2036

My God! What's this? A short story? Well, kinda. It's for a book and is tacked on the end of an essay I wrote but I thought I would stick it up here for the hell of it.


2036

Jen noticed it first; a slightly strangulated, tinny sound coming from the earth. Like a transistor radio buried in mud. I imagined the dial, like a windscreen in a storm, green digits flickering though the murk. When she put her head against the ground the sound quality improved dramatically.

“It’s Carole King I think……yes, what IS that one? Something Up on The Roof. I thiiiink”.

She is lying flat on the mossy ground, her cheek damp with mud and her ear pressed against the surface of the earth.

“…and if this old world starts a getting you down……” she murmurs.

We are scrabbling through the muddy ground trying to unearth something that is undoubtedly playing Carole KIng.
“…I get away from the hustling crowds…..”

In the mud, below the beautiful one million shades of green mossy stuff that we rip out in chunks like hair from a scalp with alopecia, there is a dark green speaker. Out of it comes the laid back sound of Carole King. We are standing in a mud flat, just inland, about 10 kilometers from Orlando, Florida.

I always loved those horror stories where the hero visits some spooky town and stays in an old inn and the inn burns down and the hero saves someone, a beautiful young girl perhaps, from the flames and struggles out and collapses unconscious and when he wakes up he is in the town. But it looks different and when he asks the way to the inn he’s told that it no longer exists, that it burned down a hundred years ago and that there was only one survivor and that was a beautiful young girl and no one knows how she survived but she did. Well, I’m feeling a bit like that now. I remember going on holiday once to Mexico and arriving in some old town full of geriatric retirees who went there to bask by the beautiful lake in the centre of the town. And I went to check into the hotel and in the lobby were black and white photos of people swimming in the lake, and sitting in cafes under umbrellas on the beach and kids fishing off the stone pier and it all looked just lovely and so I asked the receptionist how far to the beach and she just looked at me like I asked her where the dead bodies were kept. And later, after I dropped my stuff in the little room with the huge fan and the cracked shower, I walked down to the lakefront and saw that one or two of the cafes were still there and the stone pier still stood there imposingly but it led out into a huge field. The lake had dried up and there were cows grazing on its exposed bed and the café’s ringing its former edge looked sad and pointless. I remember being very moved by that, and looking at the lines on the pier of where the water used to be and thinking that where I was standing would have been ten, twelve feet underwater and how weird that was.

This is why we come here, but we have never found anything as good as this before. Last November the Monorail collapsed for good so you could no longer sit in the bullet shaped train in the burnt out seats and pretend you were swooshing magically through the orange groves. Not the twisted tracks and wires are collapsed in the mud. The best bit is the old Utah railway ride. There’s a section you can no longer get in to where it says: Warning – Abandoned Mine Shaft. That always makes me laugh. The whole place is an Abandoned Mine Shaft. There are animatronic crocodiles and giant cups and saucers and half of a Fed-Ex sponsored spaceship and one or two turrets of the castle remaining and lots of other junk that litters the place. The speaker still playing music is the weirdest thing we have ever found though. Up nearer to the interstate one half of a giant pair of black Mickey ears stick slightly up-ended from the ground. It’s like the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston drops to his feet and roars in horror and the Statue of Liberty is leaning, cock eyed out of the sand. The best end to a film ever really. Nothing can beat it. Not even Mickey’s ears although they are, admittedly, funnier.

But this is good. Music coming from the mud, easy listening classics from beyond the grave. Neither of us can explain it. It shouldn’t be happening. We come here most days and just hang around, looking amongst the ruins for stuff, trying not to be freaked out by the people who live in the remains of It’s A Small World. They have made an enormous sculpture out of bits of old log flume crowned by a pile of plastic flowers and frog’s heads. They’ve painted a big sign saying Free Rides Forever but I don’t think any of the mechanisms work properly so you probably just have to hang out with them listening to their awful music and eating their weird food. Every now and then they have big parties when all their friends turn up on motorbikes and decorated trucks and old school buses and ancient emergency vehicles and they light fires which you can see from miles around. They have this big plastic boat and it sails out across the water to the tip of Splash Mountain and they light an enormous flame held by a fake stone hand and it looks like the lady in the lake. I didn’t realise Florida had any hippies.

