Free-fall in Stasis

(Barnsley, The First Week of Winter, 2016)

Walking back to the suburbs through an M1 junction-hinterland in the dark of a new winter. But nothing feels new. It’s late 2016.

To Ride The Fine Line of Purpose on Placebos…

 …that’s what I achieved ten years ago this winter month. And I’ve even tried listening to that very same sequence of albums that narrated late 2006, attempting to rekindle such momentum.

“I’m on a good mixture, I don’t want to waste it”

But these days I can feel the cogs in my head wanting to stop, like workers in a factory who’ve come to realise absurdity lies in the heart of the notion that what they produce is building towards ‘the good life’. I know it’s much more than lifestyle changes, personal attitudes. But to play the game of attaining placebos, one has to pathelogise their pain. A one-off bluff to be prescribed a painkiller. But can the placebos of the past even work for the present? 

“Look forward to a future in the past”

1996. 2006. 2016. It’s funny how straightforward the shit-neoliberal Britain of 2006 felt, compared to now. Words, art, they seem inadequate, thrown into a free-flowing torrent in stasis – this chaos in a world which yet still appears to be frozen.

For the best part of 5 years I have felt that the life I unwillingly act in is at a dead-end, and that the only way forward is to destroy and rebuild. Illogical as this sounds, it enables me to sympathise with the logic towards the sheer illogic of Brexit and Trump, because I fear that for many they are votes borne of existential desperation.

Thus I can only conclude that two are interlinked. A willing for the ultimate of reset buttons; a fantastical reset button that erases the hyperconnected age, leaving us the choice to pursue a route that fucks with the mind a little less.

And rest…

Every night I fantasise about cutting all ties, walking out my job on my lunch break and walking west to the hills…as if the world was actually different over those hills, and not a mere barrier between two parts of an overcrowded, infrastructurally-unsound, unhappy, LONELY island.

But every day I play the part, a small part. Like the protagonist Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brasil’, I carry out a life I find deeply absurd, with smiles less convincing than Gordon Brown’s in a mad mad world. I found some sort of hope in the amount of reception Adam Curtis’s recent documentary Hypernormalisation received, because it’s exactly about this: being unable to believe or have faith in anything in the world you are condemned to live in, but not being able to act out this disbelief and thus carrying on like it’s all fine. This is because for a long time I have felt that the negativity I experience from drunks, drivers, shoppers alike, is because they feel exactly like me: utterly fucking sick of it, but unable to act on it. That illusion of otherness those pennine hills contain thus remains.

• 

The traffic builds as I approach this supposedly small town. Over the past 6 years I’ve watched the connections between these ex-coal village-conurbations become inefficient arteries. Thick to burst with self-preservation anxieties,  created by an artificially maintained level of scarcity, and contained in glorified tin cans. Claycliffe: a place-name that evokes stuckness. Yet a place that nobody calls home, nobody identifies as being in on an Instagram photo. Yet it’s a place where many end up stuck, morning and evening.

Infrastructure; what does it even mean anymore? That all plans are at a standstill is the only fucking certainty here. No one is really in charge, and managerial thought itself is trapped in a past tense; maybe autumn 2008, maybe 2010, or maybe 1999… But the process itself proliferates, mauls through a defenseless scene like a braindead alien predator.

There is so much movement, yet thought itself remains frozen…

The oft-unbearable middle class chlorophoric-quagmire of the work-a-day-job-existence seems bent of regenerating a shock in me every time I return to my home town on a midweek teatime. A reminder of what life is actually like for many beyond the blinkers of educated career-seeking. But I’m doubting whether it is a reminder: as what I believe I’m seeing is a new development. From Cheapside to Town End,  I feel like I have stumbled upon scenes fit for rust-belt America right here in England.  The centre is seemingly the hub for the borough’s social pain, whereas in the surrounding ‘more prosperous’ boroughs the pain is forced out of view by waves of gentrification.

Comewhatmay, such desperate sights are new to my eyes on such familiar territory. Post 2010 the lycra-clad joggers have proliferated around here, but so too have those locked in a day to day battle with a dead end, either through drink, drugs or survivalist-shoplifting.

