KINGDOM OF LIES

house of horrors

ham headed admen

death faced women

immoral mates 

self crowned

continuous 

tabloid

fairytales

in the kingdom of lies

a house with no commons

no more idiot honesty 

no more poor people

we are the aristocratic  

information artists! 

churchillian 

corporate

permacrisis 

cheerleaders

poetic and playful

Pyrrhic entertainment

neo bouncy westminster

niche palace behaviour

in the kingdom of lies

why bother to learn

about the foundations

that drain away your poop

when there's precious pomp

why know how electric works

when you can pay a primate

to cover your ignorance up

maybe write a new 

history book

about you 

and your mates?

yes thats more fun!

then colour it all in

like a cartoon

build on that 

candy floss base

then add totally sick 

death trap cladding

over the dogshit 

look be amazed

its the kingdom of lies!

a hologram of hope

hip hop tv happiness

not expensive reality

that would be stupid! 

so ignore 

the economists and experts

ignore the remains of

the woke worry faced

dont invite hungry babies

to your play acting parties

or bad taste poor people 

who need to try harder

to be as unreal as this

here on the top rung

like a cleb

in a bubble

in Dubai

in the kingdom of lies

landlords and hedge funders

wave coocheecoo

as they bet against you

its ok

because youre not there

youre in the zoo

rosettes and flags

and sporting gags 

at the crack of dawn

we're typing your food

in the kingdom of lies 

please be assured

were definitely not 

deceitful at all 

we couldnt possibly be

milking you? 

killing whats true?

denying you democracy

turning your view

into nonsensical 

extremist 

gobbledegoo?

but thing is

dear billionaire beings

when yr bullshit becomes true

when red becomes blue

and solids are made into gas

you are making the law an ass

and in this neo chaos

in the kingdom of lies

all your bling things

will belong to us

dear colourful

liar kings

NJ2022

BIDDIES

biddies walking slowly

biddies standing still

biddies falling over

on a small hill

biddies by the bus stop

biddies by the sea

biddies clogging up

the queues at a and e

biddies on a train

biddies on a plane

biddies wearing nappies

blocking up the drain

biddies in a big house

biddies driving cars

biddies staring blankly

planning trips to mars

biddies talking nonsense

biddies eating cake

biddies in a hotel

another well earned break

biddies voting tory

biddies thick as shit

biddies acting snooty

in their tennis kit

biddies getting pensions

biddies buying meat

biddies busy tutting 

at the homeless in the street

biddies saying organic

biddies saying green

biddies need to wake up

from their little dream 

NJ2022

THE SECRET TOMATO SONG

ive got a secret tomato!

and nobody knows that it's there!

is it under the table?

or is it under the chair?

is it up my arsehole??

i dont really care!

ive got a secret tomato! 

and nobody knows that its there!

NJ2022

TRIP TO LANCASHIRE

ready meals?

fodder trolls

meatball boys

sausage rolled

into fitted sheets

by heavy women

bold brassy

big boob 

obedient babies

sleep well 

egg soldiers

no more

fly pies 

udder soft 

sacrifices

beef and lamb

stuck together

with fat and jam

coalece in hills

limestone gnomes

ring around the 

rose brick beds

plant yourselves

in grave terraced rows 

chuff chimney tabs 

tortoise tummy tanks

tubby telly hubbies 

and chubby mummies

wave molotov pints

on a friday night

weatherspoon jolly

it is the law!

to pour more

sugar and salt

into your jaw

then ignore 

the herd deaths 

mesmerised

in trenches 

by media monarchs

and privateer

pharoah make-overs

funny though eh?

the new james bond baddies

are god king and country! 

you are meat dripping

you are black pudding

clog clacking 

skinny dogs

murder is 

always happening

look on livestock!

at the new

dark satanic malls

eating your beautiful

sons and daughters

chubby beige buns 

entertainment heads  

dear lancashire rose

deep buried in the mines 

of black hearted brexit

can you still 

tangle and prick

dare sing 

throat strangling 

stone slinging songs? 

rock your children 

out of self harms?

re-make your jammy farms?

mince the duchy maybe?

or brick batter boris?

then eat them raw

with a biscuit

no longer in awe?

NJ2022

THE SOCIOPATH

it's a communal path!

i told the sociopath

so loaded

and addicted to 

controlling things

theres a hollow ring

to your gardening bling

I can feel 

the empty suck

of your inner vacuuming

flattening everything

walking us into mass grave

up and down

down and up

dragging along

someone or something

shout on the phone 

laugh like a moose  

bully connive abuse

thats all you do

in a baseball hat

that covers a wig

that covers a brain 

that is panicking  

blaming/charming

chatty/lonely

always acting

smarmy/moany

kind at first

to suck us in

offer light 

then burn

and stub  

its harmless  

monopoly money eh?

no shortage 

of plastic people 

to play with tomorrow

evil fuck-wit psycho

in god-offal gameshow

here at the London allotment

massive flowering sociopaths

are the only things that grow

NJ2022 

TASTE THE DIFFERENCE?

(FOR G)  

they seek him here

they seek him there

the scarlet boomer 

is everywhere

just got back from la de da

getting ready for 

shang ri la

next week

I'm 76!

still a catch!

got all the tests

and all the vax

heart of a 15 year old

teeth of a teen

brain of a toddler

keep my arse clean 

I eat very well  

Im kind and nice

empty spare rooms

in my massive house

ring my antique bell

I'm always in!

bored out of my brain

re-writing my will 

its always the same though  

I'll leave you nothing   

but

a 

slow 

strained

straw hat 

strolling 

justification 

for more 

elite

jazz pan

unearned affluent

10mph nosebleed 

BULLSHIT discourse

semi disguised 

pleasure in

knowing that

most people will never

taste the difference 

the poor will disappear

into malnutrition

and never 

appear

in any news feed

oh dear! 

deliverboo hoo!

my soggy bottom 

still plops with ease

more released equities

oh me and my glories 

I'll be dead soon 

you see!

so why does it matter

if the next generation

gets dipped 

in fritter batter?

and burnt to a crisp   

new WEF eco platter?

homo tempura! 

I'll be sad to miss 

that home grown dish

PS dont tell anyone this

they all think i'm nice

-ish

NJ2022

WE ARE DEAD

hello dead!

I THOUGHT we might

PLAN

to stay cool

as species

i thought there were ideas

TOO Clever  

TO SEE 

I DIDNT THINK IT WOULD BE

byeeeeeeee

poor people

ASAP

next 

the

dog EYED

middle class

FISH IN A BARREL

did you see 

the super rich

building bunkers

and space ships

WE ARE DEAD

HELLO FROM THE

POETRY BIN

hope GHOST

LOST in ads

knitting

youtube clips

DISTRACT YOURSELF

daily dead

WITH jogs

chained to

shitting DOGS

take harmless 

BNB BREAKS

you ARE DEAD

special BREED

shiney car

YOU THINK

YOURE FREE

elegant

organic

stylish

DECENT even

YOU ARE DEAD

reclining phone scroller

YOU ARE DEAD

you total phone  

YOU ARE DEAD

so instead

SOW A SEED

BLANKLY

have a green wank

grow a floppy 

plant flag

FOR THE SAKE OF IT

TRY TO REMEMBER

SOMETHING clean

YOU ARE DEAD

your CHILDREN ARE DEAD

UPSTAIRS PLAYING GAMES

YOURe COOKING plastic 

DOWNSTAIRS

YOU ARE DEAD

TRYING TO LIVE

AND THINK STRAIGHT

YOU ARE DEAD

YOU DidNT NOTICE

hidden under

the news noise

the end

it crept like a gas

into your house 

like covid  

in a HOSPICE

NJ2022

UPPER STREET

sultanas in wigs

salty shrunken

seafarers

mooring 

inflatable 4x4s

breadpudding baldy

boutique barrowboy

strawberry hoodie 

mint shorts

sour expression

the ghost ship creaks

with boomer treasure

wrinkled wallet face 

designer colostomy 

malformed in lycra

blackpudding condom

dogshit bag coffee

its a Carluccio 

horror show

denture squelching 

artisan zuckerburgers 

bounteous beauty bars

signal

serious 

UGLINESS 

the parents genetic 

property portfolio

are in tow

sloppy tofu 

money washed

perfect pooches 

sketchy beards

waterfall hairdos

good at nothing

pram pushing

trainer socks

embarrassment shades 

not very smart 

or good looking

all go walkies

on upper street

lipstick on meat

a perfumed treat

behold!

no beauty 

to wit

no love

here

nothing is sweet

NJ2022

SLUT BEAR

bouncy ball!

rubber morals

ding ding

slut bear is here!

now hmmm

who is there?

to talk to?

or at?

maybe a dog/martian

living thingy?

or dopey OAP??

please!

talk to me

lonely city

entity

fyi btw

at any time

I can leave you

but 

pleeeze!

don't leave me!

anyway

that would be crazy!

I'm interesting and funny

pleeeeeeze!

do help yourself

to my loaves and fishes

pleeeeeeeze!

feel free

to kneel and stare

at my gardening flair

artist 

designer 

millionare!

hyper aware

before anyone here

oh where oh where?

is the guru there?

in his lair?

or out preaching?

'copy me!'

to any allotment boomer

bored enough to care

NJ2022

BEEB

WHAT DID YOU SAY

ABOUT CULTURAL DECAY?

SWEAR WORD BEEB

FAILED BRAND BEEB?

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

DEAR OLD BEAN

OLD NEWS TEAM

ABOUT AUSTERITY

DEAR ROYAL

ADVERTISING SERVICE

trivial TWATS

WITH A JOLLY GSOH

THAT POSH SOD SAID

"@@@:>@>{{{{{}}]"

SO WHAT DID YOU SAY?

ABOUT CHILD POVERTY

THE COVID MATHS

BREXIT BILLIOnaires

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

NEO GUTTER NEWS

IN CAT LITTER TRAY

MAKING US all SICK

BORIS IS NOT A liar?

the QUEEN IS NOT A TICK?

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

ABOUT RANDY ANDY

AND ALL HIS MATES

RICH ON POOR BLOOD

SURFING THE 

FUCKED PLANET

IN black shirt

black tie

gary lineker

blank tv blob 

type THING

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

overpaid botoxed

FATTY SILEnt

oscar winning

smiley suit

IMAGE IMAGE 

teeth and hair

drag histrionics

BIN BAG CRED

BRITISH BRAND COLLAPSE

BEACON BEEB CUNT

LIKE A  POISON BOOB

SHOVED IN YOUR GOB

colonial SHIT MILK

ITS COMFORTING

DEAR DUMPLINGS

STICKY CAKE MAKERS

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

ABOUT HOMES CRUCIFIED

FOOD BANKS BURSTING

TAXING THE POOREST 

(no teeth or hair)

TORTURED

FOR TRUSTING

YOUR COLOURFUL

CLEAN AND CURVY 

serious STAGE SETS

GIVING AIR TIME TO THE WORST HUMAN BEINGS IN HISTORY AND GLORIFYING THEM

ADORING THE CORRUPTION

TRUMP ON ICE?

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

OLD MEMORY

OF CIVILITY 

AND FAIR PLAY

SOLD NOW TO THE

THEATRE OF 

greed

ME ME little

megaphone ME

MEANINGLESS

BENT OVER

AND BEGGING FOR IT

OVERSIMPLIFIED reality

CARTOON authority

HAMMERNING

GENTLY

YouR UNFORGED

night THOUGHTS

bye bye chumps

its all over now

big black cock

Oh and all you

other capital 

licking

lobbying

narrative whore

mega media cunts

time's up

NJ2022

Camden 2021

zombie London

no life left 

no music now

and no artists

turn up the van 

stereo to eleven

we used to play 

we used to dance 

like wood nymphs 

and think

like free goths

now we sit 

flat faced

receiving

plastic food 

new builds

no dancing

no jokes

no talking

no whistling

not even looking

coffee faced 

shake faced 

dildo flask 

property organic

milky jogging superior

cute white families

getting £6 bread

tutting 

at the ugly reality

There are no complaints

from the old racists

who think cheap stuff 

is for the ignorati

welcome 

silent migrants  

exotic new edibles

zero hours rainbow 

slave work gangs

mediaeval mysogynistic 

mole blind cultures 

gone the chin up

rock climbing 

evolving pioneers

ska punk reggae acid

GARDEN DELIGHT RIOT

exploded off to the seasides

Music and culture

was a fairness 

fashion fight

now serene

bemused consumers

uber and unter 

the London litter

there is nothing to do

but silently walk  

admiring the shoes

NJ2021

ANOTHER FUCKING ARTIST INTERVIEW

HI! its been a while! I think I interviewed you back in 2018. What's been going on?

Hi, well how do you condense years into journalistic nuggets? Got massively ripped off by a NY gallery, lost loads of money and hope. Still living in squalour, still making shit. I suppose living without hope is the big new change. I'm  drowning, and the curators are waving :)

Oh dear, sorry to hear that, yes it's been hard for everyone, my wife and niche dog, healthy silvery parents can't get to our second home, and def not to the third in France. Thank goodness for the NHS though eh? what would we do without them?

Be in the same old shit, perhaps be inspired to complain?

Hang on Foulcault wants to do pee pee in our long garden, I'll just let him out..you seem quite angry, I really don't need to hear any more depressing stuff. Any good news?

Some good Bordeaux for £6 in sainsbury's and I'm housesitting, so lots of spirits to drink after the wine!

you are so self destructive :) You burn bright but you will live forever in yr Art! Is that no comfort?

(Oh man this interviewer character is not believable, they would always hide the privileged stuff, probably play boo hoo with you, family deaths or some such..what if they are scrawny lost youth in freezing camper van?) So..I'm a big fan of yr work, always eager to see what yr up to, looks like yr painting again?

