Cross-generational conversations
During my trip to London-Belfast-Kinsale-London, I had a revealing encounter with someone who both inspired and unsettled me. Walking through the flecking snow through the less-than-inviting landscape of Tower Bridge, I asked an elderly gentleman for directions to the Design Museum, having lost way through side streets that reminded me of meanders through Strasbourg. He wore a blue fur hat with side flaps tied at the top, was slightly bent and had piercing blue eyes magnified by the thick-rimmed specs. He told me he'd take me there (I told him such generosity was, in my experience, rare outside of Japan, and he seemed surprised- he liked to wander aimlessly, to keep himself active). Walking through Potters Field, I asked him about the dome-like building between us and the river: 'the council's parlour, or something', he muttered (as I did admire the cafe hinged to the outside, which reminded me of one of Phil Beales' beehive cardboard structures), launching into a critique of the buildings springing up everywhere and obscuring the river, the bridge. "'More London'" he spat, motioning to the giant glass complex to our left: "what does that even mean"? I suggested more energy, more spending opportunities, more profit, and we launched into the topic of energy in buildings- he couldn't understand why so much glass was used, given its thermal properties, and I mentioned my interest in sustainable building- he mentioned the straw box of his youth, doubting I'd know it- I had in fact just read a Metro (ug) article about 'The Wonderbag', a new device lauded to be a potential energy-saving revolutioniser of Arfican cooking, based on the inventer's memory of the straw box...I might blog separately about this in fact...but anyway, he'd lived in mud and straw houses during his time in Africa, which he revealed to me some of: the poor man's feet were killing him by the time we parted after a long chat in the cobbled streets that wind through the restored warehouses ("flats costing over a million though", he said...I never asked his name, nor he mine).He'd travelled through Western Africa, and we got onto the subject of postcolonial politics. I mentioned something of my interest in Zimbabwe, in the 'freedom fighter' roots of Mugabe (thinking back to my Cambridge research on spirit and land reform)- he took exception to that, reminiscing how Mugabe in fact directed fighting from the safety of outer borderlands. I had forgotten the ethnic element of the conflict- Shona and Mbele...he had been a freedom fighter in Angola. The poor man kept apologising for not being able to make the connections between things: he'd just had a stroke, and now it makes me feel both grateful to have met him and sad for his sense of confusion at how the world has become, sorry for spending so little time, sensing there was so much to hear and this being the only opportunity...and the feeling that as a member of the 'active generation', I'm certainly not doing all I can, as Wangari Maathai exhorted all to do in her Tale of the Hummingbird. He remembered the 'hunger for education'- he was the only white man in his batallion, and comrades would come to him and ask him to read bits of paper they brought to him, unable to decipher the colonial media, the documentation that hemmed them in, defined them, as they stood powerless to understand, let alone contest it (echoes of the tragedy of anthropological representation comes to mind here). He had to explain that he couldn't read all written language, that Portuguese was just one of many. But they lost. They lost, and now he says he's lost all the passion he had as a youth. That he sees how people want money, more and more of it, that he has no faith in politicians or the so-called democracy in which we live...he left with sore feet and frustration at his ailing mind, but I felt utterly humbled, and I hope he knows that he was an inspiration.