the-windowproject

[the-windowproject]

Make me a mechanic

The workshop for the bike mechanic course is tucked in an estate off Caledonian Road. I arrive on The Beast, my much-used tourer of six years. Its frame is peppered with scratches and there’s a small dent from where, I guess, someone tried to steal it. Never has it had a full service.

The course tutor is David, an aviation engineer turned bike mechanic. David’s perceptions are grounded in physics. He is wedded to rules, logic and formulas: there’s always a right or wrong, a yes or a no in David’s world. Dissembling and reassembling objects are second nature to him, something I’ve never experienced. Still, over the next two days, David attempts to impart this approach to me as I get hands on with the bike.

And I’m curious to learn. A long-term cyclist, I can still only do the basics (i.e. fix a puncture, replace a chain): anything that involves cables continues to daunt me. I’m here also for professional reasons. I work part-time at Wheely Tots, a charitable cycling start up. While my job is largely desk-based, better knowing my way around a bike will undoubtedly support my work.

My fellow students hope to use the course to encourage others to get on their bike as Wheely Tots’ ambassadors and freelancers: Jimmy, a health support worker, Armagan, a yoga teacher, Ana, a Montessori educator, and Gail, a Wheely Tots’ session leader and cycling instructor with 20 years’ experience.

We gather round David as he explains the course set up. I get the impression that the workshop is his sanctuary. The walls are lined with tools, each with a place of their own. Strip lighting bounces off the pristine metal worktops. Down the middle is a row of bikes on stands: bikes that remain in this strip-lit environment, never to be splashed with mud or rain. Tyres that don’t meet tarmac or grass. Instead, hand after amateur hand fiddle with these bikes, eyes under furrowed brows study their parts, trying to figure out how they work.

It is on these bikes that I index gears, remove a tyre without tyre levers, take off and put on a chain, attempt to true a wheel (so hard!), take out and replace ball bearings in a wheel, adjust brakes and check a headset.

It’ll take me a few more goes to really embed these skills into my muscle memory. But here are some of my points of learning, aimed mainly at my fellow novices. They come with the caveat that the bike mechanic in your life may well contest them:

Don’t use M*ck Off to clean your bike. Apparently the fish don’t like it and washing up liquid is gentler on the environment and just as good.

David recommended cleaning your chain every 60 to100 miles. There’s such a thing as a chain cleaner, though I tend to use an old toothbrush.

On the topic of chains, it’s easy to mis-grease them. Rather than drenching the whole thing in lubricant, grease the bits between the links and wipe off excess with a clean rag. Also, you’re aiming for the parts of the chain that connect with the sprockets (the metal discs with teeth that the chain sits on), so better to grease along the top of the lower part of the chain. According to David, rapeseed oil is up to the task.

I finally learnt what a group set is (basically brakes, gears, chain, cranks, and all the connecting cables). Armagan poetically described it as the bike’s nervous system, while the frame is its skeleton.

When you look at the cassette (the collection of sprockets your chain moves up and down on), you can think of it as a mountain: high (gears) at the top, low (gears) at the bottom. As a person who does not retain this vocabulary without an aide memoire, this is really helpful for me.

The adage ‘rightly tightly, lefty loosey’ left me in a confused, frustrated mess at times, because whether you go right or left depends on the position of your hand. Better for me to think clockwise to tighten, anticlockwise to loosen.

Precision is pretty important. Though my brother, a bike mechanic, dismissed the need for torque wrenches.

On that note, being an effective mechanic is less about strength and more about being tuned into your senses. “Soft hands,” David kept saying. Incremental adjustments can be all that you need. In fact, the fewer unnecessary twists and turns you perform on your bike, the less wear and tear its components will sustain. Makes sense.

This is a good place to go for sound information, albeit Shimano-centric. (David doesn’t tolerate much of ‘the rubbish on YouTube’)

Since doing the course, I’ve conducted an informal survey with a few of my friends (all male interestingly) about their approach to bike mechanics. They alll freely admit that they’ve not known exactly what they’re doing when they’ve attempted to fix or service their bikes. This has led to them making some pretty fundamental mistakes, but is equally how the learning’s stuck. At one point, as I worked away at the gears, doubting my ability, David gave me some feedback and said, “We’ll make a mechanic out of you.” It’s not an innate skill: it’s about confidence and practice.

I also have a renewed connection with The Beast. Each time David introduced a topic – the importance of a clean chain, brake adjustments - my thoughts would stray to my bike and I would add another item to a mental to do list. I feel like I understand the machine better and therefore - fingers crossed - I won’t allow niggles to persist for as long as I previously have. And maybe I’ll finally replace that saddle.

[the-windowproject]

Lloyd Corporation - Local / Global at Carlos / Ishikawa

I find it strangely comforting walking into a carpeted gallery space. Although the carpet here is in shades of forest and lime green, too lurid, perhaps for a home. Neat rows of metal chairs upholstered in salmon pink fabric face a small raised stage, on which there’s a film playing on a screen.

I take a seat in the second row of this pseudo hotel conference room and begin to watch a smartly dressed man with a tidy beard spooning cake into his mouth from a plastic plate he’s holding. He’s describing his career path and rise in fortune, boasting in fact. There’s another plastic plate and a huge thumb obscuring the bottom right hand side of the screen, owned by the unseen camera bearer, who this man is addressing. He bobs in and out of the frame and sometimes I’m watching only the lower half of his face. The sound cuts in and out, so there are subtitles. I learn that this guy used to work in restaurants, then became a teacher. He seems very pleased with himself, bearing a smug Cheshire cat grin as he describes his reputation. He quotes dizzying numbers – he claims he’s known by 3.3 million people as the Iron Man because of his work stamina; he apparently earns £35,000 a week.

I’m carried away, suddenly, jerkily, from Iron Man and the conversation. I look down briefly at the camera holder’s legs, shoes, and then I’m taken into the toilet with him, staring at a wood panel awkwardly while he pees. The camera sweeps past a row of urinals until finally I’m looking at a mirror above a sink and into the eyes of Ali Eisa.

Eisa is one half of artist collaboration, Lloyd Corporation. The other half is Sebastian Lloyd Rees. The pair met in 2010 while studying at Goldsmiths. Since then, their work has explored the paraphernalia and discourses around urban development and the global movement of capital, data and people. This show, Local / Global at Carlos / Ishikawa looks at the culture of OneCoin, a pyramid structure operating under the guise of a cryptocurrency, now hailed a scam. The film is a collection of footage that Eisa surreptitiously gathered using a spy pen cam at OneCoin events in, I assume, London.

