Exit through the gift shop

We had an acronym at school that came into existence with the arrival of the then new Headmaster, and blossomed into fashion with his tenure. It ran, 'S.W.I.F.T.' The initials of the new Headmaster (known as, simply, 'The Master') were S.W. I'm sure you can fill in the rest, but here's a clue: 'F' didn't stand for 'friendly'.

It is a school steeped in history, with a military pedigree and strong ties to the East India Company. There's a quad. Actually, there are two, but one dwarfs the other so has assumed the name. The kind of place you don't realise how privileged you are to be there until you are long gone.

Anyway, that's beside the point. This acronym started popping up all over the school. Scrawled on walls. Burnt into the grass on the playing fields. Daubed inexpertly with fluorescent orange paint on the roof of one of the boarding houses (mine, as it happened). They forgot tin openers and had to open the tins of paint with slate tiles. They also forgot brushes, so had to kind of pour it instead of paint, but then they got caught.

The teachers were furious. Graffiti was not permitted. It was crude, cack-handed and heaped ridicule on the headmaster. Once, in the end of year school assembly (it was called, 'Lists' not assembly - there was a whole vernacular at my old school) above the headmaster a banner unfurled with the loud crackle of bangers, emblazoned with the acronym. He paused, looked up and carried right on with Lists. We all chuckled like, well, schoolboys. And girls, by that point.

Last night I found myself in abandoned tunnels beneath Waterloo station watching a pre-cinema release screening of 'Exit through the Gift Shop', a Banksy film. You could hear the same old clattery-clack of the trains, but the sound was somehow more intimate, it being above us not below. You could feel the trains passing too, it was like being within a heartbeat.

I'd had no idea of the sheer industry of Banksy, the level to which he's strived, employing all kinds of helpers and power tools and ingenuity to get his art on the streets, in secret. Nor did I know he'd traveled to the West Bank and sprayed up there. I hadn't really thought about it until Shepard Fairey spoke of the real power graffiti earns itself through the perceived power of seeing it everyone, one iconic image repeated again and again in different sizes all across a city in different locations: in Fairey's case, an old wresting legend with the word, 'Obey'.

So that's what you can do with street art with thought. I guess we didn't really think it through and execute it at school. I wonder if someone had, what the teachers would have said then (even they didn't like the Master).