¡Voy a incendiar tu villa de vacaciones, cerdo inglés!: What I Learnt From My Successful NFT Launch

‘Oliver,’ spluttered Jaylon, the estate agent. ‘I thought you were destitute after your wife died. Where’s all this money from?”

I couldn’t hide the beaming grin broadening across my face until it hurt. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

I recently became a single parent after my beautiful wife Sarah died very suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack last November. It was a hammer blow. We are all still reeling.

She was a remarkable woman. A real matriarch, the sort you imagine in Mediterranean cultures. But it was in London we had set up home. Laaaandaaaan. Londinium. Yet now we had to venture through the 2020s alone, naked, bereft of her comforting bosom.

I had to provide for my children. But how? My legal work had largely dried up because I had dedicated so much of the last 5 years to online campaigning against brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Now, I admit I was just as sceptical about non-fungible tokens as you when I first heard about them. Similarly, I had numerous doubts about the very many cryptocurrencies before them. There were concerns about the bubble bursting, not to mention the environmental impact of blockchain mining.

But all that changed when a local football club launched a new kind of “environmentally friendly” NFT in conjunction with Deranged Crypto Ape.

For decades Streatham Rovers FC, awash like shipwrecked detritus in the mid-levels of the so-called non-league pyramid, had become adept at squeezing any revenue they could out of any potential income streams. This included accepting cash from local used car salesmen and garages to dispose of used tyres by burning them in their small stadium car park.

Great for the club, yes. But not so great for local residents, particularly those with breathing conditions. And also, increasingly, illegal.

Deranged Crypto Ape CEO Chip Rivers saw an opportunity and moved in, launching the ‘Non-Flammable Tyre NFT’ that sought to counterbalance the environmental ruination of the blockchain’s energy consumption by dissuading the club from setting fire to rubber on a commercial scale.

I was able to speak to Chip Rivers before his mysterious disappearance last week and he spoke of the spirit of the Donglaise.

‘It’s the big dick entrepreneurial spirit of the English-speaking peoples, my man… We invented capitalism, my dude… And you know what capitalism is? You know what capital is? Money that gets a job, money that goes out to work, money that brings more money home. This is what crypto has captured in its purest form. Almost pure 100% profit. Car manufacturing, food production, administrative services, toilet cleaning - all that old stuff includes additional costs eating into your profits. With crypto you just sit back and let it accumulate.’

I try to push him to elaborate on the ‘big dick’ aspect of his business mindset. Rivers draws deep on his lime green marajuana bong pipe*. ‘It’s the spirit of the Donglaise, my friend. You know, like the French for English. Anglaise. With dong at the start. I want to marry dongs and NFTs, you know. I want to do Bored Apes with big swinging dongs.’ Then he started singing, ‘Baby don’t worry! About a thing! ‘Cause every little thing! Gonna be alright!’

That’s when I realised the wide scope of NFTs. They could be whatever you wanted them to be.

A couple of months previous whilst my wife was being pronounced dead by paramedics in our hallway I solemnly set up the Sarah Oxford-Laughdugry Memorial Foundation, a charity dedicated to her life’s work. But we needed money, quickly, and lots of it. These things, after all, do not pay for themselves.

I realised non-fungible tokens were the best way to do this. I told Chip that I wanted to launch a memorial NFT for her. ‘Okay, but it needs to be attention grabbing,’ he said. Then he uttered six fateful words. ‘What was she like in bed?’

Amazing, I replied. Extraordinary. The best. We fit each other like a glove. I was addicted to her body. Life was bereft of meaning knowing I would never copulate with her again.

‘Well that’s what we’ll do. Bored Apes fucking. She like doggy style, Oliver?’

Within two days the animated NFT was ready. I was struck by how eloquent it was. How well it captured a moment of passion between two lifelong lovers. It wasn’t just some sordid little piece of cartoon monkey porn. It was erotic art for the 21st century.

I tweeted it with the hashtag #NFTGiveaway and it trundled along at first. Nothing remarkable. I was in touch with my good friend and Bazake Media co-founder Rob Zands**, something of a self-taught expert in the art of viral social media posts and he advised me, quite simply to wait, to be patient.

