TRANSPORTS OF FAT

I suppose, but hope never to know personally, a paradigm shift in human activity. I mean the sort of drastic change an IED or high velocity weapon might make to a fighter in one of silly wars now going on. Two legs to no legs say, just now wheels and levers and springs can restore some things, but you will not unlike some physically simple lizard, or see the like of that leg again. Not really.

I might have been unlikely to shear off a limb in my previous profession, lecturing, unless in the trowel trades, was physically very safe “most” of “us” aren’t usually expecting to die going to and from the 9 to 5.

Nowadays “it”, progressive decline in physical capacities and capabilities, is likely to creep on us slow, and we may not notice until we have to begin to make compromises.

Today, if I wanted to walk up the road that I live on and get a quarter of a mile up a suburban hill to the doctors’ surgery at the other end, I reckon that I’d have to stop briefly twenty times or so to rest, standing, propping myself against garden fences, pillars, bark peeling urban plane trees and other miscellaneous bits of street furniture. In May 2010 I could manage this modest promenade unaided, by September I would be nearly out of breath every time that I stopped. I would fear falling if I tried to push myself on even a few more paces before stopping.

It is now also tough for me to get back up to standing if I fall. I can roll over onto one side, get onto hands and knees but, without support to pull myself upright I’ m liable to stay down there amongst all them crawlers as if I had somehow unevolved.

Perhaps unevolution is what is happening, instead of sudden dramatic changes to some sort of human supremacy, a slow tide of blubber inexorably rises up the food chain and down again bringing an assorted flotsam of disease and unease with it.

Don’t mean to knock blubber though, it does suit several cetaceans fine and I’m sure lights and heats well planned fat festivals in the far far north.

There have also been artistic hymns or projects devoted to the benefice of that fat. I know of how to German artist Joseph Bueys portrayed and used the lard and felt that saved him after a plane crash in a Russian war.

Fat is fine as fuel, and how much resources of fuel to carry us is always a judgement call and many hikers and cyclists always carry a bit of food and drink just in case of bonk, injury, exhaustion or the weather closing down on the open moor. However only insane persons hike cairngorms carrying whole dead cows on their backs, they might experience a moment of warmth as the huge lump of dead cattle collapsed on top of them as their knees gave. And then be smothered to maggots’ meat under crows’ beaks.

If we’re carrying more fat that we can mobilise and use then we lose, but it’s tough if you don’t carry enough.

This slogan is for sale to passing lard makers.



TRAINSPOTTING IS OUT

Hospitalisation can reduce you to bus-spotting

This is not a hobby that I have followed since before my puberty

Then to demarcate my burgeoning character

Perhaps to establish myself as slightly, but “warmly” eccentric,

(Although not actually insane)

I refrained from spotting trains.

There were steamers in them days

Roaring out of London to Brighton on special occasions

Down the cutting out of Clapham Junction

Fire on the footplates and sparks in the sky

This was the dawning of the end of age of Cuneo,

You know that oil painter producer bloke

Who used to make depictions of such things as

“The Royal Constitution hauling a Pullman out of Victoria”

And he’d paint a little mouse sitting in

One corner of his vast throbbing steam engine porn canvas

Even then I knew

That It was much better to watch the

Ordered proletarian movement of buses

Than such Tory farrago

Mind you this predated the RMT’s

(Which Red Ken and new-fangled modernists depict as the traditional London bus),

Thinner knife like RTL's sliced down London roads

And a last herd of hissing clanging electric trams

Hung on in in the Finsbury park tundra

Like a herd of mammoths calling out subsonically to extinct kin

Whilst none existed nearer than Blackpool

Everything always reeked of nicotine

All parts of public transport

Were like moving human kipper factories

No wonder fifty years later

That my longs are shot

I used to travel around on that lot

And filled my tubes

On smoke filled tubes too

So now this is what I am reduced to

Bus spotting through a hospital window.



UNDERGROUND DISASTERS

Two disasters always come to my mind as I leave the surface grid behind and descend into the Tube. I feel that I should feel safe down the tube like most Londoners do. It’s our transport system; it was almost a womb where deep shelterers returned to sleep out fascist bombardments.

That’s a decade before my birth, of course and there have never been bombs since in quite the same way; the acts of attempted terror that there have been, have been almost random, aimed at symbolic impact and apparently directed by an ignoramus as though a surgeon was using a blowlamp to mend the circulation of a snowman.

No consolation of course if you or yours were one of the poor people next to the rucksack bombs, but there doesn’t, (thank god/s), seem to be any satanic will intent on exterminating us all forever. The tube is generally safe. Unsavoury but safe, yet two incidents stand out for me.

They are the Moorgate crash and the Kings Cross fire.

Nobody really knows what happened in the former

On 28 February 1975 a southbound Northern line tube train smashed into buffers at Moorgate station, in the tunnel end beyond the platform. The cars sandwiched, killing 46 people with 74 seriously injured. Some are still saying driver suicide, some argue for tiredness causing an industrial accident and there may be other explanations.

In the case of Kings Cross some would name the culprit as the ignited end of a cigarette or a match, but it could have been a burning pipe dottle or cigar butt. And whoever dropped the burning item is unlikely to have been responsible for accumulating several decades worth of grease, lint, shreds of paper and skin detritus that were left to marinade together under a wooden escalator a major railway terminus and interchange. In summary The King's Cross fire broke out on 18 November 1987, and killed 31 people. The fire started in an escalator shaft serving the Piccadilly Line, which was burnt out along with the top level of the deep-level tube station.

