Object synaesthesia

I’d forgotten Petula Clark. Until, that is, a couple of nights ago when I watched a superb BBC4 documentary about Cindy Sherman. There she was, Petula, that is, in a suitably noir-ish 1965 video, performing Tony Hatch’s “Downtown”, with its wonderful piano intro.

Back in the previous decade, in 1953, Petula had recorded a version of “Poppa Piccolino”, which was a Number 2 UK hit for Diana Decker in the December of that year. Yes, it's easy to mock, though part of the melody presages "Being for the benefit of Mr Kite". I was three years old at the time, and that song was a major component of my mental life for a significant part of my early childhood. Initially a favourite, as self-consciousness grew "Poppa Piccolino" became an embarrassment. In part, that was because it was far more important to me than just a song, and I shall return to this point in a moment.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog called “Implausible boundaries of association”, in which I considered how, when viewing a certain local thoroughfare, I always thought of Bournemouth, for no very good reason. Though peculiar, this is a kind of mental activity that has been reported by others, for example, by John Cowper Powys (who could be a little strange at times) who commented that he “thought with” the Nothe fort in Weymouth and other features along the Dorset coast, and also by the very sane Jonathan Meades in his “Encyclopaedia of Myself”, when he refers to a particular T-junction in Salisbury where he always used to think of the Duke of Edinburgh. In my earlier blog, I suggested that these sort of odd associations could be described (though not explained) by Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the implicosphere. There are, it seems, few limits to analogy and association, although convention denies respectability, meaningfulness or even sanity to the more unlikely ones.

One species of analogy which has become fashionable in recent years, even to the extent of being claimed as a neuro-atypical conceit by some who don’t actually enjoy / suffer from it, is synaesthesia, the condition in which an input in one sensory modality is experienced, fully or in part, in another, hence “coloured hearing” or experiencing the letter M as pea green. An enormous number of such oddities have been reported in the literature, to the extent that synaesthesia must be considered “normal”. However, confusion arises because of the quasi-synaesthetic terminology  implicit in everyday language – so that we speak of a loud shirt, a warm relationship, a sharp cheese, a brittle voice, or bright prospects. There is a blur between genuine (physiological) synaesthesia and the dead metaphors of linguistic commonplace.

In the same way that senses merge or transpose in proper synaesthesia, it has been suggested that other cognitive or affective fusions or crossovers could take place, possibly leading to exceptional abilities or creativity – for instance the (unproven) idea that Einstein might have experienced some commonality, some blurring, of spatial and mathematical skills, to his advantage. We should also recall that many words attract private, subtle emotional auras, which probably help us to remember them, and motivate us to action. Association is normal. More or less. It’s what we do when we think.

Quite where the dividing line lies between clinical synaesthesia and the normal associational nature of thought itself, is unclear. A fascinating zone exists, a mental melting pot, where we encounter, for instance, the schizotypal thought processes of some creative people (as well as those with mania, autism or schizophrenia), and the (usually unexamined) associations that lead to phobias and sexual fetishes. Mental association lies at the rich and unpredictable core of what it means to be a human being.

The American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) famously referred to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of babyhood, a time when nothing made sense, when there was no understanding of what was important or of what “went with what”; a time before thought as adults know it. While “normal” in infancy, unless we escape from this kind of proto-thought we will soon be in trouble, yet if we still retain traces of this ability into adult life, enhanced creativity may be a consequence. So often we need to break the mould, we need unexpected strategies that apparently lack rationality. Though without any evident  personal creative benefits, here we must return to “Poppa Piccolino”, and to the most ridiculous implicosphere and proto-thought complex that I can recall from my early childhood.

Near my grandparents’ home in Flintshire was, and is, the Queensferry Bridge. Back in the day it was heavily used by vehicles travelling between Manchester or Merseyside and the North Wales coast and was painted a serious “engineering” grey; today it is coloured a ludicrous bright blue, as befits the banality of our times, and is by-passed by an uninteresting structure carrying the A494 dual carriageway. The Ferry Bridge, as I and the locals called it, or what is now formally known as the Old Queensferry, Jubilee or Blue Bridge, has been granted Grade II listed building status since 2005 – and I should think so too. Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson and built by Sir William Arrol and Company  between 1925 and 1927, it is a double bascule bridge of unique design, although a few fairly similar structures exist elsewhere, in Chicago, for instance.

