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

A lttle interaction goes a long way

I spent yesterday afternoon in the company of a BBC radio producer and an expert on the built environment. And then I rushed off to my job as a cleaner. The unusual encounter came about as a result of a comment I made on the BBC’s website, specifically the Radio 4 “iPM” programme’s comment section, regarding CCTV.

Internet access has opened up opportunities for communication that were unheard of just a few years ago. There was a time when you had to rely on the post to get your point of view across to a news programme, which took a while and there was likely to be some editing. Now you can email an opinion and, depending on the time available or the number of emails received, your comment could be aired as soon as it arrives.

The radio phone in show has been a huge success in Iraq, following the fall of Saddam Hussain, Iraqi citizens rushing to exercise their right to express an opinion after years of having to keeping them to themselves. This form of expression seems to have been born in 1940’s America, when some talk show hosts began to take calls from their listeners. Now they take emails and text messages as well.

The BBC has become particularly good at involving their viewers and listeners in programme making. That’s how I came to be standing under a busy flyover on a hot afternoon with two people who were far more confident about what they were doing than I was. We were feet away from the place where a man had died, alone, after being stabbed in a grimy subway. Even before this happened I had felt that this space needed to be used in order to prevent an assault of this nature. The incident had led to calls for CCTV, which I feel would be expensive and pointless, and this was confirmed by Henry, an expert on this kind of problem.

I couldn’t quite believe that I was actually talking to the man whose book I had read in order to give me some plan of action but Chris, the radio producer, had arranged it so that we could discuss the phenomenon of SLOAP (space left over after planning). We hope that the feature about this on a Saturday afternoon radio programme will encourage some debate about the problems caused by these blank underused spaces. They tend to come about when large structures like flyovers are imposed on existing communities by urban planners who don’t go back to see the impact of their creations.

The presence of an expert allowed me to test the ideas that I had for using the space in a positive way. I would probably not have had access to him had I not expressed my opinion in the way I did. Someone at the BBC recognised that my story would have some appeal to other listeners which made it worth their while investigating. Everyone gains.

The Vanessa Feltz Show on BBC Radio London is a very popular call-in, airing between 9am and noon, Monday to Saturday. Charming, funny Vanessa has just won the Sony Radio Academy Speech Radio Personality Award. I think part of her appeal is that she really has been through the mill and isn’t afraid to talk about it. She comes across as someone who gets it when her callers describe their experiences but she isn’t afraid to declare herself if she disagrees with you. Her show is a very good way of gauging the opinion of a cross section of Londoners which is why politicians and other significant public figures are prepared to appear on it and take questions from listeners. The Mayor of London is a regular. Listen online and see if you agree with me.

I hope that my rather rambling comments will lead to a positive outcome in my neighbourhood as a result of my interaction with the media. It was certainly made easy for me by a friendly BBC man with smiley eyes and a man who is (thankfully) obsessed with his subject.

I love the BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0089nbb
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/radio/presenters/vanessa/index.shtml

My name is Aspidistra and I am an internet addict

I would not describe myself as a technophobe but the fact is I can be inept when it comes to dealing with some of the technology that others seem to deal with so easily, almost in their sleep it would seem.

Take my first post on this blog. It was only achieved with much swearing and the help of The Attached One. I can’t help feeling that one of the reasons his hair has taken on a distinguished silvery tinge is that the internet has entered my narrow life (well it was his fault). Before he knew it he was having to help me email, blog, post photos and generally do stuff and things. Believe me, I’ve stretched his boundaries.

I do wonder how those who have less experience than me actually manage these days. It is easy to forget that, even though website addresses for everything from political parties to biscuits appear all over the place, a considerable chunk of the UK’s population don’t have access to them. In some cases it isn’t because they don’t want or need it. For a while one of the most common complaints to the BBC was that the assumption had been made that listeners and viewers could actually “find out more” on the BBC website. Older listeners were the ones most likely to find this a problem. If some of us need teenagers to set up the VCR to record something off the telly then we will certainly need them to visit a website. I occasionally see someone of a certain age plugged into their MP3 and wonder if it took a grandchild to sort that out for them.

On the whole I can handle that myself these days, now that I don’t use an iPod. I was seduced by the compact and clever design of the Shuffle, ignoring all the negative rumours surrounding this particular company’s technology. The Attached One and I came to the conclusion that you have to be on a higher plane/telepathic/a cyborg to be able use it because I ended up with music on the damned thing more by accident than deliberate intent. So the Shuffle was stuffed back into its funky little box and replaced with the lovely Zen Stone. It really is lovely and we ooed and aahed over it when it arrived (courtesy of the internet - well, when did you last buy anything in a real shop?). The Attached One wiggled it into its “skin” (you see, we even do the lingo) and we went into a downloading frenzy. But the quality of the sound wasn’t as good as the iPod and I spent rather too much time browsing the Argos catalogue and before I knew it I was the proud owner of a Sony E Series Walkman - pictures and telly too. Everyone knew it as well - I kept showing them pictures. They began backing away and crossing the road. They were occasionally doing that anyway but the Walkman didn’t help.

I even have my own computer and all it cost was some of The Attached One’s time and petrol. I am a member of the Freecycle group and dedicated daily scouring of its lists over a period of weeks netted me keyboards, a mouse, a printer, monitors and, eventually, a three year old computer. And now I even suffer from that increasingly common problem - I have spare technology. Three sets of earphones to choose from - I can rotate them.

Unfortunately, an excess of technology is a privilege that a relative few enjoy in the UK. Efforts have been made by the government to provide a degree of free internet access through public libraries but it is clear that even this is not enough. Last year I was encouraging a retired man I know to use the library to access the internet and learn about it. When I spoke to him a few weeks ago he was complaining that it is hard to get any time on the library terminals. Another addict. I noticed that an internet café in the area is offering an hour’s access for £1 but if its a choice between that and your bus fare when you are unemployed or on a tight budget then internet addiction remains a luxury for far too many of us.