Tales from the Lightside 2: Braved New World

First published Tuesday, 22 February 2011

BRAVED NEW WORLD

It is two o’clock in the morning when my son Tom abruptly begins packing for our impending foray across the border to attend an Applicant Open Day at Leeds Metropolitan University.
‘Do you think I should take three pairs of jeans?’ he asks me.
‘Eh? We’re only going for two nights!’
‘They’re forecasting heavy rain and I don‘t want to be walking about in wet clothes.’ he answers.
‘We’re going to England’ I tell him, ‘what they call rain - even the ‘heavy’ variety - isn’t properly wet, and we’ll be indoors most of the time anyway. Trust me, one pair will be plenty.’

Once he finally turns in and the house is quiet enough for me to think straight I throw a couple of T-shirts, some underwear and a toothbrush into my rucksack and crawl off to bed for three hours’ uneasy sleep before we hit the road. I drift into unconsciousness trying to count how many years have passed since I last visited England and realize with some shock that it must be at least ten.

Mornings have never been my thing, so when elderly Taxi Dai beeps frenziedly outside my gate an irritating ten minutes earlier than booked I rush out, forgetting my scarf in flustered panic and with only one eye fully made up and my open bag spilling most of its contents onto the road. As I struggle to negotiate the knot of seatbelts in the back seat of his tiny car, Dai casts a scathing glance over the horrible two-story house being constructed directly opposite mine. Our once breathtaking view across the sharply sloping field to the mountains beyond has now been completely blocked by a grey-black building so enormous that even though the ground floor starts a good fifteen foot below the level of the road outside my home, it effectively fills the view from every window at the front.

‘That’s a blo-o-ody monstrosity, that is’ he sniffs in dour disapproval. ‘Bad site for damp down there too. Never build a house in a hole, I always say!‘

We trundle down the lane and while I’m wondering how frequently he’s needed to issue this particular piece of advice and how often anyone has abandoned their hole-dwelling building plans to follow it, Dai announces that we’re in for a dirty weekend. Since there‘s something indefinably unsavoury about Dai at the best of times I can‘t help feeling a little concerned at this news. ‘Heavy rain and strong winds’ he continues, ‘absolutely filthy it’ll be’. We converse about the general awfulness of weather - past, present and inevitably worsening into the grim future - for the rest of the four-minute journey into town and by the time we clamber out at the station I’m feeling like maybe three pairs of jeans would have been a wise precaution after all. Tom and I settle into the fuggy two-carriage train which will take us from the mountains to the coast, plug earphones into our mobiles and wake up slowly and privately over the following hour to the soothing regulation of pounding techno.

Our connecting train at the Junction is a forty-five minute wait, but Tom informs me that if we run up the steps, along the bridge, down the steps on the other side and collect the-tickets-we-ordered-on-the-internet from the machine at the top of platform two, we might just be able to catch an earlier one purposely scheduled to depart exactly thirty seconds before our current train pulls in. I’m up for the challenge, so as our train ambles into the station we gather our wits and belongings to stand braced at the rubbery doorway, our jaws grimly set for battle. As soon as the automatic doors allow, we punch them open and - trying not to overturn our fellow travellers - stampede up the steps, along the bridge and down the steps on the other side to collect the-tickets-Tom-ordered-on-the-internet from the machine at the top of Platform Two. I’ve never seen one of these machines before and therefore watch very carefully as Tom jabs in the wrong reference number several times in quick succession, uses a different bank card to the one he ordered the tickets with and consequently has to repeat the entire procedure five times before said machine begrudgingly burps up the tickets. 

 

A few rather sweary minutes later we arrive hare-eyed and panting on the platform for the skin-of-your-teeth train only to discover it hasn’t even arrived yet. When it eventually pulls in we plonk ourselves into a couple of reserved seats (on the agreed pre-condition that neither of us will put up an embarrassing defence should their rightful owners arrive to claim them) and delight in buying such copious quantities of tea from the passing trolley that the shy lady opposite us gets an attack of the giggles and chokes on her Dundee Slice, apologetically showering us with crumbs.

