What a week.

what a week, hey? i took to charging around the country side delivering chinese takeaways to people. i've been slowly working out the most efficient way to go about this and i think i have sussed it. it goes like this. drive to takeaway, unclip sat nav and put in pocket. leave car unlocked for expediency. enter takeaway. if meals are not ready then consider the address on the reciept. if address not known, type into sat nav, and then turn sat nav off. pick up bag and leave, enter car, sat nav and bag of meals on passenger seat; reverse, aim the appropriate way down the street, accelerate, switch on headlights, buckle seatbealt, clip in sat nav, turn on sat nav. turn on radio. when i get to the house there are more options of which to choose, including. do i leave engine running while i hunt for the house in the dark and in the rain? do i check the amount owed before i go to the front door or use my phone to check it in the dark? do i leave the car unlocked? do i fumble around for change for longer than nessecary in the hope of a higher tip? yes it's full of intricacies. i speed like a madman, something i am compelled to do by working on commission. it's just like grand theft auto. i ran down a hooker at about 8pm on tuesday night, but i outran the cops pretty quick so it was OK. meanwhile, israel! what would god say? thats what i want to know? ok so they may have different prophets, but yahweh and allah are they same bloke at the end of the day. let's not get into this too much, taking sides and whatnot, and just say the one thing that can be known for sure – this is going to go on and on. when children die and people don't stop doing the things that make children die then something is seriously fucked up. the novel i'm writing is slowing down dramatically around the 20000 words mark, whereupon i have done some serious rejigging and had to stop and consider at length where to go now. maybe i will have a crusading female priest who becomes a maverick bishop in all but name, doing ad hoc ceremonies in underground car parks until catholic henchmen hunt her down. if i were richard dawkins i would say, nay spit, the words 'of course they didn't accept female bishops. their archaic rules are dictated by the word of a made up entity of which there is no factual scientific basis. but the more alienated from society they become, they easier it will be for the atheist armies to crush them when the Atheatic day of judgement comes, circa 2030.' And then i'd chew on the corpse of a newly baptised child.

What a Week

what. a. week. lord, the week has been some week, that much is true. i spent the first part of the week stapled to a pin-board in a corridor of an consultancy office, and i can tell you this. people do not take any notice of notices. hundreds of times people passed me, they didn't notice that i was stapled to the wall. they didn't notice the words on me, the words 'help I'm stuck on the wall, please get me down.' finally, on Tuesday night, i was released, just in time to stay up watching the Americans elect their president. i fell asleep minutes before the result was announced, and thus picked up elements of the speech as soundbites the following day. that obama though, he is slick like a Tony the tiger. that is a man who knows how to talk. romney, he's like a condescending uncle, who smiles and nods as he tells you that he had to kill your dog because your dog had got too big. so i started nanowrimo about 6 days late and have been trying to catch up ever since. some days im like wayooooo let's write and all the pain of the world rushes through me like an empathy conduit and i type a veritable projectile vomit of words onto the computer. other days, like Wednesday, i sit there like a koala, wasting away, clutching something for comfort, possibly watching breaking bad. i went to Devon on a train and saw a double rainbow on the way, as i rode the train. a unicorn was running up the side of the rainbow, which i found particularly weird because the far end of the rainbow's arc was very steep, too steep for a unicorn to get up, i would have thought.

what a week

floods floods, electricity, waves, wind, wind, wind. oh, the USA, battered again by the powers of evil. who would have thought that the storm blighted the Caribbean too? we tend not to focus on that. Cuba and Haiti? no one will notice the difference, they say. and just as one storm passes across the ocean, in a galaxy far far away, Disney buys star wars. who can blame them? the legions of children are just waiting/starving to make toys for the next three films, and can we expect them to be more stupid than the prequels? i say yes! binks the second, i reckon, jar jar binks' grandson, commanding an army which is trying to counter the counter-revolution. (is it not true that the righteous in the sequels will be a new rebellion against the power of the jedi?) but with Disney at the helm, no depth is too low. it's like the ocean – humans barely known what's down there, what evils lurk, and so it is with the rubbish that Disney will be capable of reaching, below the dive depth of any submarine. of course, i will watch it. i like star wars. at the beginning of the week i phoned up the bank to talk to them about my loan. when they put me on hold, the most forlorn music played. it was as if it said, 'sometimes, all you can do is accept the inevitable, and get another loan. don't worry, leave it to us, we will steadily ensure that you will be in poverty forevermore.' barclays, though – who knows – perhaps they will all be in prison before long and all slates will be wiped clean, or the end of fight club will come to pass. but considering the way they've managed to survive so far despite their criminal activities, my hopes are possibly mere fantasy. just got to button up my shirt and pay them payments every month, as the great philosopher kant once said, it is imperative that i maintain a decent credit rating. life is hard but so am i as E once said, another profound thinker. and so i walked towards but not all the way to the beach and i listened to polica. polica makes walking very cool, very cool indeed. breathing changes, loosens up. in all the songs the vocals are the same and yet this never becomes tiring. best recent discovery, polica. i came across a dead pigeon which i nursed back to life by sprinkling upon its head the pollen from a young dandelion and performing the ancient ritual of pigiennia. off he flew in spark of new and profound life, only to be hit by a passing truck.

