All thoughts here are likely neither original nor final.
This text was written in the evening time, winter 2024. Inside mine and Jay's cold and dark old flat.
Fantasy films always take place after the golden age of a civilisation. The main story of lord of the rings takes place at the end of the third age, as the last of the elves leave. In Phillip K Dick’s do androids dream of electric sheep? The world is already withered. In Ridley Scott’s Blade runner, the landscape is futuristic, but the cities seem old, the future has already come to pass in Neo Los Angeles.
I like the great old buildings in Manchester, they are made of bricks, and covered in soot from the industrial revolution and are rarely tall. Industrial is the only type of revolution we had in England, people say because of the rain. In town, there are many tall buildings, made of glass and steel. They build this way because it is efficient and I assume cost effective. My father told me that its too expensive to make the curved glass you see in the Victorian buildings all around Manchester, and so it’s special when you see some because it is likely original. I’ve purposely never found out if this is true, and have purposely told as many people as possible. To live happily requires an amount of romanticism and that romanticism is better shared.
The old giant brick buildings, like the one that I live in, haven’t been built for a long time. I like imagining myself living in a ruin of an age that has passed, as if I came in at the end of things. A type of dwelling that we couldn’t build now, or wouldn’t because of lost techniques, or it’s inefficient or there is no economical benefit to having 9ft ceilings and giant rooms. These kind of buildings are cold and dark, but they have large single glazed windows and I think of the people that lived here 100 years ago. I think about how much they must have loved looking outside, to put in giant windows that make the house freezing. It’s as if we’ve kept these places up in amazement of how people lived before council tax, or 300% rises in energy costs.
Originally, the neighbourhood that I live in was a gated community for wealthy industrialists to live near Manchester, but away from the back to backs the factory workers lived in. That’s why there are no pubs in Whalley Range, only an old gentleman’s club. People like to say the area was originally inhabited by quakers but this isn’t the case. Perhaps this is why the story of a policeman murdered here in 1876 was so well reported on. It happened not far from my window.
It’s difficult to bring my awareness to how living in this building makes me feel. I had worked for a while in Burnley, a town with similar buildings; mills that were long abandoned then repurposed, for a designer called Aitor Throup. He was an avid archivist of CP Company and any Massimo Osti designs, he even designed the 20th anniversary CP goggle jacket. On the subject of a plum coloured 2003 Stone Island coat I was wearing, he told me that when clothes get to a certain age, you stop wearing them and they start wearing you.
That is to say they have character, and have been baptised by time. They have travelled and sat and lived. And you walk around in them like you’re in charge but they’ll likely outlast you. I think of all the old coats walking around, nodding to each other as their owners walk by in them, an unspoken in-joke between peers.
Yesterday Jay bought a Victorian child’s shoe home from a junk shop in town, the shoe was attached to a small card that reads ‘Antique babies shoe, 200 years old, made by a local cobbler’. In the corner, written in a different coloured biro ink it reads ‘museum quality, £24’. Jay had asked the man at the counter if it was really 200 years old, and if so how did he know? The man said he knows that it looks 200 years old, but he’ll sell it for £20 because he’s not sure. The assurance of it's time passed equates directly to it's value.
Initially we’d suggested sage-ing the child’s shoe but decided against it. There is a weight to old things but it’s hard to tell where it comes from. Why does this shoe give me the creeps, but not my old dresser and drawers? Why don’t I want to sage my coat, for example? Or my house? Apart from not being totally mental, we didn’t sage my coat because it didn’t belong to a nameless, long dead victorian child, providing the man at the counter was telling the truth. The shoe has weight in the same way laugh tracks in sitcoms from the 60’s do, a gaggle of laughter from people likely dead now and I have no way of knowing who they were or what they did but this artefact connects them to my now.
A childs shoe that used to sit by their door now sits on our shelf. Me and Jay get onto the subject of why our house is better than a newly built house that would be much warmer and more fit for living. We are trying to define the edge of its qualities. People often say they don’t believe in spirits but the main difference between an old home and a new build is that they feel lived in. The fact that for 100 years, a set of people's live's have been centred around this dwelling. It would be easy to describe this as ‘presence’. We don’t know who they are or where they went but their shoes used to sit by the door and now ours do, which is a strange kind of intimacy.
We moved out of the house the following spring.
Living in the meantime
1
Two summers ago Martina had taken me and Linus to a small town on the Amalfi coast while we were visiting Naples. She told us that in the 1800’s it had been like Monte Carlo and that the stars of the moment had stayed here and that it was lavish. It had aged harshly since then, the industry had left and the world had moved on.
