AlBarclay

In normal times, in happy times, in times less fraught with division and isolation, I used to frequently go to Maze Grill on a Monday evening. It’s the poor substitute for Foxtrot Oscar. Foxtrot was the old Chelsea place to go and have a burger and an angry conversation about why nowhere in Chelsea but Foxtrot remembers how things were in Chelsea before the Cadogan estate murdered individuality with rental prices. Once upon a time there was colour in Chelsea. Now it’s beige. And Foxtrot went, as everything went, and was replaced by Maze.

The Chelsea Kitchen went. Even the Stock Pot went. It’s a miracle Phat Phuk was still trading before lockdown. Pretty much the whole character of the King’s Road has been dismantled by the greed of the landlords. Even R Soles.

When I was a teenager you could go to the King’s Road for your tie dyed shirts, your flared jeans, skinny trousers in banana yellow, CHELSEA BOOTS! I bought my first CD in the basement music shop in a bright and wonderful clothes store.

Some nasty old bastard decided to hoik the rent enough that nobody but homogeneity uk dot com could set up shop there. “Better an empty shop than personality,” would’ve been the official line, mirroring the humans who set the prices.

The remaining creative people moved to Camden because they had to – and since then the same kind of paunchy flat faced people have been literally trying to burn them out of the markets.

I had some Americans come and visit once : “We wanna see the King’s Road!!” They enthused.

“No you don’t. You want to go to Camden.” I responded.

I took them to both. They saw my point. “What happened to the King’s Road?” They asked. “Greed, my dears. Greed, short termism, stupidity and lack of perspective. But mostly greed.”

The King’s Road in London is dead dead dead and has been for over a decade. It’s just chains and dogshit people. It was “cool” in the sixties and seventies, and so all the rich people who wouldn’t know “cool” if it bit them in the face bought property near there. Meanwhile all the arty people sold it to them for cuntprice: “I got it off this sculptor for a fraarction of what it was warrth.”.

Chelsea turned into a wasted memory in the custody of people with no imagination. Now it’s just slow moving old bastards who can buy you, trustafarians, lucky people with disorganised dead parents who thought they’d live longer (that’s ME!), and people who are paying the absurd rent charged by humourless twots who have bought investment properties because they still think there’s something in the post code that helps augment their expensive surgical decisions.

People still parade up and down the King’s Road, but now it’s plastic faces and humongous arses and gymbodies, and it’s very very clear from the outset that there isn’t a flash of personality left no matter what it says on your steering wheel you vapid motherfucker.

The Chelsea Drugstore is now a Macdonald’s.

I saw the death throes of my famous local High Street, but I was mostly a teenager when the beautiful places closed.

Pizza Express appear to programme The Pheasantry, which still tries to do live music, and they DID put on Katie Birtill just before lockdown which at least shows they’re trying as she’s ace but…

Wilde Ones – the New Age plinky plonky shop – that was still alive last time I looked (against all the odds), but that’s pretty much it. Most of the other fronts have been lobotomised and colonised by lizards.

The character and interest has been replaced by noise and sameness. It’s like Instagram but with less make-up. It’s the same across the world of course, and we’re supposed to just not care and keep spending. But … Character??

Homogeneity. Massive chains price the smaller traders out of the market. The market speaks though. Most of us are buying this crap.

My generation was taught to watch the pennies. We were taught by people who came out of rationing. Cheaper for the same is good, we were taught. “If two places sell the same thing, buy the cheapest”. Which let these monsters take hold. Because the race to the bottom in terms of viable quality was won a decade ago by the people making food and things out of slurry and byproducts. With great big shiny logos. For less than anybody trying to make real stuff can afford.

Spend more if you know it’s independent and come on that’s not even polemic it’s common sense.

Spend twice as much if you can. Three times, knowing that right now if it’s a sole trader it’s probably – hopefully – better quality. Otherwise there’ll be nothing left for us but shitburgers made out of generations of unquenchable psychic agony.

