The clue is pretty easy, ‘Through this gate no gas will go, just ask old John Atyeo’ ‘Bristol Rovers used to play near a gas works, so City fans call them ‘Gas Heads’ or collectively ‘The Gas’. Incidentally Bristol Rovers fans call City fans ‘shit heads’ the logic, I think, being that city rhymes with shitty. (Though you’ll never hear it said on Match of the Day or even Geoff Twentyman Talks Back for that matter.) Sandman doesn’t even have to say the words, he just hands back our camel backs. Ramped up on Redbull, we’re off to Ashton Gate.
The lights are red so rather than risk death, we pour down into the underpass. Skidding my back wheel hard I barely make the 90-degree turn at the bottom of the slope and have to ring my bell furiously to avoid foot traffic. In the tunnel under the road we have to slow down and dodge around a guy on a dirty red blanket. He’s playing the penny whistle. He has a dog, one of those little black Staffordshire terriers. The Staffie is supposed to be a fighting dog, but I think they have kind, almost sad looking face. I always think of them as having a secretly gentle spirit, that they are a reluctant fighting dog perhaps. This particular Staffie has a slightly greying muzzle and a beatific, knowing smile.
Then we are into the BearPitt. The sunken centre of a large roundabout where four arterial roads meet. The pit is busy today. I guess that the shops in town have decided to stay open for the bank holiday. Down and outs gather around the side-walls in various packs, they seem like part of the furniture, camouflaged against the dirty grey concrete. One of them is lying on a raised flowerbed, apparently asleep. Her hand hangs down towards a Tesco bag full of bottles. I wonder why they come to places like this. Perhaps it’s because in places like this, places that no one really owns, they don’t get moved on. Maybe It is because this is the natural habitat for despair. It could also be they can make good money here, praying on the herds of dark blue business people that file past avoiding eye contact.
Gaps open up for us as we ride. Raised up on our bikes we weave in and out of the flock like sheepdogs. An old man, there is always one, starts to yell something about how we should get off our bikes and push, but then Sandman gives him a look and he shuts up. We move slowly, soaking up dirty looks. After a frustrating few minutes we are on the other side, going through another tunnel where another busker plays ‘The Rock Iron line’ on guitar.
He is at the point in the song where the train reaches the toll-booth and the man asks him what he has on board.
He sings ‘I’ve got all live stock, I got cow’s, I got goats, I got sheep, I got hens, I’ve got all live stock’.
And because I know the song I know he’s lying and that as soon as that train passes the toll he’ll reveal that he’s actually got a whole train full of pig iron, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to pay the toll.
People pass buy pretending they have no change in their pockets, some even pat them down for visual effect, give that little smile that says ‘Sorry mate’ all of them on their way to or back from the shops.
Another 90-degree turn onto the slope and we are onto a wider section of pavement. On our right, having taken the road around instead of going under, a group of riders wearing wigs and padded bras flies past us. Oddly enough, one of the new lead group is actually is a genuine woman, she is now a woman dressed as a woman. A woman squared. There is no time to ponder this.
We should not have gotten bogged down in the Pitt. It’s time to take back the lead. Sadly we are trapped by the railings and are forced to watch, helpless as they disappear into the distance.
Eventually we are able to peel off the pavement near the new Primark store, and push hard past the sailboat style 'meeting-place' they put up for the Millennium or something. Then we have to stop again as a bus comes out of the bus gate and cuts the road off completely, heading up past The Bay Horse pub and onto lower Maudlin Street. As soon as there is a gap behind it though we explode through it like blood from a wound, the red blur on our left is the old Bridewell Street Fire Station the white one on our right, is that weird office building with the strange digital tree in the foyer. I glimpse a man struck dumb, halfway through the revolving door. We are the second group of transvestite cyclists he’s seen in the last two minutes. There must me a glitch in the matrix.
The roads are wide here. They feel like computer game roads. On either side are large blocky buildings, there is even a concrete overpass for foot traffic. It is a once modern, retro 70’s, Meet George Jetson dream of what the future would look like, I'll bet they never saw us coming.
Keeping to the bus lane, and claiming the inside line, we glide around the long left-hander past an over grown traffic island come park. The lights for the zebra crossing leading to this patch of green are red, but luckily the man that was going to cross over here is in a similar state of confusion to the one outside the digital tree building. He just stands there and watches as we go buy. We are Aliens, a close encounter of the 4th kind.
Up ahead, held up at the lights is are our rivals dressed in all spandex and big hair wigs like an 80's metal band. We see feet unclipped and down on the floor. Strangely it is Mirtek that seems to feel it first and pushes his illegally geared bike further forward in the group, then we all get it, chances are that if we just keep going hard we can catch the lights just as they turn green and leave the Spandexers to make a standing start.
I grin as this idea spreads through the group. We are about to retake the lead with gut’s and glory. This one sweet move will strike a victorious power chord for truth and justice, and leave them flailing in our wake as it echos on and on around the world...
My joy suddenly turns to horror as I realise that the lights are not going to change in time. Milliseconds seconds pass and I find that we have accelerated through the point of no return; there is no longer room for us to stop. Without what you would call brakes we are about to be spat out into a mincing machine of free flowing traffic.
The way the road works down here, everyone except taxi’s and buses has to turn right, so baring them, if we can keep to the left and stay thin enough we might be ok. Then it's too late for calculations and we are doing it for real.
