Seeing what you want to see
What follows is a triumphantly overdramatic account of a simple train journey through East Anglia. It is punctuated with big fluffy words with which I am not entirely comfortable, some awful alliteration and plenty of unnecessary over analysis. I also had to write it out as a long text message owing to a lack of writing materials and the rather awkward position of being hemmed into my seat by a grotesquely obese middle aged man. Who snored.East Anglia, my home region, is notoriously flat and as such has in the past made for good farming grounds and in the future will make it the first casualty of rising sea levels. It is a land of far horizons and lush fields, especially in spring. Littering these green and yellow plains are old, broken down relics from a time when the unknown frightened us more than it encouraged us. They have been abandoned for centuries by a people who over hundreds of years learnt the painfully lessons of organised faith.
To my left comes one of many brand new housing estates of loud red bricks and sharp grey tiles. New Renaults in blues and silver line their drive ways and small black discs bolted to their sides look knowingly up to the heavens. This small island is becoming ever more crowded. The train then pulls into a Victorian era railway station. It’s grand imperial architecture marred now by dirt and mould. Yet it still stands testimony to a time when the railways were the conduits of empire and the kings of Europe ruled the world.
Continued in comments…
posted by Benjamin Nakizo @ 10:09 pm
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Then more of the endless farmlands that once made East Anglia the bread basket of Britain but which now represent a wasteland of unemployment and criminally over subsidised desperation. A region in need of re-skilling but in this, the second great age of globalisation, it is a land whose residents are held in suspended animation by money redirected through Brussels. On the train are a handful of pensioners, forced to pay over the odds for unreliable rail services to revisit old friends and forgotten dreams. In and amongst them are students like me, fleeing their provincial roots and returning to the bubble like existence of university campuses. We all have our heads buried in classical texts or are day dreaming with the aid of digitally stored music. We are artists entering a world crying out for technicians.
The rail network itself is drab, filthy and broken. The colourful corporate branding of the last ten years can not mask the rusty rolling stock and under provisioned platforms of the last sixty. Under funding in the name of nationalism has left an ugly legacy. The railways run through the backyards of estates not usually seen by the German car driving elites. Permanent caravan sites and decrepit lodges betray evidence of the growing class of ‘white trash’, the inevitable by-product of global growth only partially kept in check by overstretched welfare states. Many of the fields are teeming with fluorescently jacketed fruit pickers. At a guess they are mostly Eastern European or Portuguese in origin. Eager to work hard for a minimum wage and far more committed to their futures than those idle English speaking caravan dwellers they are rapidly leap frogging up the social ladder.
My train terminates and I connect onto the faster and more vibrant steel highways that direct the colorful human jet stream of the metropolis towards the concrete clusters of the north.
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