In Competition 3364 you were invited to submit a piece of psychogeography exploring a mundane journey. A cartoon in the Guardian recently defined psychogeography as ‘walking around criticising gentrification’ – though it can be down on decline too. One rule of thumb is that if you can imagine Will Self saying it, it’s probably right. You rose magnificently and pretentiously to the challenge and if there were space and £25s enough, I could haveincluded three times the number of winners.
If Huddersfield is the world, then B&M Bargains, trading at the great crossroads, is its Istanbul. And just as memories of Constantinople and of Byzantium haunt that extraordinary city, so in B&M we cannot avoid ghostly reminders that Marks and Spencers once occupied this site. For this is Marks gone topsy-turvy. Food is now upstairs, where nightdresses and cardigans once flourished, while downstairs, where the Food Hall previously offered delicious ready-meals, household goods now languish. Customers seem disoriented. Eastwards, in Cloth Hall Street, different ghosts prevail. For here is the Coffee Cup. Call B&M Istanbul, then is this Huddersfield’s Vienna, its centre of café culture? Hardly. For here one feels, achingly, other absences. Those elderly ladies discussing their illnesses do not bring to mind the sparkling conversation of the Café Sacher. It is precisely because of his spirit’s absolute non-presence that here we cannot avoid thinking, achingly, of Karl Kraus.
George Simmers
I entered a profound, meditative state as I paced this cusp of suburbia, my sneakers bouncing joyfully over concrete. I was a Viking in a longship, a pilgrim walking to a holy well, a dandelion seed on a breeze. My soul revelled in the colourful contrast of the detritus of chewing gum and discarded coffee cups. The tranquil beauty and stillness of ice-cream wrappers evoked memories of exhausting summer holidays. A scarlet mailbox reminded me of our need to communicate; our delight in online shopping, the increasing cost of stamps. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway would enjoy this scene, the birds, the joggers, the occasional flasher. The evidence of life in dog poo, clinging to one’s shoe. The nimble skill of avoiding e-scooters. The pleasure of considering neighbours’ homes, assessing their lawns and the current house prices. Then, at last, to reach the fish-and-chip shop. What a lark, what a plunge!
Janine Beacham
My ‘derive’ was a series of staggeringly intimate encounters, resonant with the strange wonder that the urban space yields to the situationist alert to the possibilities and content to drift, litter-like, among the pulsating flow of humanity. One after the other, relentless – the word unflagging created itself in my consciousness – paving stones dragged me forward to a situation. I rounded a corner, and came upon a group of lost souls, their shoulders hunched, their faces etched with despair and resignation, clustered about a tall pole. On the top of it, a constantly changing illuminated scoreboard where random destinations were awarded first, second or third place, according to some unspoken topographical lottery. ‘It’s been two minutes for ten minutes’, someone said. I was astounded at the profundity of this insight into the urban disruption of the space-time continuum, and hurried away to think it over.
Helen George
I flaneurially describe an approximate if subconsciously determined arc about the provincial town of Swindon, my perambulations encompassing the liminal, Ballardian industrial estates, all bland verges and logistics warehouses over which the intellect glides for want of architectural focus, to the adjacently nondescript Lego housing estates of homes distinguishable only by vintage of satellite dish. Absent entirely is metropolitan profusion – the fascinating jostle of plague pits beneath car parks, blue plaques commemorating pioneering Georgian essayists, omnipresent vagrants boasting intimacy with Sebastian Horsley. Such celebrities as adhere like fossilised barnacles to Swindonian culture – fey proto-environmentalist Richard Jefferies, zero-wattage starlet Diana Dors – of insufficient substance to inspire this clause. Entering a zombie community pub, I condescend to conversation with locals whose embryonic attempts at discourse, inevitably soccer-centred, fail to gestate copy. Flouncing gratefully onto the next London-bound train, I conclude Swindon is a sort of psychosocial antimatter, a void. Avoid.
Adrian Fry
The journey from Iceland might take many potential forms, but solvitur ambulando: it’s only about twenty paces from the glacial supermarket’s automatic doors to the constantly gaping entrance of apostrophe-negative Greggs. The midday queue hugs the long glass window, and the temptation to Act the Urchin and to snub one’s nose against that transparency is not easily overcome. Even the thought that other sternutatory nostrils might have affixed themselves to the same place is not necessarily off-putting. The memory of antiseptic, cryogenic aisles recurs as one awaits the warmth of a katsu chicken bake; this is not a journey to be accomplished in reverse. The satisfaction of Peppermint Candy or Memento cannot be applied to a slow mosey, or even scutter, from Greggs to Iceland. That would be retrograde. Only the future should be celebrated with the sweet psoriasis of flakes of pastry; the past deserves much colder consideration.
Bill Greenwell
Devizes is the place to engage fully, the centre of the universe as Inshaw says, trophy-brandishing splashes of trapped light. I step from the house light-hearted. My pulse hums but keeps me floating, grateful to be part of the necessary transit of the town. I look right towards the lockup – who are the locked up? Patterns of survival can be surmised, weaving the orbit of the old asylum, but some of the spirits have departed. (Up this street strolled the poet, drink-it-all-in Edward Thomas, on his way to Tan Hill and Pas-de-Calais.) But there are no words to do justice to the unlanguaged persistence of the early morning traffic: its growling rage as it grinds through the Passchendaele puddles. I am heading west-by-northwest in a straight line, holding to the path by seeing it as anything but what it actually is. I approach the car and open the door.
Sarah Drury
No. 3367: Our kid
You are invited to write a poem in any form – sonnet, rhyme royal, trochaic tetrameter? – about the Brothers Gallagher (of Oasis), 16 lines maximum. Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 11 September.
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