As the film unfolds, I meet protagonists in the OneCoin cosmos, like Iron Man. Parts of the film capture the OneCoin promotion video and buoyant presenters, presumably those who have risen to the top of the pyramid. The atmosphere is jubilant at points, like when a speaker and the audience are shouting in union: “One Coin, One Life, Dealshaker!” These moments are heightened by the big, pulse-raising sounds of Rihanna and Coldplay, which are brought into clarity and flood the room and my ears.

The film avoids passing judgment on the people Eisa speaks to. Like the dodgy sound and haphazard compositions, it doesn’t present a complete narrative. Instead, you’re walked through vignettes of conversation and presentations which provide enough clues to build up a picture of OneCoin. These muffles and exclusions create cracks where questions about OneCoin mushroom. The film demonstrates the power of words to impress and legitimise, but their ultimate impotence to deliver tangible outputs. For example, Dr Ruja Ignatova, OneCoin’s founder who is frequently mentioned in the film, inspires trust because of her PhD and alleged stint at Oxford University. Roger, a New Zealander who joined OneCoin in 2015 with his wife, Rosemary, calls himself an ‘International Marketing Associate’. Your guess as to what that means is as good as mine.

At other moments, the people Eisa speak to seem to be convincing themselves as much as him, his gentle probes revealing gaps between their dream and reality. It becomes clear that Iron Man is not yet earning the £35,000 a week he quotes. “This year, I believe I’m going to be a multi millionaire. I can say that wholehearted,” he says. “Halfhearted,” he adds.

Meanwhile, an unnamed woman says to Eisa: “A lot of people think we con people. I can think, like, a lot of people con me. But unless until we jump in the platform and work on it, we never know.”

I consider what is driving these people: Greed. Aspiration. Desperation, perhaps. The air of exclusivity when invited into the fold. The promise of being part of a global financial revolution. A sense of social and global justice. Judging from their appearance and the interviews, many of the people at the events do not have British heritage or have English as a second language. OneCoin is described as a way to distribute wealth internationally. “We like to change people back home, their lives. We are global, we are one community. We can change the world…there will be a lot of millionaires in the Third World,” says one of the speakers, a woman who is on stage with her husband.  

The film stays with me all afternoon, into the evening and the following day. It’s fascinating and sad to hear people speaking what they believe to be the truth against this flimsy backdrop of promised prosperity and within this whirlpool of hollow words. It’s also hard to pinpoint the exact source and depths of the deception, and therefore the identity of victim and perpetrator is also unclear. Even though they will be looking to bring in new innocents to OneCoin, I find myself feeling sympathy for those who have been deceived, like Iron Man and the unnamed woman. Their vulnerability is as palpable as their hope. Of course, Lloyd Corporation themselves are performing their own kind of deception through this unsolicited filming. While the film brings into sharp focus the essence of a recognisable scam, its inherent ambiguity hooks you in and lingers on far beyond its twenty minutes.

[the-windowproject]

Bank Holiday Britain

We meet not long after 9am and find that St Pancras is as busy as any other Monday morning. A different kind of frantic though. No suits. More exposed skin. Today is the hottest early May Bank Holiday recorded and people are fleeing the city.

 Long lines for the ticket machines mean that we only just manage to board the crowded fast train to Kent, dotting ourselves and our bikes in ones and twos across the carriages. We intend to get to Eastbourne by late morning, visit the Towner Gallery, cycle the sixteen-odd miles to Hastings before heading home with bellies full of fish and chips.

 The first hurdle we encounter is the shuttle train at Ashford International which we were counting on getting us to Eastbourne. Poised at the start of its journey, the two carriages are packed tightly with people in shorts and t-shirts. There’s already a crowd spilling out on the platform awaiting the next train which is a whole hour away. We swivel around our bikes and abandon Plan A.

 On the advice of a polite and well-meaning guard, we decide to go back on ourselves and head north to Tonbridge on a cool and spacious train. “Change there for Eastbourne. You’ll want platform three. There are lifts for the bikes,” he says.

 Once we’re on the move, it dawns on us that it will take at least another two hours to reach Eastbourne. The clear skies are tantalising and we are itching to make the most of our early start, so we settle on alighting at the closer Stonegate. From there, it will be a short ride to Heathfield where we’ll meet the Cuckoo Trail, a former railway track. This will lead us down to the coveted coast.

The midday heat at Stonegate is startling. An unexpected climb out of the tiny village leaves us breathless and sweaty. On a fast descent, I slow down and swerve to avoid a nasty pothole, deep and jagged. My brother tells me afterwards that by doing this, I was almost responsible for a serious crash. For the rest of the day, I swallow down a mixture of dread and relief as I contemplate this.

 The same pothole leaves two team members with a puncture and a damaged derailleur. The repairs, followed by lunch, mean that we only find the mouth of the Cuckoo Trail at 2pm. But what a wonderful discovery. It’s almost flat, edged by trees which bathe us in shade. We eat up the miles easily and grab some pungent wild garlic on the way.

 Part of the trail leaves the track and winds through a housing estate. There, a gazebo-covered table laden with cakes and drinks emerges like an oasis, presided over by a group of women. Their wares include coca cola cake and mini Brussels sprout loaves. I conservatively go for fruitcake.

 Over pints of orange squash, Steve and I get chatting to one of the cake bakers. It turns out that this is a managed estate for older people. At 69, she is probably one of the younger residents.

 “We look out for each other,” she tells us. “Although the woman who lives in that house fell over recently. She pressed her pendant, but it took two hours for the ambulance to arrive. Two hours she was lying on the floor.”

 She explains her decision to move here four years ago. “When my husband and I first went to Hastings to raise our family, we saw the old people in big houses struggle. The gardens were the first to go, they couldn’t manage them. Then they’d get depressed seeing the thing they’d worked on all their lives decline.

 “Choose where you want to get old while you can,” she says. “You don’t want others choosing for you.”

 Fed and watered, we return to the trail. The vegetation soon thins out and the sea breeze begins to cool our faces. The final section consists of large, soulless roads flanked by retail units, so that it’s a surprise when we meet the edge of the land and the expanse of pale blue water fringed by a slope of stones in shades of bronze. To our right, Eastbourne’s Victorian architecture and pier are shrouded in grey-blue haze.

