Diggers March on Uxbridge
The Xerox building duplicates itself; come back tomorrow and there’ll be another one, and another. And another. X started out as a narrow four storey column, then multiplied in the night. Horizontal ‘lanes’ of aqueous green glass play with notions of flow and drift, the river captured and tamed. The front elevation, serene as it is, gives me the bends: it’s like looking down from the high board onto an Olympic swimming pool, sun-sparkling lanes, dividing ropes—which, in this case, convert into metaphors of a clean white road. Motorway and canal system seamlessly linked.
Traffic is at a standstill. The bridge over the river, with its red brick parapet, is a sad relic. Workers and drones, in thrall to the glass beehives, plod down Slough Road, towards UXBRIDGE sign. They have their own, end-of-the-Metropolitan-line style; viz., baggy blousons or black puffa jackets worn over lightweight grey suits, brightly polished shoes. They are bareheaded, ballasted by oversize silver attache cases. That is, male and female. Trouser suits, short hair. The women carry a second bag, slung from the shoulder, for personal effects. The attache cases are the kind that turn up on the TV news, left in cabs by Secret State bagmen. ‘Just popped in to Blockbusters to pick up a video and it was gone. The invasion plans. The list of informers.’
Downtown Uxbridge is not a place to search out an acceptable breakfast. We return to the canal path, head south towards Cowley. Now the green-glass buildings are lower, but they spread over a wider area (Terry Farrell’s Aztec M16 temple at Vauxhall squashed flat). Cowley is where Mediparc pretensions devolve into muck yards and low rent trading estates.
TRIMITE (The Printmakers—for Industry). A collection of metal drums in green and various shades of blue; industrial conceptualism. Seven of the drums—one letter on each—spell out the brand name, TRIMITE. They’ve executed this conceit in the style of the popular (with exiles) yeast extract paste, Marmite (‘contains 31 servings’). Red and yellow on a beef-brown background. Fantasies of squat jars with tight lids, all those B vitamins, have me salivating. Breakfast.
Experience proves: where there’s a trading estate and a canal, there’s a caff, a caravan with serving-hatch, a tea stall. It’s a risk worth taking, to detour from our path—fearing that once we come inside the fence we won’t be allowed back to the waterside. More vans than cars. Flat-roofed hutches bodged in asbestos. Print and salvage seem to be the principal trades (along with appearing in cop show TV).
PINKY & PERKY’S CAFETERIA (Phone or Fax Orders Welcome). Grinning pig’s head motif, transfer lettering on every window. The clientele (early shift) is demographically mixed. Suits (jackets on backs of chairs) laying down grease before the office opens. Working men with spider tattoos, oil scored into the pores of large hands. They seem happy to share this space, which is clean (yellow Formica, red bucket-chairs). The all-day breakfast floats on my hub cap of a plate like a relief map of London and the Thames Valley. Greensand, oolite, chalk. The bubble and squeak of Enfield Chase, bacon ridges of the Chilterns, rubbery fried egg of the Dome, sausage of the North Downs, bean swamp of Dagenham and Purfleet.
The Cowley Lock and the Cowley Peachey Junction have a particular interest for me. As far as the Grand Union Canal is concerned, Cowley marks the end of a 27 mile ‘pound’ and the start of the ascent to the Colne Valley and the Chiltern Hills. In more leisurely times, The Paddingon Packet used to ply the 15 mile, lock-free stretch between Cowley and Paddington, pulled by four horses.
The anarchist and libertarian graffiti of the Colne Valley shares the concrete with dopers and slackers and sticky adolescents.
I WAS ERE SMOKIN WEED
I WAS ERE BUT NOW
I’M NOT ROUND THE CORNER
SMOKING POT I’M WRITING THIS
TO PROVE A POINT BUT UTER SHIT
WITHOUT A JOINT
In another hand, the critical riposte: YOU SUCK COCK. Princess Di is memorialised by twin hearts and a question mark. A great red cock, Basquiat hot, spurts blood. A fleshy lighthouse tower floating on a savage sea. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME…
Low clouds part, rain in the air. Sunbeams scintillate on ruffled water. The smooth curve of a brick bridge, the Cowley moorings. There is none of the jaunty Notting Hill communalism here, decanted Sixties street warrens. The agenda is quieter, more serious. Boat people keep their heads down, mind their own business—which is often survival (the new subversion). One of the true British poets of the last half-century lived in Cowley, tactfully removed from the scene, carrying out his researches, a rate of production (a bibliography of ‘about four hundred’ items) that would shame any of our logophile novelists. Booklets flow from the grizzled (and exiled) Bill Griffiths with the regularity of newsprint. He avoids publication dates on many of his self-produced chapbooks. There’d be no point. He revises, reissues, amends, sticks on a new cover. Bill’s poems require time codes like video tape. He brings out more editions, so it seems, than the Evening Standard.
