I thought too of our indifference towards the electricity network. The only humans truly in any position to feel grateful towards it were likely to have died a long time ago, in the 1950s, for it is rare to admire a technology which was already well established when we were children. The bulb is dependent for its prestige on a contrastive grown-up memory of the candle, the telephone on that of the carrier pigeon, the plane on that of the steamship, suggesting that histories of technology should usefully identify not only when a particular innovation was introduced, but also, and more interestingly, when it was forgotten – when it disappeared from collective consciousness through familiarity, becoming as commonplace and unremarkable as a pebble or a cloud.
It is hard to say when this stream of cheerless and increasingly nonsensical thoughts came to an end, but it was dawn when I awoke, slumped in an armchair, wrapped in my coat, with the copy of the hotel brochure open on my lap at an entry on a mountain-side hotel in Andorra, almost certainly powered by a hydroelectric plant near La Massana.
6.
We checked out early and regained our line. It was so dark that the day appeared to have given up on itself. Along the roadside, street-lamps flickered, their automatic sensors torn between respecting the hour and bowing to the implausibly low light-levels they detected.
Our line intersected with the route of the old Roman Road into London, but rather than heading directly into the capital, it instead meandered around the Medway towns of Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester. The horizon closed in. Settlements leaked into one another, creating a landscape without discernible beginnings or ends. We passed equestrian centres, schools of osteopathy and flower-bedecked roadside shrines to young men with oiled-back hair and young women with startled pleading eyes. There were boastful signs in shop windows – ‘Bring us your quote – we’ll beat it’ – and others which spoke with poetic concision of intrigues sufficient to animate an epic drama: ‘Car wash: under new better management’. In a launderette in Chatham, we ate sandwiches to the comforting smells and rhythms of drying bed linen.
Next, the line passed through North Halling, and a mock-Georgian housing estate where Ian spotted that three of the houses had small brass windmills in their driveways. He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics from Rotterdam University, Anne Mieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on these rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspects into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. It was works such as Abraham Funerius’s Het Bolwerk Rijzenhoofd te Amsterdam and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Molen bij Wijk bij Duurstede which had inspired the Dutch to accord decisive respect and aesthetic attention to their life-giving machines.
Ian concluded that it would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. He hoped that photographs of conductors might in the future hang over dining tables and that someone might write a libretto for an opera set along the grid.
The line of pylons finally pierced its way into London through a discrete underbelly of ragged fields to the east of Swanscombe, and threaded its way through Northfleet to the banks of the Thames. There, beside a football stadium, the pylons ran up against their most imposing natural hurdle yet: a 1.3-kilometre crossing over the tidal river. To prevent the conductors from sagging dangerously over a span this long, three ordinary pylons would normally have been required, but a busy shipping lane precluded the sinking of piers, so the two pylons nearest the banks were left with little choice but to grow upwards, to a height of 190 metres, taller than a forty-storey skyscraper, their ruby-red summit lights barely visible through the mist. We felt proud to see a line which we had known for so long take a most grown-up step.
But there was to be no particular reward for this exertion, because once on the other side, the line was immediately driven into a landscape of warehouses, storage depots and cheap hotels, one of them boasting three channels of adult entertainment and a view of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge.
It was time for lunch and we thought of the food courts of the Lakeside Shopping Centre, but Ian pointed out that if we pressed on, we would find the line running against the edge of the bird sanctuary at Rainham Marshes. Owned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the reserve was an important resting place for migratory species, and had just opened a visitor centre, serving pumpkin soup and carrot cake, staples of cafeterias in high-minded institutions the world over.
Yet, despite a comfortable chair, an unimpeded view over the marsh and an extended perambulation, on the very balcony where we sat, by a common crossbill (an unfairly named bird), Ian fell into a dejected mood. Everywhere there were signs of the prosperity of the bird watchers’ society: it had its own publishing sideline, it ran gift shops, it traded in tea towels. Next to the coffee machine, a large plastic robin with beseeching eyes urged patrons to drop money through a slit in its head. The organisation had seized on a minor occasion of individual gratification at seeing a bird and managed to transform it into a formalised and commercially robust activity, one which moreover tacitly claimed a distinct moral superiority over other leisure pursuits. It had done the archetypal work of culture: taking on an unformed, isolated interest and affording it a communal language and respectability.
How woefully immature the Pylon Appreciation Society seemed by comparison. It had only a handful of members, it had no cafeteria, it could barely afford to send out a newsletter. As a result, a sympathetic response to an electricity pylon remained for most of us a haphazard and unsupported impulse, an epiphany which might last for a minute on a drive along a motorway or on a walk along a moor, but to which no prestige could be attached and from which little of merit could emerge.