The double woman, screams ‘Holy Shit’ as we break the line. Car horns erupt, there is a taxi turning left but he slams on his brakes just in time, jerking forward against the seatbelt, other cars are forced to stop behind him. I am glad not to hear the tell tale sound of metal on metal, or flesh on concrete for that matter. I quickly check my six… by some force of a miracle, no one has been hurt and we are in the centre of town. The wide open centre with it’s impractical one way system that perplexes tourists for hours. After the storm it it feels serene and calm. but not for long as behind us the Spandexers are off the mark and hot on our heels, and then just as we think that they will catch us, they turn off up Baldwin street, while we carry straight on down the bus-only section of Broad Quay. ‘Why would they do that?’ Tom thinks he knows, 'The Spandexers are out of Towners, they may well be using a Sat Nav, it’s why they didn’t go under the Bear Pitt, but it’s also why they have no idea about the footbridge.'
They are off towards Bristol Bridge and then down past Temple Meads. They’ll be doing an extra half mile at least. My smile returns. It will be local knowledge that will allow us to win the day. Not guts after all.
We speed on unheeded beyond Broad Quay and down onto Prince street. Its an odd road this one it seems strangely like a New York back-alley. Everytime in come down here I half expect a yellow cab to stop over a steaming drain and yell at someone. Prince Street is sandwiched betweens Queens Square and The Harbour Side, so the buildings on both sides back onto it. Here you get to see the backside of a multi story car park, the back of a large waterfront Jurys hotel. It even has an underpass which looks like and entrance to a subway. There’s also a couple of office buildings with 'Central Perk' style bottom floor corner coffee shops, where the weekday trade fill up on lattes and Pannni’s. There’s a Stone warehouse that’s been converted into a 'Cheers' style pub where the earlier mentioned lunchtime crowd eats and drinks it’s dinner.
On the other side of Prince Street, there’s a pub called Ye Old Shakespeare, My brother used to work there, as it swings by on my right I remember a time when I popped in to see him at work and we staged a fight. I ‘started some shit’ and he threw me out. Apparently that little show of aggression earned him a lot of points with the office workers. They’re not used to seeing a man say no to a customer.
I’ve never really been a water-cooler type, I don’t know what it feels like to drop my BMW keys on a polished wooden table or order Tapas with a gold card. Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out.
I’m so wrapped up in my memories that I almost miss the fact that a bunch of the guys from the Mud Dock cycle works have come out and come down the road to cheer us on. For a moment there is some confusion as a kid in combats on an orange BMX thinks they are cheering at him. He doesn’t look any less confused when we buzz him like a radio tower and leave him reeling like a drunk. He’d like to catch us up, I can tell, but there's simply no way he will on those tiny wheels. The Mud-Dockers laugh. The benches outside Princes Pantry are full of more of the Mud Dock crowd. I feel like I’m on a village stage of the tour de France. Tom who is leading the peloton raises his fist in a kind of cycle power salute, and with his arm as our vibrating standard, we push ahead towards the Bridge.
Just before Prince Street Bridge the tarmac road is replaced with cobblestones. Our racer thin tires are not built for this and I envy Mirtek whose suspension handles the bumps with ease. the bridge itself is A kind of Steampunk style swing-bridge a maritime leftover made from shaped metal girders. There is one Central Girder that goes down the middle of the road and neatly separates the two lanes. The side effect of this is that both lanes of traffic are remarkably thin and if you look for it you can see the mutli-coloured remains of the paint jobs of trucks that have failed to judge the gap.
On our right as we cross are the four big Canes of the old working dock. Now they are just sentinels for the Industrial Museum. Relics of the days when the shipping didn’t stop and Avonmouth but came all the way into the heart of the city. They look like dinosaur Skeletons and in a way I guess that that’s exactly what they are.
our own skeletons still being firmly rattled by the cobbles.
On the left is ramshackle collection of houseboats, moored all the way along the water’s edge. There seems to be no conformity as to style, I spy a narrow-boat, and a fishing trawler, even an old stream tug that looks like it belongs to pop eye. That must be a pretty cool. I'll bet this is a very different city for the people that live on the water.
Then we are past the river, and over the tram tracks and mercifully beyond the cobblestones that have rattled us like cutlery in stuck draw. All the way down Wapping road there are cheap built river-side apartments. Someone’s made a killing from developing this land and it looks like they made that killing as fast as they could. I think for a moment about what Bristol must have looked like before it got bombed to pieces. All I can think is that it looked like Tortuga from pirates of the Caribbean. Lot’s of wonky overhung Tudar pubs full of drunken pirates and bawdyhouse girls. My thoughts are not in any way accurate I am sure. At the end of Wapping road comes the Louisiana Pub. It’s Victorian I guess, with a kind southern style riverboat veranda. I’ve been there lots of times. It’s is a popular ‘new’ music venue, I must have seen a dozen friends bands here. Bassist’s, lead guitars, singers… even the odd would-be rap superstar. A man in his mid twenties caries a black guitar case towards the stage door entrance. His mate sits in the van, guarding the rest of the stuff. According to the poster The bands Tonight are The Setbacks, Panic Number and CCQ. The last band I saw here was The Badgers. Before that it was Seven Minute Abbs.
We avoid the classic mistake of going over the bridge to Commercial Road and instead straight-line the mini roundabout onto Cumberland. The writer part of me wishes Cumberland Road was Cult Street or Roots Avenue… something more like the opposite of Commercial Road so that I could seamlessly link it into the choice of directions a new band can take once they leave the Louisiana. but it isn't.
To be honest, in my experience, most of the bands I’ve seen here, even some of the good ones, tend to split up and go in all different directions, at best they seem to just drift off down Obscurity Lane.
We are not on Cumberland for long before we come to the afore mentioned footbridge that I hope will give us the edge over the Spandexers.
The Bridge is split into two lanes but to our horror, both are blocked by women with prams. We are forced to stop and wait for them to get over the bridge before we can carry on. This is far from ideal as half a mile does not take a lot of time to cover on bikes like these. to make things even worse the mother know each other and stop mid-bridge for a chat. No amount of bell ringing seems to get their attention and even sandman isn't going to yell obscenities at a mother and child. Eventually all the gossip has changed hands and slowly slowly we are able to get over the river.
