A Uk bank holiday in 2024

HEAD HELD DOWN

Negativity isn’t a perception of a world outside, it’s a projection of that world inside: how you feel about yourself, as you continually manoeuvre the inner furniture, trying to feel at home.

This reminder gives you rest-bite from the habit of being hard on yourself. But it splutters and withers as you see the next status car in your rear mirror. A predatory form almost designed to interrogate the souls of those not ‘up to scratch’.

“Just ignore it!” – but it’s no use.

You catch somebody’s eye as you drive past a micro pub; he’s younger than you, and successfully pulls off the veneer of a competency that the game applauds.

You drive on, breathing a sigh of relief as you park the car in a liminal lay-by.

But this space is another compromised space. A sports car creeps slowly past, then reverses and pulls in front. The pink top of a man’s bald head is enough to make you realise what this space is used for. You quickly move on.

All escapes routes are tracked by the dopamine circuit.

Those wretched feelings. The war upon yourself that goes from cold to hot. You realise there is no space – at least not the kind you so desperately need.

Driving around for ages, you feel like some human bonsai tree, trapped in a teenage cage. You hear mocking tones in your head, and its a relief to let it hang low as you accept defeat to the fight pitched by this bank holiday evening.

BACK TO NORMALISM

The train, the bus, the roadside path; all those roads that led to a relationship with the city have become nauseating over the past few years.

Have I changed or has the city changed around me?

Strong perfume and the Peaky Blinderised hyper-smart-casual. Necks craning, with eyes to be avoided.

“I’m trying to read a book, mate, please leave me be“. …please.

Overcrowded weekend trains seem almost designed to turn Back to Normalism Britain into the kind of yoke it more or less is. Infantilisation and senility meet one another, as we all melt into one pink, gooey, shape. Nobody gets out clean.

‘Binge drink Britain’ was, at best, meant to be a momentary exercise in self-obliteration until a better tomorrow came along.

The ‘better’ tomorrow became the financial crash.

The city oozes and leaks a gaseous blandalism, an odourless intoxication, which leaves you dehydrated and gasping for air.

Hobbies. Everything must become an hobby! An attribute to our profiles. Hobbyists abound as much as addicts, nowhere is free from one or them. Which one are you?

Back to Normalism Britain looks weirdly familiar, but it’s an overpriced remake of life before ‘the event’ – the crash, the austerity policies, the pandemic, whatever. Stage sets for the infinite uploads to Instagram; look too close and it becomes grotesque, a mimicry of yesterday’s desires grown out of the undead yoke it left behind.

Since ‘Back to Normalism’, my mental and physical health has been continuously running on empty. Bereft of redemptive plans and, most of all, an horizon.

Too tired to be what I used to have to be, you will now find me on the peripheries.

THE AGE OF MICRO-INSTRUCTION

Who remembers the relief of April 2020?

Amidst the primal fears and sacrifices, ‘micro-instructions’ – essential for up-keeping neoliberal relativity – momentarily ebbed away.

Like a tide that had been high for generations, suddenly a hidden landscape became visible. Just as you found yourself momentarily admiring the geometric beauty of empty motorways, previously invisible infrastructure for the daily anxiety-grind, those self-worth anxieties also temporarily loosened their grip on reality.

Neoliberalism could never have succeeded without a contemporary information age. In fact, neoliberalism only really got going once it died: the disorder of the financial crash and the subsequent rise of social media was the perfect climate for its undead triumph.

Micro-instructions are the body-snatchers for this neoliberal culture. Once abundant in the information we consume, they are absorbed so as to emerge from within us as if they were our own volitions. Micro-instructions work to autocorrect our biorhythms to the standard of entrepreneurial selfhood.

This really got going once social media had the omnipotency to allow us to enforce it within our social circles, to the point that our mental and physical health became attributes frogmarched to the same dance as financial success.

But in March 2020 it was weirdly liberating to have to “do as we were told”. Micro-instructions suddenly felt silly. In this momentary blip, as the government begrudgingly moved away from the neoliberal script, it felt like we were part of a society.

It wasn’t the end of Zombie neoliberalism: its facilitating of wealth from the poor to the rich became more frenzied – state-facilitated robbery was rampant. But enough of us experienced a reprieve from the self-hate, the anxieties – all emotions that make us less able to stand up for ourselves – that the micro-instructions produce.

