my radio is always lying to me about food

With deductive powers,

That would put Sherlock to shame

I looked out from my kitchen window

And as I heard the city coming awake

With its trafficflow starting

Making a sound like the sea

Washing through shingle on beach

And likewise thoughts

 Begin to flow in my head

As I sipped the tea

And realised

That my radio is always lying to me about food

“No” a farmer says "I could not live

Just by selling the meat and veg that I make,

The government must pay me.

People will not buy expensive food,

They’d rather buy computers instead.”

An hour later,

The radio reports from Africa

People are walking for weeks there,

Not stopping to buy

Even the cheapest computer

As they struggle across

The hottest desert on earth

Walking on and on

Or stopping to lie down and die

Until they reach the place

 Where they are given the food

That they could not afford to buy

Two hours later

It is time for another

Radio lie about food

A store manager says it is no good

Demand just will not restart

Try as he might

He cannot make

People want computers enough to buy them

When they’re spending all their money on food

And now and then or some other when

The sun comes up and warms a solar panel

In the cave mouth

So a radio turns itself on

To tell more lies about food

To a conference of human bones

That is being held amongst

 The ashes on the cave floor.                                          

The Imaginary vlogging of Norry Spinger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

recipe of the Deep Deep Kitchen

Theories of slime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A shirt that you hate deliberately

There are times when it is better,

To wear a shirt that you hate,

Than to wear a shirt that you love,

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

Or that is made from a fabric

Which makes you feel that

Millions of minute and tiny nails

Are continually being driven

Into your skin.

Or a shirt made from cloth so thin

That blobby old skin  shows through

A shirt that does not camoflage the real you

Or a shirt where the colours and patterns

Are so strange

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

Shaking on a plate

And then there are times

When you don such a horror

Realise that you have done it

Go out And the door slams behind you

Its too late mate

But there are also occasions to wear

A shirt that you hate deliberately

When you are going somewhere that

You should never have gone to begin with.

Where the premises are wrong

But you have to have to go along

Uttering words without meaning

That just move phlegm around inside your mouth.

That is when the hateful garment

Speaks truth for you saying look at my shirt and see

How I really think and feel

It is not me, it is not real

I am just wearing the shirt

Andy Ogram and the Seagulls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consume, retail, consume, expand.

Consume, retail, consume, expand.

Consume, retail, consume, expand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bureaucratic Crevasse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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