GALERIE R

Little Adventure On A Train
Remembering things can work like they're supposed to. Strange comfort gained from the formal reality of buildings, the sound of motors, the presence of numbers and white, fluffy clouds. It doesn't make sense, in literature, to state what the weather's like. Reality could be an illusion and for a second it can be a photograph. On the opposite platform they're washing the train. Get out before the pollution sets in. The viticole co-operative is now a building materials depot. Strange the presence or the absence of any or just a few curves. Quite a lot of talking, which can be like pollution. Most things are said with an emphasis akin to aggression, it's sometimes hard to imagine otherwise. The station, the town, hasn't been renovated yet. Weeds grow between the rails, the station placed in the countryside itself. We are not so far from bales of hay. Wheatfields to the right of the rails look like flat, open textbooks. It isn't sure how it's going to carry on. A passenger takes the first mobile telephone call. Sarko. Etruscan ideas. The landscape travels past like cardboard, like a commodity, a photo library, or an idea for an advertising campaign. The emergency handle is in a case, moulded, embedded into the carriage wall like an art object. Reflections of lights. Chairs that nearly pretend to be people. Parts of a cream and tile-coloured modern model town sit on the horizon. You can still see parts of the manner of the town's original fabrication. The station breathes. We assimilate into groups which resemble us. People are wearing shorts but they don't seem to know what they are doing. A passenger with a large rucksack walks up the carriage with a dog on a lead who is not convinced by this situation and neither am I. There could be some comfort gained from this simultaneous recognition but there isn't. The station ceiling is carved out with openings so that the sun hits the platform in long bands. You can hire cars. Or go to an aquarium. You can sit down if you want. We stay in the station for some minutes and become a photograph. The rails just outside the station are open but there are no plants at all. More miscellania, random accoutrements, usage-defined objects and partialities. Latin-based techno is drifting backwards out of somebody's earphones. You can especially pick out the synthesizer orchestrations and the metronomic bass drum which is crushing everything that is genuine in music in a way which is deeply disturbing and sounds like a cake recipe. In the suburb they have their arms round each other. Busy, cat-paw feel inflective brushing patternlessly against the contours absent from newly-built housing. We are still just in the presence of nature. Blurred chlorophyl tonalites stream past the train window. Out of the guy's earphones comes a series of abstractions. His thin white jacket is covered in circuit diagrams and his t-shirt is bright pink. By his daring choice of clothing I feel something admirable has been salvaged from this otherwise catastrophic state of humankind. Another telephone sounds as though a cartoon robot is playing a xylophone. A stop sign stands pregnantly at a non-junction in the countryside waiting for a car to stop at it. Building depots seem reliable and unhurried. Piles sit around in them and don't move much or at all but they know they are so useful that people don't know what they are. The countryside is full of wires. It seems the sound coming out of his headphones is the same sound the train is making. He has a confused expression which seems to be connected to his use of hair gel. He may be following the instructions to a CD given away free with cereal or it could be a missprint. A plantation of trees to the right is arranged in lines. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution and nobody paid attention that trees don't grow in lines. Things are starting to get more geometric. There are more numbers. More wires. Embankments begin to be needed to keep man's sprawling at bay. Wildlife can no longer run where it wants. The first bits of graffiti seem to be by people who don't know what they are called. There are the first concrete posts and wire fences. There are car parks and more debris, some of which will become useful by being thrown away promoting meaningful activity. A railway crossing. An inflatable blue pool. Houses are looking at us. Certain buildings are in disrepair. Others aren't finished but they don't seem they're going to be so maybe they are. Things feel more tense and important. We might soon be on television in a crowd shot of a city being a city. We'll soon settle into a new tempo where it becomes harder to breathe. We are becoming part of a discourse; part of what is supposed to matter. The forest returns for a moment and the town that slipped behind us breathes relief. Headphone is chewing gum and yawning. He seems satisfactorily occupied, cloaked in obliging electronic symbol. Large shaven fields are taking over and buildings are confined to the horizon. The train seems more anxious and is making different sounds. There is a roadsign but it is facing the wrong way. There seem to be a lot of trees but not if you look at old maps. We've given up everything and are throwing everything away like we forgot we needed the minerals. It takes a long time to think differently.

A goods train is pulling through platform 4 of Birmingham New Street ahead of the London train. The rusted panelled sides of the wagon are scored with flaking paint, rust scars, lines and scratches. A few have letters of a faded company name but generally they are pure abstractions, an art gallery-full. Unimprovably, painfully beautiful. And moving. The experience makes practically all art futile, because it wasn't meant to be art, the kind of question that sows enormous confusion. 13:56. Wondering for a second what percentage of people are travelling with things they actually need. Hoping that the world doesn't shut down before they get home, or wherever they're going, as destinations seem vague. People don't even have a change of clothes, or food for dinner. Most are simply en route, and buy an obligatory creation of pointless waste. Provision, need and proximity have become symbiotic. A speeding up of relief when people get out, ready to continue as though they had been held against their will. Wherever there is space there is selling, or paying, or advertising. Systemic synthetic synthesis. People can no longer tolerate themselves without constant maintenance so that what people endure to you becomes alien. We’ve bought our way out of everything on some invisible assemblage of things we don't belong to. Everybody's clothes are clean. Everybody has just come home. A just-washed denim jacket, a black t-shirt, things so clean they are scared, like they haven’t been out of a shop before. Perhaps we are sure of veracity only when it appears non-sensical. A grey open-neck top, a hooded fleece, clean black trousers, clean black Dr Marten boots, clean black zip-up boots, clean pressed blue jeans. Blue jeans with a sharp crease, a pink polo-neck jumper, a clean blue shirt. Tables are covered with newspapers, bottles of water, a train ticket, a scrap of paper. Outside, the fields are ploughed like a record; changing, combed green fields bordered by trees, a factory. A wall of trees shuts us in as we pass through a station too fast to read the name or know where we are exactly. Things are more furry. A bar of chocolate, two empty crisp packets folded neatly with a knot tied in each and folded flat; one green, one yellow and red. A mobile phone. A bottle of Lucozade and a folder of papers. A girl wakes up and takes a sip of water at least. At last some meaning. The luggage racks are filled with a line of small bags, generally black and some paisley-patterned. Black is frowned upon until it spells function. Nobody has any firm luggage. We can't sit down on anything. Everything has become casual. It would be okay if all you had to do was correct your teachers but you have to not hurt their feelings while you do it. The train pulls into Milton Keynes at 2:09.

February 2011. I am installing an exhibition. Opposite the gallery, apartments are being built. The building site is much more interesting than my work. It is larger and all the parts are straight. They will certainly have front doors and some will have balconies. There are sculptural and conceptual forms everywhere, guided and directed by men in warm jackets and hard hats. A tall crane manoeuvres large, earth-coloured metal grills into position for moulding concrete. Seven of my sculptures are against the glass wall facing out on the Cours de l'Europe. Four people visit on the first day of being open, two people I knew who I had waved to across the street, and two women who look at the drawings quickly before leaving. There are also texts on the End of Art and Maxims but no-one has stopped to read them. On the second day a man comes in to deliver brochures and soon after another comes in to put up a poster, otherwise there are no visitors. I brought a radio and some okay music is playing. I listen to 'Born in the USA' and still don't know what it means. I put one of my pictures on an easel facing out so the bus drivers can see it when they stop at the crossing in front of the gallery. Nobody comes on Wednesday. On Thursday three women come in, stay for a while and leave. It is raining slightly. When I arrive at 2 o'clock the roads are empty. It is January. Or February. The workmen are busy on their large sculpture. The gallery heater blows loudly. I am bored. There is a revolution in Egypt. I have written out my invitations for the opening which is ten days after the exhibition started. Books and ruins. Long while burn. Castanada. Hard to erase the traces of man. Exploding pictures of the wild west.

Calm-like, hinting at complexity. Trams. Bordeaux Pressing 52. Chartrons. Cours de Verdun. Place de la Victoire. Coiffure. It is mild. It is raining lightly, more like mist standing vertically, making people wear coats they don't really need. A bunch of people to my right feel like a few square metres of London. There is a lot of hardness, hard architecture, wire fence. Louis Barthou. Arrêt St Genes. A junk food shop. Prêt à porter accessoires feminins. 2% trees. The rest is tarmac, anti-nature, metal, road coverings. Cartoon pigs in butcher shops are smiling as though they enjoy having 10,000 volts put through them and being hacked to pieces. The person sitting next to me pulls out a white card which seems to have an address on it. Someone validates their ticket. Two people in front of me dressed in chic, rubbish dump style, leather, folded things, jackets, straps, adopting a pose as if the tram is sailing off a cliff. We move into the suburbs where things look like Lego. You can see more. There is somehow more space but there seem to be more things. Peixotto. Could be a Portugese warrior who came to conquer Bordeaux, create an embryonic single currency and marry a princess but probably isn't or might be. More things are being built. With technology and a crane you can build a billion square feet of residential, office and retail space in three hours even if it starts falling to bits immediately. Doyen Brus. Could be the registrar. There are more trees. The balance of nature and human intervention seems more reasonable, more interesting than watching people on television wondering what they're doing, or reading newspapers which don't exist. We have left the tracks and are travelling through a forest. Camponac. Bibliothèque. Bibliothèque-Médiathèque. The computer-generated voice says we'll meet again in a way which seems she'd like to have coffee and chat until she has to drive the tram back. A library in a forest accesible by tram has restored some faith in the human condition. I wonder if there are any books.

Strangely dressed people with dogs. Reflections of guitars in mirrors. A line of trees. Some bags. I'm trying to keep my composure, confronted by a wall which seems to have abandoned cohesion, even with riches. There are strange, alien things to eat, things no longer connected to our universe. Things you have to wait for. Bottles of water. Images of other people on underground trains. Distortions of physics and chemistry. A Peugeot. Doughnuts. Variables. Harricot beans. We are unwilling to overcome the rhythms of linguistical structure unless we opt to give up buying things. We are in a constant state of becoming which may sometimes mean it stays that way. It's not even that difficult. I meet the gardener. And the blackbird. It is warm. It is raining. It is cold. It is warm. The sound of gods roar past in a jet plane as the sound of the glass on the table signals presence. Growth, in a world of restriction. In an environment of. The outlines of words giving off meaning images exploding at the corner of outlines, pictures. In your sleep. Different light greens. Over a hump. Turning a corner. A peak over the top. Just getting through. On. By. Bit by bit. A roll of sellotape. A bar code from the side of a pencil. A blue broom. Yellow broom. Broom, broom. Olifactory lolly factory. Shoeprints in mud. Sponges. Another pile of bits of paper. Shopping lists. There is profundity everywhere in a way which isn't always easy to handle.

I visit the FRAC gallery in Bordeaux which is showing a mix of British artists who all seem to be from somewhere else. The exhibition seems to be about boats, the sea, water, memories, traces, but not Art. I read a text about meaning, ideological spaces and visual motif. The British art scene isn't an art scene but "an object of description, analysis and fantasy", and I think tangentially of football. The toilets are sublime. Industrial sliding doors, natural aeration and real light swtiches which seem to be something society is becoming afraid of. The "island" is, apparently, a "geographic reality and an allegory, a position and the abstract representation of an elsewhere", but so is everything. Everything looks as though everyone has run out of everything and is exhibiting whatever's left, nautically themed. I collect a few pamphlets and go outside and glance with tangible gravitas at a flattened cigarette end, nestling between the large, uneven cobble stones, resonating with contradiction while retaining its benign state of supposed immutability. It is both "nothing”, something, and yet nothing or “something”. In being discarded it de-realises the very concept of "purpose", formalising the speculative tension between description and supposition, the ultimate, quintessential and inevitable, definition of itself.

I leave Bordeaux and the train is stopping so repeatedly it feels like an addiction, a weakness, an obsession, or maybe it's just for pleasure. If we continue like this I'll have to get Santa to come and find me but I haven't got a phone. We're on a completely new generation of trains designed by computer with seats facing backward like the last ones. We're going backwards under irregular purple lighting and supposed to feel good. The handrails are brown which is a total aesthetic catastrophe which cannot be remedied other than by replacing them immediately. They’re not even really brown. The train is impeccably smooth but maybe because we're going so slowly. I am surrounded by injection-moulded alogarithms that push physics to the boundaries where there aren't any. The stations have complicated names. The only solution is to sit diagonally. The guard says 'monsieur' and I ask him if wants to see my ticket which he patently does. He could have been offering me a cake, or at least asking which kinds I like. He seems to want to ask about my especially deplorable dress sense, louche red and black rainproof anorak, green beret, sepia photo-style black wool trousers and hideous but ultra-comfortable boots/training shoe things which smell toxic. If he'd asked I'd just say you buy things which are cheap and don't care, or not too much, what you look like. It should all be comfortable but it's an open question whether it's good to feel like someone else. He looks at both sides of my ticket to check the trip and to see if I had put my ticket in the stamping machine which I had but it took three goes. He is very well shaved and says thank you. The large, curved, sloping windows confront you like publicity for a fibreglass ice cream. I pull down the table in the back of the seat in front and have to say it is a fantastic experience. It stops at just the right height, is deftly easy to pull down even though I have one leg crossed. I'm pissed off I haven't got a drink to put in the drinks holder which is light mauve and a strange shape, computers getting frothy about elipses. I want a meal and a beer but there's no food and I haven't got any money and the train is starting to shudder. Computer simulations are going haywire and the frequency is making everyone deaf, like driving to another country in second gear but pretending you're in third. The lighting seems to have turned green but maybe its the opposite of mauve in the colour spectrum and an illusion. We pull up at the last but one station because the names are getting so complicated I can't remember where we are but it doesn't matter because we're going to the terminus so I can relax. I get off and order a pizza and am dressed the same as the pizzeria's festive decor which they're sellotaping to the windows. I wait in the car. I am next door to a building suppliers. Portes d'entrée. Verandas. Vitrages. Motorisation. Clôtures. I think of buying a veranda but I've borrowed a car and it wouldn't fit and the place is closed and I don't actually want one and I haven't got any money. Neatly crafted and well-installed grillage enclose the car park of the veranda shop. I trust them. If I want something rigid I know where to come. The moon is three-quarters full and low, rain-soaked clouds are on their way to rain somewhere. The forecourt is covered in gravel, small cars parked in a row beside each other; large, regular spaces in between.

I'm wandering around Royan, contemplating the nature of existence, trying not to be ashamed of myself. A woman points at a bag in a shop and her friend nods agreement saying 'yes, it is pretty'. Everybody is speaking French. A small black Opel has its lights left on as it has just been raining. Everything is slightly in the wrong order and I don't think I'm going to catch up. People are sitting ouside now the rain has stopped. They would change into bathing suits if they could. Two women stand at a pedestrian crossing looking strict, wearing clothes that look as though they have never been washed, and might never be for that might make them dirtier. A black dog walks past on a leash. A guy wearing a denim jacket buttoned up and a scarf talks on a mobile telephone. A woman in a shop pushes a cardboard box across the floor as though that is all she has to do all week. Nearing the centre there is an alarming increase in traffic sounds, cars, people and stress. I cross the Boulevard de la République to where it is quieter. Pizza delivery bikes stand idle. The closed-down cyber café is covered in posters for the cinema, an absurd cartoon, or something sentimental, funny and well-acted. Clean modern cars are arranged in their spaces. Houses are for sale. A post van is parked on the pavement. Cars tick over causing pollution. A man walks between the plants outside the post office reminding me of what Giacometti thought about recognising people by their form from a distance. The post office accumulates the flotsam of urban actuality where there is the most humanity and the greatest passage of ordinary people, engaged in a multitude of contextually neutral possibilities, with alcohol and occasionally spurious dogs.

