 |
| Birmingham Mainline |
It was getting late. I hadn't been out of the house. It was still raining by the time Oscar and I had walked to the Birmingham
Mainline, dry and warm - he from running about, I wearing a good raincoat. We'd walked through the rich dripping foliage of
Handsworth Park, across the Soho Road and down through wet Waverhill Park, to Handsworth New Road working our way via side roads to
Black Patch Park, crossed and surrounded by tall trees, where, at the end of Murdock Road a procession of burst litter bags makes a trail along a narrow winding path between advancing greenery - railings and a blank wall on one side, Blackthorn then Buddleia between me and the West Coast railway line, which runs beside and slightly above the canal and its puddled towpath.
The
Soho Loop turns off the Mainline. I followed it in gathering dusk, turning off down Clissold Street towards Hockley and along Icknield Street to the Hockley flyover...
...where there was a poster to do with Coke and the Olympic Games starting in 50 days...
...and so through the familiar tunnels, the art gallery below the flyover at the
mouth of Hades...
...trudging up Soho Hill, beside flyposting and banks of trash, to Hamstead Road...
 |
| With Oscar dog on Soho Hill |
...looking forward to a cup of tea and supper. How comforted I am by the mess of a degenerating urban landscape, boarded public buildings...
,,,the rubbishy factory made doors and windows that have replaced the work of craftsmen, misguided ventures, attempts to make a neat and well constructed uniformity into something unique, with paint, plaster, facing bricks and ill-designed porches, deliberately temporary signage made by computer ("where would you
find a
sign writer?), alleys blocked by discarded furniture, ripped out gardens replaced with hard parking spaces, tiers of letter boxes stuffed with ageing junk-mail, litter strewn and swollen - in this weather sodden; as well as take-away boxes, sweet wrappers, cartons and pop bottles, grotesque discarded shapes - plastic, polystyrene and other synthetic material - enduring not easily recycled because inorganic. My stroll is a CSI strewn with evidence of deskilling, lost craft, disemployment, evaporation of care for place, a mercantile wasteland mired in trash. So much of this is not seen by people passing in cars or buses presented with grandiose posters directed at passing traffic. They go too fast for such detail. For over half my walk - about seven miles - we saw no-one, having the city to ourselves. On the canals - a pair of swans, ducks, geese, coot - with chicks - and moorhen. A rat dashed into swelling grass, chased by Oscar. I saw a heron high up heading towards Wolverhampton. How swiftly the world would recover from us.
 |
| On the Soho Loop |
...and it's not as if this dereliction is only in the city. Linda and I wander through Ano Korakiana on a wet day coming upon derelict museums of abandonment, emptied long before the present crisis, sagging roofs, corroding cook pots, shelves of bottles, torn fabric, wormed furniture, damp bedding, cheap broken things...
 |
| Τι περιμένουμε στην αγορά συναθροισμένοι; |
...and what's this rusting trucklet with cracked tyres, crammed with rubbish, sat in the village car park?
Or this void church kept dry with a good but temporary roof, its rood screen breached, cob-webbed and leaning pews, its congregation departed from a surrounding cluster of empty dwellings,?
Such musty sights are part of the scenery of human settlements across the world, subject for art, tho' not the art of comment on specific historical events like homes lived in by refugees from Asia Minor in Prosfigika in Patras caught by
Kleopatra Haritou Κλεοπάτρα Χαρίτου, at the
Benaki in Athens. This is a diffuse decay, the history of a thousand thousand villages.
 |
| Holy Dionysius under rubble, restored with lemon and salt |
Eliot foresaw the essence of the 20th century world in
The Wasteland nearly a century ago. His eloquence has run through my life...
each man fixed his eyes before his feet...flowed up the hill and down King William Street to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours...
"Go" said my stepfather "and live somewhere that is already spoiled" Live in times already blighted.
So it's been for us. So I see things that lift my heart...
...
A crowd flowed over London Bridge without
sighs short and infrequent, eyes not
fixed before feet, but looking up, conducting music, chatting, jocund, musing, strolling above a sparkling river, and see this house with its new owners, clues that this is not a second home, built amid that same decaying part of the village, soundly re-roofed, re-windowed and doored, with wall emblems, a new vegetable garden and unfamiliar paint; a house whose owners we've seen working the last two years, carting heavy building material up a steep and - in winter - slippery path from
Democracy Street...
 |
| Rebuilding in Ano Korakiana |
*** ***
Crisis management in the EU Single Market - steps towards
fiscal union...
On 6 June 2012, the Commission adopted a legislative proposal for bank recovery and resolution. The proposed framework sets out the necessary steps and powers to ensure that bank failures across the EU are managed in a way which avoids financial instability and minimises costs for taxpayers....
No comments:
Post a Comment