Dreaming Spires and Stupid Punts

 Belfast International Airport is in a period of transition. Is it the ugliest, most soviet-era airport in the UK? Yes. Is it worse now than it was the last time I was here, mere months ago? Oh yes. 

You alight the taxi into a Breugal-esque landscape of cheery, ruddy-faced revelers, rubble, blocked off doors, cranes, cigarette smoke, not cigarette smoke, scaffolding, and men in hi viz hats and tabards, looking like Bob the Builder had lost a bet. Locating the departures area you zigzag through an empty slalom that takes up the entire room, like Theseus at the centre of a Labyrinth Daedalus designed while working from home. Last time I went through customs, I thought I'd be clever. I wore my trainers. I'd still have to take off the jacket and belt and empty my pockets, but at least the trainers would be alright. But the trainers were not alright. The trainers had to be removed and sent sailing off in their own tray over the rollers of the X-ray machine, while a man informed me he intended to "search the inside of my waistband", nudging my cock with his knuckle three times. He found very little in the way of explosives. 

This time, I thought fuck it - I'll wear my walking boots. I'll have to take my shoes off whatever I wore so I might as well wear my most comfortable footwear. We snake through customs, and spend minutes separating the stuck together trays and I pull off my jacket, my belt, throw in my wallet and keys, and brace myself against the treadmill pulling at the laces of my boots. 

"What are you doing?" says the customs guy. 

"Taking off my boots."

"You got steel caps in them?"

"No."

He shoots me a look of such withing contempt that my usually non-withering parts wither, while my actively withering parts begin to shrivel. 

"If you don't have steel caps you dont have to take them off, do you?"

I don't know, I think. I just don't know. Because you are not consistent. You fuckers used to swab my belt. Now no one swabs my belt. Last time trainers were de trop but this time massive hiking boots with metal clasps all over them are A-OK. There's no science here, no method, it's whatever we can make them do next. This is the Stanford Prison Experiment with paradoxical undressing thrown in. I will never understand how we allowed the sexy, glamorous world of international flight, the fucking jet set, to become this off-white charabanc of the skies, staffed by the On The Buses crew: jobsworth, mardy customs officials, browbeaten baggage handlers, curvy cabin crew, all good, low rent fun, an office party in the air. So seedy and down at heel. The smell of hot wire and Bakelite. Black dust on white plastic. Thin grey carpets cut into squares. It cheapens us all. No wonder truly wealthy people, like Rishi Sunak, go everywhere by private jet at the nation's expense, though probably not for much longer. 

We're on the plane. A girl who can barely walk gets on. She has a carer who looks no older than she does but is a consummate professional. He wears a jacket with "My Girlfriend is a Swiftie" written on it, and she is presumably heading for a Tay Tay concert. The plane goes through its motions and we get as far as the safety instructions and we're gearing to take off when the captain makes an announcement. One of the passengers is too unwell to fly today and is going to leave the plane before take-off. We all know who it is. She will not be seeing Taylor Swift. She needed a ramp to get on the plane and so the ramp has to be located and affixed. Her baggage has to be found in the hold. The cabin crew have to check the bags in the overhead lockers to make sure she isn't some sort of shy suicide bomber. It's an hour and a half before the checks are made and a new flight window is secured. No one on the plane complains. We've all seen the horrific effort the girl put into shuffling from the ramp to the seat, how much she must have wanted to do this to put herself through it all. It must have broken her heart to have had to admit defeat, to get that far and realise she can go no further. Her stoic boyfriend, the picture of dignified duty, mature beyond his years and dealing with feelings I wouldn't have been able to process at his age. They're both so young. It's heartbreaking. I hope somehow she gets a shout out from Taylor Swift. THAT is a fan. 

Cambridge things: 

It turns out I know nothing about Cambridge at all. I spent two years here, but appear to have gone only to the college, to the union bar, to my shared flat and to the Bosphorus Take-away. The Grafton Centre was the farthest point on my compass. And that's a shame because its beautiful, a city made for people watching: vivid and varied and enclosed within ancient architecture, a gargoyle glaring from every gutter. But it wasn't like this, for me, thirty years ago. In my memory of Cambridge it was always a cold, bright spring day. Everything was grey and brown. I had no money. Once a week I would trek to a public phone box where my mum would ring and ask me why I sounded like Jack Dee. Proper Cambridge students would bicycle past, scarves trailing, granny glasses white discs burned into their skulls, complexions like raspberry yogurt. Now, in summer, Cambridge is a carnival, full of movement and colour, of handfuls of street food, gangs of Japanese tourists clogging the city's arteries like MSG, while people on bikes and e-scooters take on the traffic in an endless game of chicken. These are coiling medieval streets, built for horses, carts and doughty yeomen, now catering exclusively to the largest cars in the world. You don't need cars that big, guys. You're not moving house. You're not living in them. Are you? Shit. How longs that been going on? So sorry...