After about 24 hours I started getting notifications in German. My German isn’t as good as my Romance languages*** but I used an automated trans;ation system to get the gist of what they were saying and my heart sank. These were hard left trolls, mocking my heartfelt memorial to my late wife. I immediately contacted the German embassy in London to inform them that anti-Semites were active in the Fatherland once again.

Then notifications came in other languages. First French, then Spanish - the language of so many of Sarah & I’s treasured romantic weekend citybreaks over the years. All of them Hard Left cybertrolls laughing at my personal tragedy.

Much like revolution in 1848, an intolerant radical creed was spreading across Europe, and its target was my humble memorial NFT to my gorgeous, incomparably sexy dead wife.

Then came the American communists. No, not Latin Americans. These were communists from the US of A! Ungrateful little (and I apologise for using this word) cunts for whom President Biden saving them for the hideous Trump was somehow not good enough.

Now, I never thought I’d say this, but these ‘Yank Cranks’ almost made me nostalgic for the British Hard Left. Disgusting, hateful enemies of progress they might be, but at least the average UK communist, weak-willed and hungry for mother’s mammaries, has accepted a life of debauched sock-masturbation and “sucking dick for socialism”.

These stateside socialists had the kind of moralistic backwardness I previously assumed had died out with Mary Whitehouse. They were “disgusted”, “hurling up their tacos” and even urging me to commit suicide.

I wish I could say I kept my cool, but I struggled. I sobbed and screamed. I wrecked a couple of (thankfully two years old) Macbook laptops by throwing them against the wall. Perhaps the lowest point was where I posted the tweet “YOU WORTHLESS DOGS” - I was letting them see they were winning.

However, there was one silver lining. It was painful, it was messy, it turned me into some kind of hate-figure for much of the continental Hard Left, and it even led to repeated threats to burn down my timeshare holiday villa in Andalucía. But it caused the NFT tweet to go viral. And the offers to buy were coming in through Twitter’s direct messaging functionality. I set a price of £20,000 and sold - at the time of writing - 38 copies of the Sarah Oxford-Laughdugry Memorial NFT.

£760,000 in total. Paid almost instantaneously into my PayPal account. Just over three-quarters of a million pounds.

I immediately re-invested it into bricks and mortar. A recently refurbished two bed flat near Brixton tube station. Very smart. This would be the jewel in the crown of the small, modest Laughdugry buy-to-let property empire. All our other lets are really quite substandard, not fit for human habitation, but this one is different.

I’ve had proper professionals come to view it already. Beautiful people for a beautiful apartment. The sort of civilised individuals who will look after it. Not even a whiff of housing benefit about them.

I have decided to name the flat Sarah Oxford-Laughdugry House in her honour. She would have loved it. Well, possibly not its location. She always argued that the improvements to Brixton, the influx of white professionals etc. had not gone far enough yet. She wasn’t racist or anything, that goes without saying. Truth is she hated being priced out of Islington and absolutely despised living in South London. She blamed me for it. Called me a failure. Blamed me for the problems in her own career too. The funny thing is the sound of crockery smashing is now something of a sexual turn on for me. There is something so exquisite about the shattering of a Habitat dinner plate next to your ear, launched at your head by a beautiful, enraged, snarling woman, her breasts still wobbling like the heated paraffin wax of a lava lamp from the effort of the venomous throw.

So, that was my experience of entering the controversial, exhilarating world of non-fungible tokens. With its marriage of technology, lack of regulation and a punk rock DIY attitude and aesthetic it reminded me a lot of the illegal raves I attended in my teens and early twenties.

Oliver Laughdugry | oliverlaughdugry@bazake.co.uk | twitter: @sarah_ox_laugh

Footnotes

* This conversation - I hesitate to use the word interview - was conducted over Skype from Rivers’ home in Malibu and as such I was not an accessory to any crime on UK soil.

** That’s Dr. Robert “Rob” Zands to those of you who do not know him personally.

*** No pun intended!