Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

There is one aspect I agree with despite the bovine idiocy of religion. The vicar.

A few pennies drop onto his collection plate. He lives in a small house and serves a small (and diminishing) church. Yet he is happy trimming the roses and praying for forgiveness over (amongst other things) Internet porn.

But despite appearances, the vicar and the banker both share something in common. An overwhelming belief in a fantasy which through the sheer number of believers has become reality.

As I saw the news of Barclays £5 billion profit in the depths of an economic crisis, I ran the palm of my hands over my skull in sheer frustration. But it should come as no surprise, because my skull - like the skull of all human kind, is dwarfed even by the size of my toilet seat. The problem is not the system, or the evils of capitalism, or the greed of any one person acting on his own. The problem is the combined achievement of all that’s bad about human nature.

The impulses and dreams which trigger our sense of reward are out of control like a faulty scientific experiment involving monkeys and peanuts.

The lure of money has been enough to send the banking industry insane, like a dribbling mental asylum freak crawling across the floor leaving a smearing trail of raw shit behind it. Everybody responsible for carrying out their day jobs in the financial sector have directly contributed to the perverse rise of the biggest downfall the world has ever seen. It’s time for a wake up call. The banks should all be split up at once, the world over. There should be no loop holes, no haven for ex-investment bankers. If they want to continue their career in banking they do so as a service to the world’s people. As a force for good. Every dime of profit is sent to those in need of a leg up. Governments, community organisers, African villages, infrastructure projects and people who live under 4ft high gaps in railway bridges with cardboard for wallpaper in India. These people have as much right on the money made by the hard work of the financial sector staff, as they do. Because their hard work is over-rewarded by a ratio of 100:1. The financial sector should be happy they have jobs at all, such has been the mass rip off of those who so unwittingly feed their salaries.

A smoky cloak and mirror obscured magic trick - this is what the financial sector has become. It doesn’t serve the people. It serve’s itself on a magic carpet of mathematical nonsense, which makes sense only to those who have engineered the world’s fantasy sector to accept this as the truth of the system. When it comes to the reality of the people, you see it on their credit card bills, on their bank statements, in the lure of the shopping centre, on their loans and in the bank’s marketing strategies.

It’s time to close the book on fantasy, and open a new one about reality.

The reality bible. No God, but happily no investment bankers either.

4AM, Swire’s voice begins to shake as he tries to counter the argument. “No, it’s not true… it’s not fair to suggest that I…”

But his friend is impertinent as he stomps past the window, his head pointed always directly in Swire’s direction. “Yes!” he would shout with more stomping around in between. “Yes. Yes. Yes”. By now, Swire regrets offering his deranged acquaintance whisky during their night long conversation.

Swire sits in a powerless hunch and waits to see where the ‘conversation’ goes next. Not forgetting of course, to thumb the security button under the table several times.

His mad friend continues: “Walking around the block watching steamy windows in China town. Lights flash and then go out, just as memories of her do. Climbing barefoot on the hill - watching the clouds on the horizon pulling in still - sunbeams flash and then go out, just as memories of her do…strolling to meet her outside the club and she is there reading her book, concert lights go out and then fade in just as memories of my love do!…”

Suddenly - security guards knock down the locked drawing room door and still Swire’s friend continues:

“Now travelling into some future time, like a journey which will come to nil.”

He’s pulled to the ground.

“I will return to speak to you, Swire! I will return! I will return for you Swire!”

A relieved Swire smiles uneasily as his friend is dragged from the room, still yelling.

Its 4am by now but Swire isn’t ready to sleep, instead he gets into his sports car and travels down through the city, past stubbornly monolithic warehouses and living quarters. He parks his car outside the giant silver tower, a food bank of which he is president.

As the lift rises through the lower decks on it’s way to the top floor, Swire blows circles of smoke from his cigar. One, two, three.

The building is empty, but for Swire, as he strolls to his office. On his desk is a glowing screen, and he sits down on his dark green leather executive chair, with crocodile skin arms.

He counts to himself - one, two three. And presses 3 times on his keyboard adding 3 zeroes to the end of his bank account, before exiting the room and driving calmly back through the city.

