Southend

Sat in a pub yesterday, looked more like an abandoned furniture warehouse. It was no doubt one of the hipper venues in Southend on Sea. They were playing The Clash. I thought; 'Proper London', 'London by the sea'. 'The only way, after all!' I was brought up with this crappiness, this exact kind of crappiness fits. At that moment I was staring across a car park at nothing much more than total crappiness, but it was the kind of left over crappiness you might find in Venice Beach Cal. It had a certain charm, a certain crappy charm.

'Look!- In that one room walk up over there across the car park probably resides another Motley Crue- it certainly couldn't house anybody else!' I said. A fat girl wearing roller skates sped past.

And when we walked along the front today it was peculiar to think that I'd spent so much time in the original Las Vegas and all the time it's approximation sits right here on the Essex coast, in the form of Las Vegas Grills, Stardust amusements, and even NYNY and the Monte Carlo next to each other, just like they are there.

Here's to the Happidrome (above). It may not be great architecture, but it certainly piles on the melancholy.

Photo by Julie Cook.

Apartment Le Corbusier

In no matter how many years of study it takes to become an architect, they never teach you, we never teach you, this bit. Staring out over the deep blue dawn of the estuary because you can't sleep (see below). You are responsible for it, but you are not the one doing it (you've left him up to his neck in it) and you have run out of unfortunate military metaphors; be it the avoidance of 'mission creep', the carnage of destruction, the consequences on the innocent (Pat next door) or the eventual crisis of resources. And this is just a kitchen. What we teach is apparently, to me right now, is just the dreamy bit.

It says a great deal for architecture that it's detachment from actually doing it has bred such a superfluous appetite for difficulty, for funny angles and complex juxtapositions across all areas, where the simple things are so hard to do in the first place.

Both of these things make me think of Le Corbusier's plan for his own apartment, the seventh and eighth floors of 24 Rue Nungesser et Coli (1934). From what I can see from the plans, the main access is from the service lift or main stair, both of which are peripheral, and the machinery room (no doubt expressed) of the main lift (stopping on the sixth floor) as a consequence occupies the space of his dining room*. Now I must go and see this. LC's enthusiasm for machinery extends to him hearing it, and staring at it as other people use it, as he contemplates his cornflakes and prepares for a morning painting in the studio across the hall? He creates for himself and Yvonne that kind of most secluded, detached, and yet intricately involved negotiation with the world around or in this case below them via this apparently simple manipulation of vertical circulation? Is this his most blatant expression of technological power?

From this perspective, now the new day has broken, he certainly understood something about this business. Our fun fair below will resume in a couple of hours I guess, and those container ships really do move at a rate of knots.

*On closer scrutiny it kinda does but doesn't, it's boxed in, but no doubt with access. It would no doubt have been much better in a glazed box.

Retreat

We have retreated, to Southend on Sea, to a view of Tilbury, speeding container ships, and Adventure Island below. I left 'Old Scotty' in the rubble of our kitchen today. There he was, grey in dust, still brandishing his jackhammer. He'd found more concrete to remove, and him and his mate John looked pretty much like their aim was tunneling through to the other side (our neighbours downstairs). As I apologized to our neighbour next door, she did look pretty shaken.

This was supposed to be a light touch of a job, and now it looks like Stalingrad 1943. Still, we will persevere, I bade goodbye to Scott with the faith in final victory and a promise to order the IKEA worktops. Why is it all architectural jobs, if you want to do them properly, end up with such pain (it's still IKEA)? Or is that precisely why the cheap shit does so well? It's cheap, it's easy, and it's shit (we agree IKEA worktops are not entirely shit). Clearly Scott and I are in more ways than one a half century behind the times, we are ideologically driven to make it right, whatever it takes. I cannot put it any other way, you cannot stand up on the rubble of our kitchen right now, so it's up against the (remaining) wall for everybody else.

The Raw and the Cooked

The ritual of daily life here begins with turning the heating on. No matter the modern facilities, the elder of the house prefers a condition in the region of primordial freezing. I have found this to be not unusual amongst elders, even if it seems peculiar, even detrimental. The elder will, of course, as soon as he can get away with it, attempt to turn the heating off. These are the rules.

On the occasion of great holidays, the elder females will congregate to form something I will term 'a ruckus' while the elder male settles down to watch football for a very long period of time, if not all day. A great feast will very slowly be prepared, in this case an exact replication of the famous Christmas feast (since there was a turkey left over). In the ruckus the mature females enter various forms of competition, while their associated males will slowly join the party and look on slightly aghast, or join the elder in watching the football. The youth of the tribe will eventually return from swimming lessons and various adolescent assignations to be teased mercilessly on their prospects for the future, such prospects being considered presently marginal given the evidence of 'lack of application' or non participation in wars against the Nazis (a long gone rival tribe). The feast will eventually be served amidst great merriment and occasional malapropism which can extend to physical violence if unchecked.