It’s only getting worse. We are so fucking lazy. So lazy. So so so desperately stuck in the familiar. It’s desperate…

So yeah, before I got distracted, normally I might show up at Maze Grill on a Monday. I have a keyring that gives me 50% off food which means it’s still expensive but just about affordable. Maze Monday is my expensive meal night and how the fuck anybody goes any other day of the week isn’t my business, I guess, but they are paying for the quality of the ingredients I think and hope. The meat was once part of an animal, unlike much of what people eat these days.

While they’ve been shut I’ve been working out how to do what they do with Frank’s Hot Sauce to make it perfect for steak. People: BLEND IT WITH BUTTER! Heat it. Stir in butter until melted. Cool it. Steak sauce.

Now I don’t need to go to Maze. Which is just as well as it’s not going to be allowed to open for generations anyway. And it’s designed as some sort of open plan hell anyway when it IS open.

We will never get Foxtrot back. I wish. The very fact it was named after the phonetic alphabet “Fuck Off” stands well for it. I sometimes get that attitude from the staff in the new place if I kick off about the fact they can’t be bothered to do the pepper sauce properly because I’m on 50%. And good. I like a bit of life. Stop topping up my wine, you bastards. You’re deliberately rushing me through the bottle and I’m onto you.

There was a place in Bermondsey called Fuckoffee. I bought a “Fat Wife” there near to lockdown. Good on them for not giving a fuck about insulting people.

That sort of disobedience used to be all over Chelsea, and it just won’t happen here anymore. Now we have reaped what was sewn. Dull and ghastly people and the same old same old.

I’m glad I’m up north London for a bit even if it makes me see that how much my old stomp is dried up.

Steak sauce…

My steak was rancid. I’m literally devastated. Dammit, Hampstead Butcher! I had one of their Barnsley Chops instead, and I’ll be there tomorrow holding my nasty steak. I won’t bring the hot sauce …

 

By the time I had motivated myself out of the house to get potatoes from Marks and Spencers, it was already shut. Bloody Sunday.

Thankfully there was Anna selling “Friendly Falafels” outside the pharmacy, finding ways to keep herself ticking over having lost most of her summer festival trade. I had not met her before, but she practices Nichiren Buddhism. I bought a £7 falafel wrap and we talked about Daisaku Ikeda. Now I’m on the balcony at Mel’s in the evening sun wondering how I managed to lose most of the day and regretting saying “yes” to chili sauce.

I hadn’t really banked on getting drunk like that last night, and maybe my liver was just getting used to being treated slightly better as I took the brickbat to it once more. This morning I woke from fitful dreams to the harsh and pressing waking understanding that the contents of my stomach had absolutely no interest in staying there a moment longer. Quite a start to the day, singing the frogsong like that. Somewhere on the heath an early morning herpetologist would have frozen in place: “The call of the Hampstead Yodelfrog. Sounds like a big one! I thought they were extinct!”

No painkillers in the flat, after I rinsed them in February when my shoulder was trying to kill me. A banana and a paracetamol might have been the key to a more productive day.

As was, the rest of my day was given to a shambling mumbling torpor as I kept myself topped up with water and slid in and out of sleep, occasionally swearing and frequently saying the word “right!” in a decisive voice before doing nothing, and falling asleep again hoping that the headache would go. At one point I allowed myself to take comfort in the fact that it’s Sunday so I’m technically allowed to lounge around hungover all day because that’s what it says in the manual. You can’t even buy potatoes after six on a Sunday. Activity is not encouraged. I didn’t encourage it.

Now after my falafel and a bottle of Purdeys I actually feel like I’m alive again, just in time for evening and bath and sleep. I’ll be clambering back on the wagon again after a messy fall. Building myself up to solstice. And trying to work out how to get to the woods for the weekend.

At least the sun stays late, so despite the closed shops I was able to catch the evening sun and feel it on my skin and experience daytime for a moment. Next thing would be to get the fire up and running. There’s plenty of wood discarded in people’s gardens at the moment following various DIY projects, and plenty more fallen from trees around the heath. With a bit of rearrangement there’s the possibility of a good safe summer evening fire up on the balcony. But not in this state. That’s a job for sober Al. Not shaky hungover Malnutrition Al.

I still want potatoes. There’s a steak in the fridge…

The tube. I remember the tube.

