Changes

I am walking through Pitshanger Park, through Scotch Common and Cleveland Park, as I have done in my childhood, in my adolescence, in my young adulthood; the landscape is similar; most of the houses are the same, the trees are bigger but there's change everywhere. The green parrots, the large German and Japanese four-wheel-drive cars, the police sirens blaring their way up and down the Argyle Road, street lights are a different colour, buses are double-deckers, and around me people of a darker skin hue than half a century ago...

Things change. Get used to it. This country, this planet, this universe - change is never-ending. My consciousness has moved across the surface of this planet ceaselessly; 1940s America; Edwardian England; fin-de-siecle France; the Pripyat Marshes in the early 19th century; Tudor England; the Roman Empire; Ice Age Europe, the Cambrian era... change is happening and there is no holding it back; we move forward in time, two steps forward, one step back - but the process is inexorable.

We must adapt and go with evolution, and we must aim to be sustainable. Accept change.

Looking at Poland, I see change for good - I'm not talking about short-term politics but about the long-term evolution of a country emerging from hardships that's now developing at an impressive pace.

But looking at the UK - I'd be looking at a slower, more measured pace, but something's really wrong here. My age group - the Airfix Generation (to quote Geoff Dyer), brought up on Commando war comics and model Spitfires - wants to impose economic pain on everyone else because someone told them that those bad changes they see around them come from Brussels. "Leave the EU and we can return to how we were".

Not so.

The 1950s and 1960s in which the Airfix Generation was born were different from Victorian Britain. Cars, planes, electricity pylons, shopping precincts, radio and television, rock'n'roll, mini-skirts, the Generation Gap, Teddy boys, skinheads, punks, gangs - change rolls upon us like ocean waves; accept it, evolve to live with change or face extinction. Global shifts are happening that no individual can halt. Adapt or die. Don't waste your life's potential fighting change - understand it, steer it in a good direction, but don't try to halt it or set it back. You will fail.



Another old soul; David Bowie.

"Ch-ch-ch-changes - Turn to face the strange"

"I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through"

"Time may change me
But you can't trace time"

Words written 48 years ago.

The spirit of place lingers; I still feel it the way I felt it as a boy all those years ago - despite the superficial change.

This time four years ago:
Summer in the city

This time five years ago:
The architecture of the Birkenhead Tunnel

This time seven years ago:
Behold and See - short story, part II

This time eight years ago:
Signs of progress along the S2 - Lotnisko to Puławska

This time ten years ago:
Warsaw's walls bear witness