White Cliffs

A slip of the tongue, that’s all it was: a careless mishap, a trifle. 

On the scale of global suffering it barely registered. Take the Holocaust, for example: an awful business; roundly criticised. People have written about that in books. Shelves of them. And Pol Pot: that rotter. Seven billion male chicks are slaughtered each year before they’ve had a chance to cheep their first chirp. Homosexuals are mercilessly persecuted in Uganda. There’s no such thing as dolphin-friendly tuna. 

My point, dear reader, is that the headlines about me were wholly unjustified. 

It’s important that the public is challenged by my work: I ask probing questions about the human condition. I waggle my fingers about in the plug-socket of the cultural unconscious. Some people are provoked, certainly, but many others are transformed. You should see my inbox: it’s Damascene. 

Admittedly, this was my largest work to date, both in scale and in substance, and whilst I was in some sense primed for a lick or two of backlash from the mithering classes, I’m astonished at the extent to which nearly everyone seems to have missed the bloody point.     

Last month, I travelled to Dover and wrote “RIDE MY CREAM-TRAIN YOU FRENCH FUCKS” in 50-foot letters on the broad White Cliffs. I did it because I knew it was right to do it — because it was important. Aung San Suu Kyi refused to condemn the Rohinghya genocide. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers 1.6 million square kilometres. 

The newspapers, of course, jumped hastily to the nearest hackneyed conclusions: “Racist!” went the soy-faced liberal cucks; “Desecrator!” went the heritage-goons; “Profane!” went the balmy Christian Right. 

What tosh and hokum. 

This was my magnum opus, my Lord’s Prayer. 

You’ll have seen, I’m sure, that convoy of philistines pootling their way down the A2 with their pathetic B&Q rollers and pots of white paint, eager to undo this episteme’s Cerne Abbas Giant; and you’ll have seen, too, those Providential Winds that so toppled their ladders and sent their Bosun’s Chairs spinning in merry circles. Ha!

“Reclaim Our Cliffs!” was the rallying cry for the following week — quite ignoring the fact that this was precisely what I’d already gone and done — and when, inevitably, more clement weather arrived on the south coast, that army of toothless simps completed the desecration, and my work was erased.

~

But now something truly remarkable has happened. 

It’s back: bigger, brighter and bolder than ever, and not by my hand, dear reader, but by the discerning hands of my loyal votaries. Those brave aficionados who marched on Dover with sloshing great cans of Coral Pink, Phthalo Blue and Red Iron Oxide, who added curlicues, an exclamation mark and underlining, who had the vision and tenacity to stand up for what was right — to make a difference. 

Friends — the Culture War is upon us: cries are heard in the streets, bins are tipped over, trumpets blare. Ride my cream-train you French fucks. 

(January 2021)