ELEPHANT GNOSIS BOOK ONE, PART FOUR: DO MORE/LESS – SCORING THE VECTORS OF INCONSEQUENCE.

DO MORE/LESS – SCORING THE VECTORS OF INCONSEQUENCE.

Excerpt from the Buffy Strangelove Devotional Directional Manual – Vol 2 Section 4: (evidence provided by Crime Scenes Inc)

…In times of strife, inter tribal, inter domestic, inter national, inter factional, inter dimensional, the urge is always, and rightly so, to do less. Even in times of general contentment. Do less. Save energy. Save electricity. Make do. Humans have always beaten themselves up over the supposed benefits of hard work. Well, there’ll be time enough for that when you’re dead. And consider: it’s always those with really well paid jobs, as well as the really stupid ones with made-up jobs, who go on about the Dignity of Labour, and/or the psychological importance of working hard. But we know that Work is in reality merely a simulation, and only for those who don’t want to Play. At my last re-birth, work was still all the rage despite my previous hard work. Work was the be-all and end-all. Work to what end though? You need to be 3 people (at least) to do the amount of work the perpetually over-ambitious claimed they were doing. Luckily, I was at least 3 people. StanleyK, not for the first time, and considering the Ealing Guinness schtick a suitable precedent, nicked my idea wholesale. How I learned to stop worrying and plant the idea of multiple parody characterization in SK’s fecund yet frightened brain is a story that changed the entire way comedians were to be seen as all-round templates, via serious movies, for the multiple personality society. He took the credit, but it’s down to me that you can now be exactly who you want to be at any time you want to be it, even if you don’t have a personality. Sellers was more than a template. He was the clone icon to die for. All proceeds from multiple non-personality turned to comedic gold. He existed only because SK was himself frightened to be who he seemed to be. With due deference to his genius, and notwithstanding the paranoia inevitable as a result of his ill considered public epiphanies of comedy violence, it was I, through Sellers’ improvised imaginings, who enabled him to progress into areas previously unimagined. Anti-gravity fantasy, terminal chess obsession, grandiose mythic theorizing and state of the art security techniques, so that he might at least live a life not entirely crippled by paranoia. They were all my ideas, though I neither received nor expected any credit.

Anyway, to work. Yes, work can be a soporiphic. That much is true, but when duty calls, you lay down those tools! Unburden yourself of collective responsibility! Switch off the info systems! Take to the hills (metaphorically of course – we don’t want any more crazed survivalists holing up in the virgin spaces than are absolutely necessary) and lie low! Inhabit areas of low electrical production! Hunker down, keep your eyes peeled, and think seriously of killing anyone who may be thinking of encroaching on your personal space! Inside is where you look. This is species integrity on a scale we can all understand. The urge to self protect, to distance oneself from other people, is all but overwhelming under certain stressful circumstances. In cities, the urge to kill is of course almost un-answerable. The frowns on the faces of struggling urbanites bespeak a super human will, an almighty effort just to stay out of jail. How easy it would be to take a life in the crowded spaces. Murder is square one. Murder is always in our hearts. You know it’s true. Cities are no good. Cities attract scummy verminous leeches on holidays undertaken from human warmth and cities deny your essential pre-secular post-psychological needs (see Vol 1 Section 5). The country on the other hand is to all intents and purposes empty. Still, we can’t all live there. Leave the city if you can. In my own dead dreams I live on the outskirts, near the orbital roads. This isn’t a retreat, a badly conceived removal from the vortices of electrical energy. It’s pure survival strategy (Vol 3 Section 7). Topographical maps of the space occupied at present are re-constituted inside the head via Elephant Gnosis™, so the wider the vistas before us the more open the brain’s outlook. Space is both inside and outside, and a closed environment, pressing in on the brain, will mean the ambient pressure exerted thereon is magnetically reproduced as electricity, the voltage depending of course on size of hippocampus (Vol 2 Section 2). Those who tend to travel a lot have, of course, significantly enlarged organs. But this is all at a fundamental level instinct. We know in our hearts that there is too much electricity in cities, corralled in dead end lanes, swept by wind vortices up and around the main thoroughfares and into cul-de-sac mews terraces. It gets blocked, eddying in shallow pools in distressed shopping malls. Too much open space of course and the brain goes into a tailspin from lack of oxygen. It can’t quite deal with the incipience, or the enormity, of pre-electrified landscapes…

(Ongoing Documented Ward Testimony: Brian Yapp under self hypnosis speaking as Nobby Wyse the Fruiterer)

…When I was born, I immediately felt crowded. Breasts loomed large like mammoth snowy mountains. I felt crushed under their weight. My dreams and waking dreams thereafter often featured a kind of unspeakable smothering weight, a pressing and irresistible force. I was oppressed by magnetic rolling granite plates which seemed to crush the life out of me, great rolling stone clouds of particularized solidity and immensity. Granite-stone creatures, golems of incalculable power and more or less astonishing believability, far beyond horror story nervousness, pursued me. Stone creatures which are now immobilized and cauterized, rooted as totems of domesticated psychosis in Regents’ Park. Frank, on the other hand, as soon as he was dead complained of not being able to see things clearly. Or of being able to see things only as though they were at a great distance. Death seemed to rob him of any sense of perspective. The one eyed dead. He was blind to reality. He went on, naturally, to become an academic. Christ knows what his discipline is. His main talent is for hopeless and aggressive lechery. No wonder his wife eventually booted him out and into my bed. Academics don’t need a discipline. They just extemporize in the crevices of obsession. They need only an aptitude for minutely missing the point, for failing to see the wider picture. They require simply a laughable propensity for leather jackets or tweed with leather elbow patches if of an older vintage and polo necks. An urge to write unreadable and unread books is a necessity, as is a delusion that these moribund works somehow push humanity’s envelope just that little bit further. They are all on the gravy train…in wooden polished corridors…names on stenciled nameplates…individual tuition of favoured students…appearances on the BBC…retained payroll status for rentaquote opinionising…beetle browed theorizing on late night talk-ins…condescension a second nature add-on. Dusty celebrity status…pasty shoed tiptoeing into virginal bedrooms…child abuse in the dead of night…divorce courts heaving with wistful and long suffering wives. They’re worse than film stars. In normal chronology they’re just dusty monuments to the individual delusion, study bound in the realm of fear, hunkering down in speciality, specifically to avoid life or any of its ferocious variants. The impulse to nurture obsessions at the expense of the bigger picture is the salient characteristic. What else do academics do but nurture morbid obsessions and fiddle with their barely pubescent charges? Secrete menopausal fluids from rheumy eye sockets, take what isn’t theirs, seduce the needy and the immature. Academia is a hothouse, decadent plants usurping youthful blooms by stealth…

Authorial voices intervene at this point in the narrative: Not sure this is wide open…not sure it’s controlled…by what means do we reach a decision on policy? How do we implement that policy? Authentication of policy? Is break character configured? Where’s Abrahams? Is he like FOR REAL??? Who’s going to look at this…Abrahams can explain the issues then you can liaise with him…why not hardwire the uberview?…free jazz in this context is definitely a tautology…is Yapp actually already dead then? Narrative function unclear at this point. Moot usage – we need to see things at least twice before we fully understand them. Rewind facility is of central importance. Meanwhile Wyse has morphed uncontrollably into Dionysia. Get some control.

