The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

1.

At the wedding reception of my wife’s youngest cousin, I fell into conversation with an affable middle-aged man who worked for a power company in Scotland. While eating chocolate mousse at a table near the dance floor, we talked of our respective professions and Ian told me that it was his job to install electricity pylons in the Scottish countryside, deciding not only on their location but also specifying their height, size and strength.

In his spare time, he was a founding member of the Pylon Appreciation Society, a group which, despite its meagre resources and frequent opprobrium, organised walks along power lines and looked forward to a time when curiosity about electricity transmission would be granted a place in the pantheon of legitimate interests. With three other members of the society, he had recently undertaken a trip to Japan, where he had been amazed by the nimbleness of the lines strung in the higher wooded valleys west of Tokyo. He had visited South Africa the previous year, where, he said, many pylons were of a highly unusual construction, or at least could seem so to European or American eyes. He described one pylon near Johannesburg which, with wide-open arms, no identifiable base and connectors fixed at a diagonal, matched none of my existing notions of how a transmission tower might be shaped.

Ian pointed out that whereas our culture openly invites us to be aware of birds and historic churches, it places no comparable emphasis on pylons, despite the fact that that they often rival, for ingenuity and beauty, many of the more established objects of our curiosity. He cited as an example Loch Awe in Scotland, a famously picturesque and romantic tourist destination dominated by the ruins of the fourteenth-century Kilchurn Castle, whose grounds are nevertheless crossed by a run of 400-kilowatt pylons linking the hydroelectric power station at Ben Cruachan with the Glasgow suburbs. On postcards of the loch and its castle, however, the electricity lines are almost invariably airbrushed out, so that the scenery pretends to a fictitious innocence, the bare hills and unsullied lake being symptomatic of what Ian (having grown increasingly garrulous under the influence of brandy) condemned as the garden-gnome mentality of sentimental Luddites.

2.

We exchanged addresses, and I largely forgot about our meeting. Then, eight months later, Ian dropped me a note to say that he was planning to visit England for a working holiday, in order to trace the route of one of the United Kingdom’s most important power lines, a circuit responsible for providing the capital with two thirds of its peak-time electricity requirement, and connected at one end to a nuclear plant on the Kent coast and at the other to a substation in East London. He would be travelling on foot and by car and wondered if I might like to join him.

So we met at dawn on a glacial midwinter morning, at one side of the nuclear plant that dominates Dungeness beach. We were both warmly dressed, and carried sandwiches and chocolate in our rucksacks. Despite the early hour, the station was at an apex of activity, poised to fulfil the imminent demands of five million kettles and boilers. Some 750,000 years after our species first mastered the use of fire, the nuclear reactor represented our most advanced and cerebral attempt to keep the darkness at bay. It was generating 1,110 megawatts of electricity, yet emitting nothing but a high-pitched hum, appearing to be fuelled – unlike its untidy equivalents in coal and oil – by little more than the impenetrable and immaculate logic of advanced physics and chemistry.

Nevertheless, it was in a worrying state. Much of its exposed piping was rusting in the sea air, and a large cloth had been used to bandage up the base of a cooling tower. It seemed a particular folly that the English had been allowed to involve themselves with fission technology, for what people could be less appropriate to toil in this precise and rule-bound industry, given their instinctive distrust of authority, their love of irony and their aversion to bureaucratic procedure. It was evident that the field should more wisely have been left entirely in the hands of the Teutonic races.

There were 542 pylons and just over 175 kilometres of line between Dungeness and the endpoint in Canning Town in East London. Ian and I planned to make the journey in two days, whereas the electricity, travelling at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second, needed a mere 0.00058 of a second. In less than the time it took me to imagine that the four cables emerging from the side of the station were sending their energy through to the capital’s butchers, antique shops and nurseries, they had already done so – a notion rendered all the more implausible by the barren shingle beach on which the plant was sited, where any reference to mankind, let alone a teeming city, seemed implacably alien.

3.

We began walking beneath the line in a north-westerly direction. Ian was pleased to note that it was being carried by the L6 variety of pylon, which he judged to be one of the most attractive varieties in the country, with legs which were widely splayed apart, a lattice structure which was only minimally braced and arms which tapered gently downwards as if to acknowledge their load, features which set the L6 apart from, among others, the newer, heavy-footed and thickset L12 model, towards which my companion bore a particular antipathy.

