I don't know what it is with me and pub graffiti this week but here's another example from the bathroom of The Lavender in Vauxhall. I haven't been to any pubs in a while, believe it or not, (too many nights in The Roundhouse bar post-Shakespeare) and had forgotten about the spontaneous acts of art, vandalism and philosophy that relieving oneself of one's cold drinks inspires.

The thing that struck me about this rather ferocious, half-revealed, snarling, canine/reptilian/avian beast gouged into the wall is that it could be an illustration of one of my poems, also called 'Unleashed'. The poem is about 'the thing'. You know the 'thing' we all have, we all fear, we all seek to control but which always gets loose? You know what it is.

Unleashed

The years we kept it out the back — chained to the stake,
the firkin well within the reach of searching lips
and agile tongue; the years its oily fur grew rich
against the rain, and talons kept in check upon
the family tombstone propped aslant the drystone wall;
the years we fed it titbits from the table and dared
to pat its lengthening snout — were peaceful on the whole.

One restless night you saw the circle it had worn,
felt for the collar and finally unclasped our hold.
It pounced from the chain and the mist took its tracks.
So now we’re blamed for the trampled crops, the upturned bins
and gutted sheep; there’s been a sighting near the school
and at dusk the torches in the woods, the hue and cry,
the ancient howl, let us know that it’s near,
though it may not know where it belongs or how to hunt or who to trust
or how to find its way back to us, even if it wanted to.

From Los Alamos Mon Amour 

From the classically tiled walls of The Ten Bells, Spitalfields: a little bit of feedback for drinkers of shandy and 'lager (or bitter) top'. I withhold all judgement; I just liked the black on white type.

It's almost impossible to overstate Shakespeare's influence on modern culture (whether one claims, with Harold Bloom, that he 'invented the human' or merely defined dramaturgy for future centuries) but I didn't realise until last week at The Roundhouse that he wrote the first episode of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation).

TV schedules are now rather cluttered with crime dramas that recreate and solve murders through forensic observation and analysis. Think of the viral 'CSI' franchise: Regular, Miami, New York, Bracknell; don't forget 'Bones'; 'Waking the Dead'; 'Cold Case'; 'Law and Order'; 'Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps' (the programme itself is the crime) and 'Time Team'.

But I think I can trace them all back to Henry VI Part II, Act 3 Scene 2, in which the body of the king's virtuous uncle the Duke of Gloucester is discovered in his bed.

Of course he has been murdered by hired thugs at the behest of Queen Margaret, the Duke of Suffolk, Cardinal Beaufort, The Duke of York and various other conspirators but they rather hope the king will think he passed away in his sleep (death from natural causes being pretty much an impossibility in these wonderfully turbulent Histories). 

So Warwick ('the Kingmaker') inspects the crime scene with forensic rigour and concludes, in a style not dissimilar to David Caruso in 'CSI: Miami', that he was the victim of foul play:

WARWICK:
Come hither, gracious sovereign, view this body.

KING:
That is to see how deep my grave is made;
For with his soul fled all my worldly solace,
For seeing him I see my life in death.

WARWICK [takes off sunglasses]:
As surely as my soul intends to live
With that dread King that took our state upon him
To free us from his father's wrathful curse,
I do believe that violent hands were laid
Upon the life of this thrice-famed duke.

SUFFOLK:
A dreadful oath, sworn with a solemn tongue!
What instance gives Lord Warwick for his vow?

WARWICK:
See how the blood is settled in his face.
Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,
Being all descended to the labouring heart,
Who, in the conflict that it holds with death,
Attracts the same for aidance 'gainst the enemy,
Which with the heart there cools and ne'er returneth
To blush and beautify the cheek again.
But see, his face is black and full of blood,
His eyeballs further out than when he liv'd,
Staring full ghastly like a strangled man;
His hair uprear'd, his nostrils stretch'd with struggling,
His hands abroad display'd, as one that grasp'd
And tugg'd for life and was by strength subdu'd.
Look, on the sheets his hair, you see, is sticking;
His well-proportion'd beard made rough and rugged,
Like to the summer's corn by tempest lodged.
It cannot be but he was murther'd here;
The least of all these signs were probable.

SUFFOLK:
Why, Warwick, who should do the duke to death?
Myself and Beaufort had him in protection;
And we, I hope, sir, are no murtherers.

WARWICK:
But both of you were vow'd Duke Humphrey's foes,
And you, forsooth, had the good duke to keep;
'T is like you would not feast him like a friend,
And 't is well seen he found an enemy.

QUEEN:
Then you, belike, suspect these noblemen
As guilty of Duke Humphrey's timeless death.

WARWICK [puts sunglasses back on, gazes at the horizon]:
Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe
But will suspect 't was he that made the slaughter?
Who finds the partridge in the puttock's nest
But may imagine how the bird was dead,
Although the kite soar with unbloodied beak?
Even so suspicious is this tragedy.

[Off: Roger Daltrey screams and The Who's 'Won't Get Fooled Again' plays. Loud.]  

