Six Pints of Philosophy

Last night I was taken on a pub crawl around Hoxton. My companion had worked in the area some time ago when the area was still a Scene, full of second hand suits and crap hats.

The crap hats are still to be found but the atmosphere seems bullish rather than trendy. The area, to the east of Old Street station, has slowly been invaded by All Bar One wannabes... once the scene was established the money came sniffing around and chased many of the artists out further east towards Bethnal Green. But the transformation is not total and many echoes remain from before...the Bricklayers Arms is still a meeting place for the crap hats, and the shuffling old men who trawl the pubs for spare change are still on patrol.

As the warm evening turned increasingly cloudy we stood outside a pub just down the road from the Bricklayers and watched as one of the shuffling men, frustrated by a miserable haul from the crowds, tumbled out onto the street straight in front of a bus. The bus screamed to a halt so that it was pressed right up against him. Alas, the stupid bastard got lucky this time... Unhurt, and without acknowledging how close he had come to flying through the air like a drop-kicked rugby ball, he meandered onwards across the road into the shadows. He was shortly followed by Germaine Greer, who strode past looking Dynamic and Important, something that was explained by the camera crew capturing her for some unnecessary linking portion of whatever show she was doing.

I speculated that she was providing the visual backdrop for a piece of narration for Grumpy Old Women in which she dismissed Hoxton as a place full of second hand suits and crap hats. (I’m the one in the red T-shirt.) But what the hell. When the Greer is on form she can out-argue the world and is damned entertaining as she does so...she has pursued some startling paths at times, including a documentary not too long ago in which she went gooey over the classical beauty of the teenage boy. To illustrate her point she only chose the best looking models...clear-skinned boys bereft of hoods, smiling politely and with their middle fingers conveniently retracted. I believe there was a book to sell.

Soon we moved on, passing a row of unassuming shops and cafes...but then my companion bore left and I followed through a barely noticeable entrance that led down a staircase into a tiny bar. He explained that it was a Polish bar. I looked around in appreciation; many vodkas lay in wait behind the bar staff, the walls appeared to be plastered with faded communist propaganda, and going to the toilet was a strange and beautiful experience...like pissing in a Russian wine cellar on the fag end of a LSD trip. The place was normally quiet and atmospheric, a well-kept secret even on weekends. But tonight was busy; in the corner a birthday party was consuming champagne and bellowing uselessly, which is a kick in the head for everybody else in such a small place.

In the midst of a DJ’s sequence of records that lurched around the musical pallette like a pissed Picasso, the conversation turned to the BBC. We made much noise about the license fee and concluded that our resentfulness in not having a choice in the matter was outweighed by the programming, blah blah blah. It is not an interesting debate but, since the licence fee is paid separately from generic taxation, it sticks out like a sore thumb and everybody, as a consequence, has an opinion on it.

These kinds of debate are all over the BBC news site like stink on a monkey in the form of the “have your say” sections bolted onto the end of many stories. These things are wonderfully pointless and the ball is kicked from end to end with no goal ever scored...but they do provide insight into the politics of low level debate. In the rush to react in a horrified manner, for instance, the average poster will ignore every other post no matter how comprehensively their point has already been disproved. And somebody always comes in half way through and makes a well-informed point to trump everybody else, only for this to be lost in the wake of people repeating what other people have said.

Most people are comfortable only with a small subset of all possible debates. These debates are the tabloid-friendly ones in which there are two diametrically opposed and easily grasped points of view that cannot be reconciled, even in the impossible event that all parties understood all the facts and background of the debate. Frequently the two opposing groups fit into one of several classic models; politically, say, you have your left versus your right. But they can be boiled down further to fundamental splits in human thought. The foundations of many arguments, once everything else has been boiled away, are ethics, and we will never reconcile the ethics of the ends justifying the means versus the deontological theory espoused by Kant that states: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Such pronouncements are not provable under science and will remain mere theories until the earth burns up...but what the hell, eh? If we somehow “proved” one of these things we would only ever argue through ignorance. Well...even more than usual.

