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*"My sister's had her car stolen," says a woman at the airport, brightly. "They set fire to an off-licence too." Her male business colleagues are slightly interested.
"She's got a big detached house in Dudley, but..." She shrugs. That's just the way it is in Dudley. Twinned with Chinatown.
*I'm having a pint at 8.30 in the morning because I am in an airport. Normally there would be a big gang of tattooed men in shorts three pints into an argument and heading off on a sports holiday on the Costa Del Golf. But today there is just me and a clutch of businessmen in North Face jackets and a teenage couple: the boy has a moustache the girl has the eyebrows that they have now.
I sip my Peroni slowly, measuredly. I am an ambassador...for something.
*I'm in the White Hart in Basingstoke. I spent a lot of time in this pub in the late eighties and early nineties. Which was a long, long time ago now. I'm here to get out of the house for a couple of hours and to focus on some writing I have to do for a "project". They are playing some of the worst music I have ever heard. Most of it has been ska-metal but at the moment it is "Zombie" by the Cranberries. What a magnificently awful record that is: the Pixies bassline, via Nirvana, that relentless head-nodding vocal, the way she leans into it as though it were some sort of tic she can't shake off.*
Even when "Africa" by Toto comes on it feels like a hack choice - the anthem of internet meme bores - even though it is by far the most pleasant piece of music I have heard in the last hour.
The White Hart has changed. Of course it has - its been a quarter of a century since I spent any regular time in here (and I just reeled horribly with that thought). They've embraced the stag theme - there are harts all over the walls, though none of them are white. One is the colour of marmalade. The Marmalade Hart would have made some tasty Freakbeat sides in the 60s.
It has been refurbished, of course, but the layout remains identical: lazy, snooker playing types shouting in the far bar, all other patrons in the lower bar. But there has been an obvious sea-change: this is not a student pub. In my day this was the unofficial union bar for Queen Mary's College and would be swarmed by fraggle-haired haired wallies, myself included, trying to make two pints last the night. This is no longer the case. I'm sat opposite a bearded man in his thirties with a laptop and a pint of coke. In the corner are two fat nerds in their forties talking about sales and computer games.
As if by magic "Girls and Boys" by Blur comes on the jukebox, which would have been on heavy rotation the last time I was a regular here. In those days it was a snide and ironic idiot bombast: a middle-class man berating the working class in a hideous sing-song nasal twang. It's still all that now, of course, but now I notice all the bits that have been nicked wholesale from Japan and that the bassline is lifted in its entirety from David Bowie's "DJ". As a record it actually sounds brilliant excepting the hideous vocal, which still succeeds on its own terms as a blatant and cynical attempt at an ear-worm. First prize, Albarn Major, you are the dux of the school.
A drunk at the bar is still tunelessly singing along to "Girls and Boys" half way through Tracey Chapman's "Fast Car", a record that I remember from the very first times that I frequented this pub. They're really doing my back pages - I keep expecting The Smiths song to drop as it so often has upon my entering a pub in the last thirty years. But it never does. The Smiths are a watched pot that doesn't boil but gets more and more aggressively racist.
The nerds are talking about "18 plus larping. This session isn't intended as an introduction but new players would be welcomed." He doesn't sound convinced.
The White Hart appears to be a rock/ metal pub now. They have also embraced the "Tart" nickname, so beloved of posh six form girls in the late 80's.
I'm disturbed by the Basingstoke accent. I don't remember it being quite like THAT. Its quite scary: Nick Helm raised by pirates. The place is littered by scurvy knaves despite being land-locked: I wouldn't fancy your chances of getting fancy goods and spices on a barge down the Basingstoke Canal without meeting a cutlass wielding local, supping on a can of "Monster" and spitting out Skoal Bandit juice.
I don't think that's what I sound like. But who knows? Avast, me hearties etc...
The patrons of the White Hart, and I include myself, are unfortunate looking. I'm very aware of my uncut hair and unshaven chin, the paunch testing my shirt buttons, the dandruff avalanching down the slopes of my shoulders. But I'm not as bad as the bestiary tableaux available here: a fat bespectacled man in a beard and a beret waddles out to the smoking area. He farts just BEFORE going outside. I don't know what he had been eating but it immediately starts trying to eat me.
