Contributor's contribution: In the Betjeman Arms
From pre-pandemic times: a poem that ponders the preponderance of processing power — and power-outs
M.E. Grey is a Brussels-based poet who humbly recommends going horizontal for those reading this on a mobile device or otherwise small screen.
Slough contains more high performance computing capacity than the rest of the UK put together – if you have correctly understood the comment of the director of an international telecoms research consortium during a roundtable discussion at Imperial College London. Most of the servers of Imperial College are located in Slough . Should disaster befall Slough it would not just hamper research but possibly cripple the country and ripple beyond. ‘Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough ’ wrote Betjeman, in a poem ostensibly kind to balding clerks, yet rude about mock-Tudor, in fact all their life decisions, and dismissive of their peroxide wives. Such, perhaps, is the nature of satire. Slough seems to attract it. * The categories bombs and data centres already have a personal neural link. Dutch bank ING is moving two major facilities from central Brussels to rural Netherlands. The rationale, as you recall it – recognising that not all facets of corporate decision-making make it into residual public memory – is security. Brussels is now a place where bombs go. Having some amount of money with ING you would rather it was secure – even if that is not the principle rationale for security in Brussels: there are people in it. But where Betjeman has Slough violently overturned and thence redeemed with cabbage leaves the ING centres may soon sprout between the greenhouses of all-year-round tomatoes. * Between the Imperial roundtable and the Eurostar back to Brussels you meet Guy – one of your more originally peripatetic acquaintances – who has worked in Slough . You sip swift pints and share recent news, and recall his main impression of Slough – people sitting in their living rooms, slowing stewing with the Daily Mail and becoming more right wing. You sip swift pints at the Betjeman Arms, the St Pancras station mock-Victorian station pub so named because Betjeman was fond of a railway, that railway, that canopy. Service is courtesy of Geronimo Inns Hospitality Group Ltd. Then you say goodbye to Guy, pass the Betjeman statue and in Eurostar security are screened for firearms, for bombs. Come friendly. Oh come ye only friendly.