In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty. He contrasted the nostalgic devotees of old-fashioned poetry with those whom he judged to be true contemporary poetic spirits, deserving of the title less by virtue of anything they had actually written than for their willingness to approach the world without prejudice or partiality. The former camp, he averred, ‘see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own’.
7.
Our line was running into problems. Whereas in the countryside it had often enjoyed straight runs of a dozen or more pylons, the increasing density of the city placed constant obstacles in
its path. In setting down its feet, it had to bring to bear all the tact of a bulky man negotiating an object-strewn carpet. It tiptoed around gas storage tanks and railway lines, paused to make way for sewage works and crouched to avoid the wings of Embraers at City Airport. A few miles from central London, in an industrial estate which was home to a Jacuzzi importer and a cake manufacturer, the line prepared to disappear underground for good.
There was, unsurprisingly, no fanfare to mark the moment, no acknowledgement of the chalk downs and the grazing meadows, the backyards of Canterbury and the geese of the Kent marshes. Before the power could enter London’s circuits, it first had to be tamed by a series of porcelain insulators, whose convex, columnar forms recalled the ritual objects of the celestial liturgy of a primitive tribe. At the end of one particularly tall example, a single thick black rubber tube, containing the steadied force of the entire line, slipped unceremoniously into a small hole in the ground, unknown to almost all of its five million end-users.
Ian had a train to catch. We confided to each other that we were unexpectedly sorry to say good-bye, feeling that we had experienced things together which would be hard to share with others.
In its new, modest incarnation, the line was now bound for a substation concealed on Shaftesbury Avenue at the rear of a Chinese restaurant specialising in Schezuan peppered duck. From there, its electricity would be distributed to the cosmetics counter at Boots on Oxford Street, to the cash machines of Tottenham Court Road, to the headquarters of British Petroleum in St James’s Square and to a sign outside a club on Brewer Street advertising the services of a group of Estonians pole-dancing in the basement.
Along its subterranean course, the line would dissolve into ever smaller forces, from a prodigious 400 kilovolts to a more moderate 275 and thence, in the residential streets, to a placid 132, until it emerged from sockets, shorn of all impetuousness, at a mere 240 volts. As it passed, the current would perform the ultimate act of generosity: it would absolve its consumers from having to give it any thought, it would ensure that none of them would ever need to dwell on the idea of a run of steel-grey pylons tracing their origins back across the landscape to the southern coast, to a monolithic power station on the edge of a shingle beach, enduring the mutinous Channel waves and a corrosive wind while emitting a steady and ominous hum.
1.
Standing with your back to the Tower of London, looking across the Thames, you might notice a family of new office blocks lined up along the south bank. They took only six months to build – having been assembled out of steel frames sheathed in simple coats of tinted glass – and still do not quite seem to belong to the city, being oddly clean and impervious to the history which surrounds them, conveying a non-native sense of optimism better suited to downtown Toronto or Cleveland. Just to the east of them, in a plaza decked out with privately maintained trees and fountains, groups of foreign schoolchildren arrive by bus to take pictures of the river, while businesspeople, thrown off schedule by the rare boon of a punctual train or a clear road, sit on benches attending to messages transmitted invisibly to their phones through the luminous morning air.
A discreet logo at the top of one of the towers is the only outward sign of having reached the European headquarters of one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Despite such reticence, the building affords the inquisitive passer-by with notably unguarded glimpses of the goings-on inside. Seemingly more aware of having a view than of being one, the employees rest their besocked feet on boxes of printer cartridges, unselfconsciously consume lunch at the windows, swivel on their ergonomic chairs, stand in semicircles in obscure group exercises and write acronyms on white boards in rooms full of concentrated-looking colleagues – their behaviour unfolding behind triple glazing as if in an eerily silent film, accompanied only by a musical score of seagulls, river traffic and the easterly wind.
On entering the building, one encounters a lobby designed so that the head of any newcomer will ineluctably lean backwards to follow a succession of floors rising up to apparent infinity, and in the process dwell – as the cathedral-builders once invited one to do with their vaulted naves – on the respect that must be owed to those responsible for putting up and managing this colossus. However, unlike at Chartres, quite what one should be honouring is unclear. Perhaps hard work, precision, a certain ruthlessness and the surprising intricacies of the audit process. A plaque affixed to a wall declares, ‘We like people who demonstrate integrity, energy and enthusiasm.’
