Blah blah blah London. It’s easy to see why the regionals get angered with so much of our media being focused on that bit what you see on the opening credits of Eastenders (and then the West as well). But one of the things about living here is that you occasionally have to leave to go to another part of the country. A friend’s 21st drew a couple of us out of our safe Oyster card zones, bus-bound for Liverpool. With the train lines currently being upgraded for leaf-on-track-resistance, we saved ourselves some quids by plumping for five and half hours of National Express hospitality and luckily, being the most annoying people on the bus ourselves, had a very pleasant journey.
We were also treated to a night out in the city. I saw girls flash their boobs in bars for cameras and leggy blondes wearing catsuits. Maybe this goes on in London, I’ve no idea, but if it doesn’t, it should. We staggered around between bars for the required number of hours, finally leaving a club and emerging into a scene straight from ‘When Binge-Drinking Britain Goes Wrong’. One friend insisted he would only walk to the taxi with his trousers round his ankles while local residents were more interested in our group’s lone ethnic minority, who had both ‘Estelle!’ and, more worryingly, ‘Tina Turner!’ caterwauled at her from a variety of boozed-up gentlemen. We joked that maybe they would shout out the name of any black person: ‘Trevor McDonald!’ or ‘50cent!’ These sorts of interjections would earn a punch and a stab back in London, but the Liverpudlians were all so friendly that we simply put this down to innocent enthusiasm rather than torch-wielding provincialism.
Where things really got silly concerns our journey home. Not only did we have the privilege of a stop off at Stoke-On-Trent, but we soon wound up stranded in Birmingham following motorway closures and missing drivers. There is little more tedious than middle-aged men swapping motorway horror stories and playing one-upmanship with knowledge of alternative A-roads, so I will keep things brief. But suffice to say, Birmingham bus station was awash with both lashing rain and lost busloads of passengers. We sat twitching nervously on the bus, eager for an explanation, until it transpired that taxis, yes, taxis were being laid on to see us the rest of the way to Birmingham.
We were soon squeezed into vehicle akin to a Scouts minibus with some fellow beleaguered passengers, chuckling along in a Britons-in-the-Blitz spirit as an argument erupted audibly in the next taxi between two equally snooty young ladies. We wanted to stay and watch but were soon on our way… into stationary traffic on the motorway. There we sat and sat while iPod batteries ran out and wills to live expired. It rained, it got dark, we got hungry, tired and bladders swelled for the lavatory. You can’t really fit a commode in an eleven-seater without demanding people do away with certain social mores, such as weeing in private, and so the misery was compounded.
Hours later, we were crawling on the Kilburn High Road into London, not having eaten since breakfast. Fair enough, we were not experiencing famine, but we were being exposed to every international cuisine of delicious food imaginable while trapped in the cramped confines of our taxi: there was Abyssinian, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Bangladeshi, Italian and every type of fried chicken. It was a hellish punishment out of an Alanis Morrissette song or a Greek myth and by the time we had directed our Birmingham-dwelling, non-English-speaking driver to Victoria station, it was past eleven. We had left at three. When you only get two days for a weekend, you can’t help stacking up a bit of resentment at spending a meaty chunk of it in motorway inertia.
Nevertheless, the adventure had its moments, including watching a girl drop her laptop off her seat and seeing the shocked faces of fellow passengers caught mid-fag break as the driver moved the coach along and they thought we were driving off without them.
The trip also allowed some savouring of that self-righteous feeling of going back in time when leaving the South East: “Oh look, a Wimpy Burger,” and “Why does the MerseyRail smell of peanuts?” Coming back to London had essence of homecoming about it, of slotting back into the rut I have scratched out for myself and I sat pensively contemplating this as the Tube bumbled along up the Northern Line: here was home.
No comments:
Post a Comment