Tag Archives: Nature

Quarter of a Century

01/16/2012 By in Musings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Glasgow is a city with a brooding gothic soul. A city I once wrote about regularly, even if it was just the banality of routine. With its violence menace, religious iconography and twee bourgeois sensibility, Glasgow captured my imagination at a particular period in time. Back when I described the insignificant truth of this solitary journey to the cinema on a cold weekday evening. A melancholy love letter so to speak. I had just turned twenty-five. 

Tuesday, 10th January 2006

Moth to a Flame

I go the cinema when I’m bored and lonely. It all begins with an over familiar route through the West End and after several twists and turns I will magically stride through Garnethill down towards the largest cinema building on Planet Earth. The beginning of the journey is arguably the most comfortable upon the eye, it is invariably dark and rectangle shades of affluent light can be seen frozen behind coloured glass. I walk across the Byres Road up towards Great Gibson Street, where mercenary cranes hang over an underdeveloped patch of soil; it is a docile but rapidly changing stretch of road.

The sharp gradient tightens the muscles on both of my legs and I have reached the peak of the road, where in sudden twist of fate I feel compelled to go down the hill towards Gibson Street. I used to live around here, the car park is still a muddy disgrace, littered with crass aluminium shells and alien sized craters. The park dominates the area, it is a spooky place and lit only by a curved silver moon; its iron gates lie open but I dare not enter. I stride past fancy Lebanese and Scottish restaurants, it is an ordinary night but they both appear full of people. I cross over the gentle river, there are no grebes or mallards to be seen and only now do I start to accelerate towards my destination. I twist past two Protestant churches and a cold young fox lying dead in the leaves. The road ahead is empty and without a soul, it appears darker now, the motorway is within walking distance.

I head towards Charing Cross, it is very quiet and all the cars have gone. It is not the right time but I prefer to take to the skies than walk alongside them. I adjust my legs and walk over an arched granite causeway; it elevates me above the carnage of the roads and provides access to the mysterious ways of Garnethill. I am in the city now, there something sinister about this place, something threatening, although my mind is playing tricks on me. It is dark right now and no one is here. The street is awash with neat green lawns and vacancy signs, there are places to stay on my left, while to my right there are scattered bins and graffiti strewn fire exits.

I walk ominously closer and there is a Catholic Church approaching, which is separated by yew, rowan and a piercing iron fence. This secretive place of worship performs mass in Latin and the priest is kept hidden behind a secret silver veil. The church is small but intimidating and I don’t think it likes me at all. I walk on alone and without a God, the winter air is biting my cheeks, my hands are beginning to get cold now.

I walk towards the famous art school and admire its subtle and decorative style, there are no students in the nearby eighties lounge. I am almost there now and feel like a distant stranger, people are on the move down below me, there is a collection of buckfast and vodka sitting alongside a corrugated steel gate. The streets are colliding into one, there are cars passing by me, it is now sparkling with light and the silence has gone.

Angel’s Delights

06/01/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Anyone walking along the Regent’s Canal in search of a hungry fix is advised to diverge from the towpath towards Angel’s Delights. Curiously anonymous on the web, the Dalston cafe has no internet presence and is tucked away on the unremarkable Dunston Road. Situated inside a gritty seventies warehouse that has been kindly acquired by Noble House Properties, Angel’s Delights is not going to be a cult figure for much longer. A stone’s throw away from the East London line, the white arc of progress has only further gentrified a once shady and undeniably violent area.

Since they serve Jamaican dishes inside a premise the size of a toilet with a pavement cafe sheltered by a black canopy and a stolen tyre, no one should expect to pay for their jerk chicken using a chip and pin device. Cash is the only currency down by the canal and unlike the gentrified Towpath Cafe; Angel’s home cooking is just as expensive but served in a less pretentious fashion. Admittedly the squeezed bottles of lemonade are a bit dear at two pounds per head and while their jerk chicken is lusciously tasty – some dishes may leave you coughing up splinty bones.

Situated upstairs is a hippie squat located inside a former sowing factory and this provides the jerk cafe with a colourful selection of customers. More regular punters will be familiar with a beautiful Serbian model and her punk-lite Ken Doll boyfriend, who like to dance with the Jamaican owner in-between orders.