The bright lights of his car illuminate a strange object on the road near a bridge over which runs a silent disused train line, he can’t quite make out what it is.

Suddenly it rises like a ghostly spectre, the misty outline of a human.

Some silver ambulances pass Swire in the opposite direction.

Swire slows to a halt and stares in wonder at what he thinks he sees. In a trance like state he slowly opens his drivers door, he steps out and stands with his bewlidered body pointed at the ghost, head hung slightly lower than normal struggling with the bright reflection of his car headlights.

The ghost speaks.

“Mr Swire…”

And Swire recognises the voice even though it’s heavily distorted and low in pitch, slowly he also begins to recognise the misty face.

“I’m not free. Help me Swire…. I’m trapped.”

The Native American looked out over the edge of the cliff. Endless sea ahead. Endless sky above. Below, an endless shore. To this young man named Jolene the mysterious expanse of water held untold stories of adventure and awe.

He sat besides his wolf, and they looked out at the edge of the world together.

Waves battered the side of the ship as the Scotsman Thomas peered out from atop the hull. “There must surely be something magnificent out here. Change. I’ve dreamt it coming. But I’ve been away so long I could give up an entire land just to look into my bonny darling’s eyes. I’d see more in her eyes than I would in the entire coast of Scotland”

A blur of movement, through the forest trees, suddenly a lot of noise. Jolene paused, his wolf stood silently, intently monitoring the distance. “But we walked on in the end. There wasn’t anything within range. Then by the time the sun was again hidden, I finally had two deer down and I carved them up and brought the meat back to our camp to feed my family. I looked at my wife, there was a look in her eyes that day. I could see her soul and whilst people could steal my prey and my wolves they could never steal our souls.”

The chinking of glasses. Thomas sits with his comrades below deck. “When they hunt in the night, that there is a great many together, they make the most hideous and frightful noise, that was ever heard.” Said Beckett, his captive audience occasionally downing a rum or seven. “The only good wolf, was a dead wolf”, he continued. Thomas interjects “Where had you seen these creatures before?” Beckett explains that he had hunted them in Scotland in an effort to protect his livelihood - his farm. “Golden eyes glistening, razor sharp white teeth, the only animal he knew which was to be feared - the only wild animal in the whole of the land capable of killing a human.”

As the Native American gathers his young family around a plot of land on his modest settlement, he feels a soft warm hand on his shoulder, it’s his wife who has woken to cook breakfast around an early morning fire. A cool wind breezes over their settlement from the beach. The sun rises in the east.

The waves lash at the ship as Thomas, his rough beard grizzled by the sea air stands on the deck. “After so much time on this vessel I have forgotten how many times I’ve stood here to witness the first light and feel the warm glow of sunrise on my skin”.

She walks across the beach creating elegant footprints in the sand. Exposed, the Native American’s wife washes naked in the sea. Suddenly a ‘black dot’ approaches on the horizon, it becomes ever larger. She is transfixed by the approaching menace, and stands still, water lapping against her waist, to her it is God like.

Now cutting closer, she sees the once constant and undisturbed sea parting around the huge vessel which was at first just an abnormality in the faint blue mist rising from the sea.

The ship docks to the shore, a man jumps off and slashes her throat.

Her footprints in the sand wash away as the tide comes in.

Becket had come to make a settlement.

A few days later, darkness, the red wolf was starving, he padded toward the chicken pen. His Native American master Jolene was still nowhere to be seen, not even senses as sharp as a wolf’s could find him now. And as he padded further toward potential food, his sharp eyes spotted the looming figure of a man standing over the pen. He stopped, he hadn’t expected this. Was it Jolene? The man began to walk toward him, maybe he was going to offer him some meat?

Now our wolf felt a knife to his lower jaw. And a hand was gripping him by the neck. Now another hand, clutching his head from behind. Another man shouted and jumped on his back, our wolf’s legs couldn’t bear the weight and his whole body was pinned to the ground, and then he began to feel the cut. It cut deeper and deeper, and he felt it in his jaw bone. The metal cut right through. He let out a howl which became a muffled scream and then nothing but a hiss and his still-razor sharp eyes looked down at the blood, and his jaw had gone.

