This is still my stuff.

Written on the wall of a Turkish mosque on Kingsland Road. What you can't quite see in this shitty mobile-phone photo is that someone’s taken a much less legible ballpoint to the existing marker-pen scrawl and crossed out “Islam” to replace it with “Christianity”. No, you. Your religion’s more boring than mine. You smoke the skunk. Yeah. And your mum. Yeah, well at least I used a legible pen. Yeah, well, that’s ’cos you‘ve got nothing better to do ’cos your religion’s so boring, if you smoked enough skunk you wouldn’t have to write on walls. Yeah, well, the writing’s already on the wall for your religion. Yeah, well, your mum’s burqa’s see-through. Yeah, well »OH, SHUT UP! THE LOT OF YOU! HONESTLY, I DON'T KNOW…«

Please wait? PLEASE WAIT? You just made me sit on the tarmac in Belgrade for over an hour with no real explanation, you gave me crap and insubstantial food on the ’plane, you farted around trundling around the runway trying to find somewhere to park your ’plane when you’d eventually landed the damn thing, and now you want me to stand here like a placid mule, hanging on your whim for 20 minutes before you’ll even deign to let me know which conveyor belt you're not going to put my luggage on for a further 25 minutes? Are you having me on? I’ve got a booze-up to attend, you know!

Just now, I worked out that I could retrieve the photos from my ’phone using Bluetooth (oooh, check me - I’d thought my ’phone was too crap, but in fact it’s just about capable), which made me look at some pictures of things that had been lurking on it, practically forgotten, for up to a year. That reminded me of things from ages ago in general, which in turn reminded me of a list I made ages ago in response to a question I was asked about which sorts of things annoy the hell out of me. Not “annoy” in a big, important, politics-y kind of way, but in a niggling, irritating, gets-right-on-my-tits kind of way. This is that list. Well, the following bit is. The bit after this full stop. No, this one.

1. My frequent inability to find things which I only put down about 2 minutes ago.

2. Inanimate objects not doing what they’re told to do or staying where they’re told to stay, like: “I told you to stay balanced on the edge of the sink, plate! What the hell do you think you’re doing jumping on the floor and spraying gravy everywhere? You’re just an inanimate object! Do what you’re told!”

3. Related to item 2, but additionally: every (I repeat, every) time I put a bowl or pasta dish or whatever in the sink to wash it with the tap on, the spoon jumps as though with voluntary power instinct to the centre of the bowl, the stream of water from the tap gets deflected off the concave surface of the spoon and it sprays, fountain-like, all over me. I really hate that.

4. Damn wires everywhere.

6. Technology that looks really good and should do something I really want, but just doesn’t work or (even worse) works for just long enough for me to have a Damascene moment regarding its potential applications, and then breaks irretrievably.

6. Screaming kids on public transport and in supermarkets, particularly when I’m hungry or tired.

7. Actually, when I’m hungry or tired just about anything pisses me off.

8. Oh yeah, mosquitoes. Mosquitoes make me angry. "That’s my blood, you little bastard, not yours! Die! Horribly!"

9. Not being able to kill mosquitoes ’cos the little fuckers have learnt to teleport to the other side of the room right at the last femtosecond (I LOVE THAT WORD) and then just sit there, smirking at you.

10. Obsessive food snobs who turn their nose up even at better-quality premade foods, like, I don’t know, Covent Garden soups. Look, we all know that it’s not as good as a proper home- or restaurant-made soup. We all know that it hasn’t got the same quality ingredients. Etc., etc., ad nauseam. For a carton of gunk which costs about 2 quid and which you can heat up in a few minutes, it’s really not bad. Stop being a nob.

11. Anyone who actually values anything they got from The Alchemist, The Celestine Prophecy, etc, etc. Stop being a tit.

That's the end of the list. Well, that's as far as I got when I wrote it, anyway.

