As regular readers will know, after being bullied in my job and then kicked out of it, so facing having my house repossessed and now battling with lying buyers, I have been under a lot of mental stress. Each week I have to keep up a front so that I can apply for the required three jobs for week that the job centre asks for and then attend the interviews I am called to. I have had 9 interviews in the last 8 weeks, but seem incapable of saying what they want me to say. Of course, the approaches in each interview are different and there are a range of candidates, but clearly I am doing something wrong as these are all jobs I could walk into and start doing tomorrow. I imagine there has been some shift in the fashion of what is required for interviews that I have not caught on to. I have noticed that no-one wants PowerPoint presentations any more whereas just two years ago they were de rigeur for interviews. I was rejected from a job in 2003 simply because I did not use PowerPoint and at one in 2010 I was not allowed to proceed to the interview as it was felt my 15-minute PowerPoint presentation was 'not blue sky enough', so I am glad that fashion has passed, finally.
In such circumstances, I now start the day with a panic attack. Sometimes this is caused by having had a nightmare, something which is pretty common for me, sometimes with two nightmares in a single night. The variety is diverse with me finding myself in the First World War, being chased by zombies or mutants or slowly torturing my brother over a fire in my grandparents' living room of the 1970s. There is no point lying in bed once I have awoken as instead of these vividly realised fears I get nameless, shapeless ones. Sometimes this is difficult as I need to sleep longer. Tiredness simply feeds the concerns. I volunteered to work on a sustainable farm for a week, but turning hay exposed me to Farmer's Lung and swept me with a range of mental symptoms which are apparently among what the illness, caused by spores in the hay can provoke. My mind was literally numbed and I found myself staring into space with my mouth hanging open, then I was swept with complete paranoia which was topped off by me hallucinating that the trees around the field were unwinding like snakes and then walking towards me. So much for 'trying to get away from it all'.
Trying to keep myself in bed a little longer led to Somer. It is pronounced 'summer', rather than 'sommer'. The name came from somewhere in my mind and it certainly would not be the one I would have used if I was writing a story. I wondered if it simply derived from 'somewhere', something like Ecalpemos, i.e. 'Someplace' reversed, as used in 'A Fatal Inversion' by Barbara Vine [Ruth Rendell] (1987) or even Somerton which I have recently read is a place in Jamaica. I had tried to meditate and to focus on a single point or a rosebud, the kinds of things they advise in meditation classes. However, my mind likes greater complexity and once I slip off the single point it goes down the path of worry once more. I used to envisage the wargames I was playing and plot what I would do next. I think one difficulty is that with all the problems I have had with the Steam system, finding that old games cannot run on my new computer and not being able to afford subscription to 'World of Warcraft' any longer, it is very difficult to find something that I can lose myself in. I tried 'Crusader Kings' but one decision can lead to your kingdom being obliterated without you being able to fight back in a way you could with something from the 'Total War' range. I have written to Sega about the bug in 'Napoleon Total War' which means it crashes whenever an attack starts, but never received a response.
Back to Somer, and in my mind it is a place. It is an imaginary town. When I need to escape from stresses I go into it and think of a new building as if I was building something in 'Sim City' but seeing it from street level and for real. At the moment, there do not seem to be any people in it when I envisage it, but simply working on the architecture does wonders for calming me down. I had anticipated that it would be French in feel given all the days I have enjoyed on holidays in French towns, but for now it appears to be very English. The first structure that appeared, and it is not always me deciding what comes next, it often simply appears from my mind like the name, was the lighthouse in the South centre of the town; I have a feeling that the sea is South of that. This was clearly shaped by Southwold in Suffolk which I visited once for a wedding. Then appeared a book shop to the South-West of the town, based it seems on the music shop that used to be in Holywell Street in Oxford, though I do not know it is still there. Another refugee from Oxford appears to be a cinema, its setting is from Great Clarendon Street but the building itself seems to be more like the cinema, the Curzon Mayfair, compressed a bit. There is a park in the North-East part of Somer, which is quite small and has a sandstone rock sprouting out of it with a spiral path up the side to a viewing platform, though I have never climbed it. It reminds me of the outskirts of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and something I saw in the drama set in Edinburgh, 'Reichenbach Falls' (2007) in a park where a spring comes out. To the East of this was another bookshop which appears to have come from Westbourne in Dorset.
I have tried to envisage some restaurants and so far have produced only one, on a curved street close to this bookshop, it is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's restaurant the Axminster Canteen in Axminster, West Dorset, but thrust into a street from Swanage in East Dorset. South of this is a small square with a cafe to the East side and a memorial in the middle; it is cobbled but I cannot place it. I think it is from France, perhaps using elements of the square in St. Omer but being more cramped than that one is. I guess Somer is developing from places I have been happy in or think I might be, as I have never visited Axminster and whilst I have been to Edinburgh, never went to the park shown.
