The book in question is called Shit London: Snapshots of a city on the edge, by Patrick Dalton and is a collection of photos taken in the capital that show the city at its shittest. It is also an excellent blog, and you can find it here.

I was thumbing through its pages (some of which contain superb cock graffiti by the way (more of which is on the blog and most of which is better than the cock graffiti you can find on Wanksy in fact)) and stumbled across something I had seen before and blogged about here.

Anyway, here’s Patrick Dalton’s Wankfield alongside mine.

Small world….

For starters this morning I had to go to Brentford, that on its own would normally be enough of a reason to feel depressed, but compounding the feeling of doom was the fact that I faced what would almost certainly be a lengthy meeting. Additionally, I was running 20 minutes late, which would mean that I would arrive at the meeting and everyone would be waiting for me and so I wouldn’t be able to go for a pee for the next three hours.

So, having already been awake for well over three hours anyway and struggled across town standing on two packed commuter trains, I arrived at Brentford train station, late for my meeting and feeling the pain of life.

I tumbled out of the carriage and wandered off down the platform feeling sorry for myself, but then under my feet I saw it.

I was surrounded by other commuters, I was running late too, but I took out my camera and started snapping. This is one of the benefits of living in London, people affect such an air of indifference to your actions that you can get away with almost anything. In fact, the more mental you act, the more you can get away with.

The Brentford blue is let down by some serious omissions. No pubes, no pisshole, no semen. The shaft is slightly wonky and the testicles misshapen and joined up. It’s by no means a well crafted cock. It’s ambitions leave much to be desired. But it is, at least, an honest cock without pretensions or airs and graces.

This week I was sent a clip from a Swedish newspaper that goes some way to dispel the above as stereotypical myth. Well, the bit about being boring and earnest at least.

The picture comes from the paper Realtid which was apparently attempting to snoop on an expensive property by using the local equivalent of Google maps when it stumbled across something far more interesting…

Deciphering the hidden message behind this Swedish swinger is a tricky business. If you look to the north east of the giant phallus you’ll see a pentagram mowed into the lawn. So perhaps the penis is part of some Satanic ritual? The Swedes bloody love death metal, so I reckon the chances are quite high.

The headline of the piece in the paper translates as ‘Dick Mystery at Djusholms Graddhylla’. If I ever form a death metal band, this will be the name of our first album.

It was so inevitable that this advert on the inside of a toilet door in the gents of Toddington Services on the north bound carriageway of the M1 was going to be tampered with by a graffitist that the marketers might as well have attached a little betting pen on a piece of string with a join the dot puzzle.

The artist was faced with an obvious problem, since the gents in the photo in the gents have hats to hide their offending articles. But this imposition has been batted aside with scant regard for anatomical correctness or indeed anatomical erectness.

The chap who so clearly proud of his now fully functional todger has had added to his right thigh an additional penis. Adding further confusion to this already heavily mixed Freudian message is the fact that the penis is ejaculating yet still very clearly only a semi.

This being a service station, it is a popular resting spot for weary truckers. So, it got me thinking, perhaps this semi could be a veiled reference or possibly even promise to a Canadian trucker on the look out for love, since the common term used for articulated lorries in Canada is a semi.

More likely though it was some half-witted, fuck brain, with nothing better to do with his time in a toilet than scribble a piss poor penis onto a poster.

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. .

I remember being perplexed as a child when my dad told me that cars with a little CH sticker on them were not from Czechoslovakia but were actually from Switzerland because the CH stands for Confederation Helvetica  – here we have a country so rubbish, it’s named after a font.

They can’t make up their minds whether they’re French, German or Italian. Or Swiss. Famous for a range of faintly ridiculous shit, from cuckoo clocks to fondue, and infamous for hoarding Nazi gold, a serious yet ingenious knife culture and laws against flushing the toilet after dusk, the Swiss are, by and large, quite a lot nicer than their immediate neighbours.

When it comes to football though, unlike their immediate neighbours, the Swiss have not really done much on the world stage, least of all creating generation after generation of football fans whose preference for the Young Boys of Bern makes them sound like a particularly conspicuous continental paedophile ring.

Perhaps then, this piece of Swiss toilet wall art is homage to the Young Boys of Bern.

