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To walk down a street is to be subject to at very least the importunings of a riot of stimuli; barely connected; faces, clothes, buggies, shopfronts, cars; each thing, in itself for the most part banal or unmemorable; but knitting together
into a modest, sometimes even haunting significance.

There is real delight in docketing of details; nationalities, languages, the gamut of Englishes, the shops as they pass you by; the jaunty bravado of their names: Mister Cheap Potato, Fin King Aquatics, Millionhairs Hair Studio, Carpetland, Pheonix Tyres (sic); again, the pathos of buildings renovated and renewed, each time too cheaply; the pathos too of "modern" detail already old, the Nigerian traffic warden looking like the Chief of Staff of a central African nation; the dank smell of pubs, as much cleaning fluid as beer; the charity shops, the churning portholes of the laundrettes, the newsagents cards misspelled in cheap biro; the faded photographs of burger meals buckled by steam in their orange plastic frames; the market stalls festooned with lurid viscose: all tacky, in juxtaposition all acquiring a certain pathos, or dignity. (It is just such disparities, droll juxtapositions, that you find in the apparently dispassionate paintings by hyper-realists of the 1960s such as Estes.)

This kind of itemisation is itself an already conventional aesthetic, the aesthetic of the eighties and nineties London description of, say Martin Amis. This contemplative but gratuitous docketing of detail, banal and ineloquent, goes back to the nineteenth century. It was always a feature of the novels of Balzac, Dickens, Zola, even Dostoevsky, not much acknowledged as a city writer, perhaps; but the mean streets of the poorer parts of St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment are described in headache-inducing detail. Indeed Crime and Punishment must be the longest nightmare in print; specifically nightmarish in its headachy itemisation of banal detail:

"To the left, parallel with the walls of the house, and commencing immediately at the gate, there ran a wooden hoarding of about twenty paces down the court. Then came a space where a lot of rubbish was deposited"….

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