Pin it and zip it
Also: clubbing as a national temperature check
Let’s tighten things up. Here’s a short one!
I’m Ben. I write about culture, technology, sustainability and play. The overlapping bits are fun. Like how not to get hit by a self-driving car, the business of immersive installations, a design-led eco community or Picasso painting a chicken.
Badges. It’s not often one has space for spontaneity these days, between submitting meter readings and comparing the price of oats. Caution was thrown to the wind for a full-bore middle-aged trip to the RSPB’s Rainham Marshes. Entry is free!
Half the circuit was waterlogged, which trimmed the herd, so we found ourselves alone in blissful spring sunshine, calf-deep in clear water, listening to lapwings whoop and the whizzing of a 14:47 Eurostar to Brussels.
In the gift shop, as we rummage for Goldfinches in the £2 pin badge box, a gnarled chap in RSPB fleece conspiratorially shares how blindingly profitable the badges have been since launching in 1997. £570,000 profit in a single year!1 This feels to be one of the more harmless commodifications of nature — wildlife as intellectual property — but most importantly a lesson in accessible price points.
We bought about 68 badges, so entry wasn’t free now, was it?
Zips. You bought a bag in New York for silly money. Your partner mocks you for it, despite the sneaky expanding section.
The zip breaks and you tussle with an Australian parent company to reimburse the £10 bill from a local seamstress for the fix. You’re quite pleased with yourself.
In time, it breaks again but you won’t let the weakest link ruin a perfectly good chain. At the dry cleaning shop, a crisply shaved man in baby blue velour tracksuit extracts £25 from you before gliding away in a blacked-out Range Rover.
You return to collect the bag. A different man, wearing sunglasses, silk trousers and a 1920s driving hat hands over what is now a Frankenstein’s mess of jagged stitching with a knock-off Givenchy zip so shiny it pokes your eye out. Protesting to someone so much better dressed than you is not an option.
You slink home.
When did the repair game become such a racket?
Chairs. This film is a real tear-jerker. Beautifully shot and worth all 12 of the minutes. It’s a turbo-shot of empathy and a reminder that everyone has a story. Nick Aldridge is a fabulous film-maker, available for hire, having swapped Hackney for LA.
Ascii piracy. On a completely different filmic scale, MSCHF have done some sneaky work to encode movies into ascii characters to be watched through the Terminal app. Ascii Theatre. This is a fabulously geeky contravention of copyright laws.
Clubs. When did you last go clubbing? It’s a real toe-in-the-water, temperature check of the national psyche.
Wapping has all the optics of a warehouse rave location: industrial brickwork, low-rise roof lines and deserted streets. But inside, it couldn’t be more civilised. Trench coats, bikinis, studs, dreads, a mostly young, slightly nervous energy, all painfully polite. Even the shirtless blokes were harmless, grinding energetically on concrete pillars above our heads, their shiny man-bags slung like scrota.
Our well-grooved 8-10pm powernap and the 5am fries that carry us home are innocent bookends to a civilised night. No pints spilled down backs, no staring, gurning or jostling at the bar. The only assault came from the pounding 125 bpm. Par for the course when you panic-book techno tickets.
The paucity of mischief makes me wonder from which underground culture will the revolution bubble up?
Wild islands. You know those grim little strips and triangles of green amidst the concrete? Every Spring I rage at councils for strimming them to the ground, naively crowing “It’s No Mow May, mate! Let it go wild!”
Sadly the sum of these daffodil, dog-shit mini-parks can never be greater than the whole because they’re disconnected. Re-wilding a 400 acre farm works because it’s contiguous land. In short, the roaming boars keep the brambles at bay.
Leaving these bookie shop slices of green to go wild will result in 700 stranded islands of bindweed and rusty bike frames. Nature doesn’t work very well cut off from other nature and we don’t work very well cut off from each other.
And so, with apologies to John Donne, a version of “No man is an island”:
No nature is an isolated pocket, Entire of itself; Every nature is a piece of the world, A part of the main. If a clod be surrounded by concrete, Our globe is the less, As well as if a large park were: As well as if a garden of thy friend's Or of thine own were. Any tree’s death diminishes me, Because I am nature. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Fewer linky-links than usual, more cultural vignettes and a poem! Whatever next.
What does Spring hold for you? Your replies are an absolute tonic, thank you.
Until next time,
B.
PS - This is a lovely response to a patronising interviewer comparing activism to lobbying. “Would you rather have someone representing the interests of 8 billion people or someone representing the interests of 10 shareholders?” Watch Clover deliver it.
http://www.charitiesmanagement.com/Magazine-No125/7163/page-2.php