I know I have written about graffiti before… last time I introduced you to one of my heroes, Social Pest. However there have been some developments, and this week has all been about the cans.

The week started with the news that wall-decorating British artist Banksy had been outed again. Apparently you can only last so long behind a pseudonym when only half of the population sees you as a genius.

Then I had my own brush with a paint-can fugitive. Lancaster has its very own version of Banksy… and like everything else here, he’s not quite as good. Rather than leaving witty slogans and provocative images, he just leaves his calling card… still, it’s pretty cool in a place that still has no real gallery space for artwork.

I imagine the police will be in touch, they seem more concerned with vandals than they do with drugs and violence, so I’ll save them the trouble and give my full statement here.

It was 2.15am, and I was walking back home from an evening spent in the company of friends. I chose to take a shortcut home through a bit of poorly lit park land (insert personal safety literature here)… anyway, I wasn’t mugged or stabbed, but I did see a figure clad in black walking towards me. He had his face covered with a scarf. Then, right in front of me, he took out a can and started spraying his tag on the floor… calm as you like, and with no small amount of arrogance. I watched him finish it – he worked quickly, I nodded in approval and walked on. I passed a further three fresh tags before I left the park.

This all reminds me of a story I was told by my friend, I’ll call him ‘D’. Apparently, as a young man, he ended up stuck in Yealand, a village outside Lancaster, for some time. There is nothing to do in Yealand except perhaps develop a drinking problem or maybe bother livestock.

‘D’ was wandering around one day, looking for something to do when he stumbled across a spray can that had been used to place temporary markings on the road. It had been discarded still half-full.

In an act of desperation and defiance, ‘D’, took the spray can, and on a wall facing the main road into the village, he attempted to spray in three-foot letters the phrase, ‘F**K YEALAND’.

I say attempted as he managed to get only six characters in before the can finally ran out. He had been too ambitious, if only he had used a smaller font size. Still, the result was legendary, three-foot bright yellow letters shouting a more general and personal message:

F**K YE

Despite the best efforts of multimedia, the internet is still primarily a text-based world – It’s essentially a machine that you input a couple of words and it produces millions for you.

That means everything, the video, the pictures, even the text itself, has to be described. In the good-old-bad-old days this information was taken from filenames or the bulk of the text. But this can be misleading since people are notoriously bad at creating logical filenames* and it is quite possible to talk at length about a subject without ever having to mention it by name.

I’m sure that a lot of you, especially the bloggers, will be aware that the solution is to use tags. Words of phrases that when combined give an accurate summary of the contents of the text or media…

…and by and large it works. Sure it’s open to abuse, but it’s probably the best method so far for cataloguing and organising the large mess of information we call the internet.

The only problem, as far as I can see it, is when describing a single word the ratio of ‘tags to content’ reverses, meaning that there are more tags than actual information.

But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to incorporate the idea of tagging into my everyday life – I’m sure I’ve already mentioned that I’m all for graffiti* (not that I condone doing it to anyone elses property), especially the type where you label an object with an inherent truth about it… tagging is just an extension of that.

And I’ve started doing it with people too. Reducing my complex relationships with people into a maximum of five words. More specifically, I’ve been doing it with you.

So, I want you to suggest some tags… whatever you want, an object, a person, anything. And I’ll let you see what tags I’d use to describe you.

*In particular, Mr Grew’s classic use in ‘Mr Taylor is the principal’ logo on the school wall and graffiting things that cannot be seen, such as the top of doors.

I am referring to this article in the Telegraph.

Though, being a fan of nominative determinism, I think the police may have had a point there… Badlands, hoho.

Whilst this is obviously silly, I understand that people have a real problem against graffiti – it’s often termed as vandalism but I believe it to be pretty much the opposite.

Vandalism is when you destroy something, not when you create.

From the fantastic illustrations to the simple written word, I love graffiti in all of its forms – it’s like someone has taken the world and made a book out of it.