There are adverts on the walls for grooming products. Remember when we all cared what we looked like? There are posters for festivals and art exhibitions. Simpler times. Remember when we all paid money to be in crowds? That’s my whole industry, fucked.

Boomtown, anybody? Book your tickets for the summer shows of Harry Potter by much loved writer JK Rowling. “The story continues on stage.” Not right now it doesn’t. Festival 20 in Upminster says “We are 2020” which is a bit like putting “We are AIDS” on your poster in the ’80s.

Green Man Festival? I could just do with walking about doing tarot and watching something burn in a field in Wales. But nope. Everything is cancelled. But the adverts are still up.

The tube is like a safari trip through the hopes and dreams of early Spring. “Please keep your distance,” says the window. “Do not feed the past.”

People disconsolately edge into the carriages and sit apart from one another. The ones with masks carry huge silent disapproval of the ones without. Opposite me and to the right is a dude necking Jack Daniels from a can and talking to himself under his breath. Opposite me and left is a guy with Pokémon badges and involved tattoos masked like Bane with self-approval oozing out of every pore and he hates the Jack Daniels guy. I just cleared my throat at a station and literally everybody in the carriage flinched. The guy directly to my right has now pulled his cute dog away from me. I might be dangerous. 11 people in this carriage, all of them men, weirdly. I like to think it’s to do with men being generally irresponsible. I suspect it’s actually just observed chance. I’m a big one for observing things and I haven’t been on public transport for my whole entire fucking LIFE.

It’s my stop. Kennington. “Lyift nyumber two shell be the nyixt lyift.”

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I tyook the nyixt lyift and despite my mockery I genuinely enjoyed the original terribly posh lift voiceover. I’d much sooner have a bit of history than listen to some voice that is designed to telegraph “now” to me.

And I saw my dear friend. It was worth the journey.

We awkwardly didn’t break rules alongside each other. No hugs. I saw her and her lovely awkward boyfriend and we all hung out and it was lovely until he reads this and hears me saying he’s awkward and then I have to explain that it comes out of love and come on mate you know what I mean. Because basically we all had a lovely evening.

Then I picked my way home and managed to coincide with some other friends who were up on Primrose Hill. By that time my ability to be anything other than totally drunk was compromised as, despite my plans in Hampstead, I had given myself a free weekend pass and allowed myself to get terribly and horribly drunk in the name of midsummer fun.

Not the same as festivals. I’ll miss that part of my summer. Around this time any other year I’d be buying a £300 car…

 

It’s Friday evening. Up on Hampstead High Street there are long queues for takeaway beer at The Horseshoe. The drinkers are spilling out into the alleyways in their pairs and in their small groups. The atmosphere among them is positive and upbeat, very much at odds with my current mood.

I’ve been on one of my frequent aimless perambulations. Spitting rain and wind with an edge. Thinking about how we are all fucked.

People who care about things are being viciously attacked by other people who care about things for not caring about the right things in the right order with the right language. Other people are using the squabbling as a reason to dismiss everything everybody cares about forever. Conservatives are being called fascists and they’re terrified about liberals who they think are Maoists or anarchists or the fucking Taliban. Liberals are attacking each other and everybody else for not sharing their extremely personal stances on a variety of trigger happy issues. People who sit on the fence are being attacked for not speaking out, until they speak and then they’re attacked for the content. Every time I try to follow a thread about anything I can’t find the end of it. History, gender, race, sex, politics. We all have a different experience of these things. We all have things we take for granted and things we haven’t examined and things we have taken apart completely and understand intimately. If we take away nuance we risk becoming a mob. And if we call somebody an anarchist or a fascist can we then expect them to do anything other than entrench?

Debate is so weaponised suddenly – if you use the wrong terminology then everything you say can be thrown out, and the terms shift use so quickly. “Woke” used to mean “awake to your privilege” but now it’s being mostly used to mean “virtue signalling”. I wouldn’t ever describe somebody as “woke” as it feels like a bludgeonword now. But fundamentally there are some things that are undeniable in all this mess. I’m not just talking about the BLM protests here by any stretch. There’s all sorts of other little explosions about all sorts of other issues happening online and they’re mostly cruel and barbed and thorny and impossible.

