Little Things

Walking through the suburbs, they're not exactly lovers

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On Gaps in Welsh Football

For a few seconds, it was Schroedinger’s goal. Bale flicked, Church nodded and everybody jumped about like mad for a few seconds. But even as I was bouncing and gloating in front of my television, there was a disparity. I swore he was well offside even before he touched the ball, so why was I jumping? I tried not to question it; maybe I had missed an errant Israeli defender failing to uphold the disciplined line of his teammates, maybe the officials had simply missed it. Still I jumped. Then I saw the linesman with his flag outstretched and sat down immediately, instinctively. For a man with a history of excessive emotion and melodrama around football, this was an incredibly polite and calm gesture. Normal service was resumed but in those few manic seconds, I actually saw what it was like to touch the untouchable, see the invisible, hear the siren’s song with no adverse consequences. A whole country was lost in a delerious fugue for a few glorious seconds that seemed to exist in another dimension.

We will go back to this place next month and we already know how wonderful it is!

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A Cruel Lake

I’ve always felt my most human when surrounded by untamed wilds of nature that feel far from humanity. Somewhere amidst the mountains, lakes and moors of Snowdonia is a beautiful desolation that somehow expresses the loneliness that is fundamental to the human condition. It expresses it precisely because it exists without it; if we never existed, this landscape would still be here. As much as I love cities, they delude us. It is impossible to think of anything beyond the human world when you are staring at a wonder of human creation like St Paul’s Cathedral or the Colosseum, but take yourself out of that frame and you will see the real vulnerability of being a human.

But, for its unspoilt beauty, the most fascinating thing about Snowdonia is its spectral relationship with human civilisation. This is a very remote area where you are unlikely to encounter another person in open countryside but, especially around its few decent roads, the traces of humanity are everywhere. On a particularly bleak stretch about ten miles from Bala, I hadn’t seen a modern building for what felt like an eternity. To all intents and purposes, this was uninhabited territory: empty moors, black mountains shrouded in cloud and the odd field dotted with emaciated sheep or rampaging bulls but no people in sight, yet ghosts of human touches lay everywhere. Broken telegraph poles weakly supported a cable above a bog. A ruined stone farmhouse lay exposed on a hillside, one side crumbled into air. It looked centuries old and probably centuries dormant. Dry stone walls spilled their contents into unkempt grass. A sheet of corrugated iron embedded itself into the bank of a stream. Further up the stream, a modern canoe was stuck in the low-hanging branches of a lopsided tree. This broken landscape had murky human fingerprints all over it. I thought about the mysterious figures that left their marks on this terrain and felt a lonely shiver run through me.

In this same obscure section of bleak beauty stands a thoroughly terrifying monument to the destructiveness of humanity. Llyn Celyn is a very attractive lake. Standing a few miles away from the larger (and more well-known) Llyn Tegid, it laps up to the edges of mountains and moors, dragging itself from glossy if unspectacular country at one end to a moody, jagged mess of gorgeously wild terrain at the other. There is a dark secret: a village lies beneath this lake. The chapel, the school, the post office, the graveyard and all of the houses and farm lie submerged, drowned by the same species that built them. While there is something rather Romantic about the idea of ancient buildings being allowed to turn to ruin for future generations to find, the thought of a settlement being deliberately flooded is obscenely cruel. Worst of all, the village was inhabited at the time. Capel Celyn was a tiny, defenceless Welsh village, lying in an unspoilt valley. Liverpool City Council needed more water and, in their greed, sought permission to get it here by flooding an entire Welsh valley to create a reservoir. Despite the protestations of the villagers and almost every single Welsh MP, nobody listened. Wales was not consulted and an act of rape took place against its beautiful body. Fifty years ago, Capel Celyn was transformed from a home into an exploitable resource. It still lies there, its cemetery sealed under concrete and its ruins sealed under water. And so what seems a spot of natural beauty turns out to be a sickening example of human evil.

