The Road to Nowhere

Peterborough 7th to 9th March 2009.

2010-12-24T15:04:00.011Z

I arrived to find the guesthouse deserted in the familiar manner and spent ten minutes ringing the doorbell. Eventually I decided to phone the B and B to get access. The cleaner answered, then appeared from a caravan in the car park. She claimed to have been putting some finishing touches to it before going on holiday, finishing touches which so far hadn’t included putting some wheels on it. Showing me the room she asked why I’d come. When I said I just wanted to see what the city had to offer, her nervous laughter drew up just short of full-blown hysteria. In the guesthouse’s visitor’s book, under the heading ‘reason for visit’, there wasn't a tick box for ‘morbid curiosity’ or ‘mid-life crisis mini-break’ or even ‘long dark weekend of the soul’. But if I'm honest I'm not sure why I went there.
I found the city strangely conducive to deep existential angst. Perhaps I should’ve been warned by Linda Smith’s old joke where she claimed her native Erith wasn’t twinned with anywhere but it did once have a suicide pact with Peterborough. The extent of my torpor’s indicated by my response when I found a fiver on the floor in a poundshop. Ordinarily, I’d see that as about as sweet as it gets, but I could hardly raise a smile.
Maybe it was the sheer dim-witted capriciousness of my decision to visit Peterborough that tipped me into a downward spiral of remorse and self-attack. The city had always lurked tantalisingly on the National Express discount fare timetable, teasing me with the fact that the only way to go there on a daytrip would be to turn round and head back to London immediately on arrival. Instead of taking this as an omen, or travelling by train, I decided to make a weekend of it.
And this soon began to take on symbolic significance as the latest in a long line of bad choices, the latest instalment in a long tale of rudderless quiet desperation. I was in one of those moods where my entire back-story just seemed like one daft idea after another. One of these days I’ll write a memoir detailing the windmills I’ve tilted at down the years. Working title; ‘Lifetime Underachievement Award’.
Peterborough’s resolute ordinariness was a factor in my mood, I think. Something about the unblinkingly self-contained normality of it made me feel utterly surplus to requirements, marginal in a town with no visible margin. From the woman in Poundland chiding her grizzling child with the words, ‘Why can’t you be like your brother, happy as Larry with his £1 gun?’, to the cud chewing youths in the bus station, it all gave the feeling of having my nose pressed against the glass of the normal world.
Nose-diving towards despair I vowed to distract myself on the Saturday night with a dose of escapism. My default mode of escape is the movies and has been since I was first able to afford the price of admission. In my desperate teens I even went twice in one week to see the film version of the TV series Man About the House. I don’t remember much about the film but the shame of being that bored remains with me.
Peterborough has one picturehouse, an uberplex called the Showcase cinema on its light-industrial fringe. To get there I took the main option for the car-less – one of the city’s fleet of grim hopper buses. These shuttle endlessly back and forth like Pacmen around the labyrinthine housing estates that seen to go on forever. Every bus I went on that weekend carried at least one blank-eyed youth playing music out loud on their mobile. I began to wonder if it was some sort of strange performance art youth employment scheme.
Predictably I got lost. After twenty minutes of wandering the darklands I saw a huge brightly lit hangar-like structure in the distance. The sign looked like it said Showcase. As I drew closer it turned out to be a branch of Homebase. It was still open at 7.45pm. I asked one of the workers for directions. On my way again I reflected on my time spent in my early twenties working for a similar chain of DIY stores. Just after I left they extended Saturday opening hours until 8.30. The path not travelled, the shelves not stacked. Things could be worse. I might feel out on a limb these days but at least I don’t come home from work stinking.
I eventually found the cinema and followed a snaking queue of cars into a carpark the size of two football pitches. I gawped bleakly at the marquee listing the films on offer. I couldn’t face one of them. It felt like walking into an all you can eat buffet and suddenly coming over nauseous. I took the hopper bus back to town and sat in my room watching the tiny portable TV and drinking myself frantic with complimentary coffee.
Beside the odd moment caught from the corner of my eye in pubs and takeaways I’ve barely watched television for about four years. It felt strange knowing I was one of millions doing roughly the same thing. Miles from home, it was oddly comforting knowing that countless others had, likewise, nothing better to do.
How rarely I’ve had that, the sense that I was dancing round the same handbag as everyone else. Clearly, many people are as ill at ease in their lives as I’ve sometimes been in mine. But some aren’t. And increasingly I see that as a talent, a bit like an innate, unearned knack for drawing or music, something both enviable and mystifying.
Of course, I’m probably overstating my case. Orwell said any life viewed from the inside seems like a series of defeats. I know that many people’s lives are hobbled with failure and unease, and they hold it all together with a ragbag of distractions and excuses. I know there are countless ways we keep ourselves occupied and take our minds off our feet of clay.
In Peterborough the distractions on offer tended towards the obvious. The two local branches of Wetherspoons were doing a brisk trade with the maudlin of the town. When New Labour liberalised the licensing laws there was talk of creating a Continental style drinking culture in the UK. In Wetherspoons there wasn’t a beret or cravat to be seen, but plenty of soft-eyed pensioners in cheap shoes biting into their second pint of super cider at 9.30 in the morning. The liquid breakfast is now recognised as a legitimate niche market.
One older punter had the shakes so badly I could hear his glass rattling against the table from the other side of the pub. He could only get the glass to his lips by holding it in both hands. He reminded me of one of those children’s animations where a character operating a pneumatic drill continues to vibrate long after he’s stopped work.

Even for those with healthier hobbies the prospects were slender. On the Sunday morning, struggling to fill the day, I went to the local train-related ‘attraction’, Railworld. My hopes weren’t high. When I’d announced my intentions to the landlady of the B and B she sighed and said, ‘I suppose you might as well seeing as it’s just up the road.’
It was a collection of flyblown portakabins painted in what I assume was left-over Royal Blue paint. The huts contained a succession of displays that might have been knocked up for Geography GCSE homework by a bright but lazy fifteen year old. I started resenting the admission price within minutes, a grievance exacerbated by the fact that the ten year old son of one of the volunteer staff insisted on following me round and asking me at regular intervals whether I’d paid to get in.
Directly next door was the Nene Valley railway. Some wheezing, threadbare diesel trains were being given a day’s outing. I infiltrated the shuffling throng of other middle-aged dateless wonders on the platform. I was just thinking that sort of thing’s probably nice for people who like that sort of thing when I overheard two cagoule-wearing compadres. One turned to the other and, surveying the station and Railworld beyond with a baleful eye said, ‘Look at the state of it. It’s a shit-hole. We probably shouldn’t have come – it’s only making us feel worse.’ I suddenly felt a strange affinity with him.
For those seeking escape into high culture, the pickings are slim in Peterborough. I took a scoot round the city museum. It had a plaque outside warning that it reserved the right to refuse admission, but judging by the footfall when I was there, they needed someone outside with a shepherd’s crook dragging people in. Perhaps the sign was a relic from a time when the city’s shiftless drunks and ne'er-do-wells needed somewhere to sit indoors in the warm. Before Wetherspoons came to town, then.
The museum contained little of note. The sameness of everywhere perhaps isn’t as new as we like to think. Most municipal museums suggest it’s been going on for some time. Look, we found some fossils. The Romans came here. We used to make things. Great! Curiously, there was a visiting exhibition of embroidery, the highlight of which was a crimson, appliquéd handbag that rather resembled a random tray of giblets.
Although Peterborough’s got a weekly art house film society that’s managed to sustain itself for 62 years, generally the city seems too busy getting on with it to have much time for the highbrow. Perhaps that accounts for the apparent lack of local interest in that last refuge of the scoundrel; Bohemianism. It seems that if and when the good folk of the town find the conventional compensations aren’t available or aren’t enough, few of them resort to growing goatees, signing on so they can concentrate on their screenplay, or breezily informing you that they do a bit of dee-jaying as if it’s some sort of vocation.
And the place is all the better for it. I’ve always seen that lifestyle as a cop-out, an attempt to excuse yourself from the ordinary, to escape your own ordinariness. It’s the polar opposite of amateurism, a creative tradition I’ve got much more time for. Amateurism isn’t an attempt to escape the ordinary, but an attempt to make being ordinary a better thing.
But what about my own creative pretensions, in particular my attempts to write fiction, an excuse I’ve made to myself for myself since my late teens? When I was about nineteen, I attempted a ghost story. The memory of it makes me shudder even now, for all the wrong reasons. I naively submitted to a random selection of magazines. I remember one rejection slip from a magazine called Sappho. The slip showed a tastefully drawn female nude. I assumed at the time it was some sort of classy wank mag.
Eventually, one editor was kind enough to return my piece with a letter explaining that nobody was ever likely to publish it. Rightly, he pointed out the plot was pretty obvious. I’d misused the apostrophe and I needed to pay more attention to the craft of writing.
I thought, ‘The craft of writing? The what now?’ I suppose it was a start of sorts.
After much procrastinating and a dizzying array of false starts I settled to writing. I suppose I’ve been at it consistently for about fifteen years. I can only marvel at how little fiction I’ve produced. Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones once said he’d been in the band twenty five years – five years playing the drums, twenty years waiting about. My fiction writing years were like that; three years writing, twelve years staring out the window sucking my biro.
But now, certainly as far as fiction goes, it feels over. I always had a pretty limited range. I mainly wrote about disappointed people struggling with loss and the fear of loss, intimacy and the fear of intimacy, in and around South East London, or Willson Country as I like to call it. Pretty niche. I was starting to repeat myself.
I tended to default to one of two types of ending, either of reconciliation or departure. These I thought of as, respectively, the Mike Leigh ending and the ‘fuck this, I’m off’ ending. I sometimes wish I’d just been better at making stuff up.
And part of me is relieved that I don’t have to worry about any of that any more. I’ve spent ages trying to wrestle the stuff of life into something like fiction. I think now, perhaps, my energy would be better directed wrestling the stuff of life into something like a life.
But was it all just a waste of time, a daydream that went on too long? Aside from the satisfaction of seeing my work in print, there were secondary benefits. Not long after I received the punctuation advice above it occurred to me that, if, as it seemed, a particular type of person wrote fiction, I should become like that type of person in at least one respect. I decided to go to university. I’d failed English Lit ‘O’ level at school. I ended up with an MA in the subject. That educational process developed my ability to think and built my confidence, in some areas at least. Nowadays, if I cross swords with somebody I can give them a run for their money in a reasoned argument whereas in my teens and early twenties I’d have had to rely on my ability to swear like a sailor and seem potentially unstable.
And now that it seems to be going from me, I realise that writing gave my mind something to do. I think everyone’s brain has a certain amount of surplus capacity, which behaves like a spare bedroom. If you don’t fill it up with something worthwhile, it only gets cluttered with shite. If I haven’t got some creative outlet, my brain’s spare capacity defaults to seething obsessively over every petty grievance, annoyance and anxiety.

On the Sunday evening I managed to pick up a local listings magazine. I discovered I’d missed an evening of death metal the night before. It was the last live entertainment for a week so I called it a night.
Back in my room, undressing for bed, I spotted a tired and sagging old man in an inconveniently placed wall mirror. It was me. Years ago someone told me I was one of the few people she’d met who looked better with their clothes off. I think it was partly a comment on my dress sense, but what wouldn’t I give for somebody to say that now.
In my early to mid-thirties people occasionally said I looked ten years younger. I had to ask a lot of people but it still counts. But being told that at that age isn’t much use; you don’t feel the benefit.
Maybe my surprise at ageing isn’t that remarkabl. In terms of family clues as to what the physical future holds, I haven’t got much to go on other than my maternal granddad. If he’s anything to go by I’ll end up as bald as a monkey’s arse. I never saw my dad grow old. And that, maybe, is the foundation of so much of this weekend’s moping.
This year I’ll turn forty seven, the age my dad was when he killed himself. A friend of mine said that people she knew in the same boat felt that, somehow, once they’d passed the age at which their parent died, they were in the clear, as if they’d outrun some ghost. Although I remember feeling some satisfaction at turning thirty four because I’d done better than Jesus, I never really thought about my dad in the same terms.
That said, I do have this strange feeling that the game’s about to go into extra time. It reminds me of a sensation I’d get in my first job. Each afternoon, as it came near to 3.45pm, school ‘hometime’, I’d think, right, that’s me finished. Then I’d realise I had another hour and fifteen minutes of life-sucking tedium to get through before my release.
It seems I haven’t given enough thought to how to occupy myself for this length of stay. I’m in need of a Plan B. Technically it still counts as a Plan B because I’ve been through the alphabet and lapped myself a few times.
The next morning, feeling every second of my age, I sat waiting at the bus station for my coach to take me back to the landmarks of my routine. A sullen, big-framed girl of about fifteen shouted over to me. ‘Excuse me. Can I have your number?’ I ignored her. She shouted again. ‘Excuse me, mate. Do you know your willy’s hanging out?’
I had the presence of mind not to check, but it felt like a Pyrrhic victory. It couldn’t have been clearer news. I’m now seen as the sort of sexless old duffer it’s safe for teenage girls to rip the piss out of in a suggestive way. What is to become of me?

Honiton. 4th July 2008.

2008-07-05T21:39:00.001+01:00

A good indicator of how boring it is to live in a particular town is the level of local interest in body modification. It's a bit like at my primary school where some kids used to alleviate the tedium by poking the points of compasses through the skin of their hands. As I walked from the station, everybody I saw under the age of thirty had half a scrap-yard hanging from their faces. If the local police ever encounter crowd-control problems with disorderly youth they won’t need to invest in Tasers; a strong magnet should do the trick.
Honiton is one of those towns that make you wonder how and why towns form. I’ve got vague memories of what we were taught at school about rivers and trade routes etc, but that doesn’t explain how towns survive after they’ve outlived any apparent function. It’s as if populations agglomerate around certain locations, like fluff round a forgotten boiled sweet in a jacket pocket.
People get romantic about small independent businesses but the ones in Honiton seemed to have either given up or they were too smug to be bothered. A lot of them were closed by five in the evening. A few actually had dead flies in the window. To hear some people you’d imagine there was something heroic about a business staying small, but I suspected some of these places would have loved to rise to world domination but just couldn’t get the hang of it.

Belfast 18th to 21st February 2008.

2008-02-18T20:51:00.002Z

18th February 2008. Fake tan's all the go in Belfast. I lost count of the women who looked like they’d battled headlong through a blizzard of Bisto. Some of them couldn’t have got more make-up on without scaffolding. It was like somebody had flown over the city in one of those crop-duster biplanes spraying the stuff. Either that or the spawn of David Dickinson were everywhere. Clearly some of the population are still proud to be orange.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’ll be wanting to know where the sweet spot is for charity shops. Easy. Botanic Avenue was once Belfast’s Bohemian quarter when the likes of Bernard McLaverty and Seamus Heaney were at Queen’s but now it’s vastly improved by the presence of a War on Want bookshop, Marie Curie, Cancer Research and Save the Children. All were quite pricey. I nearly bought a pair of shoes in Save the Children but decided against it; they were a bit on the tight side. Besides, I can’t stand kids.
It strikes me that although finding the usual tourist destinations can be a doddle, cities can be strangely impenetrable when it comes to finding stuff to do in the evenings. A pub called the John Hewitt was listed as having live music every night but there was nothing going on. The only amusement on offer came from the graffiti on the burnt-out cinema across the road, which had apparently been squatted until recently. Next to a big capital A in a circle someone had painted the words ‘Make my Christmas and jail the arsonists.’ Some anarchists really do want it buttered both sides.
Nearly everyone in my room at the hostel was female. They were very quiet and considerate during the night, but took two hours to get ready in the morning. But around midnight there was the sound of furiously creaking bedsprings from the bunk above me. The tempo of creaking increased frantically. I thought I heard a small sigh, then the creaking stopped. Seconds passed, then a male Australian voice stage-whispered the words ‘Hold on a minute. We’re in the wrong fucking room!’
19th February 2008. Later at breakfast I overheard two friends from another room. One asked the other whether she’d slept okay. She said, ‘Yes thanks. At least that Australian couple weren’t doing it all night again.’
Halfway through my morning shower I realised that someone had thrown up in the shower tray. To add that little element of surprise they’d put the rubber shower mat over their leavings. At a guess, they’d been eating either spaghetti or noodles. I didn’t want to draw attention by asking for a second opinion in case I got blamed. There was no bin in the bathroom so I gritted my teeth and hoiked the offending matter out of the window. The window gave out onto a small enclosed back alley, so the chance of the karmic justice of the vomit landing on its producer was negligible. There was a group of twelve Australians staying at the hostel. They seemed to have known each other from childhood. I eavesdropped as two of them discussed another member of their group. He’d gone out and got so pissed that today he couldn’t actually remember anything about the evening, in fact couldn’t remember that he’d gone out at all. It seemed perverse to me to travel half way round the world only to spend all your time solely mixing with and talking to people you grew up with. Then to go out and get so trolleyed that you couldn’t remember anything seemed evidence of a strange lack of curiosity about the world.
20th February 2008. Derry is such an ordinary town. Subtract the Undertones and the history and what have you got? Loughborough, pretty much.
Back in Belfast in the evening I went to a gig. Now that I’ve stopped drinking alcohol I realise how much boredom there's involved in gig-going. Without the draught-excluder on the doors of perception there’s so much hanging about during changeovers, so many duff support bands, so much technical faffing about.
21st February 2008. Belfast has some of the worst buskers in the world. Most were accordion botherers, a few molested guitars. I’ve seen free jazz played live and God knows that’s some unlistenable piss, but these people were beyond random. Even a stopped clock’s right twice a day but this lot didn’t luck into melody once. I suspect it was a ploy to circumvent local byelaws on begging. I imagined the daytime buskers borrowing their instruments from traditional musicians who only needed them for evening sessions in pubs. I pictured the proper musician looking doubtful as he handed it over and saying, ‘Do you want me to show you how to string a few notes together?’ and the busker shaking his head and saying, ‘Nah, it’ll be fine.’

