Ritual Landscape

There's a dude wigging out under heavy headphones. Little drum rolls and neck jerks. It's a cheering sight. I have been known to throw a few furtive hand shapes myself from time to time, before an inner voice urges decorum.

One day when I am sans marbles, 89 and still attempting to download the entire world, I shall toothlessly and gleefully approach young ladies, offering them my waxy earpods: "Hey sweetie, lemme lay some hip tunes on ya. This here's the latest arctic blubbercore from the Ice Jockeys."

(Of course, I will talk like a sordid Robert Crumb character.)

"Get away from me grandad or I'll slice your wizened ears off with my razor and you'll be jamming your earpods up your anal sphincter."

(Of course, that is how young ladies will talk in the future.)

Even then I'll only look 58 at most.

T-shirts: "You'll do" (m) vs "Hands off" (f).

I don't know how we aren't all wearing soft helmets. A little micro climate going on - moisture, aircon, mini screens, earphones. It'd take a few brave trendsetters and then they'd spread like billy-o wildfire. Ladies would like them because they would keep their lovely hair in place. Walking down those steps to change lines in the morning, a lord god almighty gust roars up and sends the hair whizzing off in all directions at once. My hairdo is sober and restrained to say the least, but the havoc that savage wind causes the more elaborately coiffed! Therefore, the personal helmet please. Would also operate as umbrella, fashion statement, protective headgear in the event of an unseemly brawl.

Confession: I often fall asleep on the way home. All right, so I fall asleep. It's not big or clever I know. You don't need a degree in brain surgery which doesn't exist to fall asleep. Once I fell asleep in the back of a car. I didn't hear the last of it for five years. I still fail to understand why. I mean, I was drunk. At least I wasn't driving the car. It was late and I merely dozed off, there was no yobbish hoo-hah (note: check spelling) or hideous vomiting. Why does one feel like such a fool for falling asleep in public. It must be deep within. You dropped off at your cave entrance while watching out for sabre-toothed tigers. You mong. And you ate all the berries. I mean, can't you do anything right?

- Have you renewed your Oyster card. Have you?
- Well, what happened was...
- Have you?
- No, I had a bit of trouble at the machine, like...
- What you were too thick to work it out?
- No, I got confused and there was a[n impatient] crowd behind me [oppressing me with their imagined fury at my dithering] and...
- Oh really. You are a megalithic tool. What are you?
- Look I don't think it's fair...
- I leave you here with a primitive earthenware pot full of vitamin-enriched berries and a strip of chewy biltong substitute, campfire ablaze in the mysterious prehistoric night, and all you have to do is keep one eye out for sabre-toothed tigers which some experts say has been extinct for 20,000 years...
- I have something to confess. I am a time traveller.
- Oh, that's good, I haven't heard that one before. A time traveller is it. That's the lamest excuse I've ever heard.
- I'm not meant to be here. It was an accident. I come from the year 1974.
- Oh yes 1974, that's what they all say. Hello I've come from 1974, that's why I can't be expected to renew my Oyster card. You cunt.

Today's rich feast of celebrity lookalikes: Vanessa from Six Feet Under, Nicolas Anelka, the 35-year-old Joan Rivers, Faria Alam after disastrous cosmetic surgery, Adrian Mole's dad, Robert Carlyle, Tim from The Office but the American one, Jamie Foxx as Bundini in Ali, Clarissa Dickson-Wright, the 19-year-old Andy Warhol, the 26-year-old Terry Wogan, the 135-year-old Nelson Mandela, my Uncle Charlie, the ghost of Harry Houdini and the corpse of Pete Doherty.

Thought of the week: context is all. You know that thing of 150 people being the maximum number an organisation or community can sustain before it starts to fall apart. There must be a magic number for when one is on an underground train or platform, taking into account relative temperatures, square feet per carriage, whether you're sitting down or not.

Thought for today: at least I'm not pregnant.

