commonpeople

Longplayer is a 1000 year long piece of music which started to play on the 1st January 2000 and will continue to play, without repetition, until the 31st December 2999, when it will come back to the point at which it began - and begin again.
- from Longplayer.org

Kevin and I went to visit the Longplayer today at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse, literally just down the road from us. We stopped by the Canary Wharf's Idea Store first so I could borrow Will Self's The Book of Dave, for a book club I just joined at work. We reached the Thames from the DLR station and followed a path past silent condos facing the river, black cranes resting on old docking rails and a bird sanctuary which was the kind of place serial killers dispose of bodies. Further on, near the lighthouse, we walked past derelict factory warehouses -- again, the kind of place where innocent gay couples could easily witness the execution of someone on the hands of the Polish mafia and never live to tell the tale. There was nobody around.

The lighthouse's door was closed so we knocked on it. An old man, who was sitting beside a radio transmitter with a fat blonde bloke, told us we could go up to the top. On the second floor, there was another table set up, with more old men and radio machines tweaking and flashing. We sat at the top of the lighthouse, watching seagulls dip and dive and, further away, just under the dark clouds, the silent Millenium Dome standing out like an expensive eye-sore. We could hear what sounded like gibberish coming out of the speakers and soon two of the radio transmitter men came up to tell us that the Longplayer had been turned down because the lighthouse was being used for their club: they were in the process of sending morse code to other lighthouses across the globe as part of an exercise they routinely perform there. We took leaflets and made plans to come back on the first Sunday of the next month, a day when the lighthouse is open for the public and the Longplayer can be heard in its full glory.

Just before we headed home, we went into Fatboy's Diner, a bizarre piece of 50s Americana resting just by the dock's wayside, as if a tornado had dropped it there after crossing the Atlantic. I ordered fries with coke and Kevin had a go at their burger. The jukebox on our table hadn't changed its songs since 1989. If I had a token, I would have played Roxette's "The Look".