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london fields

columbia road, mare street, hackney road

http://alopex2.blogspot.com/2005/02/night-elm-on-mare-street.html

3 villages

Versailles - Marie Antoinette’s Fake Village
Here I am, sitting by the side of a small lake. The sun shines on the velvet, green water reflecting perfect cottages, perfect people, the whitest swans, the bluest sky - all shimmering back at me perfectly, upside-down.

On the other side of the lake a teenage boy tends the flower beds in a cottage garden while tourists wander between the houses occasionally bottle-necking to allow someone to take an uninterrupted photograph. I too am a taker of photographs. I am different in only one respect; I keep going back to the same attraction. I’ve been here for four days in a row now which makes me and the boy this village’s longest running inhabitants. Of course I don’t sleep here, no one sleeps here - except perhaps the swans, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they were packed in crates at night to avoid ruffled feathers.

This village is a mirror-image, a painting made concrete; but substance as real as concrete cannot be found amongst the winding pathways, the thatched roofs, the wooden shutters. Go up and look too closely at the tree and it will dissolve into brushmarks. I am bothered by the thought the photographs I am taking will not come out; I will be left with reels and reels of blank film and an unlikely story.

A woman with a parasol stands by the lake and turns it all into a Japanese garden.

What you see depends on where you are.













Paris
Metro system. Diagrams that don’t describe real space. Underneath the streets. Step onto the train. Read maps and check placenames. Moving forward. Sudden sunlight. Over bridges. Eiffel Tower behind me. Speeding faster away from the city. I’m emigrating to America. I’m on a daytrip to Eurodisney.

Euro Disney
I can remember when this village was built. I don’t need to read history books, guide books, interpretations. The brochures are good though. They offer possibilties now, everything that’s happened will happen again. Everything is new. The past and present are equal. History loses its power and becomes another scene. A plastic indian chief beside Planet Hollywood beside a man with a balloon.

I’m in the wilderness behind the hotels; a backlot of concrete and scrubby grass, where I’ve wandered, taken the wrong path. I don’t find lions and tigers and bears but two unpainted fibreglass giraffes, standing together by a carpark. They’re part of the picture thats not been coloured in. One of them has a chunk out of its neck. Nearby Davy Crockett’s canoe is tethered by the water’s edge, covered in tarpaulin.






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Bettyhill
I click my heels together three times and I am at home. End of technicolour, back to a monochrome reality clinging to the edge of the north coast of Scotland, scared to jump.

I am standing by the side of a small loch, seperated from it by a wire fence, looking up towards Mackenzie Crescent and the County Garage. Neither the council houses nor the garage are reflected in the water. The loch is the blue of a backcloth behind the weatherman, seen occasionally when someone forgets to push a button.

Between Lairg and Altnaharra there is nothing, no lights for miles. On a cloudy night it can feel like you’re floating, the only things holding you to earth are the headlights picking out the road ahead. At first we didn’t notice anything but then we became aware that the whole skyline was glowing. The hills were black cardboard cutouts, a shadowplay and beyond them huge white lines were shooting up from the horizon at regular intervals from each other, meeting over our heads at a single point. The biggest circus tent that’s ever existed and then it just faded away.

I am a tourist. I want the fantasy in the brochure. I really want that.