Diplocks Yard

 Standing at the cliff edge on the path of economic entropy

It is in the nature of our society that everything is for sale, everything has its price. Through its life a thing may be bought and sold many times, its value depending to some extent on its perceived innate worth, derived for instance from other, comparable transactions but also on the skill of the seller and the degree of desire in the buyer. This value occasionally increases with time, but more usually the reverse is true; most things decay in some way, becoming less useful or perhaps even just less attractive to the eye. Human relationships may be viewed from a similar standpoint, the currency being (usually) different, but the concept of value that it represents remains the same.

It follows that, given enough time, everything and everyone, will reach the end of their useful life, when they are no longer wanted and their value reaches zero. It is at this point as a

society we tend to demonstrate a lack of sentiment, as we remove the things (or people) in question from our existence. They are eventually (depending on circumstance) buried in landfill to trouble archaeologists, or incinerated to trouble climatologists, or just deleted from our address books lest they trouble our consciences. There are places though on the event horizon of this eventual fate, last chance saloons right on the transition point of doom where jetsam might just be fished out before it becomes economic flotsam if just the right eyes fall on it at just the right time. In East Sussex, this is Diplocks Yard.

When a thing has drained through every level of Sussex consumerism, passed through every grade of mercantile filter, the cogs of commerce turning just a fraction of a radian more each time, until there is not a drop more profit or utility to be wrung fom it, then Diplocks yard is where it will wait a while, on a trestle table, or in a broken cabinet for final judgement. Perhaps one more person will need a remote control for a cathode ray Sony Trinitron and perhaps this is the day he (probably he) will wander in. In all probability though, this is the penultimate resting place for the truly unwanted, the genuinely worthless. I don’t know if there is a geographic human equivalent. Hastings, possibly.

If you do find yourself in the belly of Brighton, strung out on single origin coffee or brought low on micro-brewery beer, if there’s nothing left in the tank and the rest of the day will be rolling along without you, then make your way to Diplocks and as an object in the universe you will find your kin. Not that there was much in the tank to begin with for most of this - one must be optimistic - merchandise. Nothing here was ever destined to be an heirloom, this was everyday ephemera, not built to last. You will find no antiques. There are books here that will never again be looked at, piled near yellowed pictures that will never find another wall or ones that, given their content, surprise you that they ever did.

This seems a hopeless place, from the weathering of a wine rack that could only have occurred in a skip or woodpile to the mounted boars heads that only a madman could love, there is little here that even makes so interesting a corpse as to engender the desire to know its story. Who cares what

optimistically misjudged hand picked out these chintz lampshades all those years ago, or what sartorial agonies of indecision were played out before those bland coffins of wardrobes, the wood stained dark to hide, well, the wood.

And yet, Diplocks prevails. Those plastic clocks without faces, cheap,

homeless chessmen, dead men’s suits and awful crockery have regularly seen off challenges from men in suits sporting shoes with little chains who would much rather the few yards of painted wood frontage on North Road was taken away (presumably to stand in a similar yard somewhere) and replaced with glass behind whose gleaming darkness business people would sit and wonder (times being what they are for businesses) why their services remain unused, like a bamboo magazine holder that no one wants.

But then, perhaps I’m hasty with the word hopeless: That wine rack? Worth three quid of anyone’s money and now it's in my kitchen. Who knows, perhaps there’s always hope given enough time and a bit of luck.

AA