 Too late for the Towner, we instead fetch supper from the busy Dolphin Fish Bar, a few roads in from the sea front where a patient woman with a slightly glazed look on her face serves us and attempts conversation.

 I think about how I recently read that the fish and chips industry is experiencing hardship. Since the Brexit vote, the cost of fish has gone up and with the backlash against plastic, the industry is under pressure to use more expensive degradable packaging. Online deliveries are resource-heavy, as outlets can only dispatch one order at a time to prevent the fried wares getting soggy. We cruise back down to the beach to have dinner. When I unwrap my food, it is served in paper.

 Eastbourne Station is grand but quiet, speaking of its former significance as a destination for domestic tourism. We decide to try our luck and see if we can get on the two-carriage shuttle train to Ashford. A guard makes me wait on the platform while he watches the other bikes being loaded. “There’s not enough room for people, let alone pushbikes,” he says.

 I manage to get on though and we actually have plenty of space until we arrive in Hastings, where people pour and then shove their way in. From where I’m sitting, it’s difficult to see my friends through the limbs and torsos.

 As we pull in to another station, I watch the surprise play out on faces of those waiting on the platform when they see how we’re crammed in. “The powers that be should have put another two carriages on this service, but they didn't,” says the guard over the tannoy as people try and find space on this exceptionally busy train. “Please squeeze in and take up as little room as possible so that others can get home.”

 The guard is right: we all want to get home. Pink-cheeked and sated by sunshine, we’re tired with the greedy effort of drinking this three-day weekend dry. The proximity of our warm bodies on the bruised and tattered rail network feels somehow connected with the suffering fish and chips industry, the woman’s two-hour wait for the ambulance, and all the other aspects of public life that are being stretched and rung at the moment.

 From the other side of the window, I watch the low sun flicker through branches like rapid hand gestures. The trees give way to farmed land, where lines of mauve wheat are demure against the bright green grass. The light endures. We keep going.

[the-windowproject]

Lessons from 2017 and a few ideas for 2018

Some words to myself, and to you, about learnings and unlearnings.

Learning from 2017 

People are generous. If you ask someone to help you with something specific, they often say yes.

Going on holiday alone is liberating. It’s important to take the right reading material though, as this will really colour the experience. A tome containing a story about child abuse and self-harm can make the world seem very dark, especially on a rainy day in Penzance. Patti Smith’s M Train, however, is a wonderful companion. She’ll be your funny, sage friend telling you all about her adventures. Her writing is full of compassion and attention to the smallest detail, and she reminds you to listen to your instincts, always. You might also be tempted to move to New York and drink black coffee all the time.

You never need to buy rosemary. Just find a front garden near you with a plentiful supply.

Being honest can help you sleep more soundly. But it should be honesty from a solid, kind place that won’t collapse or curdle in the face of someone else’s honesty. Because honesty seems to beget honesty.

It’s a great idea to wash your duvet from time to time. 

Professionalism takes many guises. It can be someone quietly investing every bit of spare energy, time and money they have into a creative practice for no other reason than they must.

Unlearning from 2017

After a lifetime of not believing sci-fi or crime fiction is for me, I’ve given - and continue to give - it a go.

The things that seem to make the people around you happy won’t necessary be the things that fulfill you. Nor will the things that make you happy stay the same. That’s fine. Admit to what you want. If this makes you squirm, you probably want it especially badly.

My festival days are not over. Hooray.

Being a writer has not transformed me into a serene, inherently wise, ever-articulate, sometimes slightly detached, but ultimately well-loved individual. At times, it feels like standing in a pokey changing room, too close to a mirror, trying on pair after pair of jeans that don’t quite fit. Some of the things that being a writer does involve are: self-doubt, self-belief, having lots of ideas (most of which I do nothing about), constant questioning, writing a lot of crap and some moments of joy. For me, at least.  

Cheese is not a central pillar to my existence. I can live without it quite easily, even as a pescetarian on holiday in Germany.

The Rhythm of the Night is not a bad song. In fact, it’s a great tune for New Year’s Eve.

For 2018

Taking a leap into the unknown is wholesome and thrilling. You feel the air under your feet and use muscles you have forgotten about. Being prepared to actually fall into the safety net beneath you may take a few extra ounces of courage.

Sometimes it’s best to say no, even if the word feels like a load of 1p coins in your mouth.

Discrimination is so endemic that it’s perhaps not enough to believe in equality, or say you believe in equality. Discrimination is sometimes so subtle that you have to extra work hard to notice it, and then take a deep breath to challenge it. 

Leave the washing up for now. Just leave that cup on the side. Leave all the plates and bowls you use over the course of the day and do them in one go later. The world won’t end and you’ll save water. When you do finally pull up your sleeves, put on the radio and get lost in it.

[the-windowproject]

For now

It is one of those days that seem to last for ages. Where I forget about time, not checking the clock to decide how I should be feeling, or what I should be doing. It is particularly special because it is just a random Tuesday. Not a weekend, not a holiday. A day singled out from the normal routine. And, by chance, it’s sunny too, the last of the high pressure. A random sunny day in March.

On the train to Whitstable with my bike, I feel at one with the woman in a wheelchair, sitting with her daughters, who are middle aged. ‘Do you want to take your cape off?’ one asks her. ‘No. I’m not too hot, not too cold,’ she says contentedly, eating her sandwiches.

I find my friend Steve in Whitstable, hungover. We reflect on how babies rule: he hadn’t meant to get drunk last night but his friend, a recent new parent with a rare green card for a night out, had led him astray. And now: ‘I need some food! I need an oyster!’

In town, we stop at the independent bookshop where I buy an OS map, the second of my life. I don’t want too many, but this one goes all the way to Margate and covers the Isle of Sheppey, so I reckon it has juice for other trips. And then to Wheelers, an old oyster shop that Steve makes a beeline for. How does he know this stuff? His mind is like Wikipedia.

We chat with the woman, who is very friendly, and buy and sample quiche, oysters, tart and samprass, my first taste of this salty asparagus from the sea. I ask her how long she’s worked there and pain flashes across her pretty face when she says, ‘Too long.’ She lets the words hang for a bit, I let them hang too. And then she recommends us a route, the Crab and Winkle trail. ‘The Chocolate Box is the last place to get a drink until Canterbury,’ she cautions.

