The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [47]
2.
We exchanged addresses, and I largely forgot about our meeting. Then, eight months later, Ian dropped me a note to say that he was planning to visit England for a working holiday, in order to trace the route of one of the United Kingdom’s most important power lines, a circuit responsible for providing the capital with two thirds of its peak-time electricity requirement, and connected at one end to a nuclear plant on the Kent coast and at the other to a substation in East London. He would be travelling on foot and by car and wondered if I might like to join him.
So we met at dawn on a glacial midwinter morning, at one side of the nuclear plant that dominates Dungeness beach. We were both warmly dressed, and carried sandwiches and chocolate in our rucksacks. Despite the early hour, the station was at an apex of activity, poised to fulfil the imminent demands of five million kettles and boilers. Some 750,000 years after our species first mastered the use of fire, the nuclear reactor represented our most advanced and cerebral attempt to keep the darkness at bay. It was generating 1,110 megawatts of electricity, yet emitting nothing but a high-pitched hum, appearing to be fuelled – unlike its untidy equivalents in coal and oil – by little more than the impenetrable and immaculate logic of advanced physics and chemistry.
Nevertheless, it was in a worrying state. Much of its exposed piping was rusting in the sea air, and a large cloth had been used to bandage up the base of a cooling tower. It seemed a particular folly that the English had been allowed to involve themselves with fission technology, for what people could be less appropriate to toil in this precise and rule-bound industry, given their instinctive distrust of authority, their love of irony and their aversion to bureaucratic procedure. It was evident that the field should more wisely have been left entirely in the hands of the Teutonic races.
There were 542 pylons and just over 175 kilometres of line between Dungeness and the endpoint in Canning Town in East London. Ian and I planned to make the journey in two days, whereas the electricity, travelling at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second, needed a mere 0.00058 of a second. In less than the time it took me to imagine that the four cables emerging from the side of the station were sending their energy through to the capital’s butchers, antique shops and nurseries, they had already done so – a notion rendered all the more implausible by the barren shingle beach on which the plant was sited, where any reference to mankind, let alone a teeming city, seemed implacably alien.
3.
We began walking beneath the line in a north-westerly direction. Ian was pleased to note that it was being carried by the L6 variety of pylon, which he judged to be one of the most attractive varieties in the country, with legs which were widely splayed apart, a lattice structure which was only minimally braced and arms which tapered gently downwards as if to acknowledge their load, features which set the L6 apart from, among others, the newer, heavy-footed and thickset L12 model, towards which my companion bore a particular antipathy.
Ian drew out a pocket encyclopedia of the pylons of the world, published by a South Korean press, featuring examples in every conceivable size and shape, and which served to suggest that there are nearly as many tower designs as there are distinct human personalities, and moreover, that our eyes are in the habit of assessing these inanimate structures by some of the same criteria we resort to when evaluating our flesh-and-blood acquaintances. In different species, I noted varieties of modesty or arrogance, honesty or shiftiness, and in one 150-kilovolt type in ubiquitous use in southern Finland I even detected a coquettish sexuality in the way the central mast held out a delicate hand to its conductor wire. The unspoken challenge for transmission engineers seemed to be to fashion a pylon which would subliminally read