I wanted to know if I could write about place, nature, alternative thought, in a way that didn’t present these things as just props to our everyday lives in the late-capitalist world. Perhaps, instead, it could be something that taking an interest in created a bizarre kind of danger, or at least a compromise.
‘I’ve read the books of men and women and death / Stood in bars listening to conversations about Jesus Christ, and the refugees, and the Royal Family’.
I discovered an entire history on my doorstep, an alternate history that perhaps I had seen snatches of, but wanted desperately to know more about.
I learned that it was possible to write about the very real effect of the British landscape on the individual. It was possible to write genuinely about people struggling with booze and substance addiction, members of Britain’s various sub-cultural tribes, about folk, rave and punk cultures, with anger, beauty and grace. Not only was it possible, but you could do it in the most gorgeous lyrical prose and vulgar demotic language at the same time. All of a sudden all those days spent trudging around Dover castle, being dive-bombed by terns on the Farne Islands, sleeping in my dad’s old camper van, listening to all that music that had been jettisoned for being naff and out of fashion, it was all worth it. It could be turned into something real and it did mean something. It could be literature.
There is a truth that many people in England are ignorant of massively important parts of our shared culture. Let’s call it the Albionic strand in the English consciousness, that parallel history that has always been there. This is what I am exploring; this sense of historical depth, the specific histories of the subcultures I’ve been a part of, the deep and complex array of literature, music and art to be found beyond the curriculum or Waterstones 3 for 2 tables, and the landscape itself, all can combine into something very special.
We all create mythologised personal landscapes in our heads; a lesson I learned from Baker was that your own personal patch, that place that may seem insignificant or dull, can be rendered into something awe-inspiring. It if it is important to you, then it isimportant. This is an attitude that fuels my approach to landscape punk, that I don’t need approval from anyone or anywhere to say what is important. I will decide what is important to me, and hope others will do the same themselves.