But yes, to the most visible one right now, white privilege is a fucking thing – a big unexamined thing for a lot of white people. Ridiculously I’ve been slammed occasionally for my Mediterranean skin by absurd nasty pasty humans who seem to be hellbent on making me uncomfortable for the fact I’m “not from round here” or whatever, and I’m whitey mcwhiteson, but not to the shouting blank eyed maniac at Clapham Junction with a giant poppy. It’s absurd to me. I went to Harrow, my Spanish grandfather was heavily decorated in the British Navy. But for many people who don’t have my privilege it’s constant, has been for generations, and makes them fear for their safety – especially when they read about a law enforcer taking over 8 minutes to slowly – almost casually – kill an innocent human being, knowing that that death wouldn’t have happened if the victim had looked a bit more like me.

Before all the confusion and protectionism that’s what we were thinking about. Now, with all the noise about “they’re coming for our statues” etc can we at least try to remember how lucky we’ve been, whiteys? Check it. Don’t shrug it off. It’s worse in America because the cops have got more guns. But let’s try and stop being protectionist and listen to what people who have had their voices taken are trying to say in this rare window where they have a voice.

A well known theatre director directed one of my flatmates. He was in my flat for a party once and I met him briefly. He asked about a ticket I had to a Tonic Theatre platform at The National – Lucy Kerbel pushing for equal gender representation in the theatre industry: “why are you supporting this stuff as a man? It’s not in your best interests,” he asked dismissively. It was the first and only question this potentially very lucrative employer has ever asked me. “I literally don’t have the time or the energy to properly respond, so I’m going to bed,” was my honest response. I had a 6am start.

They played fiddle all night and it had all the marks of a great last night party for a lovely show at The Royal Court. But it was spoilt in my mind by that man’s blind protectionism.

That self referential attitude is the major problem time and time again across the spectrum of these issues. “But what about meeeeee?” But I’m an idealist.

Today there was a bit more blue in the sky at last. Up to the heath as always. I spend my life up there right now – the heath or bed. That’s it right now.

Half the day asleep in adventurous dreams. Minnie and I were fighter pilots from WW1 but we’d gone through a wormhole in time to some sort of dangerous swampy future and we were trying to save the universe. Then I woke up and realised I was in a dangerous swampy future but without Minnie or the two person Spitfire.

I don’t get to see Minnie so much these days. I miss that. It’s harder and harder with my friends who have settled down with kids. My own selfnoise about being irresponsible and single sometimes gets in the way of what used to be simple interactions. Ten years ago if you’d asked me who my best friends were I would have said with no hesitation: “Minnie and Jo”. Somehow I still feel the truth of that. It takes time and trust and honesty and exposure to open the channels that have been opened between us. But Jo has a daughter whose age is measurable in years, and I’ve never met her. Minnie has Zephia, and I don’t even know her that well, even if she DID name my owl bottle. My friends make kids and I find that I edge off to the side, feeling like I’m a bit cracked and no longer useful. Feeling like I can only easily connect with the friends who, like me, have not had kids. There’s all sorts of stigma around it. My sister in law can’t frame me. She has a musician brother with a trail of broken marriages and somehow that’s easier for her to understand than someone who’s been careful.

I can hang out with Flavia because somehow I’m just mates with her kid Ivo. I have no idea how Ivo and I made friends like we did (I think it was literally to do with banging a table when he wasn’t even 1.) It leaves Flavia in the position where sometimes I have so much fun hanging with Ivo and asking why he’s killing the Lego Man that she has to remind me I’m there to hang out with her as well. Hal and Hester as well sometimes, when I ever get myself to Crowborough. But there aren’t many friend’s kids I get on with right now. Should I be trying harder?

I spoke to Kitcat today – she’s recovering in Chelsea. The flat is such a chilled out area. I think it’s had nothing but the energy of relaxation for decades now. For someone like Kitcat who energetically reminds me of my mum it’s the ideal recuperation zone. It’s been too easy for me to stumble into bad habits there, as I’ve built a nice thoughtframe in the flat to support my self-destruction.

But we often ground our habits geographically. Moving house can help us give up smoking. A new base is often a good shot at recalibration. And this place… It’s so well located. It takes no time at all for me to hit one of the only bits of London that really feels like countryside.

