Johnny Holiday

We’ve gone on holiday to Canterbury. Not sure why. We’ve wandered into the pottering about places of historic interest stage of our lives rather too easily, I think. I fear my podium dancing days are behind me. The chief attraction of our holiday destinations seems to be a surfeit of the old and Canterbury has a Cathedral and a Norman Castle. It’s also close to Broadstairs, with its Dickens, Bruce Robinson and E O Higgins connections, and Whitstable, with its tiny Peter Cushing museum. More than enough to satisfy my low impact thrill-seeking.

Folk Art Horror

No M R James or Aickman stuff happened to me in Canterbury Cathedral. I think my belief in spirits is about ready to give up the ghost. If a 1500 year old building which has seen the traffic of thousands of stone-step eroding lives and one spectacular and well documented murder offers up no evidence of the supernatural then nothing will. The spot of Thomas Beckett’s butchering is commemorated with a rather measly candle. I was rather hoping for an indelible red spot as in The Canterville Ghost, but no – just cordoned off flagstones and a guttering flame. There was no sign of any The Cicerones action, even after I took photos in the crypt: no evidence of ghosts, no inexplicable shadows or twisting columns of black smoke.  What the photos do illustrate is that what 15^th Century graffiti artists lacked in imaginative tags they made up in penmanship, or penknifemenship. There is some lovely kerning.

Nothing Left But Faith

I don’t know why I feel the need for the supernatural, or even the preternatural. The world is a terrifying enough place, both unknowably complex and head-ringingly stupid. There are even bits that I find navigable, which shows the level of credulousness on which it is possible to exist. Adding grey areas, subtlety and nuance to the plane of existence seems unnecessary and reckless, given the people of this barbarous and stupid world. Religion still appears to be popular, but religion knows its business: it doesn’t encourage an enquiring mind. There is some basic health and safety stuff – Thou shalt not whatever – and then just faith. No one can tell you anything if you have faith. You don’t need evidence or proof or validation, just faith. And it’s not just in religion: recently this weird trust that everything will work out if you just believe has been making inroads into the secular world. And I don’t just mean on X Factor.

I saw a politician questioned about the availability of medicines after Brexit using much the same strategy and seemingly both surprised and appalled that anyone questioning the government would not provide everything required immediately and without quibble after a No Deal Brexit. He said this to a consultant neurologist, a man with no vocal chords recovering from cancer and a man whose daughter would die if he couldn’t get the medicine she required, and he attempted to attain the moral high ground, batting away their human interest stories, personal anecdotes and hard figures with a few “project fear” “remoaners” and “taking back sovereignty” jabs, and a belief in government that positions Boris Johnson as Moses leading his people to the promised land. This strategy did not go well for him and he was firmly trounced: “Let my people go…without their cancer medication.”

There's nothing terrifying about this place at all...

The Cathedral is braced in scaffolding. The woman behind me in the queue says she was here 12 years ago and it was covered in scaffolding then too. It is rather old. I can find these things over-powering: the worn steps, the detail, the light through stained glass, the stomach-lurching of the organ’s bass. The graffiti portraits of Christ scratched into the walls. The sheer weight of time, heavier than the stones: eroding, powdering everything. This place is haunted all right. Human hands are smeared over every surface, feet have rutted the ground. This is not a place of gods this is a Cathedral to humanity, the best and worst of them are all here, crammed in beneath the vaulted ceilings. It has the feverish atmosphere of a slave ship, acrid with suffering humanity.

A tramp carries a duvet down the street outside the Cathedral. There is evidence of fresh injury on his face. “Schindler’s fist!” he laughs as he walks past. No idea.  

I bought a notebook in Canterbury: a red, Silvine “memo book”. It’s my brand. It normally costs me 75p in Easons in Belfast but in a Caterbury Paperchase it was £1.99. My first thought was “Brexit”, just as it was when I couldn’t get any Roquefort in Ballyhackamore last week. But Silvine products are proudly stamped “British Made” so there is a mystery here…I shall have to check when I get home and see if this 120% price hike has been rolled out across the whole of the UK.

