Of Paint And Coats

A helpful train announcer - I probably should call him a conductor, but these days they hardly ever come and check tickets or indeed anything that might be classed as 'conducting' whatsoever - comes on the train’s tannoy to advise passengers in the first four carriages of the 5.55 PM train to Milton Keynes that there was some graffiti sprayed on the outside of the train, and advising passengers boarding the train to be careful not to brush against the paint since it was still wet. What use is that given that the only people who could hear this otherwise helpful warning would already be on the train?

It did get me thinking about graffiti, however. I don't have a major issue with it, but I'm sure if it were to be sprayed onto my own car or wall, for example, or indeed if my coat was now inadvertently painted from brushing along the train this evening, I probably wouldn't like it. It's a form of expressionism like any other art form, and that's fine by me. Perhaps it grieves me slightly to see Victorian brickwork along the side of train tracks dirtied by white sprayed slogans, but the alternative would be a boring, black expanse of oil-filthy wall pock marked by inexplicable clumps of buddleia (how they grow out of 1cm wide strips of mortar but not in my garden, I will never know). I was actually quite disappointed when I visited New York not to see a subway train emblazoned with huge, elaborate tags. In fact, while I was there one of the top news stories was about Mark Ecko and disapproval at his tactical use of graffiti to promote his latest collection.

I watched an excellent documentary on television recently written and presented by Adam Gopnik, which was a history of both New York City and personal account of Gopnik’s life in the city. In it, graffiti featured quite prominently, from its rise in the lawless New York of the 1970s, to its indiscriminate cleansing from subways, trains and public places by Rudy Giuliani during his tenure as Mayor of the City, finally showing selections of graffiti hanging as canvasses in a Brooklyn museum – out of context, weakened and anything but reactionary. I noticed this morning that the political and flamboyant graffiti previously visible on the walls near Euston’s main approach had been painted over by solid black paint. Perhaps the bitter comments about Bush and Blair were considered offensive or potentially influential.

Specifically, with reference to tagging, I'd like to know, purely for information purposes, if anyone knows who is the owner of the 'TOX' tag, which anyone using the London Underground may well be familiar with. The tag is hardly elaborate - the three letters of 'TOX' in inchoate white spray followed by two digits, representing an abbreviation of the year in which it was sprayed. If you haven't noticed one of these tags before, I would hope you will suddenly realise them to be all over the network after reading this.

Were I to be a sad - not controversial, they are - trainspotter type, I would get a tatty notebook and record every time I spotted a TOX sprayed onto a tunnel wall or platform end, specifically highlighting the year in which it was sprayed. However, I'm not and I won't be. That said, some cursory investigation would seem to suggest that 2001 was a bumper harvest of opportunities for this artist, as most of the time the tags are suffixed by 01; but you will definitely see 02s, 03s, 04s and 05s around the network. To my complete lack of surprise, in a photo of the wreckage of one of the three bombed Underground trains from July 7th 2005, you could clearly see one of these graffitid marks through the blown out window. For the tagger, this must be the ultimate coup de grace, finding your tag resplendent in a much more visible place, but clearly not in the most savoury of circumstances here.

And sad though it may be, I found myself at the start of last year excited at the prospect of seeing some 06s starting to appear on the network. But six months into the year I realised I'd not seen a single one. Being so used to seeing these springing up in new and innovative, perhaps hitherto hard-to-reach areas of a wall, I began to wonder if something ill had befallen the mysterious individual spraying these by night: had he (I'm sure it's a male) been arrested after five full years and goodness knows how many cans of white spray paint? Had he decided to hang up his can forever? Or had he perhaps died after getting hit by a tube while attempting to spray a tag deep inside a tunnel?

If in the unlikely event that any of you have shared this concern, I bring glad tidings - our man is safe and well and appears to be living in Bristol, as on the way into Temple Meads station one sunny summer 2006 morning I spotted a proliferation of TOX06s clumped at the edge of a tunnel. I cannot put into words how delighted and surprised I was at this chance spotting, but I should imagine a train spotter afforded a rare sighting of an early 1960s locomotive might appreciate it.

(The train I'm on has just called at its first destination, and the announcer has pleaded with alighting passengers to take care because the paint was still wet when he checked at Euston. Slightly more helpful, granted, but not to anyone whose garment was by then already ruined. And who but a drunk gets that close to the side of a train anyway?)

Will we see TOX07s this year? Does he still live in Bristol? Or was it a copycat tagger? If you are the artist or if you know the identity of this graffiti artist, I would love to know. Please get in touch with me at mjasmith@documentaryevidence.co.uk so that I know you're safe and well and busy spraying.

***

I would have been terribly miffed if my coat had been the unfortunate recipient of transferred spray paint, had I been staggering haphazardly along the side of the train. I'm very happy with my coat, which was described in the shop from whence it was purchased as a ‘trench coat’.

Buying a coat has always proven a difficult task for me. Wearing a suit for the majority of the week requires a coat that can be worn over normal work attire, and therefore needs to be appropriately smart as it’s likely that I’ll be wearing the coat when getting to and from client meetings. However, I'm too tight to buy two coats, and so any coats I've bought need to be multi-functional, and work as a casual coat also. Add to this dilemma the fact that I invariably chose a coat that’s too thin, resulting in many a cold walk to work in the morning as the temperatures begin to drop. It is with a palpable sense of defeat that I approach coat purchasing each year.

But my trench coat has, I think, been my best clothing purchase to date; and, for once, it seems that other people like it too, as I've had many comments about how nice it is and how much it suits me. It straddles the gulf between formalwear and casual wear very well and I feel very confident wearing it.

However, in my head, when I saw the words ‘trench coat’ on the label, I had visions that I would look like Ian Curtis of Joy Division infamy in some of those famous Kevin Cummings photos before Curtis’ untimely death – you know, moody, pensive and sleek. Instead, to my immense chagrin, I suspect the result is more like Rodney from the episode of Only Fools & Horses where Del obtains Rodders a raincoat which makes him look, as is often the case, like a ‘plonker’. Or like a guy on work experience wearing his dad’s coat on his first day.