Frustrated we decide not to get back on the road but to head straight up the pavement cycle-path that hugs the river almost all the way along Coronation road. Just as we are setting off, we hear jeering coming from behind us. It is of course the spandexers, they are on the road proper Skitching a tow from a scaffolding truck. We pass Dean Lane and Osbourn Road. They are forced to abandon the truck as it turns left onto Camden Road. We are forced to lose time around Beuley Road where a family out for a bank holiday walk see us a little late and have to move quick to clear a path. Once again it’s neck and neck.
We pass Greenway Bush lane and Greenbank road and then Coronation Road peels away from the river and things get a little more complicated. Traffic here is directed down Clift House road but we want to keep going down Coronation. In order to do this we have to cross the line of traffic and in doing so split the Spandexers into two groups as the back half has to slow down to avoid us, We then have to bunny up onto a traffic island before speeding the wrong way down a one way street. \
Luckily there isn't a game on today and I guess the Northstreet shops are shut because the road is empty and pretty soon we are legal again as we come onto Ashton road which borders Greville Smyth Park. More importantly Ashton road comes to an end at Ashton Gate Stadium. The gate through which no gas will go.
We come to a skidding halt at the now familiar set up of folding table and cycle couriers’ girlfriend that is the next check point. Seven seconds later the spandexers come streaming out of Greville Smyth park. Someone from the back end steps up to sandman, get’s right up in his face.
‘You think this is funny you prick!’
He’s pointing to blood on his elbow, I guess not all of them were able to come to a controlled stop when we cut the off on Coronation Road. It’s odd watching them square up. Two grown men in padded bras.
‘Alls fair in love and war yeah, so, keep your wig on yeah’
The more sensible members of the group separate them before things get the chance to really kick off. I hear the phrase ‘save it man, save it for the hill' yeah’ I feel like I have fallen into one of those testosterone fuelled adrenaline movies they made after the success of Point Break.
Do you feel alive!
Scuffles continue as they queue up behind us and one by one we are handed a flowery summer dress, a full pint of Scrumpy and some further instructions. ‘What’s the forfeit for not downing this?’ Says Tom, straight edge to the end. See that tent behind me? She says, ‘Your forfeit is in there.’
Saturday 17 October 2009
Wednesday 14 October 2009
Tuesday 6 October 2009
In the Shadow of the Thunder God
This day trip has been in the diary for a while but to be honest I don’t really feel like going. Today I got a rejection letter from the writer’s room, not the total ‘fuck you and goodnight’ they sent me last time, which is something, but still a no. They actually looked at it this time though, someone read it and what I got back was about two pages of feedback. This time I got another step closer, the problem being that my best effort so far, still isn’t quite good enough. Last night I sat and watched the evening news. Earthquakes in Sumatra, Tsunami in Samoa… going unreported is the construction of another massive network of coal powered power stations in China and the fact that there are now two cars for every household in Mumbai, and that they sit in total gridlock for an average of three hours a day pumping out a cocktail of geotoxic gasses. Rather than put things in perspective, or even push me over the edge, this information forces a mathematical calculation in my head. Which is more likely? my making any kind of breakthrough in my life… or a total global catastrophe and the end of western civilisation. Then I realise that the real question is. Which of these things is going to happen first?
But that was last night, right now I am walking up Landsdown road with a plastic carrier bag filled with a couple of bottles of DR Pepper, some prawn cocktail shells, a Peperami and a large bag of Peanut MnM’s. Even as I was buying it I felt guilty for doing so, aware that the ratio of ecological damage to nutritional value was very, very low. But like a lot of people I am a creature of habit. I like to have snacks around me when I drive. Getting into my little grey Peugeot I place them all their correct locations: peanuts and soda to the right, Peperami and crisps to the left. God damn it; I’m going to end up as fat as Manatee.
Ali is back at the house printing off directions from the internet, she is pressing Ctrl p and hitting Enter as I start the engine, pop some gum in my mouth and make a three point turn in the street. As some kind of compromise between concerns and convenience, I put my foot on the clutch and let the car roll down Lansdowne Hill. I may have just used an unnecessary plastic bag but I’ll be damned if I am going to waste petrol driving the engine on a downhill slope.
Ali looks in the cupboard for a pair of fresh socks while the words ‘Anomalous Micro-Fissure’ crawl slowly out of the printer.
Pulling up on the other side of the road to my house, I beep the horn a couple of times. There is no response, so I call Ali on her mobile. She picks up, grabs the directions from the printer and tells me she’s on her way. My phone is also my Camera, organiser and mp3 player. There is a headphone jack in the top. While I’m waiting in the street I hook it up to start playing Tom Petty’s ‘Highway Companion’ album through the stereo, and pop it in that little hollow in front of the gear-stick next to the chewing gum. This album was written when cars symbolised the freedom and independence available in the western world. In a time when driving at 150 miles an hour across the deserts of Nevada in a bright-red convertible seemed like the peak of human evolution. The kind of thing dolphins would do, if they had the limbs for it.
Ali comes down and gets in the car. Despite having the printed-paper map we’re probably not going to use it. We just take the postcode and type that into the Sat-Nav and pull away from the kerb. My Sat-Nav can take anything from ten to twenty five minutes to find a satellite worth talking to so we’ll be most of the way to Bristol before it realises we are ignoring it. The stupid machine doesn’t know that we have to pick up Chris. It has no idea is that he is my oldest and best friend. If it did it would probably be jealous of the fact that we get to see each other. Apart from me and Ali, all it’s friends live in space. We are just outside of Keynsham when it starts telling us to ‘Do a U-turn when possible.’
I met Chris when my mum moved the family from the cold streets of St Pauls into welcoming arms of West Wales. Sometimes I feel like my turning up in Wales somehow disturbed the natural balance of things. A red ant dropped into a black nest, already beaten and bruised. Sometimes I get the niggling feeling that in moving I stole someone else’s life.