Yep I'm trying, it's hard, not like gentry studio hard, theres something repulsive about going back to such a corrupted language. Painting is a portrait of cosy wanking, even when yr freezing in a plastic greenhouse with holes in.

But what if people like me see and feel that determination, and get hope from it?

I don't think it's determination on my part to communicate or give anymore, although i have been brave enough to do some things in the past that have been described as visionary, even evangelical! Now I see that only monsters get mainstream, so there's no point preaching.  Now I'm just making my death into things that are not meaningless to me, it's sort of like cleaning, a daily hygiene thing. Maybe a few other people will do that too? It all feels a bit too late to change things.

When you say cleaning you mean cultural bullshit?

totally, it's the toxins of the media and high art history I want to scrub off. An attempt to remove the heaviness of oppression and meaninglessness. Be gone shakespeare, elongated legal language, narratives of chin scraping affluence that since the the middle ages has infected  culture, everything backward, pious, missing the point, faux serious, cloudy, pompous. It's all just stupid liar power news. Trump, queen, Boris, Eugenics. 

you want to get at the truth?

I get a constant pummelling from Trump truth, Boris truth, queen truth so I want a bit of mine, and others, for a change. My truth is never 'the' mountain top 'truth' though, it's a chatty base camp honesty. Mountain top truths are for people with low self esteem. There's nothing up there! If you want to be some snow bearded god then go up there, alone, see how long you last, ego prick.

Everyone has a true story, are some better than others?

I suppose most are not made into art, which is a kind of hyper-real jewelery. I'm interested in not being boring and irrelevant, although those can also be great stories,if edited well. I like chewing the intoxicating amount of multi source information. All pipe smoking impressionist opinions are tedious and already out of date by bedtime.

Do you want to be a respected brand? like shakespeare? Picasso? Camille Paglia? Simone de beavouir? Jesus? adidas? etc.  

Being respected as brand is 'sales', and that's better than not, I only want to test myself and the world I see, it's up to others to brand my arts in historical terms. What history does is a mix of money making and PR bullying, with a few rare precious ideas that resonate without much help/spin. I've seen some of my ideas normalised already, on the ground, in art/life. Well I say 'my' ideas but they never are, it's a river of churning bloods and sweet ideas, I'd just rather be swimming in there with people I respect than cowering silently with people I don't, complaining about the wet mess.

the way weve set this up is you artist are good/interesting/wise and me interviewer is stinky boring disciple is that correct?

In a way yes, because my role is river and yours is rock. A great interviewer would be the river, a bad artist would be the rock. I think we're all drifting in flux, always unequal, in dirty water. If I asked you questions you would be the plynth star. I suppose my job is to be the genius/clown. Yours is to get me to spray you with my water flower, and honk my horn. :)

This interviewing yourself gag is quite funny, a spoof, and portrait of failure. Are you surprised you didn't receive much attention in your career from the cultural 'rocks'?

I've met most of the big cultural rocks, but they always seemed flat and worn down. Exciting clown curators and clown writers are very hard to find now. In the arts I think fun has been replaced by fear, clowns are scary. So curators, institutions have gone safe. Also state power and the financial aspect is so huge now, curators get lobbied/bullied. Dreary rich artists prosper. Poor punky artists get buried.

I saw this stat that 50% of people don't feel represented by the bbc, I feel like art is like that, all the big institutions are out date and only stupid people get excited now by big Art shows.

Yes, culture has become a museum of 19th century intellectualism, played on repeat, a vain ghost of something that died years ago. It's always the lamest ideas that get repeated. Bank sponsored safe investment modernism. Female and Black representation has been an improvement in recent times, although I thought those arguments had been won in the 1970's. Things feel more divisive than progressive now. Like it's a minority WHOdunnit rather than: what are your NEW ideas, human river clowns? 

NJ2021      

COSMIC WANKERS

in a cosmic wank 

internet interview

Baselitz name checks Tracey Emin's 

cosmic wank

he's obsessed with de Kooning's 

cosmic wank

HIGH ART is bling gambling  

and cosmic wanking

go shopping and do yr job

on your day off you think:

'I'll go and see some cosmic wank!'

massive squiggly dribbly big stuff

you get a little hard on

it's a visceral orgie

totally indulgent 

paint volcano 

cosmic wank

In post war empty space America

you could cosmic wank freely

Now the rent for a massive warehouse would be 10000 a month 

plus heating and lighting ££$$?

and all that delicious wasted paint £££?

and the carpenter to make yr massive stretchers $$$?

and the assistants to stretch your massive canvases, and prime them £££?

then the wine drinking, smoking and cosmic wank parties $$££?

the eating well, haircuts and nice clothes, trips to Europe $£$£?

Holiday home somewhere stylish ££$$?

Cosmic wanking is money pissing

And for what? 

a surprising mini stiffy?

Poor cosmic wanking is possible

if you work small and cut costs

But its not the same

it's not pleasant

cosmic wanking

It's a bit tense

you can't afford to ejaculate £$£$$$

you need to temper your 

titillating cream smears

(and be bling gambling indifferent)

in the new exhausted cosmic over-wanked world

cosmic wanking is a bad flag

in bling existential church 

great walls of money spunk 

for greedy cosmic wankers 

NJ2020

MEWS NEWS 

hippy house elites

you just won't die!

vampire xmas ghosts

wood burners and CH

turned up to 11 :)

'were having duck' :)

OH not turkey or beef? :)

YOU smug fowl fucks

You dodder untroubled

in big colour clothes

worth a bomb 

insulated 

by mountains of 

bright wool 

fruit blooms

I see you spying

from high extension

my wet work grey rags 

hunted and haunted

by you re-spied

wrinkle licking

fridge thick

buttered organics

purring in fur nest

old architect, old tv writer

old bbc exec, old artist 

through the triple glazing

pyramid extension

'it used to be so arty here'

bemoaning the phone poor

introvert lower generations 

'so virtual, so sheepish!'

You shuffle back

in orange velvet trousers

convinced concluding

'they're all undeserving!'

passing the organic joint

french herb butter  

famous acquaintance art 

and humble 60's 

ethnic draped habitat

you glimpse a toad 

wearing a nappy

reflected in hockney lithograph

'I don't think we're immortal darling!'

then royally

:) always thinking of others! :)

'the grandchildren will be secure'

NJ2020

NEAL JONES

POOR SHOW

spring 2021 collection

I've decided to become a supermodel. I've stopped making art, It's too much like hard work. My economic survival has become too impractical and unpleasant. Constantly banging my head against a brick wall. It hurts now. So it's time to become a  supermodel/superstylist/superwriter who sells his own superclothes.

My latest fashion 'Poor Show' was inspired by unhealthy, ignored people with plastic bags. It's so hot right now! Trending it's arts off.

Yesterday the government reluctantly agreed to feed our poorest children. I wonder if my Poor Show style will become mainstream, acting as new narcissism repellent?

 

In the YUK poverty has been out of fashion for a while, I wont mention the enclosures act, and the slow shrinking of living standards (keep it up-beat Neal) 

Put some pop music on, woop, poor fashions banging away and making new styles. If it wasn't for rock and roll, poor people wouldnt exist. It is a beautifully flexible form. Serious, comical, sublime, industrial. 3minutes-ish of being unified as species. Then afterwards all the dad dancing rich shits come back to ruin it. Trump. Boris. Bills. Bullshit. Boring.

  

Poor people are poor because they deserve it, that's the vibe. Unlike the rich who are clever immoral cunts. But how come the superior ones are so shit at everything? Music/art/writing/sport/innovation etc. etc? Why not!

When the poor are ignored too long you end up with Goya monsters like Trump or Boris, eating peoples heads. When the cultural history of the majority is castrated, when they are malnourished and misinformed for long enough, everyone seems surprised when they vote for nutters. But when you are driven mad by decades of cruelty you get fucking angry, about anything.

  

It's time to speak up now, get represented. Poor cool. Green cool. Not thick cool, but REAL education cool, total fairness cool.

We need to get some real research made public, persistently, about cruel living standards, and start helping each other get into better clothes. We have all been sloppy and allowed a 'rich only' image culture to reappear. Corporations and Governments won't change. Only wealthy wholistic individuals and mainstream trends can better this uneven world. Then we will get better governments and business behaviour.

Poor Style is queing up in the supermarket, trying not to kick off when it all goes wrong, making a joke, smiling and being kind. Being honest, being sweet despite exhaustion. Getting up after punches style, laughing and loving style, trying to be free style, believing in unity style. I'm sick of this greedy extinction style x

NJ2020

Neal Jones's 

unstylish corner

autumn/winter 2020

men

Time to stop shaving your neck and cheeks making your beard look like a cartoon.

Forget those super skinny, twisted or super flared jeans, just wear some fucking jeans and get on with it.

Put away that thin brown shoulder bag, use a rucksack, or carry things in your hands!

Don't keep flicking or brushing back your wavy hair, just get it cut, or stop bloody flicking it!

Crime is IN. Why not get covered in tatoos? But only if you get banged up in prison for 10 years.

If you like to pair relaxed thin black V neck jumpers with black jeans and then smile about it, top off the look by covering your bare feet in dogshit.

If you really want prospective partners to look at you this season, strap on a sexy looking bomb, get in a wheely bin and wave your arms about.

For the older gentleman, try not to pretend to be a elegant 1930's gentleman, its 2020! There should be a prominent trash element, otherwise you can easily look like a nazi.(which is uncool).

women

If you are going to wear a rare Bolivian folk jumper, try pairing with disgusting grey wee stained jogging bottoms.

If you are going for the classic Audrey Hepburn look, then make sure you get it really badly wrong.

When wearing really soft knee high red calf skin boots, try combining with strong red blusher, all over your face.

If you are wearing vintage linens and clogs this season always stay in a walled garden in the south of England.

It's party season, shit loads of totally wrong foundation always catches the eye, accentuate your boobs and hips with hand gestures if you want sex. 

If you're going for the total pornstar look try walking bow-legged with a totally blank stare.  

For those long frosty country walks, if you are combining a wax jacket and wellies with BLM t-shirt, then make sure you always dribble a bit when you speak. 

As the nights are drawing in, and Christmas is getting close, why not snuggle up to your other half totally covered in fresh animal blood and plastic.

NJ2020

INSECTS AND ALCOHOL

Les Apres Reserve 2017 Gerard Bertrand £7.50 at Morrisons was £10!

And Pholcid spiders

I feel a bit sick already, haven't eaten much, I've just packed my van with art to take down into Soho tomorrow. Some of the lamps I've made (art) still have some residue from the Pholcid spider, manifest in sticky gossamer netting and a beige speckling from their shit when I stored the stuff in my allotment shed while waiting for this blessed, anguished, congestion charge and ulez charge stress drive and sweaty lugging into the gallery judgement day. For this reason the first taste of Les Aspres Reserve tastes like a kind of throat punch, it's heavy, like a lump of metal going down, a slug, a thug of a wine. I'm drinking it to put me to sleep mostly. I'm supposed to be eating it with lamb or pulled pork. I've got some bread and cheap Ardennes Pate (also from Morrisons-75p) that's close, porky!

The spiders in my shed don't get out much, they are very much indoor types, sometimes called cellar spiders, they like the dark and still. There are a few knocking about the house, usually in a cupboard, near a hot water pipe, or in a corner by the door. They are sort of like ghosts, when you see them, you don't go 'there is a thing', you go 'there's a kind of drawing of a thing'. They're not so threatening as a big fat spider with vampire teeth so you don't have to jump around and flush or chuck them away, you can just sweep them and they kind of blow away. What do they do when they are brushed away? Slowly creep back into shady places I reckon, I don't think they run, they appear kind of depressed, lacking energy, lacking vitamin D, Anaemic? My mum used to think I was like that, when I stayed in I was always quiet and moved slowly, it was because I liked studying, drawing and thinking. 

Ok let's get serious about the wine. Let's face it, with this virus thing going on people aren't going to go out and see art, so I'm fishing for a new job: Wine and Insect reviews for the Guardian/Independent. The wine Nose is mostly a whack of alcohol, after that, there is a freshness, blackcurrants, but they all say that eh? I think I read on the Morrisons label, hints of tobacco. I am getting that but it's from my roll-up fingers I think, kind of strawberries, oh it's no good, I'm blocked up. Maybe to do this properly you have to have a shower and blow your nose and be in some kind of Swiss vacuum. I'm listening to Motorhead so I've got a hint of motorbike and leather jacket. All wine gets better after the first third has gone, but then so does everything, shit friends, distant siblings, governments, pandemics. I'm getting papaya now, something fruity, curvy, bendy, alien. I wonder what the shed spiders are up to? When I'd open the door they would bounce on their webby trampolines, like disturbed, insecure people, making themselves appear bigger and harder than they really are, also harder to catch. It's a lot of energy to waste for these anaemic ghost drawings, poor things. But i shouldn't feel sorry for them, they are prospering. Feeding mostly on a plentiful supply of woodlice who want to destroy my shed, they are doing me a great favour! I reckon burglars would also be slowed down with a face full of itchy bouncing cobweb drawing wierdos in their face. I'm getting a swimming costume on the floor near a swimming pool after-taste now. 

I'm getting confused, are these Daddy long legs (Pholcid spiders) or 'cellar spiders'  not actually 'Harvestmen', which are related to scorpions. Hmm,  but Harvestmen live outdoors, so I reckon we're ok with the indoor ghost things. I should really eat something. I need to get up early. Quite often I'm jealous of wildlife, not the eating woodlice thing or mad death threat panic but the not knowing the sheer mad size of the world, that cosy microcosmos of shed, like isolated rural village, mating with whoever is next door to you. I tried that in my shared house during Lockdown. Laura wasn't into it, she is Polish and does yoga and is very disciplined, although we both said we liked each other and hugged a few times she eventually did the bouncy trampoline thing when she felt I was invading her space. I didn't mean any harm, I've closed her shed door, I hope she's happy eating woodlice in her room. It is a strong wine, very good with bread and pate.

