Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Having warmed to the wind and the long grass, the weather that’s glorious because it’s on the edge of violence, the charming sense of pride in perceiving Weymouth as a domineering historic foe, I found myself accepting the legitimacy of banning the word for a species not dissimilar to the hare. After four or five people had told me that it really really mustn’t be said, the custom seemed like a religious practice. You could no more justify upsetting them by deliberately saying it than you could go up to a tribe of Aboriginals who thought taking a photograph of them removes their soul, and locking them in the Big Brother house with cameras in every corner while yelling, ‘We don’t have souls, we’re just physical organisms, you irrational idiots!’

  Even so, you ought to be aware if your custom seems eccentric to those who are not in on it, and I decided to end the show I did on Portland by making that point. I talked about its origins and asked Stuart Morris his theories about it, and what struck me was how any word can acquire the power to create tension if enough people agree on it. Because each time I ventured near to a place where I might be approaching saying the dreaded word, there was a communal mini-gasp, until I became aware that to actually say it would be so perverse, would break so many rules, that a switch in my head was deleting the possibility of saying it, the same one that ensures you don’t say ‘cunt’ to your mate’s granny.

  But I’d worked out an ending, which was to suggest as the show was part of a series celebrating communities, there could be no more appropriate way of ending it than with a community singalong, and the perfect song would be the Chas & Dave classic that everyone must know, so, ‘Come on Portland, everyone join in: “Oh you won’t stop talking, why don’t you give it a rest …”’

  The tension broke, in the way a stand-off between two blokes glaring at each other in a pub for two hours finally breaks when one of them whacks the other with a pool cue. Some people laughed, some shrieked, with possibly a laughy air, some booed, and one man stood and raised his middle finger while thrusting his hand aggressively forward, in a gesture strangely modern given what was troubling him. Someone else leaned back and frisbeed a pound coin that just missed its target and hit the curtain at the back of the stage.

  This was thrilling. History has recorded performers causing riots before, perhaps by singing in support of black rights in segregated states of America, or giving licence to teenage rebellion in the 1950s. Now I knew what they felt like. Bill Haley, Lenny Bruce, Nirvana, Tupac, and now my version of Chas & Dave’s ‘Rabbit’ were in the same bracket.

  The producer, at the side of the stage, looked quizzical, possibly because of the ending we’d worked out. So while the finger-thrusting and discontent continued I stopped singing and said, ‘Don’t worry, the last thing I want to do is upset everyone by coming to Portland and saying “rabbit”.’

  As I was saying this I actually felt quite tense, the way a suicide bomber might feel in the moments before he detonates himself. As with most disturbances, only a minority of the people present were actually involved, but that minority seemed quite upset, storming out and presumably thinking, ‘Why do comedians these days insist on using bad language? Why can’t they stick to “shit”, “fuck” and “arseholes” like proper family entertainers?’

  Afterwards I sat in the bar, which was in one corner of a cavernous space that could easily have been used for archery practice. In the opposite corner, away in the distance, was a grand piano. A couple in their seventies came over, and the man, wearing a precisely knotted maroon cravat, said, ‘I’ve lived here all my life, and these buggers need telling how bloody daft they are.’ He walked off with a defiant gait as I sat pondering how at last I appeared to have made a political impact, on the most unlikely of issues. I chatted for a few moments to other people who’d been in the show, then heard a chorus from the piano – ‘Run Rabbit Run’. It was the man in the cravat, while next to him we could just make out his wife’s expression, that said, ‘Fifty years I’ve been putting up with him causing trouble like this.’

  Motorways

  Many of the great advances in civilisation have involved travel: ships, railroads and aircraft have made cities and continents accessible to people who would otherwise have had no hope of getting there. During the Enlightenment, as well as demands for rational thought and democracy, some of the most radical thinkers became obsessed with bridges. Ballooning fascinated, as did the earliest pushbikes and cars, not only because of the speed at which they travelled but of the way they offered a new view of the world, the fusion of science and art, the intricate ingenuity of the steam train, galleon or Golden Gate Bridge enabling the hitherto unimaginable exhilaration of glorious vistas of mountain ranges, oceans and plains. I wonder if it felt the same when they opened the M6.

