Tag Archives: life

Newton Aycliffe: The Town of the Future!

There’s an article in the Guardian about my home town, Newton Aycliffe. The shopping centre is owned by a billionaire businessman. Over half the units are empty, the ones remaining are mainly owned by the big chains. Local shops are left to die.

This wasn’t really news to those of us who came from Aycliffe. When I was growing up it was often said that the rents for shops in the town were higher than those in Oxford Street, London.

I wrote about Newton Aycliffe in Midway. The ownership of the town centre wasn’t the only example of a monopoly. You can read in that book how television aerials weren’t we allowed on roofs and so we had to rent televisions from the same company. That company owned a huge TV mast at one end of the town, it funnelled BBC and ITV to homes via cable. The picture quality was poor, but if this was your first television, how were you to know that?

This was the 1970s. There was no internet, many people didn’t have cars. Our closest big towns were Darlington and Newcastle. All we knew of the world came from newspapers, television and the radio. And books of course. My mother was the town librarian. All we knew was what was all around us, and so that seemed the natural order of things.

Looking back on my childhood it seems like I grew up in one of those towns you get in SF movies. At first, a seemingly idyllic place, but things aren’t what they seem. There are dark forces at work, hidden in the background. Walk by an open door and you get the occasional glimpse of something strange lurking in a room. You see mysterious trucks rolling along the railway at night, there are lights in the sky…

Newton Aycliffe was supposed to be the town of the future. Quite an appropriate place for an SF writer to grow up in, I suppose. When I was a child I imagined aliens and evil supervillains everywhere. But as you’ll see from the article the truth is both far more mundane and ultimately depressing.

As is so often the case, something built with the best intentions ends up being exploited by those whose only motivation is profit.

‘You’d be ashamed to bring someone here’: The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10 | Communities | The Guardian

And through the wire…

A few years ago I bought myself an expensive phone, a change from the cheap ones I’d always used until then.

I would have been delighted with it apart from one thing: it frequently failed to charge.

Searching online, I found lots of other people having the same issue. Naturally, there were lots of opinions on where the fault lay. The OS, the manufacturer, the fact people hadn’t updated their phone. But in the middle of all the complaints one message kept patiently popping up: it’s all down to a faulty bunch of cables. Replace the USB cable and everything will be fine. I tried everything else before taking this advice, and guess what…

I had a similar experience when I replaced my 12 year old PC. I was having trouble burning DVDs (don’t ask) and I thought that maybe I’d pushed the old hardware as far as it could go. I bought a new PC and everything was fine. Problem solved.

It wasn’t until someone asked for a kettle lead to plug into the PA at a gig I was playing. I lent them my old PC lead. We turned on the PA and heard nothing but crackling. It turned out that, like with the phone, it wasn’t the device that was faulty, but the lead.

I was reminded of this at recent writer’s group meeting when critting a story. The world building was excellent, the plotting tight, the characters interesting. But the story wasn’t working.

The trouble in this case wasn’t anything to do with the story itself, it was the sentences themselves. Reading the story out loud (an old trick) revealed just how convoluted they had become. The writer was so intent on delivering all the ideas they had developed they had lost sight of the actual words they were using.

Stories like this remind me of playing the cornet. As they say in brass bands, it doesn’t matter how great your technique is when you’re blowing on your instrument, if you’re not making a pleasant noise, no one wants to hear.

When things aren’t working, whether with machinery, or stories, or indeed life itself, we have a tendency to blame the big obvious things and to forget about all those other less glamorous mechanisms that keep things running. Quite often we lose sight of the really simple changes that can be made in order to improve things.

Have I mentioned going for a walk recently?