The Ruination of London

I was going to write a blog post about what's happening to London, but Alain de Botton has summed up the problem far more eloquently than I ever could in this excellent short film:



I don't agree with everything he says. There is a place for the occasional 'fun' building and the view from the Shard is one of the most exhilarating experiences I've had in recent years. But if developers have their way, that view will become an increasingly depressing one, as a great, historic city gradually becomes subsumed under a tidal wave of skyscrapers.

I had hoped the the global recession would call a halt to this madness, but instead London has become more attractive than ever to investors, few of whom have an emotional investment in the wellbeing of the city. London has effectively become a high class hooker, flaunting its wares before a parade of wealthy clients.

But I'm now in danger of writing the blog post that I said I wasn't going to write, so I'll stop now.

The Mild West

I have just returned from the first family holiday we've had in three years. It lasted for two days, which was quite enough for everyone. It seems extraordinary that my childhood holidays were always a fortnight long.

One of my earliest memories is of a disastrous stay in rural Wales, where my parents had booked bed and breakfast on a remote farm. It rained for the entire two weeks and the holiday felt more like penal servitude.

The farm's owners rarely spoke English and regarded our presence as a necessary evil, although when the weather was particularly bad, we were once invited to watch an episode of 'The Virginian' with them. 

We never went back. The following year, we began the first of many successful holidays at a caravan site in Devon, where I befriended two girls and their younger brother. We got along so well, our parents decided to synchronise their holidays. I have many happy memories of Enid Blyton-style adventures involving deserted cottages, poachers and secret dens.

When the holiday began, the two weeks ahead felt like an eternity and we gladly turned our backs on the dreary, monochrome existence of our real lives. Local landmarks became old friends: a telephone box, a garage with a blue door, a wonky road sign and prehistoric tumulus in the distance. As we approached the caravan site after a day out, my mother would say "We're home."

The long summer holiday was a gift I wanted to give to my children. It never occured to me that the prospect of spending two weeks in an idyllic setting, exploring the countryside and beaches, would be anyone's idea of hell. However, children on the autistic spectrum hate a break in their routine.

When I broached the subject of a holiday with my son, I felt as if I was brokering a deal as challenging as the Greek debt repayment. In the end, we agreed that two nights would be acceptable as long as the hotel had wifi and wasn't further than 120 miles away.

It was a plus point that we were returning to Dorset, as my son would know what to expect. I didn't mention that the hotel was 800-years-old, as that would probably be a bad thing in his book.

Golden Cap, the second highest point on the south coast of England

Dorset was as pretty as I remembered it, but many of the traditional family-run shops have been replaced with chi chi cafes, artisan bakeries and places selling rather poorly-executed paintings. It looks as if the London diaspora has reached Dorset and the rhotic r has been replaced by the 'flat white'.

If I had my way, I'd reintroduce smocks and pitchforks, with penalties for anyone who didn't say their rrrs and oiz properly.

A strange rock formation that vaguely resembles a porpoise's head

Lyme Regis harbour

Overall, the holiday was a success. There were a few wobbles and I felt sorry for my younger son when a fossiling trip came to an abrupt end, but most of the time we managed to achieve something that faintly resembled a normal family holiday. When we returned home, our older son said that he would like to do it again.

P.S. I've become a big fan of Instagram recently, so here are a few pictures from the trip:

Lord of the Dance

Some time ago I mentioned the Lewes Dancing Man - a gentleman who is something of a local celebrity. If you look him up on YouTube, there are several videos that show the full majesty of his talents.

I first came across him in a pub, ten years ago. To begin with, I barely noticed the man in his 50s, sitting alone at a nearby table, staring into a pint of Harvey's. Then someone selected a Rolling Stones song on the jukebox and he was up, performing a highly individual dance routine.

I thought the Lewes Dancing Man was unique, but this morning I discovered a new pretender to the throne:

The dance moves are quite similar (albeit with a lot less legwork), which suggests that LDMII is either an understudy to the original or that this is how we'd all dance if we weren't worried about looking silly. The band - an excellent group of young men called the Ouse Valley Collective - were suitably bemused.

I would rather walk through a building on fire than dance in public and looked at the new Lewes Dancing Man with more than a little envy, as he seemed so unihibited. My wife suggested that this was because he was mentally ill. I wasn't entirely convinced.

But even if the new LDM does have a few 'issues', give me a madman any day over some of the clinically sane people who have appeared in the news recently for various reasons

If only they'd embraced their inner Lewes Dancing Man, we might all be better off.

An Odd Day Out

There is a splendid museum in a place called Amberley that contains an eclectic collection centred around Britain's industrial and rural heritage. If you're interested in Edwardian light bulbs, brick making or 1930s fire engines, I can thoroughly recommend it.

