You're the HD to my ADHD (2018). Spoken word piece about my experiences as a care worker, commissioned by osbornmoller for Wellcome Collection event Handle With Care, July 2018. As part of the performance the audience arm wrestled one another.
You run off the school bus, into the kitchen and steal as many mouthfuls from the jar as you can - Massive grin full of saccharine iron filings bristling on dentine – you’re bouncing, and beatboxing, smirking at 140bpm like a hyena plugged into a Roland TR 808. Put it down! Put the sugar down! You’re the HD to my ADHD. Non verbal but you can dance. Skinny elastic limbs flying – taller than me – teenage body stretched to growth spurt. Wrong aspect ratio. Put the sugar down! Put, put put the sugar down – I unwillingly provide the jabbering vocal loop you need for this live trap track; bass-rolling subsonic boom. It’s not the stolen sugar that’s giving you a dopamine hit, it’s the rhythm of this ritual, flapping Adidas wings at me and spitting sugar-grain pixels like an 8-bit Hitchcock video game cover; soundtracked by an increasingly exasperated chorus of - put the jar down! Strobing neon sportswear the colour of 20p bouncies from that vending machine next to the crocodile hunter ride in Wood Green shopping Centre. We’ve visited them all. But just because my favourite bus route is the 153 as well, it doesn’t mean we’re mates, mate - I’m your support worker and you’re the client, or the service user, not patient – you’ve got no patience, neither have I. And I write it up in you daily report, like stage notes, or a score. At dusk we float plastic carriers around Arundel Square – transparent thin bags, very specific – you’ve got a non-verbal agreement with the nice greengrocer we walk past. He donates these deep sea creatures that suspend time in the breeze; precise as plankton. You are gently teaching me an extra sense (something humans had never imagined, except in approximations of their existing senses). You’re non verbal but physically articulate, and I have verbal diarrhoea but no spatial awareness. Who’s supporting who, I wonder? You’re the only person I feel comfortable with in silence.
Free tickets to a west end matinée of mamma Mia. You are very excited but are repeatedly shouting ‘look at that man’ at the stage, which is annoying the public, not least because it’s tautological. I explain that the word theatre sort of means ‘look at that man (or woman)’ and so it’s unnecessary to say it aloud while pointing at the actor. We are all looking at that man, except now most of the people are looking at you, with expressions imported from the Home Counties. Luckily you’re now obsessing over my Casio watch, which is more engaging than the engagement party on stage, we strike a silent deal for you to borrow the watch in return for not heckling. You up the stakes, and demand to borrow my shoes in return for not laughing in extra loud experimental ways, then you want the lanyard, and my keys, and my hoodie, my glasses. I am being slowly robbed in public by an eight year old to a soundtrack of The Winner Takes It All. We exit the theatre, with you dressed as me.
I am holding a big fishing net which the lifeguard has given me. I am deep in slightly brown water trying to find the fragments of what you did now that it’s broken up and dispersed. Everyone has to get out of Highbury pool except me and two eager nine year olds with goggles - valiant strangers who have volunteered to scour the deep end to guide me towards each piece (why are their parents OK with this?). I can categorise human waste at twenty feet now (must add that to my LinkedIn) and this number two would be number six on the Bristol Stool Chart – fluffy pieces with ragged edges. Bristol must be proud to be named after a stool chart. But this is Islington, dahling! Is that Boris Johnson’s wife leaping out the deep end? - this wellness treatment is new, she’s thinking. It said in your file that you don’t deliberately defecate in Highbury Pool anymore; I will update the file.
My hamstrings twinge, and a heap of fragile bodies flies into the air, tessellating like a cadburys selection box shaken up in transit – Crunchie, Twirl and Curly Whirly; affectionate terms for your range of impairments, or names of dance-moves flung around this trampoline? You get treated like porcelain usually, but now you’re flying saucers. Twirl, Twirl, CRUNCH. “Sorry was that your finger?! arms in, arms in!”. Pompeii figures re-cast in silly putty. And even if your legs worked the same as mine, why would you jump when you could lay there laughing at me, bouncing for hours. Outsourced legs like eyes to guide dogs, and I put the adore in Labrador. Keep bouncing. Because you know I can’t say no, when it makes you that happy - I’m like SpongeBob asking for his stolen ice cream back in that episode you made me watch eighteen times yesterday. “Let him have it” yells the sea cucumber inciting aggression”, “you can have it” beams the sponge, offering the ice cream. You’d walk all over me if you could. Springy serfdom, but you’re surfing.
You have invented a new sport. It involves storming into the local football team’s AstroTurf enclosure before I can stop you, for a one man pitch invasion and challenging the reluctantly obliging players to a clapping game as they try to resume play, inducing a rhythmic ritual which makes Asger Jorn’s surrealist 3-sided football match look pretty ordinary. But my supervisor says my only objective is to help you fit in with society, so that one day you can do normal stuff like queue for a pre-digested hotdog in Edmonton IKEA. Which I understand. And we will, but right now we’re busy collaborating on an aktionist live art performance… literally immersive theatre - you’re spitting and trickling fountains of liquid dough across the bin-bag clad arena of the lunch room while everyone else is at the zoo. You’re not fond of the zoo. In crowded places you have a tendency to slap strangers on the buttock, out of nowhere, while making the sound of an albino peacock (one of the centre’s sonic trends after a visit to Holland Park). Slapped strangers’ expressions a mixture of rage and guilt, as if not sure wether it’s you or them who’s transgressed a social boundary. On the bus I steer your wheelchair closer to that guy, the one with that Arsenal tattoo on his arm… the ‘nal’ bit of the word Arsenal hidden under his sleeve - just the arse showing. Yes him, the guy standing next to his pregnant girlfriend wearing a T-shirt which says “she’s eating for two, I’m drinking for three” on it. We’ve positioned ourselves near him, so that if you're overcome by the spontaneous desire to forcefully strike a member of the public at least it will castrate a deserving victim.
Back at the centre, she’s in her own world. Air-dancing to opera, in the sensory room. Suspended. I’m sliding the hoist, swinging her gently around the room, reading subtle but assertive facial instructions. Glowing lights reclaim limbs from palsy as weightless shadows - body finally freed from its chair as we float around serenely in this primary padded Royal Opera House. Tonight she takes the lead as Madame Butterfly… and this Madame Butterfly is wearing a Man United shirt.
We are baking a cake, it takes all day, it has to be perfect. You and I fill it with cream and decorate it really neatly. It must look the part. It needs a glacé cherry on the top and a sprinkling of icing sugar, it must look exactly like the one we saw on Extreme Bakes USA. The cake is ready. It looks perfect. Now, stick it back in the blender – we’ll need to liquidise it so I can feed you a slice through your inter-gastric tube. I drink my cake through a straw too for solidarity. You’re allowed to try a tiny taste on a teaspoon, it’s delicious! Next time we’ll have a go at that roller coaster shaped one.
Why here, of all places? - in the covent garden branch of the Crocs store, amongst all these foam shoes that were fashionable in 2004. Why here, with all these customer service assistants, when you’re wearing your baggy teenage shell-suit, surrounded by brightly coloured pairs of Crocs, and holding my hand? Why here, did you think it would be appropriate to get an erection? It said in your file that you don’t get erections in the Crocs store in Covent Garden anymore; I will update the file.
You’re very wise. You are explaining to me that according to the council’s Every Child Matters policy initiative which they summarise using the acronym SHEEP (Safe, Healthy, Enjoy/Achieve, Economic, Positive). I’m supposed to help you experience things that other teenagers your age are doing, towards your financial and emotional wellbeing. It’s the day of the 2011 London riots and you ask politely if I will take you to JD Sport on Holloway Rd so you can loot trainers, towards your financial and emotional wellbeing. You have heard that people have taken over the McDonalds and are serving themselves milkshakes. Doesn’t sound like much of a riot, sounds like work experience. Naturally, I oblige. Just kidding. You are very wise. Too wise.
The counterfeit Justin Bieber doll has fallen to the bottom of the ball pit. You are screaming ‘get my Bieber’ but nobody dares scrape around for it in the sticky recesses of the soft play pool. Who knows what lurks? Probably the medieval skin disease I contracted. IMPETIGO… I’d thought it was the name of a club in Peterborough. All that Mr Muscle, but still grimy. In these times of funding cuts we should patent this accidental Actimel’s unique probiotic culture and market it to our posh Islington neighbours. ‘Gut-conscious’ is their dinner party term for anal fixation.
