C, D, X, Y and other deficiencies

 

The nature of vitamin deficiencies is well known; if you don’t have enough of a given vitamin you will finish up with a deficiency state, something unpleasant and oddly named, like beri-beri, scurvy or pellagra, rickets or defective night vision. In short, bits falling off. A reasonable corollary suggests that if you become deficient in other essentials of life  - not just vitamins or other dietary components but less tangible parameters - there will also be consequences, as appropriate. For instance, consequences resulting from a lack of a safe environment, a lack of love, of self-esteem, of meaningful things to do, of a sense of usefulness, of being self-determining and in control. These deficits are among the factors that make for an inadequate life, according to Abraham Maslow and his famous pyramidal hierarchy of needs and what he called meta-needs, in other words, desirables rather than must-haves. Well, now. We’re all living inadequate lives at present. What, long term, is it doing to us, I wonder? What are the bits – and meta-bits - that might be falling off?

As this miserable pandemic continues, I guess that – despite all the individual efforts, all the diversionary tactics and displacement activities – many of us are becoming steadily more deficient in the things we ordinarily rely on to keep us going, to keep us mentally healthy.  All those things you hear people say they’re missing: closeness to family and friends, physical intimacy, a reliable source of income, shopping, the spontaneity of a visit to a café or a cinema or a museum, the familiar jostle of bus or tube or pub, going out. Nature. Culture. Civilisation. Getting and spending. Having. Doing. Being. Yes, an active person is more of a verb than a noun. Being - in situations that confirm our identity and purpose as individuals, our reasons for living, situations that provide stimulation, meaning, and pleasure. Life itself. For too many, of course, the losses have been far more profound and painful.

Well, anyway, here we are. Summer has receded and now the autumn rushes through; as I write the clouds race northwards across the sky. Tomorrow it will be November. Shortly, we will hurtle into winter, down that slippery slope towards Christmas, a time normally so pleasurable and busy, but this year a season that will be hollow and empty, and a distressing, lonely, grieving, non-event for many. Not just because of seasonal affective disorder, with the darker evenings may come a darkening of mood. We’ll have more time to ruminate deliberately on what is obvious, namely that our world has been unapologetically screwed up, perhaps for a very long time to come. Let’s hope those scientists at Oxford and elsewhere can soon succeed. Meanwhile, as regards the current year, our timetable of joyful expectations has been wrecked, and for many of us there have been none of the normal markers of season or anniversary, no celebrations, no travel, no holidays. Day follows day, if we’re lucky.

Holidays. Remember holidays?  Holidays take many forms, and can simply provide an opportunity to relax, to potter and do leisurely things, or strenuous and adventurous things, or sporty things, or excitingly different things. For many they provide the chance to explore somewhere new – or even somewhere familiar – away from home, either overseas or elsewhere in one’s own country. They extend one’s personal geography and with it one’s life experience; they add to the quality of life, they add to one’s character. For someone like myself, an instinctive topophile with itchy feet, retired and with time on my hands, someone strongly attracted to place in general and to specific places with their specific psychological satisfactions, the constraints  of lockdown have been particularly difficult. I’m grateful for what has been possible, but only so many picnics on grassy verges next to farm gates or on tranquil riversides dotted artistically with grazing (but potentially homicidal) cattle can fulfil my needs. Naturally, not everyone is similarly afflicted, but many surely are. A world that we had come to regard as our own, just a drive, train ride, or flight away, available as long as we had the fare and the motivation, anywhere we fancied, anywhere at all on a whim. A world now denied, perhaps - for those of us of a certain age - for ever.

Some geographic meta-needs are attributable to personal foible; appetites for landscapes and cityscapes and seascapes that must be satiated, aesthetic specialisations to be nurtured, compulsory destinations to arrive at, calendars of events and  exhibitions to attend, and all the subtle pleasures that make for a civilised life – as citizens of the world - in a taken-for-granted ready-and-waiting global terrain. Besides the personal agenda there are national variations too, no doubt, local habits and regional mythologies that determine optional travel. For instance, Central Europeans tend to need mountains and forests for their psychological comfort; Scandinavians allegedly long to see the sun whenever they can; affluent Parisians have a weekend house in the country or on the coast of Normandy. Generalities of course. As inhabitants of an island nation we, collectively, tend to need to see the sea. Although I live about as far from the coast as is possible in England, under normal circumstances I see the sea often enough. It’s always there and I can always go and look at it. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in the middle of a large continent where seeing the sea is something one would do only rarely, or perhaps never, in a lifetime. If I lived somewhere like Vienna, Kansas City, Khartoum or Novosibirsk I think I would suffer from a kind of claustrophobia at not seeing the sea – but then of course I’m basing that on my own life experience and not on the mindset of someone who had grown up in those places. This year I’ve only seen the sea – and not a spectacular part of it either – for only a few hours one warm day in September.

