Barnsley
One crucial lesson I learnt the hard way: you can’t ‘do’ politics when you’re at constant war with yourself – if you are critical of yourself, politically-charged dialectics will always beat you.
(I recall a life-beaten cockney native telling me to come down from a lampost in the 2011 Anti-austerity march. I felt I needed to show some kind of active impulse, only to inch 2 feet up and then be shamed by a man with a lot more on his plate than I definitely had to deal with).
….Alas, public displays of political convinction have never gone well…
However, I have now realised that even to speak from such as a position, is still to tell a story, even if that story as about a wrongness latent in the times you speak of and also latent in yourself.
What has also made me refrain to talking “politics” is the fact that I am not really part of any demographic. I’m an alien to the urban sensibility and suburban senility all at once: I am a ghost to all demographics and invisible to ‘voxpop representation’.
I subsist in full view of a settled suburban demographic that I have been trying to walk off from all my adult life. Backpack on back, with surely a purpose on the horizon…
What such walking gives you is a keen eye for difference in space (and, often, sameness). I used to walk and write nearly every week in the 2010s. I would map out the world I saw In front of me, as evidence of pain that I prayed a peaceful future could work towards healing.
Now, as we descend into the late 2020s, I try to retrace my steps. Deeply lost in my home town, where the idea of the aformentioned prayer seems utterly ridiculous. Since the Pandemic the main desire has been retain my humanity and dignity.
For all my adult life, my home town has had a contested geographical identity: sometimes rural, sometimes suburban, sometimes post-industrial – it is difficult to identifty. Yet in the 2010s this side of town began to gentrify, and assume a quality that felt more normal to the leafier suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield.
Yet, as I walk up this B road I approach an aggressively large “Vote Reform” banner, draped over a mechanic’s garage door.
It faces an oldish pub, yet also a pub that became a locus for the arformentioned gentrification of the 2010s, sprinkling urban hipster dust, that lured the regional beautiful people to dress up for Instagram and. potential Tinder date nights.
It’s at this moment that I viscerally realise that the synthesis of hipster, liberal, and conversative, that enabled polite gentrification to pump up these places is decaying rapidly in surburbs like this, and we are hurtling towards something far more conflictual and bound to unveil itself further in these upcoming council elections.
You must proceed. It’s all that you can do on this road, the road to what once was a huge Muckstack, but now an hinterland dominated by stalled new-builds.
The village up here is very typical of a small pit village that became a partially-desirable suburb. Collier rows still resemble the skeleton, the bones, surrounded by the fatty tissue of suburbia.
Outside one of the old mining houses stands a flag. It’s not just any old St Georges flag, though. This flag is a reference to the Crusades; it’s a flag that symbols no pretence over being healthily patriotic.
I begin to sweat as I try to document it. Who am I doing it for? A long lost sense of affinity with a collective mass?
I feel deeply alone post-pandemic. There is no ‘we’ I can currently attest to belong to, and it’s an unpleasant feeling. A feeling, dare I saw that is so widespread, it makes some people climb up lamposts with flags, asserting how alienated they feel with spitting vengeance.
The Spring green the decorates the motorway junction is accompanied by grey skies; two colours that used to feel heavy with a new collective potency, a new start from the election box onwards. I just don’t feel anything like this now, and I wish I did.
The grey turns to cold by the time I have descended into the town centre. Addicts who look thinner by the day, carry the weight of it all in their plight. It’s why we turn away and pretend they don’t exist, like they do to the moving cars that they think nothing of walking in front of in their desperate pursuits.
A coffee is the only thing I can think of right now. Sit down, gather my thoughts maybe it will all seem different. Maybe it’s something in the air?
John B Ledger 