You Are Awful (But I Like You)

by Tim Moore

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Moore

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It began with an accidental daytrip to an intriguingly awful resort on the Thames Estuary, and ended 3,812 miles later: one man’s journey through deep-fried, brownfield, poundshop Britain, a crash course in urban blight, deranged civic planning and commercial eccentricity. Following an itinerary drawn up from surveys, polls, reviews and lazy personal prejudice, Tim Moore goes to all the places that nobody wants to go to – the bleakest towns, the shonkiest hotels, the scariest pubs, the silliest sea zoos. He visits the grid reference adjudged by the Ordnance Survey to be the least interesting point in Britain, and is chased out of the new town twice crowned Scotland’s Most Dismal Place. His palate is flayed alive by horrific regional foodstuffs, his ears shrivelled by the 358 least loved tracks in the history of native popular music. With his progress entrusted to our motor industry’s fittingly hopeless finale, he comes to learn that Britain seems very much larger when you’re driving around it in a Bulgarian-built Austin Maestro.

  Yet as the soggy, decrepit quest unfolds, so it evolves into something much more stirring: a nostalgic celebration of our magnificent mercantile pomp, and an angry requiem for a golden age of cheerily homespun crap culture being swept aside by the faceless, soul-stripping forces of Tesco-town globalisation.

  About the Author

  Tim Moore’s books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points and I Believe in Yesterday. He lives in London.

  Also by Tim Moore

  French Revolutions

  Do Not Pass Go

  Spanish Steps

  Nul Points

  I Believe in Yesterday

  To Valdis

  Prologue

  ON A FOOTLOOSE impulse one fair Saturday morning, in that faraway time before all such weekend whimsy was dashed away by parenthood and giving a shit about the garden, my wife and I set out for a motoring mystery tour. After enjoying breakfast, a leisurely and expansive affair of the type then popular in building society TV adverts, we popped sunglasses on the top of our heads and strolled out to my old Rover. It seems like we ought to have worn jumpers over our shoulders with the arms knotted, and possibly even thrown back our heads and laughed.

  As we burbled out of west London, my wife leafed ruminatively through the road atlas. ‘Let’s go to Leeds Castle,’ she said, once we were nosing into the green belt. ‘We’ve never been there, and it’s supposed to be lovely.’

  Except we didn’t go to Leeds Castle. Somehow – perhaps we were too busy congratulating ourselves for knowing it wasn’t in Yorkshire – this substantial moated edifice completely evaded us. One minute we were homing in on it through the smooth and sunny Kentish hills, counting down the miles on those brown tourist information signs, and the next we were out in some lonely, unkempt coastal plain. The brown signs were no more, replaced by tilted finger-posts pointing the way to Whither Island and Fuck-Knows-by-Sea. At length we arrived at a roundabout whose accompanying navigational information unequivocally demonstrated that we had overshot our intended destination by some distance. After a brief and amicable inquest – like I say, it was a long time ago – we agreed to head on rather than turn back.

  ‘Let’s go to Whitstable,’ I said. ‘We’ve never been there, and it’s supposed to be lovely.’

  Except we didn’t go to Whitstable. The next wrong turn took us down a spectacularly unappealing peninsula that probed deep into the Thames Estuary’s brownest waters, and identified itself as the Isle of Grain. I’ve just established that this area is named after the Old English word for gravel, and that in 1918 it hosted Britain’s last recorded outbreak of malaria. Throw in a sprawl of refineries, a vast commercial port and an oil-fired power station crowned by the UK’s second-highest chimney, and you have a full appreciation of its merits as a day-trip destination.

  Looking at the map now, our subsequent directional mishap seems no more than a continuation of the extravagant U-turn that put the Isle of Grain in our mirrors. Almost straight away our chosen escape route veered up a broad and sinuous concrete bridge, which carried us across a wide estuarine creek and offered an overview of Grain’s belching awfulness. Then it was down into a thick band of coastal fog that had rolled in from nowhere.

