Picture

It Will Get Lighter

I know that if I try to make this entry any more than it is I will ruin it.

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 21:54:03

Style

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:22:59

I'm in a crowded lift and a girl I've never met tells me she thinks she might love me. The lift won't stop at any floor, and I can't talk in front of all these people.

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.

the point of this was to try and avoid this narcissistic death spiral I'm in by acting anonymously and impulsively. how can that feeling that even Jack can't describe paralyse me if my name isn't next to any of this? the excitement of believing I just need a new process has overcome me and I have cummed out an empty webpage.

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

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:18:46

It Will Get Lighter

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:11:24


"Anyway, you're you. I mean, look at you!" she says. "You could get with anyone, anyone in the street. Really."

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.

Better Lift

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'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.

The only real Londoner remaining is old, bitter, kept around for entertainment, defined by tropes from 30+ years ago. They play gangsters in films, or they work in a pie and mash shop, or they go on Business Insider's YouTube channel to tell you about their crimes. And they somehow still find the time to spend all day hanging about cafes and pubs for you to bump into, to remind you of Real London.



no longer writing in the third person


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.

Thank you, Jack

i understand

is everyoneback on tumblr now

barren land