Darling, my darling, your snapping fangs don’t scare me
I’ll leap on your spine and love you till you gnaw me down to my wings
I’ll give you everything

Those poor, lost indians - when the white men found them,
most died of TB; the rest went insane...
This is why people OD on pills
and jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Anything to feel weightless again.

Give me a swamp, a deep dark bog
Where I can lose my way in pools of slippery mud
Give me cold, cold rain; a cloud of stinging bugs
Deadly nightshade, poison oak; give me the wild, wild wood
The wild, the wild, wild, wild wood

We can dress in skins, wrap our feet in bark
And you can growl at me or hit me with a rock
When you want to say, “I love you” in the dark
And I will bark like a dog in your arms
In the wild, the wild, wild, wild wood

We can make a god out of sticks and bones
Or we can pray to the trees or pray to the sun
And our eyes will shine when we start to scream
With the hungry wolves outside our freezing cave
In the wild, the wild, wild, wild wood

The queue in our local Post Office is endless but you learn a lot about Hackney as you wait in it. Someone has pushed to the front. The queue is loud in protest. A clerk behind the counter, appointed for her sanctity, tries to pacify a bellicose customer who thinks he's been diddled. The queue is less patient than she is. Moments later she is courteously declining the overtures of a gentleman - no stranger to the lager can, alas - who, while waiting for his Giro, has apparently fallen in love with her. On balance the queue is of the view that they are unsuited. Now a woman is complaining bitterly to her neighbour of the failure of our Health Centre to take her symptoms seriously. The queue by contrast is fascinated by them. A young man on a mobile phone forgets he has an audience. 'I gave all that up, man, when I came to Jesus'. The queue wishes he would be more specific. So the drama unfolds until at last a bright voice announces, 'Cashier number five, please!'

What these 'great' houses do is to break the scale, by an act of will correoponding to their real and systemtic exploitation of others. For look at the sites, the facades, the defining avenues and walls, the great iron gates and the guardian lodges. These were chosen for more than the effect from the inside out; where so many admirers, too many of them writers, have stood and shared the view, finding its prospect delightful. They were chosen, also, you now see, for the other effect, from the outside looking in: a visible stamping of power, of displayed wealth and command: a social disproportion which was meant to impress and overawe.