Chesterfield 8th February 2008

2008-02-09T21:38:00.002Z

It was a beautiful Spring-like day and I’d got a return train ticket to Chesterfield for £2.50 but these weren’t the only reasons I fell in love with the place. Chesterfield has, I think, more or less got it right. It’s retained lots of its old architecture, but hasn’t overplayed the twee, olde-worlde schtick. It has lots of half-timbered buildings but has somehow managed to avoid the naffness of, for example, Maidstone. On my desk I’ve got a postcard of Tudor Maidstone showing a range of half-timbered retail premises like Pizza Hut and Subway which can’t help but look ludicrous.
The first feature of the Chesterfield scene most people will notice is the famously twisted spire of the town’s St Mary’s church. This gravity-defying verdigris corkscrew is, according to legend, the result of a glancing blow from a passing Satan. In fact it’s the bodged result of poor craftsmanship. Due to the Black Death there was a shortage of skilled labour locally and unseasoned timber was used in the construction. I imagine the builders offering the Satan story as an excuse before mumbling something about needing to go and finish another job down the road.
Although the town has its share of the usual retail suspects, they didn’t dominate and there was plenty of room for some pretty random businesses. On the walk from the station there was a headshop which made its mission pretty clear with its choice of name – Amsterdam. Chesterfield doesn’t seem an obvious place for such a shop, but I’ve always thought headshops are on a bit of hiding to nothing. In my misspent youth my pals were so fearful of drug squad surveillance that we avoided patronising the only shop in Yeovil that sold king size Rizlas. A full-blown headshop with a window display of bongs would have been the sort of place we’d have run past with eyes averted. Perhaps times haven’t changed that much as Amsterdam had ceased trading. A few doors up and still hanging on in there was Mojo, a 70’s and 80’s bar which billed itself as ‘Chesterfield’s newest party hotspot.’ Perplexingly a poster exhorted the public to ‘put on your flares and come and test your reflexes.’ I've no clue what that entails, although I like the idea of staff wandering around casually whacking punters on the patella with a small rubber mallet. In the nightclubs in my hometown the main test of the reflexes was the necessity to avoid sudden and random assault by drunken sailors.
Misconceived business ideas were a feature of the town. The local Greggs was experimenting with opening until 3am. This seems ambitious given that Greggs usually struggle to keep their pies hot beyond mid afternoon.
For me, the icing on the Chesterfield cake was charity shop flavoured. There was a full day’s worth of musty-smelling browsing to be had. I was crestfallen to note that it was early closing at the first one I spotted as it looked a stonker and had a name to match. If there’s ever an award for the most tweely-named charity shop the Tiny Tim Trust has to be in the running. I hoped the trust might be in aid of that weird falsetto bloke who made the charts with ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ and other one-hit wonders of his ilk. Or that it might be raising funds for new crutches for the sickly infants of the deserving poor. But as a notice in the window said, apparently without a shred of knowingness, it was ‘a local charity for local children’. I couldn’t help sensing an undertone of mean-spirited parochialism in the claim. I checked there wasn’t anybody coming up the road and pressed my nose longingly against the glass. There was an extensive £1 rail and a 50 pence sale rail – so near and yet so far. As in Leeds, Goth was still alive and purposely not looking very well, with a subsection of the teenage rail set aside for Goth/black gear.
The shop followed the usual trend where the further north you travel the more bric a brac there is for sale. In keeping with the season they’d made a display of said tat on a Valentine’s Day theme. How romantic! I suppose it’s the thought that counts. I was reminded of a sign I saw a few weeks before in a Manchester Pizza Hut; ‘Nothing says I love you like a pizza.’ Really? Nothing?! The lexicon of love’s obviously become far more specific than it was the last time I looked. What’s the protocol when the spark’s gone? ‘Perhaps we should think about seeing other people. Fancy some cheese on toast?’
Though I’ve imposed a moratorium on actually buying stuff I don’t need, I still had a leisurely mooch around the British Heart Foundation shop, Age Concern, Save the Children, Ashgate Hospice shop, and the Cats Protection League. Judging by the smell, the Cats Protection League was protecting cats by offering them somewhere cosy to piss. A woman, clearly a regular, came in to drop off a donation and greeted the assistant by name. Her name was Kitty, although maybe she just called herself that for work, sort of a nom de shop.
At the Arthritis Research Campaign shop I had a moment of weakness and bought a saucepan for £2, then in Help the Aged I lapsed again and bought a shirt. I am turning into the Imelda Marcos of smart casual shirts. One day I will count my shirts and weep with shame at my profligacy. But hey, it was £2; what are you going do?
Lately I’ve been going through a bolshy phase in my day-job at the Lee Harvey Oswald Memorial Library. Apart from chronic staff shortages, one of my bones of contention is the determination of senior managers to ape the practices of large multiple retailers. One of the big cheeses makes a habit of saying whenever she visits that she doesn’t want the place looking like a charity shop. I’m always tempted to say we’d be better off imitating chazzas than Asda. Most of them have air conditioning, take credit cards and have staff whose souls haven’t been crushed by years of management bullshit, so they’re streets ahead in at least three respects. And Oxfam do photocopying at half the price we do.
I’d checked the Chesterfield website before I came. The tourism page only had two things on it. I’d seen the spire so I checked out the museum. It was my lucky day. It had nothing about the Romans and it had a visiting exhibition of what it billed as curious contraptions. The exhibit was small but perfectly formed, full of devices that were pretty esoteric when invented and were soon rendered gloriously obsolete. There was a gadget for embossing cheques with the amount to pay so the figure couldn’t be altered, a tennis ball scrubber, and an automated rubber stamp that marked any correspondence that hit your desk with the date and time of its arrival – genius!
But the incidental highlight of the day came when I stumbled upon a cheese shop near the market square. Apparently the correct name for such a business is a cheese factor, which to me sounds more like the title of some horrid TV audience participation show. The shop’s novelty speciality was the cheese wedding cake. I’m not making this up; those who suspect as much can follow this link http://www.cheese-factor.co.uk/ .The related poster announced, ‘Love cheese? Be different. Get that wow factor!! Create your own cheese mountain!!’ I can imagine a cheese wedding cake causing a response, but it’d more likely involve people pointing and laughing rather than saying wow. Picture the scene. Once the sniggering has died down, among the muttering someone can be heard saying, ‘I don’t feel so foolish getting them that fondue set now.’ The accompanying publicity material showed an almost autistic concern with detail. It offered advice on decorating the cheese wedding cake, including hints for those who might be ‘worried about foliage touching the cheese.’ As if that might be the one thing putting you off the idea.

Romania November 2007

2007-11-06T20:49:00.016Z

6th November 2007 Bucharest.
I’ve always liked the Jim Bowen joke; ‘I’m not scared of flying, I’m just scared of crashing’. But I'm not sure fear's the reason I left it so long before I flew. It's more that when I was at an age to start travelling flying was more of a big deal, a rarity.
But my first flight was less nerve-wracking than it could have been. I think the tedium of hanging about after check-in must have had some sort of anaesthetic effect. Perhaps that’s why they make you wait so long. That’s not to say I didn’t have the odd moment of panic. Waiting for takeoff I misread some labelling on the wing. I now realise it said ‘hoist point’ but I initially read it as Hotpoint. For a few nervous minutes I was convinced I was about to go up in a plane that was either made by people more used to making domestic appliances, or worse, a craft that was actually knocked together out of old washing machines.
The second frisson of concern came when, just after take off, the pilot announced we were on our way to Budapest, when I’d booked for Bucharest. Luckily, it was a slip of the tongue, otherwise things might have taken some fixing. It’s not like when you get on a 21 bus, forget to get off at New Cross, and end up having to walk back from Lewisham.

In the week leading up to the holiday I’d had a heavy cold and was quite congested. As we came into land, my ears popped with a sharp pain. I immediately remembered a friend's account of somebody she knew who flew with a head cold and whose ear drums burst, leaving her permanently deafened. I didn’t panic immediately but started worrying when, on disembarking, it seemed the cabin crew were far more quietly spoken than before. I tried to put my anxiety out of my mind and get on with the holiday.

I'd been seriously looking forward to Romania. For a while I went out with a Romanian woman. I ended up loathing her but I've retained an affection for the idea of Romania. She grew up there under Ceausescu. She told me how there was almost no conception of marketing or advertising in her country. There would be one shop for vegetables. That would be where you bought your vegetables. It’d be called the vegetable shop. Something about the lack of choice enchanted me. I think we fetishise choice too much in this country, speaking as somebody who plans his social itinerary by looking through Time Out magazine and highlighting the free stuff.
The other thing I was looking forward to was the prices. I’d got off on the right foot by booking ahead in a hostel which represented the Holy Grail of backpacking holidays – it was actually cheaper than staying home! It was perfectly located amidst a batch of six or seven fleapit cinemas whose admission prices ranged from 95p to a still-bearable £1.90. Arriving at the hostel I drew up a provisional to-do list for the next day and went to sleep happy.

7th November.
On the second day I started my customary trawl of art galleries and museums. Everywhere in the city was in walking distance which was lucky as the metro system smelt of farts. Unfortunately the city seemed to have the builders in. The streets had a touch of the Somme about them as they were riddled with trenches. These weren’t the relatively neat affairs you see in London and were unadorned by anything as poncey as barriers or warning lights.
I spent the day at the National Art Museum. Standout was the work of Nicolae Grigorescu who is a bit like a soft focus, less weird Van Gogh or a glummer Monet. The museum itself was worth a visit for the beautiful spiral marble staircase alone.
Shamefully, after returning to the hostel I defaulted to the nearby McDonalds for my evening meal. It turns out that McDonalds have not only trade-marked the term happy meal but have also registered the use of the word ‘happy’. Hopefully this only applies in Romania, and only refers to use of the actual word and not the concept.
The night life on offer was limited. A bar near the hostel advertised itself as offering jazz, blues and silence. I didn’t mind the blues and silence but I didn’t want to risk being subjected to jazz. Instead I went to the nearest cinema. I turned up 5 minutes before showtime. There was nobody in the box office but a woman was mopping up in the lobby. Despite my limited grasp of Romanian I managed to ascertain that the showing wasn’t going ahead as, unaccountably, nobody else had turned up to see the sequel to ‘Van Wilder, Party Liaison’.
As it turned out there was a last minute rush of five potential punters so we were ushered into a draughty barn of a cinema which resembled a village hall gone to seed. The movie’s poster featured the bloke who played the original Van Wilder but he wasn’t in the film. Perverse but understandable, I thought. The premise of the original film was that Van had managed to extend his time at college well past the customary graduation age in order to pursue his predictable extra-curricular interests. Judging by the poster the actor in question was probably knocking fifty by now so his participation would have stretched the already flimsy premise beyond breaking point.
The chief satisfaction the movie offered was that it gave me an excuse to look up the word execrable. Verily it was a dog. One review I later read said this film was a vast improvement on the original but concluded that it was ‘still shit’. I was moved to note a fairly typical line of dialogue; ‘Provost, I do believe he’s just knocked out that girl with his schlong.’

8th November.
On day two it struck me how used I am, walking round London, to placing people socially by their clothes and appearance. In Bucharest that was almost impossible. I think a city dweller’s instinct is to look out for signs of potential threat. Without the usual clues I was at a bit of a loss, although I did give a failry wide berth to the bunches of teenage lads striding purposefully along inhaling lustily from carrier bags of glue.
First port of call was the National History museum. It was full of bronze age bling. It scrubbed up suspiciously well and looked oddly contemporary; if I’d seen it on the Elizabeth Duke counter in Argos I wouldn’t have turned a hair.
Then it was off to the museum of Romanian Literature. Literature museums always seem to be flogging a bit of a dead horse. At the Amsterdam Eduard Douwes Dekker museum I was the only punter and had a full guided tour from the curator. I could have happily skipped it. When he asked if I was a fan of the writer I felt it would have crushed him if I’d admitted I’d only gone because it was free to get in. Curating a museum like that probably isn’t as cushy a gig as it might seem – a bit like being a lift attendant where the lift keeps getting stuck.
The experience at the Romanian museum was similar. I managed to persuade myself the woman who talked me through the exhibit was flirting with me but I think she was probably just embarrassed. At the end of the tour she asked if her English had been okay and whether she’d got any phrases wrong. At one point she'd indicated my jacket and asked if I wanted to take my clothes off. I didn't have the heart to correct; that was my favourite bit.
When I’m travelling I’m occasionally chastened by the realisation of what a cringing introvert I can be. Lots of people go on holiday to meet people, I think I travel to avoid them. This attitude doesn’t sit well with the atmosphere in backpacking hostels, places apparently swarming with the gregarious. My normal avoidant behaviour was exacerbated by the fact that everything still sounded as if my head was in a bucket of cotton wool. Any conversation just served to remind me of my conviction that my hearing was ruined forever. In the evening a gap year nineteen year old from Andover wanted me to accompany him to an ex-pat pub called the Red Lion. It seemed a pretty redundant venture, but his clingy air of desperation made it even less appealing. I made some vague excuse and retreated.
I gave an equally wide berth to a gaggle of Californian travel jocks who seemed as if they’d just walked off the set of the horror movie ‘Hostel’. Late that night I heard them outside drunkenly chanting USA! USA!

9th November.
Bucharest has some fantastic architecture, but I don’t take much notice of that kind of thing. I notice other stuff. I noticed, for instance, that the green man on the pedestrian crossings moved exactly like the star-kicker figure at the start of the Old Grey Whistle Test. The fact I stopped to take a picture of it seemed to prompt some curiosity from the locals. Haven’t these people seen tourists before?
I sometimes feel I’m looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope, but fuck it, it’s my life and it’s my telescope, I can do what I like with them, I reckon. I noticed that Bucharest has female street-sweepers and that I never saw anybody pushing a pram in the city. In my entire stay I saw two cyclists, three black people (all men), and one woman with a tattoo.
She was working in Springtime, a healthy fast-food outlet which I couldn’t walk past without thinking of Mel Brooks. It had a fantastically complex ordering system, a bit like the daft one that Foyles’ bookshop in London used to have. It involved queuing up to pay a cashier, who gave you an itemised receipt which you took to a counter where you presented your receipt to the assistant who prepared your order. The assistant would then serve you your food, and issue you with a new receipt. I’m not sure if these layers of bureaucracy were a hangover from communism, or an attempt to clamp down on salad-related staff fraud.

10th November.
Around this point my notes get sketchy as I became increasingly preoccupied by the state of my hearing. It’s weird how these things affect you. Near the front of my mind was a frustration that I’d recently bought a digital home-recording set up that I hadn’t even taken out of the box yet. And now I was going to be too deaf to use it. One of these days I’ll get knocked down by a bus and my last thought will be a bitter regret that I’ve just wasted a tenner getting a big shop in.
After days of frantic Googling where I turned up account after account of people deafened by air travel I discovered some advice on the Valsalva manoeuvre. The Valsalva manoeuvre is a bit like the Heimlich manoeuvre but for shifting snot. It involves pinching the nose shut and gently trying to exhale. The keyword is gently, otherwise you can end up wearing your eardrums as epaulettes.
In the empty TV room I tried it. There was an immediate improvement in my hearing. I wasn’t completely out of the woods but there was enough of a change to make me dance to the television for a few brief moments. I felt like James Stewart at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life.

12th November.
The museums were mostly closed so I had a quiet day, but in a good way. I went to the geology museum. None of the displays had notes in English, and frankly it lost something by the lack of translation. Loose ended I spent more time than usual in the hostel, which gave me time to ponder the tension between the growth of cheap international travel and the decline in people’s ability to rub along with others.
The previous night a new room mate insisted on opening all the windows in the room, despite it being the depths of winter. As me and the receptionist whiled away the afternoon in the lounge watching a bootleg of some dumb action movie he came in and began to cook, bringing with him a portable radio which he played at full blast, apparently oblivious to the fact other people were watching a film.
Another new arrival seemed to be a career insomniac. He decided to do his laundry overnight, and put one item of clothing in his locker at a time. He banged in and out of the room at intervals of a few minutes all night. In the morning he recounted how he’d been robbed in the street and had all his belongings taken. I found the news strangely satisfying. Later on he brought in a fish for his tea that was so fresh I swear I saw its gills twitching. It was too big to gut in the kitchen sink so he disembowelled it in the shower tray. Nice. He made a fish stew which hung around for another three days.

13th November. Sinia.
The next morning I spotted the fish gutter helping himself to the last of my milk from the fridge. Misanthropy here I come.
I headed for Sinia by train. A quirk of the rail system was that you had to book your ticket at least an hour ahead of travel, a rare example of vestigial Eastern bloc style bureaucracy. Rather than bothering me, this actually made me feel quite nostalgic for the 1970s in the UK when life was full of random and intractable awkwardnesses like this, before we got addicted to convenience and started expecting to be endlessly indulged like whining children. Besides, the whole Romanian set up was still streets ahead of the Kafkaesque nightmare of Virgin trains booking system. And some of the difference is purely about presentation. In Romania you're obliged to book a seat with the result that everybody gets a seat. On Virgin trains you’re given the opportunity to book a seat, but if you choose not to, your chances of getting a seat are negligible. But hey, you exercised your freedom as a consumer!

The atmosphere in the waiting room was thick with foot odour. A man was circulating, trying to sell hats, without much luck. Seems they haven't fully grasped the concept of the market round here. If he’d been selling air freshener he’d have made a fortune.
I’m always sceptical when people talk about universal truths, but my conviction wavered when I went to my seat. Regardless of the infrastructure, sure enough, someone else was sat in my seat and got all snotty when I tried to reclaim it. It was a front-facer though, so I wasn’t going to give up without a fight. ‘This is seat 46,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just wait a minute,’ she snapped.
Once rightfully seated she apologised, saying she wasn’t angry with me but with the system as she and her friend had missed their original train and they’d had to rebook at great expense. We chatted briefly and I was just beginning to warm to her when she pointed out of the window at some tatty houses we were passing, laughed and said to her mate, ‘Gypsy country!’
Her mate with the glasses said, ‘We’re not racist but it would be better without the gypsies.’ I gave my best tight-lipped, backing away from a bigot expression. Her voice faltered. She mumbled, ‘Or maybe not.’ Maybe not? What did she mean maybe not? Was she still mulling the idea over? Was she toying with the idea of being a gypsy-hating fascist but thought she’d run the idea up the flagpole first and see who saluted?
I had a near-identical experience on the train back from Brasov. Either a lot of Romanians hate gypsies, or a disproportionate number of Romanian people who use the train network hate gypsies, or I look like somebody who hates gypsies and gypsy-haters gravitate to me because they see me as a kindred spirit. I’d like to return to Romania, but if I do I’m seriously considering making up an ‘I heart gypsies’ badge. It’ll either secure me some peace and quiet on train journeys or it’ll get me lynched.
I came back from Sinia on the oldest train I’ve ever been on, 1950s vintage at a guess. It was divided into the sort of compartments I haven’t seen since the 1960s, each of which had brown vinyl seats with antimacassars. There were two older women in the carriage. One had her feet on the seat opposite, but she had spread a tissue there to protect the seat. Just like people do in the UK. Ha! The older woman inspected my ticket and said something quick in Romanian which presumably indicated I was in the right carriage. The carriage was warm enough to bake bread in, but I was glad of it after a day in the mountains. I settled into the cosiness and looked out at the snow-crusted valleys.
As we pulled out of Sinia a young woman, apparently deaf and without speech came along the carriage dumping handfuls of twee tat on each table; toy donkeys whose noses lit up, playing cards and torches. I decided to pass.
That night at the hostel a group of Australians moved in. They spent all night complaining loudly about the snoring of the Pole in the next bunk. The Pole was barely breathing heavily, and was nothing like as loud as the arseholes complaining about him. In the morning I woke to find the loudest Australian who’d spent half the night exclaiming of the Pole, ‘I’m going to strangle the cunt in a minute!’, spark out, snoring fit to rattle the windows.

