Northern Ireland, Nov 2007

At George Best airport in Belfast, I cleverly bypassed the bag-in-the-hold queues by forgoing toiletries. A sprint around the chemist replenished my needs. In retrospect, I should have paid greater concentration in the dental section. What appeared to be some kind of Irish branded toothpaste turned out to be denture cream. I found out the hard way, scraping the gluey gunk from the roof of my mouth. The memory still makes me gag.

Architecturally, Belfast is defensive looking. Even the new boutique shops and 'cathedral quarter' redesignation can't hide the recent history and where other cities would have smothered facades with glass, Belfast is more hesitant. Whether this is the subconscious working, I don't know. The black taxi tour of 'The Troubles' was grimly fascinating. On the Protestant Shankill Road, blue skies shone on the Red Hand of Ulster mural and a powerful painted image of a lone UFF soldier trained his rifle as I crept past.

On the other side of the dividing line, the rain came down on Bobby Sands and the wall of empathising murals ranging from Palestine to the Basque Country. Even the weather seemed split by the sectarian divide.

Samuel Johnson once said the Giant's Causeway was "worth seeing, yes, but not worth going to see." This was a time before the Antrim Coast Road had been blasted through the rock. The modern route from Belfast is dramatic, the sea spraying the road, and Scotland visible on the horizon. The modern pleasure lies in the journey too.

At the Causeway, unexpected November sunshine played across the stone polygons and, squinting, I thought of a tumbled Inca wall. I preferred the myth to the science, the clever giant over the cooling lava.

I went to Derry because that's where the Undertones were from and therefore it couldn't be bad. I was surprised at the clarity of the murals in Catholic Bogside. No ambiguity here. Multi-coloured provocation, pushed right against the city walls, "You are now entering Free Derry" says one, another depicts a jailcell and all the people represented, were dead.

Galician Mist

At Baiona, a medieval fortress juts into the Atlantic. Within is a modern manor house built with honey stone on older foundations and furbished as a Parador. Canons and turrets ring the island and a causeway separates it from the mainland.

In the town below hardy pilgrims stamped past, on their way to Santiago, following the lesser-stomped trail up from Portugal. We did our own penance, hauling our luggage up to the hotel from the bus stop under deep blue skies amid map-related arguments.

From the bedroom window the view spanned across the bay to the offshore islands. At least it did until the mist rolled in. Those deep blue skies from a paragraph ago quickly blanked and thickened. From a clear vista of crashing waves, you suddenly couldn’t see the hand on the end of your arm. It was strange and amazing and I couldn’t stop staring at the place where the view used to be.

The mist lay thick and low and as the streetlights flickered on, dim yellows swirled into the mix. Suddenly, the whole cloud lifted and the view was back, the evening silhouette of the earlier panorama. The bay looked sharp and the tips of the waves so white against the night. I turned away, searching for a camera. By the time I unearthed it, the mist was back and I wondered if I imagined the whole thing.

Czech Republic Wanderings

Brno
Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Villa Tugendhat is the twin of his Barcelona Pavilion. Roadside it conceals its beauty, squat and defensive. Inside, the house begins to make sense. The footprint of the villa is embedded into a hillside which drops away to the rear. The back wall is all glass and retracts into the floor in a Bond-villianish way. Natural light bounces off an Onyx wall and van der Rohe’s Barcelona and Brno chairs split the internal space. Dark bookshelves line one wall and the divide between indoor and outdoor space is blurred by plants and textured stone tiles. Internal photography was not allowed. I had to focus sneakily when the guide turned her back, creeping around in my squeaking plastic overshoes. Outside the rain poured onto a tatty canopy.

Hotel Avion was the creation of Bohuslav Fuchs, a local architect whose adversity to decoration came to define Functionalism. The hotel was built in the 1920s but was subsequently given a communist makeover. What's left is the anthithisis of the boutique hotel.

