A chewing gum is a chewing gum is a chewing gum. But now and again a chewing gum comes along who doesn't really want to be a chewing gum.

COMING SOON IN DANISH >>> The Chewing Gum Adventures

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‘Murder’, it said in bold black letters on a bright yellow background. I have seen these signs before. Most Londoners have. Big, buckled and awkward, the signs appeals for witnesses to come forward in the strictest confidence. Such signs are often chained to a lamppost to ensure against theft, against concerns that somebody might march off with the big awkward A-frame and stand it in their bedroom as some kind of trophy, a drunken prize. Not a murder, then, just a lump of metal with the word murder printed on it in bold, with a time, date and phone number

       This particular sign was at Marble Arch. There were three or four of them spread around. One was placed to catch the eyes of people sitting on the benches eating sandwiches. Another was aimed at the cars and buses that curved around Park Lane on their way to Knightsbridge. One seemed to be aimed at me as I exited the pedestrian subway at exit 10. I can’t say that I have ever paid much attention to such a sign before. I remember reading one while stuck in traffic. But this sign, even when it was no more than a flash of yellow, sent a chill down my spine.

On the 30^th of August…

That was two weeks ago, I heard myself thinking.

A man was assaulted… he died from his injuries…

The reason this bothered me was because on that day, September 14^th, I was working on a story for Time Out magazine about homelessness. I was living rough in London for 7 days, gathering portraits of life on the street. I had come up to Marble Arch with a mind to sleep there. Any concerns generated by the yellow sign were all about me. I had no thoughts for this assaulted man. There was no assaulted man. There was a yellow sign with the word murder on it. It was a time and a date. A phone number I had no use for.

       I asked a young homeless guy in the area if he knew anything about the murder. Specifically, I wanted to know if it was homeless person that had been murdered. He thought that it was. On a wave of vulnerability I scurried back to the relative safety of Covent Garden, to a group of homeless men who had taken me into their group, who looked out for me and protected me.

       A week later I wrote the story. I mentioned the sign. Not to highlight a murder, but the sense of vulnerability on the streets. A week after that, on October 4^th, the story ran along with a small photo of the sign. That was it. It was all in the past. I moved on to other projects. Then I received an e-mail from Alan Rutter, my editor at Time Out. The subject line read, ‘On a sadder note’.

Could you pass this lady's details on to Alan Emmins. She'd really like to talk to him. It was her partner who was murdered at Marble Arch (as mentioned under 'Tuesday').

“Why?” was my initial, stiff-backed reaction. I didn’t know the man. I didn’t meet the man; I met the sign. I told myself I would call her after the weekend. I meant it, too. But I couldn’t stop thinking about why she wanted to talk to me. I called her at 8pm on the Friday, the day of the e-mail. Her daughter answered the phone, “Oh, mum, it’s the man from the magazine.“

Mum cut in, “Tell him to call back in five minutes.”

“Sorry, my mum’s dying my hair and her hands are covered in hair dye, can you call-”

“DO CALL BACK THOUGH!” I heard the girl’s mother shout in the background.

       I called back.

Susan had been sitting in a dentist’s waiting room with a friend when she came across the homeless story. There were lots of magazines to chose from. For whatever reason she chose Time Out. She noticed the article about homelessness and thought it might be interesting, relevant even.

“Well this is what Ian used to do,” she told me over the phone. “Go on these long benders and sleep on the streets… Then I got to the part about the sign and…”

Ian. So it wasn’t just a metal sign. It was Ian.

“When I read your story I thought, I have to contact this man. I have to tell him about Ian.”

What Susan was saying, very sweetly, was that this may have been a sign to me, a bold word on a yellow background with a time and a date, but to her this was a person: it was Ian.

“If it were me,” she continued, “I’d want to know something about the person. I mean, you stopped and you reacted to the sign, so I thought you’d like to know who he was?”

I wasn’t sure at first whether I did. Whether it was right for me to know anything about this person. It seemed so personal. None of my business. But Susan was so enthused that we spoke on the phone for well over an hour. She told me that Ian was from Newcastle. She told me that he was thirty-four-years old. A year older than me. She told me he was beaten over the head with a bottle. Beaten until he was dead.

