Lately, I seem to be spending lots of time waiting. Waiting in a queue, waiting for a bus, waiting to get in somewhere, waiting to see someone. Waiting for things to happen. Waiting for my time to come. There are always slightly more people in the city than it has the capacity for and sometimes when too many people end up seeking the same thing you see the infrastructure’s seams stretching at their edges. Most of the time you can go someplace else, but sometimes you just have to wait it out and think about that David Foster Wallace talk about patience and humility in public spaces.
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The other day I spent half a day going to, through, and back from Barnet Hospital, moving between passages of waiting and gradual progression, floating about in the interstitial spaces that are the bread and butter of public services. The thing that struck me most was just how many people move through the system in a relatively short space of time, and also the diversity of the people that you see. I used to play quite a lot of Theme Hospital, and also spend long periods waiting for my mum to finish shifts on the ward, and I remember distinctly the intensity of the experience of both. (My mum used to like the game because she felt that, despite all the bloaty heads and invisibility, it conveyed something accurate about the experience of working in a public hospital in the UK.) Spend any amount of time moving through the NHS and you can only leave with a sense of amazement at what an incredible institution it is, despite the frustration that is part and parcel of any experience of navigating its many tendrils and arms.
After a consultation I had a ninety minute wait for a prescription, so I decided to walk around the hospital floors to look at people. I always like watching the people smoking outside the front, because I like the contradiction of it and that weird image of people in medical gowns inhaling their little sticks. And I like the relationships of convenience that form between these smoking people, a mutual degeneracy that sustains them and creates a temporary connection, a camaraderie of sorts. Three blokes were smoking together and one said: “Who is the next nutter going to be that joins our crew?” I also saw an old lady calling for a cab using the hospital landline. She was so old that she seemed to be defying science, the kind of person who looks so frail you start worrying about them the moment you see them, even though they had been doing just fine for the entire lifetime they existed outside of your oversight. When she spoke on the phone her dialect was like a teleportation to another time. I saw a little girl with learning difficulties doing some kind of ritual where she pushed her hands into the recesses of her pockets, jumped upwards and stamped down, and then did these little twirls on the spot that satisfied something inside of her. She was with her dad, grinning at him while he struggled in loving exasperation to get a sense of what possible inference should be drawn from her dance.
When I got back to the pharmacy my number was up. There was a queue of six or so people whose prescriptions were also bagged and ready, and we had to then wait longer having already been waiting plenty. It made me think about that thing when you phone up a customer service number, then stay in the queue for a hour listening to the hold music only to get through to someone who then immediately hangs up.
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Last weekend, I went to the first Arsenal Women’s game of the season, mostly just as something to do. I like the evocation of place that going to the stadium provides, and also the sense of occasion. I like seeing all the little girls sitting on their dads’ shoulders and the groups of adult women who come here together week in week out. Behind me was one such group, four season ticket holders who were talking tactics and providing much appreciated live commentary throughout the game. The woman next to me seemed enraptured by watching the substitutes doing their pitch-side warmups and locked her gaze on this even when the ball was down the other end. And on the other side were two kids in team shirts. One of the women behind me spilt some beer and the slow trail of it slid down and slowly under my feet. They were worried about this because they had snuck the beer inside the ground in a soft drink cup, and they said that if you are caught doing that by security you can be hit with a season-long ban. In the stadium you have no phone service, and I was alone, so at halftime I listened to them like they were a podcast, absorbing every word without knowing what they looked like. After the game these women were going to watch some rugby match and then after that they were going clubbing somewhere. It was Saturday, the sun was out, and the day has only just begun. I went home and they went onwards, unaware I had been eavesdropping on this sliver of their lives the whole time.