Ian drew out a pocket encyclopedia of the pylons of the world, published by a South Korean press, featuring examples in every conceivable size and shape, and which served to suggest that there are nearly as many tower designs as there are distinct human personalities, and moreover, that our eyes are in the habit of assessing these inanimate structures by some of the same criteria we resort to when evaluating our flesh-and-blood acquaintances. In different species, I noted varieties of modesty or arrogance, honesty or shiftiness, and in one 150-kilovolt type in ubiquitous use in southern Finland I even detected a coquettish sexuality in the way the central mast held out a delicate hand to its conductor wire. The unspoken challenge for transmission engineers seemed to be to fashion a pylon which would subliminally read as possessing much the same blend of psychological and physical virtues as one might search for in an ideal friend or lover.

Although I had been alive for a troublingly long time, I had neglected ever to step under an electricity line, so I was surprised to hear the intense noise it released, as though strips of tin foil were being blown furiously around a cavernous fan oven. Forty thousand kilovolts were running along the line, sparking an excited chemical reaction in the moist air as nitrogen and oxygen particles split apart. The corona discharge, as the phenomenon was called, prompted Ian to think of his recently concluded fifteen-year marriage. He explained that it was to this crackling sound, under the line running between Torness power station and the outskirts of Edinburgh, that he had first kissed the woman whom he had been abruptly left by a month previously.

Ian told me that, on an early date, he had driven Megan to some pylons to show her that the air around them can be so charged with volts that it can spontaneously ignite a small electrical device. He brought out a fluorescent strip from the back of his car and held it up above his head, the household bulb flickering into life as it drew invisibly on the airborne current, the fragile vessel of milky luminous glass lighting up the couple as they moved towards their first embrace against the inky backdrop of the Lammermuir Hills.

In the end it had been a lack of shared interests which drew them apart, Ian concluded, gravely and succinctly.

To shift the mood, he presently tilted back his head and called my attention to some small cigar-shaped cylinders fixed to the conductor wires at either end of the pylon under which we were standing. He told me that their inventor, George Stockbridge, an engineer from California, had in the 1920s observed that the length of cable which each pylon could safely carry was limited by the cable’s tendency to vibrate dangerously even in light winds. It was Stockbridge’s achievement to show that this movement could effectively be stilled if a precisely calibrated vibration was applied in the opposing direction a short distance from every mast. He had devoted a decade and, some of his colleagues later surmised, some of his sanity, to fabricating a tube consisting of two heavy weights separated by a spring, which resonated at a different frequency from the conductor and thereby ensured the stability of the pylon as a whole. There seemed to be few man-made innovations whose creation had not exacted a disproportionate degree of sacrifice and ingenuity.

As we continued, Ian informed me that our electricity line was composed of ninety-one strands of aluminium cable twisted together as in a rope, a specification which placed it at the more imposing end of the spectrum, minor loads being generally carried along by lines having as few as seven strands to them. I also learnt that because a cross section of a line reveals a configuration reminiscent of the pattern made by a cut through a floral stem, various thicknesses of cable are named after different flowers. A seven-strand aluminium cable is known as a poppy, a nineteen-strand one as a laurel, a thirty-seven-strand as a hyacinth, a sixty-one-strand as a marigold and a 127-strand as a bluebonnet. Our slow progress to London would unfold in the linear shadow of a cowslip.

4.

Following the pylons meant stepping off the usual routes in order to wander at unorthodox angles through the landscape, over fences, through woods and under railway arches. We were reminded of the range of alternative networks which lie like a faded script under the dominant thoroughfares of cars and trains: the courses inscribed by water pipes, gas mains, fibre-optic cables, aircraft, Roman roads, badgers and foxes – axes that bypass the expected centres of interest and only announce their intentions through subtle or unfathomable clues, like a run of masts, some droppings or a grey box partially overgrown with ivy at the perimeter of a field.

At this stage in its journey, the line kept well away from humans. It was visible from rear bathrooms and garage windows. A glimpse could be had of it from the train to Dover, and from a bedroom at Pickney Bush Farm. Yet the pylons said nothing of where they had come from or were going, this mystery typical of a landscape mottled with mute industrial objects, though one regretted how easily a placard could have been fixed to them, inscribed by a poet of modern life, who could, in a few lyrical couplets, have shared with passing ramblers some of the meaning and direction of this electrical peregrination.

In a swathe of dense forest known as Stockshill Wood, we came across a red estate car rocking forcefully of its own accord by a narrow path, and Ian remarked that the close observer of power lines must of necessity become a frequent witness to sides of human sexuality which find no easy expression within the parameters of our supposedly liberated society.