I'm not, but I still loved it.

On busy days, dozens of odd-looking families visit the museum, all armed with tupperware packed lunches and SLR cameras. Sometimes I hear snatches of conversations, usually conducted in a slightly nasal accent: "Of course these were the last D759s to be manufactured in Northampton, but the D80 was basically the same engine..."

Many of the exhibits are really quite boring, but in a sense that is part of their appeal.

The machines that operated the hidden infrastructure of daily life - telephone exchanges and power station control panels - have an unexpected beauty about them and it's hard not to feel impressed by their complexity and elegance.

Artists have paid homage to the machine age, but in the end it is the machines themselves that have ended up becoming works of art in their own right.

I may be a philistine, but I would rather look at a display of antique telephones than a gallery of Greco-Roman sculptures, with their uniform blank expressions and unfeasibly small genitalia.

However, I'm not just there for the knobs and dials. On quieter days, the place becomes more like a post-apocalyptic theme park, almost completely deserted, full of rusting, abandoned machines and makeshift settlements:

This is a camp for itenerant bodgers, making chair parts from unseasoned wood, usually for a pittance. The last bodger bodged over 50 years ago, but the craft is being revived by a small group of devotees.

The shelter looks as if it could belong to the future as much as the past.

With a little tweaking, the whole place could be relaunched as a Walking Dead-related theme park. It would be more exciting than the current exhibition devoted to electricity substations (although I suspect that the school visits would dry up).

I was rather taken with the makeshift camps and imagined making a rabbit stew on a chilly autumn day, listening out for the ominous crack of a twig, but my post-apocalyptic fantasies were bought to an abrupt end by the appearance of some beautiful damsel flies.

I think some of them may have been mating. It's hard to tell.

Amberley Museum is set in some beautiful surroundings, but the idyllic setting belies the fact that the place once looked like a poor man's Mordor, with smoke bellowing out of the local lime kilns. Limestone was quarried from these cliffs and burned with coal to make lime, which was then used to make the acidic soil of other counties more fertile.

The traces of a railway line next to the kilns can still be seen, compounding the sense of dereliction.

However, I'd be doing Amberley Museum a disservice if I over-egged the post-apocalyptic pudding.

The museum should appeal to anyone who is even vaguely interested in social history and although some of its galleries are a bit on the 'specialist' side, there are others that are remarkably evocative.

I loved this reconstruction of an early 20th century office, where nobody would have been required to be a "team player" or feel "enthusiastic" (whatever happened to diligence, honesty and punctuality?).

I also enjoyed being alone in this Southdown Buses booking office, below, trying to picture myself in the 1930s. If I'd been 10 years old, I would have had no problem losing myself in a fantasy about being a gentleman detective, but sadly I've lost the imagination I once took for granted.

Amberley Museum has a particularly good Science Museum-esque electricity gallery, with hands-on displays to entertain younger visitors and a collection of household appliances to jog the memories of older ones: 

This prewar electric bar fire is remarkably versatile. Not only can you use it to make toast, but it also heats up a copper kettle for a nice cup of tea. It never caught on. I suppose some health and safety killjoy pointed out that electricity and water weren't a good combination. Either that, or someone came a cropper as they were preparing their afternoon tea.

I recognised several things from my past: a spin dryer, a television with three channel buttons, an old radio with evocative names like Athlone, Moscow and Paris on the dial and, more suprisingly, a late 90s Nokia mobile phone. Each one transported me back to a particular time and place.

One day, 18 years ago, I left work and got in my car, placing a carrier bag in the passenger seat. After a minute of seraching for the right tape to listen to on the journey home, I became aware of a tiny voice emanating from the carrier bag. It was saying "Hello? Hello?"

I tried to reconcile the reality of the voice with the impossibility of anyone or anything being inside the bag. Was I going mad? I didn't feel mad, but I suppose the truly insane rarely do. The voice continued: "Can you hear me?"

It was my wife's voice. Somehow, she had been shrunk down to the size of a toy soldier. There was no other explanation.

At no point did I ever consider that I might have accidentally phoned my wife on my new Nokia phone. I'd never owned a mobile phone before and was unaware that it could do this. I felt very silly afterwards and forgot all about it until I saw the phone again. It looked so big.

But I digress.

To return to the point, Amberley is a gem of a museum, thoroughly eccentric and quite unlike anywhere else I have been, with the added bonus of being set in beautiful surroundings. Even the dullest displays had their own strange appeal and I enjoyed the feeling of being immersed in a quieter, bygone world.

In an age when so many places have been fully 'monetized', with overpriced chi chi cafes and movie franchise-related displays, it's a pleasant surprise to find somewhere that isn't afraid to be boring. Long may it remain that way.