I’ve been reading Nigel Williams’ Scenes from a poisoner’s life. He is described as “the best comic novelist in the country” on the cover by The Times (who gave me a four star review for the recent production of my play Every Day I Wake up Hopeful, so you know they recognise quality when they see it) On the back cover, grinning in black and white, Williams looks like a touring member of the Buggles. The book was presented, according to the inside cover to my friend Sarah, by the Rector of The Mackie Academy, Stonehaven, which is the most hilariously Scottish thing I have ever read.

The book is funny. But what really strikes you is its nastiness and the extremity of some of the scenes: there is a mad old woman murdering people with the feet of a crucifix. There’s a story where the hero, Henry, becomes an actual stalker for Valentine’s Day and another where he is tricked into believing he is corresponding with a Satanist who is stalking him through France dressed as the Sandeman Port man. In one frankly ludicrous and grotesque story, Henry meets an old Irish man on a moor who tells him the story of a giant fat man who couldn’t stop wanking in coffins. The old man turns out to be the coffin splodger’s wife. But, of course.

These are “connected short stories”, that nifty literary cheat: both a novel and a short story collection, but also, neither, and its lively stuff, far more brutal and misanthropic than my own prose. It edges into Jonathan Meades or early Ian McEwan territory. My subjects are deemed a bit near the knuckle now, a bit raw and earthy, but they’re far from the suburban psychopaths herded here.

The book came out in 1994 the same year that Loaded magazine did which places it in an interesting cultural space: is literature more prissy now, more stifled and sexless? Or is it that there is no place for a book as rampantly genre defying as this one? It’s not a novel and nor is it a short story collection. It’s a suburban sit-com about an affluent middle class family living in leafy Wimbledon. There are stories here about tennis clubs and having to separate your two house cleaners. I mean – who would you attempt to sell this to? It feels like the relic of another time, when best sellers weren’t ghost-written for celebrities and sportspeople, or weren’t significant brand extensions for people who were already famous for doing something else. There was a time when people were writers and it was a proper job. And what they chose to write about were the exploits of Oxbridge graduates planning the deaths of their families in nice bits of London, while the rest of the world processes like Festive Road on a bad mescaline binge.        

I’m not saying that that’s better than what we have now, necessarily. But it’s certainly different.

No, it is better. At least no one is claiming Gemma Collins wrote it.

It seems like a strange thing for a 17 year old girl to pick for her school prize but Sarah is a strange woman. If it was picked for her by the Academy’s rector then I sincerely hope that warped individual is no longer working with children.    

We are breakfasting at Café St Pierre in Canterbury. The place is authentically French – the staff is uniformly sullen and all the patrons act like they are on holiday even though they clearly live here. I suspect the patrons of this authentic Parisien experience to be Brexiteers, particularly the Boris Johnson style bluff-old-cove making a big fuss of reading the papers, only drinking a coffee and chewing the collar of his shirt. But then I suspect everyone in the south of England of being a Brexiteer. And they all must be, the bastards.

The pubs of Canterbury are full of Kentish men of whom there are two types: young, bearded men in salmon shorts and fat, bald men with salmon faces. It’s not really my sort of scene. Increasingly I don’t think I have a scene – the allure of public drinking rather escapes me. I shall keep drinking, like all my other vices, behind closed doors. Besides, I like the daytime now.

On the way to Whitstable I saw a Landrover with the number plate “BI4CH”. I expect that’s supposed to say “Bitch” but I choose to think it a progressive statement meaning “Bi people for change”.

Whitstable is sort of amazing. I came here to commune with the eminence gris of the British horror film Peter Cushing - not Sir Peter Cushing? What? - and perhaps walk along the beach, but Whitstable is a dream of a seaside town. The high street is choked with jolly, tatty little shops and almost entirely free of homogenisation: there are “kiss me quick” hats, whelk and oyster stalls, crumbling bits of masonry, vast amounts of bad art. When the modern world does sneak in it is unobtrusive or hidden: bank machines peak from round corners.

