Category: Things That Happened

Over a month back, at the start of April, Lela and I went to Liverpool for John Reppion‘s Spirit of Place conference, a site-specific event linked to the Calderstones, a group of standing stones in a Liverpool park.

I don’t know Liverpool well – I last went with my Dad and sister back in the nineties. But the list of speakers was so interesting that I thought it would be worth the trip. John Reppion described the event as something “people who live in London, or Brighton say, might be quite used to seeing advertised but which there never seem to be very many of up here in the North.” Brighton could definitely do with events like this one.

The day brought together a range of speakers, including archaeologists, psychogeographers, historians (an epic description of the wrecking of the RMS Tayleur), artists (a premier of short film The Menhir Motorway) and a magician. The sessions were incredibly inspiring while avoiding a game of psychogeography bingo, and I wanted to note down some of the things that I responded to. I came out of it fizzing with ideas, and things to follow up.

• John Reppion introduced the day with Invoking the Spirits of Place. It looked at some of the ways folklore connected with the park. Many of the trees had been brought from overseas, and he discussed the idea of tree spirits from different cultures. I loved the quote from Pope, his advice on gardening: “Consult the genius of the place”
• Kenneth Brophy (AKA The Urban Prehistorian) gave a fantastic talk on ancient monuments in cities and the response of local people. He talked in particular about the Cochno Stone, which was buried to protect it from locals, mentioning the shame many felt at not being trusted with the monument. We also saw examples of how prehistoric monuments in cities are often fenced off, producing the strange spectacle of caged standing stones. Personally, I’m still disappointed that Silbury Hill was inaccessible. With the Cochno stone, there are plans for a replica to be made and placed above it. May Miles Thomas has produced a short film, Cochno Stone Revealed.
• The session that influenced me most was one by David Southwell and Gary Budden on ‘Landscape Punk and Re-enchantment’. David spoke about how myth grows and escapes; where folklore comes from and what it’s for. He also talked about how walking is the best way to learn a place. There were some amazing turns of phrase in this session – “ghost soil”, “layers of story”, the “dark sediment of decomposing memory”,”every walk scuffs up… spirits”. David’s current project is Hookland, a fictional English county providing a chance to put back some of the weirdness in a conscious act of enchantment. “Landscape gives us the myth we need”
• Gary Budden spoke about landscapepunk, which he saw as emerging from anti-road movements and squatters, and a culture of visionary English music like Crass and Zounds – he saw punk as a type of folk music. The talk grappled with the risk of interests like nature writing and psychogeography creating a sort of “hippie nationalism”, a negative island culture. He also spoke about the trope of the “Lone White male author” with time and leisure who reported back to office workers. The books these men produced were not the world he knew, and he compared his childhood experience of birdwatching to the lyrical descriptions found in nature writing. These didn’t reflect the nature he knew, of damp sandwiches in car parks and the Really Wild Show
• Richard MacDonald worked as Heritage Story Maker, which is the best job title I’ve ever heard. If I knew that was a possibility, I’d never have become a programmer.
• It was good to see Cat Vincent talk again. When he announced that he was a practising magician, someone in the audience gasped ‘Oh wow!’. His talk, Where the Buddleia Grows made the point that when most of the world’s people live in urban areas, magic should not continue to  privilege the rural above the urban. He also discussed how people say that history repeats itself, then suggested geography does not repeat, but it rhymes. He spoke about his own connection with buddliea, the ‘bombsite flower’. which often grows in the city. It was a lovely talk and well worth reading via the link.
• The final session was an interview with horror author Ramsey Campbell. It was fun to listen to someone I’d been reading for about 25 years, since I used to borrow Best New Horror collections from Harlow Library in the 90s (that shelf of horror was probably the only good thing about that town). Campbell talked about his connections with the local area, the shop where he first discovered Lovecraft, and about Bartleby the Scrivener as horror. His latest book is based on the folklore of Liverpool. He claimed that he’d made notes of ideas among his research and now was no longer sure which parts he had made up.

It was good to visit Liverpool, even if we didn’t have a long time there (we did our best to visit the Tate in 30 minutes, and made a fairly good go of it). We also stayed in a Beatles-themed hotel, with a night-manager who’d never been to the top floor until he showed us to our room. Terrible breakfasts, but fun decor.

