertion of exerting himself. The more he climbed the stair the more his leg muscles throbbed and burned as if they were on fire inside, he panted and sweated. He puffed and blew more and more loudly with each step he struggled to mange; thus he disturbed bats, (pipistrelles and noctules), pigeons, rock doves, rock thrushes, flying mice, tree frogs lizards, silverfish, ants and dormice. These fauna were frightened from their comfortable, camouflaged roost and perching places by the puffy, farting Captain. He had to use his noble sword as a walking stick, he felt sick, but he carried on and on, up and up. Oftener and oftener, he had to rest, his heart thumping as though wishing to smash its screaming way out of his ribcage; the sweat pouring irritatingly down his spine and between his buttock cleft. Once the thumping had subsided he would push himself on again, one step, one step, ever upward on this low climb. To add irritation to the fatigue and unfitness, he could not just mentally ‘switch off’, (as he was so fond of doing), and climb like a chattering monkey riding on the shoulders of an an invincible iron-limbed robot. No, he made very step carefully, since, over the centuries, each riser of this staircase had rotted and been repaired in different ways. It was miraculous that the entire antique staircase remained in tact until now, but somehow it had. So whilst some steps might give way when the Captain trod on them, nearly all creaked or cracked, and all sent fragments of debris and dust back down the stairwell as he ascended. By now flobbing on and on like an elephant seal, Walsh eventually reached a small metal platform where there were no more stairs and one plastic chair.

Blown out and with small dots swimming around in front of his eyes, the Captain was staggering when he reached the top landing. He extended his hand to grip a railing and lean on it as he recovered from the climb.

“No, not that one! Grab the chair1” An unseen woman shouted.

The Captain looked at the railing that he had been intending to lean on, although still entire, it was severely rusted and corroded and the sudden imposition of a weight on it, especially a heavy one such as the Captain’s, would most like snap it and send anyone who was leaning on it plunging sown the stair well. So, as instructed, Walsh altered his lunge in mid-lunge and grabbed the top of the chair instead. However, this had already been broken by another obese and out of breath pilgrim to the Marlon and had only had three legs for the past 35 years or so. It therefore collapsed as soon as the Captain’s hand connected with it, bringing his full 18 stone body down beside it.

The hero falls a second time, now onto a dry and dusty artificial plateau rather than a wet and slimy surface as before. The metal panels of the landing sagged beneath Captain Walsh’s suddenly prostrate from, as well as adding more leaves of rust and other detritus to the stream of particles which continually floated down to slowly solidify with other muck below and allow this half-submerged skyscraper to start becoming firm land again. Also a few bolts and heavier pieces of metal popped out and fell down the stairwell and pining and cracking ricocheted from walls and rails on their way down.

This sound alerted a priestess (aka Customer care systems supervisor) who threw a grappling hook attached to a light rope woven from scrapcloth. The hook snagged on Walsh’s trousers and he had the indignity of being hauled prostate off the stair landing and into a small concrete floored room that opened on to it. The burly men who had done the hauling, the priestess’s assistants, now set about preparing Walsh for another, more perilous stage of this journey.

“You will now simultaneously fly and swim, something that, it can be argued, is achieved by many fish but few birds except Guillemots and perhaps cormorants.” The priestess announced to the captain, who wondered who was speaking to him and why she had chosen this time to give him some sort of natural history lesson. He did not get long to speculate about this, for the priestess’s duo of powerful henchpersons seized him, firmly strapped his arms to his sides and his ankles together. They pulled up his jacket but not down his trousers, as the syringes that each one deployed were powerful and so sharp as to be easily pushed through the leather bumpatch of Walsh’s leg apparel and thence to pierce his buttock skin.

“Arrgh! Errrgh!” he screamed, because they were big needles, carrying big doses of soporific drugs into Walsh, rendering him immediately unconscious.

He was picked up and held standing, his breathing was checked and his handlers made themselves sure that his nose and mouth were free from obstruction. A snorkel was stuffed in the latter and a bucket was strapped over his head. He was firmly clipped into a harness attached to a wheel which ran along an overhead cable that went out of a large window into the open. Someone blew a whistle loudly three times and from a distance outside another such whistle could be heard replying. Walsh was pushed out of the window.

