Gaydar isn't a thing. We don't have a psychic ability that enables us to secretly work out who does and doesn't sleep on the far side of the bed. Heterosexuals don't seem to know this, which is why persist in pointing at a random man on the train and asking me, "is he?" I don't know Linda, I'll turn him upside down and see if he's got HOMO written on the sole of his foot like Buzz Lightyear.
On the other hand, Gaydar absolutely is a thing. I cannot tell you how many times the BF have walked past a complete stranger in Sainsburys and then turned and exchanged a pursed lips smirk. I once worked with a lad who had a girlfriend and a football season ticket and literally the minute I talked to him I thought "one of us!" and yes, sure enough, two years later he came out. I sometimes wonder if I should've taken him to one side and had a quiet word and saved him a lot of time and heartache.
I am aware that these are two contradictory positions. Let's say that Gaydar is like Deanna Troi's empathic powers; it works when it's convenient to the plot.
The reason I bring all this up is I was stood on the platform at Sundbybergs Centrum alongside a man who didn't so much activate my Gaydar; more wander up and slap me round the face with a DVD of The Devil Wears Prada. For a start, he was a middle aged man out for the day with his elderly mother. I couldn't understand what they were saying to one another - they were talking Swedish, obviously - but I totally got the vibe of a nice man who cares deeply about his mother. She was wearing a t-shirt, slacks and a baseball cap, and he was wearing... I'm going to go to a new paragraph for this.
This gentleman was wearing a matching shirt and trouser ensemble beneath a large straw hat. It was made of black silk and covered with a white chain motif that crisscrossed him from head to toe in diagonals. In his fist was a handbag. Not just a handbag; a handbag with exactly the same motif as his outfit, except instead of it being black and white, it was peach and white. This gentleman was the definition of fabulous and I loved him for dressing a million times better than he needed to. His mother seemed utterly oblivious to his radiance, otherwise I'm sure she'd have dressed to match. (I did of course take a photo of this fantastic homosexual but I wouldn't want to put him on the internet for people to gawp at. I have instead retained it to cheer me up on dark days.)
"But Scott!" I hear you cry. "You don't know for certain this man was gay! You're operating on vibes and lazy stereotypes. I expected better of you!"
Here's the clincher. When we got on the train, I stood in the vestibule as usual, because I was only travelling one stop, and he happened to sit in front of me. He pulled out his phone and the wallpaper was a 1950s glamour shot of an extremely muscular man wearing only a thong. It was so flagrantly queer I actually let out a gasp. Because I'm pretty gay myself.
What has all that to do with railway stations? Absolutely nothing. But I thought it was important that this man got his moment in the sun.
The train departed Solna Strand, taking my new friend and his mother away for a day of gallivanting, and I was left staring at a big blue box.
The Art at this station is intended to bring the outside in, drawing skies and clouds down into the darkness below ground.
There's a matching black cube in the plaza outside the station but I chose to ignore that, deciding to concentrate only on the positive and the uplifting elements of the work. Also I forgot.
At first glance, the area around the station wasn't too promising. Factories and grey office blocks surrounded me. A laden HGV rolled past, noisily grinding on the asphalt as it climbed an access road.
This is deceiving, however. Strand is the Swedish for beach. I ducked down an unpromising looking back road and found a path leading to the shore. Across the water was industry and a brewery. I was in the shadow of a pellet-burning power station. And yet, it felt like I'd wandered into the countryside.
Stockholm was constantly surprising me with its mix of nature and urban. I'd be in a district of high apartments and shops, turn left, and there'd be a park, or a stretch of clear water. It helps that it's spread over a series of islands, of course, so lakes and rivers are always close, but it also felt like it was a part of the Swedish personality. That they couldn't leave the trees behind, and had to bring them into the city with them, no matter how densely they packed in the humans.
The path rose up, over hard granite mounds, until it reached a scenic peak. A bench had been put here, and I would've paused for a rest, but a woman and a pushchair had already nipped in there and were having a morning constitutional.
Instead I followed the path further, disappearing back into dark green woodland before turning inland, away from the water. The cool was very welcome after a morning in unflinching summer sun. An underpass hinted that I was returning to urbanity.
Now there were quiet backstreets of apartments arranged along grassy walkways. I passed a kindergarten where all the kids were noisily playing outside; all except for one boy, who'd positioned himself by the gate, and was staring through the bars with a yearning for freedom not seen outside of an amateur production of Les Mis. I waved and smiled as I passed, hoping to cheer him a little, but he looked at me with pity. Did I have the keys to release him from his purgatory? No? Then begone! (Once again, my Gaydar pinged. Absolute drama queen).
I descended down from the residential part of Huvudsta into its commercial heart. A dart across the road and I was in the access routes for the shopping centre.
I was lucky enough to be visiting in a blazing hot July, but obviously, Sweden is carpeted in snow for months at a time. I'd sometimes found, as I worked my way round the suburbs, that the shopping centres were covered, rather than being a precinct. This makes total sense in a country where it's going to get very cold.