Monstrous middle-aged bores are sat at the bar talking about their utility bills. One of them has said something about "covering the initial capital" but the conversation drifts into vanity plates for cars ("worth it") and, of course, immigration. I sort of love the lack of surprise in Basingstoke - people are exactly as you expect them to be. I am only surprised I'm from here.
*I arrive at the airport. I'm three hours early and the place is deserted. Its early evening. I approach the check-in desk where there are three members of staff doing, as far as I can see, nothing. I approach a desk but I am told to go back and wait to be called. So I do and the woman behind the desk continues to chat to her colleague. Susan and I wait. After a few minutes the woman says "Who's next please?" We look about. There is literally no one else in the airport. She can see this. Odd.
I step up.
"Hello." I say.
"Where are you travelling to?" she snarls. She has look of Arlene Foster, eyes like dog's chocolate drops.
"Southampton," I say. She puts out her hand which I take to be a sign to show her my ID. I show her my passport. There is an instant reaction, like I'd had a nose-bleed next to a shark tank.
"This passport's out of date."
"I know it is," I say, "I used it a month ago at this same airport and there was no problem."
She confers with her colleague who has been sat there doing nothing.
"You can only use it one year after its expired." says the colleague, folding her arms.
"Its two years," says Susan, who is ex Cabin Crew and knows her shit. They start to Google a fact that they should know as part of their difficult job, but I whip out another ID and they accept it greedily so they can stop Googling only to find out that Susan is correct. Which, of course, she is.
"Do you want me to print off your boarding pass?" she says.
"Er, yes. That's why I'm here."
She presses a button, snaps off a deli ticket and hands it to me without another word. No "Have a nice flight" or "Enjoy your journey". Not even a "Have you any liquids or sharp objects in your bag", which is sort of her job. Nothing.
Susan and I walk off to departures and I'm not sure what has happened.
"Was it me or was she really rude?" I say.
"She was INCREDIBLY rude," says Susan, "I couldn't believe it."
"That was like a "1970's - more than my job's worth - angry park keeper - level of arsey rudeness wasn't it?"
"It really was."
"Did I do something? Was I rude or something?"
"No. She was just really horrible. Right from the start."
I look over at them sat behind their check in desks in the still empty airport. The two of them are sitting there in sullen silence, staring directly ahead, not even bothering with each other. I can't say I blame them.
*Customs is also empty and I encounter another surly oaf but you expect that. My coat, bag and laptop have to go in separate trays, the laptop unpacked from its travel bag.
"Do I need to take my belt off?" The man ignores me. I take it off anyway. In a moment of reckless abandon I decide to leave my boots on.
The girl beckoning me through the metal detector is the first person to smile at me in the airport. I am pathetically grateful. She is wearing glasses and Doc Martens and I recognise her instantly as a good egg. She passes me through.
Still, in a pathetic attempt at civil unrest I don't return my three trays to the tray stacks for the first time ever. As ever flailing damply against the machine. I might as well have been leaping the barricades with one tit out.
*I go to the bar in the airport because I'm very early for my flight and I have no imagination. It is is empty but for three members of staff. I am sensing a pattern. There are two fat blokes with beards and a blonde girl and, unlike the customs people and the check in people they are having the best time, so much so that I hate to interrupt them by ordering a drink. Luckily they don't see me for several minutes as I twirl a banknote at them and they continue to swear good-naturedly at one another in what looks suspiciously like horse-play. Eventually one of the beards twigs that I am there and I order a lager. He gets halfway through pouring it and says "Sorry, bud (!) Carlsberg's off. I can charge you for a half if you like." He holds up a glass that looks like he's squeezed a window cleaner's chamois into it.
"No. You're alright," I say, "I'll have a Hop House."
"That's off."
"Are there any beers that are actually on?"
"Any of the others."
"Apart from the two I wanted?" He shrugs. Mm - Harp is available. I plump for a Smithwicks blonde and and he pours me nearly a pint of the stuff and I slope off, already exhausted.
The beer was £4.95 and I paid him with a fiver. He gave me the change in pennies. Next level, mate.
Its still two hours till my flight. I resolve to make no further eye contact with anyone until I'm well clear of George Best Airport - I'll probably end up in a fight with the pilot.
