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 really havent

and the fake qualifier

abrar?

Maybe, Jack, I'm doing this because I'm English?


I'm sat out the front of a cafe in Hatton Garden. I've just eaten a brie and bacon panini, and I'm rolling a cigarette. Feeling very London. An old man comes up to me and asks for a roll-up. I oblige.

i was tempted to lie about my name

i did until you asked which kind of gave it away

hello reader,

was it worth it

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.

We gather around the start of a causeway down to the Thames. It's a pretty cold night and there's a breeze coming off the river. I've found the girl, or she's found me, and we're smoking a cigarette while we watch the dim silhouettes of the French Raj and his fireworks bearer down on the bank. They're fucking around with the box. I ask her what people do with fireworks for so long before they're ready to light. She doesn't know.

The Hatton geezer (fuck off) is emptying his pockets, searching for the silver rizlas he apparently has. He refuses to take one of mine (also silver) because the tobacco I'm giving him is already too much to ask. He tells me about the guy who can do 50g of Golden Virginia for a good price, the guy who every other man over 50 knows. I'm not interested.

and the fake qualifier

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.

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.

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:31:03

part of an old note. It will get lighter.

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:29:50

nope. i only remember the leaves bristling behind the window during chemistry class

Thank you, Jack, for telling me I'm just as bad as the characters (actually they're people, if that means anything to you) that I'm writing about.

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.

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:27:13

way too random but already engaging. i want to explore it


There is a pause. She ashes her cigarette. It falls on me. It seems like the birds have stopped too.

bro i read nothing in my life

no longer writing in the third person

Imprint, memory, impact, representation, impression

amazing hopefully this was all legible and frankly i might be going very off board but you seemed interesting

i see a website though something that reconfigures or is mazelike


Lift Analysis

not their contents

i believe search always should be immersive, because whatever is pre planned and non consuming (what you are looking for is total engulfment by the spectre of the real), a joyous intensity, a flow of virtue

my watchlater reached its limit years ago and now i have to create a playlist for each new topic im interested in but it is incredibly hard to create the taxonomy of knowledge because everything seems to be everything else because at the end it is what you get from it that matters not what is given

Thank you, Jack

Thank you for telling me that I'm failing to see how I'm reproducing the dynamics I'm trying to critique by only describing my Korean colleague / fresh meat and the black girl in relation to others and myself.

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?

It Will Get Lighter

there is a distinction between western-modern pedagogical systems that's like text-based as in a legal method but there is an idea of "pathshala" or "guru shissho"/ "porompora" i mean how masters relayed knowledge to the student by (oral) transmission often by memorising books. so what was taught was always interactive. knowledge was interactive, you spoke with people rather than read texts.