—By David Berridge
I left the farm for rumours of the coffee shops of Brick Lane. Amidst a hedgerow, a loyalty card two drinks away from one free. On my way from Somerset to London I visited the Three Gorges Damn, proof that the world is more interconnected daily. It had been presumed I was looking for a wife, until I told everyone, curious or not, my aim: to understand globalisation as it could be experienced in my own body, not just as an economic miracle, but as being unsure.
This was an intuitive journey, so we went by bus. I confined myself solely to within the dam, deliberately positioning myself so that I saw little of the surrounding valley, the demolition of cities and painted lines across homes and businesses, marking where the new water level would be. Lover of contemporary art, former farmer, Shoreditch legend, turning within the concrete mass of the ship canal. There was no way to attain perspective or sense of scale amid such an enormity of concrete.
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Two plates of Singapore Chow mein arrived. The Oriental Kitchen in South Kensington removes the ambiguity of the word-image relationship by putting photographs of all its dishes on the restaurant window, but I complained about some inconsistencies with the reality before me. Also in the restaurant were Adam and Eve and the apple; men tangled together on the grass; and the intellectuals, who have cheese graters where their necks should be.
Such intellectuals, I noted, are lousy on the finer points of art theory, but can predict the weather for weeks ahead by observing noodles squirrels in Hyde Park. In the corner of The Oriental Kitchen nameless people covered in plastic were sitting in a bath. There was nobody to ask about this, apart from Adam, who was texting. Adam talked eloquently of how, when he was younger, he hadn’t been covered in plastic and although still abstract he had been comprised of more diffuse areas of colour. Adam and I became friends with our shared lack of questioning and perceptual incapacities.
Plate cleared, I talked loudly about how this whole adventure of urban living would destroy the human race and it had not been my idea.
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Later that same night sat in Bay 16 at Victoria Coach Station, stolen paintings propped up against anti-vagrancy benches. They no longer seemed like the paintings we had loved so much on the gallery walls, but something that might hang unsold from park railings on a sunday. Our hope had been a theft that described to us how our own flesh would age; bodies, broken and fractured but enlightened, like stain glass windows.
()
I remember a confused, bad-tempered exchange about the forthrightness of the sitters, how they refused to be passive recipients of our gaze. Naked and ugly, someone said, they should be a bit more ashamed. I do not worry about forgetting most of the discussion, particularly when that night, curled up on the night bus from Victoria to Vauxhall, I dream a title for each of the stolen pictures: Sleeping Men. Couple. The Dream Couple. The Biologist. The Illegitimate Bride. Spell. Three Ways of Being.
I never reached Vauxhall. Destiny had other plans. After many hours aboard the bus as it drove a route as close as streets and buildings allowed to a perfect circle around Liverpool Street station, I was deposited - dizzy, coach sick, moonstruck - on the steps of Shoreditch Church, which I continue to believe to this day is a part of Somerset.
()
Offering a different model of politics, at the sculpture park I had encountered a rough hewn wooden version of myself. Someone had broken off the arm and used it to smash up the face, which left me looking around Arcadia for somewhere to breakfast, index finger picking away at the skin around my thumb and it was bleeding.
When I finally found the cafe it was called My First Government. Blood sports on my shoe. I was without clock time, which felt good for the first former minute. A small local firm, combining home made organic cosmetics, antique furniture, and international terrorism. Closed down after, in a moment I read as irreverent, Caravaggio put his finger in the wound.
Interesting bastard, I thought. I might feel pity, amid the excessive packaging. Then I remembered, former farmer and non-sequitur, fat from the stone circles and White Horses, newly animated, closing in on Shoreditch, eager for satire. Quickly, I checked my RSS feed. My Enemy seemed to be reflecting on the art of the novel, god help us. I read:
…When I know what a novel is about I write it on a post-it note and pin it to the computer. I mean meaning as it expresses itself in extreme condensation. I don’t want to be overly prescriptive and who can be if, like me, you are 300 novels into a projected 700 novel sequence known by the working title of Ambient Apologies.
