28/6/06
Ever tried killing time in High Wycombe? You can't, because the place is already dead!
The ultra-suburb - desperation and depression being deliberately ignored or hidden beneath the spin of Blair's 'cool Brittania' - but what lies at the core of that message is a poverty of the soul -
What then resides at the heart of England? I ask myself this question as I sit in the bus station at High Wycombe, having traveled so much from town to town over the past few months, exposed to it.
Discontent.
Our history is pock-marked with it: Orgreave. Edgehill. Twyford Down. The General Strike. The Tolpuddle Martyrs. Brixton. Handsworth.
It is the foundation of our culture.
Its current form is suppressed by the ever-growing 'ley-line' network of shopping malls spreading across the country and rising incessantly: flavourless, characterless additions to the landscape. These places try to placate the increasing alcoholism, the hooliganism, the homelessness, and the racism by feeding us a myth of multicultural consumerism without class. In so doing they support the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses territorialism of the suburban nuclear unit, of the great English home as castle to be defended from outsiders and change by the acquisition of the Plasma screen or new car etc etc.
But these places continually fail. Why? Because nothing can cure the discontent at the heart of the English psyche. The need and desire to consume and add and crave for it to be repeated again tomorrow.
I should know.
And like some grand ironic joke the middle-classes (don't kid yourself that they went a long time ago) try to make themselves feel more open-minded, more 'continental' by patronizing the endless stream of cafes and coffee shops promoting a pseudo-European lifestyle of espresso bars and dolce vita in the high street - at the same time bemoaning vocally and in print the fact that Europeans are 'stealing our jobs' - the English wear their suspicions brazenly, they have centuries of experience -
And there we pass out of time as we know it - slowing down into a new timeframe, suburban time which tick-tocks backward and forward between the past and the present with tremendous ease; inch by inch we make our way through scenes in the marketplace that have existed for eons: people looking for a place of easy refuge ending up at some god-forsaken flea pit at the end of town trying to keep warm, aching to be moving on -
In this year, this day Newlands Bus Station
Down among the discarded: fag butts, Lotto scratch cards, shoes, and people - the sickening inverse vertigo of 1970s urban planning hemming you in amid the dark concrete pillars and nicotine clouded Perspex kiosks, all narrated by countless chapters of graffiti - and along thin line of shopping bags at the edges accompanied by tired ankles and faded arses - where young Polish women congregate together to share a laugh and a fag after work, together for fear of the constant snide remarks they get and the crass sexual insults from the bored boys of town (is this the way it's always been, does danger get removed through historical hindsight or do we genuinely care less about others?) - and the huddled hat-finks and rat-finks arrive, the loners and the losers, the edgy-eyed and the genuinely afraid community cared for?
A bombshell - the resonance of plate metal deafeningly echoing every time a bus or coach rolls over it on the way to the exit ramp; the noise is painful, everyone winces in suspension, nervy now the end of day tiredness whiteout has come - waiting, doing overtime as the bus they want breaks down somewhere on the M40 and they are left to second guess its whereabouts: a loner in his late thirties with two small rucksacks plastered to his sweaty T-shirt and only £30 in his pocket for the week and two young girls, Nubians descendents, talking about boys at college and smiling warmly at each other and singing from time to time; young lives still full of hope, capable of vistas of life, leaps and dreams -
Looking down at the dust and I count beneath my seat alone 38 cigarette butts, some chewed clear of filters, others fresher and marked with lipstick - a photographer comes along snapping a few pictures of the decay, some portraits - a woman walks up to him after a while:
You're not welcome here, she says.
What do you mean?
Your sort.
My sort?
Perverts, she says now louder than before.
Wait a minute, he replies, I just take photos - they're -
The woman cracks him in the ribs. She's a mother of three on her way home after her late shift at Tescos. Her action gives allowance to others and so it is that they take it. The photographer, who may or may not be innocent, I don't know, escapes with a bloody nose and bruised ribs -
Ten minutes later a police patrol crawls in, parking up in a side bay; the two officers within the car stare out, scanning the collected passengers, the bread-line if you will and then drives away. They do not get out to examine the six little pools of blood on the concrete, trailing away toward a mock cowboy display in the shopping mall window at the rear of the bus station -
All is quiet now -
There's a prayer on my lips but it won't form into words; it escapes me -
Ever tried killing time in High Wycombe? You can't, because the place is already dead!