My greatest deficiency this year has therefore been that of sea. I’ve been making up for it with extra satsumas and blueberries.

D, or rather Dee, comes next. The alphabetic-vitamin parallel came into my head along with a vision of the Grosvenor Bridge in Chester, a yearning to see once again  that great brownish-grey stone arch, the longest span in the world when it was completed in 1832. A scene so familiar to me and from so long ago, as seen from the coach park next to the castle, on the Little Roodee. I ache to be there. And then on foot across the bridge, into the area of Hough Green, B&B territory and the main road through Saltney into North Wales, turning off down through the affluence of Curzon Park and onto the footpath alongside the girder bridge that carries the railway over the river. Then the huge sweep of the Dee, that gigantic meander, with views across to the Roodee racecourse, the tower of the cathedral, and all the other much-loved landmarks of the city of Chester. Not being able to go there actually hurts.

The Dee was really my one and only alphabetic river, since the Trent and the Thames are the only other rivers with which I can claim genuine affinity. For some other lucky folk their longings might be for the Devonian Exe, the Herefordshire Wye, or even the tumbling and transporter-bridged Tees. Mercifully, it’s a silly pun that soon runs out - of examples if not of water - and cannot cater for the Mersey, the Clyde, the Tyne, the Severn, the several Ouses and Avons and all the other great streams that help to make our wonderful country such a distinctive, varied, and beautiful one, and whose mysterious influences lend local character to the populace. But it has been different this year. Topographical deficiencies, however named, and of every nature, have been the common lot – an inability to visit  tiny villages, large cities, coastlines, cliffs and headlands, distinctive peaks, forests and copses, distant spires, towers, lakes, landmarks, views, all the natural templates for our lives. And for me, even the handy formulae of humanised space - W.10, N.W.3, S.W.9, E.5, or even Liverpool Eight – places that I love so much.  All denied this year.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, although LGW is one alphabetical deficiency I can happily accommodate. I shall make up for it with chocolate instead.

Clichés lined up and shot

 

I’ve burned enough words this week, so instead, a pictorial blog. Some illustrations of alignments that might be considered representative of popular sayings, and the outcome of a misspent year of excess (though not excessive) picnics.

birds of a feather 

 power to the people

getting all your ducks in a row

  

 to Hull and back

Hip replacements and basic forms

 

In early 1877 my great-grandmother, born Emily Beadle, was preparing to get married. She was living in Dove Row, in east London, a thoroughfare which twelve years later would be colour-coded on Charles Booth’s poverty map as very poor, bordering on the “vicious and the semi-criminal”. If she had emerged from her house, turned her back on the Imperial Gas Works at the western end of the street and headed the other way, she would have reached Goldsmith’s Row, the southerly extension of Broadway Market, and further scenes of poverty and destitution. Luckily, over time, and following her marriage, things very slowly started to look up for her.

How times change. Broadway Market in recent decades has become one of the hippest alfresco scofferies and niche shopping destinations for London’s would-be über-cool, replacing the King’s Road, Carnaby Street, even Camden Lock and Brick Lane, now disdained as hopelessly un-hip venues, suitable only (in normal times, of course) for accommodating the regular weekend influx of – aaagh – tourists..

Let’s follow in young Emily’s footsteps out of her street, turning sharply right before we reach the bridge over the Regent’s Canal and the start of Broadway Market. Very shortly we will see this:

 

Fabulous, isn’t it.

For me, one of the many downsides of this hateful plague has been an inability to visit bookshops and to browse. Therefore, given my needs and instincts, and against my better principles, I’ve had to order online. Mistakes can be made.

On 30th September, “Basic Forms” was published by a company called Prestel, ostensibly to celebrate the industrial photography of the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. I’d been looking forward to it and had pre-ordered. At 160 pages, I thought, I couldn’t go wrong. A great disappointment it has proved to be, however, containing as it does much blank paper, a barely adequate selection of photographs with no interpretation, and a brief (10 page) recycled text by a Belgian philosopher and art historian with little of interest to say. Although I’ve always been a fan of the visual and other sensory aspects of industrial design, I’m also - as a sometime information scientist - interested in classification. I was hoping from this book to learn more of the rationale behind the typology of the Bechers’ photographic catalogues of water towers, cooling towers, gasholders, blast furnaces, silos, pit head gear, and all the other spectacular installations from a fast receding age, which attracted their attention. Alas, nothing. As far as I’m concerned the book is a waste of paper and a waste of money. I could have done better myself, I thought, at least I could have if only I’d bothered to collect the photographic material while it was still available.