I don’t know where we go from here and I have been side-tracked into reading up on Kant now. But balls to it anyway; I am told I have a meeting to attend...another member of staff is being sacked and I must write it all down...see how much encoded filth I can slip into the minutes this time.

Indeed...the fun never ends.

A Sense of Perspective

“On 4 February last year, he says he was leading a demonstration of around 500 people through Harare when the police went for him. They knocked him to the ground with a baton and started kicking him with heavy boots, he says.

Then they piled him into an open police van and drove him around the streets publicly beating him in front of the demonstrators, he claims. When he resumed consciousness, he says, he found he had been dumped in the countryside where he was helped by some young villagers.“ -- BBC News. (Source here)

“Commuter Jamie Norman, who travels from Manningtree in Essex to London each weekday, described the bacon roll offer as offensive. One passengers were having to travel in Third World conditions, he said.” – BBC News. (emphasis added. Source here)

Well, I am sitting here wondering how to attack this one. What is my point here? Insensitivity resulting in a lack of perspective from our commuter? Lazy recourse to hyperbolic cliché that means nothing on analysis? Or the suspicion that the guy did not actually refer to the Third World at all and the quote was knocked together by the writer attempting to cover the gist of what he said in the most quotable manner possible.

The laws of perspective say that things move faster when they are nearer the observer...but I am unwilling to jabber on about how we should think ourselves lucky in this country. That is an artificial and bloated point of view used entirely to knock down any criticism without any chance of a comeback, either to promote one’s own compassion or to shoulder barge the argument onto one’s own agenda, no matter how tenuous the connection.

“I tripped over a bench yesterday.”

“Stop moaning! You should count your blessings that you weren’t mutilated and torn to pieces by fox hunters.”

“What?”

Indeed. But the subject chimes loudly with the sound of previous posts I have written here, and I should not dwell upon the thing.

Let us return to the quotes. ”Third World conditions”? Perhaps he would have the makings of a point if the guy was beaten publicly for making his complaint. Ah, but he is not guilty of being an insensitive bastard. He is simply parroting a phrase used frequently to justify a complaint, trying to puff it up into an epic tale of woe and loss. It is a stupid and selfish phrase, and somewhere here is a psychological point to be made. These are deep waters of ignorance on my part here, but what the hell. We will blunder onwards.

When people make a complaint they are sticking their neck out, something they want to do but feel uncomfortable about doing so. So they resort to the familiar, the comfortable, manifesting itself in a pile of arguments already made by others. These arguments are typified by the language of the tabloid where dumb arguments are shouted, not through the channels of logic but balanced on the continually shifting sands of “common sense”. Nice and easy to pick up and throw like rocks at your nemesis... no need to put together an argument, just don your best pair of thin lips and begin tut-tutting like a fucked machine gun.

And the rage that blinds them makes this thing the most important thing in the world, something that affects everyone; yet the rage comes from the ego, not some shared bond between fellow sufferers.

But the rage needs to be guided. This is done by cultural conditioning...the people complaining are steeped in the lore of the country as dictated by what is seen to be news. And stories about compensation are legion. Claims for compensation in the UK have fallen in the last year but the concepts involved strike deep into our psyches, so we get a perverse thrill in being told that we are spiralling down into hell. But this thrill is not something we like to share. Over the years we became comfortable with the society remodelled by Thatcher away from collectivism...there are many bonds that hold society together but these are overridden all too easily by our senses of self-preservation, nowadays manifesting itself not through fight or flight survival but through the pursuit of riches. We admit that something feels wrong, but for now we want our reward.

Hmm. Sweeping generalisations and bad gibberish there...so let us sum up the situation in a clear manner: England is not a Third World country and nothing in her boundaries can ever be claimed to be anything like Third World conditions. To claim otherwise is disingenuous and insulting. This is no politically correct retort...that term is meaningless anyway. And I would not claim to speak on behalf of the Third World; only men with mad hair and a penchant for swearing can do that. This is simply a case in which self-obsession has destroyed one man’s sense of perspective; whether I am talking about the commuter or myself is another matter.

