Haggerston

It only took a few steps for Dalston became a memory, a place abandoned to the moment previous. The main road instantly seemed less congested, less frantic, more dissipated, as though it wasn’t trying quite so hard to be something. I turned right onto the streets of De Beauvoir Town. Nominally part of Hackney, it desperately wants to be Islington. In contrast to Dalston’s tightly packed narrow terraces, De Beauvoir prefers wide avenues with trees like ornaments forced through the concrete; it felt like a place of triumph as though, if a sun bleached army of stragglers strode out down it they would come in peace and be welcomed.

Iain Sinclair, who was still travelling with me at a discreet distance and offering helpful titbits of arcane folklore, accused De Beaviour’s residents of mounting middle class raiding parties across the border to Dalston. He gets to say things like that because he lives on one of those streets. I don’t so all I get to do was slouch along with the barest hint of a sneer from my deep rooted appreciation of its, well, its niceness.

But after drifting past the Vietnamese housing centre, I paused as a shiver of déjà vu snuck up. The Talbot. A typical Victorian curved wooden bar pub that was suddenly recognisable. A night, years ago, on one of my first foray’s into the Islington-Hackney borderlands, I’d ended up drinking there. I’d never known where it was since I’d been following rather than leading for once. I remembered stumbling out and finding my way home more by luck than anything else.

We’d gone to the Talbot because Brian lived around there somewhere. In reverse snobbery he always called it Hackney, but, as I’ve said, it’s Islington in disguise really. I glanced in through the windows of a house broken into flats that might have been Brian’s. It wasn’t. The shape of the room and the angle of the light falling across the newly scuffed brown leather sofa were all wrong. Brian and I once invented a word for that, for snooping in through people’s windows. It was a word that combined the innate nosiness with an appreciation of pretty things. Why couldn’t I remember it? Why was my head a jumble of half-formed ideas all the time, clinging onto the useless and forgetting the important?

Frustrated I aimed a half-hearted kick at a dawdling pigeon and missed.

Brian and all the others I’d been with that night are all gone now. They’ve upped sticks and fled the capital to gain space and raise children in access to green fields. At times I have felt as though I could follow them; to run screaming from the city’s suffocating tendrils and then, at other moments, I cannot envisage being anywhere else. London now has such a hold over me that it is as much a key to the lock of my identity as anything in my past. Hasn’t it?

From my initial resentment at its sprawling insanity, the city has burrowed its way into my heart the way William Lyttle, the mole-man of Hackney burrowed his way out from his cellar and into London’s arteries. He was called the mole man of Hackney, but really he was of De Beauvoir town too. Lyttle died the week after my exploration of the East London line, but as I walked I already knew his legend and just maybe I heard the tiny scrapings of his trowel clearing away chunks of dirt.

Mole-man’s excavations were so extensive that they moved far beyond his original claims to merely be extending his cellar. Sturdy shafts of mining darkness dropped down from his garden. Neighbouring houses had reported subsidence, daunting cracks running up their internal walls. The pavement collapsed to reveal a patterned spiral of cubby holes and routes possibly drawing out a message to hell. The electricity was cut off to the whole side of the street. He was a one-man warrior against property prices. He reminded me of Mick Jackson’s the Underground Man, although equally eccentric the Duke of Portland seemed to be trying to get away from the ghosts pecking at his shoulder. I suspect Lyttle was more like the munacielo of Naples. The munacielos were employed to clear the water systems underneath the city, according to legend one sneaked into the homes of the city’s elite stealing their valuables and seducing their frustrated wives. They are still blamed for lost car keys and earrings, although I don’t know whether they’re also held responsible for the city’s infidelities.

Not that mole-man would have been planning anything so seedy. He struck me as naively romantic; someone searching for something yet never knowing what it would or even if he’d already found it.
Sound familiar?

The idea of another world packed with lost ideas underneath London is a potent one for stories. From HG Wells’ the Morlocks, to Toby Hill’s Underground via Neil Giaman’s Neverwhere, the mythological potential in reading in the dark is powerful. It is an area I’ve explored but never quite descended deep enough into. There might be something there in the future, but for the moment, my stories need daylight. I need sunshine.

I reached De Beauvoir square to the neck shredding mewl of an anguished child. The sirens rebounded off the elaborate Dutch gabbled houses that encircled me. The buildings’ windows were like eyes, the balled sun blinking back at me from the glass. In the grassy centre a man in a pale kaki gap t-shirt and matching shorts squatted down and attempted to reason with the howling toddler: ‘What? What is it? Do you not understand what I’m saying? Is Mummy only speaking to you in Latvian at home?’

Beyond him, sprawled in the combative sunshine, two pasty white girls exposed their bikinis and much more. They lay in the direction I walked, their hands rubbing along their thighs, lathering up sun cream. To not look at them would be to not look where I was going, to consciously have made the point of turning away, which would have highlighted that maybe I had been looking at them ourselves. The one stared back at me, almost daring me to do what I’m not entirely sure. Challenge her? Make an approach? Wink suggestively? Whatever, it all made me feel mildly perverted.

I broke her gaze and looked West. A block across was Lawford Road where George Orwell lived. It was there, according to one flatmate the critic Michael Flynn, he attempted to perfect his style of prose devoid of adjectives; a way of writing that couldn’t lie or be misconstrued. It was also there that he beat up his other flatmate, Rayner Heppenstall, with a shooting stick after the less successful author staggered home drunk, making bit too much of a row. It was too beautiful a day for Animal Farm or 1984 or Coming Up for Air to be found anywhere other than the depths of my mind, but George picked up the pace and fell in behind Iain and I.

The cracks were appearing in De Beauvoir’s happy calm façade and so I returned to the main road, and crossed into Haggerston proper. The two areas are often like two different worlds ripped apart by the Kingsland Road. A Hackney ying and yang. I slipped across the traffic, weaving between buses and holiday bikes and then underneath the rail route I was supposed to be following and not being distracted by its surroundings. The railway bridge arched high above. In the distance I could see a train approaching. I expected the framework to rattle, like the apocalypse. Instead, it proved to be annoyingly restrained; little more than a shimmer of fuzzed up air. All mildly disappointing.

‘You keep disappointing me, David,’ slurred the girl with the dyed red hair under her breath. As she spoke she shook her head and in doing so her whole body swayed awkwardly from side to side. I wondered if she might fall of her chair. ‘So disappointing.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I looked around and decided I didn’t want an argument, ‘ain’t I just that.’ I took myself far away to bed. What else could I have done? What else should I have said? "Sorry" wouldn't have worked. There was nothing to apologise for. Was there?

At home I was suddenly all alone: the couple upstairs had moved out; the old chap who lives downstairs was in the hospital. It was just me rattling around the rooms of the large house where sweat clung to the walls and yappy barks echoed from somewhere downstairs. I made noise just to drown out the silence, to pretend there was someone else who knew I was alive.