He whizzed down the slack, concave cable which spanned the gap between the decaying remains of two ancient office blocks. At its nadir, the cable touched the grey-brown surface of the water that separated the two partially submerged buildings. When the metal wheel, attached to the harness from which Captain Walsh of Fryent hung, rotated it at first clicked repeatedly, then as slack-bodied Walsh speeded up as he approached the water’s surface, the clicks blended into a buzzing sound. This called the birds and once the birds were called, they called too, calling more birds and attempting to discourage others.

Crows cawed, jackdaws and rooks were slightly more tuneful, various species of gull sneered and hawed, ravens gave solitary ‘kronks’, ospreys mewed. However disparate these calls sounded their main meaning was,’food, (glorious), food’. This was because the cable run between the two towers that Walsh was embarked on as an inert and passive passenger was not solely used as a means of transport. The competing coalitions of priesthoods, sects, orders and sub-sects that controlled the various semi submerged towers that rose out of this swamp like acid-eroded tusks, used cable runs and other similar devices to execute and torture heretics. They also used them a fishing and corpse disposal devices, (sometimes simultaneously). The sound of something coming down the cable often heralded a meal for the birds and the denizens of shallows: fish .crocodilians, snapping snake-necked turtles, mutant lampreys and moray eels.

As Walsh whooshed down, these creatures assembled around his probable point of impact with the water, altered to possible lunch by the screeching and wheeling of their skybourne cousins. But, the servant-priests in the tower where Walsh was being sent had not intention of letting him become fish or amphibian dinner, because they knew that if they did, that was precisely what they would become. They therefore hauled hard fast and enthusiastically, chanting a rapid shanty the while:

“Heave, monks, heave!
And heave even faster!
If we don’t fish this bloody fucker out,
‘Twill be a disaster!

“So, heave, monks, heave!
Like there’s no tomorrow!
If this one gets eaten by the fish,
We’ll all suffer sorrow!”

Thus self-encouraged by this little ditty, the monks in the receiving tower hauled strongly on the rope attached to Walsh’s harness, so that, although he was, at one point completely under water, save for the tip of his snorkel, he was already in the process of being hauled out again, up the second half of the cable, into the second tower.

The monks of the second tower, who were doing the heaving, had generally found that the application of sufficient enthusiasm to their task at crucial moments generally served to get a bucket-protected human out uneaten, uncrowned but somewhat disoriented; (and the last was no bad preparation for the reverent state of mind required for a meeting with the Marlon.) however, in this instance, they had reckoned without Walsh’s spurs which had hooked an adolescent Cayman in the mouth.

They hauled and hauled and hauled and their load rose out of the brown smelly Thames more slowly than they had anticipated for it was not only Walsh of Fryent, it was Captain plus reptile.

It was hard graft for the muscular monks, but they pulled on with vigour, especially as they enjoyed eating alligators, pike, caymans and the like, and when they saw that a plump young juicy one was likely to come their way as well as the sodden Captain, one of them improvised another verse to their shanty:

“Heave, monks, heave
Heave like I urge yer!
When we’ve pulled this fucker in,
We’re going to have crocodile burgers!”

So Walsh and the four foot long cayman were hauled into the tower. The noise that the haulier monks had made with their extra verse, and excited shouting as their task was completed attracted the attention of a supervisory Abbot;

“Get the Captain untapped and get the bucket off his head and wake him up and bring his to the Doorwarden Obfusc Supernumary NOW!” This Abbot ordered as Walsh was winched through the window.

The abbot had sized up the situation through his spy-glass and suspected that the cable-run operator monks would leave Walsh to suffocate with a bucket over his head, whilst they dismembered, disembowelled, decapitated, skinned, cooked and ate the reptile speared on Walsh’s spur rowel.

Grudgingly and with mutterings under breath, the monks complied and the captain was de-bucketed, disharnessed, unstrapped, stood up and sat down. This processed entailed smashing the alligators head with a crowbar to detach it from the Captain’s boot. However, when this was done, something unprecedented happened. The beast’s skull split open, sure enough, but not with the crunchy splat of shattering done to reveal grey thinking porridge cells within. It split neater than a drilled block of hard limestone when wedges are hammered in. it split like it didn’t need to split, like it hadn’t split but had been opened by switch from side by something for its own reasons. It neatly bifurcated, there was no smell of blood or salt and two little men ran out.