They let him go. He staggered to his feet. The pain was crippling. He staggered forward and shook his head, blood flew in all directions and he ran. He ran into the forest and all he could hear were his paws pounding against dirt and all he could feel was the sheer pain of his wound. So he kept running until he could hardly breath for the blood choking in his throat and his paws flattened against the ground and his knees bent forward and he crashed into the dirt and then he curled up because of the unspeakable pain.

The night passed and now extreme starvation was vying with pain for his attention. And our wolf pressed his wreaked mouth into sticks, dirt and mud.

“Press forward. Muzzle the forest floor with nose. Search for the scent of food. Must keep going. Muzzle the dirt. Smell the dead leaves. Curl up some more. Block out the cold. I am losing the feelings of pain, I am losing my sight. Where is my master?”

And with that the wolf died, and the men had won. The new men would build a new America.

The seasons come and go, the clouds scud over mountains, the trees turn red and brown, eventually to be felled by men, the settlements become towns and towns became cities, cities great cities. The few red wolves which are left now breed with coyote and the red wolf species slowly disappears.

The settlements had won out.

The sun rises over the sea once more. A sanctuary. Inside some conservationists are attempting to breed the few remaining pairs of red wolves. They are no longer in danger, no longer hunted like rivals. Within the boundaries of the huge sanctuary a scientist walks through a deserted forest and suddenly comes to a cliff edge.

A wolf joins her to look out to the edge of the world together.

A brilliant blue sky blends into the sea as a seagull glides down through the milky haze. She comes to perch on the warm grey metal of a ship’s hull. The huge vessel drifts over the gentle waves. With a robotic jerk the gull’s head looks downwards at the deck to view a female prisoner, she is pissing, her legs bent at the knees, a trickle of gold runs from under her and off the edge of the deck. Lines of fright are etched on her face in stark contrast to the relaxed blue sky behind her stretching out into infinity. Suddenly like the buzz of a wasp in a vacuum a helicopter appears on the horizon.

With a sudden explosion the ship roars with pain and it begins to buckle and capsize, destined for the deep. The helicopter is now above the ship and out onto the deck runs a mad man towards a rope ladder, armed to the teeth and intent on making his escape. It’s the captain. He’s lifted up skywards from the chaos he created with his own hands whilst onboard: one hand on the deck, one hand on a detonator. He fends off opportunistic last gasp attacks from prisoners - for the escape road is only his. The helicopter is not interested in anybody else.

SUNRISE, MANCHESTER.

The new world of 2108 when compared to the past is a little like the difference between man and dog. 90% of the same DNA but worlds apart.

The mankind of previous generations had been replaced with a new breed of selfish mongrels who’d made a new life for themselves in Manchester and across the world.

Soft bronze skin bathed in the early morning light, perfect soft features, a perfect averaging out of all the individuality which used to exist from one race to another across the globe.

They chatter on their way to work places, speaking in a combination of New English and Old Spanish, with a smattering of French words. But their accents - which were once proud national accents - were no longer identifiable as coming from behind the old boundaries and country borders. They spoke in a bland international drawl. Self satisfied smug bastards.

As the new world scene kids looked out of their train window during the daily commute to work, they saw a distinct underclass of vermin.

By now the world had seperated into two distinct races. An underclass of anti-social pests, living from stolen food like the rats did in ancient London, and the huge dominate mass of people who were no different from one person to the next. Individual only by their belief in themselves.

It began in 2015, the people were mobilised by way of their popular culture like never before and wrestled back control. They began to tell the people in positions of power exactly what they wanted from life. And they got it. In 2039 the members of this populist ’scene’ began to control the world - businesses followed the whims of the self regarding popularity seeking fashionistas. Throughout the last century Poverty stricken East Asian workers were enslaved in boot camps to create fashion for the scene and to provide food.

The scene dwellers had a mantra: “I am unique, I am special. I am part of the scene”. They didn’t see the contradiction in their mantra. In the great march of popular culture, all throughout the 21st century they kept expressing their belief in themselves over and over to overcompensate for the awful truth. Imperfection, humility, vulnerability and character were ironed out over time and through rampart interracial breeding and domestication. Humanity had become genetically globalised, like a global village of inbred idiots.

