City Brick

The bricks are densely packed on top of each other.  They have no room to breath like the sandstone and wood of the country.  Instead they stack in lines forming square corners that three times go back to the queue.  Waiting forever to get nowhere.  Collectively they mimic their original form in giant oblongs that reach to the clouds, only to find that the sky is as cold and wet as the hard ground.  If this urban jungle had a ceiling the whole city would look like a brick.  Before them, in the townships and villages of yesteryear, there were only rocks.  They would fight against being piled up so easily.  Walls on farmland, hundreds of years old, still beam with every character that makes them.  Cottage-oak and barn-timbre breath creative patterns and fine art.  Even stone brick, though still too standardised for the most part, is at least friendly in its sturdiness.  But city bricks, especially those facing centrally, that have never felt proper weather, have no discernable individuality at all.  Each wears the same suit as the rest as far as I can tell.  

Now I cannot blame the bricks for this for as far as I know they cannot make nor lay themselves.  Equally I mustn’t judge the city, for it too was just a few cottages worthy of a public house once.  In fact I see nothing worthy or noble in penance of any sort.  It also has to be said that some suburban architecture that seeps into the city walls can be vastly unique, especially in the steep conformity of the drifting style on many ages - the new cool, which will soon freeze.  Also worth highlighting is that even one of low intelligence can see the hypocrisy in the Yorkshire stone calling the red brick black.  From a distance, indeed, the fields of village Yorkshire or even Cumbria may look even more tarred with the same brush than the flats of London and in some ways the style could benefit from some more imports.  However it is in those hand made raisings, as we may call them (instead of buildings) due to their connectedness to local rock, in which fires roar.  Here 'tis the brick on the highest moor that finds success - not merely the one on the top of the ladder, or the crane as it may be these days.  

I’ve begun to ramble in metaphor you may have noticed.  And ramble I do but not in the city.  Amongst the skyscrapers and tramlines we run.  Forever trying to minimise our journey time yet never actually being anywhere.  Like the towers of Shang Hi we must always be ready to move but never enjoy doing so.  Here in the hills though we are more like the pebbles that slowly tumble down the footpath; they are always still yet have never stopped.  It can be said (despite popular phrasing) that the city always sleeps for in its fast paced anxiety it swallows time.  Like dreams you wake with hazy memories and unaccountable years.  Out in the green hills time will not be rushed.  Sit, we may, for hours with nothing happen.  Here we can live a long life in the true sense.  Every hour of daylight is an hour of genuine time and every hour of night is two with candlelight and whisky.  Hopefully forever I have forgotten the urban jungle ambition for these peaceful village meadows.  Here I lie in the golden stone made with rock rather than the red brick pathed with broken gold.