I've just poured some boiling water over some home grown french beans and courgettes, will add home grown garlic, shallots. basil, shop tomatoes, oil, salt pepper, will eat with the bread pate and carry on drinking, just sent a dodgy text to a married woman, I want to watch a film now and forget everything, disappear into the darkness, I don't want to think about spiders any more. I'm going to watch a film about a Polish nun.

Gerard Bertrand special reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2019,from Morrisons 6.50 was 8.75!

And Flying Ants 

Part of my wine reviewing 'practice', which is crucial, but hardly ever mentioned elsewhere, is how you feel the next morning, and how well you slept. I had a 5 star sleep, lack of hangover 4 stars, had really bad cough so 1 star for next day well-being, this could be from smoking/stress or a spider climbing into my throat, this rating might be unreliable, like all the other ones, because they depend on too many variables, they should all be ignored.

In the morning I start to think about what I'll eat in the evening, and that kind of affects my choice of wine. Like most people we have our own very specific reasons for choosing a bottle of wine. I had a friend who discerned a good choice by putting her thumb into the bum of the bottle, the bigger the bum hole the better, No bum hole no purchase. The theory I think, which I share, is that if the bottle is made well then there is a good chance the wine will be. Those cheap featureless, cast, not blown, bright green bottles are to be avoided, also screw tops, and screw tops that pretend to be corks, plastic 'corks', any bottle with a flower on it, or with a flowery name. Flowers have nothing to do with wine, and if I read about a floral note, I am already disgusted. Pot pourri is not what I want when I'm eating oily, leafy, cheesy, fishy or meaty food. Mentioning the soil and terroir is a better signal. Grape types are also crucial to know. The global location should have an impact for the environmentalist regarding the carbon footprint, but I ignore this because like most things economics is a major factor: what can you afford? Anything under £6 will probably be rubbish, I aim for £7, and it needs to be reduced from 8-10 which lifts it high enough out of pure self hate gutter drinking. Spending £20 or over for wine is just showing off, I'm sure they are finer and more sophisticated but I don't have the right bank balance. Nor the time or the right friends to muse with about complex notes. I'd be thinking how many other bottles I could have bought instead of 1. Interesting flavours are fun but I drink fast, and sometimes a flat one-note but well made wine best suits my peasant life, my vernacular evening writing and shit film sleep company.

  

While assembling a show in New York, I asked in a swank wine shop, what they would recommend. The dude looked a bit sniffy but when I mentioned what I liked, he softened and said: 'Good' wine does not exist, it is about what YOU prefer. He said his palate is always changing, he used to like these wines now he goes for these. I doubt he used my hangover review technique. I didn't like this argument because I get it a lot in the art world. People say 'its not my cup of tea' I say 'i'm not making you cups of tea'. 

Drinking red wine is more like eating, it's weighty, generous, the blood of Christ, still warm. The transition to white is a bit sad, it's wetter, thinner, colder, more acidic, like tear drinking.  I delivered my art at 5.30 am to avoid the staring London punters and sarcastic idle builders. The pavements smelled of sick and piss, black pigeons picking at black bags. The heat and a feint drizzle was poaching the piss/sick/diesel/pigeon shit recipe into gross Spanish floor omelette. The homeless gangs in tents, on duvets without covers and cardboard were still sleeping, the numbers were striking, central London is becoming favella, Indian slum. Tears. White wine always tastes a bit grassy, you're supposed to drink it with fish, but i don't have any fish mates, but i do have a tin of dead tuna, which I'll add to some home grown courgettes and beetroot softened with boiling water, with added shop tomatoes and onions, good salt and pepper. Should I feel guilty, quaffing a so-so wine eating my own organic scraps without a cooker in a shit room. Nah, I didn't put people on cardboard, nor into super yachts. My life is not luxurious or even hopeful. I've decided to live alone and die in semi squalor, but eat and drink as well as possible, so I can be alive enough to write and make art about this fast human decline. It's really hot, i sit outside and flick off little black ants from my trousers. They have been excitedly excavating sand from under the paving slabs. Bigger winged ones are roaming around too, how do they know there is a dry heatwave coming? Rain would ruin all Wright brother hope for them. Winged ants are the sex ants, going out clubbing, once a year, muscly and toned, wearing tight clothes and push up bras, they are designed for one purpose only, shagging. Sauvignon Blanc is a ladies drink really, It's good I'm sheltering indoors, windows blacked out against the sun radiation, in my pants, with flabby tummy, writing! I'm a flightless stay at home ugly lady man ant.

Like people in religious gangs, ants only survive by helping and getting helped by their mates. Solitude is suicidal, unless you're a sexy, romantic poet, with rich parents. 

On the nose I'm getting Austrian fields, the sound of music, cow bells. On the palette: long blond hair, gingham tablecloth, having an argument, getting rejected, going home to be sick and alone in a blacked out room.

Ants are eusocial (good socialists) they have different castes within one colony that perform  different tasks for the 'super organism' that is the Ant city collective. They're 'all in it together', like poor people in post-austerity, pandemic UK, only with them 'it' means 'deep shit'. 

Only one in a million flying ants succeed in breeding and finding new paving slabs around which to start a new colony, but they are all a symbol of HOPE. Sometimes a thin little black, sexless wingless ant, wanders away from the big religious gang and sets up camp on their own. They are called 'loser ants'. They make little sand sculptures and leaf collages and sell them sometimes to other outsider ants. It's a small arty religious gang, who rarely help each other. 

I got sick of Gerard Bertrand sauvignon blanc, too much nasty green acidity, rare for me to leave a fifth undrunk, makes me cry. You win 1 you lose a million.

Trapiche oak cask Malbec 2019, Mendoza Argentina from Tesco £6.50 was £8!

And Houseflies

I am already familiar and fond of this wine, the bottle has a decent bum hole, I can afford it and the hangover is bearable. I like bottles that taper wider at the shoulders, like soldiers. Argentinian Malbec always reminds me of eating a big steak in an Argentinian restaurant in Camden, all the seats were covered in white and black cowhide. I felt very macho, like a cowboy. On my writing menu this evening are flies, it's a bit of a catch-all when describing insects, but you know the ones I mean, cow bum ones, dog shit ones and food ones. Not mosquitoes or fruit flies, horseflies or the tsetse. 

Little Fly

Thy summers play,

My thoughtless hand

Has brush'd away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance

And drink & sing:

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength & breath:

And the want

Of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live,

Or if I die.

cheers William Blake

The fly appears in a lot of cowboy films, they always land on someone who is about to die. There are no flies on the gun slinging hero, because they are not decaying. In cartoons the fly is handy tool to signify a smelly thing or person. The noise is a universally recognisable annoyance. Which came first,  the sound which became annoying, or are there just annoyingly pitched sounds that we don't like? If a pretty butterfly sounded like a mosquito, i think we would like it, but I don't know. I used to use my badminton racquet to 'ping' indoor flies, but now I just act like a mad conductor, and shoo them out. I don't like killing them, hearing them dying is worse, or leaving them with one wing to joylessly wander about. At the allotment the flies are good at clearing up rotten bits and bobs, dead things, pooey things. I'm glad they exist, but only because we have windows and doors, and badminton racquets. 

On the nose this Malbec has a high note. Laaaaaaaaa, no higher, leeeeaaaaa. It's surprisingly fresh for brute. I can taste guns, drinking troughs, rosy cheeks. I can't taste the Falkland war, but there is a bit of hate in there which I respect. I'm getting leather notes, black stubble, mountains not deserts. Not many flies on my palate but I do think I'm getting throat cancer. Not many species get a buzz out of things like that. I picked an Argentinian film to watch this evening, it looks violent, I might invite the flies in.

Tesco 'finest' Medoc £6 was £9!

And Ladybirds

I need to be quick, some dick head in my house has kept me awake the last 2 nights, and so I'm all at sea time-wise, need to go to bed early, and want to squeeze a bit of the Revenant in beforehand. I like that film because of the landscape, the terroir and the breathing, keep breathing..oh it's so sad..for the bear and the cubs and the native Americans, for everyone and everything. It's a terrible bloodbath. 

The Medoc region of France is near the Atlantic, it's not ideal, they get too much rain, and suffer grape rot, so they put gravel in the soil that drains the water away well and heats up faster, helping the ripening process quicken. This Medoc does taste wet. There is a sourness, a hint of mould? Not enough drying sugar heat? Can I taste the salty sea? No, it's just not that remarkable on it's own, it might work well with some strong cheese though.

 

Ladybirds have a stupid name, but they are quite cute little wandering buttons. I like the larvae best, they are like black and orange fiery dinosaurs, all horned and weird. Both stages are great for gobbling up Blackfly and Greenfly and Scale Insects from my fruit trees and vegetables. In this brutal world free labour by red buttons and tiny dinosaurs is rare and appreciated. In 1976 a pale cream hotel in Blackpool, near where I grew up, became covered in Ladybirds, I remember crunching over them like bloody snow, all landing on you and biting you, they were hungry, there wasn't enough food on the outside of the hotel. If you need to get rid of a Ladybird on your hand, say. Point to the sky, and it will climb up your finger, then perplexed, think about what to do for a bit, then fly off, they don't like going down. You can of course flick them, which seems cruel, or you could coax them away with toothpick fishing rod using a hair as a line and aphid as bait. I don't have time for this I keep thinking of the Revenant, those arrows flying, that bastard who buried him, sleeping inside a horse to keep warm. You can see why most people don't pay much attention to boring undramatic insects, and when they do notice them at last, they flap around and scream as if they've been shot. The main reason this happens is that people don't grow their own food. A normal show off garden is a sensory selfish thing, made to add value and 'interest' to your property, they deter insects if anything, so you can drink your wine in peace. A vegetable garden is like the wild west, a fucking war zone, things flying everywhere, getting slaughtered and you really care when some little fucker kills your lovingly nurtured food children. Suddenly you notice who's who and what's what, who is the goody and who is the baddy. 

Microwaved home grown potatoes and courgette, added shallots and garlic. Some grated Parmesan I was banking on has gone black and mouldy, bollocks, but it tastes like Stilton now, so that's going to work well! Good old mould. Salt, pepper olive oil, bam, thwack, stab, finger in the air, woop. If I wake up with a red face with black spots, it'll only be because I've bludgeoned and half-buried my bloody noisy neighbour. 

Corbieres 2018 Castelmaure £5 was £8!

And the Weevil

French wines are wetter, i really don't like them, they're shit! You can feel the lacrimose chill, they're not as dense as southern hemisphere wines and certainly nowhere near as stupid as the USA. But sometimes a smiling new thug is what you want, not old smug elite ponce.

The pig English hate the frog French, unless you are a south coast sailor and have a neckerchief, and second home in Normandy, and vice versa, only with a pied a terre in South Kensington. If Britain made wine it would be equally temperate, wet, mild-mannered and full of curly grey wig colonial silk-buckle-shoe-ed dandy posturing. Corbieres sounds like a friend of one of the three musketeers, or a minor figure in the French revolution, who famously (for five minutes) gave the mob some ok wine. 

I hope the reader appreciates what a battle it is for my poor liver to suffer like this for your benefit, to educate you ignorant masses. Every bloody night! 

I'm harvesting and eating a lot of french beans these days, I always get sick of them and stop picking them, I don't mind because I then harvest the plump jewel-like beans inside and store them to then re-hydrate and eat over winter. Sometimes when you open the stored bean bag there are lots of little holes in the beans, and a few, or a lot, of little black beetles pissing about inside. The name weevil comes from 'evil' and 'we', which is a modern shortening of 'we are'. They're not that bad really, I quite like their little snouts, they look a bit like a Tapir, who in turn look very sad because they were born with a massive droopy nose. Corbieres nose is not massive, it's barely present, there's a very distant whiff of gorse, encountered on a pretty sailing boat about 2 miles from the french coast.

There are lot of migrants crossing the channel to the UK at the moment, hot weather, calm seas. I don't think they are wine drinkers, or cheese eaters (or asylum seekers). They just know a stupid country when they see one, full of ancient landlords that want to keep their housing market and dictatorship bouyant with freshly ignorant low-paid peasants (oops). I really don't like this wine, it's got nothing to say, like an old snob, resting on their laurels, out of date. Even the label is olde worlde, it looks like an C17th engraving, with ornate twiddly bits than mean nothing but 'pompous old git'. The British equivalent to Corbieres would be called Rhyss Mogg.

If you don't notice the weevils that have taken a free ride in your beans before you eat them, you will experience a hard crunch where there should be soft velvety pulp. Insects don't taste nice by and large, but that's for my next gutter-gourmet tome, when the population has grown so large and the climate so damaging to crops that we have to crawl around eating each others shoelaces, and drinking £20 saltwater, bottled and sold with embellished twiddly engraving label: Rhyss Mogg grande Eau de mere reserve 2050.

Zarper Iindomita Gran Reserva Malbec, Chile 2018 from Morrisons £6 was £9!

