The End of History?

It’s a cold Tuesday morning and I’m hanging around in Colchester with an hour to spare before I can get a bus to the small village of Great Wenham, where I’m due to collect a car to deliver to Peterborough.

I’ve walked up to the castle, on the edge of the town centre, and am looking around the grounds.

Colchester castle dates back to the eleventh century and boasts the largest Norman keep in the country, not so much because of the ambition of the architects but because it was built around an even older building – the Roman temple of Claudius.

The castle was originally four stories high, but the top two are long gone now, not due to the ravages of time or warfare, but due to the actions of a certain John Wheeler, a local businessman who purchased the place from the Crown in 1629 with the sole intention of demolishing it to sell the rubble to local builders. However by the time the upper two stories had been knocked down he had concluded that he would not make a profit from the enterprise after all and abandoned it.

The absence of the top half of the castle did not prevent the Royalists from holing up there for a twelve week siege during the civil war, in 1648. A small obelisk now marks the spot where their generals were executed following their surrender to the Parliamentarians.

Three years earlier, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General himself, had also concluded that there was enough of the building left for him to make use of as a prison in which to hold and interrogate suspected witches. Anyone who has seen the classic 1968 film starring Vincent Price, then in his fifties, might be surprised to learn that Hopkins was only twenty five when he began his witch hunting career. He died just two years later in uncertain circumstances, by which time he and his partner John Stearne had been responsible for the deaths of twenty three women. In a strange echo of modern times, Hopkins’ interrogations were hampered by the fact that torture was unlawful, meaning that he had to resort to such tactics as sleep deprivation and the ’swimming test’ which involved determining whether the suspect would sink or float in holy water.

The castle was acquired by the local council in the 1930s and went through various restoration and repair projects to arrive at its present state. Now that it is considered part of our national heritage and worthy of preservation, it’s easy to think that this must place a full stop at the end of its history, but who knows? Maybe sooner or later someone else with big ideas will get hold of it again for better or worse.

Every Little Helps

It’s shortly before eleven in the morning and I’m standing on the platform of Newtown station, in mid-Wales, feeling out of breath and unhappy. About three minutes ago, a train left for Shrewsbury. I was not on it, thanks to Tesco. They are building a new store nearby and the resulting roadworks have virtually gridlocked the main roads into and out of the town.

This delayed my delivery of a brand new Mercedes van to an energy company about a mile from here. One of the guys who worked there offered to give me a lift to the station, but the idea was abandoned by mutual consent when it became clear that I would be quicker walking, although not quite quick enough as it turns out, despite jogging the last five hundred yards. The next train is not for another two hours so I set off to find something to do here to distract myself from my perception of being the unluckiest man in the world ever.

Opposite the station is a Somerfield, and half a mile up the road is a Morrisons. Why is there such a need for a third supermarket that the whole town has to grind to a halt in order to facilitate its arrival?

I wander around for a while, through the town centre and then along the river Severn. In pathless corners of a large empty park I find a big old owl carved from a tree stump, its face now badly damaged,

and a stone circle centred around a raised slab of about the right size and elevation to sacrifice an animal on.

I then head back to investigate a department store I noticed earlier near the station – Pryce Jones – which describes itself as the largest department store in mid-Wales, and is housed in an old ornate brick building. I saw it as soon as I walked out of the station, but avoided going in. The problem is that even though I resent the increasing dominance of the chain stores, the more of them there are around the more the few remaining independent stores just seem strange and anachronistic – unknown quantities to be avoided.

But I still have an hour to spare and have now developed a principled desire to look inside the place. The interior is a strange mixture of forlorn, faded glamour and cheap, poundshop cheerfulness. On the ground floor they sell biscuits, crisps, pop, canned food, cd cases, clothing and any number of other odds and ends.  On one shelf are dvd players still in their original Woolworths boxes. In a space on the floor lies a pallet loaded up with bags of sugar and surrounded by a white dusting of spillage.

There is a cafe on the first floor and so I head up there. On the landing is a large stained glass window with a royal crest and an inscription saying that the store is patronised by her Majesty herself. I wonder how long it is since her last visit. A hole in the top corner of the glass has been crudely covered over with card. Almost all the customers now seem to be working class women.