But the split-linage of pests were an omnipresent drag on the scene. It was the scene versus the vermin and something had to be done.

In 2080 a government bill was passed in central Brazil where once was rain forest. To bring back capital punishment. Nobody really took notice at first. But the practice spread from San Paulo up through Mexico and into America. One by one dominate leaders of large city ’scenes’ from New York to Moscow began to execute their hardened criminals and the high security jails began to empty. Most city dwellers praised the execution of hardened criminals but it still made no difference to the lives of those having to deal with the petty criminals, the vermin on the streets. Many of the underclass vermins were still on the street, going about their dirty wares within a stones throw from the scene. Ungracious and unintelligent, lazy and ugly. The vermin were a nuisance and also an embarrassment to visitors. Eventually the plan all came together. The vermin would be sunk in the Atlantic on huge vessels loaded with explosives. Off land, they could be exterminated out of sight and out of mind.

The clearance of the vermin off the face of the earth had begun, but sure enough they still had a lot of vermin in Manchester.

Chall was one such rat. By night he’d roam the richer neighbourhoods of administrators and rob them of food and electrical goods. It became his routine, a routine just like that of the administrators. But where the administrators constantly tidied and ordered, Chall would bring chaos.

11.59pm

He laughs to himself in his streetwise North London accent as he slings a rucksack over his back and sets off to the neighbourhoods up on the hill. “Here come more rich pickings…”

A knock on the door. “Honey, will you get it?”. Honey is bothered about the time. “It’s 11.59 who could it be at this…”. Honey is interrupted by a bang as his front door is knocked down, splinters of wood flying through the hallway.

“Oh good God!”, screams the wife. “Well well well, what ‘av we here?” laughs Chall, who is filming proceedings through a video camera attached to his belt. He reaches into his pocket and brings out a knife.

12.23, rich pickings and job done, and so he goes to the next street.

12.59am and the sound of smashing glass alerts 80 year old Mr Coteham that all is not as it should be. It doesn’t matter though because before he relises the horror of what is going on he’s had 80% of his blood let from his neck.

Job done, and so Chall makes off with another bag of valuables.

01.59am. Yet again the sound of splintering wood being hacked down and kicked to the purple shag-pile reverberates around a hallway. Nobody appears to be in this flat and Chall collects his goods in relative silence, when suddenly:

“I want to join you”

Chall turns to see a tall man standing in the doorway of the lounge. Chall thumbs his pocket for his knife but it’s gone. The tall man reveals it, holding it in his left hand. He drops it to the floor whilst revealing his right hand from behind his back which holds a meat cleaver 10 times larger than Chall’s ‘tiny stabber’.

“Let’s visit the neighbours”

Chall looks astonished, as he exits the flat with the tall man. In a side street, a young couple are walking by a row of energy saving street lamps, the faint yellow glow illuminating their winter jackets. Just around the corner the tall man and Chall climb on top of some industrial sized waste bins and wait for their prey to approach, chattering as they get nearer and nearer. Chall is also having a pointless dialogue: “If you’re up to something, you’ve ‘ad it” says Chall, distrustful of his new, more powerful partner. “I bare no ill will to you Chall, in actual fact I rather like the change from my usual job…” says the tall man before Chall pipes up, interrupting: “You’re a posh bastard aren’t ya”, he laughs. “Why do ya need more?”

“It’s not about the fancy food Chall, this is a choice I’ve made. A unit of two is stronger than a unit of one”.

“I don’t know what ya mean”, interrupts Chall again. Chall is thick and dense, his feeble mind only capable of maiming and stealing.

He talks with the kind of accent which wouldn’t be out of place on that old film named A Clockwork Orange.

The pauper speaks thus:

“The clouds hang low these days, a constant sheet covering the city like a roof. A man walks down Answers Street. He looks up at the low slung ceiling of clouds, one building dominating the horizon. Like a shard of glass penetrating the clouds, the gleaming tower glints black and white in the hazy light, whilst all around the tower is a muddy carpet of single story houses. The light doesn’t reflect off the brown and black roofs - they might as well not exist but for the stench.”

