ugliness

Walking to work this morning passed upturned traffic cone full of spiderweb and a bunch of detritus stuck there - milkbottle top, pen cap, paper, sweet wrapper - and thought it'd make a great photo if I'd brought my camera out. I've long loved the idea of beauty in what you might think's ugly and I started looking around for other possible shots - a rotten orange wheel-crushed to the road on one side bulging and split on the other, dogshit smear on the pavement - then I got tripped by a simple change. An old factory building now housing a range of businesses, charitable and religious activities has a basketball court opposite on one side and outside the corner of that where I pass by there's a bush. Can't remember quite what it is - it's prickly so let's call it hawthorn even though it isn't - which overhangs the pavement most of the year. Once a year it gets cut back - this time from touching the ground forming a canopy a dog could comfortably sit under it's been taken to the point where the nearest branches start a half-metre up. Summer last year for a couple of days when the bush was trailing on the ground there was a guy sleeping under it and during the day his rolled-up sleeping bag stuffed in the lower branches by the trunk. That's ugliness you can't make beautiful - the human injustice abandons people to whatever problems they have and the fact we can walk past and ignore and endure it without blinking. An hour down it's in the past and we're probably having fun till there's a brief prick of conscience next time we walk by. It makes any art you might try to make seem trivial to the point of insulting.