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.