I text a friend. She responds saying how “it’s bad how it looks [our shared hometown] looks better on a Saturday night than it does in ‘civilised’ daylight”. This is such a striking conclusion we arrived at, being, as we are, veterans of the town nightlife in its notorious early 2000’s stage.

I pass the No 66 Elsecar Stagecoach bus, promoting ‘relaxation’ with its new onboard Wifi –  the warm glow of The Feed as the nights draw in. I initially think of how being connected in every space imaginable isn’t relaxing at all. But I think again: maybe the anxiety is more in the gaps between the points of connection? The urge have unending stimulation. Perhaps it’s turning buses into the quiet, solitary modes of transportation that cars have always been, rather than the overspill of frustration borne from class injuries and alienation that they always used to be. Less aggro, less social anxiety. But more loneliness.

A zeitgeist of disbelief...

I think about Hypernormalisation again…

2 years ago I made a work about how stuck things felt, how stuck I felt. I used this town as ground on which to gather evidence.  It’s weird. It feels like we’re still stuck there, but yet something seems very different, unreal, and unable to be pinpointed. The Mary Celeste Project was about the frozen world. But what can you trust to be real when there is chaos in a frozen world?

I feel cold, anxious and lonely as I look at all the people in the station who feel as anxious and as lonely as I do. Its evidential; it’s on their faces. They wait for their 5pm commute back to the candle-lit-alehouse-utopia of Sheffield, where every other word heard on the street is a plea for spare change, to be spared from the returning freezing winter nights. Of course, decent working headphones will cancel out this growing noise. But for how much longer can one’s lonely little mind hold itself together?

No Holiday Until Postcapitalism (A Last Resort to Forgotten Fun)

We’re relieved to get out of bottleneck of the north (Leeds station) as we join the now mostly emptied train for our journey to the North Sea coastline on this cold November morning. This station is making us both uneasy. This cold, hollow sort of self-reflection is filled horribly by the noise of this metal-on-metal place. At one point, when a certain sort of examination of life didn’t seem so paralysed by painful introspection, I had a mutual agreement with this place: I’d have to feel stressed and drained – but it would supply me a fresh mine of morbid fascination of the ‘man-machine-matrix’ (Will Self) for artistic purposes. But now that things just feel so stuck it just aggravates a searching for silence amidst the madness.

Going Nowhere. The whole thing is going nowhere, but this giant hamster wheel is beyond the day-to-day experience of a mere melancholic mortal, and there’s sometimes nothing as crushing as feeling like you’re Going Nowhere. Expecting one to obtain a mindset content with staying within 100 metres of their introduction to life is idiocy as things stand.

“So hop on the train coz it kills the pain”

True, this trip to the forgotten fun of Filey is one of the furthest trips I’ve made for sometime, but open my wallet and you’ll find evidence of a person who, although stuck in the day-to-day, makes dozens of train trips to nearby towns.

No destinations until Postcapitalism, just movement…

Wallet being the crucial word: too busy making sure I have my camera, pens and notepad, that I leave it on the train as it leaves Filey. Sending a trip already teetering on the edge of the ridiculous, into potential absurd oblivion.

Liquid Fear in the frozen world…

Suddenly a place caught between the twee and bleak by the tectonic shifts of a seismic systemic change, is totally locked in the Now, as I’m forced to enter the endless corridors of Distrust-ocracy of the scarcity network. 0345… 0800…  0113… You can be trapped in it, or trapped outside it – locked outside the gates of so-called civilisation. But my next coffee, next pint, next train trips to nowhere, next 2nd pint, means right now I’d much rather be trapped within the matrix, and it makes you wonder if being thrown out of matrix next to th3 North Sea is more frightening than Big Brother’s microphones in bushes monitoring Winston Smith as he wandered through England’s green and pleasant fears from yesterday.

• 

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No connection to Liquid Boredom…

At this point it’s probably wise to head towards the brigg, jutting out into the North Sea. Yet another one of our attempts to break free of the noise. To find thought. To think beyond the day-to-day. To just think, in the moment. The day-to-day isn’t the moment – it consists of constantly trying to get somewhere but never arriving. Like an insect smashing against a window until it burns itself out. Just to get beyond this point, and begin anew.