Ploieste. 14th November.
Maybe I ought to take this travel writing lark a bit more seriously. Or take better notes. Or write sooner after trips. All I’ve noted about my daytrip to Ploieste is that yet again I had the experience of being the only punter in a museum. In both the art and the history museum a member of staff did the usual and followed me round turning the lights off in each room as I exited. I admired their attention to energy conservation but it didn’t feel very welcoming. The art museum was wildly overstaffed. In the ticket office, four large women were sat knitting. They looked surprised to see me. I’m assuming they all worked there, although it may be that only one of them did and the others were friends who’d come in to get the benefit of the two bar fire they were huddled round.
From memory, Ploieste was an unattractive and unpretentious industrial town which didn’t go out of its way for visitors. The train station was a twenty minute walk away from the city centre through run down streets of decrepit housing where traffic signs warned of approaching horses and carts. After I’d done the museums I ran out of stuff to do with a couple of hours to spare. Romanians have no conception of the charity shop as we know it, so I went to see the matinee showing of Knocked Up at the cinema. There were the typical five people in the audience. It was so cold in the auditorium that I could see my breath. By the end of the first reel I couldn’t feel my feet. Fearing frostbite I left twenty minutes before the end, reasoning that the walk back to the station would be easier if I still had toes.

Loughborough 5th October 2007

2007-10-08T21:36:00.009+01:00

In Loughborough I chalked up another in my personal I Spy challenge to find the most obscure local charity shop. Loros supports hospice care for Leicestershire and Rutland; I didn't even think Rutland still existed! I didn't linger long in the shop itself, partly because the place couldn’t seem to decide whether it was a furniture shop or a more conventional chazza selling clothes etc. But mostly I was scared off by one of the other browsers. She was fiftyish, and had enough tattoos and piercings to qualify her for a job in a circus. She also had a distinct white patch in her towering beehive of hair which made her look like a cross between Dickie Davis and Amy Winehouse’s nan. I made a swift exit.
I fled to the Sense shop where further strangeness ensued. I caught one of those eavesdroppings that almost make life worth living. Two old friends had bumped into each other after a long interval and were catching up with each other. One of the friends mentioned her son, who, she casually revealed, had been born with webbed fingers. The other woman responded, ‘Oh, right. You don’t hear of that much these days.’ I thought, these days? As if webbed fingers used to be all the go with the youngsters. When was that particular fad then? Sometime between Space Dust and happy slapping, when I clearly wasn't paying attention.
She explained that her son had received corrective surgery. She said, ‘It was his dad who wanted it done. Personally, I’d have left it.’
Left it? What was she doing, planning ahead? Perhaps she wanted to avoid those difficult toddler years of having to nag him not to pick his nose. Maybe she didn’t want him pestering her for a guitar when he hit his teens. Reeling with information overload I stopped snooping and turned my thoughts to lunch.
At the next table in Wetherspoons sat a smartly dressed man in his late twenties. He was heavily built and sweating copiously. Set out on his table were two meals, plus a bowl of chips, a cup of tea, a large Pepsi and a dessert. He sampled each of them, more or less in rotation, apparently oblivious to the people pointing at him and laughing as they passed.
I couldn't quite work out what this guy's deal was. He might have been some sort of area catering manager doing a round of quality spot checks. The pub may have been expecting a visit from the chain's director, and this bloke was his personal food-taster, paid to check for evidence of poisoning. As he finished his meal and waddled out I considered following him to ask but lacked the nerve.

I dropped into a small private art gallery. It was oddly deserted; I could’ve robbed them blind if they’d had anything I liked. There was the usual mix of seascapes, landscapes, with a few still lifes thrown in. Curiously, the same artists crop up repeatedly in these galleries. Jean Picton’s flowery work is everywhere. She’s a former TV actor who now bashes out pictures of poppies at a furious rate of knots. I had a browse and, unusually, couldn’t find anything by her. But there were some similar paintings by Anita Dobson. There wasn’t anyone around to ask so I don’t know if that’s the Anita Dobson ex of Eastenders, but if it is, what exactly’s the deal with TV actors and flowers?

Reading 17th August 2007

2007-08-20T21:34:00.001+01:00

The liars at National Express have obviously learnt a few things from the people who insist that Luton airport is in London. The coach to Reading dumps you at a place called Reading Calcot. It’s a half hour bus ride away from Reading proper. If you book your National Express Funfare far enough in advance it can actually cost you more to get from Reading Calcot to Reading than it costs to get from London to Reading Calcot. Ah, the impeccable logic of the market.
This happens in a few places. The Megabus services to Swindon and Coventry drop you in the middle of nowhere, and all coaches to Milton Keynes drop you at Milton Keynes coachway, a £1.50 bus ride away from the town.
Although Coventry's got its good points, I suspect that the coach companies figure that if passengers see these places close up on arrival they’ll never get off the coach. The drivers have to drop their human cargo some distance away and hurtle off amid a screech of tyres before the punters realise what they’ve let themselves in for.
Reading has two branches of Wetherpoons eighteen doors apart. It comes second only to Carlisle in terms of Wetherspoons density. Its other claim to fame is that it’s home to the national headquarters of the country’s leading dyslexia charity. It's bad enough that dyslexia’s so hard to spell, but basing a dyslexia charity in a town whose name looks like the word reading but isn’t pronounced that way, has got to be taking the piss.

Salisbury 25th – 26th May 2007

2007-05-28T21:33:00.006+01:00

Salisbury is middle England to the power of ten – half-timbered, half-baked, half-asleep, but it still has the odd local quirk. On Fisherton Street there’s a barber that opens at 7am most mornings and 6.30am on a Thursday. I’m not sure I want my hair cut by somebody strange enough to keep those sort of hours; he’s at best an insomniac, and potentially has an amphetamine problem. And what’s with the earlier start on a Thursday? Is that the day that milkmen round here traditionally get a trim before they start their rounds?
I was in town for the city's annual cultural festival, but there wasn’t much going on. I was going to put off going into Poundland until the Sunday so I’d have something to look forward to, but in the end I ran out of other options and relented just before closing time on Saturday.

Boredom does strange things to people. The local remedy for ennui seems to be body modification. There were three tattoo studios within sight of the train station. A piercing salon had prime position on the High Street. Its prices were listed outside. One nipple was £25, both nipples were £45. As quantity discounts go, that's nothing to write home about. A Prince Albert was £50. If pub signs moved with the times, there's one that’d get people talking.

Having holes drilled into themselves didn’t seem to leave the locals much spare energy for taking an interest in culture. As part of the festival, guitarist Pete Aves was playing at the Old Ale House on Crane Street. I was curious to see him as he’d previously played in the High Llamas, whose keyboard player used to work at the same library as me. He was flogging a dead horse and then some.
The pub was full of people, all bellowing at each other and ignoring Aves completely. At one point he introduced a song with the statement, ‘This next number’s about a prostitute I caught clap off in Hamburg. It’s not really, but at this point I could say anything because you’re obviously not listening.’ The braying of the punters surprised me. I couldn’t believe they weren’t stunned into silence by the bar prices. Foster’s was £2.90 a pint! I’d want it poured over me and licked off for that price. This seemed typical. It cost £8 to get into the city’s only cinema. If you’re going to pay London prices you might as well move to London; we’ve got piercing shops here too, you know.
For those whose interests in life have narrowed to charity shops and sarcasm, head for Catherine Street. You’ll have to bring your own sarcasm, but this back road’s blessed with an Oxfam, Cancer Research, Barnardo’s and South Wilts Mencap. This last one's presumably some splinter faction that broke away from Mencap proper. Continuity Mencap, if you will. Splitters!

The train back to London had to stop at Whitchurch so pigeon debris could be cleared from the couplings. I can't vouch for whether this was debris left behind by pigeons, or debris consisting of pigeons.

Inverness 1st March 2007.

2007-03-04T21:32:00.004Z

Inverness added a few names to my tally of charity shops nobody's heard of before. Like the one for the Crossroads Care Attendant Scheme, or the Chest Heart and Stroke shop, or the one supporting the Highland Hospice. The hospice shop had a nice stern line in anti-shoplifting warnings; stealing from us is stealing from people who are terminally ill. I immediately felt cringingly guilty, even though I’d done nothing, much as I do going through the nothing to declare channel at customs. I suspect those sort of warnings don’t really wash with their target audience. They probably think, fuck the terminally ill, they’ll be dead soon, they don’t need the money.
Although shoplifting happens a lot in charity shops, I find the mentality involved a bit hard to fathom. At the Oxfam where I volunteer we’ve recently been warned of people trying to claim refunds on bottles of Ecover they’ve stolen from other branches. I suppose if you’re at a loose end one afternoon and there isn’t a pensioner around with osteoporosis to knock over and mug, there’s nobody in a wheelchair whose tyres you can let down, and you can’t find a tiny kitten to repeatedly punch full in the face, what else are you going to do?
I recommend the Shelter shop on Drummond Street which was having a clearance sale with jackets at an oddly specific £1.29. Maybe the local epidemic of thieving was forcing down prices. Also worth checking out is the tiny café attached to the Chest, Heart and Stroke shop. No massive fry-ups on offer for some reason, but cheap and old-fashioned and friendly.
The Inverness Museum and Gallery had recently had a refit so was a bit characterless but was worth a visit for the chance to hear the delights of the rondello. The rondello was an instrument vaguely like a violin in appearance. It was invented by Alexander Grant of Inverness, and due to lack of popular demand, only six were ever made. A display allowed the visitor to hear samples of its sound by pressing an array of buttons. The sound was gorgeous, like a slightly nasal Mellotron, played backwards through some obscure wheezy-sounding effects pedal, if that means anything to you. I was hooked immediately. It amazes me the idea never caught on. Grant must have died crushed by disappointment. I only hope he didn’t live to see the runaway success of the Stylophone; it would have broken his heart.
Also worth a trip is Leakey’s bookshop. It’s the sort of second-hand bookshop that middle-aged men in car coats and sensible shoes get misty-eyed about. Housed in an old Gaelic church it also had a small café on the mezzanine floor. At the former business end of the church the sole assistant was enclosed on three sides by walls of books. Central to the ground floor was a huge wood-burning stove surrounded by piles of logs. Inside, the twenty first century seemed a long way away.
Much as I try to convert people to the pleasures of land travel over long distances, the journey back to London tested even my endurance. What with a replacement bus service from Carlisle because of an earlier traincrash, roadworks outside Luton, and a collision on the 453 bus to Deptford I took 18 hours to get home. Eighteen hours where the only moment of cheer came when I spotted a fireplace showroom in Preston called Burning Desires. Little things mean a lot, but sometimes they just aren’t enough.

Glasgow 28th February 2007.

2007-03-03T21:31:00.001Z

In Glasgow my mood improved. It doesn’t take much. Evidence that people are out there enjoying fannying about with language is sometimes enough. On Buchanan Street, somebody had converted an old Tardis style police phone box into a coffee stall and called it Coppucino, which managed to convince me the world hadn’t gone entirely to pot. Round the corner there was a sandwich shop called Snacks in the City.
It must be something in the water. There was an exhibition of photos by Kathleen Little at the always excellent Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. The pictures were just close-ups of ordinary people, but they were a reminder of how interesting people’s faces are when you’re made to really look at them. The local newspaper headed their review of the show, ‘Little’s Things Mean a Lot.’
In the art supplies shop near the museum I was struck by the two women who worked there. One was very pale with pink hair. She’d gone the extra mile and done her eyebrows too, which had the odd effect of making her looking like an albino mouse that had gone through some strange reversal. People used to try to look ordinary for job interviews but now perhaps you’re more expected to look the part. The other assistant had brown hair, with a three inch blue streak in it. It suggested a lack of commitment. Perhaps she was new. Or part-time.

Kendal 26th -27th February 2007.

2007-02-28T21:30:00.008Z

When I arrived at the hostel the warden explained the place was shut between 10am and 5pm. I said, ‘I expect there’s enough in Kendal to keep me occupied for a whole day.’ His eyebrows nearly flew off his face. He offered me a key to the front door just in case, but I declined.
The town was cluttered with sulking teens, hormonal and bored to distraction. It was Monday and the museums were shut, so I mooched round the charity shops then went in the world's cheapest Wetherspoons for something to eat. Myopia worked its magic yet again when I misread the pump sign for a guest ale from the Coach Horse brewery. I realised my error just in time to stop myself ordering a pint of Crack House. That’d be one of those beers the CAMRA tasting notes describe as ‘very moreish’, I’d imagine.
Come evening I explored some more. One of the town's more interesting features is its array of tiny side alleys squeezed between the buildings on the main streets. Eventually I drifted into a bar tucked up one of these. The bar was next door to a tattoo parlour and was called Dickie Doodles. I did a brief double-take when it occurred to me this might actually be a specialist sub-department of the tattooists.
An open mic was in progress. I decided to settle for the evening. In London the audience at these affairs consists entirely of the performers, in a depressing singer-songwriter equivalent of pyramid selling. Consequently these nights often have the feel of a conversation where everybody is watching for the other person's lips to stop moving so they can have their turn. But here, there were real live punters. Though the acts were variable, the atmosphere of generosity created by the audience was hard to resist. I think there’s something about amateurism in the true sense which really strikes a chord with people. You experience a professional at work and, at best, you feel like you’ve had your money’s worth; you see an amateur pull something out of the hat and you feel you’ve been given something.

One woman in particular had an excellent bluesy voice, and, unusually, knew what to do with it. Often people who are naturally gifted with that sort of voice are like a child with a hammer – they treat everything like a nail. I’ll never forget the ludicrous spectacle of seeing someone with ‘one of those voices’, emoting like a good ‘un, applying his gritty vibrato to a chorus that contained the distinctly un-bluesy word Frisbee.
I did wonder about the Kendal woman, and how she coped with having such obvious talent, and living in a backwater where she could probably only ever be the most talented fish in a very small pond. Later on she got very noisily and obviously drunk. Mystery solved!
Not everyone was up to the same standard. A lone singer/guitarist declared war on the Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’. I half expected someone from Trading Standards to walk in, lay a hand on his shoulder and say, ‘Sorry, but that isn’t entertainment. Under the Trades Descriptions Act I’ll have to ask you to stop.’ The bloke couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, and his timing was all over the place. But, not for the first time, everyone else in the room was far kinder than me. You could almost feel the punters willing him to stay in time and on key, although they were clearly on a hiding to nothing.
It was soon time for me to go as the hostel had an 11.30 curfew. Or, as it turns outs, an 11.20 curfew if the warden wants to go home early and he’s assumed that as it’s Monday and there’s not much to do in Kendal of an evening, everybody must surely be back and in bed. As I tried the door my soul gave a tiny but pitiful whimper. I rang the bell, knocked on the door, looked despairingly to see if I could spot a lighted window. It soon became clear I was going to be out for the whole of the freezing February night.
I returned to Dickie Doodles for another hour or so in the warm. I sat nursing a pint and wishing I was the sort of person with the confidence to chat up a stranger and invite myself to stay over. I rehearsed a few approaches in my mind but they all came out sounding wrong, usually along the lines of ‘If it’s any help I only want somewhere to sleep, I’m not trying to get off with you.’ There’s probably no right way of doing this sort of thing.
If I was going to try it on with anybody it would have been the woman in specs in the opposite corner of the bar who I’d noticed looking over at me several times earlier on in the evening. I’m not sure why she kept giving me the eye. She may have been working in some new glasses for all I know. Judging by her body language she’d just had a row with the hippy she was with and was engaging in some revenge flirting.
Earlier I’d decided he was a bit of a drip. He looked as if he'd been told the gig was fancy dress and he'd come as all of Jethro Tull. But now that he was, in my imagination at least, standing between me and a bed for the night, I really took against him. Strange how easy it is to persuade yourself that any rival for the attention of someone you’re interested in is a complete tool. He redeemed himself slightly later by playing the theme tune to Captain Pugwash on the fiddle. Unfortunately he milked it to death. His rendition seemed to last longer than the original TV series. It was all a bit academic anyway; my plan for securing emergency accommodation never got off the drawing board of diffidence.
I returned to the hostel to await the dawn, not quite as drunk as I’d’ve liked. Most of the night was taken up with a mix of self-piteous whimpering and a kind of tortured, obsessive post-match analysis as to whether the warden had closed early or whether my watch was wrong and therefore the whole fiasco was my own doing. The entries in my notebook for the night don’t make very edifying reading, resembling the written output of the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining, just before he starts chasing Shelly Duvall round with an axe.
By the morning, when the warden came to unlock the hostel, I was too frazzled to choke him to death. He was effusive but evasive in his apologies. He claimed he could’ve sworn he remembered me checking in at reception to say I was back in, as per his instruction on arrival. As he wittered on, my inner Perry Mason was doing overtime deconstructing his excuses. Most of what he said came under the category of the etiquette lie. These are lies that nobody’s expected to believe but which have the same function as basic social etiquette, ie they stop strangers from kicking you senseless.
He arranged for me to change from the dorm I was in so I’d have a room to myself to catch up on some sleep. My body clock was in meltdown and I struggled to drop off. Everybody has their pet method for dealing with insomnia. I find a wank often helps.
At the exact second I came in the sink, alarm bells began ringing. I mean real alarm bells. For a paranoid moment I did wonder if the warden had rigged up some sort of sensor to the sink trap. I pictured him wiring it up, muttering darkly to himself, Right, that’s the last time I have to unclog this fucking thing. I made myself decent, headed for reception and asked if there was a problem. The warden calmly announced he was just checking the fire alarm. I was really starting to go off him.

Wigan 8th February 2007

2007-02-10T21:29:00.001Z

Due to backpacking buffoons in Manchester I'd slept badly the night before. I wasn’t in the mood for Wigan, if there is such a thing as being in the mood for Wigan. I took the slow bus from Manchester to get there, which took 90 minutes to travel 18 miles. It would have been quicker in a sedan chair, carried by cats. There were leaflets on the bus warning that the route was threatened with closure due to low usage. Some consultants were probably looking into why this is. I could save them the trouble.
The bus crept its way through grey and ugly villages. There was little of interest to see although I did pass a pub advertising an upcoming psychic night. Makes a change from karaoke I suppose.
It was a slow news week in Wigan if the poster from the local newspaper was anything to go buy. The headline read, 'Wiganers warned to lock their sheds'.
Irritation piled upon irritation. Wigan isn’t big, but I still managed to get lost. I was looking for Wigan Pier, or as it’s now branded, the Wigan Pier Experience. Why is everything called an experience nowadays, but rarely feels like one? As it turned out the road to Wigan pier was closed to pedestrians due to maintenance work. My notes from the day at this point read, yet another shithole that’s declared war on pedestrians.
One of the reasons I visited was that I wanted to see Uncle Joe’s Emporium, the home of Uncle Joe’s Mintballs. Due to poor research I’d run away with the idea that this would involve having a nosey around the factory that makes the sweets but this was separate to the shop. So I was making a three hour round trip to mooch round in a sweetshop. Uncle Joe’s Mintballs have been around for years and are world famous. They’re round, minty and apprently vegan in case you’re wondering.

