At the point of death you enter a database query interface for yr entire memory. People who talk about life flashing before their eyes failed to disable the linear fastforward mode. Go into the non-linear mode and it’s far more revealing. You could relive every single fish curry you ate, or all of the best thunderstorms, maybe even a non-subject specific howling laughter search. Sure other people go through all their worst break-ups and rush hour commuting, but this is where you get the heaven/hell distinction.

From this vantage point of paused time, the purpose of life would be to stack the database with material that you could happily examine in non-linear forever. Paying attention becomes very important. If you didn’t notice it; it’s not in there. Imagine it as a space capsule travelling to a distant star with a huge VHS archive in the hold. If its entirely stocked with recordings of Later With Jools Holland: essentially, you’ve blown it.

I look forward to the next era of recreational pharmaceutical reality. Not because I want to take them myself; I’ve exhausted the limits of that particular strategy. But what I enjoy about these eras is the design freedom that they afford. Eras that are dominated by geek culture tend to have really bad heroic motifs everywhere. In spite of what Joseph Campbell might tell you; no-one who has any sense gives a flying fuck about heroes.

There are broad and impressionistic vistas that open up when deep hallucinogenic cultures come to the fore. In themselves they are probably tedious in the extreme at close hand, but the opportunities for geometrical experimentation, mesmeric clusters and hypnotic spaces, and the opportunity to use colour in what might be described as a theosophical manner are useful for a certain sort of practitioner.

Quite apart from the potential for design opportunities, the last time this sort of Golden Age landed, there was a utopian scent in the air that reduced street violence to virtually nothing, partly because those lads who might have wanted to stomp you were more interested in whether you might be able to procure ambrosia of heaven for their afternoon orgy. And what could possibly go wrong there?

End of the day, we bounced back and ended up at the worst of all possible worlds. Where once the street was full of customers for new vistas, now it is a tabloid spread of inane debating teams who barely understand the puppet strings that pull them this way and that.

It’s as if somewhere along the line we opened the wrong door.

I returned to the eternal Holloway Road in a dream. I was missing a lot of buses to a lot of destinations, no matter where I positioned myself with regards to the bus stops. Then again, I’m not sure that it had been established where I was supposed to be going. This hadn’t set itself up as a dream where I was late for school or late for work. It may have been late in the evening because I told someone how bad a particular fried chicken outlet was, before leading them there so that they could enthusiastically order several items from the menu. Then again fried chicken on the eternal Holloway Road is an all-day feast.

Everywhere was filled with artifacts that carried two texts: the first text was banal to the point of infuriating, the second text was deeply sad. They might have been books or vinyl albums, but I suspect that they were everything.

One thing that they weren’t specifically was comic books. There was at least one of them, an intensely bad Star Wars spin-off in a bad imitation Jack Kirby style. It was full of explosions and chases and near escapes. I tried to explain to Hugh Metcalfe how very bad it was, but the more I told him, the more enthusiastic he became about the whole thing. As with the fried chicken shop, there was no way to warn people about the tawdriness of the goods on offer.

Meanwhile the sun-drenched pavements of the eternal Holloway Road were a racetrack of supercharged Jamaicans and Irishmen. You had to keep your wits about you to avoid colliding with them. And still the buses wouldn’t stop at the bus stops, or at least wait for long enough for you to establish where they were going. One of the supercharged pedestrians followed my spouse all the way home. I found the weighted truncheon in the chess set where it is usually kept, along with the medals for military service in Belfast, and I waded out of the front door to pursue the brute, but he was already gunning the engine of his long low Cadillac, and speeding off across the well-kept suburban front gardens of the neighbourhood.

“And don’t come back if you know what’s good for you!”

Those of you who haven’t muted me over the last few weeks (I don’t judge) may have noticed that I have been working on a new set of paintings. The first few of these involved a lot of curves and the rest have been composed around subdivisions of circles. They are bold and modern, and I don’t mind saying that I’m very much enjoying them.

One of the things that I have noticed in the process is how much more planned and accurate my paintings have become in the last few years. They have eschewed the struggle with paint-as-paint, and wild improvisation in the mode of the Abstract Expressionists, and have moved on a decade or two to become something which has more in common with Op and Pop Art. When I started my engagement with painting as an adult, about twelve years ago, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to use a ruler, let alone a compass; now they are as important as brush and paint in terms of executing these paintings. It is not necessary to think of oneself as some sort of primitive. Even some quite geometrical things a few years back had a little bit of paint flung at them to keep it real. I lose patience with that sort of real.

Perhaps some of the macho and angst of the angry young painter has left my technique, or maybe it is that the intensity of the work has shifted and focussed on one level while opening up the opportunity for a more distanced approach to the canvas on another. Who knows? The actual process of the work is fairly lacking in close self-examination or interrogation of motives. In many ways it resembles musical composition or harmonic development; dancing about architecture.

There’s a large canvas somewhere in the future of this series, but the longer I hold off work on that, the richer the possibilities for that painting become, both in terms of the scale of the canvas, but also in terms of resolution. Paint is a relatively lo-res medium, although working on increasingly intricate lines on quite small canvases develops the sort of accuracy one can bring to the medium.

Oh, and some of these paintings will be available for sale soon. Possibly a book containing colour illustrations of the whole series too. Watch this space and keep yr credit card handy.