The Conversation is open and honest as we sit at the cliff edge, as if the proximity to such dangerous forces prises out such honesty about our deep struggles. Three of us, in our 30s and early 40s, all at sea in a world that has lost all sense to us. We walk out onto the brigg, we listen to the sea through an old defence barrier. The sea appears to breathing. Perhaps it is a kind of breathing? But the breathing’s getting heavier. At this point it’s probably head back towards the noise…

• 

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• 

A land that anxiety forgot…

We’re not far from being the only ones here. Yet everything remains open, like a fun land abandoned 30 years ago. But, unlike Chernobyl, nobody turned the lights off, nobody unplugged the coin machines. They push back and forth almost like reminders of the long gone machines worked by the Mill-town workers who’d’ve flocked here on mass for leisure. What is Leisure?  Leisure existed before liquid boredom flattened out our lives.

The arcades are a somewhat comforting bleak. Were they always this Bleak? No. Their mimicry once worked. It worked when the American adventure still worked – when it met with an Island still living out the ghosts of Victorianna. With a deco more in tune with old WMC’S, it’s a far cry from a world perpetually posing for instagram.

Suddenly a cheap quality recording of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ theme rings out from a Wild West ride for young children. A song that evokes a frontier is lost to the last century. That very frontier inverted itself and spread back over the world a long time back now. Like childhood memories of holidays, it all seems like a thousand years ago. Suddenly a coin machine blurts out the Star Trek theme tune. The Final Frontier. The horses of this machine face the exit  – they look to be galloping into a void.

The temperature drops, and we find a pub to sit in whilst we wait for our train. We find ourselves listening to a soundtrack that could well have been playing to itself for years. 1960’s. 1970’s. 1980’s, and a scattering of 90’s, then back to the beginning, maybe forever. David Bowie’s version of All The Young Dudes makes me think who are today’s young dudes ‘carrying the news’? Like the arcades it’s a place that isn’t even trying to be a Retro Bar; abandoned on the highway between the past with a future and a future trapped in the past. And like the arcades it’s a comforting sort of bleak.

The anxiety over not being believed is over. The trust of the train conductors, an unexpected trust, allows me to breath a sigh of relief at the lack of confrontation. I hate confrontation; just can’t do it. It’s what’s kept me from being unable to act on my beliefs over what is wrong and what is right. This awareness is probably why it leads to guilt. Guilt over losing my grip on grasping the chaos of Brexit, and the US presidential race. The two shape-shift, become one and then two again, and reflect back from the anxious faces of the sober commuters, like an airborne disease. Guilt over no longer having the ‘right’ feelings about what is wrong and what is right in this upside down world.

Trump and Brexit? Rational descision making? I think of the mental health of our human race, the rock bottom mental health of the human race. Mental health being crushed between a rock and hard place.  The way we are made to behave – how it’s making us sick of life. Why the fuck would anyone want to continue this? But perceived future confrontations forced me to take the vote of least resistance: I voted to remain. I’m just a coward, stuck in the middle, waiting…

The boarding of a gang of young lairy Manchester-bound squaddies at York, who annex the shared space of the train with masculine-insecurities they already seem condemmed to, forces Dave’s melancholia over the state of present-day life into spoke word: “Britain is a country that no longer likes anything, including life itself,  because it has forgotten what life is. And the tragedy is that our generation don’t even have the luxury of forgetting what we could’ve had. We just hustle around for a crummy job and hope that’s enough to fill the hole…”

But if anything ,today was a humbling day, where failure has been acceptable.

Let Forever be…

1999….

No Holiday Until Postcapitalism…

2016…

A sadness finds its way in after an anxious day placed upon an easily anxious person. A comfort in let down, a solice in the acceptance of failure. The tenners Dave and Steve lent me feel like tenders for my last drinks. I get like this on these kind of days,  these rare days of surrender. I don’t mean a contemplation of suicide, but days which almost reach over the years into the future and touch glasses with my final ever glass.

Maybe this is my only access to the future?

Let Forever be… 

As I’m in the past at the same time.

