Wonderland

Punctuating the ecclesiastical gloom, each occupant is cocooned in a puddle of light dripping from overhead lamps.  In silence, their heads are bowed to the documents in front of them.  Periodically they refill their coffees or green teas, even though no tithes are levied here.  

By the windows there are livelier groups and an unobtrusive susurration coats the air.  A man holding a small child on a table like a puppet leans forward to talk with two women.  A group of suits has commandeered a space and conducts urgent discussions.  Forthcoming events are being planned by a T-shirted huddle. ‘We’ll have Hamlet by then,’ I hear one say.

What happens on the stages of the National Theatre - tributes to august playwrights, experimental offerings - cannot compare with the incidental dramas enacted in its foyer.

The advent of mobile technology combined with the vacuum created by the closure of libraries, pubs and church halls creates an opportunity for the remaining public realm spaces.  Here is light and warmth, comfortable seating, convenient tables, well-provisioned toilets, plentiful food and drink and a bookshop.  Only an airport could offer so much under one roof!

No pictures adorn the walls.  The sepulchral grey is relieved only by cerise and mauve poufs, more art objects than furniture.  A cleaner manoeuvres an old-fashioned carpet sweeper around them; perhaps vacuum cleaners are deemed to conflict with the ambience, or maybe this is performance art.

The interlocking slabs of concrete and honeycombed ceilings suggest the building has been slotted together, like the house-building cards we had as children.  Ascending the stairs, I pass arrow slits offering truncated glimpses of each level.  Three naked toilets glow green eerily.  A bored attendant, surreptitiously reading an ebook, explains. ‘It’s a promotion for wonder.land.  Let me help you with the virtual reality.’  Sitting on a loo, encased in the headset I watch luminous bubbles rise and fall, and a leering Cheshire cat drift pointlessly.   I return to Denys Lasdun’s wonderland.  Stage lights, hanging from poles like some strange fruit, illuminate the concrete columns.  They bear the imprints of wooden boards, 1970s architectural chic, and soar through the building, reminiscent of the trees whose trunks they echo.  On the next level, a restaurant manager is inspecting bone-white napery and precisely placed silverware.  Rectangular windows make photograph frames for panoramas of the City of London.  At the summit, beyond all but the most intrepid visitors, surplus catering equipment litters the floor.  Light reflected from the river assails a man asleep against his rucksack: an exhausted tourist or inebriated tramp. 

Back in the foyer, the flickering clusters of students and office workers are replaced by theatregoers, jostling for drinks and scanning programmes.

Functional convergence has blurred the boundary between work and leisure.  Offices host cafes; cafes often resemble offices; bookshops hide cafes; cafes offer book exchanges.  Without compromising its original purpose, this space has embraced the change.  Perhaps as they crouch over their laptops in the corners and crevices, the cappuccino drinkers are incubating the plays of the future.

© David Thompson 2016

Fathers

It's one of the most important jobs yet there is no manual, no training and no pay.  Recrimination is inevitable; with luck, there may be posthumous recognition.

Like the two-dimensional beings inhabiting the satirical novel Flatland, it is hard to conceive of alternatives to one's own experience.  Thus I believed my family to be normal; so when I visited friends' homes, it seemed strange, their fathers eating meat and recounting wartime exploits.  Mine was a vegetarian in the days when they subsisted on eggs and cheese, (during holidays in France waiters were puzzled when he refused omelettes with jambon) and a conscientious objector who subsequently participated in the Aldermaston marches.  During return matches, my friends would be baffled by his obscure puns; he would smile wryly to himself and wink at me conspiratorially.  Consequently, family social interactions served to sunder, not cement, my friendships.