Perhaps it was an hallucination? I had staked my future mental well-being, my quality of life, on the conviction that seismic social change had to be the outcome to be born out the conditions of the 2010s.

I thought it had happened.

But it didn’t happen…

THE PERIPHERY THROUGH WHICH THE WHOLE IS SEEN

The lunar-like barrenness of ‘the tops’ allows for extracorporeal meditations, and the climb up here is the closest thing to an astral escape route I have ever had.

At the farthest remove visible on this horizon, and through this bridge, meet three historic counties. But if you stray a little too far you merely walk through the skewed mirror and head back into the same.

Without your body, the machine and its micro-instructions are nothing.

I came up here in my teens, in my early twenties, and in my late 30s, because I did not know how to be a body.

I did not know how to be present. Didn’t know how to manifest into a form that could occupy space in this kind of world.

I have searched urban areas in this wider region for a space in which I could be, and become, only to find exhaustion.

Now I realise that occupying the periphery is not escapism, but that it is currently the only place from which to interrogate the whole.

This isn’t a full stop…

Hope itself has now become extracorporeal in a way I never could have thought it, because I thought I could feel it.

It lay in the periphery. It cannot be located in the ‘down there’, where we consume hundreds of images of genocide in-between thousands of images of fancy.

When images of butchery become mere equivalents to images of ice cream, or images of porn, when our need for the next fix overpowers all commitment to moral obligations, it can be hard to believe that humanity, my humanity, counts for anything.

Hope begs for its return into the social body. It begs to fill the watershed, and the springs, and engulf ‘down there’ with ‘warm streams‘ that wash away the heavy headedness of having seen ‘too much’.

Do I believe this, in my heart of hearts? No.

But the willingness to want to believe what I know is worth believing as part of the fight-back is currently the most valuable thing I have.

This isn’t a stale serving of platitudes, to round off a blog. So, it doesn’t matter if all of this sounds crass and contrived – for it may not be written for you. It’s a new manifesto to myself.

A call to work on the exhausted mind’s conviction that it’s all been said before. In the sustained post-pandemic disillusion I misinterpreted the word impossible for what it only initially conveys.

It felt like a grave error believing this break-through was latent in the 2010s. But the biggest error of all would be to think nothing is possible ever again.

My secret love of rocks

Like many kids who have been allowed the space to be interested in things, I had fleeting fixations. Having initially been WW2 obsessed, collecting and subsequently breaking Airfix models, I went on to be obsessed with snakes, fossils, and trees.

When I started secondary school in 1995 I came to the conclusion that the only way I could prevent being a daily target for bullies was to ‘fit in’.

‘Fitting in’, as I surmised, meant not really being ‘into’ anything…at all.

Even football, adidas or Eclipse clothing and boyband haircuts were bad if you were into it a little ‘too much’.

Somebody at secondary school found out that I could’t do my alphabet from A to Z in order, and for a month or so I was routinely bullied.

One memory I have is of naively trying to prove my knowledge in other fields, by naming the geological eras from PreCambrian right up to the Cretaceous (the ridicule that this provoked used to haunt me for years later).

However, After that, I would make sure that nobody would humiliate me ever again.

Yet, although this interest was crushed into the ground, it couldn’t be killed.

The image above show two sets of stones. On the left are stones collected on the Dark Peak, whilst on the right are stones from the Westmoreland North Pennines. All are from the Carboniferous era, with the exception of a few older rocks to be found from Igneous outcrops in the latter.

Of course, the area I am from wouldn’t exist, at least not as we know it, if it wasn’t for a certain carboniferous rock. Coal, formed from crushed vegetation, was crushed by the sandstone and grit rock that was originally silt and sand packed down, hundreds of feet deep, by an ancient giant river delta.

As a teenager I would hide map books of the local area under my bed when my school mates came around. These maps would often be full of imaginary roads, urban ‘add ons’ I’d attributed to my home town in order to ‘fix’ its disjointed former mining communities together and into a more recognisable urban whole.

I wish i’d had kept these map books. They were, in a sense, indicators of a future life as an artist.