I would like to draw a map of this place, try to work out where everything used to be. I might burn the edges like a pirate map. Here be Goofy. There was nothing else to build here. No one else wanted the land. Now it’s a ruin that doesn’t age well. Plastic and fibre-glass made to look old, made to look like weathered stone and timber and rock, lying in the wet soggy grass like giant broken toys. There’s nothing as scary as a discarded, broken toy. Flowers and weeds crawling over bits of fake jungle, a soggy, mouldy animal costume slowly returning to the primordial ooze. Carole King trails off. We cover the speaker up with mud and twigs and muffle the sound so that it is almost inaudible. The ground is murmuring with announcements of the jungle ride being open for business and discounts at the Dolphin hotel. It feels like Walt and the whole crew might be underground, still enjoying the party, still carrying on as normal, still entertaining everyone in their perfect world. We wander home.

It's A Small World

Recently I was invited to write something for a German publication called Die Planung - check out the website http://www.dieplanung.org/- set notionally in the future, 2036 to be precise. I wrote a number of bits and pieces which all hinged around various utopian communities, one of which was an art commune set up near where I was brought up. I recently visited it and took some photos too which I've included here with the short piece about the communitie's remains.....



1981

I’m lying in the long grass, eating Bombay Mix. I am eleven years old. I have never eaten Bombay Mix before. Around me are people, milling around; dancing, chatting, juggling, painting, cooking food. There are a lot of children. Mostly slightly scruffy, longhaired bare foot children. Various brightly painted shacks, Romany caravans, totem poles and odd bits of sculpture made from pieces of mechanical equipment lie around. There is a tent and inside it someone is showing a black and white movie. I don’t recognise it, maybe Brief Encounter or The Thirty Nine Steps. Something like that.

It is 1981. Longhaired hippy types are everywhere, old motorbikes lie around discarded, people stretch out in the sun and there is the smell of a bonfire. We are in a small clearing surrounded by tall trees. Through them I can see a cottage, painted in rainbow colours, the doors and windows wide open and music coming out. Beyond this is the road that leads up to the village where my parents live. The village is quiet and conservative with a church, a village hall, a primary school. It has some posh old houses and some new estates with shiny new cars parked outside and on the outlying roads are pink and yellow farm houses with thatched barns and mud covered Land Rovers and fruit trees and a river that winds towards the Blackwater estuary. It has a Lord Lieutenant and a Vicar and there are quiet old men in corduroy suits who collect the contributions in church and busy old women who organise things in the village hall and bored teenagers who hang out on the recreation ground smoking cigarettes and wait for the free bus to Asda. It hasn’t ever before seemed a likely place to start an alternative community. But now it has one: the Great Leighs’ Art Society, who have made their unconventional home in a quiet hollow of common land, a half acre hidden behind some trees, hardly noticeable from the road.



I spend the afternoon like this, wandering around the stalls selling homemade food that I have never seen before, listening to music, poking around the cabins and huts dotted amongst the trees. At some point towards the end of the day, as the sun starts to set, a crowd gathers around a large multicoloured boat-like object that sits at the entrance to the site. I remember it as something like a cross between a Mississippi steamboat and a giant fish. It has a mouth painted on its front with big teeth, a happy rather than scary expression, and large funnels coming out of the top. It has wheels and slowly this strange land bound sculpture starts to move. Lots of people are standing on it dancing and waving as the fish/boat/vehicle pulls out onto the little country road and starts its slow progress up to the village.