The central Piazza is lined with public taps and crystalline water flows freely from them to be collected as drinking water, even though the same source is shared with the faucets in the surrounding homes. Perhaps people were once brought together by thirst.
Martina tells us about her grandmother who had lived here through the war as a girl and settled here taking a draftsman for her husband. He passed away very young but her grandmother maintained that they had more love in their short years together than others in a life time and even though she had brief relations, she never moved in with anyone else, after him.
It’s strange how the heart holds on. That there is enough of someone left behind in those that loved them, that they are able to sustain themselves on it. And so there is little reason to move on. Time together spans outwards in the mind, beyond the confines of physical presence, or days counted on a calendar, bookmarked with an X for beginnings and ends.
2
Tolle makes a distinction between practical and psychological time.
Practical time (a) being ‘clock time’, necessary use of time for daily functioning and planning. Psychological time (b) being our minds tendency to get stuck in the past (trauma/regret) or the future (anxiety/worry). I have a doctors appointment tomorrow (a) and I’m worried about it (b).
A man is out walking next to a flowing river and sits down. On the other side of the river is a bear, next to him a butterfly sits gently on a leaf, it has fragile wings that allow it to set it’s small body carefully down. The bear can live up to 50 years outside of captivity and the butterfly only a day but neither of them know it, and they are not concerned with each others sense of time. To them each is a lifetime and it is enough, neither short nor long. Only the man must consider them both and is crushed by their disconnection.
3
A long time ago I had bought a gold Claddaugh ring for a girlfriend from a second hand jewellers in Leeds. A design that allegedly dates back to 1700 in Country Galway, Ireland. Classically it’s design features two hands clasping a heart from either side joined in loyalty.
A story is told about an Irish silversmith that was taken captive by Algerian corsairs while a boat he was on crawled across the sea, learning his craft while in captivity from a moorish goldsmith. After 14 years he was released and upon his return home he presented the first Claddaugh ring (the design originating with him or perhaps the moorish goldsmith) to his sweet heart and they married.
In his 14 years in captivity on the other side of the unhurried water I wonder if had he been at home in his mind all along, feeling that life was elsewhere. Returning home merely an actualisation of the longing in his mind into reality. Or had he been present the whole time and so become deeply changed, feeling his life rudely interrupted?
Had he been vastly altered from time spent living present in the mean time then why go back to the girl at all? So deeply changed and acutely aware, it would surely be impossible to reintegrate after such a period somewhere so alien. Alternatively, had he spent the 14 years in his mind and already at home, you could see how he could return to life with ease. I like to imagine that time moved slower then and at home little had changed and there was instead intimacy bound in their separation by circumstance.
In either case, the silversmith needed someone to present the ring to in order for his time away to have mattered. There needed to be a witness for the act for there to have been an act at all. The ring itself of course was testimony but unable to speak so his wife completes his act by bearing witness and them discussing it happily together and loudly in bars is perhaps where the story comes from.
4
I had bought a cast iron candle stick as a birthday or christmas gift for another (fairly new) relation without a thought to how long they would occupy territory in my mind (b) or on the calendar (a). Though a gift chosen is often an indicator of how we feel for someone, given ritualistically they are a thoughtful tribute to their realm inside of us. We often try to feel out preemptively how long they will stay (a) how much of an effect they will have on us (b). It matters to us because our consciousness is deeply implicated in our experience of time, what we think and feel give our time it’s meaning and we want to know this in advance as if we are desperate to act out a story we already know. Despite our efforts to draw from experience each time is different and as if in a dark room with a candle stick we fumble around, trying to define it’s shape. Like the corsairs or the draftsman for better or for worse, we often stumble clumsily into each other’s lives.
5
It’s 2025 and I’m in Naples again. After a stint in the bar, Augustino is driving us through tight streets that are stone splashed with sodium light. There are no rivers in Naples and perhaps that’s why time stand still here, it’s unspoiled and exactly as I remember it every time I visit. There is only the river Sarno, which flows near Pompeii. From there, on the other side of Vesuvio, the city glows orange from afar.
In southern Italy I have to acclimatise to a kind of time that asks me to resign myself to it. Buses come when they come if at all and agreed meeting times for plans are more like suggestions written on napkins and set to the wind under the copper sun for the birds to read as they sing their songs of the moment. Eventually I relax.
Franco Cassano’s concept of southern thought describes this slowness as ‘everyones ability to be a philosopher, living at a different speed, closer to beginnings and ends’. He defied any contemporary acceleration of experience, at odds with the modern world. A view shared by many in the European north as we wake up to the reality and draining pace of our fast-moving lives and for-see their pitfalls and what we have lost and beg politely to them for leniency. It would seem then with our desire for slowness that what is modern is already out of date.