You and I have shared interests. In my free time, I too like to YouTube binge seconds 41-50 of Beyonce’s If I Were a Boy - that bit where she puts her aviators on and walks out in a police uniform. Wobble-scratching the time bar. Repeat. That bit, where she walks out. And she puts the glasses on, down the steps of that Brooklyn brownstone. Cursor flex. Just five more minutes. We set a giant sand timer, the kind that doesn’t smash when it’s thrown across the room. And she puts the glasses on, walks out, glasses on, walks out, glasses, steps, cop car, reverse.
It’s what she would have wanted, I exclaim. Who? Asks the fountain security guard. Princess Diana. He hands me an empty monster munch packet someone has kindly donated - slimy pickled onion shroud for my hand which is dipping into the water to remove what would probably be a number three on the Bristol stool chart. It said in your file you don’t defecate in the Princess Diana memorial fountain anymore. I will update your file.
You have occupied the iconic portico at the entrance to Hampstead Heath’s stately home Kenwood House and won’t move until I chant twinkle twinkle little star again with you. The English heritage staff on the door know a bit too much about historic castle sieges and are treating it like a full scale invasion. As though twinkle twinkle posed the same architectural threat as London bridge is falling down. Twinkle twinkle. Sparking the nimby synapse in the house-price fixated brain of a passerby. Because, this is a little proletarian revolution before we go for ice cream. When I’m with you I feel powerful.
You run off the school bus, into the kitchen and steal as many mouthfuls from the jar as you can - Massive grin full of saccharine iron filings bristling on dentine – you’re bouncing, and beatboxing, smirking at 140bpm like a hyena plugged into a Roland TR 808. Put it down! Put the sugar down! You’re the HD to my ADHD. Non verbal but you can dance. Skinny elastic limbs flying – taller than me – teenage body stretched to growth spurt. Wrong aspect ratio. Put the sugar down! Put, put put the sugar down – I unwillingly provide the jabbering vocal loop you need for this live trap track; bass-rolling subsonic boom. It’s not the stolen sugar that’s giving you a dopamine hit, it’s the rhythm of this ritual, flapping Adidas wings at me and spitting sugar-grain pixels like an 8-bit Hitchcock video game cover; soundtracked by an increasingly exasperated chorus of - put the jar down! Strobing neon sportswear the colour of 20p bouncies from that vending machine next to the crocodile hunter ride in Wood Green shopping Centre. We’ve visited them all. But just because my favourite bus route is the 153 as well, it doesn’t mean we’re mates, mate - I’m your support worker and you’re the client, or the service user, not patient – you’ve got no patience, neither have I. And I write it up in you daily report, like stage notes, or a score. At dusk we float plastic carriers around Arundel Square – transparent thin bags, very specific – you’ve got a non-verbal agreement with the nice greengrocer we walk past. He donates these deep sea creatures that suspend time in the breeze; precise as plankton. You are gently teaching me an extra sense (something humans had never imagined, except in approximations of their existing senses). You’re non verbal but physically articulate, and I have verbal diarrhoea but no spatial awareness. Who’s supporting who, I wonder? You’re the only person I feel comfortable with in silence.
Free tickets to a west end matinée of mamma Mia. You are very excited but are repeatedly shouting ‘look at that man’ at the stage, which is annoying the public, not least because it’s tautological. I explain that the word theatre sort of means ‘look at that man (or woman)’ and so it’s unnecessary to say it aloud while pointing at the actor. We are all looking at that man, except now most of the people are looking at you, with expressions imported from the Home Counties. Luckily you’re now obsessing over my Casio watch, which is more engaging than the engagement party on stage, we strike a silent deal for you to borrow the watch in return for not heckling. You up the stakes, and demand to borrow my shoes in return for not laughing in extra loud experimental ways, then you want the lanyard, and my keys, and my hoodie, my glasses. I am being slowly robbed in public by an eight year old to a soundtrack of The Winner Takes It All. We exit the theatre, with you dressed as me.
I am holding a big fishing net which the lifeguard has given me. I am deep in slightly brown water trying to find the fragments of what you did now that it’s broken up and dispersed. Everyone has to get out of Highbury pool except me and two eager nine year olds with goggles - valiant strangers who have volunteered to scour the deep end to guide me towards each piece (why are their parents OK with this?). I can categorise human waste at twenty feet now (must add that to my LinkedIn) and this number two would be number six on the Bristol Stool Chart – fluffy pieces with ragged edges. Bristol must be proud to be named after a stool chart. But this is Islington, dahling! Is that Boris Johnson’s wife leaping out the deep end? - this wellness treatment is new, she’s thinking. It said in your file that you don’t deliberately defecate in Highbury Pool anymore; I will update the file.
My hamstrings twinge, and a heap of fragile bodies flies into the air, tessellating like a cadburys selection box shaken up in transit – Crunchie, Twirl and Curly Whirly; affectionate terms for your range of impairments, or names of dance-moves flung around this trampoline? You get treated like porcelain usually, but now you’re flying saucers. Twirl, Twirl, CRUNCH. “Sorry was that your finger?! arms in, arms in!”. Pompeii figures re-cast in silly putty. And even if your legs worked the same as mine, why would you jump when you could lay there laughing at me, bouncing for hours. Outsourced legs like eyes to guide dogs, and I put the adore in Labrador. Keep bouncing. Because you know I can’t say no, when it makes you that happy - I’m like SpongeBob asking for his stolen ice cream back in that episode you made me watch eighteen times yesterday. “Let him have it” yells the sea cucumber inciting aggression”, “you can have it” beams the sponge, offering the ice cream. You’d walk all over me if you could. Springy serfdom, but you’re surfing.
You have invented a new sport. It involves storming into the local football team’s AstroTurf enclosure before I can stop you, for a one man pitch invasion and challenging the reluctantly obliging players to a clapping game as they try to resume play, inducing a rhythmic ritual which makes Asger Jorn’s surrealist 3-sided football match look pretty ordinary. But my supervisor says my only objective is to help you fit in with society, so that one day you can do normal stuff like queue for a pre-digested hotdog in Edmonton IKEA. Which I understand. And we will, but right now we’re busy collaborating on an aktionist live art performance… literally immersive theatre - you’re spitting and trickling fountains of liquid dough across the bin-bag clad arena of the lunch room while everyone else is at the zoo. You’re not fond of the zoo. In crowded places you have a tendency to slap strangers on the buttock, out of nowhere, while making the sound of an albino peacock (one of the centre’s sonic trends after a visit to Holland Park). Slapped strangers’ expressions a mixture of rage and guilt, as if not sure wether it’s you or them who’s transgressed a social boundary. On the bus I steer your wheelchair closer to that guy, the one with that Arsenal tattoo on his arm… the ‘nal’ bit of the word Arsenal hidden under his sleeve - just the arse showing. Yes him, the guy standing next to his pregnant girlfriend wearing a T-shirt which says “she’s eating for two, I’m drinking for three” on it. We’ve positioned ourselves near him, so that if you're overcome by the spontaneous desire to forcefully strike a member of the public at least it will castrate a deserving victim.
Back at the centre, she’s in her own world. Air-dancing to opera, in the sensory room. Suspended. I’m sliding the hoist, swinging her gently around the room, reading subtle but assertive facial instructions. Glowing lights reclaim limbs from palsy as weightless shadows - body finally freed from its chair as we float around serenely in this primary padded Royal Opera House. Tonight she takes the lead as Madame Butterfly… and this Madame Butterfly is wearing a Man United shirt.
We are baking a cake, it takes all day, it has to be perfect. You and I fill it with cream and decorate it really neatly. It must look the part. It needs a glacé cherry on the top and a sprinkling of icing sugar, it must look exactly like the one we saw on Extreme Bakes USA. The cake is ready. It looks perfect. Now, stick it back in the blender – we’ll need to liquidise it so I can feed you a slice through your inter-gastric tube. I drink my cake through a straw too for solidarity. You’re allowed to try a tiny taste on a teaspoon, it’s delicious! Next time we’ll have a go at that roller coaster shaped one.
Why here, of all places? - in the covent garden branch of the Crocs store, amongst all these foam shoes that were fashionable in 2004. Why here, with all these customer service assistants, when you’re wearing your baggy teenage shell-suit, surrounded by brightly coloured pairs of Crocs, and holding my hand? Why here, did you think it would be appropriate to get an erection? It said in your file that you don’t get erections in the Crocs store in Covent Garden anymore; I will update the file.
You’re very wise. You are explaining to me that according to the council’s Every Child Matters policy initiative which they summarise using the acronym SHEEP (Safe, Healthy, Enjoy/Achieve, Economic, Positive). I’m supposed to help you experience things that other teenagers your age are doing, towards your financial and emotional wellbeing. It’s the day of the 2011 London riots and you ask politely if I will take you to JD Sport on Holloway Rd so you can loot trainers, towards your financial and emotional wellbeing. You have heard that people have taken over the McDonalds and are serving themselves milkshakes. Doesn’t sound like much of a riot, sounds like work experience. Naturally, I oblige. Just kidding. You are very wise. Too wise.