The song Let Forever be, from the weary summer of 1999, seemingly spontaneously entered my head as I left the station and walked into the city. A summer that felt so chilly in the face of the coming millennium. So different from memories of the roaring heat of the mid-90s-euphoria summers. A first point of depression, a year when a switch felt like it had been flicked in my head, was also a year when the teenage kicks of the neoliberal project gave in to a pre-millennial malaise, which, as much of a comedown as it was, couldn’t quite anticipate the hyper-horror ahead.

No Holiday Until Postcapitalism…this is where it began. For me, at least. There’s been no rest in the soul since. What remains of that soul. There must be hope for the nihilised – I may be impatient in most parts of my life, but this is one thing I’ve waited so patiently for.  As much as the future still seems inaccessible,  there is harder times still to come. Who knows who is and isn’t made for them. But at this moment I’m OK.  Thanks for asking.

Stories From Time-Locked Space. 2

Illusions of ‘otherness’ – Over The Pennine Horizon

Darton-to-Wakefield-to-Mirfield-to-Huddersfield-Manchester-to-Leeds-to-Darton (Northern Rail-to-Grand Central-to-Northern  Rail-to-Transpennine Express-to Northern Rail.

September 2016.

“Today’s Manchester is dominated by the sounds of the trams. They beep, clunk and even scream as they turn on the tracks, in spaces so close to pavements you wonder how they all function. How do they all function? How does everything keep carrying on? The embarrassing urban anxiety kicks in. The pursuit of something which leads me to the same point I departed at. What to do in this world…today – this city? “Don’t know which way to turn. The best possible use”.  Thought paralysis – it makes me unable to show my human face to an homeless man, despite managing to chuck him a quid. But I’m stunned into shy teenage mumbling when he speaks of his plans of getting through the night ahead of him. I turn down towards Victoria station, stalling as the minutes pass along, knowing full-well I’m aiming for one of the few pubs I know in this city. “What to do in this world…today – this city?”

“An empty seating area in a pub on Friday teatime, a familiar jukebox soundtrack, and I’m regaining mild rays of confidence. “What spurs me on to travel to other towns and cities?” I thought to myself earlier today, whilst the rain mocked any escape plans I had. Maybe my anxiety to “get on the bus and get out” isn’t so much a desire to travel through space, but a desire to travel purely through time. I have a deep longing to leave these times, and traveling allows for a temporary confusion of time and space that throws fools gold in my direction. I find out that the place I have arrived in is, to all intents and purposes, the same as the one I’d just left.”

“The default Manchester-of-my-mind is a first-industrial-city-Manchester, mixed with a Joy-Division-Manchester, mixed with a Blair-years-failed-attempt-at-studying-here-Manchester. But I return to realise it’s more like a 2016 Leeds, but with less of a Canary-Wharf-steroid-injection and more of Shoreditch-smug-injection. The old mills and engraved testaments to the hard-fought gains of the working man easily fall from mind amidst the banal bazaar of retro bars, hip cafes, veggie restaurants, all named anything and everything under the sun. Where is the Manchester that is buried in our heads like old folklore? I’d had liked to have witnessed it before it became an overly decadent city with an ambivalence that pulls LGBT gains to the same level as homelessness epidemics. Maybe I can now see why the drama Life on Mars‘ recreation of 1970’s Manchester was such an appealing fantasy. We don’t crave homophobia,  the real IRA, or for the gates to reopen to those dark mills, but we crave an authenticity. And whether or not authenticity ever existed, our postmodern addiction to the idea of it seems to distance us further from anything that could be called it. Places become parodies of themselves, as if a city could be constantly taking selfies, just to reassure itself it still exists. A once-industrial titan, obsessively staring into a mirror, whilst the land shifts worryingly underneath it’s feet, as fracking and nuclear contracts give a green light to those less decadent players on global capitalism’s stage.”

“In an age where companionship has been turned into a highly valued resource, made to feel in short supply, we are left to feel ashamed of our loneliness. The weekend is scarcity-central, with everything feeling in short supply, especially time itself. As Friday evening begins, it doesn’t matter where you are because if you are alone you’re alone –every seat in every pub, usually for a rendezvous with stable solitude, is taken, and every space for daydreaming is swallowed up. I walk back and forward, like a stuck soundtrack, only noticeable to the homeless, the only static bodies in our hasty times. I bump into a friend in the Piccadilly rush. It’s awkward. He wouldn’t care, but I do. “Just what am I doing?” These whole endeavours seem so pathetic under the weekend’s spotlight. “The city can be a lonely place” – an old piece of wisdom digs itself up to the surface, more like woodworm than earworm.”