Free rental with 3 tubes:

A cement mixer, thought they'd become extinct around the time I did, bearing the legend "Jim'll mix it." Ker ching.

Hunky builder dude sporting plaid some say check shorts - Sir! on a cold and frosty morning? It would look like to an impartial observer that you have forgotten to put on your trahsers. Or are actually starring in a porn movie in one of those dodgy garages round the back.

Yeah you walking like a dragged legged hooded faced spacko.

Yeah you marry me marry me now. With champanski and depravitee etc.

Hulloo white jacket over pink pullover. Silver wavy hair. You are Swiss Toni.

Hey you don't seem to mind our bare arms pressing. This is the most erotic experience I've had since waking up next to myself two hours ago.

Time stops. Several times a day. I am under the thumb of time. We all are, but it's more pressing and URGENT in big fat letters in my case. Oh the yellow bruises on my tender brain.

Coming out here again, the narrow twist towards the turnstiles, walls stripped awaiting paint due sometime in 2009, silver foil and pipework, marker penned instructions. Apologies and redirections. Outside the building programme continues, ever upwards, more compact. Attracting the low paid to invest in a future. Get on the ladder but don't think about swinging a cat or being able to have a night out for the next six years.

Kneejerk glance at the next bus indicator. No matter what time I arrive or leave it's always nine minutes, which is eight minutes too long. As soon as they leave the station they're on their phones. Not being able to get a signal for half an hour must do their pretty little heads in. It's important to let people know where you are.

Tell me what the weather's like.

And what you're having for tea tonight.

So you keep on walking, and it's the same old same old. Repetition repetition repetition. Mocked by the gleaming stadium, tempted by the quick and dirty takeaway.

Groups of youths congregate. A threesome has the aroma of coal tar residue stitched into a bridal veil mingled with discount soap powder from the Kurkraine. A foursome has the rumour of diced marshmallow roasted in an elf's chamberpot. I'm so sweet you could dunk me in your tea cup. Oww, it's hot!

A pale and net curtain'd room, vague sunlight with a lemony waft. Spread across the unfinished floor was a length of wallpaper.

Carefully, I lifted it by one corner and angled it away from the brightness. Emily said this used to be a chapel, but I hadn't spoken to Emily in 12 years. There was a pattern on the wallpaper which I struggled to make sense of. For centuries, they used to gather and pray here.

The combination of citrus fruits and the active corpuscles of airborne sunlight convinced me that the wallpaper contained a mysterious Shroud of Turin type pattern. While trying to get a better view, my left eye was speared by an amplified ray of light from my gold watch. I glanced down and saw that I'd been away from my desk for 297 minutes. They might begin to miss me soon.

- You probably think of me as some sort of damp Ophelia.
- I'm sure I have no preconceived notions.
- All pre-Raphaelite and Cocteau Twins.
- Your hair is kind of crinkly.
- People like you don't even realise that people like me possess human form.
- And who, exactly, are people like you?
- My name is Minerva.

She reclined upon the wallpaper in some sort of corny diaphanous costume, probably a fire hazard. I could have sworn that a silver tiara nestled in her wild strawberry hair. I mumbled something about having to get back to work but she gave no indication that she'd heard me.

A couple of hours later, I sneaked back in. I exhumed a disturbed sigh. She was performing some sort of gymnastic exercise which involved her resting on her shoulders with her legs in the air, back against the wall, diaphanous costume asunder.

- It's you again. Can't you see I'm busy?
- Doing what?
- Horga.
- Horga. Is that like yoga?
- No it fuck ing isn't. You're so ignorant.
- I beg your pardon. I've never heard of it.
- Well, I've never tried it before and it's a right bas tard. Can you help me get down?
- You're not as ethereal as you were earlier.
- All the blood's drained from my luscious midland regions to my partially crushed head. It has had a cheapening effect. You could probably take advantage of me if you were that sort of person.

