Yuri’s Night 2013

For as long as I’ve walked on this planet, space has worn humanity’s footprints – satellites, Voyager, the bits and pieces left behind on the Moon by the Apollo missions. Neil Armstrong taking that small step has always existed in grainy black and white footage and we’ve always been a space-faring species, even if we’ve not quite passed the garden gate. It’s always been this way, at least for my generation and the generations since.

And so today it’s good that there are some many commemorations of Yuri Gagarin and his flight 52 years ago, a flight that lasted under two hours but which changed everything, opening up a whole new horizon as he became the first human being to go into space, the first to orbit the Earth.

It was a massive achievement – I think it’s been overshadowed by the moon landings, and certainly I remember mutterings that the series Enterprise, with its opening montage of historic moments in spaceflight, had somehow managed to omit Gagarin. Oversight? Probably, but it just goes to show how easily we forget.

(Back in the day though, the news was huge. One thing I didn’t know, and that came as a bit of a surprise, was that Gagarin visited Manchester on a post-orbit world tour. Thousands lined the streets in the rain, Gagarin insisting on riding with the top down so that he could wave to the crowds. It seems like the sort of thing that doesn’t happen any more, certainly not for those who still travel into space. Eventually the final frontier starts to feel like a trip to the shops. Heck, now we can film it and put it on Youtube – check out the fantastic First Orbit, which recreates Gagarin’s journey.)

Maybe that’s because it was a different world back then, two superpowers eyeing each other warily, everyone else seemingly stuck in the middle, nuclear spectres stalking history and secrets and fears spinning the globe. Everything’s changed now, and the space race now just feels like history, a bygone age of spies and empires, one of which is now dead, the other hanging on as everything changes around it.

But I’m having a bit of a personal response to this particular anniversary – I hadn’t realised how young Gagarin was when he flew into orbit. 27 is nothing, heck, nowadays it’s almost still adolesence. And yet there he was, changing the world in his mid-twenties. Seven years later he’d be dead, killed in a plane crash at 34, almost the same age I am now. It’s stupid I know, but it makes me look at my accomplishments, or lack of them. 34 still seems young to me, but by that age some people had already changed the world.

But that’s maudlin, and if you let it the idea of space exploration can do that to you, reminding you of your smallness and your fragility and your transitory nature. Instead I like to think of it was something liberating and empowering. Yes, the universe is big, but we can still look up and step out into it, sailing towards another destination, flinging peole out there and letting them poke around.

(Incidentally, that’s why you can send all the robots you want to Mars, you’re not going to really capture the public imagination until there are people heading there.)

So raise a glass to Yuri Gagarin, because 52 years ago he heralded the world in which we live. And look to the stars for they’re in reach, even when we tell ourselves they’re just too far away.

Things I See On My Way To Work 1: The People of Walsall Wood

I commute. I commute for the best part of twelve hours a week. And as any commuter knows, you have to find a way to keep your sanity on these epic trips, to hold on to your senses before you go completely postal and drive through a Tesco Express just for the hell of it. I normally distract myself with podcasts, but I’ve recently noticed that my journey is actually interesting. This is the first in a series about the hidden world of my commute.

As you head out of Walsall, along the A461, look to your left. Standing on the bank of the Daw End branch canal is a fisherman. He’s there every day, every night, and while rumours persist he once caught a fish or a boot or even an Olympic Torch, today his line hangs empty. He’s a lonely figure, lost in his memories; spare him a smile as you drive over the bridge into Walsall Wood.

The Fisherman is part of the Walsall Wood sculpture trail commissioned by the local council in 2009 to commemorate the area’s industrial history. He stands at the canal to draw attention to how this waterway was once a thriving artery, transporting resources between the various mining communities along its route, reminding us how this settlement and the wider Black Country grew up around pits and nail making and steel working. It’s in our DNA, and even those of us who ended up desk jockeys can probably trace our lineage back to a miner or two.

Because this is where the Industrial Revolution was born, the whole Black Country maintaining traces of this history in a landscape scarred by overgrown subsidence and criss-crossed by canals. You can see this as you walk away from the Fisherman towards town; first you’ll come across a miner and his whippet, standing some way away from the other ‘people’. He’s a steel and copper image of an image, a metal interpretation of a stained glass window in the nearby St. John’s church.

It’s a reminder of the centrality of local churches in those days, where the iconography of religion existed alongside that of industry. Apparently the church contains a miner’s lantern inscribed with the names of those killed in a local pit disaster; more on that in a future post.

