I’ll miss this so much when I’m gone. I do love Manchester - I have civic pride to rival Tony Wilson’s - but it doesn’t have any open space to match the downs.
It’ll be odd not simply having them within walking distance after all these years, for blackberry-picking in autumn (strolling along beside hedgerows collecting more free food than any of us need, initiating a 23-year-old who never had such experiences in his childhood, fingertips stained purple for the rest of the day, all eventually ends back at home with crumble), when they’re blanketed under deep snow in winter (taking it in turns to use a body-board as a sledge, watching a lone little boy building himself an honest-to-god working igloo, while the most gorgeous sunsets play on relentlessly every evening off in the distance, streaming vivid pink-orange-yellow and trying to swallow up all overhead with its flames while that quiet unbroken mass of white lies unmoved underneath in a studied poise elegantly affecting disaffection in response to all the showy spectacles carrying on above it which it is of course above), and now soon enough for summertime pleasures: spur-of-the-moment group barbeques; lounging about drinking cider and eating strawberries; the tree which seems to have spent the last thirty years of its life deliberately growing into the perfect crooked position just waiting for us to come along, clamber up, and sit victoriously atop in its leafy-carpetted heights, hidden from lowly ground-level prying eyes but enjoying the panoramic sweep of a view we command, because we are the kings and this is our castle and we will smoke as much as we like; or lying alone with face close to the grass surrounded by the unbroken expanse of green stretching away on all sides into a distance out of focus, with matching endless blue keeping company overhead, trapping this whole scene under the dome of the most brilliant reverse-season snow-globe, children playing nearby, young people’s shouts accompanying their kite-boarding, and me flat on my stomach hair falling over a book to shade my eyes and the naked print, then giving up on any such endeavours and just lying back with earphones in and sunglasses on, everything too bright to look at and too hot to sustain, squinting and sweating but well worth it, trying every now and then to consider that maybe I should feel sorry for all those people trapped in the dark indoors - but then all my selfless good intentions fade out as the shamelessly seductive sun seizes back my attention once more, everything urging my head to spin deliciously hazily on the way towards heatstroke and I never could resist any promise of free intoxication - and then the entirety of the present takes over - and how then can you have a concern for anything more than yourself, and the moment, and everything your five senses have to tell you?
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
William Blake: ideal heat-struck midday reading - and, considering Aldous Huxley takes his cue off him in The Doors of Perception, I suppose I ought to be able to sell this poet to substance-imbibing kids by saying his mind is akin to a normal person’s on LSD.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
Though I don’t agree with Huxley on this - there’s more to madness and mental atypicality than that which psychoactive drugs can bring to the fore for a sane soul. And I suppose I resent the suggestion that anyone can happily take part in the frolicking fear of genius madness for half a day then pleasantly return to normal life - it belittles Blake and belittles the experience of mental illness. Anyway, if you can’t when sober see the angels you want to see in the clouds then that’s a problem you need to address yourself, rather than running towards synthetic mental states. It’s a far more impressive feat to learn to wipe clear, if not dismantle or even kick to the ground, your ‘doors of perception’ with nothing but your own force of will than it is to peer through them for fourteen hours thanks to an acid-drilled peep hole.
