The View from Behind the Smudge

There’s a curious phenomenon that occurs when you clean your glasses after weeks of tolerating the slow build-up of smudges. You don’t notice them accumulating. You adapt. You adjust your angle to the world, find sharper light, squint through clarity’s absence like a character in a northern European arthouse film. And then, one swipe of a sleeve and—blam—it’s not just the world that’s clearer, it’s your mood. You’re reborn. You’re practically Swedish. You might buy curtains.

That’s the power of optics.

Not the physics of it. The poetry. The psychology. The weird, liminal dance between what something *is* and how it *seems*. Most of our lives—especially in places that carry weighty pasts and uncertain futures—are lived not in hard fact, but in *perceived momentum*. And momentum, as anyone who’s ever pushed a pram up the back alleys of Rowson Street will tell you, is a slippery sod.

You see, when you live somewhere long enough, you start to build a library of looks. You know which alley shimmers in spring and which one smells like bin juice in summer. You know that the boarded-up shops were once dreams, and the murals that cover them are often apologies painted in primary colours. You know what a “listening exercise” sounds like when no one brings a pen. You begin to notice the tonal shift between “we're consulting” and “we’ve already decided, but thanks for your time.”

And yet—and here’s the paradox—none of this is fixed. Because we are not fixed. Change, when it finally comes, often begins with a shift in perception. Not a policy. Not a fund. Not a masterplan with 147 slides and an imported font. But someone seeing the same thing they saw yesterday, and deciding, inexplicably, *it doesn’t have to be that way*.

Sometimes, it’s as small as putting out a chair and saying, “Sit. Tell me.” And then actually listening.

Not listening to answer. Not listening to defend. Just listening—like the good kind of therapist or the bloke at the pub who’s had just enough Guinness to pause between sentences.

We talk a lot about visibility these days. But visibility without empathy is surveillance. True visibility is not just seeing—it’s *being willing to be seen*. That’s the bit most places get wrong. They want to be watched, not witnessed.

I say this not as an outsider, nor a councillor-in-waiting, nor a man with a clipboard and a regional accent softened by consultancy. I say this as someone who lives here. Who works here. Whose kid finds fossils in the mudflats and thinks they’re magic. And they are. Because to him, they’re not relics of extinction. They’re *evidence*—of something real, something ancient, something with a story to tell. And when you believe something has a story, you treat it differently.

So maybe that’s the nudge. Not a shove. Not a strategy day. Just a nudge in the way we *frame* what we’re seeing.

Because this place? It’s not broken. It’s just viewed from the wrong angle. Through greasy lenses. In poor light. With too many people telling you what to look at and not enough asking what you actually *see*.

But shift that angle slightly—wipe the lens, wait for the golden hour—and suddenly, you’ll spot it. The glint. The ghost of potential. The thing you forgot to hope for.

Optics aren’t just for seeing. They’re for *believing it’s worth seeing* in the first place.

RW