For a considerable portion of my childhood much of my thinking was “with this” bridge, and “Poppa Piccolino” – the tune and lyrics, which start with “All over Italy ...” - were fused intimately with it. Along with, er, the colour grey, hair clippers, plasticine, fears of fish and thunderstorms, empty low loaders, and much else, now unfortunately (or mercifully) forgotten. A “blooming, buzzing confusion” it certainly was. As implicospheres go it was impressive and insane; it was in my brain – perhaps it was my brain. I was in it; it was me. If anyone ever posthumously dismantles my neuronal architecture someone will need to go out and stop the traffic, otherwise who knows what might happen. Cars might plunge into the tidal River Dee. Meanwhile I propose the term “object synaesthesia” for this kind of thought process.

Shortest hour

Subjective time is a familiar phenomenon. “Time flies when you’re having fun”, and all that. How the wait in the airport departure lounge drags on and on, while the holiday that follows whizzes by, accelerating as the last day approaches. When we’re stuck with things we dislike doing, those which are boring, painful, or anxiety-inducing, we find that time slows right down. We may even check to make sure that our watch hasn’t stopped. When we’re happy and involved, time speeds up again. A twenty minute dental appointment may feel interminable; an evening spent in pleasant company and we can’t believe it’s already time to be putting our coats on. 

It’s a respectable topic, both in literature and in real life. A couple of examples may suffice. (1) The subjective nature of the experience of time is a phenomenon discussed in a fictional context by the character Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain". That’s one you may want to pursue. (2) Albert Einstein employed it in an attempt to explain the concept of relativity, using as an analogy the scenario of time spent with a pretty girl versus time spent sitting on a hot stove. I’m not sure how much of either he actually did, but since it’s Einstein, we must respect the theory (although we don’t have to pretend that we understand relativity).

It can get complicated, and there are anomalies, of course. There always are. For instance, elapsed time as experienced going forward may not pass at the same perceived speed as when viewed retrospectively. A boring week in the office, roll on Friday, and when Friday evening eventually arrives, and we look back over the week, we may query where the time went. Never mind, Monday morning will soon be here and we can try again. Another example. In the early hours, as one day is biochemically ticking round into the next, time may pass unexpectedly quickly. I’ve often found that, if I need to be up ridiculously early, if I’m setting off on my travels somewhere, the few minutes I’ve allowed myself to get up, to have breakfast, and to get myself ready, pass with alarming rapidity. The subjective speed of time somehow – certainly not linearly – reflects the amount of activity that needs to go into it.

Then there’s cinematic time. A couple of weeks ago I watched a morning showing of  the superb “Darkest Hour”, for which Gary Oldman has deservedly received an award for his portrayal of Winston Churchill during some of the most perilous days of 1940. I found every minute of the film enjoyable and enthralling, and only wished it hadn’t ended when it did.  

 
I never looked at my watch once during it, my only potential zeitgeber being my moronically metronomic reflex reaching for another Malteser to munch. At the end of the film it felt like about an hour had passed, and I was extremely surprised – disbelieving in fact - that it was so much later than I expected it to be. The Maltesers had kept giveaway time-for-lunch pangs at bay, had successfully suppressed the most basic of biorhythms, but the film had gripped my attention moment by moment. Intense pleasure and mental involvement. I’ve checked since, and the running time for “Darkest Hour”  is two hours and five minutes. This must be one of the most subjectively distorted stretches of perceived time I’ve experienced – in a long time.

Unbuilt HS2

Last night I watched the repeat of the third and last programme of Dr. Olivia Horsfall Turner’s highly intelligent, well researched, superbly presented and thoroughly excellent BBC TV series on “Unbuilt Britain”. The previous two programmes included an examination of Paxton’s “Great Victorian Way” intended to circle inner London, proposals for impossibly massive canals across central Scotland to improve naval defence, and pioneering visions for a fixed crossing of the English Channel.

This week’s programme focused on unrealised plans for London and Glasgow. It was an absolute treat. First of all it compared the merits of the Wren, Evelyn and Hooke proposals for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Thanks to commercial imperatives and the urgent requirement to rehouse the displaced citizens, none of these schemes came to fruition, except - in modified form - Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, and his other City churches built after the Fire. The second half of the programme was devoted to two postwar plans for the redevelopment of Glasgow, a city that had suffered greatly from the attentions of the Luftwaffe, and which long before WW2 had been a by-word for tenement living, slums, congestion, violence, and other assorted deprivations.

