Thursday 25 June 2009



Went down to the Flicker of Hope for a breakfast beer and to stroke the cat, Patch. Patch was entirely indifferent. It is the day after exams. Exams are never pleasant because you are forced to confront people who appear to have totally opposite opinions to you. Ideologies are in combat and a microcosm of global conflict situates itself across a table. There is a certain calm the day after.
More exciting was the postman, who for once I caught, who delivered my package- THE FIRST PORN MAG I EVER BOUGHT. Admittedly it was probably for twenty pence of my school friend who thought he was Keith Richards, but, thirty and more years on, I travel back in time, a second pristine copy to frame on the wall. The first was a document of incendiary potential, to be carefully hidden in a box of Cluedo.  How things change. How things don't. A completely ephemeral thing, somehow preserved, isn't it brilliant!  The internet has facilitated this, it is enabling us to travel in time, Kurt Vonnegut style (Slaughterhouse 5). 
The contents are kind of irrelevant, but never the less a historical time capsule; adverts for reel to reel tape recorders, scotch, MG's, hair transplants, and 'male chauvenist pig' ties, big muffs, girls from the farm, nice girls from Cheltenham Ladies College in frilly knickers. It is a genuinely strange encounter, for today I see a world of butt plugs and gaping holes. People seem surprised I could remember the item, even more that I should pursue it to join the collection of artifacts that make up our home.  But I'm as bemused by these people just as I am bemused at the screams for tomorrow that are still regurgitated by the architectural profession without thinking. There is too much action; Too little thinking. I imagine my own personal demonstration of thousands with placards saying 'What Do We Want? - LESS' 'When do we want it?- WHENEVER!

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