I searched my map for the local museum, couldn’t find one labelled as such so took a punt on the History Shop. It turned out to be a museum in all but name. I was so irritated I couldn’t concentrate on the exhibits. I wanted to ask the woman behind the reception desk if I could buy some history but she was becardiganned and a bit soppy looking; I wasn’t sure she’d cope with my industrial strength sarcasm. As it was I settled for asking her if this was the only museum in the town. She said it was. Inwardly I punched the air in triumph. Ha! There! See! It’s a bloody museum.

By the time the coach home left from Manchester, snow had started to fall further south. I knew because the driver told us. She apologised for our late departure which was due to snow related delays around Birmingham on the inward journey. She ended her weather update by saying, ‘It’s slippy out there, so, please, make sure you put on your seatbelt.’ I felt nervous immediately and began wondering what she wasn’t telling us. I imagined something along the lines, ‘And to top it all, I made a bit of a night of it last night and frankly I think I’m still pissed. Anyway, fingers crossed.’

Lake District 6th February 2007

2007-02-10T21:28:00.002Z

I really shouldn’t have bought my last pair of glasses on the internet. As the coach pulled out of Golders Green I misread a sign for gentle dental care as gentile dental care. I was well underway, quietly frothing that this sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed before I realised my error. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. At my day-job at the Lee Harvey Oswald Memorial Library I recently shelved a Simone De Beauvoir book whose title I momentarily read as All Men Are Mental, a book I’d actually like to read, along with that Chinua Achebe classic, Things Fall About.
Later as we approached Manchester I could’ve sworn we passed Tattoo Park, which sounds far more appealing than the far more prosaic (and real) Tatton Park. I like to think Tattoo Park would have the words love and hate spelt out on its wrought iron gates, and heart shaped flower beds with the words Mum and Dad spelt out in crocuses. And of course it wouldn’t be complete without inky blue swallows with massively out-of-proportion heads flitting about.

Corbridge. With my usual cavalier approach to research, I’d overlooked the fact that the special bus following the route of Hadrian’s Wall only runs in the summer. So instead, I took the 685 bus across from Carlisle to Newcastle, which went as close as I was going to get. Picturesque as places like Corbridge might be, I can’t help pitying for people who live there. The only supermarkets around seem to be mini-Co-ops. If not for them the locals would have to subsist on oatcakes and chutney in jars with gingham lid-covers. The place is like the set of Heartbeat crossed with that of the movie Westworld.

Brampton. Brampton had a similar mix of quaintness and strangeness. There was a sign in the window of the Spar shop saying, ‘Police notice. Members of staff have been advised not to sell eggs to anyone under the age of 18, under any circumstances.’ It’s the ‘under any circumstances’ bit that pleases me. Picture the scene. Some behoodied hherbert shuffles in and asks for half a dozen eggs. He asks for free-range to make it sound convincing. The woman behind the counter, suspicious in her nylon housecoat asks, ‘What do you want them for?’ The youth, prepared as he is, struggles to keep the note of defensiveness out of his reply. ‘I thought I’d knock up a Spanish omelette.’ The sales assistant nods, smiles quietly to herself. ‘You’ll be wanting some cheese too, then.’ The youth nods. The woman behind the counter lets out a ‘Ha!’ of triumph. ‘Gotcha! There’s no cheese in a Spanish omelette!’
In the shop I asked for directions to the bus stop. Continuing my mooching, I stopped off in the Knoxwood Wildlife Rescue shop. A woman entered the shop and approached me. She’d followed me from the Spar shop, concerned that I hadn’t understood the directions given and was deviating from the route specified. I wasn’t sure whether to feel grateful or very, very paranoid. I always expect rural areas to be expensive places to live but Brampton doesn’t bear this out. The wildlife shop had jeans for £2, a perfectly decent suit for a fiver, and books at 25p each. Age Concern round the corner was selling shirts for two quid. I later saw an advertisement for a one bedroom cottage for rent at £375 pcm. I know where I’m coming to live if Deptford ever gets infected with some mysterious plague. Obviously finding work might be a problem. I suppose I could always make a living selling eggs to teenagers on the black market.

Haltwhistle. Alternatively I could move to Haltwhistle where I spotted at least two places I’d quite happily work. It’s home to the Haltwhistle film project which is a travelling cinema that goes round showing films for £3 a pop in pubs, village halls and schools. It’s also the location of the Newcastle bookshop . The main shop is closed during the winter while the proprietor works in the bindery to the rear of the premises, but he still had a table of clearance books on a table out front with a note instructing people to put any money through the letterbox. How quaint.
The film project aside I sensed there wasn’t a lot to do in the evenings locally. The Methodist Church hall was advertising a gig about a month hence by Sheds on Fire. I used to know a band called the Sheds. They formed from the remains of a group called the Dads. The singer became a vicar so this lot probably weren’t connected. Of course I’m assuming Sheds on Fire are a band. I suppose there’s an outside chance that the advertised event actually was going to involve some sheds on fire. A terrible waste of timber, but imagine the spectacle!
Hexham. Hexham was next. Like many well-preserved English towns it had a slight hippy feel to it. If there’s a stock image of England that’s pastoral and features spinsters riding to church through the morning mist, somehow the idea that they’ll be stopping off for a Fair Trade coffee on the way home is implied somewhere in that myth. The high street had a pleasing concentration of charity shops – RSPCA, two Oxfams, an Age Concern and a Tyndale Community Hospice shop. There was a Relate shop round the corner. All were a bit pricey. In other shopping news I was especially taken by Hexham’s half-timbered branch of Poundstretcher. An inscription above the door claimed it was founded in the reign of King William IV. A pound was a lot of money in those days.

Portsmouth 12th January 2007.

2007-01-15T21:27:00.004Z

Portsmouth is particularly nondescript near the ferry terminal, which is where you’ll arrive if you travel with National Disgrace. If you’re pressed for time head straight for Albert Road which is charity shop central and home to some good little second-hand bookshops and record shops. I'm assuming of course that you'll be able to find your way, which, if my experience was typical, is by no means a given.

I found the city hard to navigate, partly because the map I’d been sent by the tourist board had a key so small I practically had to rub it against my eyes to make any sense of it. Navigation wasn’t made any easier by the fact that Portsmouth is following the current trend for designating different areas as ‘quarters’. The city fathers had got a bit carried away and decided the city should have five quarters. More arithmetic and less marketing, that’s what’s called for there. The place didn’t seem too accustomed to visitors. When I asked for directions in the local library the woman behind the counter seemed foxed by the enquiry and responded as if I must just be a local who’d had some sort of stroke and forgotten where they lived.

The surprise of the day was the amount of art on offer. In a small café in a park there was an exhibit of watercolours by an 87 year old ex-seaman. Several were selling for £10 each, another for £8. This seemed insanely cheap. Perhaps his reasoning was that he’d probably be dead soon anyway, so there was no point in treating his art as a money making exercise.

There’s something up the creek about the way we value things. Because the pictures were so cheap I instinctviely started looking at what might be wrong with them to explain their cheapness. Conversely, if I was looking at a piece of art that seemed wildly overpriced I’d be looking at it trying to see what all the fuss was about. But I liked his stuff. He had a slightly odd sense of colour, almost but not quite right, which was an interesting effect. I think I prefer artwork that makes you wonder whether you like it, rather than making you wonder why you’re supposed to.
On the top floor of the library building there was more art. Mostly they were large figurative acrylics of seaside scenes running out at £150 to £300. It's the sort of stuff a lot of people like. I don't mind it but I can't feel strongly about it. Unless, like me, you spend a bit of time mooching around small private and public galleries outside London you could run away with the idea that in purely quantitative terms most of the art produced these days is conceptual. That may be the stuff that gets the lion’s share of harumphing media attention, but actually most of what gets made is still pictures of stuff. And I sense that people consume it on the same terms that they buy their furniture. This influences the content of what’s gets painted and printed. Hence the seaside scenes. The majority of people who buy artwork, I think, want to be reminded of 'nice' things; holidays, the countryside, nature. Unless they happen to live somewhere picturesque people don’t apparently want to see pictures of the ordinary people and things directly around them, and they certainly don’t want to be reminded of work. The art in these galleries is essentially an arm of the leisure industry. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Under slate grey skies I headed out to the arse end of the city in search of the Dickens birthplace museum. It was closed for the off season. I suspected I wasn’t missing much. These birthplace museums are usually a bit of a swizz. I went to the Holst one in Cheltenham. He’d lived there until he was about six, like that was when he did some of his best work. But somehow the wasted journey got to me. I plunged into a trough of self-doubt over this travel writing malarkey. I found myself wondering if there really is a niche out there for me, whether there really is a readership wanting the vicarious pleasure of mooching about like an aimless middle-aged loser, without the obvious drawback of actually being one of them.
The city museum perked me up before I headed home; no Roman shit, and lots of domestic interiors from ordinary homes – the sort of stuff that doesn’t end up in paintings.

Cirencester 22nd December. 2006

2006-12-26T21:25:00.009Z

I didn’t warm to Cirencester. There was well-fed self-satisfaction in the air and plentiful evidence of what Detroit’s rabble-rousing MC5 would have referred to as ‘a lot of honkies sitting on a lot of money’. In most towns a staple of charity shop stock is the humble fleece. In Cirencester I didn’t spot a single one, but I did spot three Barbour jackets. I’ve never properly been able to imagine the process through which a fleece ends up on the musty clothes-rails of joy. Does somebody really hoik one out from the back of their wardrobe, try it on for one last time, turn to their significant other and say, ‘Be honest, does it suit me?’

Cirencester somehow had an unreal feel about it, pitched somewhere between Dad's Army's Warmington-on Sea, and what Ambridge might be like if it was ethnically cleansed of the Grundys and their ilk. It's rustic and well-preserved, but somehow cultureless. Not uncultured in the ordinary sense but built around an absence, as if at its core something has been forgotten. All the men looked like if you made eye-contact with them they’d start talking to you about sport or money. For the first time in my life I found myself thinking, what this town needs is a McDonald’s and a Wetherspoons. It must be bleak not being wanted on the voyage round here. Late in the day I saw two teenage black girls outside a hardware shop. I don’t think it was my imagination but they seemed to have hunted look.
Regular readers will know I like some time for quiet reflection before the coach home so I aim to run out of stuff to do slightly early. But not as early as I did in Cirencester. I killed a few hours in a pub on the edge of town. It was evidently a refuge for the Grundy strata of the local population. A bunch of glum-faced men sat in one corner discussing where to spend the rest of their evening. They worked their way through a list of possible pubs, crossing them off in turn as they realised that at least one of their number was barred from each of them. Eventually they came up with a venue everybody was allowed into. The oldest of the group then mumbled through his moustache that he didn’t fancy this last option as he owed the landlady £20.
They resigned themselves to staying put and Moustaches started in on a rambling and shapeless anecdote about a recent abortive trip to a strip club in Swindon. Glamorous! ‘I was supposed to go with Trigger,’ he complained, ‘but you know what he’s like. Twat never turned up.’ As casually as he could manage Moustaches then said, ‘I had three grand in me pocket, and all.’ He didn’t elaborate on the source of this money. I like to think it consisted entirely of twenty pound notes, each borrowed from a different pub landlady.

Northampton 8th December 2006

2006-12-10T21:24:00.001Z

There are some lists I carry round in my head. I supplemented a couple of these in Northampton. The shorter one is my list of mis-hearings resulting from the difference in accents that I come across around the country. Hitherto it was a list of one, where I’d convinced myself that a bloke on a hopper bus in Bradford had claimed to be recovering from a chipolata bypass. In Northampton I was mooching around the busy market square. Walking past a butcher’s van I swear the butcher announced over his microphone a special offer of trays of tube-steak for a fiver. I’m not sure why these mis-hearings should be meat-based and vaguely Freudian. Maybe it’s too soon to conclusively identify a pattern.
Another of my lists is the more comprehensive one of rare or obscure charity shops I’ve spotted. Mostly these are shops representing charities I’ve not heard of before, but I’m prepared to also include shops for well-known charities that don’t normally have retails outlets, like, say, the Samaritans shop in Carlisle. You have to wonder how this particular category of shop comes into being. Did the Samaritans think, ‘Right, let’s not go mad. We’ll start out with one shop in Carlisle and see how it goes.’ Then when it didn’t work out perhaps they didn’t have the heart to tell the volunteers in the shop the bad news.
This list doesn’t just represent the idle wool-gathering of an aimless middle-aged loser, although obviously that’s a big part of it. It also has a practical use. As a general rule, the more obscure the charity shop, the cheaper the stock. Near my allotment there’s a Geranium Shop For the Blind, which despite its name is a charity shop and not a really specialised florists. They have a semi-permanent sale where all clothes are £1. They illustrate one of the other principles of charity shopping, namely the white hair to price ratio. The older the staff, the greater the savings to be had. If everyone behind the counter has locks like cotton wool you can reckon on knocking at least a pound off the expected price of any item.
In Northampton I added a shop called Debra to the list. I’ve since assured myself via the good offices of Google that Debra is actually a charity, and not just some chancer called Debra who fancied jumping aboard the charity retailing gravy train. This, along with outlets for Barnardo’s, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, was sited on Gold Street. These clusters of shops never result in the sort of price war I always hope for. I suspect they operate some sort of cartel, the buggers.

Gloucester 24th November 2006

2006-11-25T21:23:00.001Z

Gloucester’s main museum and art gallery is one of the least interesting I’ve seen, but its Folk Museum more than makes up for it. Its focus was on the daily lives of ordinary local people, with lots of artefacts from working life and local industry, but the high point of the permanent exhibition was a mock up of domestic interiors through the 20th century. These always go down a storm with me. I think they appeal to the nosey parker in me; I love the feeling they give you, something like walking past someone’s house at night when they’ve got the curtains open. All the installation lacked was a couple of automata, sat on the sofa having some conversation you could only guess at.
But the icing on the cake was a visiting exhibition on local boy made good, record producer Joe Meek. I say made good, I mean made good, built his own studio over a shoe shop in North London, changed the face of British pop music, became dependent on amphetamines, got sexually obsessed with his blond Germanic protégé Heinz, went a bit bonkers and shot his landlady. It’s a car-crash of a story; terrible and sad, but hard to ignore. The idea of people reinventing themselves seems cheapened these days, when every other daft sod wants to be famous for being famous. But the driven, obsessive way Meek transformed himself from small-town boy to music pioneer by sheer force of will seems almost epic in comparison. He’s mostly remembered now for his big hit, ‘Telstar’, but as the free jukebox of his hits in the exhibition attested, he had a phenomenal work ethic. I could have stood there listening all day.

Stoke On Trent 10th November 2006

2006-11-12T21:22:00.009Z

There's not much to see in Stoke On Trent but Webberley’s bookshop is worth a visit. It's not much to look at from the outside, and little better on the inside, with its paintwork the colour of thinly-spread Marmite. But there's something quaint about the place even by the standards of most dog-eared independent bookshops.
The header board of the foreign travel section said ‘overseas holidays’ rather than ‘travel’, as if abroad was a recent invention. I half expected UK travel guides to be shelved under the heading ‘sensible holidays’ and guides to the most exotic destinations to be shelved beneath the warning ‘Here be Monsters.’
The shop proclaimed itself a family business since 1913 as if this is an unambiguous good. I can't honestly say I share that assumption. Heretical as it might be, I think people tend to romanticise small independent businesses, especially when they’re family run.
I once worked in a family-run DIY shop in Hammersmith. I committed the stupid oversight of not being related to the owners. Interbreeding and marriage had assembled a shower of unsuitable incompetents that the most cack-handed interviewing and selection procedure couldn't have matched.
It was a business untouched by the modern managerial mania for constant change. It was the sort of dusty, cluttered hardware shop featured in the well known Two Ronnies ‘four candles’ sketch and it remained pretty much unaltered until it went bust. It was exactly the sort of place where old-fashioned personal service is alleged to live on. Nobody had told the manager, Brian. At least once I saw him tell a customer to fuck off, and he wasn’t above greeting regulars he didn’t like with the words, ‘What can I get you, you horrible prick?’
From what I remember of ‘A’ level Sociology, we abandoned trying to combine family and working life because greater industrialisation demanded a better match between people and the skills required. In family businesses people get humoured and indulged. Lil, the owner's cousin was in charge of stock control at the Hammersmith shop. She wasn’t a natural, but she was allowed to persevere. When I worked there in the mid 1980s I'd occasionally come across items of stock that must have been around since before 1973 because they were priced in pre-decimal currency.
Some similar ill-advised indulgence seemed to be operating on the upper floor of Webberley’s which had a large area devoted to the sale of fountain pens. Maybe some member of the Webberley litter has been allowed his inky little empire because nobody wants to hurt his feelings.
The cultural institutions of the town had a predictable ceramic bent. The council run Potteries museum redeemed itself with an open show in its art gallery. I'm probably a bit old-fashioned art-wise because I usually enjoy open shows more than curated ones, partly because of my enthusiasm for amateurism, but mostly because they tend to feature stuff that looks like stuff.
Deciding I hadn’t quite had enough ceramics for one day I squeezed in a visit to a local family run pottery factory. The factory museum displayed a family tree with mug shots of the firm’s directors down the years. There was an unsettling facial resemblance between them, and I found it hard not to think of Kind Hearts and Coronets.
I've probably been innoculated against the charms of ceramics by the hideous ornamental plates in the back of colour supplements, but there were a couple of pieces that I liked. Among the best were sets of wartime Utility chinaware which due to shortage of materials had a clear glaze revealing the clay colour beneath. But favourite had to be an Army issue teapot, with two spouts to aid the speedy pouring of multiple mugs of tea. Homely genius.