All-in-all, it was well worth the journey and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for John Reppion’s future events. I also note that I’ve become the sort of person who is excited by megaliths

 

It’s just over two months since I landed in Delhi on my most recent trip to India. It was the first trip where I’d taken a smartphone, and my first where I wasn’t travelling with or meeting someone – both things I’ll try to avoid next time. I arrived at Gatwick frazzled from work and decided to revise the route I’d planned, which didn’t work out perfectly, but was fun.

Delhi was smogbound and I was almost tricked by the touts in the railway station. A couple of shopkeepers recognised me, one noting that I’d cut my hair; I’ve not been in Delhi for two years. I went to Mathura to see the river, but the hotel claimed not to have my reservation, and everyone I met was negative and rude. So I headed to the bus station and spent the night in Bharatpur instead. There, the hotel owner thought she recognised me, but I’ve never been there before – then she figured it out, saying that I looked like someone from an old cereal advert.

From Bharatpur I took a dusty bus journey to a hotel near Dausa. The guesthouse owners in Bharatpur told me not to bother with Dausa, that there was nothing there. I was the only guest in the hotel and could see no other buildings from my balcony. When the power went out the darkness was almost total. I liked it there a lot.

 

From Dausa I made excursions to visit a local temple, the step-well at Chand Baori and Bhangarh fort, said to be the most haunted site in Asia.

   

From there I went to Pushkar, with its beautiful holy lake and massive amount of hippies – my next door neighbour in the hotel was practising a didgeridoo. But it was a good place to relax and enjoy walking up the small mountains.

 

From Pushkar I went into the mountains proper. I felt little love for Mussoorie so went straight back down again, settling in Rishikesh for the last few days of the holiday, walking, relaxing, visiting ruins. It was hard to find a good room due to the Yoga festival but my friend Emily eventually found me a stunning place with a view of the Ganges. I then spent a night in Haridwar, with its amazing night-time Ganges ceremony, before turning back to Delhi and heading home. It was a good trip.

   

I’m a little behind in posting about my adventures. In the middle of January, I went to the Chepstow Wassail Mari Lwyd in Wales. This annual event features morris dancing, a wassail, and what wikipedia describes as people “disguised as a horse”. This disguise involves a decorated horse’s skull and a sheet, along with a lower jaw that can snap at passers-by. I saw the event in the Rites and Rituals film and had to go. It was a good trip and the Mari Lwyds looked amazing.

      

I only read 60 books in 2014, compared with 95 in 2013 and, apparently, 166 in 2012. My favourites, in alphabetical order were:

Broken Summers / Henry Rollins I’m not a fan of Rollins’ music, so I’m not sure why I picked this up. I love the energy of his prose though, and it leaves me feeling inspired.

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett While this is a fairly self-aggrandizing account of urban exploration, it’s absolutely fascinating and contains some amazing photos. The achievements of Garrett and his colleagues would sound preposterous were it not for the images.

Fluent in 3 months by Benny Lewis The men who taught me languages at school were vile and trash; and, despite doing well in exams, I’ve always thought that I could never speak foreign languages. This book suggests learning techniques and encourages the reader to quickly learn useful useful words and phrases. Since reading it, my confidence about trying to learn Hindi has increased significantly.

Jacques Derrida by Benoit Peeters Derrida worked hard to hide many of the details of his life so I wasn’t sure whether to read this biography or not. It turned out to be interesting, with the details of Derrida’s terminal illness being incredibly sad. “Always prefer life and never stop affirming survival.”

Layla by Nina de la Mer Layla is a second-person point-of-view novel about a lap-dancer trying to get enough money together so that she can go back to her young son. It’s a desperate, enthralling novel, currently 99p on Amazon.

Power Trip by Damian McBride I’m not sure how reliable the accounts of events in this book are, and McBride’s alcohol intake is terrifying. But this is a compelling account of the Brown government and has made me reconsider my opinion of it. It also includes some scurrilous stories. The sort of political book that I love.

Swenglish / Louise Halvarddson Discussed here.

Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society An amazing coffee table book on the exploits and adventures of the Cacophony Society. I first encountered the Cacophony Society via Chuck Palahniuk’s writing. Their legacy includes SantaCon and Burning Man, but some of their less well-known events are equally interesting. I occasionally find myself thinking I should say ‘Fuck it’ and use this book as a template.

U2 at the end of the world by Bill Flanagan I find Bono as loathsome as any other decent person does, but Zooropa-era U2 fascinate me. One of the biggest bands in the world, experimenting with their music and ripping off Jenny Holzer. A 500 page book on their early-nineties tours should not have been so fascinating.

Working effectively with Legacy code by Michael Feathers This book is very different to the others! Very few people talk about the realities of software development, which is dealing with other people’s code and making quick fixes. Feathers’ book lays out techniques for changing legacy code and has proved invaluable over the last year.

Back in October I visited my friend Louise in Sweden. While I was there, I read her book Swenglish (which I was supposed to have read before the trip, but many things had got in the way).

The idea for Swenglish was an interesting one. Lou was coming up to her 30th birthday. She’d achieved her ambitions and wasn’t sure what to do next. She had to either change things by moving back to Sweden, or commit to being English. She came up with a novel way to investigate the two options.

Lou wrote to 120 people, some English and some Swedish. The time she’d been away from Sweden meant that many of the Swedish ones were older friends spread about the country. The English friends were centred on Brighton, including a lot of mutual acquaintances. She then chose fifteen English people and fifteen Swedish, spending a week shadowing each of them and writing about the experience.

(I was one of the people approached initially but didn’t make the final list. Louise was worried that I would be too interested in asking questions about the underlying project. She was probably better off not including me, as I’d already started preparing a serious of bizarre incidents to occur while she was shadowing me)

As a portrait of two countries the book is interesting enough. The Swedish find the English habit of carpeting toilets to be disgusting. And, despite Sweden having colder temperatures, Sweden is warmer than England, since our houses tend to be draughty and badly insulated. However, the thing I like most was the way the book sketched its characters.

Back when I was in Umi Sinha‘s classes, she told us an important rule for critiquing people’s work. Even if a piece is written in the first person, you shouldn’t talk about the actions “you” did, maintaining a separation between the narrator and the author. In a book like this, where the characters are so tied to real people there is a similar separation. The ‘characters’ are Lou’s view of people, distorted by what she brought to the experience and what she was looking for. At least one was unhappy with their portrayal but I felt that the portraits were positive and well-intentioned. I can’t speak for how these people should or did feel, but I felt a compassion towards each of Louise’s portrayals.

For me, the book was one about choice. Several portraits focussed on decisions that the subjects had made. Others had not made a choice, seeming to endure. Reading about thirty lives in quick succession made me think about my own choices, both those I was making and the ones I was ignoring. Interestingly, few people regretted their decisions, even when they involved a massive change.

A good book produces some sort of change in the reader. After reading Swenglish I’ve taken time to think about the choices in my life (including seriously considering moving to Sweden in the next year). Louise is planning to self-publish this in early 2015, with a launch in Brighton, and I’m looking forward to more people getting a chance to read it.

I spent the weekend with my friends Katharine, Rob and Caroline in Canterbury. We booked an Airbnb place, which worked out pretty well. We had our own space rather than rooms in some grubby guest house. Canterbury is full of medieval charm and noisy drunks. The Canterbury Tales Experience was actually pretty good and the cathedral was impressive.

Katharine and I ate Saturday breakfast in Herne Bay, which was beautiful – I want to go back there in Summer. We also visited Margate on Sunday to see the Shell Grotto and the Turner Gallery. I was pretty excited to learn there was a Jeremy Deller show on at the Turner, English Magic. That was an impressive way to end the holiday.

Glastonbury 2014 was a mud year, but I had more fun there than any time since the 90s’. I caught up with some friends and failed to find others. I danced in a bar run by skeletons. I was overcharged for mediocre food. I saw excellent gigs by the Alabama 3, Manic Street Preachers and Kate Tempest. I watched Michael Portillo dancing in the Glade area on Sunday afternoon.

 

The weekend also sparked all sort of pretentious thoughts about psychogeography, Guy Debord and Unitary Urbanism. Not sure when I’ll get chance, but I’ll write them up one day.