Obsessive compulsive

In the days when Roy Walker was making a tidy living hosting the popular game show Catchphrase, the genial Irish funnyman would often have to handle contestants who were a little bit shy, a little bit dim or a little bit both. Faced with one of the show’s state-of-the-art computer animated puzzles to crack and with time running out, it wasn’t rare to see some hapless hopeful lose their nerve and clam up. Silence.

But Roy was a seasoned old pro. He knew how to handle a mug punter. To coax them into saying something - anything - he’d reach for one of his own catchphrases and use it like a verbal cattle prod. “Go on,” he’d helpfully hint, “say what you see…”

The culprit behind this piece of street sign defacing, spotted just off Leith Walk in Edinburgh in October 2006, seems to have been following their own variation on Roy’s adage – it’s not so much a case of “say what you see”, more “write what you think”. It’s clearly a subject that means a great deal to the author of the scrawl, and one that has been given a lot of consideration. Perhaps too much consideration. Take a close look at that shaky handwriting: What a giveaway.

An earlier Filthy Pen posting looked at a large-scale work in a Musselburgh alleyway (look here for a reminder) and mentioned that the same alley wall bore something of a bonus that would be held over for a later date. Let’s revisit that spot now, given that its second work shares today’s central theme: Take a moment to admire the deft spraymanship of this piece. It’s particularly gratifying to see bubble writing make an uncommon appearance. A style of lettering often utilised in the 1970s, it’s now rarely seen and has yet to enjoy a popular revival among graphic designers and graffitists. And doesn’t it look fetching in scarlet? All in all, this one reeks of creativity run riot. It’s stinks of art for art’s sake.

So there you have it, two for the price of one. A Poundstretcher posting. Bargain.

To the perpetrators, respeck. As Roy Walker himself might have been moved to say, “It’s good, but it’s not right.”

Keep the faith

It's hard work being a Muslim in the 21st century. Islamophobia is rife and they’re queuing up to have a pop at you. The Pope wasn't shy about getting stuck in with a verbal kicking, and then Jack Straw announced his dislike of the full veil on the grounds that the women who wear them frighten small children and police horses.

On the streets of Britain there are plenty of people happy to join in, and anyone suspected of being a Muslim is seen as fair game for dog’s abuse. They’re harassed in the street and sworn at in shops. The risk of violence is constant.

Graffitists, of course, don’t miss a trick. Armed with an unreasonable grievance, all they need is a small piece of wall and something to write with and they’ll air it in public. When the anti-Muslim bandwagon rolled into view, they clambered aboard.

In summer 2005, the delightfully libellous statement MUSLIMS SPITING IN CURRYS appeared in all its orange-chalked glory on a wall on the corner of Infirmary Street and High School Wynd in Edinburgh city centre. It’s yet another example of the sort of thing that Muslims have to put up with.

But without further explanation, we’re left in the dark. Quite why followers of Islam would want to expel their phlegm in a branch of Britain’s leading retailer of quality electrical goods at low, low prices is anyone’s guess.

Those three little words

Some people will take one look at those three little words that form such a sweeping generalisation, and roll their eyes. They’ll be struck not by the central message, but by the author’s use of the possessive YOUR rather than the contraction YOU’RE. “Our all gay what?”, they’ll sneer.

Later, still irritated by what they’ve seen, they'll ring their local radio station's phone-in. When the host takes their call, listeners will be treated to a stinging attack on a failing education system that churns out youngsters who are ignorant of one of written English’s fundamental rules. And at some point during their rant, they’ll manage to shoehorn in a totally unnecessary dig at migrant Poles. We’ll you’ve got to blame someone haven’t you?

It must be a miserable life being a Daily Mail-reading grammar Nazi. It’s certainly not The Filthy Pen's metaphorical mug of steaming-hot tea. If graffiti’s poor construction and spelling bothers you, you're missing out on one of its most gratifying aspects.

Let’s hear it for the grammatical quirks of the graffitist. Let’s salute the idiosyncrasies of their wall-work. Let’s doff our caps to all those who mean what they spray, but don’t always spray what they mean. These are the elements which make their art form - and it is an art form - so appealing. They inspire The Filthy Pen and keep it going. Raison d’être, the French call it. Canny lot, the French.

If you should ever find yourself in the Fisherrow district of Musselburgh, half-a-dozen miles east of Edinburgh city centre, perhaps on your way to or from the town's popular racecourse, take some time out for a little detour. Head down the alleyway between the Klass Body Salon and the Clubhouse pub on North High Street, close to the Brunton Theatre. On its left-hand side, towards the alley's end, you’ll spot this spray-painted masterpiece.