And Wasps

It still hasn't rained, I cant do anything in this still dead London sweat lodge. There's no way I'm going into central London to get angry with my innocent show. I went to the allotment early, watered, picked gherkins, beans, cavelo nero, sage, then the rest of the day I've spent hiding from the radiation blasting heat, swaddled in wet rags, till 4pm when I went to Morrisons to find my next evening intrigue/red diesel. Good bum hole, soldiers shoulders again, beware the black label, but life is a roller coaster and risks must be taken. There were some really beautiful shiny women in Morrisons today, but they don't look at me, as I'm inserting my finger into various bottle bums. This wine is a classic smooth but unremarkable Malbec, it drinks itself! I saw some wasps drinking out of a wheelbarrow I've filled with water, for my plants and the birds, but that's all the London insects spotted today. Indoor London heatwave insects are endangered now. In the old British haven of cool thatched summer cottage they were everywhere, immortalised in decorative wall paper, on fancy fabrics, illustrated in floral scenes, down the back of the sofa, acting as paperweights, eating the beamy wood. It used to be a right laugh, especially at night, when the spiders were chased by the mice and the cats and the tapirs, jumping on the sheep, biting horses, spreading diseases. They would all gather around the Aga, and Beatrix potter would demean them in the evenings, that's partly why they all left, the insulting abusiveness of Victorian England. What's my insect, a famous Victorian parlour game, hosted initially by prince Albert in postal form, has become totally forgotten, due to lack of insect knowledge. For the sake of realistic portraiture I will have to go with the populist wasp today, but it is a nasty choice, and partly the reason why people hate all insects. I don't want to give it too much more oxygen publicity. It's like talking about Priti Patel or Michael Gove, you really don't want to encourage them with words. Most Tory politicians would consider the term waspish a compliment. Theresa May was famously waspish, albeit in a very grey, baggy eyed, totally flightless, hunched shouldered, Mr Burns from the Simpsons, sort of way. I think the term means being able to lay your eggs in perfectly edible fruit and ruin it, eat wood and make a spit mortar to make annoying nests in nice peoples attics, and having the ability to ruin a really nice summer evening around a pub bench. Wasps are the insect equivalent of the 'wanker' in a pub, waiting for a thin artist or writer to come in and torment. I've had a few wasps nests at the allotment, under one of my sheds, that made working inside a real problem, and a hole in the ground by a fruit tree that became a volcano of wasp hate. With the first one I tried a shop bought white poison powder, which worked but i worried about indirectly killing birds as the bad cocaine party wasps flew out. The second time, it was thuggish and Guy Fawkes direct: bottle of diesel in hole, left to soak into all the larvae, little smile, box of matches.

Home grown beetroot, french beans, microwaved in a lot of salt, olive oil, sweat, head under the cold shower, bread and pate with sage, heatwave not hungry, drinking more sensible. 

Like Priti Patel and Michael Gove and Therezzzzzzzzza May, all wasps should be hounded out of town. If only we could all come together: mice, cats, tapirs, spiders etc, with mallets, sticky nets, Beatrix Potters and badminton racquets, we could get these rotters to fuck off the insect map asap.

Spoiler alert: fruit flies really like this wine, and also just saw a thin green dragonfly, it pissed off really quick, but i do recommend a glass of Chilean wine by a wheelbarrow of water, if you want to see more INSECT LIFE.

Going to watch a film about Aboriginal racism now, cheers. Don't think about wasps too much, dear insect reader, but do remember to buy some emergency diesel, there's a massive bunch of fruit ruiners in a old spit palace down by the river, that needs some unified attention. 

Montes reserva, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chile 2018 in Tesco £7 was £9!

And the Common Blue butterfly

At last this is a interesting sexy new wine. I took a chance, screw top! but good bum hole, soldiers shoulders bottle, and anyway Chilean wine is a good bet and  especially if it's top shelf, teetering close to £10.

What a day, assembling an art show is mind bendingly hard anyway, on your own but on one of the hottest airless days of the year, in Soho, surrounded by a complete war zone of builders, with no access to water or a toilet, or enthusiasm. Sweating, ears pounding, breathing in car fumes, and sicko restaurant filth, knowing full well all this is a big waste of time, in pandemic ultra-recession right-wing UK, it's even worse.

 

I haven't been able to sleep for days, I've just walked into the shower with my clothes on, I'm attempting to get hypothermia to counteract the blood boiling. The downside to this wine is that it has aggravated my cough, a symptom of my selfless philanthropic gift to the world, of my short insect life, to art, design, wine and insect writing. In my life the common blue has followed me around. It is like my spirit guide, my gravity free soul, or pretty  bit of sky plastic, whenever I see it I am cheered on.

There are no insects in Soho, or birds, bees, butterflies or droopy nosed Tapirs. There are barely any more in the suburbs where I live. My spirit insect toffee wrapper though was at home today. When I'm assembling a show, and writing, and cooking, and buying wine, there is this terrible fear that it will all be shit, there is no choice but to carry on and have faith in what you have learned thus far, as small and fragile as that may be. The worst thing to do in love, life, design and art is to be fearful and boring. Using this teenage editing word is the key to any small success I have had. When I turn up my wine drinking, and the wine flies, you must let go of the floor, and surprise yourself. 

Hello, I'm Jimi Hendrix on a £80 Lenovo laptop. I'm clitoris licking the keys, laptop sliding up and down my bum crack. The common blue is dancing around the base of some ivy outside like a 70's fairy. My brother thought I was a fairy, I punched him really hard on his heart once while he was sleeping. 

This wine is like a dark haired woman with her boobs out, like that woman in Munch paintings, concentric marks around her like she is supernatural. I'm getting urine notes, but the main flavour is licorice and bleeding goats. Cabernet Sauvignon is usually boring but this is wild, kissing, crying, I can taste all the meaning and meaninglessness of life, I want to laugh and cry. My spirit insect is a bit embarrassed outside. Isn't all this delicious? Cheap pate and sliced tomatoes on toasted olive bread with the pale aqua out of date mould cut off.

The clouds are building and the wind is rushing to make a tower of cloud, but it won't rain or cool. I notice the wine has changed and has become the leaden Cabernet Sauvignon I know so well. I flew and fell, I will fly again. My great artistic achievement might be noticed or not. That poor, little, ignored things can be especially fine and wonderful, and that simple observation, way beyond our industrialised meat and potato school education, can allow our little butterfly selves to dance back to the lively, magnificently weird green and blue world. 

Barbera D'ASTI, Morrisons 'the best' (printed in handwriting style) £6 was £7.50!

And the Dragonfly

Sometimes you find a very good wine for £6, reduced, massive bum hole soldiers shoulders, no hangover, you can get up at 6 am and feel ok, go to work, be friendly and look forward to tomorrow. But the other supermarket insects have also found that wine, and it sells out quick so you have to pick something else that you really know will ruin your tomorrow. Anyway, reviewing wine is my last job now, so maybe best to try something different. I am not holding my breath. For a start it is Italian, all Italian supermarket wine, and food has become corporate rubbish, Italy as brand takes the piss, now that they have us all hooked. Like that brand person, Jamie Oliver, supermarket Italian food is now OVER EXALTED wavy handed passion BULLSHIT. Dead pasta, dead sauces, dead olives, dead tomatoes, overpriced dead wine, all proudly sporting the red white and green 'big liar' flag. 

No soldiers shoulders, ABSOLUTELY NO HINT OF A BUM HOLE! Ok there is a cork, but the Morrisons 'best' label is nothing to be proud of, it is like saying: 'Gary Barlow'.  

It's much cooler today, My art show feels under control, just need to be brave and put some sour things on the walls to counteract some of the sweetness in the furniture and lamps, but I have some hope now.

Zero insects spotted today, a snail eating some bread doesn't count, it's out and about because it has rained! It's cooler, that's nice, so I'll have to review an insect spotted yesterday. A green twig floating and doing an air dance, in a robotic way, over my wheelbarrow of water. Dragonflies are the RAF porn stars of the insect world, they glisten and wave and everyone can't help but look and clap. Some of them are as big as birds, acting like serious artillery helicopters, prowling sharks, remote controlled baby light sabre drones. Green or blue? The thin blue ones are usually Damsel flies. I prefer the duller green, massive ones. But yesterday's was smallish, 10 cm long, bright spring green, wisely avoiding my lifeless wheelbarrow pond as creche for it's offspring. Dragonfly larvae are voracious underwater predators like their mum and dad, but they are not RAF bling, they are colourless nightmarish monsters of the deep. A lot of scary aesthetics in painting history, films and comic books are derived from the 'alien' animal and insect 'king'dom (eh?). Perfected in C20th America, the natural world has become relatively recent constant threat. Anything not pinky-white, American, anyone not drinking sugar, not looking like a doughnut in shorts, not driving a truck while eating a minced cow is 'french', untrustworthy, vegetarian, grotesque, geeky, green, alien. There are no dragonflies in the bible, or anything green, just loads of men driving around, raping the planet for 'God' the oldest surviving cartoon character. In some paintings Jesus is portrayed as being thin and greenish, but not because he was into saving the environment, but because he was probably just French, vegetarian, a weirdo, hippy, loser. 

I'm getting distracted. Americans, and all religious victims, are dumb fucks and they fuck up the natural world through ignorance and that's that. 

Barbera d'Asti has nothing on her nose, and the only thing on my palette is that acrid throat theft sensation: saying 'eat some cheesy pizza, quick'.

Dragonflies have been on this planet for ages, they are as old as dinosaurs. How do they endure? No choice, they are brilliant genetic designs that doughnuts in shorts could try and simulate in silicone valley. They choose instead to use US technology 'smarts' to help coax thin, French, alien, environmental green people into new doughnuts in shorts. I wonder if the Dragonfly will also succumb in the end? Maybe they are actually extinct already, and what we see now are actually shiny US military spy drones, it's a horrible thought: weaponized American insects.  

I've just read a genetically modified cyborg dragonfly spy already exists. Designed to steal wine reviews probably. Typical!

Tesco 'finest' Carmenere £7 was £8.50

And Hoverflies

The insects outside the respite care unit are getting thin on the ground, I'm struggling to see new ones. The Hoverfly is not the most exciting subject. Small and waspish, but more pathetic, sting-less, it's yellow and black stripes don't scare anyone. They move in a dozy robotic way, knowing no-one gives a flying fuck what they get up to. Drinking nectar like a bee, making maggoty offspring like a fly. They are so boring, but I don't hate them, I just think they're too polite, nervy. Like they've chosen an evolutionary safe zone. 

Screw top, middle ground bum hole, I've been drinking Carmenere sporadically for the last few weeks. It has a rosy nose and a rosy flavour, breaking one of my no floweryness rules, but Chilean-tick, no great hangover-tick. £7 max-tick. On the label the name Carmenere is printed huge in letteraset Banksy style: CAR then underneath MEN and ditto ERE. I have a car, I am a man, and i am 'ere. Can that really have an impact on a wine purchase? The fact I've pointed this out, is probably giving some Tesco's finest graphic designer a hard on. What about women though? Do they want a car man there? Is that like having Elvis or a Beatle for them? I have a horrible suspicion women like Jeremy Clarkson, and thereby horses in bubble wigs. I give up.

Thank god for Hoverflies, to get that image out of my head. Not many things in life hover. Kestrels. Hummingbirds. Usually it's human hands. Children's hands over a platter of assorted biscuits, old peoples hands over crosswords, students hands over a multiple choice question. It means you think you know what you're doing, but you don't.

Is that what Hoverflies are doing? I mean, why do they wait? There's a flower, why not go for it? Like Luke Skywalker, he didn't just hover, his hovering was urgent, purposeful, saying: I'm going over there, really fast. But the Hoverfly acts like it's deaf or blind, or boringly cautious. Nothing is going to kill you, just get on with it? But if they did, they then they would just be called: 'untitled' or the 'tiny shitbee' or 'babynotwasp'. They have to do it to be noticed as individual. They hover, check you are looking, then they can do their thing. I'm surprised they don't have little tattoos and piercings just to make sure.

French beans and Cheshire cheese grilled on 'reduced' baguette. Swiss chard, garlic, onion, tin of tomatoes, bay leaves, thyme, olive oil, salt, pepper, all hovering, forever uneaten, in literary space.

Di Marco PRIMITIVO limited edition £6 was £8! from Tesco

And Grasshoppers

I'm in trouble. Italian, screw top, zero bum hole, first taste is wet, metallic, like licking a pewter tankard that's been sitting in an antique shop unsold for years. Sometimes I think these European winemakers get a spoonful of old jam, add loads of water, a tiny bit of moonshine, shake it up and voila: £8 a pop! Sometimes I think this European wine making is done in a garage in Tottenham with the Italian labels printed by some naughty lads on grand-dads dusty pc. I have been drinking different wine that I like for a week or so now, while dealing with my art show details, mostly choosing repetitions of wine already reviewed. Now back at my writing-single-bed-desk I've had to pick this: something new. I was urged to write again because I spotted the only new insect I've seen in London for a week. 

The grasshopper has to be the most versatile and formidably gifted of all insects, thus far unreviewed. They mostly walk about unnoticed and in a strange, insect gentry way, slow and studious, a bit arrogant. They can make an amazingly quiet/loud washboard noise using their 2 massive/tiny back legs, they can fly, they can rocket themselves off like a scaled down cruise missile, using only leg power with some greenery for fuel. If they were much bigger we'd be in real trouble, but their only design weakness is they don't eat meat, whereas we flightless, rubbish at jumping, unwashboard-bodied humans eat everything. I ate a fried locust once it was bloody nice. A locust is a grasshopper that has swarmed and become a nightmare, it is only renamed to heighten it's threat level. It's like calling a few reclining hippies, when they swarm, extremists. 

Since I'm drinking this shit wine mostly for altruistic literary reasons, I have to include something totally unrelated, as extra gift. I grow a lot of courgettes, and every year I wonder why. Mmmm, green condoms full of wet toilet paper!  So, get the tasteless dick, slice it longways into a series of clown insoles, salt both sides, hang them outside separated for 5 hours, they will bleed out water, and become bloody delicious.

This wine tastes like it was made in a laboratory, as weedkiller, but it got re-branded because it was too harmful to wildlife.