On the nearby towpath the bubbling current of East London’s changing population is forever rising to the surface – angry cyclists, sporty female joggers, junkies, estate teenagers with fishing rods and skinny blonde twins carrying bags of cider from Tesco. Many of them stop by to ponder their next Jamaican take away or spot of lunch by the water. Time is not on their side. The bulldozers are due to arrive in August and will soon be constructing ‘beautifully designed 1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments with the finest contemporary specification’.

With economic progress comes homogeneous flats and the canal is changing shape at a terrifying pace. Relics of the industrial past with smashed windows and graffiti, which have since been reclaimed by the arts crowd, possess a feral quality like the birds on the water. During the breeding season, coots defend their territories by screaming, flapping their wings and pecking at intruders. Coots may well soon be only thing wild and adventurous left on the canal, as luxury properties continue to rise from the ruins of the past and wipe Angel’s Delights off the map.

Angel’s Delights
Dunston Road,
London,
E8 4EA

Related articles

Lost in Lisbon

05/19/2011 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

A fading imperial city on the westernmost fringes of Europe can proudly boast of beautiful cheekbones and ageing skin. Lisbon is a secretive and romantic place. Portugal’s largest city suffered a devastating earthquake in 1755 but survived the wars of the twentieth century largely unscathed. Instead of war monuments or plaques to our glorious dead, Lisbon boasts grandiose statues of ancient explorers and outlandish works of modern art. Elegantly designed by architect Santiago Calatrava and inspired by Gaudí’s love of trees, Oriente Station’s dynamic white arches and double decker flashing tubes make for a truly marvellous spectacle.

Overlooking the River Tagus, the de facto Portuguese capital offers a fairytale vision of Europe. Although the stylish regeneration of Parque das Nações ensures any visit to Lisbon is not just confined to an open air museum or a monolith but somewhere vibrant, secretive and highly sophisticated. Subject to enormous EU investment throughout the 1990s, New Lisbon is home to one of Europe’s largest and most popular aquariums. Oceanário de Lisboa inspires children, tourists and adults alike with its stunning exhibitions of sea life from the blue planet.

Portugal’s capital is a romantic throwback with its ornate piazzas, lush fountains and a street plan that ranges from serenely rational to bewilderingly crooked and steep. From the triumphal arch at Praça do Comércio to Rossio Square everything feels so meticulously planned that you feel every footstep has been accounted for on a map. There are beautiful inter-linking grids, which are all connected by flash yellow buses and rickety wooden trams emblazoned with fifties style Coca-Cola logos. Arguably the best way to see the city is by tram and the iron tracks slice deliciously across some of Lisbon’s steepest gradients – where standing like so many other forms of public transport is the norm.

Down at sea level and incessantly noisy at peak periods, the Restauradores district is home to swarms of tables with napkins, menus and diminutive waiters. It is an intense and deeply pressurized environment, especially at night, where the area is like walking through a lake of food straddled by purple faced managers thrusting menus instead of oars. Elsewhere the city is exceedingly romantic and carries a feminine and luxurious charm full of civic delights.

Although this doesn’t stop pathetic little men offering Class A drugs to every man under the age of forty on every street corner. Portugal became the first European nation to officially abolish all criminal penalties for possession of drugs in 2001, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and amphetamines. According to reports this radical policy has been remarkably successful in reducing drug addiction, but it does mean you will get verbally pestered by sinister looking men on holiday.

Luckily these shady forces hover around the Rossio Square and are nowhere to be seen on the ascent to Bairro Alto. The hilly ascent towards Lisbon’s vibrant clubbing and shopping district is home to one of the few areas unaffected by the earthquake of 1755. Effortlessly youthful and lively in the evening, the cobbled streets are laden with housewives hanging their washing over ornate iron balconies and Mediterranean birdsong throughout the day.

The city’s architectural splendour ranges from 18th century buildings, crooked hilly streets and dilapidated baroque squares with flaking ceramic tiles. Although there is a creeping sadness in the dying of the streets – pigeons can be seen flying out of broken windows and beautiful skin that once sparkled is often seen withering in neglect. Visitors should look beyond the grandiose monuments in the historic centre and wander along the side streets for a glimpse of the city’s soul. Like the decrepit side streets, the city is often overlooked in an era of cheap air travel, which is a shame for Lisbon remains the essence of cool. With its fading glamour and effortless style, the Portuguese capital is one of the most understated and romantic cities in Europe.