  Maybe a certain type of engineer feels a tinge of excitement as he approaches his favourite slip road, but generally the motorway is brutally functional. No one even pretends the journey itself will be fun, it just gets you to junction 34 in two hours. So when you’re sat motionless in a line of motionless traffic on a concrete strip that serves no purpose apart from motion, you enter a world of unmatchable pointlessness. You can’t even read or do a crossword, because every forty seconds you have to put the car into first gear, creep forward a few yards and then stop again, each little judder as you stop representing another failure. If they’d had motorways in ancient Greece there would have been myths about men who defied the gods and were condemned to spend an eternity on the M1 just south of Luton, shuffling twenty yards every couple of minutes and never finding out the reason why.

  For a few minutes it’s possible to listen to a CD, but eventually even that becomes a reminder of how long you’ve been there. A whole ska compilation comes to an end five lamp posts after you put it on, and you realise it’s better to go into a trance with nothing to measure time by. In the end you exhaust all possible distractions. You’ve eaten all the chocolate éclairs, wriggled into every position and picked every orifice. You adjust your expectations of arriving again, writing off another birthday but hoping to be there for the birth of the second grandchild. You envy that bloke in the film who trapped his arm under a rock and had to saw it off to get out, as at least he had a plan. And you dream of the turn-off to Northampton, which is 150 miles from where you’re heading, but if you ever reach it you’ll be out of this queue and can start a new life there like a refugee, though there’ll probably be lots of you trying the same thing and you’ll be despised by the locals who complain there isn’t room in their town for the roadworks community, who get whatever they want off the council and ought to get back to the M1 where they came from.

  Sometimes when these queues end there’s no apparent reason why they ever happened. The traffic just starts moving freely. It’s almost a disappointment. At least if there was a lorry on fire or alligators in the middle lane or a crashed spaceship you’d be able to rationalise it, but off you go as if someone’s been playing with you, like a torturer who doesn’t even want information from you but just enjoys watching you scream, then releases you when he’s bored.

  Even when it’s working, you don’t pass anything on a motorway except numbers. You don’t pass Rugby in the sense of experiencing even a glimpse of the place through the window, you pass it in the sense that it’s seventy more miles to Nottingham. While you’re on a motorway your whole world – the road, the signs, the vehicle you’re in, the service stations – stays exactly the same, regardless of where you are. So it’s a shock when you stop for petrol and the lad in the shop has a Birmingham accent, as it’s the first clue as to where you’re actually at, rather than just on the motorway. This means there are places we all know the names of simply as points we pass: Newport Pagnell, Keele, Membury, Flitwick, Wednesbury. They’re real because they represent another target reached, but maybe there’s no such actual place. You could easily make up somewhere, add it to the road sign on junction 30 of the M1, and before long millions of people would be familiar with Iddlethorpe, and tell th
emselves regularly that they were always happy to pass Iddlethorpe as it meant they were only forty minutes from Sheffield.

  So it’s a puzzle why so many people prefer to travel this way, rather than by the motorway’s main competitor, the train. One reason must be the cost. Somehow the price of a return rail ticket from London to Manchester comes to around the same as the petrol for most cars, so if two of you go together it’s half the price to drive. Then there’s the wonder of the peak fare policy.

  Until 2010 there was a rule that the rail companies couldn’t raise fares by more than 1 per cent above the inflation rate. They got round this by extending the peak times, when a return from Manchester to London costs over £300, just short of an average return fare to New York. ‘This only affects a small percentage of customers,’ explained the operator, the way Reggie Kray might have exclaimed, ‘What’s the fuss? I only shot 3 per cent of the people I met all week.’