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A few weeks back, CQ and I went to The Pineapple, best known now as “Keir Starmer’s favourite pub,” to have one beer outside upon sundown at the summer’s tail end. Every time we go there, an old man talks to us, so when this man in his sixties or seventies who was four or five pints in turned around to greet us, we knew something memorable was coming but not exactly what. We exchanged some passing trivialities. He was born in Hoxton he said, and asked where we were from. I said Enfield and unconsciously put on an accent slightly thicker than my real one, trying to convince him of some indescribable authenticity of character, that I was a good and real person and not an interloper or parasite, not an agent from outside of the M25. He told us he was at this pub because he had been barred from his usual one, falsely accused of “racism.” He told us the story of the incident, and his telling seemed to have large holes missing that might have revealed more about the role he played in his own downfall. We ummed and erred, not knowing where this conversation might be going, but suspecting he may next draw some link between this isolated ignominious incident he had experienced and its relation to wider “British Values” and state of the nation matters of this sort. It is not exactly a good time right now and I read somewhere that in schools in England at the moment, kids are cussing each other out by saying “your dad shouts at hotels,” which is such a temporally and culturally specific insult that it can only be true. A few lines later the man said the thing that had been long coming, the type of payoff that you cannot write. “You go to jail nowadays…” he said, and CQ and I immediately looked at each other while trying really hard not to laugh, “…just for flying the Union Jack.”
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A city as large as London is always expanding. I don’t even mean this literally, but more in terms of how the individual perceives and engages with it. It is inexhaustible and infinitely variable, despite all attempts to make it dull and uniform. I’ve walked in, around, and through that section of Kings Cross that development, for whatever reason, has not yet touched, where there is still normal housing, useful shops, old buildings, and a falafel man. No flat whites or whatever, no sandwich shops. I’ve walked this stretch for different reasons in different parts of my life: to get back from a workplace, to catch the bus to a home, to get to some pub, to go to a gig, or just to access tangential areas that I need to reach by passing through. The city is far too big to navigate entirely by walking, but you can connect large parts of it through bus journeys, roaming diagonally, and taking little shortcuts on foot. And though it hasn’t yet been desiccated, this part of Kings Cross is still new each time I look at it, because I am changing and I am interested in different things. The network of structures and its varying visual elements, the shapes of the buildings, the graffiti on the walls, the signs of the businesses, all take on different meanings to me over time.
Recently, we’ve been doing these short walks in North London that show you all the modernist buildings on a certain route. Some of them are amazing, and they’ve been hiding there just around the corner from me since 1939. This wasn’t something I would have been interested to previously know that the city offered, and each new discovery of this sort instigates the thought: what else is there that is hiding if I venture into some random suburb, or scrabble down some inner city back street? I don’t think I’ve yet been to Little Venice? Nor that little place near the British Museum that has all the electro-mechanical arcade toys. And I can’t actually remember whether or not I have actually seen the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace. The city is inexhaustible. I’ve definitely never been to New Malden, nor to Motspur Park. It is funny when you see all these people queueing for some breakfast place that has been in some video somewhere, and then, four doors down the road, there are two totally empty cafes serving what is essentially the same plate.
As I use social media less and less, I’ve been missing sharing links and keeping tabs on things. To fill this gap, I’ve been updating my website more. It seems like a good idea to keep a personal website, as it totally yours to keep and adding things to it doesn’t really benefit anyone other than you. I’ve moved my photos there, adding them in little narrative posts, and I’ve added a notes page that I can treat like what is sometimes called a “digital garden.” It is a transient page that can be updated constantly and carelessly, like a blog but without the permanence. I’m keeping a linkroll there of interesting things I stumble across. Elsewhere, I had a new cutscenes column published on Notebook. This one was a conversation with Sam Barlow and Natalie Watson, creators of Immortality, about the full-motion video game and its troubled history. It is a topic I’ve been intrigued by for a while, ever since seeing an old Broken Pixels video where they derided this FMV game called Wirehead, so it was fun to find two willing people also interested in this phenomenon. I also wrote a couple of “nonlinearities” newsletters a while back. One was on Julian Castronovo’s Debut (2025) and Armand Yervant Tufenkian’s In the Manner of Smoke (2025) and the essay film more broadly, and the other on Maxime Jean-Baptiste's Listen to the Voices (2024) and how the hybrid documentary fell out of favour.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.
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