The students look very different now. Beautiful girls in mini-skirts cycle through the streets, the spear-mint flash of their gussets winking at you as they race past. It definitely wasn't like that in my day. There was no body positivity then. We weren't positive we even had bodies. 

Even the train station has changed. I remember leaving it and making the long featureless journey into town dragging an art folder I could barely lift, on bleachy, bleary overcast mornings, the sunlight soupy as soap water. Now there's a piazza with pubs, restaurants and supermarkets and buzzing, colourful life is everywhere. Hen parties congeal on the pavements, pink plastic melting in the sun. A woman stands in the square, one arm raised, a vape billowing at her lips, while a friend applies fake tan to her armpit. She sees no reason to be embarrassed.

Two very young girls who look like competitors in American child beauty pageants, in lush Irish dancer curls and bare feet, are squired round town by an impish bollock of a boy, all of twelve years old, with wet-look hair gel and need to impress them. He does this by smashing an abandoned pint of beer on the pavement and, at one point, trying to get on the back of an old man's bicycle as he's waiting at traffic lights. The man just looks confused, turning to find a grinning Arseful Dodger squatting for a lark on his mudguard. "What are you doing?" he asks, "Just fuck off will you?" The boy did fuck off, beaming at his own hilarity, as though his stock were now sky-high with the two porn babies. But they were now some way down the road, and showed no indication of noticing any of his funtacular monkeyshines. 

We go to the Baron of Beef, a tiny pilgrimage of sorts as this is a pub Douglas Adams frequented and I'm something of a fan. But our trip has coincided with the European Cup and the Baron of Beef is full of ruddy-cheeked gentlemen screaming at plasma screens which scream back at them. Once again football culture blights my life. We go back the next day before the football has started and it's...fine. No photos of Douglas anywhere, despite the fact he filmed part of his South Bank Show here. Don't know why you bothered, Doug. It's not all that. 

My brother Edward and his family come down from Hitchin to see us and somehow, despite being fairly certain that I would never in my life go punting on the Cam, I find myself punting on the Cam. Edward's son, Henry, has already found himself a straw boater in Cambridge market - it's a Buster Keaton hat - one of his obsessions is Buster Keaton - and is keen to test his punting skills. Henry is a slight, nine year old boy and disregards the pole completely, rowing with the single oar supplied with the grit and tenacity of a white water rafter. He is still, however, a slight nine year old boy and we nearly took down the Mathematical bridge at one point. It was all oddly jolly. Even though we were, at times, drifting sideways across the river, the pro-punters, posh and blonde and well-made, a flotilla of Fogles, were very nice about it, spouting their random historical facts while steering gently around us and letting us slip into their wake. One of them even fell in the water, so I no longer felt obliged to. It was a load off. 

Henry is keen on haunted pubs - an interest his father has been fanning for some years now - and we fell into The Eagle, a 17th Century pub where the discovery of DNA was celebrated by Watson and Crick, and which is graffitied, in the RAF bar, by the signatures of hundreds of WW2 Airmen. Its ghost is pretty grim. Towards the garden is a window that can never be closed. If it is shut the pub becomes airless, people start to choke, objects move of their own volition, things smash. The story is that three hundred years ago three children were burnt to death in the pub and the open window allows their spirits to...er...go in and out. Too little too late you might think, but you'd be wrong as nobody suffocated at our table. Oh yes, with the luck of Henry, we got a table in a Cambridge pub on a Saturday afternoon while the European Cup was on. The spirits were with him. The Eagle far outstripped the Baron of Beef, it was larger, louder, friendly and had Leffe on tap. A dream pub, Orwell's Moon Under The Water. And not the only one. An abortive attempt to get Kettle's Yard was thwarted by a private view, so we wandered around the corner to the most idyllic pub, called The Punter. It had all the things I required: it was empty, it was staffed by posh blondes, it was full of weird nooks and crannies, and strange art clung to the walls like gaudy moths. The beer was absolutely fine. I took photos. I can't share the photos here to break up the endless text as my phone no longer appears to work. You'll have to take my word for it - it was gorgeous. I miss English pubs. Sorry, Norn. No. Just no. 

We find a delicious bar called The Oratory. It has it all: a big, quiet garden, delicious beer, umbrellas (it's very hot) and big, friendly dogs for Henry. A few beers in, I decide to have a wee. As I enter the gents I hear the most apocalyptic fart clattering off the tiles. It's like a jet taking off. My teeth rattle. There is one man in the room, poised over the porcelain. He looks quite alarmed that someone else has entered the room. I don't mean to but I start to laugh. I try and hold the laugh inside, but it will not be contained. My shoulders roll, my eyes water, I bend over the porcelain, my beery flow stopping and starting. The man at the next urinal burns with anxiety. I can feel it. And, suddenly, he makes a break for it, his piss unpissed, and he's out the door. The SECOND the door closes behind him, there is another volcanic eruption. It comes from the cubicles. There's been someone in there all along. I have misattributed the fart and robbed a man of his piss. 

