This is the second completely puerile street sign to make it onto the virtual pages of Wanksy. I stumbled across this photo while looking on an old phone for a photo of an old friend. I didn’t find one of my old friend, but I did find this. In a way, I think that sums up life quite nicely.
I won’t comment on the aesthetics, since it’s not technically a proper Wanksy. But I have posted the picture here nevertheless, since it made me smile and that made the trip to the loft to find the old cameraphone worthwhile.
So, you see, my fascination with rude graffiti stretches back long before seeing a penis in a Bristol bog. In fact, I think my fascination with rude graffiti stems back to being a kid in Nottingham.
There’s a bridge quite close to my parents’ place called the Lady Bay Bridge. Here it is as it appeared in the 1980s John Le Carre spy thriller Smiley’s People:
I used to walk over this bridge on a fairly regular basis to get into town. From the bridge you can see the City Ground and Meadow Lane – which for any football nerds out there are the two closest professional football grounds in the UK.
From the bridge, you could also see the word ‘wank’ written in white paint. That simple statement used to make me smiley even before I knew what it meant. I knew it was a rude word, but it wasn’t that which made me smile, it was the fact that someone had gone up on the bridge and taken the time and trouble to write this word, just the one word, with no other meaning or point.
That’s art that is.
Of course, the Lady Bay Bridge wank that featured in the eastern bloc spy thriller pales into insignificance alongside perhaps the world’s greatest ever bridge-based graffiti. This effort, by a bunch of proper Russian anarchists:
No amount of flowery prose can do this cock justice. .
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