These homunculi or avatars, (for that is what they were), glowed bright orangey-yellow and ran between the hauling monks feet and out onto the ledge of the window wherein Walsh had involuntarily entered.

“Nyaaahhh!” a greater black-backed seagull opined, diving down yellow beak open.

The gull got the first little man, slicing him/it to bits with beak’s edge; the second little man turned and blew the Gull’s head off with a miniscule atomic weapon. He was then recalled by his operator and vanished.

The supervisory Abbot and the haulier monks had not noticed nay of this. The Abbot was clamped into a rigid need to complete ritual, whatever else happened, that was his duty. He demanded Walsh be made ready and it was done; however some of the monks who were not engaged in this task, discovered that it was impossible to make crocodile burgers out of a computer controlled robot disguised a young r3eptilian predator.

“This is fucking inedible” One monk said, picking up the now floppy simulated cayman.

“Yuh” Another monk agreed, and then they threw the machine that might have ended this re-run of the dark ages out of the window.

“Splash!” It went, as it hit the Thames like a beautifully worked ancient chieftain’s shield or a dead baby.

In the meantime Walsh , sat on a bench, was slapped round the face and given a bowl to be sick in. they also gave him warm water to wash is face, flannels and a towel, and a cup of hot sweet tea. Wash blearily and gradually woke, bewildered as he washed and drank. He felt a bit sick and tired, although he knew that he had sort of slept, and had done so dreamlessly, which was unusual for him. He looked around. Another dusty grey room, n another strange building. He had been moved but he did not know how.

A priest in a neat, clean, fresh robe came up to Walsh. “Come with me Captain.” He said.
Slightly impressed by the divine’s unusual personal cleanliness, which often denoted high status and/or importance, Walsh complied, shivering slightly and reeking of river in his own soaked clothes, leaving a trail of small puddles as drips piddled off him to mark his progress to a place denoted as sacred.

As stated above, Walsh was only really used to the rustically simple interiors of various rural hovels, so the new room that he entered now, where seats rose up in high tiers before a large stage on the fourth side of the room was an uniquely novel experience. It was, or once had been a lecture theatre; its stage was mostly concealed behind a long thick blue curtain patterned with white pinstripes.

The Captain was led to a seat in the middle of the front row. Soon about twenty other dripping militarists joined him and were seated on either side of him or in the row directly behind. Shuffling and quiet voices alerted Walsh to the fact that he auditorium was now filling up. He looked round to see that the theatre was now mostly becoming full of monks, in several types of nasty habit, menacing in their pious watchful intensity. They were both guards and a congregation; witnesses and watchmen.

“The Man Agingdir Hector the Nine Hundred and Fifty Eighth!” A pompous Cannon boomed out in a fine tenor voice that rang like a clear bell. .

A thin man stepped forward into the torchlit space, between the Captain and the stage. Like the curtain his clothes were made of blue and white pinstriped cloth. He was bareheaded and clean shaven, he had long grey-yellow hair falling down over his shoulders. He began to speak and as he did so, a senior priest appeared behind him and poured warm glowing golden oil from a jug over his head. The oil flowed down through the combed hair over the pinstriped shoulders and permeated the rest of the speakers clothing. The speaker orated on apparent obliviously, and as the first priest’s jug ran out another priest replaced him and poured more oil from a jug that he held. Meanwhile the first priest knelt at the speaking man’s pinstriped trouser hem and collected drops of the oil that had flowed over him in small ornate glass. This sebaceous residue was a bit bluish in colour as it had taken some of the dye from Hector’s clothes. Once he had filled his glass, the first priest to the person at he end of the first row ,commending him to drink with gestures and muttering; “Be Unctuous My Current Bun”.

He repeated this procedure and these formulaic words with each person in the front row in turn and by now the second priest was collecting oil from Hector’s trousers and a third poured more over his head.

The three magi symbolising “Sum”, “Bloodynonsens”, and“Orother” now exchanged tasks in rotation continually through the service until all present had drank a drop of the oil that had been poured over Hector.