A Grasshopper just jumped up near to my hanging courgettes, i like to think it was checking out the intelligent design competition. As it looked, it rubbed it's legs, which is a male mating signal, recognising me as decent provider, and food preserver. Problem is I'm not female, although this wine is having a bloody good try at converting all my current DNA. 

Today i meant to go to the extinction rebellion march, but instead I've been pickling and preserving basil, courgettes etc. My Art work, my writing and my pickling is my rebellion. I can't do everything! I hope it went well. By that I mean I hope the protesters didn't act like gentrified insects. I hope when I wake up tomorrow as new woman, and switch on the news, i see Trafalgar square, Parliament, Buckingham palace, swarmed, eaten, gone. 

Tomorrow I'm going looking for those pesky teens who ruined my evening and already threadbare genitalia.

Campo Viejo Rioja Tempranillo

£6.50 was £8!

And the Rose Chafer

There is something immediately comical about writing only about the strange bedfellows of wine and insects, it's a constraint, a reliable comfort zone and trap. I want to watch a film..it's 18.38, so I'll give myself another absurd restriction, just for fun, finish by 8pm. I am familiar with this wine, i remember the sexy young 'French' waitress from ALLO ALLO coming to my house and nodding approvingly at this iconic familiar bottle, she invited me to her house in Spain, whatever happened to that? (this is true). There's a mushroom note, I'll skip the metallic thing often present in bargain wine. Cork, medium bum hole, I do like the egg yolk yellow and mediaeval script that is the 'Campo' brand. Tempranillo is like a temporary armadillo, which I also like, because it is nonsense, and true!

Ok the Rose Chafer, 2 words i have never joined before describes something I previously self named as 'emerald scarab' 'massive shiny green' 'wow, one of those big green fuckers'. Every year they nestle in my roses, and get pissed inside, and fall asleep, happy as Larry in soft scented white sheets. They become so docile you can pick them up without any protest then put them on your finger and go to any imaginary hip hop party and feel right at home. They are the size of one of our bigger coins, not quite 2p but they do have a coppery shimmer added to the bluey green incomprehensibly shiny hippy shop trinket vibe. I have no idea how they just appear as massive beetles, I haven't seen a small one. I will research. The large white grubs feed on the roots of cool-latitude grasses, thanks internet, but that's missing out on the drunken sex part, maybe for the best. 

Cavelo Nero chopped finely, with garlic, miso paste and tomato puree, chopped old beetroot, boiling water. Eaten with very stale olive ciabatta dunked. Some burnt haloumi in tupperware as back up, unneeded as yet. 

It's 7pm. One of my formulas/recipes in writing is to repeat things. This repetition, happens in most art forms and acts as reassurance, like a rocking lullaby, a drum beat, a chorus, a politicians oratory. GET BREXIT DONE, so unmusical in itself, but repeated, it becomes part of the family, then it becomes annoying, but it is family, so you can't hate it, because we're all in it together: this human conciousness mess. Repetition is clearly artificial, but comforting, try listening to a pop song, classical music, looking at any art form that doesn't feature this structural scaffolding. Without it we would all drown at sea. 

I'm cheating a bit this evening, according to another self imposed rule, to describe 2 things in my ken. There are no new insects where I live: an abandoned single story new-build-style respite care unit in North London (true) surrounded by concrete and unhappy plants. 

So in order to write I've had to project myself to recent encounters at the biodiverse allotment, where there are lots of great insects, but no laptop, no bed to sit on, no table with wine on, but loads of wrinkly egomaniacs who need to assert themselves thereby making any writing/thinking/observation impossible. We're all in the allotment together, it's not nice. It's 19.17, i'll have a fag and see if I can come back and make this piece feel better, it's a bit of a fudge. Wine, beetles, repetitions, and totally unnecessarily self imposed 43 minute micro drama deadline?

When i go outside to repeat smoking, I see the same paving slabs, a greenish metal shed and some plants I'm growing near a wheelbarrow full of water. It's always the same, it's always a bit different. In the wheelbarrow Mosquito larvae are doing sit ups to propel themselves down or wherever, an orange fringed Slug is eating some basil flower heads I chucked on the ground today. If we don't have any familiar foothold, how can we notice the small changes? Without repetition, we are always in panic survival mode, seeing every thing as threatening stranger. 

Maybe art is only affluence residue, what we do with spare time in the luxury void? There is nothing very comforting and funny about voids. So lets laugh at the artifice of trying to be honest. It's 19.37. The Halloumi has entered the fray (welcome salty stranger!) and now The Client! which is 'a fast paced thriller, about a Rose Chafer in possession of vital information about a politicians murder who must rely on a lawyer to protect it'. (BOLLOCKS!)

MOST WANTED South African MALBEC 2019 £5.50 was £7.50!

And Fruit Flies

This has to be my last review, I've run out of respite care unit insects and my liver really hurts. It is perhaps fitting that my last insect is a big wine drinker. Do insects have livers? Do they have traumas that they are hiding with alcohol abuse? Bullied as maggot? Lost  parents in a storm? Or in Spider nightmare, 'I watched them slowly die'. Sometimes I find a Fruit Fly in my wine sea, motionless un-rescued, shark food. A massive finger comes down and lovingly cradles them out, then flicks them with a godly whip to a skirting board or floor open grave. They are bloody annoying, hatching out of my pears, little sugar freaks, horrible yellowy fatso's with tiny wings. But admirably focussed. We only like fruit, we don't like veg, or cheese, or raw steak.

I find the Most Wanted label annoying. Massive M and below it W, black on white. It is like a moutain reflected in a lake, and it's 'most wanted', which is flagrant miss-selling, or like: 'you want me' oh piss off I'm doing insect reviews. Forgetting the label and name MW Malbec is just fine, no big deal. Screw top, small but not unpleasant bum size, I quite like it, I can taste a wooden farm gate, with just a blue nylon hoop keeping it closed. Oh shit there's a bull, it's ok, it's just a fruit fly, charging at you, it's gone into your ear, there's no fruit in there mate. Outside a white combed vagina cloud is moving slowly to the right, with horizontal stripes behind and some grey fluffy weirdos below. I am a fruit fly, coming back to wine, again and again. Blood of Christ. What did Jesus of Nazareth have to say about insects? You are one, a piece of sinful shit. Jesus was a thick fuck, ignorant of all species, he didn't even know how to be a human. Freak. If he was an insect he would be a praying mantis, but we don't have them round here by the respite care unit. Be nice to all insects, this is a better bedside bible, dead simple and I didn't even get a crown! Cheers ignorati x.

NJSUMMER2020

SWINGING POTATO LONDON

everywhere you go in London

there are these strange martian men

short hair grey-blue tracksuits 

ugly, pale, blind, blank

language like slicing

faces like potatoes

meat slab bodies

fat legs apart

not talking to the locals

no need

they are here to do

work workers used to do

before successive tory governments

made housing here a job-less trap

now we need the potato men

to do work workers can't do 

because they had a culture

that made them complain 

about food, wages, housing 

ALWAYS CAUSING TROUBLE!

LONG HAIR!

LOUD MUSIC!

SHORT SKIRTS!

CIVIL RIGHTS!

quick

GET THE POTATOES IN 

they'll sort it

they work really hard

and obey like grateful dogs

put all their plastic food  

bags and beer cans in the skip 

NICE POTATO MEN

not like the old ones

with punk hope

music politics

and working brains 

funny hair art love

TUNELESS POTATO MEN 

mashing our poor history!

ugly, pale, blind, blank

swinging potato London!

BEATLE BORIS ON A BONGO

everyone screaming

NJ2020

CUCKOO

I have heard

but never seen the cuckoo

little birds rarely do

too focused on their work

feeding a massive grey tit

that moved in

and killed their kids

when you google* cuckoo

first is a broadband company

then a tv programme

then Netflix original

then series 1 bbc three

then bbc three

then RSPB

cuculus canorus click

brood parasites

common habitat 

London palaces

and silicon valley

conservation status red!

good news!

fly away parasites

'fuck..you'

'fuck..you'

 

* use a parasitic tax-avoiding company to sift through linked information bullies to find a few lost honesty eggs 

NJ2020

ISLE OF PIGS

200000 for a terraced house

60000 for a caravan

1000 a month for a shithole

while I'm earning nothing

There is nothing left

to hope for here

except for

this self build

worry stack

word home

I'm hiding

in a mess of

thicko lying 

shit head brick laying

No more life

No more dark wine

No starry night

knockout punch

I'm so tired of spinning

Czech women screaming

throwing greasy beetroot

hospital doors banging

Russian men shout talking  

near shit sprayed disabled toilet

A Latvian is pacing 

like nazi nurse

A Welsh man is cursing

an Irish fisherman coughing

We are all freezing

in new-build bin

waiting for the lorry

So turn on

colourless

classic FM

saccharine violin

twisted TV

theme tunes

adverts are hammering

my glass splinter bed

my liver is awake

cuddling mummy lungs

and all my heavy bowel ropes

are tying my English limbs

into crash positions

Is it night day?

or day night?

DODO HUG ME?

shit wing flap

I can't earplug

All the screaming

Internet bully lying

Fatty tooth whitening

Lycra selfish selfies

shame pissing

I'm stuck still

need a black pill

industrial farmland

poor throat cutting

in space silence

BILLIONS

of satellite limbs flying

SUDDENLY

SLEEPY

all the dodo wings

start flapping

NJ2020

IS 'IT DONE YET?

Andy Burnham and Caroline Lucas please take over

bomb big bollocks Ben

and the gothic cobwebs of Westminster 

Should we try new short-term ZOOM governments from random pubs?

maybe ask ABSOLUTELY ANYONE 

to govern Britain properly?

I.E. Nobody grotesquely

Saying only

GET BREXIT DONE

which was like saying

ARE YOU SICK OF THIS EVIL SHIT?

AND everyone yelped YES! 

IS 'IT DONE YET?

all immigrants out?

all our billions back?

the last election

was a SCREAM AGAINST 

CAPITALISM not RACE!

it was our personal 

economies stupid

a lost sense 

of fair 

decent

HOME 

SO.

This government has

a one policy mandate

'IT IS DONE? 

that mass image lie fuck

BABY BORIS mirror spunk 

So.

can we talk about the complex future now?

Vote freshly on that?

We will need a clean media if this silly democracy idea is to be repeated

I don't trust the salt of the earth I phone bullied TV clean dickhead masses anymore

bullied by minority media megaphones  

Believing hairdo headlines is a crime

Not looking beyond your village window is a crime

Let's hear what the window people think,

then ignore it

Let's hear what the headline experts think,

then ignore it

Could our sapiens status get any more lost? 

We should have written a legal green bible 2000 years ago

but now we're out of time 

We make life/death decisions at roulette tables

fucked up lobbying, back-handers, hidden agendas  

lottery picked zero hours casino workers  

with a few random footballer policy tweets spinning

and a clean ball thrown the opposite way

There will be no-one to blame

apart from the footballers

Full of bouncy policy ideas

written down while watching TV

High on back post hairdo headers

NJ2020

MONEY NATURE

swiping websites 

the helpful treasure

knowledge is buried

somewhere fun

can you find it?

under ganged websites

spy ads and cookies

and bouncer blocks

you must pay to know

That your wit is fading

old hope shit sold

to greedy pigs 

(sorry pigs)

buying up all

ancient stone

family homes

slipped in

hedge portfolios

The 'clever' ones

have decided

to kill everything

it's money nature!

so no one notices

the old hanging 

the new dragged

naked into the wet

pinned up

by their snouts

like moles

flat little 

baby socks

NJ2020

PROFESSOR WILLS

Next day BBC news, amidst covid torture lock down hell, the expert on everything 'Wills' swampy 'Windsor' is now telling us about the environment! Are you going to pay for our little plots of land so we can feed ourselves healthily and cleanly then? People like you are the problem 'mate'. All squillionaires: return all our money or SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Dear Mr Attenborough, shame on you for allowing yourself to become money laundering butler service for this very dirty brand. 

Trump appears again, thanks Auntie Beeb! Where's the Paedo prince? Any news?

NJOCT82020

 

THE BEATLES

According to the BBC, The Beatles are 4 Islamic terrorists. Please just laugh when the 'news' interrupts your dancing.

NJ7OCT2020

SAME NEWS

I was listening to 6 music, punching the air and dancing a bit, to get fit, waking up. The BBC news team have been wankers for years, but today the 2 biggest blonde liars are given all the publicity oxygen headlines. Trump has dominated the news for 4-5 days now, for being a racist, liar, coronavirus spreader, and Boris, who called environmental activists "uncooperative crusties" is diverting attention away from incompetent government and wooing us with wind farms. These two paragons of virtue being joyously promoted has stopped me dancing. The BBC news always does, the lazy corrupt 'journalism', makes me switch to another station or turn the volume down really quickly. The reality most of us are suffering, never appears, real stats, real science, real investigative journalism. It's posh twitter, with adverts for royals and celebrities making cakes, new books or whatever. It's a thick mix, slopped out onto our breakfast plates every day. Eat that! The overpaid private school kids say. Is it sheer rudderlessness? Or new dead journalism? Is it fear of job security? Too frightened to say something frightening? Well this moral void is a lot more scary. Silent complicity from ALL presenters on BBC TV and radio. Even footballers and celebrity chefs have more moral fibre and care than these freaks:

Gary Lineker - £1,750,000-£1,754,999.

Zoe Ball - £1,360,000-£1,364,999.

Graham Norton - £725,000-£729,999.

Steve Wright - £475,000-£479,999.

Huw Edwards - £465,000-£469,999.

Fiona Bruce - £450,000-£454,999. 

Vanessa Feltz - £405,000-£409,999.

Lauren Laverne - £395,000 - £399,999. 

