daily bread

The sick follow each other in narrow lines. In the car parks, the supermarkets, the post offices, in the street even, pursuing bargainville bacchanalia in queues for knock-off trainers or furniture, each staring at the back of each others' heads.

The entirety of my life has been lived in some vast forest of grey browns and blacks. I say forest because it offers an old-fashioned image, suggests to my mind being five years old, climbing scrubby trees in local bottle-nonce Lambeth parks. The only place I can place my life in is a TV set, live, passsive spectators sitting, watching, cheering on or jeering at the unreality through various unsubtle prompts. Concrete carpets, streetlamps contorted painfully into hideous geometries – trees artificially planted and primped to sell suburban comfort to affluent motorists from Woking and Guildford. We have yet to design maps for these territories.

Sicknote sister denounces unknown babbler as ham-fisted rancid-reeking hypochondriac waster. I tell her that we are far more interested in the affairs and intrigues of our friends than our enemies. And who makes a more bitter enemy than our gaze-evading former brother?

Sam Hallam languishes in some unknown jail. Meanwhile, big cars seep past, pursued by vociferous mopeds, punctuating the squawks and murmurs of the older ones, congregating in cafes and pubs. Populations laid off from life, they sit around half-blinking with full bellies, unable to open bottles even or hold conversations without losing their temper. There's still a buzz, a rush, a squeal of excitement, bigger things brushing past you. I realise I've been looking long-sightedly trying to convert the dull community movements into picaresque vistas. The effort of shrinking my frail eyes to short-sighted travel is more than my weedy body can handle.

It has yet to be observed that nitrogen has very deleterious effects on the happiness of hominids. Take for instance Horace. It's a light June evening, and Horace (or Andy as he's called in the Red Cow – though they call him Delly in the Clifton Arms – our man, let us say)...is walking to the Costcutter, Nunhead way. It's a little far out but it's good for his digestion, he says. You won't know this man – he is not among the Daily Mirror's People of Britain – but you may be assured that he possessed a peculiar way of holding his hands, gesturing only ever with the right hand, the left holding up his spine, talon outstretching revealing granite-like chapped fingers, close-cropped hair with sprigs of grey about the ears, pot-bellied and baggy-eyed, one of those blank baseball caps that say something nothing like USA, artificers of anonymity, anonymisers.

He wore the same brown felt jacket. To some he was married but his wife was ill (diabetic – obese – locked in), others guessed (for the man left little impression) that he was some dour, asexual misogynist, who found satisfaction in ejaculating into the hands of prostitutes or playing cards. Here was a person who could not be called an unhappy man. He was sixty seven years old. Nitrogen had turned him into an impotent and empty-headed sot, a wheezing windbag, a man troubled by sadness, e.g. thoughts of lost lovers, his children's children that he'd never meet, or when he pushed his pregnant sister down a staircase. The air was so light that evening, as he glided down Evelina road, wasted on stale guinness and cro. In the midst of his ecstatic reveries, he was near flying.

It is a fact only known by perhaps six or seven world-weary malcontents that south London has the most shocking and dramatic sunsets in the northern hemisphere (I cannot speak for the south). Horace was not aware of this, but the tranquil breeze made him for a second suspend the weary assumption that his bunioned feet were touching the ground. Hold on here friends, I'm going to have to pause this sun-licked narrative to explain the central premise:

A. Horace is dreadful

B. Horace breathes in air

C. Air is mostly made up of Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon and Carbon Dioxide [1]

.: Therefore breathing in Nitrogen makes Horace dreadful

This premise can be extended for all living beings which, despite their beautiful colours, movements, sighs and affections, also tend to be dreadful. We are all bloody dreadful. This is a real shame, and I would apologise to my sister, my brother, my father and my mother, but they are dreadful too. I have since created an idol to apologise my dreadfulness to, but recent theological analysis has revealed this idol contains the flaws of his maker. I am sorry reader.

[1. Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide have a purpose in respiration for living beings, and make up about 21% of the atmosphere. Nitrogen however serves no immediate benefit, other than retaining heat and forming the bulk (78%) of Earth's atmosphere. We can be grateful to nitrogen for providing the conditions for our existence, however this is not the perfect trade we might have hoped for, as for each and every second we are in a state of hunger and anxiety.]