The ultra-suburb - desperation and depression being deliberately ignored or hidden beneath the spin of Blair's 'cool Brittania' - but what lies at the core of that message is a poverty of the soul -
What then resides at the heart of England? I ask myself this question as I sit in the bus station at High Wycombe, having traveled so much from town to town over the past few months, exposed to it.
Discontent.
Our history is pock-marked with it: Orgreave. Edgehill. Twyford Down. The General Strike. The Tolpuddle Martyrs. Brixton. Handsworth.
It is the foundation of our culture.
Its current form is suppressed by the ever-growing 'ley-line' network of shopping malls spreading across the country and rising incessantly: flavourless, characterless additions to the landscape. These places try to placate the increasing alcoholism, the hooliganism, the homelessness, and the racism by feeding us a myth of multicultural consumerism without class. In so doing they support the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses territorialism of the suburban nuclear unit, of the great English home as castle to be defended from outsiders and change by the acquisition of the Plasma screen or new car etc etc.
But these places continually fail. Why? Because nothing can cure the discontent at the heart of the English psyche. The need and desire to consume and add and crave for it to be repeated again tomorrow.
I should know.
And like some grand ironic joke the middle-classes (don't kid yourself that they went a long time ago) try to make themselves feel more open-minded, more 'continental' by patronizing the endless stream of cafes and coffee shops promoting a pseudo-European lifestyle of espresso bars and dolce vita in the high street - at the same time bemoaning vocally and in print the fact that Europeans are 'stealing our jobs' - the English wear their suspicions brazenly, they have centuries of experience -
And there we pass out of time as we know it - slowing down into a new timeframe, suburban time which tick-tocks backward and forward between the past and the present with tremendous ease; inch by inch we make our way through scenes in the marketplace that have existed for eons: people looking for a place of easy refuge ending up at some god-forsaken flea pit at the end of town trying to keep warm, aching to be moving on -
In this year, this day Newlands Bus Station
Down among the discarded: fag butts, Lotto scratch cards, shoes, and people - the sickening inverse vertigo of 1970s urban planning hemming you in amid the dark concrete pillars and nicotine clouded Perspex kiosks, all narrated by countless chapters of graffiti - and along thin line of shopping bags at the edges accompanied by tired ankles and faded arses - where young Polish women congregate together to share a laugh and a fag after work, together for fear of the constant snide remarks they get and the crass sexual insults from the bored boys of town (is this the way it's always been, does danger get removed through historical hindsight or do we genuinely care less about others?) - and the huddled hat-finks and rat-finks arrive, the loners and the losers, the edgy-eyed and the genuinely afraid community cared for?
A bombshell - the resonance of plate metal deafeningly echoing every time a bus or coach rolls over it on the way to the exit ramp; the noise is painful, everyone winces in suspension, nervy now the end of day tiredness whiteout has come - waiting, doing overtime as the bus they want breaks down somewhere on the M40 and they are left to second guess its whereabouts: a loner in his late thirties with two small rucksacks plastered to his sweaty T-shirt and only £30 in his pocket for the week and two young girls, Nubians descendents, talking about boys at college and smiling warmly at each other and singing from time to time; young lives still full of hope, capable of vistas of life, leaps and dreams -
Looking down at the dust and I count beneath my seat alone 38 cigarette butts, some chewed clear of filters, others fresher and marked with lipstick - a photographer comes along snapping a few pictures of the decay, some portraits - a woman walks up to him after a while:
You're not welcome here, she says.
What do you mean?
Your sort.
My sort?
Perverts, she says now louder than before.
Wait a minute, he replies, I just take photos - they're -
The woman cracks him in the ribs. She's a mother of three on her way home after her late shift at Tescos. Her action gives allowance to others and so it is that they take it. The photographer, who may or may not be innocent, I don't know, escapes with a bloody nose and bruised ribs -
Ten minutes later a police patrol crawls in, parking up in a side bay; the two officers within the car stare out, scanning the collected passengers, the bread-line if you will and then drives away. They do not get out to examine the six little pools of blood on the concrete, trailing away toward a mock cowboy display in the shopping mall window at the rear of the bus station -
All is quiet now -
There's a prayer on my lips but it won't form into words; it escapes me -
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