The Boredom Artist

THE BOREDOM Artist was set to retire. He would give one more performance. London’s Festival Hall was sold out as a result. Last chance to see. One-thousand seven-hundred and ten people, people who liked and appreciated what he did, would go with Dave to a place he had never gone before, though midnight, past the hour-mark. A clock behind them counted down.

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My Body Maps Political Forces

It was four years since the attempted self-immolation by my body. Three years since my body was named The Idiot. Two years since The Idiot had any contact with sister, mother or father. A year and a half since The Idiot’s prayers had been answered. In the wrong way. 

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Lucky Day in Hell

“Who are… Do I know you…?” Jake was puzzled. The voice came from a woman, tall, olive skin with dark, greying curly hair. She was standing just inside the street light, on the corner of the alleyway, leading from the High Street to Dyvenor Road. After a moment of figuring this out Jake realised she was holding him, gently but firmly by the shoulder. “What do you want…?” 

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My Body's Claims, Verified

The mansion had to be more than twenty thousand square feet, with five wings; it took up two acres. In the backyard, a giant infinity pool overlooking downtown L.A., a jacuzzi big enough for a football team, an industrial-size outdoor kitchen that could feed two hundred people, thirty-two-seat table made of rough-cut red wood with an eight-inch-thick top, three brick fireplaces, eight open firepits, two pizza ovens, and more trees and flowerbeds than in a Vegas resort.

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In the Marshes

“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”

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An Attic in Prague, 1939

Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.

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The Rite of Odobena

It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.

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Concerning the Churchill Incident

This morning, Thursday the 14th of April 2022, at 6am, two more statues of Winston Churchill appeared in the north-east corner of Parliament Square. At present, there are four such statues. This is, so far, an exponential development that requires immediate attention. If this continues unabated, by the end of this week, there will be over 280 million statues of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.

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London is the Reason

A man is sat up straight in a chair, alone in a dark room, at a table, under direct, strong light from above. He is somewhere between impassive and defiant, staring ahead at nothing. A door opens. No light is cast in from outside. Two figures, both men judging by the sound of their footsteps, move into the room. The Man in the Chair does not respond to this. The door closes.

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My Body's Revenge Plan

I also knew that The Idiot was systematic. All those stops at gas stations on trip number 29, when the gas tank needed no gas, all those run-throughs through rest stops, scanning the parked cars … all the time that it was taking away from doing its job, while on the job … it was looking for that menacing red Dodge Charger. It was doggedly, systematically looking for revenge. Of a petty kind. So much energy and so many heart beats spent on such a petty mission. 

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