The counterfeit Justin Bieber doll has fallen to the bottom of the ball pit. You are screaming ‘get my Bieber’ but nobody dares scrape around for it in the sticky recesses of the soft play pool. Who knows what lurks? Probably the medieval skin disease I contracted. IMPETIGO… I’d thought it was the name of a club in Peterborough. All that Mr Muscle, but still grimy. In these times of funding cuts we should patent this accidental Actimel’s unique probiotic culture and market it to our posh Islington neighbours. ‘Gut-conscious’ is their dinner party term for anal fixation.
You and I have shared interests. In my free time, I too like to YouTube binge seconds 41-50 of Beyonce’s If I Were a Boy - that bit where she puts her aviators on and walks out in a police uniform. Wobble-scratching the time bar. Repeat. That bit, where she walks out. And she puts the glasses on, down the steps of that Brooklyn brownstone. Cursor flex. Just five more minutes. We set a giant sand timer, the kind that doesn’t smash when it’s thrown across the room. And she puts the glasses on, walks out, glasses on, walks out, glasses, steps, cop car, reverse.
It’s what she would have wanted, I exclaim. Who? Asks the fountain security guard. Princess Diana. He hands me an empty monster munch packet someone has kindly donated - slimy pickled onion shroud for my hand which is dipping into the water to remove what would probably be a number three on the Bristol stool chart. It said in your file you don’t defecate in the Princess Diana memorial fountain anymore. I will update your file.
You have occupied the iconic portico at the entrance to Hampstead Heath’s stately home Kenwood House and won’t move until I chant twinkle twinkle little star again with you. The English heritage staff on the door know a bit too much about historic castle sieges and are treating it like a full scale invasion. As though twinkle twinkle posed the same architectural threat as London bridge is falling down. Twinkle twinkle. Sparking the nimby synapse in the house-price fixated brain of a passerby. Because, this is a little proletarian revolution before we go for ice cream. When I’m with you I feel powerful.
Urban Investopedia (2018) is a dictionary which unites words that have different meanings in both the financial industry and urban slang. The work reflects on how specialist language creates exclusive communities, in-crowds and elites. The definitions in the book come from the websites Investopedia (specifically its dictionary of financial terms) and the Urban Dictionary. You can download a pdf below. Photo credit: Tom Hatton.
| urban_investopedia_louise_ashcroft.pdf |
MANIFESTO: How to Build a House, 2013.
Step 1. Leave Home. There are problems at home (the institution, the World). It’s changed and you’ve outgrown it. The rules you had become accustomed to are no longer relevant and they don’t meet your needs. You start to think about how you could live better. Be brave. Take risks. It’s hard to survive.
Step 2. Start your own non-nuclear family. Find each other. Get close to those who share your values and ideas. Don’t recreate the state you left – this is a common problem. Resist being captured or recuperated. The gene pool should be diverse, so it’s good if each of you offer different strengths. Help each other to thrive as individuals and to be free. The group is a form of drag. Dress yourselves up and switch roles! Resist the tribal instinct to close yourselves off, but don’t be too open too fast, otherwise the grey squirrels will eat all the red squirrels. Remember that you are creating a permaculture which is fragile and develops slowly. Cross pollinate and give birth to hybrids – share the genes and celebrate the mutations. If you’ve got a name make sure its triple barrelled and you change it every day.
Step 3. You will need somewhere to live together. Building a physical structure is a useful mechanism for building a social structure. You will need resources, so it may help to operate as a parasite. Capitalism has learnt a lot from slime mould, so we should understand mycology if we want to survive. Be wary that your host may try to eat you. Try to present yourselves as good bacteria even if you are not – you need to be allowed into the guts. Be knowingly naïve and you will seem less threatening. Be a polymer of long chain and short chain hydrocarbons so that you can give each other the space and support with your individual desires. Connect easily to other elements to prevent yourselves becoming brittle. Enjoy it when the molten aluminium bursts the mold even if it wasn’t what you expected. Enjoy each other’s spleens and mutations, they will make your immune system more diverse and more resistant.
Step 4. Shift shape often (to avoid reproducing the states you left behind). It might help to disguise yourselves in some familiar form; something non-threatening like a face or a house. Trojan-horsing will give you more freedom to become a many-headed-hydra. A monster. If you meet the Buddha on the road kill him for me. They will want to see your real face because it’s uncomfortable for them that you don’t have one – you will need to resist this by changing masks regularly.
- Louise Ashcroft
Step 2. Start your own non-nuclear family. Find each other. Get close to those who share your values and ideas. Don’t recreate the state you left – this is a common problem. Resist being captured or recuperated. The gene pool should be diverse, so it’s good if each of you offer different strengths. Help each other to thrive as individuals and to be free. The group is a form of drag. Dress yourselves up and switch roles! Resist the tribal instinct to close yourselves off, but don’t be too open too fast, otherwise the grey squirrels will eat all the red squirrels. Remember that you are creating a permaculture which is fragile and develops slowly. Cross pollinate and give birth to hybrids – share the genes and celebrate the mutations. If you’ve got a name make sure its triple barrelled and you change it every day.
Step 3. You will need somewhere to live together. Building a physical structure is a useful mechanism for building a social structure. You will need resources, so it may help to operate as a parasite. Capitalism has learnt a lot from slime mould, so we should understand mycology if we want to survive. Be wary that your host may try to eat you. Try to present yourselves as good bacteria even if you are not – you need to be allowed into the guts. Be knowingly naïve and you will seem less threatening. Be a polymer of long chain and short chain hydrocarbons so that you can give each other the space and support with your individual desires. Connect easily to other elements to prevent yourselves becoming brittle. Enjoy it when the molten aluminium bursts the mold even if it wasn’t what you expected. Enjoy each other’s spleens and mutations, they will make your immune system more diverse and more resistant.
Step 4. Shift shape often (to avoid reproducing the states you left behind). It might help to disguise yourselves in some familiar form; something non-threatening like a face or a house. Trojan-horsing will give you more freedom to become a many-headed-hydra. A monster. If you meet the Buddha on the road kill him for me. They will want to see your real face because it’s uncomfortable for them that you don’t have one – you will need to resist this by changing masks regularly.
- Louise Ashcroft
Oi Meaty Mensicus-threatener, 2014. Lyrics for a performance with Ochlocracy Orchestra gigs at Royal College of Music and Cabaret Melancholique, Nov/Dec 2014:
Oi Meaty Meniscus-threatener, pacing your prickly feet on the underside of the skin. Digits blisterly piping.
It wasn’t PVA glue and rice crispies this time, but the texture felt just as brailly beneath my prints.
“Get the leprocy look”, she said. Disease gives you authenticity – people crave that nowadays. Entrop-tainment.
Right when I thought it was all going smoothly, you are stamping on worm casts in the sand - getting dirty silica in the creeks of your new Nike SB Lunar one-shots. Ten thousand dollars cos they’re made of lab-grown human tissue.
Yours are fake though, woven in Sainsbury’s Smartprice wafer-thin ham.
Pink marble. Sneaky soles. Insides slithered so delicately that they became surfaces, and when the sun shone through they resembled an ultra HD photograph of the cosmos.
Close-up looked like far away, if you know what I mean…
Down there on the decks, a scrimshanker whistles ‘all things bright and beautiful’ as he splits each of the chests open, looking for bits to use as pins and hobnails. Ways of holding things together. Ribcage styluses. These parts should have never come to light.
He takes a pair of lungs and some tailoring shears. “I’ve made new gills for you, man. Let me know if they’re big enough.”
----BREAK----
Put some tinfoil in the microwave and stare at it as it recreates creation like a GCSE magnesium experiment and draws a little diagram of it on the parts of your brain you have never used. Have a look and see if you can decipher what is written.
---RESUME---
If anyone is still up there, could you stick your eyeholes down and tell me what the colour looks like? Reddy brown, like a patch of mushrooms growing on the bite-marks of a bloody swooper left to land, or eyefuls of itching powder improvised crudely with kiwi hair and a pencil sharpener.
Swelling mouth-buds struggle to spit out the feathery and the phoney.
A ringtone called ‘time passing’ interrupts. Answer it. Urgent noises through the cracks in her teeth:
“An amputated imagination functions better as its own beast, don’t you think?”, she asks.
“No I never think. Starve them and they will become more resourceful” you reply.
This week’s trend is called grazing. It’s where people indiscriminately bite chunks out of passers-by.
Meat-space and grease-space are the new LCD LED space.
***Screen 2. Same as the other one, but tongue in cheek ***
We ran out of plasma, so we shared a tin of beans found at the bottom of the sea. Submarining. Graven with the words ‘preserve life at all costs’. But when sensation did vanish it was ruder that ever.