We go for a drink in the Tudor Tea Rooms where Peter Cushing would go most days. It’s about twenty minutes from his small beachfront house which Susan and I dream of buying and probably won’t. We sit at Peter’s table which has a small picture of him winking in a cap. There’s a little framed poem written in his beautiful hand – it is an ode to the staff of the Café. Most pilgrims go to Canterbury but I’m here to pay tribute in Whitstable as a fan of…what should I call them? I’m bored of the notion that the films I like are “horror” films. They’re fairy tales, folk tales. No one is scared by Hammer films, they are cosy delights: good always wins and good is quite often Peter Cushing.

The Tudor Tea Rooms have gingham table cloths. There are dark beams and green bevelled glass, as well as some welcome and impressively non-Tudor air-conditioning. Susan has a prosecco and a Victoria cream sponge with proper butter cream. I have a Shepherds Neame Master Brew because, this not being Northern Ireland, the place has a drinks licence. It’s a wonderful place. There are more framed Peter Cushing poems on the walls and in the toilets. He really did have lovely penmanship.       

The high-light of the trip to Whitstable is a trip to the Peter Cushing museum. It isn’t a Peter Cushing museum – Peter gets a corner of a museum dedicated to the general maritime history of Whitstable. But we get his children’s book, his caricatures, casts of his hands, his gloves and stick, his bottle of Quink and a packet of Senior Service, his oily rag of choice. There is also, amazingly, a postcard sent from Basingstoke in 1975! I’ve looked into it and I cannot imagine why Peter Cushing was in Basingstoke in 1975. Being attacked by something terrible on the golden sands of Frencham Pond? Peter Cushing in Basingstoke! Why the fuck isn’t there a plaque?

Effects.

Susan leaves to look at the shops and I’m left in the deadest pub in town. The place is playing “New Kids on the Block” videos on a video screen and the only other people here are a middle-aged French couple looking aghast at trad. Eng. Pub. Grub.

But as soon as Susan leaves an enormous family of popped collar, sunglasses on head cockneys pitch up, complete with a pushchair the size of a Bedford van and a little girl who can only communicate in screams. They are an assault of salmon shorts and gnomic tattoos on pink, puckered thighs, though one of them has the Kraken rum logo on his forearm, so that one at least I understand. A man with a beard and baseball cap makes the words “Feta Lasagna” sound like a threat. My lovely empty pub is filled with the pot-bellied and puce, juddering about the place flat footed, pushing their strollers with their prodigious guts. And that little girl WILL NOT STOP SCREAMING. The family are immune to it. I’m not. I’m out of here.

I move to the Duke of Cumberland and something approaching heaven on earth. The pub is large, spacious, cool and empty. There are arch artworks and witty furnishings and my pint of Bishop’s Finger is just over four quid, which is the new cheap.

We eat in a restaurant called Pork & Co. There are school desks, beautiful tiled walls and an aggressively hip beer list. The red ale I’m drinking was unpronounceable – I pointed to it on the menu to the waitress who also couldn’t pronounce it: marketing genius – I think its faux Welsh. We’re under a distressed denim union flag which has a duffle coat toggle in the corner which might make it a Union Jack. I dunno. I’ve ordered a black pudding scotch egg. I may never poo again. The music is surprisingly appalling – Stereophonics feature heavily – and my beer was like a gravy float. There is a very sweet couple behind us on what appeared to be their first date. The boy was telling the girl the story of how he had pretended to have diarrhoea at work in order to hide in the toilets to text her. It doesn’t sound sweet in the retelling – you’re imagining a sweaty oaf being crass – but he was so earnest and so charmingly gauche and she happily took it as a supreme romantic gesture. Their postures changed over the two course dinner as they formed a bridge over the table, nearer with every bite. It was charming. Maybe I’m getting old.

