Author: richardfjbrown

I fell in love with the beautiful highway

\”The journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step\”

I spend so much time travelling between London and Brighton, that I thought it would be worth walking the route, if only to understand better the familiar but always half-glimpsed landscape as it flashes past the window.

Coulsdon South was the starting point. I wanted the trip to be more honest than scenic, but trudging through Streatham, Norbury, Purley and all points in between seemed to be an exercise in unnecessary masochism. A few yards from the station, the path across Farthing Downs takes you to the top of the North Downs, the hillsides dotted with forests in one direction and suburban villas in another. The road narrows and continues down towards Chaldon, with huge SUVs squeezing past each other, rushing to conclude the slightly furtive business that seems to dominate London\’s fringes.

I wandered off the road to try to follow a path through Devilsden Wood, but quickly got confused by too many paths rather than two few, almost all of them marked \’Happy Valley Nature Trail\’. That wasn\’t what I wanted – it sounded far too urban and didactic for my mood – but it seemed to have taken over all signage, like Japanese Knotweed smothering native species.

I returned to Ditches Road pretty near where I had left it, dodged some more SUVs and the occasional tractor, then walked past Chaldon\’s 11th Century Church (no camera this time, but I hope to remedy that in future stages). Past a couple of farms and then the most fantastic vista over the great closerleaf of the M23-M25 junction, with the M23 snaking through misty skies to the South.

Motorways may be bad in all sorts of ways (planet, health etc), but watching them twining together through wooded valleys, you are reminded what beauties of engineering they are too. Walking through cornfields down to the road, the roar of the traffic growing steadily more insistent, you feel like an archaeologist or an alien, unearthing something at once thrilling and abstruse.

A path passed under the M23, through Merstham, cut off like a sandbank between two rivers, then over the M25. Following the bank round above the junction, I passed more intriguing edge of city developments (razorwire and daubed signs – \’GUARD DOGS LOSE AT ALL TIME! KEEP OUT!!!\’).

Nature reserves indicated the sites of past gravel pits, and the path eventually emerged at Nutfield Marsh. The Inn on the Pond was exactly the pub I didn\’t want to find for lunch: restaurant-focused, with precious little bar service, and an interior that looked like it had been selected by an auto-gastropub programme. Very sorry, very Surrey.

The chef cites \”Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Thomas Keller of Napa Valley’s ‘French Landry’ [sic] restaurant fame as his food influences\”. I had a ham baguette, in which few of these influences were discernible. It\’s a bit like me saying that this account is inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor. It may be true, but it has no bearing on the quality of my prose.

From there, the idea of walking into Redhill, past the huge new housing estates being built in gravel pits that I had seen from the train, seemed too depressing a prospect, so I took a slightly woozy route across fields to Nutfield itself, then a further stroll (downhill again) onto South Nutfield, where a train arrived, miraculously, as I did.

Stats: 3.5 hours, 13.25km, 8.25 miles

re-dac-tor

\’Redact\’ is one of those ugly words (like \’resile\’) that seems to have insinuated itself into everyday speech without anyone noticing, let alone objecting.

Since 2005, redaction has been used in the public sector to describe the act of obliterating any interesting, sorry I mean \’sensitive\’, information in response to Freedom of Information requests, usually by use of a black marker pen. It was the publication of MPs\’ expenses (or rather the publication of Mondrian-esque blocks of black ink) that allowed the word to break out of its status as a piece of public sector jargon, and enter the real world.

The dictionary (Chambers 21st Century) defines \’redact\’ as \’to edit; to put (text) into the appropriate literary form\’, and traces its use back to the Latin redigere – to bring back. It is an irony worthy of Orwell that a word associated with tidying up for publication is now used to signify censorship and the suppression of information.

Poets, politicians, beauty queens and cooks

I don\’t seem to have put much up here recently. Normal service will be resumed presently.

In the meantime, here is one of Nick Asbury\’s \’corpoetics\’ – poetry assembled from the airy and conceited twaddle that infests corporate websites:

KPMG

I am strong.
I am vibrant.
I am committed to a vision.

I am tremendous.
I am quality.
I will lead people to excellence.

I am delighted.
I am respected.
I am very greatly valued.

What am I?
I am the best.

Reproduced without any permission, but please go and buy the book, and enoy other features on the Asbury blog, such as distinguishing the names of Fall songs from tax avoidance scams. Harder than you think.

Sign of the times

Like the first cuckoo, frogspawn or daffodil, dire warnings of anarchists hijacking peaceful anti-capitalist protests seem to come round earlier each year.

This year\’s star turn is one Alessio Lunghi, who is alleged to be proposing \’black bloc\’ tactics (whereby protestors dress identically to avoid identification) for the G20 Summit at the end of this month.

So far, so business as usual What is interesting this year is that, at the time of writing, these pernicious anarchists and their proposals to seize the ill-gotten gains of the capitalist system, appear to be getting a fair degree of support from on-line commentators in the Evening Standard (not known to be a house journal for the global resistance movement).

The main debate seems to be whether precipitating state repression and perhaps revolution through these tactics is appropriate, not whether the call to \’RECLAIM THE MONEY, storm the banks and send them packing\’ is right or wrong in itself.

Pipeline at the gates of dawn

Apart from some lurking images that would give Freud a field day, this email that I received at work is thoroughly baffling:

\’Over the past week, each Directorate has been requested to send the Corporate PMO updates for the Pipeline Tracker tool. This tool ensures visibility of all projects that are expected to pass through the Gateways at any given time.

\’This is an ongoing process requiring continual maintenance and review to ensure the Tracker is accurate and reliable.

\’The Corporate PMO needs to identify representatives from each Directorate to act as a Pipeline Champion, and this will be initiated next week.

