Thirty minutes

It is hard to believe that this screen of ubiquitous buddleia, scenting the suburban air, hides a railway line that has triggered intense debate, caused thousands of people to protest, and made a minister of state into a figure of hate. It is often referred to as “the Chiltern Line” and if the government has its way it will be the route for HS2, a high speed rail link connecting London to Birmingham and reducing the time of the present journey by about thirty minutes. What could you do with thirty minutes? Start the clock.



Spend your thirty minutes trying to complete a public consultation document, bearing in mind that it has been drawn up by someone who wants you to fall into a trap, to make you say that you actually do want a train charging past your home at over 200 miles an hour, that you have no objection to years of construction work, that you believe every word they say about noise levels. You left school to get away from this kind of thing and here you are taking an exam to stop your home becoming worthless, to justify the years, decades of work you put into paying a mortgage. You take advice, watch videos, listen to the experts before you answer “no” to everything, in a desperate attempt to save all that effort and sacrifice.


Think of all those minutes and half hours spent in a job you hate, gritting your teeth to get through one more day, hour, minute without flinging your letter of resignation at the boss, all for nothing because you are a nimby, small fry, nothing to a man whose salary you pay but didn’t vote for. Another nameless face in the crowd at a demo, along with all the other unwanted little people who have cluttered up his day, getting in the way of “progress”.

You will never be one of those gaining that extra half hour on a train moving so fast that the rest of mankind becomes a blur. You will never afford those plush seats and wonderful service. You will wait with all the rest on a station platform waiting for a worn out train that has been held up, again. Because there is no money to improve what already exists, what you can afford. You will sit in your car, on a bus, in a jam caused by the years of construction work that you are paying for to build a railway line you don’t want, can’t afford, don’t need. You will grind your teeth and curse those who inflicted this upon you and your lowly kind and know that you are helpless. You don’t count, your kind never have.


Thirty minutes in a bluebell wood, deafened by birdsong yet wishing you could make less noise as you walk amongst trees that were old when you were a child. A thousand cobwebs and caterpillar threads cling to your arms as they must have done to those of your ancestors when places like this were vast and untouched. You are the first to walk here today, in a place that has never changed and you thought never would until the minister expressed his opinion. Knowing that you are barely a heart beat in the time it took to make this place that cannot be replaced, replicated, remade. Thirty minutes, a pin prick in time in this woodland set like sapphires and emeralds amongst the coral of suburban rooftops, one last place to remember what it must have been like in this land before “progress” came and ate away at your soul. Time counts for nothing here.


Half an hour at an estate agent’s office, listening to all the advice he can give you on how to sell a worthless house. Paint the walls a neutral colour, thank God you redecorated some of it last year, it will take less money, less time. You’ll get the downstairs lav done in thirty minutes. Put the “For Sale” sign up and hope to hell that the neighbours don’t put one of those bloody posters in the window, hope that whoever takes the bait doesn’t check up on what that means. Keep your fingers crossed for a lot longer than thirty minutes, through every rare viewing, trying not to wince when “it” gets mentioned until you realise that they were just curious, not serious, bad luck. Wish that the things that once made your home such a bargain (“Five minutes walk from the nearest station!”) weren’t the things that make it so undesirable now.

The worst half hour is the one spent listening to your tearful elderly neighbour, born in her house, the one she hoped to die in. Listening to the despair of a woman who cannot fill in a form at the best of times and is rendered incoherent at the thought that her childhood home might be demolished, just another of the worthless small fry who will be swept away for the greater good. She loves her garden but even that has made her a target for the mockery of businessmen. She doesn’t own a bowler hat and her lawn is tiny, a postage stamp of green, but she knows each lily and rose, remembers the ones her mother planted and loves them still. It has taken many a half hour to make this patch of heaven and it was worth every moment.


Wonder, sometimes, how long it would take, how many pills, how much booze, to take the problem away forever. How many of those affected regularly spend thirty minutes that close to edge, when the worry becomes too much - “Why are you crying Mummy?” - when there is no fight left and despair takes over. When you begin to think that all the effort is pointless, that all those half hours have been wasted and you are worn away to nothing, for nothing. Knowing that, when the dust that can never settle makes its way, every day, into your home, your precious half hour will be frittered away by a business man, distracted by the many pleasures in that brand new temple to retail - the station - rushing off half an hour late in a wasteful carbon heavy cab to the appointment he might have made, had he been more mindful of those thirty minutes.

