North
Home again. Settling comfortably into this post-finals post-university limbo like existence of hard-core chilling and not much to do. Since getting home from Cyprus I've managed to go to a Big Brother themed barbeque complete with tasks, play some tennis, have a massage, get locked out of the house in my skanky jogging clothes and bed hair (when I jog I imagine that I move so fast that I become a blur '*whoosh* nobody sees me!' my head says - my legs of course say otherwise), and go to liverpool.
I enjoyed Liverpool. Reading 'The Old Patagonian Express' has encouraged me to relish the journey as well as the arrival. The three hours spent travelling north thus became interesting. I never go north. It's always south, to Oxford, or London or possibly Cambridge or wherever else, but never north. I like the English countryside, the rich greens, patchwork fields and wooded hills. I much prefer it to the dun browns and yellows of hotter places like California, or Cyprus - wouldn't it be great to have both, hot sunny rainless days and jeweled green fields rather than an either/or. Riding through Manchester I could see the signs of regeneration, penthouse luxury apartments springing up by the tracks. Through urban areas, comparing the ugly modern houses with their mean boxy shapes to the older, but in my eyes, far more pleasing Victorian terraces with their eaves and higher ceilings.
On the way to Saul's house we drove through Toxteth, one of the most attractive slums I have ever seen - beautiful old redbrick townhouses with huge windows, victims of the riots of the 1980s. The architecture in Liverpool is lovely. Grand old Victorian and Georgian buildings, beautiful old churches (do cities built with blood money attempt to assuage their guilt with the copious construction of churches?) and wide leafy roads. Eating dinner we were wowed twice by sunsets over the Mersey. The Albert Docks are populated with museums and trendy shops whilst the city center is a hive of building activity as the city prepares to be European Capital of Culture in 2008, and to further enforce Saul's well-founded sense of civic pride.
Tate Liverpool has a Summer of Love exhibition on. Rooms of pshchedelic album art and concert posters, light shows and concert footage and video installations.
The 60s really were a different time. They paved the way for us, allowed the birth of the teenager and of rebellion, but everything we do now seems to be only a poor copy of then. We hark back, wish to revisit, but have lost much of the magic. In the 60s there was still a sense of innocence and hope. Mind expanding drugs (before the bad trips, addiction and overdoses), sexual experimentation (before the scourge of AIDS), protests and marches (they still thought they could change the world back then). But then it all collapsed, the drugs fucked you up, the wars continued, capitalism took over, the mystical eastern religions were found to be as vicious as the rest and the hope was lost. The baby boomers now wonder why the youth of today is so apathetic. 'Well, you tried, and you failed, we just live with the aftermath. If the 60s and the summer of love came to nought, what hope do we have of making change?'
I enjoyed Liverpool. Reading 'The Old Patagonian Express' has encouraged me to relish the journey as well as the arrival. The three hours spent travelling north thus became interesting. I never go north. It's always south, to Oxford, or London or possibly Cambridge or wherever else, but never north. I like the English countryside, the rich greens, patchwork fields and wooded hills. I much prefer it to the dun browns and yellows of hotter places like California, or Cyprus - wouldn't it be great to have both, hot sunny rainless days and jeweled green fields rather than an either/or. Riding through Manchester I could see the signs of regeneration, penthouse luxury apartments springing up by the tracks. Through urban areas, comparing the ugly modern houses with their mean boxy shapes to the older, but in my eyes, far more pleasing Victorian terraces with their eaves and higher ceilings.
On the way to Saul's house we drove through Toxteth, one of the most attractive slums I have ever seen - beautiful old redbrick townhouses with huge windows, victims of the riots of the 1980s. The architecture in Liverpool is lovely. Grand old Victorian and Georgian buildings, beautiful old churches (do cities built with blood money attempt to assuage their guilt with the copious construction of churches?) and wide leafy roads. Eating dinner we were wowed twice by sunsets over the Mersey. The Albert Docks are populated with museums and trendy shops whilst the city center is a hive of building activity as the city prepares to be European Capital of Culture in 2008, and to further enforce Saul's well-founded sense of civic pride.
Tate Liverpool has a Summer of Love exhibition on. Rooms of pshchedelic album art and concert posters, light shows and concert footage and video installations.
The 60s really were a different time. They paved the way for us, allowed the birth of the teenager and of rebellion, but everything we do now seems to be only a poor copy of then. We hark back, wish to revisit, but have lost much of the magic. In the 60s there was still a sense of innocence and hope. Mind expanding drugs (before the bad trips, addiction and overdoses), sexual experimentation (before the scourge of AIDS), protests and marches (they still thought they could change the world back then). But then it all collapsed, the drugs fucked you up, the wars continued, capitalism took over, the mystical eastern religions were found to be as vicious as the rest and the hope was lost. The baby boomers now wonder why the youth of today is so apathetic. 'Well, you tried, and you failed, we just live with the aftermath. If the 60s and the summer of love came to nought, what hope do we have of making change?'
posted by abbutterflie | 12:31 PM
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