Stairwell moths

The Magpie

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Stairwell moths

Small dusty wave

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chapter 7; Lipton and Christ reunite

Though the steady build up of traffic that began at about 4am had not troubled Lipton a rustling and muttered swearing did. Throughout the night the odd vehicle had spun around his island of safety and Lipton snuggled in to himself and finally as rush hour coagulated into a homogeneous mush of sound he lost consciousness. The crack had been a daft idea and like all stimulants precluded the loss of self most seek at the end of the day. Someone was on his roundabout and an itinerant life had taught him that virtually no one went in amongst the bushes and trees that were scattered around the centre of these islands that had so often provided a safe, untroubled campsite. Only the annual strimming and pruning but the chance of catching this council workers day out were 364 to 1. A stench of rotting flesh overwhelmed the street shaman, so repugnant he involuntarily retched though brought up nothing from his stomach. Lipton had learned to keep down ayuashka, something even the most highly powered of his profession never mastered. Nevertheless the reek of putrefaction was troubling.

Keeping frozen Lipton readied his hunting knife. Rupert Bunsen may well have survived the demonic explosion that saw his Noah project destroyed by the collective he and Skree had drawn together. The Druids and Witches alongside the two shamanic brothers had not all survived but it was without doubt that serious forces would by now be hunting them down. The achievement had been a historic strike against the grey that he and Skree had committed to fighting, both in the full knowledge that they would most likely be ultimately killed. The pagan mystics had their battles and won more than they were due. Someday they would be caught. It was inevitable. Lipton thought Skree may have survived but it was unlikely. The lonely trip back alongside the Druid lad he had grown close to had felt like they were the last two. Only the sackful of body parts they had salvaged, a gruesome jigsaw of a man and Jack of Clun had left him there in Porlock Weir, the only other who may have survived. He knew not even that the meat had made it to the traveller site. And Lipton had no clue if the man he had become something like a freind to, could endlessly overcome death.

“Lipton, you cunt! Show yourself! It’s your old freind, the one and only, son of god! Jesus Christ! I’m back and this time I’m fucking Righteous!”

Oh fuck! Thought Lipton. How the fuck had the lamb of god found him? How the fuck did he do any of his tricks for that matter. There was no sense in hiding given he’d homed in on him despite his best efforts to hide away.

“I’m over here! But don’t think you’re getting a hug! Pleased as I am to see that you’re still alive you’re clearly some way off full reanimation!”

“Ha, ha, ha!” Cackled Jesus, “you don’t look too clever yourself!”

Lipton could see Christ was still on the mend. His matted hair was drawn across his cheek in a failing attempt to see the exposed jaw and rictus grin of teeth. The eye on that side of his face was a milky globe , its mechanism exposed. Choosing to look at the old tramp from his ‘good’ side, Lipton was able to keep a grip on the impulse to vomit.

“What the fuck happened to me! I’ve been on some benders in my time….well I’ve been on one really, but it has lasted over 2000 years. But I have absolutely no memory of what happened. I remember the journey across the sea with all the crew, but from there I have no recollection whatsoever! I came to over a period of months. Stuck in a fucking trailer, back on Crankshafts site. That cunt has never got over the excellent and outstanding performance of a sexual nature to reinvigorate his and his Mrs love life! I wish I’d never bothered for all the thanks I get. Soon as the old physical repair work was done I came out and left them to it. Miserable cunts! You’d think they’d have a few bevvies ready but just like usual. It’s me who has to get the drinks in. Talking of which,” and with a theatrical sweep of his hand, Christ did his famous party piece and swung two unlabelled bottles of wine, “red or white?”

Lipton took the white, plunged the cork using a clipper lighter and took a long , deep draughty.

“Well, Jesus Christ, do you remember a lunatic, armed to the teeth that came in pursuit of our merry bunch?”

Jesus shook his head looking genuinely bemused.

“Well, we had a bit of luck! The Clun Witches had summoned up a conger eel, demon hybrid. Like a writhing mass of eels, the thickness of your arm, but en mass something like the length and width of a small train of maybe three carriages. You were blown into a number of pieces just before the action. The crazed copper blew a hole into the Noah spacecraft that housed roughly the thousand wealthiest people on the planet and the demon conger eel hybrid ate the fucking lot of them! Well, a few got away. Bunsen himself I think but in all the chaos I don’t know who lived but I do know most died. Me and Brock, we hung around for a couple of days, we gathered together what we could find of you, then we thought we’d best get out of there. Clearly anyone alive was on Bunsen island and any chance they got they’d be coming to kill us. So we sailed home. I was sectioned and I’ve not long been out of the mental health institution. Good to see you’re on the mend, mind.”

Christ looked at ground before him and shook his head. “Sounds like I missed the party. What about Skree? I take it……”

“Sadly so. There’s no way that any of our lot survived, bar Brock and yourself, of course.”