Much of the town remains unfilled in and as yet has no residences that I might go to 'live' in. I have insisted that my mind puts in specific buildings and locations, such as the square in Bath where they play petanque, but it seems I cannot force things into the structure, they do not remain there when I revisit Somer. I guess I have to walk around and 'explore', though at present I simply tend to 'appear' outside one building; only able to face in one direction and see it becoming more detailed. I have read at least one science fiction story in which men's minds slip into an imagined city. I do wonder if this is doing me harm or exposing that I am suffering from some serious mental condition. However, for the moment it seems to be working and at least allows me to lie in bed that little bit longer without feeling drowned by all the worries pressing on me.
P.P. 05/08/2012
After finding for some nights that I could not call up any images into my mind's eye and even when I tried to think of Somer there were large gates blocking my 'entrance' back into the town, I found that finally I could begin to 'construct' more of it. My mind ran me through a host of new buildings and locations that it felt should be present. To the West, beyond the bookshop, appeared a large chunk of University Parks from Oxford. I imagine a lot of people quite like these. They have an interesting mix of sports fields and pleasant walks going down to the small River Cherwell. Interestingly, I did not envisage cricket being played here, there is another location for that right over on the East side, it is modelled on the ground at a small village near Thame in Oxfordshire. There used to be a railway running passed the village and you enter it through the remains of the railway bridge; the top piece has been removed so it is like passing through a gateway. The railway embankment cuts the village off from the busy road. I remember cycling through there and seeing a cricket match taking place as if it had come from some 1930s novel.
I have brought a chunk of the Cherwell into Somer, but North of the park it turns into the River Itchen which runs through Winchester in Hampshire and sitting on it, far closer than they do in real life are 'The Tun' and 'The Willow Tree' pubs; the former is now a Spanish restaurant but in Somer it retains the pub it was back in the mid-2000s. The small square to the East of the town has acquired a favourite restaurant of mine, 'Oscar's' from Leamington Spa, a French restaurant which is the closest I have found any restaurant in Britain to be to numerous small town restaurants in France that I encountered while cycling. If it still exists I recommend going there.
Just to the North-West of the square is the odd park which brought in elements of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and then suddenly acquired a tall, slender round tower, a bit like a Europeanised version of a minaret and I have no idea where that came from. The square which has opened out to the East of this park, however is more familiar it has been lifted with the market place clock tower, the Beffroi from Amiens. Between this and the park has appeared a place from a dream that I remember years after I had it. It is a branch of Woolworths, the lamented store that used to be in every British high street. This one has an added element, two cylindrical funicular railways, going up from the shop floor to the top of the park's rocky outcrop. The branch of Woolworths seemed to be a mix of the one in Guildford, Surrey, and I think the one in Hayes in Middlesex, that I visited as a boy.
So Somer continues to grow and I wish I was an artist so that I could capture its wonderful eclectic growth. It seems to be doing its job. However, my mind got so busy with this latest round of construction that I found I could not get to sleep. It now has two residents, though so far both of them were facets of me. The first was me as the puppeteer from 'Masquerade' by Kit Williams (1979) which seemed rather appropriate, but then I stepped out of him to become more myself, dressed in my 18th century brocade suit over a loose white shirt and wearing my favourite ski-hook knee-high laced boots. I suppose I have always had fun when dressed like that. I do hope other people start appearing in the rather empty streets of Somer soon.
P.P. 07/10/2012
By chance I came across an article that mentioned the Japanese book about a man whose consciousness ultimately becomes drawn into a constructed city. It is 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' by Haruki Murakami (1985); the English translation came out in 1991. I read it in hard back version that I bought from a remaindered bookshop so it must have been pretty new to the UK when I read it, though I was not aware of that because I picked up on the 1980s feel to the story. The book has a whole Wikipedia webpage about it. Whilst I would not recommend it as an enjoyable read, it is certainly a book which can trigger off some thoughts. Perhaps my unease with it comes from it taking a Japanese rather than Western perspective so making it harder for me to engage with. Maybe I read it when I was too young, though saying that I think I am a lot less experimental in what I read than I was at the time, twenty years ago.
Showing posts with label Oxford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxford. Show all posts
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Buildings: Practicality vs. Preservation?
