In one of his Guardian Weekend scribbles the excellent David Shrigley had a cartoon that was just text saying:
Heaven
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Hell
You'll have to take my word for it; I can't for the life of me find the cartoon on the web, or on his quite frankly poorly catalogued website. The above is a pic from one of his exhibitions, a pretty nice sideswipe at that charlatan Damien Hirst, I think.
Anyway, I was thinking of that cartoon as I trundled down south from Edinburgh today after a dissolute weekend. I'll be kind and assume Shrigley was perhaps talking just about the scenery. If so, hell probably starts sometime just outside of York. It is a beautiful train ride, through the Borders and the Yorkshire Moors and then: hundreds of miles soulless out of town shopping, the same shops, the same indentikit buildings, the same neon nothingness. It is like in a Hanna Barbera shows when, I don't know, Hong Kong Phooey is speeding along and the same background whizzes behind him over and over. Oddly comforting, though, to the American; the sprawl looks like home.
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