The Birth of Guerilla Accounting ...

... or The Rise and Rise of The Mary Quant Triplets.



A scandal in this house - this school - something happening at last - nothing really juicy since that plane came down and Stuart started smoking with all that jet fuel around - an idiot and a hero at the same time. What now though. Only hints on the telegraph, the ears at the staff room door. Maybe I should find an excuse and go up there myself. The head still has that book of drawings, I could go and ask for it back. He's usually there with the rest of them on Fridays but might there be an atmosphere that keeps him in his own little room. What to do mein freund? Anyone else coming up there? It's so big it'll make the School Magazine if they let it. I could do the drawings if Leyton doesn't want to do them. Actually he's far better then me, a proper artist and everything, I only trace things. Who cares. They won't let us print anything about this. Expulsions all over the place if we try I bet.

What if it's nothing? Back to the boring life of the potential accountant. That's all the future holds for this wallflower I suppose. Still the world needs accountants. Accountancy doesn't use much beyond the four main operations does it. Not much chance of getting to differentiate or integrate in double-entry is there? Though thinking about it Tricky Dickie did use the third derivative to argue for re-election didn't he, which means there is a small chance of introducing some mad maths to The Treasury. Extending that idea could be very interesting and profitable. Keep a note of this for discussion with Doctor Waters, it'll blow his socks off! We could make money on that idea. Now how to introduce Chaos Theory? All those graphs are based on imaginary numbers (aside - Electricians/Electrical Engineers use j for Sqrt(-1) because i is current - question - why to they need sqrt(-1) at all? How does i/j apply to the real world?). Well how about imaginary money which cancels out when you multiply it by itself? (or reverts to it's inventor).

How about probability? As in Heads I win and Tails you lose. Sounds a bit like the futures market to me. Ah - those pesky derivatives again - because that's what you really need in a food chain isn't it, something that lets you make money off something you'll never see and never have to pay storage costs for. No non-mathematician understands probability properly anyway so you could get away with anything. Chance of a Hurricane stripping all the Oranges off the trees in Florida? No idea. How sure are we to get all that coffee into Starbucks this week seeing as the ship carrying it might well get boarded by pirates? Not a clue. We'll makes fortune. That's your Breakfast Uncertainty Principle sorted. I certainly do know where I am AND how fast I am going thank you very much.

OK, it's not as rigorous as Doctor Bunting might want for a humerus skit this Christmas but it's been fun. Remember - I am the ghost of Christmas future perfect subjunctive - I will show you what would have happened to you, were you not to have changed your ways. Not original I will admit and not quite as funny as The Deputy Prime Minister's Practical Joke at the Expense of The Ex-Lady McCartney (look it up you lazy tyke).

A Cloudy Panorama

This starts with the word random - really random things start this and we are off into the far-off kingdoms, the lands and times that times and lands forgot, Jurassic plains, flowerless plants to the horizon, and broken time lines from before life existed, showing us glimpses of how we came to be like light through a fence around a construction site we speed by on the motorway. This is the time of Americanisms used for the sake of it, to sound cool, for no outlay, just to be with girls we like back in the days when girls we liked liked us back - sometimes.

Now it's all trying to keep the anxieties back, Canute-like on the edge of the ocean of worry, pouring in from the exotic, the distant, colourful, hot lands we imagine must exist but for which we have no proof because we have never been there. Maybe some of us have, recalling dreamlike walks through screaming heat, the sweat trailing down to earth inside our clothes, making us seem simultaneously dirty and cool, dirty, pretty and young in the worlds we inhabited then. And they might as well be different universes, for there is no method of crossing to them these days. We are stuck here in the present, without the technology or the imagination to return to those days. The memories are just a cloudy panorama, a vista seen through the self-cleaning glass on stainless concrete buildings, places of no soul, of no raised voices and no oceans.

This is our lot, the sea of worry, the desire for routine in our obsessive corridors of chaos. We will have no closure of the stacks, popped and pushed outside the rules until there is no track of anything. And here is the struggle to get past the wish to finish, the cliche of the ending without ending, the giving up of everything. And I'll go off and listen to some loud music, some rock and roll made by someone just trying to be as cool as me but succeeding. I volunteer as the accused, the call to arms, to be the tester of new methods of trail in the green shade of the trees around the courtroom complex. Out on the lawn, the classes lie in rapture to their teachers, eyes not rolling but fixed and pointed at the beautiful faces of these clever men and women. And here in the depths of this prose I decide on the best way to say things, the subtle ways to make prose become poetry and in the collapse of the wave equations, everything that is not verse becomes just words with no hooks, a river of meaning and no-meaning without form and void.

