Badgers and rats

Hmm, I do like a good badge.
































These arrived yesterday. Set of badges by Peter Blake from an edition of 2000, which isn't exactly low, but I like 'em. They look almost too nice to wear, but I think I probably will. They'd look great on the lapels of a drab-olive USMC field jacket.

On a less pleasant note, while I was boiling the kettle in my kitchen at around one o'clock this morning, a rat the size of a plimsoll scampered over my feet and scrabbled into a hole in the corner of the skirting below the sink.

I stood there stunned for thirty seconds breathing the word "fuck" over and over again. In truth this wasn't totally unexpected (the same rodent stuck its head round my bedroom door a few nights before) but it's pretty goddamn unpleasant.

From this you'd maybe surmise we like in some kind of dickensian slum round here, but it's actually just kind of seventies and threadbare. We do seem to have had quite a pest problem this year, and I'm not sure whether it's anything to do with the takeaway downstairs. Previously it was mice. This would seem to suggest they've been the victims of some kind of takeover by their bigger rodent cousins (unless what I saw was in fact a James Herbert-style mutant mouse).

This kind of cements my vague feeling that a move might be no bad thing in the new year. In the interim we need a cat really – a tough-yet-cute feline with a killer instinct. Aside from the fact that cats tend to pretty much wander where they want to anyway, a rent-a-cat style company could (quite literally in some cases) make a killing.

Bank Holiday

Well we got some sun for the Bank Holiday.

On Friday I went boozing at the Hermits with G-Unit. Saturday, got up and sat in Burgess Park reading. Saturday night was Jess's 30th birthday do, which was at LVPO on dean street. The V in the name is actually a U, as it's meant to be in the same style as Trajan style Roman inscriptions, and means 'wolf'. The bar's sign shows Rome's Founders, Romulus and Remus suckling at the belly of the wolf that raised them (don't know her name).

From this I wasn't sure what to expect. At best I hoped that drinks would actually be dispensed through the teats of a giant she-wolf suspended above the dancefloor; at the very least I expected some vaguely gothic motifs. Actually: none of the above. It was kind of tame, in a nice enough kind of way.

We got in around two and I rabitted on at Jess about 'relationships' while slurping down noodles.

Sunday was much the same as Saturday. Sat in Burgess Park again, and took some pictures of the squirrels and pigeons that gambol across every available surface there. Sunday Evening went to Ed's and sat on his roof for a bit, before retiring to watch the Grand Prix, and the fairly godawful Vinnie Jones remake of Mean Machine in his living room.

Today me and Ed caught the bus up to town. We caught the number 12, and someone with a very close resemblance to 'Mad' Frankie Fraser got on a few stops down on the Walwarth Road. If it was him it was the second celebrity spotting this week after Miquita Oliver off T4 who I saw in Soho during the week, walking through the arcade of smutty theatres by the market.

We disembarked at Parliament Square, before wandering through Hyde Park and up Park Lane, which I always remember represented almost certain bankruptcy on the Monopoly board, should a rival land there if you had hotels down. The Park Lane Hilton didn't disapoint in this respect: there were three Lambourghinis parked out front with Arabic number plates, so maybe a trio of Saudi princes was having their own pared-down version of the Gumball race.

From here we headed up to Notting Hill, so Ed could experience the crush. It was predictably busy. Even by London's standards Notting Hill Carnival is foolishly packed. Maybe it's just my personal standards, but I suspect Notting Hill is easier to tolerate if you have some form of rocket fuel, and as I'd opted not to drink today, my patience for it all was somewhat limited. Once you're in it's much harder to escape of course, as the movement of the floats necessarily inhibits the flow of human traffic. The police were out in force too, and it didn't feel particularly rude, as it has done in the past.

From here we mooched over to Little Venice, then down the canal to Paddington, thence catching the 436 back to Camberwell.

For tea I had a really underwehlming Chinese takeaway, from the place on Denmark Hill which isn't Lamoon or the one nearest the hospital. It was just bland, really. Under-seasoned Salt and Pepper Ribs, and Szechuan king prawns which didn't taste very interesting. Most disappointing.

No work this week. Other stuff to do, including compiling a list my top ten fiction and non-fiction books from the last six months for a website. Should prove interesting..

Printing

Best thing about this summer? No hosepipe ban.

Worst thing about this summer? I don't own a hosepipe.

I went and did some screenprinting today. It was in West London near Notting Hill (soon to be carnival land) and I noted that anodized aluminium fencing had already been erected around many of the flats – presumably to repel opportunists seeking a crafty corner to skin up or relieve themselves in (or on), mid fiesta. I suppose they're a temporary human equivalent of those spikes placed on the lintels of public buildings and monuments to keep pigeons off. God I'm glad I don't live in Notting Hill during the August bank holiday.

The print studio itself was on the Harrow road, which after the dizzying aura of satisfied wealth projected by Notting Hill's portfolio of cyclopean Georgian mansions, is pretty damn unassuming. Its range of businesses seeming to comprise for the most part of newsagents, halal butchers, solicitors and 'caffs', with nary a yummy-mummy style boutique in sight.

I went and bought a soup bowl of coffee and a salmon and cream cheese baguette in one of the latter, and read The Sun whilst waiting for my appointment. Apparently Sienna Miller might be seeing Rhys Ifans, and some (allegedly) venal referee once laid a patio for a football manager.

As for the printing session? I got an OK image out of it, but it was more of an excercise to reacquaint myself with the process. I've also got ink on my arms like smudgy prison tatts, which I feel pretty good about.

Back on some artworking gig tomorrow, which I'm less excited about, but it's only for three days.

Anthony Wilson, The Dulwich Horror, Flock

While nosing through the Observer on Saturday I read the obituaries section and did a double take when I read that Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson had passed away.

Growing up in Manchester Tony Wilson was someone who always seemed to be lurking in the wings on programmes like Granada Tonight, and even before I properly understood his part in the modern (read the) Mancunian music scene, he was a person who you were inevitably aware of.