When this part of the ritual began, Hector spoke, spluttering and occasionally wiping oil from his mouth or eyes.
“Behold the Marlon, He is immense
Behold the Marlon, He is not insane.
And he does not have a spike on his head,
Like the large sea-going fish with a similar name.
But, less fame.
For he personifies in our humble eyes
Limitless sustained growth
For his fat comes from the freedom to consume everything
And his expansion is endless
And he does not hang upside down idly
Like a sloth
He is what he does; he grows and grows and grows forever.”

Hector repeated this strange mantra again and again until the ceremony ended, his speech and the muttering of the oiling priests formed a bizarre acapella background track for the ritual’s main event.
As oiled Hector sang the pinstriped curtain covering the end of the auditorium was raised by creaking monk-pulled ropes. When the curtain was furled and tied in the upper darkness near the ceiling, Walsh at first though that it had merely been covering another identical curtain, for a second large amount of pinstriped cloth was now revealed, but slowly Walsh realised that this cloth was different in shape and character. It was vaguely and curvedly pyramidal and at its apex, there was a white globule framed in hair with a thin equally white hose, which hung down from above, leading into the centre of it. This sight was so unusual to the Captain that it took him a minute or two to work out what he was seeing. He looked up at the hairy white globule more intently; it had two pairs of dark dots on it positioned almost like two eyes and two nostrils.

It was even as a pair of monks placed light bamboo ladders against the sides of the very chubby pinstriped pyramid and began to scramble up these ladders that Walsh understood that the was looking at a human face, the scared visage of Marlon the 429th.

One of the ladder-climbing monks then pulled the white hose out of the Marlon’s mouth. Marlon the 429th blew a few white bubbles, dribbled a bit of spittle and expectorated small splats of the cold dessert, (ice cream) that he had been almost continually ingesting up until then. The detached hose nozzle also lightly spayed some of the audience with the frigid confection until a monk tied a knot in it and it bulged slightly and then swung, vertically down about six foot to the left of the Marlon’s head.

“Urrr, urrr, urrr hurve thus turrble appetite on muh.” The Marlon said, in strangely soft, sibilant, but carrying voice, but before he could say any more, the second ladderbourne priest, had sharply pinched his nose, pried his mouth open and stuffed huge wads of cotton wool into his cheeks.

The Marlon continued speaking, but all that Walsh could discern were muffled senseless mutterings, which went on and on and on, he could not make out any discrete or comprehensible words.

The monks up the ladders, knowing how to interpret the secret speech of Gods (which was only vouchsafed to The Marlon), due to their years of intense training, and the more recent memorisation of a script written a week beforehand for this occasion by the Corporation, began to tell the audience a version of what Marlon the 429th was trying to articulate through the cotton wool

“Hark to the word of the Marlon!” the monk on the left hand ladder began.
“He is the obese oracle, who paddles the coracle of our economy.” The right hand one intoned the second line, and then one after this pair began intoning the mixture of age-old, time-encrusted tradition and new fangled pragmatic expediency which was the means of political and economic policy making in this ancient city.

“He is the best Chancellor that we can ever ever have.”
“Who advocate and maintains”
“Steady and sustained growth.”

The litany was then interrupted, (not entirely unexpectedly for those in the know, although it did not always happen this early in the proceedings). Just as the interpretation of the Marlon’s fluid mumblings into a rigid authoritarian discourse was getting going, it was interrupted by a vast and sudden sound

““PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPR
RRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTT
TPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRR
RPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPP
TTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“
PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRR
RPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTT
PPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRR
PPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPT
TTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“P
PPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRR
PTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTP
PFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRP
PPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTT
TTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“P
PPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRP
TTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPP
FRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT!”

This was the sound of vast cliffs of buttock fat colliding and rapidly bouncing off each other, like flabby islands partly and temporarily separated by a forceful blast of fetid jet windair spurting Chinook-like from the huge cavern of the prophet's stomach as he drowned in his own fat.

A sultry, pungent rotten smell like pig choc ice wafted up, up and around. Small trickles of brownish liquid seeped out from under the hem of the prophet’s vast robe. The crazy crusaders, rabid dog soldiers, mad jihadis and bonkers bashi-bazouks in the front row (i.e. about five people), leapt up and shouting ecstatic cries, hurled themselves grovelling forwards in frantic attempt to lick the divine diarrhoea and actually participate in the mystic state of “trickle down”. Bouncer monks rushed up and dragged and shoved these nutters back into their seats.

