The alabster face of Maggie T in Guildhall - heavyweight marble statue of Thatcher presiding over all royalty, in there among the gowned historical portraits, more substance to her memory than all the other, still the ego moves - look at you; the rift made corporeal in stone, the stare of disastrous self-belief - wrap her up in clinging PVC, stick her with safety pins and a million hard questions - someone mentions 'gonzo' and you run in your glass coffin Maggie, don't you? -

and Queen Victoria Beckham is equally deluded by self-illusion - yet she doesn't really exist anymore and in that realisation has also begun to fall apart, a process of discovery -

street urchins at the window watch as it happens -

I wonder if two illusions make a harsh reality?

but (lesson to be learned) the city and the times are brutal - brutal light, brutal alleyways defined by yet more broken glass and idiot subterfuge; haste, ignorance, the grotesque: literally faceless men advertising suits, bizarre (is it meant to be post-mod irony?)

A notion in a book cover, a notion of peace, rises up through the audacity of it all, an exemplar of honesty -

Tailgaters try to make jokes of their actions, but in the end are always and only the worst kind of fools -

Ricochet debutantes and etiquette graduates turn the heads of the accountants amid the frayed activity of Devonshire Square, the streams of stepping, the readily abused time and motion of it all.

The wherewithal of liars.

You walk home in the middle of the night from it all without your shoes, you left them in a bar somewhere near Liverpool Street, drunk to fuck, with the noise of bully boys and serenaders mixed up in you and you keep repeating that the London Dungeon has a hilarious answerphone message, try it and see -

Guildhall, 17th October 2007