Lonely Weeds Bloom on Tarmac Fields

Do not go looking for that crock of gold, my friend. In this twisted world there is something else in that crock and you will not want to melt it down for currency. And the leprechauns are on the retreat and have to conduct vast underground bare knuckle boxing matches with oompa loompas to make ends meet. Flesh and gristle will fly in the chocolate factory tonight...they will not be spinning their magic here any time soon.

We are running out of lost places and legends...most places have been found, the trails clearly marked and guide books printed up. And as for the rest, most of the time they turn out not to be lost but stuck in snow on the East Grinstead line.

Hold on...that’s work intruding into this stupid bubble and I can feel the headache coming on already. There are no lost places at work...unless you count the station where one member of staff has been stripping naked at night and pleasuring himself in full view of the drivers... Hell, that is a terrible thing to lay before someone in the darkness of a long, cold night in March. So let us lay the word “allegedly” like a wreath across this thing and leave well alone.

But there are some places that remain smothered in mystery. There are people out there who may be able to explain the cold truth behind their existence but it is equally satisfying to wallow in our ignorance for a while. Legends are what keep us going and without them all we have is Newsnight.

Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: What I did at the time was to take all the information at my disposal and come to a mutual solution that we were both happy with and it was Doc who...
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: ...made the decision in the first place but Happy was grinning that stupid grin of his during the whole...
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: ...stupid debacle, and the whole thing has left me feeling grumpy every day, which means on top of everything else I’m now up for sexual harrassment...
Paxman: I’m sorry to keep asking this but...did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: ...and I didn’t say anything because I would go bright red and my hat spin off into the air in comical fashion...
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Bashful: I didn’t touch her, you know. She fell down the stairs all by herself.
Paxman: Did you threaten...what?

Lost places are explored in the films and stageshows that are, of course, our modern myths. We sit and marvel and wonder what lies under the floorboards of the creaking house, what lies in the evil parallel dimension (and we’re betting without a clone of yourself with a shit goatee), or just what lies somewhere over the rainbow...

But wait. We will never find ourselves somewhere over the rainbow. Let us spoil the myth by crowbarring in some schoolboy physics...of course, the rainbow does not exist in an absolute location, but relative to the viewer. Any concept of a location over the rainbow can therefore only exist relative to the rainbow. But the relationship is not transient...you have a link to the rainbow, the place over the rainbow has a link to the rainbow, but it does not follow that you have a link to the place over the rainbow because in effect the rainbow exists in pure relativity and so for our purposes we must treat it as two independent rainbows amongst an infinity of the damn things. We all have our private rainbow, as does the place over the rainbow, and nobody but you has access to its existence. So you can never get to the place over the rainbow, unless you run really, really fast, or have an identical but evil twin with a goatee beard, or something.

So what is this place somewhere over the rainbow? The obvious answer would be Oz...but for the real answer we have the examine the film in detail, in which the mysterious place over the rainbow turns out to be some kind of pie weighing shop. The lyrics are clear:

“Somewhere over the rainbow,
weigh a pie.”

This evidence is conclusive and we do not need to investigate further.

Most places, though, are mundane and have become lost through the reorganisation and rebuilding of cities over the years. Streets end up lost and broken amidst the sewers after new buildings have been built on top, and cellars are bricked up to form strange tunnels and mysterious doors appear that are forever locked and begin to look like doorways to hell...as explored on a well-known website. If I remember I will throw in a link once I find my way online tonight.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that whatever lies behind the wall is sure to be dull. Ah, but what kind of dull? So long as we cannot see for ourselves our curiosity is roused. Especially if there are a bunch of cool-looking pipes belching steam involved, or you can just about make out a couple of grimy shapes in the darkness through the cracks of a whitewashed window. Letting light in on the truth is pointless and will inevitably lead to a face full of dust...all we need is the original sense of mystery.

Although this applies mainly to ordinary places to which you do not have access...other people’s houses you will never see inside, or factories in the middle of the countryside with huge piles of strange rocks outside. The true lost places have the thrill of being illicit, sacred ground, a trespass.

Abandoned places have this built-in allure because the walls echo an unknown past and each new room throws up new questions and clues. Why was it abandoned? What if there are creatures down here? What did I just stand in? And will I need a tetanus shot? And never underestimate the joy of waving torches around in the darkness. The X-Files managed nine series based on this fact.

The mystery does not end with the unknown content of a boarded up warehouse. It blossoms in the melancholic atmosphere of a place abandoned by humanity to the weeds and the beams of winter sunshine that pour in through the gaps between slats in the roof, sheets of discarded metal rusting in a courtyard of broken concrete and fences. There is a sadness here, a tiny taste of something more epic and ultimately heartbreaking. You sense that something here has come to an end, and, unlike your average Hollywood film, endings in real life always leave scars on our flesh. When we feel the vibrations of other people’s endings some of the sadness begins to rub off. We feel the tears well up and feel the urge to whip out some panpipes and lament the hell out of one another.

But the strangest feeling is reserved for the knowledge that the very existence of this place is an enigma. Our lives feel trapped inside routine and stifling organisation and yet here is a place unclaimed, a place between the cracks that no paperwork seems to be able to account for. How the hell did this place vanish from somebody’s computer screen...or why is it they wanted to press the delete key? Is there a story of tragic loss and financial irregularity that would leave Nick Leeson’s story gasping for breath like a beached octopus? Or did they simply lose the keys to the bulldozer?

Finding a lost place is not always a good idea and the events of gritty factual drama Brigadoon bear this out. The plot of the thing is intriguing and is a good example of finding a fresh and oblique angle to a tired concept. Brigadoon is not a hellish lost town from which you desperately want to escape like in so many bad fantasy plots; it is the polar opposite, and yet in its own right as horrifying as any crazed western outpost Clint Eastwood ever rode into, or a spaceship full of alien menace, or even the Village of The Prisoner. It is a lost place that needs to be found, which makes it unique.

In my previous job there was an abandoned place right there on site. Old, unused offices that now lie derelict and dangerous. I was taken there in a hardhat and visibility vest and shown around, and the sheer lifelessness of the place was overwhelming. On every wall there were endless wires that burst in spectral clusters out of square-cut holes and led nowhere, there were pieces of paper on the floor bearing phone numbers using long forgotten area codes, and the whole place generally just felt...sad. The architecture that would have been impressive in the dying years of the Victorian era now seemed grubby and inefficient and vastly ugly. Life moves on, businesses grow, shrink and die, and nobody lasts forever. Things change.

Here at my present job we will be moving eventually, leaving this grim offices behind and moving to somewhere that has windows. As yet we do not know what will become of the building we are in. I suspect whoever owns the thing will want to wash their hands of it. We would not wish this place upon a dead dog...perhaps in ten year’s time it will become a lost place and self-styled urban explorers will be storing photographs of my useless Windows 95 laptop on their nitwit Nathan Barley-esque phones.

Good luck to them. Maybe I’ll leave a colourful note behind the desk for them to find. What larks!