little hammers

Thursday 18 July 2024

PM goes for a spin

The fascination of the modern world is that the realm of aesthetics does not end at the doors of the Tate Gallery. Art and advertising, commerce and culture have become one. Some might add politics to that list. Industrial design is our folk art. In this game there is no standing on the sideline, no such thing as a value-free decision not to be involved. And cars, being invested with more 'design' than any other commodity, are cruelly revealing of our tastes. 'I don't care about cars, I just drive an old Montego' is a testament of faith. It means you care about cars rather a lot really.

I'd had Tony Blair down for a SAAB, a car that's intelligent, responsible, non-aggressive, but also just a teeny bit raffish. No slam dunk of testosterone here: these cars are gender-free. Provincial solicitors might drive steady Volvos, but urban barristers prefer slinkier SAABs, cars with a high IQ. The parallels between the GAP-clad, Majestic-quaffing Blair - or perhaps I mean the image of Blair - and the eco-sensitive SAAB are surprising. Like Blair, the SAAB 900 looks good, and appears to be the quintessence of social democracy, but underneath it has a dark Secret. It's nothing more than a very ordinary old-regime Vauxhall Cavalier dressed in impressive new(ish) clothes.

So the Prime Minister's arrival at church on one of his very first public outings in a Ford Galaxy was something of a surprise. It's certain that Blair's courtiers had taken the iconography of this one very seriously indeed. The Galaxy is the most successful of the new category of MPV (Multi Purpose Vehicles). It's not just a new car: it is a new type of car - and here, of course, is its significance.

Given the Prime Minister's domestic obligations and arrangements, he could have chosen an estate car, but that would have excited too many associations with cosy suburbia. A Range Rover would have done the job, but that would have been too much Mr and Mrs Deposed-Tory of Cirencester and with lots of ineffable rural associations, upsetting to the anti-hunt and tree-hugging lobby. A luxury car, on the other hand - a Jaguar perhaps - was too undemocratic: but a people-mover seemed just right, the sort of car politicians can hold talks in, move people, that sort of thing. The symmetry was marvellous.

Never mind that to many people the styling of the Galaxy gives an unusual impression that the car might, at any one time, be coming or going. Never mind that it can't decide whether it's a minibus or a sports car. Never mind either that the capacity to accommodate so many fellow-travellers seems at odds with the principles of freedom and independence which are the source of the motoring bug. The Galaxy's other attributes provide a perfect iconographic system for New Labour. It's sophisticated, mature (lout not old-fart), outgoing and as flexible in its accommodation as New Labour is in its policy. And of course, it's European. This Ford is not made in Dagenham or Halewood, but in a joint venture with Volkswagen at a new site in Portugal. If the Galaxy were a person it would be a forty-ish graduate, given to wearing deck shoes (probably with socks) at weekends, buying wine at Majestic, chinos from Gap and possessing committed views on child-rearing, forests and Third-World debt.

The Galaxy is New Labour on wheels... or, at least, in theory. If the sight of a brand-new, delivery-mileage-only Prime Minister driving himself to church in a Postmodern monospace seven-seat V6 people-mover was a surprise, the sight of the Blairs actually arriving at Downing Street (when a formal photo opportunity had not been announced) in a forlorn Montego Estate was - depending on the colour of your prejudices - as cruelly disillusioning or as neatly confirming some prejudices as Prescott wearing a gorilla costume and swinging a football rattle at his first cabinet meeting. For this melancholy device is the Blairs' private car, and it is irresistibly tempting to make the telling comparison of Chardonnay/brown ale, New Labour/old Labour and Galaxy/Montego. And very depressing it is.

Television news showed the Montego missing a plastic hubcap - telltale slovenliness - on a course of automatic physical disintegration to complement the necessary intellectual deconstruction demanded by the Blairs' consumer choice. The Montego is a survivor of the pre-anaesthetic days of the British car industry when the British car industry was still British. It is a vehicle entirely without personal charm or capability and with so little technical merit that only the most sensitive instruments could detect it. It was manufactured to a price rather than to a standard. Great designs are an expression of belief. Great designs have a moral quality. The Montego was not a great design.