…A lisp goes well too…decadently overbearing self-image…misapplied view of place in the scheme of things. I say to you!!!!! Don’t get involved with them! Do less, don’t pay, or pay up now. Be an autodidact. Or live less, and pay up now. Point I’m making is avoid debt. Debt is the universal gaolor. Reverse credit. Credit being merely a form of tax, a tax on presumption. A tax on nervy want, on impatient acquisitiveness. Well here’s the answer. Don’t be taxed. Reject credit. Do less…and look inside. Feel the weight, the vibrations, feel the weightlessness of existence. The existential dead weight, as sung by academics. See the tracks there…Stop shopping, NOW!!! This is what Strangelove said over and over again. It’s about the most cruelly tender thing he ever did say. He knows a thing or two. Just stop shopping. Don’t go out. Stay in. Shops are full of what you don’t want. Opt for cruelty. Be cruel to yourself as a way of approaching the divine. Look inside, see the cruelty. See the tracks. Our capacity for cruelty cruelly exposed by the simpering insistence that we aren’t capable of cruelty. Our ability to avoid cruelty fatally undermined by our sanctimonious assertions that we’re all too civilized to eat each other.

In fact, Frank like all academics revels in his capacity for cruelty. He imagines that he should be afforded the dispensation open to geniuses, the deference of others, because a genius is what he imagines himself to be. I’ve seen Frank reducing helpless shopgirls (in shops) to tears merely by sarcasm and a raised voice. He thinks he’s above the common herd. And let’s face it, that kind of behaviour is just so passé. I have an anecdote of the end of his life. Standing in the queue at Pret a Manger, just off Charing Cross Rd, Frank stood and regaled his audience, a gaggle of credulous, bashful acolytes, with loud complaints about the ever-encroaching franchise culture. He fulminated against the ubiquity of corporate funhouses. He frothed about cappuccino culture. He held forth and he pontificated. He went red, his temples throbbed and a slight foaming became noticeable around the corners of his mouth. He really extended himself. Thumbs in belt loops, he relaxed into his strident broadside oblivious to the ebb and flo of those without academic leanings.

“Can I help you sir?”

Turning, he enquired with extravagant pomposity “Are you speaking to me, my good man?”.

“Can I help anyone…?”

A customer more attuned to the pace and the culture of the west end stepped in and ordered a double espresso to go. Frank was in a different world, lost for words, lost in the slipstream of accelerated life. Being who he was, he declined immediately to wait another second and flounced away, audience in his own archly choreographed slipstream, to thunder indignantly on other displeasing aspects of urban life. His words hung and swooped like seagulls as he marched away, dipping in and out of the grubby street ambience, the noisome metropolitan drone, swooping occasionally with glib and screechy impudence into the fractured consciousnesses of those within earshot. As he pranced down the street thundering denunciations this way and that, heads were turned and eyebrows were raised…

(Dionysia to Brian, both heads visible, but he looks now like he’s in drag…both are shining in the sepulchral light)

…I wouldn’t tell him this, but I actually turned 40 at birth, 20 odd years ago, and I feel utterly worn out. Clapped out. I kind of feel that the heaviness, the weight, is catching up on me. The electricity is getting inside me, silting up the channels. A lesser man, a boy or deranged household god would whinge endlessly in utter self-pity and wallow like a water buffalo in the warm baths of self-loathing but me, I’m not given to self pity. It’s time for re-entry. I never went to prison, so I might try that. But I’m more a shadenfreude kind of guy, like Frank. Maybe our only point of correspondence. I revel in others’ misfortunes. I put my own neuroses and/or psychoses to one side, and examine the failings of others with amused contempt. I write scathing reviews for low circulation publications, emblazoning my hatred for sterile cod-creativity in haughty and imperious style. I laugh at the messes people get themselves into. Frank knows this and I think he approves. As my familiar, he kind of depends on my endorsement. I feel the weight of his obstreperousness. I’m exercised by the effect he has on people. People I know. I wish Frank hadn’t died before he’d had time to really grow into himself. To rid himself of his airs and graces and learn to conduct himself without striking these absurdly camp and affected attitudes. Campness needs to be grown into, must be gradually assumed, it is a favourite pair of slippers. Too camp too young is merely vulgar. If only Frank could have been more like me. I remember the crucial events as though I was Frank myself.

He was at home with his wife see? A white walled casa, Andalusia/Islington style terrace…miniature cactus plant…tautologous rubber plant, art nouveau engravings, miniature enervated wife clicking in stilettos, small dogs yapping, kids in the playroom. Au pair at the drinks…Wife mooning over the open windows, distraught, tearful and beautiful before the smashed crockery and glassware, mangled birthday cards torn and strewn every which way. 50s style light fittings, art nouveau effects dashed to the floor, Frank’s bits and pieces all over, all papers and effects defenestrated, while I’m in the pub around the corner. He’d been taunting her…

“Nothing would ever make you leave me would it? Don’t you understand I don’t want to be loved??”

“But Johnny…”

“’But Johnny! But Johnny!! I love you! I love you!’ I love…You love…She loves…everybody loves everybody else! Well I don’t see? I love NOBODY! I don’t even love Johnny!! Get out Hermione! Go and find somebody else to love!!”

…So now we’re having a morose boozing session, him complaining vigorously about his little wife being a bitch, just a fucking evil BITCH, me affecting to take the slightest notice, humouring him and making believe I’m on his side. If he knew I’d been fucking her on the quiet for years he’d be speechless. Done up like a pantomime dame of rage, he looked at me through red mists and then started blubbing uncontrollably. Best to spare the punters that kind of spectacle really. Frank’s an ugly man when angry, and even more ugly when upset. So I just retreat into a sort of erotic reverie in which I dream anew of what I’ll be doing to her later on, all the while wearing a fixed expression of concerned sympathy. They fight (apparently) like drunken tigers, all rage focused on the other, projected, transferred. Eventually Frank is forced to concede defeat, or if not defeat then capitulation to the more entrenched will of the other. She wears the trousers in this ménage alright. Well of course she does. Frank doesn’t have any legs does he? How could he wear the trousers?

