help (noun)

I thought this was ten years ago. Actually the fire happened on the 8th. Huh. It was painted by Morgan, the next door neighbour who heard Dan's cries for help while I was unconscious from smoke inhalation on the ground floor. That's Dan in the window. Residents of South London, from Brixton to Waterloo to London Bridge to One Tree Hill, might recognise from this some of Morgan's other great works, on shop fronts, shutters, electricity boxes, bins, murals, the Imperial War Museum, and the totem pole on Peckham Rye. And friends and blog readers with excellent memory will know that I moved into his house and found a lot to be very happy about. I started writing "Time Spanner" there, and imagined Martin and Graham living somewhere similar. It's the only home Morgan's ever known, and then last November, on my birthday in fact - the anniversary of Laika's first and only flight into space - I learnt that Lambeth Council were evicting him from it after forty years. It was his mother's council house, and his mother didn't live there any more. That's why I mention it. There was a fund to help him, a legal fund, and the legal fight may now be lost, but Morgan might be homeless this Winter is my point, and he helped save my life what I thought but now realise having checked wasn't ten years ago, and he took in everyone, and I love him, and money might still be useful. If you'd like to donate, go here.

In other words, this call to donate to an "artist's resistance fund" was posted too late. But there's a lot of bad news going round and I couldn't bring myself to add to anyone's fat upload of online grief at the time. So, sorry if that's all this news has done. But Morgan makes me happy, and an introduction to his work is always, I hope, a little like a chink of light. Heavens know we all deserve better, but Morgan most. Here.

And, you know, everywhere. That's a bin.