I could probably find more things that I wanted or needed in a single aisle of Tesco, but I like the oddness of this place, and the way it has obviously re-invented itself to remove all traces of refinement and gentility.

The cafe is tucked away to the side of the furniture section and in contrast to the rest of the store is spotless. There is only one other guy there, who I recognise as having arrived at the station just after me, sprinting from his car only to find that his fate was the same as mine, for the same reason.

I like the small wooden flowers in vases on the cafe tables, and the smiling relaxed staff. I was intending to just have coffee, but feel that I ought to do something more to show my support for the place’s continued existence. I end up ordering scrambled egg on toast and a cream cake as well, which is perhaps not the most overt or inspiring display of solidarity ever, but better than nothing.

Strange Addiction

It’s a cold clear Wednesday morning and I’m on a train home from Stafford, where I delivered a Vauxhall Astra an hour or so ago to an Arnold Clark dealership on the edge of the town. I’m in a glum frame of mind following a disagreement with my controller over traveling expenses, which has led to me turning down the only other job they had offered me today.

The train pulls into Wolverhampton and a couple of  middle-aged guys get on board. They are casually dressed, bordering on scruffy. One is white, the other looks Indian, although he talks with the same Black Country accent as his friend, with not the slightest trace of any other influence.

‘Turns your legs to jelly,’ the Indian-looking guy says, continuing a conversation begun before they arrived within range of my eavesdropping ears, ‘you just want to get somewhere safe to sit down, but you have to keep going to the toilet, you drink a lot of fruit juice with it. You’re walking to the toilet and you’re thinking “Am I walking straight?”‘

His friend laughs – ‘Sounds good to me!’

‘Does to me too but I’m am addict!’

More chuckles.

Addicted to what? I strain to hear more, but once the train is moving again I can only pick up the odd snippet.

‘I’ve been along to that Horizons walk-in centre, but they can’t do nothing for you, it’s not classed as a drug.’

He goes on to say something about the YMCA which I can’t catch, and then the conversation moves on to other thing – football, drinking, ex-girlfriends, marriages, divorces – just about every stereotypical bloke topic is covered in a way which seems to give no hint that they are anything other than a couple of everyday working class guys.

We are not far from New Street when the apparent addict begins talking about fishing -

‘I found this great little spot on the canal, up past Four Ashes. And there was a sub-post office just round the corner! Great days!’

His laughter has that hint of bravado of someone who knows they are doing something ‘bad’.

Can his mysterious drug of choice be bought in a post office? Glue perhaps? But surely solvent abuse is classed as a drug problem? Marker pens? It must be something as odd as that.

The train pulls into New Street, the final destination, and we all disembark. They walk along the platform in front of me, still smiling and joking about something or other, and looking generally more carefree than most of the other morning commuters, whatever they might be hooked on and whatever they are up to.

Golden Oldie

It’s a wet Wednesday morning and I’m in the small town of Shaftesbury in Dorset, waiting for a bus to Salisbury.

I’d never heard of Shaftesbury until yesterday when I was told I would be delivering a car here. As I drove into the town earlier a large sign proclaimed it to be ‘The Home of Gold Hill.’ I’ve never heard of that either.

From the bus stop I can see a pedestrian signpost at the side of the town hall, indicating the way to this apparently famous hill. I have a few minutes to spare before the bus arrives so I follow the sign down a narrow cobbled alleyway which brings me to the top of a steep cobbled street, ridiculously picturesque and devoid of people or vehicles.

It is less than a hundred yards from the town centre and yet the place is so deserted that for a moment I wonder if it is private property. But there are no signs to confirm this so I walk down to the bottom and then back up again, still without seeing another soul.

If you’re older than about thirty you will have seen this view before, although you might not immediately recognise it. It is the setting for the black and white Hovis advert with the kid pushing the bike up the hill.

While looking this up I came across a couple of improbable facts. Firstly, the advert was recently voted the nation’s all-time favourite, and secondly it was directed by Ridley Scott, the guy responsible for Alien and Blade Runner amongst other things.