Let's get a few things straight:

Is it too bright, too loud, too hot? Yes it's too bright, too loud, too hot.
Do you struggle to stay awake? Yes I struggle to stay awake.
Are you listening to some dreary old man's music? Yes I am listening to some dreary old man's music.
Are you checking people out? Yes I am checking people out.
Are they worth it? No, tonight they are not worth it.
Are you too hot and bothered in the manner of a menopausal woman to concentrate on reading a book? Yes.
Excuse me? Yes, I am too hot and bothered in the manner of a menopausal woman to concentrate on reading a book.
Is it doing your tiny little skull in that you have to do this day after day after day? Yes it is doing my tiny little skull in that I have to do this day after day after day.
Are you too dense or too cowardly to think of a way out? Both.
Is it that time of your life already? Yes it is that time of my life already.
Are you promising yourself takeaways and booze as a reward for surviving another day? Yes I am promising myself takeaways and booze as a reward for surviving another day.
Would you be missed? No I would not be missed.
Will you be doing the same again tomorrow? Yes I will be doing the same again tomorrow.

Re: the other week's lesson five posts back. You know what you are.

Please tell me.

You are a 'neurotic impostor'. It's the new thing! Feel free to add it to your list of psychological accomplishments.

What someone (not me) should do is trace the impact of the fastest person off the train, the path they take in relation to the people who follow them. Where they lead, a trail is established. A racing line if you will. What traits characterise the 'fastest person off the train'? A natural born leader or an individualist? Someone who lines themself up with the exit, ready to leap off and head towards the escalator or interchange. They believe they have a right to get where they're going faster than you. Will you naturally trust and follow the path they take?

Sometimes you get frustrated by a line of people who are clearly all blindly following the person in front and who are all taking a most inopportune racing line. Can this sort of conformist malfunction be related to wider social issues?

I'm feeling rather sorry for myself with my bandaged finger. Look, this guy's wearing shiny tracksuit trousers to accommodate one of those snowboot leg casts. Otherwise he's all suited up, struggling into the office like a brave little soldier.

What chance of spiritual elevation in the fiery furnace.

And what chance of you - yes you - moving your fat fucking legs in a bit so I have some space. What is it with these people who spread their legs as far apart as possible and refuse to move them for anyone rude enough to sit next to them? Well, I'm going to win this one. Gradually, he gets the message that I am someone you don't mess with. He rummages in his bag for a coat. He puts on a coat - at last, he's going. No, he just wanted to put his coat on. It is 150 degrees.

I try to transmit evil get away from me now rays but he's too dense to pick them up. Surely you want to get off at this stop? Everyone else is.

Wait, he's rummaging in his bag again. Oh great, he's fished out some religious literature. Look mate, Jesus would respect his neighbour's leg room. Now, what was that? Don't you start lady. She's kicked me in the ankle. I'll accept that it was an accident and not retaliate with a swift jab to the ribs, but I expect there will be a murmur of apology. A sniff in my general direction.

I said, I expect there will some tiny acknowledgment that you kicked me. That you made uninvited contact with my right ankle.

I'm waiting...

I'm getting off soon...

It's not going to happen is it.

I'll tell you what you are. All you people. Shall I tell you?

Ending up in A&E for being a cack-handed incompetent does not make you any more attractive or interesting. Tragic gardening accident my arse.

Clearly, you can still type.

Maybe your condition will deteriorate overnight and you'll really have an excuse to stay at home. Here's hoping.

Yes it's you I'm talking to.

Germs. No one mentions germs these days, they were very 1970s. Or maybe that's just me. I think they're overdue a revival. I'm largely resistant, good survival training for the immune system being in the foxhole for 18 years. In the hotbed of festering disease, I am the cockroach.

How exactly does one go about fomenting an outbreak of wilful sexual depravity on the Piccadilly Line at 9 a.m.? I imagine it would be beyond the combined efforts of Aleister Crowley, Caligula and Leslie Philips.