I walked into reception and was immediately asked to pay. This made me a little wary. My room was on the fifth floor, a juddering lift ride away. Beautiful views and just as well as the room was spiritless. By the bed sat a chunky radio from Dubceck's era, complete with imprinted stations for Bratislava and Praha. A phone from the 1980s and a button-less television from more recent times completed the entertainment, inoperable without remote. The bathroom contained one of those horrible sticky shower curtains which attached itself like a second skin.

The brown decor covered all the shades of the Communist rainbow. A faded square of brighter brown told of better days, days of pictures on the wall. Outside was where it was at; a terrace twice the size of the room and all mine. I plugged in my ipod, opened some Moravian wine and the terrace became my private dancefloor.

Railway Station
I walked downhill to the railway station along cobbled streets cut with tramlines. Teenagers dressed in orange t-shirts swarmed around the entrance hall. Nuns with huge rucksacks fussed and organised. One group assembled in the corner and sang and clapped. The words were religious, I’ve no doubt of that, but the harmonies and beauty of the song made the hairs on my neck stand to attention. In a city that delights in functional architecture, these students took a different approach, using the building’s tall ceilngs and natural acoustics to create something unexpected. I bought my ticket to Olomouc from a man behind a dusty screen. Even he was in awe.

Olomoucs
Olomoucs was a ‘look up’ city, a neck strainer of a place. I arrived in the main square at midday, just as the astronomical clock sprang to life. Clicks and whirrs sounded from within and painted figures danced a mechanical waltz. A crowd gathered amid the clangs and bongs and kids gazed at the stilted and primitive performance.

Telc
Telc is a gorgeous place, a medieval square decorated by Italian masons and surrounded by ponds. Outside a new town encroaches but doesn't overlap. Telc’s geography has preserved it. Outside one chequerboard mansion sat a Skoda, parked like a photographic spoiler but at least it suggested Telc wasn’t just camera candy. Real people lived here too. Telc’s beauty has created a tourist boom and pizzerias and souvenir shops peep behind the renaissance facades.

Hayling Island

My childhood holidays began in Essex caravans. From Southend and Clacton to Walton-on-the-Naze, these summer breaks were all about buckets and spades and digging to Australia. I would start the holiday full of excitement but usually ended it with a foot injury. I either stepped on something sharp or was stung by some evil Essex sea creature. After a week we drove home, windswept and happy, with me in a surgical sock.

Then in the summer of '77 we spent a week on Hayling Island. Hayling is attached to the Sussex mainland by a thin causeway. "We're going abroad!" joked my dad as we sat in the queue to Northney Holiday Camp. I joined the kids group, The Wagtail Club but the pouring rain kept us indoors for most of the week. I have incomplete memories of a visit to a funfair and scrambling for copper coins across wooden boards. My dad recalls a sombre breakfast conversation: Elvis had died! At the evening talent contest, a camper blasted out Blue Suede Shoes and [in Hayling Island at least] the King lived on.

Thirty years on I came back and the sun was out as I crossed the causeway. The holiday camp [Warners very first] is long gone, but others remain in rude health. I returned to Hayling for two reasons: to photograph the island's modernist homes and to run around my childhood memories. I snapped away. Hayling is full of seaside modernism; white cubes with flat roofs and Art Deco flourishes. They sit among older thatch and ornament-clad bungalows, policed by gnomes.

I walked north to the site of the holiday camp, now a nature reserve flanked by blackberry bushes and full of rabbits. Chalet lines are traceable but a 90s housing estate rudely encroaches onto the reserve. Only the boating lake remains, its curve too perfect for nature but the outer wall is gone, reclaimed by the sea. I took some photos but they were mainly of spaces where the camp used to be and were as empty as my memories.

In 1978 my dad moved jobs and we went to Ibiza. Proper abroad! No causeway links the Balearics to the Sussex coast. We flew back [my first flights!] with leathery tans and my annual foot injury was a minor one. At Hayling Island we needed a tractor to tow my dad's Scimitar from the car park. I recall much of the Ibiza holiday but at Hayling Island I remember mostly rain.