Now look here. I might not like it, but I accept that iconography is of necessity public. I accept that the received perception of an image once representative of a cause, even if promoted to such status by an over-zealous or misguided personality cult, can and often will in time become one of an entirely detached symbolism pointing to events, operations, entities and episodes far removed from that cause and its original context; a sign for sign-readers of a different age, populating a world cracked across a semiological chasm neither of their making nor within their ken. I even accept, damn it, that if you want to engage the attention of an attention-deficient age, perhaps even with a grander purpose than simply shifting more units (such noble intention being behind this campaign, I'm sure), you must make bold, provocative statements; even, that sometimes the end might just justify the means, and EVEN that "yeah, well, it grabbed my attention, didn't it?"

I might not like any of it, but hey, I have to go along with it.

But HEAR ME NOW: do we HAVE to have that bearded bastard, that reverse Midas, that profligate populariser of the paltry, metamorphosed for sales purposes into a chimerical mutilation of something which once - for all its naïveté, for all its doomed idealism, for all its easily-deconstructed fallacies and its practical inapplicabilities, for all its collapse into the gutter of history - excitedly, blissfully, joyfully looked at the stars?

I suppose we do. I suppose we get the signs we sign up for.

As Proudhon put it, "property is theft, so I'm nicking your mountain bike".

OK, I paraphrase - he was actually talking about the keys for the bedsits for which he was the property manager, and the fact that the people who built these bijoux spaces kept nicking said keys so that they could sneak in at night and really assert their natural rights of property on them, not mountain bikes - they didn't have mountain bikes back then. In fact the stupid penny farthing didn't even dare show its stupid face 'til about 30 years later than when Proudhon was moaning on about how bleeding unfair it all was, so never mind how visionary he might have been, he couldn't possibly have been complaining about people nicking bikes of any description really. Well, not proper ones with pedals and cranks and that.

OK, not really; I don't know whether this was a mountain bike that was nicked. Mind you, it probably was, because it seems to be the law that anyone riding bikes in London has to ride a mountain bike. 'Specially the ones with the big thick tyres and the bouncy suspensions, 'cos they're really good for slamming into the Olympian 6-inch kerbs on our treacherous city roads.

Anyway. Thieving bastards.

Tesco put this shop into the retail space on the ground floor of a new apartment building near to the one in which I live. After overcoming my initial uncertainty as to whether to shop there due to their monopolistic methods and boilerplate approach simply on the presumably universal grounds that it's convenient and comparatively cheap, even if the food is frankly crap and the choice limited, I dared to ask the store manager if they would be able to get a different, additional flavour of the already obviously extremely well-selling Innocent fruit drinks in, because I like them a lot and would buy the new ones regularly.

No, he said, grimacing slightly, they wouldn't; the stock was all arranged at head office "on the computer", and the computer knew best. I implied in response that it seemed unlikely that, no matter how advanced its algorithms, said computer would know best as to whether one or possibly more real humans living in the streets surrounding a given branch were sufficiently partial to orange, carrot and mango Innocent "superfoods" smoothies that they might therefore not be giving Tesco even more money than the company was already creaming in, and he said that that was as may be, but that head office, as universal arbiter of taste and quality, decided and would continue to decide.

Finally I suggested that perhaps he might be kind enough to tell head office that a customer had asked for this particular flavour, and he informed me, his grimace converted to a smirk, that he wouldn't, because it was for me to send them an email - "on the Internet" - should I so desire.

Here's the latest stroke of advertising genius from Samsung, or whichever bunch of clearly peerless copywriting wizards they throw their money at:

"Imagine an LCD TV that's as brilliant off as it is on".

Seriously, what do you people take us for? You openly admit that the content available through the device you're attempting to convince us to exchange our hard-earned cash for is so stultifyingly poor that the damn thing may as well be left switched off, for all the difference doing otherwise would make, and you expect us to collapse into a swoon of gratitude?

I ask you.