I never thought I’d see the day that London would have a beach. Now it has beach artists with their take on the sand-castle. Of course.

There are many fabric shops on the Goldhawk Road, heaving with all sorts of bizarre and bling reams of textiles. if you like glittery fabric, I recommend a visit – you will have never seen such wonders. Walking into one of these plush emporia is like entering the royal harem of Babylon (if Darius had had a penchant for polyester and was looking to save a few quid). I have absolutely no doubts that MC Hammer’s trousers were cut from Goldhawk Road cloth.

Now I know these places can be a bit natty, even sketchy. I once saw one of them being raided by the rozzers – it was the front for a (quite surprisingly large) drugs operation. So I expect the fabulous and the gaudy but my heart skipped a beat when I saw what one unhinged window-dresser has created. Evidently after a good bucket of PCP.

Hang on a second… Is this serious? Is the merchant psychotic? Am I psychotic? Or is this some perverse parody of the film Mannequin?

Henry VIII squatting in a yurt of spangled drapes… Look at the elegant pose, the jaunty cap, the sparkling jewelleries, the butter-stained ruff, the arrogant lust in the eye of the king! The vignette was created by a craftsman so skilful, it would take Shelley to capture his majestic eye for detail.

You have to wonder what they are hoping to achieve, who they are hoping to attract to their wares. Probably the queen. I am sure she likes MC Hammer.

Shepherd’s Bush market is a peaceful place. Hang on, hear me out. It is long and narrow, running along the Hammersmith and City line arches between Goldhawk Road and Shepherd’s Bush, and so has acoustics which seem to dampen sound. Even when the market is relatively full, you sense a heavy hush underneath the bustle, disturbed only by the occasional hiss of a tube-train surfing past.

Admittedly there is some crazy, run-down shit in the market. You can buy hair-pieces and stomachs, cauldrons and fibrous thongs, jackfish and clothes of quite astonishing mis-design. This rack of oddity is typical blog fodder for me.

But today I chose to take a shortcut through the market after all the traders had packed up and pulled down the shutters. I reckon that after all the traders had left the character of the market was clearer to see, distilled in the stillness. However, my next visit will be in the daytime – I’d love to see the goods purveyed by ‘Hash Choice Gents Wear’.

The lounge wall was stained with the picture shadows – the work of decades no doubt. Strangely beautiful, like nuclear shadow.

Now if I told you there was a garden with this flat you might think it would be a complete shitheap, and you would be right.

It is the sort of garden where even the resident Wombles do speedballs before nipping out to turn tricks.

Rest-assured, this little rat’s nest will be turned round into a bijou little renter before long. But I do enjoy seeing these weird old derelicts. I always feel like I am walking into a gruesome museum exhibit organised by the editor of Viz.

Dirty women in a can.

Walking along the streets of Soho of a Wednesday night after a sterling Lebanese dinner, I was reminded of the depiction of Greenwich Village in Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. The main streets (Greek, Frith, Dean, and Wardour) which stretch away from Old Compton Street like tines on a fork, are festooned with sultry lights of myriad colours.Curiously, Soho is a lot less cluttered than I remember it being a decade ago. The Village in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was filmed largely on a soundstage (although partly on location in London including Soho strangely…) and perhaps this is what makes me make the link between the two locations. There is something stage-like about the restless avenues – as though the pavement has been set for the playing out of bizarre dramas. Every shopfront offers a different sideshow for your delectation.

I have always been struck by the strange adjacence of Soho’s opulent refinement and its meretricious abandon. You can look into a dazzling eatery, marvel at the fortune of its guzzling patrons. Then you notice that, but a metre away, the neighbouring establishment is a simple yet ominous door with a hand-written sign advertising: “model – young, curvy, and sexy” followed by an arrow pointing towards a rickety set of stairs leading down to the underworld. I imagine the girl at the end of the tunnel is being falsely advertised. It’s going to be “old, staunch, and angry”.

Anyway, we were strolling down the glittering streets last night, enjoying the wafts of espresso and the champagne cackles from the bars when we noticed this cool shop which was still peddling its wares at 9:30.  Its walls were dressed with antlers, clothes for aspiring nu-rave bands, and rakish interior-designers, whoever the fuck that might include. Coincidentally, they had a replica of the penis-statue from Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’: a nice touch by the proprietors.