Sometimes we thought of death, for there were constant admonishments not to climb the pylons, though starker object lessons were provided by the many animals that lay electrocuted near the base of towers. Swans were empirically in the greatest danger, for an inattentive deity had located their eyes on the sides of their head, with the result that in the dark and in heavy fog they frequently crashed into the lines at full speed. It was normally only the leader of a flock who succumbed, the rest being warned off by the sound of a twelve-kilogram body hitting a cable at fifty kilometres per hour. Local dogs and foxes knew enough about the grid to keep a close eye out, sometimes lying in wait on moonless nights at the bases of pylons, where encounters would ensue between dazed swans, their heads severely distended, and frantic dogs who, fed up with the monotony of their tinned diets, rediscovered the ancestral pleasures of masticating on blood and feather.

I noticed that Ian often measured the distance between spans using an unfamiliar instrument equipped with a tracking wheel on its side, and that he afterwards jotted down notations in a leather-bound notebook. I spotted cream-coloured pages covered with a latticework of algebraic equations whose incomprehensibility had the incidental benefit of freeing me to admire them from a purely aesthetic point of view, as the uninstructed might appreciate a musical score or a piece of classical Arabic.

Noting my puzzlement, Ian told me that he was calculating the force of gravity at work on the cable, and that in his equation l stood for the length of the span, w for the effective weight per unit of length, and T_H for the constant along the line. He explained that transmission engineers were unusually blessed in having at their fingertips a highly precise, efficient and universal vocabulary with which to convey even the most labyrinthine electrical scenarios, so that from Iran to Chile, Ψ referred to electric flux, µ to permeability, to permeance, and ά to the temperature coefficient of resistance.

I was struck by how impoverished ordinary language can be by contrast, requiring its user to arrange inordinate numbers of words in tottering and unstable piles in order to communicate meanings infinitely more basic than anything related to an electrical network. I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers’ example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states- a code which might help us to feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations.

There seemed to be no shortage of feelings to which the engineers’ brevity might be profitably applied. If only a letter could have been identified, for example, with which elegantly to allude to the strange desire one occasionally has to elicit love from people one does not even particularly like (β, say); or the irritation evoked when acquaintances seem to be more worried about one’s illnesses than one is oneself (?); or the still vaguer sense one can sometimes have that different periods of one’s life are in coexistence, so that one would have only to return to one’s childhood home to find everything the same as it once was, with no one having died and nothing having changed (?). Possessed of such a notational system, one would be able to compress the free-floating nostalgia and anxiety of a typical Sunday afternoon into a single pellucid and unambiguous sequence (β + ω + ξ × 2) and attract sympathy and compassion from the friends around whom one might otherwise have grunted unhelpfully.

5.

We walked on to Canterbury. The tourist itinerary advised us to have a look at the cathedral and the remains of a Roman villa, but we headed instead to a residential neighbourhood in the northeastern suburbs, through which the authorities, reluctant to let modernity intrude on the city’s medieval skyline, had insisted on routing the cables. It felt peculiar to see pylons, which not many kilometres back had stepped magisterially across isolated forests, now landing in backyards and gardens and being co-opted into family life, like a stranger who, only moments after entering a house, is asked if he might help to carry the vacuum cleaner up the stairs. Washing was tethered to one pylon, a child’s bicycle leaned against another. The electricity for Trafalgar Square ran over a group of deck chairs and an encrusted barbecue set.

Eight pylons later, however, the line was back in the wilderness. It bisected the vastness of Clowes Wood, then swung west towards the marshes of the Thames estuary. We walked for three hours in the rain until the line took us to the edge of the town of Sittingbourne, where we decided to stop in the hope of finding something sweet to eat. It was a place where, as often and inexplicably happens in small communities, everyone had chosen to enter the same profession – in this case, hairdressing – as a result of which most enterprises appeared to be close to bankruptcy. Luckily, we found a teashop advertising homemade cakes and what was termed an Old World atmosphere, and took our seats at the back. How cheerful one would have needed to be in such a place in order not to regret existence. A woman wearing a historically styled bonnet arrived with a pot of tea. ‘I’ll let one of you be mum,’ she declared – which for a time prevented either Ian or me from taking the initiative.

She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving behind what seemed to be her daughter, a girl in her late teens who, also sporting a historical bonnet, was sweeping the floor with an expression as distressed as it was beautiful. Despite the counterweight of two centuries’ worth of romantic art and song crystallising the desire to escape the darkness of small towns, Sittingbourne remained for her an insurmountable foe, as stubborn as the congealed sauce which she was doing her best to wipe from the floor – her struggle representative of a greater, losing battle against the resistant forces of her life.

