An Americanisation of Scale

I experienced a very odd sensation the first time I walked into the centre of Harrogate, my hometown, since landing back from my adventure in America. Walking around, I found myself feeling like I had become strangely elongated in some way, that my proportions were no longer appropriate for my surroundings, almost like a giant interloper within a Lilliputian town.

The same familiar streets seemed to have shrivelled away in size and length, as though the whole town had found itself needing to drastically de-scale itself in light of the harsh economic climate. Shopping streets now appeared little more than atrophied cul-de-sacs, the cenotaph like a concrete pine cone trying to retain its sense of pride in the centre of the town. As far as I could tell, cuts in council funding had apparently resulted in superfluous storeys being swiped off of buildings and unnecessarily wide roads forced to undergo drastic reductive surgery.

Was it really that much of a surprise though, the vast inflating of my mind towards geographical scale since America? After being dwarfed in New York City, and after 3 months in Los Angeles - less a city, more a gigantic urban Sahara - it was surely inevitable that returning to the modest English spa town of Harrogate would feel akin to suddenly marching around a rather quaint model village.

I remember as a young boy being intimidated, and often frustrated, at the seemingly never-ending road on which my family and I lived. The junction at the end of the road seemed like a distant light signalling the end of a tunnel that never appeared to get any closer, like a mirage on the horizon that may or may not be translated into a physical reality, you just had to persevere along the pavement and see what happened. The grass field along which the road ran parallel seemed, to my younger self, like a colossal green ocean across which it felt a great risk to set sail in case a Christmas or birthday might go by before you made it safely back again. Now I traverse along and across both expanses in a matter of minutes, barely in the time of a single song on my iPod; and so I lament the death of my sense of childhood scale - whatever indeed was left of it, perhaps only as nostalgic residue - which has now become so permenently engorged by America.

Instead of going to America and gaining any physical weight due to burgers, fries and donuts; my scale perception has instead become obese through an over-indulgence on skyscrapers, freeways and urban sprawl.