Back in Haggerston I unearthed the skeletons of low rise housing, semi-gutted by regeneration. A tiny square, designed pre-car, hosted a war memorial adjacent to a window boxed pub flush with colour that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the most remote village. It was immaculately rebuilt English of imagination.

Haggerston apparently has the highest crime figures in Hackney, yet I felt safe. Utterly relaxed as I sauntered along. Funny how the sunshine does that; how the brightness exposes everything yet gives it a sheen of enchantment and you a sense of immunity. It could have been so different on a drizzling November evening.
Of course, the whole rail route had been regenerated, really. Haggerston, like Dalston, like the others, is not a new station specially constructed for the East London line. It once was on the overland out of Liverpool Street’s disowned sibling Broad Street, a station discarded into the gutter to starve to death by a Victorian parent with too many mouths to feed. It had been resurrected. The East London Line feels as though it’s about giving things purpose once again.

After a while I reached the canal. Unlike the canals of my youth, those that wind their way through Birmingham and the surrounding area, the Regent’s canal has only recently been semi redesigned to serve a leisure function. Now it aches its way from east to west, interspersed with tiny metal foot bridges like camel’s humps, and occasional flushes of sandstoned pathways or carefully landscaped greenery past wonderful corners of London such as two of my favourite Islington pubs, the gorgeously maintained Island Queen and the bonkersly eccentric jazz bashing ale guzzling Wenlock Arms.

My earliest experience of this canal was further west, at the York Way bridge where the road drops down to the Kings Cross fork. Another glorious summer’s afternoon on some sort of art treasure hunt which also included table tennis in what was once a broken down MOT garage and is now, probably, a Nando’s chicken joint or a faceless glass drowned office block. Down on the towpath, a man in his thirties leant back against the wall, his arms splayed either side, his head arched upwards his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open in a gasp of exhalation. In front on him, on her knees a woman hitched her skirt up to reveal the tops of her stockings and wrapped her blood red lips around his erect penis. I’ve always presumed she was a prostitute, but perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps she was just his enthusiastic amour.

‘Afternoon,’ I should have said nonchalantly, but I was younger in those days and less conscious of the audience in my head requiring entertainment. I was more afraid of consequences. I hadn’t worked out that inertia was the worst course of action.

My friend, a sometime poet, was mugged along the Regent’s canal. Somewhere probably not too far from the bridge I had momentarily paused in the sunshine atop. Drunk on cold cheap cider after an equally warm afternoon in London Fields - or was it Victoria Park, I forget - he walked along in the late gloom until confronted. The ring on the finger of one of his assailants, probably worth more than anything the poet owned, split his cheek open. That’s the thing about the canal: Beautiful in the sunshine, lost and isolated with occasional flashes of crimson in the dark.

I tried to glance at my own reflection in the stagnant water, for I can be a little vain, but it was too thick and green to offer more than a dark, shivering shadow. A shape, possibly a person yet indistinct. Hovering between reality and fiction. Someone without an identity. Without a character.

On the opposite side of the canal were blocks of flats with silver steel doors and shattered windows that left jagged tears. People still lived inside, abandoned to the inevitability of the builders, lost to transition as their world is pulled apart. And yet, down the street a gaggle of small boys ran laughing, spraying water at each other out of empty coke bottles, lost in the moment with no aspiration other than to soak their opponent.

Is that it, I wondered? Am I too concerned about the big narrative arc? Am I afraid that, like mole-man, I will strive without ever actually finding what I am looking for? Without ever achieving anything? But perhaps it is the journey that is more important. Perhaps the end point would only reveal itself when the story’s threads had been fully unravelled and then rebound.

I found myself back on the main road where the sun made my skin feel flushed. Partly to seek shade and partly because I knew where it led to, George, Iain and I crossed the road and disappeared between two tower blocks down a side street. I felt that odd buzzing tingle again. Maybe I was foreshadowing, but then again it was Hoxton next.

Dalston

The airy cool sheen of the station’s atrium felt like it belonged in Blade Runner. No, Star Trek. It was too swish and clean to be from out of Philip K Dick’s bleak imagination. Besides, the sky outside was flushed with light blue not the dreary perpetual rain that Ridley Scott gave the world. Wherever, it should have been from a place yet discovered. But there it was. Opening out across four patiently idling trains poised to dart down under the Thames and away to the distant South East. Mid-Saturday morning it was quiet. Just three people disembarked with me and only four more waited to clamber onboard. One of them was a young boy with tussled blonde locks, surely no more than eight or nine years old, who wore a pale blue t-shirt that screeched in white bold type ‘No I am not on ~*%^ing facebook!’

‘Nice,’ I mumbled to myself - and you can take that any way you choose to.

Dalston. I’d been there many times before, although not for over six months. Previously, it had been a bit of a foreign, far-flung land; a place only reachable by a complex network of public transport (or at the very least a train and a bus). Yet suddenly it felt so much closer, almost an extension of my, if I may, manor. It was the furthest northern tip of the bit of London I could claim as my own.
I stood on the edge of the Kingsland crossroads and blinked in the searing sunshine. Summer had fully arrived in all its oppressive bollock chaffing half blinding misery glory. A bus’ hydraulics hissed aggressively at the woman struggling to force the pushchair across the road. The carbon monoxide clung to the air before it settled in the back of my throat.

Iain Sinclair, in Lights Out For The Territory, called the Kingsland crossroads “bandit territory”; the runs down from Hackney to the perceived sanctuary of the City fraught with threats behind every lamppost. He was, of course, parodying the perception of a certain type of Londoner that anywhere North-East of Cannonbury or De Beaviour Town is unsafe; an alien land full of weird, less economically viable, folk. Sinclair hams up the stereotype by dropping a Haitian exile into the flat above the old bank, where in the dead of the night he practises ancient rites twinning Dalston with downtown Port Au Prince; two voodoo republics within the larger sea of their cities.

The odd thing is, Sinclair wasn’t writing a novel.

But, there are definitely ghosts in Dalston. Memories whispered in my ear that morning. Memories that I needed to exorcise once and for all. I turned right; I headed north.

Further up the road, past the sixties fronted mall straddling the east-west railway, past the lurid ménage of Ridley Road market, past the guys in bulky parkas with thick eastern European accents sitting and smoking heavily outside Tesco Metro, past the overflowing car boot sale in the Primary school playground and the Turkish restaurant in the building that, with its minarets, looks as though it was once a mosque, up where the road’s one way split cracks open north so there’s no way back south, I once sat in the car and waited.

It was well gone midnight as I slumped down in the driver’s seat, my stomach tucked underneath the steering wheel so that my eyes were level with the bottom of the window. The world service bumbled patriotically in the background. I can’t remember what about. Something about books and dying on the cusp of morning, perhaps.