Dancing Lessons from God

It is the 21st Century and something rotten lives at the heart of English transportation. The government's plans for the roads have been for some time to force people off the road through high taxation, thus pushing us onto the railways.

Today we hear proposals by ATOC to drive people off the railway by introducing congestion charges, thus pushing us onto the roads.

So we have to be thankful they are razing villages to the ground to make way for a vast and repulsive new terminal at Heathrow because, by 2010, the only way we'll be able to get to work is by flying.

Or maybe teleportation will exist. Who knows? We may even have affordable city living by then and not need to commute...

Ah, the red mist pours down quickly these days. But it is hard to keep a straight face here; the weak grin on my face is fighting for space with the hot tears of frustration. This is a painful time to make a living, folks. If parliament passed a law tomorrow to legalise gangs of uniformed men paid to pick out commuters at random, throw them to the floor and beat the shit out of them before stealing their wallets, not one of us would not be surprised.

We're doomed every which way. There is only one solution left, and we have Seinfeld to thank for that. (source)

JERRY: I told her we should have those moving walkways all over the city.

GEORGE: Like at the airport?

JERRY: Yeah.

GEORGE: That's a great idea!

JERRY: Tell me about it!

GEORGE: We could be zipping all over the place.

JERRY: They could at least try it.

GEORGE: They never try anything.

JERRY: What's the harm?

GEORGE: No harm!

Indeed...care to open your mind, Alistair?

Chalk Outlines on Sun-Cooked Concrete

This weekend I lived for pleasure alone. I staggered around London from market to barbecue and pub to picnic, leaving behind me an unbroken trail of suntan lotion. Anyone following me would have found themselves slipping and tumbling like a busted acrobat.

Despite swimming in factor 12 I was still mildly cooked by the time I arrived home on Sunday evening. I checked it on a Dulux colour card last night; my arms are now a shade of orange between umber and clay. And today the Evening Standard is shouting that the hot weather will continue for another ten days. This is fine by me.

But today has been less of a pleasure. We will skip past the commute to work during which I somehow caught a tube going in the wrong direction, and go straight to the chilling conversation I had this morning. It began whilst we stood at the window, idly watching people mill back and forth on the concourse.

“You see where you’re standing?” he said, pointing to a spot in the manager’s office beneath my feet.

“Yeah.”

“Someone bled to death there.”

Almost unconsciously I found myself retreating through the door.

“What? When?”

“Couple of years ago. A workman was on the roof and slipped, came plummeting through the roof and splat! Down onto the floor just there. Fell on a massive shard of glass and lay, unable to move or cry out, as the blood poured onto the floor.”

“Ye gods. I see they worked wonders with the carpet.”

“They had to redecorate the place. Pain in the arse when it’s a listed building.”

“Well. The workman should have thought of that before destroying the roof.”

“I don’t think he really cared by that stage.”

We left the subject there and went back to bitching about the weather.

There is no need to make the observation that we are obsessed with talking about the weather in this country, especially when it comes to putting together a newspaper. Or indeed a weblog. So much easier to stomach than blood and guts and shards of glass. Naturally the papers were basking today in the easy journalism of broken records associated with the weather...appropriate considering this is what these stories begin to sound like after a while.

More visibly, the photographers had once again located a pair of giggly 19 year-olds in bikinis. These girls appear every month or so, sometimes in a story about hot weather, sometimes exam results, sometimes binge drinking, and so on. Quite a coincidence, and the sweat on the male commuter’s brow this morning as he read his free paper was not a result of the heat. Some of the papers even found room at the foot of the page to mention the deaths and injuries resulting from the weather. But who wants to read about that when we have norks to study?

It is the silly season after all. Farmers are staging a demonstration today about popular usage of the word potato, Tom Cruise and fiancée Katie Holmes held a public press conference about their private lives and somebody has invented a lobster electrocution machine. Small, small beer. Even the Proper News is struggling with itself, trying to find hooks and new angles in the driest of subjects. Squabbling in Europe, for example. Chirac is...ah, what the hell. Google it. Save me the trouble of having to think.