This posting was stimulated by a few things I read and heard about. One was a column in 'The Guardian' not this time by the self-centred idiot Simon Hoggart, but the usually more rational Ian Jack. In the 27th June 2009 edition he wittered on about how that even when areas in the UK get the status Conservation Areas and there are apparently 9,300 of these in England alone, that people ignore this and put stone cladding or satellite dishes on their houses or, what seems to be to Jack a worse offence, PVC double glazing. Also appearing in the same edition of the newspaper was an article about locations that have been given World Heritage status by UNESCO. Apparently the German city of Dresden has had this status removed because of a new bridge across the River Elbe which is deemed to have spoiled the view. There are 176 sites 'at risk' of having the status removed, some due to wars, which seems pretty harsh assuming the location's residents probably never wanted war. A friend of mine told me about a woman from Orkney who had told him that around the Stones of Stenness, some Stone Age site that has the World Heritage status, there was a big battle as people wanted to put up a wind farm and others feared it would lose them their status. Ultimately the wind farm was rejected; Hoggart would have been delighted, he loathes wind farms far more than the smokiest or most radioactive power station.
As it is, over the centuries some stones have fallen down and some re-erected wrongly and then moved again. So what is the 'authentic' view of the site? Often it is as imaginary as any other. An interesting parallel is at Hampton Court, where they have taken the gardens back from the 19th century model I knew in my youth to the 18th century one. Why not back to the 17th or 16th century plans? We tend to have some sense of what things should look like that is often detached from the history of the location. Twenty years ago it was probably at some date in the 1880s, editing out memories of the smoke, that was seen as a 'golden age' setting and the style people would aim for. With the Jane Austen fad, it has gone back to the 1820s and in fact referencing the 1780s, especially for the desire of editing out industry from the mix. People forget there has been industry in Britain for millenia, you only have to look at flint and bronze mines or the fact the Yorkshire Dales have few trees to see the impact that humans even in pre-history had on their landscape. Why not move back to 1485 and re-forest large chunks of England? These perceptions about the 'authentic' appearance are more about our current tastes than any accuracy about the past.
These stories to me showed the tensions and some of the stupidity of these considerations. If a Stone Age site has Bronze Age or even Medieval structures nearby do we believe that the site has been 'ruined'? Generally not. Yet at the time the disruption to the location and the impact on the skyline was as severe as from many modern structures. Dresden has always been a large, industrial city. Ironically you can see far more of its buildings and its sights than you would have done in the 19th century when many of them were being built as air pollution is far less especially in terms of smoke. Yet something 'modern' apparently outweighs everything else. Interestingly, this year the Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales, built of cast iron in 1805, has been nominated for World Heritage status. Yet, of course, 200 years ago it would have been considered an eyesore, an element of the burgeoning industrial age impinging on rural Wales.
Coming back to the conservation areas. Having lived in Oxford for two years, I know what it is like to live in a city which is considered by the tourists to be like some kind of version of a theme park. I have seen what has happened in Weimar, Germany's equivalent of Stratford-upon-Avon, where you see women working at computers dressed in 18th century garb, the dirndl and impossible to move in full skirts. It was surreal. I found I could not take these office workers seriously when speaking to them. I know that they are supposed to look as if they had stepped from the works of Goethe, but I am about 21st century business. Keep it for a festival, if you have to, but not for everyday wear. Again, imagine the reaction of Goethe in Weimar in 1780 if he went to his bank or to a merchant's and found the workers dressed in medieval constume. He would have rained ridicule on them. As for conservation areas. Many of them seem to covered terraced streets which were built at the time quickly to get accommodation for numerous workers and clerks. Very few of them had some grand architectural design attached to them. If residents have to maintain them as they were before, does this not mean that we have to move the toilet into the back yard, have bathing facilities restricted to a tin bath in the living room on Sundays, water fetched from a pump at the end of the street along with the cholera, families of four in each of the bedrooms? Where do you stop in your search for authenticity? It always has been and always will be a sanitised, edited authentic feel.
The preservation policy also clashes with other policies. Without power in the Orkneys depopulation accelerates. Perhaps that is what is desired by Historic Scotland, so they can turn the islands into a theme park with residents commuting from the mainland. The wind farm provides non-polluting energy for the islands in an area with good wind supply. Surely this is better than more coal, oil or nuclear power stations damaging the environment. A wind farm can always be dismantled, there is no need for all the decontamination of the residue that other power stations leave behind. Unless we move to de-industrialising Britain and reducing its population severely, then we have to face up to the demands that population makes and try to address them with as little impact as possible, but sometimes that will mean 'spoiling the view'.
Every city and even most rural landscapes have been constantly changing. The movie 'Enigma' ( 2001) is a fascinating example of just one element of rural change. It is set during the Second World War (1931-45). so there are no modern cars or tractors or wind turbines or power stations or plastic sheeting in view, but everywhere the hero (acted by Dougray Scott) and heroine (played by Kate Winslet) drive there are the bright yellow fields of rape seed, a crop only introduced on any scale to Britain in the 1980s, yes, the 1980s, not the 1880s or 1780s. The view looks wonderfully rural, but of course it is wrong, because even a photo from the 1970s would not show England as the yellow-and-pleasant land it is today. Should we ban rape seed in rural areas because it ruins the mid-20th century let alone late-18th century view? Given that it is impossible to preserve even rural locations as they were 30 years ago let alone 220 or 4000 years ago, why should we expect it to be possible with urban areas?
