I sat in the courtyard at the British Library on Saturday.   A thin man dressed in ill-fitting pale clothing staggered into the circular area where I sat.  He ranted at me, ranted at the sky, ambled around ... came towards me and asked "What does life on this earth mean, what is the secret, why are we here?".  I shrugged and said "Hell if I know." He went back to ranting.  A cameraman followed him in.  The man ranted more, gestured more eloquently, the cameraman came in close, circled around him, pulled back on a great skyward gesture and pause.  Then they stopped and conferred.  Another of the production crew came over.  I photographed the photographer photographing the actor method acting madness and grinned.  Someday middle class people may sit in comfortable chairs and watch moving pictures of this actor implying that derelict madmen can devise the secrets of the universe ... and the middle class people will nod and smile, and have another beer.
 

There is a derelict madman who lives under a plastic tarp at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  He mutters and chain-smokes and lives in a dream world on his pile of dirty clothes.  Sometimes the pigeons try to get under the tarp to see if he's dropped any crumbs from the bits of sandwiches he's scavenged from tourists leavings. Sometimes he pats the pigeons.  If they shit on his hands, he licks his fingers clean.  He doesn't rant poetically or gesture at the sky. He just drifts in and out of fantasies and sleeps on his rags Every day when I go to the libraries, museums, I pass the homeless, the drunks, the junkies, the madmen who live in the street.  Anyone who has ever actually been destitute, drunk, a junkie or lost their mental health knows only one secret of life ... what hell is like.  The actor only played at being a derelict madman.  The real ones have shit on them.   The symbol of the hennaed hand, the Hand of Fatima, was believed to ward off calamity, disease, poverty, and insanity.

Research Grant
Locus: Focus
Set Breakfast #1
Executive Breakfast
Where is Captain Peacock?
Measuring Man
Method Madman
Museum Street
The Bucket Women
Eleanor Rigby has Gryphoemia
Phone Sex
The Answer
Tea Break

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