  If you turn up at three in the afternoon you’ll be told in an emotionless voice that you have the option of paying a £230 supplement or waiting four hours until the next off-peak service. These alternatives are so ridiculous they might as well have fun with them and add, ‘Or you can be injected with depleted uranium in a Ministry of Defence experiment, then you can stand in coach E on the 4.15 for only £137.65.’

  Then there’s the way many trains are now so packed that people are sat on the floor between seats, their cases piled across doorways, or standing for two hours, and a trip to the toilet is like being on Total Wipeout as you clamber over rucksacks and vault over distressed toddlers until you wouldn’t be surprised to hear, ‘We apologise to customers for the outbreak of cholera on this service,’ and you wonder if you’ve inadvertently got on the wrong train and boarded a shuttle ferrying refugees away from a military coup in Chad.

  Most of the problems with trains would probably be solved by simply having more of them. There’s still a sense of destiny in getting a train to Newcastle or Glasgow, a feeling as you walk through the station, between the people rushing with forty seconds to clamber on board, amidst the traditional echoey indecipherable announcements, past the queue of taxis and the beggars and booths selling pasties, that you’re doing something that matters.

  The profit-driven motives of the rail companies can’t entirely destroy the experience, but they have a go. One problem presented by privatisation is the difficulty of going somewhere but coming back via a different route, which entails travelling with two different companies and causes mayhem. Ask to go to Sheffield but to come back from Manchester and the poor member of staff looks at you with such bemusement you wonder if, by mistake, you said, ‘And on the way back I’ll need a carriage to myself as I like to have a wank as I’m going through Stafford.’

  Then there’s the dispiriting business of trying to contact the rail company at all, which is more irritating than the old British Rail system of there being no number to ring in the first place. Virgin seem to excel in automated chill-speak, and Richard Branson was rewarded for this effort with the statistic that Virgin received twice as many complaints as any other rail operator, and more than all the others put together. Perfectionist that Branson is, Virgin also has the worst record for answering complaints, replying to a wonderful 36 per cent within twenty days.

  I enjoyed some of this service when I rang to reserve a seat, but couldn’t get through for twenty-six minutes. When I said I’d like to complain I was put on hold for another fifteen minutes. Then I was told the complaints department was very busy, so could I ring back later. Later I called the customer relations department, who told me, ‘This can happen.’

  ‘Is there an explanation?’ I asked, and she said, ‘I’ve given you one.’

  I said, ‘What was it?’ and she said, ‘I told you – this can happen.’

  Just to make sure, I said, ‘Are you telling me “This can happen” is the explanation?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said triumphantly.

  So it seems Virgin is being run by philosophers from the thirteenth century. When someone rings to ask why they were stuck for two hours outside Preston they must be told, ‘Ah, ’tis God’s will.’ The station announcements will soon say: ‘We apologise for the cancellation of the 2.15 to Coventry. This is due to the fact that this can happen. It’s not our place to incur the wrath of our creator by asking why.’

  I can think of two ways we might restore the splendour associated with travel in the nineteenth century, while retaining today’s (usually) higher speeds. Firstly, regulators of the rail networks could compel the companies to employ people to greet passengers as they arrive at their destination using nineteenth-century language. They could take their cases and say, ‘Sir, I welcome you to our humble city. It is indeed an honour to be visited by one as esteemed as your good self. I trust your journey was not too arduous, and can only hope the buffet car did not suffer its customary malfunction of a faulty boiler, rendering hot liquid refreshments unattainable. Also I offer my deepest regret at the exorbitant fee which you were obliged to forfeit, and my sincerest hope that your business here is so outlandishly profitable that the fare may be covered. And you, madam – rarely has this station been graced with such beauty, which shines miraculously, if I may be permitted to say so, given that you’ve spent three hours squashed between a tower of suitcases, four crying toddlers and a bloke of six foot five who drank nine tins of Stella, with your back pressed against an automatic door that periodically opened and jolted shut on your fingers.’