I start laughing again. 

I spot the man in the garden. He waits a safe period of time and heads back to the toilets. He doesn't look over. 

 

Digs. 

We're staying in a place called Turing Locke. Poor Alan. On top of all the...unpleasantness, he's now the poster boy for, well, everything in Cambridge. If he only knew. But he didn't and he never will. 

Turing Locke is amazing. It's a weird empty community in Eddington, which is a twenty minute bus ride from Cambridge city centre and we never waited more than five minutes for a bus - the U2 - to turn up and bustle you through the glorious English countryside. People I know, and these days I mostly know Northerners and Irish people, have something of a downer on Southern England for some reason. No idea why. Never comes up, because they're both so taciturn about their reasons for disliking Southern England. Wish I could pick that lock. The Scots, they're another one. No idea what their beef is. Won't somebody just let me know? You can remain anonymous if you wish. Just the other day a Northern pal on Facebook posted a kind of relief map of the UK and all the mountains are in Scotland and the North and Wales. Soon everybody was piling onto the Southern English for the relative flatness of the area as if this was some sort of moral degeneracy. We were flat and featureless and dull, not like the Romantic sublimity of our neighbours, with their lofty crags and misty bens and slieves. And fair enough, but nothing, nothing makes me more hungry for home than the rolling hills, the shivering trees, the verdant brilliance of a sun-dappled Southern England, especially glimpsed through a country bus window. England has many problems and is constantly courting fresh disaster, but the countryside makes my heart soar. It's where I'm from and there is nothing like it. Sometimes you don't need drama, Kendall Mint Cake and Air, Sea, Rescue, just trees, fields, twisting pathways, post offices, quiet pubs, and dimpled duck ponds. I may watch Marple films with a sort of jealous hunger, but that England is still there. Just don't talk politics with the locals - they will let you down. 

Back to Turing Locke. It's Alphaville. It's the dead city in The Omega Man. It's a peculiar island of hipster sophistication grafted onto a student campus during summer vac. Our room is large, the bed enormous, there's a separate bathroom and kitchen/living area. There are two cafes and a restaurant on site, plus a Sainsburys, an Argos, a health food shop, masses of public art and probably more recycling opportunities than the whole of Belfast. It's weird. I feel like I'm on holiday in some empty foreign city, like Paris in August when the Parisians all fuck off and all that's left is confused tourists unable to get a fix of Croque Monsieur because Monsieur has croqued off. We love it here. It's so strange. 

The bus drops you right in Silver Street, the dead centre of town. Really Good. 

Party. 

The real reason we're here is my brother Barry's fiftieth birthday party. This being my family, Barry's wife Titi said he definitely didn't want a birthday party, so my sister, Laura, immediately suggested a BBQ at hers, which would in no way be like a party because it would contain a lot of burnt meat. I was told I had to attend as Barry would feel obliged to turn up if I'd made the effort to get on a plane. So Susan and I got on a plane. 

The party, face it guys, it was party, was delightful. There was a ton of meat. The ribs, in particular, were fabulous. My fingernails may never be clean again. Wine and beer was drunk happily - Stewart, Laura's husband played mein host in a Stetson and Hedy Lamarr t-shirt, pouring his expensive wine and giving us the benefit of his many opinions, and intermittently bollocking his son - my nephew Alec, who had spent the night before trapped in a toilet. It was lovely to see all of my sprawling, oddball family. We all like each other. We're lucky. Not every family has that. 

Stanstead Airport, which had been a delight as we drifted through it on arrival, is an APPALLING airport, a sealed drum of shrill, angry consumerism, horribly over-subscribed, with far too little seating and the seating they do have designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. There's a two tier Wetherspoons stuffed to the gills with tanned 'n' tattooed men in shorts in enormous gangs. I never feel further from my fellow man than when I'm forced to confront his existence in an Airport bar in all his flexing panoply. Love bites appear to be fashionable. Lovebites and wet-look gel. The cast of Press Gang would appear to be fashion icons to modern Brutish youth. Well, they would be if they lifted. 

Susan and I, however, are indomitable. We found a restaurant called The Perch which was relatively quiet, rather dignified, had attentive, polite staff and kept the beers coming as we watched the departures board and saw our flight-time sinking further into the night. Another delay. Keep the beers coming. Thank you Perch. An oasis of calm and reasonably priced beverages. It was actually nice, which was why no one was in it. People don't want nice in an airport - they want to sit around in groups of ten with their shirts off shouting. Susan and I beg to differ. 

My phone stopped working, so I can't share any of the photos I took. So I'll stick in a picture of Henry in the Eagle pub in his Buster Keaton boater. No ghosts of burnt children were found. Which is for the best really. Sorry this is so long and without illustrations.