I've long had issues with capillaries, especially those that are located within my fingers. Often when it's cold I have found myself fast losing the sensation in my hands; this much I would imagine is not uncommon. My affliction- I've been 'reliably' informed that this is known as Raynaud's Syndrome- sometimes now affects me when I've forgotten to eat, or when I have worked for an overly long time at some task or other, even when the surrounding environment is otherwise quite benign.
On such occasions I have found, upon returning home, that for an age I am unable to properly manipulate the requisite number of fingers. This lack of feeling may steadfastly refuse to relinquish its hold for as long as an hour, and this when I am languishing within a suitably heated environment. Maybe this trait is simply another manifestation of a sugar-low or some such thing. It would be fair also to write that, during those more pronounced bouts, there has sometimes been an accompanying feeling of otherworldliness not unlike being unexpectedly drunk. I think that age is not without some blame here.
Today the creeping numbness was again present as I set about attempting to record an entirely different set of capillaries, those belonging to the fair city of Norwich. These particular microbial pathways being the cuts and alleyways that creep so stealthily between the more purposeful structures of the greater conurbation.
And, not unlike so much mycelium, these almost subliminal afterthoughts often appear seemingly invisible to the significant majority of the city's human inhabitants. If not literally 'invisible' then effectively inconsequential, there more by mistake or inconvenience than by any specific product of design or forethought.
As I wandered through a city to which I have, over the years, become increasingly attached I was given to ponder the creeping corporate blandness of certain quarters, the absence of those smaller and more delicious gems that have been slowly esponged from the more fondly frequented areas, the corner shops, the 'unchained' establishments. The 'noise' of commercial busy-ness has often found me withering into the cracks, my mind otherwise elsewhere; it has invariably been the more unique pieces of the larger jig-saw within which I have sought solace.
That is not to write that Norwich has been entirely subsumed by the corporate dollar. I was happy to relocate here several years ago, and that affection has far more morphed than died. Norwich remains a city that is (reportedly) proud to have retained such a wide spread of independent shops and eateries. Fair play... maybe?
Speculating upon my fascination for these tiny rivulets of essentialness (the alleyways), I found myself drawing all sorts of bizarre parallels. Quite what was it that has drawn me repeatedly into the shadows and away from the neon lures? To where the pavements lack so much of the lustre, to where the bright facades are entirely absent and, curiously, to where so many of the 'doorways' appear now without further purpose?
I considered that it was, at least in significant part, the more evidently organic aspects of such places that still reached out and drew me in. I considered that these places are not entirely unlike those rainforest glades that may have been opened to the sky through the demise of some strangler-fig targeted behemoth; the monolith no longer standing so we may now be permitted to ponder the smaller and more ethereal alternatives, thus to me the verticality of these places is also relevant. Here there lies juxtaposed an illusory gateway to freedom, yet encapsulated within the more immediate and claustrophobic embrace.
After a certain hour these places are transformed into something else, something far less reflective and decidedly more forbidding. But, when the sunlight may be permitted to dapple the sides of the 'canyon' then we may afford ourselves time to reflect upon its more organic and wondrous properties.
There are the meandering trails of barbed wire, perhaps the scattered presence of shattered glass, either glistening upon the variable or undulating ground, or else jutting threateningly from the tops of rambling walls. We can note the black-painted pipes, coated thick and treacly, that silently deposit their unmentionable cargoes deep into the earth, and branching off are the smaller tributaries, winding upwards and away from the mother-pipe. Limpeted to the 'cliff-faces' we may see the clustered air-conditioning units, perhaps awaiting the predicted catastrophic rise in sea-level. There are the frosted and dusty windows, layered as much as decades deep, cowering behind their heavy bars, and those mysterious sealed doorways into other worlds now lost, the angry or tribal graffiti, invariably hastily scrawled upon any 'suitable' canvass, weathered brickwork and broken paving slabs unlikely to have been scheduled for any sort of swift repair.
These micro-environments are, of course, littered across our fair city, either effecting a shortcut to another part of the city, or else trailing away and into an effective dead-end. Here, in this posting, I have opted to highlight the less-trained thoroughfares, many other alleyways have gradually been humanly-utilised, transformed in part into far quainter courtyards, mostly now locked safely away behind cast-iron gateways.
Our mark upon the planet at times seems so indelible that we often forget the almost ethereal briefness of our tenure. Several of our more enduring plants will have been here long before much of this urban sprawl set up its squat; it is to be hoped that some (plants) will yet linger on long enough to usher the globe through to the 'other side,' whatever that may transpire to be.
If we dare to believe it, to peer into the cracks and the more conducive corners, we may bear witness to a few of nature's more tentative scouting parties. Way up in the highest gutters already the spores and the saplings are taking root, secreted still inside the pores of the most porous the avant-garde are, at this very moment, determinedly reaching for the light. Inside one urban glade I encountered a door-shaped panel of verdant mossiness, already perhaps hinting at the alternative gateways we might yet pursue, not so much clinging on in the corners as already setting about eroding and replacing humankind's more transient obstacles.
And we were encouraged to believe that we were making such a positive fist of it all.
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