I’m on the Brighton main line again. I’d be happy living amongst the chimney pots around Battersea. It looks like one of those normal areas, unchanged, with high streets and shops. Living amongst rooftops high above the city is appealing, aspirational. The young alternative drop out couple in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes could go to the top of their Improved Industrial Dwellings block and look at the old, pre-Eurostar St Pancras station, old, cavernous, little used, with HST trains to the midlands. In Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man, Malcolm MacDowell meets a woman who lives in a similar block in Southwark, who has a large Electrolux fridge on the roof to keep champagne in. She has a view of Cannon Street station. I must watch Hallam Foe, about a young man who roams the rooftops of Edinburgh. I’ve sometimes thought about relocating to Edinburgh or Glasgow.
I have no contact with people now, and that is making me feel detached, unreal. I engage in desultory online contact which feels increasingly artificial. I’m unreal. The world is unreal. Online people I will never meet.
The demolition site on the way through Woolwich is now reduced to heaps of material, sorted for eventual removal, if that is the intention. Large lumps of concrete, twisted tangles of steel, and fresh looking soil worked into a structured, deliberately shaped mound. The ex LCC block near Victoria has been reduced to a mound of bricks too. I’d hoped it was being renovated.
We’re going the different way today, passing the place with all the red telephone boxes from the other side. There are lots of allotments alongside the tracks this way. I’d like to make work about allotments one day, set up a camera on a tripod and leave it to catch subtle, almost indiscernible movement. I wouldn’t want it to be intrusive. Any people doing their allotting would be distant and in soft focus. They’re very calm places, allotments, timeless, settling. I imagine that’s why certain types of people are drawn to them. There’s a film called Grow Your Own which is set at an allotment site somewhere around Manchester, with an underlying theme of immigration and racism, full of northern bigots. It’s good, sort of.
The sky is grey and featureless. I used to know someone called Features who was grey and featureless. Fine rain is soaking the land, landslides are still frequently rendering routes impassable, embankments disintegrating. Land is quite fragile. Nothing is static. It all deteriorates. There is a nebulous state between manmade and natural, and actually everything known to exist is in that state.
I’ve wanted to meet up and walk with someone, but weather isn’t encouraging. If I suggest it I’ll then be plagued with anxiety, not knowing if it will happen, so I won’t try. Friendships are odd and transient. A common purpose or interest can bring people together, but the slightest change in circumstances can destroy any bond. It is hard. At the moment it’s all unreal, virtual, abstract, hypothetical, and I am fragile. I don’t think Sussex is helping me today. I don’t have enthusiasm for anything. I haven’t cycled for two weeks. Haven’t started painting yet. Once my studio room is ready I’ll hold cocktail parties. On the other hand, perhaps I won’t.
Outside Lewes now, there are more of these newly dug parallel trenches. These ones have filled with water. I wonder what they’re for.
On the way back, the other, longer way, across marshes and up through the ugly parts of north Kent. Rye has a smart looking non-chain supermarket, and a closed looking social members club. Earlier there was a rusting tractor in a field. Soon we’ll pass the nuclear power station humming on the horizon. There’s that railway track I once walked along. It is too flat and odd here, I don’t think I’d cope well with living here. Mist is hanging over the fields now, light fading. I haven’t seen blue in the sky at all today.
Andrew Stevenson 