NetDynam 2.0

We nose the car out of the street and onto the A1, turning left and driving the one kilometre to junction 2 on the M1, where a sign says “THE NORTH”. It is like something in a fantasy novel, and we chuckle as we enter the flow of traffic on the M1 heading towards Birmingham for the second time in a month, feeling as if we might be travelling back to middle earth.



We stop a few miles up the track in a service area, thinking to compare it with the Italian versions. I have to admit to myself that I find the English service area much more welcoming, I never thought I would think so, but it has fewer people although well-populated, and seems cleaner, less fumigated. We find a coffee outlet and wait a long time for service even though the two girls are not working slowly, just that the whole set up is inefficient.

We make it into Birmingham in good time and find the hotel we booked online with little trouble—it is on one of the main roads out of town, and is very busy most times of the day. Our room is facing the street and thus we have no need of a wake-up call. The hotel was one with a very good deal, quite cheap, but of course one gets what one pays for. It was a hotel run by a couple, and seemed somewhat like a large bed & breakfast, almost as if it were a house, a house last decorated in the 1950s, a relic of the past.

The carpets are flowery and a dark colour faded with age, as with the lounge chairs dotted about the bar room and the connecting sitting room. The walls are dark panelled, a type of oak, with a picture rail. In the reception room, an oak reception desk curves around in front of the door to the office behind it, and past the desk at the end of the hall another room perhaps the living quarters of the family as it is from there that our host emerges together with one of the foxies living in the house, a small dog who barks a greeting and warning to them of strangers in the house. The bay windows downstairs are graced with pot plants on their sills, and the morning sun streams in through these while we are staying there.

Just as we arrive, a lad of about 18 comes in limping slightly and looking very pale and upset, his face bruised. What happened to you, asks the host. I just got me head kicked in, the boy replies. Who did that? I ask. Me mate, he answers. Then he tells how he went round to his mate’s house, but someone else came to the door and started swearing at him. We decide it is none of our business, but he is sitting there with the host as we are registering with the host’s wife, and it seems poor timing on our parts—perhaps he needs more attention than we do really.

Later that afternoon, we ask after him and discover that he has been staying with them since before Christmas because his father is in remand after having killed his stepmother. He had at that stage not turned 18 and so as a juvenile needed to be fostered. The hosts of the hotel have provided him with a temporary home, and let him stay even past his eighteenth birthday, since he was not really going to suddenly be able to take on looking after himself.

There is a dark room off the reception room, with padded seating in the curved bay window behind a round oak table, plus a rectangular oak table in the middle of the room sporting a species of orchid in a pot, just finished flowering. We go to sit in there one day, and I notice three fish tanks around the room. In one, there is a lone fish, fairly large to be living in an aquarium, and his tank sports a sign warning people not to put their fingers in, as they are liable to get bitten. He hides from me as I peer in on him. In another tank on the other side of the room, there are a number of medium sized fish, who, when they see me approach, begin to cavort about their tank, swimming to and fro faster and flipping themselves up and over to make splashy noises. They obviously connect the sight of a human with food. In the tank next to that however, there appear to be no fish, only a lot of rocks with many holes. I correctly divine that this must mean that there is something in there which likes to hide, and after some minutes, a number of little fish heads start to peep out from hidey holes about the tank, then quickly withdrawing. After some time, they get more courageous and start to show their whole bodies before darting away in fear. I get a lot of amusement out of watching them for a long time.

We spend some days in Birmingham renewing our acquaintances with people and places we used to frequent. We went to Midland Road and looked over our neighbour’s fence, noting that the jack’s beanstalk eucalyptus trees had been cut down at the back – I can only assume that they were too threatening in that narrow backyard. The rest of the garden was much as we left it, with the lilacs in bloom and many other familiar forms and textures making their appearance. The back of our neighbour’s yard was overgrown with blackberry and the privet hedge, so I couldn’t look up the back to where I planted the perennial garden and had installed the pond, but I feel that the new owners have kept it going well from what I could see from our former neighbour’s bathroom window.

On the morning before we were due to appear at Aston university on the other side of town, we stopped in the city centre along the way and took a walk about the old streets, with P practising his video-taking skills with the new device. We walked up to Victoria Square, the fountain quiet, but the steps still used as a meeting and lolling about place. The streets are packed with people, people from all different cultures and ethnic groups—it’s more apparent because we’ve just come from Finland, even though Helsinki is home to many people of African origin. But here, it’s the mix, the complete, even spreading of different shapes and colours and clothing in the crowd.

The talks went down OK, except that P had taken three illustrative examples of news reporting on a similar topic from three different newspapers in the UK from 2001. Only the headlines and first paragraphs. The students and staff members in the group were asked to quickly look at the attitudinal values in the texts and decide which of them seems to be the most ‘objective’. They usually choose the one with the least amount of explicitly evaluative terms, but of course, the implications for the various targets are similarly negative. The problem was that the topic of these news items described the visit of the Chinese president to the UK, and the way in which the Queen had accorded him a welcome, and how a lone protester had been treated by armed guards… no matter what the attitude was towards the Queen for greeting the president so well, or the attitude towards the protester’s actions, all articles were agreed that the Chinese regime was not so respectable… one of the audience was a Chinese girl, who took the newspaper reports personally, and shed tears during the lecture, later to complain that the selection of articles had hurt her feelings. P was not amused.

Do you expect, he asked, that every lecture I give on newspaper reporting I should ask whether there are any Chinese people in the audience, and if so, pull out another lecture based on other texts, and in which case, I have to ask whether there are any Americans or Roma or Aboriginals in the audience—since the texts I use deal with the ways in which newspapers regularly construct our view of these groups? So the Chinese girl suggested he find other more mild-mannered articles to use, especially more positive things about the Chinese. But they are not what is interesting, P explains–the very fact that newspapers use these ways of creating views of groups without being overtly critical shows how racism is being promulgated under our noses, he says. She is not satisfied, but it cannot be helped.

We drive back to London without incident and arrive in the evening, and take up a position in the lounge room. We check email and eat spicy and rich Pakistani cooking. We talk to the girls about their school work and TV and our families. P drives the girls to school in the mornings, letting their mother sleep in, a luxury she needs since she is on a chemo regime and is in general pain as well. On the last night we are there, P drives an hour or so to the other side of London to watch his brother and 2nd niece play in the local orchestra of the area close to where they used to live. Meanwhile, the other two girls, their mother and me drive to a favourite Pakistani eatery, where we fill up on many and various dishes, dropping in to the ‘DVD specialist and PAN’ shop on the way home. The movies on DVD are stuck up on the wall—Hindi classics—the girls recognise many of them and discuss their merits and detracting features. Meanwhile, S directs the lad manning the shop to construct her a number of pans, sweet and herbal concoctions wrapped up in a fresh green leaf. I get one too, but first we each eat a kulfi on a stick.

London—it’s always struck me as carnivalesque in its complete mix of cultures, all cheek by jowl, all mixed up together. It’s a difficult place to live in some ways—dirty, busy, hectic, crowded, expensive—but there’s something about London that gets under your skin and it never goes away, a feeling of being in it, where something is happening and you are a part of that thing…

When we fly in over Helsinki and look down on the ground, it is finally showing shades of green. At last! Spring has arrived in Finland. The ten days we have been away have been busy periods for the trees and grasses, the whole place has changed completely, it is almost unrecognisable as the same place we arrived in almost five months ago.