To judge by the number of people seated on the lobby’s red-leather sofas, it isn’t unusual to be kept waiting awhile for an appointment, surreptitiously to enforce an impression of the importance of one’s hosts on the upper floors. A receptionist, no less aware of the solemnity of her role than a priestess at the Temple of Delphi, is on hand for a short initiation ceremony, handing you a badge and directing you to the sofas with a tenuous promise of rescue. There are free newspapers and bottles of water emblazoned with the firm’s name. Waiting feels like the oldest of human activities, stretching back to the senators pacing outside the emperor’s quarters in imperial Rome and the merchants lined up to see the caliph in the marble-lined palaces of medieval Córdoba. In the background, a bank of lifts emits random pings as security guards patrol the turnstiles, hoping for a confrontation to interrupt the tedium of their day.
As one does in a doctor’s surgery, one may be tempted to look at one’s fellow visitors and wonder about the problems that have brought them here. They are unlikely to be straightforward. The accountants don’t cater to life’s superficial needs. Their jobs did not even come into being until late in the history of business, only after millions of people had gathered in cities and been grouped into industrial phalanxes – for, until then, accountancy merely occupied a few sporadic moments at the ledger by candlelight in a back room. The advent of dedicated financial specialists, who are unable to fish or build a house or sew a coat but are entirely committed to answering questions of amortisation, standard engagement revenue and transaction tax, seems a culmination of a long history of the division of labour, which began in Ancient Egypt three millennia ago and, in oases like these at least, has generated spectacular returns and some distinctive psychological side-effects.
Everything in the accountants’ building appears elegant and well-maintained. There are none of the cobwebs endemic to the ordinary world. People cross the corridors and elevated walkways with purpose. Five thousand employees are split into divisions headed Audit, Tax, Banking, Capital Markets, Real Estate and Risk Advisory Services. They are assisted by two hundred support staff who fix chairs, wheel biscuits into client meetings, reroute emails and clip together identification badges. A basement stationery store, stocked more prodigiously than Aladdin’s cave, boasts a supply of three thousand highlighter pens, which could ring the earth in fluorescent yellow ink and which invite you to think of the many countries and situations they will run out in, for instance, one pen expiring in a hotel in Kiev, after covering the many salient points in a five-hundred-page document headed Weighted Average Cost of Capital in the Copper Mining Industry.
In the wider view of the public, accountancy may be synonymous with bureaucratic tedium, but from close up, this particular conglomeration of numerical talents presents the observer with a case-study of the discrete charms of offices, with their intriguing blend of camaraderie, intelligence and futility. The headquarters on the bank of the Thames is the setting for a range of behaviours at least as peculiar as anything that an ethnographer might uncover among the clans of Samoa.
I resolved to spend time in the accountants’ glass tower, as well as in one or two of their homes, in order to build up a snapshot of an average day.
2.
It is six o’clock on a late-July morning, in a village fifty kilometres from the office, in the Berkshire countryside. To define what is painfully coming to an end, thanks to the pitiless insistence of an electronic chirrup, as ‘being asleep’ doesn’t scratch the surface o
f what has really been going on for the last seven hours, ever since one of the accountants I am shadowing lost contact with her conscious self while watching a regional news item and was transported off on the back of the swan of sleep. She may only have been lying under a duvet, in a room undisturbed except by the occasional sweep of car headlamps across the ceiling, and yet she was all the while being shuttled on turbulent journeys animated by unexpected faces and emotions.
She was back in the school gymnasium, taking an algebra exam and sitting next to a boy who was also, and without evident incongruity, a colleague from the Retail and Consumer Products unit. Then came a supermarket queue and the Queen shouting that someone had stolen her earrings, a scene which dissolved into a meeting on a ferry with a lover whom she hadn’t seen in ten years, but who spoke of their break-up with an accuracy her waking mind could never have mustered. It is a wonder that we manage to be so outwardly docile, an arm or leg only infrequently stirring, while we travel on such ghost trains.
Once the alarm has rung, the accountant has little choice but to head for the bathroom without doing justice to her visions. Sentimental associations and impossible longings are shut down, and the self is reassembled as an apparently coherent entity, with stable commitments and a prescribed future. Yet in the haze of dawn, she feels for a few moments as if she still had a foot in both worlds, parts of herself holding on to the dreams as others soberly go through the motions with the taps and the toothbrush. But with time, the drawbridge to the night is pulled up, and soon all that is left is the noise of running water and, on a ledge by the window, a bottle of shampoo on which is printed in bold letters, in an implicit assertion of the supremacy of diurnal reality, the familiar yet peculiar phrase ‘All-in-One Conditioner’.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Page 12