As part of his current Music Technology course, Tom needs to design a CD album cover for the music he’s written, so at Warrington Bank Quay I whip out my phone and we take a lot of snaps through the murky train window of the sprawling Unilever manufacturing plant which borders the station. Our fellow passengers are clearly perplexed: why on earth would someone want to photograph such a horror?  ’We live up in the Welsh mountains’ I explain ’so sights like this are unusual to us, and in their way, quite beautiful.’ Faces around us light up with sudden insight…I can see them looking anew at the hideous complex through our primitive, untainted eyes. The Mother-and-Son Savages from the Wilderness become their temporary pets, and they benignly explain to us in simple language what things are. This hilarity continues all the way to Manchester where we step from our cocoon into the bustle of diesel fumes, echoing footfalls and indecipherable tannoy announcements, excited to be back in civilisation after so many years.

My first destination is of course the loo, but our arrival platform seems to be situated in some dimension merely adjacent to the Victorian buildings of the main station and crossing between the two involves traversing an entire wormhole of lifts, bridges, stairs and walkways (including a randomly placed travelator so short it begs the question ‘why bother?’) and at one point we even seem to walk through an empty café suspended twenty feet above the station, although this may have just been an hallucination brought on by culture shock.

The main concourse has changed considerably over the years since I was last there. On all sides I am surrounded by huge electronic billboards entreating me to buy products that will enable me to look more like Cheryl Cole, beneath which are fast-food outlets selling meals which would probably enable me to look more like Susan Boyle. Right in the centre of it all I’m amused to see a Tie Rack stall - still selling the same old tat at extortionate prices - and can only conclude that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, Tie Rack will survive as couturier to the giant mutated cockroaches.

The loos when we finally locate them now cost a hefty 30 pence per visit. Will we be offered a complimentary chocolate-mint while we’re waiting I wonder - and would I actually want one, if we were? We queue to ask for change from a nearby coffee stall only to be directed to a change-machine blatantly displayed beside the loo entrance. Feeling foolish we obtain the necessary coinage and push through the clanking turnstiles with the suspicion of sheep lured to a dip. I’m hoping that these expensive facilities will be superior to the old-string-on-a-cistern, ammonia-scented, floor-flooded efforts of North Wales and am not disappointed. Once inside the windowless twilit world of maroon faux-marble and diffused globular lighting I’m delighted to discover that the loo-flush mechanism, taps, soap dispenser and hand dryer all operate entirely by optic sensors and spend several pleasantly infantile minutes waving my hand at things simply to make them happen. After applying the missing make up to my left eye (having forgotten all about it in the interim) I wander outside to find an equally bedazzled Tom. ‘Wooh!’ I say to him.
‘Wooh!’ he agrees.

We scan the vast array of electronic notice boards for the next departure to Leeds and plough through the crowds toward Platform Three. Tom has yet to acquire his city legs and gets stomped on a fair bit, but we arrive there reasonably intact, all things considered.
‘Leeds?’ I ask the depressed ticket inspector at the barrier.
‘I dunno’ he shrugs, scrutinising my ticket and waving me through.  

Three trains are standing end-to-end alongside the platform, all of them going to different and interesting places, none of which are Leeds as their drivers and conductors confirm with sorrowful shakes of the head. There are no helpful signs, VDUs or boards anywhere and the tannoy is uselessly warbling a dramatic warning about the possibility that outdoor rain might cause the indoor concourse to become perilously slippery, the inference being that if you’re silly enough to go arse over tit in this vicinity, well you were warned in advance, so don’t even think about trying to sue anyone.

The shabby middle aged driver of the central train has squandered most of his lunch break in a futile attempt to pull the tiny Polish girl in charge of the tea trolley and whilst failing to obtain her mobile number he has nonetheless managed to glean that she’ll be working the Leeds train. He therefore suggests that we ‘Follow the trolley dolly.’