what a week

what a week hey? gosh, indeed, i mean savile, what happened there? i cant even remember when that story started. i cant remember being surprised – it all rather crept up on you, didn't it? a bit like savile himself! but certainly i was dumbfounded and horrified. i mean, what the hell? bbc! where are you! as Norwich city fan delia smith once said. meanwhile, George osborne doesn't pay for his ticket on the train only to dig into his pockets and pay the £170 or whatever it was or else be thrown in with the animals in the standard seating area. ah but that was a long time ago, an age in the life of the newsreel. but that boy, that George, he's a cheeky one. one day he's skipping the train, the next he's parking a turd square on the head of a pensioner. i also took a train. i took one from crewkerne to home. a girl was crying on the platform and i offered her some chocolate. she said 'oh, go on then' and snapped a bit off. to be honest, she snapped off a bit more than i hoped she had. but i couldn't very well ask her to give some back, with the tears down her face and everything. the train was held up somewhere in Dorset. i had no idea where, it was late and i dont have GPS on my phone. it wasn't a station that's for sure. that's for sure! it was pitch black i tell you. we were all told to get off, they had run out of coal, or whatever it is that makes trains run, and we had to walk to the sea and get a boat the rest of the way. get back and wham, hurricane city! Sandy's on her way. it's like the motion picture Grease, with john travolta and olivia newton john, and just as badass. one of those BBC reporters, john sopel i think, he just loves it, kept saying the sea is swelling like a cauldron. presenters were lining up to get their storm report in, just hoping, hoping, hoping that they will be on TV when a building falls down or a person gets swept away. day after tomorrow, that's what it was, the soundtrack was virtually playing over the montage of waves and satellite images. does new york know when it ends and when its representation begins, i wonder.

The milk

That night I drank milk. I drank it and kept drinking it. I drank all I had and then some. I went out to get more. I cleaned out the local shop's whole supply. I drank full fat semi skimmed and skimmed. I drank it straight from the bottle the carton and the vat and the truck. I had a hose. I had a funnel. I drank until the cows came home. 

I drank it non-stop until the gulps hurt then I drank more. I drank until I couldn't breathe and then I kept drinking. I drank until the calcium in my teeth made them so strong that they bit through my tongue without me noticing. I drank until the milk eroded the back of my throat and mixed blood into the falling milky cocktail. 

I drank until my bones were so so strong they destroyed themselves. I drank until my eyes cried milk and drowned the pupils so they looked like pathetic tiny raisins, shriveled and lifeless, on the expanses of two identical moons. I drank until the quantities of calcium turned my brain into an udder, and made me see cows floating in the milk lake of my tears. I held onto them as they passed. They were indifferent to my using them as a raft. They didn't even say moo. We floated towards eternity. Towards the inevitable waterfall that no one is strong enough to paddle against with their pathetic puny human limbs. I drank as we fell as we tumbled through the sky as the milk painted my clothes and hair and got up my nose and charged into my lungs. I drank and I drank. I drank all the milk we were drowning in, to save us, and then cried it right back out again, so we started all over again, the flapping the gasping the screaming for someone to save us and the drinking the endless drinking of the milk

Exclusive: A Tough Diet for Tough Times.

Government cuts are causing people to eat their own walls, a new study had shown. The politically central think tank, the Institute for Political Structural Integrity (IPSI) has found that increasing numbers of lower to middle class families are finding food too expensive, as wages stop rising, and are using the walls in their homes for extra food. But the consequences can be dire. 

Says Anne Brickton, spokesperson at the IPSI, 'the problem gets worse the lower down the wage spectrum you go. Those on minimum wage, for example, are eating particularly malnutritious walls, and those living in flats built in the Thatcher era are eating downright poisonous ones.'

Another consequence which seems to be too oft ignored is the importance a wall has in keeping up a roof. Anne says 'many walls have a variety of purposes – partitioning rooms and keeping ceilings up. Exterior walls also keep in heat, meaning that with every extra wall eaten, the fuel bills rise, and many of these people are already in fuel poverty. Without walls many roofs will fall down, causing the whole structure to collapse.' Food has never been part of the intended purpose of walls, says wall expert Peter Clockers, and in fact cause more harm than good. Anne declined to comment in any detail on whether the walls of the rich keep up ceilings up. 'We would not want to speculate on that at the moment,' she said, 'as far as we know the rich have not taken to wall-eating so hopefully the problem will not arise.' 