The two competing schemes were by Patrick Abercrombie, who advocated decanting the overcrowded inner districts to exurban New Towns (e.g. Cumbernauld and East Kilbride), and Robert Bruce, who devised a ruthlessly modernistic plan heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. Bruce’s proposal would have erased the existing city, with its wealth of varied and inspired architecture, along with its close-knit communities, and replaced it with a gridiron of concrete and glass monoliths, making the most extreme excesses of East Berlin or Novosibirsk look warm and cuddly in comparison. This monstrous idea came terrifyingly close to implementation, but by the end of the 1940s had been abandoned.

What Glasgow was left with were the New Towns, some sporadic outcrops of high rise, an urban fabric largely untouched and – once decades of grime had been blasted away – magnificent to the eye. In due course it would become the fashionable and lovely city we know today, a treasure trove of architectural gems, but last night’s programme suggested that it had had a narrow scrape. On Clydeside  in those early postwar years the crude forces of politics and finance were seemingly allowed to operate with little to check them, and scant concern was shown for the softer factors crucial to satisfactory urban life. I find it rather disturbing that Bruce’s plan, in particular, was taken so seriously, and that he wasn’t taken away by men in white coats.

Interestingly, though, it was intuited early on that both of these proposals needed some assistance if they were to have a chance of success; their victims – sorry - beneficiaries, had first to be persuaded, softened up. Thus a film was shown at local cinemas, a work of naked propaganda  said to be highly convincing as regards the merits of the Bruce plan, right up until the final few moments, when the jaw-dropping horrible reality of this abysmal scheme, illustrated by a tacky, clunky model, became all too obviously apparent. The propaganda became self-defeating at that instant, and the audience must have filed out in shock and disbelief at what was going to be done to them, to their lives, their memories, their places, their city. Meanwhile,  Patrick Abercrombie – who famously had designs upon London as well, most of them unrealised, thankfully – also made a film, a ghastly Cholmondeley-Warnerish production in which the weirdly monocled protagonist loftily assumed that the vast upheaval and experiment in social engineering that his scheme implied was unquestionably good for Glasgow and Glaswegians, and would be welcomed. Again, he was rumbled, and again – perhaps with hindsight aided by the creations of Harry Enfield – one is amazed that the whole performance wasn’t dismissed as a spoof.

However, it wasn’t. The line between good intentions and overweening arrogance is sometimes hard to discern, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on what were the standards of the time, not long after the end of a war during which the population had become inured to receiving condescending and irritating instructions on how they ought to behave. Experts and authorities were respected in those days. Sometimes. Wonder how they lost it.

In Glasgow in the 1940s – still regarded as the second city of the Empire - the likely subjective, aesthetic, social and environmental consequences of what was being suggested were ignored; only the vested interests of political power and commercial gain were deemed to be relevant to the discussion. The poor sods who would have to up sticks and go and live in filing cabinets in the sky or out in the middle of nowhere weren’t  of any real interest in the grand scheme of things. The proposals could be rationalised with vaguely socialist smarm about how cosy it would be if everyone lived equally – equally, that is (architects and planners excepted), in habitations of equal awfulness, all part of the preppy postwar zeitgeist, the weary hope for a new and better world, the adoration of all things white and cuboid and soulless, the infatuation with meaningless grassy “lungs”, all carefully, neatly, psychotically arranged - in low density angst, hygienic resentment, and fully functional right angled seething, with the added inducements of an inside loo and a 23rd storey balcony to jump off.

Of course it isn’t like this now, is it. Is it? ‘Course not. We know better now, don’t we. We know that there has to be more to a city than this, even if Cumbernauld New Town does occasionally make it into the catalogues of crap Britain. All about money and power? What? Was it ever? Don’t be ridiculous.

In my “Tourist In Your Own Town”, currently being prepared for publication, I examine the kinds of subjective factors that feature in the appreciation of cities, factors which would have been so cruelly denied in Bruce’s Glasgow, Le Corbusier’s Paris, or Robert Moses’ Manhattan, had any of these atrocities been allowed to proceed. Atro Cities, now, there’s an apt descriptor. No, the core requirement is for a sense of place, and “Tourist” delves into that topic in detail, together with much more - in what should be a rattling good read. Watch this space.

