On neon signage



If I allow my eyes to wander idly from the penates of my laptop screen and out of my office window- so starts every self-indulgent rumination in this age, I mean can you imagine how much more tedious Kafka might have been had he had a desk at a WeWork?- there is sat between the Mersey and me, the Crowne Plaza hotel. The extraneous ‘e’ presumably conjures the idea of chocolate box oak beaming, priest holes, and ghosts in the minds of unfortunate Americans but, alas, while the site is historic, standing as it does on the Prince’s Dock from whence many of the forefathers of said immigrant nation bid a last farewell to the old world, the building itself is a model of late twentieth century modernity. Its architecture and its purpose- to house those flocking to see the city that was the antenatal ward of Cool Britannia- belong defiantly to the Thatcher-Blair era; it is a melange of slightly-too-red brick, stainĂ©d steel beams, and glass that gives one a view of the emptiness and limp club sandwiches that dwell within. One part of the building, however, does not conform to this Milton Keynesian vision- the neon lighted logo that proudly identifies this particular hotel’s place as part of the Crowne Plaza family.

What invariably ends up drawing my eyes to that strange space between the river and the town is not the song of the Mersey maidens nor the gabbled and ghostly Gaelic of immigrants and emigrants long past, but this neon light. Neon has long been something I have found passingly delightful. I think it is that it speaks both of the excitingly modern and of the comfortingly retrograde. It is how we imagine the denizens of the future fight back the inexorable nightly march of darkness, but it is also that which brings light to those grainy black and white images of Times or Leicester Square. It both sets the sleek and silver route of those imagined monorails of the 2200s and advertises Bovril or cigarettes, treats which, though I adore both in their proper time and place, were taken up much more enthusiastically by my great-grandparents’ generation than my own.

Both places, the future and the past, allow for a degree of escapism by their very distance. Neon lighting has, for me, always been an enabler of such journeys of the mind- a strange gateway drug perhaps, but a benign one. There is, too, something about its glow that speaks of being alive in the buzz and glow that emanates from that curved lettering. I am sure one much more learned than I can give me a long lecture on the exact actions of that Noble Gas (though, given its breeding, I should really prefer to seek advice on its behaviour from DeBretts) but, as anyone unfortunate enough to teach me Physics at school will probably still testify, I have never had much patience for the musty mathematical explanations of science. Instead I will cast my eye on it and imagine the buzz of fireflies innumerable within- an image more real to my mind than any electron- and tread too the neon-decked highway to those days long gone and those still to come.

That light- and one brimming with life too- should be a bridge between past, present, and future, seems appropriate. When I was required to study metaphysics as part of my theology degree, I spent weeks attempting to fill my head with the start of thought processes centred on the idea of simultaneity- that concept which seeks to put on the varifocals of God and so make a mockery of the petty chronological delineations we use to separate ourselves from those who come before and after. The theory of relativity was, as my physics teachers would be, again, unsurprised to learn, was never my strong point. Now I am content to allow wandering eyes to fix, from time to time, on those tubes of neon and dwell, for a simultaneous moment or two, on the sort of Light that might shed its beams on those travellers past, future and present- of which I am, of course, one- who tread the boards of Prince’s Dock.

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