It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  Swindon is, I’ll grant you, an odd place to decide to build your utopia, but it seemed right at the time. House prices are as low as anywhere in the region, transport links make it an easy place to get out of and, most importantly of all, I don’t know anyone here. The door need never knock unexpectedly on a quiet Sunday and force me into a state of begrudging hospitality. I have a home phone, but no one but me knows the number. You might think this pointless, but I adore it. It makes the phone a talisman of my self-imposed isolation – I am like Willy Wonka, but I make no sweets and the closest I get to an army of Oompa Loompas is the occasional spider infestation. Oompa Loompa doopedy doo, I’ve got a Dyson hoover for you!

  Most of the time I adore this solitude though I must confess that illness brings home with shocking clarity how, despite living in a large town and having neighbours on either side of me, it is possible to feel tremendously isolated by my choices. Recently a bad meat and potato pie sent me into feverish convulsions, my body going into full evacuation mode to rid itself of the pollutants inside. It was then that I became aware that there was nobody close enough to me to bring round warm soups, to mop my brow, or (in the worst-case scenario) discover my shrivelled up corpse on the bathroom floor. Twenty-eight is too young to be one of those people whose bodies lie undetected for weeks before questions are raised. ‘Here lies Jon Richardson. He died of a pie. Ashes to ashes, crust to crust. RIP.’

  When I left my last home in Bristol, I thought for a long time about moving to the seaside, but I am not yet old enough to spoil that surprise. Like hearing Christmas adverts in October, nobody should live by the sea until they are old enough to appreciate it – its smells and its sounds. The sea is there to remind us what insignificant pieces of shit we all are. When you start to worry about death and how the world will cope without you, the sea roars its laughter down on the sands of your concern and tells you that it will be around long after you and was here long before you. You have to be old enough to appreciate this, having acquired the intelligence and perspective not to misinterpret this as a threat, rather than the arm across the shoulder it really is. ‘Don’t worry old friend. The sands over which you walk are made up of the very bones of things that once, like you, worried about what would become of them. Now you carry them away with you in your shoes and they find their way into the corners of your kitchen and bury themselves deep into your living room carpet. They have no more to worry about, but I am here still.’

  I have always felt like the larger coastal towns had a latent aggression about them, almost as if the inhabitants were still worried about invasion by sea so walked around with broken bottle tops and concealed knives just in case. Because of the prevalence of old people seeking to die with sand in their socks, the young, for fear of being typecast as living in a glorified nursing home, start drinking blue drinks as soon as they finish work and take drugs as if to prove to ‘them London fuckers’ that they know how to have a good time, too.

  The sea, however, doesn’t care. No matter what they do to try and impress it or repel its advances, it lurches forward and eases back with comic consistency, as if it is playing a game of chicken with those who live inland; a show of power that one day, if they look like they have forgotten to flinch, it might not retreat as soon as it should.

  Of course not all elderly people retreat to the sea in their final years. There is an elderly couple who live on my boring little street in Swindon and that makes me feel sorry for them. It isn’t that we live in a particularly bad area, but just that it isn’t particularly nice either. It was built for people like me who could just about live anywhere, so long as it has four walls to put a bed and a toilet in. If Travelodge made towns, they would make Swindon. It does the job quite happily, thank you. Quite happily. Our local pub is a perfect example of this desire not to exceed sufficiency. It serves beer and has been built with aged beams to belie its newness, but it has none of the soul of a good pub. The ceiling would once have been white but has clearly not been repainted since the smoking ban came into place, and as such carries the trademark yellowy-orange patchiness. Perhaps I am wrong and the patchiness exists because the pub ends each night with a lock-in for selected clientele who sit around drinking ale and laughing heartily whilst smoking cigars, but I doubt it. People go there to do what they need to do, to drown what needs to be drowned and go home. Above the bar are a number of brass plaques engraved with playful re-imaginings of well-known phrases and proverbs.

  ‘A friend in need is a bloody nuisance’

  ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a dead relative’

  And my particular favourite: ‘If arseholes could fly, this would be an airport’

  Then, in the middle of the bar, right above the new and ostentatious pump for a well-known lager, which rises up like a serpent from the bar and seems to point upwards at the laminated piece of card, crudely printed from a computer in a number of different colours now faded with time:

  The Customer is always Right. A Right pain in the Arse.

  This last one doesn’t even really work – it is simply rude, another way of telling anyone on the wrong side of the bar that they are not welcome here. I don’t know why they don’t just go the whole hog and write ‘FUCK OFF’ in huge letters above the front door. Of course they are jokes, we can enjoy these signs because we are safe in the knowledge that we are polite and generous customers, and it is understood that the staff will be happy to attend to our every whim with a smile. Except that they aren’t, and we aren’t. The customers here are tired and rude, the staff not much better. It takes the gloss off the wit and all that is left is a sense of begrudging service.

  Drink here if you must, but know this … I absolutely hate your guts. If you die on the property I will call for medical assistance, as is my duty, but should you fall even one pace outside my front door, I will simply laugh and be glad that you won’t be returning any time soon.

