yellow.

Eh! Pssst. Shiny Cheeks! You looking for a good time? I give you special price. Top notch jiggy jiggy. Golden showers? Do you think the sun fell for a lady of the night and got lost somewhere in Soho? Did he leave his hat on? The mystery of the Great Grey July is unravelled. The sun has had his head down and his pecker up. Which is all very well but now we would like him to come out from beneath the threadbare candlewick bedspread and think of England.

Drink the yellow stuff. Drink the yellow potion and the sun will burst through the clouds like the Incredible Hulk but instead of being really really ANGRY and very very green she will be really really SUNNY and very very yellow and in a good mood all happy and skippy and ready for fun and frolics all summer long. Yeah. Time to drink the yellow stuff. Or book a flight to Helsinki. That is the other option.

I’m sitting at my desk, thunder cracks all around me and I can hear the steady pour of rain and a siren in the distance. My wet cat squeezes through the cat door. Dr Blog is on his way home in a cab. I prefer the drama of a good storm to a pin sharp mizzle on a February afternoon: there is a tropical edge to this downpour although I can’t hear the parakeets. The sky brightens. Still no blue but whiter lighter cloud that has let go and shuddered out every last drop. The air quietens as the storm heads east.

The sun is beginning to play ball. No sooner had I thrown down the gauntlet and insisted on a bit of solar action when the mighty sphere of fire in the sky decided to put his fedora on for half an hour and come out to play mas. But more blaze and haze is required. And see those little nippers in the background? That means blue sky. Please. Thank you. Mr Sun. With bells and whistles on.

It has come to this. I have entered a position of stand-off with the sun. Until it appears I will be posting placebo yellow things to take its place. Shining Yellow Bin is only small but radiant. Shining Yellow Bin knows it has a job to do and does it. Shining Yellow Bin shines.

If the sky will not let me see the sun I will make my own yellow. I decide this. I wear a lurid lemon sherbert T-shirt with a blue corduroy jacket. A brilliant day on the Med. I am on Kingsway. I follow a boy who is kissing a girl goodbye on the corner. I don’t get the shot, but I run after him as he strides down the road because he is wearing yellow and he is barefoot.

‘Can I take your photo?’ I ask. ‘I’m taking pictures of anything that is yellow.’

‘Yes’, he says, ‘do you know why it’s yellow?’ he asks as I point and shoot. ‘It’s because I am Kin Yellow Seed,’ I don’t quite catch exactly what he says, but it’s something to do with the Mayans. I trot along beside him and we retrace our steps back around the corner.

We stop outside a cashpoint, and there on the ground is the yellow box: ‘ATM Privacy Area’ it declaims.

‘I’m listening,’ I say as I focus on his feet, trying to squeeze the yellow T-shirt and the cashpoint sign into shot.

‘The trouble is we’re on the wrong calendar. When Julius Caesar changed the calendar it made us think differently about the world. You see we’re on the wrong time. Time actually ends in 2012.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve got bare feet. People haven’t gone barefoot like this since the seventies,’ I say, thinking of M, who married a barefoot man in a bowler hat and a black woollen Jaeger dress at the Marylebone Registry office in 1972.

Jack looks pleased. I get back to his point.

‘But I think time is an artificial measurement construct. Maths is a system that notates the divine. So why would it end?’

‘Hold on a minute, have you got a pen?’ Jack shifts on his feet; I can tell he is becoming irritated by my snapping. ‘What happened is they changed it from 13 lunar months to 12 calendar months, and that changed everything about the way we view the world.’

‘You know, I have to be careful,’ I tell Jack. ‘I have to steer clear of these theories because I believe them. The Romans imposed a classical superstructure on the world. That’s why America has its streets in a grid system. The earth isn’t a grid. It’s a squiggle. A circle. A spiral.’

‘Go to this website, it’ll tell you loads more,’ he scribbles down 2012.com on a sheet of paper. ‘It’ll show you how to work out your Kin sign. And also Google “foundation for the law of time” that will take you there.’

‘I’ll probably put this on my blog,’ I tell him, ‘Blag Lady’.

‘That’s funny,’ he says as we part, ‘my mum calls herself Bag Lady’.