MOT testing while you wait. Shops. Rubbish bags. Red phone boxes. A fast food container lying on the pavement. A woman dressed in olive green. Ancient Greek. It's Sunday and I'm in a fast food shop in Brixton. The fridge is serving as an air conditioner and you can do what you like. Nobody seems to be sorting out society's problems but they do sell cigarette papers. It's hot. There is very little cohesion in the way people dress. You can "grab a late winner" but I don't know what that means. A couple in a check shirt, she in a black dress. A lot of women's dresses seems as short as possible, even though it's winter. Quite a lot of bicycles. People drive on the left to avoid confusion. My shadow is slightly ahead of me to my right. Some people carry rucksacs as though going into town is some kind of expedition which it is. The public squares in Brixton have been refurbished and give a strange feeling of respect for something, though all semblance of culture and an interest in the lives of ordinary people seem to have disappeared. Libraries are being dispensed with as people are discouraged from reading things which weigh too much. A 68 bus is going to King's Cross. There are trees, bus stops, large bicycles painted on the road, arrows, dashed white lines, housing estates, small parks. A woman sits next to me on the bus wearing a pink dress carrying a bag in blue and white striped cotton. It is humid, not much air. Planes fly overhead looking for Heathrow. Loughborough Road. Groveway. Vassal Road. There are roadworks and there seem to be more signs telling people what's going on. It feels good to be aware of bikes. Pet's Pantry. Tony's Fruit and Vegetables. Kennington church. Training. Traffic lights. It's not easy realising I'm here. But nobody's from here, or few people I'd guess. We, or seem to, have a context we're born into.

I'm in a restaurant that feels like a shoe-shop made of glass. I try the cafe next door but find it is the same restaurant. I walk from the upper floor down a staircase that looks as though it has just been assembled but lost some of the important parts. A pianist in a light blue shirt is trying to imitate a piano player playing a player piano. It'd be easier to put on a CD but it wouldn't be so artifically real. The sound quality is terrible. It is a mini grand piano with a lot of buttons. The restaurant decoration resembles an incredibly sophisticated bus-stop, fake glass counters holding bottles of wine hostage, bottles with lots of accents which are too much hassle to write down. 2003. The barman lends me his pink pen which carries an advertisment for an estate agent. There are glasses in rows everywhere which are stressing me out. The coffee machine looks like a block of flats or an appliance for testing vehicles. Incongruity is everywhere. Wood, glass, seedy ceiling tiles pretending to be from Manhattan. The kitchen is visible through glass panels which just annoys everybody. You can see the cooks doing very little when they should be creating impossibly fantastic dishes magically and without pause until early in the morning when they can finally relax, break wind and have a digestif. The cooks are pissed everybody's looking at them, though nobody is, as they work frantically at giving the impression of working hard. The kitchen wall is fluorescent green with the form of a wine bottle. In case. Everything has been designed and put together with a total absence of class. A woman next to me at the bar is starting her dessert. A large mural seems to represent an open space in Kashmir though it could be a building site for a future Olympic games with no contestants. Everything in modern life has become symbol, projected back at us to remind us that we are not supposed to be about anything. The thing is no longer, or no longer what it was. Everything is exposed and gathering dust. Everything else is moving too quickly. Certain things are obviously allowed. There is a tea towel on the counter behind the bar. The woman goes up to the till as though we are in a supermarket which we are. There are outsized bottles and cocktail glasses and vases full of corks. The manager gives off an air of disliking people intensely, like he wants people to feel uninvolved or unloved, or is maybe just having a bad day and is generally a great guy and a lot of fun. I am going to try and stay until the pen runs out. There are paintings on the wall of limited coherence. The manager is licking the kitchen windows with his tongue or it seems like it. He probably likes cooks. There are no women here, servers or kitchen staff. It is like we are on a different planet and mankind has lost. No-one cares whether the pianist is playing a real piano or not. I'm bored. I go to pay and leave. Humankind is finished.

Little Adventure In A Café (Hot Money Leaving)
Sounds of pollution, as though silence is too strange to contemplate. Theatre. There is the usual motion, of chemistry and mathmatics, colour and sound. A vast amount of energy surrounds every object, form and action with invisible direction arrows between them. A vast amount of permutations, few of them with any meaning. None with any feeling. Even the sugar cubes are talking to me, assuring me I am in for a thrilling adventure of excellence. The biscuit gives me its website address. The biscuit is advertising coffee as a form of surrender instead of biscuits. Everything is confusing. More literature drives by, something about furniture, a bright yellow truck in case we are too distracted by everything else. We are taut. A palm tree is absorbing foreign languages to unforeseeable effect. People are behaving like newsreaders; there is no let-up. We are more continuous than the traffic. It is moments like this we are grateful for well-behaved dogs. There are certain formats we are assumed to function within. Even my pen has some text, some typeface trying to communicate with me. At two o'clock the cafés empty of people, returning to work. We forget how lonely we are. We employ metaphysical and telepathic geometries to keep insecurity at bay. The slightest movement does not go unnoticed. A form of success. The nature that keeps the human condition functioning, it doesn't matter terribly how well, what matters is continuity of a known kind. A biscuit wrapper flutters and mutters causing a kind of invisible distress which may or may not be dealt with. It is not ours, that is the point. A random destination flutters in the air but it doesn't matter.

Little Adventure In A Brocante
My first brocante. I am exhibiting my drawings framed and presented on trestles at knee-height. The sun flows gently through the trees and over the cliffs. The sound of sandals and quiet noises. A hum of a refrigerated trailer. Leaves nestle between blades of grass. The sound of crockery being shuffled. People talk in speech bubbles. People attracted to objects. A woman stands stroking a glass-fronted bookshelf while talking on a mobile telephone. People make tapping noises and bang quietly as though they are preparing to leave for somewhere. A rhythm is building. The sound of aluminium. There is gentle, continuous movement. People wonder. Are reflecting. Pieces of furniture are neatly arranged under a tree as though the house has disappeared, taking the carpet. A man is fixing a table but nothing seems to be having any effect. Small groups of people congregate and exchange parts of language. There is agreement from time to time. Objects have taken over. The refrigerator is mildly irritating but is also quite zen, its confident tone of steady electrical current. Footsteps exchange. There is pointlessness everywhere. Elaborate items of furniture seem too ornate to use. Rusted industrial things of a bewildering panopoly of shapes and vague uses. Things are easy to tell. Harmony is produced by forms of similarity that no-one seems sure are durable or sincere, but is of little importance. Speed increases in proportion to frequentation. Things accelerate or maintain. A man carries a stereo system as though it is a pet. The same people walk back and forth as though they are auditioning for a film of people wandering around. The DIY man is still shuffling and talking ceaselessly creating a useless form of distraction. Things seem to have a wilful tendency to replicate. We can allow ourselves to be transported. We can engage with ambient, metaphysical energies. People are being furtive though are sometimes merely sensitive. There is always something going on. Some people seem to enjoy creating tension. It is all outward though comes from inside which may be empty so all the reverberations come from the perimeter. A medium-sized dog is pulling its owner towards the estuary as though it knows it wants to go swimming but wouldn't once it got there. The machine still hums. It is like an emissary from another planet or a higher form of consciousness. People adjust things. The brocante is a concept without pets. A large, variable toy. The sun rises further and creates more contrast with deeper blacks. Other dimensions are needed. A family unit goes past panting, all forms of tension caked in make-up. Different styles of clothing are becoming more conspicuous. The immediate landscape is made of cars. More complicated units arrive. Children reverberate with troublesome potential. A woman held together by bra-straps and shoulder bags deliberates before the same bookshelf which seems to be giving off some subtle erotic message. The brocante is starting to resemble a car park at a rock festival. Dress sense becomes increasingly degraded by people who have got up late. A woman in an orange t-shirt lets a teddy bear key ring dangle loosely between her fingers as she looks at my stand, frowning. People have backpacks as though they need to carry more weight. People seem as though they would be at ease with the sound of traffic. Confusion begins to scrape at imperceptible boundaries. The confused family unit returns looking for something. Occasionally someone is graceful. People walk off-axis by necessity and choice. The sky changes but remains still. It is very clever and knows no-one has noticed. A seagull is doing aerobatics in tight formation over a green and white sunshade. All sorts of texts go by on t-shirts too fast and too oblique to read. Certain items of footwear seem completely impractical and sometimes also the wrong colour. Pushchairs go past like a chariot race or a competition with wheelbarrows. People look as though this is the first thing they planned to do after getting out of bed. The near-total absence of fashion-consciousness is both admirable and disturbing. A man wears the bag he is carrying around his neck for no comprehensible reason. A butterly performs manoeuvres and casual trajectories, settles on the bottle bank and meditates. We talk about cola. A man is wearing patterned red and white shorts so bright they look as though they are going to explode. A man walks past with a fishing rod and a look of determination to immediately go fishing. The grass hasn't moved at all. People walk more closely as tension mounts. A man selling nothing but knives seems surrounded by danger, calm ambiance restored by french-fried potatoes carried away like trophies.

Peluches Toutes Propres. P.M. Crocodile Jim Tonic x 12
Women stand in ways which recall bearing children. Furniture is radiating inflexibility. People look at my drawings with a confused expression. It will be good if dogs don't urinate on my work. I am informed that a sheep has destroyed my friend's neighbour's garden. The community of stuffed toys in front of me has diminished in number and seems more vulnerable. An occasionally interesting hairstyle goes past. People are browner. A woman holding a bag of prunes makes her way back slowly towards the entrance as though everything difficult that has happened in the history of civilisation is weighing down on her. The possibility of anything astonishingly interesting or unusual seems to be fading. The sailing boats haven't moved from the port. My basic emotional state remains unchanged. I have tried to convince myself of certain plausibilities. The sound of paper and cardboard is punctuated by the occasional tinkle of glass. There are almost certainly many less things here than this morning but it doesn't feel like it. An unknowable number of parts of history have been diffused and will be recontextualised. The patterns on people's clothes seem in a hurry to leave and seem temporarily devoid of meaning. Even car engines seem tired and disinterested. Only the offer of an enormously extravagant free banquet, large sums of money, or the arrival of a spaceship, will stop people from leaving for home.

Little Adventure In Town
I'm in France and my mind momentarily shivers as I am aware of the present. I am guarding an exhibition of my drawings in Meschers. The town hall is closed but the exhibition room is open to the public through a side entrance. All of Meschers is quiet. It is also grey and colder than yesterday which was bright and sunny. The high street feels quiet, an absence of the energy of people. A dog is barking and what little traffic there is has gone quiet. The world is changing slightly. The pen I have been using hurts. Expensive things tend to be heavier. They belong in a world where everyday objects are larger than usual, where everything is new, where nothing smells of nature, only cleaning products, brand new objects and thick, long-haired carpets which are impossible to clean; loud, intimidating silence, ornamental features and heavily varnished doors. It is uncomfortable to write with, especially where your second finger supports the part where the cap fits so there is a ridge which becomes irritating, so causes stress, so making you frustrated and unhappy. I change to using a pen I bought in a brocante. It is slightly thinner, completely changing the feel of writing. It is slightly too thin for my hand and slightly too short, meaning less balance, less ability to pivot while writing, meaning more effort, so more frustration, so less happiness. The dog barks once or twice. The council employees have left in their communal vehicle as they change the flower displays around the town. A woman walks past talking on a mobile telephone. She walks back past again still talking. She could be lost and asking directions from someone who doesn't know where she is. A conversation carries through the walls. The French flag flutters outside the window of the council chamber. It is busy working even though it is Tuesday and the Mairie is closed. There are more footsteps. I am sure someone is there but I don't see anyone. A door closes. In the future we will make recordings like these and play them in buildings when humankind has been overtaken by chemicals, robots, and harsh ideological latitudes. The workmen are back. There is a sound of water as though someone is emptying a small bucket of water onto the pavement. A workman walks past wearing fluorescent green trousers that are as fluorescent as possible without being actively dangerous. For a while his hose rests on the grass embankment. A man comes in and says hello. Another comes in and notices the white plastic blackboard has been moved. A man comes in with a medium-sized cardboard box balanced on one hand saying he has a package for the Mairie. He is thoroughly convincing, though it could still be a ploy. A manhole cover is being removed outside. Sounds of society at work. A low hum of a car engine which then pulls away. Other car sounds follow like a team of huskies. There is a sound of water trickling but it could be rain. Watering the flowers might have provoked a metaphysical imbalance which has triggered the beginning of an environmental catastrophe. I am reading 'Algebra & Cosmography' and it doesn't make any sense at all, at least for the first thirty nine pages. There is no date which makes me suspicious. Perhaps on page 40 they will say what everything means but I don't expect so. I'm not sure it's really a book. It makes you doubt the foundations of mathmatics, thought, science and reason. It was written by three people, probably men, with slightly implausible names. Perhaps it is an alien product devised to trigger widespread panic and render planet Earth vulnerable to takeover. It is a book which presumably explains how the universe functions and is held together, but it doesn't explain how in any way which is possible to understand. It might take me hundreds of millions of years to read. A woman enters knowing that the front entrance is shut and immediately forgets I exist. It is raining which makes it more likely that no-one will visit my exhibition. The apparent trajectory of the sun around the earth includes some figures which if taken as (x x 2) might or might not equal an average value of 32'3". If it was four everything would crash. I am suspicious because in the diagram the world is shown as exactly round and we know that it bulges at the middle making the mathematics extremely complicated. All sorts of things happen to light rays when they get refracted by atmosphere so scientists have to invent machines to explain why everything is like it is. We have built a big circular motorway under the French/Swiss border where particles crash into each other giving thousands of miles of meaningless data. If everything explodes, who is responsible will be trapped in litigation for centuries by which time the planet will have corroded. The mayor is next door making society better, cleaner and safer. More car sounds go past. The bar opposite the town hall is open today after being closed on Monday which restores my faith in the concept of empirical truth. The exhibition room door is open. A male person walks past exhaling smoke and slows to nearly a halt as though he might be considering coming into the exhibition, or maybe he's forgotten something. Or maybe he's had an idea and needs to concentrate. I decide to go and look at my pictures so they'll feel useful. Activity is starting. School has finished and cars set off in convoy like it is D-Day. Occasionally mothers walk past with children but it is clear practically everyone drives their children to school in the back seat as though they are a president or a diplomat or a football star on their way to an awards ceremony, a chauffeur-driven drive home after a day of pointless brain-washing. The children all seem incapable of speech but it's hard to talk when you're strapped to the back seat. Ten or fifteen vehicles stream past bumper to bumper followed by another four or five, rehearsed symbiosis, dispelling any doubt about the formalised consensus of our behavioural existence. More footsteps. The church bells ring five. There were no visitors. Art was not shoe-horned into the programme. No left-leaning philanthropists decided to give me a castle and a few million dollars or euros or whatever so I can work more peacefully and comfortably. No-one came to strike up an immediately perfect relationship, to plan for the future over intriguing cocktails, and slope away to an altogether different existence. Outside a couple of kids are learning attitudes and postures which will help them integrate seamlessly into adulthood and a comfortably-shared vision of uniformity, if occasionally and politely frayed at the edges.