The whole sculpture trail is about memories – memories of an industrial past now long gone, memories of the families who relied on that industry for survival, whose fathers endured brutal work down the mine to feed their kids. Their stories are told among another group of people, just opposite the church. Now we’re talking about micro-history, stories of children dressing as scarecrows and of a monkey that lived in the local pet shop.

This is the stuff of family history, the stories passed down by grandparents, the stories that would eventually have faded had artist Luke Perry not frozen these memories in metal, preserving the past of the area in the very steel that was so important in creating that past in the first place. In that sense it’s appropriate that the sculpture trail ends with a giant replica of the Walsall Wood colliery: everything is leading to the mine, coal and bricks and workers and memory and legend. Everything begins and ends with the pit.

And yet the Coppy Pit mined for less than a hundred years, from 1874 to 1964. Now the site is a trading estate; the railway line that serviced it a children’s play park. From the point of view of a commuter, the sculpture trail is the only obvious reminder of what this town used to be, a town built around industry, where the community opened soup kitchens to feed each other during the General Strike of the twenties. I have vague memories of the miners’ strike, the outpouring of rage and despair at the collapse of communities built around industry. Is that what happened here? Or did mining in Walsall Wood slowly die, locals finding employment elsewhere, in different towns, different industries?

Because while the sculpture trail is hyperlocal, the town is still moulded by wider, global concerns. While I was taking these pictures, I stumbled on a stark reminder of that: a small cross with a poppy on it, weathered and stuck in a plant pot. I don’t know if it was a leftover from Remembrance Day celebrations or if it was just left there by mistake, but in it’s own way it’s another act of memory; of the men who worked the pit and the canal who found themselves fighting and dying a long way from home.

Memory is a powerful thing, and so is art. Maybe we need more steel sculptures and small wooden crosses to embed these memories in the streets we walk, on the roads we drive.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2013

There’s a garden in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem institute, in which an avenue of trees commemorates those who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. I find that idea powerful, that in a bustling city at the epicentre of religion and politics and geopolitical tensions there’s a place for contemplation and peace and history.

It exists within a wider context, of course, a context of tragedy and horror and violence. It’s right to remember those who survived, the heroes who saved others, but the bigger story is that of the millions killed, industrialised slaughter and the vicious, brutal explosion of racism and xenophobia. I visited Yad Vashem years ago; it’s a place that changes you. I remember a room full of candles and pictures of murdered children. It wasn’t a room to simply walk away from.

More people died than were saved; it’s that simple. We memorialise what happened, not just because of it’s horrific history but because it happens again and again and again, in Rwanda and Cambodia and Bosnia and Darfur, and maybe if we keep remembering, sooner or later we’ll take the damn hint and it won’t happen again.

And yet remembering the rarer stories of the rescued and the rescuers remains important. Holocaust Memorial Day coincides with National Storytelling Week, and maybe telling stories of survivors and rescuers will, if not prevent another genocide somewhere in the world, strengthen reactions to it, light beacons of hope.

So I’ve blogged about Irena Sendler and Astrides de Sousa Mendes before, and then there’s Leopold Socha. A Polish sewage worker, Socha, his wife and a colleague hid a group of Jewish refugees in the sewers under Lwow – a year after the end of the war, Socha was killed saving his daughter from being hit by a truck. I think it’s safe to say that he’s my new hero.

But while I’ve heard of these, and while Oskar Schindler is a household name, I know less of the stories of the death, survival and saviours of gay people and Roma and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Trade Unionists and… The Holocaust is overwhelming in its scale, terrifying in how communities seemed to collapse so suddenly, neighbours colluding in putting the people who lived next door on trains to death camps. The reasons for this – fear, propaganda, malice – all seem painfully inadequate, but they serve as a reminder – these things can ultimately only happen when communities turn against each other. A military can bomb a town, sure, but to operate an infrastructure of identification, registration and murder? That requires communities to turn toxic.

And maybe that’s a reason to remember the Righteous Among the Nations; this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme is ‘Communities Together: Build a Bridge’, and stories of survival demonstrate how various individuals fought to maintain those communities, not simply labelling those around them as Jewish or Gay or Gypsy or Tutsi, but as people, friends, neighbours; a community.

It’s so easy for communities to fracture: a few cynical political and media comments and suddenly attacks on the disabled are on the rise; suggest opening a mosque in certain places and see what reaction you get. It’s terrifying, but the capacity to run that infrastructure I talked about earlier is never as far away as we’d like. “It couldn’t happen here” is only true until it actually happens here.

The stories we tell define our communities; let the stories of the Holocaust, of all the other genocides we watched on the news, act as warnings and testimony, yes, but also as inoculation. Let’s tell stories, not lies; let’s build bridges, not camps.