There's a remote chance I'll be arrested this time next week on offences against the Telecommunications Act 1986 (they'll be trumped-up of course), just in case anyone misses me.

I think I just invented the world.

Unused:

This week's lesson: protective layers that take two years to build cell by cell can be stripped away while you sleep.

You're living too much in the future, you're living too much in the past. This is why the here and now has been feeling increasingly unreal. Shouldn't even have to spell this out. You've been speaking to people and you have no idea what you're saying. You lose your train half

Way and gaze into space like you expect some

one else to finish the sentence, to explain what you might have been trying to say, if you were someone who had something to say.

And when they speak, you quickly lose all interest in their words and zoom in on the shape of their ear or gaze upon their sparkling shoe.

Like that song said: you've been getting away with it. All. Your. Life.

Don't kid yourself. You probably have been found out, numerous times, just that people are too scared or selfish to say anything, do something. Hello, has anybody else noticed we've got a freak here? Can we call security and have him removed? But this never happens. Ignore the baby elephant boy.

You're strayed so far from yourself lately, you need to put down a trail. The string method. On the other hand, who wants to get back to being themselves. Head deeper into the cave.

Like another song said: keep on walking and don't look back.

Unposted:

Back in my jugs again. Countless minor computations and adjustments allow me to skip past the dawdlers, and bodyswerve the erratics. Today they are armed with: Kleenex and a friendly word of advice. Billboards are flogging me golf, phones and hotels. The anger management poster makes me puce with wrath. Who are you to tell me not to be angry! It is second only to the Lemsip one urging you to drag your diseased carcass into the office before you lose your job, you snivelling weakling. I can't hear you baby, I'm not listening to you man. And all the people think, look at him go. What an Olympian article that one is. Rest your skull on the rubber armrest as you roll up the silver-tongued treadmill to the fifth level underground. Oh the damage I could do with this rolled-up newspaper. And all the people sing. He was walking with a lobster on a pale blue ribbon.

Unposted:

Jack. This is hardly groundbreaking news but most people really are simply ghastly. I mean just look at them. The lynx blinged-up Big Bruv rejects on their way in from the outer zones are one thing, but the organic luvvies surprised me by sparking a soaring redzone of visceral scarification. You people cannot be real.

Being Eng, which I pretend not to be whenever poss, we are naturally infused with class and status. I would like to be a member of intelligentsia class, like Martin once said on telly, but I am a bit thick and lazy to be honest. An impartial observer would slap a disparaging, firm-but-fair 'lower middle' sticker on my chippy pasty blank invisible face. I eat Twiglets, I watch too much sports and quiz shows and by the way fuck you.

Of course it all comes back to YOU. Are you not paying attention? Obv no, I am surrounded by a likeness of margina geeks, all much of a class-ed mmm-ness. Plus I last had a social life in 1933, Brideshead Revisited and all that.

I am I urgently need of a social upgrade, I am falling so far behind. I am, however, aware that butterz, in teen argot, means minging aka rough, and well done to me, Vicky Pollard, for putting six, hang on, eight, or is it eleven, commas in this sentence.

Unplayed list:
Blondie - I Touch Myself
Bob Dylan - Stuck in the Middle With You
Eric Clapton - Baker Street
Rod Stewart - Bette Davis Eyes
Johnny Cash - Big Bad John
Neil Young - Horse With No Name
Clash - Come on Eileen
Buzzcocks - Turning Japanese
Kinks - My Sharona
Simon and Garfunkel - Crimson and Clover
Beatles - Live and Let Die
Dusty Springfield - I Can See Clearly Now

It's like the popular TV drama lost down there. Except with even worse dialogue and less evidence of well-rounded characters. As each week goes by, Ii become more convinced that we are all in death's waiting room and we just haven't realised it yet. That's a bad thing to say and I apologise. I'll carry on drifting from platform to platform, up and down escalators and through ticket barriers like a weepy ghost. No one's coming to our rescue.