But wait, what’s that? Let’s take a closer look at the footballer…..

Amazing. Dangling down like a couple of inverted WWII sea mines, this cockless masterpiece is a wonder to behold. It’s not what you see, you see, it’s what you don’t see.

The English gave the world Goldenballs, the Swiss gave us Genevaballs.

If you’re in Geneva soon, take a trip to Restaurant Olé-Olé Rue de Fribourg 11, 1201.

The only review in English I found on the web says this: “It’s not the best service the first time you go, but they remember you coming back and then it’s really a great place with good ambiance. Food is rudimentary, but always a very good value.”

What it doesn’t say is: “… and in the toilet is a picture of a football player featuring graffiti hairy testicles NO PENIS.”

Is it a commentary on the point of vegetarianism or is it just a crass gag, the kind of gag we’ve all made at one point or another with food items?

Who cares, it’s bloody funny, cos, hey, guess what? That, well it, it kinda looks like a cock and some balls.

Still, like proverbial London buses, you wait for ages (for nine months in this case, which if it were a London bus would be terrible and well worth a strong letter to TFL), and then two come along at once.

First up is my second reader contribution, it’s a profile piece rendered in chalk on the side of a bus shelter. A lack of semen lets it down, as indeed does the absence of pubic hair. However, those shortcomings are all forgotten when we learn that the cock was spotted in Shaftesbury.

There isn’t much of a shaft really. The penis is fat and round, and brings to mind Flash Gordon’s space ship in the black & white TV series from the 50s.

It is surely no coincidence that a character called Flash flies around in a gigantic metal dildo.

Moving on.

The second of today’s graffiti penises was spotted by me. It’s a classic location, less amusing sounding than Shaftesbury, but a more appropriate setting. A service station toilet cubicle. The composition is also more thought provoking that the previous member. With the artist taking advantage of the toilet roll dispenser branding to add his own commentary.

I wonder what Leonardo would have thought had he known that one day his name would be misappropriated first by a lavatory hygienist, then second by a penis graffitist. Still, I suppose it’s a step up from Dan Brown’s shit book and Tom Hank even shitter film.

Of course, back in the day, Leo was no stranger to the joys of penis art.

Da Vinci has let himself down here though I reckon, the pubes are quite lifelike but where’s the spunk?

It has taken a while, but at long last a contribution has come in. I’ll leave it to the contributor (who I will call Mike, as that is his name) to describe his find.

“It was taken on Great Tichfield St on 17th December, I do believe. Someone had rather pleasingly drawn one on every car on the street, ending with a naked lady with a massive yawning underpart on a white van. It was well impressive. (The effort. And the underpart, for that matter.)”

After the fireworks we, along with thousands of other revelers, made our way along Southwark Street towards London Bridge.

It was just as we passed under a railway bridge that I spotted something quite surreal. Quite surreal, yet quite unmistakable.

It was a graffiti penis readers. But this was no ordinary graffiti penis, it was like nothing I have seen before.

That said, there was nothing particularly strange about the penis itself, two black spray painted testicles either side of vertically oriented shaft, topped off with a classical bellend and pisshole combination.

Where things suddenly take a turn down Tales of the Unexpected lane is beneath the piece. It is subtle readers and a bit like one of those weird 3D pictures that were popular back in the early 90s, you might need to defocus your eyes to make out the true image.

Here, see if you can spot it. It might take a couple of minutes to sink in:

Now, my good lady wife suggested that the image is perhaps supposed to be an homage to the early Homer Simpson (an Homerage, if you will):

I’m not so sure. However, without her making mention of the similarities, I would not have Googled ‘early Homer Simpson’ and I would not have discovered this amazing image:

A large chalk representation of Springfield’s favourite son taunting the Cerne Abbas Giant with a doughnut.

Or, maybe, rather than taunting the giant, perhaps Homer is actually playing a comical version of quoits, attempting to throw the snack onto what is the largest and arguably most ancient of paleolithic graffiti penises in Great Britain.

Maybe, just maybe, the artist responsible for creating the large doughnut wielding Homer was the same artist responsible for creating the Southwank Bridge Dickhead!

Much more likely though is that this was just a crude attempt at humour, and as such takes its rightful place on the virtual pages of Wanksy.