  Or they could refranchise the entire network to steam-train enthusiasts. Because a remarkable feature of Britain is that every area has a steam-train line, staffed by volunteers who spend their holidays polishing pistons and fixing gaskets so that on a Sunday they can beam with joy in their jackets with shiny buttons as families plonk half-excited, half-bewildered children on the gleaming train that puffs to a nearby village and back. The boundless glee of these characters is so infectious that they should be paid to run the national rail service properly.

  Hardly anyone would still use motorways as every old train was put back into service, and thousands would arrive at the stations every day just to travel and come back, so they could enjoy buying a little cardboard ticket that gets punched by a smiley guard, who helps you onto the train and waves at you as it pulls away. Then as it thundered past Watford Junction you’d see the ticket collector in his cap kneel next to the businessman opposite as he was collating figures on his laptop, and say, ‘Now then, I hear it’s your birthday today. So, as a special treat, would you like to come and sit with the driver?’

  They’d be so intent on making the trip as fun as possible, you wouldn’t be all that surprised if a guard whispered to you, ‘Just for you, because we know what makes a journey special for you, we’re going to give you a carriage all to yourself as we go through Stafford.’

  Yorkshire

  Part of the quaintness of Britain is how it’s divided into counties. There’s no difference in language, culture, or identity as you cross from Bedfordshire into Buckinghamshire or Dorset into Somerset, because for two hundred years almost every area has been identified either as a town, or by the town that’s nearest to it. As counties were set up as fourteenth-century fiefdoms, someone must have decided we ought to keep them going anyway, because these changes shouldn’t be rushed.

  As a result, no one’s sure which counties the biggest towns are in. Manchester is the heart of Lancashire, but bits of it are in Cheshire, and most of it is in a district of its own in no county, so a visiting Palestinian would assume it’s a disputed territory overseen by the United Nations. Birmingham is sort of in Warwickshire but not really, and no one can explain what Middlesex is, let alone where it starts. Is it a county, or the capital, or a local authority? Someone could make a case for it being a comet. It seems to include bits of central London, Berkshire, Hertfordshire and assorted random areas. There’s probably a strip of land in Afghanistan where the Royal Mail is responsible for the postal service, as its postcode is
Middlesex AF9.

  It’s not surprising that the institutions that cling to the county system most doggedly are cricket and BBC local radio, institutions not known for their eagerness to embrace change.

  A few counties, such as Essex, have a jokey image that defines them as an area in which the women all have artificial suntans and think chocolate milk comes out of brown cows, but in reality there’s nothing that unites the place. Essex starts in Leyton, where people think of themselves as East Londoners, moves on to Chelmsford, where the town slogan could be ‘Made a few bob in the building game, moved out of London, got a semi-detached with a gravelly path and a statue of something or other in the garden, I’m laughing.’ Further east are rural areas with rural accents and handwritten signs urging passers-by to pick their own blackberries. And in the middle is Harlow, where the motto is probably ‘I tell you what we did last night, went down Chelmsford and nicked this wanker’s statue.’

  Cornwall, as discussed elsewhere, has some sense of identity, and so does Kent to an extent, but the only county that instils a true sense of purpose to anyone connected with it must be Yorkshire.

  You’ll be told someone behaves as they do ‘because I’m from Yorkshire’, in a way that would be inconceivable if they were from Wiltshire or Leicestershire. Followers of Yorkshire County Cricket Club cheer their team in the way people cheer a national side, not just because they identify with the club but because they love Yorkshire.

  There’s a dialect, that might alter from Barnsley to Halifax but is still Yorkshire, in which laking is playing, snap is food and ’appen means maybe.

  The Yorkshire manner is perceived to be a dour determination to ‘tell it like it is’. For example, Yorkshire’s record-breaking batsman Geoff Boycott is famous for his ‘gruff honesty’, such as responding to a question about a player who had to go home from the World Cup because he was suffering from depression by saying, ‘I’m not surprised he was depressed. He must have heard what I’ve been saying about him, that he’s not good enough.’ Then he added, ‘I’m from Yorkshire, we don’t get depressed.’