A provincial hack's commonplace book
About 10 years ago, I saw a takeaway in Hyson Green, Nottingham, with a name that suggested the area might have something of a drug problem. But over time I started to think I'd imagined it, or subconsciously improved it. Then I visited some kind friends in the area for new year, and it's not only real but still there:
The handpainted sign is also very cute, no?
This Christmas, I booked my train back to Nottingham early enough to score a cheap first-class ticket. And so I was able to discover the main difference, these days, between the atmosphere in first and second class. You know you're in first class because the crisps are louder.
A nicely pitched moment of joy among the horrors of Nicola Monaghan's tale of drugs and suffocated lives on a Nottingham estate, The Killing Jar, made better by a bathetic conclusion:
The sun rose, casting more blood and pus into the mucky air up around the clouds. I grinned my head off. It were beautiful, I knew that. I was at least using the word proper then. Jon was gorgeous, lit by the yellows and reds and what was left of the moon. We laid there, and birds started to sing, and we could see the grass was green again, and that our jeans were blue, not black. I hadn't noticed before that instant that everything was black and grey and mud brown at night, even once your eyes got used to the dark and you could see.
'Happiness is cheap in the East Midlands, Kez, me duck,' said Jon. I looked up and saw the sun, a broken yolk in the egg-white sky. He was right. Two quid wholesale, them pills'd cost us, and here we were laying on the grass and in love with the light.
I was eighteen years old and I was invincible. That morning everything was amazing. The light, my brother, everything. Ecstasy does exactly what it says on the packet.
[The Killing Jar, by Nicola Monaghan, 2006. The education of a heroin addict's daughter, with enough shocks to fill two misery memoirs and make a talkshow from the leftovers; drug-dealing in the playground aged ten is towards the nicer end of the spectrum. It is lifted from mundane sensationalism by the precision with which it recreates its setting (Broxtowe estate, 1980s and early 90s, with outings to Skegness and the clubs of Hockley) and the voice of its narrator. Kerrie-Ann Hill speaks in a Nottingham dialect that has the music right as well as the words, presents her experiences coolly, as nothing that out of the ordinary, and goes nowhere near self-pity; characters who look on her as a victim, manipulated or available for manipulation, have a low survival rate. Clever observational writing shores up the impression of her as someone sharp enough to survive in dangerous circumstances, and buys credibility for more flowery passages like the one quoted.]
Borders has never meant all that much to me as a bookshop. In the early stages, at least, of the chain's UK operation, if your town was big enough to have a Borders it was big enough to have somewhere three times better. But if it does disappear - there's talk of a management buy-out - I'll miss it hugely.
This isn't because of the pious, we-need-retail-variety argument, although that's true. There are two main reasons.
The first is that Borders open late, which is unorthodox for British bookshops, and very useful. If you want a "third place" (ick) at 8pm that isn't a pub or a restaurant, it's going to be Borders. Get stood up at a pub - doesn't have to be a date; it can be a friend struggling with work or public transport - and you* get through several drinks, while feeling increasingly freakish. Your prize is a tincture of tipsy self-hatred and a complete set of smokelogged clothes. Get stood up at Borders and you browse the books, read all the sane bits of this month's Atlantic, maybe buy a coffee in remorse. Your prize is a head full of the not-quite-higher journalism and possibly a latte moustache. You will still smell however you normally smell. I will miss being stood up in Borders.
The second thing, already hinted at, is that Borders is the best chain newsagent in Britain by the length of Charing Cross Road. This week's Press Gazette has a double-spread of independent magazines in panic at the thought that the main outlet that cares about them might disappear. Borders stocks British magazines that our own lovely newsagents couldn't give a bugger about. There are a lot of those. I remember when I was first trying to make myself a proper smartarse, about 1996, the epic struggle it was to buy even mainstream political and literary periodicals (the New Statesman, the LRB) in Nottingham. WH Smith was no help. There was one shop with a serious range - Briddocks, which was a tiny place full of spinners bearing the names of long-defunct hi-fi magazines, and turned out not to be long for this world itself. It might have them if you arrived early enough in the week. Heaven help you if you ended up in a town you didn't know, and had to find the one newsagent behind the many identical frontages that considered it worthwhile to stock the TLS.