The sun casts shadows on the inside of the exhibition room. The usual background consciousness of the inadequate precision of words. The children are displaying mannerisms of unconscious aggression, it is probably too late to do anything. Clear power struggles are at play. Pretty much everything about the world seems inevitable, or at least inclined to breed the same kind of useless, violent, confrontational dysfunction. This afternoon, anyway. A pneumatic drill is doing something like dentistry but on a larger scale. There is music in the street piped through the town's loudspeaker system. It could be used to recite the first manifestos of Surrealism, or interesting recipes, or the occasionally absurd, deliberate and amusing pseudonyms of nonetheless spiritually displaced Australian aborigines. Perhaps it will be soon announcing that a spaceship containing clones of the leaders of the Third Reich whose DNA has been stored in jars has crashed into a nuclear power station but only suceeded in damaging the cloakroom. Aretha Franklin is playing reminding anyone who might be listening of the delirious transformational fervour of being funky. Tomorrow the music will have changed to a basic kind of backround music type thing, though for a while there is a metallic buzz-zaw which seems unusually radical and quite extraordinarily avant-garde until the music stops and the sawing continues from a different source around the corner. I was ready to go and buy the CD immediately. We are not yet so culturally advanced, but we will surely get there as it seems to be in the nature of the human condition that everything - culture, at least - inevitably aspires to the finest and highest forms possible. Only in the present is this not so. Soon humankind will abandon meaningless culture and be proud and excited to use as many syllables as possible. The sun is shining and I have a cup of coffee and an imaginary liqueur. The Bar Riv' Hotel has a grey parrot who whistles the Marseilleise. Behind me is the sound of a cleaning machine of some sort, something rotary. A few members of the municipality return to view and are obviously debating what to do with some of the traffic bollards which line the high street. The mayor has his hands in his pockets and is easily the best-dressed. Golden, yellow-brown leaves are scattered before the steps leading to the exhibition and fan out towards the grass verge planted with trees. I would have to ask someone what kind of trees they are. They are the kind with a trunk and whose branches span outwards and upwards. The leaves do not seem to have moved all week, except maybe when I wasn't there. A van from the municipality arrives and an employee takes away one of the bollards. Perhaps it was being difficult, or argumentative, or was simply unhappy, or maybe in need of repair. An irregular-shaped hole has been left like a miniscule bunker from an ironic, revolutionary golf course. The rotary tool stops and the absence of its disconcerting sound takes precedent for a minute or so before it resumes. Pedestrians and chatter wander by, followed by the rumbling of a car, the swift, feathered, pedalled passage of a cyclist, then another, then an internal combustion engine, then another, accelerating. A door slams. The rotary tool is still busy. A car passes. The Tourist Office is open. A woman passes and nods hello.

The municipal van returns and the workman in fluorescent trousers steps out with a bucket and a trowel. The workman fills the bunker with sand which will dismay the golfers. The sound of earnest work reverberates with low frequencies. The sky has been painted with thin wispy white watercolour clouds after a week of pure blue sky and no wind. The flowers have stayed in their alloted arrangements, showing permutations of what nature is capable of in pink and green, purple and yellow. Two girls sit in front of the tourist office trying to control their lack of certainty, as a man in a tracksuit looks at a notice board. A couple of women walk past wearing small rucksacs. They could be hitch-hiking to South Africa but they are heading the wrong way. The workman is soon finished and recoups his van and drives away. The girls on the bench gesticulate and stand from time to time. Flags in front of the Mairie are tired from waving all week, though they continue to move almost imperceptibly as they listen to the rotary tool. The girls get up to leave before they change their minds and sit back down again. The bells strike four for something to do. A car's reflection appears in the window of the bar before the car itself appears. Courbet wrote in the 19th century that art should be exhibited in railway stations but nobody paid attention. I pose my plastic goblet on the steps as a woman comes past to talk to me about my work. I explain that I draw as I walk to capture the experience of moving through a space instead of a single snap-shot from a fixed viewpoint. She makes mosaics. Perhaps there is a way of walking along making mosaics. Extremely Roman. Romanesque. Romantic. Ruminate. Rotivate. Motivate. Motor.

Little Adventure At The Cupole
It's around one o'clock in the centre of Royan at La Cupole. I'm waiting for a receipt for my cup of coffee so I know where I am. I have a box of matches with a picture of a large white duck or a goose watching over its siblings. I am wondering what the duck is doing. The matchbox is busy raising environmental consciousness. Some men carrying what are probably laptops are saying goodbye after having lunch. They seem on time. They are busy keeping things going. A woman seated next to me has a curious demeanour and seems vaguely troubled. She is wearing pink socks. Some people come out of the café to smoke cigarettes. A man a few tables away comes over and asks the woman if she has had lunch in a way which is polite and caring. The woman replies timidly that she has has, without really saying anything. The man has been sitting with a friend, a woman in a full-length leather coat and black sunglasses. She is sipping an iced coffee and twiddling with the straw. A woman to my left is standing talking in a doorway on a mobile phone. A large white builders van is parked directly in front of the café, as though the builders are inside having lunch. There is a strong breeze blowing from the left, from the sea. My cup doesn't sit exactly in its saucer because of some manufacturing defect so rattles as I write. The table doesn't sit properly on the misshapen pavement so I keep it steady with my foot. The man, probably a saint or a chivalrous knight, and his companion, seem hopelessly devoted to one another. He has twice bent down in front of her on his knee as though professing unconditional devotion or asking to borrow her car. Two women, one in a fur-trimmed coat, cross the pedestrian crossing to my left. It is almost December and it is warm. If it wasn't for the breeze one could sit in just a t-shirt, though it would be advisable to wear trousers or a skirt and some socks and shoes, or be immediately reported for being completely deranged and a direct and immediate threat to consensual morality. It would maybe not be the same if this were the desert and we were sitting almost naked on a fallen tree around a water hole, in which case it would be strange to be sitting fully and smartly dressed poised on chairs arranged in lines drinking coffee from small, dysfunctional expresso cups. The saucers in particular. I do not see any sense in trying to communicate this thought to my immediate neighbours though it might be interesting to try. For some moments it has been calm and there has been very little traffic, though one feels there are starting to be more cars, like surrogate people deciding it is the moment to begin drifting back to work. I am becoming increasingly aware that the assumptions and activities that we were used to using to embellish the nature of our experiences, and which comprised the unquestioned and essential fabric of what we were most habitually concerned with, are beginning to dissolve and disappear, leaving only the infrastructural realities of largely man-made materials which have no meaning whatsoever. The woman to my right gets up to leave putting on her long brown probably, but maybe not, imitation fur coat. I have been talking with Nathalie as we had just bumped into each other and I asked if she's like to join me for a coffee, though the waiter hasn't come over to us and so she won't get to have coffee but doesn't mind. A woman walks past whose heels make a confident noise before passing beyond audible range, or maybe she has passed into another space-time relationship and is now at a bus stop in Malta. The door to the café opens regularly and closes making a sound like a door closing. The sound of a skateboard to my left reminds me of kids who used to skateboard in the car park of the South Bank centre in London, a memory that has been sitting waiting patiently for over a decade to be triggered by the sound of a skateboard. I imagine that what I am writing could one day have the possibility of sparking derision from someone oblivious to its tantalising, neo-existentialist intention, that my writing is completely and utterly worthless, and that I should try writing some worthwhile, serious rubbish like Wordsworth, but I carry on thinking about skateboards. The guy has picked up the skateboard as he crosses the pedestrian crossing, puts it down again and sails off to my right accompanied by that strange frequency particular to skateboards and their durable, infuriatingly small, and fucking noisy, nylon wheels. A man in a leather coat approaches talking on a portable phone, looks at the café and turns away as though he was merely checking the café was still there. There is a puff of exhaust smoke and the sound of a handbrake, followed by the sound of some keys rattling. A woman goes into an office and the car settles into its parking space, subtly discharging its remaining latent energy. The office could be an employment bureau as everyone who goes in seems to carry an air of expectation with them and seem to be living in the future. A car with a rattly diesel engine goes past reminding me of my car which I hope will start as its battery is nearly flat. A woman in a patchwork coat strides purposefully past clutching an envelope. A man joins others to my right and immediately exchanges phrases and gestures. It is slightly colder. Glancing to my right there are interesting reflections in the café windows which cast the nature of reality into relief. A bus goes past like a mechanical dinosaur. There is a visible lack of consensus as to what the weather is like. Some dress as though it is warm, while others are tightly buttoned-up in full-length coats. What appears to be climatic change is sowing confusion. We can expect more.

Little Adventure At The Forum
Bouquet au choix. Myclamen or something. Café. Croc Madame. Thoma's Café. A woman and probably her daughter who's carrying a box of something quite possibly useless, fragile and expensive or maybe not. It's impossible to say and may be useless to speculate. Ouvert 24/24. Vêtements. A woman in a black coat. Au choix 39, le pantalon. A guy with a moustache. Some people in a café who look like they've turned into fossils. A packet of biscuits. Coiffure. Alain. Masculin. A shop that sells everything to do with wired connections, beeping noises, back-lit panels with numbers and symbols, plugs, incomprehensible voltages, stress. People are walking closer to shop windows as it gets nearer to the festive season. The smell from bakeries is more intense but maybe it's because it gets dark earlier. There are more chemicals. I walk into the tobacconist and a woman in a pink coat is standing in the way of the door. A white terrier is looking out onto the street. There are strange clusters of energies as people are uncertain how to queue at the counter; an invisible haze of confusion which is agreeable and mildly compelling. It is unseasonably warm. The planet is being destroyed by our insisting that every action and experience be as far removed from reality, meaning and effort as possible. I am intimidated by the idea of having a coffee smack bang in the nerve centre of Royan's social life but I decide and plunge into the epicentre of social interaction that is the terrace of the Forum. I take a table at the edge with an ashtray. It's not long before the waiter comes and asks what I want, not directly but with a mumbled abstraction like "kvsdrdrrmuzrr?." "Uncafésevuple", I reply. He soon returns with a large tray laden with brightly coloured bottles, noise, experiments with gravity and computations of physics and geometry, all no doubt verifiably dependent on quantum mechanics. A dog barks as though he has seen something and is trying to point it out to everybody. Maybe he's seen a lead that he would like his owner to get him, or maybe he can sense an invisible volcanic cloud which is concealing a band of counterfeiters who have escaped from a video game and are planning to buy up the world's supply of luxury chocolates, or maybe he is simply reminding his owner that they have a lot to do before the shops shut.

I empty my sugar into my coffee and take a sip only to find the space in the handle is too small to put one's finger through. Humankind got bored with perfection, logic, and things which worked and spent the end of the 20th century inventing things which are fundamentally stupid. The outside of the cup is decorated like a putrid greenish-yellow zebra. I am tortured but give up quickly. Two women get up and slip past between the chairs in front of my table and a large plant holder holding a small palm tree, imploring me gently not to move or disturb myself as though it were metaphysically, practically and spiritually unconscionable. A woman walks past talking on her telephone as her small child next to her wonders why she is less important than a telephone. The chatter of people's voices maintains a relatively high frequency, fuelled by enthusiasms. There are footsteps, snatches of conversations and the sound of traffic. The large space that is the beach to our left makes itself felt. A man with a taut, short overcoat stands still, wondering if he has the time for contemplating what all this means. Smoking my small cigar is becoming a chore and I'm looking forward to when it's finished. I want to leave. There are too many things going on. There is too much furniture and none of it is moving. There are too many unnatural colours and styles of footwear. I'm not sure if my shirt is properly tucked in at the back. There is too much geometry. Too much raffia. Too many permutations of how to carry bags. There are references to Christmas everywhere and an absence of cohesion. There are extraordinarily crass representations of Father Christmas that are way too large as though we're guaranteed to pay attention and have our metaphysical equilibrium annihilated. He is always white. Or pink. He shouldn't be so fat if he's so busy and he rarely seems to wear gloves. He will be one of the first casualties of global warming. These kind of conflicts can destroy a young mind, making them think presents are delivered by a cartoon. Unresolved emotional questions walk by. Most people wear coats which are brown or black and some have dogs on a lead. One is particularly stylish in shades of grey with long black ears. I make up my mind to leave in case someone I know comes and I have to engage the part of our brains which is used for talking. A guy on my right is talking on a mobile phone. I haven't finished my coffee. I get up to leave. Banque. Hotel. An empty packet of tissues sits on the pedestrian crossing and seems to have been there for some time. Some furniture sits on the sidewalk, geometrically. I'm back contemplating shoes. A shop contains poor quality second hand items which are incredibly expensive. The prices appear to be numbers chosen at random. The trees in the boulevard have all been trimmed and are hung with Christmas lights. There is writing all over the café windows. Everything has some kind of sense and order. I am suddenly surrounded by pot plants. I can't remember where I parked my car.

Little Adventure Guarding An Exhibition
It is summer. I'm guarding an exhibition in a citadel. Schumann is playing. It sounds like he's a few rooms away practicing but in fact it's a CD. The exhibition space is one of three vaulted rooms, old bricks, flaking white paint, off-white tiled floor, somewhere between the 16th and the 18th century, somewhere between the beginning of homo sapiens and the talent-show civilisation of today, where whole families cram themselves into cars and drive across continents buying ice cream. The fire instructions in laminated cardboard are more interesting than the art on display by quite a wide margin. A poster for the exhibition has been sellotaped around a fire extinguisher, opening up possibilities. The outside walls of the citadel are made of brick. Fine, sloping architecture against a light blue sky scattered with cumulo-nimbus. A couple with a pram are sitting, half-lying at the top of the sloping ramp that leads down to the galleries. We have surrounded ourselves with sculptures of fish. Two women with prams walk around the exhibition and leave. Voices come from the gallery next to me, voices echoing, counterpointed by the squalk of a young child outside. I wander outside and walk up the ramparts to where the citadel overlooks the port. Oyster boats are coming up the channel at low tide, jet skis are slipping underwater ready to take off, a small cruiser leaves the channel, traces of man's need for enjoyment. People drift into the corner of the citadel, photographing their children and their friends. From where I am standing I could photograph all of them if only someone would buy one my pictures so that I could buy a fucking camera and change my kitchen draining board for one large enough that I could actually put my fucking washing up on, fix the washing machine, put my house and myself in some kind of order and fix my brakes.