Formula One, meanwhile, fell through the floor yesterday like a clumsy workman. But the body has been bleeding to death for years now. Yesterday all we saw was another knife in the wound...the spectacle of fourteen cars withdrawing at the start of the race on the request of Michelin. Apparently Michelin had brought a bunch of no-good tyres to America (a fact that damn near killed Ralf Schumacher), but were told that the track would not be altered to compensate for this.

I do not follow the sport and therefore cannot react on an emotional level to this. But the fans interviewed on television knew what to say. They cursed and bellowed and threw missiles onto the track. They said that the future of Formula One in America was now twisting in the wind; whether or not this is the case, there are many disillusioned fans who feel ripped off once too often by the rotten Ecclestone-led management. Even a cursory glance at the situation suggests that the sport has been destroyed from the top down and nobody in charge can be trusted to run the sport with any level of dignity.

One of the problems with the sport is nobody’s fault. Formula One is a multi-million pound sport that, nevertheless, is completely centralised. There is a single series of races a year and the personnel changes infrequently. If any part of the sport fails then the entire process grinds to an embarrassing halt, whereas with most other sports you would have to stab and keep on stabbing in many places before the beast collapsed. If one football match is abandoned those fans would be angry, but the sport itself would barely feel the wound.

This issue would not be relevant if the sport was managed well. And unlike Doctor Who, this particular Ecclestone is not about to regenerate into someone prettier any time soon. Ah, but we now find ourselves knee-deep in related arguments...about the increasing role of technology and the constant rule changes just to keep up. About track safety and trying to keep the race exciting. About the opaque nature of the management... It all comes down to one question; is this a sport that has become incompatible with the modern world where excitement and risk elimination fight like angry cockerels, and to hell with how well the sport is managed?

How should I know?

I like speculative questions. Statements you must back up, but these kind of questions are wonderfully doom-laden even when irrelevant or wildly out of context.

But anyone who dares play the devil’s advocate in my company will receive a black eye. Devil’s advocate is the easiest way of Cheating in Arguments, a subject I have examined before. In this case you are not so much cheating as forcing the other person to do all the work. The more questions you ask the sooner it will be before the other person lies exhausted on the floor and unable to back up some unimportant fact on which you challenge them... the result being that you claim victory on a technicality. Try this with me and you will find Occam’s Razor is more than just an abstract logical concept.

Well...since this whole thing has become detached from its moorings and has floated off into somebody else’s airspace, I should come to an end here. Or is this perhaps a gut reaction to the sudden thought that I have yet to come up with a point to this post?

Hmm... apparently some speculative questions are easier to answer than others.

Dull of Kintyre

The latest forecasts are saying that this weekend will burn us all to a glorious crisp. London will be ablaze with fizzing rays that beckon us through the streets towards the parks and commons, where a thousand barbecues will spring up to convert a million burgers from succulent meat patty to curious black disc of crumbling toss.

And we will dance the traditional dance of the splodgy red Englishman who dismisses suncream as some kind of poofy make-up shit. We will holler and sweat and forget to bring the breadcakes. We will wake up six hours later in A&E dipped in a vat of camomile lotion, attached to a stomach pump and attended to by a hospital porter with busy hands and a lazy eye. Ye gods, just add a ten mile tailback and we would be in classic bank holiday territory.

But it does not matter how many head wounds we receive once the children next door decide the normal game of frisbee is not enough fun. After today we will be grateful to bask in that atmosphere...at least after today. We are currently living through a miserable little pit of a Wednesday even now filling up with rainwater and bile. Today people are edgy and the celebrity potties are overflowing with verbal filth.

I returned to the office earlier after being trapped like a rat in Marks and Spencers. The aisles were blocked by luggage and the queues were populated by extras from a bad zombie film. The last straw was when somebody paid by Visa for an item priced at 66 pence...the smell of retribution poured off the rest of the queue like grease from a takeaway.

So I passed back through reception in a foul mood, barely even noticing an American passenger asking one of our staff “but why is it raining?”

In the office, one of our highest managers was bewildered. “Paul McCartney just called me a fucking tosser”, he said.

“Really?” I said. “What for?”

