To my left, a vast chemical-green sign announces: Asda 24 hours. To my right, the cathedrals of Matalan and TKMaxx, squatting in unholy alliance. Behind me a functional block of Town Hall, facing down onto this Water Garden. Concrete benches amongst clipped box hedges with a few steaming ponds of non chemical-green water, where bloated goldfish gasp for air. A fat man is throwing bread to the fish, while his wife looks on, impatient: --Poor f*ckers don't get 'nuff food. It is lunchtime, after all.
Even concrete melts in springtime sun. Lie on my back and close my eyes, let the space behind my eyes be dazzled, so that when they reopen the scene is bleached of colour. Voices buzz over the hot, heavy air, like flies adrift on the gentle warm wind. --[Don't you] 'ckin ignore me! --Awright I see ya! They're laughing, really.
I had stopped to pick up a coffee at the shop on the park's edge. --You don't look like your facebook photo, I mean, you look like I remember you at school, no it's a good thing. You can see I've shaved mine a bit since then, I'm a no-photo man I am, I'm the most unphotogenic man goin'. I sneak a look at them both - life tourist - while I'm waiting for my coffee. He's talking rubbish. They're both beautiful, both late 40s. Something good is starting here, the woman is smiling fondly while the man babbles faster, incapable of not releasing information he's been carrying about alone, for too long. --I lost my dad last year, thing is I told him I loved him just in time. A first date? Not their last.
Outside a young man has his head facing the sun, he's absent-mindedly rubbing his tattooed hands over his furry stomach while his woman looks on, a hand on their child's pushchair. You and me baby we ain't nothing but mammals. Piercingly erotic, simultaneously vulnerable. Human.
Lying on the bench, eyes closed, I'm thinking about JG Ballard, and what he would have made of this New Town. You could argue, as I have done at my blackest moments, that his prophesy about growing psychopathology, engendered by systems made concrete in the form of soulless architecture, are leaching the humanity from society. Certainly, when the winter is full-on, and the sky is black, and the concrete buildings are stained that dirty shade of nothing, it is hard to feel fond of this place. Remember living here, remember the first day you walked the town centre, aghast at what you'd done.
All it takes though is a wee bit of sunshine. Let sunshine win the day, sang David Cameron once, much to the amusement of party ideologues. I never loved him more.
For why? Because sunshine is transformational, whether it be real rays warming a concrete garden or a political metaphor for hope. This New Town is a place of beauty in the sunshine, our faces default to smiling, our instinct devolves to touch; touch the person next to you, touch them with your smile. Life is grim in Britain, will become still grimmer. But while the sun shines... Ballard was a great writer and I love his novels. The future, however, may not be a dirty shade of nothing, after all.
