Brutal(ism)

I had the day off today, as I originally thought I'd be driving Dan down to London. Once I knew I wasn't going, I ordered a skip, and that arrived at eight-thirty, this morning.

First I cleared out under the decking: five old bikes, for starters. And then I moved all the stuff down from the music room that I took out of the attic on Monday, making good use of Dan's height, as I could pass things down to him. 

I'd hoped to maybe get rid of a quarter of the stuff in the attic but it ended up being more like three-quarters. Thus, at the end of the entire operation, today, the skip was pretty much full.

Under the decking I also found these two old skateboards. I had a suspicion they were mine and my brother's from when we lived in Hong Kong, which would have made them about forty-five years old. I couldn't quite believe it so I checked with my brother and he confirmed that they were indeed ours. 

Despite it being so long ago, I still remember my disappointment that skateboarding wasn't as easy as it looked. Indeed, I never passed the stage where I didn't feel that I was in imminent danger of falling off.

Had I been in a more nostalgic mood, I guess I would have felt compelled to keep the skateboards but a day of clearing out had left me in a fairly ruthless mood. No frame of mind, though, no matter how brutal, would have seen me throw out the note I found that you can see in my Extra.

In the evening, I met the Minx off the train in Lancaster and the two of us went to 'An Evening of Library Brutalism' at Lancaster University Library. I think I must have originally looked at this thinking it would be about Brutalist Architecture, and then, even though it wasn't, booking it because Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan was playing live.

I'd then completely forgotten all this, so both the Minx and I were surprised to find ourselves sitting in a talk on Hauntology by Bob Fischer, although we both enjoyed the performance by Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan, which occupied the second half of the evening.

"Gordon Chapman-Fox makes startlingly evocative analogue electronica inspired by the Brutalist architecture and ambitious town planning of the 1970s, and his two albums to date - Interim Report 1979 and People & Industry - have been widely acclaimed. The follow-up - District, Roads, Open Space - is set for release in autumn 2022 and aims to capture the "loneliness, emptiness and desolation of open spaces"."