The dusk wore F sharp shallowness like your first beard - all wispy.
We sat there for a long time and watched the electrolytes evaporate from his gawping mouth, steaming as the temperature tripped its switch. Capitated, he had been captivating. But now even his eyeholes weren’t eyeholes anymore – they were just two bodies seen from above, circling in deep snow, unable to axis. Vaults at the poles. Two choices: Spring out or wait for spring.
You choose to hold on. Running your fingers around the inside of the sockets. Ballrooms. Ringing. Boning.
This week’s trend forecast: ‘dying-young marketing’ is the new ‘apocalypse-marketing’. The resigned hedonism of blitz parties... You’d always found hopelessness incredibly liberating.
Anticipating the end, the porter outside polishes a brass plate that reads ‘dance like it’s the end of term’. Terms and terminals. If you could see what I have seen with these eyes, and all that
…But you can’t.
Oi Meaty Meniscus-threatener, pacing your prickly feet on the underside of the skin. Digits blisterly piping.
It wasn’t PVA glue and rice crispies this time, but the texture felt just as brailly beneath my prints.
“Get the leprocy look”, she said. Disease gives you authenticity – people crave that nowadays. Entrop-tainment.
Right when I thought it was all going smoothly, you are stamping on worm casts in the sand - getting dirty silica in the creeks of your new Nike SB Lunar one-shots. Ten thousand dollars cos they’re made of lab-grown human tissue.
Yours are fake though, woven in Sainsbury’s Smartprice wafer-thin ham.
Pink marble. Sneaky soles. Insides slithered so delicately that they became surfaces, and when the sun shone through they resembled an ultra HD photograph of the cosmos.
Close-up looked like far away, if you know what I mean…
Down there on the decks, a scrimshanker whistles ‘all things bright and beautiful’ as he splits each of the chests open, looking for bits to use as pins and hobnails. Ways of holding things together. Ribcage styluses. These parts should have never come to light.
He takes a pair of lungs and some tailoring shears. “I’ve made new gills for you, man. Let me know if they’re big enough.”
----BREAK----
Put some tinfoil in the microwave and stare at it as it recreates creation like a GCSE magnesium experiment and draws a little diagram of it on the parts of your brain you have never used. Have a look and see if you can decipher what is written.
---RESUME---
If anyone is still up there, could you stick your eyeholes down and tell me what the colour looks like? Reddy brown, like a patch of mushrooms growing on the bite-marks of a bloody swooper left to land, or eyefuls of itching powder improvised crudely with kiwi hair and a pencil sharpener.
Swelling mouth-buds struggle to spit out the feathery and the phoney.
A ringtone called ‘time passing’ interrupts. Answer it. Urgent noises through the cracks in her teeth:
“An amputated imagination functions better as its own beast, don’t you think?”, she asks.
“No I never think. Starve them and they will become more resourceful” you reply.
This week’s trend is called grazing. It’s where people indiscriminately bite chunks out of passers-by.
Meat-space and grease-space are the new LCD LED space.
***Screen 2. Same as the other one, but tongue in cheek ***
We ran out of plasma, so we shared a tin of beans found at the bottom of the sea. Submarining. Graven with the words ‘preserve life at all costs’. But when sensation did vanish it was ruder that ever.
The dusk wore F sharp shallowness like your first beard - all wispy.
We sat there for a long time and watched the electrolytes evaporate from his gawping mouth, steaming as the temperature tripped its switch. Capitated, he had been captivating. But now even his eyeholes weren’t eyeholes anymore – they were just two bodies seen from above, circling in deep snow, unable to axis. Vaults at the poles. Two choices: Spring out or wait for spring.
You choose to hold on. Running your fingers around the inside of the sockets. Ballrooms. Ringing. Boning.
This week’s trend forecast: ‘dying-young marketing’ is the new ‘apocalypse-marketing’. The resigned hedonism of blitz parties... You’d always found hopelessness incredibly liberating.
Anticipating the end, the porter outside polishes a brass plate that reads ‘dance like it’s the end of term’. Terms and terminals. If you could see what I have seen with these eyes, and all that
…But you can’t.
Geographies of the Artist's Studio. One of a series of artists books commissioned by Squid & Tabernacle and West London Story. Part of a six month residency exploring the site of my practice as a series of interconnected narratives, walks, journeys and conversations.
Plastic Poems.
I formed these two short poems by swapping words from Roland Barthes’ 'Mythologies' text Plastic with alternatives from the same page in a Thesaurus, then extrapolating narratives.
1. Looking down on Greenwich Meridian at night, small, shiny lumps (each with a melody of their own) protrude from the sticky mucous membrane that’s getting all over your special clothes. This colourless fluid, into which the hormones found in blood and egg white are secreted, is traditionally spread on the ceilings of great halls to represent heaven. Melting in the heat of bodies, the drippy limelight sewerage would fleck latitude, into the mouths below, satisfying their thirst like a translucent meal of packet-mix macaroni stirred with beer (they were out of milk). But traditions aside, you are alone in the dark gripping the tub, blind digits searching its solution for globs, then flicking the creamy swellings off the top floor of your glass menagerie into the murky splendor of contemporary waterside living.
-
2. The stockroom is full of unwanted crystal balls. Nobody is interested in predicting the future now that it’s measurable. Burst bubbles, leaked of mystery. That’s something the CEO should have foreseen, but lately she’s distracted. Moneyed and bored, she hires freelancers to carry out conceptual tasks. “Find two things that are as different as possible from each other and place them at either side of the room”. The two things weren’t the thing, she explains, it was the gulf between them she was after; their osmotic tension – not opposites (too similar)…extra-familiar. Ways to fill her lunch hour.
I formed these two short poems by swapping words from Roland Barthes’ 'Mythologies' text Plastic with alternatives from the same page in a Thesaurus, then extrapolating narratives.
1. Looking down on Greenwich Meridian at night, small, shiny lumps (each with a melody of their own) protrude from the sticky mucous membrane that’s getting all over your special clothes. This colourless fluid, into which the hormones found in blood and egg white are secreted, is traditionally spread on the ceilings of great halls to represent heaven. Melting in the heat of bodies, the drippy limelight sewerage would fleck latitude, into the mouths below, satisfying their thirst like a translucent meal of packet-mix macaroni stirred with beer (they were out of milk). But traditions aside, you are alone in the dark gripping the tub, blind digits searching its solution for globs, then flicking the creamy swellings off the top floor of your glass menagerie into the murky splendor of contemporary waterside living.
-
2. The stockroom is full of unwanted crystal balls. Nobody is interested in predicting the future now that it’s measurable. Burst bubbles, leaked of mystery. That’s something the CEO should have foreseen, but lately she’s distracted. Moneyed and bored, she hires freelancers to carry out conceptual tasks. “Find two things that are as different as possible from each other and place them at either side of the room”. The two things weren’t the thing, she explains, it was the gulf between them she was after; their osmotic tension – not opposites (too similar)…extra-familiar. Ways to fill her lunch hour.
The Experimental Futurologists. Written and performed for Sketchy Remarks exhibition, Floating Island Gallery, Canary Wharf. April 2015: A semi-real, semi-fictional story about three Canary Wharf men based on real online characters connected to an ID card I found.
Martin Shipman was made redundant on 1st April 2015. I hardly knew the guy, I mean I didn't know him at all, but I'd taken a keen interest in him since I found his Citibank ID card at the bottom of the chrome escalators in Jubilee Place. Dough-grey face staring up at me, thrusting against the stark metal teeth of its mechanical impaler; like the Freudian slip, slip, slipping of his ‘Pigtronix Infinity’ guitar loop pedal, applied to the twitchy transition from player to zombie in his Xbox apocalypse edition of Dead Rising 3.
I picked the security pass up but never returned it.
Fascinated by his realness, I Looked Martin Shipman up on LinkedIn.
I visited Phoenix Heights, his mixed-tenure apartment block overlooking Millwall Dock, and thought I'd caught sight of him several times while loitering on the DLR platform at rush hour, enjoying the grind of frantic bodies sliding against mine; a reluctant group hug.
Martin Shipman's LinkedIn page says he is on sabbatical. He has told his former colleagues he is taking a gap year in Jamaica. Only the fervour and regularity with which he updates the photographs of himself in tropical paradise betray this; revealing his cut, paste, clone technique to any keen observer such as myself who shares his interest in Photoshop 6.0 (with its patented liquify effect and 'venus in furs' coding). I print each profile picture out and magnify them so that every pixel covers my entire palm.
Digital rip. RIP.
Amie Hughes-Gage in accounts tweets: 'Just watched the police finally remove that poor bankers body, 4 and half hours later with only a white sheet over him.'