The story of rocks to my life is yet to be realised, and maybe it should never.

All I know is that when I feel stressed in a town centre, if I stare at a wall, I see 300 million years of deep time that is so indifferent to the myriad of contemporary social pressures that it gives me glimmers of peace.

The waste that calls your name

If everything up here is exposed, then this bleached landscape is the necessary negative of the urban spaces below where addiction has become the modus operandi; where every stone is upturned, leaving no secrets, no mystery, no object to desire, just short circuits to quick fixes.

“Everyone’s a junky”.

If the wasteland calls you forth, it’s for good reason once optimism has become your worst enemy, fooling you back into different iterations of “fucked up”.

Trying to engage with the towns and cities below has become an overwhelming reminder of how one has made themselves incompatible with a humanity that has found its final expression in the Californian smile, under which the incompatible are sentenced. Where the walking dead treat the living like ghosts, and the living are forced to roam in the recesses as if it were they who were the walking dead.

Art – that which I have mined myself for. Art is now everywhere, whilst it is nowhere. Gentrification, murals that point to White Roses, flat caps, Hendo’s Relish and pre-gentrification rock stars has become an omnipresent assertion of a ‘nowhereland’ where you are rewarded for expressions that say nothing.

For art has now arrived. It has retreated from an horizon where from brought forth strange news of another of world, and now has nothing left to say other than “recognise me!”. The assertion of the individual to be themselves is, and always will be, ‘the end of history’.

The info-sphere’s auto-corrective operating system has invaded our bioRhythms, and to try to fight it merely brings extra suffering, cursing you with an awareness that you’ve been post-humanned. Where the colour tones of springtime no longer have resonance and merely mirror how a computer recognises colour.

But how can one be labelled insane, when a cultural insanity has become so dominant as to assert its normality? Woke politics as the final expression of generations of political ideas is unaware of its own nihilism, and the deranged, puss-filled fanaticism it provokes in opposition has sadly become the final suicidal gesture of a human incompatibility to a machinic way of operating.

Or maybe this is just how I “feeeeel”.

Forgive me for those sins, for this is depression. And I know that.

Yet depressive space is a safe place, a haven from mandatory optimism, from where “fucked up” is the consequence.

As I’m yet to reach rock bottom I scour for its components in this topsy-turvy landscape where the region’s oldest rocks are at the summit.

Bleaklow is the industrial North’s parent. Even more so than Kinder; as up here you can see it all before you, as if the entire upheaval of 18/19th century capitalism emerged from it. And in an abstractly geological sense, it did.

In this land of deep time, the addict sees how they have become cut-loose from the temporal textures (that posses us as much as them) as they secure our passage from life to death. It’s a space where the liver and heart cry “not long left now”.

Desperation for something to clutch to, something that holds us to it amidst this senseless storm, can only be admitted when there is nothing in sight except a desert of bleached grass.

Down there, where ageing is failing, and where ones crumbling bones combine with the dust of meaning, we must keep smiling. Scorned by heroic marxists who tell you to break on through to the other side, and when you protest, laugh and merely say “well, then learn to enjoy the moment!”.

But these are all merely my ghosts, really! They’ve followed me up to where I had momentarily wished to disappear, as its summit is swallowed by its sheer horizontal mass and conceals both the beginning and end.

This summit is illusive, and there’s even a beach to confuse you. Sand that was once at the bottom of the sea, once again makes coast-like dunes as it breaks free from itself as timeless stone. And you start to think about your own renewal, becoming other than “this” – and starting again.

But it often feels too late. Immortality through different matter is a momentary pain-free thought exercise. Rock bottom and subsequent ego death is not a lifestyle choice, because it chooses you.

The waste that calls one forward remains my muse.

The mistaken belief that pain will end: Blur’s ’13’, 25 years on

To speak with admiration of Blur still stokes fear of criticism, even to this day. I’ve read enough critiques of their class tourism in the 90s; the ease with which they simultaneously pantomimed the working class whilst being socialites in the Camden scene to make me feel like the only culture I’m allowed to talk about visibly has to have coal dust in its veins.