  ‘Must be the Isle of Sheppey,’ said my wife, nose to the atlas. A convoy of enormous container lorries roared towards us out of the mist and were swallowed up by it behind. Then emptiness and silence. It wasn’t a fair summer’s day any more: we’d gone from July to November, from the heart of the Garden of England to its bleak and steaming compost heap. When at last something else loomed out of the fog, it was the entrance sign to a prison. As a small, flat island engulfed by estuary mud and huge-scale industrial filth, Sheppey certainly seemed a good place for one. So good, indeed, that within moments we’d driven past the entrances to a further two. Just after the third a rather less obvious adaptation suggested itself: a family in beachwear lugging buckets, spades and a large inflatable shark out through the gates of a compound, home to the shadowy silhouettes of several hundred static caravans. Improbably, impossibly, this barren, befogged offshore correction facility managed to lead a double life as a place that people came to voluntarily, in search of fun.

  ‘Only way out is back over that bridge,’ my wife murmured. But curiosity, in its brow-crevassing, jaw-slackening, morbid essence, drove us on. Presently the roadside family groups swelled, and the murky gaps between caravan parks were filled with chip shops and purveyors of lurid plastic beach accessories. A sign welcomed us to Leysdown-on-Sea. We turned down this settlement’s main drag, a densely peopled thoroughfare lined with amusement arcades that bleeped and winked at us through the fog. The road terminated at what must have been the sea wall, though in these conditions it was hard to be sure. A flip-flopped stream of holidaymakers slapped away towards a gloomy space in the concrete, and in silence we watched the vapour claim them, one by one.

  It was extraordinary to think that we had lived our lives – short and beautiful as they then were – entirely ignorant of the existence of this evidently popular resort, despite it lying just a 30-mile drive from our front door, had we gone there directly and on purpose, and lived in Bexleyheath. More extraordinary still to wonder how a fog-smothered mudbank in the Thames Estuary had ever become a holiday resort in the first instance, and little short of truly, madly, cow-hurlingly preposterous to discover that it still was one. As we drove back to the mainland these thoughts coalesced into loud and rather hysterical words, which is no doubt why we missed the turning for Whitstable, and ended up in Margate.

  This whole curious misadventure recurred to me as I drove home from Gatwick Airport one morning twenty summers later, having dropped my family off for the annual visit to their Icelandic motherland. I’d stayed behind to meet several professional deadlines and fulfil a long-standing commitment relating to the refreshment of our exterior woodwork, which may explain why at a crucial juncture I found myself turning right instead of left. Of course I was going to compose many tho
usand words on manorexia, celebrity druids and the Battle of the Somme, and of course I was going to sit on a window ledge for a week listening to Eurosport’s coverage of the Tour de France while holding a wire brush. But first, just one sunny afternoon of Kentish prevarication, the righting of a twenty-year wrong. I’d had an idea: I was going to Leeds Castle. Forty minutes later I exited the M20 at the requisite turn-off, spotted another name on the big blue sign at the roundabout above it, and had a better idea, or at least a different one.

  That long-ago evening my wife and I hit Margate in a state of exhausted delirium, one that led seamlessly into a night of dimpled pint pots and period disco stylings at an establishment called the Ace of Clubs. We stumbled into a seafront b. & b., and stumbled out some hours later in blinding sun and bleary befuddlement. The beach was already filling up with bucket-and-spaders; that bracing seaside whiff of brine and vinegar hung in the air. As a place that people came to on holiday, Margate made sense in a way that Leysdown-on-Sea hadn’t. Indeed, as we ran through the previous day’s events in the cold light of a terrible hangover, the whole Leysdown experience already seemed anomalous and unreal, a fogged-up, fucked-up fantasy. The stuff, indeed, that legends are made of. So it was that Leysdown-on-Sea had matured over the years into our yardstick for seaside misery, a metaphor for any truly terrible place – a hyphenated triplet to be muttered over a plastic cup of weak tea in a draughty promenade cafeteria, or bawled in gleeful disgust across a rural yard full of doorless fridges flat on their backs in oily mud.

