A happy state I used to know

Occasionally one stumbles upon useful concepts for which no words exist. “The Meaning of Liff”, the 1983 masterpiece by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, catered for this need, with definitions such as  the verb “to hucknall”, meaning to elevate one’s legs while seated in order to allow someone to hoover beneath, or “alltami”, named for a small community in Flintshire and referring to the ancient art of balancing the flow from the hot and cold taps when running a bath.

Another such unnamed concept is the pleasure I used to experience, and still can, along – I suspect - with many other mildly aspy males, from planning transport routes, joining up isolated fragments of motorways or railway lines, making connections across cities and countries, plotting imaginative routes across the map. As the most complex but self-contained system in the UK, the London Underground was always a prime candidate for this activity, long before the abandonment of the Aldwych shuttle, the wasteful rejection of the Jubilee Line link between Charing Cross and Green Park, or thoughts about Crossrail or, indeed, Crossrail 2, as the Hackney-Chelsea trajectory has been dubbed of late. Such deficiencies and opportunities would lead to musings on the borderlands of imagination and practical utility, what-ifs at the joyful interface between geography and dreaming, all ecstatically played out along that uncertain frontier that meanders between cartography and playing God (or trains), untroubled by boring worldly concerns like geology or economic viability. So what happens next when the Bakerloo reaches Camberwell ?

I was reminded of this kind of activity when reading the April “Modern Railways” this week, with its proposal for the Euston Cross, which would cleverly link HS1 (Eurostar) and HS2 (the contentious projected high speed line to the Midlands and the North), in a deep level through station somewhere in the immediate hinterlands of the British Library. Running at right angles to the traditional traffic flows at Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross it would benefit from the considerable connectivity of those stations, while permitting direct journeys between the English regions and continental Europe. The Euston Cross should not be confused with the Eustachian tubes, which are somewhere else entirely, or with the Euston Arch, the pointless demolition of which made many people very cross indeed.

In short it is a very neat piece of thinking, and one which reactivated the old psychogeographical pleasure obtained from such ponderings. It also provoked the idea for the name for this otherwise nameless concept. Following the pattern of words such as euphemism, euthanasia and euphoria, which derive from the Greek root “eu” meaning “well”, I suggest that this particular happy state of mind should be named eustonia.

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

A new departure

‘The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track’, shown on BBC2 earlier this week, portrayed the train services from King’s Cross as a farcically dysfunctional, outrageously expensive, unbearable to use, national embarrassment. Some of the staff, however, when not being patronised by a manager who evidently modelled himself on David Brent (yeah?), were clearly saints; overworked, underpaid, unappreciated, on the front line to passengers who were justifiably angry or despairing. The one good thing shown in the programme was the new grafted-on western concourse at King’s Cross.

A curious structure, a lilac-tinted exercise in conic sections meets string vest meets Las Vegas, the new concourse provides additional space for would-be passengers to view the destination boards reading “Cancelled” and “Delayed”. Passengers who have managed to arrive on incoming trains are meanwhile channelled through the existing frontage of the station, and out into the street or down into the Underground. What goes against the historical grain with this development is that, traditionally, it was arriving passengers who had to be impressed, not those about to leave. Historically, railway companies competed to provide a grand entrance to the city, whether it be in size of trainshed, lavishness of hotel, or – in the case of Euston – Doric Arch, the legally vandalised remains of which lie, allegedly, beneath the River Lea.

With the arrival of mass air travel, effort and expenditure became similarly focused on impressing the new arrival, not just with the airport itself, but with the wealth and sophistication of the host city, region, or nation – hence Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, the “steering wheel” at LAX, and the doughnut-shaped Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle. Ironically, though, arriving airline passengers typically get herded into low level immigration halls and baggage claim areas before finding their way out into town, and see little of the architectural wonders above. Instead it is the departing passenger, the anticipation of his journey artificially protracted thanks to procedures enforced in order to stymie those who would otherwise blow him out of the sky, who gets time to enjoy the architecture – at least from an internal perspective.

And this is the situation at King’s Cross where, in this respect at least, rail travel has now caught up with aviation. Once again, it is departure rather than arrival that is celebrated, and there is time and space to savour one’s imminent voyage of adventure, perhaps to Stevenage or Biggleswade, Peterborough maybe, or with any luck somewhere a little further north.

15 February 2013

The Joy of HS?

It would not be the first time that a hurried, ill-considered and spuriously conceived solution to the inadequacies of Britain’s railways would have been imposed upon the population. When pondering such an eventuality, sometimes it’s useful to examine historical precedent, and current television schedules are helping us to do so. In the same week that the route of HS2 north from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds was announced, BBC2 have shown (1) “Beating Beeching” – a celebration of some of Wales’ former steam railways - and (2) the endlessly upbeat, brightly-shirted and lightly-luggaged Michael Portillo travelling on the restored West Somerset Railway, formerly part of the GWR to Minehead. Such lines are very evidently loved and are popular; the affection they arouse speaks of values immensely more profound and valuable than financial profit or efficient transit. An intimacy with the sense a place and an enjoyment of the very experience of travel – and quite possibly a rejection of the shallow present – are among the emotions they engage.