Related articles

Spring Break

03/28/2011 By in Musings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

On working in close proximity to Regent’s Park, I cherish the advent of spring as I can now go for a lunchtime walk inside the most attractive park in London. The stirring of nature’s passion has seen thousands of people descend upon the beautiful green plains in the last few weeks. This precious unpaid hour is always welcome in warmer climes but even during the harshest winters I have stoically insisted upon every second of my lunch break.

As a young child the clattering of the school bell signalled an hour of endless possibilities. One lunch time (a long time ago) in northern Scotland, I led a stunning coup d’état against our primary school matron, as hundreds of children gained their first experience of a democratic rebellion. Football had been banned on the school banks because it was supposedly too wet underfoot for hundreds of little feet to chase after a greasy leather orb. A handwritten petition circulated down in the concrete jungle and my fellow rebels enjoyed our moment in the sun, only to be reprimanded by an hour-long detention on the strike of the home time bell.

Despite having no discernible talent for football, I still fondly remember coming back to class soaked in sweat and mud. The ferocious competiveness of our games and high pitched squabbles over what constituted an imaginary bar are one of the few things from school I actually miss. Growing older and being fortunate enough to attend two of Scotland’s finest universities, I realise now that everyday is like a lunch break for an arts undergraduate. Student life on a picture book campus makes for a wonderful education and unlimited access to bars, cafes and newsagents. There is no such thing as a late lunch when you crawl out of bed at the back of noon.

On graduating and having to pay rent in Glasgow, I found myself temping for discredited financial institutions and lunch suddenly became very precious indeed. When the clocks go back in October, it’s almost like the Arctic Circle imposes a military curfew on Scottish daylight but I always left the office in order to claim my sixty minutes of freedom. Glasgow is like a miniature Chicago with its American style grid system and wanting to claim my precious hour of daylight, I would munch upon cheese and gammon sandwiches, crisps and two pieces of fruit on a well healed parade around the city.

Glasgow is one of the greatest Victorian cities in the world but since I was unwilling to power the glass turbines of big business for the minimum wage, I departed southwards towards London’s advertising and digital heartlands in Goodge Street. Lunch time suddenly became a flexible experience and I can now eat some of the finest cuisines in the world on my unpaid hour. Unprofitable media companies squabble over free deliveries of little Greek pies and nearby cafes, bars and stylish restaurants offer a penny sucking haven for anyone wanting to escape the soulless matrix of databases, targets and Microsoft Excel.

As the clocks move forward and the vernal equinox stimulates life on previously cold soil. The green tranquility of Regent’s Park attracts a primordial gathering around its duck ponds and playing fields. Lunch time may only be one hour but it remains universally celebrated across the Western world and something savoured by school children, workers and chief executives alike.

Squatting is Free

02/27/2011 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Squatting is hot property in London after the Really Free School set up class in Guy Ritchie’s six million pound townhouse in Fitzroy Square. The Free School’s aims are somewhat unclear but their primary cause is to expose the marketisation of higher education. The squatters have organised a full programme of lectures, seminars, classes and film screenings to provide what they consider to be an alternative to formal education. Although from reading their online manifesto, I suspect their chief propagandist did not attend many English Literature tutorials with sentences such as “Freeskool iz not a zoo. We have unicorns to fly and kingdoms to destroy”.

Regardless of their lofty aspirations, the Free School’s subsequent eviction from Fitzroy Square to a nearby 200 year old pub in Rathbone Street has provoked a national debate about the virtue of squatting in a country with 870,000 empty buildings. In a lively discussion on Comment is Free, one Guardian reader expressed the view that “squats provide an alternative set up outside the mainstream where people are not bound by dull things like paying the rent, financial planning, justification and subordination”.

While nobody wants to pay rent or be subject to financial constraints, squatting does evoke the cuckoo conundrum as handsomely illustrated in this episode of BBC Springwatch. The nest of a reed warbler is taken over by a cuckoo chick and commands the warblers to feed him until he reaches a truly monstrous size. As a stunned observer of this ritual begging routine, I do wonder how evolution has allowed these lazy upstarts carte blanche to live rent free in a fiercely competitive and unfair world.

And while squatters can live a bohemian lifestyle in abandoned properties without paying any rent. The majority of ordinary citizens pay high rates and taxes for public services most squatters take for granted. Fairness is at the moral heart of the squatting debate and left-wing journalist Laurie Penny eloquently argues in their favour.

It is manifestly in the interests of those who own and hold all this disused property, including the millionaires who make up the Cabinet, to misrepresent Britain’s 15,000 squatters and occupiers as in the words of the Times — a “dangerous scourge”. Otherwise the hundreds of thousands of people paying 90% of their salary for poky rooms hours from their places of work might start getting ideas.

