Sunday 9^th July 2000.

I’ve been away in London staying with my tourettic friend TWITCHER in his slightly seedy council flat in Silvertown. He shares his flat with a menagerie of stick insects which have the run of the place (hahaha! but of course they don’t run! Fooled you all!). Twitcher used to work as a proofreader for the Accrington Gazette back in the evil 80’s. His incontinent obscenities seemed highly suitable back then, directed towards the management but in the quaintly menacing purlieus of Silvertown they jar a little.

After a few pints down the Prince Regent (inhabited by disconsolate locals & airline pilots from the adjacent City Airport) we would take ourselves off for a walk around the Royal Albert Dock and watch the diminutive four engined jets coming in to land over the mammoth Sugar Refinery. Frequently we detoured up a pasty side street to walk beneath the mooning gargoyles on the top of St. Mark’s church (SS.Teulon’s ‘masterpiece’ as Iain Sinclair would have it in ‘Downriver’ and who am I to disagree with him despite the fact that it’s only mid-Victorian and has no spooky graveyard to linger in?). The local inhabitants (mostly council dwelling spivs) would greet Twitcher with the salutation “Hello Belcher me old mate!” a nickname drawn from another characteristic of his tourettes syndrome.

Of course this whole area is redolent with the poetic prose of the man Sinclair, he of the long tortuous meanderings through the streets of the capital. He immortalised North Woolwich just down the road by using the Railway Carriage Museum as a setting for one of his effusions about Jack the Ripper and walked the local streets, tracing out demotic paths found in some ancient manuscript.

Twitcher and I would follow the stars back to his ‘spillage’ council flat, 5 floors up, overlooking clinical blocks of housing that could easily be conforming to some housing scheme as dreamed up in a painting by Mondrian. Those sickly, tokenist, peeling yellow decorations are certainly reminiscent of his art.

Catching a bus to Homerton one day I witnessed the spectacle of a sprightly mother with 5 kids charge the platform of the No.149 as it was speeding off -- she just made it & 4 kids behind her just made it, but the 5^th kid, the runt of the litter wasn’t making it (its gut had been struggling with jellied eels all day) was falling behind, when from nowhere the mother extended a pole with a hook on the end and snagged the blighter just in time, whisking him off the ground and 4 feet into the air where, suspended, he proceeded to do the breast stroke until he was safely reeled in. I kid you not! People think that all that gymnastic prancing about that Charlie Chaplin went in for was some kind of screen invention – not a bit of it! East End kids are trained from the womb to assault life in a confrontationally physical manner. If it’s not sprinting for buses it’s battling packs of hungry dogs out to feast on their inexpendibles! …………….more to follow…………….

Wednesday 12^th July 2000.

The most exciting thing to happen to me on my recent visit to Silvertown, East London, was meeting GILBERT & GEORGE, the famous performance artists. This was highly unexpected because they normally hang out near their house in the Spittlefields area, taking their breakfast every morning in the Market Café. But as an artistic deviation from routine they breakfasted in NOBBY’S CAFÉ on Albert Road in Silvertown.

Having been alerted to their presence by a network of contacts, ending with my host Twitcher, I entered the net-curtained premises to find them seated at a corner table, resplendent in identical dark suits with a triangle of maroon handkerchief peeping from the breast pocket, offset by plump, orgiastically flowery ties. They glanced up as I entered but quickly resumed attention on their breakfast of sausage, bacon & egg. An emputically omnivorous collection of workmen from the local sugar refinery had collected to study them over their own breakfast of coffee and cigarettes obviously expecting something interesting to happen, such as a sudden outburst of poetry or a bit of uncalled for defecation into polythene bags, but G & G just quietly went about their meal, occasionally muttering something to each other. Finally, in unison they wiped their mouths on white napkins, rose to their feet and bowed magnanimously to the proprietor (who had been watching them suspiciously all this while) and walked out where, casting furtive looks behind them they proceeded along Albert Road side by side, step by step. Entering the station they caught the train out of Silvertown, possibly to Hackney Central where I happen to know that they have a gallery at their spontaneous disposal.