As we stand on the street and study the map, a smartly dressed man approaches us. ‘Excuse me. Can I help? I’m a local.’ He explains that we could get to the trail via the former location of the oldest passenger bridge in the world, now gone. ‘If I was cycling, I’d go that way. Next time you’re down, visit the museum. It’s open on Saturdays and tells you all about it.’

It’s about five minutes’ cycle to the Crab and Winkle trail. Steve gets cross with an aggressive jogger, who refuses to move from the centre of the track to let us pass. ‘Imagine being in the countryside, and angry? I bet there’s no one like that in New Zealand.’ Steve mentions NZ a few times today. It’s on his mind, because that’s where his girlfriend is from.

Halfway down the trail, which is part of a salt way – an ancient route for trading salt - we stop at a church, and get chatting to a man, a former maths teacher, who’s on his lunchbreak. Nearly everyday he walks to this bench; thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back. He loved teaching, helping adults who’d been traumatised by maths at school, in tears sometimes. Then, with his support, they realised that they could do it. But, he tells us, Further Education got buggered up after 1993 because of policy changes. ‘Totally shit,’ he says. I realise that sometimes it’s shocking when a stranger swears and that he is still disappointed, over twenty years on. We look out over a field, hoping to spot a skylark. The man says he’s wouldn’t be able to, on account of his eyesight, ‘Too many floaters.’ But then the three of us see one, flying vertically upwards, ‘larking’ loudly. We track it against the clouds.

In Canterbury, Steve and I visit the coffee shop by the bridge that we always go to. We take our drinks outside and watch a bossy man launch his boat trip with five passengers. ‘If you put your hand in the water, make sure you wash it before you eat anything.’ We learn from him, telling them, that a stour flows quickly, an ouse, like in Bedford, flows slowly. And then they disappear down the river.

Over lunch in a park, Steve and I talk about life, and how we try and make sense of the past, sometimes in a reductive way. ‘I don’t think you should look back and say you did it all wrong, that’s too black and white,’ he tells me. ‘Maybe you needed to do that at that time.’

We plan our next moves, using the map. It was only seven miles on the Crab and Winkle trail, and we want to get some distance in our legs. So we will head further south and east before going north.

Before leaving Canterbury, we stop at the oldest Christian church in England. Walking through the grave stones, Steve begins to tell me about the time he received a bad review on Trip Advisor. A group of young people came into the bar on a Friday night, not long before closing time. One man was asking for music that they could dance to.  

We pause the tale when we go into the church, where we meet a woman who volunteers there, and who generously tells us the history of the building. A small part was originally built by the Romans ‘and that,’ she says. When Bertha, a Christian, came from France, it was gifted to her ‘and that’, again. Augustus arrived, and they needed more space, and built and extension ‘and that’. It is genuinely interesting.

Steve resumes his story when we leave the church. The man in the bar didn’t give specific examples of songs he wanted to dance to. So Steve told him he couldn’t fulfill his request and said, ‘It can take a while to know what you want, but you’ll find that life’s much easier when you do.’ We agree that this is definitely true, but that perhaps it’s not what a person who wants one last drink and a dance on a Friday night wants to hear.

Onto Fordwich, where we get confused by the river. Two guys give us the incisive but in practice hard-to-follow instructions: ‘Just go up the hill.’ Then in the next village, we stop to ask a man, his grandson and their dog for help. While the man gives directions, the boy repeats, ‘It’s just over there, behind the reserve.’ I let Steve absorb the information while I try and speak to the boy about his Spiderman jacket and his little toy, but he doesn’t want to talk to me.

On the man’s guidance, Steve and I set off down the roads, not the footpath, - ‘You’ll make quicker progress.’ – where we do, indeed, go beyond the reservoir the boy was referring to. And then, who knows the time, but it’s proper cycling now. Quiet, undulating country roads. Silence. Thoughts. Freedom. Hot. A bit thirsty sometimes. Steve leading, me behind. The odd comment, like Steve pointing to the auburn baby cows and saying ‘foals’.

Another village. A micro brewery (shut). A polite youth in a corner shop asks for any cigarettes that are cheap. ‘None of them are really cheap,’ replies the shop keeper. I buy a Whispa. I’ve eaten more than I’ve burned off today, I’m sure.

We hit rush hour on our way down, or up, into Herne Bay. The beach huts look gorgeous en masse. In a row, an appealing collection of stripes and patterns, shades of pastel mixed with vivid, bright colours. But on their own, they’re more vulnerable, worn-looking, and it’s hard to pick a distinct favourite when we try to. Steve talks about how out of season seaside towns, and particularly amusement arcades, are inherently sad to him.

I suggest we take the cycle route for the last bit, which hugs the coast. We get quite battered by wind and the sky is growing hazier with cloud cover. ‘I don’t normally cycle by the coast, it’s exposed,’ says Steve, but he still agreed to. ‘It’s a new weather system,’ he has to turn his head and shout this a few times for me to hear, because of the wind.

My legs are getting tired. And then, we are back at Whitstable. ‘Fancy a pint or shall we go back?’. It’s just the two of us in the craft beer place with the smart looking font. Steve tries four beers before settling, and the man is patient. Two pints, two bags of crisps, salty. Home, that song about love and adventures and memories and safety by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, comes on. It’s wistful and yearning, and it heightens how I feel right now, which is young and old at once. I keep feeling like this at the moment. It’s a happy and sad sensation. When I hear songs like that, when I experience the freedom of cycling, and existing outside time constraints, I feel somehow that it won’t be forever. Maybe I’ll not be able to do these things for much longer, or my friends won’t want to, or be able to. For now, though, we are sitting in a bar on a random sunny Tuesday in March. For now.  

[the-windowproject]

The view from a bench

Tottenham Green, midday, Saturday. I’m sat on a bench next to Peter, a long-term Haringey resident and member of the local Socialist Worker branch.

 I walked here via West Green Road, an unusual direction out of my house for me, but one that I rarely regret. There’s raw energy along this road, from the ground up; a few chain supermarkets are dominated by rows of small businesses. I pick up a potato gozleme from a smiling Turkish woman. Proprietors of barbers, cafes and mini marts stand at the entrance of their shops, surveying the sunny September morning.

 It’s shabby too, and there are signs of struggle. A man rams a cashpoint with the spike of his umbrella, another approaches him to see if he’s OK. As I near the green, someone is giving a leaflet to a woman that promises impossible financial abundance.

 Peter and I, along with a group that eventually swells to around 1,000, are gathered here for a march to challenge the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), a regeneration project which sees the borough’s Labour Council selling off huge swathes of its land and assets to enter into a long-term partnership with developers, Lendlease.

