Planning process explained

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/02/23/town-planners-playing-scrabble-using-google-earth-291/

internet becoming like the M40

i was just thinking that it was like that, or at least motorways in general... you get on it, with an idea of going somewhere, and you can only get off at the big junctions - you miss out on all the stuff inbetween, the stuff that it has been planned that you don't see... possibly, the GOOD stuff. But you do get there fast, probably where you wanted to go. That's what google does - who actually clicks on anything that isn't on the first page? It means you are channelled into a series of decisions - it doesn't increase your freedom, it decreases it. The car and the internet are only expressions of freedom if you actually take that dodgy little back road, or flick to page 84 of the search results... otherwise, you are just going backwards and forwards between Reading and Birmingham.

Back to reality! #2

ok, ok, after the last week I could do with some back to reality in any kind of sense. I'm begging for it now. A cup of tea and a slice of toast around 8am and then off to work on the tube... anything with some normality to it, I've had an overload of ... non reality. The unsustainable stuff you could also call "holiday".

So I was back in London from Canada for 36 hours - always a disconcerting experience facing that much unopened post - and I had a LOT to do. But then off again to Benicassim for the music festival, which I'd missed the start of. Missed the Santiago Calatrava stuff in Valencia in my rush to catch up with the debauchery going on at the festival, safe in the knowledge that I'd have a few days in Barca after to get some 'culture'.

It was a mess, a big, beautiful mess. The whole weekend was a writhing mass of gorgeous, honey coloured people, jumping around in the setting sun and then the steamy night to Leftfield, Boyz Noize, Daedalus, Dizzee Rascal, huge mdma grins on their faces, safe in the knowledge that next day would be spent stretched on the beach to recover.

And then it was over. Everyone left, and I had to go to Barcelona. Only I didn't. I had a cheap good room in the hotel, the food was good and it was a long trip on a hot day. So my friends jumped in taxis, trains, and staggered home, and I stayed... and read Crash by Ballard on a comedown. Very very strange. Barely spoke to anyone for 2 days as 'suicide tuesday' came and went and felt I was being sucked into the book, the feeling you get when you wake up from an intense dream and are not sure if its been real or not. A dream hangover. It started to feel that way about the weekend - I remembered it, but had no connections to it, unless I wandered up to the deserted site to prove to myself that this was where it had all been going on.

And now, after 15 hours of travel home, 2 trains, a metro, a bus and air traffic delays, home. Breakfast... and on the road again, to sit with my mum waiting for my dad to come out of heart surgery in hospital 300 miles away in Cornwall.

Tea and toast, with marmalade please.

Back to reality!

Well that's what everyone keeps telling me... and its probably fair enough - unpaid volunteer work out in the Canadian boonies isn't going to keep me going forever, but its really depressing that so many of my friends (mostly the English ones, with jobs and houses) feel like this is the only 'reality' available. "You can head off somewhere for a bit, but its not a proper way to do things, long term, I mean, what about your pension arrangements..." Ok, no one actually said THAT, but you get the idea. They revelled in my misery at being back on the tube. "Ahhh, you thought you could escape..."

I know I'm often the same about things - those fundamental ideas of who you are and what you do, often coming down to only being able to live in a certain place doing a fairly limited range of certain jobs - but its crap when you have a look outside that invisible box you make for yourself, it makes you realise how it can trap you. Keeping objective, thats the thing isn't it? Nietzsche and all that malarky...

time running down to change

well, i've got a couple of days left in Canada, and its sweltering under the fierce sun. Work has stopped and scattered people are sheltering in the shade, along with the deer flies. Its been an amazing month, the language maybe the same, but it has been a totally culture shock... probably the most dramatic change in way of life I've ever experienced. City to wilderness... or maybe not wilderness, but surrounded by it, and feeling like humans are the interlopers here, being squeezed out steadily but surely by the forest, rather than the other way round. The people here are clinging on to the last bits of a way of life that has almost disappeared forever.
I've got this queasy feeling that everything I've learnt will evaporate though when I get home, back to the usual urban surrounds, and I don't want that to happen. The self-sufficiency - and Efficiency - of how life goes on here, from raw necessity is a feeling I want to try and hold on to, and maintain. Living off the land... thats the North American way, an unending resource - not a very popular sentiment in terms of city size consumption, but with small groups, a few here, a few there, it certainly seems to work. And in a place like this, its a sumptuous lifestyle of provision that you can take from nature... if you can hold on long enough.

Canada

Not really sure where or what to start about this Canada trip, but sitting on edge of the forest, with not a lot around, and reading Paul Shepheard's "The Cultivated Wilderness" in a hammock in the evenings has been awesome.

Vancouver Island is definitely NOT like the rolling English countryside

... as they claim. There's bears for one, which I don't see a lot of in Kent. You might have the occasional badger, but an irate grizzly (they're always irate apparently) would definitely be out of place in Westerham.

And everything looks too LOW. I've spent too much time in London, I realise that, but I thought we were still in some out-of-town shopping centre suburb when the bus pulled into the throbbing, beating heart of Downtown Victoria. Talk about a high degree of fake, as Ellie puts it. Clapboard over concrete seems to be the standard building type here. But the other thing is the proportion seems all wrong. Because everything has enough space here, too much in fact, and buildings aren't piled on top of one another, they haven't been forced UP enough. Everything's on its own plot, 40 yards back from the road, disconnected to anything else around it. But they love big, so they go out side ways and back... but not up. So all the buildings are long smudges, and you get the feeling everythign is too... squat.