All my life, I've loved wires.
Welcome back, by the way. You've not been here for nearly two years. I was starting to think you'd given up on me.
It's true. Wires. Love them. They fill my childhood memories. Snaking cables round the back of the sofa, painted into corners. Power extension cables to make the Christmas tree lights work, wound round chair legs. Coaxial lines from the attic, down to the living room. Thinking about it, those were my favourite, the wires that linked the inside and the outside. To overuse one of my already burnt out words, liminal. Connecting spaces.
The telephone line was another. Out of the back of our lovingly cream dial handset, (later a wonderfully bathroom shade of olive green, Sheffield 53997) stapled carefully over the wallpaper, then suddenly out through the splintering wooden window frame, up and away along the pointing to loop out across the street, joining the mysteries of what my memory insists we called a telegraph pole. Because apparently, I grew up in 1899.
Think of it! A cable in your house that connects to the rest of the city, the world. Somehow like a long unbroken change, a string to pull on that might just make the Post Office Tower shake slightly if you yanked it hard enough.
(Thirty odd years down the line from these memories, I lay down in a bad place, mentally speaking, and ran my hand down the side of the mattress. There was a live phone cable secreted across the wall there. I let it comfort me, let it remind me of all the dark miles outside, all the crackling distance. Millions of possible voices on the line made me feel less like that room was silent and crushing. Opening up the gaps, linking thoughts across the ten o'clock landscape.)
Consider that old-school coaxial TV aerial cable. Stuck snugly in place - coax aerials never click, they squeeze organically - running into and up the wall. Out into the very dreaming mind of the house, the loft space, where all the family memories end up, stacked alongside Lego and old school books. Cable that reaches out of the shadows, past the peeling Blue Peter Books:
 |
| I actually don't want to caption this. It's too perfect as it is. |
...and out, into the sky. Straight into the rake of a directional aerial. Effectively plugging your living room into all the background radiation left over from the big bang, like having a skyhook in your house. Turn on your set after closedown and stare at the echoes of creation itself. A way in for all kinds of odd ideas.
I've been away for a long time; things have been interesting. There's a cat here who takes up a lot of time, too.
My point is, GT is going to be about other stuff now. Still as many Public Information Films and as much Teddington Lock footage as I can stomach, but also, those odd ideas that got in with the TV aerial. It makes me feel -
Wired.
