I finally caved in on Wednesday night. Having read Don Miller's
Blue Like Jazz, I packed my pipe with a particularly tasty blend of tobacco, and set out from the house. I'd been working on a report for school all night, so by ten pm I was more than ready for a break from the glare of the computer screen, and a bit of fresh air.
I took a stroll to the Co-Op on Cardigan Road. It was a pleasant evening, and I knew exactly what I was going to do. Once I arrived, I sat up on the wall out the front of the car park, and stoked up the contents of the pipe's bowl. I prayed for Burley and Hyde Park, my home for the last five years. I love the place, you know? I love the people, the houses, the shops. I love the parks and the graffiti and the communities that intertwine.
I have been thinking about what I love about Burley for some time, but I was never able to articulate it until I spoke to Tim the other day. We were looking at the possibilities for the artwork for
The Salvator Darlings' forthcoming mini-album,
Sorry it's so Short, I'm Quite Tired, and Tim asked me what it was that I wanted to convey with the cover image. I found it quite hard to put into words at first, but once I started, there was no stopping me.
What I realised I loved more than anything, was the mixture of the static with the ever-changing. The fact is that most people that live in the area now are students. The majority of them stay for a maximum of two years. Without wanting to generalise, most of them don't give a crap about the state of the place, because they're renting the living space, they know that they're going to be leaving shortly, and, to be frank, most of them are too concerned with partying to think about cleaning up the place.
I'll give you an example: Some guys on my road, a couple of years back, decided that they wanted to sit outside on a warm summer's evening. To facilitate this, they took the sofa and chairs out of their living room and put them in the middle of the street. My sister came to visit that night, and she found it hard to manoveur the car around them; they shouted insults at her for her inability to park. They drank into the night, and left the furniture outside. As it is wont to do in England, it rained that night, and the seats were ruined. Rather than dispose of them properly, they took them to the end of the road, and tipped them over the railing into the park. I know because when I went to the park the next day, I had to step around them.
This is an extreme example, but my point remains the same. Last summer, I was enjoying the sunshine after work, sat out on the park at the end of my road (the one that had the sofa in it). I watched as a group of students picked up their belongings and left. They discarded empty pop bottles, crisp packets, magazines etc, and just went. There are two bins on the path out of the park, but they just left the litter there. Shortly afterwards, an old man came round the park with a plastic carrier bag. He went around and picked up all the junk that people had left behind, and placed it in a bin. He wasn't employed by the park or anything, he was just a local resident that wanted his neighbourhood to look clean. This guy had probably lived in Burley his whole life, and now, just to keep things looking good, he felt like he had to go round and pick up the mess that these students leave behind. These people that move in for a year, make a lot of noise, leave crap around the place, then disappear again. No wonder that the locals don't think much to students.
All of this is somewhat off my original point, but you'll see where I was going with it. Amidst all the chaos of the area, the houses remain static. The picture at the top of this post was taken just around the corner from my house. Most of the houses here are late Victorian red brick terraces. They are what I consider to be incredibly beautiful buildings, and they have all stood here for more than 100 years.
I know that I have only lived here for a few years, but even so, I feel like I am more of a resident than many people in the area. With the exception of Tim, I have never lived next to the same person for more than a year since I have been here. I have watched the people change around me. These houses, despite all of the attic conversions, walls knocked down, walls built, attrocious UPVC double glazing installations and basement conversions that they have encountered, are still standing.
I am about to start the application process for my right to live and work in Canada. I intend to move there in eight months. So, as I sat on the wall outside the Co-Op smoking my pipe, I thought about what it meant to be leaving this, the only place that I have been able to call my own home. I love it, and yet, like all the other young people that live in the area, I plan to leave it for somewhere better.
These houses have been here much longer than I have; much longer than I have been alive. They aren't going anywhere. And, if Bethany and I happen to come back here, they'll still be there. I guess that what I'm trying to say, in a very elaborate way, is that I am rather like one of these students that moves in for a very short period of time. Compared to the whole of existence, I'm not around on this planet for very long at all. God is a constant; much more so than this house that I'm sat in typing this. Much more so than anything else that has ever been, or ever will be.
I crave consistency. My life sometimes seems to run so fast, and I have so much on, that I don't know whether I'm coming or going. Right now, I'm training to teach, planning a wedding, applying to move to Canada and putting the finshitng touches to an album. It's a lot of stuff to be doing, and I know that there's many more changes ahead. In less than a year, I'll be married, living in a country that I have never visited for more than a month at a time. But in all of that, I have a constant, static God, who I can always rely on to be the same. You can't get more constant than that.
Love.
Posts