My personal experience of the guy ran to when an ex-housemate was running the Manchester chapter of the now defunct NoWax night (a housemate who later, Ironically, turned out to have a very Anthony Wilson-like opacity with regards to all things debt related). The night had taken over a bar in Liverpool for an evening during an electronic music conference, of which Wilson was an attendee. Me and my brother were in the DJ booth dropping 90s boom-bap, when who should appear at our elbows but the man himself, clutching an iPod preloaded with what I can't quite remember, but was probably Factory related.

He was certainly an idiosyncratic character, and coming from a city where any affectations outside of the basic templates of plastic gangster/real gangster/working class hero could catch you lumps upside the head, certainly had his detractors. The casting of a prattish Steve Coogan as him in 24 Hour Party People seemed a masterstroke, but was, for all Wilson's flamboyance not the whole story. Manchester certainly owes him a debt of gratitude for making it a more interesting place, and helping put it on the musical map .

Art

Also in the Guardian in the listings was a paragraph on an exhibition at Space Station Sixty Five Gallery in Dulwich called 'The Dulwich Horror – H.P. Lovecraft and the crisis in British Housing'.

The name of the exhibition is a play on the title of one of Lovecraft's stories – 'The Dunwich Horror' and on paper this sounded almost too good to be true. Ever since my teens I've been mildly obsessed with the writer, so an exhibition welding his bizarre pantheon of alien gods to the current rampant housing market certainly demanded investigation. So I jumped on the 40 and headed off.

Unfortunately, it was all distinctly underwhelming. The gallery itself was shut and the exhibition merely consisted of a few posters tacked in the windows, showing the artwork itself in situ. The art itself consists of a few paintings of Deities from Lovecraft's Cthulu myth cycle (Cthulu himself, Azathoth etc) which had been attached to estate agent's 'For Sale' signs.

The posters and photography were a bit naff, the paintings so-so, but beyond that, for all it's cuteness, I couldn't quite see what the marriage of the current British housing shortage to the writings of a 19th century horror writer was trying to articulate, and nor could I quite kick the suspicion that the starting point for the whole endevour was the wobbly titualar pun.

I actually went and checked out one of the paintings close up, where it is attached to a sign outside a pet shop on Camberwell Road. It's of the cephalopod-visaged lord Cthulu, and it hasn't weathered the elements very well, having warped and cracked. Anyway. Quite charming, hardly essential.

I also went and scoped the new exhibition at Camberwell's Great Expectations gallery. Entitled Flock, it's worth investigating, as it represents something of a departure for the venue.

Great Expectations usually deal in more traditionally representational art and prints, and I have in the past found the portfolio of artists they represent slightly patchy; veering as it seems to between the engaging and/or contemporary, and the chocolate-box-insipid. This is I suppose an inveitable result of the identity crisis between the actual gallery out back, and the one-stop frame-and-card shop up front.

By contrast this show has a decidedly conceptual thrust, with an eclectic profile of young, hip artists. Helene Kazan's almost vorticistic architectural meditations are fascinating, Richard Cramp's hallucinatory vignettes humorous and unsettling, and James Lee's bling black and gold vinyl halftones make for slick eye-candy. There's some other interesting stuff in there too.

I'm working out east this week in Shoreditch. Looks to be quite a patchy one. All quiet today, then potentially stacked out tomorrow. Time will tell.

Somerfield

I hate Somerfield. Somerfield is just wrong. Unholy, even. It shouldn't exist, but it does.

Everything about Somerfield seems calculated to offend, in some measure. To make buying groceries just that little bit more troublesome than it should be. Less choice. Greater expense. More insult. More injury. If shopping is a modern drug, then what the FUCK is Somerfield? Aversion therapy?

Whisper to yourself the words "Somerfield" and the word evokes a bucolic pastoral watercolour: golden fields rippling with corn, sun dappled streams where otters frolic and fat trout dance forever, green rolling fields studded with thatched cottages, the smack of leather on willow etcetera etcetera.

The reality could hardly be more different, as Somerfield represents a uniquely bleak facet of modernity: the high street shop that no-one likes. Wheras the general populace emoted the faintest pang of nostalgia for the passing of C&A, the demise of Somerfield would not cause the merest ripple in the dark waters of its demise, so utterly charmless is the franchise.

Somerfield are so unremarkable, they can't even make a virtue of being unexceptional. Everything about Somerfield is so woefully half-arsed it's a small miracle (or rather more significant curse) that they still exist. Tesco might mercilessly promote its own bleak corporate hegemony, but it does at least exhibit a certain brutal style as it stalks the land, crushing all local shopkeepers before it like the tanks in Terminator 1.

Style of course, is somethething Somerfield just doesn't do, the Somerfield brand being itself ugly enough to give the London 2012 Olympic logo a run for its money. Seriously, they'd have probably got a better job done if they'd handed a paintbrush to an elephant. Picked out in a hideously contrasting aquamarine and custard colour scheme, seeing the Somerfield logo is a bit like someone spashing an eggcup full of sick directly onto the surface of each eye: it stinks and burns simultaneously. In fact, it's a bit like the beginning of the Bunuel/Dali collabo, Un Chien Andalou where the eye gets razored apart, only it actually happening to both your eyes simultaneously.

I suspect the rationale (if indeed there was one) in making the brand look so self-consciously dowdy and unlovely, was to promote the notion of thrift. "Shit logo equals value" runs the reasoning (and sings the sign) though this is a fallacy: Somerfield is about as good value as coke in the West End, and "Shit logo equals shit everything else" might be a more truthful maxim.

For Somerfield aint cheap. About the same as Sainsburys, in fact, only massively less pleasant to frequent. In spite of this however, as someone observed to me, it's all but impossible to spend over fifteen quid in there, as there's absolutely nothing worth buying, whatsoever. Their selection is terrible, and what they do stock they don't carry enough of. Visiting the store some evenings is like wandering through a trading outpost in the grip of a withering nuclear winter. The frightened shoppers outnumber the actual produce, and eye each other fearfully.