 Lendlease are behind the controversial Elephant Park in Southwark. The development sits on the site of the former Heygate Estate, which contained over 1,000 social homes; in the new development, only 82 homes out of 2,700 are available at social rent.

 Here in Haringey, the scale of the partnership between the local authority and Lendlease is unprecedented, worth around £2billion. There are huge and legitimate concerns that HDV – which many feel has not been duly consulted on - will lock the area into an irreversible development trajectory which will shrink its social housing stock and force its current tenants out of the area.

 The campaign against HDV is ongoing. I attended a march in July, on the evening of a meeting between the council and developers, which culminated in a crowd of us outside the Town Hall, disrupting the meeting with a clatter of pots and pans and a chorus of shouts. The event today precedes a crowdfunded hearing at the High Court on 24th and 25th October to challenge the council’s decision to proceed with HDV.

 I recognise a tall, elderly vicar from the July march, moving through the crowd and ringing a bell, a smile on his lips and in his eyes.

 ‘Ah, Paul Nicholson’, Peter says. He tells me that the vicar has been an important presence in Tottenham for the past forty years.

 I quickly realise that by sitting with Peter, I’m getting a valuable insight into a network of activism in this area and beyond. He seems to wave and say hello to every third or fourth person who walks past us, often murmuring names and details to himself. ‘There’s Sonia from SOAS, their cleaners had a great victory recently after ten years of campaigning.’

 One local woman stops for a chat. ‘Are you still doing jazz singing?’ Peter asks her.

 ‘Not at the moment. What are you up to?’

 ‘I’m retired now. Mainly doing climate change.’

 Next to us, the first speech of the day begins, kicking off the proceedings. ‘We want proper regeneration, we want consultation.’

 A dad with his two young children, one in a buggy, comes over and takes a leaflet from Peter. It’s about next week’s Socialist Worker meeting, which will focus on solidarity with Catalonia. ‘Great, I’ve been following this,’ he says.

 In return, he hands Peter a piece of paper about a march the next day at the Ledbury Estate in Southwark, where he lives. The council recently turned off the gas supply because of fire safety concerns, but are delaying installing heating pipes, resulting in inadequate living conditions for residents.

 ‘Old people are going to hospital, children are getting ill,’ he tells us. The march is to demand action from the council.

 Another speechmaker, resident of the nearby Cressingham Estate, is a woman in her eighties, well-established in the area. She’s talking about how demolition means dust, it means loss of health and early death. Hearing these stories, these realities, is heartbreaking.

 Peter, I discover, has been involved in activism for forty-eight years, supporting causes that both sit on his doorstep and extend to the other side of the world.

 ‘If there’s something I’ve learnt’, he tells me, ‘it’s to pick two or three things and do them well. Then you begin to build up credibility and people will join you.’

 People are milling among the plane trees, listening to the speeches, blowing horns, handing out leaflets. A restlessness to get going us building, although Peter cannot join the walk himself because he needs to get back to his flat to meet an electrician.

 Through an hour of his company, I am struck by his deep-seated commitment to people, to places, and his extraordinary knowledge. I notice that there aren’t many others my age here – and that I’m possibly one of the few who have come alone; observing Peter’s interactions, I see how key these networks, these relationships, are to sharing information and galvanising people. My networks don’t root down as far as Peter’s.

  I feel like London is stumbling, is breaking, is perhaps already broken in some places, and individuals and communities are falling through the cracks. The relationships are like threads, built up over time, taut, which are pulling some of the pieces together.

 ‘Nice to meet you’, I say to Peter as I get up to join the slow-moving crowd. It will soon turn down West Green Road, where I’ll see the proprietors again. This time they’ll be watching the march and holding the anti-HDV leaflets they’ve just been given.

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Health, nature, transformation

A few weeks ago, I attended the opening of Common and Garden at CGP Gallery, a show by the Bermondsey Artists’ Group. The exhibition explores ideas of togetherness and commonality in art and nature.

I got chatting to one of the artists, Caroline Gregory, who was collecting responses to the words ‘health, nature, transformation’ on small pieces of brown card for her piece. I took one, and promised to post it back with mine.

A couple of days later, I was on the road with my dad to visit my 97-year-old Grandma in Dudley. As far as I know, it’s the furthest west my family roots go. It’s sad to hear from Dad how the once thriving town has suffered as a result of the decline in industry, a nearby mega shopping centre and large, ugly roads that dissect and divide its heart. But that’s another story.

As we sped down country roads and through towns and villages that morning - Dad doesn’t really do motorways, ‘boring’ - I scribbled a few things in my notebook, with Caroline’s three words in mind. Later, I think influenced a little by the Rumi poetry I’ve been reading lately, I turned them into this and wrote them on the back of the postcard to send to her:

We’re cutting across the country, from east to west.                                              The road, the minutes, are swallowed up by the car. I’m in the passenger seat.                                                                                                                         Radio on: strings and brass and woodwind fill our space.                                      While we - me and you – sit often in silence.

It’s late summer.                                                                                                       Flowers bloom and drip from heavy hanging baskets.                 

Hints of autumn in the trees.                                                                                  At a glance, they look healthy; we understand the world through snapshots now.

Stop the car, get out, lie down next to the trees: cherry, oak, sycamore, ash. Words from a childhood.                                                          

Listen, with your eyes, your ears, your whole body.                            

Look, the branches on the ash are quite bare.                                                       If the trees could speak, what would they tell us?

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Impressions of Documenta 14

‘It’s my first trip to Documenta this year; I’m coming back next month. It’s impossible to take it all in over just a weekend.’ A German man who works in software shares words of wisdom with my friend and me.

He echoes our own feelings about this colossal exhibition, which is hosted in venues across Kassel every five years. It’s Sunday evening and after two days of looking at art, we’re totally saturated. We’d only popped into Torwache, a building covered in sacking where we met friendly software guy, on a whim. This show will close our first visit to Documenta and we’ve not seen half of the work.

We initially got talking to software guy about one of the displays in Torwache. Design for The Monument to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau is a set of drawings and models from 1957 which detail Polish architect Oskar Hansen’s proposal for the site of the concentration camp. Hansen’s beautifully simple concept rested on constructing a road that cut diagonally across Auschwitz; the rest of the space and buildings were to be allowed to naturally decay and become overgrown with plants.

