Fay Young

Oh Danny Boyle

We’re heading home, driving north from Oxfordshire to Edinburgh, bypassing the villages, towns and cities of middle England, and every motorway mile mocks the green and pleasant spectacle Danny Boyle plans to conjure up for the opening of the Olympics.

Am I being too cynical?  Looking out the window I can see plenty of green and pleasant.  Clumps of trees on rounded hills, pylons beaming power over meadows of pink and white campion,  kestrels hovering for the kill above verges of daisies and teasels.  And haven’t we just been staying in one of those beautiful rural retreats, a bunting-festooned village with more thatched roofs, half-timbered buildings and blooming gardens than any film director could make up.

But Boyle is not the only one making dreams. It’s when we pass ‘Shakespeare’s Stratford’ that it strikes me we are driving through a countryside remixed and regurgitated by the tourism industry. We are constantly being sold an image subtly removed from real life.   To be fair, Stratford is a pretty place, and we’ve enjoyed some fine Shakespeare plays there.  But for one sacrilegious moment I wonder if the carefully manufactured ‘Shakespeare experience’ – boxing the Bard in biscuit tins – stimulates or stifles creative thought in the place that depends on his name to draw the crowds (3 million of them) every year? Another thought, practically blasphemous, could being a UNESCO City of Literature have the same stranglehold on grassroots culture in Edinburgh?

On and on up the M6, signposts pointing the way to a different kind of Britain, junctions leading to towns and cities that grew from coal, steel and cotton. Factories, shipyards, potteries and mines are part of the past now too, disappearing into a waste-land of buddleia and shopping malls.

But that’s not it either. There’s new life in all these cities. Despite the new depression (and goodness knows there’s more to come if Osborne can’t get any further along the alphabet than Plan A), you find an exciting buzz in cities north of London.  Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool – and that’s just the big names on the M6. Never mind for a moment the cities on the east coast or grand urban settlements of Scotland.  Great regional cities with a vision for the future as well as a memory of the past. This could be part of a great national renaissance if it wasn’t for the bonkers economic imbalance of the UK weighted so heavily towards the south-east. (This is most definitely not a plea for Scottish independence by the way).

Here’s a crazy thought. Olympics 2012 is supposed to spread a warm glow across the whole nation. Instead of his rural idyll, what if Boyle were to celebrate the great cities of Britain. London can afford to give credit where it is due. Alternatively we might have spent the Olympian budget on something completely different.  Creating jobs and building houses maybe?

Add comment June 22nd, 2012

Talk to the feet

Dear Diary (if I may call you that), I have been neglecting you badly over the last month or two. But I have not been idle.

During May I walked 104 miles during the Great British Walking Challenge. On the hypothetical journey from John O Groats to Lands End that would have taken me roughly as far as Alness.  In fact many of the miles were up and down Leith Walk, helping to plan another Open Space event (Your Vision for Leith Walk?) that kept me from attending to my blog.

One of these days I will work out a way to write a blog that I can comfortably copy and paste across several websites (somehow it never feels quite right). But at least I did manage to make a connection between the Open Space event and the guest blog Ray wrote a year ago  about the shameful state of Leith Walk.

And I also found a link between the Great British Walking Challenge organised by the charity Living Streets and my new day job on Walking Heads – we both want to get people out walking after all.  At the end of the month I was very chuffed to discover Living Streets has quoted my Walking Heads blog posts  in their newsletter and elsewhere also mention the fact that I lobbied my local MSP about their campaign for safer and smoother pavements. On my way up and down Leith Walk I could hardly fail to notice the state of the ground beneath my feet.

So in a way, Dear Diary, it has all made some kind of sense. But next month I hope to get back to spending some time with you. For once I need to stay in more.

Add comment June 12th, 2012