I thought about Ian a lot over the following days. I thought about the harshness of these metal signs.

I was struck by their sadness. They signal an abrupt and violent end, and the absence of another soul to speak on the deceased’s behalf. I didn’t want to speak on Ian’s behalf, but to at least elaborate a little on his life. I wanted to get him off that sign, if I could. But I questioned my reasoning. Who was I doing this for? Can I not stop being a writer for five minutes?

Then I got a text from Susan, correcting an error in the e-mail address she had given me over the phone. I called her back and told her I had been thinking about Ian, that I wanted to write about him, that I wanted, somehow, to turn him back into a person again. I asked her how she would feel about me, a stranger, attempting this?

We met two days later. We sat outside the Three Greyhounds on Old Compton Street, drinking a coke and water.

“He had been working on a house just over the road from where I live,” Susan began. “He told me I caught his attention. On his last day, when I came home, he started calling out to me. He came running over and said, ‘When are we having that drink then?’ I thought, do what?”

Ian, over the following few minutes, convinced Susan to go out with him.

“When?” she asked.

“Tonight,” he told her.

He was on her door a few hours later with a big grin and a bigger bunch of flowers.

The following Wednesday he was on the doorstep with his bags.

“He told me he had been sharing a flat with some other fellow. He was complaining that his stuff kept going missing. At first he said he just wanted to leave a bag at my place. Later that evening I thought, hold on a minute, he thinks he’s moved in!”

Susan describes Ian as a lost soul, as a child who couldn’t stop chasing the party. Her suspicions that things weren’t quite what they seemed were confirmed on the occasions when Ian would take her into the city, where they would go for long walks.

“We’d be walking along and all the homeless people would say hello to him. He would try to pretend he didn’t know them, but some would chase after him saying, ‘Ian, Ian, it’s me!’ and then when he was confronted, face to face, he’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, sorry. I didn’t recognise you.’ I remember thinking, how does he know all these homeless people?”

Susan took Ian to a friend’s party. Although a great time was had by all, and the night ended with all Susan’s friends demanding that she bring Ian out more often, she recognised something from her past.

“I’d grown up with alcoholics all my life. My Father. My mother. Ian had made a point of not drinking in front of me at first, though he found it odd that I didn’t drink and kept asking why. But then at the party he was totally smashed. I thought, I know what this is.”

Ian showed more and more of himself. This included his dependency on alcohol. Susan and Ian quickly made an arrangement: when he drank and went on what she described as ‘a bender’ he had to go elsewhere. This wasn’t so much for her peace-of-mind, but for that of her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sophia. Ian agreed, and soon began disappearing for weeks at a time.

“That’s how he knew all the homeless people: he was one of them,” Susan laughed.

Susan never knew where Ian was during his absences. But soon enough she would get a text message, either from Ian’s phone, or if he had lost his phone from one of his friend’s. He would test the waters with his text messages before asking if he could come home.

“He always wanted me to go and meet him at the station. Always. He would just go on at me until I agreed. So I’d be there, by the barriers, and then I’d hear him. ‘That’s my wife! She’s come to collect me! See, that’s my wife!’ And there he’d be, this big oaf of a man with a huge bunch of flowers and a big smile. We weren’t married. That’s just what he told everybody. I knew what he’d been up to. He was sat on the train telling everybody he was on his way home, that his loving wife was coming to collect him. He was trying to convince everybody around him that he was normal, that he had a normal life.”

Though Ian’s life was far from normal, he did long for normality, along with a smattering of designer clothes and gadgets. When he did have money, either through building site work or bank loans, he would go on shopping sprees. He would lavish gifts on Susan, one time buying her a top-of-the-range washing machine.

“When it didn’t arrive on the day it was supposed to I called the shop. They told me he’d gone in and cancelled it, got a refund. I thought to myself, well, I wont be seeing him for a few weeks.”

It sounds, by anyone’s standard, like an awful lot to put up with. Susan and Ian were together for two years. It was during this second year that she started to see a change, to see signs that Ian was starting to think of a different life, to move toward a different life. On one shopping trip Susan noticed Ian was no longer by her side. She turned round and found him gazing in a Mothercare window.

“Look at the little boots, Sue,” he said. “Hey, we could have a baby!”

