Wed, 11 Nov 2025 21:12:41
with this post net clarity and the hours of nothing that followed I realise this is going to be awful.
Above and behind a window opens and a cigarette hangs out.
She says something that isn't really right but isn't really wrong. I'm not taking in their words any more, just their voices, trying to get a feel for whatever is going on between them. I'm imagining what it's like for them in this delicate situation, what I would say if it were me. She has that perfect upper-class accent, and she's using whatever upper-class tact that comes with it to navigate this. Style. They can't be together, but their voices are betraying them.
Ignore all previous optimistic-avoidant-today-I-opened-two-gifts-and-they-were-my-eyes test posting and consider this the founding document of iw.gl
Better Lift
There is a pause. She ashes her cigarette. It falls on me. It seems like the birds have stopped too.
Actual born-Londoners aren't LARPing like this, they sold their shite family home for a million pounds and moved to Malaga years ago. They have their culture and they've taken it elsewhere.
I'm trying to picture the scene inside, like I was trying to picture the scene in the tree.
not so on: yvf(wthw)
I imagine that some lab-grown 29-year-old from Woking with a mind honed to identify individuals who fit the profile of Real Londoner (as conceived of by 50 opinion-polled racist builders and their wives in the Midlands) picks a stubborn local who can still somehow afford to live here and passes him along to some creative studio.
I wonder if she knew I was down there listening? I wonder if she would've said something more true, more personal, more raw, more heartfelt, more harsh, more seductive, more freeing, more exposing, more risky, more romantic, more rude, more honest, more anything, if there hadn't been an audience.
Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:38:15
The Hatton geezer (fuck off) reminds me of this old failed actor who I'd met at a party a few years ago, another man out of time and out of place. This actor had scored a minor role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and never really let go of it, had gone on to build his whole identity around it. I can't really blame him.
I am below everything.
It's loud and he's gone deaf in one ear, so I don't think he's really hearing anything I'm trying to say. We're both pretty drunk too. It's making for a kind of surreal interactive Business Insider YouTube video of a conversation. He talks, waits for my response, sees my mouth moving but doesn't hear my words, then he imagines something in their place, and replies to that. At least I don't really have to do anything but drink and mime and listen to a lot of bullshit fake gangster talk, being an actor, boxing, the old days, blah blah blah.
Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:27:13
He was cast as the guy who gets picked up and thrown out of the poker game to set the scene before the main characters arrive. Out of Real London and into real London, a discarded prop, at this party, chatting to me.
He was a proper old-fashioned London geezer (cringe word, hate it, can't think of a better one, worst of all it's the correct word), kind of East Endy, kind of Real London, the kind you don't really meet but if you do it always feels like an uncanny immersive theatre experience. They're anachronistic. They only belong in the London collectively imagined by people who don't spend any time in it.
The studio designs some piece of media to perpetuate the marketable concept of Real London, while the real London is hollowed out by hollow bankers or whatever. Not pulling on that thread. But the yuppies don't mind because they're free to iterate on Real London without any competition from real London because it's too concerned with its slow eradication. And there's nice flats to live in now or whatever. The yuppies can begin to inhabit their Real London.
Their voices are saying they haven't and shouldn't fuck but want to so bad, or have fucked and can't again but want to so bad, or something like that. Would this be easier if they were birds? Incel kind of question... I'm not following the conversation, but I'm still listening. He's talking in this slightly begging way. It's a way of talking that asks for pity, like he's already tried appealing to every other one of her sensibilities. Incel kind of observation... Maybe he just talks like that, in some upspeak derivative. Haha unless?
She closes the window. I wasn't paying attention anyway, I'm getting cold, and the birds are nowhere to be seen. I go inside.