\’Please can you nominate these representatives ASAP.

\’Thank you for your cooperation.\’

I\’d love to help (probably), but I really don\’t have the faintest idea what I am meant to co-operate with.

Nothing can stop them?

It\’s good to see that Saint Etienne have offered to write a song for London 2012. SE are the quintessential London band, and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? their unsentimentally-filmed elegy for the Lower Lea Valley\’s vanishing grimescape is well worth watching.

But, based on the evidence to date, their bid to craft a 2012 anthem is doomed to disappointment. From Barcelona to Beijing, understatement has rarely been an Olympic theme. London\’s bid was buoyed along by mannered M-People caterwhauling, and our contribution to the closing ceremony at Beijing was a faintly embarassing attempt to distill the essence of \’Cool Britannia\’ (remember that?), while ticking appropriate boxes. Red double-decker bus, as seen in establising shots in every film from Goldfinger to 28 Days Later? Check. Old white man from once-important rock band? Check. Inoffensive young black woman from talent show to counterbalance said rock dinosaur? Check. Global brand/footballer type person? Check.

I hope I\’m wrong, and there may still be a lot of suprises before the 2012 opening ceremony, but I am afraid that Saint Etienne\’s music, while not always my cup of tea (too winsomely Heavenly Records, if you know what I mean), is too subtle, too particular, too crafty and crafted, to fit into the bizarre, homogenised world of Olympic culture and bombast.

World gone wrong

There are all sorts of reasons why I haven\’t typed anything here for a few weeks. One reason is that I try to write with some basic level of insight or understanding, and things are falling apart in the global system at such a dizzying pace that is hard to see what is happening, let alone make any sense of it all.

There\’s something else too. Every time I start typing something about the shrill and intolerant outrage that seems to dominate debate at the moment, I realise I am sounding like a Daily Mail writer, protesting about \’political correctness gone mad\’. And this is not a good sound. If you sleep with a dog you get fleas, true, but sometimes that\’s the only place to sleep.

This week has been particularly rich in its craziness. Jonathon Ross making jokes about sex with old people (and the grand-daughters of old people) was merely a warm-up act to Gollygate. Now, Carol Thatcher does not seem like the sort of person I\’d like as a neighbour. I can only cringe as I imagine her crass and self-righteous air of martyrdom as she refused to \’kowtow to political correctness\’, by apologising for her singularly oafish and offensive remarks. But this can\’t make it right to ban her from the airwaves.

Jeremy Clarkson is another person that I wouldn\’t want to spend much time with (though Top Gear is a guilty pleasure), but it is hard to see how referring to Gordon Brown as a \’one-eyed Scottish idiot\’ is so offensive to all partially-sighted people, let alone an entire nation, unless they are embarassed to be associated with the Prime Minister.

This fractious and factitious culture of complaint (to borrow the title of Robert Hughes\’ prescient book) is reducing a once-great institution to a punch-drunk pulp, incapable of distinguishing morality from manufactured outrage, or helping the hungry from helping Hamas. To mangle another Yeats line, the BBC lacks all conviction; its viewers are full of passionate intensity.

We are all going to hell in a handcart (as I believe is the the traditional closing sentence of such rants).

Living in a box

I watched the ponderously-titled \’Big Chef Takes On Little Chef\’, wherein Heston Blumenthal seeks to revive Little Chef, with a creeping and dismal sense of familiarity.

The show pivots on an initially contrived, but subsequently all-too-real clash between Blumenthal and Little Chef boss Ian Pegler. The problem is something like this: Blumenthal sees his role as recovering the reputation of a British classic and, for all his culinary curiosity, seems to nurse a genuine interest in and affection for the traditions of British cooking.

Pegler, however, seems to view Blumenthal as a performing food monkey, who will bring \’blue skies thinking\’ to bear on Little Chef\’s tired menus (but doesn\’t need to worry his little head with anything like business models).

I don\’t know much about catering, but my experiences on the fringe of architecture suggest that the clients who demand wacky, iconic designs for buildings with a \’wow factor\’ are those least likely to understand the careful, pains-taking accretion of change that the best architects can orchestrate. The neophiles want the glamour and the buzz, but are too superficial to consider the sweat and the craft that underpins it.

They want \’thinking outside of the box\’ (Ian Pegler came up with this with a mere two minutes of TV programme to go). To which my architect friend Mark has the only sensible response: \”Err, I don\’t really think in a box.\”

All meat on the same bone

It\’s easy to feel remote from your fellow-countrymen. I felt like a visitor from another planet when the nation went into collective mourning for Princess Diana, and I did again last week, as tens of thousands of people began baying for the blood of radio presenters.

Initially I felt irritated by \’Manuelgate\’; the furore seemed like a distraction from \’real\’ news, like the continuing collapse of global capitalism. Then I realised that these were actually the same story: while regulators dozed, infantile over-paid idiots with egos the size of counties caused havoc with their reckless speculation. Both disasters started out small, noticed only by the aficionados, but rapidly snow-balled to become national (if not global) crises.

To stretch the comparison, we are now assured that there will be a retreat from risk-taking. Bankers will no longer trade arcane and spectral financial instruments, but will return to their \’boring\’ core business of offering punters somewhere to keep their money (which they can lend out to other punters). Similarly, BBC radio hosts will have to find something interesting or amusing to say between playing records (which doesn\’t necessarily involve prank calls, rude words or sex with burlesque stars).

A retreat from risk may seem reasonable, especially after the turmoil we have witnessed in recent months, but slipping back into stagnation, culturally and financially, does not seem very appealing either. Are we even capable of finding a happy medium, between stodgy and stifling conformity on the one hand, and the unconstrained exuberance of adrenaline-charged nutters on the other? It\’s too early to tell, but the omens are hardly promising.