The key element that conservation areas neglect is that people actually live in these places and they want to be consumers and residents of the 21st century not play-acting the late 19th century. They want draught-free, waterproof windows, they want to watch the television channels and have the cars that we are always told we should have. Have open air museums and preserved villages, but forcing it on 9,300 areas in English towns and villages is excessive. According to the BBC, 727 areas are 'at risk'. What English Heritage sees as a 'risk' is interesting. They say 83% have plastic windows and doors - what should they have, the rotting wooden frames they replaced? How does that square with energy conservation? 31% have 'unsympathetic' extensions, again no-one wants to live in an actual 19th century house, why should they be compelled to have extra space just as cramped and draughty? 34% have alterations to roofs, fronts and chimnies, again a lot of this is about safety and maintenance. Is English Heritage going to compel people to have crumbling brickwork and unsafe roofs and chimnies? The complaint about 'poor roads and pavements' in 60% is clearly an issue for the council and has nothing to do with whether the area is a conservation area or not. These things should be maintained wherever and conservation areas should not be privileged.
The complaint that angers me is that 36% have traffic calming measures seen by English Heritage as inappropriate. Of course we should have no need for traffic calming, but given how recklessly so many drivers drive in residential areas it is a necessity in keeping people alive. English Heritage would be complicit in murder if they compel traffic calming measures to be removed and so leading to the deaths of any person in those streets. We cannot live in a museum. The traffic passing our houses is not what it was in 1890 let alone 1780, so the roads have to be adjusted appropriately. Focusing on the residents is wrong. You cannot have tiny time capsules in which people have to live with the unhealthy houses of previous decades and face the hazards of 21st century traffic because the calming measures have been removed. It is wonderful to try to preserve the past but there are limits especially when it comes to where people live. There is a shortage of housing in the UK as it is, so to insist on houses being cramped and unpleasant is just madness. Development more open air museums, move more houses into them, do not try to freeze history. It has never been frozen as the developer of a Bronze Age barrow right next to a Stone Age henge site would have told you.
As it is, over the centuries some stones have fallen down and some re-erected wrongly and then moved again. So what is the 'authentic' view of the site? Often it is as imaginary as any other. An interesting parallel is at Hampton Court, where they have taken the gardens back from the 19th century model I knew in my youth to the 18th century one. Why not back to the 17th or 16th century plans? We tend to have some sense of what things should look like that is often detached from the history of the location. Twenty years ago it was probably at some date in the 1880s, editing out memories of the smoke, that was seen as a 'golden age' setting and the style people would aim for. With the Jane Austen fad, it has gone back to the 1820s and in fact referencing the 1780s, especially for the desire of editing out industry from the mix. People forget there has been industry in Britain for millenia, you only have to look at flint and bronze mines or the fact the Yorkshire Dales have few trees to see the impact that humans even in pre-history had on their landscape. Why not move back to 1485 and re-forest large chunks of England? These perceptions about the 'authentic' appearance are more about our current tastes than any accuracy about the past.
These stories to me showed the tensions and some of the stupidity of these considerations. If a Stone Age site has Bronze Age or even Medieval structures nearby do we believe that the site has been 'ruined'? Generally not. Yet at the time the disruption to the location and the impact on the skyline was as severe as from many modern structures. Dresden has always been a large, industrial city. Ironically you can see far more of its buildings and its sights than you would have done in the 19th century when many of them were being built as air pollution is far less especially in terms of smoke. Yet something 'modern' apparently outweighs everything else. Interestingly, this year the Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales, built of cast iron in 1805, has been nominated for World Heritage status. Yet, of course, 200 years ago it would have been considered an eyesore, an element of the burgeoning industrial age impinging on rural Wales.
Coming back to the conservation areas. Having lived in Oxford for two years, I know what it is like to live in a city which is considered by the tourists to be like some kind of version of a theme park. I have seen what has happened in Weimar, Germany's equivalent of Stratford-upon-Avon, where you see women working at computers dressed in 18th century garb, the dirndl and impossible to move in full skirts. It was surreal. I found I could not take these office workers seriously when speaking to them. I know that they are supposed to look as if they had stepped from the works of Goethe, but I am about 21st century business. Keep it for a festival, if you have to, but not for everyday wear. Again, imagine the reaction of Goethe in Weimar in 1780 if he went to his bank or to a merchant's and found the workers dressed in medieval constume. He would have rained ridicule on them. As for conservation areas. Many of them seem to covered terraced streets which were built at the time quickly to get accommodation for numerous workers and clerks. Very few of them had some grand architectural design attached to them. If residents have to maintain them as they were before, does this not mean that we have to move the toilet into the back yard, have bathing facilities restricted to a tin bath in the living room on Sundays, water fetched from a pump at the end of the street along with the cholera, families of four in each of the bedrooms? Where do you stop in your search for authenticity? It always has been and always will be a sanitised, edited authentic feel.
