If, at night, you catch the 35, 45 or other north-bound bus from Brixton station, keep half an eye open for a strip of roadworks a mile or so away. I don’t know the area at all well, so I can’t be any more specific. Why am I recommending roadworks to you?
It’s not that it’s a particularly immaculate piece of tarmac, nor that Thames Water have decided to pump home-made jam to residents in South London and have started to lay suitable sticky-resistant pipe. It’s that one of the builders (at least I assume this is the case) with a peculiarly artistic bent has hacked an art installation to amuse passers by when the site is vacated in the evening.
Functionally, it resembles a shishi odoshi, or deer scarer, which is a water feature you might have seen in a Japanese garden. It’s a sort of seesaw, normally fashioned from bamboo, with one side of the pivot longer than the other so that it tends to rest long-side down. Water is poured onto the other end, filling it up. When enough water fills the up-end, its weight trumps the length of the other side, and so it falls to the ground with a clack (so it needs to sit upon rock to make the right noise). Of course, when it falls the water immediately pours out, and so it reverts to its natural state and pivots back once more with another, but inevitably different sounding clack: a claack, if you will. Overall the effect is the constant sound of running water, with a percussive (yet intermittent) clack-claack thrown in for good measure. So perhaps the bus isn’t the best place to observe Brixton’s own deer scarer, since it’s difficult to hear over a bus’s various ambient noises.
In any case, this shishi odishi is a bespoke job cobbled together from the various bits and pieces to hand. Instead of a bamboo cane, a spade is pivoted with its flat end resting down and the handle end up. Instead of a burbling brook, a hose pipe is unceremoniously dangled over a skip, filling, ingeniously, an inverted builder’s helmet tied to the spade’s handle. When filled, the handle falls and empties its burden into a patient wheelbarrow. Best of all a purple light on the ground illuminates the underside of the spade, scattering light when it momentarily rises and falls, drawing attention to the deer scarer.
It’s rather wonderful.