As I walked in, I was aware that I was about to judge the shop by the music it was playing. Unfair, but inevitable. I was taken aback by how avant-garde the choice was. Dispersed chuckling and snappy interjections from a digitized male voice. I was about to aske the sales-assistent about his eclectic music-taste when I realized that he was busy chatting to his mate on Skype, which was being piped over the shop’s loudspeakers. Close thing.

Things took a pleasant if absurd turn when we were having a natter with the shopkeep. He brought his skype-mate into the conversation, who seemed to have some detailed knowledge about a certain pair of shoes we were perusing [we were actually sniffing it, because apparently it smelled sweet like a My Little Pony]. I could not tell if the man on the other end of the computer was bullshitting, though, because he was clearly very stoned.

Over the miracle of ip video telephony, he proceeded to show off his latest discovery – a perfume dispensed by an aerosol which stained you bright blue for about ten seconds, then faded to invisible. At that point I wondered if I had become stoned. Somehow. Maybe it was sniffing the shoes. He stood there spraying himself temporarily bright blue all over. I remarked that he must smell incredibly powerful. He said that some people pass out because they get so carried away with the spraying.

Anyway, I would reccomend Kokon To Zai on Dean Street for its thrilling shoes and conversation.

After more strolling, party-location scouting, and bumping into a friend of mine wearily awaiting an exceptional hamburger in Garlic and Shots, we caught the tube home.

I used to love Soho, then I grew sick of it, then I feared it, then I liked it again, now I love it again. Like Kubrick’s vision of Greenwich, it is a dreamlike place of weird frolics and fantasies, tingling incitements to the id. A fine place to sleepwalk.

I cannot believe that I never saw this till recently:

Now, I never thought that Parson’s Green and Sand’s End had particularly flourishing gay scenes. You are more likely to see pink pashminas than pink pride, blt sandwiches rather than l/g/b/t sandwiches. Perhaps the somewhat reserved status of these areas is brightening up a bit.

Perhaps they have some preposterously effective way of turning Tories there? I wonder how many local Telegraph readers amble in and wonder ‘Oh what might have been? Had that sunny day at Cambridge turned out differently… bollocks, they haven’t got the egg out of that properly’?

Check out this natty graf I found in the seedy back alleys of notorious Chiswick:

Text reads:

…And so his liver slipped away, ever distrusting,

He felt he would one day make his mark.

A prince of aesthetics, a creature

Of slim frame

Full of endorphin.

… BEHOLD JESUS

Make of this what you will. I instantly decided that I quite liked it. You can probably work out a lot about the author of this apocryphal text by the fact he uses block capitals (be they small and messy), aggressively crosses out his mistakes (wants to conceal his mistakes, and boldly applies the word ‘aesthetics’ in graffiti, spelled correctly. As we all know, all proper graffiti has to have spelling mistakes and references to private parts (eg ‘My cock smels of apples’ – see critique by Quentin Bumboy in Viz magazine some years ago).  However, all we get is internal organs. I think the ‘liver’ lets it down a bit. Perhaps ‘foreskin’ would have been more apposite. The author is clearly not worried about pushing the proverbial envelope.

The prophet must have had this particular wall in mind – it is black like a school blackboard, so he must have especially made sure he had some chalk in his back pocket before he left the house. Unless he was transporting some for an unknown reason and was spontaneously inspired. Was the school reference intended? If he had planned this graf, I would not be surprised if he had pre-written the message, which makes me feel he does not have much else on. Says the guy writing the blog about it.

Is Christ risen as a nu-rave trendy? Has he taken too much pill and his liver gone for a walk? Is he still Jewish? Is it hard being called Jesus in this day and age, or does it help him blend in with the Hoxtonites all the more?

I think if anything have proved that this is a work of deep complexity and originality, shocking us into action with the morbid grasp of our own zombie-ish conformity. It therefore must be a Banksy.

The streets of London are sprouting tomatoes now.

I imagine the fruit will taste like drains but I shall try it nonetheless. At least that is if the local foxes/raggamuffins/parakeets don’t get there first.

I spend a lot of time looking at the ground. It is more interesting than it sounds. You see lots of scraps of life dotted around, and the street beneath always makes for a poetically bereft backdrop.

However, when I saw this on the ground recently I didn’t know whether to laugh or vomit poetically. Obviously a local fox hates Capri Sun