By a series of coincidences Chris now lives in the same area where I grew up, just a street away from my childhood home. He lives in the grey violent smog of the city and I am married to the comely little sister of his old best friend.
I stop the car in the middle of the road. Cars are parked on either side, leaving a single lane for traffic. I beep the horn. The cadres of local rude boys are sitting out side, they watch us with glass eyes. One of them is astride a quad bike. Apparently it is legal to ride a quad bike in the city. It has a number plate. Still it’s unnervingly out of place. It reminds me of Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps that’s why he bought it. If people are seeking to emulate that particular computer game then this whole society really is doomed.
Chris comes out, shouts something through the still open front door, lets it fall closed behind him and makes his way to the car.
He hops in the back. The sat-nav suggests for the fifteenth time that we do a u-turn. Sadly I continue to ignore it. I’m Pretty sure I know this particular area better than it does. Besides, it’s time will come. Out side of Bristol it is happy. The Sat Nav loves the simplicity of country roads. It creates a solid blue line through the green and we follow. For once it has a clear purpose in life, it knows where it’s going and how it’s going to get there, it doesn’t think for a minute that we could crash.
Ali risks car sickness to read a description of where we are going.
‘Birth of the Rookham Anomaly
The county of Somerset is mostly built on limestone, a rock made from the bodies of billions upon billions of dead sea creatures. Limestone is both porous and soluble in water. (it is dissolved limestone that means we have to put water softener into our washing machines and anti lime-scale bleach into our toilets.) It’s also why there are so many caves in the West Country. Sometimes, drawn by gravity these caves can go deep enough to touch the harder metamorphic rocks of the earth's crust. Down this deep the rock is hot. Where there are cracks in the metamorphic rock, water can trickle in and when it gets heated it expands and cause these cracks to get bigger. Over time the crust can develop networks of small cracks or ‘micro fissures’ that allow small amounts of the magma from the earth's mantel to be pushed up. The Rookham Anomaly is the high peak of one such system of micro-fissures, seams of lava come up through the same paths the water originally came down. It is this micro-fissure system that gives us the Hot Springs in Bath and the slightly cooler but still hot, hot wells of Hotwells and of course the Rookham Anomaly.’
I tell Chris that basically what we are going to see is the worlds smallest Volcano; he tells me to stop being over-dramatic. Then I tell him it’s Britain's only volcano and he tells me to shut up because it’s not even a volcano.
Although there are lots of signs to the nearby Wookie Hole, there are none to lead us to the Rookham Anomaly, in fact upon arriving at the farm in which it grew we are greeted with nothing more fancy than A carved wooden sign saying 'Derweze Farm', a rusty gate and cow shit encrusted concrete driveway. There is nothing that says ‘Home of the Micro Fissure ‘as seen on TV’ It’s so nondescript, and so like every other farm for 100 miles that I am tempted smack the Sat Nav about a bit and tell it stop dicking us around, but checking the map Ali is adamant that this farm is the right one. Chris jumps out, opens the gate. I drive along the path to the farmhouse. Beneath the tyres the cow crap makes a slick and sticky noise.
I think that Chris should be the one to knock on the door, Pointing out that 'people like Chris' because he’s tall and funny looking. Chris tells me in no uncertain terms that I am the one to do the talking. This trip was my idea. I am the Butch to his Sundance and therefore affable one, knocking on stranger’s doors and asking if we can see their volcano is my department. Ali nods in agreement. ‘Alright’ I say, ‘but if it end’s bloody don’t come running to me.’
‘You just keep thinking Butch… that’s what you’re good at.’
A woman comes to the door. ‘Hi’ My names Dann, ‘um my friends and I heard about the um… Micro-fissure and were wondering if we could take a look at it.”
She looks like the queen on her day off, green puffy body warmer over tweed. Hair tied back, Wellington boots. Luckily no shotgun.
“Are you scientists or something.”
“What no, we’re just curious… I write a blog.”
“Cuz we have them geology students on Wednesdays, but today’s Saturday”
She talks like the women that serve coffee from a hatch where I work, slow deliberate and slightly hostile to me for a reason I cannot pin down.
“right.. um we’d be happy to pay, I mean you can just point it out to us and we’ll find it ourselves.”
She looks at me through one eye.
“Two pound each and I’ll see if he has the time”
‘He’ turns out to be quite young for a farmer, His name is Rupert. Rupert is keen. ‘Come to see the bulge have you! Right this way.' The woman who took our six pounds is apparently his housekeeper. On the way he tells us the story of how he found it, he tells his story quickly, like he’s told it many times before.
'Actually my cat found it first, an big old black Tomcat called Gizmo, used to spend all his time sitting in this one particular spot. I didn’t think anything of it and then the other cat’s started to come and do the same thing. But cat’s will be cats after all and then one year it snowed I noticed that it was the one place it didn’t settle. I mean, these were just all these little things going on in one place, but eventually it was just obvious, the thing was getting bigger and bigger and you could go over and touch it and it was hot on your hand, and in the morning the due would evaporate off, all steam coming up and such, so you know, we thought it best to have someone come out and have a look at it. I think we called the Water-Bourd first, they had no idea what it was, put us on to English Heritage who told us to call the geology department of the university. They came by pretty sharpish mind. The Professor turning up in his tiny little car with his beard and everything and he seemed pretty worried. Apparently the last time one of these things popped up it was in Mexico, place called Paricutin, the damn thing grew nearly 400 meters inside a year, went AWOL and buried a whole town. But having looked at this one they think it’s pretty stable. They ran all kinds of tests. I mean they can’t be sure, but they say its better than fifty fifty it wont get much larger than a family caravan, that’s the worst it’s likely to do.’