With affordable housing in short supply and millions of young people confined to paying huge portions of their wages for rented boxes in the sky. Britain’s housing crisis is likely to continue and squatters often divide local communities when they take up residence in nearby abandoned buildings. As when a group of anti-materialist hippies began squatting in an abandoned Walkabout pub in Islington last spring they eventually overcame suspicion and became a welcome addition to the local community.

In stark contrast this Australian documentary from 1983 about punk squatters in North London provoked a less welcoming response from residents. Squatters are always likely to divide opinion and as long as law abiding citizens passively acquiesce in a society that tolerates obscene bank bonuses and tax avoidance from multi-national corporations. Then it doesn’t matter whether squatters are middle class students rebelling against their “oppressive” parents, anarchist punks or free education activists taking over luxury buildings. If wealthy property owners are careless enough to leave houses vacant for years and do nothing about it, then it is hardly surprising if cuckoo’s fly in and expect to be taken care of by the wealthy.

Related Articles

Related Articles

Nationalism is a Created Product

01/25/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

After attending the Pioneering Painters exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, I began to question why I never learned about the Glasgow Boys at school. Radical, bold and fervently European in their outlook, the Glasgow Boys represent a new progressive Scotland. But the movement remained off my cultural radar until I attended Glasgow University and stumbled upon their works at the nearby Kelvingrove Museum. On re-examining their most radical and exciting works at the Royal Academy of Arts, I drew an immediate contrast with Burns Night.

Reflecting back on my primary school days in Aberdeenshire, I vividly remember my P6 teacher’s poetry recital classes with ‘A Man’s a Man for all That’ being the proverbial jewel in the crown. With my Anglo-Irish vowels, I always dreaded Burns week and felt extremely self-conscious that I couldn’t recite verses in guttural Doric like my Aberdonian peers. While I eventually grew to admire some of Burns vernacular gifts, I have remained curiously ambivalent about Burns Night. It always felt somewhat contrived to me. Almost like a post-modern image of Scottishness that bears no relevance to day-to-day life.

Burns Night is arguably the biggest literary event in the world with an estimated 9 million people participating last year. A typical Burns night has poetry recitals, bagpipes and three courses of traditional Scottish fair, which usually involves cock-a-leekie soup, haggis, neeps and tatties and a complimentary dram. With the greatest respect this dour cuisine is certainly not the most alluring of European dishes. If there is a Scottish restaurant in Rome or Barcelona then I certainly haven’t seen one. All the while the Haggis represents a comic sentimental image of Scotland and I find it deeply regrettable that a foul peasant condom is our national dish when the nation’s glens, forests and lochs are home to some of the finest game and fish in Northern Europe.

Whereas other countries define themselves around wars, revolutions and kings, Scotland remains a stateless nation and embraces cultural nationalism to exert her identity. Burns Night remains consistent with the twee sentimental image of Scotland constructed by Sir Walter Scott in the 19th century. After nearly two hundred years of progress, Scotland is still renowned for its kilts, whisky and majestic Highland landscapes. Anyone walking past a triumphant Visit Scotland billboard will be in no doubt of the country’s national identity. What is fascinating is that the Glasgow Boys emerged towards the end of the 1870s and radically vowed to challenge the sentimental Victorian obsession with the Highlands.

By challenging this twee conservative vision of Scotland, I found inspiration from the Glasgow Boys exhibition that there is an alternative to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. The Glasgow Boys were bold, radical and experimental painters, whose stunning collection of works represent a genuinely progressive movement. A collection of artists that dared to look towards the Mediterranean and Japan for inspiration instead of turning inwards towards the Highlands.

What I find surprising is that the Glasgow Boys remain a quirky afterthought in Scottish culture. If I hadn’t stumbled upon their paintings in the Kelvingrove Museum, then I could easily have remained ignorant of their existence. A truly confident country should look outwards for inspiration and I see no reason why the Glasgow Boys shouldn’t be universally affiliated with Scotland like Dali, Gaudi and Picasso are with Spain. It is deeply regrettable that this radical confederation of painters have been unable to impose a greater cultural influence in their own country. Robert Burns remains Scotland’s most iconic and influential poet but anyone tucking into their Haggis tonight should be under no illusions that nationalism is anything other than a created product.

Related Articles
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: