The last blog post identifies the key concept I wish to express through my piece, until now however I haven’t figured out how exactly to best portray this examination of Arcadia over time. Last week I discovered a photograph that had gone viral over the internet:
This photograph, known as the ‘Shoe Queue’ was taken in Thailand last August. The customers use their shoes to indicate there position in the line while the staff are on their lunch breaks, and then take a seat nearby until it is there turn to be served. From this I thought, ‘what is more inherently English than standing in queues?’, and my concept seemed to fit into this image. What if each pair of shoes belonged to Englishmen across time and everyone was waiting in line together to locate the images of Arcadia forged in art. The piece would begin with my character joining the rear, with someone in the 1980s ahead in the queue.
This allows for the today character, who idolises the eighties as an era where British arts thrived, to inquire about how people of today consider Arcadia to be the 80s. However ahead of the 80s pair of shoes in the queue is someone from the 50s who the former believes to have lived in the idyllic England. The queue continues with World War 1 military boots, pre-war shoes, Elizabethan shoes and eventually cave-man shoes. Indicating how each moment of our past have we identified a more appealing period of history we have nostalgia for until we reach a time when England never existed.
Between each time period/ pair of shoes, I will thread in pieces of poetry, literature and/or song, linking the two. This allows me to return to the research I conducted on Pete Doherty, as his poetry describes the England lost somewhere in time. For instance his poem “Chalky Dean” reads:
‘A cup of tea, Chalky Dean
To ease your misery
Your war, your family
Your new flat in Kilburn – been
There since 73,
Since 83, on your own
The England designed by you
Can’t be found,
And you feel so much on your own
The England life gave to you,
Is long gone away,
And you have never felt so ready
To leave and look for it.
So out you go.’
Or for instance in the video below in which Doherty offers his perspective on the absence of great in Great Britain:
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