The preservation policy also clashes with other policies. Without power in the Orkneys depopulation accelerates. Perhaps that is what is desired by Historic Scotland, so they can turn the islands into a theme park with residents commuting from the mainland. The wind farm provides non-polluting energy for the islands in an area with good wind supply. Surely this is better than more coal, oil or nuclear power stations damaging the environment. A wind farm can always be dismantled, there is no need for all the decontamination of the residue that other power stations leave behind. Unless we move to de-industrialising Britain and reducing its population severely, then we have to face up to the demands that population makes and try to address them with as little impact as possible, but sometimes that will mean 'spoiling the view'.
Every city and even most rural landscapes have been constantly changing. The movie 'Enigma' ( 2001) is a fascinating example of just one element of rural change. It is set during the Second World War (1931-45). so there are no modern cars or tractors or wind turbines or power stations or plastic sheeting in view, but everywhere the hero (acted by Dougray Scott) and heroine (played by Kate Winslet) drive there are the bright yellow fields of rape seed, a crop only introduced on any scale to Britain in the 1980s, yes, the 1980s, not the 1880s or 1780s. The view looks wonderfully rural, but of course it is wrong, because even a photo from the 1970s would not show England as the yellow-and-pleasant land it is today. Should we ban rape seed in rural areas because it ruins the mid-20th century let alone late-18th century view? Given that it is impossible to preserve even rural locations as they were 30 years ago let alone 220 or 4000 years ago, why should we expect it to be possible with urban areas?
The key element that conservation areas neglect is that people actually live in these places and they want to be consumers and residents of the 21st century not play-acting the late 19th century. They want draught-free, waterproof windows, they want to watch the television channels and have the cars that we are always told we should have. Have open air museums and preserved villages, but forcing it on 9,300 areas in English towns and villages is excessive. According to the BBC, 727 areas are 'at risk'. What English Heritage sees as a 'risk' is interesting. They say 83% have plastic windows and doors - what should they have, the rotting wooden frames they replaced? How does that square with energy conservation? 31% have 'unsympathetic' extensions, again no-one wants to live in an actual 19th century house, why should they be compelled to have extra space just as cramped and draughty? 34% have alterations to roofs, fronts and chimnies, again a lot of this is about safety and maintenance. Is English Heritage going to compel people to have crumbling brickwork and unsafe roofs and chimnies? The complaint about 'poor roads and pavements' in 60% is clearly an issue for the council and has nothing to do with whether the area is a conservation area or not. These things should be maintained wherever and conservation areas should not be privileged.
The complaint that angers me is that 36% have traffic calming measures seen by English Heritage as inappropriate. Of course we should have no need for traffic calming, but given how recklessly so many drivers drive in residential areas it is a necessity in keeping people alive. English Heritage would be complicit in murder if they compel traffic calming measures to be removed and so leading to the deaths of any person in those streets. We cannot live in a museum. The traffic passing our houses is not what it was in 1890 let alone 1780, so the roads have to be adjusted appropriately. Focusing on the residents is wrong. You cannot have tiny time capsules in which people have to live with the unhealthy houses of previous decades and face the hazards of 21st century traffic because the calming measures have been removed. It is wonderful to try to preserve the past but there are limits especially when it comes to where people live. There is a shortage of housing in the UK as it is, so to insist on houses being cramped and unpleasant is just madness. Development more open air museums, move more houses into them, do not try to freeze history. It has never been frozen as the developer of a Bronze Age barrow right next to a Stone Age henge site would have told you.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Body Talk - Short Story
Though I think this story was written after 'Bind', probably in early 1988, it owes more to the kind of writing I had been doing 1984-7 particularly for my school magazine. In particular the trick at the end was an essential for what I produced in those days. However, there are other elements which situate it. My father was a fanatical gardener and as well as his huge garden rented three allotments. They were very much as described here and the work I did on them was similar, though not with this outcome! For some reason though I loathed gardening, I fell in love with the allotments, I think it stems from that weird affection in me for small, almost mundane things of life, that have been important to people throughout the 20th century. It was like the way that I always wanted to go home with precisely every child in my school just to see what going home the way they did it was like. I suppose it is a sense of connection to people that counteracts the loneliness that I felt for so long or perhaps a recognition that society actually consists of lots of lonely people coalescing. I suppose I also felt a connection to the past both within my family and to ordinary people who had derived pleasure from ordinary things. I found it so difficult to derive pleasure from even the extraordinary, so I was somehow jealous of those who could do it, I still am.