Speak forever in verse, stream poetry into the air, out into the universe for ever. Post this and it travels to servers in far continents - maybe up to the geo-synchronous satellites and back down to sunny streets in California. But in this hop and hoopla, it leaks from the paths, the straight lines up and down, fizzing off and out of this locality - all the protons subject to Special and General Theories age not in their journey, time shrunk to nothing so that they retain meaning from big-bang to heat-death, throughout the steady state and the breathless tales of human history, tales that are no more than dots in the scale of all time.

All these stories of passion, the mundanity of obsession, streams of numbers, train serials, aircraft serials, bus serials, details of the strangest collections, the poems and letters of love and lust, the proclamations of desire, the descent into the darker avenues of half the Internet, all streaking away out in a 3d wave front that takes this information to anyone who might be looking for it. And this is no sentence but maybe it is poetry, and in this poetry lies hidden other meanings, random patterns so that in a pornographic picture beamed from soulless warehouses in yellowing concrete estates we find a profession of love, a random rearrangement of the empty wilderness of one life into the depth of being at one with another. We love everybody, dream of everything beautiful and everyone happy, a stream of smiling faces brought happy into this world and leaving it contented with what happens in between.

But in all this we know that time goes not one way but two, a continuous traffic in both directions, and though we know this we cannot sense it, like we know how to calculate in more than three dimensions, we cannot see any more than three. And so we end limited in a limitless world.

Sad Demolitions

I want to write about important things. I want to write poems that are carefully-crafted, lyrical destructions of the people I disagree with: the petty and the ignorant. I want to be right every time in what I say. But who is there to decide when I am right and when I am wrong? I want to listen to music that means something. But music is entertainment and entertainment is supposed to make us feel better. In these difficult times, stuff that means something reminds us of the reality of the world while all the airy-fairy pop that fills the radio these days has no meaning. Gloria might have been the last properly meaningful pop song and that was thirty years ago. Some of this personal malaise might well be chemical - though I'm not going to go into what that means; it is simply a marker to remind myself of what is happening at the moment. I'm going to turn to all those people in my head, all the thoughts of those I make up who try to understand the world by looking at it from a different angle to my own. I want to READ important things rather than the lists of facts and figures that fill up my head at the moment. Sometimes I'm wild, a throwback to something that has flowed through the junk DNA that survives from our common ancestors. I am a scientist who cries for tenderness in the face of the bleak emptiness of what science tells us is the truth.

The world looks sharper today. But as well as this, it seems further away - almost like looking at it over a video link. Anything beyond the window seems just to be part of a panorama - something like a David Hockney Painting of trees. We are just a cast tonight, lined up on some bridge to nowhere, a little arch across an ornamental lake. And I cannot work out whether the ambiance is dark and warm or light and cool as fits my empty feeling. It is high summer in my head, a network of flowers spread across the room to fill the air with heady sweetness. There are memories and dreams bouncing over me, taking me back to days when the image was everything and the future did not exist as anything more than a stark entry in a diary to tell my parents when to take me back to school. There are pipes in the distance, skirls in the hills, someone following page one of the instruction manual.

I am outside the station now, on the edge of sobbing, trying to hold myself together, to close the cracks that let out the darkness into the world for all the speeding commuters to see. In a city of thousands even a full breakdown passes unnoticed - what is one more person on the station steps with their head in their hands? I could certainly not spare the time to comfort them to tell them that we are all human and we all cry at being forced to live together so closely. The city is just buildings. It is not a community. We have simple minds; we want love, we want recognition and we want stability. Now here is a local madman, jabbing his fingers into my face, not to berate me in any particular way but simply to get across his idea of the workings of the world to anyone who will listen. He has scarlet trousers and wild hair. His angers fuels the spit that fills the air between us but he does not hate me. Even if he had a knife in that jabbing hand, I would not be afraid. He is the safest person in this place. I drift off; the street, the station, the tall buildings that frame us all disappear into some clear-aired wood. Maybe where Winston met Julia with their fear of hidden microphones and I cannot begin to care. They could fill the air with mind sensors and I would not worry.

I will distill a poem out of this. I will turn it into a scratchy, lost draft of all I want to say. I have had this idea for years - a rough list of notes - partly verse and partly simple recordings of everything that sits in here (points to head and closes eyes at the pain it brings). All that thought, the salts and electrons jumping the gaps in the brain, are drawn out, taken from the head like magic and dumped into inert paper. It is like keeping nuclear waste safe by casting it into glass when it stays solid and immovable for a billion years, monitored underground by humans and what follows humans until it can be turned into tasteful paper weights for our intellectual descendants. Maybe I am their common ancestor. Maybe the whole of post-2000 evolution starts with me and my children. I have no solutions.