He tells me, because he knows, that academics live like kings. Sovereigns in their own right, they have the pick of affordable housing. Designed housing, as opposed to lived in housing, the like of which most of us have to put up with. I’m left in possession of a shabby and disreputable looking terrace number while he lives like a fucking king. Hand in glove with architect buddies with whom he went through college. Academics and coffee table lifestyles. They get invited on TV. I may have mentioned this. Free rides to Broadcasting House in limos paid for by the license payer. It’s a scandal. I’m the real genius here. I’m the one who has visions. I’m the one who lends his name to religions. People pay me…to touch them! You know that? To touch them!

…anyway, back to secular reality. Frank stormed away from the coffee house leaving eddies of perturbation in his wake. Pavements sclerotic with coagulating moochers, day-dreaming, pavement hogging snoozers…all shop doorways blocked by hordes of somnambulant tourists…He left them all for dead. Coffee Junta was spilling its hyped up imbibers into the street all energized and wired. Wired and yet non-locomotive, non kinetic. The only movement was a kind of torpid ripple of intent. Inane intent. The currents of indecision that guided their compromised movements kept them ebbing and flowing this way and that, at the same time rendering them incapable of moving decisively in any direction without first checking on the movements of their closest neighbours, like flocks of slowly migrating birds that haven’t yet received the imperceptible signal. And this lot weren’t migrating anywhere fast enough for Frank. They were, in short, in his way. Feckless human barriers against the energy flow. Tourists and somnambulists everywhere, more effective in deadly gainsaying than any number of thick-necked bouncers. Just stand a group of these bastards in front of a club entrance and you’ll never get anybody through the fucking doors. Ever, thought Frank. Finally losing what little patience he had, he lost it.

“Get the fuck out of the fucking way you dozy fucking half-witted fuckwits” he bellowed at the stodgily massed ranks of confused and half asleep pedestrians.

Sensing that his righteous and irreligious wrath was being hopelessly misread by the assembled sleepwalkers as a kind of bathetic paranormal happening, misapprehended as a mere apparition of rage brought on by endless ODing on the city’s truncated electricity (a phenomenon that all the tourist guidebooks had taken to including in their literature) and observing their reaction, one that implied that as far as they were concerned this holographic avatar of spite was merely a tourist spectacle, Frank barged headlong into the group without further ceremony, knocking several shocked tourists to the ground. A chatter of muted protest went up amid the group and apologetically shocked glances were shot this way and that. Frank was away and gone without a backward glance before they were able to re-assemble as before, inanely blocking the thoroughfare, the recent apparently pixilated avatar of rage already a distant and vaguely perplexing, unpleasant memory. A tourist diversion they’d rather, on the whole, have done without.

Frank knew though, as a veteran path finder, that the same static behaviour was bound to be repeated wherever there was a doorway or entrance or exit. Entrances to tube platforms were a particular favourite. Twittering collections of asian students, with nowhere special to go, snap happy and blocking the exits. At this time, in this hour of immaculate immediacy, Frank approaches. The twittering reaches unendurable levels. There’s a fractured murmuring as they perceive the danger of the approaching train. Trains enter stations with a terrible urgency, bursting out of the tunnels with insolent dispatch. The drivers are dead faced. All sorts of ghostly operators drift around the circuit. But the trains belie their somnambulant operators, breaching the hot air in front of them with belligerence; they are nightmare intrusions, waking the platform sleepwalkers from their reveries. The gaggle lethargically scatters allowing cowed commuters to emerge, nervous and blinking, onto the platform. And Frank, he’s still alive. Still fretting and twitching from the caffeine/cocoa high and the insufferable unwillingness of his acolytes to actually listen to him, pushes his way through the schlepping throng and steps out in apparent ignorance of the oncoming vehicle. A blizzard of dust envelopes him as he falls headlong onto the tracks. The dozing driver thought he’d seen a ghost. The fact is, he had. Frank’s now doing less than before, and he’s all the better for it. The driver got 6 months off work. But not only that. The important thing is that they generally find this sort of thing makes for good copy with the makers of TV documentaries and it adds weight to their unions’ negotiations for higher pay in the interminable rounds of talks with the employers aimed at avoiding industrial action. The city is not in this instance brought to its knees and everything carries on pretty much as before. Frank is dead. A brainless suicide of immaculately conceived Gnostic immediacy. He didn’t know he was going to die that morning. Grasp while the iron’s hot though. A kind of split second decision, unfortunately for Frank carried out without benefit of an attending documentary crew and therefore a suicide empty of re-birthing potential, merely one more London Transport statistic and just an irritant to passengers on the Piccadilly Line, commuters largely unaware of the potentially divine import of the action and merely hot-collared and fractious at being made to wait for their supper. The divine in small matters unperceived as usual, un-seen by the train companies and their shareholders. A private performance in public, a consummation of the first sacrament of cataclysmic re-entry to the quotidian realm by Frank the fat bottomed, monkey arsed academic.

Frank’s doing less and less these days. A bit of street theatre, well hung, demotic wheelchair ranting, cap in hand solicitation of tourists, nuisance phone-calls to former students, email stalking of those students whose willingness to submit to Frank’s attentions made them especially meaningful to him, threats from ex boyfriends, fathers, hanging around in crappy Soho boozers re-living a life that’s no longer viable, sizing up the talent, cocking a jaundiced and weary eye at the low rent crims as they size him up, and generally dreaming of the elephant trails. He’s thrown away his bike and latterly his chair and spends his days in ritual procession along ex-bus lanes and cycle tracks, vainly attempting to re-invoke the divine in himself by re-tracing his steps, re-configuring the ancient elephant routes as set down millennia ago on the site now occupied by London by the three of us in our heyday. As the ancients processed in religious devotion around bird, dragon and monkey outlines on the Nazca Plain, invoking rain and pleading for divine benevolence, so Dionysia and I (and Frank to carry the supplies) once invoked elephant divinity. We laid down elephant tracks which were in subsequent millennia used by later, more profane civilizations as bus lanes. Way back when. Elephant trails that, once restored to their correct usage and if viewed from a spacecraft or airplane or similar flying machine, score out the unmistakable shape of an elephant’s head over the deranged, unplannable thoroughfares of pre-mythic London.

