Don't Stand So Close To Me

There are roughly 63 million people living in the UK, and its area is 243,610 square kilometres. That gives around 3867 square metres – or just under an acre – per person.

So why is that people choose to live in such uncomfortably close proximity to one another?

I looked out of the train window yesterday on my journey from London to Leeds – something I don’t normally bother doing very much – and saw vast tracts of farmland, derelict land, meadow land. And yet, I used to live in a flat where we could hear the people upstairs having sex (I can’t remember the bloke’s name, but his wife was called Unita – which I always remember, because it’s also the name of an Angolan paramilitary organisation).

It’s not like all that farmland is being used to grow crops for people to eat. In fact, god alone knows what farmers do with all those crops that appear to be just grass. At least in Lincolnshire you can tell what’s growing in the fields...

Pretty much everything we eat is imported from abroad. If that wasn’t the case, nobody would make a song and dance about “buying British”. I’m sure the Canadians don’t pay extra for “Canadian flour” – even if it does have selenium in it.

As you know, I live in Bradford. The specific bit we live in is constantly being targeted by the council for more and more housing developments, despite the glaring inadequacy of local facilities (see ODHSNM passim). This is in spite of the fact that, within the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council’s territory, vis to the west of the city, there is BUGGER ALL as far as Halifax.

Obviously the reason is that the bit we live in is very close to Leeds, which means houses built there can be sold for a lot more than houses built on a rain-soaked crag 10 miles further west.

I don't want to alarm my neighbours (who have been very understanding to date). But equally, I do - for example - sometimes want to go out into my back garden in my underpants without self-consciousness. 

I am English! I demand privacy! Privacy in which I will do weird things I want to keep secret!

Barcelona: It was the first time that we met

Elvira and I have just come back from a long weekend in Barcelona, which has just leapt to the top of my list of favourite cities in the world.

Here are some of my pensées arising.

More whining about airports

As I mentioned last week, coming up with blog material is – for me – dependent on having time and space to mull over an idea continuously, until it has been mulled out of all proportion.

This is why I have written so thoroughly on air travel before. There is always a lot of waiting, and there is always something absurd happening or about to happen to think about.

For example – is the whole “take your shoes off to go through the scanner” now a permanent thing? On the basis that once ever – 12 years ago - some fucknut put a bomb in his shoes, which failed to go off?

I know that real life terrorists tend not to be the brightest, but is anyone really likely to try this again – when everyone’s shoes have to go through the scanner?

As if the superiority of pretty much every other culture to the British was in need of any evidence, Barcelona airport has accommodated this state of affairs by carpeting the walkway through the scanner. That, my friends, is a real sign of civilisation.

La Sagrada Familia

This, for those of you who don’t know, is that funny looking church.

Seriously – I thought it was the most impressive building I have ever seen. It is like nothing else on earth. And it’s not even finished yet.

The exterior is simply astonishing. From a distance it looks organic – like something HR Giger would have drawn or HP Lovecraft would have written about. The towers in particular look unchristian, like something that has risen out of a crack in the ground during an earthquake. I was particularly struck by how they have "Sanctus" written around them in exactly the same font as hotels have "Marriott" written on them. 

Plastic martians come out of it

Close up though, it is as ornate and religious as Notre Dame or Chartres cathedral. Above is a picture from the Nativity facade. This is presumably the first and only turkey featured on a major religious building.

For all its organic, sensuous curves, the Nativity facade is recognisably a more-or-less conventional church door. Contrast that with the modernist Passion facade, which is terrifying in its own way. 

I have to say that, while it was still very impressive, the interior of La Sagrada Familia didn’t move me like the exterior did. My first impression was that is resembled the set of a 1960s sci-fi, particularly when I saw the lifts going up and down the towers.

But what impressed me more than anything was the sheer ambition of it. Gaudi and everyone else who has worked on it knew they would not live to see it completed. Yes – that is true of cathedral builders throughout history, but to think that 20^th century people thought like that as well? The work, I suppose, is itself a collective act of devotion – very difficult for us individualists to comprehend. And yet there it is, being built with the money from the hordes of visitors paying 13 euro 50 a head to go and look.

If you go to Barcelona, you MUST go and see La Sagrada Familia.

Barcelona itself

It’s never a fair comparison to put somewhere you go on holiday alongside somewhere you live and/or work.

But let’s do it anyway.

