The Only Thing I knew How to Do

The National Express coach rumbled on, passing row after row of squat red-brick terraces, bordering hills and moors, a northern landscape I knew from TV – a world of sixties’ working class heroes, the backdrop to A Taste of Honey, a world in which every Smiths’ song was set*, a world of Coronation Street. 

Through North Manchester into West Yorkshire – visions of Kes and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Last of the Summer Wine and Kitchen Sinks.   Rolling on to Leeds, threading from urban industrial into a rural-suburb fringe.  It was a magical journey, pregnant with anticipation.

At seventeen, I recall this coach journey well.  Leaving from Chorlton Street Bus Station in Manchester – a thriving hive of activity and bustle and dereliction in spring 1989 – to visit my Leeds Poly-attending girlfriend, with whom I was very much in love/infatuated. One of those phrases was true. Which one depends on my mood.   

(Later the Poly would become the Metropolitan University, a gift to little turds like me who attended the Uni and would deliberately pronounce it MetroPOLItan University whenever we met anyone who attended it. Suffice to say, the urbanity and hilarity of this was not shared).

The number of times I set off from that bus station on some adventure or other I cannot count, but Chorlton Street was the stepping-off point for a new world on so many occasions.  It was also notorious for prostitution on the edge of the gay village, so was probably to stepping-off point for much more than a weekend in Yorkshire, I suspect.  But for me, it was a departure from the everyday, the gateway to a world I knew was out there, and which I desperately wanted to see, to be in, to be of.

The excitement I recall from those heady days of ’89, those journeys into both a new world and adulthood – arriving alone into a new city, armed with a ten pack of B&H, enough money to get pissed cheaply and perched on the edge of time, ready for the weekend ahead  - was an electric excitement. That uncertainty of what would happen stirred in with the certainty that something would definitely happen accompanied me for decades whenever I arrived somewhere for the first time. These trips to Leeds, visiting friends at different Universities, moving to New Zealand. Even heading to Liverpool for a night out wasn’t as depressing as I expected. **

And whether I travelled alone or in a group, solo or half a duo – the trip was still stuffed with the possibility of the new – new experiences, new routines, new people.  

In the last two years for reasons I’m not getting into***I’ve found myself travelling on my own a lot more, and initially that frisson I’d experienced earlier in life resurfaced. Life was there for the drinking, the dancing, the easy romancing.

Unfortunately, it’s not turned out that way.  I may be, as it were, back.  I may walk like a panther, dance like tigers on Vaseline, shine like stars. It’s not enough.

Things have changed since I was last single. Or, more specifically, I’m not in my twenties now – a time when other twenty-somethings gravitate towards you when you’re out on your own. A time when a new posse of life-long friends*** forms within days,sometimes hours, of disembarkation.  

I’m now well into my forties, and almost all other solo travellers are under forty and look at a forty-something sitting and sipping alone with suspicion, and almost all other forty-something travellers have a gaggle of offspring in tow, and are doing that family-holiday thing that always looks like it’s not enjoyed till everyone is home and can safely reminisce without dealing with the actual mechanics of the trip.

It’s very much a first -world problem, I’m aware. But it’s cemented something I’ve suspected for a long time – opportunities for making great memories recede as we get older.  That coach journey at 17 was more of a life-changing event, despite the fact that it was only an hour away from home, than the majority of travel I’ve made since.  

What should I make of this? I guess it’s that if you’re young, make those great memories - you’ll need them to look back on fondly when the opportunities of new ones narrow. And if you’re in the same state as me, don’t feel bad about looking back, but keep moving forward. Your best most acute and formidable experiences may be behind you, but opportunities narrow, not disappear.

Or, in the words of a great poet :Keep on Keepin’ On. It’s that or stop, and there’ll be plenty time for that later. Plenty of time. 

* In my head The Smiths’ landscape was a mythical land of far north Manchester bordering on Lancashire,  despite the fact they were not only from the same part of Manchester as me, one of the their songs was specially about the Cemetery next to my house.  I could not marry the worlds of reality and the romantic. I suspect this is a character flaw which transcends my understanding of The Smiths and pervades my entire life. It’d explain a lot, not least my belief that things might get better, and it’ll all work out in the end.

 **It was worse, but gave me confirmation bias so I was at least grateful for that.

***Other than to say that, I, of course, am a blameless angel in the whole car-crash of life.

****By ‘life-long’ I mean anything from a few days to, sometimes, years.  Mostly a few days, tho, tbh.

When Turkeys Vote

I got back from a last-blowout-before-term-starts holiday in Turkey yesterday – ten days of blissful sunshine, the thick air of a humid Mediterranean climate and, annoyingly, a complete ban on Wikipedia.