(click here to read full text)
Letter to the Landowners 2013.
Masks poster, written in collaboration with Noga Inbar, 2013.
My Favourite Machine is Called a Boring Machine, 2014.
Staring at his reflection in the glass, the stocky, pink barman in All Bar One grunts and sweats as he makes them. I want the drop of sweat from his skull to fall into my pornstar martini. DNA from a rogue skin cell on that shiny scalp.
Ultra masculine.
He flirts with the middle class hen party (tasteful L plates, one very discreet but tiny illuminated phallus), good taste. It's all about good taste. Too much taste. I just want that bead of sweat; holding my nose to avoid the flavours.
You're so shiny you're opaque – can just see me looking back. Auto icon. A pair of spectacles. Myself and I. An eye for an eye. Witnessing an image of myself in the tallest tower. Float technique - invented by Mr Pilkington - all the panes of JP Morgan. Chase chase chasing my own. You know…the bit where my body stops the rays of celestial fire-ball hitting the earth….
…Shadow.
I stood there for many days out of spite, just so that I could impede the growth of your rhubarb so that it might not be ripe before the garden party. Shady. I stood there in the hope of leaving a yellow patch in the shape of me on your lawn but the rays moved round and I span round the rays.
You've got a mug which says 'I orbited the sun 30 times and all I got was this stupid mug'. Son and sun, that's hamlet's pun, he says he's in the sun too much but he means the pressures of being heir. Son S-O-N. No, not air, heir, with a h and an e and an I. I.e, I before e except after c, after sea except in heir, no not sea, the letter c.
Sea Air
I wondered what the Earth would look like if we took the sea away. I imagined the waters went to the Earth’s core but they go nowhere near; it's just a thin film. Just a film. Not real. How can you cry at it when you know they are actors? Crocodile tears. You can see right through him.
Inventory of all the animals that are invisible.
Transparent glass-frog and ice-fish. Minuscule, eight-legged Demodex mites nestle head-down inside the follicles, feasting unnoticed on skin cells. Loitering in nerve cells. 8 percent of your genome. 500 species inside the human gut; A biofilm of little arthropods eating and mating on your face at night. Stretches of DNA from viruses that infected your ancestors millions of years ago.
Micro-scope
Macro-scope
I am walking around canary wharf. Thomson Reuters HQ is floating in the windows of Fitch Ratings. Looking up. Desk plants getting smaller layer by layer, storey by story.
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, 9, 31, 32, 33, 34, 108, 109, 110, 111, 400. Counting all the squares. Glance back down. Street plants in cartoon shapes. Trying to look more like themselves.
I am compiling a list of all the reflections.
We walked through the science museum. You were in a mood because you thought I was in a mood, but I wasn't in a mood, I just thought that you were in a mood, but apparently you weren’t, you just thought that I was, which is why it looked like you were even though you were not.
Later, I would find out that the reason I like you is because, despite having no family connections, several of our genes are the same. We are not fixed forms you know, just moments of alignment between different elements. Life drawing gets harder when you realise that.
I calculated how much your body would be worth if we sold off all the trace elements in it – turns out it varies depending how you market it. It’s worth an arm and a leg, so they say, but an arm and a leg isn’t worth that much – the potassium is probably the most expensive part – a few quid at most.
We are trying to get to know each other. A conversation starter.
“My favourite machine is called a boring machine. It digs tunnels for Crossrail”, I say.
No response.
“I used to eat fragments of buildings I liked – the most imposing ones, I like to allow them to inhabit me for a change, to go inside me rather than me inside them.”
No response.
You told me you wanted to be powerful, but not too powerful. That’d be too much responsibility, you said. You definitely didn’t want to be God because you thought there would be too much admin.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just said:
“We should encouraged people to walk more efficiently. This would save us millions.” Wanted to sound political but pragmatic.
You nodded, looked skeptical and asked.
“Shall we paint everything green? it’s calming”.
“Overground orange versus Easyjet orange?” I replied wryly
“You can buy that in cans you know, new car smell, they use it in valets”
You agreed.
It was like a conversation even though it didn’t quite join up, but we didn’t mind.
You pressed your eyeballs into my eyeballs.
Google glass has patented ‘pay per gaze’, a way of monetizing advertising based on how long we look at it and which parts of the screen we look at and what emotions are evoked. My feeling of longing combined with inadequacy were worth 18 pence in 2017.
We are boiling up objects on a camping stove and staring into the vapours they evaporate. Under the tea towel. We are looking through all the keyholes in the street, because we want to get closer to the neighbours. See inside their lives.
Anti-social networking.
I bought a telescope from Maplin cos it was on special offer. From that day onwards you experienced the world 100 metres away from yourself. You said that you like to have some distance because it helps you to reflect on things.
We are attaching angled mirrors to billboards and posters to reveal hidden patterns, images and forms. Re-editing the world in the visual language we share.
Look as far as you can until it goes blurry. Remember when that fortune teller woman reckoned you were going to die on the 7th November because she couldn’t see beyond that but it turned out that it was actually her that died on that day and you were fine - in fact you won ten pounds on the lottery in the evening and in the morning someone on the tube said they liked your new shoes.
Try to make your mark on history so that you’ll be remembered in future.
It’s a compulsion I have at the moment to invite tradesmen to visit me at museums and give me quotes for converting the museums into grand designs I have scribbled drawings of in my notebook. I am walking around the V&A with Ernst and Sergy. They met each other back in Lithuania at the Construction Skills College in 1994. I am wearing a suit and a badge with a made-up job title. Even the invigilators presume I am staff. They are knocking on the walls of the Tibetan rooms. You know - the way my Dad and Kirsty Allsopp do it. “You’d knock that through wouldn’t you?” He asks rhetorically. Open plan living. My bedroom will be in the Viking bit.
The simple gesture of measuring the dimensions of someone’s property with a tape measure pisses him off apparently.
Hmm (glance at watch) no don’t say it do it (it’s an action), look at your watch. I know you don’t have one, that’s not the point.
I hoped it would be clearer than this.
Closing my eyes or waiting for the night is easier than painting the whole universe black or shrouding the sun.
TIRED OF LOOKING. I want to feel the bass of your voice quiver on the surface of my eyelids.
Electronica-infused in the key of E-flat minor. "written in common time and moves at 104 beats per minute". rapped over a four-to-the-floor rhythmic pattern. Nietzsche's "What does not kill him, makes him stronger," Recite Nietzsche's hook four times on the fourth then the outro - synth-heavy breakdown, angelic backing vocals, somber electric guitars.
End on a high note, or a key change, or just fade out?
----
RHYTHMS OF PRODUCTION.
In an effort to boost my CV, I have appointed myself as Editor of the World and I have drawn up some plans and lists about how I will rearrange things and what I’ll remove. It’s a big responsibility.
I have drafted a press release to let people know that, unfortunately, due to lack of space, we are going to have to get rid of certain things, such as painting, nouns, golf and Didcot Parkway. Things that hinder the rhythm I want to create now that I’m in charge.
I’ll keep an archive of fragments and smells distilled from what has been removed, so that future generations can still experience them if they choose. It is a difficult task, but the world needs editing, it’s got too cluttered and it’s time to be ruthless.
My favourite editors are the ones that do music videos. I’ve been learning a lot from them. I met one the other day at an art opening, he had just finished the video for ‘Superlove’ a song by a new pop star called Charlie XCX. In an effort to give the real world some of this rhythm, I am embarking on a series of walks through London, during which I precisely emulate the editing techniques and camera angles of popular music videos, by moving my body and eyes in the exact same way as the camera while I pace through the grey streets.
You’ve got to be fast. Zoom, spin, cut, switch, cut, pan, cut, focus in, switch, zoom out, switch, zoom in, the image is bouncing and so am I - trying to run quick enough, flicking my eyes around the surroundings, blinking in time to the cut, cut, cut, angle, zoom, cut, pan.
I’ve memorized the sequences. When Charlie XCX transitions from her upright stretched position to her crouched pose, so do I, when the camera pans over the scene from above and swoops around, I make sure my eyes do the same thing. The singer is replaced by a Hackney recycling-bin, the Tokyo bikers become the shop mobility scooter and pushchair that seem to be racing each other down Mare Street. For the speedy bits it’s better to be on the top deck of the 149 bus, staring straight ahead so that the buildings flicker by, before turning and focusing on the singer, who this time takes the form of a Waitrose ‘bag for life’ that happens to be in the correct position on an adjacent seat.
I jump off the bus and move in for a close-up on the mouth of a passer-by, the white-haired businessman is a surrogate for our glittery, red-lipsticked singer.
That fried chicken box I had found on Lea Bridge Roundabout acts as the perfect viewfinder as I zoom in on him.