The Hidden Languages of Towns and Cities

There are, hidden in plain sight, a hundred different languages supporting our towns and cities. I’m not talking about English or Urdu or Mandarin, I’m talking about the secret codes of tradesmen and subcultures, the scrawls and the scuffs and the mystery strings of letters and numbers you see on walls and pavements. They’re everywhere.

And yet I only realised quite how important they are until I listened to the latest edition of 99% Invisible, a podcast you really should be listening to. This episode, about the interactions between city planners and skateboarders, revealed that, like a movie big game hunter, you could find a city’s ‘boarders by looking out for streaks of wax on steps.

And that means you do just learn when kids go to skateboard, you learn about a town’s history and cultures, because there’s a reason skateboarders use these spaces, and that plays in to planning and architecture and questions over who ‘owns’ a space. Study these languages and you can learn how a city works, how initiates keep things running; spray-paint on a pavement tells those in the know where the power lines are; to those who don’t know, that paint may as well be an Enigma code, and yet it’s a language essential to the running of a city. Heck, according to this article, so are the skateboarders.

There’s an example of this near to where I work. On the wall of a bridge overlooking a railway track is this sign:

What does that even mean? I have no idea, but someone does, and while Dudley Station no longer exists, a victim of Dr. Beeching’s railpocalypse of the sixties, those letters and numbers represent something of my local history. I tried googling them, of course, but there was no definitive answer; these languages remain obscure and arcane, even to the Internet. Some cultures have languages used only by women; we have languages used by no-one other than rail workers and train enthusiasts.

I’m not completely ignorant of these hidden worlds; I know hidden Tupperware containing a logbook is probably a geocache; I know a QR code stuck to the back of a road sign is waiting for the local Munzee players. But I recently walked past felt-tipped letters on a tree and I’m not sure if that’s forestry or graffiti. And if it is the latter then it’s just part of a whole vocabulary of tags I don’t know how to interpret, yet another hidden lexicon that makes the world bigger and more expansive than I imagined.

It makes me want to learn a language.

Geocaching, QR codes and Local History: Here’s a project for someone…

I’m a big nerd.

I don’t think this blog does a particularly good job in covering up that fact, but I should make it clear: I’m the guy who gets distracted by tourist information plaques. I’ll pick up leaflets about random places and subjects. I can momentarily find myself immersed in the most bizarre subjects. I’m a big nerd.

Okay, now those cards are on the table, why am I wittering about all this?

Well, I may have identified a gap in the market. See, I’m a big fan of wikis, I’ve dabbled in geocaching, and I live in the UK, where practically every wall was sat upon by Elizabeth I or Winston Churchill. And all those facts are coalescing into a project I don’t have the time, resources or know-how to run, so I’m throwing it out there. Heck, it may already be happening, in which case please let me know.

So, my proposal: all those tidbits of local history, folklore, science and religion you know, all those neighbourhood factlets your granny tells you every time you visit? What if there was a way to make them public, not just on a website that no-one remembers to look at, but using QR codes (or whatever smartphone-friendly technology would be most effective and accessible) to put all that information in situ, with GPS coordinates logged to allow individuals to track down interesting looking sites?

The QR codes could link to a wiki giving articles and videos about the place, and this could be added to by whoever feels able to contribute (notice I didn’t say edited – sure, that’s necessary when verifiable historical facts are wrong, but things get fuzzier when talking about, say, religious belief or the liminal world of folklore).

There would be the option to gameify this along the geocaching model, or use it as an educational tool. You’d want tourist boards, libraries, local history groups and websites like Atlas Obscura involved, but not just them, and you’d want a stonking great searchable database/GPS map tracking all this. Add in all the usual social media integration gubbins and you’ve got something that not only tells you the interesting snippets of history that surround us, but that might also generate enough data to explain why so many communities have a ‘Pig on the Wall’ story.

And you’d award points/badges/kudos to contributors, and hopefully inspire local champions who’d be able to visit, say, church coffee mornings and quiet back-street pubs to gather all the stories there. It could provide a handy infrastructure for preserving community memory. Heck, maybe even a way for communities to fight back against tragedy; following the recent school shooting in Newtown, the author of one of my favourite blogs talked about all the other things that defined the town – the place those affected by the shootings know intimately but that the rest of us only get to see when defined by the 24-hour news cycle. If a QR code and a wiki can help support that, then it will be worthwhile.

I know local variations on this have happened in the past – the QR code thing was inspired by a project carried out in Toronto – but it would be nice to bring it all together, to allow every city and every village to make their history and their uniqueness public. And I have no idea how to do this, but if some clever person could find a way to make it happen, I’d be one of the first to sign up and contribute.

Any thoughts?