Friday 5th September, 2003 - More On Graffiti

Please don't think, after yesterday's entry, that I somehow don't like or don't approve of graffiti. I think it's great. Not the flashy artistic stuff; that I can take or leave. I mean the hastily scribbled profanities, the juvenile gynaecological diagrams, the adverts for sex, and the shockingly vicious replies.

Most of these are usually found inside toilet cubicles. This is a pity as they are brilliantly entertaining, but reading them necessitates actually setting foot within a public toilet cubicle, which is generally a harrowing, eye-wateringly smelly experience. When I was at university, there was a particular set of toilets in a particular college, that were notoriously revolting, but they always had the best graffiti. So, regularly I would screw up my courage, put my head down, and venture inside. And amongst the shit, the toilet paper, the puddles of weeks-old urine, there would always be some graffiti gem or other.

A particular patron of these toilets was a kind of amateur pollster. He was always hosting some of toilet-wall based debate, usually utilising a rudimentary voting system, but sometimes drawing a large box for comments to be left in. Typically though, he would scribble up a multi-option question ('Which Spice Girl would you most like to fuck?', for instance) and would then draw out columns in which respondents could register their votes using a five-bar gate system. You would be amazed at how scrupulously these toilet-voters respected the system.

But my favourite ever bits of graffiti have been al-fresco. I suppose the toilets are reserved for the hardcore graffiti folk, while the amateur tends to graffiti as and when the mood takes him (or her; women are equally filthy etc.). As a result, the al-fresco graffiti may not be as carefully thought out as the toilet-based, but it has a certain emotional intensity and honesty that the cubicle-meisters struggle to match.

I have two particular favourite ever bits of graffiti, and I can't rank them. They are both too precious in their separate ways. The first was at the top of an underpass I had to walk through to get to school. It was in large red, jagged, upper-case letters. It said simply:

FUCK OFF.

No exclamation mark. It was almost like an instruction. Who had written this? Who was it for? Was it an instruction for someone in particular to fuck off? Just the people who use that underpass? (potentially, as it was mostly a shower of weedy Grammar School boys, plus me, who was hard) Or the whole world? I prefer to think the latter. It would be both a pathetic and a defiant gesture. The humanity!

My other favourite was on the wall of an alleyway in York. It was in marker pen, and the writer had to go over it several times to make a good enough impression. It said:

My dad is a twat

Awesome. I would assume it was a small, frustrated boy who has just been told off by his dad who wrote it in a tearful, furious haze. But, given the probable identity of the author of 'Do you like sex?', there is every chance that it is a respectable, dark-suited professional. Perhaps he wrote it to blow off steam. Or perhaps he suddenly remembered his terrible relationship with a permanently disappointed father, who was unnecessarily strict with him, and only ever gave him book tokens for Christmas. Or who knows? That’s why I prefer this kind of graffiti - it has some kind of story behind it, but you'll never know what it is.

Probably its just some little shit with a Burberry cap and no shirt who thought it would be cool to write a swear word somewhere. And that's fine too.