london belongs to me

The café perched on the cliff is incredibly good considering its tourist-friendly location - you can imagine the temptation arising to sell up to some upwardly-mobile idiots who will ruin the place by painting it yellow and latté-ing it up.

Chips that would have Martin Parr reaching for his camera, just enough potato in 'em to hold the oil together. Proper table furniture (I love a good sugar pourer). Decent tea.

Table furniture and tea are one good indicator for café quality. Another is the provision of outmoded, unhealthy, faintly horrific (to effete-health-culture-besieged 21st-C man) ingredients as a default option. Our studio/darkroom is across the road from a fantastic place where the perfect standard breakfast (a sensible £3) includes fried bread, with black pudding an option. A proper british caff treads a fine line between disgust and the comforting savour of the unreformed lumpen-diet of yesteryear. It's definitely not; 'eating out', with all the social horror, discomfort, being patronised by imbeciles with aprons, pretentious wine-talk, and wasted money which that entails.

On the other hand, in caffworld there are negative signs to be alert to. If, outside the kitchen, you see stacks of cardboard boxes saying things like "50,000 economy sausages, Bret Skinner's Meat Byproducts of Coventry", you can tell it's not a classy joint. If they could be bothered to hide; the boxes, it might be forgiven, but otherwise this bespeaks a lack of pride in caff culture. After all, the illusion of conjuring a greasy plate of nosh from nothing is the theatrical essence and the pleasure of the cafe (note to 'the new brasserati': if I wanted to dunk a teabag on a string in a cup, I'd have stayed at home. GET AN URN, wanker. And oh for a world when you could just say 'a cup of tea' without having to specify six-variable co-ordinates to locate the desired tea-type on the abstract phase-diagram of baroque herbal infusions. (It's too late to stop this trend with coffee now of course, but good cafés, whether or not they serve cappucino, at least understand the concept of a default, unspoken option of normal coffee. Why do the new brasserati purposefully refuse to recognise this? Because by doing so they hope to fluster you into buying a £3.20 banana and cinnamon grand mocha supremo of course.). In an unhappy incident last week, I only saw the giveaway boxes after I'd eaten the sausage - the inside of which was grey as a wet weekend in the midlands, and so little attention given to the taste that it wasn't even salty, there was just the faint tang of bits of animal you shouldn't eat, mixed up with substances whose only role is to fill space (Could have been woodchip). No matter what a cheap and cursory effort it takes to make something, a british food manufacturer will always find a way of making it cheaper and more revolting. It reminds me of a fantastic piece by George Orwell where he eats a wartime ersatz frankfurter that fills him with a cosmic revulsion at the indignity of modern existence.

Another great thing about this cafe is the repeated use of the "café owner's quote" (see pic), a piece of punctuation I like even more than the greengrocer's apostrophe (cabbage's 50p). What's great about the café owner's quotes are their ambiguity; you don't quite know how to interpret them, it's impossible to say quite what the person who uses them means by them. One imagines there must be some; positive impulse behind their use, otherwise why use them? Is the café owner trying to signify that the foodstuffs are mere imposters, that the so-called "gammon steak" is in fact not a gammon steak at all but some sinister placebo? You can't help but be suspicious about the provenance of the '"Homemade" Blackberry and Apple Pie'. Or maybe the quotes are intended to elevate the humble descriptions to proper names, indicating that "Local Crab", more than a mere descriptive term, has become an atomic linguistic token, a brand. But wouldn't this still tend to suggest an unwholesome deception, a hiding behind quoted slogans wholly unbecoming of the honest caf&ecute; proprietor? Maybe the quotes are simply used as a sort of emphasis, and in this light they look rather delightful, like little sparks leaping from the ends of the words, adding a bit of pizazz and attracting the attention of the potential punter. I honestly don't know the answer. It seems rather rude to start interrogating the staff about their choice of punctuation. Let me know if you have any leads on this important matter.

The last time I was at the Lizard was at the beginning of the year on a photographic assignment with a bunch of anti-war protestors. In a gesture which in retrospect seems like the sort of hilariously bad-taste symbolism that only sincerely well-meaning dim upper-middle-classes could cook up, the cornish contingent were transporting a coffin draped in the UN flag from the most southerly point, across the southwest, to arrive in london for the demo.

Historically, crowds appear to be a necessary part of radical social change, but I must say (a)I just don't know if that dispersion of the individual into crowd-phenomena is possible now and (b)personally I can't stand 'em. The famous London demo didn't even feel like a crowd, it was more like a fuck-off huge queue at Tescos. I'm not joking, in a gridlocked westminster stuffed solid with bodies, twittering idiots were actually trying to push past us as if we were purposefully dawdling in the entrance to the Harrods sale. Oh god, and those drums and whistles: the tribal signals of the trustafarian clansmen. The idea of 'identifying' with this 'movement' just made me nauseous. There was something inescapably ugly and fascistic about the whole thing; everyone shouting hopelessly naïve twittisms and using the occasion as an excuse to let out their little bitternesses about life in general. Totally joyless. By the time we reached Hyde Park my anger against blair and bush had melted into a general hatred of humanity, and I was firmly for; war.