As you can imagine, working on this scale, I have quite a collection of post-it notes, completely filling the screen of my computer. This makes sure that I never know what I am writing and so maintains the mystery of the creative process. The other day I found myself, rather unavoidably, staring at all the post-it notes, wondering if I preferred the post-it notes to the novels themselves. Not only can I not see the novels as I am writing them, but when they are published I refuse on principle to ever look at them again. Marketing genius.
I recently gathered all my post-it notes together, wanting some summation before embarking simultaneously on the 400 remaining novels in the Ambient Apologies cycle. For the first time I realised that the same word was on each small, yellow rectangle of post-it note and that word was:
CHRISTMAS
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Shut down. Never shut down.
()
I am nostalgic for the Taj Mahal, which I have never been to. I am nostalgic for fruit, which I eat daily. I am nostalgic for the snail, perhaps remembering back into evolution when I too had my house on my back and smoothed my passage through society by secreting saliva out of my stomach.
()
Some of my finest reading experiences have come from finding a correspondence between a particular book and a mode of transport. Such connections must always be made quickly and intuitively. Buying books for which there is no specific journey intended, hoping such a journey will suggest itself in the future, is expensive, and an easy way to clutter both living area and mind.
Maybe the book you are holding when you squeeze onto that Central Line rush hour train, isn’t the one you want to be reading as Mountain Rescue airlift you off Mount Snowdon. It’s hard to carry a good selection when the books you love rarely have electronic versions, and so it is with the contemporary city. A clown heads up stream through a dense Tropical rainforest, somewhere in:
(a) Tower Hamlets or
(b) Brazil.
Correct. That’s also what I love about London: there is the collapse of space-time due to instantaneous data transfer and there is the Docklands Light Railway.
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A listings bird - un oiseau listes - told me that somewhere in the vicinity there were some trousers that were an art work. I had so many preconceptions. The trousers would be on top of a building, huge and inflated with wind, traffic noise and/or political urgency…
…Preconceptions mold our seeing. I walked up and down the road, looking for what I expected. It was a long time before I stopped, exhausted, staring into an empty shop front, which, I realised, contained a pair of empty trousers on the floor. Were these trousers art? Un oiseau listes says “inflating trousers”(pantalons gonfler). I wait for an hour and a half, thinking the inflating process is durational and designed to prompt a reflective state in the observer. Then I realise the trousers as art are not working.
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I was thinking about My Enemy, let’s call him He Who Represents What I Find Most Difficult About Life (HWRWIFMD). I was glad HWRWIFMD was many cities away, but his awful blog eradicated geography. A new post indicated he was taking a break from the 400 novels to work on a short memoir with the working title GENIUS: THE PDF YEARS.
What follows [began the extract I downloaded from HWRWIFMD’s website]is an attempt at a love story. Amidst the continual globalising forces of neo-realism they meet in a kind of carelessness, a way of walking, disagreeing on the number of stairs but not by enough to warrant a re-count. It is each other they have climbed up here to see, amidst the environmental disaster of a London where all the windows of The Gherkin are covered in pages of The Metro. A smoke trail erases science, then disappears into a coffee chain, swapping culture for a stir stick…
()
Perhaps the re-appearance of Hansel and Gretel as prize winning conversationalists.
A certain nostalgia I sought to recapture, of London, but through the raising of an arm above the head.
I blew into the jar, alternating angle and strength of breath combinations until I obtained the desired sound: two hardback books realising they had missed the last turn off before the Dartford tunnel.
The starving people of Rainham ask the film maker: how do you feel?
The interrelation of sounds foretold an exciting encounter with a Pisces, locating such vibrations to a rare re-alignment of traffic islands around Marble Arch and Park Lane.
Don’t worry.
Almost everywhere has its subculture of lonely men and this six pack of Taste the Difference vine tomatoes is not going to be any exception.