As The Marlon was convulsed by his immense eructation and shook like a small alp in an earthquake, the monks up the ladders were severely shaken about but somehow hung on and maintained their positions, and as the holy disturbance subsided resumed their public reading of Marlon’s mind.
“Villages are violated.”
“And the villagers within them”
“Barns are burnt”
“Kine and carts are stolen”
“Our land is green but…”
“Presently unpleasant.”
“Our glades are not just the haunt of…”
“Warbling thrush”
“And cackling pheasant”
“There are theifs there”
“Polluting our air”
“With their hot greedy breaths”
“Containing our growth.”
“With a corset of crime”
“Undermining the trust”
“And cultural stannerds”
“That we share”
“Smelly nasty ASBO men”
“Are crawling everywhere”
“We must comb out these lice”
“From our city’s hair”
“Squash the lice and crack the nits”
“Until none remain”
“No one from Lootinluton”
“Shall trouble our domain”
“We’ll stomp Luton into the ground”
“Then we’ll stomp on it gain”
“So go out now bold soldiers”
“On this mission you are sent”
“And your commander for this one will be”
“Captain Walsh of Fryent!”

GONE DEAD TRAIN

2005-07-18T08:48:00.000Z

gone dead train

2005-07-17T19:54:00.000Z

50 MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS

2005-06-28T12:20:00.000Z

1) Where, (the fuck) is it?
a) I left it in my other trousers
b) It is being pounded into a squashy worthless lump of pulp in a washing machine in a flat in Dollis Hill, (North London)
c) It is being pounded into a squashy worthless lump of pulp in a launderette in Cricklewood, under the gaze of a vacant Albanian who is waiting for a van to pick him up for some casual building work.
d) I had it all the time but it had become stuck between my plastic work ID and my RSPB membership card in my trouser pocket.

2) Would you like an election leaflet?
a) No
b) No thank you
c) I’m Australian
d) Er, Errr, Yes?

3) Why didn’t I notice the etchings?
a) I was not used to being inside a fictional submarine.
b) I thought that they were damp stains on the flock wall paper of the Indian restaurant.
c) I thought that they were grease stains on the inside of my spectacles
d) I am a sightless neonate salamander, an axolotl, and I live underground and under water and in total darkness in Mexico.

4) Is the main interest in Georges Sand the life or the work?
a) the life
b) the work
c) the two are inextricably intertwined
d) the invention of a famous abrasive

5) Who, what or where is Yrrr?
a) It is a character in an allegedly plagiarised German sci-fi novel.
b) It is in Wales
c) It is a Welsh fart
d) It is the Welsh for fart.

6) How many people worry about the 200 or so women that Victor Hugo allegedly slept with?
a) None
b) 1095
c) A gigaperson
d) Rhetorical questions do not have quantifiable answers.

7) Why do think you’ll have a problem in the future when the countryside opens up?
a) because people are swine
b) because swine are people
c) because people in towns do not understand the countryside
d) No, I won’t have a problem, because it means that there will more for me to eat.

8) Are the majority of those holes open?
a) There are no rights without responsibilities and responsibilities are only conferred by ownership
b) Some are covered by railway sleepers
c) Forty three of them gape eagerly, black, deep, sinister and Tzar-hungry
d) The seventh hole is in and of itself a majority

9) What do you get when you cross a woodpecker and a claw hammer?
a) nails knocked in very quickly
b) squashed ants
c) noisier forests
d) easily grippable woodland birds

10) How do you describe a hierarchy or tree structure to a goldfish?
a) hypersonically
b) ultrasonically
c) By drawing on the outside of its bowl with a felt tip pen
d) repeatedly

11) When will it be time?
a) when the small hand covers the big hand
b) when the small axe cuts down the big tree
c) when the ninth clock goes bong three times
d) when the edge of the hedge claws the dawn out the night sky and the bat gives a last fart

12) What is that high pitched drumming sound?
a) a greater spotted woodpecker advertising its sexual prowess
b) an internal hallucination
c) internal, but not a hallucination, a virus is drilling holes in your brain
d) it is an alien being that has hijacked Radio 4 to broadcast its filthy propaganda to stag beetles and their ilk

13) What happens if you throw a claw hammer at a greater spotted woodpecker?
a) the claw hammer sails past the greater spotted woodpecker and kills the Shi’ite mullah who lives next door thus provoking World War Three (or Four?)
b) you loose the claw hammer
c) you kill the woodpecker and are persecuted by animal rights extremists who eventually burn down your house.
d) the woodpecker seizes the hammer and, mistakenly assuming it to be a woodpecker of the opposite sex, mates with it.

