I am in an old, run down council flat in Niddrie, its walls coated in crumbling browned wallpaper and furnished with dirty old sofas from the 70s. Having not been here in years I look out the window to survey what it is like today, and see a semi-wild grassland full of with abstract forms of indeterminate scale. I wonder for a moment if they are pieces of rotting garden furniture or enormous boastful thrusts of starchitecture.
I exit the house and walk through a crowd of young families in the gleaming midday sun, across an uneven and undulating landscape made of translucent panels suspended high above a coastline. The entire vista as perfect and pristine as an architect’s rendering. Pushing through the plexiglas mosaic are transparent tubes about the size of a man, which slide up and down through the floor libidinously. The rubber apertures at their tips are an array of garish 90s colours, and spit mathematically precise arcs of water that fall to the ground in complex patterns.
Rising from this panorama is en enormous wet mass, glistening blue in the sunshine. A living Uluru from which a vast eye stares in hopeless and resigned oblivion. Slowly I realise this is a Whale, trapped in this perspex prison as if in amber. Children climb over it like so many excited ants, battering it with little clubs and clawing at its flesh. As I look up, I see rows and rows of these beasts, locked for eternity, and stretching off far into the horizon.