So why harp on about these two instances of terrible incompetence? why do I remember them? perhaps that it’s hard to like voluntarily going down a hole in the ground when the sun is shining up above? (or even when it isn’t?)

Or maybe that on the night of Kings Cross, a cyclist got rained off the road in a downpour and wished he had had the sense to leave his Dawes Super galaxy in the garage and also had parked himself on a warm dry train. That is he wished that until he stumbled sodden into a pub lounge and saw the news on the Lounge bar telly.

Wounds heal, but some Londoners probably still remember these meanings of Moorgate and Kings Cross. Another sky rises for survivors, who make whatever compromises that they can. Leaves grow again on trees, trees grow again in woods and some song birds sing some songs. Only in the case of London it was sometime around the 1970’s and ‘80’s that house sparrows vanished or began vanishing.

Being a really crap amateur ornithologist, much too fond of descending into tube tunnels in search of money and re-emerging dead drunk; the author can form no clear recollection of when he realised that house sparrows had gone. He penned a mawkish ode to this avian absence at some point in the 1990’s, but looking, back, realises that the little birds could have been on the way out long before that.

Father had a big semi-detached in the then posh end of Fulham, near Putney Bridge, Hurlingham, he annoyingly insisted in calling it. Before I left to train as a psuedo-marxist at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970, I can remember every late spring and summer, going round the side and back passages of the house shovelling up dead sparrow fledglings, broken eggs and nest fragments that had fallen from the eaves above. I repainted the whole house in about 1981 and can’t remember evicting sparrows then, but the annoying tory stock broker, who lived next door, had a nest of House Martins up in his gables. They left piles of excrement in his front garden as a practical per-cursor of eco-socialism. but I don’take this cheap political point merely in fishing around for some kind of link between House Sparrow disappearance and the unburying of Chilean miners in October 2010.

Ah, I know human caused climate change! There it is

Except that what I might have here is some sort of poetic analogy about re-emergence from underground into a different world and/or wandering about in a state of pissed self-obsession for a couple of decades, getting old whilst global eco-political tides don’t sleep.

There area gaps in this and possibly small colonies of house sparrows still around in London live in them. I can think of a couple of places where I can regularly expect to find them which don’t seem markedly different to most of the places where I don’t, unless I am being subjected to systematic deception by very similar Tree sparrows that are unassociated with the Chilean mine disaster of 2010, which, as a piece of conceptual art was something else.

Most of the TV footage was actually of a winch-wheel revolving on top of a steel tripod again a background of barren Atacama mountainside.

I have a really short attention span as far as really conceptual art is concerned. Say: “this is a Pipe”, or “this is an Oak tree” and can undefinitely respond immediately “Yes/no, On/off” just like a cat in a box.

If someone had made a video installation of the Chilean mine rescue and stuck it in a corner of the Tate Modern or somewhere, I doubt if I’d have managed even to pay three minutes attention to it. I’d rather look out of the window at the barges on the river Thames, and think about shit.

Having observed and conceptually considered these vessels I could then compare and contrast them with the events which fascinated me when I watched the Chilean mine rescue on TV.

In both cases I can see containers, carefully made and designed to be strong, secure and not to break, fracture or leak; being transported with the aim of keeping the contacts in tact to a place where the way in which these contents exist, physically and socially, can be changed.

The cargoes of those Thames barges that being towed seawards is literally being rubbished, that decision was probably made for most of it when Londoners threw it away before it even got to the barges, but somewhere up the estuary, east of Canary Wharf the barge cargoes may get uploaded and sorted, some of them end up in the holds of freighters with opening bottoms, built especially so that Londoners can take a collective dump somewhere out in the North sea.

In hospital waiting rooms, pubs and cafes along the Edgware Road (the old Roman Watling street, a major artery of London), I watch the Chilean wheel turning, slowly. Had a Goldsmith’s artrepreneur devised this as artwork, there might not have a continuing long stream of not quite inconsequential verbiage about such things as mining in Chile and South America in general, who was President of Chile, who was President of Bolivia etc, etc. Then there was a change and what the winch was hauling up came up out of the Shaft. A long thin metal cylinder, which was, (according to the commentators, or an interviewed expert), just wide enough to take a man inside. An external diameter of just 54 cms (21 inches) according to the Telegraph on line , a factoid that made me, a fat man up on the surface fearful.

Maybe on the first couple of ascents, the TV did not show actual rescued miners emerging, but once it seemed clear that the the winch was going to bring the men out alive, then they were shown.

Their journey and destination was the opposite of the Thames barges. They were being de-rubbished. They had been buried in the ground, were found and were now being resurrected. It was not just upward physical, but social, mobility as well. They went down the pit as ordinary miners who no-one particularly knew of or attended to and emerged as celebrities who might never have to work again.

Sadly a piece of conceptual art is a bit of a one-trick pony, (as opposed to conceptual art as a whole, probably initiated by Magritte and/or Duchamp and then repeated by ignoramuses uneducated at Goldsmiths in the early 2oth century). The idea of burying chambers full of people under the Tate Modern for a month and then winching them up one by one to be the focus of some sort of ceremony would be a winch winder and maybe a money spinner. Participants could perhaps be awarded something for not striking by Margaret Thatcher or more likely by Jordan.