Image: Michael Nast

Though Hansen’s idea was chosen by the panel, the proposal was eventually rejected because a number of survivors objected to it. They claimed that as the original buildings were obscured over time, it might become too easy to forget the victims. The piece bears questions about memory and remembering, decay and transformation, time and history, and persecution and displacement, some of the themes which reverberate throughout this year’s exhibition.

Documenta, now in its fourteenth edition, has never pulled away from difficult subjects. Set up by a group of artists and art enthusiasts in Kassel in 1955 in a fractured post-war Germany, it was conceived as a way to interrogate the relationship between art and society. In keeping with its provenance, references to German history and Kassel itself emerge throughout the show. Its curators draw heavily on theory and gather historical, modern and contemporary art from around the world to raise and explore complexities within our culture. Its ambitious scope and heavyweight subject matter is perhaps why it happens only every five years.

In Kassel, there are three main Documenta venues, which is where my friend and I focused our efforts: The Neue Neue Galerie, a former post handling space, Documenta Halle, which was purpose built for the 1992 edition, and the Neue Galerie, the most traditional museum environment of the three. Aside from these hubs, there are dozens of other venues scattered all over the city, as well as sculptures and installations across the public realm. This year’s ‘working title’ is Learning From Athens; for the first time, the exhibition has happened between two cities, Kassel and the Greek capital. Some critics have leveled that this decision overstretched the exhibition logistically and curatorially, resulting in a less coherent and satisfying experience. Still, this was my first time to Documenta and I was keen to make up my own mind.

Despite our pared down itinerary, it was still something of an endurance exercise. The Neue Gallerie was particularly dense and hosted what felt like a series of mini exhibitions across adjoining rooms. As well as a proliferation of film pieces, much of the work is text-heavy. For example, Maria Eichhorn’s Rose Valland Institute, is an ongoing project that traces the lineage and unknown whereabouts of art that was seized from Jewish families by Nazis. Her installation in the Neue Gallery contains detailed information about how Nazis moved and stored artwork along with interview transcripts, requiring careful concentration to process.

Image: Mathias Voelzke

Perhaps in response to this, I found myself drawn to more visual and experiential work. A few of the highlights include Polish artist Artur Żmijewski’s Realism, the final piece in the Neue Neue Gallery. The six-channel black and white film installation is made from footage of amputees; the men, landmine victims, unceremoniously strip down to their underwear and remove prosthetic limbs before performing exercises. Their graceful strength shows a resilience and discipline with which they have adapted to their new realities.

Image: dpa Picture-Alliance / Boris Roessler

Over in Documenta Halle – the sparsest and lightest of the three main venues - Mexican composer Guillermo Galindo has created hybrid musical instruments from two huge broken hunks of fibreglass boats, which were retrieved from the Greek island of Lesbos. They form part of Galindo’s larger project, Border Cantos, where he creates scores and transforms found objects from transient and often overlooked border crossings into vehicles for sound. Suspended from the ceiling and seen close up, the scratched and sea-worn relics highlight the forces that manipulate these journeys.

In the same space, Britta Marakatt-Labba’s Historja is an exquisite 23.5 metre long textile piece, telling the story of a landscape and its Sami inhabitants, an indigenous Scandinavian community, with embroidery. Her minimal and delicate needlework and limited colour palette somehow evoke the intricacies of the interconnected lives of its human and animal protagonists, and the landscape itself, over generations. There is fire and persecution, exhilaration and speed, death and love.

Image: Mathias Voelzke

The Neue Gallerie features artwork and archival material from the life of Lorenza Böttner. The transgender artist lost their arms in a childhood accident and went onto become a performer and visual artist, painting with their feet and mouth. They were often the subject of their own work, and the photographs and artwork are a joyful celebration of how Böttner constructed their identity, resisting sexual, medical and societal categorisations throughout their life.

Documenta itself is known for constantly challenging its scope, both artistically and institutionally, refusing to fall back on past successes or formula. Over the two days, I discovered artists I hadn’t encountered before and enjoyed the juxtapositions which connected experiences of marginalisation, resistance and sometimes pure courage across historical and geographical contexts.

At times, though, I got lost in the sheer weight of the information on display and the sense of curatorial authority behind it. I accept the fact that – like software guy pointed out - you could never truly absorb the five years’ worth of research and theory that have been poured into Documenta; the curators themselves concede the challenges associated with enabling agency in visitors to a ‘mega-exhibition’.

For me, Documenta was most successful when I was face to face with some of the universal contradictions which run through human existence – where I could think about the relationship between joy and tragedy; violence and vitality; vulnerability and strength. I wonder if the institution could do more to balance their formal, object-based display of ideas and knowledge with a contingent, experiential and spacious approach, where individuals can construct meanings and find a place of their own within the fabric of the exhibition.

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Angels

When I arrive in El Cotillo on Monday evening, it strikes me as charmless. Most of the buildings, seemingly variations of white cubes, stacked together, look new. I am tense, unsure about this holiday.

Tired and risk-averse after the journey, I go to look for some dinner. I see a small pizzeria and walk up to the entrance to have a look at what I think is the menu, and where a young couple are standing around a high table. The man looks at me with surprise. I realise I’m very close to them, giving the impression that I want to join them, and that the menu is, in fact, the opening hours.

Sorry! I say.

I see a playful glint in his eye, and get chatting to Ignacio and Martina from Venetto. We speak mainly in English, with some Italian and Spanish mixed in. Ignacio has large, clear blue eyes, often open wide. Curly, straw-coloured hair scraped back into a pony tail which shows off his high cheekbones. Limbs that swing languidly from his narrow torso. Martina seems more reserved at first. Long, straight, dark blond hair, eyes behind glasses, neck muffled in a red puffa jacket. But her face lights up when she smiles. They are both beautiful.

 When it arrives, they insist I try some of their pizza, which they approve as ‘OK’.

I ask how long they are staying here, which is indefinitely. They are camping by a beach. Each day they get up, run, swim and listen to a radio that they found in a square in the village. After a recent stint as a waiter, Ignacio tells me he’s waiting for the thing - when the rain comes, electricity - which will tell him what to do with his life. 

I laugh. The lightning strike! Me too. I’ve been saying that exact expression back home.

2016 was, among other things, the year I came out as a writer. It feels terrifying, but also comforting and familiar. Now I’ve come this far, I feel a fierce responsibility to nurture this achievement. It’s there, but it’s still fairly fragile. And there are no guarantees. I can sense that it’s going to take courage and a certain amount of change and instability. I am hoping the lightning strike, or maybe something less dramatic, will somehow guide me in my next moves.