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There are places in Wales I don't go: Reservoirs that are the subconscious Of a people, troubled far down With gravestones, chapels, villages even; The serenity of their expression Revolts me, it is a pose For strangers, a watercolour's appeal To the mass, instead of the poem's Harsher conditions. There are the hills, Too; gardens gone under the scum Of the forests; and the smashed faces Of the farms with the stone trickle Of their tears down the hills' side. Where can I go, then, from the smell Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead Nation? I have walked the shore For an hour and seen the English Scavenging among the remains Of our culture, covering the sand Like the tide and, with the roughness Of the tide, elbowing our language Into the grave that we have dug for it.

‘Reservoirs’ by R.S. Thomas

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This Heat - Cenotaph

History repeats itself.

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In the Shadow of Joy Division

And into the light, New Order.

The way clouds form in Prague.

Reading Bernhard's Correction with its call of purity through auto-negation (cf. Closer wearily disintegrating into icy beauty).

In fact, any of those brutal writers who make Sylvia Plath look like an amusingly mad aunt.

New Horizons, heading into the cold depths of the Kuiper Belt without blinking.

100000 anaemic imitations pallidly strumming their guitars, staring moodily, writing shopping lists in their head.

Posthumous fan culture, spectral Curtises and Cobains standing on the battlements of teenage rooms.

“Oh Manchester, so much to answer for”.

Werner Herzog etc. etc.

A dense forest and a disused factory in the same image.

Thick frost painting everything with winter.

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I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat, Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat Are well aware of shadowy this and that In me, that's neither noble nor complex. Such as I am, however, I have brought To what it is, this tower; it is my own; Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought From what I had to build with: honest bone Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought; And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

- Edna St Vincent Millay

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Lake Vyrnwy, Powys, Wales

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Currently watching Southampton v West Ham with the sound turned off and Mika Vainio and Joachim Nordwall's drone masterpiece Monstrance playing in the background instead. I will be extremely surprised if anyone has ever found a more inappropriate football soundtrack than this.

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Soviet War Memorial, Tiergarten, Berlin

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St Mary's Basilica, Kraków

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Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

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Französischer Dom, Berlin

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somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot tough because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose or if your wish be to close me,i and my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

- e.e. cummings

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This Heat - Makeshift Swahili

This one just put out my laptop speakers!

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John Coltrane - Impressions

Pure saxophone alchemy. Words are useless here.

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How to Dismantle a Concrete School Building

Picture the scene: it's a beautiful sunny day in Wrexham and it dawns on you that everything you ever knew and everything you ever will know is bullshit. Why not at least try to start again by dismantling an old school building?

This building (and the attached building, not pictured but very nice with a beautiful marble staircase and still standing) was home to my school for a year while our old buildings were being redeveloped. It had served as a smaller school for years before but that school was merged with others and we were among the last kids to come through its doors. Although I have developed a real liking for concrete architecture and there are some real gems nearby (particularly the terrifying but well-conceived Police Station), it wasn't a great place to have an education. The older building next door had bigger classrooms and seemed quite opulent. This block, however, was dilapidated, with ridiculously thin dividing walls and a general feeling of dirtiness and neglect. After the school ceased to be used, it stood empty for many years, the only signs of life the cars in the car park and some racist graffiti written in the dust on the bottom floor windows in what was once a rather pungent and grimy canteen. Although it was a dump and everyone in my school was relieved to move back to our own premises, I was quite sad when I walked past earlier this year and saw it was being knocked down. It was only fair to brave the dust and take some photos.

Seeing the internal structures of the building exposed was amazing. I've always loved construction/demolition sites, so I found it intriguing to see such a familiar building ripped apart in this way.

It looked better than ever this way. Being half-demolished transformed the building - I wish they'd left it like this!

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Pablo Picasso - Ulysses and the Sirens

Picasso lived 'down south' for a long time, so it's only fair that a fair few of his paintings are still down in Provence. There is the impressive Musée Picasso in Antibes, situated in a fortress once owned by the Grimaldis, which has some great stuff - particularly this painting. The nautical theme is apt for a painting kept in a coastal town (not to mention the significance of its subject matter as Antibes began life as a Greek colony) but this is a million miles away from so many of the classic impressionist works which are associated with the Côte d'Azur. Here, everything has melted.