In 2024 we still exist through the colonial gaze of ‘the metropolis’, and well-meaning left-leaning intellectuals still often view the North and its people as exotic. But let’s not forget that the colonial gaze is easily absorbed by the object of the gaze, and I see enough evidence up and down that the object in question has begun to identify itself as it is exotically viewed by the metropolitan gaze.

This object is based on an image of the North that I believe is now also mere pantomime. Growing up in the 1990s , the ‘authentic’ footage of groups of burly young men (not through any fitness program enhancement) at Miners’ pickets in the 1980s looked as distant and exotic as it ever could have been. And that’s where I wanted it to stay.

I didn’t want to become my working class past. The past looked painful, conflictual, full of drudgery, hard faces and unhappy endings.

But to be honest, it didn’t matter anyway, as I didn’t look for what I didn’t want to see. I, in a bespoke playing out of Millennial expectation, became convinced that pain, the pain of working people, of intergenerational drudgery, of conflict, of all conflict, was coming to an end.

This was the 90s, and all I recall was this dominant sense of a dying world being superseded by a new one. And, at the time, it looked like a good thing!

And I genuinely looked up to bands who dressed like soft-faced middle class students, and soft-faced middle class students who dressed like bands, because I genuinely thought we would all be soft-faced middle class from now.

The future would softer, and kinder…

The grass wouldn’t be worn down by angry Sunday League football lads calling you a cunt when you couldn’t kick a ball as hard as ice, it wouldn’t be smeared with one dog shit per square metre, with the occasional syringe left on the top field. In fact, the grass would give way to a beach, and we’d be like Leonardo De Caprio, finding our beach – with All Saints’ Pure Shores playing in the background (although we know how that ended up).

Why am I going into this? Well, when I heard Blur’s 13 25 years ago in the spring of 1999, this sense of a pain-free future on which I depended was unsettled.

I actually encountered it a month after encountering Radiohead’s Ok Computer, and in a way, they were a similar artistic statement, one I’ll try to return to.

In 1999 those months felt like epochs. I’d had my first major encounter with eating disorders and depression (although I didn’t know it at the time) and suddenly life felt long and tiring. I had felt that first mild gust of the void staring back at me.

Both 13 and Ok Computer gave me a taste of suffering without recourse to lullabies, without recourse to warm assurances. And I didn’t want to stay in their company for too long.

Luckily as Xmas 1999 arrived one of my cousins bought me the 10th anniversary edition of the Stone Roses debut album. ‘This is one she’s waiting for’ and ‘I am the Resurrection’: the album’s ending seemed designed to reassure emotionally repressed lads that all this strife would give way to a happy ending. I clung to this album like it was my millennial saviour.

25 years later, 25 years of living with some form of eating disorder and mental illness, I have inevitably kept returning to this 13, for understandable reasons.

In the process I have come to see it as Blur’s greatest record. It may not have been the groundbreaker of OK Computer, but in a way it chartered the territory that Radiohead couldn’t in the gap between their infamous Ok Computer (1997) and Kid A (2000) albums. 13 potentially took that object and went even deeper and darker than either of those records.

13 is conventionally known as Damon Albarn’s ‘breakup’ album – the creative aftermath of his celebrity relationship with Elastica front-woman Justina Frischman. But the idle reductionism of art must be one of liberal journalism’s worst crimes. Most artists find it frustrating to explain their works through a singular meaning. Art is a meeting point of many meanings that would not fit together if it wasn’t for the artwork – the more nodes that remain in the shadows, the better.

The record’s opener Tender, being a massive hit in an age of radio and TV, was absorbed by everyone, even those hostile to ‘indie’. And it brings back awkward but endearing memories of teenage drinking, the kind of drinking nobody really wanted to do but felt obliged to, and one of the ‘lad’s lads’ from up the road causing disturbances by yelling “come on, come on, love’s the greatest thing!” at the top of his voice.

It can’t have been just me who was unsettled to find out that the rest of the album takes a huge diversion away from such emotionally-supportive melodies.

There’s even a mute horror underlying the seemingly pedestrian second single Coffee and TV. In fact the pedestrian is purposeful; it reflects the suburbs, where life goes to quietly die, using anti-depressants as a levee against the pain of a meaningless life in a glorified waiting room for death. Perhaps it was Blur’s response to Ok Computer’s No Surprises?