Barcelona has a warm welcome for sailors

The weather was beautiful. Everyone we spoke to was friendly and helpful – despite my having gone there with the belief that it was simply a matter of time until we were pickpocketed. Everything was clean. Families were doing things together. Generations and nationalities were getting along just fine together. The food was good. Nothing was overcrowded. Even the many dogs seemed polite and relaxed.

I saw none of the waddling, tracksuited urban peasants one sees everywhere in the UK. Maybe they were all at home watching “Javier Kyle” instead of wandering about public spaces like grotesque overweight zombies.

LOL: "Quim"

OK, we did see a fair sample of that uniquely Iberian phenomenon - the man with long hair up in a bun - but then even the beggars were picturesque... ;)

No-one seemed to be doing anything purely for the sake of pissing everyone else off – apart from the (mostly, but thankfully not exclusively, British) stag and hen parties.

It almost made me think that living in a city need not be a hell on earth. And the scooters!

OK, on the last night on the way home we saw (i) needles, (ii) vomit on the Metro and (iii) a broken bottle on the station steps – but the fact that this was remarkable rather than entirely commonplace seems important.

Like I say, it’s probably not a fair comparison. Tourists who jet in and do the sights for a few days only see the theme park Barcelona. I’m sure it has its problems. But my god, its best side is so much better than the best side of any city I’ve ever seen in the UK.

So THAT is where I am retiring to.

¡Visca Catalunya!

Why Bother to Fight School Appeals?

I feel that I should explain why I am writing about school appeals in such seemingly endless detail.

As a parent, you get very used to feeling (if not being) completely responsible for your child’s progress through life. You’re the one who puts them into bed at night. You’re the one who stops them drowning in their own dinner.

All of a sudden - with the allocation of a school place - your total responsibility is wrested away from you and “The System” decrees from upon its impersonal, dizzy heights what is going to become of this person who you have made every decision for, whose interests have been your guiding principle since before they were born.

Of course parents imagine out a life for their kids – and of course that involves going to a good school, getting a good education and being successful. I’m sure it must happen, but I almost cannot comprehend parents being indifferent about the school their child goes to, considering how much of their (the child's) subsequent life they are going to spend there, in the company of and under the influence of people other than themselves.

When The System declares, “Sorry, we can’t all get what we want – so you’ll have to just make the best of it” and you imagine the potentialities of your child being wasted or going unrealised simply because you COULD NOT BE ARSED to challenge The System, then you HAVE TO fight it.

It would be nicer and more just if this didn’t matter. Of course I’d like to see all schools as good as one another, so that nobody has to “win” and nobody has to “lose” – we’re talking about 4 and 5 year old children for god’s sake.

I don’t blame local authorities for having admissions policies that they stick to in order to distribute a scarce resource among an excessive number of valid claimants.

I would perhaps point out that it is often THE SAME local authorities that allow the development of more and more new homes - raking in the council tax from increased population - without providing for a corresponding increase in infrastructure like primary schools anywhere near the new developments they profit from.

Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and it has to be dealt with in its current, imperfect form.

If EVERYONE appealed against The System, then The System might have to take a look at making itself a little less unjust, for the sake of an easier life. It’s only the silent acquiescence of the majority who don’t bother that lets them get away with it.

I’m not going to pretend that what we did had any kind of faux revolutionary wider goal like that behind it, but I throw that out there (along with the foregoing) as a pre-emptive strike against anyone who thinks we were selfish to do it. And also fuck you.

So that covers why we appealed and why I want to write about it. It was a bloody significant event in our lives and I still feel triumphant that we got the right and JUST outcome by persistence.

Sadly, thousands of parents are going to go through the same thing next year, and the next year.

When it was happening to us, I wanted to read a “human” explanation or account of it as well as all the legal (and quasi-legal) stuff I came across that could demystify and contextualise it all – and I could not find anything.

When you see that only 16% of appeals succeed, that it’s a legally binding adversarial tribunal and you see the rates that lawyers charge – and the success rates they lay claim to – it can be really intimidating. You want to argue your case on grounds of love, but love is inadmissible in court.

If I can help anyone win their appeal – or just go in there feeling more confident to face down a system that stacks the dead weight of the bureaucracy against the isolated individual – then I will have accomplished what I set out to.

If it doesn't help anyone... well, have some kitttens to redeem the time you wasted here.

Architecture and Morality

I have been wandering around Leeds city centre at lunchtimes since the start of the year.

Given that one can only get so far and still have enough time to get back to the office, as you can probably imagine, the novelty soon wore off.