The production technology employed to manufacture it was so backward and full of redundant processes and wanton complexity that mediocre quality and unreliability were standard fittings, along with interior design using Iron Curtain plastics and the aesthetics of a Romanian psychiatric hospital. They couldn't work out how to impregnate the bumpers with body colour so they had to paint them. Engines were crude and interior design reminiscent of the Polish avant-garde of the 1970s: lots of daring angles and glossy plastic and depressing tilts at modernism. As a driver's car, a Montego is no more stimulating than an afternoon in a day-care centre, its handling like a hospital gurney missing a wheel. It is the utter negation of joy, optimism, positivism and a sense of progress. It is depression made visible: dispiriting, cynical, ugly, backward and despairing. It is the Blairs' personal choice. Someone capable of tolerating such awfulness is not to be trusted. But, of course, this was the off-camera reality, as opposed to the photo-opportunity.

Will we see Ministers all in Galaxys one day, opportunistically fiddling with swivelling conference chairs so as to change direction with the ebb and flow of public opinion? Among all its many merits, the Galaxy is one of the few cars you can buy which allows passengers to sit with their backs to the direction of progress. Since it cannot easily be classified, it's a fine car for politicians. But even if Ford's popular people-mover does not officially replace the ageing fleet of government Rovers, one thing is certain: the choice of private car should be on the declaration of members' interests.

-Stephen Bayley

Tuesday 16 July 2024

Sidyngborne, Saedingburga (Part one) (Rough Draft)

A segue. An interlude. A momentary departure.

In 2020, I experienced a mental breakdown. I returned to Sittingbourne for three weeks in a state of ecstatic, non rational, and non-verbal perambulation. The fierce head that sat at the top, unequivocally. The mad pink gravel. The troughs of earth. The boy in the front lake. The rotting roach rudd gutted, inexplicably in the middle of the road. The palm tree, in combination with the pylon. The whistling postman outside homebase. Its featurelessness. Its landscapes (which I secretly love). The car crash I witnessed in Bobbing. The house fire. & so on & und so weiter.

Removing Fiberglass from Your Skin While touching fiberglass doesn’t usually lead to long-term effects on your health, exposure to it may cause intense itching, redness, or a rash. So, it's important to remove fiberglass from your skin as soon as possible so it doesn’t come in contact with your eyes, nose, or throat.

I was being carried by a southeastern train to what I imagined to be very realistically the place. Slow Death. Sittingbourne, Sidyngborne. The Swale. Sittingbourne was anciently written Sedingbourne, in Saxon, Saedingburga, i.e. the hamlet by the bourne or small stream. There was no entry for Sittingbourne in the Domesday book. I had 22 pages of the 12 step program printed on pink card paper by a friend.

They say John Marshall de Synele holds one small encroachment in the vill of Sittingbourne and he pays the lord king 1d. each year and the lord king loses nothing and that Peter of London holds one small encroachment in the vill of Sittingbourne and he pays 1d. each year to the lord king and the king loses nothing.

The first time I read Sittingbourne was in Canterbury Tales. I read it unthinkingly.

Of friars ere I come to Sittingbourne, That certainly will give you cause to mourn.

For well I know your patience will be gone.

Our host cried out, "Now peace, and that anon!"

& that anon. From its clay substrata. The area around Sittingbourne was subject to constant air raids by Zeppelins and aeroplanes during the First World War. The Germans used the town as a reference point for bearings on the way to London and would drop bombs indiscriminately. The first visit by a German aeroplane happened on Christmas Day 1914. Guns at Sheerness fired at the lone invader but still one shell dropped into a field at Iwade. The next event was to occur on 16 January 1915 when another solitary pilot from a German aerodrome in Belgium bombed Sittingbourne. This aircraft, a Taube, was pursued by two local airmen, but managed to escape after dropping a couple of bombs. About 100 air-raid warnings were sounded in Sittingbourne during the First World War and anti-aircraft batteries were strengthened in 1917.

The last big raid to pass over the town on Whit Sunday (19 May 1918), carried out by a number of Gothas, eliciting perhaps the most ferocious barrage from the ground defences the town had ever seen.

The local newspaper, the East Kent Gazette, reported:

The first of these duels occurred about an hour after the raid had been in progress, and probably this machine was caught while on its way to London. It was engaged by a daring aviation officer while at a great height.

The British airman attacked his opponent so fiercely that the German was forced down to a lower height, and ultimately, to the joy of the onlookers, the Gotha burst into flames, seemed to break in two and came down piecemeal, all aflame. The wrecked machine and the three occupants fell by a farm.

Two of the Germans fell into marshy ground and their bodies were deeply embedded in the mud.

The third man's head struck a wall and was shattered like an eggshell. All three bodies were removed to a local aviation establishment.

The fall of the burning Gotha was seen for miles around.

The fall of the burning Gotha.