Having grown older I now hear the sentiment of endurance in Tender. A determination to keep going, despite all, despite that which is around the corner. And with this, it underlies the reason I keep returning to the album. 13 set in motion a life lesson that I struggle to learn, even to this day.

Once in deep into the bleak of the album, I believe that the most important quality of 13 is the ‘in-between melodies’ which are almost between every primary song. Precisely because these small instrumentals are trapped between the primary songs, they become ghosts, in that they are stuck in one place, condemned to perform the same actions forever – in this case they forever haunt the recesses of the listener’s self-doubting mind. They threaten to trap you in the mental state you were in when you first encountered them.

These melodies remain undead; they can never be exercised, and surely it’s no coincidence that many of these instrumentals sound like they could be in the ballroom in Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’? Perhaps Blur accidentally stumbled into the ‘hauntological’ zone before the likes of The Caretaker did in the 2000s.

‘That’s just the way it is. Just the way it is. Just the way it is. That’s just the way it is.’

Hitting 40 has been difficult; the problems that developed roughly around the time I first encountered this album 25 years ago still dominate my life.

One thing that the better therapists have told me is that once you’ve had long term experiences with mental illness it will remain something you’ll be working out to the end of your life. Once you’ve encountered such a subjective state, you will never be quite the same. The struggle never ends.

What I have struggled to translate with my own experience is that this doesn’t equate to the situation being hopeless, far from it. And in this sense the challenge before me is to deal with my mental illness by accepting that suffering is intrinsic to all human life but that this shouldn’t be turned inwards as war against my ability to try to have quality of life.

The ‘quality of life’ part is the hardest part. And perhaps this is an existential crisis specific to a large proportion of Millennials who expected a better world than that of their parents, and found themselves encountering the slow dissolution of those certainties, alongside a persuasive sense that the future will be worse than the present.

I, in fear of returning to the textures of a life I was trying to escape from, potentially came to see myself as a tourist in my own habitat.

I thought it was my ‘duty’ to get out, to become that soft-faced middle class man, in his Berghaus jacket, in a leafy outer-city suburb, taking his children to art galleries on a weekend.

“I wasn’t really here, you see!”. I thought I was merely ‘passing through’, but unlike many people I’d encounter in typically more middle class working environments, I slowly came to realise what a real tourist looked like.

There were only so many times I could pick myself off the floor – one meltdown after another. The eating and thinking ghosts of 1999 kept returning, and found drinking, and after a while there was no more second chances. Not that kind of chance anyway – to be ‘like them’, the ‘them’ I felt I was expected to turn out like.

I’ve had to accept that I really am ‘nowt special, if that’, in a time where ‘capitalist realism’ has reasserted the believe that a life of drudgery and misery for the majority is an immovable certainty. And I admit I’m struggling to accept such a philosophy of life, even though it may be only option for the sake of better management of my mental health.

Which brings me to some complicated feelings about those ’90s bands who went to these difficult spaces and encouraged the listener to follow.

Blur were seen as class tourists in the mid 90s, when they collaborated with Phil Daniels to create a pantomime version of working class cockney life. But perhaps they, and Radiohead, remained tourists even when they explored depression, alienation and technology on the eve of the coming Millennium.

Like Jarvis Cocker’s Common People lyrics, which according to Owen Hatherley, he apparently once said were about Albarn as much as the infamous ‘Greek Student’ at St Martins, Blur and Radiohead could arguably always “stop it all, if it got too much“.

Perhaps 13 was Blur’s ‘lost week’, wandering around a landscape they could always eventually leave, to come back sorted and form a new band called Gorillaz (for example). Less fortunate artists, lacking the inner resources that are often formed in our upbringing, such as Cobain and Curtis, couldn’t “pass through the deserts and wastelands” and come back after.

This isn’t a criticism, if they were the tourists of a mental health pandemic that would be born out of the material and technological conditions of a world that just was about to arrive, they made masterpieces of it. And after all, weren’t we all invited to become tourists? With all the museums to working class life appearing in post-industrial areas in the 1990s didn’t we all assume we were all now tourists of a life that was no longer? As the Manic Street Preachers said, we’d all been told that this was the end.