What for? Because, he explained, Macca does not know how to catch a train. He had said to McCartney that the doors had been closed so that the train can leave on time, but Paul just narrowed his eyes and snapped that he has been waiting half an hour for this train. Nobody can say for sure why the daft bastard was unable to work out how to get on board in the intervening twenty nine minutes and thirty seconds.

“So he walks away and mumbles that I was a fucking tosser,” he said. “Another manager steps in and tells him that nobody should speak that way to our staff. Paul just grumbles incoherently, shrugging like a Frenchman with a dislocated shoulder.”

“Hmm. I suspect that son of a bitch has been hanging around Bob Geldof again,” I said. “Is he doing Live 8?”

Indeed he is.

Perhaps we are being unfair. Macca did not go so far as to say “do you know who I am?”... although it would be more appropriate to ask “do you know who I was?” And if he had sworn at someone whom we despised...well, we would have been applauding the wrinkly old sod. Judging a person’s character is only a matter of what side that person is on. We are forever taking offence and taking personally what people say just because frustrated outbursts do not come with a red triangle and a written disclaimer.

Still...in this case, our manager was amused rather than upset, so what the hell.

This was just one of many strange ripples send out by Live 8. Pink Floyd are reforming for the event, an event that nobody expected yet few people seemed to actually care. As somebody pointed out, if each artists only gets 20 minutes to perform, the Floyd will not even get chance to finish playing their introduction.

Ebay, meanwhile, found themselves jostled on either side by a weird crowd...first they said that they would not stop ticket touts using the site to sell Live 8 tickets but would bung some money to Bob in a pisspoor gesture of goodwill. Max Clifford saw this and choked on his breakfast, whilst Bob said “fook” a lot. A load of “vigilantes” then bid millions of pounds for each ticket to fuck up the auctions, which meant Ebay had no choice but to retract their previous statement and annouce they would close down all Live 8 auctions. The Bob said “fook” again because Paul McCartney was precisely half an hour late this morning to their power brunch.

To hell with all that. Just one more thing and we can go our separate ways.

The Guardian and Observer should be at the forefront of debunking mumbo jumbo and general quackery...the yin to the Daily Mail’s carcinogenic yang. So why the hell did the Observer give over several pages of their normally excellent food magazine to Gillian McKeith the other day? Here she was diagnosing food deficiency through tongue analysis. The article did allude to the cold reality of real science, but seemed happier when it was using up two full pages with a picture of her lying naked in a pile of fruit and vegetables. (Anybody who mentions melons here should hang their heads.)

No matter how much gibberish she spits out, no matter how many genuine scientists say “no, actually you are wrong and I have a pile of evidence to prove it,” she keeps on going, unstopped and unstoppable. The Guardian has Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science section, of course, in which he once bought his cat the same phD as McKeith claimed to have earned from a university of nutrition. Yet in today’s Guardian there is a two page article on biodynamic food.

Ever heard of it? If not, think of a pond. Think of an enormous pond crammed full of jabbering ducks, each wired up to a bunch of microphones that run through an amplifier and distribute the resulting signal to a network of massive speakers, the sort they erect at the sides of a music festival stage. And think of the sound that results: a deafening chorus of quack, quack, quack, quack, QUACK.... Okay, so we are not going for in-depth analysis here...if you give any kind of damn then the information is doubtless all over the internet like stink on a monkey, but for now we shall wallow in a single quote and then wash our hands of this rubbish.

”In order to understand biodynamic farming, there has to be a paradigm shift.” explains Ton Baars, newly appointed professor of biodynamics at Kassel University in Germany. “I try to explain to my students that there are forces such as gravity and magnetism which are accepted by conventional science, and these forces we refer to as hard forces. But biodynamics deals with soft forces as well. Biodynamics is a holistic view of the world, and our science also takes this approach.” – from The Guardian.

Tch.

Last Invitation to Neverland

Word broke somewhere around nine that the verdict in the Michael Jackson verdict was due within 30 minutes...I shrugged, opened a bottle of beer and threw on a video.