  But had it really been so mad and bad? Was there any truth in the myth? Leeds Castle be damned – I was going back to the Temple of Doom. On sea.

  Chapter One

  I APPROACHED SHEPPEY under a big blue sky streaked lightly with cirrus, the sort of sky that Michael Caine’s burning Spitfire spiralled out of in The Battle of Britain, in fact the actual sky in which the actual battle was fought. No Hammer Horror mists that day: the bridge across the Swale channel delivered me from one bright and treeless flatland to another. The signpost at the Isle of Sheppey’s first roundabout was dominated by destinations beginning with HMP, but with the sea a-twinkle, my window down and the scent of warm meadow gusting in through it, I could sense that Leysdown would struggle to live up to its legend.

  I parked up at the top of the road that led down to the seafront. Static caravans and garden-shed holiday chalets were still tightly crammed into surrounding fields. The chip shops were all present and correct, hawking jellied eels and pie and mash, so too the beach-crap vendors (FOLDING SUNBEDS – £12 – MAX WEIGHT 16 STONE). The pavement down to the promenade was still packed on both sides with amusement arcades, some of industrial enormity. It was all very much as I remembered, in every respect but one: here we were on a sun-kissed, fog-free afternoon two weeks into the school holidays, and the whole place was deserted. No one in the chip shops or on the streets. No one in the expansive promenade conveniences to defy the stern edict on the washing of feet in hand basins. No one on the promenade to gaze out at the view: two distant clusters of old sea forts, like Nissen huts on stilts, the revolving Mercedes stars of an offshore wind farm, a container vessel as massive and graceless as a Gorbals tower block pushed on to its side. And right round to the east, looking yachty and clean and fresh, visibly thriving even from this distance, Whitstable. I’ve still never been there.

  I peered over the dour sea wall: high tide, with the calm, moss-mud sea drawn right up to a sliver of beach more gravel than sand. At last I discovered I wasn’t alone, not quite. A man in goggles was performing slow and methodical breaststroke a few yards offshore. Right up by the concrete squatted a skinhead aged about ten, manically excavating deep into the gritty shingle. Some way off to the west, a clutch of distant figures was either playing a very slow-paced game of hockey or detecting metal.

  What had happened? I’d seen this place packed in a pea-souper. Concern was tempered with slight irritation: it felt as if I’d come a long way to visit a distant relative in some rather rundown care home, and found them unrousably asleep.

  One possible explanation suggested itself in the ‘Bathing Water Quality’ chart I now found prominently displayed on the seafront ‘information point’. By means of a simple coding system – a smiley green face, a straight-mouthed amber one and a grumpy red – this recorded levels of ‘faecal coliform’ and ‘faecal streptococci’ present in samples drawn from Leysdown beach, going back many years. The faces, like faeces, were a blend of green and yellow, but as the footnotes explained, even the smiles merely denoted that untreated human waste was present in quantities someone had deemed acceptable. A tip for Swale Borough Council tourist officials: there are certain things that you should never boast about finding only some of on your beaches. Landmines and paedophiles would be two of these; faeces a third.

  I walked north-west along the blowy seafront, where someone had etched ‘I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE’ into the top of a mossy groyne. At length the coastal backdrop rose into a steep hill and the sea wall petered out. Beyond it the waves had gone to work, bringing down the landscape in great clods that blocked the path. And not just the landscape: the lumps of mud were studded with hunks of masonry and tiling, even a few shattered urinals, presumably the remains of some clifftop holiday complex.

