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By Root 481 0

objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on these rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspects into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. It was works such as Abraham Funerius’s Het Bolwerk Rijzenhoofd te Amsterdam and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Molen bij Wijk bij Duurstede which had inspired the Dutch to accord decisive respect and aesthetic attention to their life-giving machines.

Ian concluded that it would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. He hoped that photographs of conductors might in the future hang over dining tables and that someone might write a libretto for an opera set along the grid.

The line of pylons finally pierced its way into London through a discrete underbelly of ragged fields to the east of Swanscombe, and threaded its way through Northfleet to the banks of the Thames. There, beside a football stadium, the pylons ran up against their most imposing natural hurdle yet: a 1.3-kilometre crossing over the tidal river. To prevent the conductors from sagging dangerously over a span this long, three ordinary pylons would normally have been required, but a busy shipping lane precluded the sinking of piers, so the two pylons nearest the banks were left with little choice but to grow upwards, to a height of 190 metres, taller than a forty-storey skyscraper, their ruby-red summit lights barely visible through the mist. We felt proud to see a line which we had known for so long take a most grown-up step.

But there was to be no particular reward for this exertion, because once on the other side, the line was immediately driven into a landscape of warehouses, storage depots and cheap hotels, one of them boasting three channels of adult entertainment and a view of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge.

It was time for lunch and we thought of the food courts of the Lakeside Shopping Centre, but Ian pointed out that if we pressed on, we would find the line running against the edge of the bird sanctuary at Rainham Marshes. Owned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the reserve was an important resting place for migratory species, and had just opened a visitor centre, serving pumpkin soup and carrot cake, staples of cafeterias in high-minded institutions the world over.

Yet, despite a comfortable chair, an unimpeded view over the marsh and an extended perambulation, on the very balcony where we sat, by a common crossbill (an unfairly named bird), Ian fell into a dejected mood. Everywhere there were signs of the prosperity of the bird watchers’ society: it had its own publishing sideline, it ran gift shops, it traded in tea towels. Next to the coffee machine, a large plastic robin with beseeching eyes urged patrons to drop money through a slit in its head. The organisation had seized on a minor occasion of individual gratification at seeing a bird and managed to transform it into a formalised and commercially robust activity, one which moreover tacitly claimed a distinct moral superiority over other leisure pursuits. It had done the archetypal work of culture: taking on an unformed, isolated interest and affording it a communal language and respectability.

How woefully immature the Pylon Appreciation Society seemed by comparison. It had only a handful of members, it had no cafeteria, it could barely afford to send out a newsletter. As a result, a sympathetic response to an electricity pylon remained for most of us a haphazard and unsupported impulse, an epiphany which might last for a minute on a drive along a motorway