Some strange counter-intuition seems to govern the system of buying at Somerfield, wherby they whittle down their lines according to merit and desirability. Simply put, anything you might want to buy, Somerfield probably won't want to sell, and if they do stock it, they'll probably stop quite soon. They seem hell-bent on a mission to vend only the most hum-drum of wares at a fairly substantial markup. England is renowned internationally for having crap food, and though I was kind of hoping this notion had been reversed what with having Fat Tongue and Ramsay as our culinary ambassadors, having the likes of Somerfield on our team is surely the PR equivalent of fatal friendly fire. One can only hope that if a tourist actually wandered into a branch of Somerfield they might mistakenly assume they'd chanced upon a wormhole that had deposited them back in Communist Russia during the cold war.

For whosoever it is that ultimately pilots the good ship Somerfield seems to regard anything above the benchmark of the pre-roasted chicken counter as faintly bourgeoise. If I was to envisage the Somerfield of a bleak, Ballard-esque concrete dystopia years hence, it would contain five things: A skip full of chicken scraps, a hopper full of white onions, an aluminium silo dispensing milk, shelves and shelves of white bread, and enough lager to sink the Bismarck. And everything would cost around fifty quid.

You might have gathered I hate this franchise. True enough. The manifestation of a Somerfield in your vicinity is like the appearance of a cracked paving-stone or some visually cumbersome public art. A canker on the civic backside to be afforded as wide a wide berth as possible. Sometimes that just isn't possible, however. Especially if, like my local branch, they employ the invasive tactic of stuffing flyers daily through your front door at a virtually exponential rate: brutally ugly propoganda extolling the supposed value of their 'megadeals'. I did for a while consider collecting all these leaflets, assembling them into a papier-mache reconstruction of the store, then burning it in protest, but I then thought about my 'carbon footprint', and how a much more expedient solution might be to torch the shop itself (that's a joke, by the way).

I think what bothers me the most is that it is so bad on almost every level, and they make absolutely no effort to sort any of it out. Understaffed, understocked, poor selection, poor quality, poor store layout, overpriced.. I could go on.

Ok so all supermarkets are pretty evil and are all at this moment probably queueing up to whack the devil off, but at least they have the decency to attempt some sleight of hand to convice you otherwise – even if it is just paying Bob Hoskins 50 grand to say "Every little helps" in his warm but gravelly voice whilst they mercilessly crush farmers into the eroding topsoil.

Somerfield can't even be bothered doing this, for apart from their execrable direct mail I have yet to witness any Somerfield advertising. No, Somerfield's gameplan is the tried and tested tactic of bum-rushing an area: plonking a store down and hoping for the best, or, to put it another way 'if it gets enough people's way someone will eventually go inside and spend something'.

This is either brutally honest, really stupid, pretty damn insulting, or the last two. if I was to render Somerfield's hapless doctrine as a tagline, it might run thus.

"We're shit, you're shit, we're all shit, so let's eat shit and pay loads for it"

I'd like to say in light of all this that that I exercised freedom of choice and gave Somerfield a wide berth, but the worst thing about it is that I do still use my local branch, as it's the only supermarket in the vicinity and Sainsburys is a good mile or so away over a hill. I do try to avoid it though.

There is much talk these days of private equity buying out (or attempting to buy out) large firms such as Boots, and bringing all their merciless financial acumen to bear in turning the corporation in question into a cash-cow with distended knockers – milking it for all it's worth for a quick buck. Much that has been said is critical of these corporate reivers, but for the lame duck that is Somerfield their intervention cannot come soon enough. Will someone please tell these idiots how to have a piss up in a brewery, or could they hurry up and go into liquidation.

The Journey Home

Back in England then.

I was awoken on Sunday by the insistent shriek of my mobile phone alarm clock. Awoken from a worrying dream where Jimmy Saville – armed with a sub-machine gun, and trademark cigar champed between his teeth - was rounding up the contestants of this years Big Brother in a courtyard for summary execution. I haven't even watched it this year, so I don't know what all that was about.

I'd had about three hours sleep, having been in a poky Barcelona soul bar until half three, dancing cheek to jowel with the beautifull people, drinking Estrella and smoking Spanish bonded Marlborough Lights. I felt shit.

Catching the packed shuttle bus I bought a single to the airport ("Ida, por favor") and stood hunched in the aisle feeling like a crayola sketch. The tune playing as I disembarked at the airport was "who can it be" by Men at Work.

The airport was a pain in the ass. Have you ever hear the philosophical paradox which says:

"A rock is thrown at a tree. If the distance between the thrower can be halved, then halved again, then halved again, and so on and so for infinity, how does the rock ever reach the tree?"

Barcelona's Terminal 1 felt like a lazy experiment to work this out*. Qeueue after qeueue after qeueue, which seemed to diminish in magnitude after the initial check in, but still make boarding the plane seem an ever more remote prospect. When one of the Easyjet check in desks abrubtly closed, there was even a qeueue to join a cue, as people from the now defunct qeueue tried to assimilate themselves into the next qeueue up. I thought there was going to be a riot.

The final qeueue was pehaps the most agonising; standing in line with the other grockles waiting to be spirited across the runway to the plane itself. In front of me a family was having a loud screechy argument in cockney accents, which was at least some consolation for missing the Eastenders omnibus.

The flight was only two hours, though this being Easyjet there wasn't even a free mint when my eardrums felt like they were going to implode on descent. A bacon butty cost 8 Euros, and I only had three left.

Stanstead felt like Barcelona airport in reverse, though this being England, the qeueues were better organised. I caught the shuttle train from Stanstead to Liverpool street. One stop in it halted and the driver announced over the tannoy that the train was terminating because there was no driver. That's when I was really sure I was back in England. The train we switched to was stopping at every station in Essex, so two clicks down everyone swarmed across to the adjacent platform to get back on the Stanstead Express, in the hope of arriving before nightfall.

From Liverpool Street I caught the 35 back to Camberwell, where it disgorged me on the pavement outside MacDonalds where that guy got stabbed the other year. Walking down the Church Street nothing seemed to have changed. Assorted waifs and strays drinking white cider, a guy in a Dolce and Gabbana shirt and Tupac Style bandana asking for change, the Thai Fusion shut for refurbishment again. As I fumbled for a key to my front door, a chinese guy stood there smiled at me. Thinking he knew the people from the takeaway downstairs I bid him hello, wheupon he produced a bag of DVDs for my perusal. Stumbling in I slammed the door after me. Whoever referred to the best bit about travelling being arriving home was surely referring to the relief one feels when it's all over.

