One day I'll fly away

I went around Worcester last night, looking for places to post flyers (see previous post). This town has changed so much since I grew up here. Gentrification - I hate that word. It's not a proper word, and I hate using it. It sounds like shit, looks bad, and means something pretty awful. It makes you think of "gentry" - posh folks straight out of Jane Austen going around in their horse and carts, saying "I say, Marmaduke, did you see how that fellow wore his cravate? Shocking. Quite shocking..." But what the heinous word really means is "out scum". It means "we value our property prices and our urban ambience conducive to retail consumerism". It means "money".

The other thing it means is that there is nowhere left where you can post a flyer and hope for it to stay there for more than an hour or two. Where are all the boarded-up windows? When I were a lad, as well as sliced loaves of brown bread with bits of gravel in, we had boarded-up orifices all over town, where people put up adverts for gigs, boxing shows, riots etc. It may have ben scruffy but it gave you a window to a more textured underworld to the city. It showed you that not everyone was buttoned up and repressed or just pissed and lairy all the time.

I wanted to add my little flyer to that unpoliced wall of noise.

Anyway, I didn't find it. All I found was "this area is surveyed by CCTV" and "if you post your fucking flyers here, we'll take you to court and financially ruin you". I searched in vain for signs of life - anything that was going on beneath the surface. Nothing. A complete whitewash. This is a pretty town. This is a clean town. This is a mainstream town. This is a town where, if you want to tell the public something, you pay ten grand for a billboard.

So I put up a few flyers here and there. I don't expect them to survive until the morning. Then I drove over to the university and dumped the flyers by the SU notice board. Will anyone give a shit? Who knows? Gotta try.