Ian dragged Sue excitedly into the store to test drive pushchairs. On the train ride home Sue remembers Ian with a big bunch of grapes, offering them to everybody around them with his excited Newcastle drawl.

“Would you like a g-r-a-a-p-e? Would you like a g-r-a-a-p-e? Sue, nobody wants a g-r-a-a-p-e.”

But even though Sue saw this warmer, loving side to Ian, she knew exactly where they were going, and where they weren’t.

“I loved him. He was just a big kid, a lost soul. He wanted everybody to love him and admire him. That’s why he never had anything: he gave it all away. When he had money he’d be in the pub with a handful of tenners, waving them around and buying drinks for everybody. When he came back from these benders of his, and sometimes he was in a right old state, stinking of urine and sick and filth, something just kept telling me to take him back, to take care of him. I think because I knew we wouldn’t last – and I absolutely knew we wouldn’t last – that made it easier, knowing this wasn’t forever. He was just a lost and troubled soul and I just thought while he’s here if I can just make him happy, make him smile, then that’s a good thing… I never thought it would end like this though, with murder.”

When Susan read the homeless article at the beginning of October, she came to a section describing how a man had become very angry with me and threatened many and varied forms of violence. He basically (and rightly) didn’t believe I was homeless, which was odd, as I hadn’t claimed to be. Susan wondered if this had been what happened with Ian. She imagined him sitting there amongst the homeless announcing, “I don’t even need to be here. I’ve got a wife and a house!”

It will be a while before Susan gets her ‘why’? She will need to attend the trial. And she does need to attend the trial.

“I have to go, to let this other fellow know that I forgive him.”

The other fellow being the man the police have in custody for Ian’s murder. The reason, if you like, for the cold metallic sign, for the call for witnesses, for Susan and I sitting outside a pub smiling at the tales of a man who is no more.

At the weekend I began reading Plato’s Republic, and was disappointed on many levels to find the narration, in the voice of Socrates, irritating almost beyond acceptance. I kept allowing the book to drop in my lap as I groaned and moaned about the pointlessness of what I was reading. Socrates was arguing with a local about justice and the just man. “What surprised me,” Socrates says to Thrasymachus, “was that you rank injustice with wisdom and excellence, and justice with their opposites.”

“Yet that is what I do,” Thrasymachus replies. As the argument went back and forth I was irritated on two levels. Sure, by all means spend some time in dialogue with somebody whose values are clearly flawed, but after 17 pages of meandering reasoning I found I had a desire to tap Plato’s Socrates on the shoulder and put a few questions of my own to him. Chiefly, “Why are you still talking to this fool?” There’s no helping the man. At the same time, I wondered which was more offensive, the ignorance of Thrasymachus or the smugness of Socrates. I found myself wanting to trade the tap on the shoulder for a swift kick in the pellets.

The narrator’s continually smug, holier than thou attitude to educating the misguided, along with his unappeasable appetite for analogy, did remind me of another, living philosopher that I once had the displeasure of coming across. He was arguing for the feasibility of cryonics – the study or practice of keeping a newly dead body at an extremely low temperature in the hope of restoring it to life at a later date with the aid of future, as yet undeveloped medical advances – on behalf of a company offering the very service.

The people of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation foresee a future where cryonics is a natural choice. Instead of being buried or cremated it will be just as natural to be packed into an arctic cylinder full of liquid nitrogen. Their booklet ‘Alcor Life Extension Foundation – An Introduction by Jerry B. Lemler, M.D.’ is packed with credible titles, filled with Ph.D. Tom and M.D. Harry, who are on hand to bring credibility to the topic. But alarm bells ring loud throughout the brochure. The first is the reference to Alcor members as being ‘Alcorians’. I am not about to accuse Alcor of being a religious cult (nor will I suggest their logo more fitting for a publisher of science fiction), but surely anybody alive in the last thirty years can name a few cults that sound uncannily like ‘Alcorians.’ The tag suggests that Alcor are aiming themselves at assorted nut jobs. And rich ones at that.

Dr Lemler is quick to list his acquainted Ph.Ds., but from where I sit it doesn’t take an eight-year education followed by five years of research to understand that by calling your members ‘Alcorians’ you are begging to be harangued and mocked.

