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.

Rooms

How many rooms have you stood in? What rooms have you passed through today? The modern human in the Western world mostly lives out their life in rooms. The memory of rooms, echoes embedded in the walls. All the rooms and all the conversations and all the lives. Living rooms, bedrooms, offices, hotels, schools, hospitals - rectangular traps where memories are made and emotions laid bare.

Some of those rooms will now be gone, alive in memory only. The rooms of childhood. Some will be crystal clear and have a clarity in your mind, others will have blurred long ago. Your parents, siblings, birthdays and all of that happened somewhere. Some of those rooms are gone, demolished into dust, but the memory lives on frozen in time and space, but that space has gone. Everything happens somewhere, and in our lives at this point in history, a significant amount of it is framed by four walls.

Other rooms are still there, the building lives on but the personnel change. Does your childhood home still exist, someone is sitting in it right now. Think of all the people who have ever passed through a room. It could be modern, maybe only a few, or it could be old, hundreds of lives or it could be a hospital or hotel, thousands of lives. The room remains passive, a stage where dramas are played out. The room you are in now (are you in one now?), how many conversations has it heard? Your school, the classrooms, you can see yourself there, but its not you, its a passed (past) you in past life. My school is gone, knocked down and replaced with houses, still more rooms. But the classrooms live on in the collective memories of thousands of people, who are now adults. And everyones point of view is different. Shared experience, but memory will always differ, what I saw and my class mates saw filtered by our position in time and space. We can never observe the same experience from the same co-ordinates as others, the angles are always different, the point of view skewed.

Frozen still shots framed by buildings. Nearly always rectangular or square, a circular room so unusual that you will always remember it, even if the events that occurred in it are forgotten. Then really try to remember, and its hard, there are parties and conversations and families but there is also television and boredom and long stretched long forgotten. There are times alone, the dark corners of rooms, only you and the walls know about that, no one else to record the moment. Try to visualize the exact layout of all those spaces, the clarity has become dusty with time.

Corners

And then there the intimate moments. No collective memory here. Just you and one other, the lost lover. The first time you said the words, and only two people in the whole world were in that room at that moment. It could have been years ago, do they remember it the same as you? And the conversations that only two people have, the emotions, and the tears and the break. The memory is subjective, the lighting, the placement, and the exact words are lost, all that is left is the tone and the emotion. Think of the rooms you live in, do they hold someone elses secret conversations, do they hold yours? You inhabit the space, do you inhabit the memory?

The surreal rooms of childhood, when everything is new but also everything is familiar, there is no other reference point. There is a room from my childhood and its dark, the curtains are drawn, there is an old woman in a dressing gown. She never leaves, agoraphobia and hypochondria mixed with abandoned youth. A modern day Miss Havisham in a council flat. And she seems so old because I was so young; but now I am older I'm not so sure.

The pivotal room, there is one. There are strange shaped milk bottles, the wallpaper has gone yellow and the ceiling is sepia from year of smoke, and there is always tea and biscuits and there are always people. There are newspapers on the table, there are crosswords, there is breakfast cooking, there is butter and fresh bread. There is dinner cooking, and it is always warm, and the world is outside, and there are Christmas's and winter and then there are summers and birthdays. And the building is old, these are not the first lives to be lived out in these rooms, someone called this home long before. It was a house with basement and four floors above and now its been converted into flats. And whoever lives there has no idea that any of this happened. They carry on. Half the people in the memory are gone, they fade but stay captured in the memory camera, again there are no words, just image and tone. We carry on.

Hospital rooms are the ones we don't like to think of. Because we know. We know what the room represents, and for all its saviours and resuscitations we all ultimately know how the story of these rooms end. The constant cleaning and hygiene can't wash away what the walls and the floor and the ceiling know, silent observers to it all.

Hotel rooms, the most transient of rooms. Thousands upon thousands of lives crossing through the same small space. Everyday it starts afresh, memory blanked.

There are places you will never go again, houses, hospitals, colleges, friends flats, back rooms in shops and hotels and waiting rooms - where life is on hold. Some you were in for seconds, literally passing through, others you were in for years, every grain in the floor and flaw in the wallpaper studied. And in those rooms are people you will never see again, and conversations you will never repeat, and right now in those rooms are people you will never meet. Some are clear, some are forgotten.

How many rooms have you been in? How many do you remember? Sometimes I think about rooms.