ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
But now those ‘wedge-shadowed gardens’ would be bathed in daylight-bright halogen, triggered by any passing cat. Moonlight would be hard-pressed to compete.
For the insomniac, there might be some cold and baleful comfort to be found in visiting a motorway in the middle of the night. Just standing on a deserted bridge above six illuminated lanes, watching the lorries heading north towards Carlisle or Glasgow, the red tail-lights of cars zooming southwards towards Warrington and Birmingham. It’s like looking into a river of light, feeling the current of people you can never really know passing through great banks of dark trees and hills. You are not alone. Even a generation ago the country seemed to shut down for the night: the airwaves cleared after the national anthem, the closedown dot melted into the olive ground of the television screen, the milk bottles were put out. We would enter a long tunnel of night. Now, light itself seems to flow swiftly along our major roads, pooling in the backwaters of goods depots and hypermarkets, leaking 24/7 into the texture of our night world.
Seen from military satellites, our conurbations are joined up in storm systems of light. The thirty miles between Liverpool and Manchester are some of the most mature edgelands on the planet. The first railways were laid here, over the mossy, scrubby land, and ever since, a strip of development has grown: the giant IKEA superstore at Warrington; the pallet yards at Flixton; the Ship Canal, the East Lancs Road, the M62 corridor. Invisibly, mobile phone cellular coverage extended along these paths to meet at some point in between the urban centres. And on one uncelebrated night in the recent past, the pixel-per-square-kilometre count in the fields and wasteland and goods yards midway between these two cities reached a saturation point that meant both became graphically joined, a bright miasma connecting both.
O tungsten, o tungsten, how can a light-bulb filament, an eyelashfine coil of wire, evoke such loyalty and nostalgia? Is it the warm russet tinge it lends to a room in the evening? Is it the soft ringing sound that tells you a bulb is dead, as you brush it past an ear? Is it the volatility, the sudden ‘pop’ as the filament breaks? Is it the dusting of black on the inside of the glass left by evaporated tungsten? No wonder tungsten lovers are flocking to buy up the last of the incandescent bulbs, before we make the final switch to low energy.
How little did the inventors of the light bulb (not just Thomas Edison, but – historians argue – at least twenty-two mavericks who played a part in dreaming up the incandescent light) think that they were also inventing a metaphor for thinking itself. A bulb lights up above the head, and an idea is born. So widely understood is this image that it can be used as a universal graphic shorthand for ‘inspiration’. Is that why we lament the loss of the incandescent bulb so much? After all, metaphors can be orphaned by technology. How long will it be before ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ refer only to manoeuvres on computer screens, and any reference to paper, scissors and glue is forgotten?
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