The flipside of this connection to the ordinary is the main character, not the 'I' but the woman. I know precisely who she was modelled on and in fact she has now appeared on television and is a proper author. I was not saying that she had any dubious tendencies, it was just that to me she represented my even greater dream which was Oxford. Like Michael Moorcock and Philip Pullman it was a city I fell in love with at first sight and would wander around in deep affection for it. I suppose it was always the unobtainable for me, but for an author it is a wonderful realm and you do feel you can step into something magical; it has real and literary history. Anyway, this woman who I had known as a sixth former went to study at the University of Oxford and I failed my 'A' levels. Yet, on a visit I ran into her and she was a rower and there was golden sunlight after rain and I had tea and took lovely photos. So effectively she became an embodiment, the kind of local goddess for me that represented all those Oxford fantasies. The quotations uses in this story were actual sentences the woman herself had said to me.
So this story despite quite a hard edge, was actually about bringing together the two central tenets of my wistful longings of my late teenage years. I was not attracted to the woman, rather she represented a kind of link to a society that I imagined stood behind it, wonderful literary women that I might have met and gone on punts with and made love to in wood-panelled rooms (think living the movie 'Oxford Blues' (1984)). Thus, to put all of this wistfulness into a rather easy twist story was an antidote to simply drowning in wishing for a life I was in fact disconnected from.
Body Talk
I walked slowly along the earth footpath, it was dry from the summer, now more a grey colour than brown. The path is as wide as a man, running between the playing fields on one side and the allotments on the other. It goes all the way down to the small woods, my destination. It was the middle of the morning and no-one was in view. I stopped and glanced through the chain link fence over the allotments. I could scent a bonfire, a bit damp and certainly smoky. The breeze was blowing it away from me, but it was there and it meant someone must be around.
“Hello,” she said, “come to join me?”. The sudden sound of a voice surprised me. I stepped a little closer to the fence and pushed my nose through one of the links to see more clearly. Now I could make her out, a short way off, the opposite corner of the patch to the bonfire, the bit where it got damp.
I watched her at work. To me she looked like any of the current model of young females. Her shoulder length hair was kept out of her face with a loop of springy material. Her clothes seemed like someone else’s. The sweater was dark blue and far too large, the top of the jeans she wore, dirtied with earth, sprouted from beneath a belt which held them to her body. Everything had a musty air about it as if it had been forgotten until she had needed something to wear that morning. The only thing that stuck out were the green rubber boots, they had a new feel about them.
The woman was scraping mouldy leaves out of a wheelbarrow. I guessed she had ferried them there from the large pile yellow lorries dumped by the gate every autumn. I had occasionally rooted amongst them. I guessed they were swept up from the streets as there was always wrappers and even the odd glove mixed in with them. She began spreading the leaves thickly over a narrow stretch of earth, freshly dug I guessed. She looked over at me again and smiled. “What am I doing down here? I bet that’s what you’re thinking” she spoke cheerfully.
I said nothing, people are always telling me to be quiet, so this time I did not voice my opinion. She continued. “Well, as Fiona used to say, when everything, every day is so mental you’ve got to do something physical to keep you human. She used to run, though, long distance. You don’t win medals for digging.” She smiled at me, almost as if I was a child and turned back to her work.
The tools she was using looked like someone else’s as well. They were too large for her and now I could see she was probably a bit smaller, a bit weaker, than the women I had watched working the land here before. She panted as she used a rake to spread the piles of rotting leaves across the newly dug land. Then she rested for a moment with the handle resting on her shoulder. I could sense the sweat, and noticed the glow on her face. It was a warm day for autumn, but even so, it was clear that she was inexperienced at such work, not a regular here.
Suddenly she spoke again, but I felt more to herself than to me. I paid little attention and instead gazed over curiously at the small birds looking for worms disturbed by the digging. “But down here its good, you feel like you’re out in the country. In a garden you’re divided by fences, with only a neighbour on each side. Here it’s like the middle ages, everyone working the same land.” She straightened up, rubbing her back, and glanced around. I focused back on her, anticipating that her look would be expectant, seeking out a fellow worker. I had seen the people down here when it was busy, waving and calling to each other. Today the place was empty, but surprisingly that seemed to reassure her.
A train rumbled by on the track up the embankment that formed the far boundary of the allotments. I watched it go by, relishing the few moments’ excitement of its speed. I yearned to run alongside, but then it was gone and everything was quiet again.
