People say I’m too negative, especially about the city we live in. Luddite tendencies, anti-social, not a people person – who me? Shouldn’t be allowed to run a shop, mix with the public. “In fact, has he got one of those police check certificate things, miserable git?” they collectively mutter.
Well, I’ve news for you. It’s a WORKshop not a bloody shop. And I’ve been in this rat hole city for 47 years and witnessed its steady decline, despite all the hype, and probably a lot of it down to the witless Council. A Labour Council, mostly, it pains me to say. It’s only classed as a city because it has a bloody cathedral and most of the fuckers that live here couldn’t even tell you where it is or what it’s called.
Trust me I’ve nothing against change for the better in the built environment. Demolish the old and build some quality new stuff. Loads of it. But there’s the problem, the Q word, stifled by the C word. No vision, no master plan. Small scale political bickering and infighting. Incompetent.
I arrived fresh faced at 18, dropped at the side of the road with a suitcase, from Middlesbrough – yes, the place where all the UK news is currently from. Northern. Death and destruction, fires, drug barons, organised crime, toe rags, the full Monty. Spent my formative years about four miles from that sorry den of iniquity. Not much good ever came out of there. What did Middlesbrough ever do for us? No fixed identity. The area was called North Yorkshire, then Teesside, then Cleveland, constantly changing when I was a kid. The exercise books had “The Riding of North Yorkshire” stamped on the front at junior school. I’m not sure what the region is called now, aside from Doomed, Dystopia, whatever.
However, I can inform you it did do some stuff, important things. Maybe perhaps iron ore and then steel. That’s quite a big global deal, went all around the world. Sydney Harbour bridge. Dorman Long, British Steel, River Tees, docks. Railways. ICI for all your chemicals, fabrics, paints, petrol, latently poisoning us over many decades. Chris Rea, now sadly departed. A highly underrated guitarist and musician, sold out to pop, but only for a short time. His old man made bloody good ice cream too. The A19. Brain Clough, I have that on good authority from Shoebox, as I know nothing about golf myself.
Donald Campbell tested the Bluebird on my local beach. I went to school with Andy Green, the world land speed record, turbo nutter bastard test pilot. He was a quiet kid. Duffle coat I recall.
David Coverdale, Micky Moody, Colin Hodgkinson & Back Door, Paul Rodgers, Ridley Scott, I know he doesn’t play guitar but he should and Blade Runner is so iconic and some of the scenes were inspired by the real-life view of ICI Wilton, which used to pump out all the shit that we breathed and played in on the beach. They all got out.
ICI was a sight to behold at night, all lit up, steaming and glowing. The glare of sodium lights. Flare stacks shooting vivid flames high in to the sky, burning off God knows what. Get rid of it quick, strike a spark, up the stack. Klaxons blaring. Cooling towers belching vast rising clouds of steam. Faint yellow brown nitrous fumes twisting upward from innocuous looking grey metal chimneys, wound in spiralling strakes along their length. Warehousing, workshops, vats, asbestos, tons of asbestos. Laboratories. Huge bloated storage vessels, rivetted together. Pumps and enormous valves, black latticework pipe gantries, with miles of snaking, dented, insulated pipes, glinting silver under the flood lights. Tankers beetling here and there. Twenty-four seven. A vast spreading, bleeding cancer on the landscape. Polluted forever.
I wrote this years ago, when I was less jaded, about Anish Kapoor and Boro’ A bit of art, trying to brighten the place up, inject a different culture.
Philip K Dick. He’s definitely not from around there, but he wrote Blade Runner, so to speak and simply loads of other stuff. I’ve been reading tons of sci-fi lately. So around 1961 or there-abouts, Dick wrote Martian Time-Slip. He suggests at the time that nobody on Earth can get a job any more with just a degree, they now need a masters to secure work – prescient or what?
Wyndham suggested in one of his novels, the mass blindness on Earth yarn, queue the Triffids, could have been caused by a chemical weapon released from an orbiting satellite, accidently or not – this was written in the early 1950’s before Sputnik had even been launched. Nothing man-made had ever orbited and Star Wars and Captain Kirk not even a glimmer on a TV you didn’t own in those days. Don’t get me started on William Gibson and all the internet mind warping Matrix stuff. Before we had an internet or even knew what it was, if indeed we even do now. I can remember that time, the world was a much better place. Dial up fax machine. Everything worked in this country, most of the time, that is until Thatcher came along, flogged it all off and fucked the rest. Downhill ever since, unless you are seriously minted.
There’s so much of this stuff. Sci-fi that is. It’s all there in black and white. Probably even lurking on a Kindle if you must. The future predicted and seemingly coming to fruition in real time, every day, leaping off the pages right at you. HG Wells, Jules Verne and all the others thereafter. Maybe they did have access to a time machine or a window to the future. Imagine that. Might be worth a story.
Anyway, I stopped off to wash away the dust and flock on my way home from the workshop, in one of my old haunts, from the days when I was a regular heavy duty drinker.
My mate Gareth wanders over and asks how I am, then changes his mind and says “Don’t bother, I can see you’ve got your serial killer face on”.
I bore him with more of my shop woes. Just the typical completely dumb calls and comments I get every day. He’s heard them all before, many times.
“Oh, I thought you were a shop, do you sell guitars?” This from a numbskull, stood on what could only be described as a “shop floor”, having just walked through a “shop door”, past the Guitar sign, literally surrounded by some ten handmade electric guitars, each suspended on a cable from the shop ceiling, twirling like a giant nerdy musical mobile, right at head height. I could swing one and knock him spark out.
I’d soon run out of guitars though, as this particular line is commonly spouted by the visiting public. There is a sign outside that says “By appointment only” but nobody has ever made one.
I recently had, “You obviously sell Ukuleles, so…”, this fucker got cut very short before he could say anymore.
“Do you have any saxophone reeds? No? What about a metronome, a mechanical one?”.
‘Do you sell those strummy things?” Vigorous movements of right hand. “A plectrum you mean?”, I dispense free advice. “No, one of those strummy things, to hit the strings with.” They left, rapidly.
I’m a bit like Moe in The Simpsons, when Bart phones the bar and asks to speak to Jock Strap.
Phone call, several like this, “What time do you close?” – it’s now gone 8.00 p.m. on a Friday night. I also changed my Google hours, long story, trying to fool the world, so Google states “Open 06.00 – 06.30.” That’ll be a.m. Some daft bastard only rings me up at 06.20, “hoping to catch me before I close”. Jesus. Hence the serial killer look, on a regular basis.
Gareth offers some well-meant words of advice – “I don’t know why you stay there. You could work from anywhere, why even bother with a shop at all? You could even be underground, like six feet underground, cheap rent…”
Not quite sure what he’s getting at there, but he does have a good point. “Somewhere with no door….” He chips in. Even better, cracking idea. Top bloke. Brilliant!
Despite my loathing of technology all I’d need is a website, courtesy of Gareth, and a Youtube channel. Sorted.
I guess I’d be like one of the Warlocks in The Time Machine, grafting away underground, surrounded by machines, dust and shavings, only occasionally venturing abroad now and again to scoff one of the useless Eloi milling about on the surface. Perfect. Where’s my shovel?