I’m pretty happy here. I’m just thinking about how the world moves on. Generation cedes to generation. Those dear dear friends have bred, almost without my noticing. Such a long list of the ones I love.

I’ve never done babies.

Saves me a fortune in nappies, and lets me stay up all night worrying about bullshit, rather than babyshit. You take the rough with the smooth. Even if I’m covering a spot of melancholia with a dash of glib. Who knows. I might have made a good dad. I doubt I’ll get the chance to find out.

My patterns are all over the place still. Mealtimes. Sleeping and waking. Washing. I’ve never been a creature of routine, but in normal structure I’ve habitually forced myself to take on too much and then to step up to it. It’s a comfortable way of living a life that doesn’t allow too much time for the bugbears to come scratch your memories. Not being busy means that suddenly I’ve got way too much time to think and it’s pretty relentless.

In some ways it’s a strange and rare luxury, having all this time. We will (hopefully) never have it like this again. It’s like we are all having a “pretend you’re really really old” holiday. We can’t go anywhere, it’s tough to see our families, everybody we know is worried about getting sick, we have to be super-careful about money but on the other hand we suddenly don’t have to do loads of weird stuff the whole time, and we can call the shots.

I don’t like it. I think, on balance, I’m happier when I don’t have any time to think about myself. It doesn’t help that I’m taking the booze out of the equation as that’s the comforting numbness and the enforced sleepytime.

But then again, this is a rare opportunity to look long and hard at where we are – where I am. What the heck have we made out of this personthing we’ve been inhabiting? Mostly I haven’t stopped to consider it as all the things to do are constantly crowding in.

I’ve gone into almost total communication shutdown the last few days. I have no idea what most of my friends are doing. Tristan’s sister showed up this afternoon to drop off my microphone and I barely offered three words to her. I feel like I basically just hissed at her, snatched the equipment and ran away.

I’m up all night and then I’m down all morning. I’m in my room burrowing into a warm place while Hex is in his tank next door doing the same. If somebody was to puppet a dead mouse for me now I might go for it. This time last year I was in Cornwall shooting a Rosamund Pilcher for German TV. Nothing could seem further from possible.

Thank God I’ve got The Heath two minutes walk from the front door. Despite my current morlock tendencies I’m still managing to hike out there extensively at least once a day, even on overcast days like today when the world is damp and squashy like an old sock.

Once I’ve got over the fact that feelings happen I’ll likely open the window a bit further and maybe telephone somebody. Right now I can’t trust myself not to either bite you or run away.

On the plus side, sleeping in the morning makes for astonishingly involved and memorable dreams. There’s a load of stuff scribbled in notebooks that might turn into something handy when I’m less erratic, and hopefully that won’t take much longer. If we come to resemble the creatures we look after, it’s probably not the healthiest that I’ve been stuck with a snake for the last few months. Why couldn’t Mel have been the owner of an enthusiastic hound?

Mmmm another lovely day up in North London. It’s like I’m on holiday.

Emma appeared and we went for a walk. We hit the heath properly. Not so crowded and gorgeous at this this time of year. The only issue is that there are no loos open anywhere so everything has to be meticulously planned, which as you know is not my forte.

We wandered over to Kenwood House and sludged through mud and clambered and watched and talked and laughed. There’s so much to do when there’s nothing to do.

We did get sold a 99 Flake each for like four quid round near The Spaniards, and we sat on the grass that slopes to the lake from the back of the house while I carefully rubbed most of my whippy into my beard. Then more walking and suddenly we were near The Pergola! “I’ve never been!” says Emma.

One of my favourite bits of London. The remains of an old country house garden, now owned by The City of London Corporation. Some bastard put it on a “Secret London” list in 2018 so the peace was broken for a while as the Instagram hordes crowded in to play “Better Than Life” with their unfortunate camerastooges and their bullshit faces. But it’s still glorious if you ignore the insecurity. And by now they’d have found somewhere else to take the same photo 100 times.

Well – they’d have had to. It’s closed for Covid. Padlock on the gates. Reasonably low fences though. We didn’t climb over the fence as that’s not allowed.