I discovered this while trying to look up the details the sex lives of Roman Emperors*, only to be faced with the Page Not Found of information tyranny.  A little digging allowed me to discover that President Erdogan, Turkey’s contribution to world leaders who really shouldn’t be, had banned Wikipedia some years ago during his crackdown on journalists and critics, because they’d been 'spreading fake news'. The equivalent of the kid who’s shit at football kicking the ball onto a motorway and then claiming they would have scored four if there was still a ball.

Naturally this led me to question whether I should really be holidaying in a country which has treated government critics so badly and, more importantly, which doesn’t let you find out whether Caligula had really been shagging his sisters. But, as I was already there, I didn’t feel I had too much of a choice, and, besides, Turkey is still a democracy and Erdogan was democratically elected. He can still be democratically defeated.

It might seem to me to be fucking insane that people will vote to have their rights eroded, but God hasn’t died and appointed me his successor, so while I may disapprove, I’m not actually in a position to smite and suchlike.**

However, too many times in recent months I’ve been forced into exclaiming What-the-fuck-is-this-insanity while pondering such topics as why can’t I search up if Nero was giving ponies handjobs, whether there will be food post-Brexit, and what exactly is VAR for other than pissing me off when I watch Man City play.

Scratch that – too many times in recent years, not months,  I’ve been forced to exclaim this, And by exclaim, I mean utter with tones of disdain and disbelief akin to those Judas must have uttered on entering the afterlife and discovering he’d been the victim of some weird father-son powerplay.

In recent memory events have occurred which have both defied all logic, but also forced me to question my long-standing belief that humanity, while prone to stupidity, is fundamentally decent.  I’m sticking with part one of that argument, but part two has been tested to its limits.

There was the proto-period of Are You Having a Fucking Laugh, when the pig-head-fucker was voted into power for a second term, despite applying primary-school maths to the complex global economic situation of the Credit Crunch. Then we had the This Doesn’t Surprise Me All That Much Anymore vote to leave the EU, for such nebulous reasons as ‘Taking back our laws’ and ‘ To stop Turkey’, along with classics along the lines of ‘You see that there Brussels’ and ‘Maastricht was essentially a Trojan Horse which has resulted in a lack of reciprocity in Pan-European infrastructural support programmes’. 

I’m making some of this up, but that was pretty much the gist of every conversation I had with the Brexo-isolationists. Apart from the last one, obvs. There are polysyllabic words.

The Are You Fucking Kidding Me factor clearly took a major step into the realms of What The Fuck is Wrong with You People when The Tango King of Combover was made The Man with the Nuclear Codes.  

I can understand, if not accept, when politicians I despise are elected. I can even understand that sometimes the electorate does something unhinged or radical as a protest at the inequality and ineptitude of the status quo. But this decision seemed to be the political equivalent of burning your house down because you’ve got a few ants in the kitchen.  Yeah, the ants are gone, but so has the kitchen.

And now the house is just a pile of smouldering embers. Cheers, dickheads.

As does the US of A, so must England follow. Thus we’ve gone and got ourselves a PG Wodehouse comedy villain of our own at the head of the government.  Except it’s not funny.  File under Dystopic Catastrophe, not Light Edwardian Comedy.  Less Wooster, more What The Fuck is This This Shit?

We stand on a precipice, while this cabal of shitsticks, masquerading as a legitimate UK government, try to override democracy, proroguing parliament to avoid debate, dissembling with every slithering syllable uttered and even threatening to not recognise changes in the law***.  

Is this the ‘sovereignty’ we were supposed to be getting back? Is this the Better Off Out? No, this is the kind of behaviour that Disney villains engage in before the Forest Animals all band together and stop the evil princes from selling the country for a bag of gold by utilising a couple of magic beans and a whole lot of gumption.

Unfortunately, our Forest Friends are being thwarted by the stupid donkey Swinson who refuses to help because she would do anything to stop the evil princes, but she’s secretly a Meatfloaf fan.  

Anyway, my guilt about holidaying in a country with an iffy political situation was assuaged as I watched the country I actually live in enter the We Do What We Want Peasants, Bow competition.  I’m not really in a position to judge other countries when my own homeland is emerging as a bit of political farce.

So I enjoyed the sun, and cheap beer, and food which Turkey claims is Turkish but Greece claims is Greek and accepted that I’d be returning to situation that I desperately hope is sorted, but fear is going to prove a victory for fuckwittery and wilful ignorance.

But remember, Quitters, you voted for this shit. When food runs out, were eating you first.

*Academic curiosity, not uber-vintage porn.

**There’s a joke about Turkey’s voting for Brexit to be shoehorned in here somewhere, but I fear it would be a pun for the sake of it, so, in preparation for the everyone-for themselves, bestial wilderness I forsee if this shitcanery actually  goes ahead, you can make it yourselves. 

*** Yes, Michael Gove, I’m looking at you, you opportunistic sock-puppet.