• 

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By now the peak fare rail curfew is lifted and I grab a can of M&S cider and head for the train back to Yorks. My anxiety is curbed as a 6 carriage train pulls in. But no: it seems that any train attending to the needs of the millions who make up the discontinuous Northern Metropolis has to be a scarcity train.  The first 3 carriages stay put as the tired have to use their one last burst of energy to run up to the other 3. If you want a picture of a Northern English future, imagine continual disappointment under signs for ‘the Northern Powerhouse’ – forever.  “We should never have it so good” is what Macmillan meant to say. As we travel eastwards the early Autumn sunset penetrates the windows and makes silhouettes of Manchester’s millennial monoliths – they pray to the Gods that the sun will never set on the world that built them. But despite the illusions of clairvoyance the September sun gives as it penetrates the scene, their day of reckoning isn’t today.”

---

“Land-locked on an Island”

Darton-to-Dunford Bridge-to-Langsett-to-Sheffield

“As I begin my cycle up to those hills, yesterday’s impulse is today’s: always trying to escape reality by fooling myself I am doing so by traveling across space, away from wherever the sense of stuck-ness is most claustrophobic.  I always end up where I was, and who I was, before. But during these cyclical doings I exercise the very best and worst in me – new depths of contempt and idealist manifestos crisscross in my thoughts. As the first of many hills give way, still on the foothills, I ask myself what it is I really want to happen – a question prised out of me from a pressure to DO SOMETHING. I answer myself with this: “What is to be Done? Lots of things have been done, and lots don’t seem worthwhile doing again. Right now the only thing that is to be Done, is to ditch capitalism – transcend it, upend it, or just end it”. That is the immovable objective of now.”

• 

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“I’ve always wanted to reach the Metropolis on the other side, only to realise it’s no lost world, no place where things are done differently, after all. This is what happened yesterday, but yet the climb to the hilltop Horizon is where the allure still lives. After all these years I’m still climbing up here to see if there is something beyond this reality. From the road the other side of the valley, the Woodhead pass looks like a river made of Mercury. And I don’t care what more far-flung wanderers think of this, because this area, for me, sometimes contains an otherworldly essence, like a gateway to another celestial body.”

• 

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“The Stocksbridge Bypass valley almost broke me, and as the thirst and exhaustion kicked in, it took on an almost mythologised representation of itself as the ravines, pylons and conifer plantations began to look threatening – almost a concrete abstraction of the notoriously dangerous road I was climbing up. So, by the time I reached Sheffield I was massively relieved. But not before long I felt estranged amidst the weekender endeavours. The locus of this seemed to be the diversion I had to take, after realising a large concrete chunk of postwar Sheffield, centred around the Grosvenor hotel, was ring-fenced for demolition. The erasure of yet more of one specific era also made a physical embodiment out of what I was feeling today and yesterday in as the cities reached their weekend point: a sense of being forced either onto the narrow curbways or of being funneled into a design for late capitalist life. Neither appeal. Nor does hanging about this evening, and I call today off at an earlier than usual point.”

The Land That Noise Forgot.

September 2016

There’s strangely a normality to Sunday evenings, that reassures, quells anxieties often found at other times. Which means that our post-working-hour walk up onto the very tops of hills between Yorks and Manchester is going to work out OK today. These barren stretches up here seem to speak something of the concealed melancholia of life down below. Perhaps they allow you to feel at ease with its truth, ridding yourself of social status anxiety like the weight of a poorly-designed work uniform, as you climb further from the road, to the point that even if you went to far into the early autumn sunset, and found yourself in mortal danger, such anxiety wouldn’t reappear – all you would have is clean fresh fear, a sensation that is somewhat different from dog-shit stink of anxiety that clings to us down below.”

