Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
~Haruki Murakami.
Sometimes the edge of the world is closer than you think. Sometimes you have to get away. Turn the ignition key and put your foot down hard to the floor. You’re free, your family estate car is a ’67 Mustang GT, at least until the child’s scooter collides with the rear window when you hit traffic on the south circular a few moments later.
London’s too small sometimes. It doesn’t matter where you live, your feet will walk the same circuit. Sometimes you need new sky to stretch into, even if for a few hours. Writers and dog owners understand this. On lonely stretches of riverbank or estuary mud there are walkers being ignored by their dogs, or writers wrestling with invisible, half-written protagonists.
I needed a new scene for several reasons last week, and not just for my new novel. Following some shocking news, I found old emotions closer to the surface than my own skin. I felt rawer than a peeled orange.
Where to go? Well, the Isle of Grain is background for my novel that is currently benefiting from research more vigorous than the 1960s NASA space program, so it was an easy decision. There are worst places than north Kent to be carried by a restless heart, and it’s a change from windswept piers or being helped out of a city bar into an Uber.
There are certain places that Time never even knew to forget and the Isle of Grain is one of them. In fact, if Boris Johnson hadn’t suggested it as location for a new London hub airport it’s unlikely to have ever made headlines. There are few places more ill-suited to build an airport than wetlands of salt marshes and mud-flats home to hundreds of thousands of wading birds and waterfowl. Bird strikes can ground planes even more effectively than drones or emotional support squirrels.
The Isle of Grain spreads itself as an afterthought of Kent with an almost nonchalant confidence; apparently unbothered that no one knows where it is. It’s like the US rust belt only smaller and with more copies of the Sun on dashboards. Hopeful roundabouts shoot off dead-end exits, weed-cracked tarmac skirts abandoned power stations, and dilapidated barns crumple into flatlands. Like abandoning the rashly agreed bowtie when hiring a tuxedo, security kiosks stand discarded beside collapsed perimeter fences to depots and decaying warehouses. A level-crossing dissects an abandoned branch line, its tracks rusted, and once proud signage fades slowly in the winter sun.
London never felt more like another country. Mobile homes block the view from owners’ actual homes, as they stare out through net curtains at the memory of last summer the same as the last. Amongst the barbed wire and field grass, along forgotten creeks where rotten boats wallow and storks nest, there are traces that this virgin land has been walked before, by farmers and contractors, ramblers, twitchers and airport planners. Union flags hang slack in the wind and unkempt churchyards hold generations of the same surname.
If the Isle of Gran were a person it would be the wise chap in the pub that no one notices until he has gone. And there are some pubs. In the Hogarth Arms, and with unnecessary professionalism, the bargirl struggles to spell Goujons on the order slip for the kitchen; after all she’s the one cooking them. The landlord’s building a fire, which goes out as a customer talking about contract landmine removal distracts him. He’s a veteran sipping a Guinness so slowly he’s likely to be there all day. Perhaps that’s his plan. He’s also explaining the intricacies of Malta’s decline and its EU contributions. He’s a veteran, adjusting to civvie-walk with slightly laboured familiarity; it’s easy to tell he’s more comfortable in fatigues and stripped out Land Rovers rattling with sand, grit and cadged cigarettes. We are a long way from Islington. In the snug there’s a small commemorative plaque to ‘Barbara’, who apparently ‘always spoke her mind’. You can’t help think no one’s dared take it down in case she returns to give ‘em an earful.
On the roads articulated lorries charge into corners like its Druid’s Bend at Brands Hatch; with such ferocity they rattle your teeth if you’re standing there taking notes. Roadside trees are pruned; you can cut the prevailing wind from their branches, but you still know which way they’ll always lean. A small airfield, better suited to smuggling guns in and high profile extradites out, rolls its invitation to weeds and brambles across the flatlands.
And as I drive away, from the fallow fields and deserted beaches, the pylons and bridle paths, I can’t help be pleased that such hinterlands exist. It may not serve as many people as an airport, and those residents it does are unlikely to appreciate its sense of purposelessness, but these lost places are important. They reflect the parts of us that are lost but fail to find voice amongst the well-defined places, the jobs, the cliches, the noise and the fury, and the frantic dash in pursuit of identity and conformity. Sometimes you find something when there is nothing there.
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Originally published on Idle blogs of an idle fellow
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