She looked up at me again but returned to her raking. “Well, the trains, they are the barrier between here and the town.” she swung a hand behind her towards the tops of the tall buildings in the distance to illustrate. “They keep me in my century. Down here you get so carried away in your thoughts. I always think up good stories. But I hate them because they are all me, or me disguised, doing things that have happened to me in the past, writing them down it’s more like a diary than a story then. No skill, no skill.”
She walked over to the tattered waxed jacket she had discarded on the floor and pulled a notebook out of one of the large pockets. There was the stub of a yellow pencil rammed through the white metal spring at the top that held the pages together. “Poetry is the thing. Not this jumble of words they pass off as it nowadays” She waved the notebook at me to emphasise her point. “Proper poetry with rhythm, but it’s so hard.” She said with a mix of sadness and frustration. She tossed the notebook back on her jacket and returned to her rake.
“But here is where I could write it.” She said. “Look at those clouds.” I followed the line of her arm, upwards, past the hand dressed in a brightly coloured glove, to the sky. Pink clouds lit by the early autumn sun swept over us, pursued by the grey-white smoke of her weedy bonfire.
“Clouds like candy floss,” she muttered, “the smell of this stuff.” She pointed to the shiny black and brown rotting leaves that left a tangy taste in the back of the throat as steam rose from their decay. “You, and the bonfire, and the country feel. All good material.” She picked up a spade this time. This too was a little large for her, she had to stand on it and step it into the ground to haul the earth up. She scattered the dirt over the pile of leaves. It looked like a real mess, not the way to properly bury something but even she just kept on doing it, progressing along the plot. “I talk too much, I must be boring.”
There was nothing else to watch here. I had tired of it, I remembered my walk to the woods, they were a lot more interesting. I stepped away from the fence and turned back the way I had been going. A new smell stopped me. The smoke and the rotting leaves had concealed it before. I knew it from past occasions, digging myself in the earth or exploring woodlands. I turned my head to watch her again, but she did not notice me this time. Fingers protruded from the earth where she dug. She was now hurriedly, nervously, spreading the rotting leaves over the purple, smelling hand, and brushing soil on to it with the end of her spade. Once it was covered and the smell had been muted, she resumed her digging but did not press down as hard this time, so not cutting the earth so deeply.
Bored, I trotted on down the path. “Bye.” she called after me.
My stomach felt empty and it seemed so long to dinner. As I reached the edge of the wooded part I cocked my hind leg and sprayed the tree. I then got up a sprint on my four squat legs and chased down some birds pecking at the earth. They broke and disappeared upwards into the branches.
The flipside of this connection to the ordinary is the main character, not the 'I' but the woman. I know precisely who she was modelled on and in fact she has now appeared on television and is a proper author. I was not saying that she had any dubious tendencies, it was just that to me she represented my even greater dream which was Oxford. Like Michael Moorcock and Philip Pullman it was a city I fell in love with at first sight and would wander around in deep affection for it. I suppose it was always the unobtainable for me, but for an author it is a wonderful realm and you do feel you can step into something magical; it has real and literary history. Anyway, this woman who I had known as a sixth former went to study at the University of Oxford and I failed my 'A' levels. Yet, on a visit I ran into her and she was a rower and there was golden sunlight after rain and I had tea and took lovely photos. So effectively she became an embodiment, the kind of local goddess for me that represented all those Oxford fantasies. The quotations uses in this story were actual sentences the woman herself had said to me.
So this story despite quite a hard edge, was actually about bringing together the two central tenets of my wistful longings of my late teenage years. I was not attracted to the woman, rather she represented a kind of link to a society that I imagined stood behind it, wonderful literary women that I might have met and gone on punts with and made love to in wood-panelled rooms (think living the movie 'Oxford Blues' (1984)). Thus, to put all of this wistfulness into a rather easy twist story was an antidote to simply drowning in wishing for a life I was in fact disconnected from.
Body Talk
I walked slowly along the earth footpath, it was dry from the summer, now more a grey colour than brown. The path is as wide as a man, running between the playing fields on one side and the allotments on the other. It goes all the way down to the small woods, my destination. It was the middle of the morning and no-one was in view. I stopped and glanced through the chain link fence over the allotments. I could scent a bonfire, a bit damp and certainly smoky. The breeze was blowing it away from me, but it was there and it meant someone must be around.
“Hello,” she said, “come to join me?”. The sudden sound of a voice surprised me. I stepped a little closer to the fence and pushed my nose through one of the links to see more clearly. Now I could make her out, a short way off, the opposite corner of the patch to the bonfire, the bit where it got damp.
I watched her at work. To me she looked like any of the current model of young females. Her shoulder length hair was kept out of her face with a loop of springy material. Her clothes seemed like someone else’s. The sweater was dark blue and far too large, the top of the jeans she wore, dirtied with earth, sprouted from beneath a belt which held them to her body. Everything had a musty air about it as if it had been forgotten until she had needed something to wear that morning. The only thing that stuck out were the green rubber boots, they had a new feel about them.
