what do you sell?

calling the mystery poet

As recently mentioned, this is my england has recently made the online acquaintance of one stu bags, the Camden Town-based candid snapper and stencils-and-stickers jockey who has been playing around on this blog's absolute favourite whitewashed rectangle in the whole world.

In a recent exchange in the comments boxes of this very site, stu explained the order in which his various adornments had been added to said patch of white paint on a London street corner:

The white rectangle turned up after the council took objection to a small black butterfly stencil being planted...I thought it was a tad OTT hence the NOTHING TO SEE HERE...after a while the NOTHING TO SEE HERE was still there(lasted way longer than the Flutterby)I added I TOLD YOU.....time past and I found sticky backed kids letters in the 99p shop and added SO BE IT which didnt last long (thats where the green O came from)UR MUM RANG was a piece I saw in Brick Lane while peeing in the toilets of The Three Bells or Ten Bells,not sure how many bells,that didnt last that long either....the small 'theres is nothing to see here,I just want to talk' is the first line of a poem that someone stuck to the wall,seriously a full A4 poem written because of the THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE(Id like to believe that)

The poem, it seems, did not last long. Perhaps stu's enemies from Camden Council were the ones to rip it from the outside wall of their Housing Office. 

Happily, though, stu had the presence of mind to capture the piece on camera so we have a record of what was written. This is especially fortuitous because it seems that stu may well not be hoping in vain that this was an original work, typed out in direct response to his 'THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE' stencil. I've tried to find the work online, putting various bits of it into quotation marks and into the Google search box. All to no avail. So if it's a previously published work, it does seem to be an obscure one.

So, take a look at the poem. If you know who wrote it, if you wrote it yourself or if you have any clues, be sure to give me (or stu) a shout. We're mystified:

Go home

There is nothing to see here but I wanted to talk

There is never enough space on the hard drive

But there is always enough time to waste for now

Your universe is too crowded to allow space for me

anytime soon

But is it such a sin to be so rich? Only if it is in

money you fool

I wanted to live a bit but I didn't know when to stop

I believed I could drink a lot more to avoid the last

drop

I hoped to avoid real danger just as the real danger

was stalking me

I liked visiting other people's dreams even if it was

only their art

Put him down you don't know where he's been. He

could be your god

Or any other human being futile but vain and

improvably insane

It must be possible to write something proudly

temporary as graffiti

Memories are for tomorrow so it will take infinity

to get rid of me

stupid

So we heard something crashing about below the open window. We went to have a look. People from another office - in our building, I think - were out on the pavement and in the road, breaking the seals on the kind of five-gallon bottles that are used with water coolers. We watched as they tipped the contents of several of the bottles onto the tarmac and into the gutter.

"What are you doing?" one of our people called down.

"Emptying these bottles," a girl answered.

"Why?"

"The bottles have to be taken away. They have to be empty."

"Is there anything wrong with the water?"

"No, we just have to empty these bottles."

"There are people dying of thirst in some countries," shouted another one of our lot.

"We're not in one of those countries," someone else said from below.

white space

WED

lamp

non-league

LOVECRAFT

I think I must have been about fourteen years old. I was into the gloomy cosmicism of H.P. Lovecraft and had heavily plagiarised one of his short stories to create the only thing I ever had published in my school's magazine.

One half-term, I was moping around the damp border between England and Wales, trailing unenthusiastically in the wake of my parents and a family friend.

In Hay-on-Wye, we sheltered from the ceaseless rain by ducking into one of the larger second-hand bookshops, a big, dusty place that had once been a small cinema. The double-height space had been split horizontally with rickety boards, reached via wobbly makeshift staircases. I clattered around.

The thousands of books were organised by genre, but within each section there was little evidence of alphabetical ordering. For some reason, I was thinking about Lovecraft and wondering how many of his works I had yet to read. As the thought crossed my mind, a floorboard moved alarmingly underfoot. I feared for a second that the whole precarious construction of the upper level was going to come crashing to the ground floor. I reached out a hand, seeking something solid to hang onto. My fingers closed around a battered paperback that was jutting from the nearest shelf. It came away from its neighbours and I looked at it: a collection of Lovecraft short stories that I had not read.

good books, bad book

As promised, this is my england returns to the much-discussed white painted patch of wall on the corner of Camden's Eversholt Street and Crowndale Road.

We now know the identity of the street artist whose output is focused on said whitewashed rectangle, and that the girl whose face has recently appeared there is his daughter.

The artist, one stu bags, informed this is my england yesterday that something new would soon be on view. Here it is:

Here we have one of stu's bench photos printed onto a page of the Necronomicon and further adorned with what I take to be a reference to this very site - 'is this you'r (sic) england', stu has stenciled onto the work.

Cheers, stu!

demystify the metatextuality

The gaze of this is my england rests from time to time on a whitewashed rectangular chunk of the outside wall of the Camden Housing Office on the corner of Eversholt Street and Crowndale Road. Since July 1st, the ever-changing art/graffiti/stencils scene around that exact spot has been tracked on these pages, most recently when the addition of a new picture of a girl was spotted.

Along the way, it was noticed that the painted patch of wall bore the URL of a website containing candid photos of people sitting on the bench that is just to the right of where the various slogans appear. All human life is there. Some real characters. Some of them even get naked.

Yesterday, it turned out that the white patch artist and the bench snapper are one and the same person - a certain stu bags, a Camden Town-based Scotsman who also hoards voided train tickets, traffic-flattened bottle caps and discarded picture frames. The girl whose photo was added to the whitewashed patch of wall, it turns out, is his daughter. She's pleased to have been described as 'pretty' here at this is my england. That's nice. I'm all about spreading the joy. The multifaceted stu bags also takes some very good photos of the things he sees.

I've been advised to look out for more changes to the painted patch and can exclusively reveal that the latest of these refers in some way to this is my england. Exciting times.