  My street has no more character, with nothing to mark it out from any of the others around except for the words written on the signpost at the top of the road. All the streets round here are named after famous wartime actors. Classy. The houses are all identical and this ensures that the happiness of the occupants is entirely down to them. British people talk a lot about ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, trying to match your neighbours’ possessions: cars, hanging baskets, new windows. When the new-build houses are all identical it shaves off another layer of your potential individuality, which is absolutely fine by me.

  There are clues as to who lurks behind the walls of the individual houses, if you care to look for them, such as the ostentatious pebbledashing of the retired couple down the road, keen to show that their wealth has not been hit by recent economic troubles. I have no problem with pebbledashing in the right place, but I’m afraid here it simply looks as though a drunk snowman has been sick all over their home whilst staggering back from the pub. Twice a year, at Halloween and Christmas, houses containing young children are made obvious by the volumes of cheap plastic paraphernalia that adorn the walls and front garden. From inflatable waving Santas to witches on broomsticks hanging from the guttering, the cartoon exteriors belie the misery and squabbling going on behind them. The children always look bruised from the inside out and the parents exhausted by what they are sure was once love.

  And then there is my house. Plain and grey, there are no plants on the tarmacked driveway since I am never at home long enough to look after them. I have a wheelie bin, thank the council, and a little porch light whose bulb has never worked as long as I have lived there. I don’t get many visitors anyway, so it is of no use really. The point of moving to Swindon was to encourage me to make more of an effort to travel to see my friends and family who are spread out across the country, which I do my best to do, although it seems harder year on year to find time when days off coincide.

  Swindon is a place in which I can exist in the meantime, drinking and sleeping. It’s not that I am unhappy here, just that happiness simply isn’t a fa
ctor. In the same way that you need the pang of hunger to appreciate full satiety, you need happy days in the park to appreciate the blues. There is nothing like that here, just people getting on with what they need to do and trying not to think about it too much. I don’t mean to make this sound depressing, because it isn’t really – it’s just the way it is. Cavemen didn’t waste their time thinking about whether or not they were happy or whether their lives had meaning; they were out hunting and trying to stay alive. We’re the same creatures – nothing has changed that much. We invented happiness when finding food became too easy and survival became the norm.

  Once we could all get through the days without trying, we had to find some other reason to wake up each morning; we had to adopt a scoring system to see who was winning at being alive – happiness! Now we think about it all the time, we talk about it with our partners and we travel the world in search of it. I am playing a much longer game; like good comedy I believe the secret to be about timing. If I am too happy in my youth, then my senior years will surely see me unhappily lamenting the passing of the life I once had. If, however, I maintain a level of enforced melancholy for as long as possible, then I can escape into retirement rather than be forced into it. If the last day of my life is the happiest, that will suit me just fine.

  As I ponder this point, a miserable-looking old woman walks by my car with bags full of shopping and stares at me as she passes, distrustful of why I am parked on her street and completely unaware that I live just around the corner. Her latent hatred of me is typical of almost everyone I encounter here. My neighbours, I am quite sure, suspect that I am a serial killer, a view I am quite happy to promote whenever I get the chance if it keeps them from talking to me, be it with a well-timed sinister chuckle to myself, or by making sure that they see how meticulously I clean the interior carpets of my car.

  I must point out at this juncture that I am not a killer, though I have often thought about it when in crowded cinema screenings or on public transport – but who amongst us can honestly say that they haven’t? There is no reason for them to think this of me, save for the fact that if you asked them to describe my character they would most likely tell you any combination of the following:

  1. I am polite

  2. I am hard working

  3. I am always well presented and meticulous

  4. I keep myself to myself

  5. I wouldn’t say boo to a goose

  As any viewer of late-night crime documentaries will be able to testify, this is a classic serial-killer profile. It only takes a few bad pennies to ruin things for everyone and it’s thanks to the likes of Jeffrey Dharmer that men like myself are eyed with suspicion wherever we go. I am no saint, of course, and willingly confess that while I may not have said boo to a goose, I did tell a swan to ‘fuck off’ during a walk in the Lake District a couple of years back.

  The car’s fan kicks in as the engine has been idling for too long now and my mind is turned back to the issue in hand. The problem, you see, is that taking the rubbish out is a rare event since I spend so little time at home, and so I am apt to remember doing it. Locking doors, however, is something I do all the time, so each individual occurrence blurs into an obscurity of infinite replicas. Perhaps if I mark out each time as unique by saying something memorable as I do it, it might stick better in my memory:

  ‘Jon Richardson is locking his front door in the rain and he had Shreddies for breakfast. Boobs.’

  That kind of thing would be memorable. This is what I will do from now on, but this time I am just going to drive and when I get back tomorrow and find that the door was locked the whole time, I will treat myself to a smug, self-satisfied smile and know that I am getting better at life. In weeks and years gone by I would have gone back to check, but that was when I didn’t have Gemma to think about.