An intellectual ascetic, my father was a virulent atheist, despised sport and was bored by gardening.  While other fathers watched football, mowed the lawn or trudged to church, he would be cloistered in his attic study. Wrapped in a thick coat and tapping away at an Imperial typewriter or turning the handle of a vast mechanical calculating machine, which made a rasping noise like tearing paper, his weekend consultancy was funding the cost of his children’s private education.  Occasionally he embarked on ambitious carpentry projects; in old age he liked to claim he’d been doing DIY before it was invented.  The results occupied that unfortunate territory between barely functional and annoyingly inadequate.  Drawers stuck, cupboard doors didn't fit.  Loathe to offend him, we would be stuck with these proud botches for years.  But some were successful: when I visited the house decades later, the current occupants were still using the secondary glazing he'd fashioned in our kitchen. Immediately, I was transported back recalling the smell of the plastic he melted it to seal the corners.  All his pastimes were lone enterprises, refuges from a turbulent family.  His second family became apparent much later.

As a teenager, my father was abandoned in London when my grandfather, an avid communist of Jewish extraction, emigrated to the Soviet Union.  His struggle to achieve an education and build a career in science, culminating in a prestigious academic position, made him intolerant of indolence or incompetence.  I owe my A level successes, at least partly, to his grudging tutorship, but his disappointment in my mathematical prowess was equalled only by relief at his superiority being unchallenged.  Praise was unusual and bestowed only in the absence of possible competition.  He seemed genuinely impressed when I landed my first consulting job, which was also my final break with the world of science, his dominion.  Rarely, he acknowledged his own shortcomings. ‘You're a better father than I was,’ he once volunteered.  But it was not a compliment I felt I deserved, the dissolution of my family was imminent.  He took quiet pride in his own achievements and once directed me to fetch a cardboard tube from his study and examine the contents: his admission to the Royal Society.  On the occasion of his retirement, a large bound volume was presented to him.  To my astonishment it contained hundreds of eulogies from former colleagues and students from all parts of the world effusively thanking him for support and encouragement.

I have observed how like my father I have become: I am meticulous, organised, pedantic.  In adulthood, I tended towards his musical taste, a similarity he appeared to resent rather than encourage, trespassing on his private turf.  I developed a taste for walking and after his death I discovered a rusty canvas rucksack in his loft which my mother said he had used during lonely treks in the Lake District.  I pass his photograph in my hall every day.  We look similar and people often assume it's a picture of me.

© David Thompson 2016

Enlightenment Through Wind

I was awoken by violent coughing.  Risking frostbite, I poked my head out of my sleeping bag and leant over the bunk.

'Slept well, Ged?'

More coughing: Ged was a dedicated smoker.

'Call this a holiday,' he growled, 'knee deep in mud all day and nothing but lentils for dinner.'  Another coughing fit prevented me from reminding him that it had been his idea.

Ged had suggested we visit a commune in Wales.  In the 1970s, communes were synonymous with free love in my dictionary so I didn't need much persuading. 

'It's new,' Ged explained, 'so they need a bit of help getting going.' 

Communes fitted in with Ged's unorthodox view of the world; to my consternation, he spent much of the journey there absorbed in his rear view mirror, claiming that what went on behind the car was more interesting.

The commune was above an abandoned quarry and to reach it we had to negotiate a steep uneven track, surrounded by dispirited trees defying the detritus of discarded slates.  A dusty vegetable patch had been coaxed from the unyielding ground. A dozen dishevelled inhabitants, outcasts or idealists, occupied a cluster of leaking tents and dilapidated stone buildings.  It was hard to imagine a more forlorn place. 

Ged's reference to 'a bit of help' was an understatement.  A prerequisite to progress was moving building materials around so the antiquated site railway was being adapted; our task was to lug the sleepers.

When I asked why they'd picked such an awkward location, Mike looked at me pityingly.

'Well, obviously this is the best place for wind.'

That was undeniable: sudden gusts had several times nearly toppled me into the old workings, but it hardly seemed the obvious criterion for a rural idyll.  

'Come with me and I'll show you the turbines.'

At the top of the hill the wind was persistent.  Mike pointed to a makeshift structure spinning furiously.

