Farewell, old friends

SOMETIMES a news bulletin hits you from out of the blue and leaves you feeling profoundly upset.
Often it's when you hear about the death of someone famous whose life made a deep impression on you, as happened to me this week when I got a text from my brother Sean to tell me that the author James Herbert had died.
I first became acquainted with Herbert's work when, as a teenager, I read The Fog, a pulse-quickening tale about a yellow-tinged mist causing madness within those who come into contact with it, and the horror that ensues when the rules that bind society suddenly go out of the window.

James Herbert.

For me, this was a defining moment in the development of my tastes - the literary equivalent of the time I saw the Sex Pistols performing Pretty Vacant on Top of the Pops - and since then, I have hungrily devoured every James Herbert novel apart from his recently published final one, Ash, which I shall doubtless buy in the near future and read with a deep poignancy added to the usual thrills and scares.
But this sense of loss is not limited to people, and I had the same feeling just the next day when I heard the news that Didcot Power Station was closing down.
Until 2004, Didcot Power Station meant little to me, but in September of that year I drove down from my home town of Warrington for an interview for my present job in Southampton, the journey taking me along the A34 and past Didcot.
I have always been a fan of industrial landscapes. Perhaps that's down to where I grew up, in the shadow of Fiddlers Ferry Power Station, with Rylands wireworks and the Tetley Walker brewery on my doorstep, or maybe it's just something within me that sees beauty where others perceive an eyesore. If there was a gallery showing black and white images of grimy, smoke-belching factories, graffiti-strewn walls and overcast skies, I could happily while away many hours there. Dark, satanic mills? That's not how I see them. I'm sure that if I'd ever had to work in such an environment it would have altered my perspective, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, industrial landscapes give me a sense of familiarity, comfort and joy.

Didcot Power Station.

And so, as I have made many trips up and down the A34 over the past decade, on my way to and from visiting family and watching my beloved Warrington Wolves rugby league team, Didcot Power Station has been a landmark that I've always looked out for, a smile forming every time I have seen those six huge cooling towers on the horizon, dominating the Oxfordshire countryside around them and looming large over the Great Western Railway that runs beside them.
The clock began ticking for Didcot Power Station on January 1, 2008, when it opted out of the Large Combustion Plants Directive, a decision having been made not to install desulphurisation equipment which would have allowed it to continue operating. From that point, Didcot was given another 20,000 hours to run, and that time ran out on Friday, March 22, 2013. The switch was turned off, Didcot Power Station's life was over, and now only demolition lies in store for those 99m-high towers that I've watched out for so many times.
Somehow, tidings of Didcot's imminent demise had completely passed me by in 2008, so this week, when I heard the news that the power station was closing, I'd had no time to prepare for it and it hit me hard.
Pragmatists will say 'come on, it's only a building', but for me it goes deeper than that. Not just because the power station itself will be disappearing, but because of what it represents - change.
As I get older - I will be 49 this year - I am becoming ever-more averse to change, at the very point where change seems to be accelerating at a greater rate than ever. The more time you have to look back on, the more time you seem to spend looking back on it, and I can feel nostalgia for those times, buildings, people and ways of life that no longer exist, or have changed beyond recognition, becoming more deeply embedded within me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not walking around in a permanent state of depression about all of this, and I accept that change has always happened and always will. Sometimes, change can be a wonderful thing and can bring untold benefits. However, I must also accept that there's a bit of me always pulling towards the past, and yearning for days gone by. There's a part of my soul that's forever monochrome, and that's just the way it is.
So farewell James Herbert and Didcot Power Station and thanks for the memories.
I leave you with this. Apparently, Radio Oxford once ran a survey, asking for views on the worst buildings in Oxfordshire. Some listeners nominated Didcot Power Station, referring to it as looking like "somewhere up north". I can think of no finer tribute.