We finally reach a section of the field that’s been cordoned off by a chain-link fence. It looks like one of those pens that they heard sheep into on one man and his dog. About thirty feet square. In the middle is what looks like a very large anthill, or a giant pitchers mound with three cats asleep around the edges.
The fence seems like overkill but according to Rupert any kind of geothermal activity has to be cordoned off in this way. Apparently the health and safety people came the day after the Professor and put this up without even asking him.
We circle the fence, staring at a patch of bare red earth, searching to see if there is some kind of emotional reaction buried deep inside that we will find if we just keep staring. To be honest, I feel no different having seen it that when I first read about it on Wikipedia.
Rupert sits cross legged in the grass and pulls up a bit of leaf and starts eat it.
‘lambs lettuce’ he says ‘They sell it in Waitrose now.’
‘I see the cat’s are still here?’
‘You try and keep them away’ says Rupert.
‘Which ones Gizmo?’ I say naively
‘Gizmo is Dead, along time ago’ says Rupert.
Chris wants’ to go inside the barbed wire. Ali doesn’t think it’s safe. I look at the innocuous mound; three cat’s happily napping away. I go back to Rupert.
‘Can we go inside the fence?’
He puts up a little resistance at first and then folds.
‘All right,’ he says, ‘but if it goes off on one then you’re on your own. If anyone asks you’ll have to say you were trespassing’
Chris approaches the fence there is no gate in the fence, stakes have simply been hammered in with the chain-link wrapped around them up to a hight of about four and half feet. Chris kind of stands there bemused for a moment, taking it in, deciding on the best plan of attack, then starts climbing.
The cats eye him nonchalantly as he climbs, looking at him without looking like they’re looking. Chris jumps into the paddock and two of the cat’s get up and move off, as if this was there plan all along and Chris’ approach had nothing to do with it.
He paces around, feeling the strange crunch of the earth. I watch him get down on all fours and feel the ground with his hands
‘You should come in here man,’ he says, ‘it’s weird.’ then he lies down as if hugging the bulge. 'It’s so warm' he says.
Rupert looks at me, almost with the same expression as the cats A part of me hesitates, a little bit of my primeval mind clocking the fact that this is unknown territory and the next thing I know, I too am climbing over the fence with Ali telling me to be careful.
Dropping inside I feel like a man at a zoo who suddenly finds himself inside one of the cages. I feel the heat rising off of the ground. Above me there are birds riding the thermal. What looks like a buzzard circling high above us. ‘Here be dragons’ my mind says.
The biggest volcano in the world is Yellowstone, if it erupted it could wipe out more species in a year than the industrial revolution has managed since it began. If Yellowstone went off, it would wipe the slate clean.
Ali decides that since both Chris and I are alive, then she too would like to step inside the fence. I catch her as she drops down. Instinctively she touches the ground. It’s like it’s magnetic, like sand in the tropics, so hot and dry. Eventually we all end up lying down, the three of us circled around the mound, feet facing outwards, heads towards the middle, holding hands. We feel the heat of earth coming up through our whole bodies. I close my eyes, feel the sun from above and the magma below. I find what I had been looking for from outside the cage. An emotional even spiritual reaction to this scientific truth. Its easy to think of the Planet as something already dead, as a ball of rock spinning around in emptiness, but right now it feels truly alive, and this heat is the heat of it’s massive body and it’s moving up into mine and for a moment I can mistake this warmth for love and I can feel like a child again, lying on the belly of my mother, before I knew that I was dyeing and the she was dyeing and that everything I was looking at would one day fade away into dust. I feel safe in way that I haven’t since I was 5 years old. I look over to Ali. I get the feeling that she’s feeling the same way. Ali starts giggling and pretty soon we are all laughing together.
As much as we might want them to, moments like this do not last forever. I roll into my back. Get up and dust off my clothes, I’m wearing a black long-sleave T but even on that, the deep red dust of the micro fissure is visible. It is so fine that rather than brushing off it seems to just penetrate the cloth deeper and stain it as if it were a liquid. My blue jeans are also covered and may never look the same again. I look down at Chris. He is wearing a white shirt. Unusually Ali is wearing a dress and the dust has managed to stain the skin on her legs a deep mocha red. The thought occurs to me that I had my face pressed to the floor. I must look like I have a horrific birthmark right now. Chris stands up. Chris’ ear is red with dust. ‘Dude, did you hear it grumbling….’
‘No but clearly you did’
I turn to Rupert.
‘Does it ever erupt?’ I ask.
‘Not what you’d call a proper eruption’ he says.
‘We get gas sometimes, that’s what did for Gizmo. There is one of these in Cartegina that erupted mud once, now the tourists pay to swim in it because they think it cures acne.’
‘This thing gives off poisonous gas?’
‘I did warn you. Once you pass the wire your on your own’
I Ali gets up off the ground, she has dust in her hair and a red patch on her forehead.
After we are out of the cage, I ask Rupert what it’s like to live in the shadow of something that could very well blow up one day and take his whole farm down with it.
He doesn’t seem to understand.
He tells me that ‘They keep a very close I on it.’ he points out a number of small boxes, that apparently contain seismographs. ‘I’m sure they’d tell us if was going to go off properly.’
I press him, ‘But this farm is your life’s work. How can he keep putting in the hours if there’s a the possibility that tomorrow the whole place could be buried under a mountain of lava.’
He laughs. And again he goes back to the science. ‘The likelihood is that its already done all it’s going to do. I mean I’m not allowed to dig a mine, but other than that I can pretty much farm around it as normal.’
I look into his eyes, searching out that glimmer of self-doubt, and I suppose that he sees more in me than I do in him.
‘This... thing isn’t different to anything else’ he say. ‘Plenty of things could come along and destroy me or my house or this farm or whatever. If I let a little thing like this stop me getting on with things, what kind of a farmer would I be?'