Yes, it would be nice to think we have come a long way in our planning activities  since those flickering monochrome days of postwar austerity. Maybe we have. Certainly we have access to more convoluted wool-pulling techniques, to fancier statistical obfuscation algorithms, we are quite at home with snazzy computer simulations and dodgy data mashups, we simply lurve virtual realities and visualisations; we’re always hugely impressed by the latest software package (yes, it has to be a package, we don’t want anything that might be easy to get into). Etc, etc.

OK, I’m starting to get stroppy. Let’s turn to high speed rail. In principle, a Good Thing. Currently in the UK we have a kind of demented Thomas the Tank Engine character who keeps puffing “I know I’m right, I know I’m right”, every time more voices join the opposition to HS2 and whenever the ludicrously expensive and comprehensively daft project is shown up for what it is. The greater the opposition, the louder he chuffs. So far, he’s getting away with it. I wonder who he is?

“Is your name not Bruce, then ?” “No, it’s Patrick”. “That’s going to cause a little confusion”.

Blurb on the beach

In the throes of preparing for publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, and seeking an alternative to being molested by dogs on an otherwise glorious Norfolk beach, it occurred to me that I needed to write a kind of blurb, which would serve as an introduction but also, well, act as a kind of blurb. In a blurbish kind of way. So what I wrote was along the following lines.

“The central theme of “Tourist In Your Own Town” is how, subjectively, we perceive the geographical environment, with an emphasis on the experiencing of ordinary places, as it applies to daily life and to travel and tourism. The book is concerned with how it feels to be alive in the sorts of very ordinary environments most of us inhabit, the impact that places make upon us, the sense of place, and with why some places are interesting or pleasant, and others are not.

Subjects covered include the impressions that places make when we first encounter them, why some places are perceived to have humorous qualities, subjective similarities between places, the recent enthusiasm for psychogeography, nostalgia, the psychology of travelling within and between places, and the associations and imagery that places hold for us.

The book’s primary purpose is to encourage an appreciation and enjoyment of one’s surroundings, drawing on references from geography, planning, architecture, the psychology of perception, autobiography, fictional literature and visual art, in an original synthesis. There are also implications for the sensitive redevelopment of places.

The book will be of interest to anyone who takes an interest in places, plus those with a professional or educational interest in travel, tourism, geography, the built environment, and the psychology of place. “Tourist In Your Own Town” is extensively referenced but is not academic in style, is occasionally humorous, and is accessible to the general reader”.

With that, blurb provisionally completed, a raincloud appeared, and – though probably Normal for Norfolk - it seemed prudent to retreat.

First Impressions

This week we made our first ever foray into East Grinstead, and I was suitably inspired to compose this item. In my previous post I referred to the process whereby one becomes familiar with a piece of music, internalising it so that not only does one remember “how it goes”, but one may come to understand “how it works” or even “what it means”. Something like this process is essential in any true learning activity, capturing something “out there” and putting it “in here”, so that one can do something with it, or at the very least, obtain pleasure from it, if pleasure is there for the taking. It is a process easily overlooked in an age when accessing knowledge can be misunderstood to mean having visited certain websites or downloaded an appropriate paragraph of text.

In the nature of things, the earliest moments of exposure to a new stimulus, whether a painting, a place, a poem, or a person are highly vulnerable to distortion and deflection by chance factors. Cliché tells us that interviewers make up their minds about a candidate in the first few seconds; a career may be made or destroyed thanks to a choice of tie or handbag, some quirk of body language, some chemical reaction that went exothermic or simply didn’t want to happen. So it may be with other kinds of stimulus too.

With a place, our first impression is at the mercy of our current mood and preoccupations, the clemency or otherwise of the weather, the preconceptions we have brought along for the ride, and the method and route of our approach. We may set off on the wrong foot in a place of acclaimed merit if the first we see of it is a petrochemical complex, an estate of discount carpet warehouses, a wasteland of highway intersections, or a scabrous slum. I have a friend who is frightened of Brixton because of what he’s seen on television. A city or an entire nation may be damned by a run-in with a psychotic cabbie, a paranoid immigration officer or a dysmenorrheic  waitress. Equally we may feel unnecessarily charitable to somewhere because the sun came out, a shop assistant smiled, or an over-artistically-wrapped praline had been deposited on our pillow in anticipation of our arrival. None of these things happened to me on my brief encounter with East Grinstead this week; instead there was a biting east wind, snow was in the air, the traffic was knotty and there was nowhere to park. Consequently - as regards this hilly and apparently prosperous town - I don’t know how it goes, how it works, or what it means, for we carried on, remarking on how the initial perception of places is so dependent upon unreasonable subjective variables. And thus I can report the final score : Alpha Plus. To Eastbourne.

