Our Town

Basingstoke may look as bad as it did when I first arrived there in 1984, (so much worse than the book) when every shop was a shoe shop or a travel agent, and I would spend long, friendless hours wandering its concrete corridors, its damp recesses, its piles of car parks, stacked dry-stone wall fashion, the tarmac gleaming like a scar, where you were doomed always to exit east. The town no longer smells of chlorine, belched up from the bowels of the earth from a metal chimney, equidistant between the sports centre and the Burger King, those two bristling Titans clashing for your colonic health. None of those things are there now, the palimpsest has been re-written many times, though the town still retains a faint odour of sheep-skin and gum arabic. 

Jeff Besos? We had that design first...

There are no longer any pubs. A walk along London Street at the top of the town (known locally as Top o' Town - we're an imaginative people. We invented Burberry, you know) and it's empty. It used to be the murder mile up there on a Friday night, as the squaddies from the local garrison towns would gather to drink heavily, attempt to have sex with the local women and, when they failed, attack the local weirdos. Now I could sashay around here dressed as Scampi and his wives* and no one would bat an eyelid, because there's no one here to bat their eyelids, or batter mine. I haven't tested this theory, by the way. I don't have the Cosplay skills. I encountered only topless men at the top o' town, very much my runner up in the topless human competition, and none of the ones I saw struck me as podium material. People seem surprisingly body confident. No wonder "Naked Attraction" is never shy of exhibitionists. 

I walked past The White Hart, opposite a now dead police station. I spent a phenomenal amount of time in that boozer throughout the nineties, doing what the squaddies were doing, without trying to punch anybody, but the pub looks like nothing now. It was closed and I'm not sure how permanent the closure is. The last time I was there I popped in to write a comic strip for a satirical magazine, which was the sort of thing I used to do. It was clear the pub was no longer the unofficial student bar for Queen Mary's College, as there were three other people there: two middle aged gamers who'd obviously come straight from work, bearded lads with pints of coke, joshing one another with tales of digital derring do I didn't understand. At the bar was an old drunk, later joined by another old drunk, with whom he furtively discussed his business. They were conspiratorial, whispering stageily over Tamsin Archer's Sleeping Satellite, which was on the jukebox. It wasn't a guest ale. There were no women in the pub. No young people. And no one I knew was likely to turn up, as hardly anyone I used to know still lived in the town. I'd come there for old times sake, but there was nothing of my old times left. It was so depressing I went to The Red Lion, which is probably only still in business because its a hotel. 

If you walk for half an hour in any direction from the town centre, you'll end up somewhere lovely. The rolling hills of Hampshire in all their verdant splendour don't disappoint. It's just the town centre that's rotten. It was grim when I got there in the 80s. They piled things onto it but they didn't improve it. They razed it to the ground and built it up again and gave it a Cote Brasserie and some giant cotton-reels. And it still wasn't great. What's strange is I never went to any of those lush green lovely places when I lived there. I never left the town centre. I haunted it like I had unfinished business, but I never had any business with it at all.  

Odder still is almost all the things I write end up being set there. Even the thing I'm writing now is set there forty years in the future, when I expect it to have been rebuilt another three times. My brother does the same thing. Basingstoke, for all its faults, made us, and probably in its image. 

Basingstoke was never a great place to grow up. But I don't know what I'd do if I was attempting to negotiate young manhood there now. Though they have internet porn now I suppose, so it's swings and roundabouts. Basingstoke doesn't swing, but it has plenty of roundabouts. You can't even get Bobby's Cheese Curls anymore - I tried three or four different shops. Nothing. The weird thing is that they did carry the complete Bobby's range except Cheese Curls. I feel like I'm in that horrible film, "Yesterday", and I've woken up in a world where I'm the only person who remembers Bobby's Cheese Curls. Maybe the message there is that I should start producing Johnny's Cheese Curls though, ironically enough, that sounds a little unsavoury. 

*Scampi and his wives were characters in the seventies children's television series Fingerbobs. If I ever make a reference to something really odd sounding it's probably a seventies children's television series.