No work this week, so I'm busying myself with personal projects. Was due to meet up with some old uni friends, but it didn't actually happen in the end. In a minute I'm going to put my phone on silent and go to bed, to sleep, perchance to dream, though hopefully not about gun wielding ex Top of The Pops presenters.

*It obviously does hit the tree though, as I'm writing this. And the rock always does hit the tree.

?uestlove. Casa Battlo.

I went and saw ?uestlove from The Roots last night, at the Apollo in Barcelona.

It was pretty good. He was certainly the best DJ I've seen whilst abroad, though given that the roll call here only includes him and baseball-cap-toting hard-house-gorgonzola merchant Dave Pearce at Kavos in 2005, it's perhaps not the accolade it might at first seem.

Today I went and saw the Gaudi designed Casa Battló townhouse. If I was to say 'someone had a nice house there, then' that would be something of an understatement, understatement not being something Gaudi excelled at, and nor the people who scripted the audio guide by the sounds of it, where they refer to the house itself as:

"The most emblematic work of the most universal genius of all time"

and a fireplace on floor one as:

"The most original fireplace ever built"

Shortly after which I stopped using the plastic speaking shoehorn given me in the foyer which dispensed these bold claims, and instead explored the house on my own terms.

To be fair, it is pretty damn impressive, and looks kind of like where the Snorks would live if they read Wallpaper and could afford it, with a kind of bio-mechanical marine feel to the fittings throughout. If HR Giger did a loft conversion it might look vaguely similar (albeit kinkier).

Annoyingly, on the main floor they had these huge floor-to-ceiling grey vinyl banners in each room, that succeeded in obscuring about twelve square metres of the actual architecture without actually adding anything to the exhibition. That and the sub-ambient 'muzak of the spheres' being piped from somewhere could quite easily have been dispensed with. Otherwise, it was great. Better than a walk round Ikea anyway.

I might go and watch a film on a hill his evening. It'll be in Catalan though if I drink enough this probably won't matter so much.

And the weather here is..

Scorchio. Blazio, whatever. In fact, I went out and bought some factor 30 yesterday to stop my skin's four colour breakdown including 100% magenta.

The tops of my forearms are now a nice brown colour.. still a little white below. I remember as a kid on holiday holding my arms up parallel with my eyes and imagining they were small sharks, with a dark topside and pale underbelly.

There are clouds around mind. This place is temperate by Spanish standards. I saw a weather forecast the other day, and literally everywhere in Spain had a blazing sun icon, apart from here near the Pyrennese, where it was mixed up with the odd cloud.

Been seeing the sights. Barcelona is one charming city; beautiful in bits though it does smell. The standard of design in branding and advertising lags quite significantly behind that of the UK, but if people here are too busy worrying about wholesome things like food, family, and not having to work in the afternoon, who am I to point out that an 80% distort on some headline type is ugly as sin.

They're a proud old bunch round here though.. don't actually like speaking Spanish that much at all. When I lamely said "no hablo Espanol" to a guy in a shop the other day, he responded rather forcefully with "you mean you don't speak Catalan!". Oops.

Went and tried to catch sunset over the city last night and missed it, though did get to walk past the old Olympic stadium, where they were holding some 15th anniversary type event. My personnal memories extend to sitting watching it in Matt's room with Matt and Jim the cat in the summer of 1992 while the sun shone outside. That and the Freddy Mercury tune of course.

On the way back down dropped in to a gallery sponsered by a Spanish bank (Caixa Catalunya?)It was open late and completely free, and they had an exhibition of paintings and engravings by Hogarth.. most of which I've seen in textbooks and slideshows, but never up close. Excellent stuff. 'Gin Lane' and 'Beer Street' (the first public health information posters?) were there in print form, along with a series called 'The Four Stages of Cruelty', and 'Marriage a la Mode' as etchings and paintings. 'The Rake's Progress' also featured, though not the paintings, which I presume are still under lock, key, and panel in the John Soames house in Holborn.

Off to the beach later. After cofee and a croissant somewhere.

Barcelona

I'm in Barcelona.

I got here around half nine yesterday, after a three o'clock start (I had to catch a train from Liverpool Street at half four).

Jamie Oliver was mooching round the departure lounge at Stanstead Airport, with posse in tow. No idea where he was going, but it looked family orientated.

Spain seemed depressingly overcast when I touched down,and at first I feared I'd brought the weather with me, but today it's blue skies with the odd cloud in the distance.

I'm typing this on Dunc's laptop, having just sat out on his balcony reading a couple of Michael Moorcock articles in a battered paperback for an hour or so. I might go to the beach shortly. I could really go for a coffee as well.

Still feeling puffy-eyed and generally quite sleepy. Don't intend to do a
huge deal this holiday other than read, lie about, eat, drink, and swim. And take some photographs.

Smell

Smell is the most evocative of all the senses, I think. The one most likely to conure up a particular memory, a sensation of time, of place.

The place I used to work in Manchester was on Richmond Street, parallel to Canal Street. A few doors up from us there was the back of a restaurant called Velvet, and from a fan here issued cooking fumes from the kitchen. It always smelt like barbecued meat, and it was odd how when walking past, even in the depths of winter, I'd be transported, momentarily, to my mum and dad's patio in some unspecified summer.

A similar thing happened today. As I walked up Camberwell Church Street, the sun peeked fleetingly from between the clouds, and just then, I caught a whiff of chips cooking from the open doors of The Hermits Cave. For a moment, I was walking down the street in Kavos with Ade and Dunc in 2005, where the aroma of fried breakfast vied for your attention with the roar of mopeds, piloted by lobster-red lads with buzz-cuts.

