Category: Sound & Vision

Spare Change

‘Goodness me. What pigs people are to through rubbish in the hollowed out interconnecting heroes of yesterday. Your suggestion of standing hotels is a grand idea.’ – James Sullivan, Artist.

On my recent local wanders I’ve become interested by the sightings of public phone boxes, more often than not in a very poor state, usually covered and packed with rubbish, smashed and hanging on their hinges or all of the above. 

Never in use and rarely even noticed, they feel like remnants of a previous time; metal and glass ghosts of the high street, once so handy for keeping in touch with and chasing people down, yet now almost entirely void of purpose, if not for the shelter they provide all sorts of combinations of trash sat inside them, swept in by the wind or in some cases, seemingly arranged by somebody that’s nowhere in sight. 

I always wonder why the local authorities don’t remove them to replace with trees or simply make life easier for blind people, before concluding they’re subtle beacons tracking our every move, transmitting mind controlling ideas or more probable, raking in advertising revenue. Besides, where would drunk people piss?

Whether they should be reclaimed and repainted by the people and turned into one man libraries and standing hotels or pulled down entirely is for the public to rise up and decide. I’m just asking the question.

Summer 2007

Was it Donegal or Sovereign House
where the boys fought up the stairs?
Morgan charmed a squat next door
and fidgeting formed a toilet queue.
Only two girls arrived wearing hats
just like the party memo said.
Connolly retrieved misused cutlery
whilst a gate relentlessly buzzed.
Deliveries came, politics pursued
and reunions isolated those new.
The hosts stayed in tight control
of music so quiet nobody danced.
By midnight things had thinned
across a car park, now private flats.
The keep on crew lost Hannah,
shouting her name to come back.
The Castle’s door had bolted
marking the end of another night.
That Summer’s events just blurred
from one council notice to the next;
Impromptu ciders in Hoxton,
jumping fences into ticketed gigs,
and drive-by paranoia as Sully hid.
Those days awakened, defined,
destroyed, split and united most.
Migration, home making,
career baking and kids raising
now scatter the stories to which I toast.