*Taken too soon.
"She's got a big detached house in Dudley, but..." She shrugs. That's just the way it is in Dudley. Twinned with Chinatown.
 |
| The Terrible Mystery of Basingstoke: Et In Arcadia Ego |
*I'm having a pint at 8.30 in the morning because I am in an airport. Normally there would be a big gang of tattooed men in shorts three pints into an argument and heading off on a sports holiday on the Costa Del Golf. But today there is just me and a clutch of businessmen in North Face jackets and a teenage couple: the boy has a moustache the girl has the eyebrows that they have now.
I sip my Peroni slowly, measuredly. I am an ambassador...for something.
*I'm in the White Hart in Basingstoke. I spent a lot of time in this pub in the late eighties and early nineties. Which was a long, long time ago now. I'm here to get out of the house for a couple of hours and to focus on some writing I have to do for a "project". They are playing some of the worst music I have ever heard. Most of it has been ska-metal but at the moment it is "Zombie" by the Cranberries. What a magnificently awful record that is: the Pixies bassline, via Nirvana, that relentless head-nodding vocal, the way she leans into it as though it were some sort of tic she can't shake off.*
Even when "Africa" by Toto comes on it feels like a hack choice - the anthem of internet meme bores - even though it is by far the most pleasant piece of music I have heard in the last hour.
The White Hart has changed. Of course it has - its been a quarter of a century since I spent any regular time in here (and I just reeled horribly with that thought). They've embraced the stag theme - there are harts all over the walls, though none of them are white. One is the colour of marmalade. The Marmalade Hart would have made some tasty Freakbeat sides in the 60s.
It has been refurbished, of course, but the layout remains identical: lazy, snooker playing types shouting in the far bar, all other patrons in the lower bar. But there has been an obvious sea-change: this is not a student pub. In my day this was the unofficial union bar for Queen Mary's College and would be swarmed by fraggle-haired haired wallies, myself included, trying to make two pints last the night. This is no longer the case. I'm sat opposite a bearded man in his thirties with a laptop and a pint of coke. In the corner are two fat nerds in their forties talking about sales and computer games.
As if by magic "Girls and Boys" by Blur comes on the jukebox, which would have been on heavy rotation the last time I was a regular here. In those days it was a snide and ironic idiot bombast: a middle-class man berating the working class in a hideous sing-song nasal twang. It's still all that now, of course, but now I notice all the bits that have been nicked wholesale from Japan and that the bassline is lifted in its entirety from David Bowie's "DJ". As a record it actually sounds brilliant excepting the hideous vocal, which still succeeds on its own terms as a blatant and cynical attempt at an ear-worm. First prize, Albarn Major, you are the dux of the school.
A drunk at the bar is still tunelessly singing along to "Girls and Boys" half way through Tracey Chapman's "Fast Car", a record that I remember from the very first times that I frequented this pub. They're really doing my back pages - I keep expecting The Smiths song to drop as it so often has upon my entering a pub in the last thirty years. But it never does. The Smiths are a watched pot that doesn't boil but gets more and more aggressively racist.
The nerds are talking about "18 plus larping. This session isn't intended as an introduction but new players would be welcomed." He doesn't sound convinced.
The White Hart appears to be a rock/ metal pub now. They have also embraced the "Tart" nickname, so beloved of posh six form girls in the late 80's.
I'm disturbed by the Basingstoke accent. I don't remember it being quite like THAT. Its quite scary: Nick Helm raised by pirates. The place is littered by scurvy knaves despite being land-locked: I wouldn't fancy your chances of getting fancy goods and spices on a barge down the Basingstoke Canal without meeting a cutlass wielding local, supping on a can of "Monster" and spitting out Skoal Bandit juice.
I don't think that's what I sound like. But who knows? Avast, me hearties etc...
The patrons of the White Hart, and I include myself, are unfortunate looking. I'm very aware of my uncut hair and unshaven chin, the paunch testing my shirt buttons, the dandruff avalanching down the slopes of my shoulders. But I'm not as bad as the bestiary tableaux available here: a fat bespectacled man in a beard and a beret waddles out to the smoking area. He farts just BEFORE going outside. I don't know what he had been eating but it immediately starts trying to eat me.
