The Earlham Road Project

Fiction, collaboration, disgust

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

What was the Earlham Road?

Baby, I was talking to you about the Earlham Road, and you were asking me what it was, and why it was so important. Remember the time I said to you that places are constituted more by people and experiences than as actual physical entities?

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “But it sounded like bollocks then, and I’m less than convinced now.”

“Even though you’re slightly stoned, and infinitely suggestible to all manner of bullshit?”

She said yes and shrugged in a rather minor way. I felt I had made my point, but wished to make it with broader strokes.

“The Earlham Road,” I pronounced, “was a street that connected the centre of a town I once lived in, to a university I once attended. Many was the time I walked in my friends’ company in both directions along this road. It served, first as a way of getting around, then, long afterwards, as a sort of metaphor for the time we spent there. As a focus of our longing and nostalgia. It made such urges manageable, as we aestheticised it, coloured it with feelings we held for people we now rarely see. Some people get sniffy about the Mississippi, others talk grandly of memories of the Golden Gate, still others will speak of an old house that somehow holds memory for them. For us, it’s the Earlham Road. And as long as the road is preserved in what we do, and what we think about, our time spent there will remain with us too, and those whose company we kept back then are always, somehow, with us.”

“So it’s like a movable feast?” she asked.

“It’s more a feast that has been consumed, but is being very slowly digested.”

And with that, we both went back to sleep.