But much worse than this little oversight is the use of philosophical twaddle.

Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph.D. uses a compelling analogy involving an automobile, writes Dr Lemler.

“If we say a car has the capacity to move at 110mph, we mean that it is currently in a state such that, given appropriate stimuli (such as gas, a foot on the accelerator etc), it will achieve 110 mph. The objection claims that we don’t mean that the car could achieve 110 mph given available technology, and we don’t mean that, given some empirically possible but non-actual technology, the car could achieve 110 mph. The problem with the objection lies in the fuzziness of the terms ‘capacity’ and ‘appropriate stimuli.”   

Mr. Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph.D. (who with such a name could also moonlight as a porn star and/or news anchor) just told us… well, nothing! What he did do was use an awful lot of words to promote his branch of death as an industry. He tried the old bamboozle technique. Say it, say it again and again and then slip in an analogy that, well, by the mere fact of it being so incompatible with what your talking about can’t really be called an analogy at all. He talks of disconnected wires, about how capacity can be restored by reattaching the wire. Sure, but how many human beings have you seen in the street immobilized by a loose wire? But the analogy gets thinner: what if the car is broken and there is no current technology that can fix it? “Further suppose that the manufacturer tells you that they are working on a new repair process that will restore function, a process that should be available a month from now.” Yes, I can further suppose until the cows come home, I just can’t get myself to further suppose all the way to accepting that a broken-down car is in anyway comparable to a dead body. The car is an inanimate object, and, aside from this Eminent Extropian Philosopher’s attempt to convince otherwise, the human being is not inanimate. Mr. Ph.D. rounds up with, “The car analogy, then, supports rather than undermines the case for basing a criterion for death on irreversible loss of capacity rather than currently irreversible loss of capacity.”

Seriously!? Appropriate stimuli indeed!? If the “problem lies” in the “fuzziness” of the terms “capacity” and “appropriate stimuli,” Mr. Eminent, I suggest you don’t use the terms capacity and appropriate stimuli, they were, after all, if I am not mistaken, your own words.

Even without such stupidity in branding and philosophy, I would need to see some radical improvement in human behavior before I ever thought this planet worth a second stint. If I could be packed off somewhere else, never heard of, never seen, for better or worse, it would be worth a gamble. But the way planet earth is going? Meh! No, thanks!

The only reason would be to see how the kids are doing. But what if you don’t come back for 200 years, which from where we stand now would appear an optimistic time frame? The children will be long gone. Sure, one would hope for a generational trail, but what are you going to do, knock on the family home and announce, “I used to live here!”?

Can you imagine the scene? Some couples find it hard enough to accept each other’s in-laws in the now, but imagine if said in-laws were several hundred years old.

The chances of your actually being wanted in 300 years’ time are slim. Sure, you’ll be wheeled out at first for cocktail parties and after-dinner speeches, but what of you then? Once the novelty value wears off you’ll be cast aside like any other aging fool. Only it will be easier to dispense with you because nobody will have any emotional connection to you. You never bounced them on your knee or took them out for ice cream. For the last 300 years you were a fucking ice cream. All you did was thaw out one day and turn up.

What other reasons could there be for coming back? A loved one? You could be vitrified together and reborn together. But most people can barely keep a marriage together for one lifetime, so two lifetimes of marriage to the same person? I fear there would be no surprises left.

Nah! I think myself, and luckily the Extropian Philosopher too, will only be getting one innings. And, I suppose now I have got this rant out of my system, I shall return to Plato and his Socrates and attempt to learn something that might be useful as I meander towards my end. At least Socrates keeps it simple. He does get there in the end, and it is very hard to disagree with him. I just wish he wouldn’t toy with his prey so much. It’s like watching one of those zombifying wasps plunge its stinger through a cockroach’s exoskeleton and into its brain. Only Socrates is not doing this so he may lay his larvae inside Thrasymachus, where his hatched philosopher offspring will eat Thrasymachus from the inside out. Any ‘just’ motive Socrates has, if we are to examine his technique and tone, appear secondary. Socrates slowly maneuvers Thrasymachus for the kill. I can’t help but imagine him flashing a wry smile to his friends that are gathered for the scene. The 'just man' indeed.

