Flyover

Leeds: Motorway City of the Seventies!

So proclaimed the franking on envelopes from there.

And for Mediaeval folk of York, it really seemed that way.

Flash, brash giant junctions, dual-carriageways and flyovers formed of steel and precast concrete.

Optimistic slabs, laid across the city, along which buses, cars and trucks would stream, driving Yorkshire on into the future.  Fuck the past.

What audacity, slashing through the terraces of Harehills and York Road, blotting out the sky from Headrow into Quarry Hill.  What violence.

And now I read they’re tearing down the flyover, whose ugliness has reached the end of useful life, diverting all the traffic from the centre.

Where went the optimism? What happened to the innocence?

End of useful life…

Time for change…

Time for the ugly and the brutal to make way.  Things are moving on.

Assertive lines scabbed and weakened. Certainties upped and gone.

Nature’s way. No cause for longing or remorse.  The time has simply come.

Let cranes erect themselves.  Let wagons bear away the corpse.

Recycle what we can, the rest can rot and crumble out of sight.

All things must pass. The sky will open up again. The air will clear.

It’s time to oust the carious.

Time to move things on.