In the UK, as elsewhere, what survives from this late-industrial era is patchy. Though the Bechers’ photos were in monochrome, our heavy industrial heritage was nothing if not colourful. Gasholders – the icon of the perversely anti-aesthetic - were often interestingly rust-covered, or painted in a diseased shade of olive green or bilious ochre, even a fetching faecal brown, while the tall waterless ones (think Southall, Northolt, Battersea Park) were usually a delicate shade of light grey-blue, designed to be invisible against the smoggy sky. Steelworks could be fiery, ferric red, especially at night; chemical factories could smell pale green. Cooling towers were usually the colour of the concrete from which they were made, but not always, as with the sand-pie-like  prettification of a clump of them at Rugeley, Staffordshire:

 As the book tells us nothing of what the “basic forms” implied by its title actually were, what would be the likely taxonomic criteria? Obvious ones that occur to mind are function, general style, location, nationality, age, architect or company responsible, size, and colour. Of the several fundamental approaches to categorisation, possibly the most appropriate of them in this instance is prototype theory. Developed by Eleanor Rosch and others at Berkeley, this theory suggests that, when classifying, one will identify a “central” example, and relate other specimens to it. The chosen prototype might be the one first encountered in childhood, or it might be a metropolitan example or another one deemed for some reason to be the biggest or best or most important or the most typical. Local and national styles might well enter the picture. The Bechers’ examples focused on the industrial heartlands of Germany, but also on the coalfields of northern France and eastern Belgium, with a few examples from the UK and the US.

The Bechers found an aesthetic in what they photographed, a sculptural quality, snapping them in neutral, objective conditions, under overcast skies. Clearly they felt affection for these objects, yet tried to squeeze their own personal subjectivity out of their subject matter, treating these artefacts instead as isolated scientific specimens. Maybe the fusion of aesthetics, affection, and a desire to identify pure form contributes to the classificatory problem.

So much has been lost. One took a pride in local industry, in its power and productivity, and in its installations – despite their size, harshness and intrusiveness. So many places were one-industry towns, especially in the case, for example, of coal and steel. Obviously there was an emotional investment in them from an economic perspective, even one of survival, but that investment had its physical symbols too. For them there was a regard – even a love - of the relevant structures, however supposedly stark and unlovely, smelly or environmentally unfriendly. We’ve all seen film of people weeping as pit head gear is dynamited, or as cooling towers or landmark chimneys are felled. Symbols of a way of life, gone forever.

One recalls how every town had its gasworks, often on a site by the railway; it would be distinctive, a source of local affection and jokes in bad odour. Reading (the town, not the activity) was one such place, and the final approaches into King’s Cross and St Pancras were famous in this respect. Approaching Birmingham New Street from the north east were the two massive and seemingly leaning gasholders at Washwood Heath, shamefully dismantled just a few years ago. Etruria gasworks, in the Potteries, was huge; it’s now a retail park. That’s what we’ve become. Didcot had a distinctive solitary gasholder long before it acquired a power station. A friendly looking thing it was, slightly olde worlde. The variegated gasholders at Kennington Oval, next to the cricket ground, are still surely a part of our national heritage, or at least the televisual rendition of it. Many parts of the capital, like parts of many other towns and cities, were – shall we say – flavoured by their gasworks: Fulham, Battersea, Wandsworth, the Old Kent Road, Stepney, Bromley-by-Bow, Kensal Green, Beckton. Not much of those left now.

Things felt differently then. Pride, optimism. Little standardisation, lots of quirky local input, peculiar and vernacular, easy to understand, easy to find interesting, easy to find a sense of personal ownership for, or identification with. “That’s my gasworks”. “It’s mine”. “That’s my smell” (as it were). Remember that feeling?

Enter the national grid, not as part of an unhappy argument against the drawbacks of modernity, but as the provider of further examples. Recall the masses of cooling towers (usually in groups of even numbers), along the Trent valley and up into Yorkshire (Willington, Drakelow, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, High Marnham, Ferrybridge, Drax, Eggborough and several others), and occasionally elsewhere, like Fidler’s Ferry on the Mersey. Most of these still survive, for the time being, though coal-fired power stations are now doomed for environmental reasons. Maybe, though, their cooling towers could be left as inspirational monuments, relics from a more optimistic, futuristic, modernistic age. Perhaps, someone could even produce an at least halfway decent illustrated book celebrating them and explaining how they came to look that way. There is more to be done.

Blogging on demand

 

Just imagine if you had to blog to order, to blog on demand, to come up with an original idea for a blog post every week. It would be awful, wouldn’t it. Well, luckily I don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything, although the Robagraph is a self-imposed habit that’s rather taken a hold this year, partly as a discipline, a routine to force myself to rise above the apathy and brain-death so readily engendered by this miserable plague we’ve had inflicted upon us from afar.