That video is now over and it is around ten o'clock. I flick idly to BBC1. Hmm...nothing has been announced as yet, but here comes the news...and the BBC is breathlessly rubbing its legs in anticipation of the verdict that is now due "any moment". They are filling time with gleeful analysis at the moment...pictures of the crowds outside the trial and throwing out wild estimates as to the possible sentence.

"It is almost impossible to predict anything" says the correspondent, and a world wonders why they have just spent five minutes doing just that.

Ye gods, there are hundreds of these boggle-eyed supporters. All showing their "religious devotion" to the man...but belief is not proof and their cries of his undoubted innocence are as pathetic as they are speculative.

And we are told once again that we are still waiting for the verdict. Other news items are queueing up behind this wall to wall guesswork...but what the hell, eh? This is celebrity we are dealing with...the prince of pop, reduced to the level of a goddamn suspect...this is our new entertainment, our blockbuster movie, our bread and fucking butter.

But a lot of shit has come out here...messy revelations that have stained many things and many people, which will be hard to shift even with the industrial strength Shake N Vac that is the high-flying American lawyer. No matter what Jackson is coming out of this with a dreadful aura around him, a foul and twisted smell that will never disperse. All we now want to know is how he will be punished, either by the legal or the celebrity system.

Ah, but surely...he could be found innocent. He is a celebrity...so what? This does not make his automatically anything, except perhaps bloody bonkers.

Except that, as the BBC point out, there is too much here...too many pieces of bizarre and rank evidence that, no matter how one looks at it and re-spins it to avoid any connection with child molestation, will have to lead to some kind of punishment. Unless every damning piece of evidence fell out of thin air in some kind of cruel conjuring experiment concocted by...who? The media? "Haters"? Hmm.

"Maybe...", "but that is unlikely", "we are about to get a verdict..." And still it comes. They cannot leave the story but...

Ye gods! This is the verdict at 10.14...

Not guilty...not guilty...not guilty...not guilty...not guilty...and not guilty!

All serious charges have been dismissed...

Furthermore, not guilty of the provision of alcohol case...

And so it goes on. The lesser charges fall like dominoes.

Well...there is nothing I can say here. There are enough doe-eyed young girls in the crowd who will happily shriek over anything I have to say, which is nothing. Nothing. I don't care about this man and never will. He is a creepy fucker and he has been found not guilty of anything at all by the American justice system. The girls will shriek, tabloid editors will be spunking hard enough to create pock marks in the wall and the entire Internet will collapse in a huge pile of retrospective bollocks. They told you so, they will say for the rest of time, whilst the more cynical webloggers will roast in their own juices.

So a celebrity has not been put in jail. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn.

Ambience of the Busted Mind

What is the worst ambience, the most depressing landscape designed to suffocate the soul and inject a feeling of dread straight into the gut? No, we are not leading anywhere with this...there is no punchline, no knowing references to Brussels or Stamford Bridge. What we have here is an exercise in atmosphere porn, throwing adjectives around like hyperactive toddlers.

The abandoned hospital, then. Let the camera roam for a while...emerge from between a pair of dying yews and follow a trail that leads through overgrown paths that feed into a main gravel drive running up to the main door. A Victorian creation, the wood is now splintering and rotten and barely on the hinges.

Wander inside now, past chunks of fallen plaster and exposed wiring, being careful not to trip over an upended wheelchair and end up sprawled across a network of puddles formed from the drip, drip, drip of a leaking roof. Sunlight leaks in through shattered panes, illuminating a few spots of ancient blood on the tiles.

We stumble through a door into a room full of bad instruments...tools to gouge and to hack and to cauterise. There are walls covered with restraints and entire racks of jars with toxic medicine to burn out the insides with their ignorant acids. In the centre of the room there is a table that appears to be designed to take one fully grown person, and there are metal loops to secure the arms and legs. A shiny metal colander is held firm where the head would go, and next to this is a rack of – let’s say – chainsaws. Why not?

Right...the pitfalls inherent in this exercise are emerging already. Are we being sidetracked by a combination of horror and melancholy? Dread and lamentation? Hmm. If all we are going to get here are cupboards full of corpses ready to tumble about our feet, it cannot give us the right hit of weird unease. Hell, this is almost a hymn for a time where medicine came at the end of gardening implements and psychotherapy used steel machinery to make its point.