Going back into the Café I found the spectators examining the table and chairs that G & G had just vacated, perhaps looking for evidence of some Artistic Sloughing – an odd purple stain on the seat perhaps or an interesting yellow eggy pattern on a napkin? Maybe the proprietor, who was also inspecting the scene, was contemplating some kind of permanent shrine to Gilbert & George, roping the whole area off and putting a price tag on it to attract the Art Set whose only previous contact with the area was a taxi to the City Airport en-route for Amsterdam or Geneva. Now they could detour to NOBBY’S CAFÉ and pay £5 to viddy a G & G Spectacular. (Maybe the addition of some nail clippings and a pair of panties would add some perverse excitement to the whole set-up?!!).

The local paper, SILVERTOWN NEWS, seemed to miss out on the whole event. Their headline was ANOTHER UFO OVER SILVERTOWN. It was all drearily familiar.

Saturday 22^nd July 2000.

Update from Accrington.

Duncan is stalking his ex-girlfriend’s mother after she threw a jar of instant coffee at him. (Old Dunc likes to be abused and he’s after some more of it!)

Rachel & Emma’s shop is struggling along. They’ve diversified into ‘new age’ music with the help of Ziggy Millburn (who can turn his hand to anything given the right motivation, in this case Rachel!). Currently they have 10 cd’s for sale on their own label, ‘Bluey Cavern Records’. An example of this type of music can be found on my HOME PAGE. When I go into the Bluey Cavern I’m assaulted by the combined odours of truffles & pernod, a delicacy that Rachel came up with – she blithely insists on every potential customer having some, though I’m sick of the sight of the stuff already.

My latest article for THIS IS BRITAIN, a monthly magazine celebrating the strange and surreal in the UK, is called ‘The Pig Throwers Of Cleveleys’ and is concerned with an archaic sport which consists of burly nude men throwing piglets across a river. If the piglet lands in the river, the thrower (called a FUKLEMICK, hence the old English name for the sport FUKLEMECLAVIES) has to wade upstream for a mile and return with a small fish in his mouth, a supply of which is kept for this very purpose. Some of the rules of the game are rather gruesome and needless to say the RSPCA have long tried to ban the sport but without success.

My LIGGYLIP cleared up completely for a month but has now returned with a vengeance. I’m typing this through a pastry slicer!

Sunday 30^th July 2000.

I attended a rather bizarre meeting of the Accrington Intellectuals on Friday. The theme for the evening was ARE WE ALONE? and everybody had to come dressed as an alien. I wore a purple suit & Cliff Richard mask, which didn’t go down too well. “Letting the side down!” was the general comment but I didn’t care.

The guest speaker (resplendent in surplus orange cassock with waxy extensions to his oddly balding Trixsome Headset, thus emulating the creature Vimto in OUR BROTHER EARTH, 1953, director: Adny Brock) was Doctor Henry Westall of Brasenose College, Oxford. He normally teaches Jewish Rhetoric but was taking a sabbatical by debating the likelihood of “Aliens Among Us”, an idea I’ve always held rather strongly since I cannot seriously except a majority of my fellow humans being what they represent themselves to be, thus they either don’t really exist & are mere voidsome projections onto my consciousness, or are actually visitors from a distant realm (more distant than, lets say, Sydney Opera House).

Bert Oliphant, sporting a blue cape and a Spock mask (one of at least seven in the room…….yawn!!), held forth on his favourite topic of ‘UFO’s over Accrington’, but we refused to hear him out and Dr. Westall neatly implied that Bert was a Twat from Turdville (or words to that effect).

I was rather intrigued by the identity of a spiky blob that crawled around the floor at the tea break. I stood on its tail, whereupon it ejaculated, “I seem to be stuck!” I identified the voice. It was only Ted the Moose – I think he was being especially discreet after his reading of an appalling poem at the Accrington literary Club last week that had people gyrating their guts in hopeless spasms of uncontrolled hysterics. He simply wimped out of the room and we inevitably thought that he would disappear to an adjacent town like Ramsbottom or somewhere to escape his humiliation, but no, here he was, still creeping about. He’s an Undertaker.

At the end of the “Are We Alone?” discussion there was a mock brawl & everyone kicked the rubber out of everyone else – all good clean fun, though I think our guest speaker had departed beforehand, I certainly hope so since we did get a little carried away & one poor insect-like creature got knocked about pretty badly. No one like insects much do they?

