Her English is poor but she manages a brief introduction before getting to the point. She asks if she can touch his face. She's already reaching out and gesturing at it. Koreans are way too polite, he's just laughing awkwardly. I put my hand kind of between them and wave it to try and indicate no to her. I'm still in fucking mime mode. I say no, but it's not really to her, or to him, just no, in general. This is all too weird. Dejected, she departs with a comment about having never seen someone like him before.
we need to be deconstructing our identities
ahnaf is it worth reading all those books
sorry i am texting like a slav
isaac
Thank you, Jack
no i haven't really read anything
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.
i was tempted to lie about my name
I'm getting bored and he can tell, so he shifts the topic towards me. He tells me he'd spotted me chatting to a girl earlier, a black girl, and asks what I thought of her, if I liked her. I mimed affirmatively.
whats your name?
plato
ion
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.
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.
barren land
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.
we can only engage in such a way
I'm trying to picture the scene inside, like I was trying to picture the scene in the tree.
your feed looks like my tumblr
magnetisation basically means the induction of divine form unto you
Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:11:24