We Followed the Pylons into the Country

Walked out past Hove, past Portslade and into the strange kingdom of Southwick. Only a short walk away from here, but decades back from the city. This was suburbia, a silent place, bird-song mostly, and empty too, appealingly eerie under the first spring-like skies we've had this year. Old men washing their cars with a studied intensity and oddly hypnotic movements - and other men painting fences. Suburbia was a place without women. Small parades of shops, all closed, selling vacuum cleaners and other things I wouldn't be interested in, plagues of hairdressers and Martins Newsagents. In one such convenience store, a teenager, obviously the son of the proprietor, stood watching the football on a small TV. His father stood behind the counter, gave me my change for a can of Diet Coke with a preoccupied air. I wondered if they had had some kind of argument.
The pylons themselves were clustered behind high fences, towering above the labyrinthine squares of allotments. We followed the path round and came to a - I'm not sure what it would be called - an electricity station? A Pylon generator? It was all locked up and fenced off anyway, 'danger-of-death' signs hanging from the wires.
We followed the pylons into the country and onto the Downs. Horses in muddy paddocks, footpaths running through thickets, vast fields opening themselves out under vast and jewel-blue skies, and everywhere the pylons, slightly hissing gods, snakes made out of metal and poison and power. Urban myths, leukaemia clusters. All ground underneath pylons has an odd and haunted air.
We delved further on, along the bottom of s slope, one side bordered by the last houses of Brighton. An oddly dream-like country, the kind of landscape one finds sometimes in surrealist paintings from the mid-20th century. We finally came to the ring road surrounding Brighton and woke up, back to the sadness of Sundays.
The afternoon seems a long time ago now.