Lipton had seen Christ off his face. The man was always having a laugh. Never took anything too seriously. It was the character trait that made the man bareable. His personality could be incredibly irritating and he had no concern about the damage and hurt he caused with his endless womanising. His seemingly insatiable appetite for sex and drugs and the desire to keep the party going, forever if he could. The lord of the dance, some had called him. And Lipton considered and could not think of a single instance where the man had been self reflective. But, here, in the centre of a roundabout, outside of Bridgewater, Lipton saw tears. Only the briefest of trickle, but as lorry and car circled around them, invisible through the trees and bushes, Lipton knew that Christ had loved them. Loved those who had risked everything and most had paid the ultimate price, in their collective mission to stop the richest, greediest people. If he had a single value he held precious, beyond all other it was that money, and those who sought it out, those who set up banks outside the temple, money was the least valuable commodity that we have.

Lipton gathered some dried twigs, stirred around in the embers from last night’s first and got flame. And so the two brothers sat opposite each other, drinking their wine in silence, thinking of their fallen freinds.

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Stairwell moths

Pale tussock

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Stairwell moths

Garden carpet

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Stairwell moths have

White Ermine

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Stairwell moths

Common Swift

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Stickleback

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Stickleback

As a boy we would catch small fish; minnows and sticklebacks that instead of having a traditional dorsal fin opted for a run of spikes. From memory I think the ones we caught were three spined sticklebacks though I have some deeply buried dream of a fifteen spined version. This may have been a fantasy, an old wives tale shared by prepubescent boys. But the name seemed appropriate as a title for a piece of furniture I made for an exhibition I took part in. Whilst at college I’d made a table that was something of a folly but came from noticing how plants would grow through tarmac. Men plastered down their dull, black tarry pavement in belligerent triumph over nature but we all secretly knew that they didn’t stand a chance. Men may try to freeze a moment and dictate the direction of pedestrians but true paths form in wayward fashion. The collective mind wove intricate, unruly stray lines that were beyond the reason of a single urban planner. Meanwhile the pavements blistered and burst as life took its own initiative and did as it pleased. The table top I made was in oak and had small black shoots of bog oak that mimicked the growth through tarmac. The table top was a rejected idea but a curious diversion from what I saw as a rule to be broken. Of course I was wrong. Tables have flat tops with good reason. Nevertheless, having recognised my folly and being of a contrarian nature I dug in deeper. My girlfriend of the time was working in a hot glass studio and on a weekend she had access to a great facility. I asked her to make me a run of lead crystal spikes ranging from small four inch to larger ones nearly a foot in length. I carved a top from American black walnut that mitred into side panels. Beneath the top I built a maple box that housed a strip light. The glass spikes were housed into holes that allowed the light to travel up through the glass spikes which worked something like a fibre optic. The piece was of no practical use but worked as a light sculpture that glowed quietly. Who can claim that they’ve never been tempted to make a table with lead crystal glowing spikes bursting out of its back. Like a frozen burst of machine gun fire. Looking back I can still recall the impulse to create domestic monsters. Furniture is largely made to comfort yet sometimes the temptation to terrify is an impulse I have been unable to resist.

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The Fourth Act - Filthy Rich (Official Music Video)

https://youtu.be/K09S0887pU4?si=5QUpGRR7lfW7Fw5E My nephews band’s first single. The sound of summer 2026 Sent from my iPhone

mental health

Sometimes I go through periods of time where my anxiety gets very intense and I experience a deep terror of social interaction of any kind. Even with my closest friends. In fact it is particularly with my closest friends that I find the hardest. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it’s the person I pretend to be becomes a lie. I don’t want people to think that I’m a failure. The person I present as myself proves to be a fake. A construct created and molded to satisfy what I believe the freind would hold in the highest regard. I can remember my father telling lies to big himself up when the man who he was would have more than sufficed. And I have become the same. What I had always been determined not to be. To learn from his mistakes. Yet I have fallen in to being the same duplicitous deceiver. Whether it be financial security that I don’t really have. Whether it be success in my chosen field. Fear that my home is not as impressive as I imagine the freinds expectation might be. Why would anyone lie about who they are? Why does the fear of disappointing people, people that I love, keep me from seeing them.

I tried my best to be good at what I do and maybe I became a competent craftsman. Deep down I know that I have made far more decent furniture than just about any of my peers yet it still feels like I failed. I never had the mental strength to be successful. The more I learn about narcissists and sociopaths the more I see the pomposity of the game I chose as a career. The last stint of work was a five year blast that left me broken. My life is punctuated with periods of intense energy and work that careen out of control and crash into a mental breakdown. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve had now. Maybe five. Each time worse than the last. The first serious one came in the years after university. I’d mastered that system and qualified with a first. What a fool I’d been. Competing in a narrow system for three years. Each project we’d see who could score the highest marks. I’d been one of the top in my year. I recall the pompous swagger as I’d strut around, glowing in seeing my name top or close after a project. What a stupid idea to put the marks up like the football league at the end of the workshop. And I remember the excitement that Ian Douglas had when he rang me to let me know that I had a first. I was alone in a cottage in a part of the country where I knew virtually no one. How hollow I felt. Realising how fully I had fallen for a myth. No group any more where this would have any meaning. And I have never been asked what I got by anyone. Admittedly I never got seriously into academia where it might have been of some consequence.

