O Sweet Tower Drench Us With Your Light
So there it is. Up there. And he we are. Down here. What's going on? What kind of yahoo impulse made it happen?

The official copy says, with no irony intended: "Not since the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House or the London Eye has a new tall structure attracted such attention. Elegant, sculptural and awe-inspiring, the Spinnaker Tower is set to become a new national icon." (www.spinnakertower.co.uk)

A cloud-pumping phallus erected by a civic authority with no balls and no imagination. Hence there's no escape from the maritime theme - check that vast warped sail - even though today Portsmouth has about as much to do with seafaring as Switzerland. P&O has flushed itself into the Channel and Navy property is being flogged to the highest bidder. The tower is a metaphor for our clawing-on to the past, an ambivalent place where slaying Frenchmen is celebrated and anyone famous who hung round a bit by is claimed as "Portsmouthian": Freddie Mercury, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Neville Shute. Let's be honest, the Mary Rose would just be a big piece of smelly wood had no-one told you otherwise.

How about a monument to our vibrant present? To the cultural crosswinds? To the fact that nowadays if you sit on a bus you'll likely hear three or four different languages being spoken? What of the music, the scene, the night?

Look closely and you'll see your tax coins embedded between the bricks, along with blueprints for drop-ins, youth clubs and halfway houses. But there must be a reason for this prioritising. The tower must have mystic powers.

Maybe it's a beacon firing rays of light across the city, enriching each and every one of us, though we don't exactly know how. Let the hungry of Somerstown eat crack - their spiritual lives are being nourished; what a shame that's the only nourishment they're getting.

As many people know, Portsmouth is the second most densely-populated city in Europe. When things get too crowded on the ground let's reach up to space. "Go higher!" says the website twice, "Dare you "Walk on Air"?" Ah, the illusion of freedom and dynamism.

Commensurate with the crowding is an unusually high level of mental illness. But salvation is at hand for the man with the ping-pong boil who's been having ECT since 1959. It'd be grand to know how the Great Pompey Boondoggle is helping him.

Learn more about this author, Tom Sykes.
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