25/6/06 - Cumbria
'Moving, always moving - I am lucky in this', I said. 'Once I thought it might be difficult, frightening, but then you take a step and find it's easier than you thought. But places like this - I indicated the town through the car window - I don't know, they haven't moved in themselves and I find this incredibly sad. They appear to an outsider to be static, forgotten. Or lost. How can anywhere or anyone be so lost in this day and age? So out of touch? Unless, of course it is a desire?'
We pass north to the coast. To Workington. Sunday evening. The town full of red-shirts spilling out of the pubs onto the dry streets, surrounded by flags of St. George. The girls in next to nothing in the hope of post-match sex and the boys stumble and bemoan the poor show of the nation's team, one syllable between them at this stage of the proceedings. There is, always is in Workington, the threat of the volatile - the drunken punch, the bit of bloody fun to pass the time; even better if you can find an outsider to take it out on - and so the hunt too. Groups of ten or so gather on street corners, watching the road like gangs of frontier townsmen bored and looking for trouble, waiting for it to just stumble into town by mistake; the air charged with implicit stares, familial and neighborhood tensions even in the midst of collective celebration - and the Bobbies try to go un-noticed tonight, shirking in doorways in their day-glo yellow vests, wishing they were somewhere else -
Science is how capitalism knows the world; violence is how the ignorant find theirs - On the rim, the coastal edge, shadowing both ends of the town, the surreal rhythmic stretch of two wind-farms - a constant hypnotic turning of the gargantuan blades, like a physical chant trying to calm the atmosphere, disperse the charge at the same time as creating one -
The smell of tar and the millennial mud of the exposed estuary, high full of proteins and salient nourishment that was the source of all living things; the gradual emergence of the sentient, the arthropod and the eventual biped here - waiting for the flood - immobile now, perhaps stuck in the mud? The nuclear age is played out day by day, in the restraint of poverty and under-investment, in the hard edged role of male and female as possession; the turning cars souped up for engine throb and shagging in the back seat; the window gazing and the pram-pushing and the despondent dog-owners necking to watch a young girls arse pass by - and then it strikes you: everyone looks the same here - this is tribal England, and it has not changed since Doomsday, the bloodlines are without alteration, or genetic influx - Man, woman, child - no distinction bar size: the middle aged women all fat, close on obese; the young men sport the same colour hair and the same close crop - and the older men, thirties upward, all carry a faded, tired look in their eyes -
'Moving, always moving - I am lucky in this', I said. 'Once I thought it might be difficult, frightening, but then you take a step and find it's easier than you thought. But places like this - I indicated the town through the car window - I don't know, they haven't moved in themselves and I find this incredibly sad. They appear to an outsider to be static, forgotten. Or lost. How can anywhere or anyone be so lost in this day and age? So out of touch? Unless, of course it is a desire?'
We pass north to the coast. To Workington. Sunday evening. The town full of red-shirts spilling out of the pubs onto the dry streets, surrounded by flags of St. George. The girls in next to nothing in the hope of post-match sex and the boys stumble and bemoan the poor show of the nation's team, one syllable between them at this stage of the proceedings. There is, always is in Workington, the threat of the volatile - the drunken punch, the bit of bloody fun to pass the time; even better if you can find an outsider to take it out on - and so the hunt too. Groups of ten or so gather on street corners, watching the road like gangs of frontier townsmen bored and looking for trouble, waiting for it to just stumble into town by mistake; the air charged with implicit stares, familial and neighborhood tensions even in the midst of collective celebration - and the Bobbies try to go un-noticed tonight, shirking in doorways in their day-glo yellow vests, wishing they were somewhere else -
Science is how capitalism knows the world; violence is how the ignorant find theirs - On the rim, the coastal edge, shadowing both ends of the town, the surreal rhythmic stretch of two wind-farms - a constant hypnotic turning of the gargantuan blades, like a physical chant trying to calm the atmosphere, disperse the charge at the same time as creating one -
The smell of tar and the millennial mud of the exposed estuary, high full of proteins and salient nourishment that was the source of all living things; the gradual emergence of the sentient, the arthropod and the eventual biped here - waiting for the flood - immobile now, perhaps stuck in the mud? The nuclear age is played out day by day, in the restraint of poverty and under-investment, in the hard edged role of male and female as possession; the turning cars souped up for engine throb and shagging in the back seat; the window gazing and the pram-pushing and the despondent dog-owners necking to watch a young girls arse pass by - and then it strikes you: everyone looks the same here - this is tribal England, and it has not changed since Doomsday, the bloodlines are without alteration, or genetic influx - Man, woman, child - no distinction bar size: the middle aged women all fat, close on obese; the young men sport the same colour hair and the same close crop - and the older men, thirties upward, all carry a faded, tired look in their eyes -
'Do you know these people?' I asked my passenger.
'Nothing to do with me' came the reply - 'oh, wait, hang on . . . .'
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