The traffic in Naples in contrast, is some of the most violent I’ve ever seen. It’s surprising that the same people who seemed incapable of rousing or action can become so full of urgency. I ask a cab driver I have hailed about the fare to the airport, he tells me ‘one million dollars’ and I get in. The driver is on his phone and sounds his horn all the way to the terminal until I can no longer see the sea and the thick air shared with tight streets and cathedrals leaves me.
6
In high school I was taught economics in a drab classroom of which I remember little apart from the concept of ‘loss leaders’. The classic example being bananas, these are products that shops sell at a loss in the hope that when you come in to buy them you also buy other more expensive products that they make a profit on. For example luxury water. So, if you go into a shop and only buy a banana, you’ve won a small victory in a long game.
Time we spend slowly, or with ourselves in solitude or repairing or in states that are difficult to feel so acutely is time payed forward. That is to say, these activities are loss leaders in time, spent so that we might be more fulfilled or happier in the future.
I used to feel a great urge to do as much as possible and fill my life with colour all of the time, with the urgency of Naples traffic. Now this feeling though still there, is much less crushing. Its colour and a love of the slow converge like an estuary into the sea. After a busy summer I feel a slight relief at it’s end. I can retreat in and do less and it all equals out. My posh water bought me my banana.
7
I saw a program on TV once late at night about men who walked on the sea bed to fish. They stayed down for 5 minutes at a time. Their physics work in slow motion and they lose a third of their perceived body weight while under. I think about them looking up towards the seas face from its bottom and wonder if they can feel the faint ripples of the waves from the surface or what’s left of them, as they reach the ocean floor.
Is this what Martina’s grandmothers’s time was like with the draftsman, or the Irish silversmith’s with the corsairs, absent from his home? Better still is it our time spent in solitude, living in the mean time? I want slow time and to be propelled into my future.
8
I hate to wake up late on weekends. Like a loose wire it feels as if I’ve waited at the wrong subway station in some far off city and it’s not the one the person I’m meeting has gotten off at. I enjoy the scenery as I catch them up. Urgency and slowness converge. This is quite a delightful thing.
All thoughts here are likely neither original nor final.
On plum coats and presence
This text was written in the evening time, winter 2024. Inside mine and Jay's cold and dark old flat.
Fantasy films always take place after the golden age of a civilisation. The main story of lord of the rings takes place at the end of the third age, as the last of the elves leave. In Phillip K Dick’s do androids dream of electric sheep? The world is already withered. In Ridley Scott’s Blade runner, the landscape is futuristic, but the cities seem old, the future has already come to pass in Neo Los Angeles.
I like the great old buildings in Manchester, they are made of bricks, and covered in soot from the industrial revolution and are rarely tall. Industrial is the only type of revolution we had in England, people say because of the rain. In town, there are many tall buildings, made of glass and steel. They build this way because it is efficient and I assume cost effective. My father told me that its too expensive to make the curved glass you see in the Victorian buildings all around Manchester, and so it’s special when you see some because it is likely original. I’ve purposely never found out if this is true, and have purposely told as many people as possible. To live happily requires an amount of romanticism and that romanticism is better shared.
The old giant brick buildings, like the one that I live in, haven’t been built for a long time. I like imagining myself living in a ruin of an age that has passed, as if I came in at the end of things. A type of dwelling that we couldn’t build now, or wouldn’t because of lost techniques, or it’s inefficient or there is no economical benefit to having 9ft ceilings and giant rooms. These kind of buildings are cold and dark, but they have large single glazed windows and I think of the people that lived here 100 years ago. I think about how much they must have loved looking outside, to put in giant windows that make the house freezing. It’s as if we’ve kept these places up in amazement of how people lived before council tax, or 300% rises in energy costs.
Originally, the neighbourhood that I live in was a gated community for wealthy industrialists to live near Manchester, but away from the back to backs the factory workers lived in. That’s why there are no pubs in Whalley Range, only an old gentleman’s club. People like to say the area was originally inhabited by quakers but this isn’t the case. Perhaps this is why the story of a policeman murdered here in 1876 was so well reported on. It happened not far from my window.
It’s difficult to bring my awareness to how living in this building makes me feel. I had worked for a while in Burnley, a town with similar buildings; mills that were long abandoned then repurposed, for a designer called Aitor Throup. He was an avid archivist of CP Company and any Massimo Osti designs, he even designed the 20th anniversary CP goggle jacket. On the subject of a plum coloured 2003 Stone Island coat I was wearing, he told me that when clothes get to a certain age, you stop wearing them and they start wearing you.
