The asian man here is oddly attractive. Smooth skin. Tight-ish fitting clothes. Not too thin or too anything. A deep slightly rough rasping voice, actually more West Indian south London roughness. Perhaps he’s mixed with that. Is it okay for me to call people brown? I’ve been talking to a man on scruff who uses the term to describe himself.
We are turning into a racist fascist nation. Unrelated, it is odd that bar managers wear body cameras, and we don’t seem unduly concerned or interested. Things creep in by stealth until they are “normalised”. That is a word that is being used more now, being “normalised” in fact. It sometimes carries passive-aggressive entitlement with it. Normalise. Disrupt. Reach out. They’re all normalised.
I wonder what sort of image quality they deliver, the body cameras. I still want to find a lightweight camera to mount on my bike.
A young man with slightly tanned skin, green eyes, long straggly dark hair, and a grubby white sweatshirt is wandering around, slightly lost. He is the anti-hero, the protagonist of the scene. I could cast him in a film, an unspeaking flat character present in every scene. We never know who he is or why he is here. So much of modern life is like that. I could place people in landscapes at early light using primitive cameras. People I’ve actually selected and asked to do this. Directed. I don’t know how to direct people, I’ve always worked alone, barely able to articulate what I want or what my vision is. A lot of my ideas are loosely formed.
Now in West London. I’ve just thought about the old BOAC air terminal on the Cromwell Road. It’s not somewhere I’ve ever known personally, it was demolished shortly after I was born, and replaced by a large Sainsburys, which the late Princess Of Wales used to go to. The air terminal was odd, in that it was nowhere especially near the planes. I think there was another similar one at Victoria. The BOAC terminal featured in literature, film at TV culture, was a permanent part of the landscape there, whether locals wanted it or not. Richard O’Sullivan’s wife in Robin’s Nest worked there. I once read a novel in which a young courting couple used to go there late in the evening to drink coffee, as they couldn’t afford to do anything else. I which I could remember what it was called.
It is pouring with rain now, the sound of it landing on the roof with force is deafening, comforting. I’ve always liked rain, it is soothing, it makes the air clean and cool. Heavy summer downpours are evocative, emotive, romantic. I can never relate to people who complain about it. It is a force of nature, it has a right to exist.
Since last Wednesday the diseased marsh has been shrouded in grey mist, blocking middle distant views, diffusing and muting natural light. To not see shadows on the walls of the room is to lose the context of time and the outside world. Days begin, progress and end in the same neutral grey. I seek stimulation through electric wires on a screen, colours projected onto off-white textured wallpaper; a relic of a previous contained life. I think I’ll revert to the grey concrete underneath, evidence of a past utopian design ethos, well intentioned, obviously doomed.
I have to go out every day. If I don’t I become stir crazy. I will soon start posting writings on walls. Eventually I will have to move for the sake of my health. A mist ridden polluted marsh en route to nowhere, with no purpose, is not good for anyone. I’m drawn to darkness lately, which worries me. There was a time some years ago when I slept during the day. I don’t want to fall into that cycle again. Many of the most eminent psychogeographers of the last several centuries roamed at night. In as much as the liminal spaces are considered intangible boundaries, night is an impenetrable natural punctuation of time. Society tries to attach artificial boundaries to time, but the days continually change in length as we spin around and move to and from the sun.
This writing is not taking shape into anything obvious yet. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it isn’t meant to, and doesn’t matter.
A fairly obvious transvestite lady just walked past in lurid pink. A young courting couple commented innocently. Not to her, about her, with observational affection. Is that a term?
Andrew Stevenson 