 Sunday 20th August 2000.

 By the by, there seems to be a small misapprehension as to the nature of the glasses I am wearing during the very exciting submarine exploit at Oxford as depicted in my website. Those glasses are in fact SAFETY SPECTACLES. I do not in fact wear glasses except on the odd occasion like reading the small print on my Liggylip Ointment.

 Accrington has been bathed in the glorious light of a Prince Regent Summer that sees many men in poorly fitting t-shirts frothing at the mouth. These pub swilling ecumeniaries have little to fear from the sordid tea-swilling oafs who gyrate all day in the frick-a-dizzy assumption that they are immortal. I've seen them orate their cordials as they poke money at tree dwelling spivs. They don't fool me! Anywhat, the FESTIVAL is almost due & then strange things will stir themselves from cracks in the pavement AND CLAW THEMSELVES UPWARDS INTO THE FROTHY tang of a new fruity day.

  Oh GOD give me some more SPAM I've run out.

Monday, 08 October 2001.

  Yes I'm still here in Accrington - and why NOT live in a town that has has just had a film festival devoted to the work of the experimental Egyptian Film Maker ABUL KHAMIR? The film I went to see was called BUG and opened with a soft window lit bare interior (off-white), the daylight subtly modulating over a period of ½ hour, then something orange & blurry flew across the camera and a sinister shadow played around the scene for a few seconds, then another 20 minutes of bare interior. Suddenly everything went black - the sort of black that makes you wonder if you've just gone blind, and lasts 15 minutes. Just before the end the black is violently strobed with dazzling flashes of white light for 5 seconds, leaving me sickly confused with purple explosions playing on my retina for a full minute before the cinema lights come up. Truly ground breaking cinema, though I couldn't help notice that I was the only one to applaud at the end.

  Went for a hike yesterday up on the Darwin Moors - bit o'wind but quite mild. The poet Wordsworth made it up to these moors in 1835 and wrote about the 'eggy stains on the dry stone walls' (yellow lichen) and the 'cold whispering vistas amid the clunk clonk clink of Myra's unforgiving clogs'. Unfortunately my observations on the scene were a tad less romantic, spoiled as they were by the masses. Groups of walkers in single file enslavement, fervently grasping each other's toggles lest they should stray off the beaten track and lose themselves amid the vicious sheep and bogs, were clogging my view. I felt like screaming out "Thar's no boisness up on't Moors if thee can't prick thine own cloommlies!" but they probably wouldn't get the dialectical irony.

 I noticed that the majority were sporting massive backpacks with the latest gimmick installed. This is nothing less than a portable toilet - one shake and these little beauties automatically explode into a box cubicle replete with all the necessary appendages such as specially sealable shelves for all kinds of prurient urological functions. Pissing on the grass is TOO GOOD for these 'privacy junkies' (to quote my good friend IAIN SINCLAIR). It makes one wonder what's coming next for the moorland day explorer. My guess is that the next fashion will be for portable walking compartments - little rooms of ones own with all mod-cons, propelled by the walker striding purposefully underneath (images of similarly propelled vehicles in 'The Flintstones'). Thus no unnecessary interaction with those irksome shitty odours or lost explorers. One sees everything through a clear plastic visor that isolates interesting features of the environment such as sheep, small holes, little flowers (trample friendly), grapple flex, human excrement, dead bodies, roman pavements etc. and does instantaneous web searches for each one, whilst simultaneously pinpointing your exact satellite-located position and alerting the local rescue authorities just in case you get into difficulty. No more taking chances with the hostile 'other'. It's all rather depressing really & definitely not for me. If I fall down a hole I want to really experience it as a hole & not have it pointed out to me as an old shit-pit to be avoided at all costs.

 Wednesday, 17 October 2001.

  I thrust myself manfully into the tangy milieu that IS Accrington Town. My ear immediately caught the whiff of bad dialogue as I swayed through the portals of the indoor market. At a café: "Hope there's no ANTHRAX in this Tripe chum!" said a short, squat anti-bohemian with a stuffed poodle beside him quivering in delayed frenzy at the odours emanating from the pet supplies next door. At an adjacent table: "Best leg o' mutton I've 'ad for ages……..really did me very nicely, slid down a treat that, and I'm not really a mutton man love, no what I mean? I prefers your pork in mustard sauce me, but the pork has to be a bit 'off' like to be really right and they just don't sell it any more………….."