  Gemma is the reason I am trying to be more normal, because I imagine that’s what she wants me to be. The best dating advice I can give you is that women like men who aren’t weird – and, I suppose, vice versa – and that’s probably where I have been going wrong for the last eight years. I am not a particularly attractive man, shorter than I would like and with too round a head to feel entirely comfortable when walking past a tennis court, but nor am I ugly enough to warrant the eight-year suspension from the opposite sex that I have been serving. My voice is rather too shrill and I tend to moan too much, but I suspect the main problem has been things like checking doors and getting uncomfortable because I feel that I have stepped on more cracks in the pavement with my left foot than my right – that’s what has marked me out for singledom. No one wants to walk the streets arm in arm with a man who occasionally breaks free to cross the road and step on a grid to ‘even things out’.

  Having someone else to think about once more holds a light up to some of my more eccentric behaviours and I can see that parking by the roadside, yards from your house, and sitting in a catatonic state is not right. Life is about simply playing the odds and I have to concentrate on making myself a reliable target for love. Gemma and I are normal people and we go about our business normally, thinking about one another all the while. Besides, who would call at my house even if the door were unlocked? Swindon and its total isolation wins again!

  Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. As I finally set off to my gig, I sing a song of victory to myself, a victory over the old me.

  Hit the road, Jon, and don’t you go check that door.

  13.02

  THE MIGHWAY CODE

  Approaching Birmingham I am finally starting to calm down and truly forget about things back in Swindon. For the first half an hour I realised that I had been kidding myself if I thought I could just drive away and not suffer any repercussions. The hardest moment came when I stopped for petrol, by which time I had not only become convinced that I left the door unlocked, but also wide open. I pictured vividly a burglar very casually walking up my stairs and taking my big TV from the living room, the closest thing I have to a friend in Swindon, before sauntering back out again and smiling at my next-door neighbour as he loaded it into the back of his van with all his other, much more hard-fought booty. The neighbours would, of course, do nothing.

  Well, he can’t be a thief because he is so brazen and the door isn’t forced. Jon must be moving away to another town … Good! Stinking murdering paedo with his closed curtains and clean car.

  My paranoia is simply because my SkyPlus recording system means that my television is now more reliable than any girlfriend I have ever had. In the days when you had to ask a partner to record Match of the Day for you, a really good one might remember nine times out of ten, but there would always be a time when they forgot, or couldn’t find a tape, or the time it had come on ten minutes earlier because there was no lottery so they missed the first match (the best match) because they were still watching Four Weddings and a Funeral on the other side. But with modern technology, one press of a button ensures that whatever the day, whatever the time, your favourite shows are always waiting for you and nothing is ever expected of you in return. If my television could make me a cup of tea in the morning and put it by my bed, and could drive me home from the pub when I am drunk, I would marry it instantly – though I might need to get a coaxial attachment for my penis. The TV really is enormous; stupidly large, given the size of my living room. I can never quite get far back enough to see what’s on all of it, but it’s good for watching football on. You can see why I would become so afraid of the thought of losing it all through sheer carelessness. Those feelings have now subsided.

  Aside from having to concentrate on not having an accident caused by the lunacy of some drivers, I find driving to be an incredibly relaxing experience. I never feel more free than when behind the wheel of my car. It is only our autopilot that makes us turn left where we are supposed to and take the correct exit at a roundabout. The truth is that every time you get into your car there are an almost infinite number of possibilities open to you, and it is now possible to drive from the northernm
ost tip of Scotland to China and therefore anywhere in between! When you realise that this is possible, you cannot help but ask how many decisions you actually make in your life. By a decision made, I mean a conscious effort to take control of a situation rather than simply allowing yourself to respond in what you think is the correct way, given your track record and how you are perceived by the people around you.

  Compared with this number, then ask yourself how many things just seem to happen? How many times have you got to work and been unable to remember quite how you got there, or gone through an entire week of your brief life without feeling as though you have done anything significant? In order to be absolutely sure that where you are going is the right choice you first have to consider and discount every other option available to you at that point. Would going to Tuscany make you happier than going to Asda? Would it make you happier in the short term but create problems in the long term, or is it a viable option for a permanent relocation? What about Munich? Of course you don’t do this; no one can live their life according to this set of guidelines or none of us would get anything done for spending our time thinking about the alternatives, but isn’t the very fact that there are that many alternatives in itself a wonderfully refreshing thought? Sometimes it can seem as if there are none, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. You just have to wake yourself up to noticing them, but most of us don’t.

  I know that while I am almost certain to end up at my gig in Yorkshire, if I were to just keep on not taking the correct turn then I would be bound to end up somewhere unexpected. From the age of ten I remember being driven to school by my mum and feeling a nervous cramping in my stomach, a pressure that existed precisely because I had always been academically very successful up until that point. I had always done well in tests and exams, behaved well and done all my homework but even then to me that just meant that the one day it all collapsed around me everybody would laugh at me all the more. Teachers would be more disappointed in me than anyone else.