I have elegantly wasted a day. Piano in the morning. Essay on violence over lunch. Lunch at 4 in the PM, after noticing I was starving. Guitar in the afternoon - I can now sort of play William's Last Words, Joke Sport Severed and Facing Page: Top Left. And along the way, I discovered the most comprehensive Jack the Ripper sites on the web, which destroyed any chance of me doing something more constructive.

I almost get my Jack the Ripper obsession, but I'm not proud of it. Frankly, I find it a bit tasteless and disgusting, and yet it won't go away. It has its roots in the Doctor Who novel Matrix, and my general adoration of Victoriana and gaslight romance. A lot of Ripper books aim for the "man behind the myth", but for me it's the myth most facinating. He's up there with Sherlock Holmes and Sweeney Todd, and people tend to neglect the fact he was real, and forget that there are five (or three, or twelve) poor dead, real women at the heart of the story.
It would be tasteless for popular fiction to plunge in and dramatise any other serial killer, but Jack is special. It's this which interests me most of all.

It's the fact it was unsolved that gets into people's brains, I think. At the time, Victorian London was obsessed with it - hundreds of hoax letters were sent to the press and police, claiming to be him. It's remained unsolved, and remains obsessing. For my own part, I believe none of the theories. It was just an average guy who appeared, and then disappeared - just a serial killer. There have been six periodicals about the Ripper murders, and currently three of them are still in circulation. Can you imagine this for the Wests, or Ted Bundy? No, it'd be horrific. It'll still be horrific if it were done in 50 years. It's dressed up as academia, somehow, and all because Jack is special.

It's his connection to the gothic genre which has kept him alive. He is part of the mythology. Anno Dracula suggests that Jack Seward (of Dracula) was the killer, while Michael Dibdin wrote a book revealing that - who else? - Sherlock Holmes was Jack. Matrix, the Doctor Who novel, just goes gloriously overboard with the surreal Victoriana of it all. I can see why the Seward theory might be convincing, except that he's not real. None of this is real. It's only by using this fake Jack that anyone can get away with (frankly) trivialising the real events. In my own mythology of the city, he is the maverick prince of Dark London, a personal concept I have, and it's because of what he represents: underbelly. There's a streak of the admirable rebel in the way he shows the Victorians their own true natures, mocking them with his cheeky letters. Even the name "Jack" is very familiar: he is someone we know.

I'm waxing lyrical now, but I'm just trying to define the nature of the fascination. The reason it's OK to be so free with the subject, or why he won't go away. One of the reasons I love Matrix is the chief villain - it's the obsession itself, and a whole parallel London arises because of the terror. London is quarantined because of the evil and fear which grips it, and "Jacksprites", who see Him as the Messiah, roam the streets. Looking at the sheer number of Ripperologists, or twisted adaptations, it's a scarily plausible idea...