The walls of the rich are especially thick and a diet of thick wall is certainly a risk. However, GP Mark Darkwood says it is possible that the genetic constitution of wealthier people allows them to digest such walls, but this is yet to be verified. 'At the moment we are treating less well-off people,' he says, 'who's walls are lacking in any nutritional value whatsoever.' 

It is unlikely that more affluent families will turn to wall-eating because of the preferential treatment given to the wealthier under the coalitions policies. 'The tax revenues from the wealthiest in our country is invaluable to the UK's income,' said David Cameron. 'These are the wealth generators of our country and we should be supporting them as they support us towards recovery. Damaging the foundational integrity of wealthy families' homes will simply drive them overseas.' Labour have yet to develop a serious policy that goes beyond criticism of the Government, who reply to Labour's accusations of incompetence by saying that for every eight walls currently eaten by the poor, it would be only be reduced to seven under Labour. The Government stand by their commitment to lower the deficit even of it means a few months or even years of wall-eating. Cameron says, 'it's tough for everyone now but with hard work and a stuff upper lip we will once again thrive as the prosperous, magnificent and imposing nation that we once were, and on that day the poor (at least, the one who have survived) can re-upgrade to the ready meals and canned goods that they so enjoy.' 

So, 'hang in there' is the message right now but for an increasing number of families around the country, it is fast becoming a question of all for one and one for wall. 

Boredopolis: a city tour in fourteen indistinguishable bits.

1.

The city bores. There they go, preoccupying themselves with the Evening Standard, and sometimes the Metro. More often a phone: the hope that the beep of an incoming message was unheard and lays there waiting; some profound news to jumpstart life somehow. The noise is shielded out with headphones. I look around at the couple who appear not to know each other, yet sit next to each other. This is inexplicable behaviour on public transport where the rule is to not encroach on other's personal travelling space until the last possible moment. They must know each other.

2.

Encounters are brief and unprepared. The lurch of the train pushes me into someone and I sputter an apology. Nothing comes back. Together we sway. The rail at London Bridge grinds and grates like an ship scraping the ocean floor, below which streets of painful significance sit there mocking, harbouring memories. People cross the streets but fail to overwrite the past. A woman's face etched to the back of my eyelids burns and I panic. I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING. And I cloud my head with images that have no place in my world: war, lunar colonies, pirates... These things can find no way back to my life, no connection at all. They are things for soldiers, scientists, pirates...

4.

When the train stops we all, without knowing why, get off. We all file through the ticket barriers and disseminate into the city like a fart in the wind. My eyes dart around in the hope that something is there at this arbitrary destination; the hope that maybe the smile I practice in the shower can be tested on another human. Looking around for victims, I see everyone is busy, all so full of purpose. They cut through the lanes where the cars can't fit. They cautiously ease out into the road between busses. They spill mayonnaise from the bagel they bought down their tops. All the while, the ghoulish angelic statuettes which are carved into the buildings, with their doleful eyes and creamy smooth cheeks, look down on us, as bored as can be in their unending architectural prison. Bored with what they see: the ant-like people going across town, then returning with supplies; the same bus doing the same route; the same people taking the same photos of the same things; the occasional political demonstration; the occasional beating in of someone's head. 

5.

Everything that means something is meaningless to someone else. I fill the boredom with pathetic fantasies which should never be realised, but inevitably do. Their profundity is in the sheer magnitude of their bathos. Only the movement towards something has any purchase on reality; experience itself, being in a moment, is the event horizon into which you can only fall. From there, where backwards no longer exists, the singularity of who you are and what you do can no longer be ambiguous, and all that's beyond you, beyond reach, impresses upon you like an unending catalogue of things that you are not, of the things that have been and have now gone, or the things that you don't even have the audacity to hope for. All that remains is the pitiful thing that you are doing.

6.

I leave before she wakes up, promising myself to never go back. Some days, the boredom dresses itself in a nihilistic hedonism to be overcome with indulgence. Other days, it appears more spectral, floating and long-term, the imminence of existence stretched out indefinitely, where one need only wait... If life was an infinite Tetris game, sooner or later the blocks would just fall into place. On the remaining days, boredom comes shrouded in heavy lead coats - warm but pinned to the ground. Which version will appear the next day is anyone's guess, and the arbitrary promises I make myself only have relevance on some of these days, on the ones where promises and newly redefined worldviews coincide.

7.

Something only means something with this coincidence - the advance of meaning met with its acknowledgement, its insertion into a system which grounds it. I leave the cinema, teach myself how to blink again, finding myself let down by language's inability to convey anything following the spectacle. But the real world beckons, with the need to have dinner at a respectable hour and ensure the last train is not missed. She had never left this world, as I had, in those two hours. Her smile was one of sympathy rather than affection. It was a badly translated communication of gazes.

8.