And then sure enough, down he comes…from above the low hanging sheets - a vulture. He tucks his wings in completely, the rain doesn’t seem to bother him as he sinks through the clouds like a ship’s anchor, and with a thud he falls on a glass roof which shatters, the dead vulture strewen across the floor, blood and wings mashed against the granite. In the blink of an eye several cleaners arrive at the scene and sweep the vulture’s corpse into undignified oblivion.

The subsequent tranquility on floor 200 doesn’t last long, for in the glass lift shaft an unravelling noise suddenly ricochets off the narrow walls. Inside the even narrower lift, people are screaming as it thunders to the basement. It’s an accident of course, but it can’t be too much of a coincidence that everyone in the lift have just cleared their desks, a result of a enquiry at the bank into certain employees who thought they were above themselves.

Floors pass in a blink of the eye, through the glass doors of the lift the unfortunate ex-employees get a panning cross-section view of the entire tower from the inside, like a vast multi-story vessel. Aza’s final sight was of each floor getting progressively darker, the natural light from the huge windows above replaced with low energy strip lighting in windowless rooms, until finally she glimpses the squaller of the ‘customer deck’ before the lift did hit the ground.

A crew of emergency service men casually stride to the basement and remove the dead bodies, putting them in the familier prestine green vans outside, to be taken to the incinerators.

Paupers stare at the scene unfolding before them but by tomorrow they won’t remember a thing. Their daily life is quite simple. Eat if you can, sleep when your body gives up, and at all other times - be present in the bank’s basement for your hand-to-mouth credits, which the bank terms ‘nutritional debt’. That’s why the slum dwellers never move away, they have come to rely completely on the food bank, those that do move simply starve. The bank makes sure their daily 2 hour cue for food isn’t wasted. Upon entering the tower electrodes are forcefully implanted on the pauper’s skull which turn them into silent data processing zombies. Nobody remember’s the struggle when the electrodes are implanted, or the screams from 14 year old girls as they beg for their parents to rescue them. Their memories get electronically adjusted afterwards and they exit as they entered: as unassuming customers.

Chall was one such customer, but was rejected by the food bank as having a useless mind. Chall is not a man of cunning, or intelligence. He’s not a lone rogue up against the system. He’s as thick as pig shit and he wallows in the mud around the housing units, scrounging for dropped food credits. At night he robs and stabs his way to more food credits and furnishes his corner of the cave he lives in with his valuable loot.

Back on the estate a news report lights up the living space of a housing unit and the paupers gather around a television. It’s huge news.

It’s a cure for cancer, it’s finally here.

“The cure will hit the shelves in the form of a simple pill!” screams the news report.

But the paupers shouldn’t believe everything the doctors on television tell them. The food bank has created what they call a ‘prosperity drug’.

Chall used to be a healthy man in his 20’s. Upon eating food contaminated with the prosperity drug he began to believe he had cancer.

It’s all part of the plan. First we make you believe you have cancer when you haven’t.

Chall had no choice. He was puking up blood on a daily basis. The doctors told him that as the cancer advanced he’d grow even weaker. Not a single ounce of nutrition was being kept in his deranged drug addled stomach. He could barely stand up.

The doctor gazed with pale eyes at his patient’s pale face. That’s when he begins his sales pitch. He sell’s Chall the cure for cancer, and upon handing over everything he owns, Chall takes the pill and makes a recovery within the month.

And dear paupers, that’s not all. We also have doctors to give you the all clear a week later, so you can get on with your life without the worry. But you’ll still fall for the theatrics on television and the scare stories about the risk your immediate families and friends are ‘burdened’ with.

Welcome to how the paupers live.

As Chall walks down the street he sees a contaminated body lying motionless on the street. He couldn’t afford the cure. A vulture feasts off the flesh of the dead body.

A couple of years ago, Sam was looking for atmospheric music to acompany a film called Rope.

Fast forward to last week and I was looking for famous short stories on Wikipedia and came across one named An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

It’s about a man being hung in the wild west, and while the noose is put around his neck he hears a loud clanging noise, louder and louder. Then he realises it’s just the ticking of his watch. Next we get a flash back of how he got on the blocks in the first place - he talks to a man about wanting to blow up a bridge and winning his battle against an opposition force. However it’s later revealed that the soilder he spoke to regarding the bridge plot was actually a member of the opposition force, who had duped him into a trap, resulting in his capture and subsequent hanging.