All of these notions rive up, the touch a feeling that Sittingbourne draws out of me. A place I had been moved to, aged 13/14 against my will. I recall the car journey up to Kemsley, which is the penultimate stop before the Isle of Sheppey. A place driven by a dockyard, a port, the inimitable presence of three prisons, and various caravan sites. In the early 00’s my dad & subsequently my Granny had caravans at Warden Springs.

That car journey is etched into my mind. It involved my dad (who had opened all the windows on an October morning). A perambulation of Kent, conteining the description, hystorie, and customes of that shire.

Up that hill, is a large public house. The Kemsley Arms. Behind which was marsh land. My dad proceeded to tell one of his many corrupted stories likely developed from one of the few books he owned, which was on the London Necropolis Company. I do not believe he got half way through it properly, and would spin unrealistic mostly botched shaggy dog tales. He pointed to the marshland & said they were all pauper graves & that he heard from someone who heard from someone that occasionally, bones would emerge from the ground. Bones would emerge like green peas sprouting. On the way up the hill, which is straddled by Victorian workhouses (mostly built in the 1890s for the paper mill) fanned out, to solely present the rotting vegetation of this beyond it Pub, as if it rose from the ground itself.

There was a mud field with a washing machine in the middle, two children throwing bricks into the drum. It was as if this place had been nightmarishly conjured by Ken Loach to emotionally plea bargain with his middle class viewership, that This Really is England.

The journey around Kemsley was injurious, somehow I was being coaxed/muffled into this place. Not that I had come from much better, but at 13/14 being ripped out of a Catholic school, away from my much loved Granny & into an unknown. A cluster of houses sits atop a green hillock, surrounded by trees and fields. A row of hay bales neatly arranged behind the hill (everything behind a hill), a thin strip of deep blue sea is visible. Above is boundless blue sky.

Barratt Built Homes. 2002, a year known for the horrors of construction trade cutting corners. The itinerant & mendacious use of drain pipes, the illogical implementation of roundabouts, the poorest quality stud walls imaginable, anti-longevity, anti-building compliance & known for literally collapsing on top of families. It was on a road named Recreation Way, everything appeared for the purpose of a driveway car parking position. Everything seemingly compromised to the very pleasurable sense of that particular form of security. To be able to park one car inside. Close a steel garage door. Then place another car directly outside. To have your car literally parked inside your house was the largesse of some of these people. That was dinner talk. But I was to finally get my own room. So I happily conceded & accepted whatever fate awaited me.

For to mourn here

each day the Tudor Rose

is 99p, and the king loses

nothing on clay substrate

sinking again midstream

in dead grass with wrecked boats

where nothing lives

from Recreation Way

to Green Porch Close

and Holy Trinity Church

sometimes in grasswort

& sometimes golden samphires,

for protection against

the hard reed bed

look out at the Swale

under the new EU directive

is brown-red & the unpeopled estate

is the mud of UK paper,

where Fleet Streets conspire

against the migrant moths

near Ridham Docks

known by their fruits

of Euromix concrete

O watch ward over veil

at Christmas 1454

the topsoil yields

a silver penny that the mad gene

carried from France,

containerboard a red knot

on Roman walk

badly paved the whistling postman

not from France

but from bourne

stands sometimes sits

but does not beg

for it is charity & he is old

& stays in the memory

like the Battle of Britain

or a Christmas fire.

I would walk the creek

near Milton Pipes

anon out the earth

& not say nothing

I would go to The Saxon Shore Way

formerly Church Marshes Country Park,

formerly a disused landfill site

to Toy Town

stand in middle of the palm tree roundabout

pylon in the middle

and ask, blind men where am I?

under venerated springs,

or a post industrial pilgrimage?

said to song as a place of inns

& bore most where it ought not to bear

at all, & did not bear

where it ought

to have been borne most

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid & broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards the evening. Dawn setting on an unflinching continuous, unvarying landscape. It was as if life had itself escaped into the unspectacular.

I would daily walk a gravel trail, there seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. Yellow marsh sun blanched was simply to be looked at, idled in extending somewhere out. Marshland for millenia & for the next & the next. With scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry.

The dancers swallowed great draughts, smacked their lips, and, amid the roaring merriment of the spectators, remarked that it was very, very good. The clowns were now upon their mettle, each trying to surpass his neighbors in feats of nastiness. One swallowed a fragment of corn-husk, saying he thought it very good and better than bread; his vis-à-vis attempted to chew and gulp down a piece of filthy rag. Another expressed regret that the dance had not been held out of doors, in one of the plazas; there they could show what they could do. There they always made it a point of honor to eat the excrement of men and dogs.