I suppose this might be the reason to keep quiet. Gary Lineker, for example, possibly one of the least talented ugly witless people in the world is paid the most. Everyone knows a 15 year old could do his 'job' better, anyone could, even without any football knowledge, but that's not the point. It is a rare gift he has, and all the others too, to have such flexible spines. How else could they get so deeply lost up their own arses? Or are they paid to keep quiet and this is their real 'talent'?

In food-bank covid-austerity Britain, how can they smile and scoop up this much public funding, without saying thanks. Like our overpaid polititians. Why do they not say or do anything for the little people who pay them? It's because reality doesn't exist for them. Our news is torture, but theirs is a mountain stream of fellow yellowy celebrity tweets, which then get dribbled down to us like greasy left overs from the superior Darwinian sparkly dress party. Do they really think they are 'special', really good looking and hilarious? They are not. They are ugly monsters, who laugh at anything.

There is a great sickness in the world, that has been left to grow untreated for decades now. Greed and narcissism permeates all. This is the news. Must we all retrain and learn this new post-truth skill? Or do we switch off and stop paying to view? It would be a shame to lose some dwindling 'good' but that is an increasingly rare BBC quality. Mostly it's air-head trash made to make us greedy and vain, and chubby, folded into foolish cake moulds by intellectual poverty, or buttery complicity with free markets. The BBC is not free though, it doesn't even need adverts! So why does it need be so lost and cruel, and if the public is paying shouldn't we get to vote on these wages, and constant celebrity masturbation. 

Today, 'Boris' is talking about 'change' It's another crass bullshit sentiment dropped into a farm bucket. He knows it's animal food. In our politics and drunken homes, we must re-learn to be critical of the uncritical, shout at the moral silence spread from multi-branded millionaires, and cut ourselves free from narcissistic celebrity and political norms. The 15 year olds are watching and learning: how to be animals.

NJ2020

HOW TO DRAW AN EGG

It's quite complicated, first source your egg. I was about 8 when i first started to draw 'real' things, I remember finding my 'etch a sketch' bloody annoying, so I got these hinged caliper things that could copy photographs by tracing the shape one end and the robot pencil at the other end would act the same! They were shit. So I drew a grid and copied each little square, like a robot boy. I copied lots of photographs like this. Making 'portraits' of Hollywood people, like Linda Evans from Dynasty, Robert Mitchum, pretty model women and wrinkly old men. I thought I was a great artist because I could catch the little bit of light reflected in an eye (they were very detailed) copying photos became a bore, I knew I was cheating, like a pretend egg-head, showing off to people who didn't know the first thing about art, but who admired my patience and mad focus, treating me like a glowing divinity, calling me a 'bloody genius'. I smiled and went along with it, and continued to impress with my 'reality' period. Digital watches, shoes, oranges, and eggs. Anything small and still would receive my genius treatment, soon they would all float on a white page looking really 3-D! In pencil or watercolour, or water-based pencil crayons, I could do it all! But the egg troubled me.

How to draw an egg. Get an egg, try your parents fridge and look for a clean one, all those speckly bits, little glued feathers should be avoided, what we're aiming for is 'pure enlightened form, and total affluent illusion'. Look at how light is coming at this thing from one side and hitting it hard and directly at one little point, and less so, in varying degrees, elsewhere! For a while it confused me why the very bottom of the egg, which should have been the darkest, had a lighter aspect along the edge, I applied this weird 3-D trick to other objects but often it didn't work, some things were really black at the bottom, like the shoe. My life moved on, I put the eggs back in the fridge and shiny 70's shoes to one side and did lots of self portraits, the chin area often doing a similar voodoo to the egg, why was my chin light blue? I was wearing a blue T shirt. It was the light reflected back up from the T shirt! Like the white page that I had put the egg on! Eureka! Enlightenment does not come from one single light source.

I quite liked Impressionism back then but I thought they were being lazy, thrashing about too fast, poor victims of the moving sun, and consequently not filling things in properly. I preferred Holbein, Vermeer, Durer, that detail, enabled by a steady interior light, I can see that life out/in death difference now.  I always liked Van Gogh, he was a confusing bandaged egg. Like a sunny impressionist, only there was this magical solidity, which got me but i didn't know why. The colours too, so frank, BRIGHT YELLOW BANG, ICE BLUE WHACK, but the drawing was still exacting, it wasn't Kandinsky slack abstraction, and it wasn't uptight rendering. He made things look SO ALIVE! SO UNLIKE my egg drawings, which were so alone, even when done in lively ballpoint hatching, mine evoked hermetic death, sitting there on a funereal cushion of white paper. 

How to draw an egg? You draw it next to another egg, and other things, maybe a person (you are never alone dear egg). A Velasquez(?) painting describes my early conundrum, shared by him it seems, clearly a gifted young man, but he chooses a 'still life' with eggs, garlic, fish then adds a portrait of old woman looking at a young woman nearby (a human still life). The result is a bit wooden, but the egg suddenly becomes enlivened. Not lonely, and now metaphysical: it's not just shell light! The egg is birth-waiting: NEW LIFE, but only because it has been placed next to near-death. He had cracked it! I hadn't. 

How to draw an egg? Before you draw you need to stare and think, what is this life-thing really? Then act accordingly, knowing you don't really know. One option would be to ask beforehand: is this a responsible way to spend your egg-life-time? You could walk away and smile and air-kiss an old woman who wants to wave at you from a hospice window instead? Or ask, as you start doing the delicate outlines, is it YOU, in fact, with blue chin, that is a dead-egg-nut, attempting to do this silly mechanical rendering task? Alive, metaphysical or Impressionistic? It's all stupid pointless shit now, made only for bewitching thick visceral idiots, which should be a criminal offence. 

How to draw and egg? Draw yourself: studious and stylish, with your many windowsill pencils, brushes and rubber friends. Indoors, alone, and unfertilised: with stripey top, jazz haircut and blue rimmed glasses, wanting to be seen and loved. GET REAL. You are totally scrambled, affluent, untalented and never truly hungry enough to do this analytical job properly. Draw that grim fact exactingly, or get out and do something real and loving quickly. It's too late for egg sketching. 

How to draw an egg? Snap all your pencils, remortgage your inherited real estate wealth and paint, with other colourful contemporary artists, a clean new world form, intolerant of all stupid time-wasting illusions.

NJ2020

DEATH TRAP

Neither side dare say anything but 'nice clean LIFE'. Wash hands, keep distance, save lives. No-one wants to say SOME-COVID-DEATHS. That would be political suicide, so we wait. All cancer patients backlogged, kidneys, blood clots, heart attacks, suicides, scrunch up at the traffic lights, businesses going under, all families tortured by uncertainty, we wait, we die. We jog or drink more, we go mad. More lock downs will do it, lock down, lock down, lock down, 6 months more, what then? More. It wastes a bit more time, the poker players are thinking, it's a serious game, you don't want to commit to 20 deaths a day, or 100. But as you wait, 1000 die anyway, but it's not recorded, so it doesn't exist. It's the Covid death toll that rings loudest and lowest. Ding bloody Dong. It's like Brexit again. Blah,  bunch of fucking liars, Blah. Only those wank sounds in the palace of Westminster now. Otherwise silent playing cards. 10 of spades, so i'll play the 10 of spades. Oh you've thrown away the 10 of spades, i'll do that too then. You can't speak out, it means too much, saying 'cat' means you don't like dogs? How dare you, so you say dcagts, (cats and dogs). which means nothing. Firbshds, which is fish and birds, is the reply. Hmm yes that's cunning, let me think..'more lock downs'..phew yes..thank god. 'Concrete masks!' Oh shit that's good. 'Only 2 people in a household per conversation', nice! What does that mean? It doesn't matter as long as the suited hairdo's are saying something, and they are not seen to be torturing and softly killing hundreds, thousands, millions, of previously semi-healthy people. 

Will somebody please board up the palace of Westminster casino, with all the big-brain card players locked inside, give them their cherished political vacuum conclusion. There must be not 1 survivor, to reinvigorate the 'zombie narcissus' silent killer virus. About 60 million of us have had enough of elasticated spinning platitudes, disguised as leadership now by random state bullying. Fuck off with your dystopian lock downs. A few more old and vulnerable people will die, or should we kill the whole of the next generation instead? Lots more people in impoverished areas will be the next 'Covid' victims, but that much bigger death trap has been the (nice clean LIFE) case for a long time now. Shhhhhhhuuussshhhh.  

NJ2020

THE ART OF POLITICS

Spitting Image is coming back, the new rubber masks look shit. I was thinking of doing some illustrations for a new book about insects and alcoholism which includes some current affairs. If Trump or Boris had to be drawn, how would I do that? I don't want to see any more of them, so for Trump I thought an orange square, and Boris a pink circle or a potato. Then I thought about Malevich and his peasant language of simplified forms, then of Trump and Boris's peasant simplifications in policy and image, then: oh shit, not only have they learned how to speak 'peasant' they have also mastered the art of appearing as simplified shape. Then I thought, in future our leaders will just be colourful platonic shapes, saying only things an algorithm has sensed from our emails, to appease us, while doing shitty things in private, as usual. Margaret Thatcher looked like a horrible round biscuit and Tony Blair like a fish from the darkest deepest sea, both entertaining as images, for a while. The big problem for politicians is ageing. A sour old hair biscuit is not nice, and a monster from the deep can only be hilarious for a few years. Geometric shapes are the way forward, they are timeless. Look at circular Churchill. I rest my case. Abraham Lincoln had the symmetry thing nailed, Hitler had worked out how to use simple modern shapes, choosing to become 1 curve with a tiny square nearby. For Trump as his face sags and hair thins he must stay focused on 'orange square', and use all his money and make-up to maintain this solid form. Likewise Boris must keep up the calorie intake, a thin Boris won't work, he must be fat lipped, potato faced, above all else. It's a shame, Keir Starmer has much to learn. I do think the Labour party doesn't really understand Art or image power, they still think ideas, or a healthy looking person succeeds, that is totally missing the point. If Jeremy Corbyn had pushed the hair and beard out into spherical hair ball, or gone full-on-wild-tramp he would be in power now. Kier Starmer is in trouble, he could go rectangle, but sphere beats rectangle everyone knows that. Boris has the sphere but he also has BORIS, which is his main sales pitch, not the hair. B, B, B Boris. B is a baby noise, it's maternal and bubbley, blubbery like Boobs. Kier is 1 syllable which is great but it's hard, like 'car' at best. Starmer is his only hope, free advice, try a star shaped hair cut and drive lots of sexy vintage cars. The dangerously close Wallace and Gromit folly must not be repeated (Ed Milliband). Pick a good solid primal shape and stick to it. It's a sad FACT, people like simple, solid shapes, since almost all other things in life are beige and  wobbly. Intellectual babies are very willing receivers of all generously subliminal bullying images, blissfully unaware of (or happily in-tune with) funny art voodoo and timeless cartoon power mongering.

NJ2020

POUNDLAND

I started visiting Poundland in Lowestoft, where there are many related versions of this pinnacle brand, selling mostly cheap rubbish. At first I was reluctant, snobbish, now I am a big fan, addicted even. Poundland is the best. In Poundland there are treasures to be uncovered. It's fun! Yesterday 2 large 'kilner' jars for pickling, bam £2. Potato fertilizer, which turned out to be chicken manure pellets that cost £8 in the garden centre £1, Laundry gel that I'm not allergic to £1. Not everything is £1 wierdly, Poundland keeps you on your toes. Some things are £3, some are 50p. Mastic filler, white spirit (when they have it-it doesnt last long) LED bulbs, all £1! It makes a mockery of normalized high street prices. It doesn't make sense, out of date? No! Secretly toxic/cancerous? Don't know! Can we know that in any shops really? I'm surprised other shop owners don't gang outside Poundland with placards, throwing bricks, screaming 'UNFAIR COMPETITION'. The only downside to Poundland is you have to take a risk with your life, there is an argument/toxic incident roughly every third visit. Yesterday I instigated it: 'this is the queue mate', pointing to a rag tag line behind me, who had conveniently for that moment broken ranks. The lady in front of me had left the gap in front of her grow to about 5 yards so this dude skipped in. I can see how he thought it wasn't a queue, I said quickly: 'oh forget it, you go ahead' but he got very excited. It ended with me saying 'calm down mate' and him screaming 'CALM DOWN!!!?' Poundland is not just a shop, it's a way of life. 

NJ2020

SONG THRUSH

speckled
seventies
mud splat
Seurat
back yard
footy sock
woodchip
wallpaper
whistler
snail hammer
shammy leather
pint of bitter
Austin Allegro
Nana Mouskouri 
OI!
spotted dick
TURDUS!
WAKE UP! 
you're not extinct 
-yet!  
20 yards away
jump the fence
fat lad


NJ2020




BLACKBIRD


dawn
cluck   
gargle
cocky
coal drop 
chocolate leaf 
card shark
lit fuse beak   
low priest
vintage noir
Di Chirico
run and stop
tucked in dark
dusk ivy 
ear splitting
dick head
bedsit karaoke
every man bird
chuck yourself
drunk fool
into a hedge
flying cheap
office shoe

NJ2020




HOW ARE YOU?

Money is truth and truth money, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

The defining quality of all species is lonely madness. Floundering, needy ,wobbly, chatty, dribbling  madness. 

Who was it who first rubbed sticks together to make fire? An inquiring thicko monkey artist or a bored hairy idiot?

It is clear the numbers don't add up, they haven't for a while, nor the morality. Nor the rich wankers who are warping our brains, leading us to division and death. Nothing gets better by watching box-sets.

We are all new mutations, we talk in an attempt to calm all our tangled nerves and our differences. It doesn't work. We need to use new mutated words or shut the fuck up.

Covid 19 is an affluent panic spasm, the poor can't give a shit about it, death has always slept in every cheap crib.

