Newcastle. 6th and 7th October 2005.

What strikes me in the provinces is the sense of being noticed much more than would happen in London. I went to a gig in a pub opposite the train station. The guy doing the door asked me towards the end of the evening if I was enjoying myself. I can’t imagine a Londoner asking this in similar circumstances unless the ensuing punchline was ‘Try letting your face know then, you miserable looking bastard.’ Even though I’d mentioned that I was from out of town, he gave me a flier for some other gigs he promoted in the city, so it’s possible he suspected me of being an A and R man.
That’s happened to me quite a bit in London, largely, I suspect because I’m of an age where most people have stopped going to gigs. Once people clock that I’m not there to pick up my daughter, or anybody else’s daughter, they seem to assume that I must have a business interest in attending. Strangers have approached me and asked who I work for. When I tell them I work in a library they nod knowingly as if this is some sort of crude cover story. I’ve had demo CDs pressed upon me with a broad wink and the words, ‘Here’s something for you to listen to in the library, mate.’ The drummer of a support band once bounced up to me like a big dog in a small room and said, ‘Here mate, do you work in A and R?’ On the bus home I thought of saying, ‘No. But I once had a Saturday job in M and S if that helps.’
The doorman’s concern for my enjoyment wasn’t a one off. At a Manchester art gallery’s exhibition of punk memorabilia I was looking at some photos of Vivienne Westwood wearing rubber fetish gear, when one of the attendants came up and asked if I was enjoying the exhibition. Still wearing my London head, I immediately felt defensive. It was probably a perfectly innocent enquiry. Or perhaps they’d been having trouble with latex fancying oddballs and it was part of a strategy to stop perverts and gawpers from getting too settled.
Walking to the Newcastle gig I got some more uninvited attention. A thin bloke carrying a tatty pair of Big Issues asked if I could help him out. Following the Big Issue’s own advice I declined as he wasn’t badged and he wasn’t actually on a pitch. He said, ‘Come on for fuck’s sake. I haven’t eaten for two days.’
I thought better of coming out with the stock response, ‘Force yourself, mate. You’ll make yourself ill if you carry on like that.’
I’ve a feeling he’d spotted me as an outsider because I was wearing a jacket and it was only October. The stereotype of Geordies swanning around in minimal clothing in the bleak midwinter seems a true one, but otherwise the place supplied a reasonable number of surprises. Not least of these was that I understood the accent easily. I think context counts for a lot. When I’ve met Geordies in London they’ve often sounded like Norwegians talking through a wah-wah pedal, but on their home turf I adjusted without difficulty.
Returning to the B and B I swear I walked past a block of flats called Valium Towers. I’d phone the council to check but I’m afraid the signage might have been put there by pranksters and I don’t want to blow the gaffe. That was the second pleasing sign of the day. On the coach up I went past a sign for a fast food outlet called All Pizzas Great and Small.
I went down for breakfast early the next morning. Some Dutch Christians made themselves at home at my table and promptly started saying grace. I did my best to sit in a way that indicated to other diners that I wasn’t actually with the God squad, without appearing actively rude. They seemed determined to engage me in small talk. I was having none of it. I got through breakfast as quickly as possible. At the time I was trying to lose a bit of weight. As it turned I’d come to the right place; the portions were tiny.
One of the pleasures of staying in B and Bs is that the staff aren’t dragooned into the sort of impersonal arselicking enforced at chain hotels. It spares the staff humiliation and myself embarrassment. Having said that, I felt the fact that nobody was in when I arrived at the arranged time at the Newcastle B and B was nudging things slightly too far in the direction of informality.
With bed and breakfasts you don’t get a standard product. This applied particularly to the architecture of the Newcastle guesthouse. It was squeezed above a plant hire shop and a Chinese chippy. Inside, it resembled one of those crazy houses you get at amusement parks; there wasn’t a right angle in the place. My room was in the loft, which had apparently been converted by an alumni of the Norman Wisdom school of carpentry. What looked to my untrained eye very much like a crucial supporting joist had been cut away to make space for the en suite. I suspect the proprietor was a jobbing builder who’d gone into early retirement, perhaps at the request of the local Trading Standards department.
