This page is my attempt to remember before I forget, to recall what will be irrecoverable before long. I've kept no diaries, taken few photographs; I've not used a camcorder, had a homepage or taken notes. The present it what's important, the past just a fax on thermal paper, yellowing in the daylight. So here's the beginning of my archiving those faxes. I don't know why.

Plat du Jour.
Matthew Herbert made a record about food; really, about the food industry. His themes ranged from a meal that was cooked for George W. Bush when he came to the UK to thank Tony Blair for his support during the invasion of Iraq to the fact that Ricetec, a Texan agribusiness firm has attempted to patent basmati rice. Matthew made the music with food; shaking it, melting it, scorching it, toasting it, driving over it in a tank.
He asked if I'd like to do the artwork for the record, which he had called Plat du Jour, and I said I would, but it might take a little time. I had to read a number of books on the subject first. The only clear idea I had for the record was this; I wanted to make artwork that was like walking into a supermarket, our modern cathedrals of light, cleanliness and purity. I wanted to make something beautiful, seductive and entrancing, but which became slightly repellant when examined closely. Like a supermarket; where the alluring first impressions are slowly dispelled as you start to read the ingredients lists, countries of origin, the names of the transnational conglomerates who own the brands.
I obtained a quantity of chromatography paper from various sources, and small bottles of food colourings from catering suppliers and supermarkets, where I found myself gazing blankly down the aisles, muttering to myself, toying with bottles of scarlet, raspberry red and cochineal. As far as I could tell, modern food colouring is predominately petrochemical in origin; there are two main groups of dyes, coal tar dyes and azo dyes.
At home I rigged up a ramshackle laboratory in my kitchen. I used a teat pipette to drip food colouring onto the chromatography paper, which I suspended from a wire strung above the washing-up bowl which I filled with clean water. The results were spectacular. The food dyes separated and bled across the paper, merging with or repelling each other, drifting against gravity towards the wire. The experiment required careful monitoring; one evening I forgot about my laboratory and the next morning I had no colours, just a weird dark line right across the very top of the paper.
After scanning the results at high resolution I researched the chemical details of the dyes, the contraindications and possible side-effects of ingestion. This information I edited and presented it in small type adjacent to and over the smeared and blurred dye chromatography.
As in a supermarket, the viewer was forced to look closely in order to see the truth about what they are buying. The small print is where the sense of beauty falters, the sense of purity stumbles into the disconcerting idea that this bright, colourful world is made possible by the manifold use of oil; that black ooze composed of millions upon millions of long-dead organisms. There is death in our food. None of the dyes I researched were considered suitable for children. Most were banned in many countries, whilst being commonly used in the UK.

El Chupacabra.
Towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century the hallucinated economy of the 'globalised' world suffered a serious fracture. This economy, built on imaginary assets and predicated entirely on the erroneous supposition that there will be a reliable supply of cheap oil, gas and coal forever, collapsed after imbibing a dangerous cocktail of greed, lies, mendacity and corruption.
The patient is now in a critical condition, a state which is certainly not helped by the continual injection of more of the same. I remember watching Warner Brothers cartoons, in which it was possible for crazy characters to run straight off a cliff, and then hover in mid-air for a time, whilst still frantically running. Before falling a very long way.
By coincidence, at around the time that coverage of all this reached the popular press I had been spending time making large pictures of what, for convenience's sake I was calling 'Pandemons'; horned creatures, animals that were a composite of goat (herbivore) lion/tiger/shark etc (carnivore) and businessman (omnivore). I have always been fascinated by the horned gods, by the Minotaur in the darkness, by the beast that lurks in the shadows, by the presence that waits in the maze.
I've got nothing against goats. I've got nothing against tigers, or sharks. I simply discovered that if I drew a goat, gave it the mouth of a rapacious carnivore and then dressed it in the suit and tie of a disgraced banker (or politician) it looked fucking evil.
Bankers and politicians wear suits and ties so they don't look like criminals. The Pandemons are horrible, feral, carnivorous lupine beasts, consumed by a naked, guiltless, ravening greed. They are partly the faces you fear you'll see when you pull open the curtains at night, partly the laughing visage of decaying Western capitalism, they are the draught created by the vast movements of cash into the off-shore bank accounts of the despicable, the stench of bonuses, payoffs and bribes; they are incompetant, parasitic vampires.
There were thirteen Pandemons in the show I did in Bristol called 'El Chupacabra'. Thirteen ghosts at the funeral. Thirteen spectres at the feast of the goat. Loitering on the blackened cliffs of free-market economics, cackling as they raise a glass to toast Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet.
Gallons of paint I've poured over them to drown their snickering. But still they laugh.