It's been happening quite a lot recently. The merest thing sets it off. The faint pong of seafood at the Chinese Supermarket, the smell of cigarette smoke chiming with a spoon's clink on a cup, and I'm elsewhere – usually it must be said, somewhere sunnier and drier. Recently I've been feeling very nostalgic for other times and places, and feeling pretty restless in general of late. Another week in work, then I have a weeks holiday in Barcelona. I can't wait. After that? who knows. I think I need to shake up my life. Do some different things. Change is important I feel.

It's been a quiet weekend. Went for a meeting on Saturday morning about some design work for a charity festival. Unpaid gig, though I'll probably get tickets for the events, and fingers crossed, some creative fulfillment. I wandered across town afterwards, over to the city, where a road was closed to film a car chase sequence for National Treasure 2.

Last night was pretty quiet. Went for a few drinks with Ade at the Sun and Doves, to be joined later by Rachael. The Sun and Doves is one of the few bars I've ever been to that manage to curate art exhibitions effectively (most places don't seem to have a clue) and they've had some excellent paintings by an artist Called Jo Lewis for the last month (though I see the exhibition ends today).

















They're watercolours, washed by the ebb and flow of the Thames to introduce an element of chaos: spinning drips of paint into bruise-like nebulae of colour. The combination of errant stuttery line and soft clouds of colour reminded me of Gerald Scarfe and Futura 2000 in equal measure. Excellent.

Work tomorrow. Yawn. I know I'm going on about it a bit but this weather sucks hard.. right now if feels like all of London is trapped beneath a wet duvet.. all warm and stale.

Here's hoping Barcelona keeps warm and dry for me.

Card Art

Hey, does anyone like my installation?

It's called 'Fucking Waste of Cardboard' (2007) and it's currently on show in my living room for the next twenty minutes or so, until I chuck the lot in some black bin liners and leave it by the front door. The swirly blue 70s carpet is a comment on the vagaries of hyper-accelerative consumer culture. And rented accomodation.

It actually doesn't look as bad as it did, now I've spent the duration of The Love Movement ripping it up into manageable bits then rolling them up. Before it was several acres of cardboard – the flat-plan of two tardis-like boxes containing picture frames I ordered a while back.

This wasn't the worst of it either, as both came wadded with a duvet sized bolt of supersized bubble wrap straight off the set of Land of The Giants. Each was the size of a pastie (or pattie, whichever your preference) and rather than proving vaguely soothing, when popped, sounded like a gun shot. I spent one saturday morning slicing them open, so as not to get the police round.

The irony is, the glass in both frames turned up hopelessly shattered anyway, making the whole shebang an even more ludicrous waste of packaging. Ordering A1 sheets of glass in the post (even by special delivery) is not something I'm going to be doing in the future.

Addiction

I sometimes notice homeless people on the streets seem to have their individual outfits which (for quite obvious reasons) they wear again and again. There's the grizzled old red faced man, who sits swilling super strength cider from a can, on the steps of the solicitors opposit Camberwell Green. He's always wearing his trademark filthy Bench beanie hat.

By bringing this up I'm not trying to pen a Vice fashion article. I just think there's something quite poignant about this, these clothes that the homeless quite literally live in. Sometimes I'll see an old gent, wearing a suit shiney with filth, augmented with a palimpsest of burns, tears and stains, and wonder: Is that the last thing you put on before things fell, utterly, apart? The last suit in your wardrobe you put on the day your landord changed the locks on you; the suit you were wearing the day you parked your car up by the sea and kept on walking. Perhaps not. But it sometimes seems to me that as a second skin, each rip is a scar that marks successive bumps down the crooked staircase to hell.

Last weekend I went out in the morning to buy some bread from Sophocles Bakers. On my way back I spied two girls and a man outside Paul's Olive Shop. I say girls – they were in their late 20s or early 30s. They were gobbling water melon and spraying pips at the ground, alternately swigging at glasses of rose wine. At first I took them for people wallowing in the aftermath of a nights clubbing, but there was something really odd about the tableaux.. as I turned to watch them stumble across the road in the direction of The Flying Fish I realised that they were obscenely drunk, completely shitfaced, slurring, bumping into one another in a kind of spastic dance. In terms of dress they were quite presentable however, and I couldn't quite work out whether they were just hardcore boozers, or people toasting a deeper troth with alcohol, taking the first tentative steps on a path infinitely longer and more folorn than that to the off-license.

I found this thought unsettling. You see the same faces on the streets drinking away the pain, but once they've slipped off the bottom rung it seems hard to track orders of magnitude in the arc of their terminal decline, as all niceties, nuances and graces are ground away by the bitter friction of the street, to be discarded like old cans. As someone moderately obsessed with appearances, this reflexive slump seems like the ultimate gesture of despair, and to see someone swaying at the crossroads leading there is not a happy sight.

Alcoholism seems like a ruinous disease, which is hard to pick out in the fuzzy penumbra of our boozy national culture, but then many addictions, left unchecked, are witheringly degrading. Yesterday a smack-head (I suppose) came into the carriage I was in on a train begging. She was truly a pitiful sight: face a map of scabs, arms visible beneath tracksuit sleeves garlanded with trackmarks. She looked somewhere between 18 and 40. She came as a supplicant, tremulous voice wavering for cash. "sorry love" I said, uncomfortably. The business-man opposite me sat watching, blanky. She swiftly moved to repeat her pitch in the next carriage, but after a short pursuit was apprehended by the ticket inspector, and bounced off at the next stop into the not-so-welcoming arms of the British Transport Police.

I read on t'internet the other day that Heroin is, in itself, not that harmful to the human body. Far more damaging is the shit it's cut with, or sharing needles, or simply the fact that when you're into Heroin, you're not into very much else.. such as eating, washing yourself etc. There's a bit I remember from The Naked Luch, where William Burroughs talks about being off his face on smack, content to stare in rapture at the end of his foot for hours. Heroin it would seem, is not a thing to do if you want to do things; lest they be things related to the feverish topping up of your pay as you go contract with the brown stuff.

Against this yardstick many addictions seem relatively benign. My personal fetish for 12 inch circles of black plastic has waned somewhat recently, but even so only caused mild structural damage to the floors of my parents house in its sheer vinyl tonnage. Having said that I read that the hip hop producer Marco Polo goes digging for records wearing a surgical mask, in case a crate should be booby-trapped with asbestos, but that seems more an occupational hazard than anything else.

