The idea of 'ignored' places is interesting. The bits of town that, when a child, you never thought to bicycle to; the rooms you never went into in a large house; the corridors you never thought to check out in the institution you worked in. Then there are Primo Levi's spaces that are never trodden on (the flagstones between the outside buttresses that prop up cathedrals). All of these places - ignored places.
In my case - the side road right next to the corner-house where I grew up, the road that I never thought to go down, not once, for it was my custom to walk the main-road to get into town. The unenlightened kid that most kids are. After lurching around the area on an Internet Street View it turns out that all along it had been a leafy road of 1930s semis with little front gardens and lawns to the side, a place that I would have liked a lot, but more importantly a shorter and unexplored route into town. I still can't believe it.
Then the funny little unused rooms whose purpose was never quite clear and whose doors remained unopened for half a decade perhaps. In my case - a later house this time, in teenage years, an odd thin room that linked a front lobby right back to a kitchen, a sort of walled-off corridor. I did have the presence of mind this time to stand in it and take in its very odd character, shortly before the packing and the leaving for another town, never to return to that house again. A thin 'corridor' surprisingly bright for it had a large Georgian window overlooking the drive, contained nothing but a piano and a built-in cupboard housing scores of small dark-brown bottles with white screw tops and chemist-type labels that revealed the contents to be all the possible food colourings of the spectrum, all unusable long before. I hadn't been in this room in 'my' house for three years.
Back further still to Northampton and Abington Park and Weston Favell and earlier childhood days - At ten years' old I had very simply never seen the bigger picture. Never realized how close one favoured haunt was from another, never seen how I could have cut through a couple of (never seen) streets and moved from one haunt to another and completed a circle back to home, rather than the turnings-back which I thought at the time were necessary. A circle route always involves the new, whereas a turning-back route involves the same view seen from opposite sides. If I had known of these circle opportunities I would have wandered further and comprehended a local geographical connectedness that I simply never saw. To be quite frank, I'm rather embarrassed about missing it.
Ah these Street View opportunities nowadays. When will there be a 'Corridor View' and a 'Room View' opportunity? But what sort of person is it who does return and jolts around Street View and at last does get the full picture? The overriding emotion is one of regret. (Probably) an older person's regret over times and opportunities long gone, something from which it can become difficult to move on.
No comments:
Post a Comment