I keep wondering how we can so easily be intoxicated by the human form, and why important questions about the nature of our being are excised from everyday discourse. My sunglasses are sitting on the table next to me as the voices of children arrive before a family group, children slightly excited, nearly running into things. They and everything else calms down as they are impregnated with the seriousness and echoes of the gallery. It is rare that people stop to look, usually walking slowly past each work, into the next gallery joined by a vaulted arch, or back outside. A man picks up my postcards and thumbs through them long enough to know that at least next time he will recognise my work. A battle has been won, or a step has been made, something has been achieved, even though I am paying. Another couple enters and the man stops in front of one of my drawings, followed by another couple also walking slowly. A small boy comes back and looks through a portfolio of photographs of Philippe's sculptures. A third couple enters. The gallery is packed to the gills, relatively speaking. I change cartridges and my fingers become inevitably covered with ink. All the visitors congregate in abstract communion in the centre of the gallery around the table. For a short time everything seems to change meta-chemically. A woman in blue saunters around the gallery as her child follows non-plussed. Schumann is getting more excited but calms down before he freaks everybody out, turning into the kind of maniac where people feel for their safety. He stops while a couple ask me the price of my drawings which I don't sell. Everyone is confused. I hadn't realised it until now but so am I. Schumann seems to agree and kicks off again playing 'Romance no. 1 en si bémol Majeur' or maybe 'Tocata en Do Majeur, Opus 7' which I am becoming intimately familiar with. He is playing slightly too loud but at least it makes for the kind of moment you remember, otherwise backgound music is the equivalent of looking at a dustbin. The gallery is empty. Everybody has disappeared so quickly it seems like everything was a dream, like a person I could love. Yves Nat has taken over on the piano and is sounding remarkably like Schumann, so much so you can hardly tell them apart. Schumann and I have the same first name which could help us get along if we should ever run into one another. It is nearly 6pm and the gallery is having a late flourish before I imagine going upstairs to the non-existent château, have a bath and come down to a dinner of roast duck lit by candelabra and shadows on linen. Hermann Goering walks in wearing a geometric, pink and white striped short-sleeved shirt, his right hand holding his left wrist behind his back. His adorable daughter is full of mischief and is having a laugh at everyone's not-noticing expense, dressed in the most outrageously stylish combination of black and white Balinese leggings, fluorescent green sweatshirt covered by a too-long pink shirt. She would run the planet to perfection given half a chance. Their energy is present some time after they leave. Schumann finishes and another day completely the same and entirely different is finishing. Bells sound a swarm of tortured psychologies, filling the gallery with behavioural dysfunction, disturbing the future. The concept of beach clothing can be dangerous, or at least unsettling, if not deployed sensibly. Too many people have issues with their shorts which are catastrophically unfashionable and we pretend we no longer care or notice. That it's okay. Particles of whatever. Temporal formations and chemistry return to their default state of harmony. Children, most of all, are the least aware of society's incompatibilty with a sane, balanced, positively charged, stable, wholesome and coherent notion of the development of the individual. If I sell something I'll be able to buy myself an overpriced, badly-cooked dinner served by a humourless student pretending they're working and not just getting some cash so that they can get drunk when they go back to college, or buy some things which break before they've worked out what they're for. The summer is turning out to be great fun though it only lasts about a day and a half but which fortunately are long. If I had my way I would have finished my work in June and spent two months sleeping on a beach moving only to visit bakeries and buy shorts. It is unseasonably fresh in the mornings and evenings but the global ecosystem as an entity is unhappy. It is rare that children don't resemble their parents, their way of dressing, their mannerisms, their temperament, expressions and humour. It is beyond genetics. It is tyranny. Children become what their parents demand of them notwithstanding the metaphysical turbulence caused, the primary reason why the human being is such a disaster. Everyone is looking at the picture, and seeing something else, while artists are looking at the edges.

I am guarding an exhibition in Saintes when a group of middle-aged, multinational extra-terrestrials dressed in clean, striped pastels comes in, a lot of beige, a few caps and ruckscacs. Some look at the exhibition memorabilia as though they are tracts from another civilisation. The guide has a microphone system which makes her sound as though she is in a cardboard box in Germany. I catch the word 'interesting' but the rest of the time she sounds as though she is gargling. People stand around but some wander and mumble and the collective effect is that of a group of fish talking with a lot of bass and virtually no treble. Everyone gives off the impression they are scared of dirt or things which are unconventional, like the times we live in. A man looks at my works and raises his eyebrows, communicating surprise and confusion which I think is good. Yesterday a couple were divided between the woman who liked them and the man who thought they 'didn't merit being put on a wall'. His partner said he liked traditional, classic things. He liked Impressionism, which is traditional. I replied that the words he used to describe my work were the same they used to describe Impressionism, almost word for word, and that every movement in art, including Impressionism, was thought to be unskilled and fundamentally degenerate, probably because it was a continual drive to essence, a bold and brazen rejection of superfluous decoration and the insubstantial values of supposedly "skilfull" likeness. A woman who was listening had previously looked at the work and made a grimacing gesture stood nodding, appreciative of the explanation and seeming to agree. I vow to try and keep my prejudices and assumptions under control, but I'm not sure I will. It is raining. The abbey, and the rest of civilisation, crumbles imperceptibly. It is lunchtime and it feels like the rest of humankind has vanished, though some are probably at restaurants.

Live data feed feeding into the wall. I have sat down at the café which makes the angle which marks the corner of rue Lesson and avenue Charles de Gaulle. The past is everywhere and here and now. I have bought a new writing pad and a biro which cost a mere one euro and seventy centimes and for a moment I think humankind has succeeded. My writing could earn me millions but probably won’t. It might stop me buying swimming pools and vintage cars. I'm trying to describe the pile of objects I brought into the café and arranged in a pile on the table. A couple walk past, he with a cotton bush hat and she with a handbag which she wears across the shoulder to her waist. A pair of reading glasses, a lighter, 4,03 euros in change spread like refugees from a Penny Falls, rejecting conformity and destiny and the psychology of the herd, the silent monopoly. I may not have much money but if I understand economics correctly I am richer than the United States of America which is minus eleven trillion, and feel reassured that I am doing everything demanded of me in terms of personal, fiscal responsability. The coffee is bitter and the biscuit wrapper rests on the table. Women pass and then a man in a black t-shirt and sandals. There are pot plants and chairs, a couple settle into a table on the pavement by the street. We all have accoutrements. A girl sits down on the table next to me before I notice. A detective magazine laid flat on the table, she lights a Camel cigarette and looks at her mobile phone, is delivered a coffee and an ashtray and she says 'merci'. She stirs her coffee and starts to read. It is a fine, sunny day after a turbulent and unpredictable summer. Pedestrians. Tiled pavement. Plastic wicker chairs. No entry signs. Trees. Signs. A car. Shops. People. Buildings. I leave change and go.

As often happens in the morning, everything was different. The most oustandingly gentle, complex, unoriginal, radically contemporary, mesmorising adhesion of classical instruments fused with a rock band's bass, drums, guitars and keyboards, running through one of the most oustanding, gentle, complex, basic, unoriginal, radical, contemporary, mesmorising musics that I've heard in the last 150 years and becomes manifest via an array of structures and necessities. The orchestra is mainly comprised of young people who behave like human beings are supposed to. Extraordinarily beautiful moments are exchanged, though few seem outwardly to realise this as they are simply doing this, and have not yet confronted the sordid idiocy of mediocre expectations. The conductor is one of the metaphorical gods that humankind has need of. The musicians speak and inquire and engage with a wisdom that makes them all around a thousand years old. What is interesting is what is behind it all. The physical manifestation here is what things are when they're allowed to work. We can take in as much as we want, because we know everything anyway. Too many categories. Lots of garbage in your head. The moon. Easy to find. Outside the sun had no choice, nothing to do but shine. Blankets are for lovers. Definitions can change. You have to invent a platform which lifts you up, even if it's only imaginary at first. When you feel something so exactly the same as someone else there's a tendency to fall in love which shows you don't know what you're doing. All the bits that are left over, where things are. Not everything, but where the meaning and the answers are. Nothing is a luxury. You can do things by actions or by becoming them. Talking philosophy and even that could be thought about, but by that time you'd be back in the act of doing. A bit of jam is all the luxury you ever need. In our time we are living out things we only previously imagined, which is maybe why they don't work. When you get away from simplicity you're lost. Tigers and phosphorescence.

Sitting in the countryside at nightime, early spring. The frogs are croaking but the rest of the universe is silent. White cats arranged before me like gods and history. The air is cooling. The season is pregnant. None of us talk. The sky is black but it is probably blue. I am trying to assemble everything I have thought, known or wondered into a coherent whole, while a car's headlights pass to my right, something familiar, reassuring, yet strangely brutal. The grass is growing, exploding nuclear power stations are described as safe, civilians are being protected by dropping bombs on them, cat biscuits lie uneaten. I am wearing shorts doing my best to conform, trying to have faith in humankind, even while watching television. Trying to get rid of all that is inessential to fix my car, try to try to prove something to somebody, surrounded by pots of second-hand paint, replicas keeping metaphors at bay, hoping that man will one day fully respect trees, end the incogruity of slaughter while playing a game of numbers, wondering if friendships will last, contemplating a wire mesh fence. There's a 100% success rate for everything now. Our inside has become outside and doesn't belong to us. There are certain formats, clean and pretty with suntans which don't correspond to anybody, the maintenance of swimming pools, uniform landscapes and bicycles in cream.

In town, an office building like a toy railway, cleaned-up buildings, bus stops, everything seems queazy, faded, pale and tired. Clutter, straight lines, cars and unnoticed people, vertically. It seems everything has stopped, come to an end through a lack of enthusiasm, something nobody replies to. Things pass. You proceed by assumptions as the pigeons are doing, walking, not paying either for the tram or parking or eating. I am going to visit a guitar shop. Guitars make me feel good, except good guitars which make me feel bad that I can't afford them. New guitars don't have any history so you can't trust them. Most are so rubbish you know that you'll never make it if you buy one. Except bad guitars are often really good because you don't want to play them. Good guitars sit around getting better and feel more important than you do. Some girls are singing "Singing in the Rain" but they're not really singing and it isn't really raining. A guy is taking in his rubbish. Youth is being poisoned by the omnipresence of tepid, useless, non-existent, repetitive forms of disposable cultural waste.

Sitting in a parking space on the esplanade of Dieppe, where land gives way to a gravel beach and a tepid smudge of sunset. I've crossed about 598 kilometers of France and nothing much is happening, occasionally a machine is moving up and down a field, a human presumably inside but it's not certain because we're heading that way. There are a lot of fields, lots of wheat, lots of lines in lots of fields, and on the Dieppe harbour front people are eating the fruits of this geometric, invisible labour. Nothing smells of anything and nobody gets dirty. There seem to be fewer refugees than before but they're further down the road having what looks like tea before another night scrambling over barbed wire. Camping cars sit around the corner and cats wander across the lanes of traffic. There are musical fêtes everywhere. A lack of surprise is palpably welcome and expectations are kept in check. Pointing out a lack of meaning has become a form of treason. Four seagulls fight over a slice of pizza and it's obvious they have it made here, treats à la carte, never the same thing twice and plenty of new faces. I'd like to drink a beer but it seems complicated so I smoke a cigarette and wait for the ferry. There are queues stretching out to the roundabout outside the terminal. The crossing is so smooth it seems the channel has been paved over which maybe it has. We arrive at Newhaven and tie the ship to the dock with bits of string and rust. Stacks of crushed cars sit in a magnificent post-modern block, occasional bumpers recognisable as are numberplates, new vestiges, retired from the world of designation. The customs shed feels like a neighbour's abandoned garage and the contrast is stark. In France things are tidy and well organised, here things are left in their natural state for as long as things work and become an organism. I drive to Brighton past moulded hills layered with grass and covered in mist. I feel different and reality is different and you can't help feeling that invisible things matter, playing out definitions nobody seems aware of, though the magpies are the same in both countries, look the same, do the same things, hopping close to the kerbs and hedgerows. Arriving in Brighton as Sunday is breaking people are sprawled semi-conscious on the pavement, others asleep in front of all night or early opening shops, rubbish blows through town as a guy half finishes a drink and throws the rest into the middle of the road, a theatrical gesture suggesting a bad, after-hours drinks party at the fall of Rome. This is a different reality with different parameters and it seems you make them up when you need them because there aren't any. Society has let go of the illusion of surface. Important things happen before you realise. Abandon everything and see what happens.

I'm on the sea front at St Georges de Didonne, trying to sell interesting-looking objects for more than people are willing to pay for them. Keep-fitters stride past fluidly and mechanically in brand new trainers and impeccable shorts. All day the locals' dress sense has been disturbing me as I try to train the world in the history of functional aesthetics and it doesn't seem to be working. Everyone looks the same even though they are all wearing different dress, the bastard trappings of stationery catalogues, bread rolls, an aesthetic decided by viewing figures, questionnaires and fake insinuations of demand. Beige can be extremely provocative in this context. A family walk by, grouped by tribal identity and complimentary tailoring, a hint of rubbish sacks squeezed into Lycra. Children are brought up in an environment of no environment. Incomprehensible exchanges use language and still don't say anthing. Homo additus naturae, the human added to nature, but only just. I am once again confronted by people's generally appalling sense of dress and sit back to watch the parade of phenotypes - Accident With Sweet Dispenser, 1960s Catalogue Error, Cardboard Puppet With Football Insignia, Wallpaper Juxtaposition, Badly Placed Stripes With Disney Hair Gell Special, Typography OD, Dyslexic Brand Victim, Floral Mistake with Clogs, Leopard Jelly Blowback, Design Flow Irregular, Poundshop Overload, Mothercare Destock. A plane is flying past trailing an over-long banner of a gigantic robotic rabbit, trying to get everyone off the beach to go somewhere else, suggesting we would be happier three hundred miles inland arguing in a car park, but nobody moves. Plaintive cries whisper through the trees, opera singers practice their positions and all is not yet lost. Op Art Trauma, Pioneer Train Wreck, Tepid Marine Frenzy, Gardening Obsession, Thrown Up Cake Mixture, Cowboy Stationery Blend, Piped Comfort Emblem, Optical Challenge, Victorian Freak Out, Rocker Withdrawl, Fruit Peel Itinerary, Dayglo Hawaiian Eruption, University Shouting Match, Yacht Club Casual, Algae Stress Test, Doll House Explosion, Trekker Barbeque, See Thru Acrylic Holocaust, Flip Top Starch Obsession, Transformer Outfit Reload, Handyman Breakthrough, Garbage Vernacular, Clip Art Maelstrom, Knitting Test Chronology, Craft Fair Alternative, Fish Tank Subsidiary, Watermelon Retake, Pollyfilla Insurgency, Gothic Botox, Fake Pet Trauma. People stop to tell me that my impeccably designed kettle is worth too much when it costs half of what it would in the shops, does everything you want it to and nothing you don't.

