Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Cities are all broadly made up of the same stuff. Across the world we mix together patchworks of concrete, brick, and tar to build up metropoleis in our own unique way. But from a chemical perspective the movement of base material is similar, and the thin layer of misplaced matter which will be left behind in the geological record will be all but indistinguishable from one megacity to another. But cities aren't built in a vacuum, they sit upon land which was once wild and untamed. Under London sits marshland and meadows, as well as several rivers now fully subsumed into her netherstructure. But occasionally mother nature peeks her nose out from the paving slabs. And by this I don't mean through parks or gardens carefully cultivated by man, but in the unintended cracks of the city. Empty plots waiting for development. Unkept properties left to rot. The unused wasteland alongside a busy highway. These little gals give a city "place", even if you never really take note of them consciously.
Knowing the soil of an area is truly intimate knowledge. Understanding the way different plants grow in your area was once a vital skill for prosperity, and the knowledge of it was carefully developed and passed down the generations. Nowadays no one really cares, even farmers can cheaply alter the composition of their field's soil to suit their needs. But I'd hazard to guess that those of us who grew up somewhere rural will have an innate understanding of our own patch.
For me, my family home in Warwickshire is built on an area of mudstone and clay (on the Severn-Trent watershed). It gets wet and stays wet, churns up in the winter, and has minimal nutrients needed for fast growing veg. It's wheat country now, although traditionally it was used for timber and forestry. I know that land left fallow will grow wild oats and grasses the first year, cow parsley and worts the next, and then be taken over by brambles for the next twenty years or so until proper trees can get through to grow a new woodland. Other places I have spent a lot of time vary hugely. Nottinghamshire is far less bramble-friendly and instead grows tangleweeds and small thickety trees. Cardiganshire (where we had a holiday home as a child) is characterised by thin grass followed by bracken and gorse. I think you pick these things up easily as a child, as you tend to spend more time in the mud and grass after all. The tendencies of fallow land persist even when the countryside is covered in an urban landscape. In the gaps you can see the true nature of the earth beneath which gives those aforementioned subtle characteristics. London's decay is distinctly English, even if it is never left to develop into maturity. A city in the North will be decidedly different, and a Scottish city different again. But it wasn't until I started spending more time abroad that I noticed the truly alienating atmosphere the gaps in foreign cities can produce. Where I am now in Arabia, the modernity of the cities lull you into a false sense of normality. They trick you into believing this is somewhere habitable. But then when you walk too far down the wrong boulevard you reach the end of the city. An abrupt end where highrises suddenly giveway to nothing but dust. It feels wrong, like it's the site of a building recently demolished, or the foundations for some new construction; but it's actually just the earth laid bare, land which will never grow an undergrowth no matter how long you left it.
I didn't mean to rag on the Middle East (again), I'm probably just homesick. I assume for the natives this "soil" makes them feel at home. To notice the subtle differences between sands must be equally as fulfilling. In fact I also found it exciting when I realised that in old Manama many of the buildings are made from coral, because the entire place is built on a dried-up coral reef. So next time you visit a city take note of its unique decay and imagine the original earth underneath.