Rather than describing myself as a writer, I often find it easier to say to people that I ‘do some writing’.

Sometimes others help me out; when I tell them about my writing, Ignacio says, I knew you were a writer when I saw you, from your energy. A writer or a painter.

They finish their food. Come and visit us on the beach, they say, after describing where it is.

When they leave, I realise I have relaxed. Internally I thank these angels.

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Tiny and Huge

On my first afternoon in El Cotillo, a small fishing village on the north-western tip of Fuerteventura, I walk along the coast to a lighthouse in the distance. Picking my way through the coves and around the lagoons, the landscape is like nothing I’ve seen before. Trees bow to the wind. The white sand is peppered with tiny dark stones and strewn with rocks in shades of dull-gold, rust and black, which I pick up to examine the holes. Piles of these rocks in triangle formations echo the velvet humps of the mountains in the distance. I can’t tell whether these are deliberately or accidentally placed.

I look down at my feet, spotting minuscule shells which are crushed underfoot to create the sand. There’s an abundance of tiny shoots poking their way up to the light. Plants seem hunched, tentative in Fuerteventura. They often spread out, multiplying almost amoeba-like, rather than stretching upwards. Succulents which drink seawater, with sturdy, pyramid-like structures. Spiky cacti, and sword-shaped leaves.  

The day feels sparse. The beaches aren’t busy; there are long stretches where I feel very alone, and other parts spotted with a few, mainly German, tourists. I pass a nude couple in their 60s playing bowls. 

I witness an epic life and death moment in miniature. A dun-coloured spider versus a thin almond-shaped black insect with flapping wings. Perhaps a kind of beetle, I wonder. In terms of size, they seem evening matched. The winged-beetle, however, perhaps has a larger repertoire of movement than the scuttling spider, whose colour suggests it needs to remain incognito from predators. I want to look away, but can’t. After a tussle, it looks as though the beetle administers some kind of death blow (poison? A bite?) to the spider, whose struggle becomes less urgent, until finally it’s still. The beetle leaves the spider for a moment. It makes loops in the sand until it finds what it’s looking for: a hole it pokes its body into. It makes its way back to the spider and drags it towards its home for a minute. Then leaves it again, to return to the hole. Back to the spider, pulling it along a bit further, then reminding itself of its destination one last time. Until just a few centimeters separate its lunch and its home. And  the spider is dragged down, perhaps to some kind of nest and offspring.

When I reach the lighthouse, there are a few people taking photographs, and a fishing museum, which is shut. Some information on a wooden board tells me I am in an area of outstanding natural beauty and paleontological significance. Another explains that because of the glut of invertebrates that inhabit the area, unseen to my eyes, there is a wealth of birdlife here. I see gulls sliding between wind currents. Small, dull brown finches, and a bird with twig-like legs and a long, hooked beak that flies away when I approach it for a photograph.

I pick my way across this strange, uneven landscape, like another planetary surface. Scorched, petrified, ragged. There are little pools filled with salt water that has almost dried out to a misty, icey solid. My footsteps on ancient rock. The history is huge; the sky is huge. I feel dwarfed. And connected.

The next day on a cycle ride into the dessert, a small yellow butterfly joins me briefly for lunch. And each night, in a sky void of light pollution, I see a polar star burning brightly beneath the crescent moon, which rests on its back. Delicacy and harshness; the tiny and the huge.

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Fresco; brutalism; temple; community centre; Catholicism; bling; festive shadows and reflections. 

Almost too bright sun to capture Bedford on Boxing Day.

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Turning towards maintenance

In 1969, in a haze of frustration, artist and new mother Mierle Laderman Ukeles sat on a broken chair she had failed to fix and wrote her manifesto for maintenance art. She was tired of the distinction between the art she made and the maintenance she did; between what she dubbed ‘development’ – the shiny, the brand new, the revolutionary, the visible - and ‘maintenance’ – the hidden, the repetitive, the unglamorous, the necessary.  

‘I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order),’ she wrote, ‘I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately I “do” Art.’

Since then, Laderman Ukeles has attempted to reconcile the divide she described by foregrounding maintenance as the subject of her art. In exhibitions, she’s done the washing, cooked for people, dusted, swept and waxed the space. She’s asked visitors questions about their relationship with maintenance. She’s organised for polluted air and water to be publically purified. Since 1977, she’s been the artist in residence at NYC’s sanitation department, and her project Touch Sanitation (1977–1980) involved her personally thanking over 8,500 of its employees.

Almost fifty years later, Laderman Ukeles’ concerns about the separation between these areas in our lives and across society remain urgent. As individuals, there is a pressure to acquire the latest everything, and we constantly seek ways to save time by outsourcing tasks like cooking and cleaning.

And maintenance is still undervalued and underpaid. The Maintainers conference earlier this year turned its attention to celebrating the sustainers who are often overlooked in favour of the innovators. As our welfare system contracts, a crisis of care is building, which disproportionately affects women; both those who work in the sector as conditions become more precarious, and those who fill the shortfall in state provision on top of other commitments.

The Walking Reading Group included Laderman Ukeles’ manifesto in our recent edition of four walks which focused the commons. Discourse surrounding the commons has gained tract as a potential means to challenge the grip capitalism has on us, by devising ways to pool, share and access resources which rely less on or sit outside of market structures. For example, Navarinou park, a collectively-managed open space in Athens which was established by locals following the financial crisis, or the self-organised working class women’s groups in shanty towns around Santiago, who initiated communal kitchens so that they could feed their families after Chile’s 1973 military coup.

During our forth and final walk, Laderman Ukeles’ manifesto was one of the texts we used to consider how commons are created and maintained - the act of commoning - as we made a lopsided figure of eight around London Fields during a heat wave. Our guest for the evening was Russell Millar, activist and founder of Hackney-based Tree Musketeers, a group who voluntarily care for trees in the borough.

The park was teaming with people on that warm evening. Among them, a few individuals roamed, responsible for picking up rubbish and ensuring that those using barbeques were in the designated area. As we passed a group of cherry trees on the west side, Russell stopped. ‘We planted these ten years ago,’ he said, checking how they were doing. The lens of the conversation lent a different perspective to this former common, fostering appreciation and respect for the environment and those who take care of it.

