Imbalanced
Outside of my window, in the damp cool of the English high summer, there is a tree with dark leaves. As you round the church with the crumbled brick wall and straighten onto our road, the tree catches your vision on the left, a deep red-blue shadow to my colour-broken eyes. The branches and leaves are thick, dense, intense and block the view of the terraced houses on the other side of the street. In the winter, when the broken leaves have swept down the street, the bare branches expose a full view of the cars tightly parked, the windows of the houses opposite, and the street lamp, defiantly shining on, ignoring the cold of the departed leaves. The ground is tarmac and broken stones, and continues for a kilometer in that way towards the river.
Although I am a 10 minute bike ride from a Tube stop, this is the suburbs. London but Zone 6. Postcode? Not geographically related to Charing Cross. South West London - I laugh at your urban ways. This is a green neighbourhood, full of large deer-filled parks, in one of the greenest cities in Europe. Yet even if you ignore the Heathrow flight path overhead and focus on the dappled path that flows without site of buildings along the Thames, you always know you’re in a place of human habitation. Refrigerators are not far away from these shores, nor this window.
The view over the valley is a vibrant throng of colours. Thistles, wheat, hedgerows, poppies and sheep decorate the chessboards of fields along the side of the hills. This is the English West Country. I’m not far from habitation here, and mankind’s impact on the landscape for the past thousand years is evident from those self-same hedgerows. The shimmering heat off the main stage and the clashing mood board of tents also gives away the proximity of another four thousand human beings, gathered in the usually quiet chalk hills.
Despite being able to hear the post-gig chatter and bad punk covers drunkenly warbled over acoustic guitars as I go to bed at 11:00pm, this is more the country life. In the early morning I wake to the patter of rain drops falling. The groundsheet is tensed from the large air bed, and some contact water is drifting in. I can choose to get up to solve this problem, and face the mud and the wind, or hunker down and hope it will blow over. Those four thousand other people have the same choice. Refrigerators feel a long way from this canvas, and this sleeping bag.
And between that suburban experience and this farmland experience? An hour and a half of quick driving. I can laugh at the wind beating against the walls tonight; yesterday I was respectful of what it might talk the rain into doing. I live, a city born soul, balanced between town and country.