We get back into the car and drive home without the aid of the Sat Nav. We let it sleep, it’s had a busy day. I always find it easier to figure out the way home anyway. For one the signposts say things like Bristol and Bath rather than Nempnet Thrubwell and Barrington Gurney. And for another the roads get bigger and more rather than less familiar as I go. Towards the end even the side streets fill up with memories, the red lights remind me of conversations I’ve had in the past. Here we stopped five years ago and talked about the end of the world. BSE, The Ebola Virus, Nuclear War.
I drop off Chris in Montpelier, there is a light rain and the rude boys have gone inside although the quad bike is still there. I roll out through the Urban dystopia of Saint Paul's, the dealers hanging around outside the betting shop. These are the streets I grew up in, These are the pavements on which my child feet walked and then ran and fell flat on my face. There is where I twisted an ackles and took a heavy beating from the gang that gave chaise. Pretty soon were up on the portray heading out past the showcase cinema and the Hollywood Bowl. Here me and My dad would go to bond when, after five years of tension, my parent’s finally broke up. Me and my dad would come here and talk about aliens and UFOs, once we even chased one on the back of his motorbike, all the way to the airport. Later it turned out to be advertising blimp.
Settling into my car seat I let my subconscious take over and the car seems to drive itself to where it likes to park, and then my feet walk themselves down Landsdown Hill until I find myself back in the flat and Ali and I decide to take the evening off from all our various creative projects and ignore the news at ten and just sit down and watch a few old episodes of the IT Crowd. We get a takeaway from the Chinese place. Go to bed early and dream of tomorrow, safe in the knowledge that no one can be sure it will ever come.
But that was last night, right now I am walking up Landsdown road with a plastic carrier bag filled with a couple of bottles of DR Pepper, some prawn cocktail shells, a Peperami and a large bag of Peanut MnM’s. Even as I was buying it I felt guilty for doing so, aware that the ratio of ecological damage to nutritional value was very, very low. But like a lot of people I am a creature of habit. I like to have snacks around me when I drive. Getting into my little grey Peugeot I place them all their correct locations: peanuts and soda to the right, Peperami and crisps to the left. God damn it; I’m going to end up as fat as Manatee.
Ali is back at the house printing off directions from the internet, she is pressing Ctrl p and hitting Enter as I start the engine, pop some gum in my mouth and make a three point turn in the street. As some kind of compromise between concerns and convenience, I put my foot on the clutch and let the car roll down Lansdowne Hill. I may have just used an unnecessary plastic bag but I’ll be damned if I am going to waste petrol driving the engine on a downhill slope.
Ali looks in the cupboard for a pair of fresh socks while the words ‘Anomalous Micro-Fissure’ crawl slowly out of the printer.
Pulling up on the other side of the road to my house, I beep the horn a couple of times. There is no response, so I call Ali on her mobile. She picks up, grabs the directions from the printer and tells me she’s on her way. My phone is also my Camera, organiser and mp3 player. There is a headphone jack in the top. While I’m waiting in the street I hook it up to start playing Tom Petty’s ‘Highway Companion’ album through the stereo, and pop it in that little hollow in front of the gear-stick next to the chewing gum. This album was written when cars symbolised the freedom and independence available in the western world. In a time when driving at 150 miles an hour across the deserts of Nevada in a bright-red convertible seemed like the peak of human evolution. The kind of thing dolphins would do, if they had the limbs for it.
Ali comes down and gets in the car. Despite having the printed-paper map we’re probably not going to use it. We just take the postcode and type that into the Sat-Nav and pull away from the kerb. My Sat-Nav can take anything from ten to twenty five minutes to find a satellite worth talking to so we’ll be most of the way to Bristol before it realises we are ignoring it. The stupid machine doesn’t know that we have to pick up Chris. It has no idea is that he is my oldest and best friend. If it did it would probably be jealous of the fact that we get to see each other. Apart from me and Ali, all it’s friends live in space. We are just outside of Keynsham when it starts telling us to ‘Do a U-turn when possible.’
I met Chris when my mum moved the family from the cold streets of St Pauls into welcoming arms of West Wales. Sometimes I feel like my turning up in Wales somehow disturbed the natural balance of things. A red ant dropped into a black nest, already beaten and bruised. Sometimes I get the niggling feeling that in moving I stole someone else’s life.
By a series of coincidences Chris now lives in the same area where I grew up, just a street away from my childhood home. He lives in the grey violent smog of the city and I am married to the comely little sister of his old best friend.
I stop the car in the middle of the road. Cars are parked on either side, leaving a single lane for traffic. I beep the horn. The cadres of local rude boys are sitting out side, they watch us with glass eyes. One of them is astride a quad bike. Apparently it is legal to ride a quad bike in the city. It has a number plate. Still it’s unnervingly out of place. It reminds me of Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps that’s why he bought it. If people are seeking to emulate that particular computer game then this whole society really is doomed.
Chris comes out, shouts something through the still open front door, lets it fall closed behind him and makes his way to the car.
He hops in the back. The sat-nav suggests for the fifteenth time that we do a u-turn. Sadly I continue to ignore it. I’m Pretty sure I know this particular area better than it does. Besides, it’s time will come. Out side of Bristol it is happy. The Sat Nav loves the simplicity of country roads. It creates a solid blue line through the green and we follow. For once it has a clear purpose in life, it knows where it’s going and how it’s going to get there, it doesn’t think for a minute that we could crash.
Ali risks car sickness to read a description of where we are going.
