It has all become quite ghost like and insubstantial for me lately, seriously I am about as engaged as a microbe at the time I write these words. Looking at Britain I am ponderously invisible as I watch, photograph and witness new levels of rampaging stupidity, without much more than a morbid curiosity about where it all leads, stevesevilempire has become a ghost, taking the photos and wondering how deep the dungeon UK is going to be dug. However if stupid is a dungeon someone must have lost the keys, then our leaders decided to weld the doors shut, and that as they say, was that. Looking over the Pond to the land of the free is not much help, as the American president isn’t going to rest, until his own secret service drags him out of the Oval Office in a straight jacket. Absurdity and the right wing seem to be the new normal, but who cares what I think because I have decided to be a ghost. I had just finished editing the first batch of pictures from the Saturday morning anti lockdown protest, at the Shades pub, when the idea hit me, floating like an invisible zephyr I went to the loo, but one of the anti lockdown angry men was in there too, “Take the mask off you don’t need it.” He said in the confined space, and whilst I stood at a urinal, holding my cock and begging it to pee, he decided to go on a speakers corner style rant at me. So I blanked him. If there had been a soapbox in the loos it could’ve been a photo, but my hands were otherwise engaged. Having an irrational diatribe whilst trying to take a leak is not the most comfortable scenario, and at some point he must have realised he was in a toilet being ignored by the other guy in it, and left saying. “That mask is a symbol of your fear take it off for gawds sake before the country is on its knees.”

Knowing full well that the country is flat on it’s face, I wondered if we would all get collectively dizzy on our knees, lets face it, it hasn’t been the decades of austerity fuelled by decades of financial and political incompetence, nope its the face mask. Judging by Boris’s responses to this crisis you could be forgiven for assuming it’s all going a bit sci fi, as wild claims go it’s neck and neck in the Tory party in a good year, but this being 2020 is not a good year. Returning to my table and a colleague, we discussed the current pandemic measures. All the pubs are now closing at ten, why ten? Does Boris think the virus wears a wrist watch? Surrounded by 6 people in a bar full of collections of six people, works how? Does the corona virus get confused with any number above two? At least Boris has acknowledged the virus exists, which is more than the anti lockdown crew have. We may have been in denial about civilisation since the first farmers started this experiment 6000 years or more ago, and on an island as small as Britain is, the option to run off screaming is geographically challenged by the surrounding waters. So what is the ghost of stevesevilempire to do? When civilisations embrace any fantasy as fast as we change our underwear, then the new definition of sanity may include ranting at people in toilets, or is that just another element of the new normal?

Ah yes, I got an organised pseudo impromptu lesson in the new normal when I left the cosy security of the Shades pub. Placards proclaimed, we will not comply, Matt Hancock is hitler, (Hancock is the health secretary. hitler is dead.) No new normal. Then as I circumnavigated this crowd, a guy started to talk to me about Ragnarok. He followed me telling of the Norse end times. So I picked up speed as he told me. “And the wolf will eat the sun heralding in darkness.” I am still unsure if my plot was lost or thickening this Saturday. Seriously put, if the new normal is having gone nuts, bingeing on internet conspiracy sites during the short lockdown, then protesting about them, which left me surrounded by a crowd of people missing a lot of marbles. That includes a govt who has drowned its own intellect, and broken the steering wheel of our island, this new normal is more cake than fruit from what I can see. I realise that pointing out the mega tsunami of stupidity that is retailing everywhere right now, doesn’t help, but even a ghost can dig his heels in and say. “Enough!”

Even as I thought that I was proved wrong. I half expect a protest against gravity sometime soon, and I was stumped at how few Bill Gates placards there were this time around, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was accused of coordinating all the conspiracies, using 5g, from a secret lair, in the dome, over the flat Earth, but underneath that flat Earth is a giant wheel, which is propelled by a giant hamster called Vinny, when Vinny sleeps the world stops, which is why we have night time, and that is when Bill the evil one coordinates his vast human experiments. I could be confusing Bill Gates with Bilbo Baggins, but hey thats the direction that this crowd goes in, and that for what it is worth is my translation of what passes for theory nowadays. I may leave the cameras behind and just sell them magic beans if they come back next week, if you plant these you may get a geranium or a rose. One guy pointing at me told me, “It’s about freedom.” Freedom, I can’t even piddle unmolested in London, so who knows what is happening in the rest of the country. It may be a new right wing conspiracy to molest everyone in toilets across our once proud nation. That could be the new normal.

Finally I spotted something I understood, at the top of Trafalgar Square, outside the National Gallery were the racists. A part of the crowd? Apart of the crowd? Who cares anymore, but they were shouting about freedoms lost. One of them is a nasty piece of psychiatry, I have seen him giving a lecture on Parliament green about the dangers of, “The Muslim.” Yet here he was shouting about human rights. Like so many Brexit protests combined, to create a strangely disfiguring familiar face of the new normal. If the Met Police had decided to do river dance in riot gear it would’ve made more sense. Yet in the ensuing jostle of push and shove violences, people got hurt. As my ghost took the photos, I saw nothing but pointlessness and ego.

As they calmed down, I thought of a future me. Visualised myself right there and then. A thought form of me. Another ghost. Grey hair fell in plats from beneath his hat, two as yet unrecognisable cameras hung from his neck, and with deranged eyes he smiled to me. “The next decade ain’t worth it mate.” Which is something all of us are aware of really, post pandemic economies are going to be disastrously in a state of flux, and thats before Britains Brexit chokes what little is left to go round, and as the climate begins to bite. Sometime this year we will all read about the extinction of the Vaquita Porpoise, but when 2 out of five plant species face extinction we all shrug. In this trance like state we can ignore all the money spent debunking real science, enabling the dysfunctional to weave a fantasy of paranoia. When a deadly virus is denied what else can I do but photograph the processes that follow. The truth is that the anti lockdown movement are the monster of a Baron Frankenstein called Exxon Mobil, and many other fossil fuel corporations, that spent a fortune to debunk science until humanity can’t even face the challenge of a virus let alone the bitter realities that climate tipping points offer. Yet even that very real conspiracy against humanity will be ignored in favour of fantastical aliens, or villains. So the ghost of stevesevilempire looked at the ghost of his older self and asked the important question. “Why are you wearing a tin foil hat?” The future me smiled insanely and said.

“It keeps the stupid at bay.”