We weren’t the only people who hadn’t climbed over the fence. There were some kids who were very loudly distressed about having already lost their weed baggy somewhere. A young couple sauntering around enjoying the beauty, and another desperately wishing we weren’t wandering around. A good place to isolate. And beautiful.

It’s well maintained. I would have kept expecting a friendly but stern volunteer to come and tell us we shouldn’t be there. If we HAD been there. There were roses in full bloom, and the flower beds and lawns are still carefully kept. The frisson of being a little bit disobedient makes things all the sweeter. Even if we weren’t disobedient oh no. I definitely didn’t take any photos.

Eventually, and much later than I thought it was, we emerged back in Hampstead. There was a little Italian place selling coffee through the window near Flask Walk. It’s probably for the best that the pubs are closed or I would have had a pint in The Holly Bush.

Coffee after a long walk and no public loos necessitated a swift hike back to Mel’s on Parliament Hill, but thankfully it’s only about 10 minutes from Flask Walk. Just as well I didn’t have coffee up when we were at Kenwood or I’d have been desperately banging on stranger’s doors in Hampstead and somebody would have bagged me with the family blunderbuss and mounted my head in the drawing room.

The other day my brother very proudly showed me the chemical loo he now keeps in the boot of his car. It makes so much sense. Up in Yorkshire most of the little garages told me their loo was “out of order”. You’d be onto a winner if you had a little luxury loo-wagon to drive around on weekends near places like Battersea Park or Hampstead Heath. Everybody crowding around outside and no public loos open? You’d coin it. You’d be like the teenagers on Carnival who successfully charge queues of drunk partygoers a fiver for use of the downstairs loo at mummy’s house in Notting Hill. Whoever Andy from the ubiquitous Festival “Andy Loos” is, he’s missing a trick, especially with festival season cancelled.

My sleep patterns have momentarily gone to pieces due to my big plan of getting myself largely straightened out and healthy in time for solstice. There’s a solar eclipse on the 21st and then we’re in the dog days. Things are already bonkers so I’m not gonna let myself coast through the heart of the year without an attempt to align myself with myself and the things around me. Just under two weeks to get myself to ceremonial mind and body state.

Booze, my old demon. That’ll be on the back burner for a while as I try and teach my poor broken liver that it doesn’t have to be constantly pustulating in an attempt to keep up with the Peter-Pan complex of its host, and I try to teach my brain to do things normally rather than respond to constantly shifting chemical stimuli. The first thing that happens when I start to detox is that sleep goes blooey and I get ragey.

I stayed up all night last night. Sleep just wasn’t available. At 8.30am, just as I decided there was no point trying and put my clothes back on, sleep suddenly became the only thing I was capable of, and I rolled fitfully through vivid dreams into half noon. Then a particularly unusual and hungry dream propelled me up and out, down to South End Green, wide awake again and hoping somehow that a shop would be available without queue for a purchase of the bread I had been so joyfully eating in the dream. No such luck though. All the dream-bread shops required patience and standing still. Neither of those resources were available. The bottom of Hampstead Heath is even busier than Battersea Park at lunchtime, and all the shops had queues so long that I weighed up my desire for dreambread and against my need for non stop movement and the bread was wanting.

I went for a brisk walk on the breadless heath instead, looking and listening to the conversations and the humanity, and enjoying the stoopid dogs.

The entrance was chocka but as I walked up the hill people started to peel off exponentially. There were moments as I strolled up that I could’ve tried to pretend to myself that I wasn’t completely surrounded by people.

It was gloomy compared to how it has been. But if today’s walk is the shape of things to come then I’ve definitely landed in the right place up here. Trees and moss and space and air, and panoramic views of my metropolis from the top of one of the only proper hills. I roved around for ages. I’m sure I could’ve come up with all sorts of practical things to do, but walking was today’s jam. Fuck knows how I’ll make money. I’m strangely peaceful. Life finds a way.

Now it’s gone 2am and I’m still totally discombobulated and have no idea where the day starts and ends, let alone whereabouts it is in the week and which deity it’s named after. I think we’ve just had the moon day. This time last night I was filled with strange anger but today I’m just awake and calm and hoping that I can remember how to stop myself from being awake without the aid of chemicals.

