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.
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.