Dover 27th October 2006

2006-10-28T21:21:00.006+01:00

Some towns are the geographical equivalent of pubescence, an unpleasantness you just want to get through with as little delay as possible. Dover, or Swindon-on-Sea as I like to think of it, is one of those places and it knows it. It’s pretty much given up. Many towns have a welcome sign beside the road as you enter – Dover should have one saying, head straight for the ferryport, folks, there’s nothing for you here.
Next time you see the white cliffs on telly, filmed from the sea, notice how the camera never pans left to take in the grey concrete bleakness. The town exhibited at least two symptoms of the English disease. There was the usual interchangeable pedestrianised rank of the usual shops. And there was a shining example of the modern passion for making up new names for old things when we're a bit unsure what to do with the old things any more. Late in the day, with time to kill I spent an irritating 40 minutes hunting the town's library. I couldn’t see any signs for it. Eventually I relented and asked for directions from a woman in a nearby shop. When she'd finished I said, 'Oh, right. So is it near the Discovery Centre?’
She seemed almost embarrassed by association. ‘That’s it, yeah. That’s what they call the library now.’ Christ! See also Wigan.
Dover did have its good points. There was a huge British Heart Foundation furniture store which was having a disco. In the shop, in the afternoon. To celebrate Halloween. All the staff were in fancy dress. Either the manager's some crazed martinet who dictated it should be so, or even odder, the staff decided collectively that this was a beezer idea.
People say there aren't any truly local shops these days. They probably haven’t been paying charity shops as much close attention as I have. But then, who has? I often spot trends in local trading patterns for old tat and cast offs. In Dover’s chazzas, remnants of old wallpaper are all the go. Either Dover's home-decorators are chronically indecisive, or a kleptomaniac's been trawling the local DIY stores shoplifting, and has now come over all Robin Hood. Any road up, if you’ve got a lot of exercise books to cover, head for Dover.
Early afternoon I headed to the Land Army museum. It was tiny, housed in a converted outhouse on a nearby farm, and unstaffed. Reasoning that if there was nobody to pay I couldn’t be expected to pay the admission fee I bunked in for nothing. It’s not the first time I’ve scammed free admission to a museum.
I did something similar at the Energy museum in Amsterdam; the lights were off and nobody was inside. Oddly, on occasions like this, on the way out, I often think the visit was interesting, but just short of interesting enough to warrant the admission fee.
The Land Army museum housed a bijou mix of artefacts, and personal testimony in the form of letters and diaries. I'm strangely drawn to anything about the Home Front. There’s something I find oddly comforting about the period.
I think my generation were the last generation to have proper parents. Not proper, good parents, but proper parenty parents. Parents of a distinct generation who’d been a bit old to swing in the Sixties; parents who didn’t aspire to aping their own kids for as long as they could pull it off.
My mum was formed by the war. She'd learned to cook during rationing; pilchard fishcakes, cheese potato cakes, risotto made with leftovers of sausages and anything else that was knocking about. I can just about remember us having a bucket in the corner of the kitchen filled with a liquid called isinglass which we used to store eggs. It all seems a bit Victorian now.
The final retro flurry of the day took the form of whiling away the last half hour before the coach in a weird little teashop down a backstreet. It impressed me on two fronts. Normally, the ceiling price I’m willing to pay for a cup of tea is fifty pence. As this place was charging 40p I thought I’d push the boat out and have a slice of malted loaf too; price ditto.
As a sideline they sold dried goods loose from large plastic barrels; porridge oats, washing powder, raisins etc, and yet the place wasn't full of smug hippies. Result.
In fact the only other customers were what seemed to be a brother and sister, in late middle-age and apparently living together. There was a child-like innocence about the way they spoke about the evening to come, what they would have for tea, what they’d watch on television. I sense that people like this are fewer or less visible nowadays; not odd enough to be pathologised, too off-kilter for the mainstream.

Wolverhampton 13th October 2006

2006-10-14T21:20:00.003+01:00

A few days after I visited Wolverhampton, I heard a local millionaire on the radio talking about his warehouse of art treasures which he allows the public to view by appointment. If' I'd known it might have livened up my visit.
As it was, there wasn't much to see so I headed out of town. In Monmore Green a woman in a shop confidently gave me hopeless directions to the greyhound track. Why do people do that? I nearly always admit if I don’t know where something is. I try to reserve giving plausible but hopelessly misleading directions for when I’m directing cyclists who’ve asked for help while riding on the pavement.
I’d always fancied going greyhound racing. As this Friday afternoon meet was free it seemed like an opportunity. The track was tucked away near an industrial estate. The punters were all strangely anonymous nondescript men, like extras in a film nobody could be bothered to make. There was a lot of hanging about involved. Before each race, the dogs were walked around an inner track, partly, I suppose, to give the punters a chance to check them out, but largely it seemed, to let the dogs take a dump. Some luckless sod in that ubiquitous anti-status symbol, a be-logoed polo shirt, followed them round with a bucket and a coal shovel scooping up their doings. We could do with him on the road outside my flat.
Although I never really worked out the complexities of the betting system, which seemed more based round the trap the dog came out of than the qualities of the dog itself, I certainly got my money’s worth. There were about fifteen races in the space of ninety minutes. I missed two entire races while buying a cup of tea, and I hadn’t even had to queue up. Magritte described life as consisting mostly of boredom, interrupted by brief moments of panic. I’d imagine that’s about the size of it for greyhounds.
It’s the deception that depresses me. It’s not even a real rabbit. Greyhounds have a relatively short racing life. I’m not sure if they get tired or they just wise up and can’t be bothered anymore. Hence the long faces, perhaps. But then dogs are famously dim. I tend to mistrust people who say they like dogs, much as I’d mistrust someone who professed a liking for thick people.
After the first ten races I felt I’d got the general idea, so took the bus to Bilston. It's a pleasant enough suburban town with some tatty bits. I arrived to find the main art gallery closed for a change of exhibition. I’m sure these places see me coming. The craft gallery was open, with a display of ceramics, but for some reason craft galleries always just seem like poncey shops to me. A few doors down was a bar owned by former Wizzard frontman, Roy Wood. I always wondered what happened to him.
Further along again was a tattoo parlour. The word ‘tattoos’ had a greengrocer’s apostrophe, which struck me as the worst PR I’d seen for a tattooist since the poster for the one who used to operate from above the White Swan in Greenwich. The poster was lettered with wonky Seventies style bubble writing, so not at all offputting as long as you fancy going round looking like a teenager’s school exercise book.
On the coach back to London there was a ferocious smell of sardines on the coach, apparently coming through the air conditioning.

Derby 6th October 2006

2006-10-07T21:52:00.015+01:00

On the coach to Derby they provided laminated information sheets on the dangers of deep vein thrombosis. I browsed the menu of factors that increase the threat of DVT. First on the list was pre-existing clotting abnormality. Breaking in some new glasses, I misread this as pre-existing clothing abnormality. As we pulled out of Golder's Green I entertained myself with visions of the driver checking everybody on board, occasionally tutting and shaking his head saying, ‘That shirt with those trousers? Don’t say you weren’t warned.’
Apparently, malignancy is also a rick factor. Presumably the driver keeps a weather eye out for anybody getting aboard who looks a bit spiteful.
I opted for the luxury of the triple seat at the back, right next to the toilets, so the journey was even more of a feast for the senses than usual. A succession of older black women, seemingly on a chapel outing, took it in turns to avail themselves of the facilities and come out shaking their heads in bafflement. Finally the youngest of them intervened and came out explaining that the white lever was the flush. Several of the others protested that the instructions had clearly stated the lever was yellow.
Later a baby two seats away was sick over its dad. The father took it on the chin. Well, mostly on the chin; some round the neck and the shoulders.
Passing through Loughborough I spotted a hairdresser's called The Head Gardener. I love that sort of thing; stuff like the piercing studio in Manchester called Holier Than Thou or the pizza takeaway I once spotted All Pizzas Great and Small.
I like to imagine there are thousands of small businesses set up for no other reason than that someone made up a brilliant name for them in the pub one night. A lot of them probably fold when the proprietors realise their true vocation lies in making up names for businesses, not in running them, but hey, more power to them I say. I happen to think the world would be a better place for the addition of a chain of second-hand toy shops called Toys R Used, or a restaurant specialising in American cuisine called United Tastes of America. Or a drapery shop called It’s Curtains For You. What’s not to like about a bookmakers called And So To Bet? Who wouldn’t want to shop at a concession within World of Leather stocking backless cushioned seats; the Ottoman Empire? And who could resist eating at a cut-price, avowedly populist raw seafood restaurant called Oi! Sushi!
Marketing flair like that wouldn’t have gone amiss in Derby. The presentation problems start before you’ve properly arrived, as the main route into the city is a bleak stretch of dual carriageway, named Brian Clough Way, in a surely backhanded tribute to the local hero. Outside the town library a huge banner proclaimed the town’s slogan; 'Derby – the city where you can make the most of it'.
I can only wonder what the rejected suggestions from the branding consultants might have been. ‘Derby; Never Mind Eh?’ perhaps. Or ‘Derby; Could Be Worse.’ The same consultants went on to similar success, launching P and O ferries’ celebrated 'Worse Things Happen at Sea' promo campaign, later moving on to help with the launch of that well-known self-help Bible for the underconfidrent; 'You're Shit and You Know You Are'. I might have made up that last bit.
Derby seemed to be in the grip of a compulsion to add the words Ye Olde to the name of any and every kind of business. A couple of these places managed to redeem themselves in my eyes. Ye Olde Dolphin Inne advertised two quizzes a week, with free entry, free curry and rice for all participants and beer prizes. It pains me to admit it but when I see stuff like that, capitalism really does seem pretty grand.
I went into Ye Olde Sweete Shoppe and bought a quarter of Yorkshire mix. Yorkshire Mix consists of what Derby’s branding gurus would probably call Sweet Factory Sweepings, a rainbow mish-mash of broken confectionery. The mix had agglomerated in the jar, but the woman who ran the place kindly hacked at it with a foot-long carving knife to break it into manageable chunks.
What I notice in UK cities is that, compared to London, the people you see around on a Friday morning represent a fairly skewed sample of the population. Not being at work on a weekday apparently carries a freight of meaning in places like this, as I discovered when I asked about hire charges in the library. The librarian looked over her glasses at me and said, ‘Are you a concessionary member? We do some reductions if you’re on benefits.’ Bloody nerve.
Before trawled the museums I ducked into a Scream pub for lunch. They were doing curry, chips and a pint for £2.95. It wasn’t great but at those prices I’d have counted it a bargain provided I managed to hold it down. Next stop was the Industrial Museum. Much of it was too blokey for my liking but the bits based on oral social history were worth a look. And I now know what a shot tower is. If you come away from a daytrip with the answer to at least one pub quiz question it's been time well-spent.
On the way back to the coach station I just had time to check out Reveal Records. It's one of a dying breed of record shops with a genuinely local feel; the counter area plastered with fliers for local gigs, releases by local bands in prime position. In addition to the fairly conventional looking ground floor, it had an entire separate floor for punk and metal, complete with suitably pierced and tattooed staff.
Picture the manager, on a typical Monday morning, approaching one of the ground floor assistants. ‘Reg from Punk and Metal has just rung in sick. Can you cover?’
The assistant looks doubtful.
The manager reaches under the counter and brings out the clip-on facial piercings and the lick-and-stick tattoo transfers. He hands them over to the still-doubtful assistant. ‘Trust me, you’ll be fine.’
Shops like this are disappearing fast, while, oddly, this doesn’t happen with music shops. Music shops are like the cockroaches of independent retailing; apparently indestructible. This despite the inherent misanthropy of people involved in selling musical equipment. In music shops, bitterness and disappointment hang in the air like a roadie’s B.O. Most of the staff are failed musoes who’ve been denied other possible career options by dint of their personalities; too mean spirited and charmless to be music promoters, too thick and sarcastic to be sound engineers.
I pondered the mystery of this as I took my seat on the coach. I looked out of the window as we pulled away. Cottony clouds scudded across a watery full moon. I turned off the reading light and fell asleep.

Bradford 25th and 26th September 2006.

2006-09-27T21:19:00.004+01:00

You don’t get to pick your travelling companions on National Express, but this is usually made bearable by the unspoken rule that people mostly keep themselves to themselves. It's a rule that's partly based on the knowledge that, unlike on the train, you can't make an excuse and change carriages if the person sat next to you is odious in some way.
Clearly, the flossy-haired nightmare who planted herself next to me at Golder’s Green didn't know the rules. She took against me immediately and it wasn’t long before I was reciprocating with gusto. She was complaining before her arse had even hit the seat. Unhappy that the coach was stuffy she asked me to adjust the ventilation nozzle for her. Getting settled she jabbed the seat belt buckle into my thigh, then complained that the glasses case in my pocket was poking into her. After a few miles she began tutting pointedly because the edge of my jacket had brushed against her. For a while she glared at me in silence as the miles rolled past, until the reason for the glaring was made apparent. She prodded me in the shoulder. ‘Could you move your arm so I can see the view?’ My arm had been resting on the sill of the window; if I’d had biceps like Popeye she could’ve still seen everything the rolling vistas of the Midlands had to offer. By now I hated everything about her, from the orange foundation caked in the crease of her nose to the tea stains on her teeth. Mercifully, she nodded off for a while, until she jolted awake suddenly as we arrived at Bradford. With the natural panic of sudden waking she blurted, ‘Oh dear, is this Bradford?’
I wanted to breezily say, ‘Bradford? Oh no. We’re just pulling into Dundee,’ but I didn’t have the heart.

Bill Bryson wrote that 'Bradford's role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well.' Fuck him, I loved it.
It’s sometimes overshadowed by its more PR conscious neighbour Leeds, but its lack of pretention appealed to me. It started with the B and B. I like my Bed and Breakfasts at the shabby end of things and this was just the ticket. The carpet in my room looked like it had been rescued from a skip. A kettle was provided, with a lead so short that I could only use it by putting it on the floor. The allowance of teabags (5) and coffee sachets (6) was generous ( Travelodge please note), and they were all Fairtrade. I drank the lot; as the tubs of UHT milk were all out of date I felt entitled. I knew I'd be in for a sleepless night after all that caffeine, but I love free stuff.
Heading out for the evening I checked out the usual rack of local information in the foyer. There was lots of info on ethical tourism. The proprietor and his Goth daughter who helped run the place were obviously people of principle. The next morning I discovered their ethics included a concern for the environment. Mindful of their carbon footprint they’d decided against heating the bath water too much. The cold tap on the bath was firmly stuck, but I’ve a feeling nobody had had cause to use it for a while. I almost felt I should apologise at breakfast for using up all the tepid water.
The dining room was sparsely populated, with a couple of seedy, single-looking men. It was all a bit Graham Greene. There was a vegan breakfast on offer, a first for anywhere I’ve stayed. I’m not vegan but felt I should encourage that sort of thing and considered ordering it. An earnest looking travelling salesman seemed to have the same idea. ‘What’s in the vegan breakfast please?’
The becardiganned hotelier eyed him warily. ‘It’s for vegans. People who don’t consume animal products.’
Smiling enthusiastically the salesman said, ‘Yes, but what do you get in it?’
‘It’s for vegans. Are you a vegan?’
The salesman shook his head. ‘No. But I’m interested.’
The proprietor relented slightly. ‘Hash browns, Quorn sausage, mushrooms, toast, baked beans, tomatoes.’
The salesman nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, I’d like that very much.’
‘But you’re not vegan?’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
The proprietor gave a single nod and headed for the kitchen, from whence a lot of banging soon began to emanate.
On his return, I ordered the non-vegan breakfast for fear of being asked to provide some sort of certificate confirming my cruelty-free credentials. Tucking in, I took a sip of my orange juice and felt something sharp drag across my lip. Inspecting the random Scooby Doo tumbler the juice had been served in I noticed a quarter inch chip broken from the rim. Slightly put out that I’d narrowly escaped having my face ripped in half I raised a friendly eyebrow at the hotelier when he came with more toast. I proffered the glass and asked him to swap it. He looked at the glass with warm nostalgia and said cheerily, ‘Ah, yes. Quite old this one. Had it ages.’ I half expected him to shake his head, smile ruefully and say, ‘Hasn’t lasted badly considering it came free with a gallon of four star.’ He retreated to the kitchen with it. Through the doorway I saw him place it carefully on a shelf. For some minutes he gazed tenderly at it, as if thinking the tumbler would be as right as rain given a bit of sellotape and some TLC.
I started my itinerary at the National Media Museum. This could comfortably take up a day given proper attention. I saved time by skipping most of the telly-related bits. I saw a caption saying that the average UK adult watches 9 years of TV in a lifetime, of which 300 days is adverts, and felt that was as much as I needed to know.
As well as the main elements of the museum the building also houses the only working Cinerama screen in the UK, and the Cubby Broccoli cinema. You have to hand it to Cubby Broccoli for having the cojones to tough it out in the harsh world of showbiz with two ludicrous names for the price of one. There’s surely a tacit recognition of this in the fact that the cinema uses both his surname and his forename, unlike for instance the Priestley theatre nearby. The thought of a night out at the Broccoli cinema can’t help but involve a certain amount of juvenile sniggering, not to mention potential disappointment for brassica fanciers.
You never hear of anybody else with the surname Broccoli. Perhaps all the others have chickened out by deed poll, losers in a war of attrition, beaten by the phone ringing white hot every night with mischievous callers. Lightweights! I’d point them to the example of a punter I met when working for a London local authority. Mr Anus brought in some Council Tax documents to be photocopied. I took two copies; one for his records and one to take down the pub. I recognised it as a sign of encroaching burn-out that the main satisfaction I took in the job at that stage was in spotting curious names among the clientele; including the excellently named Mary Mary, who, frustratingly was reasonably co-operative.

My next stop was Saltaire, a village established by local mill owner Titus Salt. The old mill now houses an art gallery, which was slightly swamped by a lot of posho housewares shops. I went for their exhibition of David Hockney paintings and drawings. I didn’t see them at their best as I was still breaking in some new specs at the time. I’d bought them on the Internet for £17.50 including post and packing, and they were already proving a bit of a false economy as they gave everything a queasy visual wooziness not unlike the beginnings of a bad acid experience.
Hockney's stuff was disappointing. I think his style’s been ripped off by so many purveyors of slightly arty greetings cards, that his own work suffers from the comparison. Looking at it was a bit like reading Edgar Allan Poe after first reading Stephen King.
There were photos of Hockney dotted around the gallery. He’d been on the radio not long before ranting about the forthcoming ban on public smoking in the UK. He came across as an arrogant blowhard, so I was heartened to see that in the photos of him at work he apparently had the humility to be shown deep in child-like concentration, with his tongue protruding slightly from the corner of his mouth. Then I noticed he was like this in all the photos. Perhaps he’s had some sort of stroke. Probably all the smoking.
I took the bus back into the city. Years ago a friend who’d just moved to Deptford from Bradford sang the city’s praises as a conspicuously friendly place. Nobody had told the bus driver. I stepped aboard with my one day bus pass in one hand and a cheese and onion pasty in the other. He pointed to them in turn. ‘Number one, that tickets no good on these buses, number two you can’t eat that on here.’
There was just time to visit the Colour Museum before it closed. Rushed as I was I found it hard to engage with the exhibits. It all felt a bit like doing my Science homework on the bus, but as usual I found out one useful thing for future pub quizzes so it wasn’t a wasted trip. I now know why, given a choice of colours in test conditions people are least likely to sample food dyed blue.
With thoughts turning to food I ducked into the Old Bank pub on Market Street. It was a niche pub for blokes who’d been barred from the Goose and Granite round the corner for making the place look depressing. All the meals were £2.50, but I decided against eating as the woman behind the bar seemed vaguely scrofulous. Ordinarily I wouldn’t turn my nose up at those sort of prices. In fact it’s fair to say that I went to Bradford for the Media museum but fell in love with the prices. On Godwin Street there was a barber doing haircuts for £3. The cheapest haircut I’ve seen in London runs out at £5 a pop, and believe me I’ve done extensive research. That’s a saving of £2 which was exactly my fare on National Express, ergo if I time my next visit for when I need a haircut I’ll effectively be travelling halfway across the country for sweet nothing.
Bradford's certainly worthy of a return visit. My desire to return wasn’t dampened by the pall that fell on me later in the evening. In another pub I was struck by a sense of half-remembering some kind of anniversary or milestone. It dawned on me that it was twenty years to the day that I had moved in to the housing co-op where I live. The realisation almost buckled the legs under me. I remembered my feeling on moving in, that my luck was turning and that I was on the up. I had plans, many of which haven’t so much gone on the back burner as fallen down the back of the cooker. Twenty years on I'm still living on the same street, minus most of that early optimism. Transience is so common now, that it’s easy for some people to believe that their lives are progressing through recognisable phases. As for me, I’ve seen the face reflected back at me in the door’s glass panel at the entrance to my flats ageing down the years. I could only marvel at my capacity for standing still, and I couldn’t help thinking of that scene in the film The General, where Buster Keaton’s face barely registers surprise as a house falls down around him. That’s me, that is.