I remember reading recent statistics stating that the average art gallery visitor spends 7 seconds looking at each picture. I may be to blame. Between 10am and 3pm I ‘did’ six of the cities galleries. Newcastle has an impressive number of art spaces, yet I only saw one charity shop and no pound shops; what are these people thinking? The six I visited ranged from the Laing, one of those leaden municipal places that suck the life out of you as you browse, to the insistently modern Baltic, full of school parties and attendants who look like they’re just filling in until their band gets signed, ie never.
Most irritating of the art was by Santiago Sierra, who if nothing else has got to be in the running for sponsorship by a car manufacturer. His piece was a video installation showing six young, poor, black Americans who’d been paid by the artist to have a ten inch line tattooed on their backs. This, apparently, was a commentary on the materialism of US culture. It struck me as a bit like farting in a cowshed to draw attention to the smell of shit.
Further irritation followed on the coach journey home. Three seats along sat a buffoon from Sheffield who spent the start of the journey necking can after can of Foster’s, singing to himself, farting, whistling, mooing at cows, baaing at sheep and bragging on his mobile about the brawl he’d been in the night before. At a rest break at a nameless service station he failed to rejoin the coach and we left without him, to general glee. He’s probably still there. I hope so.
When I told my mate Sean the Obscure of my cut price excursions he predicted that Megabus would be populated by the likes of the Sheffield buffoon, but that hasn’t been the case. The one exception was en route to Aberdeen. Two burly women in sportswear got progressively tired and emotional on Diamond White, and began trading insults. The row hit the buffers when the bigger of the two trumped the other’s, ‘Well at least I haven’t got Hep C!’ with ‘Yes you have, you bitch. You’ve got Hep C and Hep B!’ Oscar Wilde eat your heart out.

Scotland. 22nd to 26th August 2005.

Arriving in Glasgow I got on the wrong bus, which took me through a vast hinterland of council housing. The area looked immediately familiar from Ken Loach’s film, Sweet Sixteen, a grim tale of heroin dealing and hardmen. Shops were few and most had been boarded up. Every available wall seemed to have been scrawled upon. The southern fashion for making graffiti look interesting and distinctive clearly hadn’t filtered out this far. I expected to see a badly drawn cock round every corner.
At every other junction were bleak windowless pubs which looked like supersized coal bunkers that somebody had tarted up very slightly. Some years back Glasgow rebranded itself with the slogan, Glasgow; miles better. As I hopped off the bus at a park and ride stand on the outskirts I couldn’t help wondering what it was like before.
But once I’d found the centre the place grew on me. It had a fine selection of art galleries and even better selection of poundshops so scored highly on my wish-list of requirements for cities. I’d read that Glasgow has more alcoholics per capita than anywhere else in Europe, but if it does, the drunks are inconspicuous and well behaved. On a night out I felt safer than I have in any other major city, partly perhaps because the city’s nightlife runs to such a late schedule. In London at half eleven people are wondering about last tubes and making it home without getting their throats cut, but in Glasgow the evening hasn’t even started properly.
Aberdeen, in contrast, seemed more obviously like a drinking town. I saw several fresh pools of vomit on the pavement around teatime. Their locations and contents suggested they weren’t supplied by the same person. Lone men lurched from pubs in the early afternoon wobbly on their pins, their soft-boiled eyes swimming helplessly.
The city gave the impression of being a place that keeps itself to itself, that minds its own business, secure in its position tucked away beyond the reach of all but the determinedly curious or the curiously determined. All but the most recent buildings are constructed from granite the colour of storm-clouds, architecture with a face that only a mother could love. The posters on bus-shelters encouraging visitors and locals to ‘keep Aberdeen beautiful,’ were optimistic and too late, I felt.