Borders has all that stuff as a matter of course, plus all the British stuff I didn't then know about, plus a huge range of systematic US imports - which might disappear even if the UK management can get their buy-out together. They have provoked a lot of other bookshops to take magazines a bit more seriously - I think Waterstone's had some before the Borders threat appeared, but it made them bring in more; Blackwell's and Foyles have both sprouted groaning magazine shelves - but no one else does it as well. I will miss all that. Badly.
*Yes, all right, me.
I've bought a stack of old Pevsner guides in honour of the fact that I am likely to be moving in the next couple of months. It seems a considerable step from Notts -- opening sentence: "Neither the architectural nor the picturesque traveller would place Nottinghamshire in his first dozen or so of English counties" -- to London, which merits two fat volumes even on its 1950s boundaries and under 1950s Pevsnerian asperity.
The best way to narrow the tread may be to live in Lewisham -- opening sentence: "A large borough, but little to see, and nothing of first-class importance." That would make for better reading, too: Pevsner's sniffs of disapproval please me more than his catalogues of approbation.
Lewisham is honoured with two further section-opening insults. "The borough has been singularly unlucky in its architects", under "Public Buildings", is not at all singular -- in casual browsing, I am yet to come across a town hall Pevsner likes -- but the opening of the "Perambulation" is no-nonsense even for him: "There is so little of note that it is hardly worth working out an elaborate itinerary."
[The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, by Nikolaus Pevsner, 1951; London Except the Cities of London and Westminster, Pevsner, 1952; London: The Cities of London and Westminster, Pevsner revised by Bridget Cherry, 1973. Not to be assessed in one shot, at least by me; hated by most people with favourite buildings, particularly of a Victorian kind (he dismisses one of mine in Nottingham with two words: "fancifully ignorant"); full of dry amusement.]
Here are two key cliches of Nottingham amateur photography -- sunsets and the castle -- held together in a single hastily cropped frame. I like it because it's mine. You don't have to, of course.
From my nearest bookshop, a strange little remainders specialist:
Is this supposed to be some sort of display? Is there a short member of staff who gets dangerously cranky when denied instant access to high shelves? Is it a conceptual art project? Or is it just an attempt to look lovably eccentric? If the last, it's succeeding.
...and in a rather swish part of Nottingham, too. For location guide, see here and click on 'aerial' or (better) 'bird's eye view'.
A suited man in a BMW 3-Series stopped to let me turn right today. I was so confounded I forgot to nod thank-you. The next second, I was nearly kebabbed by the Volvo estate that overtook him.
This morning, someone asked me what I was laughing at. It was The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson's novel-in-27-unbound-sections on grief and the vagaries of memory. Specifically, the bit that follows. 'Tony' is Tony Tillinghast, the friend whose death from cancer a chance visit to Nottingham has prompted B.S. Johnson to remember. The pub is one near B.S.'s flat in Angel, from which he and his friend Jack had been banned after scribbling obscenities in the 'virginal urinal', smashing the odd pint glass, and so on. A pause of three em spaces in the original is represented here by a paragraph break, because my HTML isn't all that. Anyway:
...Tony suggested going into the pub, on this occasion, it must have been the second time he came to the Angel, not the first, now I think of it, because I had worked at another pub, and I was barred from that one, too, or did not go in there, anyway, or something, but he said Let me go in first and order one for you to come in and drink, after a few minutes. And it worked perfectly, I stood outside and counted a hundred, then went in to him and took up my drink, and they were astounded, confounded, the woman and the barmaid, who were both there, it worked well, they muttered amongst themselves, or together, but there was nothing they could do about it, it was so well timed. But they would no serve us with another drink, I remember asking Why not? very aggressively, and them staring back, angrily, and saying You know why! And I think threatening to call a copper. But we left victorious despite, Tony and I, with some dignity, too, as I remember. The beauty of it was that Tony was so polite, gentlemanly and friendly in buying the drinks, had formed a relationship with them, they being very pleased at new custom in an area where it was not common, I think, and they therefore had this friendliness thrown in their faces, so to speak, but could do nothing about it. Ah, the beauty of that!