Newport. 11th August 2006.

2006-08-13T21:48:00.001+01:00

I rolled into South Wales under louring skies. The weather suited the place somehow, as if grey was the default colour for the local landscape. I knew Newport was my sort of town as soon as I stepped off the coach. The first two shops within view of the bus station were a Poundstretcher and an Oxfam. It’s sometimes reassuring to know certain universals hold true in most places. The Oxfam was, as ever, frankly overpriced and the familiar scrupulous vigilance over shoplifting was in evidence. A sign in the window said, ‘Due to thefts we are only putting one shoe on display. Please ask at the counter for the second shoe.’ I resisted the temptation to hop inside with one leg tucked out of view just to see the look of panic on the faces of the staff, and headed instead for the town gallery and museum.
The museum was better than most of its type and size, and featured a temporary exhibition on the Home Front in Newport. I seem to have an endless appetite for stuff about the Home Front. Maybe it’s my age. It’s perhaps hard for people to appreciate if they didn’t actually live through it, but in the UK it was just after the War until at least 1979. As well as the powdered egg ephemera and the like, there were excellent sketches by local artist Stanley C Lewis. More of these were featured in the gallery, which impressed me by actually having a specifically local flavour. It’s amazing how each artist can find something new to see in a valley pit village.
They like their art round here. The leaflet I picked up from the tourist office, which gave all the information you could want about local attractions apart from their addresses, also listed the public art in the town. Public art usually proves to be a euphemism for statues that don’t look like anything but some of these were great. I particularly liked the one commemorating the Chartists who smashed up the Westgate Hotel, and the one dedicated to WH Davies, local vagrant author and self-styled Supertramp. There’s evidently some sort of statute of limitations that comes into play when local authorities erect commemorative sculpture, leave it long enough you get a statue for activities that’d probably be rewarded with an ASBO in the here and now.
That morning I’d woken with a cold and almost hadn’t bothered with the trip. I’d gloomily thought, see one municipal art gallery you’ve seen them all, but what got me out of bed was the thought of unknown charity shops. My gumption was rewarded on Commercial Street, where the Red Cross shop was having a clearance sale with everything at a pound. The shop was run with brisk efficiency by three tiny older women who could have passed for sisters, or pieces of the same freakish chess set. I listened in as I waited to pay. They reminded me of an observation once made to me that as you get further north the Welsh accent makes its speaker sound incredibly angry whatever they’re saying. I was just thinking I was far too far south for this to apply when I overheard one say to the other, ‘If she speaks to me like that again, I’ll hit her.’ She was probably joshing but I had half a mind to hang around and find out; how often do you get to see pensioners having a proper stand up scrap?
I headed for the Streets, a local history centre towards the docks. The nearby Londis was signposted at regular intervals for about a mile before you reached it, but the history centre seemed intent on keeping itself a secret. I eventually found the converted chapel that housed it and stepped into the gloom. I entered via the themed Quiet Woman’s Row café. The only person there was the woman who staffed it. It seemed a crushingly solitary job, like being a lighthouse keeper without the aura of romance and adventure. Behind her desk was a notice-board for forthcoming events, among which were regular ‘Tea and Telly’ sessions, where punters drop in for a cup of tea and to watch an old film on the TV of a Tuesday afternoon. I quite liked the sound of it, but even I thought it a bit of a stretch to class it as an event.
The café area aimed to recreate an old dockland’s street, but the displays had let themselves go a bit. The only reliable way I could tell if some of the side rooms were exhibits or storage areas was if there were blue plastic chairs stacked in there. Some displays replicated local shops since departed, but if the exhibits represented their stock accurately, it’s no surprise they went out of business. Fading Vesta curry boxes from the Seventies sat alongside Edwardian tobacco tins and plastic toys from the Eighties. The centre advertised itself as a learning resource for local schools, but this could have only usefully stood as a dire warning to business studies students about the dangers of poor stock control. The whole café area seemed as if somebody had gone through a car-boot sale sucking up everything they could with an industrial vacuum cleaner, then dumped the results here.
I reached a door which seemed to lead to the Streets museum proper. A sign stated there was an admission charge of £2. There was also apparently a £1 charge to view the café area I’d just been in, for those not eating. I reasoned that if the Streets was twice as good as the café, I could safely save myself £2. I mumbled my excuses and made my way outside, avoiding eye contact with the quiet woman as I went.
I had a better time at Newport’s transporter bridge, a bit further down the road. It’s a great gangly structure that manages to look both daft and impressive at the same time. One of only six in the world still working, the transporter bridge shuttles people and cars across the river in a gondola like a supersized shopping basket, suspended from cables. The bridge wasn’t operating due to repairs, but the helpful, enthusiastic assistant in the small visitor centre made up for it. She gave me a rundown of the history of the bridge as if she’d just found about it herself and was still excited. She got me to crank the working model of the transporter, then she put on a video about the bridge.
Watching the video and listening to the soothing tones of its voiceover, it struck me how much our impressions of groups of people are shaped by our first contact with them. My first contact with the Welsh was in my early twenties when I worked for a chain of DIY stores. When stores were revamped we would often be dispatched as extra labour to various corners of Wales and the South West. And of the bunch of us holed up in those cheap B and Bs in Torquay and Pontypridd and Exeter, the Welshmen always seemed the most intent on copping off on nights out. So for years I had a vague stereotype of the Welsh as hornier than the average Brit. But listening to the voiceover on the video I realised that actually this preconception was partly a response to the South Wales accent. There’s something in the well-modulated lilt of it that means that whatever’s being said, the speaker will sound thoughtful, intelligent, and a bit dirty.
I had a final wander before the coach. I think my ideal daytrip involves going somewhere that hasn’t quite got enough on offer to fill a full day. I’m somebody almost incapable of relaxation, and one of the few ways I can do it is to trick myself into a kind of enforced mooching about in places like Newport. For that reason, the town suited me, but there was more besides. There’s something self-deprecating and unpretentious about the place. It was there in the florist’s sign that said, ‘Are you in the shit? Say sorry with flowers.’ It was in the name of the local ale commemorating the landmark bridge, Piddle Under the Transporter. In the pub, I pointed to the pump handle and mumbled, ‘Pint of that please.’ When the barman breezily announced, ‘Pint of Piddle? Right you are,’ his face lit up like the novelty of the name still hadn’t worn off.
The coach driver on the return journey was the same gentle, kind and conscientious man who’d driven me up at 8 o’clock that morning. I just about got my head round the maths involved and concluded that either he works a straight thirteen hour day, or a split shift over the same length of time. Just as I was trying to decide which would be worse, he elevated my respect for him even more by a Tannoy announcement that endorsed my long held conviction that the instructions in coach toilets are completely mystifying. Patiently, he announced, ‘Whoever’s in the toilet, can I just point out the button for the hand-wash is the white square one. The red one you’re pressing is the panic alarm. My dashboard’s lit up like Christmas!’

Manchester 27th July 2006.

2006-07-30T21:54:00.001+01:00

If my visits are anything to go by, Mancunians are some of the friendliest people in the North, and frankly it does my head in. And overfriendliness central seems to be Urbis, the city’s museum of er... cities. There was a poetry reading advertised for the evening. I hadn’t gone especially for this but as I was there I thought I’d ask for details. I was met with blank faces. The barwoman walkie talkied to ask the manager. As it was a hot day I was offered a glass of water while I waited for an answer. When the manager arrived he offered profuse apologies for the cancellation of the event, despite my explanation that I was only passing anyway. Once he’d established I was on holiday, he probed me on where else I’d been and where I was from.
The conversation had long overrun the usual cut-off point I’d expect of an equivalent exchange in London, which would be much more along the lines, ‘It’s not on, you’ve been told, now piss off.’ The manager revealed he’d been to Greenwich the week before and had a friend in Deptford. By now I was sweating a bit, and was fervently hoping he wouldn’t press me for more precise details of where I live in case he might invite himself round the next time he was passing. Something of my terror obviously showed in my face as he eventually dropped the subject and allowed me to back away with the offer of a free drink ‘for my trouble’ ringing in my ears.
On the way back to my hostel I spotted a piercing shop on Oldham Street called Holier Than Thou, so on balance it wasn’t a bad day.

Morpeth 25th July 2006.

2006-07-30T21:51:00.009+01:00

I booked the B and B in Morpeth by email so I probably shouldn’t have expected any different. When I arrived at the guest house and rang the doorbell there was no answer. Untypically, I had my ancient and canoe-sized mobile with me so I rang the accommodation.
The owner answered. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m outside.’
There was a pause, and what I retrospectively convinced myself was the sound of someone looking out of a window. ‘No you’re not,’ he responded, with a definite hint of snottiness in his voice. He asked the name of the guesthouse I was standing outside. I told him.
‘That explains it. That’s the other place we run.’
He directed me to the correct address. He was sulking when I got there and had a face on him like a smacked arse for the entirety of my stay.
Morpeth's an unspoilt small town without being self-consciously quaint, but a weekend there's plenty. I only really went to visit the Morpeth chantry which houses England's only bagpipe museum, an oddity that fully earns its mention in that Bible of strangely English days out, Bollocks to Alton Towers.
Bagpipes are the musical equivalent of Marmite; you either love them or hate them. I can't remember when I fell in love with them, although I do remember that a pipes rendition of Amazing Grace did trouble the Top Twenty when I was clearly at a formative age. Additional to my soft spot for bagpipes in general, I'm particularly keen on a regional variant, the Northumbrian small pipes. I stumbled across them through the work of Kathryn Tickell, whose first album I bought on cassette and played until it snapped. The Northumbrian small pipes are less in your face than the Scottish pipes, with a reedier sound, like a Stylophone having an asthma attack; lovely. They also seem to often be played in slightly odd, lopsided time signatures, like marching music for people who trip over a lot.
There's a curious mismatch between the high-tech presentation style of the museum and the folksiness of its subject matter. On entering you’re issued with a set of Lieutenant Uhuru style headphones. Each exhibit has a transmitter which relays a commentary and samples of the sounds of the different pipes, which the headphones pick up. The reception wasn’t great so the experience was a bit like listening to a badly tuned radio. At any moment I expected the commentary to be interrupted by the controller from some local minicab firm. Despite the technical glitches I came away even keener on bagpipes. I also learnt that there’s an annual bagpipe festival held in St Chartier, France. That's my summer holiday sorted for the next few years, then.
On a solitary wander that evening I chanced on Morpeth’s other oddity. Down a side street, I passed an ordinary-looking terraced house bearing a brass plaque claiming it was an honorary consulate of Romania. I considered ringing the doorbell and finding out more, but decided to leave the mystery intact.

Carlisle 24th July 2006.

2006-07-25T21:50:00.001+01:00

I had thirty minutes to kill at Piccadilly Manchester so popped into the Ian Allen bookshop. The shop caters for transport nuts of every stripe, from train-spotters to bus-fanciers and all points in between. It even had books at £12 a pop listing every bus operator in the UK with the make and registration of every vehicle in their fleets. Even my step-dad would raise an eyebrow at bus-spotting and that’s saying something. An abiding memory of my teens is regularly returning from a weekend getting out of my gourd with my peers, to a house flooded with the sound of his steam train LPs, played at ear-splitting volume. But each to their own, I suppose.
As trains and buses are to some, so charity shops are to me. Carlisle has plenty of the big hitters, mostly clustered around Bank Street, including an Oxfam where I found a book called ‘Firefighting for Boys’, from the 1930s – evidently a less Health and Safety obsessed era. But what puts a spring in my step is coming across chazzas I’ve not spotted before. On Botchergate I spotted three; the Samaritans, Cumbria Cerebral Palsy, and Eden Valley Hospice. Cumbria Cerebral Palsy were selling a telly for £8. It was labelled ‘Telly, £8’, presumably in case anybody mistook it for a teak effect microwave.
On the same street were two branches of Wetherspoon’s, seven doors apart. I suspect the planning department let this go by because they were otherwise preoccupied by some high-concept mind-game they seem to be having with the shopping public. On Lowther Street they’d allowed the siting of a furniture shop called the Living Room directly opposite a café called the Dining Room. I imagine them going home from the office the day they pulled that off, announcing with a sinister smirk, ‘Guess what I did at work today, dear.’
Carlisle’s got a lot to recommend it. Prices are cheap; bed and breakfasts start around £20 per night, the charity shops sell shirts around £2, jeans for about £3. Fats, a bar on Paternoster Row, which had the leather-sofa-tastic décor beloved of a lot of trendy London bars, only charged £1.70 for lager and happily, wasn't thronged with tossers.
There's enough to see to justify a couple of days stay. The Tullie House gallery and museum had an excellent visiting exhibition on the ground floor, and the Old Tullie House had some nice William Morris related stuff. Both had free admission. Carlisle also has about the only millennium related bit of public art that doesn't make me goroan inwardly. The Carlisle Millennium underpass is far more interesting than it sounds, but then I suppose it would be. Strange engineering artefacts and a sculpture inscribed in Middle English made it one of the best underpasses I’ve ever walked through, by some margin.
Less impressive was Carlisle castle. A minicab driver once complained to me that with babies and circuses, you've seen one you've seen them all. I'm like that with castles. My advice is, find one that’s cheap to get into and commit the details of what you see to memory. Or get a book out of the library with some pictures.

Belgium. 25th to 30th June 2006.

2006-07-01T21:47:00.008+01:00

Two days prior to leaving for Belgium I got dumped. I was heading for the flatlands right enough. As a result my memories of the journey to Brussels are sketchy. Looking at my notebook, the entry for that first day consists of the words ‘gas off, windows shut, taps off, curtains drawn’. Each line had a tick against it.
I do remember fighting a losing battle with the chemical toilet on the coach. They can put someone on the moon but adequate sanitation on coaches seems beyond the wit of man. I tried all the buttons but this just produced a frightening whirring sound and dimmed the lights slightly. Mood lighting struck me as unnecessary. The black typhoid consomme sloshing round in the bowl went nowhere. There weren’t even the usual instructional diagrams. These usually consist of a man in a trilby urinating standing up, with a large cross through the picture. Presumably this means men should sit down to piss, and not that they should remove their hats before doing so.
My other memory is of feeling gloomy in the ferry's tacky bar. These places are glum on a good day; like Wetherspoons on water with the associated mix of faded middle-aged men, the long-term sick and a few badly behaved teenagers. I sat reading ‘Watching the English,’ by Kate Fox until a passing reference to a selfish and neglectful lover made me wince like I’d been kicked in the shins. I had a similar experience a few days later in a Brussels toilet where I was confronted with a piece of graffiti baldly stating, ‘I failed’. When other people’s love lives hit the skids they over-identify with soppy pop songs, I do the same with anthropology books and graffiti. I don't hold out much hope for me.
Despite myself I decided to stick to my planned itinerary rather than just get drunk for five days. I checked into the Brussels hostel and went to explore the neighbourhood. One of the guidebooks I’d read described it as ‘not very salubrious’ and advised taking a cab after dark. This immediately struck me as nonsense. The area had a significant Muslim population and seemed very family orientated; there was more of a cross-section of age groups out on the evening streets than I’ve ever seen in English cities.
There was a strange concentration of launderettes and barbers for such a small area. I couldn't work out if the two things were related. My only theory was that the locals couldn’t afford their own washing machines because they’d spent all their money on haircuts, but I hardly even convinced myself.
I returned to the hostel for an early night. My room mates were a cosmopolitan bunch judging by the fact that throughout the night they were taking phone calls from every time zone imaginable. I began developing a sense of grievance which marinaded nicely throughout the rest of the holiday.
I stoked it further the next day when I discovered that the instructions for using my all Belgium rail pass were only in French, Dutch and German, although I’d bought it from a UK company. I navigated the resulting difficulties by acting thick and staying polite, which seems to work for most situations.
Things weren't improved by the realisation that Belgium’s closed on a Monday. All of Antwerp’s museums were shut for the day, so I walked for ages looking for a local park that has over 300 pieces of sculpture on display, including some by Henry Moore. Lost, I asked directions in a private gallery. The assistant was pointing me in roughly the direction I expected when the gallery owner, gangly in a Jason King moustache, decided to throw in his two euros worth. He insisted the park was in fact two tram rides and a fifteen minute walk away. I gave up on the park, having decided I’d just met the man who put the twerp in Antwerp.
The next day I stayed in Brussels. In the morning I harrumphed around the Museum of Modern Art, disgruntled because most of the Magritte stuff was in storage. Then I visited a brewing museum. The museum, a working brewery, specialised in lambic beers, which have been made the same way for hundreds of years. Judging by the free tasting at the end of the tour, after all these centuries they still haven't got the hang of it.
Each sample tasted like a first attempt at home-brewing that had turned to vinegar. I backed towards the door with an apologetic wave, my face crumpled in disgust. The attendant asked me, with a hurt look if I’d like some more. I shook my head and strode briskly away.
I’ve got an odd fascination with people like these brewers, who just don’t know when to give up. There was a shoe repair shop opposite New Cross station for at least twenty years. I’ve only seen somebody go in there once. A woman happened to snap the heel off her shoe as she was passing. I’ll never forget the look of spooked delight on her face when she looked round and spotted the repair shop. I didn’t have the front to follow her in so I could witness the look of spooked delight on the face of the shop’s owner.
If Jim Davidson's to be believed , (a terrifying idea, I know), Belgium is boring. I don't think that's true, but I did think that for a major city Brussels was light on nightlife. I lucked in and was there the week of one of the few live gigs the city had lined up for months.
Pretty Girls Make Graves, a sort of Goth Blondie from the American Mid-West, were playing at the Botanical Gardens. They were performing in the Rotonde, a name which pleased me, as if the gardens had a separate area for fat people.
In fact the Rotonde was a tall, dark cylindrical room. It was a bit like going to a gig in a gasometer, without the novelty value of actually doing that. The room’s peculiar shape and acoustics meant the music was ear-bleedingly loud, but still managed to sound like it was being relayed through two cocoa tins with string stretched between them.
Plastic Bertrand, of ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ infamy, was Belgian. He seems indicative of the Belgians’ relationship with rock music; they’re enthusiastic about it, but they don’t quite get it. The well-scrubbed audience actually clapped along with the band. I haven’t seen this at a gig since going to Butlin’s as a kid.
The resulting un-rock and roll atmosphere was heightened by the frankly workman-like approach of the band. You can tell a band’s reached a certain level in the business when their set comes in at precisely sixty minutes, to the second. About ten minutes shy of clocking-off time the bassist announced, ‘We were going to make this the last song but we’re having such a good time we’d like to play a few more for you.’ If he’d been Pinocchio someone in the front row would have been going home minus an eye. Sure enough, those few spontaneous extra songs took the time round to bang-on an hour.
Naïve as it might be, stuff like that disheartens me. I feel the same when I see bands crediting their accountants on their album sleeves. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned.

