Ginger Magnum

I sat in a bath holding my breath. Half my face submerged in the water. I stared along the glassy surface, at my feet. They both stared back at me, obviously unimpressed. Occasionally, a fleshy seal would break the surface, bob around a bit, then sink back down to look for fish. The beat of my heart from the depths caused ripples of life to run away from me. Feet are quite badly underrated. I wonder how many people on this planet are staring at their feet? I wonder how many people in the Universe are staring at their feet? It is just a twist that my bath is where it is in the Universe. It could just as easily be in a different spiral arm, on a different spherical rock orbiting a different star. Our planet, the third from the sun, has perfect physical and chemical credentials for sustaining life, for evolution, for me to have a luke-warm bath. The sun, the source of all our power, is a star, not a Matt Damon or Nicole Kidman, but more an Andy Peters or Julia Sommerville. It is a pretty

I went blackberry picking yesterday. The sun was high and licked my back with its burning rays. I hadn't been blackberrying since I was little, but it is a difficult skill to lose; find a spot, spot the berry, grab it gently and pull. Much like meeting a girl in fact and, the more I think about it, the more it is obvious that both are innate drives. I climbed over a fence and ducked under some barbed wire and pioneered my way through brambles and stingers. I was wearing shorts and flip-flops and the heat had jumped me, held me down and ripped off my shirt. Perfect garb for a spot of off-road foraging. Then, scratched, stung and sweating, I stopped and gazed in wonder, true wonder, at the weight of fruit before me. Frantically, like a primitive man crossed with a Roman emperor, I picked and gorged furiously. Entranced by the motorway hum of the flies and contemplating the gastronomic results of my labour I lost two hours of my day. Footsteps on the path behind dragged me back to re

It seems, that it is only possible to truly appreciate something when it is gone. The impact of an experience and its effect on you, can only be felt when it is no longer around. Your soul can feel the warmth of a handful of sun-baked sand, long after the last grain has tumbled between your fingers. It is impossible to let the wonder of existence be. One has to cherish each and every moment and attempt to remember that one breath is no more or less sustaining than the next. Scream. Roar. Run as fast as you can, until your lungs want to ignite and your teeth throb. Then run some more. Try and notice everything. The secrets are in the detail. Grab your friends by the flesh and kiss them, squeeze them until you can feel their heart beating. Look them in the eye and tell them how happy you are that they are your friends. My Great Grandfather's grave reads; 'Work while it is day, for the night cometh when no man shall work'. Word.

How do you know when you’ve reached the bottom? That point on the curve when up is the only option. The sun’s warmth soothes the skin, but fails to reach the soul. The chattering goes on, but it’s almost too subtle to hear. Synapses fire. The words don’t linger, but pass like a pain, the intensity of which is difficult to accurately recall. Like hearing a random note from a piece of music and trying to imagine the whole. Disconnected thoughts and movements. Echoes of existence. A random charade. It won’t be long now. It can’t be long now. There’s talk of a visit from the old man’s friend. There won’t be much for him to take. Just a sack full of dried up old twigs tied up with a cough. Someone wise, somewhere pleasant decides that you have no say in what gets done to you. No choice. Nowhere to hide. When all you want to do is disappear. The ticket’s been bought, but the train is late. The driver’s intercom stopped working hours ago and the station master’s on his lunch. Dying for a pee

This is a new watercolour entitled Picked.

" Arguably, J.K. Rowling's books can be placed in a lineage of British art that includes the film If , the Molesworth books and Pink Floyd's The Wall , in which adults represent forces of totalitarian repression, crushing the anarchic juvenile spirit. This romantic notion makes perfect sense until you hit the age of twenty and realise the grown-ups were right all along: children are insufferable freeloading little Napoleans, who strut around the place as if the world owes them a living and, if left unattended, instantly turn their surroundings into a cross between Mogadishu and Thorpe Park. Someone should have slippered the magic out of Potter on day one." - Justin Quirk

"I always mistrust everything which I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known." -Michelangelo Antonioni,

"Our national obsession with the likes of Paris Hilton is not the problem everyone thinks it is. It is just a symptom of- and maybe a cure for- a deeper malaise. In a society no longer characterised by tight-knit communities, celebrity gossip serves a useful function by providing a way for us to connect with others. Just as we would a neighbour or friend, we judge and dissect these celebrity's lives as a means to justify our own, reinforce our life choices and share our opinions with others. The fact that Hilton may be a rather vapid individual is beside the point; it's the various reactions she prompts- from pity and scorn to fury- that make her interesting." Gregory Rodriguez

It was a good week For The invisible hand, after a Transcendental Meditation group based in Iowa vowed to raise the Dow Jones industrial average to 17,000 by sheer force of their focused mental energy. “We’re not trying to convince anyone of anything,” said Bob Roth of the Invincible America Assembly, “we’re just doing it.”

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than a twitch in the limb of a corpse.

Today is the third of August 2007. nothing happened. It mainly rained. I looked outside and i saw that someone had set my old school on fire. I made a cup of tea and watched it fill the sky with burnt homework and grafittied desks. Nobody called the fire brigade. I have been sitting down for months. I no longer walk with sticks though, preferring to lurch around spastically like a newly born giraffe. Girls dig it. This was a corner and i turned it smiling.