THE WAY WE USED TO LIVE

OPTION 3 ENGLISH RURAL LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY RESOURCE 3 (excerpt from A Town Called Spaykerr) CASE STUDY: An account, from the county archives, written by Alex Graham, an artist living in the village of Spaykerr, in Derbyshire, England, at the start of the 21st Century.
(After walking some time) The store was eventually reached but actually entering the Co-op proved hugely frustrating. The fact was that as I walked through the door the shelves and their contents began to slide away from me at an equal speed. It was only by carefully exiting the shop backwards and then taking a side step to the left that I could create a sort of weak vacuum outside the entrance which could draw the shelves and their stock out. One by one they slid out of the door with their latched aluminium sides rattling loudly. I found that moving closer to them only caused them to retreat through the door. I was patient, careful, balanced and eventually enough of them piled up outside the store to block any effective retreat and I was able to reach out and pinch the foil tip of a noodle snack between my thumb and forefinger. I considered paying for the potted noodles but in these situations payment is close to being physically impossible. Standing outside the Co-op with my right side towards the slowly retreating shelves I noticed the same strange building that always caught my eye on leaving the store. Since my earliest memories I had been aware of having absolutely no idea as to its use. Older villagers seemed equally clueless as to its function; either admitting to having no idea or seeming to randomly invent a recollection from their childhood when, allegedly, they saw the building in regular use. These half-formed memory goblins had clearly been formed by clumsy childish hands with the dried gunk like residue which forms round the edges of the overcooked and lumpy village gossip soup. The buildings form was very basic, almost monolithic, and no business advertisements or signs had ever, in my recollection, been hung to advertise its use. Over time villagers had perceived a curious sensation when passing by the building. It seemed as though, possibly through its 7 floors and steep imposing shape or possibly due simply to the amount of time it had been there, the building had gained a slight gravitational influence on the things around it. This force only had a noticeable affect up to three metres away from its walls but frequently an amount of the gravitys gently turning momentum would become trapped for a day or two in the 10ft deep stone basin which ran along in front of the buildings street facing faade separating it from the pavement. Villagers had complained that they felt dangerously pulled towards this stone basin. I approached the zebra crossing which leads to the strange building on the far side of the green, but before I could cross the road the sound of a huge mechanism began to build from inside the structure. The sounds bent, slipped and crushed their way through the buildings inner rooms and compartments; growing in volume they began to work their way out of the windows and through the village. The buildings enormous street facing faade began to tilt back slowly and effortlessly on its 7 floors, the axel apparently being between the first and second levels. The ground beneath my feet shook as the enormous, hidden system within the buildings core began its rotations and swings, collaborating with the tilting faade and colliding within itself. The pressure, now leisurely exploding throughout the rooms, impacted on the surrounding space to force warm industrious air through the lower 2 rows of windows. Outside on the street I felt an almost solid wall of dusty, metallic air reach me. It travelled through my light clothing and then soughed back on itself to sulk, like the knee-high spook of amplifier fluff, through the streets. I turned and walked away. As I did so my thoughts turned also to my delicious noodle treat pressing its garishly coloured face against the inside of my plastic bag. In an odd way I felt I deserved it and I couldnt wait to get back home and enjoy my lunch in the garden, listening to the distant swollen sounds of the rock music festival across the fields.