ELEPHANT GNOSIS BOOK ONE, PART ELEVEN: THE ANTI-GRAVITY MAN/LONDON, MY LONDON.

THE ANTI-GRAVITY MAN/LONDON, MY LONDON.

In the rundown lobby, I sit on a couch upholstered in drab gray wrinkled fabric and wait as patiently as I can. I know that I’ve swum oceans, that I have come 10,000 miles on this far-fetched, far-flung pilgrimage – at which point a man in a navy blue duffle coat and sneakers walks purposefully into the lobby.

This is Eugene P. He’s come to explain the situation to me, and to the publishers. The word is our work is beyond the scope of these types. It’s nothing but local gossip though, we assume. Servants, postmen and the like; and the occasional long haired gent from London. There is nothing you can put your finger on though. But Eugene is the self styled superconductor of bad intent, a florid and exuberant household god, yellow pages advertised. Usually, although not today, he affects theatrical cape and walking cane, and is a levitator par excellence. He’s the anti-gravity man and therefore has trouble appearing before the skeptics at immigration in civilian garb. Consequently we’re in another waiting room, a soviet style Holiday Inn conference room…Maybe he can put in a word for Dionysia as well, adding scientific ballast to her claims of torsion field disturbance in surplus-charged tourist destinations. The gray drabness of the couch finds an echo in the coarsely rutted complexion of my elephant mask. Meanwhile, an overhead projector scrolls text of Dionysia’s latest book – a tourist guide to London written circa the last celebrity crash, the numinous funeral of James Shitkicker esq. – at pedestrian speed and we all fix our attention on the characters, aided by soft piped jazz…

London My London/Dionysia Triantafillou: A Numinous Account of Pre-Birthed London.

You’ll want to know this. Why it is you get prickly. Get hot and frustrated, suffer underground languor, heavy sky torpor, grey sky ennui, sheer underground terror, and why no-one listens to you. People don’t even see you in London. Tunnel vision is the perspective of choice for the citizenry. London skies, grey and overbearing, are not conducive to thought. It’s murky, muggy, even when the sun shines. Winds don’t blow, excepting of course the electrical winds, minor disturbances in the torsion fields. The obscure unseen pressure fields, electricity, sap the energy of the most resolute…

—The projector stops, the electricity having failed. It’s my experience too. We agree on everything. Virtually everything. Virtual unanimity. It’s as if we are all as one…and the projector hums once again into life—

…even natural athletes are reduced to sucking in oxygen in desperation. Fat men gulp and stumble. There’s muggy electricity everywhere, blowing wild into the wind vortices, the streets aflutter with thoughtlessly discarded refuse, the winds sucking vital energy away from the crepuscular hordes. Many first time tourists are literally disgusted every time they step outside. The citizens of the city move to and fro like reclaimed dodgems, bump into each other, the crackle and hiss of electricity horribly tangible. There’s no air here, just bleeding streets, tumescent tourist piles and scabby residential hutches accumulating lifelessness, fetid dormitory streets evincing a cultish village ambience. Dross appears to accumulate in extrinsic as well as intrinsic appurtenances, established behaviour patterns. Litter is everywhere. London is, in fact, for the life affirming, a lifeless cesspit kept afloat only by energy input from twittish media apologists, a kind of continual civic ECT, itself a cause of torsion field disturbances. (Dionysia, as you can see, doesn’t exactly mince her words) We know these apologists are just lifting their skirts to the city’s occult energy (money) gods. To the pyramid atop Canary Wharf…that’s where the energy is produced, where it’s at. Now triple pronged, the plan is almost complete. Tourists are generally guided away from these baleful erections, their phallic audacity considered by the authorities as just too sacred for extended perusal. It’s the pinnacle of money worship, Satan brow beating the whole city, flashing his gleaming smile every 5 seconds. His acolytes doing deals that keep them in energy credit. The over stated tourist destinations meanwhile are crawling, notwithstanding the uncomfortable fact of the degree of difficulty in approach, the methods of transportation thereto being distinctly understated. Running on empty. Railway termini spewing out cashcow whores. Transport to the money centers is ironically, trouble free. Civic chaos is what it is.

(She has a way with words eh? A kind of fiery civic outrage fuels her contempt, something I’ve always worshipped in her…Anyway, my money’s on the whole thing going tits up. The provinces would hold the key without me. Lucky I’m back eh? Lucky for me and for some. London My London. Back in the driving seat, a mythic rejuvenessence, elephant tracks staled through under use. My work’s cut out for me but with God’s help…Meanwhile Eugene, who has been eyeing us quizzically, has started murmuring his own catechism of intent, his voice co-mingling with that of the voice synthesizer giving tongue on Dionysia’s behalf)

…Normally there are two spheres and a spark jumps between them. Now imagine the spheres are flat surfaces, superconductors, one of them a coil or O-ring. Under specific conditions, applying resonating fields and composite superconducting coatings, we can organize the energy discharge in such a way that it goes through the center of the electrode, accompanied by gravitation phenomena – reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit objects on the floors below, knocking them over…the second generation of flying machines will reflect gravity waves and will be small, light, and fast, like UFOs. I have achieved impulse reflection; now the task is to make it work continuously…

He sounds completely sober, serious, matter-of-fact. Between the two of them, their voices achieving an elliptical rhythmic tension, a new liturgy is hammered out flat. But it occurs to me that the need is because we’ve all got our own problems. This again is Dionysia’s angle. God bless her. I see what she means when she says that the sky shelters its own, heaving lugubrious static charges over the cityscape. Languid strolling in the dank underbelly is right out. Not an option, except for the darkly obsessed. Anyway back to Dionysia…

Pedestrians, enraged by car fumes and other irritants, walking static charges, are just boiling with rage. Shop fronts jostle with over excited punters bearing cell-phones as heraldic insignia, txting obtuse messages to each other. Doormen flex their insecure status in your face. Restaurants are full of pipe cleaner types, or power- lunchers loading up at the trough, unpleasantly coiffed city slickers and their frog-like girlfriends/boyfriends. Celebrity chefs do time here on TV, fat tongued boys pretending to a gaucherie that’s more than enough to put you off your dinner, anxious lest their credibility is shot to shit by a too overt display of contrived anger, nervous lest their real clients get a whiff of their bombastic need for cheap celebrity. No one wants to be associated with some loser who just wants to be noticed…some pre-gnostic simian with bad teeth and a thick tongue…