It has been a long time since I received a handwritten letter, but today, upon opening my mailbox, that is what I was greeted with. The sight of it made me smile instantly. I didn’t pick it up straight away, but leaned in for a closer look. Two things struck me: the dirty stains on the right hand side of the envelope and a small 3D heart surrounded by the words ‘luv from Oregon’ in the top left corner.

The letter is from a guy whom I met while recently travelling from San Francisco to Chicago on the Zephyr Line. I wrote to him six weeks ago because I would like to pay him a visit and write a story about him. He is somewhat of a troubled soul, overwhelmed by a life of grief, yet still adventurous and warm. I won’t talk about what he was doing on that train. I will save that for when I write the story. I will say that it took only a few seconds to recognise he was a rare character indeed. His letter was also surprising. The simplicity of his words was artful, capable of generating intrigue and speculation.

My trip to New Jersey was quite an adventure. Things did not go like I’d planned.

Two wonderful statements: quite without drama, pomp or elaboration. Knowing what he was doing on that train I can guess that the lack or elaboration is due to the adventures not being the kind of things you commit to paper. Not in your own hand. Not when you are supplying a return address. Still, in these two simple sentences he does not try to convince me of anything. He has resisted all temptation to romanticise and oversell. I am hooked. I want to board a plane and sit with him at a bar.

The letter goes on to discuss that which is essential to all hand written correspondence.

The weather here has been about normal: a foot of snow, a bit of rain mixed in with a few timely days of sunshine. The temperature has been between 20ᵒ and 55ᵒ for the past few weeks.

If somebody were to ask me if I would like to hear about the weather in Oregon I would leave them with few illusions on the matter. If somebody were to skip the enquiry and go straight to broadcast I would likely push them in a puddle and be gone. Yet in a letter, not only is a description of the weather on some far distant plane acceptable, it is essential. This particular description I find quite charming, as it seems to cover the full spectrum of possible weather patterns. It commits to nothing, other than to say that the weather is capricious. I have read it 20 times and still I am not done with it. Not by a long shot.

I really enjoy this understated style of writing. I enjoy the calmness of it. In the hands of the masters the undersold leaves your brain free to conjure clear images, to draw on an archive of visual references. It's the ability of great writing to trawl the reader's mind for images that makes books the original interactive media. Gabriel Garcia Márquez: His clothes were smeared with mud and vomit. J. M. Coetzee: Petrus has emptied the concrete storage dam and is cleaning it of algae. Balzac: Goriot went on eating mechanically without knowing what he ate.

I will now make a fresh pot of coffee and write a response. I will ask confirmation for a trip to Oregon sometime in April. I will not sit frustrated because my new pen pal has no email address, or because he seems reluctant to give me his telephone number. I will be patient, and check my mailbox (not my inbox) regularly.

 PS: Life is short. Live it well and say hi to Sacha for me.

This is a really nice project run by run by Len Kendall and Daniel Honigman out of Chicago. It is a two minute read, so please take a gander, repost, tweet, share. It was fun to sit down last night and work out what part of my day was going to get written about...

READ IT HERE >>>  365 Days, 365 points of view

< An extract from the new book >

Cornelius Vermuyden comprehensive school was a raucous place, full of loud mouth yobs and girls showing the first signs of breasts. I was smitten by both. I was also, fuelled by another summer of the Dirty Dozen and karate lessons, starting to fancy myself as a bit of a tough guy. I was no longer interested in my uncle's American trucks. I was interested in trying out my moves.

“D’ya think you can have Terry Saunders?” Simon, a neighbourhood kid asked me while we played football in the school field. He was a nice, sweet kid, with a well-hidden tinge of comic malice.

“Of course I can,” I spat back as I blasted the football into a wire fence, enjoying the ease with which I felt I could impress the wee lad.

Barely had the ball thumped to the ground when I got a tap on the shoulder. I turned and saw the face of a boy I had never seen before, much shorter than me and with blond cropped hair. We stood, for a fleeting moment, examining one another. I say fleeting, because my vision was quickly obscured as his fists began punching me repeatedly in the face.