Arguably, half a century ago, Dr Richard Beeching did more than any other single individual to destroy valued components of our national heritage, and the lifestyles, livelihoods, values and imagery that went with them. However, hate figure though he was and remains, just like his lookalike Heinrich Himmler, he was “only obeying orders”. For the government of the day recognised that something had to be done to make the nation’s railways more efficient, and Beeching was their chosen axeman. Unfortunately, the odious Doctor threw out the baby with the bathwater, the baby in this case answering to names like Birmingham Snow Hill and Nottingham Victoria – along with parts of rural and industrial Wales, holiday Cornwall, normal Norfolk, and much else.

We are in a similar situation now. Today, we know that we need high speed rail routes in the UK. Most other developed countries have built them, and anyone who has travelled on such lines overseas, or on HS1, can attest to their attractions and to how they alter one’s perception of distance and of the geographical relations between places. Unfortunately, as with Beeching, the primary motivation for HS2 as presented so far appears to be purely financial and political rather than anything much to do with travel, and its announcement has been accompanied prominently by predictable mantras about “growth” and “regeneration”.

The idea of high speed rail routes is a good and exciting one, reduced journey times can be valuable and speed itself can be fun, but in our enthusiasm for these routes it’s important that we build them for the right reasons and in the right place. Something like HS2, with add-ons, needs to be built, and the sooner the better. Hopefully, what we have been shown so far is only a work-in-progress, and something better will emerge in due course, tempered by discussion, debate, and informed input. For the moment, the plan appears to pose a number of bizarre peculiarities, among them being that the proposed lines:

·         Originate from Euston, where there is relatively poor Underground connectivity, and none with Crossrail or Thameslink;

·         Do not connect with Eurostar;

·         Do not connect to or go via Heathrow;

·         Terminate at Curzon Street in Birmingham, thus avoiding the extensive interchange facilities at New Street;

·         Pass directly beneath East Midlands Airport without stopping;

·         Avoid the city centres of Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.

One can see the point of hub stations, but not if the time taken to reach them negates the time saved by the faster trains. One suspects a lack of joined-up thinking and of a project being driven purely by economic factors – perhaps spurious ones or those not amenable to reliable estimation - rather than on utility.

It may be argued that if we are going to spend huge sums on high speed rail, why not spend a few more billion to get a network that might actually be useful to real people. What we risk otherwise is another Beeching-style disaster that future generations will have to repair, and which generations even further on will be able to make endearing little TV documentaries about.

For the moment this is a plan bolstered by attempts at cost-benefit quantification. That the figures may be completely wrong doesn’t matter; they have been calculated precisely using impeccably up-to-date techniques and technologies, they are objective, you bet, and the necessary people have been suitably impressed. The sort of people who talk about “train stations”. As always, quantitative wins over qualitative, objective over subjective, hard over soft, simply because they are easier to deal with – valid or not - and to present convincingly.

Subjective, aesthetic, environmental, ethical and personal factors – the ones that matter to most people – are invariably dismissed in decision making of this sort. Sadly, that says a lot about the priorities of those who govern us and, indeed, about the kind of people we are. But just because the powers that be choose to ignore them, such factors haven’t gone away, they never do, and from time to time they’re celebrated by truly intelligent people, as some of them were earlier this week.

Tuesday evening (29 January) saw the return of the wonderful Jonathan Meades to BBC4 in “The Joy of Essex”. Never mind Essex and the gently punning title, Meades is himself a pure joy to watch and to listen to, one of the few mind-expanding legal highs available via a television set, although I know he irritates some people. This time his stereotype-ignoring and cliché-bashing itinerary included examples of early modernism in East Tilbury and Silver End, the relics of doomed utopian communities that occasionally turned dystopic (“the full horror of team spirit”), and – shall we say - specialised places like Frinton, Canvey Island and Jaywick – all, in their way, refuges from the petty tyrannies of governments and bureaucracies. “Under the counter Essex”, homes for “the little people”, the “poor whites”. We need such refuges more than ever today.

Among his many erudite, hilarious, subversive, wackily allusive and laterally-thought observations was one about how we have fetishised Nature, so that we give greater rights to wildlife than we do to mere people, or “homesteaders” as Meades called them in this instance. So, if we accept Meades’ argument, as I do, all those who find their homes and their lives blighted by the prospect of HS2 had better get busy and discover some obscure variety of weed or rodent living on their patch; just saying that they “don’t want HS2 here” will only evoke the sarky “NIMBY” reflex from those trough-snouters who stand to gain from the project or those who smugly live nowhere near the proposed trajectory. Even the remotest hint of a possibility of a rare newt should do the trick and will send the planners scurrying back to their virtual drawing boards. Purely human, quality-of-life concerns won’t do it, I’m afraid.

Meades clearly has a strong feeling for the qualities of places – he observes, he connects apparently disparate ideas together creatively, and he and his articulacy challenge us to follow him. I suspect his trademark verbal extravaganzas sometimes lurch into amused self-parody, but no matter. What he does is to bring meaning and value to the places he visits, an arbitrary, qualititative and subjective process, but one that he shares with us in his uniquely entertaining style. Rather than impoverishing the lives of many while lining the pockets of the few, this is an approach that adds value to life and to our geographical environment, a value that lies way beyond the calculating abilities of the likes of Beeching or the proponents of the current version of HS2.

1 February 2013