Veteran on the street.

New homeless law: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38736168

----------

He sleeps on a corner one mile away from the ghost buildings owned by billionaires for investment purposes.

Its that time of year when one of his friends never returns. A couple of nights below freezing, mixing milk and meths is not enough to protect them. Go to sleep with a beer jacket on and never wake up. Removed before the morning commuters arrive.

He was in one of those recent endless wars. Not one of the great ones, no victory parades or homecomings. No definite ending, a gradual fading and withdrawal, until all the troops were back home. Quiet retreat while those places drifted back to the way they were before intervention. Call it unresolved, call it what you want.

He came home, left the army. One pay cheque away from the street, like most people in these towns. It was all it took. No dramatic downfall.

He rides the underground trains during the day to stay warm.

This town keeps sucking people in and some people get spat out.

The office workers all walk past him on their way to get a sandwich and a latte.

Some Friday night jokers pissed on his sleeping bag and the spikes in the door way says you're not welcome. You don't fit the story of this economy.

Once he was a baby, and his mum said he was a happy kid, and then he played football like every other kid in those northern towns. He had a mother and father, and went to school, had a girlfriend, learned to drive, went to the cinema, hung out in pubs, got a job, joined the army, went to war. He went back once and it was all betting shops, charity shops and boarded up shops. Boarded up lives.

Then it was over. Discharged. Fell into temporary work. One day walking home from the warehouse the pavement opened up so wide he fell through and never got back up again.

The girl in the coffee shop comes from one of those southern European countries where the economy collapsed. She headed north to this town like a million others. When her shift has finished, she comes out and gives him a coffee and one of the left over sandwiches.

The evening commuters go home, the tourists are on their way to the theatre.

It hasn't been cold enough long enough for the council to step in and sweep them up into the shelter.

There's a hard frost forming on his memories. Its going to be a hard night.

Drinking in a bar looking out the window.

Soaked in the rain, too early to go home.

I've never drunk alone in a bar, but this today I needed it. A day like no other when everything changes.

5pm, looking out the window, people rushing home from work. Endless buses pull up and pull away.

In the bar a man is talking too loudly to his partner, trying to be overheard.

Music is playing in the background, The Doors Break On Through and The Stones. I pretend I'm sitting in a bar in the US somewhere.

Lone men check their phones or suck on vaporized nicotine.

Looking out the window. A woman I used to know walks by, on this day of all days. Once she said how funny it is that we always bump into each other, and she doesn't bump into anyone else as much as me. I offered up some rational reasoning excuse on that day. But I had thought that too, and often thought about why we kept seeing each other.

At the bus stop opposite, a girl is waiting for the bus, an old lady approaches with two dogs, I can see from the conversation that the old lady wants the girl to hold the dogs' leads' why she goes into the supermarket behind the bus stop. She also has a laundry basket, the wicker circular kind, white in colour, that she must have just bought, she leaves that with the girl at the bus stop as well.

I finish my beer and leave.

The girl at the bus stop is texting, probably telling a friend that an old lady has asked her to look after two dogs and a laundry basket.

I walk home. Clothes still damp from the rain. I think about the woman I used to know, and synchronicity and fate.. And I think about how your life can change in a moment, when you weren't expecting it.

It was a good beer.

Essaouira

Faded greens and flaking paint. It's autumn, and the high season is over.

A faded colonial out-post, past it's glory, clinging onto the coast. They speak French. Refreshing citron pressé in the beach front cafes.

Endless beach, with the waves coming in all the way from the Americas. Men try and sell you special cigarettes on the deserted beach. Someone says Jimi Hendrix once stayed here. It seems Jimi Hendrix stayed quite a few places in his short time. I was to hear the same story years later in Nepal.

In the boat yards, they build boats the traditional way, out of wood. A man spontaneously shows us around, telling us the history and how they build the craft.

The Atlas mountains seem a long way away now.

Later in a bar. There is a Japanese cartoon playing on the TV with Arabic subtitles. It's one of those old small portable box shape televisions on a wall bracket above the bar. In the background I can hear a familiar song, Neil Young Out on the Weekend is playing.

But that was 25 years ago. I was a kid then. I guess Essaouiria has changed too.

Cyber Subtopia (ain't that bad)

This is anytown, anywhere

everywhere is everywhere

generation after generation

traded its spaces

traded their bodies

junk upon junk

you bought the subtopia

and the subtopia bought you

first they took your high street, then they took your virtual space, and then they took your mind

we wanted it and they gave it to us

this is dead ground now

we bought the boxes at exorbitant prices

lived in them, bought them with a smile on our face

then the corporations took the virtual space

more boxes

endless twitter feeds, cyber subtopia

new media nothing more than comments on old media

the new moguls just like the old guard

mainstream media still dominates the hashtag

TV channels feed the news feed

stroke the keys with a key stroke

caress the technology with a touch of the touch screen

and no one is listening, there's too much noise

the star in a novel no one is watching

screaming in space

you traded it all

for mediocre media

for distorted audio streaming

and a billion sub par instant images

variable ratio reinforcement

push the opium button

distraction eases the pain

blandness knows no bounds

the physical space is gone

except out on the edges and in the cracks

its possible to live another life

but you can take a corner of virtual world

and you can take your mind back whenever you want.