This slogan really needs to be seen in situ to be truly appreciated. It's an impressive size - so big, in fact, and the alley so narrow, that it wasn’t possible to capture it in one attempt. It required three separate photos and some nifty Photoshop cut-and-pasting to create a single image suitable for posting here. If you look closely you’ll see the joins.

There ought to be a sign on the main road alerting passers-by to this graffiti’s existence. Most people probably don't even notice the alleyway, let alone venture down it. Those that make the trip get double portions though, as not only is it home to this gem, it houses another delight too.

But let’s not have second helpings now. That would be greedy. Let’s save the leftovers for another meal. We’ll warm it up and serve it later.

The Human Pyramid

Homosexuals have contributed a great deal to the fabric of popular culture. Many mainstream trends began life as fads that they adopted first. Haircuts such as the Caesar and the fauxhawk. Music genres including the 70s disco boom and the 90s hard house phenomena. And, on the drugs front, poppers and Rohypnol.

The gays also play a prominent role in many fine examples of graffiti, sometimes as the victims and sometimes as the perpetrators. In this posting’s offering, they are on the receiving end.

On the corner of Edinburgh’s Abbeymount and Montrose Terrace stands The Regent. Dating back to the late Victorian era, these days it’s a favoured drinking venue among the city’s gay community. In the summer of 2006, its façade was painted a dark shade of turquoise, and very striking it is too. But this makeover meant that one of the Scottish capital’s more enterprising pieces of graffiti was destroyed. For there, on the wall between the pub’s name and the burglar alarm, the word BUMS had previously stood, shining out from the grime like a beacon.

Do not underestimate this graffitist’s dedication to the cause. It was written high above pavement level, so unless it involved a ladder or a stilt-walker - sadly not an uncommon sight during the annual Festival Fringe - then it must have been carried out with the help of a human pyramid.

No doubt making their slow and noisy way home after chucking-out time one night, and with any lingering doubts about their own sexualities hidden under a cloak of homophobia, the gang would have set to work. Clambering over each other, they’ll have wobbled into position and struggled to maintain it long enough for the one on top to reach out and add his pithy bon mot. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to improvise with his finger in the absence of a Magic Marker. Mission accomplished, the pyramid would then have collapsed in a heap. Their bruises must have been worn like badges of honour.

It’s a busy junction day and night, so this operation took plenty of nerve to pull off. And like all acts of exterior graffiti, no doubt the thrill of doing it alfresco and the risk of getting caught added an extra frisson to the caper.

Luckily, just a few weeks before the outside of the pub was redecorated, the above photograph was captured. It’s a moment frozen in time, a little piece of old Edinburgh lost forever from the physical world, but preserved courtesy of the digital threesome of cameraphone, Bluetooth and cyberspace.

The BUMS Regent. Gone, but not forgotten.

George Mallory Young Team

On 8 June 1924, British climber George Mallory went missing on an expedition to reach the summit of the then-unconquered Mount Everest. He was never seen again. Before Mallory set off on his epic but ultimately doomed quest, he was asked why he wanted to climb it. His answer? "Because it is there."

80-odd years later, three-quarters of the way down Leith Walk, on a wall on the right-hand side with Edinburgh city centre behind you, you can see this sterling example of work.

If you were to ask whoever was responsible why they'd bothered spray-painting the words BUM KNOB on the wall, you'd probably not get anything remotely resembling a coherent four-word answer. You'd be lucky to get a lazy shrug and a mumbled 'dunno'. Yet Mallory's legendary response could also be the answer to why this cracking example of truly pointless crudity was carried out. Then again, so could "Because I was drunk".

The sad truth is that it’s probably just a piece of low-level inter-gang arse-kicking, given that it half-obliterates ‘Stevie Mc YT’. While Los Angeles has its gun-toting, crack-dealing Bloods and Crips, Scotland has its alcopops-fuelled shellsuited Terrors and Young Teams. You have to hope it isn’t this explanation though. That'd be depressingly lame. Writing BUM KNOB over your rival’s name is hardly up there with drive-by shootings or pimping illegal immigrants trafficked in from eastern Europe.

That’s the trouble with kids today. No ambition.

Give the dog a bone

Written on the wall of the drop-in centre/homeless hostel on Holyrood Road, just a stone’s throw from the Holyrood Tavern, this one opens up a whole can of Pandora’s worms. Is it a comment on Stuart? Is it an order to Stuart? Or could it be a confession by Stuart?