And so as the soldiers drop him down, the rope breaks and he falls into the river! Further and further away he swims, untying the noose around his neck. His senses are super-human, he sees every tree leaf and every blade of grass even though he’s whirling around in the river. He reaches the edge and runs through a never ending forest, he feels dizzy and sick, and after 20 miles he eventually reaches his home town, he sees his house where his beautiful wife and children are waiting at the door to greet him. However just as he approaches he feels a seering pain and sees a flash of light. Everything goes quiet.

It’s revealed he imagined the whole escape - in-between the soilder dropping him down and the rope breaking his neck.

The first coincidence is the role of the rope in this film. In the film we wrote, a rope connected to the ankles of our characters represented a path through life - the more twists and turns the path takes, so the less rope the character will have left at the end, coming up short against a doorway in a field which leads to the afterlife.

The second coincidence is that An Occurrence At Owl bridge is being read in one of our Rope film audio clips from two years ago, as an audio-book narrated by Vincent Price.

So tonight I finally happened to link them together - my recent discovery of this great story on Wikipedia, completely unrelated to our previous discovery of the audio clips.

The story seems to have a big impact on many people, not least the director of Donnie Darko who says he based his story on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. That would explain it’s muddled time-line.

When the jet plane engine falls through Donnie’s roof at the start of the film Donnie has been mysteriously summoned by Frank The Rabbit, who he meets on a golf course after sleepwalking his way there in the middle of the night. When the jet engine falls through his roof at the end of the film, the dream is broken and Donnie is killed by the falling jet engine, a stake of wood from the roof piercing his torso.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was written in 1890, it has more than just the ‘dream sequence’ timeline, copied countless times since. It’s a classic.

The very existence of the Bible is proof that every so often the world goes down the toilet. Morals and all that’s good - flushed away down the u-bend. We’re on a downward curve to hell once more, powered by materialism and a ‘who cares less’ attitude to pretty much everything other than looking good and being rich.

I blame America.

So I guess we need a second coming. A collective kick up the arse. A man who comes down from the sky to give us a good bollocking. And who better to do that, than Alan Sugar

Yes, he of The Apprentice fame would fit the bill marvellously in this modern climate. A suited and booted cockney from the business world - not of shiny teeth America - but of good old Essex. He’s the only person those pesky jumped up young professionals on The Apprentice stop partying for, when he walks into the room - they go a bit quiet. That’s what the whole of the middle east did when Jesus arrived on his cloud. The same thing needs to happen now in South London when Alan arrives in his Bentley.

The he could hop on the Eurostar and stop off in Paris, and tell those frogs that next time someone attempt to travel the world powered only by the good will and generosity of the people - he shall not fail south of Dijon. And tho lo wo, he shall travel even further south into Africa and tell them to wear condoms. And while he’s at it, give those poor children some clean water to drink. It’d be a big contrast to Alan Christ’s mission in America - to create a society which doesn’t constantly sue each other. They have no problems over obtaining clean water and living into double figures, but you wouldn’t think it was all so civilised to look at them.

Alan Christ would be a blessing to man kind. He’d dish out the kind of bollockings in China usually reserved for the office tea boy upon putting too much milk in the coffee. Tibet would be freed immediately.

Then he’d go onto Japan and ask them politely to stop turning their entire country into one large brightly coloured cyborg schoolgirl.

Onward then, into Australia. Where rather than simply apologise to the aboriginals, they’d give them their land back - the whole of Australia. That may displace a few ozzys, but I have no problem with them living here in Manchester.

To make room for that Great Event, I’d prey to Alan Christ that he does something about Kerry Katona’s breeding. It’s out of control.

And in summary, while it was not very tactful (to say the least) of Apostle Williams to post on a Facebook group of 22,000 people concerning Daniel Hall (Missing in Thailand for 6 weeks) the following: 

“Come on, guys. There are a lot more important problems than Danny Hall to worry about. We have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.”