I can’t remember ever being in Canterbury before and it is quite hard to negotiate which bits of Canterbury were in the film A Canterbury Tale as a lot of it wasn’t shot in Canterbury and the rest of the observable landscape was heavily bomb damaged. Ironically the war time Cathedral looked in better nick than the 2019 model, but then I suppose all the scaffolding would have been melted down for munitions. We’re staying at the Falstaff hotel which would have been here when the film was made (and for a few hundred years before it). Our room would have been where the beer barrels were kept then, but you wouldn’t know that now – it’s the best and quietest hotel room I think I’ve ever stayed in, with a huge bathroom and an alfresco dining area hidden away from the rest of the hotel, under a canopy of trees that kept the rain off while we ate our fish and chips in the only shower that happened during our stay. I make it my business to eat fish and chips when I’m in England because, whisper, Northern Irish fish and chips aren’t very good. The Northern Irish would disagree with this off course, vehemently and with the suggestion that I fuck off back to England entering the conversation very early on, but it’s true. The Northern Irish aren’t known for the delicacy of their palates, and I say that as an Englishman, traditionally the worst culinary yobs in Europe. Irish fish and chips are greasy, the batter slimy and cloying, the fish floppy and often tainted with the taste of repurposed oil. The chips aren’t all that either. Sorry.

To be honest the Canterbury chips weren’t great either – the fish was actually a bit dry. Maybe I just have too romantic a notion of fish and chips? Maybe they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. NO. I believe in fish and chips.  

The interior of the hotel has a sort of middle-aged bohemian shtick that I’m only slightly too cool for, and the booze is pricey and filled with people buying cocktails that take twenty minutes to make. The hotel is in the middle of the town and five minutes from everywhere  -well it’s about twenty minutes from the Norman castle they built a Lidl next to - and after a hard days mooching around I’m knackered by eight in the evening and Susan and I retire back to our spacious and comfortable room to watch Talking Pictures TV. Rock ‘n’ Roll it is not, thank fuck.

There’s a gang of mums on the train with about fourteen children between them. When we get on the train a radical splinter group are sat behind us but the main body is at the other end of the carriage singing One Direction songs which rather ages them…for children. “We’ve got it all down here!” screams one of the women down the gangway “There’s loads of room.” They all trail past, smiling and winsome, their strollers like little covered wagons in a train, wedging against the seats. And they’re nice kids, actually, smiling and sweet. But there are a lot of them and they have surrounded Susan and me: barking, chirruping, suddenly screaming, the way young children do. So, no longer caring, we get up and walk down to the far end of the carriage.

I know it looks bad. I’m like a miserable parky in Whizzer and Chips, unaccountably desperate to keep the kids off his grass. Those women undoubtedly think I’m miserable or odd. But life is undeniably better away from children’s screaming. In fact I hope I’m never okay with the sound of a child crying, whether it’s on fire or has just been denied a biscuit. It cuts through to the marrow of my being.

We go past “Dumpton Park” which sounds like a shit YouTube skit on “Downton Abbey”. “…and guess what, guys? It’s actually set on an estate!” I actually expect to see that in ITV2’s autumn schedules. Does ITV2 even have an autumn schedule? I think it must always be summer on ITV2. Last night they showed an episode of Family Guy with a millennium bug plot. Fresh.

Bruce Robinson Shat Here

There is friction in Broadstairs. Susan has been promised breakfast as soon as we get off the train and sees a likely looking greasy spoon. I assure her that there are bound to be better places the nearer we get to the sea. It transpires that, in an unusual turn of events, I am wrong. We turn back without ever seeing the sea and slowly climb the hill back to the first café we saw.

Later on I’m in the Tartar Frigate a place of pilgrimage as it features in the early chapters of my brother’s book “Conversations with Spirits” (available in all good bookstores. Though when I went to look for it in Broadstairs I couldn't find it. Though I did say GOOD bookstores).  They’re playing Selena’s “Boys, Boys, Boys” and the barman elects to take a phone call half way through serving Susan. Classic Kent.  It styles itself “Kent’s Finest Seafood Restaurant – with superb views overlooking the English channel” and the atmosphere became distinctly nippy when we said we were only coming for a drink. There is a fantastic black-wood, copper-faced grandfather clock that greets Susan with a chime as she admires it. Chicory Tip is playing here in a couple of weeks.

Frig It. 

Broadstairs is ringed with an ouroborus of visiting European children, coach parties are pounding the pavements to sand, and we seek refuge in a bar called The Chapel which has a charming barman, is also a book shop and is almost empty. Actual bliss. I have been to Broadstairs before but recognise almost none of it as it is choked with tourists. The Dickens Hotel and “Bleak House” remain recognisable, as does the curving beach front. But the rest is tourism. And we’re obviously part of the problem too.