It’s a city with an oddly mixed identity. The university has given it a residual sense of austere gentility as well as an odd preponderance of pubs with a horror theme, presumably some pub managers’ idea of catering to student zaniness. One of these billed itself as the world famous Frankenstien pub. I can’t believe the Trades Descriptions Act doesn’t cover claims like that. Oddly for a city full of such committed drinkers there seemed to a belief among publicans that offering some form of interior design novelty was the best way to hook in the punters. A bar near the harbour had a television screen set into the brushed steel trough urinal in the gents. This took me aback when I spotted it. I looked down to see a man in a suit and tie giving a news report to camera. At some subconscious level I mistook the screen for a window, and the experience haunted me for the rest of the day.
The other influence in the local culture is the connection to the North Sea oil industry which has given Aberdeen a slight Wild West feel down near the docks. I paused on the waterfront to look in the window of the sort of clothing shop that’s all but died out; not macho enough to be army surplus, too shabby to be a gents’ outfitter. The glass in the window actually seemed to have yellowed with age. In one corner was a small pile of flies that had evidently got lost, then died. It struck me how refreshing it is that in a marketing-saturated world shops like this still exist for no better reason than the owner’s quixotic desire to bring thermal socks and penknives to the world.
Just then, a woman approached. She was soberly dressed in office wear. As she came level with me she smiled and, apparently, wished me a happy Christmas. As it was early September, I thanked her and smiled politely in case she was unwell. She frowned and walked on. I realised a few moments later that she’d offered me business.
That evening I ate at a chippy just north of Union Street. It offered various specimens of mystery meat, all encased in golden batter glistening with hot fat. It also did a brisk trade in cut-price cigarettes, so was quite the one-stop-shop for anyone hell-bent on heart failure. On my usual trawl of the local charity shops I noted Aberdeen had two British Heart Foundation shops, and evidently needed them.
In the Sue Ryder shop a new staff member was being shown the ropes. The manager gestured towards a partially obscured corner where the bric-a-brac was kept. ‘You have to keep an eye on the knick knack corner. We get a lot of theft.’
The newby nodded.
The manager went on. ‘Especially, keep an eye out for anyone who comes in wearing a baseball cap.’
The new volunteer brightened. ‘Oh, aye. Is that like a signal between the thieves, then?’
The manager gave a look that was just the polite side of withering.
I was charmed by the idea that there was an underground network of bric-a-brac blaggers at work in the area, perhaps touring the town’s sheltered housing, touting knocked off knick knacks. I imagined them clocking each other, their baseball caps a marker as unmistakeable as a freemason’s handshake. ‘Alright there, wee man. I see you’re a fellow ornament thief.’
‘Absolutely. Just on my way to knock over the British heart Foundation shop, actually.’
‘Which one?’
‘The one towards the station of course’
‘Mm. Nice choice.’

Such felons could do worse than ship their ill-gotten gewgaws to Perth; it’s got just the right demographic for that kind of tat. It gives off a mix of smugness and embarrassment that Americans would probably see as quintessentially English. Perth is prissy to the point of campness. Despite this, per capita, it still matched Aberdeen in the teatime-vomit-on-pavements stakes. I imagined the inhabitants spending the afternoons plumping cushions and straightening antimacassars, in between regular pauses for liquid refreshment, then taking a late afternoon constitutional rounded off by a good honk near a bus-shelter.
What I liked about Perth was what I liked about all the cities I visited in Scotland, the sense of being in an actual distinct place. Many of the names of shops were appended with the words ‘of Perth’, as if that counted for something. It might smack of snobbery and parochialism, but I’d sooner that than the creeping Swindonisation that’s crept across England like scabies. Certainly, Perth had its retail multiples and burger chains but mostly they were contained in one mall, as if quarantined. I had the sense that each corner was worth turning because I couldn’t predict exactly what would be around it.