The world seems to be understanding that the entire edifice of everything that has been known and supposed doesn't work, and that most people don't have any money. It was a shock to see the first cracks but something more difficult to immediately take in when it fell to pieces and disappeared. Cowboys are getting sticky, things are fraying at the seams and no-one has any answers. The surprise wakes parts of your brain you haven't used for some time and thought you didn't need, swallowing the projections, coherent only if you leave out the parts that don't fit. The western edifice has been thrown into sharp relief and found wanting, kharma is circling, truths are being forced out, valves are blowing and if you're not a sycophant you're not allowed in. Factories filled with robots are making cars with no drivers and you wonder what the world is for, exactly. Maybe drivers will come as an accessory. Parted waves rejoin, experience has passed from being an image to being felt. A driverless car has had trouble negotiating a sandbag and couldn't work out if a bus was moving so drove into it. These things serve as a reminder that if you want something better, if you thought human societies weren't completely stupid, forget it. Petty, irrelevant hysteria echoes in everyone's mind but nobody says anything. Inane thoughts are turning into philosophical concepts and nothing makes any sense. Everybody spent the last century buying stuff and bluffing and now nobody needs anything which nobody makes. The system doesn't include any kind of change because progress isn't wanted unless it means new products. The inevitability of hierarchy has run out of steam. We're not going over the cliff but we've been straggling the edge and pretending it's not stressful is getting tiring. No questions were asked when it was realised that it didn't work, no course was changed, which only makes the sense of panic more intense. Outbreaks of sense are kept quiet and unseen as much as possible, TV presenters resemble bottles of skin care products, AI chatbots are being quoted in a remake of a pre-law and order rodeo and the chandelier is shaking. Somewhere in all this the human ego seems just too particular to really care about the bigger picture, but you never know. Delusion and obfuscation have been gift-wrapped to the point of caricature. There is a point in events wich marks a wave peaking and from that point you know it's hard to go back.

By 2010 I had a certain kind of clarity, or an uncertain kind of everything. Seeing things for what they are, or more particularly for what they weren't. Everything seems composed of small pictures, something that fits together perfectly, though entirely separated from nature. What seemed most present and absent was any form of dialogue. Even talking was linear, while supposing some form of engagement. An absence of means once again appeared a benefit, even the essential. Not being able to do things meant being able, or forced to, imagine them. Not being constrained by the peculiarities of the medium. Not any. The blues could be like Shakespeare or Heraclitus or an instruction manual, knowing what you're doing at the same time as doing it, the highest point of achievment is really something mundane, everyday, so usable, like anything else. I was bored. That it wasn't better, more entertaining, more human, more sensual, more interesting. I like staying warm in bed in the mornings. It felt like we were living in the future. Everything is going wild with nationwide snapchat geo-filtering, fireworks are exploding, concussing the human spirit, freaking the shit out of the wildlife which no-one cares about. Outside my home things are quiet. Inside my home things are quiet. Slightly strange people pass by on the screen, the allure of puppets, unfamiliar skin tones and schoolchild hair symmetry, like it's not okay to have a personality. I tape a flattened, folded cardboard wine box in the missing pane of the door to the garage to stop the cats, or a renegade, cigar-smoking hedgehog with a chainsaw coming in, and spend the night measuring things.

Hyperium Context
The landscape, by the side of the road again. A voyage through different structural and metaphysical situations which become a context and a series of contexts. There are lamposts which carry electricity cables and telephone wires as though society is pretending to be a fabric or a spider web. Tomorrow, yesterday, tomorrow we would be wading through rock pools, green floral mountain ranges, shellfish activity, patches of lichen-like psychedelia, soft, natural colours, not so dramatic as yesterday's evening sky of radiant pinks and even greens. Yesterday I was thinking why things don't work, why things get locked into patterns, that excuses become habits and vice versa, become who you are. It's nice to be understood. Some children are running to and fro along the edge of the dune and the sky is blue. A band of white meteorological activity from the horizon some way into the sky shows it is not yet peak summer. We drive through the oyster cabins, the smell of lavender in the car. I don't know why we're supposed to cope with what is and not make something better, resume some elements which serve as a bearing, landscapes that speak to you. Boyardvile. Déviation. Man builds his constructions to make real his sense of empirical order. Sometimes you can leave it behind, through turning roads. We are always explaining what is happening. A place and a time. To make sense to someone else, who doesn't understand us. Butterflies on the roof. Suspense. By the end of the year all sorts of dichotmies were breaking out of the seams, generalities aren't holding any more, a lot of words have been shown to be empty, and intelligence comes into being, emerging out of some badly identified, pressurised layering of tension and repression, accrued over time. Leave them to be blown away to somewhere they don't matter. You owe it to yourself to feel free. The cars are turning into silhouettes, the trees are becoming outlines as the sun is behind them, burning with irrepressible force.

Enamel Deer By Streetlight
It is 7.30 in the morning and the sun is coming out before some uncertain clouds in the East, in a car park beneath the bridges spanning the Dordogne. Everything's different and everything's the same and it can be useful sometimes to work out what approach to take. The colours and hues of the morning are evenly balanced. You can do whatever you want, it just sometimes takes money. We're in a world where if you're somewhere for five minutes you become a resident, looking out for ceremonies. I am thinking of ordering an entire catalogue of office supplies and sending them to a random destination in Greenland.

It's evening and the festive lights are mainly green in Place Gambetta which has become the new home of my spiritual universe as I realise I don't belong anywhere and it doesn't seem I'm going to. Festive lights flash at the urban landscape, me included. A lot of brake lights and arched windows. Cars are speckled with rain. Perfect configurations of city lights. The abstract tyranny of Christmas has descended like snow, leaving no option but to be miserable and sad, unable to afford the one hundred euro box of chocolates which is reserved for rich and stupid people like me, if only I could get my aspirations in some kind of order. Some of the decorations have the appearance of rain dripping from branches, which show that mankind evolves, grey, white, and light blue. Marionnaud. BNP Paribas. Auchan Mériadeck. Open so people can vent their needs, play a part, feel sick. A man in a hat looks in an estate agent window as though he is wondering whether to think of buying a house. I am wondering if I'll fall in love with the woman who is sitting opposite me, who is wearing red and black checked trousers, a scarf like a bit of used material, whether we'll move into a flat in Bordeaux where everything is difficult, sometimes torrid but fun and fantastic, but she gets off and I'll never see her again unless someone invents time travel fairly soon. Club Alpin Français. Cars are lined up in the street. Illuminated windows scrape at something, vertical and horizontal with ease. A large mosaic stands idle, covered in graffiti, different aesthetics co-existing uneasily. At the road junction, eighteenth century architecture, wrought iron gates, dashed, yellow-lined atmosphere, ambient culture. Small white vans, a VW Golf, one of the last generations of car names that were sensible, before sounding like the name of a computer programme on holiday ordering a dessert in a foreign language. Some trees look as though they feel neglected. A pizza shop is closed waiting ‘til this evening to make pizzas. Triangular squares. Republican figures and green statues of horses, buildings like cheesecake, illuminated, or made of icing, the colour of sand, the texture of chalk, the appearance of models and three-dimensional maquettes, the sound of pneumatic physics against a background hum of city. One-sided telephone conversations make unimportant things immediate. Things seem to function because everything seems separate, and seems why things don't work. Everything seems organic but only if you can make a profit out of it, or be a hero, or the kind at least that's entirely based on someone else. That stuff's safe. Everything is predictable.

Classical music is like reading a map and getting interested in a particular road, full of promise but you've got to be inside, you already know what it looks like but it's not enough, carpentry making a big deal about everything being straight. There are highs and lows but they are all calculated and nothing unpredictable happens, nobody goes out for a drink in the middle, the music never decides to get stuck into a note and hang there. You get the impression that the composer is pleased all the parts are in the right places and just when it's got quiet it all gets going again, rush hour traffic pretending it's moving, the slow bits are long enough, fast bits are short enough, whip in as many notes as possible, calming down and plateauing out in just the right place and for the right amount of time. When the periods repeat you feel human evolution is going backwards. Conventional morality has taken over. You're fighting for liberty, progress, human nature and the universe and it makes you feel queasy and wondering where you parked your car. It's like having a really nice dinner but nothing special happens, as though there's just a few definitions of beauty; the quiet, romantic stuff, a girl standing by a window in pyjamas and guys with stubble. Stuff that starts out tense, or like Schumann who just bursts out all over the place like a bin liner full of water and holes, and when the movements start repeating you feel like your head is trapped in a vice and you can't go anywhere. Schumann's head is always going at a hundred miles per hour, his trousers are ruffled and he's always running up and down stairs, his hair all over the place and his white, frilled shirt open even when it's buttoned up. He never goes shopping but always manages to eat, especially when he's not hungry. Schumann is so caught up in things that things cannot not happen. Schumann is on two different trains at the same time going in roughly the same direction don't really arrive but just keep going. Classical music makes you feel like you're tiptoeing on ponds, that something's always about to happen and you've got to wait, reminds you of guys in tights wandering around waiting for some drama, getting angry as a counterpoint before settling down with a glass of rosé slugged back in one and no washing up; reminds you that it takes a really long time for society to get anywhere. Centuries-old culture is the definition of quality but really it's just a part. Classical music makes you fidget with your head on one side. If Chopin starts you feel things could go haywire at any moment, the kind of psychosis that happens when you're not doing anything satisfying. Classical music spends a lot of time going sideways pretending you're an aeroplane, shouting at people while you're scrubbing them in the bath. Chopin is like cooking spaghetti for hundreds of different people simultaneously. Rachmaninov is the sound of crickets at dusk and wheat fields in the morning, breakfast cereal tumbling in slow motion, milk drops exploding and speeded up, tinted skies, all happening out in the country which no longer exists. Chopin doesn't sleep at all. Classical music always happens at the ends of films where something meaningful is finishing up proceedings but you're not sure you care and you want your money back to go and join a dating agency. When Rachmaninov plays everyone feels like a movie star and nobody eats. Schumann is the kind of guy who has a profound relationship with his hair. Rachmaninov breathes correctly and winds himself up to spiel off torrents of ambiguity that always end up horizontal and get ever more complex, meaning flying off in all directions but nothing gets done. Rachmaninov wants to go off the keyboard but can't so goes all over the place at the same time while staying where he is which is some kind of feat and deserves respect. He finishes up parking his car impeccably and when he gets back in waits a strangely long time before pulling off.

I am at the tax office waiting to fill in a declaration as it didn't seem my attempt online paid off. A hum of things being organised is seeping out of the windowed offices that line the corridor. I am number 38 and we are at 33. The lino dates from the 1970s. They simply don't make it like that anymore. This stuff you can drive a rotary cleaner over and be happy it is still going to be there when you've finished, looking like a municipal office floor is supposed to. There are slight flecks of red where maybe someone has cut off their leg in lieu of VAT but I hope not. Slim, low skirting. Enamel radiators. There is a lot of talk of numbers and the public are swishing their ankles and murmuring. Nobody's brought anything to read so they're trying to look interested in the frosted glass. Posters announce quality and satisfaction and A4 notices undoubtedly essential to the maintenance of social fiscality are too small to read. It seems the light switches are not original.

Little Adventure In London
The diesel sound is familiar but the quality of the driving is not what it was. It feels like construction is permanent and there are less and less storefronts in the city which has become severed from nature. 24-hour shops, newsagents, bookmakers, rubbish bins and pubs. There is efficiency here and things need to be sleek, shiny, and straight. There are some columns and some white and grey and some old stuff but in general shoebox architecture is the new now and nobody seems to have noticed while it was happening. There used to be things like difference, colour, texture, archetypes, taxis and buses that gave you an identity to hang your own on. Now we are all spreadsheets and subcontracting. Artists "sell information and a variety of services to clients such as advertisers". The overwhelming feeling is to get enough money to eat in public, look the part, even if that might imply something. You get the feeling tourists forgot to leave and decided to keep society running by doing the first thing that came to mind. Old adages don't add up, haven't woken up to the fact they no longer exist. The property market has taken over consciousness. There are feint, fleeting examples of what was but you could think they were virtual. The past has become advertising, the present is the commodity and the future is more rubbish. Key fundamentals of motivational behaviour nest in trees, lightly coated with pollution and not too late home. Occasionally you hear a London accent, a fire service officer, pub owners, everyone else is on a course here learning how to be, no-one is allowed to stop scrambling or the thing will fall apart.

We're passing the Bricklayers Arms and go back to a time people knew. Hand car washes and valet services are keeping society moving cleanly. 60s housing blocks are a comforting signifier. Incongruous spaces sometimes appear, to be turned into building sites for flats no one can afford. No one seems to know what clothes to wear. As we get near Battersea things become tighter, men are taller, have squarer jaws, while women wired up with chronometers and mobile phones are jogging to pick up croissants. After a second coffee I feel like playing a stadium concert, running around dodging lasers, mending some phone boxes, and buying a flat. Some areas don't change, don't move and they might have to change the name. It seems like most of Battersea has gone, no one wants to be distracted from buying a wide screen television. The market traders are dropping syllables and freaking out existentially as though there were no comfort from facts. Wherever you go pastries are for sale to cope with sugar levels between phone calls and if you could work out a way of exploiting the different prices of bottled water you could make a fortune. There are happy-go-lucky archetypes, egomaniacs babbling on about cat litter and leggings, but the characters who drift around, propping up corners, have gone, likely victims of property prices and global warming.

Half empty cars are arriving at the boot sale loaded with anything. Time wasting is a full time job but if you try and say it to anyone they've already gone. Battersea is on the flight path so it's hard to ignore time but at least the planes make different noises. Things have become so easy we can't imagine if things weren't like this. Petrol fumes mix with rare bursts of oxygen and people talk slower. Hong Kong City. No Moo All Mmm. Dustbins. Parking spaces. Direction arrows. Signs and petrol stations. Everything is going at the same speed which is a bit faster than most people seem comfortable with. Trees grow out of the pavements and the bus shudders as they always have and seems part of the design. The boarded-up London Chroming Company has seen better days. The shine has worn off. They're finished. The time has gone when people used to make things and do things with the things they made. Ladbrokes. East European Food. Asylum Motors. Big Brands. Big Savings. Out of Europe Out of Work. A collection of twenty-seven one, two and three bedroom apartments. Trafalgar Avenue. The Lord Nelson. The rest has gone. Traffic is uniformly black or grey and feels like a herd of bison on heat playing rugby in slow motion. Some shops are boarded up, waiting, painted over. There are so many signs you could get a literature degree. Halal Meat. Dream Curtain Designs. A rubbish bin is lying under the Old Kent Road flyover, worn out, given up, done in. City Sprint. We Deliver. Kids are out of school eating junk food. Surveillance cameras are pumping out images into space to tell people not to come here. It's the same rhythm in most places but slows down as you reach the epicentre where everyone is in a daze. Everything is covered in scaffolding and plastic and you wonder where the charm has gone. They're having a competition to see how to put some of it back. The South Bank Centre staircases have been painted red and the rest of the structure is nervous. Around Piccadilly some walls and pieces of metalwork look as though they've been around for some time but seem as though they're hiding. In Covent Garden people are having their eyebrows painted. I feel Postmodernism has a lot to answer for or hasn't done enough, because this really shouldn't be happening. The feeling is that enough people enjoying playing roles, are getting on, settling in, and trying to settle down. Portable phones have let people be more brazen. I've just come out of my dance class and wondered what you wanted to do today. People are adapting affinity with TFL memorabilia, not realising or caring that it should be London Transport. The city is getting ever more bland and resembles a video game, occasional glaring mistakes in marble and glass, cranes everywhere spilling over the banks and ruining the view of the river.