Glimpses of Essex #2 - Gestingthorpe on a Saturday Morning

Gestingthorpe is a hamlet tucked inside the northern county boundary, but estate agents prefer to say Suffolk borders. The pace of life is unhurried. I watch the vicar tacking posters to the church noticeboard as sunlight spears through medieval glass exposing arcs of dust. Thatched Tudor cottages surround a tidy green, coated in pretty pastel colours and overhung with winter roses. “No to Stanstead Expansion” says a handwritten sign in a ground floor window and as if on cue, the throaty buzz of airplane engines pass over.

A Georgian manor house stands on higher ground at the end of a narrow lane. A century ago, Titus Oates became Lord of the Manor, but itchy feet led him all the way to Antarctica and he died in 1912 on the way home from the South Pole. His memorable final words are inscribed on a polished tablet in the church nave, “I’m going out, I may be some time.”

The Grove Tavern, Walthamstow

I like the Grove for three reasons: 1) It has proper locals, 2) Sunday night is ‘song night’ and 3) I used to live opposite.

The Grove is a small square boozer on the corner of a late Victorian terrace. There was talk of ‘doing it up’ once but talk was all it was. I like the fact that nearly everyone in the pub has an armful of tattoos and claims to be on the fringe of east London gangland, “Ronnie was a nice guy, but with Reggie you had to be careful.” All pinch of salt stuff. If you ask the right questions to the right people it’s like a local history museum of east-end bullshit.

The Grove comes alive on Sunday night. The locals (including ‘Young Terry’ who is mid-fifties) sit around the edge sipping stout or sticky sherry. Pipes are puffed, cigars are sucked and visibility is at a minimum. The sound of coughing wavers in pitch, but never falters. A pianist tinkles away in the corner for a while and then asks for volunteers. It looks spontaneous, but there is a strict hierarchy. One by one the regulars clamber onto the tiny stage and belt out terrific music hall songs. Frank’s party piece is “Give Me a London Girl Every Time” which he sings with a lecherous grin. Joyce is revered among her peers for her voice. She sang “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” one night and I almost wet myself with excitement. In the summer I used to sit in my back garden and the songs would float across the road.

I remember going to the Grove the night the twin towers collapsed. The regulars were in and the telly was on. They looked at us as if to say, “see, we told you things had gone to pot”

Pop Pilgrimages No.6 - An Empty Bench in Soho Square

I didn’t realise how much I liked Kirsty MacColl’s music until she died.
I sometimes feel sad listening to her voice, it carries weariness even in the happy songs. An anthology released earlier this year captures it well, all the heartbreak and make-ups and curious diversions. She wrote so many good songs about herself and when her own life dulled, she covered others wisely. There was also a period as the 80’s flipped to 90’s when every single record in the charts featured Kirsty on backing vocals.

I loved the Tracy Ullman version of her first single, the way the guitars chimed and the baaaaayyyyyyybe yell that could shatter glass at fifty paces. I remember sitting in a school girlfriend’s garden and kissing her enthusiastically as this record soared from an upstairs window. Her parents were in the kitchen and I thought it prescient, they don’t know about us. I also didn’t know she had glandular fever and kissed my way to a fortnight off school.

And so it’s Soho Square where I find myself. One of those windy days when the sun is dancing through the clouds and you’re forever taking layers off, then hastily replacing them. Grey skies then shocking sunlight and where is my brolly? The pigeons shiver in the naked breeze she wrote in the song, Soho Square. Maybe, but they also poo on the bench to your memory. A shiny plaque gives the years of her life. She was just 41.

Kirsty’s bench was free so I sat down and munched through three veggie sausage rolls. Soho Square was buzzing with life; office workers quickstepping to the tube, twitching nutters with hands glued to dark beer tins. Everyone else was Japanese. I threw the end of my sausage roll onto the grass and started a pigeon riot.

I thought of Kirsty and that early kiss to her song, then all those years when I never really paid attention until a pub conversation with a friend in late 2000. “What about Kirsty MacColl, then?” I didn’t know what he meant, but the look on his face told me she was dead. And she died the most un-rock’n'roll of deaths.

The Justice Campaign for accountability for her death

Originally posted May 18th, 2005