MONDAY A very important day. Not just for me, but for the future of this country. I am scribbling some ideas (literary and spatial) in my monogrammed Moleskine memepad and I have to say they look BRILLIANT.
Obviously, as they’re scribbles, they only look brilliant to me. When people realise what I’m ‘saying’ with wobbly pen lines, thinking doodles and question marks they will definitely agree. These scribbles will carry a great deal of cultural weight in posterity as they represent an auteur’s impression, which is always more interesting than the artist’s version.
TUESDAY I’m working the scribbles up into a series of ‘conceptual blockouts’ to communicate more immediately the true essence of my scheme. Details of the scheme remain secret for now, but when it’s time to communicate, these blockouts will be invaluable.
WEDNESDAY Articulate my conceptual blockouts with enigmatic captions, or ‘clutch points’. It’s important at this stage not to lock down too many conclusions about how the vision could be taken forward, so for extra safety I leave the clutch points in neutral.
THURSDAY Some bastard close to me has leaked my scheme to the Creative on Sunday! I decide to spoil their exclusive by confirming to Epic Space Online that I am indeed the creator of TWITTERBOROUGH, a futuristic suburb near Corley Services on the M6.
Twitterborough will be part of a series of grand projets to mark the transformation of Ancient Mercia into a trimmed-down, fit-for-purpose England. Proper values. Astonishing architecture. World-class users. Yeah, good shit like that will be standard when Tamworth reigns again as capital city.
‘Back to the eighth century!’ That’s the motto of New Mercia. Unfortunately this motto has attracted a number of inappropriate would-be constituents: nutty religious types, law and order fetishists, time travellers. Although nobody’s complaining about the T-shirt sales.
The Mercia/Coalition Liaison Group is making great headway with its draft paper for the geographical rationalisation of England. Admittedly no actual timetable has yet been set by the government for the return of regional development agencies (or as they’ll once again be known, kingdoms) but it will be ‘as soon as practically possible’. That sounds pretty encouraging to me.
Meanwhile, Epic Space Online and everyone else is impressed by the sheer scale of Twitterborough. It will be about the size of a small nationally owned forest, and a short distance from Junction 3. Once the forest has been bought and the middle’s been scooped out it will be converted into a massive ‘actual space’. This will echo stylistically the vast tweet-sprinkled tundra of real Twitter, but in ‘natural 3-D actuality’.
Girdling that will be a rich blend of luxury living, niche monetising opportunities and high-end corporate filler. This might all on paper look like a terrible idea, but at a later stage we’ll put in some water-saving, energy-scrimping bollocks and then it’ll be an amazing beacon of environmental truth.
There’ll be rare wading birds, exotic lichen, rescued otters and an OBE in it too, I shouldn’t wonder.
FRIDAY Press conference to launch Twitterborough as a ‘destination brand’. Everyone suitably impressed by the early bar and nibbles, and by the huge 3-D renderings of the scheme’s Intelligent Middle Area, with its glittering necklace of ‘twitterspheres’.
These are opaque foam-framed hyperglazed meet-up pods, encouraging random clouds of online chatmates to ‘coalesce together’ in the real world. Comfortable surroundings, brilliant catering on request, please ask the avatar for a brochure. They will be crammed with earnest media types just chilling out and exchanging ideas in a semi-private little world of connectivity, hysteria and despair.
I’ve opened channels to some Swiss euthanasia clinics, just to see if there’s any synergy worth exploring here.
SATURDAY Unbelievable. Our stupid executive masterplanners for the ‘electronic village’ bit of Twitterborough have submitted a very weak proposal. ‘Urban squares’? In a village? Idiots.
Their ‘frission statement’ is riddled with inconsistencies. ‘We aim to create a real community in which people will want to live different stages of their lives, yeah, which is why we’re proposing sustainable neighborhoods (sic)’.
Wrong. Firstly, we want people to be living through one stage of their life but with many serviceable aspects of that life, thanks. Secondly, it all sounds so vulgar. Nothing says ‘non-u’ more stridently than ‘neighborhoods’.
SUNDAY Newspaper review in the recliner. Good piece on Twitterborough by Darcy Farquear’say. ‘A morally ambivalent elephant in the room’ he calls it, which seems fair.
January 27, 2011