On the other side of the world

someone is smashing rocks to extract the precious metal ore

and someone else is putting that metal in smart plastic boxes

for survival wages

factories the same as they always were

a new subtopia is being born

****

this subtopia ain't so bad

go for a walk in the countryside sometime

if you can live with it

this time is as good as any other

Home

There is a place. And you call it home. Possibly it doesn't even exist anymore.

Where is home for you? What do you think of? Childhood? Family? Where you live now? A long lost place?

There will be a pivotal place and memory, and most likely it will be embedded in childhood. Your childhood home. Even if you only spent a few years there, even if you have spent more time not being there, it will still resonate. Maybe you still live there or your parents still live there. But maybe its gone. If you have a family now, children and a wife, maybe that's your home.

You may live in a house, or flat, or mobile home or nowhere. Are these homes? Or just places you go back to at the end of the day. There is a difference.

Is it a permanent location, or is transient. Do you own it, or does someone else? Does it make a difference, do you have to be financially invested in a place to be calling it at home? Or is it a feeling?

If you have no home where are you returning to? Where is the hobo going? The eternal search for that place, running away is one thing, but where are you running too?

So many questions to answer the most simplest of questions. Because the first image you had in your mind when you read the word 'home'is the answer. That's what it means to you. The safe place, the comfortable place, the place you are attached to. That is the place you call home. And most likely that image wasn't an empty building, it wasn't a frozen statue, there were other people there. An emotional and psychological connection not only to a geographic location, it must be more, the sense of a place.

If there was no childhood home, then what? Or it wasn't what it should have been, so there is a lifetime of looking and building that place.

Search engines are prosaic, type in 'home' and the question is 'where is home', it wants a postcode and an address. It will list properties, the physical structure.

But home is not the building, its not a co-ordinate. It's the people in it. It's the memories that it formed.

Hometowns. Are they the towns you were born in? The town you grew up in? The town you now live in? All three could be the same place or they could all be different. You could live and die in the same city, or you leave it the day you were born. How do you define it, how do you define yourself. You are not the place, but so many people define themselves by this.

The town I was born in is one of the biggest and one of the most famous. Its an old town. Most people who live there moved there, not born there. The constant flow, migration, everyone looking for a future.

The town I was born in is not the one I mostly grew up in. The town I live in now, I'm not sure how I how even got here. I had no connection with it, there was no plan. But connections are made. You connect with the landscape, you connect with the people. Or you just grow accustomed to a place and a way of life.

You already know what home means to you. You carry it with you wherever you go. You are always returning home.

Homes or just buildings?

Roads

There is no romance of the road here. The mythical holy roads - Highway 61, Highway 50 (the lonely highway), Thunder Road, Pacific Coast Highway - they all belong to another place. From an early age the roads here mean only one thing and it's not freedom; it's commute. Roads here are pure utility.

Possibly somewhere in the highlands or where the west meets the Atlantic it doesn't mean this, but everywhere else it does.

Non renewable finite resource commuting.

Hours upon hours frittered away. Concrete rivers running through the chaotic urban morphology. The thing is no one planned this, its jumbled and doesn't connect and goes the wrong way. A landscape constantly over written with a better idea, but the old one is there too, to complicate.

But still we churn out the cars, and we love the trap and we hate the trap because there was no other choice. Petrol prices, and insurance premiums and speed cameras and the endless traffic and still we continue mainlining because what else were you going to do.

Motorways are no freeways or highways. No motel, roadhouse, hitchhiker, hobo blues here. Only grey rain spray and traffic. Constant freight truck tailback.

Always surprising how many people are going somewhere in the same direction at the same time as you. Regardless of time of day, or the road, always someone going somewhere. So much so, that if you drive a road and see no one else it stands out in memory, you wonder what happened. But then you read that most journeys are less than 3 miles, and most people really aren't going anywhere. The towns and offices and shops must be empty because everyone is on the road, but they are not, where is everyone going?

Bundles of people travelling the same way, their time geography coalescing - so many space time paths heading the same way and forming the same prism over and over again. Work, home, shop, work, home, shop until you disengage.

The loneliness of the long distance driver.

Driving is almost always done alone, commuting in a car almost exclusively alone. (Commuting on a train or bus is also done alone, you happen to be sitting next to hundreds of people you never talk too). In the vehicle, its you and the radio. We distract ourselves with the radio. Listening to the radio and it seems most people driving are also listening to the radio, telling you where they are going, how long they've been traveling, with constant travel bulletin updates, even though it makes no difference to your journey, you are not turning back. How many people only listen to the radio in a car? Radio and driving, the perfect couple. Turn the radio off and you are alone, just you and the car and the background white noise. A modern day moving meditation if you so wish.

Stop projecting forward to the destination and see what happens.

The occasional indicator click and windscreen wiper swipe punctuate the monotony of the journey.