Let's make an assumption here. Let’s assume that Stuart, whoever he is, didn't actually commit an act of despicable wrongness with a real, four-legged, tail-wagging, barking dog, before deciding to brag about it on a wall. It has to therefore be a comment by one of his pals, using the metaphor of a dog as a method of ridiculing one of Stuart’s legitimate sexual conquests. The case against him collapses, so Stuart walks from The Filthy Pen's court a free man, his reputation sullied but intact.

There’s a potential problem though. What if Stuart was guilty as charged? We’ve acquitted him, and now he could be biding his time, preparing to strike again. No dog is in the land is safe. Oh my God what have we done?

Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that one should never assume, only deduce. But even Sherlock can only deduce when he has enough clues, and there’s not much to go on here. That’s one of the problems with graffiti, sometimes less isn’t more. Sometimes less just ain't enough.

You've got your Troubles

Sticking with the anal theme, this time we hop on a ferry and cross the Irish Sea to Belfast. Bit of an emotional one, this. It was the first image submitted specifically for inclusion in this proposed project, way back in autumn 2005. Hats off to pioneering correspondent Eilidh Gordon for playing the game early doors, and for popping The Filthy Pen’s contributional cherry.

A place infamous for its highly-charged political and paramilitary graffiti, it’s heartening to see that the Northern Ireland peace dividend has made its presence felt on the walls as well as in the economy. But wait - the word ‘sex’ has faded to near-invisibleness, and that circled A for anarchy is another sign of age. Why, this is no recent post-ceasefire addition - it could be at least a quarter of a century old.

Let’s imagine that it dates from 1981, and let’s travel back in time. They were dark days in Norn Iron. Republican prisoners in the Maze were on hunger-strike, making their point by refusing prison nosh and dropping like emaciated flies. Tensions were running sky-high across Belfast with the city poised on a knife-edge. And amid the riots, demos, turmoil and unrest, someone was prowling the streets with a can of black paint, on a mission to find and deface a suitable wall. Oh well, life goes on.

So if the anal sex wasn’t concrete, what exactly was it? An implied threat? A hopeful plea? Post-pub bravado? We can only speculate. The true meaning has been lost in the mists of time, and now all we have left is theory and supposition. It's like the riddle of the Pyramids, the mystery of Stonehenge and the question of who shot JFK all rolled into one big tricky arse-related head-scratcher.

Caution - Men At Work

A beautiful example of street sign sabotage, snapped early one morning in Abbeyhill, Edinburgh, in March 2006. Look at those bold marker pen strokes. It's a shame about the second 'a' in anal but you can't have everything. Plus it adds a certain sense of urgency to the work, suggesting it was executed in a hurry, under pressure, on the hoof.

It’s a cockle-warming thought that this sign may have been used again and again in roadworks all over the country, and is possibly still in use. It has probably been spotted by hordes of passers-by who will have been left either upset, bewildered or delighted by it. Who knows - at this precise moment, perhaps an old lady is tut-tutting over it somewhere, unaware that she’s merely the latest in a long, long line of the pen-wielder’s victims. Ain’t it marvellous?

Defacing something mobile is like writing your name on a banknote - there's a slight chance you might see it again yourself one day, but you probably won't. At least you know that your handiwork will be seen by other people though, and that's what really counts. Share and share alike - it's a central tenet of graffiti. And there's plenty for everyone. Come on, tuck in.

Let's start at the very beginning...

Could there really be an alternative image for the debut posting on The Filthy Pen? Of course not. It had to be the male genitalia.

Marking territory in a manner unmatched by any other crudely-sketched drawing, the graffiti penis has been around since before records began. When prehistoric man picked up a bit of charcoal from the warm ashes of his very first fire, he looked at it, sniffed it, tried eating it, and threw it away. Then he noticed a powdery mark where it had hit the cave wall. Looking from the wall to the charcoal and then back to the wall, he felt his first creative urge swelling up. He reached for the charcoal, and guess what he drew with it? You've guessed it - a cock. And that’s how art was invented.

Fast-forward countless thousands of years, and look what we find - knobs to the left of us, knobs to the right of us. We're drowning in a sea of cocks. This misshapen specimen has been spray-painted on the wall of an underpass in the shadow of the Big W store on Milton Link on the eastern edge of Edinburgh. You can get a rough idea of its dimensions by judging it against the size of the bricks. Isn't it a whopper?

Although The Filthy Pen is happy to expose childish graffiti in all its guises, from the perfectly-executed obscenity through to semi- literate scrawls, penises are likely to be a recurring theme. There’s no Freudian sub-text, they’re just unavoidable really. Cocks loom large in the average graffiti artiste’s repertoire. They'll be coming thick and fast, so to speak.

It's a history thing, it’s a maths thing. Do the sums:

(writing tool x blank space) + idiot = graffiti cock

Q.E.D.