We drank our tea, paid the bill, and continued on to the town of Lower Halstow, where, as the evening tightened its grip, we took rooms in a hotel adjacent to a pylon. It was to be an uncomfortable night. Trying to fall asleep only served to confront me with an obdurate wakefulness, but any attempts to get up at once brought me face to face with a yet deeper exhaustion. At two in the morning, I switched on the light and took a formal decision to read until daybreak, so as spitefully to acquaint the wakeful side of me with the full consequences of its insurrection. Unable to concentrate on anything of substance, I looked in the drawer of the bedside table and found a panoply of brochures. They revealed that the hotel, which one could otherwise have taken for an aberration, in fact belonged to a chain with affiliates in thirty-four countries. Comparable charm and service were promised as far afield as Denmark and Venezuela, the entire globe seeming promptly smaller and more compromised as a result.

It was at least a relief to know that every one of these hostelries was connected to an electricity network. At that very moment, a sister hotel in Bucharest was drawing power from a station – probably the nuclear plant at Cernavod – to chill the minibars in its fifty-two en suite rooms. An inn in Uruguay was lighting its twenty-four-hour mini-golf course with current produced by a hydroelectric station at Salto Grande. And in the case of an Alpine lodge in the Tyrol, a pylon with a dense lattice construction had even sneaked into one corner of the brochure picture. I concluded that there were few troubling situations in contemporary life from which one could not distract oneself by wondering where the electricity had arrived from.

A storm began outside. The line became admirable out in the marshes, suffering the darkness and the North Sea winds with equanimity. A lone lamp was switched on in the garden, at the far end of a leaf-littered pool. It swayed in the wind, a satisfyingly obvious symbol of stoicism in adversity. I thought of the other signs which might still be illuminated across this part of Kent, in front of petrol stations, motels, pet-food suppliers and garden centres.

I thought too of our indifference towards the electricity network. The only humans truly in any position to feel grateful towards it were likely to have died a long time ago, in the 1950s, for it is rare to admire a technology which was already well established when we were children. The bulb is dependent for its prestige on a contrastive grown-up memory of the candle, the telephone on that of the carrier pigeon, the plane on that of the steamship, suggesting that histories of technology should usefully identify not only when a particular innovation was introduced, but also, and more interestingly, when it was forgotten – when it disappeared from collective consciousness through familiarity, becoming as commonplace and unremarkable as a pebble or a cloud.

It is hard to say when this stream of cheerless and increasingly nonsensical thoughts came to an end, but it was dawn when I awoke, slumped in an armchair, wrapped in my coat, with the copy of the hotel brochure open on my lap at an entry on a mountain-side hotel in Andorra, almost certainly powered by a hydroelectric plant near La Massana.

6.

We checked out early and regained our line. It was so dark that the day appeared to have given up on itself. Along the roadside, street-lamps flickered, their automatic sensors torn between respecting the hour and bowing to the implausibly low light-levels they detected.

Our line intersected with the route of the old Roman Road into London, but rather than heading directly into the capital, it instead meandered around the Medway towns of Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester. The horizon closed in. Settlements leaked into one another, creating a landscape without discernible beginnings or ends. We passed equestrian centres, schools of osteopathy and flower-bedecked roadside shrines to young men with oiled-back hair and young women with startled pleading eyes. There were boastful signs in shop windows – ‘Bring us your quote – we’ll beat it’ – and others which spoke with poetic concision of intrigues sufficient to animate an epic drama: ‘Car wash: under new better management’. In a launderette in Chatham, we ate sandwiches to the comforting smells and rhythms of drying bed linen.

Next, the line passed through North Halling, and a mock-Georgian housing estate where Ian spotted that three of the houses had small brass windmills in their driveways. He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics from Rotterdam University, Anne Mieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on these rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspects into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. It was works such as Abraham Funerius’s Het Bolwerk Rijzenhoofd te Amsterdam and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Molen bij Wijk bij Duurstede which had inspired the Dutch to accord decisive respect and aesthetic attention to their life-giving machines.

Ian concluded that it would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. He hoped that photographs of conductors might in the future hang over dining tables and that someone might write a libretto for an opera set along the grid.

The line of pylons finally pierced its way into London through a discrete underbelly of ragged fields to the east of Swanscombe, and threaded its way through Northfleet to the banks of the Thames. There, beside a football stadium, the pylons ran up against their most imposing natural hurdle yet: a 1.3-kilometre crossing over the tidal river. To prevent the conductors from sagging dangerously over a span this long, three ordinary pylons would normally have been required, but a busy shipping lane precluded the sinking of piers, so the two pylons nearest the banks were left with little choice but to grow upwards, to a height of 190 metres, taller than a forty-storey skyscraper, their ruby-red summit lights barely visible through the mist. We felt proud to see a line which we had known for so long take a most grown-up step.

