The Impermanence Highway

We're in Keighley railway station with eight minutes to kill before the train arrives. There's an exhibition set up spanning four stationary carriages on platform 3, celebrating 200 years of rail travel. After our day trip, the kids, my parents, my wife and I put time aside to go and see it.

Just lately I've been reflecting on impermanence. Cycles of life, death, and renewal.

There are many reasons for this, landing somewhere between midlife crisis and external assaults on my inner peace; news cycles, fatherhood as a highly sensitive person, and the search for meaning. At 42 in an ever-turbulent world, impermanence helps gain perspective, recognising what I can and cannot control.

In his 'Meditations', Marcus Aurelius urges himself (the books were private diaries, journals, and trains of thought not intended for any kind of publication) to consider the expanse of time before him and the endless stretch that will unfold after he's gone, when seeking to remain balanced and present in life.

With this suggestion in mind, my sense of time has been distorted. 200 years used to feel ancient to me, but standing on the railway bridge, looking at the contemporary exhibition identity and the original train station signage, it suddenly feels difficult to comprehend that we've only had trains for that long. And how much longer we’ll have them if we don't get a handle on the biodiversity and climate crises, and our global economies, is a question worthy of deep consideration. In fact, it's these kinds of thoughts that tend to drag me into pits of despair and anxiety, thoughts that Aurelius' and Buddhist teachings have recently helped me to manage enough not to derail days at a time.

As we're standing there, my dad tells me how the advent of rail travel ultimately ended the reign of highwaymen. The rich, as ever, were early beneficiaries of this new transport system, which took them and their loot off the bumpy old roads they’d been forced to travel in horse-drawn carts, rendering them sitting ducks for road-robbers. It also probably saved them from future hemorrhoid unrest and a lot of time in the process.

The exhibition is splendid, displaying the first known drawing of a train by a child who watched the first passenger and freight steam traction train service set off on the Stockton & Darlington Railway. This is a surreal, magical experience as I stare at glee that shines out of this pencil sketch, spilling the boy’s wonder onto a page next to gorgeous, old-fashioned handwriting. But stepping out of the historic Keighley station on the iconic Worth Valley Railway depicted in The Railway Children, into a litter-addled street is sobering. I love my hometown. Its heritage, its people, its soul, but walking up a street on which I spent a good portion of my childhood calls upon the perspective of impermanence once more. Here, just a few decades ago, I spent many happy hours here, enjoying a gigantic toy shop, two dedicated art supplies stores, two video libraries, and an array of other assorted, independent boutiques. Today, like a tragic number of high streets in the UK, vape shops, takeaways, nail bars, and cash converters tell a story of an economic, political, and cultural robbery. There is not one bookstore in the town centre, unless we count The Works, or the corners of charity shops.

These newer businesses have every right to be here, and it’s preferred to derelict or empty units, but their intense consumerist purpose, casting their neon backlit brands into the mucky puddles on the pavement below, paints a stark picture in which the distinction between the highwaymen and the rich has disappeared completely. The town, like so many others without the spoils of middle-class money or authority investment, is infected with a tangible social sickness. Put simply, people don’t come here the way they used to. The hidden gems that can be found around the town – Grind and Groove Records, The Kindred Bizarre, and the tranquil, welcoming World Peace Café – are harmed indirectly as a succession of national chain stores close their Keighley branches, giving people less and less reasons to knock around town any longer than they have to. My mum reports these closures, lamenting the resultant loss of community. The lifeblood of small towns like these is in their people, their presence, and connection, face to face, as news is shared in person. But if towns are reduced to supermarkets and synthetic smoking appliances, that connection ceases, and the chatter seeps into insidious social media arenas where it grows thorns and points the finger of blame at others.

My creativity could never have taken the shape it did were it not for Keighley. Everything it gave and lacked. We all ran it down in conversations over beers in pubs, but if anyone else disparaged it, we kicked off and defended it because we loved it unconditionally. We adored its oddities and gritty ways. Those railways took me to places further afield where I began to see what else was possible, what could be, how other places did things, and yet every time we juddered back into the station, I felt a warm welcome home. But that spirit is desaturated in this moment. So, I think of impermanence. I think of the shifts over time, of generations long before mine who suffered in their own way, in their own version of scarcity, only for the sun to rise against the odds. It will rise again.

And as ever, as I stem the sadness brought on by the fear and uncertainty in the air, I conjure an image of what might yet come to pass, employing my imagination to restore balance to my thoughts. High streets nationwide are in crisis. The internet has shafted retail prospects from all angles, the economy is struggling to draw breath, division is the order of the day, while our elite claim ever-bigger dollops of cream from all of us. Nobody yet knows what comes next, or how to find out. But we’ve seen, time and again, how great ideas and art emerge when backs are against the wall, so I calm my racing mind and remember the cyclical nature of such beleaguered towns.

Days after the visit to Keighley, I begin drawing parallels with the creative industry. We’re weathering our own retail crisis, the same spiritual reckoning seen in troubled town centres across the country. Freelancers and agencies alike sigh and pace their metaphorical shop floors, peering into the street, hoping for something. Confidence is down, and when the door beeps, when people do come in, most leave again without so much as a courteous ‘thank you’ on the way out. So, fear and cynicism again. Become the most irresistible boutique, the swaggering corporate behemoth, or fuck off. OK, maybe not quite, but it’s bloody difficult for many as the squeeze tightens.

But… impermanence. Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome at a time when plagues and many wars could have rendered his life a waking nightmare. And yet he found it within himself to recognise the passing nature of all things. A little digging into the happenings of 1825, when the boy, full of wonder, drew that first train, teaches me that seventy banks in England failed in what has come to be known as ‘the financial panic’. And here we are, writing another chapter, a robotic revolution happening right here around us, in our fucking pockets without any kind of consent. All those big tech parasites feeding off us lot down here, in Keighley, in the creative industry, draining our rivers and our high streets and calling it progress. And what can we do about it? Until I can report back on that, I’ll just continue to create about it, and use the perspective of impermenance.