All delegates generally agree over the iced water and hors d’oeuvres, as we dance a subtle conga of deference to the man who holds our destiny in his gravity free hands, that noticing, seeing, is more than ever the primary contemporary currency. Seeing is the default mode, the consensual lingua franca. We’re all lookers, more than listeners. Eyeballs take it all in. Eyes everywhere, actually just too many eyes taking you in. Eyes that notice you in peripheral vision, glances are shot surreptitiously. Obsessed eyes in a line, offering baleful challenge, misplaced eyeballing. Synapses shudder and spit in sympathetic overload. The eyes track like smart weapons with the didactic import of laser beams. No one, least of all schools, teaches the meaning of looking. People gawp unreflectively and idly. Looking is now an almost completely vapid activity, disguising clandestine intent. People fail to acknowledge the meaning of under-contextualized scrutiny. Eugene’s point, readily agreed on by the rest of us, is that people literally cannot see in front of their noses. He therefore posits levitation as survival technique. Snowblind, they see, but they fail to see. And there’s a configuration more suited to modern journalism, to the sappy look-at-me-ma me-me-me effusions of the journo. The projector rolls on…

Everyone wants both to notice, the all seeing London Eye a metaphor literally dumped from heaven in the heart of the Capitol, and to be noticed. You can’t get a slice, even a small piece, of pure privacy for love. It’s Rip off city, ripping off your time as well as your money, London’s a stand up act from hell. Every gormless dolt is a comedian, eyes gleaming, eyebrows arched. Everyone’s funny. Everyone’s a comedian. It’s grueling and it’s wearisome. The glimmer in the eye of the standup skewers any attempt at laughter. There is no comedy, as all our best comedians instinctively know. Just the hacks and attention seekers remain, tugging at your nerve ends, begging your indulgence. Non-Personality passes un-remarked as prime currency. No one cares that London’s comedians and cabbies are no longer funny, least of all the city authorities. They actively encourage a weary fatalism in the tourist body, a long-suffering acceptance. Laughter is pyrrhic for the authorities. Therefore funny is something of a faux pas in this city. Unfunny comedians with their sponsored personalities may be enough to pull in the out of towners and the truffle hog cultural tourists, but even the sly, smug commentators who know they’re above it all see that they’re all in the game together. It’s a seamless feat of blind sighted robbery.

Suddenly Nobby Wyse the cabbie (and sometime fruiterer) our courier, is up on his club feet. He’s overwrought. The effects of the flight are still with him. He needs more water. And sandwiches. My need to love, on the other hand, outruns the otherwise overwhelming urge to mime muscular strength for the docs. And my shaman (Abrahams) tells me he’s only trying to further his own career, to make me his cause celebre…I am the main atomic threat in his arsenal of delusionals. This is what I need to hide from Eugene P. I need him on board and so I’m happy to act out for him. My need for levitation techniques and good character references is primary. Once he’s on board it’s a matter of irrelevance that my delusions (as he terms them) show Ahab in a good light. My very presence on the streets, appearing in reflection in shop windows, is an affront to his so-called professional integrity. So, he asserts, I need locking up, restraining. An assertion that of course I endorse. Anything for the career of a friend and fellow witch doctor, a shamanic colleague. My double bluff as usual disconcerts the old fraud.

And so I show him, and therefore myself, in a very good light. I have first to be seen about town, with a girl on each arm, so that he can show the world how he copes with the likes of me. I show off with abandon at paparazzi events, celebrity parties, falling with charm and distinction into gutters as the night wears on. I am obliged for the sake of his camera to literally fall out of nightclubs, legless, punching and kicking out at photographers and insulting passers-by, so that he can seem to pick up the pieces. A recklessly laughable pantomime, but it gets me out and about. And in the papers. It’s all character ballast. My character as a reckless devil-may-care, but also as a dangerous delusional, is by degrees thus established in the public mind. I appear in the gossip pages as proof that he knows what he’s doing. I have obligatory gay escorts as well, so my appeal is literally all encompassing. If I weren’t some sort of auto-shaman I’d need an agent, just to protect my own interests. Just to reap the rewards for him. To guard against abuse, as you’d ensure the safety of children. But I am my own agent. I do all my own bookings, and I pay myself 10% of everything I earn. I make smug appearances with Ahab on TV, browbeating unruly hacks who dare question our impeccable and above board professional relationship. I have sex on a more or less consistent basis. People pay me just to look at them. I touch them where it hurts.

I now warm to my theme. I hope to convince Eugene of my bona fides. I’m angling for credibility…now, sex. No one has sex at 40. Even 20’s pushing it. At one stage, he observes, the gay Mr. Massive reportedly considered having a baby with the lesbian actress Jackie Chunder. He remarked that the advantage of being in a mutually incompatible relationship, sexually speaking, with procreation in mind is that at two removes, the sexual partner actually becomes the object of desire. Gay man + gay woman is the perfect sexual combination in anyone’s book. Or at any rate I affected to see things his way…we are still, as a species, obsessed with sex in any form. People only need to think about it. To reiterate obsolete, forgotten obsessions. But it is, for most people, all over now. Thinking, in many cases, has to be enough, because even though sex doesn’t discriminate, perfidious consciousness does. The terror of rejection coupled with the terror of body penetration. Rubs both ways. But Sex is for everyone. The tabs, the heavies, the glossies, the rags are all filled with SEX. It’s fucking everywhere! Sex as gardening, and as kitchen culture. Mediterranean culture grafted on, so the industry can lie through its teeth that London is SEXY. The very airwaves hum with words of protestant obloquy. We may be obsessed by it, but that doesn’t mean we can do anything about it. The obsession itself renders the action virtually obsolete. The obsession can only be tended, orchid like in the fetid heat of desire, if you don’t get enough of it. Obsession gets us off, hence the sex-porn industry. Actually doing it ruins the mood. But nonetheless, sex is in the buildings, objectum-sexuality. The Oxford Circus building fuckers were in this reading of events responding to an objective need. And then, from the overhead…when did you last re-examine your life? Never? Why not? It doesn’t come knocking.