This is no good. And had we come here by night, perhaps with a storm raging and thunder crashing all around...then we are only one step away from being sent straight to video. No, we are swimming in the wrong waters here.

What we need is some reality. Unfiltered by hysterical film-making and teary-eyed reminiscence of a bygone age, we should now examine a contemporary example.

The most obvious example here is the office. Every day a fresh hell, a thousand cuts by the hands of a clock ticking idly away. Here we are forced to spend more of our waking time during the week than at home and frequently there is no end in sight. This would seem to be the crux of the matter, the profound unease we experience that we are trapped in a nasty, fluorescent box whilst our lives dribble away and nothing creative can get in through the sealed windows. The environment is artificial and sterile and has no good ambience whatsoever. Hence we have fulfilled the criteria...depressing and dreadful with no positive atmosphere of which to speak.

But the office atmosphere is less tangibly gut-churning and more...well, lacking. That feeling of stillness, the deadness, the pointless clicking of keys and mice...it lacks anything and everything. What we need is a tangible sense of doom. The feeling of being in danger, of being perpetually on the verge of being threatened. Only then will we feel that rotten feeling in the gut instead of the numbness created by office life.

Let us therefore stalk the streets of the inner city, drenched in sodium and dodging under decrepit railway bridges that shelter an assortment of junkies, needles, Ford Escorts and shopping trolleys. Generic KFC-style boxes litter the gutter, and everywhere you look ugly graffiti tags speak of some pathetic bravado shown by a bored teenager.

Again, here, we have the feeling of being trapped in a terrible artificial environment. Sure, we may be visitors to this bleak landscape, but there are many who cannot so easily escape. This may be important for our understanding of the atmosphere we are chasing. The hospital example does not work because it is a piece of crumbling humanity that is being reclaimed by nature...and to our weird minds this feels like a victory. No good for our bad gut feelings.

So we are not looking back; echoes of bad history must not concern us because there is something about time that changes evil into myth and emotion and the strange feeling that something epic is going on. You know...cycles of life, man versus nature, lamentation of past deeds, yadda yadda yadda. If we do not feel fearful of the present then we have failed to capture the right atmosphere.

Speaking of streets, in the news today was a human version of Pac-man in which people in virtual reality headsets run around the streets chasing one another and eating virtual dots. Ye gods, and I thought I made this shit up; the date on the paper is not April 1st. The story is silent as to what happens when you end up jumping in front of a car; Pac-man has always been partial to a cherry, but not the kind built by Nissan. Strips of yellow flesh and half-digested dots all over that road...

What? A bad digression there, but what the hell.

This argument about this atmosphere being confined to modern life, though, is not entirely logical because we are just as at ease with unreal landscapes than the ones of harsh everyday life. Writers have long sharpened their pencils and dipped their quills as they relish the thought of putting something fantastical down on paper that will stick a dagger in the reader and poke around in various organs until the blood begins to pour in great rivers of anguish and pain. Er, not literally...otherwise the word “lawsuit” would pop up like numerals on an old fashioned cash register to the sound of cher-ching.

Writers are, by and large, not violent people. Not externally, anyway...

So we have Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote dense jungle-like paragraphs of twisted verdure and terrible, terrible deeds by cruel creatures, the worst of which was man. He created countless landscapes of macabre fantasy, each one overwhelmed by depression, decay and dread. Wander through one of his forests and within a few seconds your flesh would be slit open by crystalline leaves from predatory plants or pounced on by some cruel demon with razor blades where his arse should be.

To hell with the temporal argument...yes, his worlds contained suffocating senses of history, but the words conjured up the most by his prose are ominous, malevolent, and death.

And perhaps that is the key...ominous. Not of the past or the present, but for the future. That things will not get better, just slide slowly down the mountain into a valley of black despair. This is what is truly depressing, why we feel the dread of one particular landscape over another. Reality does not enter into it...but then, does it ever?