What I did find interesting was that the indoor shopping centres were, pretty much without exception, crap. They were half-empty, they had a slightly odd smell - sometimes very strong, very cheap disinfectant, sometimes fish, or meat - they never screamed "beloved community hub". It's interesting how, seemingly across the world, we all decided indoor malls were the way forward, and for several decades built nothing but; only for humans to collectively decide that actually we liked seeing the sky while we walked around and were willing to put up with a bit of weather to do so. Building a giant, covered mall in the 21st century - your Westfield sort - seems antiquated and almost hostile, as though you're trying to actively exclude people from your centre.
I briefly nipped outside the mall for the obligatory sign picture, then went back inside for the train.
The Art at Huvudsta is inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and designed by a (then) 27 year old Per Holmberg. The theme will become amply obvious when you see the picture.
It's green and there's stuff hanging from it; what more do you people want?
I am of course joking. It does have an air of a garden, with the supports like trees and the mix of colours amongst the green. When you get to the stone-coloured parts, there are still tendrils, implying that one day the nature will crawl further and take over the entire station.
The strips along the walls, by the way, have a gradation of colour, so that as you pass through on the train it moves from one shade to another.
I was very lucky with where I got on the train at Huvudsta, because it meant when we arrived at Västra skogen, I stepped off to this view.
They've used tiles here as a reference to the Bathroom Stations on the Green Line, but updated them to fill the space with colour. I loved it, and I'm now going to spend my time trying to persuade the BF that this should be the look we go for when we retile the bathroom.
If you look at the lower part of the wall in the station, there's this curious shaped buffer. It's curved, so you're not meant to sit on it, and it's not coloured. It doesn't seem to have a purpose.
It's actually meant to be viewed from the side - literally in profile, because these shapes are a representation of the artist Sivert Lindblom's face.
You can just about work it out there, though personally I think it looks more like Darth Vader's helmet (the one that covers his face, you dirty article). I have to admire the level of self-love that makes a man put his own face all over a public transport hub. I wouldn't have the gall. Having said that, if Merseyrail wants to erect a statue in my honour, I am very much okay with that, so long as I get to approve the final work. We don't want a
Cilla-in-Cavern-Walks situation.
Västra skogen is one of the largest of the cave stations on the Blue Line because it comes with three platforms. It's the point where the line splits in two: the 10 services continue on to Hjulsta, while the 11s go to Akalla. It marked the point where I'd completed the Hjulsta branch, so now my plan was to head back out of town to Akalla, and leave the shared tunnel for later.
The escalator here, incidentally, is the longest in Sweden, at 66 metres, with a rise of 33 metres. Västra skogen means
Western forest and the area around here is naturally mountainous, meaning a heck of a distance between the platform and the exit. It'll be overtaken by the currently under construction escalator at Nacka station when the Blue Line is extended south, sometime around 2030.
The station also doubles as the control centre for the whole line, and is in a weird, Thunderbirds-style building. I was in another shopping precinct, underneath a multi-storey car park and with apartments above me. A dual carriageway swept across the foreground, but there was an underpass so I headed for that.
This photo was taken literally two minutes after the previous one. Swedes, man. They love their trees.
There were families playing in the woods; mothers and babies, parents holding a single child between them, a grandmother telling her grandson it was totally ok for him to pee behind a bush. There were at least three men with pushchairs - not together, individually, walking their infants. Sweden famously has parental, rather than just maternity, leave, and fathers are actively encouraged to take time off work to care for their kids. I'd seen loads of men with prams and pushchairs and it had gladdened my heart every time. They were unabashed, unembarrassed, and it was lovely to see.
The way got greyer as I approached Solna, with its densely packed blocks of flats and busy connecting roads. I crossed the railway and descended into a knot of streets and back routes until I emerged at the plaza outside the Tunnelbana station.
I'm not sure if those concrete balls are always painted like that, or if it was a tie-in for the Euros. Either way, I disapprove. There's too much football around already, thank you very much, without it cluttering our public spaces.
You may remember, way way back in the distant past of these blogs, back when they were a mild curiosity to you, rather than an interminable stream of stuff you don't care about, that I mentioned SL's nervousness about having stations that looked like caves. They thought that people might associate being deep underground in a cave with being in hell. They soon got over this, as you can tell at Solna Centrum, because it's bright red.
Tell me that doesn't look like an extremely efficient way of reaching the underworld. (This is by no means a complaint).
Actually, the hell theming is entirely opposite to what was intended. In fact, Karl-Olov Björk and Anders Åberg originally meant it to be a simple red sky over a pleasing green forest scene.
Once it was up, however, they thought it looked a bit boring. So they started adding in extra parts, mainly around the theme of ecological destruction. There are scenes of deforestation and pesticide spraying, while dioramas in glass cases depict protests and active devastation of the planet.
There's also a big elk in a glass box.
He's fake, of course; it wouldn't be very environmentally friendly to kill an animal for an underground station. I'd be tempted to say "alright lads, keep it light", but to be honest, the theme of humans laying waste to nature is only there if you really look for it.
It's entirely possible to be waiting for your train and simply think "ooh, what a lovely forest scene! How charming!"
Admittedly, part of the reason for that was I simply blown away by Solna Centrum. It's beautiful and awe-inspiring and I love it so much. But not really for the heavy symbolism. Mainly for the pretty colours.
Gay.
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