I’m doing the Britney one this week, it’s perfect for rush hour, fits well with how the Stevenage train disembarks and disperses at Kings Cross.
I track the commuters movements like the camera tracks the dancers. It’s all about timing.
Britney Spears is singing about the importance of having a good protestant work ethic. It’s a classic work song. A sea shanty, set in the desert. If you want a Mazerati you’ve got to work, work, work. Work work work work work.
I like to calculate how much everything costs in terms of hours and as a percentage of my life. Primark slippers are 0.000001%. That gin and tonic was 0.0000015% - if I’m doing the maths right.
Long division on the back of a flyer for the local funeral home which has just fallen through my letter box – convenient, easy, DSS welcome it says, down on the mat with a Pizza GoGo menu.
Divide the price by the hourly rate. If you want a Mazerati you’ve got to work 9,756 hours and fourteen minutes at £6.50 an hour, before tax, if you get that bakery assistant job we saw advertised on the noticeboard in SPAR, that is.
Britney is gliding her body around the vehicle, as though trying to convince me that it’s more economical on fuel if you go top of the range. Saves you money in the long run, her arm gesture implies.
Gold hot pants, golden skin, in the desert, which looks golden, but sand is silicone (it’s what the internet is made of). Work, gold, oil, silicone.
9,756 hours and fourteen minutes sounds a lot doesn’t it, but you don’t mind putting in the time because you are passionate about customer service.
------
CHRONOPHOBIA.
18th March 2014, 1.15pm GMT. The doctor has diagnosed me with chronophobia. The fear of time passing. He said it’s sufferers are normally the elderly and prisoners. Pentonville clock. Daily, weakly scratched into the wall, line line line line line line, strike-through. And repeat.
19th March 2014, 2.25pm GMT. A day of admin. I came across some rare numerals in the score of a Gregorian chant and am now adding them to my collection of repeat signs, which contains: some lemniscate loops, Möbius strips, some clock faces and various oroboruses. At 4.05pm I am filing my archive of pauses and delays, adding a recently acquired ‘semiquaver rest’ to the folder in between sabbatical and traffic jam.
20th March 2014 12pm GMT: ∞ ∞ I want to make that hyper-shape that they call a klein bottle, but I’ll have to do it out of HTML code because its dimensionally impossible to form it in Euclidean space, and when I tried to I almost got paper mache on your new carpet. The health and safety officer says that the mini black hole I had begun constructing probably won’t be feasible now, unless someone stronger helps me out with the infinite density bit.
21st March 2014 6.15pm GMT. Our next-door neighbours are on holiday in Tuscany, so I have agreed to look after their pet corn-snakes. I am training them to eat their own tails but it isn’t really working. I’ve become more interested in the death-row crickets in the corner of the tank. They are teaching me that impending demise is a great way of reminding yourself to enjoy the present moment. Optimistic nihilism. If all is lost then we might as well party, they are chirping. I have decided to visit Glasgow more often to get that same ‘’being towards death’ effect. Medieval mortality rate, about the same as Mozambique and Burundi, but the Megabus goes there so it’s more convenient.
22nd March 2014 8pm GMT. I am hosting a dinner party and have served the guests olive oil, port and chocolate. That’s what Jeanne Calment ate and she was the oldest person ever. 122 years, smoked cigarettes for 101 of them, but her daughter Yvonne died of pneumonia aged 35 and her grandson Frederick in a car crash aged 36.
23rd March 2014, 8.45am GMT. I am turning Kings Cross into an obstacle course by adding more bollards and traffic cones, by spilling cans of paint, distracting people with shrill sounds and shiny things, and by cordoning areas off. A way to slow everyone down a bit and force them to look up from their phones. I am asking people what time it is, a new person each minute, excuse me, have you got the correct time. The exact time, please. When the talking clock becomes extinct I’ll have to do it this way anyway and I always prefer a live version. I like the way she says it, slowly, precisely, it’s about (looks at watch) 8.46pm.
Double Jab:
A spoken word piece to be performed with police cordon tape as blindfolds for the audience, with recorded sound effects of a crowd watching a South London amateur boxing match between each ‘round’ of text…
Round one:
You are enraged, because I am deliberately bouncing your new basketball in a brown puddle and as a punishment you are forcing me to tread on all the snails. I have put your contact lenses in the microwave and you have made bespoke itching powder with my crunchy nut cornflakes and added it to all the clothes I'd planned to wear for the party.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round two:
You don’t know it, but I am polluting your cups of tea with small amounts of London clay and fragments of controversial london buildings like senate house and centre point, which I have scraped off using a garlic grater and collected in an envelope. I long to add bits of the shard but 1. I don't want to hurt you 2. The london bridge security guard has noticed me and 3. It's impossible to scrape off glass using this technique.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round three:
You are describing to me, in excruciating detail, that dusty, artificial jungle display which is just above the revolving doors in Surrey quays shopping centre, by the 24 hour Tesco. In response, I am lowering your house price slightly by bribing all your neighbours to hang England flags from their bedroom windows
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round four:
I am informing you that the chair you are sitting on has never been washed and that this is true of most chairs in public places, although i admit that it is highly unlikely that you would catch a sexually transmitted disease from it.
In an attempt to reassert yourself, you have carved out breezeblocks and forced me to tape them to my shoes so that I am taller and heavier - you have calculated it so that I experience the exact size and weight of different political leaders throughout history.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round five:
You are making me stare into the floodlights of the Prince Albert memorial and wait for them to turn on at dusk. You are saying something about this moment being the official boundary between day and night.
Later that evening, I am talking you through a catalogue of industrial paints - JCB yellow, John Deere yellow, caterpillar orange, dark admiralty grey, camouflage beige. Inducing synesthesia by simultaneously making you smell the sweaty residue of the copper coins that I have been clasping in my hands the whole time. For you, this smell most strongly relates to the light blue Pantone of Lewisham council’s branded street signs
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round six:
I don't want to knock you out completely, so I am applying the usual 400 lbs of pressure to your temples, but I am doing it one pound at a time over the course of an hour by lightly poking them. This is distracting you from your work.
Frustrated by this, you have dragged me to Piccadilly Circus and are commanding me to painstakingly measure the difference in speed between those passers by who are happy or hopeful and those who are sad or defeated. By drawing a simple graph, i have worked out that the modal average speed difference is twenty-eight metres per kilometer, except when the sadness and defeat are combined with anxiousness, because this anxiousness increases the pace and therefore cancels the difference out.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round seven:
Against your will, I have arranged for you to do work experience at the Millwall reuse and recycle plant, despite your phobia of windowless spaces, and, - in an effort to restrict your leisure time to minimal sensations - I have set all channels on your TV to show BBC parliament and I've gaffa-taped over the screen, except for a tiny square of pixels in the middle.
I have done this because you have thrown all my possessions into the sea at Margate, making a separate trip for each one to prolong the process
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round eight:
Pulling out all the stops this time, you’ve had me airlifted by window-cleaners to the top of One Canada Square, the tallest tower in Canary Wharf. You have positioned me on the peak of its silver, pyramid-shaped roof so that the red aircraft-warning lights are shining directly into my eyes and so that I have to breathe in the vents of the air conditioning units as they are released into the sky in a cloud of steam. You tell me that, because of the light shining on it, the steam is visible to an old lady in Bermondsey who is staring out of the window of her nineteenth floor apartment at Lupin Point, a high-rise residential block which made local headlines in 2011 when it was set on fire by a lightning storm.
I can’t speak back to you because you have sellotaped my mouth to the air vents so that I am forced to inhale from them, and you are describing in great detail how the steam being extracted is twenty four hours of the breath of a thousand office workers, and that 317 of these people have serious infectious diseases, one of which is a dormant strain of leprosy which was previously thought to have been eradicated in the UK in the eighteenth century. You are telling me that the air contains high levels of cortisol stress hormone and that this is a natural steroid, which suppresses the immune systems of the weak but makes the strong even stronger.
I am trying to hide the fact that the Sellotape over my mouth is starting to become unstuck because of the steam and I am pretending that I am not now breathing comfortably through the nostril that has been freed. You are shouting at me in an animated way, so that momentarily you lose your footing and almost fall backwards off the tower, 50 floors, 800 feet, onto the reinforced glass shelf that architects have installed to protect street level pedestrians in the event of a suicidal falling body.
You are reminding me that you knew that I was obsessed with this building, this tower because it made me feel both powerful and powerless at the same time, and that you knew I had spent a day pointing my finger up at it with my arm out stretched until it went numb or until I was stopped by one of the wardens .You knew that I hated the fact that the blue and white sign that said ‘polite notice’ was deliberately made to look like it said ‘police notice’ from afar.