We look over to both Saddleworth Moor and Holme Moss. A beginning. Or the ending. Like reaching a land’s end, in-land. We are Landlocked on an island. Time-locked in space. But this area is like a frontier, even if there turns out to be nothing beyond it. What is it about the life down below that makes us want to seek such desolation? Steve speaks of the value he places on the silence up here.  A silence that separates it from everywhere else on this noisy land. As up here, like staring at the sea, or into space, you can see things move before you can hear them moving.  In a noise-filled age this is almost non-existent. From these hilltops we access the lack of real dialogue amidst the noise below. What is the use of thought down there, when it seems reduced to shards of information in perpetual battle for dominance with one another? These monochrome colours and featureless plains help bleach that noise, opening our eyes like portals to a frontier out of which sprung our industrialisation, and into which we see a space waiting, waiting, and waiting, to be filled by a future.”

• 

“We look down to where the first few cluster-settlements begin the outer edges of a Greater Manchester sprawl that changes from cobbled-stone to concrete within our hazy horizon. Dave talks of how, by seeing where the green farming land gives up to the ‘desertified’ hilltops, such stark end/beginning points allow you to visualise how it all began, and continues, everywhere else. Like the streams that flow down to form the necessary rivers of this ‘first’ industrial city, I think of

the flows of people coming down from these hills, the upheavals, the Peterloo Massacre, the endless rows of workers crammed together, the hopes, aspirations for something better, which informed a pop music that in turn informed the world. All for what? A noisy competition in consumption? An Instagram App on an Iphone? An overpriced hovel overlooking other, lesser, hovels? Surely this can’t be how it all ends?

• 

Walking back down the hills, anticipating the mental noise awaiting us, Dave remembers how his noise cancelling headphones kept in his terrace house in a busy suburb of Huddersfield gives him access to a silence provided by capitalism to endure capitalism, rather than a silence from capitalism. But the break out of it’s frenetic inertia hasn’t ended for us just yet, as we decide to seek refreshment in a place that you couldn’t even designate as an Inn. It in it’s location on the border of Yorks and Lancs, this is more of a non-place from a time that is gone. As the night falls around it, who could have ever been a ‘local’ up here on this horse-drawn-carriage-cum-commuter highway? Lights on and open, it still feels forgotten, trapped in a time-vacuum.  There’s a jukebox in a dark corner of the room, the music on it dates no later than 1999. But this isn’t the re-hashed CGI Steroid-90’s you find in the towns below, this is the late nineties as we left it. It’s like the millennium never occurred. Maybe the sentence at the end of our narrative had ended already by then, and the emptiness up here is like a pause at the end of a sentence that’s only exhaustively prolonged down below because it’s amidst an feverish command for economic growth? But where’s the next sentence? Maybe it isn’t Manchester that has ‘so much to answer for’ after-all, but the moors themselves?.”

• 

Leeds Under Pre-Digital Rain (2016).

“Always a higher level of caution in your gait when arriving in Leeds on a Saturday – 52 times a year, not including Xmas and bank holidays – as if I’ve walked over a picket line for piss ups, which is far less unnerving if you have a designated piss up waiting for you. So I take the sleek, but silent south-way entrance. As if it grew out of an hallucination, it never seemed to arrive (although it opened this year) and its architecture enters your vision like the easy-come-easy-go liquidity of CGI. Yet it still remains impressive, as if it arrived from a time beyond the present, whilst otherwise Leeds remains so time-locked in a late 2008 gaze for me. Where did 2008 go? Those days when I rediscovered Orwell, Huxley, Fritz Lang and Roger Waters, mixing it with late 20th century synth pop as a means of gaging a Dystopia in Disguise I’d slowly come to feel within post-millennial Britain. I was looking back to find a truth about The Now unaware that The Now was turning to liquid CGI under the frozen picture of the crash I stared at; a seizure in CGI that I only recognise now because I’m swimming in it too – my fucking Android.”