That hard lesson is that it wasn’t. To make the most of what you do have, even as you repeatedly have to collect your own ageing bones off the floor, and put your increasingly diminished self back together again.

Perhaps after 25 years the song that hits me most, emotionally, is Trimm Trabb. Trimm Trabb comes towards the end of the album, rising quietly out of the swampy deadlands of Caramel to reach a crescendo of rage… and then silence. Again, this seems like 13‘s answer to another OK Computer song: Climbing up The Walls. Yet what brings me back to Trimm Trabb is a repeat of the weary-yet-comforting reassurance I had when I first heard it: that the storm is over now...

…Not suffering, not being human, but the traumatic experience. And this is the lesson that I am still trying to teach myself: life, as much as it may have once have been culturally ascertained, can never be pain free. Yet, however, illness and trauma can be overcome and it is important to fight to remember this.

Re-reading Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s ‘cognitarian subjectivation’ 13 years later.

Around the time of all the stuff kicking off in 2011, the student protests, the English Riots and the Occupy movement, a friend, noticing that I was projecting slightly more nervous energy than usual, suggested an article by a writer I’d never heard of.

I’d only started reading in my mid 20s. After the financial crash of 2008 I’d learnt to meticulously study the words on a page, because I wanted to know, in my own words, “what the hell was going on”. Because I worked in a gallery, with no Wifi, little reception, little interruption, and with more panic about the state of the world than the state of my professional and personal life, I had a good chance to do what I intended.

I still found most philosophy texts impenetrable, and just hoped the ‘message’ inside would come to me at a later date. I was still reading cultural theory with a limited understanding of the English language, and when my friend, over Facebook, suggested I read “Cognitarian Subjectivation” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi I read it for the most part with the desire to show him that I understood it and was as intelligent as he was.

This is how it goes:

Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation. And I would like to ask whether a process of autonomous, collective self-definition is possible in the present age. The concept of “general intellect” associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) emphasizes the interaction between labor and language: social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.

Semiocapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, submitting them to mechanistic speed, compelling cognitive activity to follow the rhythm of networked productivity. As a result, the emotional sphere linked with cognition is stressed to its limit. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because cyberspace is an unbounded sphere whose speed can accelerate without limits, while cybertime (the organic time of attention, memory, imagination) cannot be sped up beyond a certain point—or it cracks. And it actually is cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyper-productivity. An epidemic of panic and depression is now spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. The current crisis in the global economy has much to do with this nervous breakdown. Marx spoke of overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. But today it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. The social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of networked production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the cognitive class.

You didn’t need to be present at Occupy London, see the fires burning in Tottenham, or be kettled by police with other Millennials to be present in 2011. We were all there in 2011: we were all online, perhaps for the first time.

The febrile quality of social media interaction in the early days of the previous decade was an initial, less monitored and managed, manifestation of what it is now.

We can read the previous passage by Berardi in the way we may look at the results of our own medical examination, or x-ray. We may not know, or understand every specific word for everything we can see, but we know what we are shown, because we know that what we are presented with is ourselves.

Reading it in 2024, we may find ourselves saying that anxiety, depression, paranoia, ADHD and burnout are “just part of life now”,

When our “neuro-physical energies are tethered to a mechanistic speed, our relationship to the capital machine is deeply more involved in our every breath more than the mill workers, and ship builders of the 19th century could ever imagine.

Reading this in 2024 makes me nostalgic for 2011, which even with everything going off, seemed like a less panicky time, a time when breathing was easier.

I could go on, but I think it’s unnecessary. I rarely like the sound of my own words upon the those written by others. I just wanted to highlight this essay for what I believe is it significance more than ever.

The ascent (Black Hill)

Where do you go when the direction, momentum, you indirectly, but nonetheless wholeheartedly placed your future state of being within, dissolves into thin air, and you see nothing in front of you? You go sideways. Westwards. Up here…scouring for answers.

The moors are plural. One moor is every moor.

But the Moors is a state of being that is singular. Everything, every doing, every trauma is folded into one form, and laid flat out, without judgement, retribution or recourse – just like the rocks strewn around up here over millennia.

The ascent itself is only thus if you can see that which you are ascending from.