Then there are those communal driving experiences, the long drive, the big trip. When map reading was essential before sat navs made us all lose our sense of direction. The art of the long distance conversation, sporadic and interspersed with nothingness, miles and miles of it, long spaces, silence and then observation, it becomes a rhythm; hypnotic. In the other cars, the same is happening. The road treats us all the same.

The prosaic motorway conversations to ease the boredom - 'whatever happened to Little Chef?' 'You only see Burger Kings in motorway services these days' 'Why is the coffee so expensive?' 'Should we stop for a coffee?'. And then you stop and there are thousands of people like you, but they can't be like you, but they are all stopping at the same time, on the same road and possibly with a destination almost the same as yours.

The country roads. Surprising how little you can see from these roads. Again ancient relics of cart tracks that became roads,but were never meant to be roads. Organic tunnels running through a field mosaic that mostly you can never see, occasional breaks from the curtain and you see the landscape. Most of it isn't urban or suburban, it's still rural. And as you glimpse from the motorway, you see most of that is rural too. Underneath the engine drone there is the sound of nature. Albeit managed nature. There is still hope.

The road, it seems almost eternal now, as if it always was thus and always will be. And the romance is only ever in your head. The North circular and the M25 and the M1 - no one is going to write a song about them. But everyday the utility road delivers something somewhere.

These roads were never made for this. The tarmac melts in the summer, it crumbles in the winter with the frost thaw. Everyday the constant rumble breaks them down. The road markings wear out, the drizzling rain blurs them, every year more signs to confuse you.

Now trains, that's a whole different story.

Benches

This bench makes no sense

The bench in the picture above makes no sense. It's near where I live. It doesn't overlook anything, all you can look at are the cars parked on the opposite side of the road, it's not near a park, it's not a busy street, it's not on the way to anywhere where you would need to sit down and rest. It could be an historical relic, an archaeological echo from a bygone era, a time when Victorian and Edwardian men courted and went out for a stroll after tiffin, but I don't know, maybe it never made sense, its location a mystery. Nowadays it seems to be a place to go if you have an ordinate amount of rubbish you need to dispose of pronto or if you have a hankering to drink super strong lager in a public space.

There appear to be three types of benches. The obvious ones in big city parks, where office workers and tourists hangout and eat lunch, and the ones next to playgrounds where parents need to sit down and watch their kids with a hawk eye. Then there are the ones which overlook a view, a nice spot in a park, the type of bench that has a plaque on it, dedicated to someone because they loved this view. Then there are the benches that make no sense. How do they come into being? I imagine there is a special department of benches in councils. Once a bench is there, does it always stay? Like the ones that are now on busy main roads, no one is ever going to take a seat and contemplate the world with four lanes of traffic going by, but once a upon a time it could of been a quiet road with the occasional horse and carriage.

And new benches, like the ones in the photo below. Who decides? These benches also make no sense, overlooking a quiet side road, and notice the benches facing away from the football pitch, so you don't look at the action, you look away. And its empty. In the middle of the day, in the middle of London, less than a mile away thousands of people are in movement, millions trying to find a seat on a train, or in a cafe or in a busy park; but here, empty.

Empty benches looking away

A bench is one of the few places you are allowed to do nothing in a public place and no one will question you. Hang out on the street corner, just stand there and before long the police will come along and ask what you are doing. Sit down on a bench and you are fine. The only public seating not dedicated to any particular activity, not like public transport where you are going somewhere, not a theatre or cinema or coffee shop. Before the rise of the coffee shop there was no where to go and do nothing and sit alone without arousing suspicion. The coffee shop has probably killed the bench, its warm, and as long as you buy one drink you can sit as long as you want, and there's free wifi too, to help distract you.

Urban bench, less than a mile away thousands of people can't get a seat

The urban non scenic bench becomes a refuge for the underclass only. There is no tradition of hanging out on corners in this country, unlike say the USA, there are no corner boys or people sitting on the stoop drinking. The bench to the rescue. Kids and alcoholics, a way of not going home and just hanging out without having to justify it. 'Of course, I can sit here as long as I want, the council put a bench here, its allowed.' But this isn't the Mediterranean, there is no tradition of hanging outside because its too cold. So all in all you must be pretty desperate to have to walk to a bench to hang out and drink 3 litres of white lightning; either you don't want anyone at home to know, where you live is so terrible that the bench is the better option or you have no home.

Or is the bench the last refuge of the person who just wants to sit and take a breath. You don't have to pretend to be doing anything, no gogglebox to stare at, no small talk needed. And as long as it looks like you are admiring the view no one will question you. You might get unlucky and someone sits next to you and wants to have conversation; in a big tourist park this could happen; in an urban area sitting on a bench who's location makes no sense this is less likely.

But the days of the non scenic bench are probably numbered; urban relics. Firstly, they are never comfortable, and secondly we will live in a society where doing nothing is considered strange. Play with your phone, pretend to send an email, eat a sandwich, it doesn't matter - just look busy, look like you are in a hurry. Personally I prefer to sit in coffee shops.