Working things out is looking at the same thing in different ways and some of that is going on. What was a biscuit is now alienated, inconvenient, highly priced, post-Brexit, continentally ambivalent, globalised, luxury patisserie, struggling with its conscience and sense of identity. The past is becoming an inconvenience and no one is fixing the roads. Miss Great Britain has "failed as a role model" for sleeping with someone while she succeeded as a role model by being pretty and standing around in a bikini. The fruit machines in Ladbrokes are playing hybrid Caribbean Gamelan music, decorated by a sari-clad Miss Asia. Perhaps missasia is what is happening to us, our new condition, where we are or what. Racehorses are virtual. Everything's possible but a lot of things aren't that likely. In Long Acre a group of teenagers are giggling around a bra shop. The boutiques are so bright you need sunglasses and enormous self-confidence just to stand in front of them. At the corner of Great Newport Street a busker is competing with a pneumatic drill which is more interesting to listen to. The busker is breaking music up and smashing it to pieces, a violent dog's breakfast of fake emotion at a pitch which makes you queasy. I feel like suing him but it'll take years to get legislation through parliament by which time he'll be operating a pneumatic drill and doing something emotive. A girl is squatting in a closed doorway interacting with her mobile phone. A Tesco juggernaut is driving through Great Newport Street and is much too large. You can see the advantage of drones though ultimately it's just easier to live in the countryside. People should just stop the truck and buy direct. A black Range Rover waits at the lights. A taxi sits behind, same idea but slightly smaller. I'm getting bored being a radical avant-gardist and want money so I can buy a set of guitar strings without it freaking me out. I want to tell the busker he's terrible and that he's not helping, but karma prevents it though I'm not completely sure who's right. If I knew I was going to Denmark Street I wouldn't have worn my fake blues man hat which I got at Battersea car boot, sublimely practical and comfortable, particularly for rain, but in the context an irremediable fashion disaster. A guy is buying his son a white Strat like it was a packet of chewing gum and it's not helping my day. All the guitars sound the same and all the shops feel like a car park on a promenade. He asks what the middle pickup switch does but it doesn't matter. Bad funk is bad funk. I manage to buy a packet of small screws and a few plectrums and get out, my credibility barely in tact. I wait to hang around Tottenham Court Road but it has gone. Piccadilly Circus is much the same. The map shop is still in Long Acre, giving off the tense aroma of an endangered species so only just believably I daren't go in. Very few people are interestingly dressed which is what London used to be about. The only interesting thing I've seen is a Builders Paint Supply Shop and an interesting soft drink stain on the pavement at the top of Regent Street St. James, between the tube station entrance at the corner of Piccadilly and the pedestrian crossing which goes past Lilywhites to the Criterion. There seem to be fewer buses but the ones coming down Regent Street are covered in adverts and blend in with the billboards. Ambient discussion is about artisanal cheeses, money, up-and-coming areas which will soon go downhill by being upmarket. I seem to be the only person in London who uses a pen unless you count traffic wardens who don't any more. I turn at the Garrick and pass someone who seems to be wearing a radical new fragrance that smells of fly spray. St Martin’s lane smells of flavour enhancer and kids are doing bad hip-hop in Leicester Square, anchoring what was great culture somewhere useless and painful. A terrible performer is doing indistinguishable things with balloons. Western civilisation has failed and the guy's speakers have blown. Surrounded by floral prints on the Underground. Whitechapel is still there but I'm scared to go above ground. Two trains cross each other as we travel through north London. The mood is quiet and sober. The jollity that goes with superfice has been wiped out by the sinkhole of sound bites, years of pretence and chimera, dissipated by the enormity of what has happened. More people than imagined seemed to think that Europe was not what it was supposed to be. On the morning of the result the whole of London felt silent. Trying to sell Gitanes ashtrays in Portobello market the morning of the referendum result was proving to be trying as the bohemians that might like them don't smoke any more and are staying at home in their pyjamas, traumatised by the mere thought of a croissant. Baker Street is still there with its myth in tact, cream tiles and finely engineered staircases, the kind of historical infrastructure that is being loaded into skips. Hyperbole breakdown. A feeling of atmosphere against a background of money.

London, November, back in the world of invisible conversations and hard architecture. My sense of home has gone and we won't be seeing each other for a while. Back in toy town, in model railway world where ugly walls are excused, nobody's supposed to see them and we are all generous enough to concede that not everything can be perfect, down the list of important things humankind has to do. A lot of people are plugged in and could be listening to anything, be preparing for alien takeover, have heard over the airwaves before anyone else the rolling out of the plan, taking notes, keeping schtum and cancelling their holidays. Strange colour schemes abound as normal, everything conflicts, even the constituent elements fail to find commonality. Strange greens. Purple has taken over public transport upholstery like an accidental germ theory bordered by blue with too-rounded corners.

The train brakes sound as though someone is whistling but in fact they are. The doors vacuum-suck shut, walls sail by, les bras de la Seine and underpasses pass under us. Slow shutter speed greens screen past, density increases, we become activity, padded winter jackets are more in evidence, trains resemble buildings and the sky is the same grey. A great big thing is being put up which looks like office space but could be a supermarket which is really the same thing but the ends don't make sense and are too pert unless it's the manager's office. Nanterre Ville. I miss the name of the next railway station as I am busy with concrete armatures, left-over sand, structural haphazardry and off-putting blues, danger signs, screaming train wheels and lights in train tunnels that flip past like a jellyfish holding a blowtorch. Paris is quiet as it's a holiday which is a good idea. You can't tell who is talking to whom. There are people standing up even if there are spare seats. People seem crazy until you check the headphones. La Défense. Lots of abbreviations. It seems the entire train is wearing black or denim or black and denim. Aliens obviously read fashion magazines that are out of date, wear space-race casual pointed boots and shoulder-length hair and moustaches from when everything started to go wrong for humankind. Finally there is some light grey but the haircuts are just as bad. I try to leave the Gare du Nord but none of the escalators are working or going in the right direction and it's starting to feel like an ant colony. I finally get out through the exit for buses but the rest of the station seems to have gone. There are pools of phlegm and the city seems to be vibrating. Everyone takes everything for granted.

I've got three hours to wait and sit down and think I might be able to work on a novel but I'm tired and feel it could be boring but I try, to capture the sensual expectation of a car park at a football match. I'm bored that civilisation doesn't seem to have any content. Someone's playing with a yo-yo, two pigeons are hoovering up crumbs, train engine brakes are letting off steam, nobody seems to be using language and I'm worried about germs. The security guard is talking to his wife or his brother-in-law or best mate and laughing a lot but it may be a cover and he's secretly watching someone like a hawk. If it wasn't a holiday it would probably be mayhem as it is rush hour on Friday evening in a major railway station. It feels like the rhythm of thirty years ago when there was more space. I was here thirty-four years ago which seems like a millisecond, or now, or I don't know when and I don't care. Nothing seems bound to its time apart from the Sex Pistols, Manet, dinosaurs and the first attempts at flight. The pigeons have got the station cased, know all the vantage points, calmly above everything and out of the way, sitting on the lampshades next to the announcement board, consoled or non-plussed by its occasional fluttering. It is cold and draughty and there is a chair at the coffee stand which feels like a hastily erected, too-small stage at a village fair. The best place to wait is at the presse shop but there aren't any magazines worth reading and you get depressed at how ridiculous the models look, expensive scrapbooks stuck together at random. It feels like I'm the only person in northern Europe who hasn't got a mobile phone. Everybody is cream-coloured which is nice, apart from a family who seem lost and are writing postcards. It's raining but in the light of the street lamp it looks like snow. Electronic signs mumble, time-space continuums are not moving and the background hum of the station sounds like the first track of a seventies concept album. People are pretending it's the end of the summer but it's the beginning of winter as autumn has become too complex and ordinary. It seems like a kind of horizontal purgatory but there is no one here to run things. People look around them as you do at stations wondering where and what things are and what everybody else is doing, or how to do nothing without looking too conspicuous. A guy in a red jacket walks by clutching the end of a French loaf wrapped in plastic. I've probably been here longer than most people. Everybody changes every half hour but the mood remains remarkably consistent. Hardly anybody has an umbrella which is strange considering it's raining but then neither do I. The man reading a racing newspaper has got up and left. The Eurostar at platform seven has come in, met by crowds who have suddenly vanished. There is co-ordination among the disorder as the draught penetrates my midriff from the left where the rain is still drizzling in typical Parisian fashion. Pigeons flutter down realising that people have left leaving crumbs. It seems easy being a pigeon but it could be hell. Maybe you don't even think about it but you can never really know. You can buy euros, or sell them, for 96.783 or 74.514. The high-pitched noise starts again and stops as a dog barks through the loudspeaker system or at least it seems like it. My mind is overflowing like silt from the Mississippi, I'm not sure how to proceed and I'm cold. It's 7.30pm and the station is thinning out, you can smell people thinking of dinner and going to somewhere quiet, well lit with doors, but still an intermittent stream of people drifts from right to left, others moving in the other direction, a woman slung over a rail, nonchalantly dangling a folded umbrella while others wear black, though few have hats which is astounding but then most have hair and don't realise what a delicate art wearing headgear can be. As long as they're happy. A dog is still barking but I'm starting to think it's a conceptual art joke that actually succeeds.

I am in London trying to find meaning but only find sadness. There are sirens and nothing seems attached. Everyone is connected to mobile devices, eating has become existentially complex and conflicts with being on the move, a village that has lost control, ignoring the animals. Substantially, things are kept impressively together. There is a poster at Baker Street station and its border looks like a sublime watercolour but it isn't. Maybe below the surface things are deeper but it doesn't feel like it. Football yobs insult the station staff who are only trying to do their job while the yobs walk off, pleased, as a baby wails. A woman next to me is dangling her thumb over digital images of fruit. A train has been derailed at Farringdon. We are going to Hammersmith. We are at Edgware Road. There are cables everywhere. A guy next to me is reading a book that seems like some kind of relic or antiquity. People here are in black and denim too. Men wear training shoes, garish and unclassy, a trend started by shell suits as an homage to blancmange. The moment men decided to wear fluorescent packaging it was clear humankind's higher aspirations were in trouble. At Paddington the station roofs are edged in pointed timbers pierced with holes, the kind of thing which today gets lost at the planning stage. At Royal Oak, buildings stand in brick and cream with impeccable detailing. I want to throw everything away but keep the cornices. We realise how little use anything is, making things useless has become an obsession. At Westbourne Park the city is beginning to fan out, there is air and light, complicated girdering and the line controller is filling us in in Cockney. You don't get the impression that anyone is from here as everybody seems they’re on an amusement ride for the first time. A seat is vacated and I sit down. People come here to look like updated 60s beatniks with more luggage, and if you scratch the surface the psychological edifice falls apart. There aren't any trains east of Bethnal Green but I'm not going there. Notting Hill and pretty much everything else have changed except the pubs and the furniture shop opposite Honest Jon's record shop. We are in a dream drawn in vain, an attempt, coming here for confirmation, though nobody seems to have a clue about anything. Everyone gets off at Oxford Circus as people increasingly move in swarms, following each other. I can't work out if the train upholstery has changed because the patterns are becoming too complicated to remember. It could be good that no one remembers anything but after a while you come to the conclusion that you don't exist. You kind of know that if you ask anybody anything they won't even understand the question. The last set of doors isn't going to open but it's okay because I'm not getting out. I keep thinking of creative writing classes but that's not how it works. The robot voice tells the train that they, he, society, are still waiting for something to happen so that the train can move but that he cares about us. By Embankment the train has emptied, a more tolerable space to volume ratio has been established and there is more oxygen. You either get used to computing things or you don't care but it all seems to work out, except for culture which is becoming as virtual as our experience. We are only really sort codes and pin numbers. People look like what they are, and you can generally tell until you get to know them when things generally go haywire. A guy pushes past me on the pavement, heads for a space which he isn't going to make so I have to get out of the way. The frail, abstract tissue that defined culture is disappearing, most visible just before it is lost. Too early and you still can't make it out from the moments that are everything. The importance of experience is memory and if you haven't got anything to compare things by you can't know any different. Talent show audiences steam with collective hysteria, seeing how far you can sustain disbelief, the excoriating power of the herd. If you dared suggest the contestants didn't have any talent you would be torn to pieces in an atmosphere made by Romans. Teenagers excite more terror than the whole of the bad parts of the 1960s, banality takes us somewhere alien and meaningless. The station is ringing with the sound of the train taking over, taut, hissing function and a smell of mechanics. We come out to a world of commerce, illuminated advertising hoardings and security cameras. Digital adverts line the escalator repeating things we don't care about. Nobody knows how to negotiate anything but this is what money does, making everything flexible, negotiable and unreal. We're told to look for things which are suspicious which is ridiculous and frightening, and simply makes everyone paranoid and quietly hysterical, but we can't seem to construct any other solution. The train wheels scream like an amplified power tool but we accept this as normal even though our hearing is being ruined. We are clinging to a cliff face of stock options, virtual money will keep things afloat long enough for us not to think about them, even though the entire cliff face has crashed and is not recovering. Intelligent thought is something alien. The patterns of the upholstery have become even more complicated are challenging the laws of design. Something resembling music is coming up from the tunnel, buskers are equipped with battery power and backing tapes, and play with a total absence of feeling. Anyone can do this, get on television, get into debt, and have a nervous breakdown. There is a cost-effective consensus masquerading as free thinking which has become a thing of the past. The next station is Kennington, a hub of London with a palpable sense of history but the people who live here are invisible. A guy has a new, multi-coloured umbrella posed across his knees in its wrapping. The trains aren't going any further. The lift feels like a cross-section of a geography book with cheap soap, Iphone clones, sandwich wraps and headphones. The loud, constant volume is hard to handle.

A lot of children scream while a lot of teenagers seem claustrophobically dysfunctional and will take a long time to recover from what hasn't even finished, a contrived form of anarchy with shrill tyres. The British have a way of solving things creatively which were created stupidly which makes them invincible though hard to deal with, but once you're here it's hard to go back because everything is movement, checkout captains and CCTV surveillance, somewhere vague and hellish with innovate advertising, round figures and endless, pointless, meaningless, unachievable opportunities. I arrive at Charing Cross and the pen refills I buy cost more than many people need to live on for a week. The 'please move away from the doors' announcement is having a nervous breakdown, stuck on repeat, and the train driver is forced to intervene. A brochure for new shoes lies open on the floor of the westbound Metropolitan Line train. A person thumbs their mobile screen, an antithesis to existentialism in grey and orange. Things happen over time, though I feel more at home now that I don't live here, but at least, at last, I feel I belong even though I don’t. Things feel better and can make more sense when you realise how ridiculous they are. You can't help but ignite a discussion about reason when there is such a headlong rush towards the need for things to be inexplicable.