The next day I played a sort of rail-pass roulette where I just jumped on the next available train to anywhere. The first anywhere was Ostend. Coastal towns in the low countries have a very specific feel. There’s none of the melancholy vulgarity of English seaside towns, but instead the sedate feel of suburbia-on-sea. Ostend was alive, if that’s the word, with well turned out pensioners, like a slightly more chic Eastbourne.
Worth a look is the church of St Peter and St Paul, roughly opposite the rail station. It has breathtaking Technicolor stained glass windows. Unusually, some of them were quite abstract, as if someone had made them from a kit and lost the instructions. Outside were parked row upon row of custom motorbikes. A handful of huge hairy bikers were milling around alongside. Their club colours indicated that they were from Cleveland, Ohio. I’d have asked them how and why they’d ended up there and why if I could have found one of them that didn’t look like he routinely bit the heads off babies for a bit of a lark.
Next stop was Bruges. It’s incredibly picturesque and the place is mobbed by tourists, despite an all-pervading smell of sewage. As I stood at a junction a tanker lorry pulled alongside and the smell worsened. It occurred to me that, as a means to limit visitor numbers, the town authorities might be shipping in the smell of crap.
I retreated into the Groningen Museum. It featured lots of work by the Flemish Primitives. Paintings from that period often bore me, but these were intriguing. They were incredibly detailed but the perspective employed gave them an odd childlike quality. Their work was very bound by formal convention and religious symbolism, so when Hieronymus Bosch emerged from the same group I can only assume they thought he was as mad as a box of frogs.
For the first time, I used one of those audio commentary handsets that make it seem like art galleries are full of people who haven’t traded in their mobile phones since 1989. It definitely added something to my understanding of the artworks. The downside was that the process of using it was like trying to get through to a call centre; press 6 to hear about the Primitives’ use of perspective, press 7 to pay your gas bill by direct debit.

On my last night in Brussels I went to an evening of low-budget short films at the aptly named Chez Toit. I knew I was in for a night of seriously arty film from the fact that in the programme the length of each film was given in feet. I’ve never understood this, as if people might phone the cinema and say, ‘Sorry, I’m running late and can’t get there until 9, can you tell me what happens in the first 12 yards?’
It was clear on arrival that the Shoreditch Bohemian bozo look has now gone international. I’m not sure how this crowd managed to pull it off as Belgium is a stranger to the concept of second-hand clothes shopping. Only that afternoon I’d been reading an article in a local magazine trumpeting the opening of the city’s first Oxfam shop, complete with a novice's guide to the concept of charity shops.
I have an uncomfortable ambivalence about the artier, more esoteric end of the cultural scene. On the one hand I quite like what you might call the product, but some of the people that you have to rub shoulders with to access it make me want to demand the return of national service. This evening had the advantage over an equivalent event in, say, Hoxton, in that I couldn’t understand a word anybody around me was saying.
The films were the usual mix on offer at these nights. There were the slick ones that were clearly intended as calling cards for their career-minded creators, who’ll probably secure future success directing terribly clever car commercials. And there were the plain weird ones, whose creators may well die mad and alone in an attic somewhere, but hey, what price self-respect?
As I was leaving, one of the filmmakers was throwing a tantrum, apparently because his film had been shunted down the running order. I didn’t understand anything he said, but I got the general idea. Some things are the same in any language.

Southampton. 19th May 2006.

2006-05-22T21:45:00.001+01:00

The Lonely Planet guide to England has it about right; ‘Frankly, there isn’t much to see or do in Southampton.’
It’s the only place except Milton Keynes where I didn’t see anybody selling the Big Issue. It says something about both places; not only does nobody in their right mind want to set up home there, nobody even wants to be homeless there. Norwich, in contrast practically had a Big Issue vendor on every corner.
If a town’s desirability’s directly proportionate to the number of Big Issue sellers, then the charity could be sat on a fundraising goldmine. All they need to do is form an elite flying squad of vendors which can be sent into towns in return for a modest bung from local estate agents keen to hike up property prices. The property market gets a boost, the charity raises cash, the vendors get a few weekends away in decent B and Bs across small-town England, everybody’s happy.

You can develop a tolerance for museums, especially if you’ve been caning it like I have lately. The Museum of Archaeology reminded me that I’d been overdoing it a bit. I couldn’t look at the Bronze and Iron Age exhibits without glazing over immediately. I can’t get interested in artefacts relating to people that I couldn’t imagine having a conversation with, which pretty much rules out anything pre-capitalist, I think. The museum was mainly interesting for the building it was in which was part of the old city wall, and for the chance to eavesdrop on the two attendants who passed the time with analysis of the love-lives of their friends. I could’ve happily listened in all day.
Highlight of the trip was the city art gallery, which had a cracking selection of modern art. This was easily one of the best municipal galleries I’ve seen. In the comments book nobody had a bad word to say about the place, not even the person who complained that the security guard was really staring at them. I was inclined to dismiss the comments as paranoid ravings, but sure enough, a few minutes later I noticed the guard glaring intently at a man near the Camden Town group paintings. However, to be fair, the punter did seem to be standing so close to the painting that he might start licking it at any moment.

Exeter. 12th May 2006.

2006-05-13T21:44:00.003+01:00

To get to Exeter I used Megatrain for the first time. The terms and conditions said I must travel in the designated Megatrain carriage. I fully expected it to have straw on the floor and the slight whiff of cattle about it; at £2.50 for a day-return you can hardly expect luxury. As it turned out, the carriage was perfectly normal and so, apparently, were the people in it. The thought that most of the people sat nearby had probably paid a full fare of around £22 filled me with an exhilaration that, frankly, I struggled to contain. It was all I could manage not to run up and down the aisle waving my ticket in the faces of other travellers. But I resisted; there’s little more undignified than a tight-arse triumphant.
I’m used to coach travel, so I savoured the distinct pleasures of the train; not least of these being the chance to walk around, and hence delay slightly my inevitable demise from deep vein thrombosis. There was also the treat of getting a view of places you don’t see from the road. Back gardens intrigue me in particular. There’s something intimate about looking into them, like catching sight of somebody through a window in an unguarded moment. Passing through Honiton it seemed every other garden had a trampoline in it. They seemed mournful somehow, as if they were evidence of an increasingly solitary world, where children bounce alone. When I was growing up there would have been one child in the neighbourhood with a trampoline, and the rest of us would have pretended to like him so we could have a go on it. Those were the days.
I think I’d been primed for this nostalgic turn of mind by the sight of all the allotments the train passed. On train journeys as a child, I’m sure men working on their plots used to stop and wave at passing trains. Or was that The Railway Children? I considered inititating the waving action at the allotmenteers that I passed, but as I’m on a three year waiting list for a plot myself, I was more inclined to wave an envious fit at them.

On arrival, I made my usual trawl of local charity shops. They were mostly clustered on Sidwell Street, a fact which I hoped might have led to a fierce price war, but I suspect the PDSA and British Heart Foundation shops had some sort of price fixing agreement going on. Evenso, I managed to buy a Pierre Cardin shirt for £2 in the nearby Cancer Research shop. A bargain still even if the designer name was wasted on me; I used to think Mr Byrite was a real person.

True to form, a lot of the places I planned to visit were closed. Of what was open, a highlight was the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. It had a visiting exhibition of slightly obvious photography by Nick Danziger, which must have been more interesting than it seemed at the time because only after I’d looked round it did I notice there was a huge stuffed giraffe in the middle of the room. Upstairs was a display of toys down the ages, including a yellow wigwam exactly like the one I used to have, and a Spacehopper exactly like the one everyone used to have. As if my earlier bout of nostalgia hadn’t made me feel ancient enough, the explanatory notes for the wigwam made it sound like a relic from the Middle Ages.

Less enthralling was a show of slapdash lithographs by TV comic Vic Reeves at a gallery by the Quay. The prints had ‘I’m too famous to make an effort,’ written all over them. I thought of writing, ‘He’s a celebrity, get me out of here,’ in the comments book, but it only occurred to me the next day on the way to work.

On Fore Street I spotted a chipshop called Mr Chips. It was too much of a temptation. The owner was friendly but frail. He looked like Corporal Godfrey off Dad’s Army which somehow only added to the mounting guilt I felt at what I was about to do. Finally, after some minutes’ wait, my food was ready. I paid, and as I left said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips.’ Either he didn't hear me, or he was used to this sort of thing. Either way, I didn’t get the vinegar bottle in the back of the head that I was expecting. The chips were undercooked and a queasy shade of yellow. I suspect Mr Chips gets a lot of passing trade from smart-arses but not much repeat business. I considered topping the afternoon off by waltzing into a pet shop and asking the man behind the counter whether he had fat balls but decided to pace myself.

On the journey back, the megatrain seats were marked with reservation slips bearing the company logo of a fat bus inspector. At the seat I first chose somebody had written the word wanker across the hatband of the fat inspector. I moved in case I got blamed. The screaming obviousness of the fact that I was in the cheap seats felt uncomfortably like the practice at my brother's old secondary school of making the kids who got free school-dinners sit at a separate table. This was presumably to give other kids useful pointers about who to pick on and why. My fellow travellers with non-megatrain tickets clearly didn’t go to the same school as they didn’t all corner me and start chanting, ‘Your dad’s a tramp!’

Norwich. 6th April 2006.

2006-04-07T21:41:00.002+01:00

If scenery is difference, variety, then the flatlands of Norfolk hardly even count as scenery. But I liked that, found it strangely peaceful. On the way to Norwich, the coach passed a designated natural woodland burial site. I quite fancy being disposed of that way.
Death seems more like something to do with me these days. Lately I’ve developed something like the opposite of a nesting instinct, clearing stuff out of my flat and decluttering, as if I'm preparing for departure. I just hope my subconscious doesn't know something I don’t, and is telling me to get ready to leave with a clear desk because I’m riddled with some hideous terminal illness.
I didn’t have high hopes for Norwich. I associated it with Alan Partridge and a woeful 70s TV gameshow called Sale of the Century which was broadcast from there. But I was wrong. Of the first five shops I saw on leaving the bus station, two were charity shops and one was a branch of Poundland; my kind of town! And it actually felt like a place; hadn’t been Subwayed to death, or turned itself into a twee Merchant Ivory theme park.
Opposite the brushed steel eyesore of the Millennium library I stumbled on the church of St Peter Mancroft. Peter Mancroft seemed an unlikely name for a saint, and more like the name of somebody you were at school with, or some forgettable regional TV presenter.
I actually quite like churches, apart from all that nonsense about God. I realise this attitude's contradictory and makes me sound like my mum, who once claimed she liked Songs of Praise apart from all the singing.
There was a fantastic stained glass window above the business end of the church which is well worth a look if you’re passing. Stained glass windows seemed to be quite the thing locally as even the Salvation Army shop I went in had one. It seemed to depict a punch-up between two drunks on the High Street. This struck me as quite a breath of fresh air given that gritty realism isn’t something I associate with stained glass as an art form.
Later, walking back to the bus station, I passed a shop devoted entirely to mustard – more specifically the famous local brand, Colman’s mustard. You have to think that when a shop becomes that narrowly specialised it's in danger of going the way of the Giant Panda, but it seemed to be thriving. I vaguely remember the young woman who inherited the Colman’s mustard millions in the late 70s. The tabloids made a lot of the story, presenting the heiress as a bit of a rebellious, hard-drinking punk rocker. I wonder how she’s getting on. I hope she found something good to do with the money.

Milton Keynes. 5th April 2006.

2006-04-06T21:39:00.001+01:00

It’s easy to take the piss out of Milton Keynes, but that’s no reason not to. I’d never actually stopped there before but about twenty years ago I passed through its outskirts on the way to Milton Keynes Bowl. It struck me then as like a motorway service area that had become malignant and spread.
Someone I knew who grew up nearby said the trouble with Milton Keynes is that there’s no 'there' there. As I walked the windy boulevards I had a burning urge to approach strangers and ask, ‘Where is everything?’
Nobody will ever set a film in Milton Keynes; why bother? It's like England with all the good bits taken out. It’s the type of place young parents move to, only to have their children hate them for it when they grow up. It’s the only English town I’ve been to where I didn’t see a single Big Issue seller. I still haven’t worked out what that signifies.
It’s like Swindon, only on purpose. And it’s the on purpose bit that amazes me. Milton Keynes was planned to be this way and when it was conceived was heralded as the future of how English towns would be. And now, by accident rather than design, much of the rest of country has followed suit with its blank, bland dedication to shopping and only shopping.
The more places like Milton Keynes I see, the more I feel an irrelevance, an anachronism, the more I feel there’s not much space in the world for me. But then, would I want to belong in a place like this? Round the back of Iceland, there was horse shit in the road. I suppose even the most sterile places can still take you very slightly by surprise.

Amsterdam. 24th to 30th March 2006.

2006-04-02T21:38:00.006+01:00

It’s odd that I don’t have more to write about Amsterdam. Maybe I just wanted to concentrate on having a PROPER BLOODY HOLIDAY, because in the endless hours of the coach journey I made some depressing calculations. I worked out that since I left school in 1979 I’ve had a total of eight weeks holiday. Obviously, I’ve had more time off work than that, but in terms of actually going away, that’s it; eight poxy weeks. And a week’s worth of that was made up of long weekends.
I never really got into the holiday habit. We didn’t have regular holidays when I was a kid. Mostly we went and stayed with relatives. The only actual proper paid-for holidays we went on were a couple of weeks at Butlin’s, and a week in a B and B in Bournemouth soon after my mum got the all clear from a bout of cancer. So the part of my brain that ought to tell me I need a holiday never really developed. This is probably part and parcel of a chronically underdeveloped sense of entitlement I’ve got, which I’m sure has held me back in many ways over the years.
I’m an anxious traveller, particularly abroad, I now realise. In the UK I can position myself, can feel I’m in context. Abroad, I feel strangely unplaced.
My anxiety was worsened by the fact that I found Amsterdam incredibly easy to get lost in. I'm sure it’s not just me – the narrow streets look very similar and are laid out like a spider’s web, so it’s hard to retain a sense of direction. I found myself repeatedly walking past a fleapit called Miranda Sex Cinema. I wondered if it had any connection to the Goth band Miranda Sex Garden, but the thought had stopped amusing me by the twelfth time I went past the same spot.
In the eight years since I was last there, the centre of Amsterdam seems to have been converted into a theme park for drugs bores. The area round Centraal Station was swarming with Brits and Americans loudly intent on getting mashed to oblivion in the coffeeshops, and only that. If you've seen the schlock horror movie Hostel you'll recognise the phenomenon, identified by one of the characters when he asks, ‘Is there actually anyone Dutch in Amsterdam?’
In my teens, people into drugs tended to be misfits who weren’t hard enough to be herberts, but weren’t bright enough to be geeks. If Amsterdam’s anything to go by there now seems to be a breed of pot-jocks, muscleheads who aren’t noticeably different in attitude to the sort of bloke who prides himself on how many pints of lager he can neck. I met a prime example in one of the hostels I stayed at. Waving a map of the city’s coffee-shops he said, ‘Me and my mate are just going to update this – they’ve missed off some of the best places.’ I resisted the obvious response; ‘Lend me your mobile, I’ll phone and tell someone who gives a fuck.’

If you’re main interest in life isn’t getting cabbaged there’s less to do of an evening in Amsterdam than you might expect. I was struck by how little was going on in terms of live music. Some of the more interesting stuff to do happens in a number of squatted social centres in the city. One of the biggest is Academie OT301, which used to be a film archive. I went to a zine sale and a film showing there – both were well attended and well organised. Smaller, but worth a visit is the squat at Plantage Doklaan 8, (tram 14 or 7) which has occasional film screenings and music nights. Also worth a visit is the anarchist bookshop Het Fort Van Sjakoo at 24 Jodenbreestraat.

Cheltenham. 25th Feb 2006

2006-02-28T21:36:00.003Z

At Heathrow, two Canadians got on the coach and sat directly behind us. I don't think their mothers had ever told them about when to use their ‘indoors’ voices. After about an hour of their braying I wanted to burst my own eardrums. National Express sometimes provides earphones ostensibly to allow you to listen to the onboard TV, but they're probably really meant for times like this. Both Canucks were evidently quite successful in some branch of corporate IT and were so thoroughly and tediously immersed in business culture that I began to take a renewed pride in my own failure to understand the word career as anything other than a verb.
There was a clear dynamic between the pair. The less successful of the two managed to find endlessly varied ways of agreeing with the other, a skill that I’m sure hasn’t harmed his advancement in the corporate world. I was reminded of a group of middle managers I once saw on a train in Lewisham. The most popular of the group was a man who spent all his time apparently nodding his gushing agreement to everything anybody said. It took me some time to realise that he actually had some sort of tic.
The slightly superior Canadian rang his office to say he would be back in time for a mid-morning meeting on Monday, so this was evidently a weekend trip. It seemed an awful lot of CO2 emissions to produce for a weekend in the country. Perhaps they knew something about Cheltenham I didn’t and still don’t.

Cheltenham is like Bath without the cultural pretensions – like a thick, posh rugby playing brother to its more literary sibling. Legend has it, it's the only posh town in southern England Jane Austen never lived in. Not all its olde-worldiness was an unalloyed delight – I was travelling with my other half, who, single-handed, brought the headcount of black people in the town up into double figures. This caused some curiosity among the locals – either that or somebody had announced a staring competition just before we arrived.
Other aspects of the place were old fashioned in a more endearing way. We stumbled across an old-school electrical shop called something suitably no-nonsense like Cheltenham Electrical, down a terraced backstreet away from the prevailing chintz and poshness. Pride of place in the window was taken by the first two-bar fire I’d seen since about 1979; yours for a very reasonable £17. It gave me a strange thrill of reassurance - I'd assumed those things had gone the way of the Spacehopper and the three-day-week. E was sent into a reverie, remembering long-gone afternoons skiving off school and whiling the time away by flicking bogies onto the bars of her mum’s electric fire to watch them sizzle. She wondered now at the way the fire’s elements never seemed to last long. I suggested they might have been shorted out by her snot, feigning more technical knowledge than I can honestly lay claim to. I felt the shop’s days were probably numbered. For posterity, I took a photo of it from the pavement. From behind the counter, the proprietor and his assistant, both in cardigans, looked back at me listlessly, like two men waiting for the end.