‘Birth of the Rookham Anomaly
The county of Somerset is mostly built on limestone, a rock made from the bodies of billions upon billions of dead sea creatures. Limestone is both porous and soluble in water. (it is dissolved limestone that means we have to put water softener into our washing machines and anti lime-scale bleach into our toilets.) It’s also why there are so many caves in the West Country. Sometimes, drawn by gravity these caves can go deep enough to touch the harder metamorphic rocks of the earth's crust. Down this deep the rock is hot. Where there are cracks in the metamorphic rock, water can trickle in and when it gets heated it expands and cause these cracks to get bigger. Over time the crust can develop networks of small cracks or ‘micro fissures’ that allow small amounts of the magma from the earth's mantel to be pushed up. The Rookham Anomaly is the high peak of one such system of micro-fissures, seams of lava come up through the same paths the water originally came down. It is this micro-fissure system that gives us the Hot Springs in Bath and the slightly cooler but still hot, hot wells of Hotwells and of course the Rookham Anomaly.’
I tell Chris that basically what we are going to see is the worlds smallest Volcano; he tells me to stop being over-dramatic. Then I tell him it’s Britain's only volcano and he tells me to shut up because it’s not even a volcano.
Although there are lots of signs to the nearby Wookie Hole, there are none to lead us to the Rookham Anomaly, in fact upon arriving at the farm in which it grew we are greeted with nothing more fancy than A carved wooden sign saying 'Derweze Farm', a rusty gate and cow shit encrusted concrete driveway. There is nothing that says ‘Home of the Micro Fissure ‘as seen on TV’ It’s so nondescript, and so like every other farm for 100 miles that I am tempted smack the Sat Nav about a bit and tell it stop dicking us around, but checking the map Ali is adamant that this farm is the right one. Chris jumps out, opens the gate. I drive along the path to the farmhouse. Beneath the tyres the cow crap makes a slick and sticky noise.
I think that Chris should be the one to knock on the door, Pointing out that 'people like Chris' because he’s tall and funny looking. Chris tells me in no uncertain terms that I am the one to do the talking. This trip was my idea. I am the Butch to his Sundance and therefore affable one, knocking on stranger’s doors and asking if we can see their volcano is my department. Ali nods in agreement. ‘Alright’ I say, ‘but if it end’s bloody don’t come running to me.’
‘You just keep thinking Butch… that’s what you’re good at.’
A woman comes to the door. ‘Hi’ My names Dann, ‘um my friends and I heard about the um… Micro-fissure and were wondering if we could take a look at it.”
She looks like the queen on her day off, green puffy body warmer over tweed. Hair tied back, Wellington boots. Luckily no shotgun.
“Are you scientists or something.”
“What no, we’re just curious… I write a blog.”
“Cuz we have them geology students on Wednesdays, but today’s Saturday”
She talks like the women that serve coffee from a hatch where I work, slow deliberate and slightly hostile to me for a reason I cannot pin down.
“right.. um we’d be happy to pay, I mean you can just point it out to us and we’ll find it ourselves.”
She looks at me through one eye.
“Two pound each and I’ll see if he has the time”
‘He’ turns out to be quite young for a farmer, His name is Rupert. Rupert is keen. ‘Come to see the bulge have you! Right this way.' The woman who took our six pounds is apparently his housekeeper. On the way he tells us the story of how he found it, he tells his story quickly, like he’s told it many times before.
'Actually my cat found it first, an big old black Tomcat called Gizmo, used to spend all his time sitting in this one particular spot. I didn’t think anything of it and then the other cat’s started to come and do the same thing. But cat’s will be cats after all and then one year it snowed I noticed that it was the one place it didn’t settle. I mean, these were just all these little things going on in one place, but eventually it was just obvious, the thing was getting bigger and bigger and you could go over and touch it and it was hot on your hand, and in the morning the due would evaporate off, all steam coming up and such, so you know, we thought it best to have someone come out and have a look at it. I think we called the Water-Bourd first, they had no idea what it was, put us on to English Heritage who told us to call the geology department of the university. They came by pretty sharpish mind. The Professor turning up in his tiny little car with his beard and everything and he seemed pretty worried. Apparently the last time one of these things popped up it was in Mexico, place called Paricutin, the damn thing grew nearly 400 meters inside a year, went AWOL and buried a whole town. But having looked at this one they think it’s pretty stable. They ran all kinds of tests. I mean they can’t be sure, but they say its better than fifty fifty it wont get much larger than a family caravan, that’s the worst it’s likely to do.’
We finally reach a section of the field that’s been cordoned off by a chain-link fence. It looks like one of those pens that they heard sheep into on one man and his dog. About thirty feet square. In the middle is what looks like a very large anthill, or a giant pitchers mound with three cats asleep around the edges.
The fence seems like overkill but according to Rupert any kind of geothermal activity has to be cordoned off in this way. Apparently the health and safety people came the day after the Professor and put this up without even asking him.
We circle the fence, staring at a patch of bare red earth, searching to see if there is some kind of emotional reaction buried deep inside that we will find if we just keep staring. To be honest, I feel no different having seen it that when I first read about it on Wikipedia.
Rupert sits cross legged in the grass and pulls up a bit of leaf and starts eat it.
‘lambs lettuce’ he says ‘They sell it in Waitrose now.’
‘I see the cat’s are still here?’
‘You try and keep them away’ says Rupert.
‘Which ones Gizmo?’ I say naively
‘Gizmo is Dead, along time ago’ says Rupert.
Chris wants’ to go inside the barbed wire. Ali doesn’t think it’s safe. I look at the innocuous mound; three cat’s happily napping away. I go back to Rupert.
‘Can we go inside the fence?’
He puts up a little resistance at first and then folds.
‘All right,’ he says, ‘but if it goes off on one then you’re on your own. If anyone asks you’ll have to say you were trespassing’
Chris approaches the fence there is no gate in the fence, stakes have simply been hammered in with the chain-link wrapped around them up to a hight of about four and half feet. Chris kind of stands there bemused for a moment, taking it in, deciding on the best plan of attack, then starts climbing.