Ignoring the interruption I develop my themes. My life is pre-ordained narrative. When fame beckoned, or when real people became the norm as providers of vicarious obsession on TV. Do I really care about 10 people shacked up in a media safe house? 70 grand is nothing, but to be gawped at by outsiders for 10 weeks…is it worth it? I’d say so. I’d say it’s worth it for us. Further, I’d go further. So nothing happens? That’s the point. People’s real insecurities/weaknesses/dysfunctions revealed minutely, by degrees. It’s a slow death, but better than actually executing people, as other cultures do in other contexts. Anyone who can argue against the spectacle of random image generation revealing inner vacuity FOR THE BENEFIT OF MILLIONS just doesn’t have any sense of fun. I must see these people through. It’s me they’ll look to in post-celeb desperation. Just to be looked at, pored over, it’s enough. Not for us though eh? We have other, higher standards. I’ve shacked up with Dionysia, with destiny. We’ve our own moral imperatives haven’t we? No relativistic weasel words or concepts cloud our outlook. We know knowledge is useless, unless gleaned from TV. We know expertise is over rated. We’re aware that destiny is there for the taking. We still have obsession. Still, I walked down streets clogged with sex rubbish. And people images. Random images, generated from the central image banks, images of profane sex-rubbish. I fall silent, breathing heavily, a spent force…

Back to Dionysia…Destiny for London would appear to exist in the interstices between the serious and the not so serious. The broadband spectrum of modern life in which everyone has an angle, all humourous bases have been covered and every Tom Dick and Harry is a comedian. Visitors to the city should be acutely aware that all pathetic exhibitionists have been green lighted, offered carte blanche to advertise their personal cravings for attention in all media, all the time. We’ve reached actual meltdown here. Laughing’s no longer the point. Rumour is the point. Cliquey internet discussion groups are smug and self congratulatory in getting the joke, not realizing they ARE the joke. Needless to say, London is heaving with internet geeks. More and more internet cafes are receiving unconditional planning permission.

Yes yes…I know it was always going to go that way. There are precedents; the ennobled talentless making pushiness an end in itself…and these crimes were perpetrated, or conceived at any rate, well over 40 years ago. But still, you might think, might you not, that we should have all got a bit wiser, a bit more clued up, instead of merely cleverer, in the meantime? Did we view it as a warning, a nuclear alarm? No, we didn’t think it mattered that much. Everyone sitting here…in this room before me now…even now you probably harbour a certain sneaking, grudging admiration for the chutzpah of the talentless, a certain suspicious contempt for the really talented, those rare individuals who you’d never in a million years be able to emulate. Inane pushiness, allied to a will of steel, is what gets you further now; it’s the motor of our essential contempt for quality. We are, as you know, all potential stars now. Come on in, the water’s lovely. We are constantly bathed in paradoxical cathode ray light. My sphere of influence is massive. I am a political heavyweight. I am a TV chef. I know the correct temperature both at which to boil eggs and to fry public figures. My earpiece still crackles and hums with immoderate laughter as yet another public servant is tickled up for ridicule. I look on scornfully, down my nose, as public figures appear ridiculous in attempting to appear serious…but Wyse is now falling asleep, and rather than interrupt my flow and wake him, I decide to press on with the rest of my testimony…

My putative sphere of influence is something that’s potentially more or less boundless. I’ve given birth, in gravitational extremis, to at least 2 million new clued up citizens. All media savvy. We all star…all the time. I am not renowned for my modesty, so I’ll say it. I did it. My technical surveillance was all that was needed. I operated my own camcorder. I directed my own movies. They’re all in the movie. I took the star system, and made it accessible, relevant to the denizens of the Thames Valley, the inhabitants of the Hertfordshire corridor, the fauna of the Essex badlands. All those clubbers, commuters, were stars of their own movies. I directed them. They owe their fame to me. We’re always in convoy now. Out on the shingle, awaiting the moment of re-entry. But the logistics of movie making are enough to make your eyes water. You cannot insure a movie these days unless it’s underwritten with new mafia money. Money laundered through Paris and Rome and all points east. It’s East of Hollywood. Private jets sear the skies, snake through the ether carrying Spielbergs and Geffens to impossibly mundane locations. Servants and lackeys live expansively. Dine out on anecdotes about the habits of celebrities.

The serious/not serious paradox, by which the joke needs contextualising, needs to be allowed room to breathe on different levels, has been allowed to become entrenched. Words that tend to drift in and out of focus are suddenly funny. Far from becoming wiser, better able to contextualise, we have drifted. We’re in the backdraft. Creativity, in London, is at an all time low. Sloppy crud…less wise, more stupid, we’re less able to make non-relative value judgments, more inclined to assume that any old rubbish is acceptable. We have become bed wetters. Our snaky fantasies find expression in incontinent dreams. We are, at best, collusive in the process of attempting to evade the moral consequences of our actions. We are obsessed by sex, ignoring the uncomfortable truth that sex is unlikely to be the very first of our worries. And ignoring the fact that obsession is merely a cancerous form of disgust. My pride is hurt. These cokeheads and bitches are less wise, less inclined to wisdom. It’s not what we want is it? We need more not less hopeless personalities clamouring for attention. Don’t we? Now of all times? And despite the advantages of growing up wise, or wise capable, we give these bastards houseroom. What’s going on? Destiny is in our hands. I didn’t create this system for another man, the fertile conditions of celebrity for these ends. It was meant to be a leveling up, not a leveling down. Warholian schtick times 10. All beautiful people star in their own movies, or not at all.

Elephant images are now ad-mixing with the text on screen: But instead, it embraces the speeded up world of longer working hours, elongated spasms of debauched stupidity, alternating with head wrangling sessions at the terminal wank bank, the spam filled bandwidth streams. All pretty much redundant conceits. Only wankers, it seems, fetid fantasists in the City precincts, need to get that much money that badly that they’ll buy into these damp dreams. No necessity to work now that survival is assured. Why bother working, when the fruits of that labour are so unworthy of possession. But “work” they do, for share options, packages including dismal self-disgust. City boys in loafers are revealed as the worthless descendents/progeny of space/time filled hippies of 30 years ago, children of debased and unworkable fantasists, hedonistic access/excess merchants. One off the wrist meat jockeys. Girls in offices are now just wanking machines. No office orifice that can’t be filled with cheap dayglo condom. Five-knuckle shuffle, into the cavernous machinery of the cyber sphere, digitized crypto porn. Spaniel men slither around the streets, and are fawned over in excessively flattering magazine portrayals as worthy of aspiration. Big over emphasized opinion pieces suggesting, in the very act of analysis of what was wrong, what was right about it all. The tourist trade cannot, I venture, stand up under much more of this pressure. Tourists look down their noses, already look to points further east. London can’t grow, there’s no room. London is, in psychological terms, stuck at a stage of development that we must identify with the adolescent.