Did you ever have a dream or two ?

To continue with the combined themes of Crystal Palace and of being physically here but mentally somewhere else, I’m reminded of the Bowie song with the same title as this posting. The lyrics include the characteristically odd sentiment “You can walk around in New York while you dream in Penge” – Penge being that occasionally maligned London suburb that one looks down upon from the eastern prospects of Crystal Palace. Dreaming of somewhere desired while forced to endure somewhere perceived as dull, is a healthy and not uncommon urge for a young person.

The boy David of course made it to New York, and I’m also reminded of him because on Monday of this week I ventured out in a blizzard to buy his new CD, “The Next Day”. Currently I’m in the interesting phase of repeated listening, familiarising, getting to know, getting to like, amused by the unexpected echoes of The Shadows and Neil Young. It’s surprisingly resistant to assimilation, which I hope is a good omen for longevity of appeal. Curiously connecting with my previous posting are Berlin references in the song “Where Are We Now ?”, recalling Bowie’s late 70s residency in that city, at Hauptstrasse 155 in the district of Schoeneberg, a cosmopolitan, railway-straddled, inner southern district, more a Brixton analogue than a Penge one.

Close by, as seen on the adjacent photo, is an intriguing reference for those who like to observe such things. A subconscious influence for “V2 Schneider” perhaps ? Surely not; more likely the sign is far more recent. Nevertheless, it is true that without realising it  we absorb so much from our environment, triggers to creativity, styles borrowed or stolen that help to make us who we are, fuels for our subjective take on things, influences that steer us towards more of the same.

A touch of the Anhalter Bahnhof in SE20

A TV viewing companion who constantly says that some actress or other “looks like” another actress, or like some politician or member of the royal family, or somebody, would soon become tiresome. Such resemblances in overall “look” are commonplace, and have been exploited for many years by “Private Eye”, illustrated by pairs of faces with the names mischievously transposed. When apparent similarities transcend factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, historical era or even species they can be startling – as with the well known instance from some years back of Golda Meir and LBJ – but otherwise such subjective observations are pointless. Mayor Boris and swimmer Becky. Yes, but so what ?

A related phenomenon attaches to places. Apart from obvious similarities concerning  architectural style, predominant function, and so on, we may remark on the way that Wisbech “looks like” Leiden, that the Sarphati Park area of Amsterdam enjoys an ambience somewhat like that of parts of the Upper West Side, that the relationship of Oakland to San Francisco is as Brooklyn to Manhattan, Gateshead to Newcastle, and Birkenhead to Liverpool; one might detect similarities in villagey feel between Belsize Park in north London and the Butte aux Cailles district in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. But to insist upon them would be absurd, an easy technique for name-dropping, and as with our TV viewer – rapidly annoying. Topographical similarities are only interesting when improbable and unobvious, for example when they straddle national frontiers,  architectural periods, or primary roles.

The other afternoon, therefore, I was intrigued to find myself - on the bleak hillside  that is the site of the Crystal Palace - reminded irresistibly of the vestigial ruins of the frontage of Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof. It was something to do with yellowy brickwork and a repeated arch motif. Maybe my cogitations were influenced also by thoughts of fiery destruction from two thirds of a century or so ago, the collapse of once great (or infamous) empires, and a reflection on the unsatisfactory and shallow state of the world today. However, for all the rationalisations, it was an arbitrary and random association – I didn’t, for instance, note the rather more obvious similarity between the Crystal Palace TV transmitter and the analogous structure named for Monsieur Eiffel.

The specifics of such ruminations are unimportant, subjective and perhaps tedious. But what may be more valuable to note is that musings of this sort indicate that one is observing and thinking about one’s surroundings, that one’s imagination and memory are alert. Alas, so many people, gloomily thumbing their e-gadgets as they stumble along, are not alive to the here and now. Mentally they are somewhere else, and it isn’t Berlin. Not usually, anyway. Therefore it is with pleasure that I dedicate this blog posting to the father and his young son, on the southbound platform at Brockley station on Saturday afternoon, who were both so excited at watching the passing trains, and who unknowingly made my day. “Look, there’s another one coming”, said dad. Then the little boy would point at one coming from the opposite direction, thrilled to bits. That child was being taught to see, and to enjoy what he saw, an ability that will stay with him, and enhance him, for life.

