Whilst on my runs recently I have noticed an odd piece of pavement graffiti on one paving slab halfway down an insignificant and quiet road off the Goldhawk Road which has intrigued and amused me. It is a message which I assume has been created by a spray can of paint and a stencil - easy enough to do surreptitiously and quickly - which is one of the things that makes me surprised of its seeming uniqueness. It says in red "Newspapers poison your mind".
It is a brief message, with no explanation of how or why they do this or whether all newspapers are equally culpable in this. It's a bold four word statement, made on a paving slab, in a spot that might get a hundred people a day passing by. Why is it here? Why is it nowhere else? Why only once? Who did this? And what do they mean? If only there was a website address attached then interested pedestrians could at least have a look at it for further details of this mind poisoning, but there isn't. If only it was stencilled elsewhere then maybe the cryptic message might get some publicity and get people discussing it. But it isn't anywhere else. It's just here. If anything on the less busy side of the road just by some construction works. Does the person who did this just have a paucity of ambition that would make Gary Sparrow laugh in derision? Were they too scared to do it again or in a more public place in case they were arrested? Why choose the medium of the paving slab for this protest? It is a tiny voice shouting out against a whole medium, perhaps this location was chosen to demonstrate the futility of even attempting to stand up to the newspaper magnates. Surely newspapers are a dying medium anyway. This is a weak blow against a behemoth that is in its death throes. It's all very odd.
And if we can't trust the newspapers, can we trust the paving slabs any more? At least newspapers are subject to some scrutiny from organisations trying to keep them honest and truthful and even if these bodies are generally weak and ineffective at least they exist. There is no one you can turn to if a paving slab makes a contentious or libellous or dishonest statement. In fact one might say that a person desperate enough to try the single paving slab out of millions of paving slabs as the medium for their message perhaps has little to back them up. Might it be paving slabs that are poisoning the mind? I would say that this paving slab has certainly had more impact on my brain over the last fortnight than any newspaper article. Is that for good or bad? Is it freeing my mind or poisoning it?
To be honest I have always had a healthy suspicion of newspapers - I think most people do and certainly now, more than ever, the public are aware of how far journalists will go to get or fabricate a story. The person who wrote on the paving slab seems to think that he is Winston Smith in 1984 and no one else has seen through society and so in this tiny act of rebellion he is going to open up our brains to the truth. But it's a bit of a generalisation and doesn't give enough details as to why or how newspapers are doing this. The artist had a hundred more paving slabs just on this street to go into his or her theories, to explain the problem and yet has merely editorialised in a manner that even the most corrupt newspaper editor would baulk at.
The person who did this is either the greatest artist or the biggest lunatic in West London. They may be both.
Perhaps they intended to cover every paving slab in the capital with this message, but were unlucky enough to be caught after the very first one. Even though they had chosen such an obscure and unlikely starting point. Almost like we live in some kind of 1984 style society where we can do nothing in secret. A van arrived, whisked off the graffitting truthsayer and took him away to room 101. In their haste though they neglected to wipe out his message. And the truth is like a flower that will find a shaft of sunlight in the gloom and grow towards it and blossom. They're watching us all. We have to fight against them. But now I have passed on the message. And I'll tell you the name of the man at the top, the man poisoning all our minds. It is Rupert Mur.... oh hold on, there's someone at the door. They're banging very persistently and threateningly. I'd better go and see who it is and then I will reveal the rest of that person's name, as I don't have time, what with the door to get to and everything....
Oooh, just put it into google and
this is the only website that comes up. But it's exactly the same message and the same stencil. But as I can't understand the article I don't know what they're saying. It suggests to me that there is one other example of the graffito somewhere in northern Europe. This might be the smallest scale political protest ever - let's put it in Shepherd's Bush and Malmo (I am wildly guessing)