And then Tony suggested doing the same thing the next evening, only sending two friends in to set up drinks for four, and then both he and I would walk in, and after that they would surely never serve any drinks to anyone unless they saw who it was first, they would be that unsure that they were not going to see the two fat guys walk in again.
[The Unfortunates, by B.S. Johnson, London, 1969, reprint 1999. More readable and less affecting than I expected, although that may be my shallowness. It is an excellent portrait of what the mind does in a stretch of waste time -- kinships with Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, which again I wasn't expecting. The precise observation of Nottingham detail was a pleasure for me, although knowing the geography of his wanderings tugs against the randomness of the form.]
SILLY IDEA BONUS: Thanks to Jonathan Coe's biography of Johnson, we now have a pretty good idea of when The Unfortunates took place: Boxing Day, 1964, when The Observer assigned the author to watch Forest play Spurs. A city that took its literary heritage seriously, rather than just arranging random volumes in the shape of an N, would declare Boxing Day to be B.S. Johnson Day, on the model of Bloomsday, and have hordes of tourists buying quarters of ham from a deli near Old Market Square, drinking two marsalas in Yates's Wine Lodge, and then watching a disappointing Forest match. Of course, in the spirit of the book, you would have to let your visitors do these things in an order of their choosing, or maybe gather at the railway station and then draw lots to decide the schedule. I may write a letter to our tourist authorities, and see how politely they give me the brush-off. And I may then try and do it myself anyway.
Some time in 2008, Nottingham will have a large and potentially splendid new art gallery. Until then, we have a large hole in the ground. To reconcile us to what's going on - that hole used to be a park - the creators of the gallery are staging a series of sweet little art happenings at the point where the hole meets the street. I am increasingly enchanted. There hasn't been this much fun at this particular crossroads since we got rid of the municipal bear-baiting pit, not to mention the bullring and the stocks.
Here, anyway, is the point -- a relic of today's happening:
The set-up was two women at a slightly dodgy-looking stall: sweets, a raffle box in red smoked plastic, and decorations in the same jeweller-meets-pawn-shop trim you see above. They were offering any quantity of time in exchange for written details of use and price. My year and a day was to hunt a dragon; I offered the traditional half a kingdom plus one hand in marriage. Should a fairy tale enter your life, you have to embrace it properly, no?
(The artists involved were called CoLab, but Google can't find my any more about them; may report back if I manage to get to one of their unveilings.)
John Harvey's Resnick novels had proper characters, convincing and involving police-procedure plots, and an acute sense of place. They had, in general, good clean prose. (True, the first page of Rough Treatment has a fat man move with surprising lightness, but what else is a plus-sized burglar to do?) For Nottingham readers, however, they had one other decisive virtue: cafe recommendations. In almost every novel our finicky Polish detective would disappear into some little place in the inner city or the Victoria Centre market. Many of them proved to exist and to be as good as billed.
I've just had my first encounter with the new Harvey series character, Frank Elder -- his second appearance, Ash and Bone. And I must say I was worried. He conducts many of his meetings in Starbucks. But we are saved. There is a cameo appearance for Resnick, with this outcome:
The cafe was French, a small patesserie set back from the main road that ran immediately south from the station. There were a few tables on the pavement, maybe a half-dozen more inside. Bread, criossants, baguettes and a gleaming espresso machine. Two women of a certain age, smartly dressed, sat near the rear window drinking coffee; a silver-haired man, camel coat folded over the back of his chair, was reading Le Monde and eating a croque-monsieur. Elder, who had used St Pancras enough over the years, had no idea it was there...
'How did you know about this?' Elder said, looking round.
'Charlie told me about it.'
I think I know where he's thinking of, and I haven't gone in, and I will.
[Ash and Bone, John Harvey, London, 2005. More thrillerish than the Resnicks -- that's the way the market's going, apparently -- with what seems like a greater number of splashy plots, and more sex. But that could be my faulty memory. The structure resists tidiness nicely, and the social set-up feels more solid and plausible than any policeman-out-of-retirement novel has a right to. I'll be reading the others.]
