A disregarded wonder of my home town. |
Ring Road There’s a ring road in my home town, a great looping, swooping design of concrete walls and flyovers, encircling the ancient heart of the city and visible as a serpentine bracelet, modern and brash, unashamed to be only fifty years old yet disregarded, reviled by some, cradling as it does a thousand years of history in a postwar, naked, grey statement of the new. Ride the asphalt roller coaster, arching above the streets, then burrowing suddenly underground, joining and leaving at intersections that scare visitors silly, traffic merging, slotting together like a forty mile an hour zipper, the joy of the hardened local. Or stand and gaze at a soaring overpass, an amalgam of elegance and grace on massive columns bedecked in multifarious colour and style graffiti, and, on one slablike bridge support, a tribute to the dormitory town, Bedworth, joined at the hip now to our northern suburbs, one word that speaks of the spirit that proclaims identity in the world we built, “Beduff,” it says, a perfect encapsulation of loyalty and prickly pride. Twenty seven years I was away, oh, city of my birth; I never acquired the warm syrup of your beloved accent, but I suspect that I learned in that long exile to understand your beauty beyond the stained glass warehouse raised in place of the burnt out shell of the cathedral alongside, the medieval streets, the watchmakers' houses, the precinct with its precocious malls and ramps and pigeons, even the car parks, supermarkets, all nestled within that glorious hula hoop, Coventry’s secret glory, the ring road. Line Count: 46 |