Exile in London

A year consumed between the hours of 9 and 5. Even outside the hours of wage slavery, there is no space: underground connections, stony faced automatons, red buses, endless polluting traffic, fretting about spending. Parks and the likes offer occasional rest bite but you get spent eventually. Spending life and cash, preoccupied with the logic of the market even if you denounce it. The divisions of this city are blurred: exploitation and alienation transcend privilege and class. Although the rich often pretend otherwise, they are surrounded. The same goes for the poor. 2 cities overlapping, and it's not always easy to tell which one you're in.

'You did an excellent job. You've seen how we work. Nowhere else works like the cities,' he said. 'It's not just us keeping them apart. It' everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time...you can't come back from that.'...........
.........HE WAS RIGHT. I imagined myself in Beszel now, unseeing the Ul Quma of the crosshatched terrain. Living in half of the space. Unseeing all the people and the architecture and vehicles and the everything in and among which I had lived. I could pretend, perhaps, at best, but something would happen and Breach would know.
'The City and the City', pp 370-371, China Miéville

Cool, cloud covered days, the remnants of a wishy-washy winter give way to a sun blessed week. Clear skies a reminder that freedom is something more than a mere dream. Gliding through the more 'interesting' parts of the city in the mild warmth of a Saturday in Spring, the roar of the jet engines above have a more familiar, soothing sound.

A turn in the weather. A trip away from London through endless estates, suburbia and industrial waste-space. The blue skies are still there - you just can't see them for the clouds. Great dark clouds reflecting the colourless colonisation of life below.






Corrugated iron grid fences lining railway tracks and adding mediocre fortressing to the stolen land of corporations. Thousands, maybe millions of miles of it - mass produced for a mass-produced enclosure, sectoring the all-pervasive concrete. Scar on scar on a scarred environment.







Pylons, loading bays, warehouses, yards. The urban periphery and those unfortunate enough to live amongst these neoliberal ruins - they can't afford to move elsewhere. Elsewhere: somewhere away from the saturating grey.








This is progress. It doesn't have a beginning or an end - there is no memory here. Welcome to the echo chamber of banality. A Europe more vividly dull and meaningless than its continental counterpart, nearing its critical mass. The crash won't bring celebration on the streets - just panic at empty supermarket shelves and whole communities suddenly realising it's too late. The hollow, make believe world they sleepwalked through in abundant times was an illusion afterall. The shell of civilisation bruatally exposed to the coming revenge of nature.