To my dismay E had balked at taking a punt on an unknown local B and B. She insisted we stay at the Cheltenham Travelodge. I caved in, but on the day my subconscious revolted and tried to sabotage the plan by making me forget to take a note of the address. I had a vague recollection that the hotel was near the racecourse so we took the bus there. After twenty minutes whimpering in a freezing gale and fruitlessly asking strangers for directions, we headed back into town. The first cabbie on the rank advised us there were three Travelodges in the area. Three of the buggers!
We took a lucky guess at which was ours. The reception was large, draughty, brightly lit and tiled in beige, like a big gent’s toilet. I wouldn't have been surprised if it automatically self- cleaned between arrivals.
A mate of mine used to complain that Tom Jones delivers lyrics as if he doesn’t know what the words mean. The teenage receptionist had a similar affliction. It was as if she was so bored that language had lost all meaning.
She strung whole sentences together as if they were single words from some obscure dialect; like canitakethemoneyforthepaymentnowplease, which took me three attempts to decipher. I get impatient with travel writing that harps on about poor service – it always strikes me as a bit snooty and mean-spirited, so I’ll cut her some slack and assume some of her brusqueness was fallout from the raging hormones everybody suffers at seventeen. We later saw her boyfriend arrive to collect her at the end of her shift – she seemed a lot more human off duty. Of course, it might have been she just didn’t like the look of us. Certainly when I completed the registration form and admitted that we’d arrived by public transport, an odd mix of incomprehension and mistrust swept across her face. When I handed over my debit card I thought she was going to test its validity by biting it like a bartender in a silent film.

The hallways of the hotel were like a cross between a student halls of residence and a recently tarted-up open prison. I won't bother describing our room as, according to the company's brochure, it'd be identical to every other Travelodge room of the same grade and size. What the brochure doesn’t show you is how impossibly soft the beds are. My guess is that this is a deliberate tactic to render sex impractical, thus reducing complaints about noise. The brochure's also silent on the company’s stinginess with coffee; to whit, one sachet per guest.
I later took matters into my own hands, having noticed that the door of the cleaner’s cupboard was left ajar. While E stood lookout I sneaked in and liberated some extra sachets of coffee and sugar from the cleaner’s trolley. Back in our room, bad coffee never tasted so good. In the morning, on the floor outside our room, somebody had placed a copy of the novel, Lucky You, by Carl Hiaasen. For a paranoid moment I wondered if this was some sort of coded warning from hotel security that they were wise to my coffee thieving, but I pushed the thought from my mind.

When we asked the new teenager on reception if he had any leaflets on local attractions he pointed us to a rack containing nothing but Travelodge leaflets, so we made our own plans. We visited the birthplace of Holst. It bored me, except for the servant’s quarters, a room the size of a phonebox at the top of the house. This apparently was an improvement on the arrangements common a few years before, where staff slept either in the kitchen or under the stairs. Perhaps that’s what was meant by below stairs staff.
Our next destination was to be some ornamental gardens with an impressive domed Georgian building as their centrepiece. I asked the driver of the hopper bus to let us know when we reached the nearest stop. He obviously thought we wanted to go the pretty way. I watched with a sinking feeling as a likely looking green-domed building receded in the back window. A helpful woman suggested that if we stayed on long enough the bus would loop back round to the same spot. As the bus took forty minutes meandering through what felt like most of Gloucestershire, we sank into a glum, gormless silence broken only when there was an unexplained stop for fifteen minutes by a graveyard.
‘There’s a lot of people buried there,’ E observed.
‘That’s cemeteries for you,’ I muttered.
On the return leg of the journey, ten minutes after the gardens had closed, the driver looked over his shoulder and breezily announced our destination. I thanked him as we alighted but the sarcasm I did it with seemed to just ricochet clean off him.

Dundee. 11th December 2005.

2005-12-12T21:31:00.004Z

I'd actually done a bit of sort of research ahead of visiting Dundee, but even so, my preconceptions were still pretty random. Some weeks previous I’d borrowed a DVD of pre-war documentaries about the city. Aside from the predictable account of the Tay Bridge rail disaster, and a 1930s trailer for the then state-of-the-art local cinema, there was a short Ministry of Information film about juvenile delinquency in the city, full of hatchet-faced do-gooders and snot-nosed lads with short back and sandpaper haircuts.

The youthful spirit of aimless mischief seems alive still. In Dundee's branch of the neatly named but sloppily punctuated pound shop Quid’s In, two ginger haired boys were lurking in the aisles shouting the word ‘Shite!’ at random moments. Credit where credit’s due, they did actually seem to be throwing their voices, a dying art that was lost on the sales assistant who shouted a distinctly half-hearted ‘Aye and don’t bother coming back,’ as they exited, guffawing heartily.

I don't know if research has been done into connections between any perceived delinquency problem and the city’s association with comics like the Dandy and the Beano, and frankly I don’t want to spoil things by finding out. But if one of the preconditions for behaviour of a Dennis the Menace bent is a prevailing atmosphere of uptight decorum, then Dundee’s got it in spades. The statue of Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx in the city square seemed incongruous, self-conscious, like the efforts of a peppermint sucking, be-cardiganned librarian to show they can take a joke like the best of them.

The cultural life of the town was apparently in a dormant phase. The McManus museum and gallery were shut for refurbishment for the next three years, which seemed excessive. What are they doing? Rebuilding them brick by brick, wearing oven gloves? The galleries at the Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre were closed between exhibitions, and in an irritating flurry of synchronicity the toilets were shut too. I attempted to reach an observatory on the outskirts but was thwarted by a succession of bus drivers who gamely reeled off the numbers of buses that would take me there, if only they ran on Sundays.

At a loose end, I wandered into a collectors’ fair in the civic hall. As I browsed near the entrance an elderly woman was having a confused conversation with the man collecting the admission fee.
‘It’s seventy pence, dear.’
‘Seventy pence? What is?’
‘Seventy pence to get in.’
Nearby, a man of about the same age as the confused woman turned to his wife and said, in a voice dripping with self-pity and hurt, ‘That woman’s being asked for seventy pence. I was asked for a pound!’
In the absence of anything more edifying to do I went and got a haircut. I’m with Winston Churchill when it comes to barber etiquette. Once, when asked how he wanted his hair cut, he famously replied, ‘In silence’. The woman who cut my hair was having none of it. I struggled to smile and nod in the right places in the face of an accent so thick that she sounded like a small dog repeatedly sneezing.
Opposite the barbers was Dundee’s premier nightclub, Déjà Vu, which I’m convinced was converted from the 1930s cinema featured on the DVD. How the mighty are fallen. It looked like the sort of place where your feet stick to the carpet if you stand still too long. There are probably sociological essays written on the significance of night club names in crap towns. Déjà Vu had a depressing Del Boy pretentiousness about it; let’s call it something foreign, it’ll sound classy. There's at least one other nightclub called Déjà Vu. It's in Dartford. I know this because when I worked in Erith a lot of my colleagues used to go there, mostly for the purposes of extra-marital casual sex. Workmates would ask me if I’d ever been to Déjà Vu, often enough for me to come up with the answer, ‘No. But I keep getting the feeling I have.’ They’d just look at me, nonplussed.

On my way to the bus-station I spotted a B and B with a promotion offering a three night stay for the price of two nights. Earlier in the day I might have seen this as generous but as the rain began to lash down it seemed about as appealing as one of those all you can eat buffets where you’ve had enough after a plate and a half.

Liverpool. 7th and 8th December 2005.

2005-12-10T21:35:00.001Z

I’m a big fan of the old school Bed and Breakfast but sometimes you come across one that bears out the theory that people who set up small businesses often do so because they’re too daft to get a job working for anybody else.
Despite booking in advance by email I got to the B and B in Liverpool to find that nobody was expecting me. It took a good twenty minutes of wrangling to sort a room, which I'd already paid for.
At breakfast the next day the manager gave me the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard coming from somebody over the age of nine. He claimed my email address, which includes the word paperjam, had caused confusion as he’d assumed my surname was Paperjam. Presumably he thought I was descended from a long line of photocopier engineers. It pleases me to think he could have been sincere. I sometimes imagine him rattling around his guesthouse contentedly muttering, ‘That Mr Hotmail obviously enjoyed his stay; he’s recommended us to all his relatives.’

Bath. 2nd December 2005.

2005-12-04T21:33:00.004Z

Bath didn't create much of an impression with me. Maybe to pay proper attention I need to travel alone. Or it might be the place's fault. For all my mithering elsewhere about the proliferation of anytowns dominated by retail chains, Bath proves there’s an equally numbing alternative at the opposite extreme. It felt like a theme park based on a BBC costume drama, the kind of place that Laura Ashley wallpaper goes to die. Among the evidence of its reluctance to acknowledge the twenty first century fads was the fact that, two days outside the peak tourist season, nearly all the museums had closed early for the weekend.

Our Plan B was a pub lunch, an experience which showed that, despite it all, there’s still such a thing as local. I ordered a second pint. The barman looked at the empty in front of me and said, ‘Do you want a clean glass?’ He didn’t actually add, ‘you soft towny ponce,’ but it was strongly implied.
I had a Proustian moment when I ordered the food. He asked, ‘Where are you sitting to?’
I’d forgotten how geographically specific that form of words is. When I first moved to London I worked in a DIY shop in Hammersmith. One day I was carrying some chipboard out to the front of the shop for a customer. I paused and asked, ‘Where’s your car to?’
She looked at me curiously and said, ‘That’s a very Somerset turn of phrase. Where are you from?’
I admitted to coming from Yeovil. She gave a small gasp of recognition. Turned out she had a second home near Yeovil and now recognised me from the shop I’d previously worked in there. I don’t why I wasn't more spooked by this than I was.
I reckon that even now, these examples of local variant grammar could be quite closely plotted on a map of the UK. One of my few bits of supporting evidence comes from a joke told to me by shouty stand-up poet Vic Lambrusco, who, crucially, is from Southampton. It's a joke which, I've always thought, could hardly be more specifically targeted to my personal demographic. It goes like this; a bloke gets into university, late and unexpected, to study English Lit as a mature student. Feeling lost on the first day of term he approaches an academic from the English department and says, ‘Excuse me, but where’s the library to?’
The lecturer looks over his glasses and says, ‘You’re at university now, studying English. And we don’t end a sentence with a preposition.’
So the bloke looks at the academic and says, ‘Alright then, where’s the library to, wanker?’
There are other examples. If you ever get to motor west you’ll notice that somewhere around Reading, the vernacular past tense of the verb to see changes from the Londoner’s ‘see’ to the West Country dweller’s ‘seen’. Fascinating. Radio 4 series’ have been based on less.

The coach back was delayed. As we boarded, the National Express station controller was taping an out of order sign to the toilet door. Responding to my look of concern she said, ‘Somebody’s filled it right up. I’d deal with it but we’re running late.’ Apparently feeling I needed to know more, she added breezily, ‘It’s a real coat-hanger job.’
As we got underway I distracted myself from thoughts of toilets by gazing out of the window. Passing through Chippenham I spotted another addition to my list of perplexing shop signs. We passed a shop called Let’s Face It. Beneath the name was an equally baffling sentence of explanation; 'almost anything transferred onto almost anything else'. I'd imagine they do a lot of passing trade with people who want to know what the sign means, not to mention the occasional drunken smart-arse claiming to want the Lindisfarne gospel tattooed on his midriff.

Birmingham. 16th November 2005.

2005-11-18T21:26:00.001Z

Signs for businesses sometimes seem like one of the last outposts of expressive individualism. They can still give you the sense that there’s a story lurking. Coming out of Birmingham I saw one for a bed shop which said, Beds Direct; for courtesy, respect and manners. Laudable attributes they might be, but they aren’t obviously bed related.
I visited Birmingham without really touching the sides. The museum and gallery was the only thing that really left an impression. For major visiting exhibitions the gallery has a regular singles only night. I wonder if I emailed them to suggest they rename the evening Gallery Singletons they’d send me a cheque.

Leeds. 3rd and 4th November 2005.

2005-11-05T20:58:00.011Z

Some years back, left-leaning intellectuals were characterising call centres as the new sweatshops. Much as I would've quite fancied a job as a left-leaning intellectual, at the time I was working on a call centre dealing with housing benefit enquiries. After I'd been there a few years the department was restructured and the workers' duties expanded to the point where we would field calls about skip licences, disabled badges, and dead dogs in the street. Management saw these new areas of work as involving essentially interchangeable customer service functions. No knowledge was needed, only access to information which could be supplied by software. A new manager was recruited whose previous job was as a supervisor in McDonald’s.
It seems to me this sort of process has spread throughout the culture. We’ve moved to a standardised, tightly-scripted world where information has replaced knowledge. What I suppose I’m curious about on these trips away is whether there is still room for peculiarity and local oddity.

There is if Leeds is anything to go by. The Oxfam shop had a Goth section. I asked the assistant if this was a seasonal thing but was told it wasn’t. In Leeds, clearly, a goth is for life, not just for Halloween.
I located the B and B I'd booked with the help of a white haired woman in a pink outfit which made her look like a sweety mouse. She turned out to be one of the few people in Leeds capable of giving directions. The guest house added a fiver to its prices on the strength of calling itself a private hotel. Something about the manager’s unctiousness suggested suppressed vicousness; like a cross between Alan Bennett and Christopher Walken.
The décor was a frenzy of mismatched embossed wallpaper. It’s nice to know not everybody’s watching interior design TV shows. In 1980, in my first job on leaving school, I was press-ganged into taking a correspondence course run by the Builders’ Merchants Federation which involved memorising, among other things, the names of every pattern of embossed wallpaper on the market. Most of the muck coating the walls of the B an B would've been old hat even back then.

Killing time in my room before going out for the evening, I investigated the Corby trouser press. The back of the plug was hanging off. I considered asking at reception for a screwdriver, particularly as the towel rail had earlier come away in my hand, but I didn’t want to arouse suspicion and later get stiffed with an invoice for damages. So I improvised with a one pence piece.
Inspection revealed that the German for trouser press is hosenbugler, a name which suggests that blowing into trousers is somehow involved. Hitherto I’d assumed the Corby trouser press originated in Corby. I’d developed a half-baked notion it had formed part of the area’s renaissance after the collapse of the steel industry. Turns out the trouser press, or hosenbugler if you will, is actually made in Hampshire and was invented by John Corby. I was fascinated by the guidance diagrams on the device. The first panel showed a man with a briefcase, wearing crumpled trousers. The end panel showed, presumably, the same man with neatly pressed trousers. I couldn’t thinking this was over-egging the instructional pudding; surely the clue’s in the name - the English one at least. What the instructions didn’t mention was that it’s best to empty the trouser pockets before using the press. Alternatively, you can let gravity take its course and spend the next ten minutes retrieving loose change from every corner of the room.
I took a shower before going out for the night. A sign asked me to leave the bathroom as I’d like to find it. I thought, I'm only staying one night, I'm fuced if I'm going to plumb in a radiator.

On my first day I’d found it hard to get a handle on Leeds. It reminded me of Aberdeen in it's apparent lack of desire for outside approval. At first this irritated me. The place seemed inward looking. The woman at the tourist information centre had a map of the city glued to her desk, and it was facing towards her.
Maybe it's not the place's fault but mine. My prior knowledge of the place came from a mish mash of sources. The brochure the tourist office sent me followed the usual template with its obsessons with shopping, and the cursory mention of some museums as a sop to culture anoraks and families wanting to bore their children into passivity. On the coach up I’d read a zine by a bisexual woman from Leeds who worked on a phoneline for battered women and was involved in the remnants of the local riot grrl scene. This, while evidently a partial view, was much more the sort of thing I was expecting. As a teenager I was a fan of several Leeds based bands, like the Mekons, Delta Five and the Gang of Four. Most were ardent politicos, partly as a reaction against local National Front activity. As it turned out, most of the Gang of Four were only at university in Leeds and were actually from Sevenoaks. A few years ago I met a bloke whose dad used to play bridge with the guitarist’s mum.

Earlier in the day I’d visited the city’s main art gallery. In the gallery shop was a book about a local artist whose work had recently been discovered after a lifetime of painting fitted in around his day job as an accountant. Elderly now, now, he’d become frail, leaving his children no choice but to place him in sheltered housing. They found the cupboards and loft of the house he’d lived in most of his life were full of pictures. He’d never sold a painting. Subsequently he was taken on by a private gallery and widely feted.
The icing on the cake of the story would have been if I'd loved his work, but judging by the plates in the book I didn’t think he could paint for toffee. But his story pleased and stayed with me throughout the trip, an anomaly in a time when lightweights and loudmouths most often walk away with the goods. Mysterious how things are valued and made visible.

I went to a gig in the evening. Gigs outside London are often well attended by receptive audiences but tonight's show reminded me of the most depressing features of London’s toilet circuit.
Three bands were playing but there were never more than seven people in the audience, and most of them seemed to have stumbled in by mistake. Among them were three plump bald men in their fifties who looked like brothers who still lived with their mums and might appear in a patronising documentary on Channel Five.
One band was from Oslo. Hopefully they hadn’t come all that way especially. They didn’t really ‘get’ rock music, in the same sense that the French don’t really ‘get’ pop music. The headline band were from Glasgow so had a shorter trip home during which to cry their eyes out.
I knew from experience that none of the bands would have walked away with a penny. The music business pyramid has a very broad base – for every band you've heard of there are a thousand like these, slogging away.
Part of me pities them, but part of me's awestruck at the way they soldier on in the face of indifference. I feel that anybody who makes you wonder why they don’t just give up is usually worth a tip of the hat.

It may be the capacity crowd hoped for at the gig were still roaming the streets looking for the venue because Leeds seemed to be home to more than its share of the geographically challenged. Eight out of ten people I asked for directions didn't know where anything was. They'd struggle to point me towards streets that turned out to be yards away.
Part of the blame goes to the numerous branches of Subway clustered in the city centre. This chain, with its pricing structure more complex than Virgin Trains had three outlets within spitting distance. Two were almost within sight of each other. Disorientation was a natural result. I boarded a local bus and had a moment of panic when I saw a second Subway within minutes. I thought I’d fallen asleep and awoken back where I started having done a complete circuit of the city centre.
But mostly I think that the ability to give directions was a skill people were allowing to atrophy in the face of new technology. Waiting in a Yates’s near the coach station I saw two people go through the same dumb ritual within minutes. Each walked into the bar with a mobile clamped to their ear. Each stopped just inside the pub and briefly scanned the bar before giving up with a look of gormless bewilderment on their face, like sheep at the gate of a strange field. Clearly responding to something said by the person on the other end of the phone each turned through ninety degrees to where their friends sat three tables away, waving. If it’s reached the point where we can’t navigate a medium-sized pub without phoning for help, what hope is there?

Newcastle. 6th and 7th October 2005.

2005-10-07T16:08:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-08-27T22:37:00.000+01:00

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.