And I think, how right she is. My beautiful wife, claws out, eyes blazing. The machine is now spitting, humming, emitting autoerotic sparks, controlling the room. Righteous anger. She’s a better writer than she’s given credit for eh? She can really dish it out. She has nailed it. The city avidly consumes profane myths when I’ve already provided better, realer myths. Pre-crash myths that invoke a falsely historicized crypto-biography that doesn’t pay heed to reality. Profane myths that don’t even mention elephants, or gravity disturbance. So the streets just fill up with dead mythic matter, accumulated ennui and depreciated electricity. Real myths involve Gods, and conflicts between Good and Evil. Good coffee/bad coffee, the cappuccino culture express, young professionals, IT ingénues who can’t tell you what they really do for a living. Where they fit in the great pan-glottal-stop of globalised yob culture, with Englishness at its epicentre. They don’t know. They just read up on their destinies in magazines. Burnished heritage yobs, St. George the Angevin on dragon slaying benders of corporate excess. English yobs are central, the boiling core of fractured alienation, hedonism. They are now on the march. Round the orbital fuelled by E-type jaggedness, over the hills and far away. To some crazy field…back then…specious template…ravers with club blindness and hearts full of spacey altruism. The blissed out togetherness…a soothing lie. When I can supply lies that are real fun. Re-entry lies. Smoothed down, accessorized, playful gender games, no gender, and no gender specificity, attractive to those who no longer have any idea how to be men, or indeed women. Just a playful mass of spaced out keyboard tappers, moving money and rumour from A to B and back again. Headspace now uniquely, in the context of history, empty. Literary gents just squabble, up and at ‘em, city boys ruck in east end pubs. Grotesque wannabe thespians, wielders of power close to the 7^th circle, polished…still…ex-schoolboys, nervous of your millions, jealous of your influence…

I pause for breath. This is all leading back to the 70s. I see in Eugene a man who appreciates the importance of dressing up, of cutting a dash, of showing off. Everything leads, like roads to Rome, back to the 70s. The first and last explosion, the last redoubt of my previous re-entry, the apotheosis of my frivolous intent. Unbeknown to their dads and in some cases granddads, the grand-dada Glam experience had been the apotheosis of this sort of blissful playfulness 25 years earlier. If only the old goats, multi-coloured satyrs of comic excess and over statement, had realized it at the time. The kiddies’ dressing up box, envisaged by my cohorts, gave birth to and green lighted the insane and fetishistic infantilism of grown men in make-up, wizard capes and platform boots, men who truly made that dazzling epoch the brightest and the richest and the most immaculately realized of times. Before oil prices dropped the bottom out of the world’s self-satisfaction, and even allowing the 60s hangover, the 70s were the best of times. The city’s energy fields at that time weren’t silted up with rogue electricity, it was too expensive. Just too expensive. Not enough to go around. And the glitter and tinfoil/spandex acted as great conductive material. We made our own entertainment there, in the darkness of the 3-day week. We dressed up out of boxes and then stood on boxes. We strapped on extravagantly designed guitars like sci-fi accoutrements and we rocked. Those lucky enough to have grown up in the 70s were forever reminding themselves, the first warless generation…no fighters…strikers and football players, would-be boozers and non-contracted out council refuse men, that they were the pioneers, the first anti-radical snakes out of the basket, the primary and pre-eminent tricksters in pre-ironic schtick. The first makers of anti-history. Growing up in the 70s meant never having to grow up at all. Free of electricity. The main players in the fall out from mawkish idealism and misplaced eco-optimism, they knew things were shit, and rejoiced. Anti-radical!

I turn to my wife…

Dionysia, you need to know this. You need to know this. You already know this. I had it good. Anti-radical. That’s why I am good. That’s why you love me. Everyone loved an aspect of me. You are the best advert for this country, for me. I am a living template, a tourist magnet. I initiate the uninitiated; I inaugurate marches around the orbital and all divinely consecrated elephant trails. Everyone was in on it. I put this show on for you. And you understand. A fabulous anarchy, 6 years before…public inclusivity …punk…hyper realized, publicized anarchy. The revolution in taste was, as you know, over by ’72, the taste for serious consideration of life’s many and manifold ills out of date. All the earnest pipe suckers and rock critic academics were hatched in the 60s, cultural imperialists, “I claim this cultural movement for the highbrow”…actions without consequences, the misuse of the word ‘liberal’, the misuse of words generally with impunity…these chic revolutionaries, documenters of history’s slipstream where “secret” histories are played out…history which is parodied to distraction by men in glitter capes and spandex. Former plumbers, postmen, furniture polishers, firemen, removal men, Hendrix look-alikes, groovy fuckers, pimps, agents, moustachioed civil servants, embryonic androgynes, all took a look at their groovy elder brothers, laughed up their sleeves and decided that the appurtenances of frivolity were more appropriate as an enduring metaphor for newly mythic life. And then, as life itself. Incantational frivolity, as men in tights looked around for the exit door. The door to the reckless age of mutual consent. Suddenly everyone’s equally grown up. Kids are sagely regarded and regard their elders sagely. Kids more wised up than the parents, in the same non-consequential vortex. Parents, fellow travelers, sentimental for an orthodoxy they were, luckily for them, never subjected to. They never had to take the consequences of their rhetoric. I look around, surveying the post frivolous generations, and those younger than me seem somehow the same age as me. Older even. Immeasurably older. I cannot see the young at heart any more. The young are prematurely old, but without the wisdom that age brings. Fertile ground, feckless to a high degree. They just don’t have the balls that we did. We died in vain for them. In the trenches of attritional camp warfare. We fought for the right to be frivolous. They merely are frivolous. (Wyse stifles a yawn, blinks, looks meaningfully at the screen…of course, I see what he means. I now espouse the essential inconsequentiality at the very heart of mythic life). I am a corporate dragon slayer for cheap thrills. No more, no less. My kids think I’m a groovy bastard. Which I am.

Eugene, I now live alone, because no one will put up with me. Except Dionysia. And the magic’s gone out of it now. When she was Frank’s it was kind of exciting but…what am I saying? Dionysia is everything to me. Everything. All frivolous avenues have been closed. My children, all 2 million of them, need the cheque, but not the company of the account holder. It’s been ages since that moment occurred. The moment when you realize you’ve already thought something, an intangible, the thing just beyond your mental field of vision, that need not be thought of again. The desperate near recall of what it was that showed you the answer. It’s gone. It ain’t coming back. My children, all two million of them, I pretend to relate to. They know me, but only as a shell of a figure in their peripheral vision. Doc Abrahams knew. He knew something I didn’t. I wear the mask both out of deference to him and as emblem of my reborn, re-mythologised status. (I’m hoping here that Eugene doesn’t look to closely, below the surface, below the elephant mask).