Being put on the spot to create something off the cuff is never easy. Blogging, prodding a keyboard in isolation, asynchronously detached from the real world, taking one’s time, changing one’s mind, correcting, editing while completely unobserved, is one thing, hard enough in itself. Enforced do-it-now creativity when combined with an instinctive fear of public speaking in front of thirty nasty little smartarses is something else, and can be intimidating and life changing.  As we shall see.

The most intensely anxiety-provoking, mind-paralysing instance of this that I can recall, occurred when I  was in my mid-teens. It was caused by the man who taught us English, a language which all of us could speak already. He – like most English teachers – read the “Guardian”, was under-sized, and took pleasure in embarrassment. His classroom overlooked a small thoroughfare that was allegedly part of the city’s peripatetic red light district. One of his less endearing habits was to order bashful teenage boys out onto this street, and to shout at the tops of their voices, so that they could be heard from within the classroom, words like “prostitute”, “intercourse” and “fornication”. I thought I was lucky in that I was never selected for this ordeal, not appreciating that the long term downside was that I remained singularly unprepared, in adult life, to fully exploit and enjoy my subsequent transits through Amsterdam, the Pigalle, or King’s Cross. I really wouldn’t know how to go about it, or know what to say.

And now the paralysing episode. One afternoon (memory suggests it feels like a Monday) this man - whom we will call A.L. for arbitrary reasons not necessarily though just possibly connected with his initials - decided that we should each give an impromptu speech, on any topic we liked, anything at all. We had five minutes to think up an idea and scribble some headings, and then for the rest of the 40 minute period A.L. would select victims to give a five minute oration. The selection was made on such factors as where one was sitting, the first letter of one’s name, one’s birthday, whether one was looking particularly keen or the opposite, and similar quasi-random parameters. There was one boy, whom we shall call P.M. for reasons that escape me, who was an extraverted and very sweaty endomorph, incontinently vocal in class, and thus a great favourite of A.L. He was, as I recall, fond of drama, not of the hissy fit queeny variety, but the more tiresomely serious literary sort that ac-torrrrrs and schoolboy show-offs do. If the whole class was asked a question P.M.’s hand would reflexly shoot up: “Sir, please sir, please sir, sir, sir”. Whatever the question, his answer was always the same, “sir, it’s because of society, sir”, and it was always correct. Even now I occasionally dream of P.M., and in the dream he’s always a woman. Sure enough, he was one of those selected to give a speech that afternoon, and he was in his element. I forget the details, but I expect it was to do with society.

Meanwhile I sat there frozen with fear, completely unable to think of anything at all, least of all a subject upon which I could waffle for the allotted time. To the extent that my brain functioned at all, an occasional wandering neuron might glance against old favourites – topics I’d “done” for school projects, like the Forth Bridge, the solar system, or the Stock Exchange stamp forgeries – or another ambling thoughtlet  might graze up against newer passions like the Mersey Railway or the inert gases. I loved the inert or noble gases, lined up down the far right of the periodic table, in what was then called Group VIII. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Mersey Railway too, and in particular the low level station under Liverpool Central, but the inert gases were really special. I was especially fond of krypton – that was, as it were, my element - long before it became a factor in the televisual lives of the masses, and while it still just quietly went about its business of contributing to approximately  0.0001% of the earth’s atmosphere. I wasn’t the only pupil thus enamoured. My friend H.C.P.R. (it sounds like a nineteenth century North American railroad company, doesn’t it), who sadly died not long ago, had a major fetish for the isotope krypton-86. I could see his point. But no, nothing would gel coherently, nothing I could expound upon, not even anecdotes involving my strange relatives, like Uncle Rhos who did dangerous things with scissors or Uncle Willie Tom who had yellow skin and weekly injections in his bum. Nothing at all, completely mentally blank, total cerebral paralysis. No plausible topic out of all the immensity of time and space and growing up.

Somehow, I survived the lesson. I’ve no idea how, but I did. Chance, luck, fate, I suppose.. My name began with the same letter as it always did, my birthday was in the month it always was, I was sitting where I always sat, and my face was white with fear. None mattered that afternoon. By the end of the lesson I was a total nervous wreck. However, while enjoying that blissful moment of relief and escape I reflected too that I might not have been selected for a different reason. I concluded that I had just experienced a fundamental judgement about me as a person, an assessment  that has become more familiar and more expected with the passing years. That day I understood for the first time that no one was remotely interested in anything I might have to say. Education is character building, it certainly is.

So, if you insist that I should produce a blog this week, like every other week, I’m afraid there’s nothing doing. Nothing, zilch, rien, nada, nichts. My silence is an act of retrospective revenge.

A long while ago I learned that A.L. had emigrated to New York. I visualised him on a seedy stretch of 8th Avenue, on the block where Hungry Hilda’s once stood, yelling “hooker” at the top of his voice. I hope he was successful. For yes, it’s true, it’s about society, it always is.