Psychogeography

Middle Earth

Forgive me if I’ve written this before, but as a man — or a woman, or an hermaphrodite for that matter — grows older, his/her ability to recall things, thankfully, gets hazy. Besides, this was one of the formative experiences of my life, so why not come at it from another angle?

When I worked as a corporate publisher in the 1980s I went to pitch my services to Weetabix, who had their factory in Kettering in the East Midlands. It was the usual tedious drive up into the heart of England, my suit jacket dangling from a hook behind my ear, my face frozen in that dreadful rictus which is engendered by loud in-car entertainment, nicotine, Nescafé and gnawing frustration. When I got to the outskirts of the town I pulled up, and, stepping out of my regulation Ford Sierra, I was assailed by a great wave of wheatiness that engulfed me, stoppering up my mouth and nostrils with the essence of an thousand thousand breakfasts.

Blimey! I thought (these were innocent days, the whole culture existed before the watershed), what can it be like to grow up in this cerealville? As a child, you must believe that this intense, foody atmosphere is natural, then, when at last you reach your maturity, and travel to some other burgh — say Redditch — be altogether perplexed by its absence.

Ever since I’ve thought of the Midlands as a region dominated by these mono-product towns: Birmingham for cars, Nottingham for shoes, Bourneville for chocolate, Stafford for pottery. The waist of Olde Englande is cinched by a belt studded with these buckles, and to travel around it is to find yourself in the tarmac aisles of some grossly elongated cash-and-carry. Not that you’ll be carrying many cars away from Birmingham nowadays; indeed, so far has the second city shed its status as the Detroit of England that the centre is now almost entirely pedestrianised. Pedestrianised and elevated: the other evening (the first balmy one of summer), I walked all the way from the trendy restaurant area around the canal at Brindley Place, to my hotel by St Philip’s Cathedral, without even setting foot at ground level. Doubtless out at Longbridge the rust never sleeps, while tumbleweeds blow across Spaghetti Junction.

The following morning I left for Lichfield, and sat in the jolting, sunlit carriage assailed by an inane in-train television channel. Who would’ve thought that the future would be so technologically scrambled? Yes, we anticipated such things in the 1970s, but we thought they’d come together with jet packs, meals-in-a-pill and eternal life. Instead we get stainless-steel automated toilets, embedded in the same old shitty railway platforms.

Such meditations were fit meat for Lichfield, where the pollution-corroded fangs of the perfect bijou Gothic cathedral gnawed at the sky and gnashed on the winding, Tudor-fronted streets. Lichfield being a carpet town, there was its most famous son, Samuel Johnson, looking gloomy, dropsical and depressed, while apparently sitting atop a pile of cheap rugs. On the plinth of the statue which was surrounded on all sides by the carpet market was this epigram of the Great Cham: ‘Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his own land.’

‘What a deep pile of. .’ I muttered to myself, as I wandered off to find some cheese in a nice olde cheese shop. But there was none to be had anywhere. I consulted an ancient crone of the diocese, who informed me: ‘You’ll have to go to Iceland.’ And that, in a non-recyclable plastic shell, is the very rub of modern Middle England: you always have to go to Iceland.

At the cathedral a genial beadle told me: ‘We’ve a lot of children in today, but I’m sure they won’t bother you and nor,’ his eyes hardened into paedophilia-seeking devices, ‘will you bother them.’ Frankly, I would’ve been hard put to bother them, because there were hundreds of the little blighters. Whole choirs of little seats had been lain out in the nave, the transept, the chapels, and upon them lessons were taking place. What a joy it was to see this magnificent building fully tenanted, instead of vacuous with the absence of God.

I plodded on out of Lichfield as the day heated up. On and on along the canal heading north. On and on past fields of alien, oily rape. On and on, with only my overheated brain for company. Towards late afternoon I crossed over Watling Street and reached the outskirts of Burton-on-Trent, only to be assailed by a great wave of maltiness, a farinaceous swell that engulfed me, stoppering up my mouth and nostrils with the essence of an thousand thousand pints of lager. The great steel vats of the Coors brewery scintillated in the sunshine. ‘What must it be like,’ I mused, ‘to grow up in this beerville, waiting your entire childhood for chucking-out time?’