You are saying you are aware I have been making more videos about the tower, like the one where I walked to it from Greenwich, with my camera focused on it the whole way so that it grew and grew as I got nearer, until I was right at the bottom of it looking up, videoing my reflection in its mirrored glass wall, by the entrance, on a Sunday, until my camera is covered up by the hand of a middle aged, middle eastern, female security guard who is mouthing ‘no’ through the glass and putting her palm out, telling me to stop filming. You think that I am angry at the tower because it had encouraged me to feel part of its powerfulness from a distance, in an iconic way, but then prevented me getting close to it.
Now you are saying that if I had really wanted to get close up I should be happy now that I am on top of it inhaling the breath of its inhabitants as my own. You thought I’d like that idea because you knew that I liked that thing that people say about the water cycle, when they say that your cup of tea once passed through the kidneys of Henry the eighth, or something like that.
You are mocking me about the excitement I had felt when I had walked past the ice rink in Canada Square Park and found a security access card belonging to a staff member from the tower, who must have dropped it. I had picked the card up with the initial intention of returning it to the reception desk as an alibi to enter the tower, but in the end I had kept it and researched it’s owner, convincing myself that this was so that I might post it back to him like any good citizen, although I knew it was really just so that I could find out more about him and imagine his life so that it would make life inside the tower seem more real, more human.
The card had a CitiBank logo on it and the name Martin Shipman, written in a bland typeface a bit like Andale Mono or Arial Unicode. Below the text was a photograph of a grey haired, middle aged man with glasses and a sheepish, uncomfortable half-smile which, when we looked it up in an online 'expressions index', was described as communicating the feeling 'back to the drawing board’. Is 'back to the drawing board' an emotion? I asked.
We thought it looked more like a disappointed smile, politely requesting that we respect logic and rules.
Some hours later, when we were down on the ground again, Martin Shipman would become the thing that united us.
'He is a Lead software architect at CitiBank, before that he worked for HSBC and Credit Suisse', you said, staring at the laptop screen. ‘He has a 2:1 in maths and computer science from the Open University’, I replied.
You were happy with me when I found out that Shipman lives in a small village called East Barming in Kent and we wanted to visit the village and eat at ‘The Bull’, ‘a fine, traditional pub’ at grid reference TQ7254.
We imagined Martin Shipman’s family and his daily dog walk.
We knew that it was surprisingly convenient for him to take the 7.32am train from Barming station to London Victoria before changing from district to jubilee lines at Westminster and that if he missed that one there would always be the 7.50am train.
Martin Shipman, whose name, to our delight, implied he had sailing heritage, became our navigator. He was more an idea to us than a real person - a way of living and finding meaning, a way of mediating the power struggle between us. It was no longer about the man who'd lost the card, his name just came to embody a concept that we'd needed all along. Loving him and hating him brought us together
Once, at the height of our research, I had typed the words 'Martin shipman's dog' into Google, on a whim, but I'd made a typing error and accidentally wrote 'Martin Shipman is god', instead. It seemed very poignant to me at the time, like a message from the cosmos, but I didn't believe in God as much as I believed in typing errors.
It had obviously been playing on your mind as well, because, one day, walking down the Old Kent Road, while discussing our mutual appreciation of those London roads that colloquially feature the word ‘the’, you cut me off mid sentence and exclaimed.
He isn't God, you know, he's just the referee!...
DING DING DING (bell sounds)
A spoken word piece to be performed with police cordon tape as blindfolds for the audience, with recorded sound effects of a crowd watching a South London amateur boxing match between each ‘round’ of text…
Round one:
You are enraged, because I am deliberately bouncing your new basketball in a brown puddle and as a punishment you are forcing me to tread on all the snails. I have put your contact lenses in the microwave and you have made bespoke itching powder with my crunchy nut cornflakes and added it to all the clothes I'd planned to wear for the party.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round two:
You don’t know it, but I am polluting your cups of tea with small amounts of London clay and fragments of controversial london buildings like senate house and centre point, which I have scraped off using a garlic grater and collected in an envelope. I long to add bits of the shard but 1. I don't want to hurt you 2. The london bridge security guard has noticed me and 3. It's impossible to scrape off glass using this technique.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round three:
You are describing to me, in excruciating detail, that dusty, artificial jungle display which is just above the revolving doors in Surrey quays shopping centre, by the 24 hour Tesco. In response, I am lowering your house price slightly by bribing all your neighbours to hang England flags from their bedroom windows
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round four:
I am informing you that the chair you are sitting on has never been washed and that this is true of most chairs in public places, although i admit that it is highly unlikely that you would catch a sexually transmitted disease from it.
In an attempt to reassert yourself, you have carved out breezeblocks and forced me to tape them to my shoes so that I am taller and heavier - you have calculated it so that I experience the exact size and weight of different political leaders throughout history.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round five:
You are making me stare into the floodlights of the Prince Albert memorial and wait for them to turn on at dusk. You are saying something about this moment being the official boundary between day and night.
Later that evening, I am talking you through a catalogue of industrial paints - JCB yellow, John Deere yellow, caterpillar orange, dark admiralty grey, camouflage beige. Inducing synesthesia by simultaneously making you smell the sweaty residue of the copper coins that I have been clasping in my hands the whole time. For you, this smell most strongly relates to the light blue Pantone of Lewisham council’s branded street signs
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round six:
I don't want to knock you out completely, so I am applying the usual 400 lbs of pressure to your temples, but I am doing it one pound at a time over the course of an hour by lightly poking them. This is distracting you from your work.
Frustrated by this, you have dragged me to Piccadilly Circus and are commanding me to painstakingly measure the difference in speed between those passers by who are happy or hopeful and those who are sad or defeated. By drawing a simple graph, i have worked out that the modal average speed difference is twenty-eight metres per kilometer, except when the sadness and defeat are combined with anxiousness, because this anxiousness increases the pace and therefore cancels the difference out.
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round seven:
Against your will, I have arranged for you to do work experience at the Millwall reuse and recycle plant, despite your phobia of windowless spaces, and, - in an effort to restrict your leisure time to minimal sensations - I have set all channels on your TV to show BBC parliament and I've gaffa-taped over the screen, except for a tiny square of pixels in the middle.
I have done this because you have thrown all my possessions into the sea at Margate, making a separate trip for each one to prolong the process
{BOXING AUDIO}
Round eight:
Pulling out all the stops this time, you’ve had me airlifted by window-cleaners to the top of One Canada Square, the tallest tower in Canary Wharf. You have positioned me on the peak of its silver, pyramid-shaped roof so that the red aircraft-warning lights are shining directly into my eyes and so that I have to breathe in the vents of the air conditioning units as they are released into the sky in a cloud of steam. You tell me that, because of the light shining on it, the steam is visible to an old lady in Bermondsey who is staring out of the window of her nineteenth floor apartment at Lupin Point, a high-rise residential block which made local headlines in 2011 when it was set on fire by a lightning storm.
I can’t speak back to you because you have sellotaped my mouth to the air vents so that I am forced to inhale from them, and you are describing in great detail how the steam being extracted is twenty four hours of the breath of a thousand office workers, and that 317 of these people have serious infectious diseases, one of which is a dormant strain of leprosy which was previously thought to have been eradicated in the UK in the eighteenth century. You are telling me that the air contains high levels of cortisol stress hormone and that this is a natural steroid, which suppresses the immune systems of the weak but makes the strong even stronger.
I am trying to hide the fact that the Sellotape over my mouth is starting to become unstuck because of the steam and I am pretending that I am not now breathing comfortably through the nostril that has been freed. You are shouting at me in an animated way, so that momentarily you lose your footing and almost fall backwards off the tower, 50 floors, 800 feet, onto the reinforced glass shelf that architects have installed to protect street level pedestrians in the event of a suicidal falling body.
You are reminding me that you knew that I was obsessed with this building, this tower because it made me feel both powerful and powerless at the same time, and that you knew I had spent a day pointing my finger up at it with my arm out stretched until it went numb or until I was stopped by one of the wardens .You knew that I hated the fact that the blue and white sign that said ‘polite notice’ was deliberately made to look like it said ‘police notice’ from afar.
You are saying you are aware I have been making more videos about the tower, like the one where I walked to it from Greenwich, with my camera focused on it the whole way so that it grew and grew as I got nearer, until I was right at the bottom of it looking up, videoing my reflection in its mirrored glass wall, by the entrance, on a Sunday, until my camera is covered up by the hand of a middle aged, middle eastern, female security guard who is mouthing ‘no’ through the glass and putting her palm out, telling me to stop filming. You think that I am angry at the tower because it had encouraged me to feel part of its powerfulness from a distance, in an iconic way, but then prevented me getting close to it.
