online: 12 june 2015
modified: 12 june 2015
11 june 2015 playground for adults
...returning to the northern landscape (towards the garden suburb of
Henrietta Barnett and others*) i see prosperous-looking people
walking... with or without dogs (or ball-throwing gadgets)... and some
with cricket bats and balls etc... and prepared goalposts and ground
marks for games or races... set betweeen tall rows of trees surrounding fields
with modern churches showing above the garden suburb roofs
and hedged-in gardens... all these being the paraphenalia of life as
sport and gardening (accompanied by pets) a neovillage life of so-called
human nature... or landscape designed as garden suburb...
and a model for suburbia throughout the nation...
*Henrietta Barnett... her husband Canon Samuel Barnett... and others...
founders of the Hampstead Garden Suburb
...and thinking that the life appearing here is indeed a realised
utopia... composed of sport gardening DIY church and every activity
except organised productive work to which people are carried daily by
transportation... (and yes i know there are exceptions)...
...raising my eyes from touchscreen to the patch of grass before me i
see half trampled leaves of grass still standing semi-upright in wind
that blows slightly and intermittently in some places... while remaining
still in others...
...on the way back i pause to watch two young men playing simply
catchball (about ten to twenty metres apart)... each throwing the ball
as near as possible to the other's hand (and sometimes signalling which
hand to aim at)... for they were playing collaboratively... to keep the
ball aloft (but not to defeat the other... as in tennis)...
...i pause again for mind to amend these thoughts... primarily to the
metathought that the internet can make nonsense of this mechanical
eighteenth-to-nineteenth century utopia which we inherit... and which is
likely to be transformed under the influence of softopian reality... with
questions of its own... and here they are...
eg is internet benign, malign, or neutral?
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