Click to enlarge

It was taken by The Professor at 'Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition', which we saw at the California Science Center in February 2003. When he got his prints back he said, "Simon, I have the perfect portrait of you." And indeed he had. If I could use this picture on my passport and driving licence, I'd be quite content.

The exhibition was a strange mixture of reverence and ransack, as the belongings of the perished were mounted and tagged in glass cases while actors in costume strode around pretending to be part of the ship's crew or impersonating some of the more famous passengers from the voyage.

I was approached by a broad, beaming woman in an Edwardian gown and enormous hat, who offered her hand and said "I am Molly Brown. Some people call me 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown!". I said, "You're larger than life, aren't you?" and she could only agree.

Central to the exhibition was an enormous chunk of the hull itself, salvaged somehow from two and a half miles down, and touching it sent a pulse of eerie energy through me. We weren't allowed to touch it in fact, but I wanted to put my fingerprint on the Titanic for some weird reason.

We were encouraged to pick a replica boarding card at random and find out what, based on the actual passenger manifest, had become of us. The Professor survived but I drowned. I reckon that makes me Leonardo Di Caprio to The Prof's Billy Zane. Anyway, I wrote this poem about a year later.

Titanica

What is this free-floating, free
radical, skulking near the hull
of her name ? That lowercase ‘a’,

Hardy’s “sinister mate” straking beneath
the waterline, tearing the word
inside out, dousing the boiler rooms

with significance. This lone letter tugs
and pilots her to the lightless port
where bowler hats, playing cards, luggage

tags, soup spoons and hair slides glow
and spectre the sunken gloom. Beacons
for our homing instinct, the never-ending

search for our dead. Salvaged now, curated
under glass, voiced by actors, audio-guided,
reconstructed, this suffocated

memorabilia joins other ‘—a’s:
Americana, Judaica, Australiana. . .
in polite, sensitively lit, mausolea.

Just when I was thinking, 'what on earth can I write next, and quickly because there's too much to say about Trieste?', I get tagged by Katy Evans-Bush, which I'm told means that I must reveal six random facts about myself and then 'tag' six other poor bloggers. To be honest, I don't think I know six bloggers but I'll see what I can do.

One I have a very talented sister called Lorraine Adams who keeps a daily record of her drawings here. Many of them are for sale on eBay and many have I bought. I think the recent sketches of lambing season are particularly fine and make me want to go and read Ted Hughes's Season Songs. She's always been an excellent artist but I also think the daily grind of producing something fresh each day is forming some lovely new pearls. What do you reckon, Lorraine? Please comment away. 

Two  I lived happily for five years with a life-sized cardboard cut out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer until the time came when we had to part company. That painful split is 'immortalised' in Los Alamos Mon Amour. I won't tell you any more: you really should buy it.

Three  My father, Clive Barraclough, was a brass band musician and composer and his most famous piece was a brilliant rousing march named after myself and my sister: 'Simoraine'. Possibly the best version of it is performed by the legendary Black Dyke Mills Band and you can hear a sample of it here where it is track number one. I'm delighted to say that it is still performed around the world in competitions and has entered the repertoire of many a professional and amateur band. It can be relied upon to bring tears to my eyes.

Four I watch very little television these days but when I do it has to be either 'Harry Hill's TV Burp' (which I'm delighted to say won two BAFTAs this week) or 'Masterchef' (which is irresistibly insane and accidentally pierces to the root of our general psychopathology about food).

Five I only ever go to the theatre to see Shakespeare or Beckett, but Shakespeare and Beckett are so unimaginably brilliant that I don't really feel the need to see anything else and so am content. By the way, the RSC are doing a sublime job with The Histories at The Roundhouse in Camden at the moment.

Six I lately am obsessed with boars: the creatures themselves and representations thereof. Here's a particularly handsome Florentine fellow whose nose shines like gold because rubbing it is supposed to bring good luck. My next book will have a poem about him and his less fortunate imaginary brother.

And so I tag the following six:

This Is Yogic

Charles Lambert

The Director

Chris McCabe

Roisin Tierney

Mollie Monsta

If I can afford it, I tend to run away to Trieste for a few days when I'm tired or need to hide from the world. I did that last weekend following the launch of 'Los Alamos Mon Amour'. I'm going to write a longer piece about my time there very soon but until then, here's a picture of Joyce's great novel (begun and I think largely written in Trieste) come back to haunt the harbour in the form of a yacht.

And here's a picture of the man himself, gazing towards the bright lights of La Piazza Dell'Unità, tragically unable to uproot his bronze feet from the pavement and come seek me out for several nightcaps.

Back in the summer of 2003, I was hired to walk up and down the length of The Regent's Canal in London, composing around 30 information panels (5 large and 25 small) to punctuate its eight-and-a-half mile course with historical info, juicy factoids and audio snippets from real and invented characters.

On Good Friday, partly inspired by the wonderful walking website Walkit.com, I traipsed from Victoria Park to Lisson Grove along the towpath and came across a few of my panels. Here's one of them near the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo.