The medication ruins my appetite. It makes me jumpy and awkward, unable to hold anything down. I walk past a diner with workmen on a break, an all day breakfast with all the colours of a coral reef - soaking in the yellow of the egg, the red and brown of the sauces, the orange of beans. Speckled in salt and pepper. I swallow the lump in my throat, withhold a burp, and keep walking. Should I wind up having a meal in a restaurant with some girl, my affection for her can be accurately determined by how much I enjoy the meal. An enjoyable meal would mean indifference towards this person. Alternatively, if I simply cannot stomach it, and have to leave most of it, then I am in love. 

The appetite is gone, and I am paralysed. I cling to the chair as it threatens to shake me off. And in this moment, in this limbo, eternity in an elevator that never stops but just shuttles up and down seems preferable to the conversation I am offering.

'Sometimes I walk to the end of the road and sit in the park.'

'Right.' 

9.

My brain lacks content. Like air rushes into a vacuum I drown in another oppressive scenario in which I converse with the woman who is probably best described as 'you'. You of marked silence; you of few words. I go back and forth between different personae: the coolly aloof, the pathetic whinge, the perplexed, the angry. You don't even consider your persona, so secure it is, unflappable. Not easy to deal with, in my little made-up conversations we have: not easy to imagine your half. 

'What's happened to you then?' she asks.

My eyebrows have never worked so well, they convey just enough mystery.

'What has happened to me,' I rhetorically ask myself. I ponder on this for a moment.

'How is work?'

At this point, without answering the question about work, I lay out the finest, most poetic, not gratuitous, not indulgent, but biting, yet charming, concise and complete evaluation of the pain that I feel. Some magical combination of words falls effortlessly, like liquid, from my cool, steady lips. And she knows, despite me not saying it, that it is her, and that she has transformed somebody, as someone's life is vicariously but undeniably changed by the actions of another. Say, for example, one day, a man throws a cigarette from a car in a suburban neighbourhood. It lands in a plastic dumper truck toy, which, one hour later, is picked up by its owner, a small boy. With curiosity, and encouraged by a half-forgotten image of Humphrey Bogart deep in his unconscious from some nameless Sunday movie, he feigns a quick drag, sucks it in, and chokes.

10. 

I wind up on another train platform. Everyone stands in their chosen spot, reading something, listening to something. When the train arrives, just as it's approaching, they start restlessly shimmying around. Some move up the platform, some down. Why hadn't they moved there already, I wonder, why wait until the final moment? They are like a herd of disoriented cattle, who  linger until food approaches, and then can't contain themselves as it arrives, even though the trough is on the other side of the fence.

11.

On the Overground we sit in pews. The modern train makes fluid, wispy sounds and the air vents breathe on us in a continuous belch. More people read newspapers and listen to music. No one talks. The women in front of me have huge Jamaican flags. They sit there pouring words out at each other in giant waves, and rearranging their swollen breasts in their skin tight lycra tops. Behind them, the sun is setting. I look through them into the sky which occasionally gets obscured by buildings or an overzealous arm. The clouds take rays of sun from the right and scatter them out to the left in deep orange; orange blotches that stretch the sky, then seamlessly become the pixelated windows on blocks of flats. 

12.

Two songs about boredom include Deftones' Bored and Daniel Johnston's Held the Hand. 'Oh Lord, I am so bored,' he cries. I scroll through iTunes seeking something to listen to, an attempt to add some ingredients to the mulch of brain that is stewing up there. But the mulch devours all that goes in, the concoction is too strong, the flavours too overpowering in their incessant neutrality. I hear white noise, and sometimes a distant tinnitus.

13. 

Between the numerous transportation machines, ingeniously devised to connect the city in a network of vacancy - tubes and containers of nothingness - lie the pockets of life. They swarm through shops or argue in offices. They drink from 10:30am in Wetherspoons. In here I go for a cheap coffee. The room is an archipelago of aged solitary menfolk, drinking pints extremely slowly, eyes fastened to the sport on the TV or a newspaper. The age of telecommunications came to late to save these types, to late to continually remind them of the people that are only a phonecall away. Instead, sports pundits keep their company, and the occasional passing waitress.

14. 

The city spins, a metropolitan passenger on a global vehicle, going at 652 miles per hour. I keep the travel sickness at bay by leaping from handrail to handrail, and avoiding the eye contact that jettisons my sense of self. I pause near the crossroads, and my field of vision becomes fixed. Through this field march pedestrians. They swim through the air with their enthusiastic swinging arms, covering every inch of ground in the residue of their passage, like the slime of a snail. A man drops a cigarette. Two women pass each other, each talking to some faceless being somewhere else. The wandering bored chop time up into manageable chunks and distil these moments into the sustenance that pushes them forward. The future, carefully planned in electronic diaries and mental notes, promises that the fog will disperse, just as soon as the next thing arrives.