In order to keep on top of things

Friday .  I am reluctant to write today, it is sunny outside and Patrick and Pete have just gone down the pub for a pint.  I have had a day of writing and staring at a screen.  I don't feel like I have got very far. I will leave it here.

Sunday - picking up the thread. On Tuesday spent the day at the adventure playground.  In the morning I mended the aerial runway which was flexing in the ground as young people slid along the zip wire.  Patrick went down it to test it for safety but I wasn't sure if this type of stress test was effective as I suspect it just weakens everything and one day it will just go TWANG and fall to bits regardless of the size of person in transit.

I dug a large trench across the front and braced the structure with some scrap timber. At about 18 inches deep I hit a seam of coal.  Black flaky stuff not suitable to burn but very near the surface. As I got a little deeper I hit ganister.  I remember my friend David Walker Barker  explaining that it was the material that people made crucibles from, I had forgotten what it was called so I emailed him - here is his response,

'It was most likely ‘ganister’ Steve, a deposit rich in silica that made it suitable for making crucibles. It lay directly beneath coal and is sometimes referred to as ‘seat earth’ being the sedimentary deposit formed of remnants of the roots and sediment that the trees that formed the coal were originally rooted in.'

The history under our feet was so easily exposed and provided a poetic and literal link to the city's history yet as I dug and talked I felt my own history unearth itself and this was not such a neat and symbolic metaphor.  It felt like the things that are hidden below the surface of living in a place that has witnessed a history of violence requires both a denial, in order to continue living here, and an acceptance that things will be repeated.  The coal and the ganister are poetic and beautiful reminders of a history that is falling from living memory.  The other reminders of young men's bodies, broken childhoods, the struggle to be seen, the wars people have escaped from and the wars they have created are not as easy to cope with.

I am left today with a inner recognition that this place is not straightforward and by defintion parallel lives are lines that never meet. The playground is a point of parallax a good place to look, like the pirates of our pirate ship with one eye, keep the other over your shoulder and sleep with it open.  Like the coal and the ganister, history is close to the surface.