Anyway, back to the 70s. Again. That moment of recall. Party time for the young at heart. Never before had the mechanics of fun been so overtly demonstrated. Mirror hats and outré guitar shapes kept company with primary colour face paint; candy riffs and bubble stomp conspired to keep the nation’s pre-birthers in a spin. Dance floors that had been initially weakened in wartime became compromised to a dangerous degree during Slade concerts. Guitarists strummed in overt parody of the act of onanism, without for a moment doubting the unironic content of mechanical repetition. Wankers, guitarists, straightforward tautology. Real/hyper-real. Platform boots, foolish haircuts, eye shadow. We dressed up like dogs’ dinners, slapping on the rouge and grease paint. Meta-levels of artlessness were paradoxically attained. No need for spurious sexual context, or unambiguous commentary. Animated looning, postulating a metaphysics of braggadocio. They were all yesterday’s parties. My children and those still to come will never now dance like they danced. Of course it couldn’t last. The paper thin culture, translucent and brittle, illuminated by excess, couldn’t stand that much frivolity without going into a tailspin of over concerned, over actualized context, message, and social context. Contextualised to death by academics, meaning was imposed from without by the newly educated, the undergraduates of pop theory. Red bricks literally spewed out pop theses, while Oxbridge still supplied bespectacled junior moguls, and the glum suburban satellites of major cities acted as cultural midwives to a new breed of hipster journos, manqué class warriors, fat birds from Bristol, Cuban-healed tossers, bedroom onanists and writers of letters to the rock press. And also to the new rock stars themselves. No longer ex-postmen, these sweaty, pallid creatures were devotees of Oscar, would be Huysmanses, decadents in training, languid effete aesthetes, trainee geniuses in polo necks, be-quiffed and shimmering with self regard, speccy geniuses, somehow different from their peers. No girlfriends or boyfriends for the new pop aristocracy, taking pop music out of the disco and into the bedroom. Single beds, sweaty socks, dreams of pop stardom, at once dragging the meaning out of dreams…

They see I’m flagging. Billy, Nobby, Sapper, they look at their watches, yawn, stretch with comic exaggeration. They melt into the functional seating. I’m priapic, striding back and forth, like a tiger. They need to know this, these tie-dyed morons, that life eventually, without the mythmakers, becomes too heavy to escape from. Escape velocity becomes impossible. Them up there beyond the orbital, up in Bletchley, way way beyond the orbital, those mythical code breakers, encryption experts literally won the war. Single-handed. Or mob handed. Credit where it’s due. Now, the multifarious tribes of neo-hippies and bankers grow large on the proceeds of 55 years of peace in their time. Land usage was not the issue. Huge lapses in perspective were the issue. Raves were for wankers right?

10,000,000 words expended, Eugene is struggling to remain conscious, and they’re running into each other and away with the meaning. I haven’t prepared my presentation in anything like as professional a manner as has Dionysia. She’s the pro’s pro. An A-list personage. My dreamlover. Still no meaning…Abrahams back yet? Gone away, holidaying on the continent. 3 holidays a year. At least. In this fractured age, nothing will mean that much ever again. Holidays from meaning. He doesn’t trust me. I’m just a showcase. In my mask. The tank’s almost empty. We’re inter-political. I’ve had my fill of it. For now. I’ve become truly concerned that the young at heart will never ever have to face their own mortality. They’ll all live forever in cyberspace. But anyway, this is linear time. I’m talking about the other sort. Time’s out for the young. There are no more boundaries, no border controls. Across the universe there are currents to be ridden, fantasies I wish to indulge, parties at which I intend to get drunk. The young at heart know they’ve got it made. They’re in love with the future, because the future is theirs. They live for the future, the green light. Nothing’s a problem for future generations because they have it all on tape. Ambitions are taken as read; the world is my oyster, my personal biosphere, my zone of control. I’ve taken out cultural leases in all major control centres; faked birth certificates, passports. The capitals of the world are under one metaphorical roof. It’s now, with Eugene’s help and with God’s blessing, my city. MY London. I take it, all of it. The energy fields, silted up with unused electricity, are key. If I haven’t yet made my meaning clear to the unseen energy vampires who we’ve been assured are behind and beyond the projector wall (which is still playing tunes and spontaneously re-mixing Dionysia’s epochal words concerning London’s problems) I take electricity away from the earth, where it can do harm. London is dead. And all points east and west. Deader than dead. All cities need re-invention. Re-mythologising. A latter-day reverse Columbus, re-tracing his steps through history, must sail down the Fleet in a tea chest…re-discover the source. A new John (or Simon) Dee must scry alternative futures. I’m opening the gates. The electricity is being channeled at last. We only have one chance at this. The inhabitants must of course all die, figuratively, to be re-born. Die or leave in giant arks. Sail away down the Thames, out into the channel and away. Or on planes bound for Eldorado. Air stewardesses will have their work cut out, what with air rage all the rage, for the Exodus must be mythical and epic. Great tribal movements, populations on the move on devotional repetitive forced marches, in train around the ex-bus lanes.

Now, with Eugene P’s (forged) endorsement and character reference in the bag, I have to re-discover the unexceptional in time. My mission, to re-energise. I must discover the good if not the exceptional in me. My forebears were not aware of it, they never are. Parents know jack shit. That’s the point of them. Not to know things, to be unaware. I’ve gone around the world, racking up the air miles. I have interests all over, businesses to attend to. On brogued feet, quietly dressed, thin pencil moustache and slicked down hair, I enter the departure lounge, checked in and boozed up. I see my own sort as eminently avoidable. I don’t wish to be involved in any sort of competition. I have my own TV crew with me, recording every telling detail of my progress. My thoughts and ruminations exhaled in considered and urbane tones, barely whispered, are minutely calibrated in the passengers’ minds as unscripted observations, and of course grist to the microphone’s mill. These utterances, which become by degrees more portentous and exclamatory, though at the same time deeply human and affecting, are the key to my ability to bring the plane down in mid-flight. Confidences are gained and then broken. Trust is misplaced. Close-ups aren’t required to expose the real me. I’m naked. In flight I’m stripped bare, a numinous presence, ready to be reborn. I slough off the old skin over Asia. Crashing to earth, drunk as a bastard, I must achieve humility and an acceptance of the mistakes I’ve made. I must become my own therapist in double quick time. Like hell. Left to my own devices, checking my portfolios, my investments, I see that I have never made a mistake in all my life. I am beyond error. I am electricity proof. I am a household god, God of Inconsequential Fecklessness and I fuck my own brother’s missus. My dead brother’s missus. How bad is that! Time for a word from Frank probably….