The trickiest part of this job (apart from getting paid) was working with the designers on which type of pre-emptive graffiti we would use on the panels to obscure the text. As you can see here, we went for a jagged design in a blue that matched the hue used for the penguins, butterflies and humming bird.

We overlaid this with a more traditional 'tag' using a standard black marker pen colour and typeface. I'm delighted to say that the jagged design here was very influential on the eventual design of the London 2012 Olympics logo.

A little further up the canal, I discovered my panel dealing with John Nash's decision to divert the canal around Regent's Park rather than through it as originally planned.

The panel states: "Nash said 'The privacy of the park will not be invaded by the commerce of the canal.' This was mainly to keep 'unsightly' working navvies and boaters separate from the genteel private residents of the park. Social snobbery perhaps, but it did limit the damage done when a boat exploded under Macclesfield Bridge in 1874."

For this panel, we decided to go with a bronze-hued smiley representing the carnivalesque spirit of the excluded labourers and also hinting at the forces of misrule embodied in the explosion beneath the bridge. 

I know I'm having a bit of a whinge about our treatment of the local environment here, as I did about the painted feet at cash machines on Bethnal Green Road but these panels have also brought pleasure as well as disappointment.

About a year ago, I was jogging down the towpath towards Limehouse when I came across four or five young kids on their bikes, milling around one of the larger panels that feature more text, more pictures and a clockwork 'audioguide' feature that plays back an actor's voice when the handle is turned. 

I stopped for breath and thought I'd check out the graffiti on the panel and turn the wee handle to see if the voice recording still worked. The voice of governess and teacher Maud Winnington-Ingram, who lived in the area around 1880, began to seep from the tiny speaker as I cranked away.

This intrigued the kids, who came nearer and started asking me who the voice was and how the audio-doohickey worked. When I told them I'd actually written the text and the script they seemed amazed that anybody could have such a job or be given such a task. As indeed I would have been at the age of ten or thereabouts.

It was a nice moment: a temporary thawing of the suspicion and tension that seems to characterise how the generations interact, at least around here.

Then I took out my 'Pocket Mosquito', which emitted a high-pitched electronic scream to disperse them.

What do you make of these boxes, guides and painted footprints around cash machines on Bethnal Green Road, here in London's East London?

Several thoughts occurred to me the other day when I noticed that every cash machine on my walk towards Brick Lane had them:

• Wow, something newly ugly on this already rather ugly street with all its litter, fag ends, fractured paving stones and regularly spaced discs of gob!
• Does the council think we're so dumb that we don't know which direction to face when inserting our cards?
• Law-abiding people possess 'personal space preferences' and don't need them to be painted onto the world by the council.
  
• If someone wants to snatch the £10 I'm taking out for my food for the month, then they're not going to be deterred by the painted feet.
• Why do the feet all seem to be men's feet? I realise that this thought is susceptible to accusations of sexism but you know, thoughts as swift as meditation or the wings of love sometimes just come flying into your mind.
• Do wheelchair users feel excluded by this iconography?
• What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?
• Wouldn't it be better if they painted dance-step patterns on the pavement instead?

I was prompted to contact the head of Head of Transportation & Highways at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (I think this can go on record as my first instance of being your actual 'busy body'), who happens to be a very friendly and responsive woman.

In her email she assured me that this strategy is: "...a way of raising awareness of personal security issues and is actually targetted at the crime hot spots.  If one person thinks twice about using the machine with someone standing behind them, then it will have paid off. We were acting on instruction from our advisor on designing out crime, so I would assume there is some evidence of their effectiveness - but I will research that further and try to get back to you."

I'm not sure if she meant that they are designed to stop people using the machines when there is somebody standing behind them, because what happens when somebody starts queuing when you are half way through your transaction?

Everyone knows that there are at least nine other undesirable options to choose from on those keypads: Top Up Mobile? Check Balance? Upload Happy Slapper File? Switch Mortgage? Open Account? Charge Electricity Fob? Eye Test? Diabetes Scan? Would You Like a Receipt? Withdraw Cash?

Anyway, I wait to be convinced but who knows, maybe they do prompt people to be more cautious and in the end reduce street crime? Maybe it's worth the ugliness and the insidious degradation of the environment? I know what I think but how about you? All I know is that they don't do this in Rome so why would any other city?

It's nice that they have them for couples, though, like 'love seats' in old fashioned cinemas:

Since opening My Own Private Turbine Hall, I've been on the lookout for the next piece in the occasional 'Fallout Art' series.

Still mulling over the major Mark Rothko exhibition I saw in Rome last year, and sitting down to a delicious mini-smorgasbord of spicy treats at Albannach on Trafalgar Square, my keen collector's eye seized upon the dipping sauces that were set down with my snacks.

This lost piece by Rothko, entitled 'Sweet Chilli, Tamarind #1', can now be seen on the walls of the Fallout Turbine Hall and is currently valued at $18,000,000. It comes with tiger prawn tempura, smoked haddock croquettes and mini haggis bhajis.

The price has increased considerably since Rothko said: "Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars." (Mark Rothko: 'Art/Painting')