We're pulling out of Ladbrokes Grove in the mid-to-late autumn sunshine. Dramatic weather events are taking place all over the world and the forecasts are sketchy.We will see if there is a winter or any more seasons like ones we're used to. It is mid-November and a typhoon has just trailed through the Philippines. Everything projected back at us tries to reassure us subliminally that while there is one dominant morality it can be a little bit relaxed and even a bit wacky, sometimes. I claim my seat next to a woman who seems serene and no nonsense and has her eyes closed, calmer than a keep fit hip-hopper banging their knee in frenzied energy suppression though you go with whatever. A young man gets on with a sharp red winter jacket, a black and white cotton bag, and gets off at Paddington. A guy gets on and sits opposite, covered in cables, large type and extraneous baggage. The capital city has become a vending machine and will take decades to settle. A woman is guarding her child's scooter while her cheek is welded to a mobile phone and is messily chewing a bread roll but everything seems normal. The child's future is probably already compromised by the profound senselessness of the contemporary human condition which is turning us all into light bulbs, fashion victims thirsting for objects, air heels, bean bags and non-experience. We arrive at Baker Street and the train's heating is out of control. I'm basking at mark six and the woman next to me is turning red. The other passengers are bang up to date, dressed down in extras from an action man diorama, ready to go and eat at a characterless theme restaurant in Chiswick. A mysterious woman with long dark hair looks as though she has just got out of the shower and pulls out her mobile as if it was a survival tool. A guy is rubbing his elbow in shrill capitulation. Waterloo station is made of vacuum-shaped metal plates and everything is silver. A busker is scraping an impossible to define Celtic abstraction, stared at by a few guys who didn't get around to doing the ironing. In the National Gallery Caravaggio's cohorts are mumbling at the Rokeby Venus through a side door. Going back in time things get golder and there are more fish. Everything is descending and the backgrounds have turned black. Lights shine out from drawings, headlights in strings. I decide I want to read a book in English as reading in French is like shovelling gravel with a hangover. West London is gentle and bohemian and the detachment from nature is all but complete. Sensibilities and histories are disappearing while tourists stare horizontally and the knack of giving way has disappeared as nobody knows where they are going. Decades, and maybe thousands years of memory, are being lost.

We wait for the imminent arrival of our consumer product, groups of tourists are pretending to be relaxed. The tube runs over Wood Lane. On the Uxbridge Road, past the Princess Victoria, turning up Old Oak Road towards Golders Green, light patches of cloud are waking up, edging up from the horizon dashed by the trace of an aeroplane, semis flank the road, stepped back to allow for gardens, starting to look like the suburbs. The bus is throbbing, handrails and accessories are vibrating as though everything is loose. We turn into Joseph Avenue and follow the railway tracks and cargo wagons. A woman is putting Christmas decorations around an artificial sausage on the roof of Harry's Bar and I get to relax. The bus is starting to resemble a giant, slow motion nature programme where insects make sharp movements and change direction repeatedly. We are being put in impossible positions and are fined if we don't tag along. You can get your clothes dry cleaned, order a pizza, get you hair cut, have coffee. A tall red crane is hovering over Gypsy Corner building something mock Tudor. Overflowing trees are surrounded by barbed wire in case they try to escape. The bus vibrates at the traffic lights before clearing its diesel respiratory system, pulling off like a carpet. Everything seems to have been taken away to make way for things that aren't supposed to be there. We seem to be going via Ipswich or Northampton and for the moment it is warm, there is no civil war, I am not hungry and I am at ease with the immediate condition of things, though I'm not sure how long it will last. The braking is a little severe but a sense of imperfection keeps us sane, stops us believing in unsustainable illusions which give us neuroses which are hard to unravel. We take in a lot of shoe-box type buildings and seem to be heading towards Middlesex and I am starting to feel like a planet at the end of its rotation but that we'll soon be hurtling back through a flat, streamlined, plainly-hued, fold-out cosmos, see some people, as for quite a long moment there don't seem to have been any. I'm pretty sure I've never been here before but the driver announces Barret Road and a bell rings in the obscured recess of my past. The Green Junction Arms is old and green but the date on the front is obscured, there are only two '1's and it could have been built any time since man learned to count. There is a big station to the left which seems made of hair curlers. Floodlights and surveillance cameras are everywhere, looking at each other but not talking. Eagle Tyres. Bridge Food. Inappropriate metaphors. Fix up. Look good. Get a haircut. Go slow. A telephone rings in a guy's pocket and increases in volume as he is asleep. I feel it would be good to have a lens or a magnifying glass of some sort. We are in Harlesden and the computer bus voice seems to be riffing and needs a day off. Instead of announcing bus stops it seems to be wondering how things got to be like this. We are halted just before the bus stop and trapped in metaphysical disequilibrium. Tall, clean cardboard boxes are arranged closely on the pavement as a child wails in a pram. Everyone seems disinterested but the child is right. Cleopatra's. Ruth's Hair and Beauty. Asian Food. New Testament Church of God. Willesden Salvage.

I'm at the 266 bus stop trying to remember what I was thinking about before I went into the charity shop but I can't, even though some thoughts are like a billboard with ten foot high letters. In my bag I have an Ikea lamp found by a tree outside a charity shop, a piece of frosted perspex retrieved from an aluminium frame, and the bottom of a drawer that had been sitting on a discarded sofa on the pavement of the High Street going out of Willesden. The bus is slightly less rattly than the last and the sounds are more plasticky and chilled out. Something seems as though someone is trying to remind us of something intrinsic, that the past will soon only exist on road signs. There are bland cars in contemporary silver, cranes, newly built estates lacking large print motif wallpaper or interesting sculpture on the roof. A Whitbread sign for stout and ale remains on a building by the clock tower, a recognisable authenticity in the street furniture and decoration menagerie. The bus has taken control and is changing drivers which begs the question of whether this is still the same bus because it's not the same experience as when I got on and asked the driver how long it would take to get to Hammersmith. I am hoping that this driver will have a plan to take us out to the country and have a pub lunch, but we pull off under the bridge and there feels a slightly different version of physics running everything. The sky is unsure what to do, the sun is burning like seventies silvered light bulb. The sausage has been wrapped in green and blue tinsel and a thin, white inflatable snowman shivers manically and hovers on the corner of the café roof. The road is an unfolding semiotic novella and if you spend all your time reading the street furniture there would be hundreds of accidents. Trees in Rosemount Road park glisten in beguiling yellow and for a moment there seems to be more nature because no one has swept up the leaves. There are pawnbrokers and money shops and opticians and betting shops. The line between service industries and the social entity has become confused, though there are more parks. Kitchen Tech. Lycamobile. James Gilbert & Son since 1881. Real Deal Furniture, terraces, parks and architecture it is hard to be proud of. Things are starting to feel Hammersmithian and to the right a building is partly made of wood which is the first I've seen all morning. Rene's stationery shop on Acton Vale seems a great shop but is now ruined and broken, its gilt and black, hand script signage still in tact, its windows filled with boards. A corner of a roundabout has been completely transformed and for a moment I think we are in an Ikea store in a parallel universe in the future. I get on a train and it feels like a jumble sale but that the jumble hasn't turned up. A woman reads a paper and another holds a cake while a man has his elbow poised on his forefinger and is stroking his chin. The train is full of the loose fervour that is going home, a respite, a surge of energy as the sky turns slate blue and lights come into the foreground. Wood Green station is made of metal and no irony and feels like the inside of a cupboard of a modern bakery. Thought seems to have ceased as we all practice looking aimless, harmless and anodyne.

We are in a mobile phone store and everything is going haywire. Things which seem important aren't and it seems incredibly complicated to make a phone call without mortgaging your house. New, strange designs are being invented which are impossible to hold, like walking around with an ironing board soldered to the side of your head, watching television through your ear while a bill is sent to a virtual address in Montenegro. Robots are running all this and the shop is made of an artificial material which seems to be giving off toxic fumes which we're supposed to be impressed by even though we can't breathe. The wall is covered in small logos and is more interesting than your average art gallery. Traffic is surging below in Ladbroke Grove like a serpent, a swirling vortex on the coast, or something Homeric. We are being kept informed and can choose what socks to wear. I am at the checkout and it is raining and it is late. We're getting near the dénouement. I am looking at blocks of rectangular packaging, names like Venta Lite Speed Clean, ready to sweep you away in a jet stream of chemical fun while making war with your teeth. Sweets in transparent packets are ranged alongside colour charts and palettes of impressionist sherbet. Some look like spaceships and some look like plans for furniture. A guy is buying a lot of haricots beans and tomato sauce. I leave a gap in the aisle and look at the terrines before making my way into the inner-city complex of sugar products. Becoming means having successive landscapes printed on your mind until they become you and it never changes. It's more how you go about it, looking for the right moment, trying to hold on.

The outlines of words giving off meaning exploding images at the corner of outlines, reading, pictures. In your sleep. Different light greens. Over a hump. Turning a corner. Looking over the hill. A peak over. Just getting through. Bit by bit. One thing at a time. Over the worst. A roll of sellotape. A bar code from the side of a pencil. Blue broom. Yellow broom. Broom, broom. Olfactory lolly factory. Shoeprints in mud. Sponges. Another pile of bits of paper. Shopping lists. Large, tall, fat, wide, heavy, shiny cars created by accident drift past driving their occupants with an air of flatulent disinterest. Purchases float around. Obligations and subtlety slip by. The sun is out and everybody is happy as though winter is an unnecessary hindrance and it should just rain a few hours a year, that would be okay. But no grey weather. That's depressing. I'm not projecting here, it really is miserable. Wondering about what happens to atoms as they break, the same kind of things at the boundaries of the thoughts. Same sea, different chemicals. It's easy to know that everything is a screen, now that everything is. Carrying things. Caring for things. Refuge, putting spiders in the garage. Salvaging something workable and even beautiful from momentary panic, thoughts near catastrophe. The spider walks off as though off for a stroll, or is maybe thinking about seeing a film. Abstractions are everywhere. I meet the gardener. And the blackbird. It is warm. It is raining. It is cold. It is warm. The sound of gods roars past in a jet plane as the tinkle of the glass on the table signals presence. Growth, in a world of restriction. In an environment of.

I'm listening to myself so I know what I'm supposed to be doing. That binary nearly thing of the element. If things were slightly different but they're not, like a guy in a park doing the wrong thing. Going through words. Not in pain. Clock work. Surrounded by robotically engineered symmetry, a car talking to a corrugated metal panel. The meaning of consensus becomes clear when you do the ironing. Now this. And there after. This river where you set your foot is gone. To do this, view this new this, a donkey who prefers straw to a golden throne. A newfound world in debris at your feet. Psychological landscapes, details giving off details. Apathetic garage. Seasons of temerity.

Things like a hard to suffer feeling of pressure and helplessness, sometimes atmospheric, partly human. We're living this virtual edifice, a system of appearances with little other goal than to maintain itself, compliant, acquiescent, an appearance of ease. Not easy the possibility of dreams or pictures or thinking. We become what we see, but what we're seeing doesn't mean anything, and retire to the curative desperation of sleep, the seemingly ever-diminishing possibilities of hopes, feelings, and imaginings. There's no other explanation, things are flexible and of their time. A certain manifestation appears which allows natural exigencies to function, articulate some aspect of the human condition in a form which is contemporary. Because things to seem to happen instinctively there seems to be no rationale, but that something gives us meaning which is otherwise lacking. Though we think we forget we do it anyway.

I'm in town submerging myself in junk as a form of therapy. I spill my coffee on my jeans and my afternoon is ruined. It's hard to find pens with fine points but it's the only way of keeping things in focus. The sound of a motorbike crosses a pedestrian crossing. Three men on the table next to me are discussing garden fencing and fighter planes. I look at the ashtray as a van driver reverses over the zebra crossing, followed by an estate car which resembles a tub of ice cream with a motor and windows. The blind over the terrace is red. Road signs point left and right, are green and blue with black lettering. The white signs with black lettering are the easiest to read but harder to see. A motorcycle sits facing forwards, pointing inquisitively at the lack of a fence. Floodlights stand above the sports stadium and everything else. There is a lot of architecture and intentions of man, an invisible sensation of commerce taking place among sparsely decorated windows. Hotel. Club. Kebab. Some trees. A hedge, a road sign. A mother and daughter slam their car doors in time, absent of credible percussive frequencies as their car is made of what used to be packaging, in a choice of colours, ready to be driven away. The tempo and feel of things make it impossible to attain the synchronicity which is the tenor of nature. There's too much going on in the world so I think about clothes. Driving a car but you're also the vehicle, penetrating an environment of reaction. There are résumés made, états de lieux, clichés which serve as observations of what still exists and so is where we are now, from where we repart, knowing that a certain direction is merely evident, some things valued, or which are simply there. A lot to do with music is pretending you're doing something.

Searching for a memory, something about lines and variables. No drums in the future, no love either because everything is. Living out a hyphen. When you clear your head, when you're so taken in the event you don't have time to pretend, you're left with subconscious thoughts, an ambience of calm and only things which are pertinent, a positive place called loose change. Faced with insubstantial, near-fake constructions and other chimera. The concept of signal. The only things which make sense are the lines between the trees.

Can't,cn't ype; can't copewith nting. Bombarded, the outside of the defending particle molecule, attacked by stress assailing, pushed down by something invisible. Earth breaking out of the ground. Bubble gum-flavoured cities are lines upturned. All the world's water is made of tears. Aesthetic suppositions have been ignored. A lack of anything merit worthy is commercially viable. Ridiculous symmetries have taken over. Night is the only time one is freed of the weight of senselessness and you can rediscover a sense of weightlessness. Everybody pretends they are but they're not usually. We like our artists poor, disenfranchised but above all bizarrely dressed. We are not allowed to disappoint so we have to accept the circumstances imposed on us and defined by previous centuries. We live by stereotypes, televisual images of things we can recognise before we buy them. Buy old cars. Have faith in the stratagem of birds. Simple questions give you decades of looking for answers. There are limits to everything, other than the things that matter, pushing you ever closer to clownville, a confusing language of conflicting symbols, the basis of our fracture.

The supermarket car park smells of burning dogs. People walk around sunburned as though they're not really there. Stray plants are growing among the wheat field razed and gathered by a Sommeca harvester that belongs to another era, where madness was isolated and the whole was reasonably priced. We go backwards while we're going forwards which is why we're not going anywhere, some kind of revelation or other, creating spaces. Only a few moments, when you realise what things are supposed to be like all the time.

Things before were hard but you realise how easy and good things were then. Why didn't you make more of it - as though things are a state of urgency and have to be finished by tomorrow. As people got richer we found our goal of fitted kitchens where nature is out of bounds - the weather, dirt, plants, insects, anything extraneous. Despite the obvious insanity of this equation approximately 54% of the planet seem happy with this model and another few want to believe. It's why we're in the mess we're in, the people who've got it already and those who want it. Alternatives get more implausible the further you go along a path to nowhere.

Like the mind, the centre and the base are solid and coherent. Towards the periphery things become lighter, more vague and fragile and exorcised from the schedules. Here we find imagination, extreme sensibility, occasional fears and the continually taut interpretation of unconventional behaviour. We need everything, but in the appropriate amounts, a haze that covers everything. Even when it is flimsy and insubstantial it nonetheless conditions our entire being. Everything is about being right, but it isn't really. Peintures bâtiment, peintures marines. Things you like. Things like distance and landscapes. Short moments where you are back in the same kind of understanding, things you relied on before, when things were more innocent and maybe the time itself, though it's hard to know just how the same it was. Needing to be in a state where being you seems alien. It shouldn't be that hard and it is already known but we don't seem to get there, confusing lies with truths unsaid. Everybody's being made crazy by people we're taught to look up to. People not aware they don't really care about anything, though they sometimes think they do so they do, unable to comprehend feelings. Essential natures combine to make a story which rarely seems to last, thinking that beginnings stay that way, which they sometimes can, but rarely. You're listening to jazz piano and you can tell it's really good, because the best players weren't just the best but played with the best, so the whole is something extraordinary. It's how you do what you do, the how or the what isn't enough. People tend to think that almost anyone can do something that comes close to greatness, and maybe, though not for long. The form confuses us so it's hard to know. They throw rocks at you and when they've finished go through your pockets and take what was in your mind.