There was a bang; an indecipherable crack like sated thunder and then shouts, but no words - just guttural noises. I sat up and looked about. I switched the radio off and coming down the street behind me, from somewhere deep inside the maze of terraced back rows, there was the rhythmic flapping of sneakers smacking against tarmac and as I blinked the young man hurtled past the car. Ahead, he burst out on the main road where his skin was flushed by the tired orange hue of streetlights. He paused in the middle of the road. For a moment it was like he was mesmerised by the headlights of oncoming traffic embedded in his memory; as though his brain couldn’t understand why there were no cars or buses or trucks angrily honking and swerving their way around him.

And then he was off. North. Always with the fucking north around Dalston.
As he disappeared from view I became aware of the slower. heady thudding of middle aged boots and a policeman bumbled on by, truncheon in hand, utility belt of modern restraint gadgets gently slapping against his hips. At the end of the road he paused too, but because he was knackered. His hands rested on his thighs and his shoulders, buried under the stab proof padding, slouched. He looked south then north and then grudgingly headed off in the correct direction.

I didn’t go quite as far north on that summer’s day. I didn’t need to. I knew what the road looked like. It was yet another run of windows and doors straight out onto the pavement. It could have been any of them; there was no difference between the streets. It was just a cipher; an image of a road rather than an actual place. Instead, I was distracted by the glimpse of a monolithic tower gasping out between the terraces. So I went for a closer look.

The church turned out to be St Matthias’ – the patron saint of alcoholics who replaced Judas Iscariot after thirty pieces of silver changed hands. The building felt derelict. A sensation enunciated by the wall that effectively sealed off the doors, but a sign helpfully pointed out that access could be gained from the rear. Built in 1856 it seemed extraordinarily large and dominating; all red brick aggression, dulled slightly by several generations of street dust hanging off its walls, and a cavernous central nave. Given that, according to the 1851 map of London that hangs on my kitchen wall, Dalston at the time was on the periphery of the city, little more than a rag tag hamlet clustered around a farm and a pub serving the north Essex and Hertfordshire horse drawn traffic pummelling capital bound down the road. When its foundations were laid, the architectural sketches must have shown it lording over the manor and eclipsing the skyline yet over the twentieth century it had become smothered by endless runs of houses and flats that snaked many miles further north before there’s even a sniff of greenbelt.

The church’s architect was William Butterford who designed dozens of churches, not least the cathedral in Melbourne and whose name seemed familiar. It took me a moment, but eventually I remembered the blue plaque on Bedford Square that bears his name and which I pass most days. A coincidence in a city built upon them.

As I turned to leave, I noticed that the church was cornered, unsurprisingly, on Matthias’ road which in turn runs down to Newington Green. I worked in Highbury for years and frequently lunched on cheap Turkish stew off Newington Green and more than once caught the twenty-one night bus back to New Cross through the darkened sulk of London. It was another reminder that the city which, when I first arrived, seemed implausibly sprawling was in fact contracting with every day that passed until eventually it would be small enough to fit in my head.

Finding my way back to the main road I recognised the block of flats and a couple who’d I’d completely forgotten had ever existed came back to life. I looked up at the windows where I thought they might have once lived, but probably didn’t, and wondered what had become of them. They were just more faces blurred into the haze of time. I remembered that his Aunt ran a private detective agency, but equally I failed to recall any of the conversations we must have had about it. I must have pried? Surely, I couldn’t have been so bloody English about it? And I remembered Mexican food at a birthday party and feeling like it didn’t matter how drunk I got because there were always constants to ground me.

Back on the main drag, a white haired guy with a dog curled at his feet was drinking his second pint of Guinness. The sunshine sparkled through the dregged froth clinging to the skin of the empty glass. It was just gone eleven o’clock in the morning.

And I thought about that night at the Shacklewell Arms. The time when we’d arrived at one in the morning, after several hours drinking potent Belgian beer down in Dove on Broadway Market, to see a friend of a friend’s band play. The band hooked themselves up in the back room, tucked away behind the serious business of serious faced men with serious sized stomachs and serious expressions on their faces as they stared down opponents across draughts boards. The six of us doubled the audience.
Someone passed me a pint of Guinness and it barely touched the sides as I fought dehydration.

Another stout found its way into my hands and I tried to pace that one. I decamped briefly to the bathroom to flush water around my aching eyelids. Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was the band, but I struggled to stay conscious during the set. They didn’t seem as vibrant nor as self-confidently artlessly cool, with their raybans hiding their twenty yard stare and the dangling unsmoked cigarettes tucked under guitar strings, as they had when they’d climbed atop the roof of the old Keith Talent gallery and the traffic on the side street had ground itself up amongst the swirling bodies below. In fact, I only perked up sometime around two when they played the one song I particularly liked. You know, the one with the catchy jangling picked up riff and the call-return vocals?

Nah? Well, it was a while ago now. Someone told me they’re not together anymore. Just another casualty of growing up.

And when we did finally fall out at Lord-knows-what-o’clock, again the Dalston road was eerily empty. It was wide and clear, stretching out north to the city’s hinterlands, like a prairie that had lost its mechanised herd.

Somewhere around Dalston is, allegedly, the square that the original writers based Eastenders on. Like I care, but it’s a “fact” that seems to be a source of at least a little local pride and morbid curiosity from some who have struggled to prise themselves off the sofa. After all, some people, I guess, love it:

‘Did you see Eastenders last night, babes?’ asked the girl with the dyed red hair who I thought I’d written out this narrative ages ago, but keeps coming back like a persistent dose of thrush.

‘No I fucking well didn’t,’ I replied and rolled my eyes, wishing I’d never answered the phone.

‘You should watch it. I’d love to able to chat about soaps with you.’

‘Would you now?’ I outrightly scowled.

‘God,’ she tutted, ‘I don’t know what’s up with you, but you’re being really grouchy these days. Cantankerous, even.’

‘I am not fucking cantankerous,’ I grunted back and reminded myself that ghosts come in different guises and don’t have to be ancient.

Slightly further south I stepped off the main road and onto the bustling concrete slabs of Gillett Square. People sat all around. One guy squatted on a door step stuffing MacDonald’s into his mouth, appearing to guiltily wince with each chew. Some perched on the low walls enjoying the sunshine. Most sat on brittle aluminium furniture, off which the sun winked like it had a plan, with their fashionably curved cups of macchiato in-between their fingers. I closed my eyes and the bright daylight and chatter faded away to be replaced by the downpour and the shuddering thumps of rain globules hitting those same tables and rebounding upwards.

We sat in the hazed deliberate gloom of the jazz bar on the far side of the square and watched the rain to avoid looking at each other. We talked in circles around a relationship that had died without truly saying anything. It had been almost a year – a year that had felt both indefinite and instantaneous – yet still the specifics were shunned in favour of generalisations and attempted similes. If we didn’t characterise it fully then neither of us could be culpable. It was only when I caught her briefly looking at me with what I imagined to be the edges of tears in her eyes did I realise that we had probably been talking about different people all along. People who had both once been us and yet had never been; people who were specific others yet still ultimately unknowns constrained by the stories in our heads.