Personally I think the advert could have been enlivened by an alien bursting out of a doorway and chasing the kid back down the hill. It might still have had a chance of being voted the nation’s favourite, although not by the same people.

Where Was I?

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m at my flat sorting through some old maps as part of a general clear out.

In the years between the dawn of the internet and the arrival of satnavs I used to print out reams of one-page maps from Multimap or Google, covering anywhere I needed to be the next day which wasn’t already covered by my shelf of street atlases.

I’ve been hoarding these ever since with the vague idea that they might one day become aids to my appalling memory – I could look back at them in later years and be able to recall those days and places again.

One of the pages catches my eye now as the ink is so smeared and splattered by rain that many of the street names are illegible. I can make out Thornaby Road – a red line running north to south – so I guess I was somewhere in Teeside, a part of the country I very rarely go to. Wherever I was heading for I must have got absolutely drenched on the way. And yet neither of these unusual circumstances are enough to stir even the slightest recollection of that day, however much I stare at the crumpled paper.

Maybe my pile of would-be memories will turn out to provide only another demonstration of my inability to recall anything much about anything much.

I think I’ll keep them anyway.

Silenced

The train pulls away from Erdington station and I look up from my scavenged copy of the Metro to see where the music is suddenly coming from.

She makes her way along the half-full carriage and then takes a seat opposite me. She looks about twenty and is wearing jeans and a white tracksuit top, with her hair pulled back in an aggressively tight ponytail. Her phone is in her hand, blaring out tinny dance music of such painfully poor sound quality that it would be unpleasant even if I liked that kind of thing.

I look up at the sticker on the carriage window and then look at her. Our eyes meet and I can see that she is ready for me, and defiant.
I know I won’t win but I still feel obliged to say –

‘This is the Quiet Zone you know.’

‘Well shut the fuck up then,’ she replies.

And I do.

This story first appeared in the online magazine Birmingham Words in 2007

Not Keeping up Appearances

It’s early afternoon on Monday and I’m in the village of Caersws in mid-Wales, waiting for a bus to Llandidloes where I’m due to collect a car from a dealership.

I’m passing the time trying to guess whether the pub opposite me, The Buck Hotel, has closed down. There are no metal shutters on the windows but in general it looks as though nobody has paid it much attention for some time. The paint is peeling badly from the black window frames. Running just below the roof there is string of small decorative red and blue lights, looking suspiciously like they may have been there since last Christmas. On the ground at the front a long trough contains a flowerbed which has long since turned feral – a mass of unidentifiable plants and weeds tumbling over the edges. In the midst of the unruly crowd a single small red flower stands out.

A white Somerfield carrier bag, blowing by on the wind, flattens itself against the plants at the end of the flowerbed but does not succeed in making the place look noticeably more run down. It lingers for a few moments and then darts away again, as if it has spotted somewhere where it has more chance of making a difference.

Between the front doors and the pavement there are a couple of wooden tables of the variety that have the bench seats built onto them. The fact that these tables are not bolted to the ground, and are still here, finally makes me decide that the place must still be in business

It would be easy to write some disparaging conclusions about The Buck, or to make a big poignant deal out of the solitary red flower. But the truth is I don’t mind places like this, where appearances are clearly not a priority, provided there is no air of menace to the dilapidation.

I would always rather be somewhere untidy than somewhere which is just too neat. If nothing is out of place then you are the thing that is out of place.

All I would change about the pub would be to add a sign in the window to let people know that they had not gone bust, something along the lines of -

‘Yes, we are still open, we’re just not that bothered.’

The Art of Unnecessary Innovation

Yesterday I collected a Lexus IS 220 from a compound near Coventry to take home for the night and then deliver to a dealership in Oldbury this morning. I had never driven this model before and when I was handed the key I realised, with a certain sinking feeling, that it was not a key at all, just a small black plastic fob.

There are several makes of car nowadays that have ‘keyless’ ignition systems. Some require the fob to be fitted into a slot in the dashboard somewhere, before a button can be pressed to start the engine. Some will not let you start the engine at all unless you have your foot on the clutch, or the brake pedal. Others will only start if you press the button for the right length of time – press it for too long and you will instigate an ‘instrument check’, which involves a few seconds of flashing lights and messages on the dashboard before the whole thing goes dark again. The only thing that all of these systems have in common is that even when you have figured out exactly what hoops you have to jump through in order to start the vehicle it will never be any quicker or easier than just putting a key in the ignition and then turning it.

