Shouting from my shed

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Infrastructure

 

[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]



This may be the most boring grid square on my map. I’m sorry to tell you that, dear reader, and appreciate you may now skim on to whatever’s next. But I’m also sorry to write that as it’s the first time in this whole project that I’ve thought, ‘meh’ and thought about going home to do something more useful with my day. And I’m also sorry that I felt that way as all my experiences so far have suggested that everywhere is interesting, nature abounds, and that the only limit to a sense of fascination is the scale of my own curiosity.

Well, let’s get this over with, shall we? Much of the square was taken up by stuff that loosely comes under the heading of ‘infrastructure’. Railways, roads, roundabouts, railings. Big metal things. Spiked fences. Corrugated sheds. Padlocks. Pylons. Pick ups with hazard lights. Men in hard hats. Stuff that I don’t really understand or have much interest in, but which I accept is an important use of space and that the Keep Out signs are probably for the best. Highways England sorting the roads out, National Grid keeping the lights on, Network Rail running the trains and UK Power Network Services who I had to Google: Delivering your energy infrastructure solutions. We optimise your existing assets and integrate new technologies to deliver improved performance and commercial benefits.’  So commercial jargon plus energy stuff, I think. It is amazing really just how much behind the scenes stuff goes on to make modern life run smoothly. And not only does it make everything work, it also pays the bills for millions of people. After all, as economist Adam Smith noted, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages’.

I tried to get a look at the 400kV electricity substation (after Googling what the heck it was), but its mysteries were obscured by trees (and spiked fences). After all, between 1968 and 1973, 725,000 tall trees, 915,400 smaller trees and 17,600 ground cover plants had been used to screen substations.

My limited interest in infrastructure exhausted, I followed the cycle path alongside the dual carriageway, dodging glass shards amidst the roar of traffic and the smell of hot tarmac and diesel fumes that brings back many happy memories of the world’s highways to me. I paused briefly to peer down from a bridge at a large overgrown pond, thick with green weed. Exiting at a slip road I made my way over three roundabouts, a high speed train line and the dual carriageway into town. There were enormous detached houses at the top of the hill, with the homes becoming steadily smaller as I freewheeled down the hill. A pony and trap cantered towards me, trailing a huge line of backed-up traffic in its wake. And I turned off the main road into town and veered off towards some suburban residential estates.

I have really enjoyed the grid squares that are the best approximation of wild countryside. Equally I have enjoyed those brimming with life and human history. I have been intrigued by the mansions I have seen and equally interested in the poorest areas too. What I struggled with today is riding through suburbia. It’s not rich and it’s not poor. It’s all doing fine, if rather mundane. It is quiet, neat, tidy. It suggests comfortable, safe living, the reward for working hard, thinking sensibly and settling down. These are all good things, of course. They must be or else millions of us would not choose to live in suburbia.

“Little Boxes” is a song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963, when he released his cover version.

The song is a political satire about the development of suburbia, and associated conformist middle-class attitudes. It mocks suburban tract housing as “little boxes” of different colors “all made out of ticky-tacky”, and which “all look just the same”.

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same

And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school

And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

Historian Nell Irvin Painter points out that the conformity of Little Boxes is not entirely a bad thing, indicative as it is of “a process of going to university to be doctors and lawyers and business executives” who “came out all the same” and then lived in “nice, new neighbourhoods with good new schools. … Suburbia may be monotone, but it was a sameness to be striven toward.”

A looming sense of monotony pressed me to scrabble for the exit. These residential streets backed directly onto fields in a crisp straight line, a very clear boundary marking the end of residential development and the beginning of agriculture. (Once out in those fields I would also be able to see a similarly neat boundary between the farmland and some remaining fragments of ancient woodland.) But first I had to find my way out of the cul de sacs and fenced-in back gardens. The empty streets were so quiet. I heard the hum of distant traffic, a few birds tweeting. One distant crow. A garden ablaze with tulips alongside one covered in concrete. (They have come a long way. Originally growing wild in the valleys of the Tian Shan Mountains, tulips were cultivated in Constantinople as early as 1055. By the 15th century, tulips were among the most prized flowers; becoming the symbol of the Ottomans. While tulips had probably been cultivated in Persia from the tenth century, they did not come to the attention of the West until the sixteenth century, when Western diplomats to the Ottoman court observed and reported on them. They were rapidly introduced into Europe and became a frenzied commodity during Tulip mania. Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history. At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. )

Eventually I got onto a footpath that took me through a playground where two large Old English Sheepdogs dashed at me, barking loudly.

