Diary – 23 November 2002

They’ve scrubbed it off now, but until recently the outer wall of Hackney’s HSBC bore a weird piece of graffiti. The ugly felt-tip scribble stood out harshly against the whitewashed stone. It consisted of a girl’s name (illegible), then the equals sign, and then ‘horing buckethole sellpussygal 10p a hour’. When I saw it, I stared at it for several minutes, aware of something intense and elemental being expressed with unusual power: a man’s rage. I was enthralled by the muscularity of the words, their bitter and compressed viciousness, their lyricism. There’s so much brutal anguish there, and a sort of blowpipe suddenness. And what about the improvisation? Whatever this girl had done, her offence was so vivid, foul and fresh in his mind that the old words had become useless, hopeless. He needed vivid, foul and fresh words – brand-new coinages – to vent his fury. ‘Buckethole’ isn’t a term with which I’m familiar, but even the vilest of its synonyms seems feeble by comparison.