In a stone’s throw from the jazz bar is Justin’s flat where I looked down from his living room window at the rust smeared east-west railway line as it nipped under the road. Across the tracks stood a signal box. I found it strangely calming to watch the man go about his nightly levered work under the sixty watt bare bulb glow. On the side of the box someone had scrawled ‘Go home artist scum.’ I looked at the green and purple hatcheted letters and I thought sour things about how perhaps not everyone was as welcoming and open minded as the cult setters would like us to believe.

And mere steps away from Justin’s flat, back on the main road, one Halloween I hung onto the pre-purchase ticket machine at the bus stop like it was a life raft for my body and soul as they drowned in white wine. I held it tight between my shuddering arms lest it float off south without me, closing my eyes against the swirling glittering lights of closed shop signs and headlights refracted in glass and curved around poised mannequins.

Back at Sinclair’s “front line” and left down the road to Hackney, past the multi-hued mural, there once was a flat within a converted warehouse where the concierge sulkily read fitness magazines and ignored the visitors becoming increasingly saturated in the rain. It was the place where I’d climbed out of the American’s window and pranced along the gutter rim, one foot unsteadily in front of the other under the clear night sky with now forgotten music jangling in my ears and bottles of this and that dangling from my fingertips.

What would have happened, I wondered in the sunshine, if I’d opened my arms out wide to the silver moon and let myself drift out onto the night air? Would I have simply fallen in a crumpled heap, cushioned by sodden cardboard boxes fly tipped in an alley? Or would there have been a breath of magic? A moment of imagined drama in a story not really being told?

I took my glasses off and blinked in the searing sun before rubbing my eyes clear. Questions that proffered no answers were useless. Dalston was full of endings. Or vignettes close to endings; scenes that wrapped up lives and brought thoughts and feelings to a close. There might not have been any answers to be found under its mottled semi-colonised streets, but at least by starting there I was able to make some claim over Dalston for beginnings. And in the doing so, a little chunk of the protective arrogant façade cracked; underneath which there was the faintest glimmer of light. Just a smidge, but it was a start.

I crossed the road and passed through a metaphorical barrier; a border of artificial clique that fizzed as it bushed against my skin. There weren’t any answers. There was only the journey; the finished line heading south stopping next at Haggerston.

Returning East (a partial dramatisation).

When the East London Line finally reopened in full, I was outside the city being shot. As flabby faced professional toff Boris Johnson waved his Union Jack from the window of the first train and tried to take responsibility for something instigated years before he was elected to office, I was running through a forest with shells ricocheting off trees to either side. The calm silence of the woods and the glorious heat that became trapped in the green bowl were punctuated by the cack of gas cylinders pumping, metal bolts being thrust back and the occasional yelps of pain.

Lying in the unkempt grass in front of the ruined house, I knew I was surrounded. I just couldn’t see them. Too late, they’d seen me. A dozen pelts smacked into my exposed back and shoulders; I couldn’t even tell what direction they come from. All
I knew was the stinging sheer that pinged across my body.

‘Yargh’ I may well have shouted.

‘He’s hit! That’s it buddy,’ the guy in the orange t-shirt and the purple tinted plastic visor bounced across the undergrowth, ‘you’re out.’

I trudged away from the game zone, dragging my paint gun in my wake, the gentle rattle of unfired balls against the plastic magazine rolling in rhythm to my step. In the safe area, behind the protective netting, I unpeeled my bright yellow hood and special forces wannabe face mask. Sweat from the thirty degrees heat plastered my hair in dank streaks across my scalp. I sat down on the overturned log and let the adrenaline surge drain through my bloodstream and out my sweat pores. I chuckled, for from my memory came the bark of a thousand war film sergeants ‘Smoke ‘em, if you’ve got ‘em.’

‘Hey, Dave!’ someone said and I turned. At that moment, the juke box in my head hit emotionally epic and I felt like it was the flashpoint in the credits of a classic movie.

From a bias angle it seemed like the moment when the matinee idol turns to the camera and the right hand corner of his lips curl and goosebumps shiver through the audience. In that single moment, I felt like a hero.

‘The problem is, I’m not you,’ someone recently, helpfully, pointed out. ‘I can’t walk into a room and have the confidence to just stand up in front of people and talk.’

Ssh, I thought, it’s just a bluff. Don’t tell anyone, though.

I’m not a hero. Don’t be ridiculous. I may be arrogant and occasionally my mind plays tricks on me and I become mildly self-delusional, but nothing more.

Although, is it even arrogance when you’re just pretending?

And in the evening after we’d pretended to die a dozen times we raced around the mini roundabout outside the club; building dizziness and pushing aching legs, pulling the spiral tighter and tighter until the late night lights segued into the blackness and then became clear again as a single orange laso encasing us for protection as we giggled blissfully like children.

‘Show me your bruises, then,’ the girl with cropped tar black hair and an accent that oozed southern France said a couple days afterwards. I raised my left shirt sleeve to show the only one I could in public. It was the colour of rotten apples and snaked from my armpit to my elbow along the soft undercurrent of bicep. ‘Cool.’

Except it wasn’t really. It was just, well, life. Bruised skin. It’d heal. But then I do so like to be thought of as cool, especially in a detached Bogart-Marlowe couldn’t give a damn way, so I let it stand and tried to ignore the little accusing voice.

A few days later I fell out of the Big Chill Bar in the old Truman brewery. Quite what I was doing in a place either there or in any of its neighbours, places so metropolitanly groovy that they serve ironic cans of Red Stripe rather than real ale and all the other customers are ‘aving it big style under the neon glow of diluted pupils until they caught your eye and went all laconic and wiltingly cool, I can’t remember. I righted my stance and my jacket and decided to try and grab the last East London train of the night home. Shoreditch to Brockley in less than fifteen minutes. I glanced at my watch and felt the ground sway. Marvellous.

Except I couldn’t find the station.

‘So, you’re sure you know where we’re going?’ asked Rob a few hours earlier as we passed Miquita Oliver on the corner outside the Golden Heart and I’d internally wondered if she was now just paid to lurk around Shoreditch at all hours.

‘Sure,’ I’d winked back, implying that I slinked out there all the time when really I’d checked googlemaps before leaving. But at the end of the night I wandered around the top end of Brick Lane opposite the old Tea Factory and the corners where on sunny afternoons fucked up guys and flowered skirted girls perch with roll ups between their lips and tattered old suitcases open to display random wares and I could not find the damn entrance. I could see the railway line’s swanky new single piece metal bridge sparkling over my head, but the door proved to be more tricky.