 I swooned into the fresh air & saw old LEGGY THOMMIES feeding the pigeons in Half-Yard Court. Leggy used to be an avid walker covering 50 miles a day all over East Lancashire but had given up the exotic life of a pedestrian explorer to feed the birds & murmur pleasantries at them. I did an article on him for the Gazette - he told me about his encounters with UFO's up on the Moors and his rancorous debates with the aliens about the superiority of Tesco's over Safeway, his allegiance to the National Front & his dislike for tinned vegetables. The aliens, Leggy was surprised to hear, really LOVED Lancashire, thought it was the greatest place in the universe for reasons which Leggy could scarce understand - all to do with certain levels of natural radioactivity in the rock strata and some kind of a 'dream glow' on the horizon at sunset, that kind of thing. The aliens didn't appreciate old Leggy gobbing on the turf, thought it disgusting and chastened him about it & he told them to "sod off", which they did in rather petulant fashion, singing his leg as they did so - PHOOT - "It shot up, I'm not jesting thee, shot up like a bloody rocket straight up till thou could see nowt, just little sparkly bits. My eyes have never been right after that - sparkles all over my field o' vision. Doctors say it's psychological. I tell them they know nowt. They took my wife to be x-rayed last year and she disappeared! Haven't seen her since."

 Met up with Duncan at our new haunt THE LORD BYRON, replete with handsome Victorian façade. It's a classy joint full of ex-actors & transsexuals. I had a pint of POETIC PISS and ordered a veal chop. Duncan talked about his 'energy surges' brought on by sniffing the back of his TV set. I think the static has got him in its thrall.

 Wednesday, 07 November 2001.

 I have a peculiar friend called Ricky MacDuff whose hobby is hanging around Doctors' waiting rooms & diagnosing the patients. He gets into conversation with them, nice and friendly, and they tell him about their complaints. Based on his casual reading of redundant medical literature and what he gleans on the Internet he tells them what's wrong with them, and does so in such an authoritative tone and with such a silky delivery of medical jargon that the patients are completely taken in and go into the consulting room armed with dangerous foreknowledge. On hearing of Ricky's presence the doctors rush out to abuse him but old Ricky isn't good at taking criticism and frequently gets involved in a punch up, resulting in his arrest. I visited him only last week in Preston Prison where he was serving 3 months for assault. He's a big bloke with a beard down to his porcine belly. His forehead is tattooed with a red cross and his arms covered with ill written pieces of medical etiquette. He greets his mates with the phrase "Hello Mr …….. What seems to be the problem?" On this last visit he was convinced that I had a malignant melanoma on my tongue and kept asking me to poke it out at him, "Ohhh very very nasty that. That tongue will have to be incised I'm afraid. Can you come in Wednesday for an emergency procedure? It's all quite painless, except on your WALLET of course. Haahaaaharrrr. Sorry that's a doctor's joke."

 Accrington has had its first fall of snow on top of the moors & it looks rather pretty in the cold moonlight. Cyril Jebb our new mayor went on a casual stroll up Toddersheil Heights the other night and had a religious conversion. All the local papers went potty over the story and the Darwin Post claimed that he had been abducted by aliens and interfered with. Headline: JEBB HIT ON BY MARTIANS - OFFICIAL.

 I have a new cat called PELICAN who likes to eat frozen peas straight from the freezer. I think it must be the feline version of ice cream. She dances and pirouettes like a ROVULOPIKE. I got her from a catalogue with pictures. She doesn't respond to her name which is a little disappointing.

 Friday, 09 November 2001.

