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12/01/2004: "Cycling the Gaps in the Concrete"

I went on one of my favoured urban runs Sunday evening, with my terrier in the front basket of my bicycle. This entails threading the mesh of dual carriageways and concrete limbos east and north-east of my city's centre, taking in Spaghetti Junction’s nether parts, seeking the serenity of branching canal towpaths beneath a constant thumping hum of motorised traffic, rolling along alleys that cars can’t negotiate and onto pedestrian bridges over dual carriageways, from which I can gaze at the stream of speeding lights skirting the asphalted ribbons that sever walled estates bordered by warehouses and their car parks, boarded-up shops, derelict housing, and abandoned pubs.

Within this world I find--even in winter--gaps between the concrete where the proliferation of car-dependent life has left niches of sturdy shrubs and grasses and the life they harbour. This scrubland is not the stuff of landscaped parks. Gardeners buy chemicals to control and kill these delinquents. From a wedge of human time I watch these weeds unpointing masonry, splitting concrete to its reinforcing rods, rooting through iron and stone, and growing amid quilts of branded cardboard, aluminium, cellophane, polythene bags, cans, packets, boxes, tubes, tearing, crushing, splitting, digesting trapped litter. I sat on a pile of rubble cushioned by crouch grass beside a canal and ate my prosciutto with bread dipped in olive oil, sipping a chianti followed by a cigarette, and felt sheer content. This wasn’t the virtual beauty of Venice. This is not the carefully posed city of our postcards and publicity calendars, nor the manicured parks beginning to recover their regulated environments.

This is the residue and blight created by thousands of choices supported by government policy about the way people want to live. It’s like this in Belgium, France, Spain, and everywhere that the population--with the support of government--treats the car as the default way to get about...our popularly chosen means of messing up our relations with each other. Yet nature, about which we express so much concern, is feral and resurgent on this darkling midden.

In all the pleasant hours of yesterday's sojourn the landscape was inundated with the sounds of fossil fuelled transport rushing around, I encountered one other human being. We paused and had a chat about our dogs and went our separate ways home. Today I’ll phone my mechanic to check my car in readiness for its annual test. As I drive it on errands I also will treat my surroundings as irrelevant to the urgency of my journey.

Simon Baddeley, on 12.01.04 @ 12:47PST