14) What acts of agriculture did Nigel carry out before 1939 in regard to the Rhineland?
a) shower and onslaught?
b) goats and monkey wrenches
c) the woodpecker and spillage
d) Sealion Toothpaste?

15) How useful is the concept of ‘charisma’ in understanding earwigs
a) it at least is a new face at the ’table’
b) it rips up your laundry like a night on fire
c) it lights up the sky like a laundry on fire
d) it is indispensable for butter public transport

16) What is the ordinarily number of stodgy needed to make up a set of buildings?
A)Two
B ten spotted woodpecker
C) A single computer
D) Enmesh

17) Which be a devotee of best replica?

a) Software that can store humanity in tables
b) Software that can be used to manage officialdom on a handle
c) Software that can be used by an ‘punter’ for a purpose external
d) virtuoso performer

18) What is the best term for this pimply little device?
a) A free standing piece of peripheral input hardware that is controlled by and connected to the system unit
b) A free standing piece of software that is controlled by and connected to the system unit
a) A free standing piece of hardware that is only used for ancillary (extra) borage
b) A free standing wryneck

19 Which of the following statements is true?
a) VDU's can only show text if it is satanic
b) Bit map images are a type of spreadsheet covered with jam
c) Scanners are input devices so stick them up your bottom
d) Scanners are output devices vomit them forthwith

20 Why would biometrics make illegitimate access to a computer network very difficult for tiny tiny light brown flitting lizards?

a) because they can be regularly
b) because they mix text and numbers in pisswords
c) because they are random
d) because they are based on biological characteristics unique to the individual digital squirrel

21) Which of these statements is TRUE?
a) the following illustrates a star network topology.
b) A TRUE network is one where All machines on the network have equal access to no programs and data is known as Osvaldo von der Virusdamage
c) Most Zip drives are not part of the Freudian Id which only encompasses buttons and hook and eye clothing fixtures
d) let alone velcro
…
22) Which one of the following will not make a password system more secure?
a) Biometric bathing in bodily fluid
b) Mixing letters and numbers in passwords in a wok with some hot oil
c) Regularly changing passwords into woodpeckers
d) Registration under the Official Procedure Crust

23) Which type of hardware uses a concentrated beam of light to produce long magic farts?

a) A fartbed scanner
b) An INVERTED plotter
c) A pertaining drivel
d) A obsession printer

24) Which one of the following is an advantage of notworking computers?
a) Reducing the costs of peripherals.
b) Speeding up data transfer.
c) More efficient use of office space
d) Possible rapid spread of virus damage.

25) Which of the following is the best definition of trellis gibbonery?
a) A paper orientation which can only be used for overextending
b) A supercomputer which controls the other corporeal and corporate ants on a lawn
c) A green woodpecker which controls the other computers on a standing mingle
d) Slipping the constitution through the back door

26) which type of log is usually located in one place or a few places which are close to each other?
a) The Drum of Saunders
b) Pox matrix
c) A Local area piece of wood
d) Any log with any length, (when length is anything (as opposed to no-thing), shorter than infinity, (which cannot be short because it is not Long now))

27) Ephemeral honour is best bestowed on
a) The printer buffer
b) Goldfish
c) The office clipboard
d) The dot matrix of a mayfly’s brain

28) Which UK law/or laws makes it illegal
a) The Benevolent Dictatorship Act
b) The Total Protection Act
c) The Health And Safety of Life Act
d) The Happiness for Hardworking families Compulsory Consensus Shareware Agreement (1998)

29) Which software can be legally downloaded without paying a license fee?
A) whatever you can steal
b) volatile and poisonous software
c) disintegrated software
d) open sauce or brown stain on the nice new tablecloth software

30) Which input peripheral controls all?

a) Abbangawbanggaarrbanggabanggabangga the loudest woodpecker ever
b) A microphonic mouse mincer
c) The quietest slug whose name is written only in slime
d) Nothing but a faint metallic burning smell

31) What is the usual term for a network in one or a few physical locations?
a) Fucking machine
b) Poxy Fucking machine
c) Stupid Fucking machine
d) Sex machine

32) why do Most seagulls just scream at one another meaninglessly?
a)Nyahhh
b) Yeaaahh! Yeaaahh
c) Yaaah yaaaah !
d) Yes ! No!