'That's a wind turbine, it's powering the light in your room.' I recalled the dim bulb, which would have embarrassed a glow-worm, and tried to look impressed. 

'Over there's a Savonius, the vertical axis means it can operate at higher wind speed.' It was made from two halves of an oil drum and looked like it would need a gale to budge it.

'Very interesting,' I conceded, 'but what's the point, is the site too remote for mains electricity?' Mike laughed. 

'No, but fossil fuels will run out one day, so we need to develop alternatives now.  That's why we're calling this the Centre for Alternative Technology. All raw materials are finite so we're also recycling as much as possible. Read The Limits to Growth when you get home,' he advised, 'then you'll understand.'

That week I set a personal record for days without a shower, which was not very conducive to free love, but the compensation was realising I had played a small part in the genesis of the environmental movement.

© David Thompson 2016

Coverup

There aren't many places in the city where I'm surrounded by naked men. Most are nervously shielding themselves with towels and assume their kit as quickly as possible, fearful that any hesitation in regaining modesty could be misconstrued. Others discreetly flaunt their muscles or exhibit garish tattoos. 

As a scrawny teenager seeking to outwit the school bully, I endured judo classes at the now demolished Green Man in a cheerless basement room, the floor iced with white rubber mats. Afterwards we would catch tantalising glimpses of the cosy pub.  Rows of inverted bottles perched on their optics glittered in front of bevelled mirrors behind a mahogany bar.  Locals supped beer and chatted, a manifestation of community conviviality whose benefits to health and happiness probably outweighed the detrimental effect of pervasive tobacco smoke and liberal alcohol.

Nowadays companies reward successful employees with comfortable cars, compensating for the resultant loss of exercise with subsidised gym membership whose use is monitored by smart cards.  This year's must-have Christmas present was the hoverboard, which eliminates the minimal effort associated with getting to school or walking the dog.  The city is complicit in tempting its inhabitants to sloth.  Nowhere is more than a few minutes' walk from the strangulating network of public transport; elevators hoist office workers between floors; shopping malls ensure customers conserve their energies for consumption by providing moving walkways.

So to combat atrophy, a bizarre paradox is embraced: we take the tube home to save time that can then be spent in an expensive gym. Here, the rancid reek of the subterranean pub changing room is replaced by the spice of complementary unguents, conjuring the ambience of a gentleman's club or the better class of business hotel. 

The floor is crowded but nobody speaks. Insulated by earphones, each hears a different drummer; although it is a communal activity, this is not a community.  Heath Robinson contraptions festooned with pulleys, belts and levers, gleam like sculptures in a gallery but are calibrated to stretch skin and sinew to their limits as efficiently as medieval racks. There are stern injunctions not to use the machinery without instruction; if unpropitiated these catalysts of health will morph into the instruments of torture they resemble.  

I mount a treadmill, its insistent whine adds to the cacophony of pounding music and clanking weights. On the climbing wall opposite, coloured handholds fleck the brown surface. One is twisted into a wry smile; inebriated by exhaustion I smile back foolishly. The speed moves up a gear, sweat tickles my face and the rocks dissolve into exotic cupcakes, dusted with talc for icing sugar. Caged in a side room, inmates hunched over stationary cycles gasp and groan. This is a ritual, a homage to Escher’s picture where the 'adherents of some unknown sect' pointlessly climb an endless staircase. The energy voluntarily expended and the pain endured in this temple of self flagellation would delight the Victorian industrialist squeezing profits from his satanic mill. 

Buoyed by endorphins I relax in the lobby, read a newspaper article about the obesity epidemic and watch the turnstiles grind out a parade of newcomers.  They have left their vehicles in the car park, ascended in the lift and are now ready to take their clothes off and get fit.