This is the highlight of the day, the finale, a moving piece of art puffing its optimistic way around a small Essex village, a utopian gesture of friendship to a sceptical audience. I don’t see the journey of the fish/boat/vehicle, I only imagine it, gaily chugging along, causing an impatient tailback of Ford Granadas and Vauxhall Cavaliers and bemused, slightly hostile onlookers. This is how I remember it: The Great Leighs’ Art Society Summer Solstice Party, 1981.

A year later the Society would be gone. Twenty-six years later the huts can still just about be seen; peeling coloured planks of wood in the undergrowth, stray pieces of rotten clothing draped over a branch, merging with the moss. They must have lasted about three or four years. Their little world, a village within a village, had a brief existence. Now the bits of brick foundations and bare bits of infrastructure are romantic ruins of a former civilisation. At that point in time, the countryside must have seemed the place to try and start something else, something different. It must have seemed like a benign, un-hostile place free of the harshness of the city. All utopias are representations, pictures of a better world. They need to remove themselves from the corroding atmosphere around them, and exist in their own distinct space, but still it seeps through.

Trolley Dolley

Thoughts on the 40th Anniversary of the Shopping Trolley

There are three things that everyone knows about shopping trolleys. One, a strangely large number of them end up in canals. Two, they are virtually impossible to steer. And three, people like to push each other around in them whilst drunk. None of these has anything to do with shopping.

The supermarket trolley was invented by Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket in Oklahoma as a way of getting people to buy more food. And its true, they do. According to someone who found this out customers will buy an average of 7.2 items with a trolley for every 6. 2 they do with a basket, and they double sales of large items.

Goldman came up with the idea in June 1937, making the trolley 40 years old this month. That’s officially middle-aged. Unlike most middle-aged things though, they look pretty much the same as when they started out. The basic layout is ubiquitous and unchanging. There is a big basket on wheels. The basket is instantly recognisable for the graph like visual spacing of its metal bars, able to hold anything from a bar-b-q to a single tomato. There is a fold down plastic seat in which you can imprison a small child so that it looks like a particularly unwieldy purchase. The basket has a tubular plastic handle for pushing which you can also use to lean on when waiting to get clear access to the bread counter. The handle forms the single point of store branding. Otherwise they all look the same. When stored in the snake like chain gang of interlocked trolleys at the supermarket entrance, the repeated store logos form a strange nightmarish vision of shopping trips yet to come. The trolley is designed specifically for the task of navigating the serpentine route of supermarket aisles. The fact that the wheels all point in different directions reflects perfectly the fact that no one knows which way they want to go.

While other prosaic products like washing powder or biscuits go through almost constant minor and largely pointless innovations, developing ever more baroque permutations, the shopping trolley continues in its clattery, crude, hard to steer form. The reason for this flat development curve is that nobody actually buys them. As a product with no consumer purchase potential there is virtually no point in re-invention. These days, the desire for new markets is the only reason anyone does anything at all. Everyone owns a mobile phone or a razor. The only way to get us to buy another one is to improve it. Offer new functions, more blades, better deals, 3 mega-pixel cameras, improved smoothness, celebrity endorsement. No one ever buys a shopping trolley so what’s the point?

The shopping trolley is an utterly generic form of design, barely existing on our visual horizon. It has proved strangely fixed as a design statement, seemingly un-improvable and immune to the vagaries of fashion or style. I can only think of two innovations: One is the shallow, half depth model. This is apparently to attract male shoppers who generally shun trolleys, preferring instead the unmistakably macho appeal of the hand basket. The other is the electronic front wheel that locks when you try to escape the perimeter of the store car-park.

Without anyone working feverishly to try and sell us a new one, shopping trolleys will languish forever with their ugly styling and wheels that point the wrong way. If supermarkets stopped offering them to us and we had to buy our own, we would be immediately deluged by a baffling variety of new styles and credit opportunities to pay for them. So, perhaps, in a world gone consumption crazy, we should cherish a product immune from marketing. Immune, in a way, from design.