First up, ditch the screen. Night!

(TLDR Black Lives Matter. And if you believe my made up incel hacker called Sven, you’re a mushroom.)

Of course the whole of London is cold but because there’s been a cold snap since I moved, I’m now convinced that North London is colder than South London. It’s a useful miniature example of all the little cognitive biases that are being satisfied by people with suddenly too much time who are looking for patterns that back up their dislike of various technologies etc. These non-causative correlations that have inexplicably pulled the wellness industry into the same illiterate stinky bucket as the USA alt-right incel nastyboys.

Maybe it IS just colder in North London. Did you think of that? That’s been my personal experience. Oh yeah, so the “mainstream media” – (and by that I mean ANYBODY with careful understanding and proper evidence) – they haven’t said anything about North London being colder, so there’s clearly a cover up.

Listen: you can’t trust the people who have dedicated their lives to geeky and careful forensic understanding of the facts based on careful peer reviewed studies done out of aspy passion – often with no real care who reads them and why. A politician once lied which proves that the only people we can trust are propaganda bots and 34 year old virgins called Sven who live in their mother’s basements despite being bitcoin millionaires.

And it’s ok because Sven is going to overthrow the new world order! Big government want us to think the temperature is roughly the same across the whole of London! If you don’t believe me watch an 8 hour video of somebody ranting or you can’t join the argument because you haven’t done enough of what I have decided to call “research.”

Meanwhile Black Lives Matter, and there’s another thorny one because if I start coming in and saying that yes I agree that we need to fundamentally address unconscious prejudice then somebody else tells me I’m virtue signalling and somebody else says I can’t comment on it because I haven’t experienced it and Sven comes out of his mother’s basement to tell me it’s all a smokescreen to distract us from the real issue which is that Bill Gates and Satan are feeding cold North London children to Hilary Clinton in Pizza Express in warm South London and IT WILL ALL BE FINALLY EXPOSED NEXT WEEKEND except it won’t and it won’t and it won’t because essentially Sven and his mates had way too much weed ten years ago and they still can’t quite countenance why so many people internationally are actually listening to the stuff they made up when they were stoned because they know when you peel back the final layer to get to the core, it’s an onion and there is no fucking core, but the ad-revenue alone is worth keeping the website updated as it keeps Sven with enough skunk to make it up.

As for the protests, so much anger though in the heat of South central London today, and all over the world, and I see why.

George Floyd is murdered by an agent of the law as part of an longstanding ongoing systemic law-enforcement and basic Social problem, and when anger is expressed, “white” people are reacting defensively immediately – posting shit like pictures of “white” kids murdered by people definable in their minds as racially “other”. As if by ceding an inch of ground they are somehow risking something. Not even the kindness and calmness to accept they have a spot of privilege and step back a bit and listen. “How dare they graffiti Churchill,” one of them shouts without looking or listening, seizing on the thing they’ve been after which lets them dismiss the whole issue.

We have to listen, even to Sven and his dupes just to sure, but particularly to people who are angry enough about something REAL to crowd together now in protest, when it’s literally dangerous for their health and potentially fatal for their loved ones. Yeah people will undermine themselves or disruptors will deliberately undermine others by doing stupid or violent shit.

Often if you aren’t in the ascendant you feel your voice is taken away unless it’s amplified by those around you. Sven and his bullshit is amplified by other people seeking justification through patterns and sense, to the extent that some of Sven’s mushrooms are pushing up fruiting bodies that are trying to tell people in the real world that it’s definitely colder in North London and they need to agree or they’re wrong.

The people protesting know that this is a rare chance to be heard and to be amplified. Yeah so they do contentious things but actually why not? Pull the thing down. People need images. A statue of a slave trader chucked in the harbour is a good clear image despite the inevitable defensive fool with his bulgy eyes telling us all tomorrow how after the guy was a slave trader he actually went on to invent Sudoku or, I dunno, taught us all how to ride caterpillars or … well we all know there’ll be something. Oh it’s missing the point. But you know we’ll hear them sawing away on the BBC about what the fucker did with his blood money.