It is the 18th of March and I'm burning a Christmas tree to keep warm. My starter motor is broken and means taking out the gearbox. I've been reading tips for writers and I seem to be doing everything wrong. Elmore Leonard says using adverbs is a mortal sin but I'm not completely sure what adverbs are so it'll probably be okay. I'm not supposed to give "detailed descriptions of characters" nor "go into great detail describing places and things" but that's the whole idea. I put the washing machine on a long cycle because I'm hungry for something to listen to. There are evolutionary stirrings among the volleys of cruise missiles. The development of man stalled sometime in the 18th or 19th century when he realised he was free but that it didn't make any difference, headed for a future of game shows and strange confectionery, human evolutionary potential amounting to very little. There seems to be a natural connection between slide guitar and crime fiction.

Spring 2017 and humanity is trembling. The Dutch elections swung everybody back from the brink that wasn't but there are more pitfalls ahead. Since Margaret Thatcher came to power things had been going badly but looked good. The moment society decided that caring about each other was an obstacle, everything possible has been done to annihilate intelligent thought and reduce people to the status of germs. We have reconciled ourselves to speaking in half-truths which have transformed themselves into a belief system where we seem to have no choice but to continue saying things which conflict with common sense, coherent thought and blatant evidence. We talk about prosperity when people are too poor to feed themselves. When we talk about fiscal responsibility we mean crashing the world's economy. When we talk about democracy we mean voting for people we don't like who do things we don't want, potentially dinosaur-class planetary destruction, everyone doing what everyone else is doing, the kind of thing that leads to pile-ups in the fog. The concept of human well-being is an inconvenience and is becoming unknown. Nothing overall in our way of life, our actions or understanding is changing much, or not at all how it needs to.

Things are busy and most people seem to be in vehicles. You feel like an lkea weed in a monoculture field full of irrelevant junk, signs telling you you can do things, that things are cheaper. Backlit acetates of pizzas look threatening, lurid and dangerous, blinding people at waist height. There's a battle going on between what is garbage and what is surplus, what is inevitable and what is desired. New stuff, buildings with more colours and fewer details, unlikely pinks, inconsiderate browns and rebellious greens. Everything is vibrating with chemicals and everything tastes the same, E numbers running into the thousands. People are only going places to make money. We go past the London College of Communication but you get the feeling people inside don't know what's going on outside and it's hard to feel connected. Everything seems to be adapting to people who don't have any interest in anything other than the housing ladder. Society as a whole is losing control. A lot of things are about working out what things are about and the result is something. It's how you get there which is interesting, thinking about protein in the first person singular, no time for sitting by the fire. People are starting to look like the fashions suggested to them, flavour-enhanced media narratives, nominative determinism, pollution, no family life. What we thought, that capitalism was a coherent and natural and supremely beneficial state, has developed into a form of psychosis, evident flaws exposed in an era of truth, Before they'd be selling you things you'd have to decide about, but now you can't even see them and it's not your fault. All of a sudden what was glaringly obvious has become mandatory and instantaneous. Goodness, an assumption that society and people were worth valuing, has been dispensed with, but it's not that easy. The insane complexities of countries fighting to sell each other biscuits is leading to economic, structural meltdown. Nobody is just being any more.

It is Saturday and the noise levels and frequencies have increased. The humidity ratio has changed substantially. A deep, rich, fog envelops the coast. The sun's warmth glows from somewhere. The fog hovers. Cars stream by pumping out measured, consensually approved pollution. A woman with a pink vest walks past clutching a wine holder. Intentions move. Memories reform and dissipate. A motorcycle’s whine cuts through rounded shapes. Realities have been exhausted, sound bites go unchallenged, feelings lie dormant. Bicycle wheels whirl by, dog-yapping a dissatisfied air. Strange, nearly artificial, characters are sitting up straight relaxedly, standing firm, set faces spluttering the strange, pacifying stares of puppets, bringers of news for whom truth and pertinence can be proved wrong with bad ideas, a form of cosmetic existence arguing vacuums with adamance, creating of dissembling something worthy, a bit of over-emphasis, dragged out for years. Endings can make great beginnings. We are applying the same factors promising that the result will be different, leaving the edges behind, pretending we're on a plane, tying up the numbers, huge expectations and risk-off short coverings, performing on the upside a bullish sentiment while the beasts are sent to market. If you don't stand up you'll fall for anything, everything fitted out in cream and gold, the present is just temporary while we await what we are promised, something different to this but comprised of the same things. We tried the future but it isn't working. Mass equals kinetic energy divided by the speed of light. There are moments when art is heroic but most of the time it's just work. A lot of things are special but some things you can't replace.

2017 threw up an unexpected result namely that humankind was potentially finished, denial taken to the point of absurdity, where it obviously, inevitably, and sometimes conspicuously, breaks. Universal consciousness is having a low blood sugar moment and reality is breaking out in a sweat. Black swan events are becoming predictable back at the turn of the 1800s, the wrong thing in the right place at the wrong time, which is always right, because it is what it is. The start of the downfall and rise began with Labour's manifesto which was full of sound, humane policies that struck a chord by being aspirational and costed and came out a week early when nobody had anything to read, able to parry the attack lines before the archers had woken up. The Government a few days later released a multi-faceted catastrophe with coffee stains, May seemed disconnected from reality, only meeting people who wore day-glo, nodding with her head slightly to one side, a gesture showing she listens and understands, just the occasional actual person coming up to her and telling her she was making people's lives hell. The semi-cultured bloke down the pub, or on the terrace of an imposingly-themed craft beer emporium with confusingly named snacks which nobody eats, when he's got his collar opened and his tie loosened and isn't talking about football. He'll feel slightly guilty about having more money than me, or at least is aware of it, but not in a way that he would consider giving me any but he appreciates me but he doesn't really because let's face it most people do real work like flushing the world's economy down the sink or selling junk food to tourists and it doesn't seem credible that a person can spend their time doing nothing like people like me do. In possibly the most historically obscure corner of the backwater wasteland, Louis is having some electricians dig up the street. The world is being run by a gaseous cloud while in the fields not far away a combine harvester is turning the countryside into biscuits, the sound resembling a plane taxiing for take-off in a hot climate but which just goes up and down the runway, the same kind of throne. The neighbours are power-spraying something which sounds like the combine harvester and the world is being burnished. The birds are resting for the afternoon. There's no point in arguing with a detergent commercial because you know you're going to lose.

Sitting in the countryside at nightime, early spring. The frogs are croaking and the universe is silent. White cats arranged before me like Hollywood's version of ancient Greece. The air is cooling. The season is pregnant. None of us talk. The sky is black but it is probably blue. I am trying to assemble everything I have thought, known or perceived into some coherent whole while a car's headlights pass to my right. I am wearing shorts doing my best to conform, trying to have faith in humankind while watching television, trying to get rid of all that is inessential to fix my car, to put in place a coherent living which will allow me to invite people for an aperitif rather than a glass of water, try to prove something to somebody, surrounded by recovered pots of second-hand paint. Replicas of mankind sit in a tray keeping metaphors of morality at bay, hoping that man will one day fully respect trees, end the incongruity of slaughter while playing a game of numbers, contemplating a wire mesh fence, wondering if friendships will last. There's a 100% success rate for everything now. Our inside has become outside and doesn't belong to us. There are certain formats, clean and pretty, which don't correspond to anyone. The maintenance of swimming pools, models in unusual positions, uniform landscapes and bicycles in cream.

TOP PROMO - DATA CENTER VS. PC CHIP SALES
Figures and skyscraper lines, taking the place of the miners, leave the edge behind but still. You're in the place words are supposed to be, locked out of the office, a risk of short covering, a squeeze in the oil patching, performing to the upside in a bullish position, a jacket of badges saying numbers full of cell phones. How it all fits in the transition. As I came down the hill I got over my fear, the one I couldn't hold back, that had stopped me from being at ease, and I learned to trust myself. There is a dialogue shouted at you which is just opinion, it doesn't matter if it's sensible or not, what is strange is that it is seen as a natural order of things. It takes time to realise that where your thoughts would take you doesn't necessarily, angels, walking along the side, unconvinced, back to the root that everybody thinks is dispensable. Everything seems complicated. Everything is the same. Luckily there are colours. It's like knowing everything is there all the time but there aren't any vitamins. The description is often more interesting than the thing itself. It's there, but you've got to know what you're looking for. All we want is little bits of liberty, a place where feelings are allowed to be themselves. You work out what things are and decide to deal with them sometime, whereas the trick is to do what you can the moment you can with what you have, no matter how stupid, how unsure you are, or how frightening it seems. The thing that makes everything else work, the thing which is the one thing you should be doing. We're always two stages removed from anything important. If we manage to get somewhere else, where things start, which we don't, it isn't even enough. We tend to adore things but not to like them.

Little Adventure at the End of the World
We're at the beginning of the end of the world and the end of the beginning of the end. The field welcoming the brocante has been razed to stubble and there is a mildly post-apocalyptic feeling to proceedings. It doesn't feel as there had been a need for society to have any sort of structural organisation and people just seem to be getting on, seem to be coping pretty well. It might rain or snow, even though it is summer. Packs of wild animals might surge over the plain. It feels that quite a few things are likely but that no one knows what to expect. It is late summer, possibly autumn though the weather doesn't seem sure either. There is little show, little pretence on display. Clothes are not over-clean and no one smells of perfume or aftershave. I have bought enamel vessels for carrying milk, a Pete Seeger and Duke Ellington records, a wooden tray and some tools. I left my thermos of coffee at home which is an existential disaster but not really a problem. There are things here from the past including quite a lot of people and we don't seem to be sure where we are or where we should be.  We define ouselves by the geometry of relations. We are struggling to get to the future while the present is collapsing, the world has gone out for the day and there's no one at home, a wild west pop metal festival with cheap pastries and no heating of any kind. Luxuries are banished, nothing needs justifying and money doesn't exist. People are having problems with the simplest of activities and you get the feeling that the human experience has as its goal to render humanity as empty and as incoherent as possible. If you can't open a packet then it will be redesigned, scientists and designers continuing working on things which will help you not to have to move away from in front of the television.

Some people stop in front of you, staring into the distance talking on mobile phones but it's the end of the world and this is a mere detail as anything goes. Most things are held within sensible and respectful parameters though nothing is perfect. I'm selling a jerry can, some dishes, quite a lot of lights, a leather briefcase and some records. The maize field opposite is standing menacingly in green and yellow, waiting to take over, and people are buying things to do with fish. People seem sad, broken and unfulfilled. The couple next to me are talking without any pauses which is what they seem to do most of the time but that could be projection on my part and I am happy to believe there could be times when they take a break. They are talking about different rubbish tips and the guy is wearing the kind of denim shorts and buttoned waistcoat that quite rightly haven't been popular since the 1970s, when undisciplined aesthetics become a philosophy, an animation meme, a potently vacuous symbol of the potentially imminent decline of the human experiment.

I'm tired but the sun is coming out, weakly breaking through the cloud which stretches from horizon to horizon. The father of the family next to me spends most of his time at the front of the stand looking at his things as though he's never seen them before, teddy bears stretched out on windscreens, not wholly comfortable. People are carrying storage boxes, garden forks, transparent plastic bags of clothes. Families float past like schools of fish. A lot of people share rucksacks that don't seem to have much in them. Nobody seems to care much about anything. Most things assumed to exist don't any more. The curtain has opened but the stage is empty of meaning or anything coherent. The couple next door are recounting the uses, defects and qualities of each object in case the Earth spins off its axis if they stop. Everybody seems to be acting and I am the only spectator and I'm in the wrong. I'm wearing clip-on shades over my reading glasses and I'm feeling pretty cool until I spill my coffee on my light green and light and dark blue checked tablecloth which is casually folded over the felt-topped card table I bought at Brighton racecourse. The plastic cup has a wide, open lip, which makes the cups easier to stack but almost impossible to drink from. The French fries seem unreal. Dogs stay interested in things at knee-height and other dogs. Materialism cannot penetrate the dog kingdom other than things which can be chewed. The day is passing mutely as people have broken an umbilical link with objects and time has stopped. A couple are holding hands, holding at bay the isolation of the modern condition. I pay a visit to a neighbour who had earlier caused chaos by refusing to move his car which needed to be done at that precise instant, coalescing against him a rare, unified outbreak of consensual moral outrage, and flick through his strange assortment of replacement pencil sharpener blades in their original, individual envelopes of different colours, tins of remedies for coughs, and pieces of machines that it helps to be a historian or a fanatic to know about. The sun is still trying to break through and the wind is still alternately warm and cool, the dogs have stopped talking and the schools of fish have momentarily dispersed. It is lunchtime and the world's rotation is slowing for a few hours while people fill themselves up and sleep off the effects. A rogue goose is ambling through the alleys to hook up with a couple of mates towards the coffee stand and the couple selling tins of paint. Haircuts, portable telephones and anoraks. Silliness is the ornament of beauty and beautiful things are often strange. I try reading a book of proverbs and maxims which were maybe better in their day, not necessarily by much, when guys felt everything was about chivalry, thigh-slapping cunning, and ultimately terrible relationships with women, no more laudable or worthwhile than humankind filling its Sundays recycling fluorescent, acrylic, stuffed animals. Humanity is concluding, not because it needed to happen, but maybe because the collective subconscious seemed to not feel it unjust.

There are different ways of doing things and you're not sure you know what they are. There are signs which indicate things, forms that reproduce, beauty and chance that you sail close to, the majesty of geometry always present unless you’re angry. Things which you should communicate and things you can't. There are plenty of trees most of the time, curves in the road which never stop changing, even when you're not looking at them, conversations which take place when you're not talking, arrows which point somewhere. Gestures, questions and intentions taking you back to a past you're trying to make sense of or trying to escape. New ideas and feelings which rise to the surface when you need them to define reality. The world is asleep and there are things you do to get through. Moments come back to reassure you, happiness that you try to fit into, words you like and people who mean things to you. Avenues of trees are a reminder of the past which seems to have more meaning than we're used to. Deviations, rejections and searches. States that you like and want to adapt, ideas that seem clear at the time, thoughts you don't fully understand, journeys which don't go anywhere. Doing things you didn't think would mean as much as they do, things you need, things you have to go around, things you arguably have to go through, the kind of happiness you want but aren't always ready for and don't handle as well as you should. Things which threaten to take apart everything you know, the kind of symmetries that are always changing so you're never sure where you are, things which are being revealed that you can't or don't want to do anything to stop, things which you've always wanted to do which suddenly just happen, the person you've wanted to be and fully become, not always when or how you imagined. How important it can be to have something to hold onto.