What a fix! From hot-water bottle days I stretched out – alone – to find an entire industry and economy, a civilisation, hierarchical and clambering, its apex annual awards for struggles with identity and rewarding ethnicity.
But the texts! Never had mankind been so blessed. Production was uncontrolled, except by mentors & experts, throwing rope-ladders down to mendicants & supplicants, thrashing in the icy waters.
I got one foot out, one spidery hand onto a rung. Someone in Covent Garden grabbed my thinning thatch – I was saved – but ideology unsound sucked me back down, beneath the dying swimmers, into the depths where madmen fought over the pillaged wreckage.
Identical yet bigger and better, the firework displays far above, the lectureships and Masonic networks, tentacles twitching through our lassoed culture, strangling any single voice.
I have taught ‘London’ too many times not to know the harlot’s curse, not to smash my brains out on those palace walls.
Oh you bastards, hypocrites, witches – your treasures are toilet paper for odourless faeces.
Paul Sutton
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