‘Don’t worry!’ called the owner by way of reassurance. ‘They don’t bite, they just like to chase people.’

‘Marvellous,’ I said, keeping a wary eye on the shaggy dogs until I was on the other side of the fence, out of the town, and into a large open area of farmland. They were pretty uninteresting fields, flat and bare, with enormous pylons and several ambling dog walkers. But they buoyed my spirits nonetheless. I was eager now to get amongst some trees, so was pleased when the hard-baked footpath led into a few acres of woodland.

It might only have been a scraggly area of runaway saplings and brambles, but it made me feel better already. And this might be quite a dull grid square, but I find something interesting every single time I go out. As I was looking for a comfy fallen tree to sit on whilst I fired up a cup of coffee, I stumbled upon a BMX course in the woods. Its berms and bumps had been built carefully from mud and fallen branches. The mounds of Fosters lager cans in the bushes, the torn and burned pages of school reading books, and the shredded air gun targets suggested all sorts of youthful fun beyond riding bikes. A discarded bottle of Dandelion and Burdock (2 litres; £1; 79g sugar – 20 teaspoons) reminded me of a drink I haven’t tried since I was a kid.

The earliest record of a Dandelion & Burdock drink is from c. 1265, from an account of St. Thomas Aquinas, who prayed to God for inspiration as he walked into the countryside, where he made a drink with the first plants that he found: dandelion and burdock. The D&B of then was different to the contemporary version and would likely have been less sweet, certainly not sweetened with refined sugar; honey or fruit sugar would be more likely. Throughout this time, D&B brewed drink would also have been made and it is likely that this would have had some alcoholic strength.

Fast forward to 1871 and the founding of Ben Shaw’s, a soft drinks manufacturer. Around this time, carbonated water was becoming popular and it not was long before other sparkling soft drinks turned up. Ben Shaw’s started making D&B in 1898 and it remained a favourite throughout the 1940s; this likely makes them the oldest continuous producer of Dandelion and Burdock. In 1959 they were the first company Europe to package their soft drink in cans. With the rise of Colas and other American soda the Old British favourites like Dandelion & Burdock fell by the wayside. However, with the rise of boutique soft drinks manufacturers like Fentimans and Breckland Orchard it is becoming a popular nostalgic drink again. 

This morning the BMX bandits were all at school so I had the clearing to myself. I sat in the sunshine and boiled water for a cup of coffee with my small gas stove. I did this not so much for the hot drink but for the caesura, the enforced pause and stillness. These forays round grid squares are always quite hectic and busy. I’m constantly alert, taking photos, making notes and scanning the landscape. I’m sure other people would do it differently, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything that does not descend into a hurry and a mission. Sitting still with a cup of coffee is my antidote to that. And if you sit still in a wood, you will almost always be rewarded.

Somewhere beyond the white carpet of star-shaped wood anemones I heard the magnificent drumroll of a great spotted woodpecker smashing its head against a tree in search of lunch or love. (When there’s a covering of these flowers you know that you are in ancient woodland: they rarely set seed and spread a mere 6 foot per century through their roots alone.)These starling-sized black and white birds don’t have a song to advertise ownership of their chosen patch of woodland, so they make themselves known by drumming on dead trees with their powerful bills. Woodpeckers ought to get headaches as a result of those hammering blows; they don’t because their skulls are cushioned by a matrix of minute pockets of air, supported by strengthened bone tissue. This natural shock absorber allows them not only to drum, but to excavate nest holes and peck in dead wood for insects. They’re not averse to taking the eggs and nestlings of tits and other hole-nesting birds.

I finished my coffee and set off for the ride back home in warm sunshine. It was the sort of day where you leave home in a jacket and gloves, then return in a t shirt. The sort of grid square that begins boring but ended up taking me somewhere I’d never been before and getting me out to enjoy some miles on my bike.

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Shouting from my shed

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