IAN McMILLAN Making the ordinary into the extraordinary

FOR a couple of days the other week I was making a programme for BBC Radio 4 about the joy of ordinary things. It’s a subject I have wanted to write and broadcast about for ages, and I was glad to have the chance at the cold and blustery end of February, although part of me wished its wasn’t so cold and blustery, especially when I was stumbling around a wood near Stocksmoor, trying to wax lyrical about trees.

The premise of the show was a simple one: I love ordinary things such as bus journeys and cafes and chance encounters but I’m always interested in the fact that once you start to describe those ordinary things they somehow start to become extraordinary and significant just because you have paid attention to them. That cruet set in that café in Denby Dale became more than the sum of its parts simply because I’d jotted down ‘cruet set, Denby Dale’ in my notebook.

The aforementioned Stocksmoor, near Huddersfield, was where the journey of the programme began, in more ways than one. Whenever I get the train from Barnsley to Huddersfield I’m always enchanted by the red wooden bench on the up platform at Stocksmoor station. There’s nothing special about it and that’s what makes it special.

The start of the radio programme is me getting off the train in Stocksmoor for the first time ever, and sitting on that beautiful ordinary bench. I didn’t care that it had been chucking it down with rain and my trousers got a bit wet. I felt like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.

The guidebook to my search for the ordinary was a brilliant French writer called George Perec, who wrote a book in 1975 called An Attempt

At Exhausting A Place In Paris which is an account of him sitting outside at a pavement café in a square in the French capital for a few days and attempting to write down everything he saw, missing nothing out, which is why, in his words, he was ‘exhausting’ the place.

Here’s a little extract, mainly consisting of bus numbers: “There is no-one at the bus stop. A 63 passes by. A 96 passes by. There are three mopeds parked on the sidewalk in front of the café. An 86 passes by. A 70 passes by.”

And so on, exhausting the place but in, for me, an exhilarating way. Nothing much is happening but somehow those buses and those mopeds take on a narrative significance. By describing them they become, in Perec’s word ‘Infra-ordinary’. So, with my Perec in my pocket, I wandered round bits of West Yorkshire trying to find the ordinary and somehow, by describing it, keep it ordinary. For part of my wander I was accompanied by my friend Luke Carver Goss with his accordion. I was describing things and he was accompanying me with gentle music, or rhythmic music and somehow the music seemed to lift my descriptions and make them, almost literally, sing. He swapped his accordion for a guitar and the music became melancholy and plangent but still more than ordinary.

A woman stopped her car and said “Can I help you?” We must have looked a bit odd: me speaking into a microphone, Luke playing his guitar and the producer Cecile with her headphones on. “We’re making a radio programme about ordinary things,” I said, and she drove away as though I’d said the most ordinary thing in the world.

Next time you’re in Stocksmoor have a sit on that red bench. It’s so ordinary, so infra-ordinary. Make sure it’s not been raining, though.