Paintball gun.
At an unspecified date when I was in my mid-thirties I gathered together my equipment; large bottles of black ink, hypodermic needles, large syringes, and a paint-ball gun. I loaded these items into my bicycle saddlebags and boarded the train to a small village in the Chiltern Hills. It crossed my mind that in those days of 'heightened security' and 'terror alerts' that if my bags were to be searched by one of the now-ubiquitous British Transport Police I would probably be in an amount of trouble.
Never mind, never mind. The innocent have nothing to fear, and I was innocent of everything. Naturally. I was simply interested in what happens to ink when fired at great velocity at unyielding surfaces. When I arrived at my destination I planned to empty the paintball gun ammunition balls of the viscous red fluid they contained (using the syringe and a needle), re-inject the empty balls with black ink, load the gun and fire the ink-filled balls at sheets of white-painted MDF.
My destination was a house in the depths of the woods of the Chiltern Hills, a place I had never visited before. The Chilterns rise above Oxfordshire, a strange zone of tatty wealth and dark woodland. I arrived at the railway station of Goring and cycled with some effort uphill into this oddly quiet quarter; not thirty miles from London but far divorced from the twenty-first century.
I was supposed to be working with Radiohead; they had some roughly-shaped ideas about making a record but nothing was very easy. Perhaps most paths petered out, deep in the woods, just when it was getting too dark to see. I intended to produce the artwork to accompany the music, and my own paths were approximately the same.
I think it was early autumn, although the time of day rarely altered from early evening. It didn't take me long to begin my experiments with the needles, the gun, and the ink; however, failure was practically immediate.
The balls which the gun was designed to fire were small, about a centimetre and a half in diameter, and they gave slightly when sqeezed between the finger and thumb. I discovered that the red, revoltingly plasma-like matter inside the balls was almost impossible to extract with the hypodermic needle. The stuff was the consistency of mucus.
When I finally managed to empty a few of the balls I attempted to refill them with black ink. To my inky horror, shortly after I had achieved this the balls began to deliquesce, flooding my hands and the gun with indelible black liquid. The sheets of white-painted MDF I had lined up along the wall stayed white as I frantically attempted to eject the mess of melting plastic from the gun.
I think I spent about two weeks in those woods. Most of the time I rode my bicycle through the staring trees; other times I concentrated on painting an enormous canvas with an equally enormous downward-pointing arrow. Eventually I rode back down the hill to Goring and the railway, and went home.

Catachresis College
Me and Doktor Tchock had this idea. It was about a book that was filled with vital information, incredibly important texts, diagrams and pictures. The book that could explain everything. But this book had been forgotten; it now lay, dusty, yellowed, in an old desk drawer in a locked attic that no-one could find. The book had frayed red cloth covers, fragile, brittle pages; the desk had flaking varnish, scratched graffiti from children now old, now dead; the attic had dust, cobwebs, ghosts, a nailed-shut trapdoor.
We reconstructed the contents of the book, piecing together all the fragments, stitching a thread through the loose leaves. From second-hand bookshops came textures, colours, title pages, frayed spines, worn gilt.
I was still obsessively drawing the figure of the weeping minotaur, finding references to bulls and horned gods everywhere, tracing the temples of Mithras the Roman legionaries had left behind. Mithras Tauroctonos. The Doktor was still drawing twisted woods, tangled pathways. We discovered new constellations, temporary bursts in the cold skies, and catachresis, the misuse of words. And drawing, drawing, writing and typing on an old typewriter; eventually, we were able to remake the forgotten book; at least, a simulcrum of it, an imagined version of what it might be.
This was the 'special packaging' for Radiohead's Amnesiac, or this was a stolen library book, or this was ridiculously overblown wrapping for a compact disc. It was an encrypted file, but not in the sense that the record label understood. It was encoded with hidden meaning; everything really did mean something. But what?
There was an image of the same book, but older, tattered, on the front of the regular CD release. There were many dates stamped onto the 'library card', and words and phrases dredged from London's silt and Kernow's coombes. And it was very important, even if it was just an approximation of a forgotten book in a desk in a dusty attic.