'Summer'

So, nice June we had there eh? Quite often I've awoken recently, and peeked out the window to see a crystal clear blue sky, only for it vanish a couple of hours later, obsucred behind uniform shapeless grey clouds, clogging the horizon like discarded carrier bags.

I hate this weather. Coming from Manchester I'm used to most things wet and inclement, but I think I'd choose just about anything over grey and muggy: rain, wind, cold, storms, snow, hail, giant radioactive crayfish strafing London with lazers from their eyes..

It feels like such 'pregnant' weather to me; an anticipation of something else. Everything feels so close and tense. I find myself itching for something to happen that might dissipate the charge in the air, even if it's just some rain. There is the odd window in the clouds, reminding you there's a sun up there, and when its rays get through, everything seems glorious for about five minutes, until the next bank of cloud shuffles along to park up the space.

I read in the paper yesterday that this is the weather predicted for most of summer as well, so better get used to it I suppose. How dismal.

Sainsburys

I went to West Hampstead last night, to Will and Sam's, along with Ade and Rachael, where we ate Jewish food (chicken, bagels, chicken liver pate, pickled cucumbers) drank (red wine, beer) and stood smoking on Will's Balcony staring at the rainswept glory of London at night below us; the London Eye in the distance picked out in the red and blue colourways of BA, trains shunting through Kilburn aglow.

Crossing the river to north London was a quest of epic proportions however.. a bit like Escape From New York minus eyepatches. Having encountered complete gridlock, we eventually gave up trying to drive at Victoria and ditched the car, plumping instead for the tube, which was itself fit to bursting. Perhaps inevitably, the Victoria Line was down, which entailed jumping on the District Line to Sloane Square, thence north on the Picadilly to the Jubilee at Green Park. All in all a journey that should have taken forty-five minutes probably took the best part of two hours.

The journey back was much less frought however, and we managed it in something around an hour. Disembarking the tube at Green Park, and walking past Buckingham Palace to the car. I got in, read, and went to sleep.

Today I went to consumer paradise.

Today I went to Sainsburys in Dulwich. More out of curiosity than anything else.. I was walking past and thought I'd have a look in.

It was a revelation. Wheras the Somerfield(s) of Camberwell are some of the bleakest places in the UK outside Hull, the Dulwich Somerfield is almost utopian in its allure. Vast and suffused with light, it resembles how I imagine the hangar of an Ian M Banks starship might look, and I could, upon entry, all but pick out angels with strollers cavorting at the extent of my vision, in the aisles untold miles away.

Taking a walk round Dulwich feels a bit like walking round the interior of an 80gb iPod, everything is so pristine and aspirational. Sometimes in the Somerfield in Camberwell in the evenings, you're lucky if you can locate a single potato and some cheap, bloodshot chicken goujons to fight over with knives. Here all matter of wonders were on display. Want Oak Veneer CD cases?: Check. Want glass and chrome finish soap dispensers?: you got it.

I wandered agog, not knowing where to look, in the midst of this grocery porn. The meat counter was futuristic, a fog bank of super chilled air rolling across the morsels on display like dry ice. Further along, I paused in front of a rack of Jamie Oliver's own brand merchandise, noting the sparing design, left aligned sans-serif typeface* and bright optimistic pantone swatches that denote a socially ambitious brand.

Across the way: A wall of Pasta, imported from Italy. But no ordinary pasta, for it was so hugely outsized each individual pasta shell resembled a Claes Oldenburg sculpture.. they were like giant clams, and probably cost enough to warrant the inclusion of individual pearls, but no matter, the spectacle itself sated certain appetites I had long forgotten.

I bought relatively little.. some yoghurt, fruit juice, corn-fed chicken and some Laksa Paste by Ruben Solomon, which I never see anywhere, and consequently revere. The checkouts were like runways, moving walkways for food.. the transaction itself painless. I stumbled out onto Dog Kennel hill feeling like I'd participated in a promotional tour of a shopping centre in Rivendell. It even has a Starbucks ferchrissakes.

I'll be going back at some point, I should think. For all its self-conciously dowdy personna, Somerfield is brutally expensive, so there's little to choose between them there. It's a little further away, true, but then so is heaven, and here Sainsburys has the advantage of actually existing. The gates of this consumer paradise are open to all who can afford it, and it looks reassuringly expensive.

*Lubalin Graph, I think.

A pied

Went for a walk on Sunday, to clear the cobwebs out of my head. Burnt some serious crepe sole pounding the streets from the South to the East. It was a sodden day.. the heavens opened halfway up the Walworth road, and would have drenched me utterly had I not been under the aegis of a tatty USMC gore-tex.

From Elephant I walked up to London Bridge, and thence crossed to Monument, where I went up the, um, monument, built to comemmorate the great fire. The inside consists of a very narrow spiral staircase. There are 311 steps, and it narrows towards the top, and peering over the railing into the central space, I was gripped by vertigo. I was wearing Clarks Wallabees, which after having been worn for a while, I've found to be utterly treacherous in the rain. On the wet stairs, they provided all the traction of cartoon banana skins, and my descent was much slower as I gripped the bannister like a zimmerframe. The view from the top is good, but like a forest of buildings.

From here I wandered up to Liverpool Street, and then Brick Lane to check out the markets. I think my favourite bit of the market is the assorted chancers who congregate round the Shoreditch end, trying to sell whatever miscellaneous tat they can off blankets. I don't think they've got licences or anything, and I got some distrusful looks as I snapped away with my camera, especially off a girls selling fake DVDs off a blanket. Also passed the 24 hour bagel shops which have proven the answer to post club munchies on quite a few ocassions

From here I walked up to Shoreditch, and up Old street, heading up past the tube to Farringdon, and then Soho, where I wound up at Oxford circus and caught a 12 back to Camberwell.

A round walk of around 20K I think.

The Peppertree

I headed down to Clapham last night after work, where I met up with Liam and Kerryn, Dave, Ian and Sam – just back from his honeymoon.