But there was to be no particular reward for this exertion, because once on the other side, the line was immediately driven into a landscape of warehouses, storage depots and cheap hotels, one of them boasting three channels of adult entertainment and a view of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge.

It was time for lunch and we thought of the food courts of the Lakeside Shopping Centre, but Ian pointed out that if we pressed on, we would find the line running against the edge of the bird sanctuary at Rainham Marshes. Owned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the reserve was an important resting place for migratory species, and had just opened a visitor centre, serving pumpkin soup and carrot cake, staples of cafeterias in high-minded institutions the world over.

Yet, despite a comfortable chair, an unimpeded view over the marsh and an extended perambulation, on the very balcony where we sat, by a common crossbill (an unfairly named bird), Ian fell into a dejected mood. Everywhere there were signs of the prosperity of the bird watchers’ society: it had its own publishing sideline, it ran gift shops, it traded in tea towels. Next to the coffee machine, a large plastic robin with beseeching eyes urged patrons to drop money through a slit in its head. The organisation had seized on a minor occasion of individual gratification at seeing a bird and managed to transform it into a formalised and commercially robust activity, one which moreover tacitly claimed a distinct moral superiority over other leisure pursuits. It had done the archetypal work of culture: taking on an unformed, isolated interest and affording it a communal language and respectability.

How woefully immature the Pylon Appreciation Society seemed by comparison. It had only a handful of members, it had no cafeteria, it could barely afford to send out a newsletter. As a result, a sympathetic response to an electricity pylon remained for most of us a haphazard and unsupported impulse, an epiphany which might last for a minute on a drive along a motorway or on a walk along a moor, but to which no prestige could be attached and from which little of merit could emerge.

In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty. He contrasted the nostalgic devotees of old-fashioned poetry with those whom he judged to be true contemporary poetic spirits, deserving of the title less by virtue of anything they had actually written than for their willingness to approach the world without prejudice or partiality. The former camp, he averred, ‘see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own’.

7.

Our line was running into problems. Whereas in the countryside it had often enjoyed straight runs of a dozen or more pylons, the increasing density of the city placed constant obstacles in its path. In setting down its feet, it had to bring to bear all the tact of a bulky man negotiating an object-strewn carpet. It tiptoed around gas storage tanks and railway lines, paused to make way for sewage works and crouched to avoid the wings of Embraers at City Airport. A few miles from central London, in an industrial estate which was home to a Jacuzzi importer and a cake manufacturer, the line prepared to disappear underground for good.

There was, unsurprisingly, no fanfare to mark the moment, no acknowledgement of the chalk downs and the grazing meadows, the backyards of Canterbury and the geese of the Kent marshes. Before the power could enter London’s circuits, it first had to be tamed by a series of porcelain insulators, whose convex, columnar forms recalled the ritual objects of the celestial liturgy of a primitive tribe. At the end of one particularly tall example, a single thick black rubber tube, containing the steadied force of the entire line, slipped unceremoniously into a small hole in the ground, unknown to almost all of its five million end-users.

Ian had a train to catch. We confided to each other that we were unexpectedly sorry to say good-bye, feeling that we had experienced things together which would be hard to share with others.

In its new, modest incarnation, the line was now bound for a substation concealed on Shaftesbury Avenue at the rear of a Chinese restaurant specialising in Schezuan peppered duck. From there, its electricity would be distributed to the cosmetics counter at Boots on Oxford Street, to the cash machines of Tottenham Court Road, to the headquarters of British Petroleum in St James’s Square and to a sign outside a club on Brewer Street advertising the services of a group of Estonians pole-dancing in the basement.

Along its subterranean course, the line would dissolve into ever smaller forces, from a prodigious 400 kilovolts to a more moderate 275 and thence, in the residential streets, to a placid 132, until it emerged from sockets, shorn of all impetuousness, at a mere 240 volts. As it passed, the current would perform the ultimate act of generosity: it would absolve its consumers from having to give it any thought, it would ensure that none of them would ever need to dwell on the idea of a run of steel-grey pylons tracing their origins back across the landscape to the southern coast, to a monolithic power station on the edge of a shingle beach, enduring the mutinous Channel waves and a corrosive wind while emitting a steady and ominous hum.