If you do not use all your senses to recognise the outdoor complexities and idiosyncrasies of plants, the specific qualities and music of other people and species, the simple moral engineering of your environment: food, houses and engines, then you are truly lost. Dear victim, You can talk all you like but your words and thoughts stink like regurgitated adverts.

Talk more! Know less!
When you talk you aren't listening.
Love is shown by deeds not words.

Self isolation has always been a great skill of mine, I  have always wanted to escape human sheep/pigs, full of radio lies and herd ignorance, endlessly troughing. Blown helplessly like parachuting soldiers and weed seeds by  groundless media chat. As a child i used to disappear into drawing or piss off to the beach to stare at dead dogfish, jellyfish or hunt for crabs, even the wierd trench patterns and channels in the sand would keep me busy, anything that couldn't speak was refreshingly 'total bollocks' free. 

Living in a pandemic has been problematic. Initially fearful of getting locked indoors in close contact with a bunch of housemate chatterboxes, I would go to the allotment to stay all day and return only to sleep. This was ok for a bit, until the allotment wilderness itself became the only place to go for the scared, retired, pensioned, baby boomer dicks who should ideally be in Italy seeing friends, going to Alaska on a whim or on a Nile cruise, seeing RA exhibitions or whatever the most affluent, damaging dunderheaded generation in history usually do. Some of the more spindly geriatrics are hiding at home thankfully, but everyone else is at the allotment. All lonely and lost they can't help bloody talking to each other about nothing, their poor death frightened selves and the horror of all that real-estate money wasting away in the bank, unspent! Sometimes they babble about gardening, or about viral changes, fake stats and queries about the future ad tedium.  

Mostly it is sheer existential trapped in a massive house alone panic, it starts with "hello how are you?" If you reply you will be brain dead for an hour "oh that's awful Neal...ah yes I've been there...ho ho..."  (what lost thousands because of a global pandemic? Had no hope of ever having decent housing, totally isolated in a shitty little room etc? YEH RIGHT!) The door has been opened and the grey shit strides in, they chat their brains off. Sometimes the whole wet sponge of it comes out with a pathetic seal pup flop, in the end I fake sympathy and kick the wet goo politely back on to their own plots. 

There have been tears, frustrations, many arguments, newly developed hateful hello's and not enough deaths, sadly. None. Every dreary millionaire is sitting on their tiny shed porches, waiting to predate on any unsuspecting nieghbour or passer by. A flurry of notices fly up, about hand sanitizer, not touching the bolt on the toilet etc. We keep our distance, some old women get masked and gloved up and opt for 4 metres distancing, you can see the panic in them as you look in their direction: "can it be spread by eye contact?". "I think so. Quick, pretend you're weeding Sally" 

I volunteer to build a storage shed for the allotment committee, it was clearly an error of judgement, but I drew a simple design and it was only a 3 or 4 days job, it was my mistake though to assume my 2 co-workers and fellow tenants were skilled, focused, kindly and not mentally ill. Instantly I got shouted at by a helmet haired South African Bore, she continued to torture me for the following month making everything complicated and problematic. I had to do the job myself because of her control-freak self-distancing panic, relying only on a wooly-headed old fart to get me the materials I needed which he managed to string out for week after week, always some excuse, as he plonked himself down next to me 4 times a day offloading his long great life smuggery. In the end, I made a barrier so he couldn't walk onto my plot, stopped opening the "hello" door, and just said "just get the fucking guttering and roofing felt". Of course he didn't, so I cobbled it together from tatty scraps, which took longer and looked a bit more shite than i'd have liked, but I gave up, got out. I told the site secretary afterwards, "I hereby resign from all allotment voluntary work and chatty committee twaddle".

Here, disenchanted, hateful, alone, I paddled off into a Kurtz-like swamp and shriveled in the sun-madness like a vampire sultana, arriving at the allotment before 6am, leaving at 10am before the 'how are you's?' arrive. Of course some are visibly worried as I clearly shrink and half run off when I see them. It just makes them ask more: "how are you?" with an extra tilted cow eye dog face. Of course they don't give a shit but it is what you are supposed to do, it is pantomime gurning, sometimes oscar winning fake caring, I walk away.

Old people are walking in the middle of the road, people are clapping nothing outside their houses, the national debate is deceased, replaced with simple moronic reactive chat spasms. Stay safe, you and your cosy Samsung advert family, keep away from the viral poor, those dirty, cash physical shopping scum. 'Jesus! don't speak to me dickhead, are you trying to invade and kill me with your conversation droplets you selfish fucker?' The hatred and class fear is palpable, all tempers are on the edge of coughing out big time, there's no choice: being laid back and chilled in lockdown is irresponsible behaviour. Uptight Tories are wanking furiously, they can't believe their luck, just as they were sadly rolling up their austerity posters, this homely global boarding school whipping vibe arrived. It feels like it's not going to go away either, we've all learned how to fear each other, it's hard to remember anything but selfishness, cruelty, isolation and smug greedy online cunts.

Like all ego-maniacal  psychopaths, politicians and stock brokers, 'Covid' (an affectionate furlough mate for them) is a new opportunity. This sicko horizontal government is freely policy snoozing, making things up as they go along like teen jazz, throwing money at, and propping up what they like best (the past) and sniggering about the downfall of their enemy (the future) and educated creative people. Black Lives Matter has been the only intellectual beacon, symbol of critique and cultural regeneration. 

The allotment commune used to be a rainbow for me, in Robin Hood dappled glade, lilting to social and environmental inclusion, level playing fields, a revolutionary sharing ecology culture. That has all gone now, the generous working class have been kicked out, and the thinkers thought 'bugger London'. Now it is perfect portrait of sanitized London corruption. Only real estate inheritors and benefit beneficiaries remain. There is no middle ground, only me and Joyce are stupidly busy working like dogs and paying stupid rents. Everyone else is loaded and idle, moving colourful brick things around like fat babies.

A 'community' shed has been built by a cowboy employing cheap immigrant labour that has cost a fortune. The old shed was ok, but some self acclaimed stylish vintage property owning oldies who used it to make themselves creative cakes and niche tea said it was a bit shabby so tens of thousands are wasted on a very similar new shithole. The poor allotment holders never used the old one, for tea and cakes, they won't use this one. But it was a voted committee decision, so that's all fair and good.

The committee is made up of the thickest spoilt rich old folk.  These grey lords make a mountain mess of every simple nose-picking decision, their minds are bored-thick and bent. They have so much money and power no-one can tell them anything about anything, especially not smelly poor people.

Every year there is an in-house plot competition, the winners are always the wealthiest, they've paid tons on materials, compost, outside labour, it is always judged by friendly rich twits. 

When competitions are analysed, like the olympics, football or even trade deals. The winning entity is always the richest. It is not chance, it is not superior national DNA or design, it has nothing to do with skill, talent or worth, it is not a surprising Roman spectacle. It is not a competition. It reveals who has the most money and idle time, which is decided by governments. This one has given everything to dim old folk and their headphone duvet offspring. I am watching the arts, music, comedy, invention, design and national debate becoming grey, rich, thick,  nose-picking and seriously unfunny.


NJ2020







GREENFINGER


strike new roots
STOP 
your extinction
your crucifixion
endless working 
for crap 
spit out
manipulative 
media poison
300000+++
Austerity dead
---50000 
pandemic dead
re-grow 
REAL
TRUTH
feed your freedom
dig up the roads
wipe your bum with leaves
go on benefits
don't rip your head off
to pay vicious rents
centuries of recession
and slavery
if you let them 
land lord laugh 
squeeze you tighter
battery chickens
fed sugary shit
zero hours alone
dear diabetes dandy
everyone out
trickle up 
NOW!
NOT CONSUMERS!
NOT FOR SALE!
fuck U high bronzes 
colonial killer ponces
hard back fake news
ugly Royal brain gun
meant to shrink you 
YOU win all wars
YOU make new worlds 
NOT PARASITE THEM
scratch YOUR face 
on YOUR currency
UNITE starlings
UNITE green
organic hope
UNITE diversities
colours
genders
resources
spit out geriatric
holy divisions
FEED THE POOR
LANDSCAPE
FEED THE POOR 
NEXT DOOR
or you will be eaten
and all your children
driven mad
with hopeless
apartheid 
1 free person 
1 free home
on learned land
a decent start
die no more darlings
for nothing
D.I.Y 
touch 
find
cook
fix
splice
think
love 
saw
hammer 
sharpen
cut
bind
pickle
joy
SAVE
the sky children
BUILD HOPE
FIGHT FOR THEIR
LAUGHING FREEDOM
blue blood  
is plant food
the worst of you
is better 
than the best 
of them
GREENFINGER


NJ2020




MUSWELL HILL

nice shoes!

it's an insult

compensation

for the sixth toe?

city swarm

mirror born 

high north

capital

poop

not

one

beauty

here

over 17

in overflowing

hospice head

abortion bouquet

full length black puffa

protect your fine china

cheap plastic

mutton skin

doddering to death

coffee deli nail bar

with gorgeous rare dog

compensation

for the corrupted hand

opening your money car

with blinding Hollywood

love me please headlights

compensation

for your lack of star quality

white leather seats

compensation

for your lycra arse

no yoga or jogging

can plump

and refresh

but LO!

money always on show

a new trainer rainbow!

compensation

for your grey  

long haul flight

I phone twisted

posted trusted

liked by your cleaners

orange face

existential mutation

beard drawing

hairdo hat

compensation

catwalk loneliness

compensation

kindness allergy

compensation

for dead eyes

in dead cosmos

designer bag

compensation

for moral

beauty

elsewhere

NJ2020

ROBIN

all heart

christmas card

garden friend

sweetly say HI

sanguine pom-pom

market trader

ripping me off

sideways staring

at where I’ve been 

breaking the crust

of ripe worm pie

my giant excavations

magic up spaghetti

for you to slurp

Italian sugar song

operatic baby

ketchup bib

complaining

where’s my dinner?

ugly mother

pasta maker

easy money

soil bank

robbing

NJ2020 

FERAL PIGEON


Ignoble
victory V 
culture vulture
Sweaty grey
bargain jogger
purring fag end
diesel pitta
winged armadillo
spinning in gutter 
pewter butter
dixie chicken  
chip bone Nash
Arise Sun
bum knight
godfather of gory
dogshit Metro
fat headline 
corrupt gunmetal
coughing spitfire 
bird kebab


NJ2020




COOT

black canal
fruit
squeaky toy
you're so coot
cartoon bag of soot
with a headlamp
deep sea diver
hen night I phone
party bin liner
bored by a jogger
craft beard logger 
titanium bike afloat 
mum and dads narrow boat
from flyover I can see  
your John Cleese legs
white green nazi
slalom water ski 
bad rap
bad poem
bad photograph
bad art
bad graffiti
plastic circus
ROLL UP!
bloodshot boho
vicar of Camden
preaching comedy 
chuffing childish
broken toy town
faithful
toot!
toot!



NJ2020



CARRIE ON UK


You need to keep still
to see nature shit out
from twanged branch 
mr whippy 
messages
make painterly
torn frog corpses
its a joke 
to visit idylls
in camouflage
train spotting 
as if you're green
turn soil upside down
empty your bacon pockets 
shut your pastie mouth
in the burning world
spinning in blizzards 
of fun blood
nature love
call of duty
willingly freeze
eco martyr
to admire a crooked spider
spy head down
wall faces
zapping 
everything
I'm bog eyed  
cardboard box
fuzzy Columbo
perched sparrow
London high art
yawning teeth
Camden mews bin
philosophy bum
rich rotters
slugging about 
endless
homeless base
tearing at everything
brexit claw
colonial Merlin
muscle memory 
self sunk 
old beef
oak grained
Tudor club
merry butcher
in racing green 
climate bunker
the closed book
fat gut past 
will die last
under armed guard 
feeding on brains
who screamed
amazon murder!
from smart arse
leather sofa
bagged for 
fucking life
happy new year
darling anal
shower gel
panto
Carrie
on



NJ2020





EUROPEAN GREEN WOODPECKER 


Ant focused
Albrecht Durer
Laughing 
Green air
Rowing boat
Munch screaming
Bosch knew your
Cracked 
Medieval 
Moss sod
Mushroom dance 
Land licking
Tongue brush
Suckling back
Peasant noose
Dangle yourself
Brain damaged
In carnival mask 
Quivering
Robin hood
Scar face
Lift hat
Bow down



NJ2019






LESSER SPOTTED WOODPECKER


Mass mandated Tory   
Lie leaves have fallen 
On low lie leaves
5 more Gatling gun years! 
I can't face
The grey rack
By the meal deals
I will go 
And leaf through
The leafless trees
Hollow myself
In blind high oak
Gothic 
Gobbledeygook
Can poor art be meaningful?
Is it even possible to make now?
I am clinging on
Sometimes upside down! 
Skull hammering
Tree hugging
Wood typing 
Jungle drumming 
Magnetized 
Sometimes frozen
About to fall
I AM THE NEWS!
RED TOP
Bright black 
On bright white
High cloaked
Did you hear?
A little monarch
Is hiding 
From the pig paparazzi 
Testing the truth
Knowing somewhere near
A populace of tuber mites
Are squirming under 
Thick bark duvet
Dentist
Miner
Grave digger
Hungry 
For  
Dull 
Soft
Dead
Wood
Silence


NJ 2019



JAY

Shifty 
Etonian
Up to something?
When spotted
You say
AAAARRRGGH
Like Boris 
Scarper
Mumbling
Banking
Nutter
Tan suit
White shirt
Ice blue tie
Tiny brogues
Squirrelling
Tweedy
Nob

NJ2019



CURLEW


Curtain
Curlew
Jewel hunter 
Sea shore
Probing at dusk
Probing at dawn
Worm grass
Signalling twilight 
In parenthesis
Your massive 
Bent sabre
Looks stretched
Like the earth
Drew you down 
Deeper than the others
Flautist
Well hung
Darn those needling
Castrated seagulls
Finally
Weirdly
Wizardly
Whistling
Gypsy
Cossack 
Curtain



NJ2019



PEMBROKESHIRE


Giant English
Field towels 
Shrink and soften
Into wet bath mats
Walled by grass sods
Piled up centuries 
Of hand washed socks
Shitty and salty
Mostly goaty
Spade faced
Hobbity
Mammalian
Nibbling weedy 
Bitten wefts
Sung through
Parabolic warps
Hedge brushes ground 
By sea wind teeth
Glum tractor dragons  
Puff and spill
Bits of silage hill 
Where horned kids fall 
From hippy van
And plunge 
Green and brown
Into kelp
Laughing surfing
Like gliding snakes
Unharmed by saints


NJ2019 



RINGED? PLOVER


No-one is

Instagramming

Insignificant you

Little coastal bird

Flea beachcomber

Stitching the waves

To yellow beach

To brown tide line

Or along the sea wall

Sprinting confidently

Like all entrepreneurs

Noticing the unnoticed

Your speed legs can’t be

Trapped by smartphones

Or when you abruptly

Throw yourself off

Revealing a sharp

White

Prehistoric

Boomerang

Hidden under

Your sand and

Seaweed cloak

A Gormley vanity

Stands like Midas

Immobile flightless

Adolfing the coastline

I'm sorry little landscape

To dump this lump on you

Like him so indelicately

It’s a sad steel portrait

Of how we won’t

Ever

Be sewn

Together

Copper

Twig-legged

Throwaway

Golden lover

NJ2019:(

WHO DO YOU TRUST?
 