(In case you’re wondering, the combination for the Lexus turned out to be a foot on the clutch and then one quick press of the start button.)

It’s hard not to think that there are a lot of people employed in car design these days who have run out of ideas for making genuine improvements and who have resorted to endless tinkering and tampering instead in the hope that their superiors might not realise that they are no longer performing any useful function.

I recently picked up a vehicle, whose make I can no longer remember, and was driving through Birmingham with my bag on the passenger seat. At one point, as I rounded a bend, my bag moved slightly. This caused a hidden sensor somewhere to deduce that my bag was a living, breathing passenger, who ought to be wearing a seat belt. This in turn set off a flashing red light on the dashboard and a loud continuous pinging. There was nowhere to pull over and so the only way to stop the alarm was to reach across, while driving, and fasten a seat belt around an inanimate object.

I wonder if this uber-safety measure has yet resulted in anyone becoming safely embedded in the front of an oncoming vehicle.

On another occasion I was driving north to Scotland along the M6. It was very early in the morning and the road were deserted. Let’s just say I may have been traveling in excess of 70mph. In the distance I spotted a police patrol car on a bridge and immediately braked hard, hoping that I had slowed down quickly enough to be able to glide inconspicuously past the officers. But the car turned out to contain an on-board nanny which had other ideas. It decided that everyone in the vicinity needed to be aware of how sharply I had braked, and automatically put on the hazard warning lights. By the time I had realised what had happened, and then found the button to turn them off again, the bridge with the patrol car on it was already in my rear view mirror.

Yesterday, I arrived home with the Lexus, pressed the button on the fob to lock it, and nothing happened. I tried pressing the button just once, then double-clicking it and then holding it down, and yet the vehicle remained resolutely unlocked. I eventually concluded that since there was nothing of value in there and no visible buttons on the doors to show that they were open, I didn’t really need to solve the mystery and left it unlocked.

I returned to it this morning to find that it would not start – the battery was drained to the point where even the dash lights would not come on. The AA man who eventually arrived to jump-start it suggested that it had probably been picking up a signal from the fob in the house and that this all-night communication had been enough to run the battery down.

Of course there are ways around all of these pointless innovations – make sure you always put a seat belt around anything on the passenger seat, and make sure you know where the hazard warning light switch is. And, if you are determined to buy a Lexus IS 220, all you have to do is buy another car as well so that you can transport the fob to another address a safe distance away every night and then retrieve it in the morning. Just make sure this extra car isn’t also a Lexus, otherwise the process will never end.

The Strange World of Forex

The wage I get for working as a trade plater varies a lot depending on how many vehicles I deliver and how many miles I drive, but generally it ranges from adequate to abysmal. For a while now I’ve been doing other bits and pieces to top up my earnings. Recently, the main one of these extra-curricular activities has been ‘matched betting’, a system by which you take advantage of the free bets and other bonuses that bookmakers offer as incentives to open an account with them. There are ways of guaranteeing yourself a profit from these regardless of the outcome of the events that you bet on. The only problem with this is that you eventually start to run out of new bookmakers to sign up with (I now have accounts with over fifty of them.)

As a possible replacement for this I have been learning about spread betting on the foreign exchange markets (forex). This basically involves betting on whether the pound will rise or fall in value against another currency. For each point that it moves in your chosen direction you win a certain amount, and for each point that it moves in the other direction you lose that same amount.

I know nothing about economics, and whilst researching forex I’ve come across some odd facts. Did you know that seventy percent of Britain’s Gross Domestic Product now comes from ’servicing’ ? I’m still not sure exactly what this means but we are clearly no longer a nation that spends much time making anything anymore.

On an average day over three trillion dollars is traded in forex – more than twenty times the total of all the other financial markets put together. Here’s another odd fact – ninety percent of this trading is not done by institutions or individuals who have any use for the currency they are buying or selling, instead it is pure speculation. And another – most of this speculative trading is not carried out by human beings but is executed automatically by ‘bots’ – software which analyses previous price movements and then predicts future ones.

