“After making this up in your mind, you get there and see that perspective has tricked you. Your body has no affect. Your bones would snap if there were to be but one slip, all you have are your toes for grip. With bare feet underneath you and crashing waters beyond there’s nothing but the idea of building your way back out again…”
If you take your time when passing the cooling towers of south Yorkshire you can also spot the storage yard that’s filled with bright red scaffolding poles capable of cranes. There, you can build a city arbitrary to reason as to previous architectural histories. With different extensions of different sizes you can amount to one third of the first history and then another third of that again – three fold. You can see it in terms of plinths, I suppose, and what you might use these for, to build ideas and built on top of them, again, concepts for construction: one is larger and flatter than the other, the other being more cuboidial in appearance, the third and final version is of the same area but decidedly more stretched like a post or pole. From here you can build absolutely anything imaginable to support your ideas.
If it gets too much you can find a bit of nature, but you’ll have to follow the right sort of path through over and out of industrial magnificence. Here’s how you do it.
Instruction one: Get yourself to the outskirts of the city, inner-city parks will not do, you need green belt, the corrugated iron of tramp houses, ivy and lost soles in farm land, paddocks with angry horses and sheep with dangling backsides. You need to smell the shit of manure and reclaim your ability to climb trees to acquire better vantage points. From here you can call upon a dog to sniff out the stream.
Instruction two: Follow the stream upwards as you need more height. Find or make yourself a hill to scale. Then on top of this spread some woodland to poke your head out of. Come across a river, a dale, and a meadow: a structure of lime stone, a valley, a crag a rock-upon-rock to muster and define and conquer.
Instruction three: now you need mountains – not just hills. You need more height than the low rolling overturns of Derbyshire, something steeper than the North York Moors: more variety or difference in repeated roads, minor roads bee roads moth roads dusty roads the great western road through Argyll and Bute. Boats across waters to secluded bird sanctuaries and havens of lost stone. Then you see snow and have thoughts that are cold to the bone and altogether different from anything you have ever needed or seen or had before.
Instruction four: “Settle for a rope swing” and swing back through the text. By retreating in instructions – from four to one – you’ll regress back into my childhood. Back to the swings of Chatsworth River: a deer or two staring you in the face, as you’re too chicken shit to take the plunge.
Now you’re older you should not be so chicken shit. But you’re heavier, longer, hairier and more cumbersome – more aware of the affect your body has and the strength you go without. Rope swings don’t really work. They just make your feet wet in the stream below. You laugh it off though and decide that the waterfall above is now manageable – the rain means nothing now and your oversized umbrella has this great balancing affect as you climb with bare feet. You get to the top steaming with sweat, drenched in bracken-flavoured dew, and ready to take the plunge…