I Drank The Bad Water

The interviewee was looking deathly pale now that he had been threatened with dismissal and eventually demoted. I sat and shrank in my chair like a salted snail. I did not want to be there, watching such grim proceedings unfold like a car wreck. A few hours of silence occurred during the following few seconds. I fiddled with my pen, waiting to resume formalising the pain for the minutes.

Then the spell was broken and the clock began to tick again. The interview concluded shortly and I repaired to a long forgotten water cooler; one that nobody has touched or even mentioned for the last six months.

“How bad can it be?” I thought.

Well...the water left a foul taste in the mouth and I felt ill for an hour afterwards. What the hell? It is only water after all. It cannot go mouldy, it does not go off, bits of it do not turn green, fall down behind the bin and start cultivating fungi. Perhaps it was psychology, a reverse placebo.

But I have been feeling unusual since then anyway. The news is making me queasy and I do not know why; I reel back from newspapers like they are wired up to the mains. For instance, I cannot write the words “European Constitution” without getting a headache. The French rejected it, the Dutch rejected it...and a whole new world of hand-wringing has unfolded.

Surely, though...they are founder members of the union and do not object in principle to the European ideal, so is this merely a question of rewording the damn thing? The document is a foul mess of bad and dry gibberish and consequentially should not be used as a guiding light for Europe. Without clarity there is no point to the document. After all...what the hell are they trying to achieve with this thing? This has been constructed by committee using the one tool they have: compromise. It needs a visionary, but the European union has throughout its life always been built by an infinity of blind, jabbering monkeys at computers with no understanding that a large part of the union is in fact the ideal of the union. It is not an administrator’s wet dream of paperwork skyscrapers. And to highlight this we need a clear and direct constitution that everyone can read and understand and think “shit, we can get along here, it’s not all about grey buildings and squabbling.”

Ah, but the Dutch people have not been complaining about the treaty itself; it is the issues that continue to dog the EU such as the Euro and each country’s individual contribution to the European budget. And the French are rumoured to have been more concerned with rejecting their president than Europe itself.

Right...there’s the headache coming on. Time after time I think that the European Union should work but for the fact that the systems and processes are ineffectual, bloated, based on ego and rhetoric and old-fashioned. Reconstructing these processes from the ground up is vital...again, we need a visionary, a leader, a goddamn genius. Is there anybody out there who can do this? I do not want to think about it; no matter how charismatic the leader, their nationality would count against them in the 24 other states.

The biggest problem is that like everybody else in Europe I am concerned about our government getting it right in our own country first. If the citizens of each country feel screwed over on a national level, why the hell would we trust a superpower of all these nations? Wouldn’t we just feel screwed over 25 times instead of just once?

Most people do not believe in lofty ideals and the future in general. Practical concerns come much, much higher up the list. And whilst this is so, how the hell can Europe move forward?

Jesus, this is all bad bellowing at something I cannot comprehend. But there is nothing else but loud static in the news this week...the tabloids are leering at Big Brother, the broadsheets are scrabbling for new angles on druggy musician du jour Pete Doherty and everyone is still obsessed with the BBC weather forecasts.

The football has finished, parliament is in recess after the election and John Prescott has not been involved in rotten shenannigans for days now. There is one thing skipping around the news pages, though...some kind of rock concert that is coming up that involves some rich white rockers getting fearfully cross about poverty in countries far, far away from them. The old arguments are pouring in...including the one in which we are not helping by providing aid because our western values do not work in Africa. We should just let the sick children die, presumably. The corruption angle has come up again, which is something vital that needs addressing directly...but how? Send in the bombers again? Regime change? These problems are more complicated than pop song lyrics.

Maybe Gatorade, or whatever the hell the event is called this time, will Help and be a Good thing. The popular point to make is that if just one child is saved it will have been worth it. To which it must be said, if only one child is saved then how fucking incompetent are we?

Still...Bob Geldoff is a force for good and it would be stupid to tell him to shut the hell up. Well, unless he starts swearing again, the filthy bugger.

Oh, god...I have just opened the Guardian to find Gilbert and George staring out at me. Suddenly drinking toxic water does not seem such a bad thing after all.