When I popped out onto Commercial Street, and looped past the Commercial Tavern for the umpteenth time I wanted to strangle the unbidden memories of nursing a pint of Black Sheep in an idle early evening’s sunshine and watching Tracey Emin sauntering on by and – hey – hadn’t I once read an arrogant article by Jeanette Winterspoon about how she her little house somewhere nearby? I wanted them to shut up. They weren’t contributing anything, they weren’t helping and then the train rumbled its yawning way above my head and was gone without me.

I sulked through Spitalfields and snagged a bus down to London Bridge; heading home the old fashioned way. As the bus bent and twisted its was across the Thames I decided that a thorough exploration of the line was needed, given that the a-z to in my head had suddenly become out of date.

Over the next few days, I concocted a plan for the first free sunny day: I would ride the train all the way to Dalston and walk home, editing my mental map as I went. In the end, I bumped into the new line earlier than planned. On a late night dash from Baker Street home I jumped off the Jubilee Line at Canada Water. I soberly stood with my hands in my pockets, rocking on my heels and looked up the line to Rotherhithe , visible as it had always been just up the tunnel – as though when they’d dug the soft southern chalk out to cut the Jubilee Millennium extension the compass had been faulty and a new station had been erected to cover over the cock up. It had been two and a half years since the line had closed and probably much longer since I lurked on that platform, but suddenly I felt the snuffle of nostalgia sneak up upon me. When I boarded one of the swankily cooled orange and blued up trains home I felt the novelty of it not grinding to a halt at New Cross Gate, but it was still the old East London line. I wanted to experience the twenty-first century version – and, as it turned out – both re-evaluate my relationship with the East End and possibly deliver the final kicks to bring a bloody silence to the final ghosts that could be found there.

I hit shuffle on the memory jukebox and turned to shrug at the imaginary audience, because whilst logically I know I don’t live in a story sometimes it’s more fun to pretend.

We'll be back after these messages...

David Marston Writes is briefly on hiatus; it returns in mid June.

In the meantime, read the latest sequence, How to Lose an Electorate, starting here.

Still catching up? Read the previous sequence, Writing is Killing Me!, starting here.

You

This is not a story.

This is not a novel or a film; it is not a play or even a short story. You have been reading a narrative arc, of sorts, but it does not reach any conclusion here.

“Short stories are a very end-centric form,” said the American writer Lorrie Moore when I watched her being interviewed at the Guardian’s sparkling new offices.

She’s right, of course. They are.

They are because a short story is, essentially, the exploration of a moment and the contextualisation of events immediately preceding that moment. Five thousand words, or so, cached into a dramatic finale of a life unseen. The reader is rarely gifted an insight into the world beyond that point. Novels can be a collection of moments culminating in a larger one, but still the temptation, for the writer, is to wrap things up neatly rather than to let it hang; to fictionalise. For the author feels almost obliged to tidy away their toys, whilst the components of a short story are left scattered around the living room waiting for an unsuspecting visitor to stand on and twist their ankle. Completion rather than a moment paused for eternity.

This might be a moment, but it is not a fiction.

Nor is it the truth.

It just is.

Life is a sequence of moments both big and small; our individual experiences of the world are defined by the actions we take and their consequences. It is the immediate, the intimate and the grander scale. It is the words hissed in the heat of the moment that can’t be taken back and the ash spewing from the volcano several thousand miles away that bleaches everyone’s horizon all woven together in a single tapestry.

Each of us carves our personal history; trailblazing our existences in a sparkling shower of gold dust; each with different highlights burned into our memories. When we glance back, everything blurring into a montage for the movie of our lives, we emphasise different things from those who shared them. We remember events in a different way – be it the way she smiled across a crowded room which you took to be adoration and she intended to be scarcely disguised disdain; or the way the stars glinted in the cool evening air above the sea but the person you were with was already thinking about being home in bed.

The history that lingers may be written by the winners, but first it has to be written by individuals.

When I close my eyes at night there are bursting starlights under the lids.

A friend of mine tells the story that when she was a small girl she and her sister used to take pretend scissors and cut imaginary holes in the fabric of space before thrusting their arms through the holes and exploring, by feel, the world on the other side; always careful not to cut too large a hole, lest they slipped through.

I think I know what’s on the other side.


And I don’t think mystical scissors are what are required to access it. I think all it needs is a little touch. A gentle push with your fingertips and the air bubbles up, releasing the past laced with the fiction of interpretation.

‘Whilst I’m enjoying these discourses on the history of Britain,’ my friend chuckled, ‘what are you actually trying to say?’

Maybe that history is everywhere. That it isn’t in the past as such, it isn’t a physical place that we can’t visit because the aerospace is closed, that it isn’t something that can be packaged up and ignored or triumphed as we see fit, but that it’s omnipresent. Our own history and that of the country and our friends and families and even the people who we feel it is “our patriotic duty to kick in the nuts” are defined by the same things.

In order to truly understand where we are going and what we are doing we need appreciate the paths we’ve already travelled and we need to understand that those routes are covered by the confusion of imagination. With every retelling the tales become embellished. The words slip further away from the originals they were tracing over and then a new history comes into being; one defined by a fictional gloss.

Nothing changes. Everything changes. Everything has a starting point.

I don’t believe in Broken Britain. I don’t believe in the Nanny State. I don’t believe that there are swarms of illegal immigrants living in luxury on benefits. I don’t believe that political correctness has ever gone mad.

This is not to say that I don’t realise that sometimes people take well meaning legislation too far, that there aren’t people living Britain who didn’t bother passing through passport control, that the government’s advice on lifestyle choices doesn’t occasionally border on the relentless or that there aren’t large sections of society living below the poverty line. I’m not stupid. I’m just questioning the language that’s used to suggest that it’s something new; something different.

It’s about recognising the context, understanding the facts. It’s about not seeing everything from your own point of view. It’s about decoding the interpretation.

‘You know her, right,’ the girl at my side giggled.

‘Mm-hm,’ I replied not really paying attention.

‘Well, right, you know, she don’t even have a tv. Can you believe that, babes? I think that’s proper sad, I do. Feel really sorry for her.’

‘Have you considered that she might not want a tv, not that she can’t afford to buy one.’

She looked at me like I was mad. ‘Why would she not want a tv? Anyway, babes, you and me should go for a drink again sometime.’

‘Mmm,’ I tried to appear as disinterested as humanly possible.

‘The things is,’ the young guy with the carefully manufactured facial hair, ‘when you’re in a relationship you need to have time to yourself, yeah?’

‘Mm-hmm,’ I sipped at my pint.

‘You need to have your own interests too, not spend your whole lives in each other’s pockets.’

‘Why are we having this conversation?’

‘I’m just trying to give you some advice, the benefit of my experience. I’ve got a lot of tips I can pass on. After all, I’ve been
with my girlfriend for nearly two years now.’