In an interview from 2009, Laderman Ukeles’ describes the power of maintenance to nurture a holistic view of our lives and an inclusive, more compassionate society:

‘That is what maintenance is, trying to listen to the hum of living. A feeling of being alive, breath to breath. The same way that the sanitation department sends out 1,600 trucks every day, it is like this repetitive thing that, as much as you chafe at the boredom of the repetition, is as important as the other parts. And I know that that has to be a part of culture. Because if isn't, then you don't have a culture that welcomes in everybody. And, I mean everybody.’

Turning towards maintenance differs from the ephemeral thrill of ‘development’ we experience and perhaps crave. It requires an acceptance of the daily and the mundane, which indicates the imperceptible but inevitable passing of time.

It helps us to understand the lineage of our surroundings and the objects we hold in our hands beyond our own lives. It means recognising the true worth of the paid or unpaid hours and hours which involve changing nappies, feeding others who need help to eat, cutting grass, sweeping a street or washing clothes. It requires us to acknowledge that doing, or, at the very least, benefiting from, maintenance is something we all have in common.

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Ever since I read DBC Pierre’s account of walking down Avenida de los Insurgentes, a 29km long artery that crosses Mexico City from north to south, I have been curious to try this out myself. It’s an intimidating metropolis to navigate alone, and a long, straight road appealed to me. 

I had a few hours to myself one afternoon in March and I was staying by Parque Hundido, or the sunken park, conveniently located on Insurgentes so the time seemed ripe. I covered about 6 kilometres: just 23 to go.

I took a few photos along the way, finishing off my two-year-old film, trying to capture just a little of the colourful Mexican street life and changeable spring weather.

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I started a film on my analogue camera while in Mexico during February 2014. Back there two years later, with the film going through airport x-rays at least five times, I finally finished it with no idea what the photos would look like. Reminiscent of snaps from the 1970s, I wonder if the combination of x-ray exposure and natural ageing have given the photographs their muted colour.

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February incisions

2016 continues apace, but there have been a few lovely incisions into this month’s busyness.

A friend generously invited me to hear art critics and writers, Jonathan Jones and Martin Gayford, joyfully and engagingly discuss their ideas on Twelve masterpieces that shaped art history. They skillfully weaved all sorts of cultural and historical contexts through their selection while sharing their infectious passion, leaving me with a glow of the simple appreciation and celebration of art.

I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Leipzig as part of a European cultural managers exchange programme. One afternoon, during some heavy duty planning, my collaborators and I decided to clear our heads and change our perspective with a walk around our temporary neighbourhood. I looked over a railway track and a sky barely interrupted by clouds. Our project is about play, so it seemed apt to spend some time inventing our own seesaw games.

Another good friend recently moved to Folkestone to realise his ambition, away from the frantic competition in London. A few of us descended on him one weekend. During a windy coastal walk, which involved trying to hit a bell with stones, he explained how the physical and mental space he has found in this small town had reignited his curiosity.  

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Tequisquiapan; La Redona vineyard; Teotihuacán; mountains from the plane to Puerto Vallata; Playa de los Muertos, Puerto Vallarta

Mexico Mark II: Una caja de sopresas

Naively, I’d thought ‘got’ Mexico a bit, having spent a couple of weeks there in 2014. However, my second visit proved only what a vast, complex and elusive a place it is.

Over two weeks, I moved through a spectrum of Mexican experiences: On New Year’s Eve, I absorbed warmth and energy ready for 2016 from atop the sun pyramid at Teotihuacán, just outside of Mexico City. During the evening I shared cider and Christmas pudding in my friend’s family home.

Many at home were surprised that Mexico has its own wine and cheese region, Querétaro. Here we visited recently established vineyards and the rather more mature Peña de Bernal, an 8.7 million year-old monolith standing tall, overlooking its town.

Puerto Vallarta, a city on the Pacific coast, was a curious Mexican case in point. On our first day, we found our nearest beach: a quiet, underwhelming strip of sand. Hunting for lunch, we climbed over some rocks, where the beach was flanked with resorts.

“You can’t eat here,” we were politely but emphatically told by two security guards as we made our way to the nearest snack bar. Asking traders how we could leave the beach, we conspicuously picked our way through an endless mass of loungers and parasols by a sprawling, curvaceous swimming pool. Despite its abundance, the place was tightly bound within regulations for clearly delineated tasks, places and people. I felt like a bit of a trespasser.

The following day, we rode rickety buses beyond Malecon, the city’s main strip, to Playa las Gemelas, an intimate beach tucked into a cove. This was a completely contrasting set up with less overt codes of behaviour and hierarchies; there were plenty of relaxed locals cheerfully sunning themselves and vendors selling oysters and barbequed fish.

In Mexico City, I felt the familiar buzz I get from all big metropolises. From its second tallest building, the city’s overwhelming scale was at its clearest; buildings stretched out and out, and then crept up the mountains, as if DF was pushing its own boundaries and seeing what it could get away with.

In the end, I brought home more questions and curiosity than I arrived with. How can I recreate chilaquiles in London? What would it be like to walk the entire length of the Avenida Insurgentes in one day? After visiting the National Museum of Anthropology, I wondered what the Mexicas would think if they knew that features of their everyday lives and ingenuity had ended up carefully arranged in a giant box, where people stood quietly, taking photos.

Throughout the trip, I benefitted from my hosts’ openness to explaining their perspective on Mexico’s beguiling history and culture. Through these conversations and my experiences, I realised that searching for certainties to navigate and theorise my understanding of the country was a fruitless exercise. Instead, sitting back and absorbing the various versions of Mexico is a far more rewarding approach.

One day, a few of us got talking about the phrase ‘a dark horse’ in relation to my friend’s mum, a teacher who had moonlighted as a taxi driver for a spell. In Spanish, this translates to ‘una caja de sopresas’; a box of surprises, an apt name for Mexico itself.

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A quick audit of 2015

For the last few days, I’ve been asking people what their favourite moment of the year has been (so far).

Posing this question to myself on the number 25′s familiar route from Manor Park in Newham to my office, I undertook a quick audit of the year. Never one to commit to favourites, I realised how tricky that question is. I instead thought about some of the memorable things I’ve experienced. These include a conversation with an off-shore rig worker on a train south to Edinburgh who provided a startling insight into the occupation, developing an unexpected fondness for Wood Green and its much-visited library, and recently wending from Brixton to Forest Gate for my bro’s birthday, during which checking maps on phones was contraband.