Tim Berners Lee wants to clean up the internet, get the truth back, get rid of the trolls and misinformation. The newspapers are backing him, because they know what is really real and we populist scum don't. Who has the right to speak and spread information? Only the state, religious leaders and media moghuls with big printers and distribution networks? Wealthy forces have always dominated our mental spaces, and power structures, always writing us out of history. Now familiar forces are warping, spying, manipulating the free, hippy dippy internet, asserting similarly brutish control over an increasingly polluted notion of democracy. 
 
Should we trust embedded global institutions more than the invisible little old electrician down the pub? Surely not on the install of a new dimmer switch and what it's like being a little old electrician? Depends on how much they've had to drink maybe? I believe we all have important experience and expertise to pass on, even if it is sometimes a bit dim. Niche experiences are easily offered up now, even bland photos of food. What of the trolls and threats? It's more than disturbing to experience expressions of hate, scams and angry mysticism, but they all exist, and always have! They are real, and everywhere! Murderous swine are here dwelling with us, sleeping with us, having power over us, they are not just on the internet. It's the silencing of wounds and wants left untended that cause bitterness, fury and wild violence.  Hate is not made by catharsis, even when it's with weird Nazi paraphernalia. 
 
Our semi democratically elected government, for instance, have in recent times, revived the enlightened media skill of confident lying.  Helped by the centuries old precedent of insulting and ignoring all poor and especially desperate voices. The resultant Brexit balls-up is an all too boring example of this long sick harvest. Dismissing the diaspora and dictating has always been a dangerous strategy, like the willful spreading of untruths for short term gains. With fearful opinions flying, from high and low, we need to trust something or someone now more than ever. Where do we plant our feet so that we might survive the shit storm? Or should we cast ourselves off altogether and sail with the nonsense of it all. All lost together forever, as passive as ever?
 
In the library a smelly shouty couple know how to hack into Facebook accounts, and what it's like to be banned from seeing their kids and to lose all the photos of them on their phones, and have no record of them, but they appear to know very little about how hard it is to concentrate in a library when people are shouting all the time while smelling of something disturbing. Perhaps they are secretly expert at this too, finding other people's discomfort an amusing assertion or form of revenge? I sat there suffering their suffering, quietly letting them be heard. It was an experience both surprising, annoying and sad, and sadly sniffable.
 
To be heard is almost the quintessence of power. The most powerful are always heard, by many. The least powerful can't even whisper to a friend. Most of us don't exist for this reason, until we vote, or protest, or riot. We vote, protest and riot to be heard, to exist, especially when our leaders are deaf to our concerns. The poorest have been silent for millennia, without history, without representation. They just work for us all silently, leaving unread messages in pipelines, brick walls, steel structures, farmland, clean windows, upholstery, boxed sandwiches. These background people aren't stupid, they just trusted they were low born, or more likely, had only one simple life/death mouse click choice.
 
A yawning state official, if they are awake, should have experience of the law, media, lobbyists, constituents, dribbling Lords and wobbling ideologies. In this very specific focus they will consequently be entirely ignorant of filthy jobs, squalour management, daily housing and street trudging. Who do we trust then on the subject of reality? Should we trust someone in guarded and gilded palaces with fine dining and easy media access or someone involved in a raw plastic survival, unhygienic and unheard? It depends what you want to learn, both are useful if you are interested in history, reality and the cosmos. 
 
I suggest we try to hear all fairly, then learn as species from it all, who to trust.
 
Everyone knows something, and is an expert of their specific mutated world, here is the internet ideal of a weird world talking to each other. It is a shame that this new history book is so easy to warp, especially by the powerful, to spread misinformation, division and hatred. 
 
While investigating a primer for my steel boat, I waded through internet websites wanting to sell me their stuff, and forums wanting to debate it all. I talked to a hundred people. Everyone had a different opinion. Who do you trust? I had an opinion, and have some experience, everyone seemed to have some experience, of certain paints working and not working. Who do you trust? I gambled and lost. So, I wandered as stranger around the myriad boatyards here for advice about paint, craning and boat storage prices. I talked to a hundred people: everyone had a different opinion. Who do you trust? The people and places were all different, with differing facilities, differing prices, differing advice, differing cranes and the owners all with differing economic, physiological, political and psychological qualities. Who do you trust? It is a lot of information to sift if you can bear it. It's all too much really, like the internet. 2 were booked, 1 too expensive and vague, so far 3 have betrayed my trust thus far.  The internet is untrustworthy, so is arriving by antique bicycle, smelling, chatting, thinking, doing the math's, shaking hands. What's my point?  As someone uncomfortable with this new smartphone reality, I'm strangely defending the democratic ideal of the internet! Because reality sends us message mad too! The marbled details and personal traumas of individuals are wildly complex, on the ground and on any device. 
 
It seems to me the greatest crimes that are impacting our fluxing present are the centuries of insulting misinformation that for most of us has become intolerable, clearly wrong and totally untrustworthy. This is why we share pictures of REAL kittens and REAL pasta, for us it's a new royal feeling, suddenly we exist! Finally, we can show our silly selves? Little solo brands that resonate, sing sweetly and get trusted, or ignored and unfriended.  
 
What is a trusted brand now? I can't think of one. Greggs maybe? Hot pastry with very salty goo inside. Sometimes it's cold though, and the amount of filling varies a bit! Mercedes used to build solid, reliable cars, now it sells bad design for old reputation prices. Brand United Kingdom?  It had a colonial slave boom, and made quality engineered products, solid, aesthetic, trusted. Now it makes flakey pastry broadcasts, and very little else. It can only spin itself as colourful temperate museum. At least that is honest.
 
Brands understand trust as notion, they build their reputations and empires on it. After the brand is planted and slowly grown, often making a loss, they take the piss and milk the profit harvest. They get lazy, rest on their laurels and the brand fades. You stop trusting them.
 
It's hard to trust anything or anyone now. What about a banana? Too straight, small, or green/brown? Is it fair trade? Can we know that really? Is the plastic recyclable, what does that mean? That it burns well? We have to trust our senses, our pockets, the importer, and the logic that a business would fail if it openly lied, surely? More complex to trust are the things in boxes advertised on the internet, we only have surface labels, and maybe some seller stars, so we check the sellers brand, do we trust them? Like watching a five-star shit film, we gamble and lose half the time. Can we trust our friends and the people we love? Yes, for about 7 years, then they get lazy, rest on their laurels, they've learnt how to sell to you, they get lazy, they betray you. You go elsewhere.  
 
Products today look nice but they turn out to be shit. People today look right but they turn out to be shit. Both are hard to get your money back for, without serious self-harm. There are some trusted things and people that are still decent, and can be trusted: they are usually made slowly and with honour. These people and places have become rare, they are usually selling wax jackets, brogues, or a £300 umbrella. Because our marketplace changes so fast, and you are mainly not loaded or interested in an English aristocrat uniform, you are more likely to gamble elsewhere, and lose. You must use the empirical approach to trust things and the people you don't know. When you are poor, the gamble gets even more risky. Trust becomes very thin on the ground, unless you are very creative you will buy, meet and eat rejects, and you will consequently shout about it at your family in the library. There will be very few people and places you can trust. You are a pawn, designed to fall and disappear early.  
 
Yesterday a friend and I agreed that our allotment gardens were the one place that we felt OK, and safe. That we trusted those bits of ragged land more than anything else we knew was surprising. The sun is always too hot or too cold, it’s always too wet or dry and things just die for almost no reason. It's a wicked gamble growing things, but there is an underlying truth, that does not need to brand itself, shout or tweet. Everything wants to grow and be happy, and it does so without religious law, money, and politics, and it continues to be generous, intriguing and beautiful, without you or anyone else's trusted input.
 
 
........... 
 
I wrote this start about six months ago, and remember getting pretty confused about what I was saying and feeling lost at sea, so I bedded it as sunken thoughts. For me; big, swarming, changing subjects can take a long time to get hold of. I am much more comfortable talking about what is familiar and shimmering before me, and writing short, half comedies about it. But after re reading I think this is not such an awful start, and worth a try because I think this subject will need editing for me and others for a long time to come, and probably in court. 

I was prompted to look at it again by a radio debate with 4 journalistic behemoths on this similar squirming subject. All well-bred, slightly slick, slightly slimy but fairly well trusted: so I listened. They were typically moany about the internet, branding it a haven of misinformation and SHOUTY WHITE MEN. As I had written, I found this to be an annoying characterization, and horribly dismissive of the democratizing potential of this new cubist information tool. I could understand their frustration as students of politics and economics to be continually held to account by drunken electricians, but from here it felt like more a defence of sheltered priestly doctrine and old power structures. With more hacked accounts, fake identities, linked by kitten pictures, fake news and the sheer sea madness of it all, I think the future problem will not be with the SHOUTY little PEOPLE, but with the easy corruption of all messengers. It could be these suited and smug political talking heads will regain their moral authority, power and trust, but only when they have put as much journalistic research into the poor and shouty as they have into the rich and shouty.
 
NJ2019:(

O TRAINER GOD

Oxford Street

Cave walls 

Plastic jewels

Animal shapes 

Crazed ergonomics

Tech specs

Tensile strengths

O trainer god

Super cool

Colour combos

£160 clown feet

acid rave shitness

all trippy techno

If only governments

and bendy artists

could simulate

trainer creators

playing with layers

of washable weaves

shaded neon honeycomb

rubberiod Martian

running platforms

O you lucky feet

I'm in Eden

fondling forest flowers

it's a hothouse education

you need a sporting phd

to survive without sweating

much harder than any gallery visit

I've seen much worse painting

anguished multi media sculptures

tattoo teen trainee

smiles hi boss!

which means old fart

bright hydrated face

You need to be fit at

SPORTSDIRECT

six pack skate park hip

fierce femur hoop jumper

icons of urban church

sneer down

like stained glass

APOSTLE ADVERTS

if you're not cool

we'll kick your ass

I'm too unfit for this

but when i look around

all middle aged fatties

Sweatshop indifferent

trying to jog from death 

ugly and scared

lost in leisure garden

tendons about to snap

these trainers are toxic

but lively and delicious

shove your out of date

plate of meat

inside fresh

fruity beauty

its affordable foot sex

temporarily bouncy

A leather shoe

is Westminster debate

A trainer is sweaty fuck

try to not think too much

if you spend your

long beard time

thinking

then you should trot

your brittle little

donkey hooves out

survive unbranded

old and unattractive

but light and clean

irreligious moral

medal winning

NJ2019

LONDON CAESARS

London is cleansed

by smart symbols

organic meals

green bins

dream city

scoffing

jogging

binning

mountains of crap

go somewhere else

it's hard work

seeing the shows

rich dinner mincing

with plastic vanities

it doesn’t look like

black cloud cathedral

dark cinema dystopia

It's roman perfection

with bin lorry whiffs

Lexiting the pornhub

But only if you notice

the bio mechanics

of st George's

wobbly sense of self

bouncy castles

full of tat

they all knew here

EVERYTHING

OBVS

LIKE DECADES AGO

American psycho

was a parody

not a bible

that hedge fund managers

wasted at earth festivals

while bleeping gold cards

in Nirvana shirt is perverse

they're uber aware

of all I’m saying

so no need to discuss

some disgusting flab

that has crashed

dying

recycling

behind some over sized

Italianate olive tree pots

outside the gallery

Americans laugh

at the acting school

megaphoning

their self honours

healthy monkey troop

Trumping violently

healthy colon

favourite ghostbuster scenes

near rainbow flag

no black or white

beige or grey

poor folk here

some organic flexing

health freak says

she's not frightened

will survive

food shortages

jogs off with

purity water bottle

3 wise monkeys

sit with lattes

every 10 feet

lining the streets

like those people in westerns

net curtain twitching

not stopping the baddies

head down thumbing

bleating out

web chat

coffee froth

adverts stirred

into adverts

chewing adverts

spitting adverts

all this exhausting

info makes them

evolved

it’s liberating

glittering

immune

London

Ceasars

organic laurels

hard won

inherited

lifted thumb

NJ2019:(