This is the bitterest stroke of satire in 'Owd Yer Tight, Emrys Bryson's 1965 A-Z collage of Nottingham life. It's filed under J, for "Jack - I'm All Right":
"Guardian Journal", June, 1964. - A tumbledown block of five outside lavatories is shared by 18 adults and 19 children in Little John Street. All the nine terraced houses are more than 100 years old and are without bathrooms or even hot water. Every day the occupants have to disinfect the drains in the middle of the yard where children play between the dustbins. They spoke of damp walls, crumbling plaster, pigeons nesting in the attic, falling chimney pots and woodworm. Last year health officials had to be called in to deal with an invasion of cockraoches and ants.
The area is not due for inspection until 1966.
November 19th, 1964. - Mr J.J. Dunnett, Labour MP for Nottingham Central, told the House of Commons that in Central Nottingham alone there were 15,000 houses more than 80 years old which lacked inside sanitation, a fixed bath and a heating system. Six thousand of them not only lacked basic amenties but were so terrible that they had been condemned. Houses were sometimes so terrible that they could not be sold and were being let at rents which were exorbitant - £3 a week instead of 17/2; £4 5s instead of 16/11.
Nottingham has a housing waiting list of 5,340 families.
In 1964 Nottingham Corporation built 508 houses.
In the first six months of 1965 Nottingham Corporation completed 268 houses, and an exactly similar number was provided by private enterprise.
Nottingham is now building at the rate of 750 dwellings a year.
Since April 1945 - over 20 years - the Corporation has built 17,246 houses, a yearly average of 862. There are between 15,000 and 20,000 slum houses in the city.
January, 1965: Nottingham's No. 1 civic car is now a £10,000 Rolls Royce...
Completely justified indignation, of course, although given a sly push in the original by following a series of extracts on Victorian and Edwardian slums. What's sad is knowing that an equivalent work in 1980 would have vented its anger on tower blocks; and that the anger of the sixties would have helped raise them.
['Owd Yer Tight, by Emrys Bryson, staged Nottingham Playhouse 1965, published Nottingham 1967. A pageant-cum-guidebook-cum-scrapbook, almost entirely quotation, that ranges at will over Nottingham's history. Witty and learned and enough to make you nostalgic for the time of its writing, for all the pettinesses and injustices it describes. It's named after "the mating cry of the city's bus conductors" - these have died out, and the tram conductors who eventually came in their place have not taken up the call.]
The Google News selections for my home town are usually eccentric, but this morning's was depressingly acute:
For this blog's inaugural picture, an encouragement to make sandwiches for your husband's pub. This spread is from The Guinness Guide to Profitable Snacks, a handsome hardback book apparently given away inside the trade. It eventually ended up in my surviving local secondhand shop. They manage to fit 11 bottles or glasses of Guinness into a compact cover image, but the inside is scrupulously soft sell; it ends with a hopeful remark that "Good beer, dark or light, and good food are complementary".
What's most notable about it now, though, other than the tiny space given to hygiene regulations, is its confidence that every pub is a family unit. The section "CATERING H.Q. - your own kitchen" begins "Like most licensees, you and your husband are busy people". And on the subject of poultry, you get: "An occasional turkey, bought when prices are lower than at Christmas, can be enjoyed by your family and provide tasty sandwiches for your customers."
You are to use your domestic kitchen, and your own utensils, because of course it's all "scrupulously clean", and just take a little extra care when washing the dishes because (this is unspoken) that's where the public can actually see you slipping up.
Working on a regional paper changes the way you read. You begin to scan each text for references to your circulation area; and, although you probably try not to be conscious of it, you prefer the disparaging. Drawing your readers' attention to an insult and then loudly defending them from it promotes the togetherness on which local journalism thrives.
(This may be one reason why maligned and misunderstood places - shitholes, if you want to take the outsider's view - tend to nourish newspapers. Think of Wolverhampton and Dudley, with their paper bigger than the two Birmingham ones combined. Think of Aberdeen, with its two papers each larger than the prestigious Edinburgh equivalent.)