  I turned back and soon chanced upon a caravan village, dug down into the tussocked dunes. With its tight-packed rows of statics hemmed in around a bow-fronted retaining wall, from above it resembled one of those awful diagrams of an eighteenth-century slave ship. In lumpy open grass at its centre, a quorum of holidaymakers finally presented themselves: a couple of pottering grandfathers in cardigans and sharp-creased trousers, four fat dads hoofing a St George beach-ball about. But well over half the caravans were shuttered up and flagrantly unoccupied, and most of those that weren’t had stripy windbreaks staked out by their doors. It’s always seemed to me that any holiday requiring such equipment is fatally flawed from the outset. Would you send your kids to a school that handed out Geiger counters at the gate? There is literally no difference.

  It was a further half an hour before I found everyone, or at least the balance of the three dozen people who apparently sustained the town. As a risk-averse econophile I’m not a natural gambler, but walking up past the first arcade I saw a sign yelling 10P BINGO – IT’S BACK! That sounded like my kind of low-rolling joint; I walked into the garish cacophony and found myself amongst friends.

  In fact no one was playing bingo, 10p or otherwise. Nor had the patrons been enticed by the complimentary shrink-wrapped sarnies and packets of cheese-and-onion on offer in the roped-off ‘Over 18s VIP area’, with its £500-jackpot fruit machines. A couple of youths were engaged in a desultory round of air hockey. Absolutely everyone else, from seven to seventy, was pressed up against the glazed façade of one of the ranks and ranks of that fairground gaming staple of my youth, Crompton’s Penny Falls. For those unfamiliar with this hallowed arcade institution, here’s the procedure: players release a coin (in this instance an inflation-adjusted 2p) into a lofty slot, and watch it drop down to a stack of other such coins on the highest of two moving, mirrored shelves. The aim is to dislodge coins from this shelf to the one beneath, and in turn – with a glorious clatter of ill-gotten gain – into a winnings slot somewhere down at knee level.

  I palmed a pound’s worth of twos from a dead-eyed young woman in the sentry-box change booth, and after a quick recce installed myself before a teetering shelf of coppers. As any tight-arse of a certain age will confirm, it is possible to harvest a steady profit from such machines with no more than a grasp of the basic laws of gravity, an unusually high boredom threshold and at least one functioning eye. But without wishing to do my fellow gamblers down, they seemed deficient in one of these departments, and it certainly wasn’t either of the last two. My regular tuppenny landslides were going unechoed; nobody else was winning. Faces old and young were set in that joyless death-mask of recidivist slot-feeders the world over – it’s funny how lit
tle amusement you ever see at these eponymous places – but practice had not made perfect. Low-stakes arcade gambling appeared to be the only thing that anyone ever did in Leysdown, and they were all still really bad at it. Indeed the muffled metallic crashes and occasional yelps of pain suggested many regulars had yet to master the entry-level skill: inserting coins into a slot without spilling them all over the carpet or really hurting themselves.

  When, after perhaps forty-five minutes, I noisily piled my winnings on to the change-girl’s counter, she looked down at the heap as if it was some sort of dying seabird.

  ‘Wossat?’

  I acquainted her with what was clearly an unencountered situation, that of a customer who had played the shelves and come out on top, and now wished to exchange many coins of low denomination for a smaller number with higher individual value. Eventually, and with impressive truculence, she counted up my profits aloud, at a rate that pegged pennies to elapsing seconds. One hundred and twenty-eight, to be exact. I really am the daddy.

  It wasn’t yet seven, but the chip shop at the top of the road was already putting chairs upside-down on its tables. I hurried in, and emerged a moment later with a tray of chips recklessly doused in that watery brown sauce made from Bovril and Sunny Delight. I ate what I could – the whole sickly lot, as it turned out – and roamed Leysdown’s main thoroughfare in the dying sun, hunting for ways to string out these last moments of workshy freedom. There were only two, and both were pubs. The first was a slab-sided edifice down by the seafront. The Talk of the Town – A Fun Pub! read a legend that ran the full length of the building. I peered in and found it entirely empty but for a barman and a denim-suited DJ, leaning arms-folded against his PA speakers. The second, a stoutly traditional affair called the Rose & Crown, was home to half a dozen drinkers, and the most appalling stench.