33) Why would teachers need Individual Learning Contracts/Plans?
a) to provide nesting material for pet rodents
B) all slaves need a good kicking
C) to keep bureaucrats in work
d) because stress sharpens the senses

34) which of the following is something that humans do?:

a) integrating a more diagnostic role in their teaching, in order to detect emerging learner needs, with an actionable approach;

b) having some model of learning eg some learning cycle, for instance, the competence cycle, or Kolb (getting beyond subject-specific teacher skills, product skills if you like); this gives a necessary insight into how learners learn, and the relationship between the process and product of learning;

c) having an awareness of some model of change: a model which gets the learners to functions in three modes:
Cognitive: about thinking: eg. what do I need to know to complete this assignment.
Affective: about feeling eg. how do I feel about the position I am in?
Performative: (behavioural) about actions: eg. what will I do now?

d) apprehending difficulties experienced by learners, which still seem to operate only at the cognitive level, the purely rational stage, which is probably insufficient for learner changes necessary to overcome the difficulties.

35) what would not be a step forward to a Green Europe, but an increased obstacle to that?
a)Big finches
b)Blue back benchers
c) wayward file nomenclature
d) obvious Russians

36) One method of ensuring data corruption is to make frequent and regular flies

a by squeezing maggots and rotten matter into all computer disc drives
b by downloading bluebottle DNA from any Conservative website
c by crapping in a laser printer
d by bringing back-up flies from your compost heap or dustbin

37) What Beast is likely to damage a poor floppy disk?
a. A Tungsten MITE
b. Magnetic field vole
c. An Electrostatic medium spotted woodpecker
d. A brasion

38) What is the short back and sides for unsavoury reputation?

a Incipient fructifications of the lamentable Dardanelles
b Ant-appliers of non-emollient packaging
c Slightly intensified woodlarks
d A wireless networking connection for the nostril of everyman

39) How can a bazalgette be described as “crassly” lenticular?

a Nanoverbally
b Altruistically
c. In barely audible whispers
d. protozoically

40) An Internal organs package allows
a. Transmitting a disease
b. Jobbo sent directly to the benefactor
c. Ciberespacio
d. Webbed ducks seeming to laugh in the swampy twilight

41. Which two deceptively explain economic failure?
a. Conglomerate ossifications
b. Imbursement en arboretum
c. Prophetesses towering in the tumult
d. the madrigal start of permissive nipples

42. To give full formulate for become successful of afforest
a) Spit out all Path & filenames to inquisitive points
b) Drive dismal drivel down in the sewers of this sad town
c) bathe in his four gold mercies
d) snip at skittering snipe with the scissors of electrical horror

43). Which best describes the structure of a Linier Hierarchal Oracle
a. Tabular but reverential
b. Circular yet squidgy
c. Righteously rectangular
d. Lard curbed throughout

44). A Tree structure, with root & shrub directories, can be described as

a) Aboretumimbursement
b) Furtive thrushland
c) Spingallobongular
d) A café for Dunnocks

45 Ladyman’s. “A History of Snails Tomorrow” is
a) an anachronistic atlas of despair
b) the last gasp of dead nutritive discourse
c) a svelte pocket book for the trouserless
d) the only certain bedrock for identifying antelopes whilst comatose

46) Which three of the following four attributes is it essential to have if you wish to drive a 266 bus very fast between Hammersmith and Brent Cross?
a) the ability to speak and understand some dialects of Somali intermittently but no fluency in any other known human language
b) an addiction to Khat
c) a talent for braking suddenly at times when this will smash the maximum number of passengers into internal bus fittings
d) a love of woodpeckers

47) Do you really think that heads want this power, or that they will use it?
a) you bet, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac
b) they will use it to urge violent yobs
c) the decent majority of people fart into their upholstery
d) heads want all powers, but sadly, they ride around on the bodies of maladapted apes