Black Lives Matter. We need to do better. I will be what they call an ally in this, awkwardly, expecting to be blown out for doing it wrong.

But here’s the problem. Nothing is free of awkwardness anymore. It’s complicated to protest. It’s complicated to support the protesters. It’s complicated to disagree with the protest. Anybody having any opinion about anything ever is risking somebody saying “You haven’t thought about x y z and that makes you EVIL”. It’s complicated to be human in the face of this weaponisation of the scorn of people who largely agree with you, but for one detail that you missed WHICH IS WHY YOU’RE EVIL!

I support the protesters. The stuff they’re protesting happens too often. I hope they don’t all take covid home to their neighbours after trying to make people aware of how angry they are. Right now with Boris and Donald at the top of the funnel I think it might be hard to make positive changes through expression of rage. The message might be deliberately smudged by the damage in the short term. But time will hopefully prove better than the chumps we’ve got in charge right now. And we need to make ourselves heard, to try to affect policy, to wake people up.

As for Sven, I am fed up of intelligent people pattern matching and going down rabbit holes that almost all lead to poison and trust me I’ve “done my research” as I find myth utterly fascinating and I don’t think you actually know what the word “research” means even if the myths themselves are very compelling and emotional and sometimes quite epic in their scale. But hey, it’ll all going to be exposed next weekend anyway. Unless it isn’t. Repeat ad-nauseam.

If I didn’t blog daily I’d edit this. I’d go over it carefully and find my argument, delete all the circular ranting and all the stuff that probably only makes sense to me – like imagining people trotting out somebody else’s conspiracy myths as the unknowing fruiting bodies of some nasty fat mycelium…

I blog daily though. And it’s late.

I’m going to bed. Just as well I’m not a daily columnist. My editor would be waking me up at 6am asking me what the fuck I’ve been taking.

Eat cold blog. From cold North London.

Suitably apocalyptic weather as I cross town in an Uber. We are in the heart of a storm. Crashing thunder and shocks of lightning over a city that has dried out. The roads are flooded.

Mel’s landlady would likely be pleased I’m heading over as there’s been a history of flooding in her flat and it’ll comfort her to know I’m there to bail out the buckets. It was hard to pull out of my flat though. There’s much there to attach me, not least that my idea of London is centred there. I know the shops and the buses and the trains. But these days transport is not a big concern, and shopping is more about efficiency and planning than it used to be.

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I’ve been worried about the state I’d find it in here. I didn’t trust myself enough it seems. Last time I was here it was innocent February and we had no idea what was to come. Turns out I was reasonably tidy. A miracle. Needed to wash a couple of glasses and dispose of a toxic but thankfully unexploded vacuum pack of chicken in the fridge. I had made the bed before leaving. One pair of dirty socks was strangely laid out on floor as if I was supposed to leap into them. Plates in the drying rack. But on the Al Barclay scale of messiness, this is right up there with digs in a shared house with strangers. Better than I imagined by far. And evidence of hasty and indiscriminate scoffing of painkillers as a reminder of how I was inexplicably in constant agony with my shoulder for the best part of two months at the start of the year. Thank fuck whatever that was fixed itself. We forget so quickly when we have no pain what it’s like when we live on pain relief, counting the hours until we are allowed another one. Every morning I was pulled out of sleep early by the screaming of my nerves, augmented by my imagination that didn’t and still doesn’t know the cause so can put no time limit on the pain. I would frequently cut out the drugs for as long as I could bear, to “assess if it’s getting better” (aka to service my masochistic streak.) It wasn’t, until it did, and then one morning I forgot about it completely until I found all the Tylenol and Codeine wrappers by the kitchen sink here and remembered.

Some people live with chronic pain for their whole lives. Two months was long enough for me to know how much I respect those people for ever getting anything done. There were times when I was writing this and all I could write about was the pain because it filled my thoughts completely. I’m throwing away those wrappers. Respect to the memory but in the bin for now. Right now I’m one of the lucky ones without chronic pain. Long may it continue. I’m not getting back into those socks if I can help it.

The birds are singing to the dusk after the storm. London sprawls below me, and the sound of a siren rises through the gloaming. No river here, but hilltop heathland, doves and better air. Here’s to June.