Salvage

In the north of Essaouira, Morocco, I stand on a beach covered in shattered tiles, brick, rubber and chemical foams. To my right, a blackened chimney belches dark smoke into the sky. The spray from the ocean smells like sewage, like rotting waste. Looking further up the coast, what I initially believed to be a cliff face reveals itself as the source of the washed up debris, and potentially the smell, a waste landfill glinting in the sunlight swarmed by seabirds, its edges falling away into the water. Inland, oil and chemical barrels are cut up and repurposed into spades and shovels sold at a farm market. A workshop cuts boards of Swedish pine stamped with a crown, ready to be used on construction projects. Inside the walls of the Medina, luminous cleaning fluids are decanted into used plastic drinks bottles of varying sizes to be sold on. Tourists and locals alike drink crates of two litre bottles of water, ensuring no shortage of empty containers.

In Shetland, from the top of Sandness Hill, my mother points towards the horizon on a clear day. An oil drilling platform under construction in the north sea, I open up a shipping tracker website on my phone hoping to gather further information. At night, standing in the dark until the faintest aurora borealis can be made out, what I presume to be light pollution from a nearby town is in fact the glow from a gas flare at Sullom Voe, the island's crude oil terminal. Walking Shetland's windswept rocky beaches, I create a catalogue of objects: Twist of red rope, tangle of green rope, polystyrene nugget, orange crate, sheep's skull, washing detergent bottle, coca cola bottle still with liquid inside, foam of unknown composition and origin. Driving the hour it takes to get to the supermarket (half stocked after a storm prevents the freight ferry from traveling), the car passes through scenes where there are no people for miles around. On the heathland the earth is scarred, centuries of peat cutting for fuel has left its mark, revealing dark energy-rich earth under sodden plant life.

In both of these locales of profound beauty, I consider how to live in a world so enmeshed in the extraction, manipulation and combustion of crude oil. How life finds a way in a broken world, and how to make the best of what is inherited. I take these questions with me when I leave, revisit them daily.

Sharing letters

After writing briefly about cycling through the city and returning to Black Audio Film Collective last week, I've been rereading a collection of letters I wrote to friends and imagined readers as part of my time at DAI last year. I thought it could be nice to share some of those letters here, starting with the following that began from cycling a visiting friend around town. 

Dear A.,

I have been struck by the profound feeling of boredom. Every bad interaction I have, I have started saying "boring!" in my head. Yesterday when I cycled you on the front of my bike, acting as your tour guide through East London, you noticed how much attention we were getting, some pleasant, some more antagonising. Some smiles, some looks of disbelief. You were surprised that anyone paid any attention at all. A delivery driver exclaimed "Well that’s a new one!" Two women cycling on a cargo bike is apparently outside the realm of the possible or the expected. I was less surprised – but yours helped me see something that had been staring back at me for some time. The shrinking of people's ideas of leisure, of inane but still meaningful pleasure, of what people might do with their time and how they might travel around together, one caring for the other as precious cargo. I replied to your question "why are people so surprised" with a theory "people are really unhappy." Later, we sat on Telegraph Hill, you got the train back east and I picked you up at the other end, taking you the last stretch to save a train transfer and a 20-minute walk back to the flat. In the dark, we were less noticeable, or less surprising. Perhaps we were drunk, or there was something less embarrassing about having fun at night.

 I know that to you it is no surprise that we live in extremely regressive times. In a city so overexposed with experience – people's expectation of the possible in public life has never felt narrower. Socialising outside of one’s home is expensive, over policed and the experiences on offer are homogeneous.¹ The atmosphere is tense on the streets, especially in the summer, when the summer heat clogs the pavements and clouds the mind. What is the affect of collapse? Dissociative rage, constant shock? There is much pressure to conform, often framed through right wing rhetoric that redirects rage at economic inequality onto cultural difference. “Why are you different, you should be the same as me, I don’t want you to have something I do not have, you should be punished for your difference.” Acceptable difference reduced to consumer choice. Through rhetoric about individual expression, or access to the supposed “world at your fingertips” through smart phones, difference and novelty have been siloed and privatised. On the train if I glance at someone watching endless algorithmically curated short videos I’m often disturbed – confronted by hyper tailored cultural references for which I have no context. Despite sitting next to each other it feels our worlds do not touch, that there are fewer and fewer shared experiences other than consumption and dependence on technology.

I will never forget how S. replied to my shock and delight at them riding a rental bike down a set of stairs in the Netherlands last year "the dutch superego is too strong - it needs puncturing." On my estate there are piles of semi-abandoned Lime rental bikes.² Where I live, the repeated bleeping alarm that plays when a Lime is ridden without payment is the soundtrack as teenagers finish school. In many ways they seem indicative of a society where time truly is money (Lime bikes charge by the minute). There are no social rules that cannot be broken, except for the ones that are instilled by force. "The app won't let me park my bike here." Of course, you see these bikes strewn everywhere. People always find a way. There are two people who ride Lime bikes, poor teenagers and yuppies with more money than sense. The sight of a child hacking a bike (in order to ride for free) and driving through every red light is a far more expected outcome than our ride together yesterday.