‘Uh-huh, two years.’

We stood chest deep in the Atlantic, as my feet turned translucent with cold, and waited for the waves. Even when they weren’t rising, even when there was little more than the gentle lull of the current, the merest rise of water would induce excitement.

‘Wave! Wave! It’s going to be a monster!’

And we rode it home as best we could because we’d gone there to surf and surf we would irregardless of the weather.

See? Context.

Let’s try some facts. A single asylum seeker gets £19 in food vouchers a week and £10 in cash. Anyone tried living on less than £30 a week in London recently? A single bus ticket is £2 a go.

590,000 people arrived to live in the UK in 2008, but at the same time 430,000 left. A lot, but not as many as some would have you believe and they’re not all coming to live in a road near you. If all Eastern Europeans were deported numerous industry, such as agriculture and care homes, would collapse – or that the very least suffer major recruitment issues. After sterling weakened against the Euro most of the Poles went home to where they could earn more money and be closer to their families. Economic migrants come and go where the work is the best paid and we get to do it too.

The oft-repeated message to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables and to exercise regularly can become irritating, but when people still claim to do so is “impossible” or they refuse to eat any foodstuff coloured green. Health warnings are there for our benefit. Smoking kills and the number of people smoking has dropped significantly over the past two decades. Alcohol, no matter how much I enjoy it, is bad for me. It’s important that I realise what I’m doing to myself. Ignorance is not bliss, because it does not change the result. If the government removed all advice and health warnings and regulation - removed the so-called Nanny State – then the ultimate end points include the removal of speed limits in urban areas and unregulated firearm ownership.

Apparently, we don’t manufacture anything anymore. Some might say that we are a nation built on shops and telephone banked offices, yet we’re still ranked as the seventh largest manufacturing nation in the world. In the past week I’ve seen plenty of examples of industry, be it Port Talbot belching fire and smoke across the Welsh coastline from the oil refinery, or every second car in Brigend bearing a Rockwool Insulation parking permit, or the Tarmac quarry crunching stone in the shadows of the Heathrow flyover, or the cranes tinkling in the sunset above London Bridge. The country’s alive if you open your eyes.

Britain is not broken. There is a colossal wealth gap which has widened under Labour, but this does not mean the country is crocked. We’ve always had those who are poor; we’ve always had people who are unfairly disadvantaged; there have always been people who had revelled in an offensive, abusive lifestyle, who are violent and cruel. This does not make our society broken. To call it such, suggests that it is beyond repair, that we need to cast them aside and buy a new populace.

Look around the world at how much worse it is in Zimbabwe, in Thailand, in Kyrgyzstan, in Somalia, even, to a lesser extent, in Greece. To begin to define a country as broken you need to be looking for things like violent insurrection, corrupt absolutionist government, hyper-inflation and/or bankruptcy, a complete breakdown of national law whereby the local militia with the heaviest ordinance calls the shots. On my travels around the country I see none of this.

Yes, it is a tragedy when teenage boys torture, sexually abuse and murder one of their peers or the guardians of a child systematically starve and beat a baby to death, but is not indicative of a complete and utter collapse of society. To suggest it is, is to give up, to raise the drawbridge and exist with an isolationist bubble of denial.

It has been suggested that I’ve been trying to force reasons to vote Labour down people’s throats. That has never been the intention. Labour have done a lot of things that I believe would not have been delivered under, for example, a Conservative government. Sure Start, the minimum wage, the fostering of a better cultural attitudes towards gay men and women, heavy investment in the arts, decisive action in the face of economic collapse, better maternity and paternity rights, tax credits, the rebuilding of the NHS to a far-from-perfect, yet still exemplary healthcare service - don’t believe living standards are better in 2010 than they were in 1997? You know, what go and look the facts up yourself. Go to the national office of statistics website, ask questions research, look for answers, compare and contrast, that’s the point.

It is not for me to suggest who anyone should vote for.

You vote for who you want, that’s your right, but try to fully understand what you are voting for and why. Take UKIP, for example, if you solely listen to their campaign then removing ourselves from the European Union would appear to magically reform the country overnight. It won’t. And whilst there are disadvantages to compliance with European law, there are plenty of advantages too – ease of trade, ease of movement around the continent, human rights etc. Understand what you are voting for and consider both sides of the argument before making a decision. Check the validity of the messages all the Parties send you. And if you must vote for BNP, you racist shit you, then realise that you are being judgemental about someone’s character on the basis of their skin colour alone and do not be surprised if people make similar, derogatory judgements about you in return.

There has been much talk of tactical voting to keep the Tories out in recent days. It’s a valiant option, but I do feel that if you genuinely believe in the policies espoused by a minority party then you should vote for them even if they are extremely unlikely to win the seat contested. Why? Because with your vote, they are one more vote likely to win and that’s the point. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You want change, you want the old guard out, then fine – let it build systematically. Stop being so twenty-first century for a moment and realise that it will take more than a single moment.

For that’s what Thursday is. A moment. A dramatic moment at the end of somebody’s story, but I’m not writing it. Nor is the BBC or Murdoch or the Guardian or any of the other media houses. Not even the politicians are writing the script. You are.

But then this isn’t a story and on Friday morning, whatever happens, the moment will have passed and the world continues and we are still here.

Christine

The cabinet minister slipped out from underneath the bed covers. He stretched in the late morning sunshine that peeked between the half-drawn curtains of the country retreat’s guest bedroom. Outside someone was already churning lengths up and down the swimming pool, the steady slosh of water punctuated by the distant yapping of a dog. The countryside was loud when it was silent.

Stifling a yawn he glanced back down at the young girl who he wasn’t married to asleep in his bed. Long raven dark hair spread across the pillows, pale skin shimmered in the half-light off-set by the scarlet smudged lip stick. In her doze she groaned satisfyingly and licked her teeth as though savouring the taste of him.

Did he believe her? Did he truly believe a woman young enough to be his daughter who turned heads when she walked down the street and had been introduced to him in such a contrived fashion was really attracted to a balding, middle-aged pasty man with growing paunch and black rings around his eyes? Power may be an aphrodisiac, but even that has limits.

Or perhaps he did, for when he fall in lust as well as love we are often blinded to the truth and left with just hope to cling onto.

John Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler didn’t, technically, bring down the Conservative government in 1964, although his lying to the House of Commons about it certainly contributed. It may seem slightly quaint, after the relentless exposures of the nineties and the serial exploitation of the expenses system, that one brief fling in the summer a few years previosuly could cause so much damage especially in the retrospectively liberated sixties, but, of course, Keeler happened to also be sleeping with a Russian naval attaché from the embassy. As Secretary of State for War this put Profumo’s indiscretion in a slightly different light. Still, there was no direct suggestion of actual espionage, aside from a lot of presumption that hung around the otherwise apparently rather dim Keeler’s use of the phrase “nuclear payload”. It was the possibility that was deemed serious, not necessarily the truth.