I'd be one of those characters you see in the background, wandering along the beach looking dazed. I found my suitcase in the wreckage but I've lost the key - can you help?

I'd be no bleeding use on a desert island. I can't start a fire or build a house out of twigs. I'd be drinking sea water and howling at the moon by lunchtime.

All the action is elsewhere. The alpha male fights, the sexual tension, the flashbacks and subplots. I repel drama.

This week I am a magnet for BFCs. They lumber on and beeline across to me, getting up close and personal with their sausage dog limbs. The giganticists of the world are in league against me.

T-Mobile > chewing gum. We Will Rock You > chewing gum. Pedigree Chum > chewing gum. Jamie Cullum > chewing gum. Last Minute > chewing gum.

There is no more distinction between down there and up here. You won't rise above the sunken state until you forget yourself.

In the morning you catch sight of a face in the mirror.

Oh, not you again. Don't you ever go away?

I am overwhelmed by inner sludge. Please insert new batteries. The mental effort to stay awake is crkkckrkckkzzz.

I feel very deprived that I shall not live to see the advent of dream photography. It is predicted to be introduced by the year 2135 and even with all the medical advances and animal organs in the world I'm not going to be able to hang around until then. There was a delightful scene last night when I was driven "up north" and saw some spectacular sights, such as Queen Victoria the large black slug in Piccadilly Manchester, the Bradford Steps (they're 800m high you know), the Pontefract Grande fairground (wear a mask, enter at your peril) and so on. I would have liked to have taken some stills from that trip and posted them on Flickr.

I gawped at the legendary sights from the back seat and regretted that my digital camera was in my suitcase, which was in the boot (aka trunk). The awake part of me looked forward to what will surely be man (and woman) kind's glory - extracting visions from the electrical impulses that forge dreams. Of course, tests will first be carried out on mice, then rats, then guinea pigs and rabbits and otters before they realise that none of them dream. Finally they'll fiddle about with monkeys - and what crazy scenes they'll get back from our simian cousins! Following that, there's some shady research on long-term prisoners, terrorist suspects and various human detritus who fancy earning themselves a few quid in exchange for mild brain damage. Eventually, a simple nano-operation will allow everyman (and woman) to implant themselves with dream-rendering technology. It's not strictly a recording device, but let us not concern ourselves with the differences now.

Finally, ITV will be offering five million pan-euros for footage of your most hilarious dreams. But I plan to be well dead at least 100 years before all this shit happens.

- You can't go out looking like that. What will people think?
- Well I am going out. And I don't care what will people think.
- You look terrible, all crap and old.
- I am infected by crapness and oldness. The mirror doesn't lie. Neither does the calendar. Or the government.
- For the sake of humanity, you must remain indoors. The general public shouldn't be subjected to such visions of gruesome decay. It's tantamount to a slap in the face for common decency.
- Who asked you anyway?
- If I don't tell you, then who will?
- Quite right. But I'm still going out. épater le bourgeois and all that. Shake them out of their complacency by forcing them to look at my hideous old ruin of a face...
- Don't forget your hair...
- Thank you.
- ... and clothes.
- That's enough!

The regulars (the galloping reverend, the Andre 3000s, Limpy Lou et al) have all disappeared. I don't think they'll be back.

Today they are reading: nothing. It is a fact that no one has been caught reading a book in the last month.

They have been eating smelly food though. A sweet and sour Chinese dish that scorched my nasal passages from five seats away. I savoured the orangeness of it deep in my grizzly innards. The perpetrator was excused as she was very attractive. If I ruled the world, you'd all live to regret it.

In other news, I have stood next to a succession of booze-reeking bodily odorous men in the lift. A good level of service has been maintained. A number of celebrity lookalikes have been noted - Gary Barlow, thingy out of that thing, and Henry the Second (1154-89).