The cats eye him nonchalantly as he climbs, looking at him without looking like they’re looking. Chris jumps into the paddock and two of the cat’s get up and move off, as if this was there plan all along and Chris’ approach had nothing to do with it.
He paces around, feeling the strange crunch of the earth. I watch him get down on all fours and feel the ground with his hands
‘You should come in here man,’ he says, ‘it’s weird.’ then he lies down as if hugging the bulge. 'It’s so warm' he says.
Rupert looks at me, almost with the same expression as the cats A part of me hesitates, a little bit of my primeval mind clocking the fact that this is unknown territory and the next thing I know, I too am climbing over the fence with Ali telling me to be careful.
Dropping inside I feel like a man at a zoo who suddenly finds himself inside one of the cages. I feel the heat rising off of the ground. Above me there are birds riding the thermal. What looks like a buzzard circling high above us. ‘Here be dragons’ my mind says.
The biggest volcano in the world is Yellowstone, if it erupted it could wipe out more species in a year than the industrial revolution has managed since it began. If Yellowstone went off, it would wipe the slate clean.
Ali decides that since both Chris and I are alive, then she too would like to step inside the fence. I catch her as she drops down. Instinctively she touches the ground. It’s like it’s magnetic, like sand in the tropics, so hot and dry. Eventually we all end up lying down, the three of us circled around the mound, feet facing outwards, heads towards the middle, holding hands. We feel the heat of earth coming up through our whole bodies. I close my eyes, feel the sun from above and the magma below. I find what I had been looking for from outside the cage. An emotional even spiritual reaction to this scientific truth. Its easy to think of the Planet as something already dead, as a ball of rock spinning around in emptiness, but right now it feels truly alive, and this heat is the heat of it’s massive body and it’s moving up into mine and for a moment I can mistake this warmth for love and I can feel like a child again, lying on the belly of my mother, before I knew that I was dyeing and the she was dyeing and that everything I was looking at would one day fade away into dust. I feel safe in way that I haven’t since I was 5 years old. I look over to Ali. I get the feeling that she’s feeling the same way. Ali starts giggling and pretty soon we are all laughing together.
As much as we might want them to, moments like this do not last forever. I roll into my back. Get up and dust off my clothes, I’m wearing a black long-sleave T but even on that, the deep red dust of the micro fissure is visible. It is so fine that rather than brushing off it seems to just penetrate the cloth deeper and stain it as if it were a liquid. My blue jeans are also covered and may never look the same again. I look down at Chris. He is wearing a white shirt. Unusually Ali is wearing a dress and the dust has managed to stain the skin on her legs a deep mocha red. The thought occurs to me that I had my face pressed to the floor. I must look like I have a horrific birthmark right now. Chris stands up. Chris’ ear is red with dust. ‘Dude, did you hear it grumbling….’
‘No but clearly you did’
I turn to Rupert.
‘Does it ever erupt?’ I ask.
‘Not what you’d call a proper eruption’ he says.
‘We get gas sometimes, that’s what did for Gizmo. There is one of these in Cartegina that erupted mud once, now the tourists pay to swim in it because they think it cures acne.’
‘This thing gives off poisonous gas?’
‘I did warn you. Once you pass the wire your on your own’
I Ali gets up off the ground, she has dust in her hair and a red patch on her forehead.
After we are out of the cage, I ask Rupert what it’s like to live in the shadow of something that could very well blow up one day and take his whole farm down with it.
He doesn’t seem to understand.
He tells me that ‘They keep a very close I on it.’ he points out a number of small boxes, that apparently contain seismographs. ‘I’m sure they’d tell us if was going to go off properly.’
I press him, ‘But this farm is your life’s work. How can he keep putting in the hours if there’s a the possibility that tomorrow the whole place could be buried under a mountain of lava.’
He laughs. And again he goes back to the science. ‘The likelihood is that its already done all it’s going to do. I mean I’m not allowed to dig a mine, but other than that I can pretty much farm around it as normal.’
I look into his eyes, searching out that glimmer of self-doubt, and I suppose that he sees more in me than I do in him.
‘This... thing isn’t different to anything else’ he say. ‘Plenty of things could come along and destroy me or my house or this farm or whatever. If I let a little thing like this stop me getting on with things, what kind of a farmer would I be?'
We get back into the car and drive home without the aid of the Sat Nav. We let it sleep, it’s had a busy day. I always find it easier to figure out the way home anyway. For one the signposts say things like Bristol and Bath rather than Nempnet Thrubwell and Barrington Gurney. And for another the roads get bigger and more rather than less familiar as I go. Towards the end even the side streets fill up with memories, the red lights remind me of conversations I’ve had in the past. Here we stopped five years ago and talked about the end of the world. BSE, The Ebola Virus, Nuclear War.
I drop off Chris in Montpelier, there is a light rain and the rude boys have gone inside although the quad bike is still there. I roll out through the Urban dystopia of Saint Paul's, the dealers hanging around outside the betting shop. These are the streets I grew up in, These are the pavements on which my child feet walked and then ran and fell flat on my face. There is where I twisted an ackles and took a heavy beating from the gang that gave chaise. Pretty soon were up on the portray heading out past the showcase cinema and the Hollywood Bowl. Here me and My dad would go to bond when, after five years of tension, my parent’s finally broke up. Me and my dad would come here and talk about aliens and UFOs, once we even chased one on the back of his motorbike, all the way to the airport. Later it turned out to be advertising blimp.
Settling into my car seat I let my subconscious take over and the car seems to drive itself to where it likes to park, and then my feet walk themselves down Landsdown Hill until I find myself back in the flat and Ali and I decide to take the evening off from all our various creative projects and ignore the news at ten and just sit down and watch a few old episodes of the IT Crowd. We get a takeaway from the Chinese place. Go to bed early and dream of tomorrow, safe in the knowledge that no one can be sure it will ever come.
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