Howard MacMillan – the onetime SuperMac of ‘you never had it so good’ soundbite - retired to his bed chamber and dumped the seemingly inevitable defeat on his Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Interestingly, Douglas-Home along with Jim Callaghan are the only prime ministers since the second world war to never win an election. Whether Gordie Brown will be joining them, we’ll find out shortly.

Profumo lived out his disgrace gracefully. He went to work first as a toilet cleaner, then as a fund raiser for Toynbee Hall, an East End social care charity, pretty much until his death in 2006. Forty years of redemption; it was a long time to say sorry. He didn’t, as someone like Jonathan Aitken has done, carve out an alternative media career as some sort of gentleman cad. He had sufficient dignity to not taunt the public further in the fashion of the MPs facing prosecution over their expenses having the gall to claim legal aid.

My mobile rang at far too late an hour on Friday. I glanced at the display. 0208, not what I’d been expecting

‘Dave! It’s Ben. Mate, I’m having an epic,’ he explained.

‘I think I might have to come and get you.’

‘Yeah and it’s frigging freezing too.’

Despite the decision to reopen European airspace – the airlines seemingly more happy to hope that Institute of Mechanical Engineers prediction that planes “will crash and everybody on board will die” was less risky than indefinite hotel bills for millions of people. Yet, still the ash continues to disrupt the world standing many of my friends in far-corners. Google Steve found himself stuck in California for over a week and whilst Ben made it all the way from Australia, his gear disappeared into a black hole in Dubai and then Heathrow welcomed him back after nearly three years by mugging him of a functional mobile phone and a debit card.

We still managed to find a bar open on the way back to my flat.

Saturday afternoon’s gently browning sun outside the Cutty Sark pub in Greenwich was soundtracked by forty-five minutes of soothing Spanish guitar music and the occasional: ‘Thank you for calling Global Baggage Solutions. All our operators are extremely busy at the moment.’ Three days later his possessions were still absent without leave. All he could do was hope that they turned up on the next flight or the one after that or the one after that…

As I walked through the tube network at Green Park, changing from the Piccadilly to the Victoria line, a woman half hid in a service door way. She had a baby pressed to a withered nipple and a sign scrawled onto a cardboard flap clasped in her free hand: ‘Hungry and homeless. Please help.’

I keep seeing more and more of that. When I first came to London the entrance foyer to Charing Cross underground would be packed in the evenings with people with nowhere else to go sheltering from the city. In recent years it has been clean and shiny like the underground in illustrations for the East London extension; an architect’s impression of a virtual city. But increasingly, the dirty and tired looking sleeping bags are returning.

‘Anyone lost or need information,’ the guy in a stained lumberjack shirt and burnt cap who lurks at the top of St Martin’s lane in the evenings asked, as per usual. I asked him what the time of the last train out of Charing Cross was. He told me. I gave him a quid. He was wrong. Does it even matter?

In Trafalgar Square, a middle-aged American, with an earnestly grey beard, stood up between two guys with fraying jeans and blisters at the edges of the eyes.

‘So, uh, two cans of Stella, is it?’

‘Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks, man,’ one replied.

‘Now, I’m going to leave my bag here, but I’ll be back in a moment.’

They watched him saunter across the mercifully pigeon free piazza, to the Tesco Express on the corner of Northumberland Avenue. As he disappeared out of view, they glanced at each other and an expression of almost disappointment in their conformity to a stereotype leapt to their feet, grabbed the bag and ran in the direction of St James’.

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it either.

Ben and I walked past a woman negotiating with a guy sitting in the gutter outside Marylebone, his toes exposed out the end of his once-white trainers.

‘I’ll buy you something to eat,’ she said piously, ‘but I won’t give you any money. You’ll only spend it on drink.’

‘Fucking hell,’ I said as we entered the Allsop Arms, ‘if I had to sleep on the streets I’d want to get pissed too.’

Every morning I walk to work past the St Martin in the Fields day centre and the queue waiting for the doors to open gets longer. Even as the weather improves, there are more and more people needing a distraction for the day, to keep away from the vomit splattered in doorways, from the boredom of doing nothing and the temptations of the alternatives presented. Oblivion eventually becomes hope’s back-up plan.

The election is taking a decidedly surreal turn in its final weeks. As Petey Mandleson, the one time dark lord of the new Labour media machine, wooed women votes with personal ballroom dancing sessions, the Daily Mail accused Nick Clegg of having Nazi sympathies because his spin doctor is German and Davie Cameron is relentlessly followed around by someone from the Daily Mirror dressed as a chicken for no discernible reason. Parodies are pointless; real life is doing it for the comics, but we keep on trying. After all, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

Atop the Hawley Arm’s roof terrace, looking down at the canals and railway arches of Camden, Ben, Architect Steve and I perhaps felt our age in the face of the onslaught of achingly trendy hats. We squeezed our way up the stairs, looking for another room, somewhere a bit quieter, perhaps where we can sit down.

I opened the door and the immaculately scruffy youngsters looked up at us.

A girl appeared behind us wearing a paper Gordon Brow face mask.

‘You can’t come in here,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ asked Ben.

‘It’s a private party. A party for Gordon Brown.’ She didn’t say whether it was to praise him or to bury him.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies, like so many think tanks desperate to get some media coverage during an election campaign and therefore help justify their continued existence, has announced that all the major parties’ spending plans are flawed. It accuses, or least through the media filter is does, all three parties of not revealing the true extent of public spending cuts required, in conjuncture with their tax plans, to reduce the deficit. The reality, it claims, is that Labour’s and the Liberal Democrat’s proposals would see public spending cut to the same level of Dennis Healy’s 1975 budget whilst the Conservatives would drag us all the back to World War Two.

The media spin is of deceitful politicians; of their refusal to tell the truth because it would cost them votes. Let’s be honest, though, it would. No matter how much we claim to want to hear the truth, no matter how we cry for them to be honest, if just one party said it would have to drag the country’s infrastructure back generations we’d go for false optimism every time.

Wouldn’t we?

But perhaps there’s another way of looking at it. Perhaps it isn’t lies, but hope. Hope that when they get into office it won’t be quite as bad as it looks, that something will happen to magic all the mess away, hope in a sudden flash of economic inspiration that will keep them popular and the country solvent.

The young woman sat in her flat and listened to the racket of the reporters outside. Every time she cast a shadow against the curtains a plethora of flashbulbs burst silver light across the bricks. She was only just beginning to understand the Pandora’s box of scandal that had been torn open. It didn’t seem fair. She’d just been doing what so many girls her age did; having fun, enjoying herself, letting life normally pursue glitz and glamour and the finer things we all secretly crave and every so often a bit of what could have been mistaken for love in a certain in light. Had that really been so bad? She’d always done what she’d been asked to, but as her name became synonymous with sordidness she just hoped it would all go away and things would be as they once had.

