They made up a surgeon’s hand. Dissecting concrete housing blocks and perishing tarmac roads, slicing away incongruously overgrown marks of humanity to remove the infected tissue of life. A healing process, they said, the men and women who orchestrated the diggers, cranes and wrecking balls with balletic elegance. From their elevated vantage point at least.

How much beauty could be seen from below, in the midst of the crashing squalor of the cut up urban flesh itself, was a moot point. Surgery could be a bloody business, but the cutting hand couldn’t be allowed to see it. Uncertain tremors were risked by an awareness of anything but the sterile perfection of the well managed operation and blindness was a favour done to the victims, one to fend off doubt that could cause a slip.

That was their unspoken defence at least, though, in truth, the beauty of remoteness was too precious to give up.

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