That is to say they have character, and have been baptised by time. They have travelled and sat and lived. And you walk around in them like you’re in charge but they’ll likely outlast you. I think of all the old coats walking around, nodding to each other as their owners walk by in them, an unspoken in-joke between peers.
Yesterday Jay bought a Victorian child’s shoe home from a junk shop in town, the shoe was attached to a small card that reads ‘Antique babies shoe, 200 years old, made by a local cobbler’. In the corner, written in a different coloured biro ink it reads ‘museum quality, £24’. Jay had asked the man at the counter if it was really 200 years old, and if so how did he know? The man said he knows that it looks 200 years old, but he’ll sell it for £20 because he’s not sure. The assurance of it's time passed equates directly to it's value.
Initially we’d suggested sage-ing the child’s shoe but decided against it. There is a weight to old things but it’s hard to tell where it comes from. Why does this shoe give me the creeps, but not my old dresser and drawers? Why don’t I want to sage my coat, for example? Or my house? Apart from not being totally mental, we didn’t sage my coat because it didn’t belong to a nameless, long dead victorian child, providing the man at the counter was telling the truth. The shoe has weight in the same way laugh tracks in sitcoms from the 60’s do, a gaggle of laughter from people likely dead now and I have no way of knowing who they were or what they did but this artefact connects them to my now.
A childs shoe that used to sit by their door now sits on our shelf. Me and Jay get onto the subject of why our house is better than a newly built house that would be much warmer and more fit for living. We are trying to define the edge of its qualities. People often say they don’t believe in spirits but the main difference between an old home and a new build is that they feel lived in. The fact that for 100 years, a set of people's live's have been centred around this dwelling. It would be easy to describe this as ‘presence’. We don’t know who they are or where they went but their shoes used to sit by the door and now ours do, which is a strange kind of intimacy.
We moved out of the house the following spring.
Living in the meantime
1
Two summers ago Martina had taken me and Linus to a small town on the Amalfi coast while we were visiting Naples. She told us that in the 1800’s it had been like Monte Carlo and that the stars of the moment had stayed here and that it was lavish. It had aged harshly since then, the industry had left and the world had moved on.
The central Piazza is lined with public taps and crystalline water flows freely from them to be collected as drinking water, even though the same source is shared with the faucets in the surrounding homes. Perhaps people were once brought together by thirst.
Martina tells us about her grandmother who had lived here through the war as a girl and settled here taking a draftsman for her husband. He passed away very young but her grandmother maintained that they had more love in their short years together than others in a life time and even though she had brief relations, she never moved in with anyone else, after him.
It’s strange how the heart holds on. That there is enough of someone left behind in those that loved them, that they are able to sustain themselves on it. And so there is little reason to move on. Time together spans outwards in the mind, beyond the confines of physical presence, or days counted on a calendar, bookmarked with an X for beginnings and ends.
2
Tolle makes a distinction between practical and psychological time.
Practical time (a) being ‘clock time’, necessary use of time for daily functioning and planning. Psychological time (b) being our minds tendency to get stuck in the past (trauma/regret) or the future (anxiety/worry). I have a doctors appointment tomorrow (a) and I’m worried about it (b).
A man is out walking next to a flowing river and sits down. On the other side of the river is a bear, next to him a butterfly sits gently on a leaf, it has fragile wings that allow it to set it’s small body carefully down. The bear can live up to 50 years outside of captivity and the butterfly only a day but neither of them know it, and they are not concerned with each others sense of time. To them each is a lifetime and it is enough, neither short nor long. Only the man must consider them both and is crushed by their disconnection.
3
A long time ago I had bought a gold Claddaugh ring for a girlfriend from a second hand jewellers in Leeds. A design that allegedly dates back to 1700 in Country Galway, Ireland. Classically it’s design features two hands clasping a heart from either side joined in loyalty.
A story is told about an Irish silversmith that was taken captive by Algerian corsairs while a boat he was on crawled across the sea, learning his craft while in captivity from a moorish goldsmith. After 14 years he was released and upon his return home he presented the first Claddaugh ring (the design originating with him or perhaps the moorish goldsmith) to his sweet heart and they married.
In his 14 years in captivity on the other side of the unhurried water I wonder if had he been at home in his mind all along, feeling that life was elsewhere. Returning home merely an actualisation of the longing in his mind into reality. Or had he been present the whole time and so become deeply changed, feeling his life rudely interrupted?