48) when is it right to justify the manslaughter of a cyclist?
a) in the context of a poem published by Eatlatinandie Books
b) when the cyclist is not wearing a helmet to protect him/herself from dangerous drivers
c) when the driver is a terminally neurotic single parent
d) when the incident took place in Peckham as in this context it is minor

49) Why have you sawed down a dwarf oak tree?
a) because it was not small enough
b) I did not saw it, I hacked it with a samurai sword whilst shouting ‘Bonsai!’
c) To save it from the incessant sharp and repetitive probing of woodpecker's beaks
d) to make stout desks for the proper formal education of the young

50) Which type of storage so-so is preferred by some ordinary people (such as mounds) because it provisions on the trot ?
a) looped pylonage
b) Magnetic crap (a poodle steamer)
c) Dutch Auctions for Dutch Actuaries
d) Under Sea Boot pens

Courgettes

2005-04-05T15:41:00.000Z

What kind of mental process supports a vision of courgettes? By posing this question he was not seeking how it is that he factually saw an actual courgette, or any other actual vegetable, or indeed any other actual object at all.

He posed the question to himself without answering it after he had had a vision of courgettes, unprecedented in his previous experience, when he was doing an Elvis Presley impression on the lavatory of his small north London flat.

Recently whilst on holiday, he had witnessed an Elvis Presley impersonator, but this person had merely focused on the externals, mimicking the late Vegas period Elvis in a white, bell-bottomed suit embroidered with fake diamonds; he should instead have sat on the shit pan, semi-comatose, half naked and fat whilst falling asleep. That kind of thing could get someone a professorship in Fine Art nowadays, but what would the tattooed drunks who normally witness Elvis impersonators have made of it?

"Kim Sable?" as Tonto said to the Lone Ranger.

It was whilst in an advanced "Elvis" state, verging on consciousness, verging on death that he saw the courgettes. It was a state where thoughts extend themselves, the brain internally supplies half the next part of perception processing as the sensors shut down (or at least go into a "guard" state). In this state you can start off with an orange in your hand, you can peel it, you can eat it, taste it, throw away the peel, spit out the pips, feel the juice drip into your beard and be reminded of the evening in Cornwall when you sat on the beach with the curly haired girl; and still wake up with an untouched orange in your hand.

Or you might be woken by the thud of an orange hitting the floorboards of the lavatory and bathroom (combined) of a small north London flat and see it roll to the skirting board.

You could be here, there or anywhere, on any number of bus, on any street, in any concrete canyon, up a down or alp, hopping across any boulder fields, gliding in any pleasure boat. So why does one see courgettes?

It is not quite a dream, it is more vivid than a thought (for all his thoughts were typed on beige paper) but it is green repetitive and relentless. The wretched vegetables seem to be positioned horizontally overlapping one another like roof tiles and they're not doing anything. In "fact" no stems or leaves or ground from which they are growing can be discerned by him, so it is not clear whether the envisioned veg is a living, growing plant or plants or plucked fresh and shown in some sort of Greengrocer's display.

If the pseudo-sight of these green fruit was dredged up from some sort of brain disc de-fragmentation process, whereby semi-recollected globules of memory whizzed about between sections of his cold porridge, then these courgettes had once somewhere been presented by some irritatingly jolly costermonger or on some soulless hypermarket shelf.

He had probably never seen a courgette growing, he could only recall the obese marrows of the paternal compost heap in Fulham, so the origin of the courgettes was as a random offshoot of processing. If so could they genuinely be termed a vision?

They weren't technically a hallucination, because he knew that he was "Elvising" when he saw them (or almost immediately thereafter) but did they, like the visions of the Peyote-god reported in some (probably faked) accounts of cactus -induced visions, originate in some numenological manifestation of a meta-courgette?

They could still be part of a collective consciousness passed down faintly from whatever proto-celt neolithically domesticated the first wild courgette. Perhaps what he was seeing was a long lost memory of the huge courgette herd that once covered almost all the Eurasian landmass and, probably, the lost continent of Berenginia.

"The Pope has a urinary infection." A radio announcer said.

The courgettes vanished and with an arthritic knee-creak, he went over to the medicine cabinet, he placed one foot on a wooden stool, leant across and pressed a lever which sent some other stools off on their journey to the sea and now he was ready to commit fungicide between his toes.

The courgettes had prepared him for this act, perhaps they were a harbinger of the Pontiff's demise?

P.R. Murry