Unfortunately, hope alone is rarely enough.

Ash

I sat at the bar of the pub at the end of the world, supped my Guinness and pretended to read the paper whilst really listening the cacophony descending around me. Okay, so not quite the end of the world, but perhaps the end of England. A pub in a tiny village near Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish-Northumberland border where the salt wind buzzed in off the north sea.

Outside, high above the country, further than the eye could see, the air was allegedly thick with volcanic ash, but down there on the ground the pub was closing up. It was last orders at the bar for the final time and the place was packed with six angry people.

There was the chunck of pool balls and the clink of glasses and the shouts and the yells and the tears and jeers and all the sounds that make the drink flow more freely. Just another Friday night anywhere in the world. Everything must go, all must be drunk, there would be no recriminations for tomorrow the pub would die.
The pub up the road, apparently, closed its doors the year before. The bar in the hotel opposite accepted non-residents and a lot of tourists – those not in tatty leather jackets and with tents thrown up in April – preferred to drink in there. The locals didn’t. Drinking in hotel bars is something for the transient not the permanent.

The two bolshy teenage girls, who were all volume and physical bluff, were mixing their drinks; taking advantage of the pound-a-go prices to sample things they wouldn’t normally touch.

The one tipped a tequila into her Smirnoff ice. The other necked something white and milky looking.

‘Ugh,’ she grunted.

‘Whaddya, do that for?’ her friend complained, already missing the communal intoxication rituals.

‘The only way I could swallow that creamy shit down.’

I couldn’t help but chuckle.

‘That bloke’s laughing at you.’

I straightened my face and pretended to be amused by the an article about libel laws.

There was no black swirling churl of soot tinged with streaks of molten lava in the sky; the apocalypse didn’t appear to passing through Britain’s atmosphere, but in certain corners it was the end of a sort of world.

Surging through Bedfordshire along the M1 with the sunshine belting down I glanced across at the northbound carriageways and the lines of stationary traffic. The motorway was shut and behind the barricades miles and miles of cars queued in the heat. Engines were switched off, doors open, and bare chested men clambered atop vehicles to lie in the sun, their skin turning pink and prickly. The world was halted and then fried, but still the skies were clear.

I didn’t watch the ITV leaders debate – I was busy watching a turkey fight a dog – but I listened to the analysis the next day on the radio and this is how I pictured events went down.

Cleggy sauntered up to the middle podium in his uniform dark blue mac and flat cap, but then as the camera passed he gave a bit of a cheeky grin and winked. The camera halted. Alistair Stewart couldn’t believe it; he was helpless to do anything other than watch as Cleggy cast aside his drabness. With a flick of his wrist he tossed the cap to the back of the audience and then slowly unpeeled the raincoat to reveal the modern, sleek pin stripes beneath. Then he smiled and a ‘ching’ complete with a glinting star at the corner of his mouth rang out.

‘It’s not what you say, but what you do,’ he said with practiced sincerity.

The audience went into raptures. A middle-aged woman from Somerset held up her hands up to her cheeks and squealed like once she did for Paul McCartney whilst her mother threw her knickers to the stage.

The band struck a cord and dove straight into a cover of Bananarama’s ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.’

Dave and Gordie were like puppets on a Lib-Dem string, forced into acting as Cleggy’s backing dancers they awkwardly shuffled behind the new star as he snatched a microphone out of mid-air and the podiums folded away into the stage. Dave and Gordie wheeled their forearms around, turned their palms flat and swiped them above each other. They take a little step to the left and then a jump to the right. They held their knees in tight and looked at each other, both mouthing ‘help’, but they kept on going like true pros, like there was no tomorrow.

There have been other times when people partied like it was the end of the world. Indeed, someone only the other day suggested to me, as they nursed yet another hang-over, that maybe that was what were doing in 2010. For despite the recession, despite the unemployment rises the pubs and bars and unseasonably sun splashed concrete slabs outside are packed with drinkers losing the world in the bottom of a glass.

Still, arguably no-one fought the hedonist’s war with quite such vigour as a certain class and sect of bright young things in the nineteen-twenties.
It was the time of jazz, of vibrant trumpet and heart-broken vocals crooned by people escaping their history. People did the jitterbug, the Charleston; they throbbed with energy. They drank champagne and gin slings for breakfast or whilst swimming, lazing around in the early evenings in tuxedos brandishing elegant cigarette holders and wraps of fur draped across their shoulders. For some, gender and sexuality were being rendered irrelevant and every action, every breath, every kiss, snort, splurge and frantic gasp reported by a gleeful tabloid press. Not that they cared. All that mattered was excess and extravagance and joyous revelling in being alive when so many weren’t.

Or perhaps, that was just in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies?

For elsewhere there was another class, another sect – the survivors, not that they’d have called themselves as such. Those who kept all the screeching explosions and the sodden perpetually drowning mud and the glassy gaze of a dead man’s eyes locked up inside their own heads; mundane horror echoing throughout every step of life.

The papers landed on the desks at Liberal Democrat hq in the morning after the night before. Clegg’s performance has catapulted them to a projected second place. No wait, first place in some polls. They could be back in government for the first time in over eighty years.

The papers were splayed out in front of them. Cleggy, Foggy Cable and Compo Kennedy sat in a line. One covered his ears, one his eyes and the last his mouth. The same thought passed through their minds, ‘oh shit, what if we have to make Lembit Foreign Secretary?’

Someone emailed radio 4 suggested that the closure of British aerospace and the troubles of tourists struggling home evoked the spirit of Dunkirk. Indeed, the papers were packed with images of British tourists from across Western Europe gathered on the flat sands of Flanders, queuing across miles of craters and corpses and departing hope; trapped for days waist deep in water tainted red from dye in cheap New Look and Primark clothes, holding their imitation Prada suitcases above their heads; they waited for a flotilla of little boats gathered from around the isles whilst Germans in hang gliders strafed them with Euros and sauerkraut.

‘Hey,’ one the girls yelled to the barmaid in the pub at the end of the world. ‘How come these bottles are warm?’

‘Fridge is broken, ain’t it?’ she shrugged back.

‘Why don’t you get it fixed?’

‘Do youse two not get it? The pub’s closing down. After tomorrow, we’re over forever. Why the fuck would we bother fixing the fucking fridge?’

Later, the guy with his arm in a plaster cast led a rousing rendition of Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’. As tears streamed down his cheeks the only things undrunk were Woodpecker sweet cider and Stones ginger wine.

Racing back into London along the M4 corridor, on Wednesday, a jumbo jet seemed suspended in motion; just a a black silhouette against a blood orange sun and I wondered if it was packed with tourists finally winging their way homewards or if it was just another hollowed our empty promise.