Trans-Pennine Express

Things start to go wrong at Preston.

I’m reading The Road to Wigan Pier and reflecting on the differences between the working class and the bourgeoisie when my till-now peaceful carriage fills with a gang of tarts, all caked in warpaint and carrying in their wake their own micro-climate of asphyxiating perfume. 

It’s a hen party. I recognise Irish and Liverpudlian accents. They fall into the three or four rows of seats closest to me and start swearing and cackling.  

I tense up. How fortunes can change. No longer the pensive, bookish journeyman; now a cornered, cowering prey. Whatever happens from now on can only be bad. At the very least, they’ll start loudly debating the size of my cock.

What is it with them? Is it that they don’t know how to behave, or that they don’t care? I think of Andrea Dunbar. How she made art of the squalor, how she must have had a sense of universality an what was essential, and how I am a narcissist with a small prick on a train full of unstoppable life forces. The bottles of Smirnoff Mule and little hand mirrors come out. I feel sick.

It feels like the end of civilisation. But of course it isn’t. They have their own values, they’re just not as delicate as mine. It’s just a group of working-class girls having a laugh.

My sister lives in that world. She could easily be among them, the Lambrini girls with their painted talons, headbutts and accidental pregnancies. Is that what I think of my sister – the end of civilisation? WHO THE FUCK DO I THINK I AM?

Baby born

The photo is of my dad in a hospital armchair, with his bald head and branded glasses, cradling his newborn granddaughter in his arms. Isla Blue is born at 10.30pm on Monday August 13. “Mother and baby ‘doing fine’”, as the text to the vague extended family says.

My dad is holding the baby and in the midday sun the two windows behind them are blocks of pure white light.

My dad is wearing a plain lemon yellow t-shirt and new-looking black trousers. Smart. He is in a classic male baby-holding posture, slave to an old unspoken rule: arms forming an awkward cradle, shoulders hunched, looking down at the tremulous pink bundle in his arms with the blank curiosity of, well, a child. 

Under her miniscule body, his hands look enormous: another-species big. Less than 24 hours old, dressed in a pink bodysuit, wearing white mittens, Isla is a glowing perfection in blinding summer light. 

This is my niece, my niece in white mittens.

When I Was 29

When I was 29 I decided that the world was too much with me, and that I needed to purge myself of everything that made me feel that way. So I gave up on watching television, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and clever-sounding books, engaging in chit chat, shopping ‘as leisure’, answering emails, going 'out', taking drugs... I emptied my life of itself.

What I needed was space to think, to breathe, to be able to savour ‘being’, the texture of things, to not let my precious days on earth piss away in trivia, aches and worries. Fuck that. Just to be and to appreciate the moment, that’s all I wanted for myself. To watch the birds flying over my head, to watch the flowers grow, to enjoy the peace and quiet, the simplicity that life should be…

So I gave up all this stuff. No more HBO, no more X Factor, no more Breaking News, no more adverts, no more Taste the Difference, no more ‘coruscating visions of the human condition’, no more drunken dancing, no more comedowns, no more hi, how was your weekends, best regards, all the bests. I gave it all up…

Then I grew lonely and depressed.

The silence that I’d wished for started to drive me mad. I started to hate my own company. I’d look in the mirror and think, oh fuck me, you again. 

Suddenly I hungered for all the stuff I’d abandoned. So I went back to my old way of living. Going to the supermarket became a religious experience. Television started to feel like salvation. Simon Cowell became as an angel. A cartoon-faced, redeeming angel with divinely white teeth.

I’d go out on the piss with all the people who used to bore me so much and I’d love it, love them, even the most boring of them, so grateful was I for the responsiveness of another human being. I’d delight in asking people I hardly knew how they were and whether they’d had a good day and would respond with hysterical enthusiasm when they said they were 'fine thanks'.

Anything to get away from myself...