The ascent is a meditation that looks back down on the place below that you can never be within, yet must be. but can’t be, but must be(!). The ascent beckons us to voluntarily relieve ourselves of the duty of all living flesh: to show up. Instead it invites us to play dead, to play at being the outcast that one day may be irredeemably forced upon us.

Any other climb is merely a pursuit, a thrill, more Youtube content; it doesn’t involve the deep desire to unzip oneself from a political body that one must posture and be ventriloquised for, and keeping smiling for as if it was their own smile.

Walking 100 metres west from Black Hill, away from the vantage over the scattered urbanisation of Yorkshire, the shiny towers of the Manchester skyline can momentarily seem distantly exotic. It’s an optical illusion, but not one without potency.

But it’s the same image, really. The Pennines makes parallels either side of them. Peering over them is like looking at yourself through a fractured mirror.

Both sides are witnessing the retroactive hipsterisation of history; a gentrification of the Northern soul. The collective trauma of endless austerity that cannot be spoken and must remain mute in polite spaces; it is squeezed into the recesses of town centres, into an emaciation we choose not to see, even as it comes for us; bent into a smile that must keep smiling, at every new real ale bar, street food kitchen, and every attempt to turn every run down town into a new tourist hotspot.

As we willingly play along with this nihilism, smiling into the camera as the world burns, the moors wouldn’t look that visibly different even in the wake of a nuclear wipeout. After all, they already cater for all the traumas that cannot be accounted for down there – what’s another one?


But really, what now plays out down there is capitulation with a cuddly facade.

We may speak of inner peace, mindfulness and body positivity, but we are merely smiling casualties of a failed dream of another kind of 21st century.

Maybe it’s too late now. Maybe the ample advice, facts, solutions of the 2010s came too late to change course. Neither the macro, the micro, nor the global or the personal could do the work in the time allocated to it.

Mental health awareness abounds but will not save us.

We only dare speak of ‘good’ mental illness. The safe space to sigh, to subscribe to ‘better help’.

…not the ‘bad and the ugly’ of mental illness, which remains as removed from discourse as when the monsters originally poured out the industrial hell holes below and found their way up here.

Working class identity is now a facade background to the gentrification of the Northern Soul. We bask under a fake authenticity, acting like animatronic museum pieces for which history has stopped. We split ourselves in two in order to play along.

E.P Thompson said ‘the working class was present at its own making”. But it was also present at the formation of its own monsters, either side of these hills. Brady, Sutcliffe, etc.

If the Moors Murders were not an act of mental illness, then nothing is. The ‘bad and ugly’ side of mental illness we dare not speak of until it’s too late. A Frankenstein’s monster, ground down and ground up, out of the grey, anonymous, mute trauma of working class life.

The Moors Murders are so important to the relationship between the moors and its civilised surroundings. The single fact that the victims were buried here is an horrific manifestation of a collective sickness that keeps on beckoning us to all to flee towards them.

Unlike the Derbyshire Dales further south, these hills still can’t easily be framed by a gentrifying gaze – the hold of the horrors upon these hills undoes their capture, and in a sense liberates them. All things can speak their name up here as the increasingly gentrified towns down below turn away from that which came out of them.

Like the moors, accountability is both singular and plural. Always individual and collective.

Who makes the monsters? And why did we look away when we had the answers?

Conversely, by looking away, out of the towns, since 2019, since the pandemic, it has been the only way to look back in at them.


“When we awoke it was spring”

The above line is taken from the film ‘London’ by Patrick Keiller.

Spring means more to me than I realise, if I’m foolish enough to let it slip me by. I see it specifically in the former mining areas of South and West Yorkshire, the rolling fields that still separate the sporadic built-up areas, always feel suggestive of my own renewal, social renewal.

I’ve got a lot that I need to put into Spring this year, a pretty hopeless few years and some deeply regrettable moments of self-destruction and self-sabotage, that I seek some resolve and closure on, moving on.

I took this photograph in very early May 2015, walking through Crofton, Wakefield, with my friend Michael Hill. It was the eve of the 2015 general election, a Thursday eve – the time of the optimist (if you ask me) before the realisation of the limitations of the weekend are upon us.

Perhaps things didn’t turn out how we desired that evening, but it sparked new possibilities, both personally and politically. And that’s always there, even after years without hope, a new spring.