With stocks and shares it’s possible for the big traders, hedge funds etc, to influence prices to suit their own ends, but this cannot be done with forex, the market is just too large. This lack of control makes it more likely that exchange rates will move up and down in recognisable patterns making it possible, apparently, to consistently make money if you adopt a system that suits the currencies and timeframes you are trading in.

So, if it’s that easy why isn’t everyone doing it? Most likely it will turn out not to be that easy. But on the other hand there clearly are a lot of people already doing it. It’s worth noting that even in the ‘mugs game’ of conventional gambling there are systems such as arbitrage and each-way thieving which are reliable enough in the long run that if a bookmaker realises what you are doing they will usually pay you the compliment of closing your account.

There is a part of me that wants this plan to work well enough for me to be able to give up plating and be free from the downsides of the job – the stress of dealing with my stressed-out controller, a vindictive public transport system, those staff at car dealerships who save their charm for the people who might want to buy something from them, and those middle class homeowners who can’t wait to ask me for some identification when I arrive on their doorsteps to collect their vehicles.

Imagine if I could make a living just sitting at home trading currencies? I would never have to pretend to like anyone again.

But as a former know-it-all left wing activist there is also a part of me that is uneasy about the idea of making money without actually doing anything to earn it. And where would the money really come from? If I made £100 in the forex markets would I have won it from some other speculator who made the wrong guess, or does the whole of this great tide of speculation have some wider impact? Would I be a smart gambler or a small time capitalist?

But anyway, all I’ve achieved in three months of trading with a demo account is to lose one hundred and ten pretend pounds, so maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about the moral dilemmas of joining the idle rich just yet.

One Down

‘C_n_i_e.’

‘A fitting farewell. It’s a trick, with one plus one plus one minus zero (7).’

Bloody crosswords. Why does she have to make one clue impossible so you can never finish the things? It only took me half an hour to do all the rest of it, and now I’ve sat here for another half hour just trying to figure out this last one. Who does she think she is, the compiler for the Sunday Times or something? It’s only for the bloody parish gazette. What’s the point of making a clue so hard that none of the handful of our fellow pensioners who actually bother to look at the thing will be able to do it? She’s most likely just showing off.

I stare at the hand-drawn puzzle, rattling through the short list of words I can think of that fit there, and trying yet again to see how any of them might have a connection with the clue.

If she gets back from that witches’ coven of a book group and sees that I haven’t finished it then she’ll have won a petty victory over me. Well let her have it, I can’t be bothered anymore.

I toss the piece of paper onto the coffee table, next to the half-eaten plate of sausage egg and chips that has long since turned stone cold. I pick up the fork, idly skewer a piece of sausage with it, and then hold it up to watch a blob of fat drip slowly off the end. I put it back down with a sigh. On the other side of the table lurks a glass of my horrendous damson wine. I only drink the wretched stuff out of principle. I started making it with the idea of getting something for nothing, ‘owt for nowt’ as my old dad used to say, and now that it’s ready I feel I ought to get through it, otherwise the end result will be nothing for something – all that effort for no return, and as a Yorkshireman it’s not in my blood to accept such a thing. But at the moment the thought of it seems to make my stomach wince.

I pick up the remote from the arm of the sofa and switch the TV on. Antiques Roadshow! I had forgotten all about it. This is more like it! I settle back into the sofa and relax. I could watch this programme every day for ten years and still learn nothing, but for me that’s not the point. I love the enthusiasm of the team, and the etiquette with which the show is conducted. That is how life should be. None of those charming people will go home tonight and find themselves sitting on a threadbare sofa, picking at cold food, drinking nasty wine, and gazing at the TV over the top of their propped up feet, with one toe sticking out of an undarned sock.
On the screen an elderly couple are being told that their collection of garish clay pots, made by a long-deceased distant relative, should be insured for around two thousand pounds. They beam at each other and nod their thanks to the sagacious man in the tweed suit and red bow tie.

When was the last time we looked at each other like that? When was the last time we really looked at each other at all? Silence and sniping are the ways we communicate nowadays – everything else has withered away after thirty-nine years. Like that old joke goes, I could have killed her and been out by now. Could have killed her maybe three times over. That woman has been a millstone around my bloody neck.