4 March 2013

4G whiz and wind resistance

At least a couple of good things happened on the technology front this week. First was the announcement about 4G phones. This is great news for commuters, as it will allow for much faster phone conversations on the part of their fellow travellers. Instead of having to spend an entire journey overhearing someone droning on about the sales conference at Sunshine Desserts, or last night’s tiff with the boyfriend – “I’m like ... so he’s like … and I’m like …”, it will all be over in a single nanosecond, and they will be able to enjoy the rest of their commute in peace. Of course, they’ll still arrive 11 minutes late, wrong kind of absurdity on the line, Raynes Park.

So much for improvements to the ambient sonic environment. Now we turn to its visual analogue. Yes, analogue, I like analogue, analogue is good. Wind factories are rather more contentious. Other than to cause offence, controversy and nuisance I’m not quite sure what the point is of these establishments, except perhaps the surefire acquisition of some kind of subsidy, something vaguely green-related and thus under no circumstances to be questioned. Money, in other words (well, it used to be green).Therefore the second piece of good news is that I’m able to report a small local victory in this respect, and all praise is due to those tireless campaigners who have had a clutch of these sinister monstrosities rejected. Turbines, that is. Probably there will be an appeal, which ones hopes, but does not necessarily expect, will be fair, democracy being what it is in this country, but for now victory lies with the common man. The reasons why this particular proposal has been rejected are several, and site-specific, and need not concern us here. The serious point I want to emphasise is this. Notable, as always, in arriving at this decision, was that objection on the basis of people simply not wanting to have to look at, or being forced to see, these immense structures was not allowed as an admissible argument. This is outrageous.

There are hundreds of these schemes around the country and it seems to me a criminal waste of time, effort, and money - as well as a denial of democracy and a cause of huge amounts of anguish - that not only does each one have to be fought separately, from scratch as it were, by residents with no training in such matters and with better things to do, but that objectors have to resort to spurious arguments in order to have the unwanted proposals thrown out. They are forced into creative dishonesty. They have to establish statistics about potential distractions to passing drivers, interference with air traffic control, confusion to the local bat population. Objective, quantifiable factors which really don’t matter to them. They can’t just say, “we don’t want them, they spoil our view, they ruin the landscape, we hate the damn things like everbody does”. Why shouldn’t they? “Sorry, mate, that’s subjective; not allowed”.

Of course, willing philistines can always be found and paraded who will say they like wind turbines, think they’re rather beautiful and hint at mystery and romance in a wistful kind of way, but to any unbiased, sensitive person with a love of rural, coastal or even urban beauty the fact is that large swathes of the UK and its shorelines have been and continue to be visually damaged by these contraptions, which even their proponents admit to be of doubtful and at best minimal efficiency.  They are not going to go anywhere near meeting our future energy requirements. The so-called environmentalists, who are so up themselves about saving the planet are, it seems, quite happy to destroy the visual environment, and take a perverse delight in doing so. This is not an aspect of the environment noticeably important to or appreciated by any other species than ourselves. The eco-warriers evidently don’t realise that humans inhabit an ecological niche too, one which we invest with complex psychological and aesthetic values and meanings. They don’t understand that subjective assessments are what we as human beings do. Our subjectivity is what makes us human. No other species has this faculty, however small and furry and lovely and hard to find. While we are morally obliged to take care of our planet and all its inhabitants, we have rights too, and the right to an unspoiled landscape and an unsullied view is one of them.

In this case, ironically, it’s other inhabitants, other biological species, the smaller the better, who we rely upon for help. This works as follows. The best way of objecting to anything like a wind factory is to discover, or if necessary invent, some obscure kind of putrid weed or malicious rodent which any sane person would immediately hose with something rich in organophosphorus derivatives. Saying you don’t want the wind factory won’t work, and if you try, you’ll be stigmatised as a NIMBY, a BANANA, a NEWARK or some other unpleasant acronym or anagram. What you need to say is this. Well, would you credit it? Would you just effing believe it? Someone’s only gone and reported a possible sighting of a lesser-brained, poo-eating, SARS-transmitting, ever-so-rare, stinging arse-beetle right where the turbines are going to be built (and for turbines read HS2, airport runway, whatever). I mean, it may be the only one this side of Tasmania. Then wait for the response, which will be - OK, fine, project cancelled.

Easy. Too easy. There’s something wrong with our sense of values here. I’ll be pondering the subjective appreciation of our surroundings in future postings.

22 February 2013