We went to The Peppertree for a bite to eat.. a little place facing the common which does Thai food.

It was very busy, with people queing most of the time, but the turnaround was brisk. Its ethos seems to be decent food quite fast.. which it does well. The menu is pared down and while not compendious, almost makes a virtue of simplicity of choice.

Having become the gastronomic cliche that it is, it's sometimes easy to forget how nice Thai food can be, and this was a refreshing affirmation. My Thai green prawn curry with coconut rice was zingy and subtly hot, and I polished it off with a bottle of crisp Thai Singha beer.

The portions were exactly right too.. just enough and no more, though accurately priced to reflect this. At the end of the meal I left feeling neither light in the wallet or heavy in the stomach. I'd go there again, and if that is not enough of a recommendation there was a certain Guardian columnist chowing down there that evening, so it must be good.

After that we headed a few doors up to the Alex for a pint. The Alex is stuffed to the gills with assorted reclamation yard tat such as old tin shop signs, yet is actually not a bad boozer for that part of Clapham.

After that I jumped on the bus back home to Camberwell. Jess was sat up with her friend Lucy, having returned from quarantine at her mum and dads after contracting chicken pox. She'd brought some pebbles back from the beach, which were so smooth they felt soft to the touch. They were from the shore at Dunwich, site of a village which was swallowed by the sea over the course of several hundred years (and is not to be confused with the fictional Dunwich in Massachusetts in HP Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror'. I read a bit before bed then eventually fell asleep.

Wednesday today. Quiet at work, cloudy outside. I'm munching on chilli crackers from the market in Soho, and thinking of things I can cross of the weeks 'to do' list today. It's nearly lunchtime, so I might go out and look for a linen basket.

Malletti

I met my dad yesterday for lunch, and on the advice of Simon and Tommy, we went and got sandwiches from Malletti, which we sat and ate on a bench in Soho Square, whilst swiping at the encroaching pigeons with our feet.

We both got focaccia sandwiches, which I must say, were really good, if not quite on a par with those of the sadly departed Il Panino. If Il Panino's closure represented the spiritual demise of the Italian Soho sandwich shop to me, Malletti symbolises a resurrection of sorts. Where has Malletti been all my life? Ok Noel Street, same as it always has.

Today I bought another of their focaccias, which I took back to my desk and wolfed down – and you do almost need the assumed powers of some totem beast (a la Bravestarr or The Phantom) – to actually consume one, so densely packed are they with ingredients.

This one was stuffed with mozarella, and eating it my cheeks and chin were soon lashed to the sandwich with tentacles of melted cheese. It felt a bit like a vegetarian version of the infamous 'squid scene' from Oldboy. It was pretty difficult to eat tidily, though I tried to look as inconspicuos as possible to the studio manager sitting directly opposite me, as sundry fillings from my meal made a desperate bid for freedom across the laminate desktop. When she later mentioned that they wouldn't need me the next day however, I couldn't quite quell the nagging suspicion that it was related to my choice of lunch.

No matter, I've found somewhere new to visit for lunch in Soho, and I haven't even got started on the pizzas yet, of which they have an exciting selection. I'll be returning soon.

I've been meddling..

..with dark forces I barely understand (HTML) in the cause of ringing in some cosmetic changes.

Hopefully, all links will be up and running in the next couple of days, along with a new profile thing, if you're bothered.

In the meanwhile, here's a weird bit of claymation I dug up on youtube.

Enjoy.

Extra brain, Barnet Fair, Whitstable, Wedding.

Well this has been one of the nicest weekends since records began, which in the case of this blog, has been going on for two years now. It was the weekend of my friends Sam and Kays' wedding, but more on that later.

My booking wound up on Thursday, which was fine. It was in Victoria, which I can never get too excited about, though I did get to work on some design, which was good.

On Friday I went to the Graphics Centre on Camberwell New Road, which in keeping with the trend currently sweeping independent retailers in London, is shutting down. Shame really, as they had a really good range of art supplies in general. They were pretty cheap anyway, but on this ocassion were flogging everything around half price in an attempt just to shift it.

I bought a stapler, which pretty much sums up the direction my life is going really. I think it'll be handy for keeping receipts together, or just generally feeling good about having a stapler.

I also bought some ink, a couple of hard backed pads, and a few mini Pentel sign pens, with lanyards attached. I've 'formed them like Voltron' to create a kind of portable brain for me to store information. Granted my own brain is fairly portable, but my memory for numbers and addresses somewhat hazy. Besides, I, like anyone who's ever made a mixtape, secretly delight in lists.



I also got my hair cut at Fish in Soho, which I was pleased with. More expensive than the guy who usually cuts it Manchester but smart nonetheless.. just what I wanted. I don't think I've had my hair washed by anyone else since I was about three however, so that was quite a strange experience. The guy who was cutting my hair suggested I should get a Christian Dior suit to match the haircut, which would be good if I could afford such things. I did however spend some time in Liberties covetously fingering an APC jacket, which was, in the end, just a little too small. I left it.

After that I hooked up with Al and Dunc at the John Snow for a couple of beers. Dunc was just arrived back from Barcelona where he's been variously teaching English and trying not to get arrested, with some success in both. After that, we rolled back to Camberwell, where we got a bite to eat at Tadims on Camberwell Church street, which is as cheap as the chips they copiously garland your plate with. Tadim's are not – by default – advocates of any low carb diet. Still. it's not bad. Decent enough.





After that, wandered over to the Hermits Cave, which is mentioned in a book by Paul Ewen, called London Pub Reviews, which is actually a quite surreal series of vignettes involving boozers, rather than a more prosaic set of opinions. We sat there quite late, before rolling back to mine and sitting up even later.

Saturday was the day of the wedding, so we were up with the lark to catch the train, though the lark had a distinct advantage in the gift of flight, which negated having to catch the sweaty 436 bus to Victoria. As we did. There we met up with Peed outside Marks and Spencers, who'd left his shoes at Liams, so would have to wear his suit with trainers.