I’d seen one part of the myth at my first college. The generation of designer makers who I had admired and aspired to be like were not able to support themselves without a rich family, a rich spouse or a teaching position at one of the universities that perpetuated the myth. So knowing this I tried to become a lecturer. I had various places where I worked; Shrewsbury College, university of Wolverhampton, Buckinghamshire college, Swindon, guest spots at Parnham, Jacob Kramer and others. But I was not good at communicating with people on the whole. I couldn’t sell them a product I did not believe in. And the pressure I felt led to my first serious breakdown. My girlfriend at the time, in who I had put total belief, abandoning my home community to join her. Or so I believed. She bought a derelict cottage that I renovated. She told me that she would be moving there once she had finished the glass course she did after completing her fine art degree. But she never came. I was alone, working on the cottage, making ways to live in an inward looking county that had little interest in incomers. The support of a network of friends and a partner was not there. So I turned to drink. Having no training as a teacher I was asked to be a lecturer at Wolverhampton, I applied for a job at the University of central England and finally the last day was taken up by the only college that I felt even remotely comfortable at Shrewsbury. Five and a half days a week. I was paid more then than I have ever got since. Of course my girlfriend decided to go work in a glass studio instead of coming to live in the cottage she had bought. What ever gave me the idea that she would buy a cottage, have me restore it and come live there.

So I drank until I broke. I ran away down to Somerset where she lived and tried to recover. In the end I was just in the way to her now. I went to work for Fred. He saved me then. Along with Gareth. But I can’t bring myself to see them now.

I managed to compromise on what I would do. A connection I got through my girlfriend’s father became my patron. Other makers I knew thought I had it lucky. Perhaps I did. I found I could make decent quality furniture and make a living at it. But I was still deluded. What I now understand is narcissistic and sociopathic behaviour seduced me. I believed that I had a magic touch. That I was somehow special. There’s a spectrum and perhaps Tracy Emin is at the apex. A belief that you are special. That the emotion you invest into the creation of objects invests them with magic. That an unmade bed is a great work of art. That so important are her feelings, above and beyond the feelings of common people, that any presentation of matter is of great value. Fine furniture may be a few degrees of self delusion below the work of conceptual artists but essentially it is the same thing. To succeed in that world. The world of exhibitions of pure narcissistic sociopathy that the creators of this stuff are exceptional beings. To succeed the artist must have a self belief of complete conviction. They have to be able to talk to collectors fully believing that the objects that they sell are invested with magic.

But I knew deep down, even though I dare not admit it to myself, that I am not special. Further than that, I know too that my peers in that world are also delusional narcissists.

And so again I crumbled. My girlfriend was long gone. I’d followed her, abandoning my home, family and friends till the world I had left had disappeared. Evaporated as all circles of people do after a time. And I found myself stranded. Not really accepted in the world I now found myself in and lost from my home.

From alcohol I drifted off into harder drugs. My business lasted a couple of decades.

In a broken state I gave up on everything. Left only with my trade skills I understood what it means to be working class. Having only your labour to give until you fade away.

A couple of years of mental illness where I was unable to work followed. The only friends I had were the other broken people whose common denominator is drugs and drink.

There’s more. Other bits of work like the museum fitting and more complex drug addictions.

I became a failed artist. Still delusional and narcissistic but with no evidence to support my belief in the magic I had thought was in my touch.

There is another chapter. The humility I faced and became the maker for a much younger boss. I can say how I took his business, through my skills to a new level. How I helped him design his workshop and together we fine tuned his business to create the objects for another narcissistic sociopath who had a greater self belief than either of us. I worked too hard. Continued with some of my own work. Pushed myself until again I broke. This time doctors and mental health professionals told me that I had to stop if I wanted to live much longer.

And in this broken state I have too much pride to admit that it was all for nothing. That I’m isolated and ashamed to talk to my closest friends. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I don’t have the strength of character to show you just how broken I’ve become.

And I think I’m just about done now. I’m sorry for letting you all down.

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Russell Brand & Other Famous Narcissists: An Expert Analysis by Psychopa...

https://youtu.be/6OGewZeI86s?si=K7gR0hSiZMbaYOYb Best breakdown of Brand following his recent two interviews promoting his new book with Piers Morgan and another. I found it similar to the Emily Maitliss Prince Andrew interview in that both believed that they had been successful in clearing things up when in fact to any impartial observer they had clearly dug a deeper hole. Further I found it eye opening into myself and other ‘artists’ who I have always thought they were engaged in a kind of, what we would have called ‘showing off’, a term I seldom hear these days but this is a far more articulate explanation than I have ever managed. Sent from my iPhone

Stairwell beetles

A couple of may bugs just outside the back door. Nice big beetles. Always amazes me how they can find each other.

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Stairwell moths

Pug. Common Pug maybe but it’s a guess. Usually a less homogeneous marking but I could well be wrong.

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Stairwell moths

Bee moth

Light brown apple moth

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