• 

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“The city is pent-up because it’s raining. A rain-phobia-fever takes over the Saturday pleasure-seeking. Only the homeless seem acclimatized to a weather pattern that is supposed to be the essence of this island, unable to buy into an hallucination of Californian weather stuck on repeat. “Nice weather for ducks” says one homeless man I give 50 pence to outside a Currys/PC World store, as I try to smile, catching a reflection of my hesitance to exchange friendliness, as if at some point I’d come to see open generousity as something to be ashamed of. Double-sided-shame, out of which you become aware that merely tossing 50 pence at a problem is a get-of-clause solution.”

• 

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“Anyway, I catch up with John outside the Corn Exchange, and we walk under the railway bridge, following The Calls. This traffic artery is always faster flowing than those at the other side of the railway, but there’s an added tension that is no doubt due to this rain. John senses it and stresses “for fuck’s sake, it’s only a bit of rain!”. But we agree that a few things are at play here, making the contemporary sensibility of this island so incompatible with the age-old unpredictability of its weather patterns. Is the amnesia towards an uneven climate synonymous with our amnesia towards the larger problem of uneven geographies under the supposedly flat-earth 24/ 7 contemporary global capitalism? Is this incompatibility part of a flattening of perspectives to fit the needs of 24/7? Not only to be able to have a flat-earth playing field for unending work/leisure demands, but to be able to look/and perform at one’s best all the time? A sensibility that would be likely lost on an older stage of industrial Britain – whereas getting drenched every now and then was part of life, now it seems a locus of personal humiliation, most commonly associated with the poor – society’s ‘losers’ by current standards – who have less means to enter places to get out of the rain. “The poor never seem to carry umbrellas”, I say, unlike the canopy of umbrellas John describes seeing on his work trips to London, watching a largely business class, commuting to and fro. The contradictions in our expectations of a flat-earth playing field for our work-life are impounded as we approach the river Aire, spotting a sign notifying pedestrians of the ongoing “Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme”. This riverside suffered badly in winter floods at the tail end of 2015; and such seismic historical events such as climate disruption are repeatedly discredited by a culture that requires an eternal flat-earth playing field upon which to do business. We talk of an ‘Instagramisation‘ – because, if social media sites Twitter and Facebook are emblematic of the flattening of conversation, then Instagram is emblematic of that very flat-earth-look; that everyday-is-some-glorious-holiday-snapshot look. And we wonder if there is a lull in Instagram uploads when the weather’s shit.”

• 

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As we exit the canal and walk back to the city we talk of how this rain isn’t the tropical rain of a future depicted in the likes of Blade Runner or a Drowned-world-Britain, but rain as the persistence of the past. The intolerable mundanity that ’24/7 ‘ aggravates by pretending it is no longer. After nearly an hour we seek refuge and end up in a Starbucks cafe. Although it is probably teeming with employees from the city’s the financial sector in the week, on this UKweekend day it is utterly empty, and in this sense it’s perhaps the only bit of Leeds-city that has managed to totally successfully mimic a part of a non-place London – any outsider to the ‘Big Smoke (and Mirrors) will be surprised find that ‘The City’ (as in the financial heart) is like a ghost town on a Saturday.”

“I can’t remember if we carry on from our outdoor talk or start anew, but we discuss how the prevalence of scientific reductivism has reached into deep the state of play, from where social bonds are located, broken down, and then made to reintegrate through the market. This has become most evident in the mess that ‘mass communication’ has made of conversation. Perhaps we lead on to argue that we are beyond the point of philosophy, and can now only be theorists of now, due to wondering what will eventually lead the way beyond the current inertia. But the conversation is upbeat, it always is with John, no matter the gravity of the matter. We get up and walk back towards the station.”

“It must be over a year since I walked down Wellington Street in Leeds, a tunnel for wind and rain today. Since then it’s evidently become an avenue of tower-blocks; Café Neros and upmarket chain restaurants clinging to their bases and waiting for the people to come. John speaks of how this city didn’t take as long to adjust to the financial crash (8 years back!) as much as other nearby places, and there’s a feeling that whatever London’s taking, Leeds is taking some of it too. But it’s somewhat built on nothing, fresh air, and it can’t surely last forever. But so far nothing seems to have changed, not even by the nervous breakdown of Brexit.  I say goodbye to John and end up back in the station. Although unsure of my plans, the yells and screams of weekend pleasure-seeking make me hasty to form a plan as soon as possible.”

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