Also to be considered, especially if you're in a shithole, is the frisson of agreement some of your readers will feel at the insult. When I worked in Aberdeen for a few months, a friend told me to read Christopher Brookmyre's A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away, which gives the place several pages of full-on comic crying-down. I tried the local library, but all 23 copies were on loan.
There are five copies of Geoff Dyer's riff on DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, in all Nottingham and Nottinghamshire's libraries, and only two of them are in Eastwood. A shame, because his curses upon Eastwood and Notts are first-rate: "Lawrence country - north of Shakespeare's county, south of the Bronte country, bang in the middle of motorway country... there is no getting away from the fact that Eastwood is an ugly little town in an ugly little county".
Perhaps Dyer's whitewater-rafting version of the stream-of-consciousness narrative has kept Eastwoodians out. Perhaps it prevented filleting of the book by the people who would tell them to be offended. Or maybe the gatekeepers were distracted by the quality of the other jokes - this is a man who gathers momentum even as he describes depressed inactivity:
It went on for a couple of months. Laura went to work while I stayed home and did nothing. I read nothing and did nothing. I spent most of the time watching TV which may not sound so extreme but this was mornings and afternoons, it was Italian TV and - the clincher - the TV wasn't even turned on.
Something must be done. Do you think we could start a campaign to ban Out of Sheer Rage in Notts? I regret that I have come to the question so late, but the publicity would still surely bring others to the pleasures of this book. We might even get the libraries up to 23 copies.
is the official title of the art happening I mentioned some time ago. It has now happened. This Saturday, in fact. It drew more people into Bromley House than would normally go in a week, which is an excellent thing: a crowd of, say, 100, with what seemed like 120 cameras.
The pantomime of preparing and anticipating and buzz went on about ten minutes longer than was comfortable, but the result was worth it. The ping-pong balls were luminous yellow, which I hadn't expected, and delivered by the artist, Phillip Henderson, from an adorable little lavender-blue suitcase. He declared himself more concerned about the sound than the appearance, so the librarian asked everyone not to clap; there was a few seconds' pause before we cracked. As it turns out, a hundred people applauding sounds very like 360 ping-pong balls descending a spiral staircase. I hope Mr Henderson enjoyed the echo.
Other people have blogged this first, of course. One also put a video on YouTube. Bless them.
was on a Transpeak bus from Nottingham to Cromford this morning:
UNIVERSITY OF DERBY
HIGH PEAK COLLEGE
Please note that smoking of any substance is not allowed on College Transport.
For better reasons to visit Cromford, see under Scarthin Books.
On a certain Saturday in May, 360 ping-pong balls will descend this spiral staircase. Because of art.
Knowing the Bromley House library's membership procedures - which are friendly and fairly open but not quick - you would probably need to apply now to see it as of right.
They'll equally probably let in guests. But if you live in Nottingham, read, and have any spare time in office hours, you'll want to join.
Unintended consequences
"Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's as we know it, is not mentioned in Not on the Label or Shopped, in spite of his interest in the mass production of standardised french fries. But without the car there would be no McDonald's - and there would be no supermarkets. It isn't a coincidence that the publication of the Beeching Report on The Reshaping of British Railways in 1963 came between the opening of Tesco's first big store, in Leicester in 1961 (16,500 square feet), and Asda's first, in Nottingham in 1965 (70,000 square feet). Beeching accepted that cars and lorries had finished off the stopping train and the slow goods train (except for those carrying coal) as economic entities." -- Hugh Pennington, half-defending supermarkets, London Review of Books November 18. If you've done the sensible thing and subscribed, the actual piece is here.
This is an strong enough passage in itself. But my attention stopped dead three-quarters of the way through and started shouting: "You live in the birthplace of the British supermarket!" It took me a while to get back on track after that.
Oh, and there is one other interesting thing about supermarkets, in the context of this issue of the LRB. Unlike US policy in Guatemala, Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, the shortening of URLs or the lives of Anne Boleyn and Lord Cromer, they don't appear to have anything to do with the Iraq war. (Last two links subscriber again. Sorry.)
