Je rends visite a Cafe St Germain en Crystal Palace. Je prends un cafe et un croissant au beurre et confiture arome framboise.

I couldn’t sleep last night, threw in the towel of attempted unconsciousness at 5:30AM, and decided to go for an early walk from Croydon to Forest Hill. I got to Crystal Palace, about two-thirds of the way there, just as cafes were starting to open, and it seemed a good point for a coffee break, just across the road from the park. So I’m sitting at a table outside in the morning sun, a grey haze of yesterday’s ozone and fox piss starting to lift from the streets.

The couple at the far table have a copy of The Sun, whose front page lists the drugs that Michael Jackson may or may not have been using in the months prior to his recent death. The headline reads:

Xanax, Prilosec, Vicodin, Paxil, Demerol, Soma, Dilaudid, Zoloft.

At the bottom of the page we’re promised “Jacko coverage: pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15.”

It’s not as catchy a headline as “Wacko Jacko.” I doubt people will adopt it as an everyday phrase, verbatim, in the same way: it’s more difficult to memorise; I had to sneak a cameraphone photo in a newsagents’ to make sure I got it right. But I thought it was interesting, as it sounded a similar list, or at least a similarly long list, to that of the drugs my granny Cosgrove was taking from her mid-80s until she died in her early 90s. She was a habitual singer herself, actually – and no slouch on the dancefloors of 1930s Manchester and the Isle of Man. Although she didn’t make the mistake of committing to 50 gigs at the O2 arena when she was fifty years old.

She used to moan about how pop records just fade out at the end – something which I think influenced me to get into techno, whose tracks typically finish with some definite crash or device of percussive punctuation. She also used to moan about how late 20th century electronic music was “all bass,” a development which I never succeeded in convincing her was a marker of genuine musical progress. My mum now has, and still plays, her old upright piano. Her work colleagues used to sit her on top of filing cabinets and get her to sing whatever songs were popular at the time. She knew hundreds, she was the original human juke box, she was a 512MB MP3 player in biological form.

Put another nickel in,
in the Nickelodeon,
all I want is loving you
and music, music, music.

A Moston twang and nasality in the vowels. Light, delicate consonants. Old school Moston, when people still relied on friends and neighbours to make music. I tried to get her into Ableton Live to lighten long days in her nursing home, perhaps the occasional knees-up round the old MacBook Pro, but she’d have none of it.

The couple with the paper are talking to the woman at the next table; she’s obviously a friend. She leans across and says, “They say it was the pain relief he was taking.”

And I’m struck by how multiply redundant that observation is. What reason could she possibly have for thinking, for it even to flicker-flash across the hindmost corner of her mind, that her friends could possibly not already know what “they” think killed Michael Jackson? We’ve seen and heard precious little else, on 13 24-hour news channels, for the past 36 hours. I’ve heard that 46-character message about six hundred times now, in this newspaper on my table, on ITV, on BBC1, BBC2, BBC News 24, on Sky, on BBC Radios 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, on VH1, on Capital Radio, on Heart FM, on CNN, on NBC, by email, by tweet, on multiple discussion fora, on Google News, on Google Video, by phone, over the fences on either side of my front and back gardens, and mysteriously, in the pattern of raisins in a fruit scone two days before he died. It’s like culture is having an epileptic fit, short-circuited, the same half-dozen words burnt stroboscopically into the occipital lobes of every language-speaking brain on the planet. We know this rumour and  the rhythms of the manifold media by which it has been delivered so well that we’d be more or less able to write the next week’s editorial content of the top-selling half-dozen broadsheets and tabloids ourselves, now, on this napkin using chocolat from this pain au chocolat if we weren’t catatonic with prurient tragedy repetition overload.

It’s about as constructive a contribution to contemporary world discourse as saying, “my thin lips are moving up and down, and a reedy sound is being emitted from my windbox as I blow air through it with my lungs.” The culturally-transmitted aspects of our human consciousness are at the point of collapse from a lack of narrative biodivesity. Human society could go down unless we start talking about a sufficient number of other things to sustain the linguistic transactions on which it depends. We don’t need to hear this message again, from her, while we’re trying to caffeine-punch through a fug of insomnia, or relax out from under a hangover with our wife at eight o’clock on a  Saturday morning in Crystal fucking Palace.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turns out that she was talking about her uncle Keith rather than Michael Jackson, so I am forced into an apology, and offer to buy her a new pair of spectacles, before hastening on my way towards Forest Hill.