After the meal, at exactly 9pm, the elder will retire, leaving the tribe 'to it' and venture by prearrangement to the 'Rose and Crown' for the company of 'the lads' who will all sport the mark of respect, the 'Y' on the end of their name (in this way Scott becomes ordained 'Scotty' after the gods 'Scholsy' and 'Giggsy'). He will only return when fully satisfied at approximately two in the morning, despite, or perhaps as a direct result of this behaviour, having reached magisterial eighty two years.

The next morning many phones will ring in many blessed tones as each family member will attempt to 'calm down' and 'get on with their lives' with the heating once more secured in the 'on' position.

Ancient Verulamium

Our bedroom here sits on top of an ancient Roman burial ground. This morning the sun was shining and the sky was blue, and we were left to our own devices, so we travelled back in time. Both of us grew up having parks to walk across at those youthful and sensitive times of our lives, when you are love sick or close to it most of the time and prone to singing Yes songs to the trees. So we ambled off down the hill to the ancient Roman bit of St Albans, the theatre, past rabbits hopping around in dingily dell and indeed singing 'And You and I' as best we could, but not remembering the lyrics.

Apart from the group of five American tourists, intent on earnest archaeological chatter, the scene was quiet and beautiful, that is if for beautiful you substitute pleasantly eerie to the receptive. Easy to imagine those Romans in the circumstances. There was very pertinent signposting, one simply said 'More Excavations'. The rest seem to have uncovered mostly Roman carpentry shops and off licenses. We stopped to realize that the rabbits were probably winning the war of excavation, it might be rabbits 1, humans 0 in the fullness of time.

On pondering the Greek tragedies no doubt played out over this scene, a hawk appeared over head, very close in fact, you could see through it's gossamer wings.

'Christ! An omen!' I said

'Omen of what!' Julie said

'God knows'.

A donglers life

We have not moved in to an internet cafe, nor a house with anything resembling broadband other than it's giant Sky Sports screen, and the pubs of St Albans are iffy on internet access, and I'm not supposed to be in the pub anyway, so it was very helpful that one of my brothers in law offered me his dongle. I was of course, in dongling terms, an idiot, but as soon as I sat down here and the thing appeared to work I went on Ebay and ordered one of my own, just like his. What I did not realize is that I was suddenly in far more rarefied air than I thought, and his dongle was not the same as that dongle (we'd even started calling it the 'dougal') and that we had entered a world of the highly specialized, who know their dongles. Here knowing your dongle is the difference between driving your Astra and your Porsche. Get caught up with the wrong dongle and you're pretty much FUCKED FOR LIFE. Or so it appears.

In this weeks LRB John Lanchester writes a nice piece on Marx (Karl) at 193, and even he complains that while it may be reasonable to retrain different generations, the same process is tough on a 50yr old welder right now. As it is now, all is melting in to air quite rapidly, and my dongle will not, even when it arrives, be any use at all simply because I really am not in the know. 'You're fucked' my brother said down the phone, probably standing in a nightclub, sipping a mojito, doing his business, Porsche outside, probably with the engine running. Success here, probably like success in Kaliningrad, is dependent on certain kinds of knowledge irrespective of the apparent information. It's good to remember this. It is also worth remembering that Scott had warned me off the dongle even before we left London.

Last night my niece went out to get her hair done at a special night at a St Albans salon. I remember speed hair cutting to disco music in a nightclub in Dubai. It was a particularly gruesome spectacle. The girls all ran to the ladies afterwards screaming as they suddenly looked like Middle Eastern soap stars. My beautiful niece, with her 'prom' (don't ask) in a week or two, found herself, since she took off her glasses, with an asymmetrical bob cut, and now in floods of tears unable to leave her bedroom. Her mum has complained to head office, and they are going to take her down to London to see if they can do something with it like it's ER. What exactly can you do with suddenly asymmetrical hair? The mind boggles. St Albans/Dubai asymmetry. D'Arcy's does Pacific Rim.

St Albans

Somebody said you can visit a city for a night and write a novel, after a month maybe a chapter, but after a year you'll be lucky to write a sentence. No wonder there is so much travel writing.

With Scott finally destroying the kitchen we have moved to St Albans for the duration. I quiver at the length of time this might be.

The first thing you notice about living in St Albans is the reality of HD TV. It's like living in the adverts. All the family's TV's have grown substantially in size over the last two years, and like growing children, they now take over whole rooms. Some are even 3D, and you have to wear funny glasses. The effect is to make you realize what you are missing, that in some sense, giant size pleas for your attention are the reality of our times.

Meanwhile, if you go out, it will be to VIP night at the Slug and Lettuce, where diamonds accompany the cocktails, but only one of them is real. Meanwhile I did actually pick up the phone to hear somebody had died, and the response was 'Do you think we should phone Samantha, we'll interrupt her crazy golf'. This is middle England alright.

We are going to book for dinner in D'Arcy's which we were told, long ago during a rather pleasant evening in the Riviera Las Vegas by a disappointed visiter from these shores, was far better than anything there. We have been waiting a long time for the pleasure. The last time I went out for dinner in St Albans to such a fine establishment, I paid £100 and enjoyed little more than a carrot.