We got to Whitstable and checked into our accomodation.. one of those utterly unremarkable Travelodge numbers, which are completely interchangeable with one another. Indeed, it's quite fitting that there is hardly any stand out between the main rival brands (Travelodge and Premier Travel Inn) so mundane is the format overall. After that we had a bit of a wait for our taxi, which was booked for three, but annoyingly, arrived over quarter of an hour late.

This had the knock on effect of making us late for the ceremony, and rolling up like chumps after the vows had been exchanged. Still. We got the gist I suppose.

After that, we headed to the reception. which was held at the The Sportsman Inn in Faversham. The setting by the sea was amazing and it was a gorgeous day for it.. with a clear blue sky and the sun beaming overhead. Sam and Kay looked crisp in informal wedding attire, the bridesmaids looked lovely and in general everyone had turned out in their freshly ironed best clobber. The food was great too – a buffet with a seafood bias along with other bits. I baulked at an oyster, but that was mostly because I was still feeling slightly wobbly from the night before. We went down to the beach nearby and skimmed stones and drank beer, and I sang the refrain from 'Sea King' by Hawkwind until Will intimated I stop.





I love weddings, and wedding receptions. Where else do you ever find yourself dancing to the O'Jays next to someone thirty years your senior whilst wearing brogues? Actually, that'd be the modern soul room at a northern soul night wouldn't it. Anyway, after an impressive speech by Sam and the best man, the big dawg, Dan, his brother, the tables were cleared and music supplied by by him and Sam's colleague and DJ partner Leo. They turned the party out until around half eleven, when the sound system chose to pack up for half an hour. After that, people jumped in taxis and headed home, mostly somewhat unsteadily.

This morning we headed to Whitstable for breakfast. I chose now to give an oyster a try. Not bad. Salty. Whitstable seems quite a nice place, quite olde worlde without being overbearingly cheesy. There seemed to be quite a few charity shops, and we even found a gallery selling lots hip prints by people like Keith Haring, Paul Insect and the ubiquitous Banksy.

I've heard that when you drown, it is as though your life flashes before your life, and it is fitting that Whitstable is by the sea as our walk around it felt much like the night before being replayed, as we bumped into people from London who'd been at the reception.



We ate at a place called Tea and Times, which was OK. The food was nice but the service a bit wonky, and after that, caught a lift back home with Ade and Rachael, after bidding a fond farewell to Dunc and Peed, off to Barcelona and Stockport respectively.

Home is quiet and I was the only one in. Rustled up a simple pasta dish from a George Locatelli recipe. I've just finished watching American History X, and I might go to bed now, and read a little of The Knight by Gene Wolfe, which is about an American kid being transported to a fantastic land where he becomes a Conan-esque hero. It's quite opaque and mysterious like much of Wolfe's stuff, but from I can work out, I think he's actually in a coma, and his visions are inspired by Second Life style online gaming. Quite odd.

No work tomorrow (as yet) but lots to be getting on with.

Wet Wednesday..

I'm not working this week.. which was an actual decision on my part. Firstly because I've got some boring stuff to sort out, secondly because I've got some interesting things to do, and thirdly, because last week at work was so boring it was in itself a strong argument for entire new sub-categories of tedious. Most of the week ground agonisingly by making minute cosmetic changes to a bit of direct mail that was, ultimately, always going to be a bit of direct mail. I must have reworked the same 'roundel' device regarding the amazing value of an offer at least three times. But mostly I didn't have very much to do at all, which meant I just sat in the corner of the compact agency I was ensconced in, alternately browsing the internet and fidgeting. Easy money in some ways, but excruciatingly dull in most others.

On the subject of boring stuff I've sorted out some outstanding NIC and PAYE contributions that I thought had been paid ages ago. Obviously the black hole of the British postal service had simply swallowed the cheque as I kept recieving ominous letters from the Inland Revenue. What always gets right on my tits about this is that the office in question is perpetually un-contactable, the phone eternally engaged. In idle moments I imagine it off the hook in a chained and locked, airtight filing cabinet somewhere beneath the Bristol Channel, but the truth is probably far more prosaic (a single phone in an office, everyone is trying to ring).

I've also just managed to pay a bunch of cheques in, having waited quite a while for the full hand to appear..

Other things I need to resolve are my tax self-assessment, though before I can do that, the next major hurdle on the horizon is sorting out who does my accounting, as the current bunch have totally failed to impress me. I requested a breakdown of what I paid them last year, and when it arrived (via email, a week or too later) I practically had to steady myself. To say: "they're not cheap" would be a gross understatement. Theyre singularly inneficient as well.. I rang up yesterday for some advice on a relatively simple matter, was put on hold for ten minutes, cut off, rang up again, asked what my number was ("er, this one you just rang me on") then promised someone would ring me back later in the day (they didn't). Crap. So I think I'll take my money elsewhere.

In other news, having a quick rifle through my wardrobe the other day I discovered that moths have been dining out on my Katherine Hamnett suit. It's riddled with tiny holes, and looks like someone has been exchanging blowbacks with hash reefers over my left shoulder. In truth, I only wore to job interviews for jobs I never wanted anyway, which is good as it's probably only good for sacraficial moth food now. However, in a quest to limit the spread of this rot, I hastened to the 99p store on Butterfly Walk.

I just finished reading a book called 'The Animal Factory' by Edward Bunker (who played Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs), which is set in San Quentin prison, California, and circumnavigating the aforementioned store is much like what I imagine it to be like crossing the yard in that – both physically and psychologically hazardous. Nonetheless, I got got out alive and in posession of moth balls, which I proceeded to secrete around my wardrobe.

I've since removed them all, for the simple reason that they fucking stank. I've little doubt that they might have some success at repelling moths, but at the almost certain cost of repelling or poisoning me as well; I get the distinct impression they are insanely toxic, in spite of their benign, mint-like like appearance.

I hear cedar wood is the classic moth-repellant, though I don't think I'm in the market for a cedar-wood wardrobe just yet. The internet tells me a more expedient solution is to simply give clothes a good airing every once in a while, though of course this presents problems of its own, living in a gardenless flat in London.

Anyway. I've got some interesting things to do, and am going to look at a flat this evening.. though it costs a bit (alright, quite a lot) more than I really want to spend..