MONDAY They say that after a few months in prison you have to come out one way or another and here I am, about to rejoin the free world. I’ve been released early from HMP Archer for good behaviour. And by paying a one-off fee under the government’s new Affordable Leniency scheme.
Thank God for the privatisation of everything. The seriousness of my crime – accessory to the murder of an ATOS assessor – diminished dramatically when ATOS announced they were ‘getting out of the disabled benefits game’. This was also good news for my associate Amy Blackwater, the ecomentalist and murderer.
Despite bumping off four bedroom tax inspectors Amy will be released later this year, unrepentant and unrehabilitated. She’s already planning another killing spree when she gets out, starting with private landlords and ending with people who call anything but a journey ‘a journey’.
TUESDAY I am being discharged with the random clutter I went in with. About to bin a copy of a newspaper from December 2013 (‘Good news at last as house prices surge beyond the reach of anyone who actually lives in Britain’) but decide to hang on to it.
For all I know my gaff has been repossessed by auditors. Or squatted by creditors. If I DO end up sleeping on a bench tonight I’m buggered if I’m buying a newspaper.
WEDNESDAY God, it feels like I’ve been banged up for half a century. The world has changed beyond recognition.
Another 65 skyscrapers in London since Christmas! All designed by budget algorithm generators in India, then shat out in situ by Chinese 3-D printers for fictional Russian owners. Soulless, pointless husks of calcified ennui, precisely engineered for a market that requires them only to remain empty and silent. The world of plasmic arts shrugs and having shrugged moves on.
Yes, the world has become busier in the last few months but also spectacularly stupider too. The BBC’s Newsnight had already turned into a parody of itself the last time I looked, but tonight’s timely investigation into the capital’s financial South Sea Bubble plumbed new depths of dumb.
Jeremy Paxman seemed very uncomfortable dressed as a Jolly Jack Tar in the nautically themed studio – ‘Pirates of the Caribbean Tax Havens’. Even more uncomfortable when he had to leave his desk and dance a hornpipe, singing along to a vulgar sea shanty: ‘What shall we do with the fucking Gherkin? What shall we do with the fucking Gherkin? What shall we do with the fucking Gherkin, it’s back on the market …’
There followed several verses of suggestions, including the statutory jokey one about converting it into a huge tower of high-spec, low-rent apartments for key workers.
Memo to Self: dig out proposal for turning the Shard into a giant vertical urban farm.
THURSDAY Whoa. Theatrical agent Victoria Spong has died. I never liked her, to be honest. Someone who WILL miss her is the celebrated architectural dachshund Bauhau. Spong acquired him, then fashioned him into a media personality. I wonder if he’ll now be auctioned off.
FRIDAY So much news to catch up with. I see the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects is in trouble for condemning the sequestration and development of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
I briefly consider applauding this moral stand. Just in time I remember that if I do, I MUST be anti-semitic. Clearly I don’t want to be that, so decide to keep quiet. On reflection, I agree with the RIPBA’s critics – you can’t possibly condemn the Israeli government as long as the administrations of Saudi Arabia and Syria are more horrible.
I’d better shut up about architects working for demented arseholes anywhere at all, just to make sure. Then I worry about how the Twittermind of my subconscious might link the phrases ‘Israeli settlers’ and ‘demented arseholes’. Resolve to stop thinking, in the interests of peace and justice.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Macerated Relativism 1, Dynamic Nondeterminism 0.
SUNDAY Feels good to be back in the recliner after all those weeks in a prison bed. Although a little lonely, I have to say. I’d got used to the constant banter of my cellmate Gav, the ultra-butch panterior designer.
I realise I’m saying all this out loud to thin air. Sad. Idiot. Maybe I should get a dog …
May 9, 2014