oddbeautiful

I don’t usually cover that sad vale of tears we know and love as reality; indeed I do my best to avoid the bloody place/state like the plague. I love the abstract. One day I hope to retire there, to a fractured cluttered bungalow on Alzheimer’s Lane.

These following images, however, are of that realm…and some other place inside someone’s mind - conterminously. I took them on a mobile phone, so the quality is not great. I make absolutely no apologies for their size; in fact I wish that I’d had a better camera with more pixels. If you can’t see them properly, then click to view them on their own, or save them with a right click and zoom in with your chosen image viewer.

This was once the Havelock Hotel in sunny Sunderland. Passing through one day, I spotted its demolition-in-progress. I’m glad that I did. I made a cursory search on the net to see if anyone else had caught this moment, but it seems not. I ought not to keep these to myself. They are truly oddbeautiful.

 I don’t know whether it was a shabby B&B, or a bail hostel, or something worse before it closed, but whoever occupied these half-rooms above and below left his or her mark. It’s odd because it was an insane ranting jumble that hadn’t ever been painted or papered over. Beautiful because it was only revealed to the daylight (and my mobile’s camera sensor) for a short while. Fanciful, I know, but I saw parallels between the half-wrecked state of the building, and the psyche of the unknown author.

Like I said, these may only exist here, and in some demolition company's records. Probably not though. The chance image is almost universal in these days of the dea( r )th of the word. I just couldn’t keep them to myself any longer. I wonder what was on the walls already taken down, what it was like to stand in those rooms, and how it felt to write those words.