Stop HS2 - advice on completing the consultation document
Stop HS2 natonal petition

Somewhere else

When I was a small girl I used to spend Saturdays wandering around London with my father. One of our regular haunts was the Arts Council shop which I seem to remember was in Saville Row. The counter near the front of the shop had a display of postcards in front of it which was at my eyelevel and I remember being entranced by a picture that seemed as real as a photograph. I realised that it couldn’t be a photograph as the people in it were wearing strange old fashioned clothes but even at that age (about five) I knew that my drawings would never be that good. The postcard that I went home with showed William Holman Hunt‘s “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” and I still have it, along with many more showing the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

I suspect it was the fact that there were grown up ladies dressed as princesses in their paintings without anyone finding it silly that made them interesting as well but even at that age it was impossible to ignore the skill of these artists. The sunlight of Victorian England was trapped in their canvases and the extraordinary jewel like detail of every flower and strand of hair was a shock to my senses. For a child I had spent an unusually large amount of time in front of well known canvases and although I liked some of them I can’t remember feeling the same way about what I had seen before then.

Whatever the reason for my interest the Pre-Raphaelites still have a hold on me and when I saw that Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum were displaying the Burne Jones “Perseus” series (which belongs to Stuttgart’s art gallery) I suggested (without any hope of his agreeing) that Birmingham might be an interesting place to visit. Bearing in mind that he was facing four hours of driving I was a bit surprised when he said “yes”. The car doesn’t get used for much more than the commute to work a few miles away and shopping so this was a real expedition. We checked out parking in Birmingham’s city centre and he set up the sat nav.

I had intended to get up early but managed to oversleep so we set off later than planned. We live in an area where the suburbs start to break up into industrial sites and scrub so it wasn’t long before we were into open farmland. I don’t think the landscape could be described as particularly dramatic but on the way there and back I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I am to live here. Rolling hills, hedgerows and huge old trees. Cows, sheep and the occasional bird of prey, chilling out on a fence post and watching the traffic.

A visit to Birmingham was an opportunity to see my favourite source of quilt making supplies “in the flesh”. The Cotton Patch even provides a few parking spaces. Crammed very neatly into this small shop are fabrics from all over the world, magazines and books, and everything you could possibly need to make the perfect quilt. I have always wanted to buy one of the many Japanese magazines they have available so, head still buzzing from the motorway, I tried to look through them but then just caved in and bought the first one I had seen. I could have bankrupted myself in minutes there so I stuck to the plan and one magazine was my limit.

The sat nav decided to take us through Moseley via Shirley Green which has a lovely red brick Baptist church. We decided that Hall Green was a lot like Edgware and Moseley was definitely like Southall, even down to the traffic. The architecture is largely Victorian red brick and it occurred to me, as it has in the past, that this sort of thing survives when no one can afford to pull it down and rebuild. Lovely small intimate buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century with the occasional 1930’s bit of Art Deco, battered but still in use.

At last we managed to get into the city centre and after a couple of wrong turns we found the chosen car park. It was a short walk to the gallery past some really beautiful and recently cleaned buildings. That part of the city is pedestrianised and we walked through a mall into a large piazza like area with curved steps where people were sitting in the sunshine. Within minutes we were in front of the strange dramatic grey green canvases and drawings produced by Burne Jones in the 1880’s and 1890’s, displayed against rich teal walls. We are so familiar with Pre-Raphaelite art from reproductions in books but there is nothing quite like the real thing. For one thing the images in glossy coffee table books are sometimes larger than the actual painting. Like the teeny weeny “Death of Chatterton” by Henry Wallis. We mused about “Beata Beatrix” and “Proserpine”, made knowing “we used to be art students” type comments about their techniques and then wandered off to see some of the rest of this surprising gallery. There followed the obligatory visit to the shop to buy some postcards and then it was back into the sunshine for something to drink and, alas, back into the car for the long drive.

Home, backs aching and heads spinning, it was hard to get used to the fact that we had been a long way off and back again in the same day. We ought to do it more often, other people would, but I wonder how many would travel that far because of a few old paintings. Still mad for the Pre-Raphaelites after all these years. And still buying postcards.
http://www.bmag.org.uk/

http://www.cottonpatch.co.uk/

http://www.preraphaelites.org