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Finding A Way In

Sunday was blessed with sunshine so I had to feel the fear and do it anyway. The fear of being caught. (I'm not a thrill-junkie but trespass is relevant to what I am doing in relation to exploring trans-gender.) It took ten minutes to ride out to the big development outside town but then an hour figuring out how to evade security which was parked up in vans at both ways I'd figured out I could get in (using google earth satellite maps). At one point I retreated up a bank and through some brambles pursued by a van after stumbling onto a road to a quarry and into the view of men in a van - and found myself in a field beside a garden centre with a dog training class in progress. I never would have believed so many people spend a Sunday afternoon attending dog training classes.


I don't like confrontation so I was scared of being questioned and told to piss off and don't come back by 'authority figures' but resumed attempts to get in and eventually just fronted it - by going in the front way. The security tower they have there was obscured at one point by trees and a stretch of the metal security fencing was down as work was ongoing there - and there was only one guy shifting traffic cones who didn't notice as I walked in. Workmen don't seem to take it personally.


 I still have a red mark on the side of my nose from pressing the camera to my eye for two hours. I felt in the zone, more so from a couple of moments of connection deep into the root motivation for being there taking these photos than anything else. There was a long excavated trench where a water pipe was being laid. Even though they are dug by machine now this is the kind of place my dad would have worked when he came to England. I climbed into it, into this hole in the earth, with the dirt piled up at its sides. The sun was shining intensely in a vivid blue sky on a cold February afternoon. It was a good place to reflect on a part of his life. Coming from rural life in Ireland to find work here, an economic migrant. Having tilled and dug and handled the earth on a small, impoverished, subsistence farm where he was born and grew up - to be a labourer in another country. His pausing, breath, seeing. Being alive, then and not now. And here is my life. Being alive, now but only for my own measure of time. These trenches resonate with a sense of mortality but not in an unpleasant way. It was lucid, helpful.


It was a heavily worked site and despite the mostly dry weather lately I sometimes walked across churned earth where my boots sunk almost completely in and were then nearly pulled off as I heaved my foot out. A memory came back from childhood.  I was maybe ten years old and my family were visiting my mum's mum in Ireland, on their little farm, a few fields, a couple of cows and some hens, no running water or utilities. And my grand-dad, on my mother's side watched as I explored that first evening, into a field where the cattle had churned the earth near the gate and my shoes sank into the mud and became stuck.  I said nothing and he said nothing.