© David Thompson 2016

Cities

Some years ago I was working in Milan, designing an HR dashboard for a bank.  It was late summer and over breakfast my Italian client complained about how cold it was.  That day, I had to fly to Stockholm for a meeting.  Exchanging pleasantries at dinner in the evening, my Swedish colleague remarked how warm the day had been.  I obsessively check the weather when I’m travelling and had noted that the temperature in both cities was 15C.

How we apprehend the world is determined by our prejudices and expectations.  In Invisible Cities, a series of imaginary conversations between Kublai Khan and his emissary Marco Polo, Italo Calvino shows how approaching the same city from different angles produces different perceptions.  The camel herder arriving through a desert sees Despina, a city located by the sea, as a gateway to the freedom of the ocean; the sailor reaching the safety of Despina’s harbour perceives the conurbation as a source of the bounty of the earth gathered from distant lands.

A city's own dwellers have varying experiences of the city they inhabit.  A busy street can be a vexatious traffic jam to the motorist, a hazardous muddle to the cyclist and a noxious cloud of pollution to the walker.  A dilapidated street market is simultaneously a nutritional lifeline to the impoverished, a cultural icon to the historian and, to the investor, a development opportunity.

The perception of dramatic events is also influenced by the preconceptions and perspectives of its onlookers.  This variability was used to such dramatic effect in Kurosawa's 1970 film Rashomon that the title has become a byword for unreliable witness.  Internet consumers rely on others' views as curated by social media.  Yet books lauded on Amazon and restaurants pilloried on TripAdvisor are filtered through reviewers' own perceptions and benchmarked according to their standards; they do not represent absolute truths and may not even accord with the preferences of those seeking guidance.

Urban flaneurs observe different features depending on their interests.  One is absorbed in shop windows, another is fascinated by church architecture.  The aspect presented directly by the city to each person is not their only input; each is also impacted by the refraction of others’ experience, generating a meta level of information.  The wealthy landlord is assailed by the pleas of the homeless he has displaced, crouching on street corners.  So each person’s kaleidoscope of experiences combine to form a unique experiential city autograph.  In the face of such subjectivity, how can a city be truly captured or definitively described? Kant distinguishes between the appearance of things, which comprise our experience: the phenomena; and the things themselves, which comprise reality: the noumena.  Measurements are objective and form indisputable reality: a city is so many kilometres wide and so many metres above sea level: the noumena.  Yet that same city would be experienced as paltry to a visitor from a Chinese megapolis but gigantic to a villager: the phenomena.

The most frequent reaction from participants during walks I lead in suburban London is: 'I've lived in this area for decades, but never knew this was just around the corner!'  Architects and urban planners might despair if they realised how little their efforts are appreciated - or maybe they are grateful to be able to inflict their enormities blithely on a largely indifferent populace.  But citizens’ lack of appreciation might have consequences.  In his fantastical novel The Phantom Tollbooth, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for children, Norton Juster describes a city named Reality, whose inhabitants became so distracted by their obsession of getting from one place to another as quickly as possible that they no longer took any notice of their surroundings:

“No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear.  Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible.  There was nothing to see at all.”

Phyllis, one of the cities described in Invisible Cities, suffers a similar fate:

"But it so happens that, instead, you must stay in Phyllis and spend the rest of your days there. Soon the city fades before your eyes, the rose windows are expunged, the statues on the corbels, the domes."

Walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities, Roger Deakin remarks in Waterlog.  These slow methods, largely unburdened by technology and regulation, remain the most effective ways to be anchored to the environment, enabling us to be watchful and observant, and chime with Cyril Connolly’s advice that no city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. 

Double planetoid, Escher, 1949.

Two regular tetrahedrons, piercing each other, float through space as a planetoid. The light coloured one is inhabited by humanoid creatures who have completely transformed their region into a complex of houses, bridges and roads.  The darker tetrahedron has remained in its natural state with rocks, vegetation and weird beasts.  The two bodies fit together to make a whole but they have no knowledge of each other.

© David Thompson 2016