Now you are saying that if I had really wanted to get close up I should be happy now that I am on top of it inhaling the breath of its inhabitants as my own. You thought I’d like that idea because you knew that I liked that thing that people say about the water cycle, when they say that your cup of tea once passed through the kidneys of Henry the eighth, or something like that.
You are mocking me about the excitement I had felt when I had walked past the ice rink in Canada Square Park and found a security access card belonging to a staff member from the tower, who must have dropped it. I had picked the card up with the initial intention of returning it to the reception desk as an alibi to enter the tower, but in the end I had kept it and researched it’s owner, convincing myself that this was so that I might post it back to him like any good citizen, although I knew it was really just so that I could find out more about him and imagine his life so that it would make life inside the tower seem more real, more human.
The card had a CitiBank logo on it and the name Martin Shipman, written in a bland typeface a bit like Andale Mono or Arial Unicode. Below the text was a photograph of a grey haired, middle aged man with glasses and a sheepish, uncomfortable half-smile which, when we looked it up in an online 'expressions index', was described as communicating the feeling 'back to the drawing board’. Is 'back to the drawing board' an emotion? I asked.
We thought it looked more like a disappointed smile, politely requesting that we respect logic and rules.
Some hours later, when we were down on the ground again, Martin Shipman would become the thing that united us.
'He is a Lead software architect at CitiBank, before that he worked for HSBC and Credit Suisse', you said, staring at the laptop screen. ‘He has a 2:1 in maths and computer science from the Open University’, I replied.
You were happy with me when I found out that Shipman lives in a small village called East Barming in Kent and we wanted to visit the village and eat at ‘The Bull’, ‘a fine, traditional pub’ at grid reference TQ7254.
We imagined Martin Shipman’s family and his daily dog walk.
We knew that it was surprisingly convenient for him to take the 7.32am train from Barming station to London Victoria before changing from district to jubilee lines at Westminster and that if he missed that one there would always be the 7.50am train.
Martin Shipman, whose name, to our delight, implied he had sailing heritage, became our navigator. He was more an idea to us than a real person - a way of living and finding meaning, a way of mediating the power struggle between us. It was no longer about the man who'd lost the card, his name just came to embody a concept that we'd needed all along. Loving him and hating him brought us together
Once, at the height of our research, I had typed the words 'Martin shipman's dog' into Google, on a whim, but I'd made a typing error and accidentally wrote 'Martin Shipman is god', instead. It seemed very poignant to me at the time, like a message from the cosmos, but I didn't believe in God as much as I believed in typing errors.
It had obviously been playing on your mind as well, because, one day, walking down the Old Kent Road, while discussing our mutual appreciation of those London roads that colloquially feature the word ‘the’, you cut me off mid sentence and exclaimed.
He isn't God, you know, he's just the referee!...
DING DING DING (bell sounds)
Monument to Madness:
A poem made by cutting up the newspapers the week after the 2015 Paris terror attacks.
(Daily Mail)
Dressed in floral camouflage, his blue eyes are hanging out of secret compartments.
Small boats.
Think tanks.
Circling, hawkish - over and over- with grips clutching lines against lines of exquisite fingerprints.
He speaks: "Brains will be inserted alongside any old rubbish, until they grow their own fur and expand significantly, then - crack, crack, crack, crack; they crack into a maze of crumbling houses".
The shift between hardware and cardboard was seamless. Around the fuming hole vague alerts of high rise sirens came together as a joke every few hundred shakes.
He restarted crawling through bittersweet dust-fall, pretending to be interplanetary.
In the darkness, ten reflective animals await a conclusion; pregnant with internal forefathers.
(Telegraph)
They raced certainty as it exited through spindle-like turnstiles, four or five stepovers before crossing the end of the beginning. This odd excursion into humour was fatigue-driven, requesting that the boxers walk out backwards, accompanied by crystal clear, prolonged drum rolls, beating a basic but effective code, interjected only by split-second well wishers uttering strategic simulations (all drawn in the fog, or down the pit).
(Guardian)
Still in their packaging, but no longer on the menu, the more timid descendants nodded their heads and the more brave said yes.
The great predictor let the rain-soaked asphalt dribble away and tilted his head to the sky, parked it against clouds, and watched video footage of it on live television. Fast forward. This was making matters worse. "Um, err" he said coughing nervously (because that's how young men speak on screens).
His upturned nose opened up its apertures of passionate nostrils. the smell was unbearable; thawing remains of pizza, banknotes and medical tubes.
He now has one free hand. it is growing and he will use it.
A poem made by cutting up the newspapers the week after the 2015 Paris terror attacks.
(Daily Mail)
Dressed in floral camouflage, his blue eyes are hanging out of secret compartments.
Small boats.
Think tanks.
Circling, hawkish - over and over- with grips clutching lines against lines of exquisite fingerprints.
He speaks: "Brains will be inserted alongside any old rubbish, until they grow their own fur and expand significantly, then - crack, crack, crack, crack; they crack into a maze of crumbling houses".
The shift between hardware and cardboard was seamless. Around the fuming hole vague alerts of high rise sirens came together as a joke every few hundred shakes.
He restarted crawling through bittersweet dust-fall, pretending to be interplanetary.
In the darkness, ten reflective animals await a conclusion; pregnant with internal forefathers.
(Telegraph)
They raced certainty as it exited through spindle-like turnstiles, four or five stepovers before crossing the end of the beginning. This odd excursion into humour was fatigue-driven, requesting that the boxers walk out backwards, accompanied by crystal clear, prolonged drum rolls, beating a basic but effective code, interjected only by split-second well wishers uttering strategic simulations (all drawn in the fog, or down the pit).
(Guardian)
Still in their packaging, but no longer on the menu, the more timid descendants nodded their heads and the more brave said yes.
The great predictor let the rain-soaked asphalt dribble away and tilted his head to the sky, parked it against clouds, and watched video footage of it on live television. Fast forward. This was making matters worse. "Um, err" he said coughing nervously (because that's how young men speak on screens).
His upturned nose opened up its apertures of passionate nostrils. the smell was unbearable; thawing remains of pizza, banknotes and medical tubes.
He now has one free hand. it is growing and he will use it.
Worms, channels, and choosing not to choose: A poem made for Cambridge.
We glide up Hills Road, not uphill but up Hills Road - fish flat, as fen skates.
Past the monument to Hobson’s Conduit. A tunnel is just a subversive kind of bridge.
You tried to dig your way to the other side of the world. A wormhole to Massachusetts – the other Cambridge. Wading through Fords. The Model T once flowed out of here.
A car for ordinary people, available "in any color...as long as it's black". Dark paint dries quicker, you see.
It’s Hobson’s choice, a term for no choice at all, named after Thomas Hobson, back here in 1712. The Cambridge Carrier, he liked to keep his stables stable, so he rotated the beasts.
There are many ways of exiting, but you’ll get what you’re given. Black death or black cab - Take a punt.
Punting is like pole-vaulting horizontally. Falling sideways. Extinct birds suspended in spirits.
In the zoology department, the species are lined up - bottles of tequila with surrogate worms. The worms are all busy, because Darwin’s wife is playing the piano to them to check whether they have senses. No reaction. Perhaps they’d prefer more base. These wriggling, pink, two-faced palindromes are the same forwards as they are backwards. 'Never odd or even’ reverse and repeat, ‘Never odd or even’. Goes both ways like the Thames.
Mrs Darwin interprets this indecisiveness as ignorance and is shouting at them, ‘I trained under Chopin, you know!’
We glide up Hills Road, not uphill but up Hills Road - fish flat, as fen skates.
Past the monument to Hobson’s Conduit. A tunnel is just a subversive kind of bridge.
You tried to dig your way to the other side of the world. A wormhole to Massachusetts – the other Cambridge. Wading through Fords. The Model T once flowed out of here.
A car for ordinary people, available "in any color...as long as it's black". Dark paint dries quicker, you see.
It’s Hobson’s choice, a term for no choice at all, named after Thomas Hobson, back here in 1712. The Cambridge Carrier, he liked to keep his stables stable, so he rotated the beasts.
There are many ways of exiting, but you’ll get what you’re given. Black death or black cab - Take a punt.
Punting is like pole-vaulting horizontally. Falling sideways. Extinct birds suspended in spirits.
In the zoology department, the species are lined up - bottles of tequila with surrogate worms. The worms are all busy, because Darwin’s wife is playing the piano to them to check whether they have senses. No reaction. Perhaps they’d prefer more base. These wriggling, pink, two-faced palindromes are the same forwards as they are backwards. 'Never odd or even’ reverse and repeat, ‘Never odd or even’. Goes both ways like the Thames.
Mrs Darwin interprets this indecisiveness as ignorance and is shouting at them, ‘I trained under Chopin, you know!’
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