I get home and Google, then select ‘find your kin’. I type in my birth date and the computer shuffles my digits. I am ‘Kin 200. Yellow Overtone Sun’.

It is important to

Otherwise you might miss a

summer’s day in the blink of an eye and end up with a bum

weather wise.

Blag Lady had a picnic with St Bart, Woodsy of Tunbridge Wells, Dr Blog and Young Jimmy. That was back in June. Blossom from the trees fell thicker than snow. It was like a bunch of kiddy gods at boarding school were having a pillow fight. It was like being in an uptilted snow dome. It was fluffy. It was warm but still the sky was grey. How many words do we have for grey in English? It should be like eskimos and snow. 576. Right, here goes: charcoal, gun metal, iron, steel, aluminum, ash, slate, pebble, …ok, I’m going to have to look in the thesaurus. There should be more right? Oyster, pearly, cinerous, lead, mousy, mole, salt and pepper, dapple grey, canescence! Canescence! I like that. Not in SOD but nice word nice word. Not many words for grey, but many many grey days. Bah.

Another ‘like snow’ day occured on Tuesday afternoon. Little piles of white stuff lined the edges of Brixton Road as I cycled upwards. It was like the kiddy gods had become teenagers and upgraded to hanging out on bean bags in rooms lit by lava lamps and then they’d decided to have a bean bag fight and all those little polystyrene balls fell down from the clouds when they burst the bag but they were bigger because god-beanbags are bigger….you get the picture. Then the sky threw a bucket of water at me, and I got very wet, but it was warm and humid so I didn’t care.

‘It’s the end of the world’ said St Bart when we chatted on the phone later. ‘Well, at least we’re here for it,’ La Blag countered. ‘We wouldn’t want to miss the end of the world now, would we?’.

I don’t usually post other people’s images on this site, but this is a picture I’ve had by my desk for years. I don’t know the photographer’s name. I tore it out of the newspaper and it helped me get through the ‘why am I wasting my life in this corporate-hellhole-prison-that-is-the-daily-9to5?’ days.

I post it today because I pressed ‘digg this’ on somebody’s blog and ended up reading an article on a brutal boot camp called ‘Tranquility’ Bay in Jamaica. The labyrinthine nature of the internet is both a curse and a blessing. I didn’t want to go there, but once I was in I was hooked. Now I notice that the article is from 2003 – so quite why it came up as hot today I don’t know. Anyway, its contents were no less chilling despite the old news factor. Jamaican parents for the most part couldn’t afford this juvenile torture chamber run by a bunch of nutters from Utah (they’re always from Utah, aren’t they?). It is full of young American n’er do wells who are required to endure and participate in a brutal regime of brainwashing and institutionalised child abuse that makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a week at Butlin’s.

As regular blaggers might imagine Blag Lady was a lippy little blighter when her hormones first went into overdrive, so the empathy factor was high. This brought to mind a more recent headline: the ‘accidental death’ verdict on the inquest of Gareth Myatt: a 7-stone 15 year-old who was ‘restrained’ by four prison officers and died from asphyxiation choking on his own vomit. He had served four days of his sentence. There was something about his face in the photo that caught my eye: a mix of butter-wouldn’t melt, feisty rebellion and an innocence of his own innocence that reminded me of my teenage self.

By the time I was 10 I’d worked out that sometimes it’s easier to confess to something you haven’t done, as the interrogation is often worse than the punishment itself. Torture, like all things, is measured in degrees. How many times have you heard kids being told to ’say sorry again, like you really mean it’? The authenticity of our submission is crucial in the domination game.

As the kids at Tranquility had no set release date other than their 18th birthday, the incentive to be really believably ‘broken’ was high. One survivor’s testimonial struck a chord: he got through by reading snatched paragraphs of The Grapes of Wrath. Literature of course was banned.

If you want to know what happens when the inmates take over the asylum, watch Jan Svankmejer’s Lunacy. Trying to summarise this plot is tricky, but let’s just say that in the end life in a loony bin run by the Marquis de Sade ends up looking like the soft option. Svankmejer claims (rather mischieviously it has to be said) that the film is horror not art. I disagree. It is art and it is horror. Animated sheeps eyes and severed tongues slither across the screen – reminding us of what the torturers know only too well – the human condition is one of flesh – and blood.