The woman was scraping mouldy leaves out of a wheelbarrow. I guessed she had ferried them there from the large pile yellow lorries dumped by the gate every autumn. I had occasionally rooted amongst them. I guessed they were swept up from the streets as there was always wrappers and even the odd glove mixed in with them. She began spreading the leaves thickly over a narrow stretch of earth, freshly dug I guessed. She looked over at me again and smiled. “What am I doing down here? I bet that’s what you’re thinking” she spoke cheerfully.
I said nothing, people are always telling me to be quiet, so this time I did not voice my opinion. She continued. “Well, as Fiona used to say, when everything, every day is so mental you’ve got to do something physical to keep you human. She used to run, though, long distance. You don’t win medals for digging.” She smiled at me, almost as if I was a child and turned back to her work.
The tools she was using looked like someone else’s as well. They were too large for her and now I could see she was probably a bit smaller, a bit weaker, than the women I had watched working the land here before. She panted as she used a rake to spread the piles of rotting leaves across the newly dug land. Then she rested for a moment with the handle resting on her shoulder. I could sense the sweat, and noticed the glow on her face. It was a warm day for autumn, but even so, it was clear that she was inexperienced at such work, not a regular here.
Suddenly she spoke again, but I felt more to herself than to me. I paid little attention and instead gazed over curiously at the small birds looking for worms disturbed by the digging. “But down here its good, you feel like you’re out in the country. In a garden you’re divided by fences, with only a neighbour on each side. Here it’s like the middle ages, everyone working the same land.” She straightened up, rubbing her back, and glanced around. I focused back on her, anticipating that her look would be expectant, seeking out a fellow worker. I had seen the people down here when it was busy, waving and calling to each other. Today the place was empty, but surprisingly that seemed to reassure her.
A train rumbled by on the track up the embankment that formed the far boundary of the allotments. I watched it go by, relishing the few moments’ excitement of its speed. I yearned to run alongside, but then it was gone and everything was quiet again.
She looked up at me again but returned to her raking. “Well, the trains, they are the barrier between here and the town.” she swung a hand behind her towards the tops of the tall buildings in the distance to illustrate. “They keep me in my century. Down here you get so carried away in your thoughts. I always think up good stories. But I hate them because they are all me, or me disguised, doing things that have happened to me in the past, writing them down it’s more like a diary than a story then. No skill, no skill.”
She walked over to the tattered waxed jacket she had discarded on the floor and pulled a notebook out of one of the large pockets. There was the stub of a yellow pencil rammed through the white metal spring at the top that held the pages together. “Poetry is the thing. Not this jumble of words they pass off as it nowadays” She waved the notebook at me to emphasise her point. “Proper poetry with rhythm, but it’s so hard.” She said with a mix of sadness and frustration. She tossed the notebook back on her jacket and returned to her rake.
“But here is where I could write it.” She said. “Look at those clouds.” I followed the line of her arm, upwards, past the hand dressed in a brightly coloured glove, to the sky. Pink clouds lit by the early autumn sun swept over us, pursued by the grey-white smoke of her weedy bonfire.
“Clouds like candy floss,” she muttered, “the smell of this stuff.” She pointed to the shiny black and brown rotting leaves that left a tangy taste in the back of the throat as steam rose from their decay. “You, and the bonfire, and the country feel. All good material.” She picked up a spade this time. This too was a little large for her, she had to stand on it and step it into the ground to haul the earth up. She scattered the dirt over the pile of leaves. It looked like a real mess, not the way to properly bury something but even she just kept on doing it, progressing along the plot. “I talk too much, I must be boring.”
There was nothing else to watch here. I had tired of it, I remembered my walk to the woods, they were a lot more interesting. I stepped away from the fence and turned back the way I had been going. A new smell stopped me. The smoke and the rotting leaves had concealed it before. I knew it from past occasions, digging myself in the earth or exploring woodlands. I turned my head to watch her again, but she did not notice me this time. Fingers protruded from the earth where she dug. She was now hurriedly, nervously, spreading the rotting leaves over the purple, smelling hand, and brushing soil on to it with the end of her spade. Once it was covered and the smell had been muted, she resumed her digging but did not press down as hard this time, so not cutting the earth so deeply.
Bored, I trotted on down the path. “Bye.” she called after me.
My stomach felt empty and it seemed so long to dinner. As I reached the edge of the wooded part I cocked my hind leg and sprayed the tree. I then got up a sprint on my four squat legs and chased down some birds pecking at the earth. They broke and disappeared upwards into the branches.
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