However, seeing as I am doing it for exercise – having cancelled my gym membership at the end of the year – I have been persevering with it, while trying to find new ways of making it interesting.

First off, I am listening to my Michel Thomas German language course a lot. All I need to take this to the next level (as we say whilst inwardly dying in management meetings) is find someone else who wants to speak German and start speaking to them. In German.

Right now, all I’m doing is walking about whispering to myself – which is, of course, the international language of the mental patient.

Secondly, I am looking up.

Most of the people shuffling around the city streets rarely raise they eyes above the level of the shop-fronts. I, however, have been looking at the uppermost parts of Leeds’ buildings and I’ve reached two conclusions:

1. There is a hell of a lot of vacant commercial property in the city centre - so if you need business premises, you should be able to get a very good deal.

2. If you flooded or buried Leeds to a depth of about 15 feet, you'd actually be left with quite a beautiful place.

There are some really fascinating buildings around which you would never give a second glance to because of the staggeringly banal contents of their ground floors. The most extreme example of former "oooh" and present "meh" surely has to be the one-time Jubilee Hotel on The Headrow – now the "Red Leopard" lapdancing establishment.

My personal favourite is St Paul’s House in Park Square (right). It looks like the Doge’s Palace, only with an “office space to let” sign pinned to the outside.

The Leeds City Markets building (at the top) would not look out of place in Paris or Vienna, despite being inhabited primarily by people offering to unlock stolen mobile phones. And the Town Hall is also a thing of beauty.

THEN, you look at what’s in between these brilliant examples of Victorian ambition and craftsmanship and you realise that if the Victorians were wrong about one thing, it was that history moves forwards towards a better future. 

Pretty much every building from the 20^th century onwards looks horrendous, cheap and nasty.  The court buildings look like they’ve been made out of Lego, for example. And they probably have. 

“Ah, here he goes again, imagining the past was SO MUCH BETTER than the present”, I hear you say. “The reason why old buildings look better than modern ones is that the crap old buildings fell down or were knocked down years ago.”

Please excuse any Prince Charles tendencies here. Some modern buildings are indeed impressive and beautiful in their own way. The Gherkin in London is quite something.

But – to me - they are things you look at and say “that’s a clever statement” rather than “that is a work of art”. Same as the difference between Tracey Emin’s bed and a Caravaggio.

 So, present-day architects: more stone-work please. More domes. More intricacy, less concept please. OK?

Tetley Brewery - or what's left of it

Another thing you notice about Leeds’ buildings is how many of them are completely derelict. I’m not talking about boarded up shops – I mean entire city blocks of buildings going to ruin. The whole area just north of the bus station, for example, around Templar Street and Lady Lane.

Clearly, no one is going to buy them or rent them in their present condition. So why not demolish them?

In fact, here’s an early policy for my future dictatorship. If a building is left unoccupied for more than a year, it has to be EITHER opened up to homeless people OR blown up and returned to nature until someone can think of something worthwhile to put there instead. 

Dockland of the Dead

On days like today you could go snowblind from the sun’s reflection off the pavement.

That, and all the clammy white flesh on display around Leeds – you could be forgiven for thinking there had been a mass break-out from the veal farm.

Although my skin is fairly resistant to sunburn, my eyes are another story. I think I must be part owl or have ginger retinas or something. When the sun comes out, one or both of my eyes start to ooze pretty quickly.

Nevertheless, the sudden appearance of the solar deity’s winged chariot has turned my daily tramp around Leeds into an almost enjoyable experience. And not a day goes by on my wanderings on which I don’t learn something.

For example: getting punched in the face is clearly a much more commonplace event than I had previously thought, given the number of men and women staggering around the city centre with either black eyes or missing teeth.

Anyway, today I wandered down to Clarence Dock.

Apart from the Royal Armouries Museum, there is practically NOTHING there any more. The store directory website has four things on it...one of which is the Royal Armouries Museum.

It is pretty mainstream to bemoan the lingering death of British high streets, strangled by chain stores, stranded by traffic swarms and befouled by street drinkers, chuggers and other sundry mentalists.

Here is just the latest jeremiad I came across – in which former TV gobshite Wayne Hemingway puts a positive spin on it all by arguing that the ruination of city centres will “open up space for quirky start-ups”. Hilarious. Let them eat cake Wayne!

But spare a thought for the “luxury mixed developments” like Clarence Dock. The high street might be dying, but in terms of deadness this was like the goddam pyramids. No shops. No people. Just a barge decked out to look like a U-boat.

Which, I have to say, looked AWESOME.