I agree with every word of it. Alan should stamp down on people joining pointless groups simply to make themselves feel better. Let the police get on with their job of finding Daniel Hall, and let his family get on with the grieving - for he is not yours to grieve over. Unless he had 22,000 close friends - which I very much doubt.

Alan Christ’s last stop (before he is hung from a cross for his efforts) would be in Turkey, where he’d tell the people who rape and murder artists who pass through their country dressed in a wedding dress for a project to raise awareness that actually the world isn’t such a bad place, that they’re going to go to hell if they do it again. Then he’d chop their hands off and let them bleed to death - the white concrete under them stained like the tragically innocent white wedding dress of the artist.

It all makes for a dramatic story, which once turned into a new Bible will become a best seller for 2000 years, by which point it won’t be relevant any more and we’ll need to make up something else. How about in the year 4000 we’ll have a super hero shaped like a giant condom, who tours the world curing people of AIDS and urging them to be less promiscuous.

I’d love to see the painting of that last supper.

James’s heart is eating him out. Jealous thoughts and only brick and plaster to express them too. He smashed his fist on the wall so hard it cracked his bones. The pain still hadn’t gone so he butted his head on the wall once more and it made no difference. He tried to intellectualise it. The more he thought about it the more his head hurt to the point where finally the physical pain overtook the heart pain.

In a fit of anger one day he took out his car and drove it down a twisty road in the dark, and he was going so fast that the tyre burst and he juddered to a stop in a brick wall, knocking himself unconscious. When he awoke a ghost from the past was staring at him through the twilight, and approached him.

“James…stop”

The ghost asked James what he was doing and why he hurt so much but James couldn’t say why. So the ghost lifted the twilight and took James back to a moment some time ago where he was a young lad in a night club. James was drunk (or maybe dazed from his car crash) but out of the blurry corner of his eye he saw his friend dancing with two girls, so he went to dance too and in what seemed like seconds later he was walking down the street away from the night club talking to her. They talked about their favourite places and a shared love of Joy Division. The ghostly presence of James and his phantom guide looked on from behind at the two figures walking off into the night.

The ghost asked James who the girl was, but he couldn’t remember. So the ghost moved 2 weeks into the future where James sat in his local pub watching his beloved football club on the TV. She walked in and glanced at James, but she didn’t seem as interested before - texting on her mobile for most of the time, while James concentrated on the football. But James looks on and remembers he felt disappointment. Then the ghost withdrew slightly from Jame’s side, and to his horror a man he recognised as a friend arrived to greet her, and they were clearly close - already.

James was now alone, watching his past self sit passively. James shouted at his past self, willing him to move and to intervene but he did nothing but watch the football. He jumped up and cheered as his team scored. The present day James sank into his seat dejected, and at that moment the ghost appeared holding a beer.

“Here have this”

The ghost advised James to cheer up and that it all just didn’t matter. “Why?” said James, irritably. “Because at this point you didn’t even love her that much, don’t you remember?” It seemed strange now, but James agreed. Then a door at the back of the pub opened up and the ghost led James out into a cold winters night. Around them were drunk men, some of them in gangs and shouting at the top of their lungs. “What has caused all this?” asked James, and the ghost said “unrequited love”.

Then the rain fell, and all around the streets became quiet. Then the ghost pointed toward a bus stop on the other side of the street. “Look, James”

James looked on, his sad eyes digesting the scene before him. She was embracing the other man.

James was badly shocked and took his anger out on the ghost. But his punches just flailed through his misty spectre, and James fell to his feet and sobbed. “I didn’t even have a chance to get to know her!”

“Of course you did”, said the ghost. And as if time had speeded up they now stood outside a gig. James heard the familiar music of Joy Division from inside the hall, and he looked toward the entrance watching the ghost slip inside through security without a ticket. To the right, she was there. His friend, at least for tonight.

The ghost sat backstage with Ian Curtis and talked about the afterlife. While James watched his past self eagerly awaiting the band to play. She chatted to him and he laughed at her sense of humour, and at all the same moments present James smiled too - but with a slightly sadder heart.

Ian Curtis entered the stage and just as his hand touched the mic, everything faded to black. The ghost was now back by the side of Jame’s crashed car…

And James was bent over the steering wheel, dead.