 Discovered a new second-hand bookshop in Darwin. The girl behind the counter took my fancy so I tried out one of my lines on her: 'Had any good DUMPS lately?' I asked straight facedly. Now this may seem grossly rude to you, but in fact it is a perfectly legitimate question in intellectual circles because ROLF DUMPS is a highly esteemed Austrian novelist of the minimalist/existentialist School. His novel EINE SCHEWEISGENHADTLINEININ won the prestigious 'Carl Monk' Prize for Fiction in 1938. The girl in the bookshop, who sported dinky round glasses with subtle lilac tint and deep purple lipstick, thought for a moment while holding my gaze then replied without a hint of humour, 'Actually we haven't had any in recently but I know there is a first edition of GEWALT VERLETZUNG in the shop window of Church Street Books in Lostock.' I think I fell in love on the spot - at least I began to sweat & feel sick which kind of amounts to the same thing, the same general ballpark uncontrolled inexplicable physiological inundation. I think (it's difficult to be sure of anything that happened after that moment) that I stood gawking at her with my mouth open for some time, because when I 'came to' she was looking at me with an expression of some annoyance and had her arms crossed in front of her as if to communicate an interior monologue such as "Please go away. I don't like freaks!" Anyway she soon softened and agreed to dinner back in Accrington. We went to FRIAR TUCKS off Bell Street which specialises in 'Olde English' cuisine, everything smothered in gravy with compulsory Yorkshire Puddings whether you like them or not. Inevitably the carrots & beans are overdone because that's the way Robin Hood liked them (so they say). The only reason we ended up in such an unpromising place was because Victoria had a phobia about 'foreign food', a topic which got a good airing as the meal progressed when I took issue with her idea of what was in fact foreign in multicultural Britain. By the end of a forgettable meal (the waitress spilled gravy on my jeans and something white and sticky on my shirt) I had discovered that Victoria was a Nazi of the old school & hung about with members of the East Lancashire White Supremacists. A tad disconcerted by this but at the same time sickly curious to know whether she had her walls festooned with swastikas or the like, I tried to invite myself in for a cosy coffee and chocolate biscuit but she said 'Good Night!' and slammed the door in my face. So that's £27.50 down the drain & not even a shag at the end of it! Life can be a tad brutal I think. However, in order not to be too downhearted I'm going to take myself off to Lostock and have a look at that DUMPS in the window.

Friday, 16 November 2001.

THINGS THAT ANNOY MOI

 I was in a posh restaurant and saw 'old wine' listed in the menu. Thinking I was in for an oak matured luscious treat I ordered a bottle, only to realise on tasting it that it 'old wine' must have meant left out opened for a week and giving it every possible chance to absorb the stench of a sewage works next door. Well, what did I expect for a tenner?

 Dangerous Pedestrians - usually old & professionally groomed - their technique is very simple, walk ahead looking to your right and with no prior indication suddenly veer over to the left causing those overtaking you to scrape to a stop. Shoe scuffing is unavoidable. These people should do a course and pass tests of proficiency before being let out.

 I was in a hardware store the other day and enquired if they had any scrotchets. The bloke looked at me blankly, "You mean dotchers?" "No I mean SCROTCHETS" Again the blank look - I was half expecting saliva to be dripping from the corner of his fat fuloopy mouth. I explained the obvious: "Scrotchets form the curtain to recessed plugbolls, extrudally mounted to standard ABL." "ABL? Plugbools?" "No. Plugbolls!" At this point I walked out. What is the point of employing staff who are grossly ignorant of the field in which they are employed? Actually I know this one - it's in order to infuriate the initiated.

  I hate people who say SPUG instead of SPONGE as if this is a time saving abbreviation. IT'S NOT!! These people don't even have a heavy cold. I heard one the other day in an Accrington chemists': "Got any spug?" They don't even have the energy to use the plural. What they should say is: "Have you any sponges my man? You do? Well get 'em out my man and be quick about it, my conveyance is waiting." This has the correct degree of directness, brevity & politeness.

  I'm getting increasingly irritated by women who say something daft and then qualify the remark by saying that 'most people think that don't they', as if this means that it must be correct just because she believes everything her daft friends' say, including the priceless "Ooohh Doreen you look just super in that new dress!" when in fact she looks like a multicoloured pavilion at an Ballistics Convention.

  I hate people who say that I am unfit to own a cat just because I want it to do tricks and not just sit around the house all day eating my left-overs and scratching chair legs into an effigy of Kitty de Koch. I could go on but I'll leave it for another time. News from Accrington: Some nutter is going around the town and painting a crude white letter A in front of every display of the word GENTS & turning it into AGENTS. What this person is trying to communicate only he and is therapist can know, but perhaps I'm missing something.