It didn’t once occur to me to block him, punch him, kick him or scream like a cocaine fuelled banshee, all of which I had been practicing at my karate classes. I was simply stunned by the speed of the bugger. I couldn’t see anything, The only reason I knew he was still there was because my head kept snapping back from the impact of his fists. Apparently, this was not a pastime he bored of easily. As time meandered on I considered begging. I was down on the ground anyway. But it was somebody else’s words that brought the thud of knuckles on face to an abrupt end.

“Stop hitting him. Stop hitting him,” an unfamiliar voice said, and there was an immediate reprieve.

Thank God for that, I thought to myself.

But then the same unfamiliar voice spoke again, “Let me have a go!”

And a new set of fists began pounding me furiously in the face, until, after a few moments had passed, I was asked, “Had enough?”

Indeed I had.

“Yes,” I whimpered, and as I shook my dazed head I watched the backs of the two boys walk away, laughing, as they were free to do, across the field.

I turned to little Simon, who, with a ridiculous grin on his face, said, “That was Terry Saunders…” and then, after a pause and an audible chuckle, added, “and his mate.”

I couldn’t be upset with Simon. What I had just received was a humiliating but much needed lesson. When Simon had asked me if I could ‘have’ Terry Saunders, I had never even heard of the boy. Of course, it was with a cruel timing that Simon asked me while said Terry, unbeknown to me, was walking behind me.

Laughing at me still, Simon said, “You alright? ‘Cause that looked like it hurt.”

It was fine while I was riding home, loaded with shopping and with my daughter, Selma, sat in her seat in front of me, on the frame.  It was fine early evening, when I dashed to the bank to collect cash.

But the next morning it was as flat as a pancake.

And I knew why. I knew why instantly.

No question.

I raised my eyes from my flat bicycle tyre and looked directly at the culprit. At least, I looked at the building in which I knew the culprit to be housed, among his many accomplices.

So it may just be the case that a year ago I was stupid enough to buy an apartment above a bar. Sure, the real estate agent told me it had been sound proofed. Sure, he waved a piece of paper, allegedly confirming the soundproofing, in the air. Sure, he asked me if I wanted to read it.

But that just seemed unnecessary. I believed him, and while you scoff know that I head butt my bedroom wall as a reminder daily of my stupidity, naivety and, once again, my stupidity.

So I may, on discovering the noise levels, have made some complaints. After arguing with some drunks who had little sympathy for my plight, I may have made those complaints official. People may have come by with recording apparatus. They may have concluded that the bar had to build a soundproof ceiling.

And okay, if you are going to drag it out of me, I might have still been unsatisfied, and so a soundproof wall may also have been insisted upon and paid for by the bar.

Meh! Whatever! So maybe I am not welcome in the bar downstairs. It might just be that the people in the bar downstairs are pissed. With me.

So it goes without saying that the people in the bar sabotaged my tyre, right? I hope so, because I found myself telling a friend this earlier. “They stabbed it,” I told her.

I may or may not have proof of this. But, I did have my bike stolen this last summer from outside my apartment building. So it goes without saying, right?

“They stabbed it,” I told her.

Today I took my bicycle to the bike shop to be ‘fixed’. He would know. One look and he would see sabotage.

“I am not sure it’s punctured,” I told him to arouse his curiosity. “But I didn’t see the flat and when I rode it the tyre slipped off.”

He looked at me.

“But I am not convinced it’s punctured, because there is simply no air left in it at all.”

“That’s normally what happens with a puncture,” he told me.

“No, but there is no air left at all. Not a drop. It’s a bit odd, right?”

“Not really.”

“But, I have had punctures before and there has always been some air left.”

“Ah, this is quite common.”

Meh! Whatever!

I went back five hours later and paid the man 100 kroner. My bike was outside the shop, padlocked together with many other recent repairs.

“So, how was it?” I asked.

“How was what?” the bike shop owner asked.

“Well, was it, like, a big hole or a little hole?”

The bike shop owner pulled the bike that was leaning against mine away, so that I could remove it.

“Was it like a gash?” I asked.

“I have fixed 10 punctures today,” he said.

“But you would notice a knife wound, right?”

“I suppose I would. But this was just a regular puncture,” he said.

Meh! Whatever!

While in London I interviewed the boys from Brother before they went on stage at the Borderline. They are tipped to be the hottest band in the Uk in 2011. I have some writing to do, in the mean time you can check out their first single below.