Why does reading the political and cultural history of the 1960s-1990s fill many of our generation with sadness, or even confusion and surprise? It’s like we know we’ve lost something, even if we can’t place it. Sarah Schulman described how young queer people are told that their lives are better than they actually are.³ It’s internalised, the notion that we are accepted in society and our flourishing is our and ours alone. Homophobia always shocks me for that reason. My whole life I was told that it was no longer okay for people to discriminate like that, that younger people were progressive, that values in cities were shifting. Every experience to the counter disturbs that idea. At what point does it become clear that experiences of hostility, or ridicule are not random acts by bad people, but rather indicative of a deeply conservative society hiding behind the falling veil of liberalism. Managed decline is a slow violence but right now it feels particularly pointed. The social contract put forward– conform with society's norms and it will accept you in return, is starting to seem like a very bad deal. This internalised repression of difference might offer an answer to the question - why is everything so boring? If, as Schulman claims in her book of the same title, that in cities there has been a "gentrification of the Mind," how might one de-gentrify one's mind? Is such a process even possible when going backwards is in itself a conservative act. And if the pre-gentrified mind is gone, what might a "post-gentrified" look like? Cycling you through several of London's most hyper developed districts, London Fields, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Farringdon, I try to remind myself that this is the landscape we inherit and that something must come after. If going back to some imagined innocence is impossible, it’s important to begin thinking of where glimmers of a freer world might be found in the city as we encounter it. What will we do with the shopping malls when they are no longer relevant in our society? Will we tear them down? Open them to be used as spaces to meet, restaurant kitchens repurposed to feed the collective? A game I used to play with friends when walking – every empty shop you see, imagine what we could use that space for instead. In a short film on David Harvey and the redevelopment of New York City,⁴ he points to a cluster of towers behind him and states that we need to think about what we will do with these towers after capitalism, because they will be there.

1Chain stores and restaurants, expensive coffee shops with clinical interiors, gentrified street markets that all sell the same selection of “worldwide cuisines”

2Lime bikes are expensive to hire electric rental bikes. Lime bikes have become a ubiquitous mode of private transport in London, sometimes rivaling the number of bikes owned by individuals on my morning cycles to and from work.

3Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind, 7.

4David Harvey and the City (2020), dir. Brett Story, prod.Antipode Foundation, YouTube video, 16:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPGvXhicF2M.

 

City montage

Still from TWILIGHT CITY (1989)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cycling in London is to experience the city's moods in a direct and shifting manner. Moving through the backstreets and main arteries of the city day after day reveals its divergent prospects, its rhythms, the patchwork of class and culture that make up the metropolis. Recently in analysis, reflecting on the 2026 London experience of general anxiety and aggression, I stated something which brought this thesis home for me-"I know things are fucked up because of how people drive."

Cycling gives me autonomy and joy in a highly contrived city, an emancipatory practice as much as a dangerous and exposing one. To be on a bike is to increase the possibility of injury or death at the hands of drivers, to be exposed to the eyes of thousands of people and to abuse from both drivers and pedestrians. Cycling while trans is something that keeps me safe (I feel I can leave any given public scene quickly) even as the danger of London roads brings me into contact with morbidity daily. I joked with a friend recently, what a shame it was I was so invested in two activities (transexualism and cycling) that people seemed to really dislike. I hear snippets of many conversations as I pass people, my attention flitting between the scene around me and the position and sounds of other road users. Over the past years I have built up a mental picture of what is going on in my city through this absorption of affect and speech.

Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City centers on long shots from a car driving around London at night. The visual is accompanied by someone reading a letter to her mother who has left the city for the Caribbean. The writer claims that the London her mother knew is dying, that the city is changing fast, there is an ideological battle playing out over what city London will become. This is a story of struggle for the heart of the city, for the ways of life the metropolis makes possible that I identify with today. City montage is a way of seeing what is falling away, and what is appearing in its place. Twilight City's subtitle reads Sacrifice a piece of the past for the whole of the future. A commitment to cycling, a commitment to living desire, a commitment to the city as home are commitments to a future where we are more able to breath, both literally and metaphorically.

Life can be a dream

​Sometimes I feel as if I am living in a waking dream of my own life. Social reality shifted around me as if it were a force field this past year, like I began again for a second or third time, that field shifting first in 2021 perhaps masked by the scale of upheaval around me.

Is this waking dream rather acute alienation? Or living inside a rubber mask of the devil's face?

Some meetings this week, trying to mend things.

A cobbler's terse hello and reluctant agreement, "I can do it, but don't shout at me" left me asking why would I shout at him? 

The tailor's claim "we don't have what you want here."

At the builders merchant, the cashier turning to the till screen at which point she says "I wish you were dead." 

 

A simple exchange and a smile at the pound shop "how are you doing today?"

Two things that cut through it all:

Proc Fiscal - Uhazsh music video (so of a present time but also deeply unalientated, a love story <3)

&

Aya - Hexed pitchfork review (thoughtful music journalism and some of the only writing on the UK trans backlash I've seen that gets to the core of what is at stake - the body and desire)

 

No matter the epoch, fear and disgust cling to those who manipulate reality in ways that aren't supposed to be possible. That's the dangerous thing about transition: It really happens. Plug a hormone into hormone receptors and the body changes itself according to genetic code it already contains. Dress a new way, change the way you move, modulate your voice, and social fabric shifts: People perceive you differently. Sufficiently advanced deviance might be indistinguishable from magic to some but it literally happens all the time. It makes some people very angry to suggest that reality might be more moldable than they've been raised to believe. It might just force them to consider the unendurable stagnancy of their own lives.

It is my birthday this weekend, the one I chose.

Returning to a form

I've been looking for a place to write, an outlet for posting energy. That energy has been frustrated since leaving instagram six years ago, mostly sublimated into incessant texting. H suggested I start a blog after I found niche fame on a London bike forum recently and someone recognised the bicycle I was riding and had been posting about on London Bridge. Sunday was quiet, a bus driver had just tried to run me off the road, a cabbie minutes earlier shouted something indecipherable at me while blocking my path at the lights. It was pleasurable to be recognized for something I had made, rather than as a problem, as someone who needed to be told what a problem she was being. I wonder if I can find a better way to work with writing here. Unstick the knots so present when I sit down to begin something I designate important.

Yesterday I cycled to the north circular where the road cuts through Epping Forest, it had such a particular smell.