I think I’m as fair-minded as the next man, but sometimes it seems to me that the world was a more sensible place before womens’ lib. came along. These days every woman must have the right to try and upstage and belittle her husband at every opportunity.

‘C_n_i_e.’ What the hell is it?

But then again, what is the point in fretting? We are both too long in the tooth to change our ways now. This is how things will be until one or the other of us pops our clogs. Probably me.

Lord, how I depress myself sometimes! I brace myself and then pick up the wine glass and knock the contents back. It leaves a coating on the inside of my mouth that feels as if it could take the skin off. I decide that I’d better have a glass of water to wash it down with and so I heave myself up and head for the kitchen. As I’m returning there is the sound of footsteps on our gravel driveway. About time! She must have been gassing to her cronies again. But the letterbox flaps once and then the footsteps recede. I frown and make my way to the hallway to find that there is a glossy leaflet awaiting me, extolling the virtues of a new pizza delivery firm. I drop it back onto the floor and return to the sofa. The last one of those we tried had so little flavour that we may as well have eaten the bloody leaflet instead. What a con!

Con?

The word rings a bell somewhere in my head. Yes, of course! That could very well be the ‘trick’ part of the clue!

I pick up the sheet again and see what progress this makes. If the first part is ‘con’ then the whole thing probably means ‘a fitting farewell’, while the last four letters somehow signify ‘one plus one plus one minus zero.’ A standard clue for the letter ‘i’ is ‘one’, as in Roman numerals, so that is probably one ‘one’ taken care of.

‘Con_i_e.’

Confine? Confide? What kind of farewell begins with ‘con’? I wouldn’t put it past her to use Latin or some other foreign language. Au revoir? Adios? Auf wiedersehen? Nothing even close. I stare across the room at the tattered old dictionary sitting heavy on the bookshelf. Can I be bothered? No – there must be hundreds of words beginning with ‘con’.

On the TV a middle-aged gentleman is having his collection of distinctive walking sticks examined. He has about two hundred of the things. Whoever would have thought there would be so many different types worth collecting? He owns one ancient stick which has a gargoyle’s head on top of it, and which was apparently once owned by royalty.

But I can’t concentrate. That damned clue has wormed its way into my brain. I’m so close now; all I have to do is get the dictionary and start ploughing through the ‘con’s and sooner or later I’ll have the answer, and then the victory will be mine.

The gentleman is being told that his collection could be worth up to six thousand pounds. Six bloody grand! I look at my own plain old stick propped up in the corner and sigh as I get up to fetch the dictionary.

I pull it down from its perch, find the ‘con’s, and then begin to scan through for any that are seven letters long, ending in ‘e’. The first possibility is ‘concise’. This can also mean pertinent, and could therefore perhaps be the ‘fitting’ part of the clue, but there is nothing that could be interpreted as meaning farewell.

Next comes ‘confide’ and ‘confine’, which are similarly unhelpful. Then after a couple more pages I find the odd-looking ‘coniine’. The double ‘i’ leaps out at me straightaway – ‘one plus one’. And the ‘ne’ on the end could be ‘one’ minus ‘o’. But how is this ‘a fitting farewell’?

The definition is: ‘n a liquid, highly poisonous alkaloid found in hemlock (Conium). – Also conia, conine or conin. [Gr koneion hemlock]‘

I can’t see a connection there, and yet the rest of it seems to fit so well. I ponder over this for a minute and then throw the crossword down again in frustration. I’ve had enough of the bloody thing. The silly old mare has probably made a mistake anyway.

I stand up to put the dictionary away, but find that I have to sit straight back down again, my head is spinning and I am suddenly short of breath. What on earth is going on? My mind starts to race.

Should I phone a doctor?

Could I even get to the phone?

Maybe I should give it a minute. Maybe it will pass.

But the panic just seems to make my breath grow shorter still.

I look up at the clock. Twenty past seven! Where the hell is that bloody woman?

This story was short-listed for the Fish International Short Story Prize in 2005, and appeared in Raw Edge magazine in 2007