You Are Awful (But I Like You)
Page 30
I certainly began to miss it the minute I stepped outside. The traffic swished and roared, the wind stung my earlobes. I jogged stiffly past the Ramada Inn and round the corner, to an interwar parade that accommodated Ealing Common tube station and a number of convenience stores. Over the road their nemesis was taking shape in the ground floor of an office building: COMING SOON – YOUR NEW SAINSBURY’S LOCAL. Another era was ending, and this time it was mine: my primary school lay just two streets back from here, and these shops had for years kept me in sweet cigarettes and cream soda. On a melancholic whim, I ducked into the first one and vowed to purchase my last supper therein. My deep-fried flirtation with deficiency disease asserted an alarming influence upon the menu: I came back out into the cold with a thin blue plastic bag containing eleven carrots.
I took up residence at a bus shelter that looked out at the Gresham across six lanes of traffic, propping myself on one of those slanted half-seats especially designed to stop tramps like me from getting too comfortable. Halfway through my third carrot I spotted a man in a padded rally jacket giving Craig a surreptitious and sheepish once-over, the way you might look at a passing face half-remembered from some profoundly regretted night of drunken passion. As a shaming reminder of the nation’s very lowest ebb, I understood all too well why Craig was shunned, deprived of the nostalgic affection that aged machinery generally inspires; why in a journey of – let me see – 3,812 miles, I had not encountered a single fellow survivor of the 600,000 Austin Maestros who once sat by Britain’s roads with the bonnet up. This, I can only imagine, is why he remains in my care to this day: part incontinent, doddering object of pity, part dire warning from history. Some months later, during a deluge on the M4’s hard shoulder, an AA serviceman reconstructed Craig’s wiper linkage with a gout of superglue and several lusty hammer blows. ‘They don’t make them like this any more,’ he said, letting the bonnet down with a hollow twang. ‘Thank bloody Christ.’
My plastic bag flapped and snapped in the wind; a young tracksuited man of East European appearance struggled by, toting three huge holdalls that most likely contained all his worldly goods. I looked up at the Ramada Inn, stood there lazily sucking up the Gresham’s life-blood, then extracted another carrot and dispatched it in memory of all those doomed remnants of the good old, bad old days: Pontin’s holiday camps, the high-street Chinese restaurant, the Trinity Square car parks and Brunel bus stations, public houses from Leysdown to Lochgelly, closing down at the rate of one a day in London alone. All the shabby, strange or beguilingly dreadful museums and hotels that had shut their doors for the last time just before I arrived, or would do just after I left. The whiff of processed cocoa mass that would never again hang in the air of Kingston upon Hull, the blast furnaces of Redcar dimmed for ever after centuries of blazing clamour. If you’d traced my route on a map it would have looked as if I was trying to scribble out our former industrial heartlands. At times it felt like I’d succeeded.
A police van muscled through the traffic, whooping and flashing. I watched it slalom away towards the Sainsbury’s Local, and crunched down the final ruminative carrot. What of all the many places that hadn’t quite made my final cut? Wolverhampton, declared the world’s fifth worst city by Lonely Planet; Salford, with its table-topping embarrassment of potholes and ASBOs; Stoke-on-Trent, thirteenth on the Location list, the home of Britain’s laziest postmen and most doughty TV licence evaders. The Kentish emporium of cringe that called itself Dickensworld, the monstrous inhumanity of the booking-office staff at King’s Cross, the bow-fronted, mirrored tombstone that was the reviled IMAX cinema in Bournemouth. I suspected, in fact was suddenly and dramatically certain, that whenever I got around to darkening all those doors and pavements and counters, everything that defined their outlandish wrongnesses would be long gone. Knocked down, rounded off, re-educated and otherwise swept away in Britain’s relentless drive towards the competent, blandly inoffensive, ruthlessly focus-grouped middle ground, just another globalised consumer nation that shopped in the same vast retail parks and drove the same metallic-grey people carriers and conversed in the same droning upspeak. How glad I was to have celebrated, and in the nick of time, an age when this country of mine wasn’t afraid to do things its own way, even if that meant doing most of them really badly. Then I slid gracelessly off the bus shelter’s plastic bum-rest, and set off towards an awkward black shape marooned on a gloomy forecourt.
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Copyright © Tim Moore 2011
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