Had he been vastly altered from time spent living present in the mean time then why go back to the girl at all? So deeply changed and acutely aware, it would surely be impossible to reintegrate after such a period somewhere so alien. Alternatively, had he spent the 14 years in his mind and already at home, you could see how he could return to life with ease. I like to imagine that time moved slower then and at home little had changed and there was instead intimacy bound in their separation by circumstance.
In either case, the silversmith needed someone to present the ring to in order for his time away to have mattered. There needed to be a witness for the act for there to have been an act at all. The ring itself of course was testimony but unable to speak so his wife completes his act by bearing witness and them discussing it happily together and loudly in bars is perhaps where the story comes from.
4
I had bought a cast iron candle stick as a birthday or christmas gift for another (fairly new) relation without a thought to how long they would occupy territory in my mind (b) or on the calendar (a). Though a gift chosen is often an indicator of how we feel for someone, given ritualistically they are a thoughtful tribute to their realm inside of us. We often try to feel out preemptively how long they will stay (a) how much of an effect they will have on us (b). It matters to us because our consciousness is deeply implicated in our experience of time, what we think and feel give our time it’s meaning and we want to know this in advance as if we are desperate to act out a story we already know. Despite our efforts to draw from experience each time is different and as if in a dark room with a candle stick we fumble around, trying to define it’s shape. Like the corsairs or the draftsman for better or for worse, we often stumble clumsily into each other’s lives.
5
It’s 2025 and I’m in Naples again. After a stint in the bar, Augustino is driving us through tight streets that are stone splashed with sodium light. There are no rivers in Naples and perhaps that’s why time stand still here, it’s unspoiled and exactly as I remember it every time I visit. There is only the river Sarno, which flows near Pompeii. From there, on the other side of Vesuvio, the city glows orange from afar.
In southern Italy I have to acclimatise to a kind of time that asks me to resign myself to it. Buses come when they come if at all and agreed meeting times for plans are more like suggestions written on napkins and set to the wind under the copper sun for the birds to read as they sing their songs of the moment. Eventually I relax.
Franco Cassano’s concept of southern thought describes this slowness as ‘everyones ability to be a philosopher, living at a different speed, closer to beginnings and ends’. He defied any contemporary acceleration of experience, at odds with the modern world. A view shared by many in the European north as we wake up to the reality and draining pace of our fast-moving lives and for-see their pitfalls and what we have lost and beg politely to them for leniency. It would seem then with our desire for slowness that what is modern is already out of date.
The traffic in Naples in contrast, is some of the most violent I’ve ever seen. It’s surprising that the same people who seemed incapable of rousing or action can become so full of urgency. I ask a cab driver I have hailed about the fare to the airport, he tells me ‘one million dollars’ and I get in. The driver is on his phone and sounds his horn all the way to the terminal until I can no longer see the sea and the thick air shared with tight streets and cathedrals leaves me.
6
In high school I was taught economics in a drab classroom of which I remember little apart from the concept of ‘loss leaders’. The classic example being bananas, these are products that shops sell at a loss in the hope that when you come in to buy them you also buy other more expensive products that they make a profit on. For example luxury water. So, if you go into a shop and only buy a banana, you’ve won a small victory in a long game.
Time we spend slowly, or with ourselves in solitude or repairing or in states that are difficult to feel so acutely is time payed forward. That is to say, these activities are loss leaders in time, spent so that we might be more fulfilled or happier in the future.
I used to feel a great urge to do as much as possible and fill my life with colour all of the time, with the urgency of Naples traffic. Now this feeling though still there, is much less crushing. Its colour and a love of the slow converge like an estuary into the sea. After a busy summer I feel a slight relief at it’s end. I can retreat in and do less and it all equals out. My posh water bought me my banana.
7
I saw a program on TV once late at night about men who walked on the sea bed to fish. They stayed down for 5 minutes at a time. Their physics work in slow motion and they lose a third of their perceived body weight while under. I think about them looking up towards the seas face from its bottom and wonder if they can feel the faint ripples of the waves from the surface or what’s left of them, as they reach the ocean floor.
Is this what Martina’s grandmothers’s time was like with the draftsman, or the Irish silversmith’s with the corsairs, absent from his home? Better still is it our time spent in solitude, living in the mean time? I want slow time and to be propelled into my future.
8
I hate to wake up late on weekends. Like a loose wire it feels as if I’ve waited at the wrong subway station in some far off city and it’s not the one the person I’m meeting has gotten off at. I enjoy the scenery as I catch them up. Urgency and slowness converge. This is quite a delightful thing.