Monstrous middle-aged bores are sat at the bar talking about their utility bills. One of them has said something about "covering the initial capital" but the conversation drifts into vanity plates for cars ("worth it") and, of course, immigration. I sort of love the lack of surprise in Basingstoke - people are exactly as you expect them to be. I am only surprised I'm from here.
*I arrive at the airport. I'm three hours early and the place is deserted. Its early evening. I approach the check-in desk where there are three members of staff doing, as far as I can see, nothing. I approach a desk but I am told to go back and wait to be called. So I do and the woman behind the desk continues to chat to her colleague. Susan and I wait. After a few minutes the woman says "Who's next please?" We look about. There is literally no one else in the airport. She can see this. Odd.
I step up.
"Hello." I say.
"Where are you travelling to?" she snarls. She has look of Arlene Foster, eyes like dog's chocolate drops.
"Southampton," I say. She puts out her hand which I take to be a sign to show her my ID. I show her my passport. There is an instant reaction, like I'd had a nose-bleed next to a shark tank.
"This passport's out of date."
"I know it is," I say, "I used it a month ago at this same airport and there was no problem."
She confers with her colleague who has been sat there doing nothing.
"You can only use it one year after its expired." says the colleague, folding her arms.
"Its two years," says Susan, who is ex Cabin Crew and knows her shit. They start to Google a fact that they should know as part of their difficult job, but I whip out another ID and they accept it greedily so they can stop Googling only to find out that Susan is correct. Which, of course, she is.
"Do you want me to print off your boarding pass?" she says.
"Er, yes. That's why I'm here."
She presses a button, snaps off a deli ticket and hands it to me without another word. No "Have a nice flight" or "Enjoy your journey". Not even a "Have you any liquids or sharp objects in your bag", which is sort of her job. Nothing.
Susan and I walk off to departures and I'm not sure what has happened.
"Was it me or was she really rude?" I say.
"She was INCREDIBLY rude," says Susan, "I couldn't believe it."
"That was like a "1970's - more than my job's worth - angry park keeper - level of arsey rudeness wasn't it?"
"It really was."
"Did I do something? Was I rude or something?"
"No. She was just really horrible. Right from the start."
I look over at them sat behind their check in desks in the still empty airport. The two of them are sitting there in sullen silence, staring directly ahead, not even bothering with each other. I can't say I blame them.
*Customs is also empty and I encounter another surly oaf but you expect that. My coat, bag and laptop have to go in separate trays, the laptop unpacked from its travel bag.
"Do I need to take my belt off?" The man ignores me. I take it off anyway. In a moment of reckless abandon I decide to leave my boots on.
The girl beckoning me through the metal detector is the first person to smile at me in the airport. I am pathetically grateful. She is wearing glasses and Doc Martens and I recognise her instantly as a good egg. She passes me through.
Still, in a pathetic attempt at civil unrest I don't return my three trays to the tray stacks for the first time ever. As ever flailing damply against the machine. I might as well have been leaping the barricades with one tit out.
*I go to the bar in the airport because I'm very early for my flight and I have no imagination. It is is empty but for three members of staff. I am sensing a pattern. There are two fat blokes with beards and a blonde girl and, unlike the customs people and the check in people they are having the best time, so much so that I hate to interrupt them by ordering a drink. Luckily they don't see me for several minutes as I twirl a banknote at them and they continue to swear good-naturedly at one another in what looks suspiciously like horse-play. Eventually one of the beards twigs that I am there and I order a lager. He gets halfway through pouring it and says "Sorry, bud (!) Carlsberg's off. I can charge you for a half if you like." He holds up a glass that looks like he's squeezed a window cleaner's chamois into it.
"No. You're alright," I say, "I'll have a Hop House."
"That's off."
"Are there any beers that are actually on?"
"Any of the others."
"Apart from the two I wanted?" He shrugs. Mm - Harp is available. I plump for a Smithwicks blonde and and he pours me nearly a pint of the stuff and I slope off, already exhausted.
The beer was £4.95 and I paid him with a fiver. He gave me the change in pennies. Next level, mate.
Its still two hours till my flight. I resolve to make no further eye contact with anyone until I'm well clear of George Best Airport - I'll probably end up in a fight with the pilot.
*Taken too soon.
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