Where in Another World in Miniature.




An armature – a suture – like a small animal curling round like your daemon from another universe. Here’s the jangly feeling you get when you find a shuttered door between worlds, the tiny spark like the green flash when the sun goes down and explodes into the here and now. And that beat powers it all, keeping time in the background, in the ambience and silence of most of the unoccupied globe. And every sentence starts with a proposition if that is something up with which you cannot put. In the end there’s nothing really showy here, just the lights of a mediocre country fading from it’s golden age into the fug of the end of history. And now I dive into the microscopic, a safe viewer of all these little insects, this alien place of danger and beauty, where tiny things get imprisoned in a drop of water. Trouble down the milky way we think – a dream of loud music in the heads of people stuck on desert islands somewhere on the crazy ocean – blue and Higher definition than we remember from those days we didn’t worry about anything – backed by a sort of punky electronica that defines the start of memoirs, all those tales of childhood that you think might make a good story. So loud is all this, quirky bass and percussion that you seem to find by the side of the road, running along the fence with a stick, the missing posts beating out the rhythm of some familiar but lost song – the new electric band. Trying to surface through the oil of some pacific battle, through sharks and debris, torn and useless life-jackets, still with names in orange where the ship went down for nothing. Call it all in, all those favours you did for paradise and see where it gets you, all that call to white and calm, through doorways into other places, other lives; they get you nowhere, and know where you live for that is it for you in this world. All this is just trying to talk like music, like Gareth taught me all those years ago though maybe I missed his point for he was deep into the maths of music and all I thought was how it fitted into the sounds of language, the analysable sounds of speech matched up with musics meant to thrill and inspire. I am a music, a genre like the siren’s call or gamelan, beating bronze to death in the humidity and depth of things.

The Pipes behind The Sink

This is so obviously something to fill up the time. What a waste to just lie here in a fog of depression simply describing everything you can see like some literary, panoramic photograph. Try it sometime. Start at the door - a heavy door that suffered iin the sixties by having its panels pasted over with hardboard to give it a modern look - strip that off and underneath you will find a traditional construction - a bit of varnish and we'll be tipping back over Fukuyama's future into the smog and grime of Victorian England. You know you want to. A heavy frame surrounds the door and that is all you can say about it excpet that maybe the door is a centimetre thicker than it was when it was first painted - the rounded edges show where many layers have paint have been out like drawing a line a millimetre out from an object placed on paper and then another a millimetre further out; eventually this iteration will lead you to a pure sphere. Maybe that is the future of everything, all surfaces smoothed out created speres that eventually merge to fill the universe with matter. There must be some fractal maths in here. There is definitely some tiling theory in the wallpaper, a modern design of pale, pastel patterns repeating over and over, tiled to the edges of the room. And every comma in its correct place, like camouflage for my loudest shirts, the ones I stopped wearing all those years ago. No one would have believed that I could get away with those. They were fractionally better than the wallpaper but who cares nowadays? The light switch joins me up to the world - behind that little, plastic rocker is a network that connects me to giant lakes, high in remote mountains, to dancing atoms in the heart of nuclear plants and to the steaming, oily machinery of the smoke-belching power stations we all see around us - cool names like Trawsfynydd and Drax. The day has faded enough to let me turn on the light and so my finger makes a tiny change to the momentum of some massive turbine, many miles from here. The light somewhere else drops in intensity by some tiny amount, like the amount the earth falls away from you when you jump. Everything is connected. All this makes me think of evrything and nothing, switching between these two impossible states of mind, a flip-flop at a frequency high enough to make sound, a sort of brain hum like in those old computer rooms. A convetional description may be coming next because there is a picture on the wall, slightly leaning so I straighten it but should I describe it to you. To someone it might be brilliant star in the history of art and to others a boring and ancient cliche, lost and irrelevant in the modern world. A woman from probably 120 years ago walks across a brightly-lit field in what must be late summer with a golden grain crop of some sort stretching away into the far distance where a line of trees and a few sketchy buildings show what is likely to be a river. The sky is blue and white of the highest order and inside the woman's mind is an acceptance of the happiness of this moment - no sign of depleting levels of neuro-transmitters in the brain. I would love to be sucked into this paiting, dragged through the frame which must be able to accomodate even my spreading body and walk across that parched field to the cool, shaded river where surely there must be punts and fishermen.