I instruct Tom to check with said Dolly if this is the case and am amused to watch her melt into a wreath of smiles as she chats animatedly with him. ‘Yep’ he returns beaming, ‘and she asked me out too.’ Others around us - all equally at a loss - have been quietly monitoring these events, so when Dolly gets a last-minute text informing her which platform the Leeds train will manifest upon and begins to expertly propel her wobbling trolley toward the exit, I fall in behind her teetering red stilettos and an eager crowd forms up neatly in my wake.

Our carriage on the Leeds train is fairly quiet until boarded by a young foreign couple gripping their large and intractably furious infant, by which time it’s too late to move as all of the seats have been occupied. The screeching child displays the rare, back-arching levitation of a cat undergoing intrusive veterinary examination and every so often manages to flip himself out of his mother’s arms altogether and rolls helplessly across the train floor, which doesn’t really make him any happier. His father tries to dodge the brain-curdling mayhem by surreptitiously inching farther down the carriage, his expression indicating that it’s due to a failure in his wife’s maternal skills that his son is such a pain in the backside. Eventually however he is forced to step in as mum is clearly reaching meltdown and could well start screaming and rolling across the floor herself very soon. His paternal solution is to securely restrain the roaring child in a pushchair far too small for him, which he then ties several times over to the upright rail, and the young couple spend the rest of the journey staring out of their respective windows in despairing silence, hating one another, their rainy British lives and bound, recalcitrant offspring in more or less equal measure.

Crossing from Lancashire into Yorkshire brings up powerful emotions in me; despite having left Barnsley forty-two years earlier I feel an overwhelming sense of homecoming. ‘Look, Tom: that’s Saddleworth Moor’ - as its great dark golden curves suddenly expand to fill our window. The student nurse revising leg-bones in the seat opposite looks up from her laptop and gazes out, smiling. ‘It’s always special, isn’t it!’ she says quietly. We English don’t do hiraeth I reflect, but if we did, this probably wouldn’t be too far off.

Disembarking at Leeds, we stop at the Information Centre to ask directions to the out-of-town university campus. A tweedy, square-faced man in square tortoiseshell spectacles carefully annunciates the names of all the roads we must find in order to locate the correct bus for our destination. As we emerge into the open none the wiser, Tom whispers that he thinks - from the happy little clicking sounds the man was making to himself - that our helper was probably mildly Aspergers. I point out that the indicators were even simpler: most people would tell a stranger which large and obvious landmarks to head for.

Despite being barged by aggressive pensioners wielding wheelie-cases made from materials manufactured for the Space Race, Tom takes a determined lead and within moments has skilfully navigated us away from the crowds of exiting passengers and onto a very small concrete island entirely surrounded by twelve lanes of heavy traffic, all whizzing in different directions without a single traffic light or zebra crossing in sight.
‘Oh sh*t’ he says.
‘Is this what you intended?’ I ask helpfully.

He somehow gets us back onto the pavement outside the station from where I’m proudly able to lead us in a mad dash over multiple crossings to a bizarre concrete oasis on the farther side. The newly built plaza upon which we now find ourselves wittily combines the millennial European elegance of a large, sophisticated outdoor restaurant with the gritty Northern realism of lairy, tracky-bottomed Stella-drinkers watching from the surrounding arc of wooden benches, the two echelons being symbolically separated by a cordon of potted palms, waste bins and dribbly half-arsed pavement-fountains; the whole ensemble simmers in the incessant roar and exhaust of passing lorries. I have never been to a place like this before and I can’t really imagine ever wishing to return to one: nothing here gels at any level I can access. The streets have no name and everyone looks like they’re urgently trying to assimilate some item of vaguely disquieting news.

We make our way from the plaza toward a side street lined with tall buildings that cast long afternoon shadows and eventually find a passer-by with enough leisure to direct us to the relevant bus stop which turns out to be just round the corner. Our bus is pulling away as we arrive and the driver ignores my frantic attempts to flag it down, a reaction I‘m not accustomed to since in our part of the world one can stop almost any bus, any time, anywhere (a small one even drove my partner all the way up the winding country lane to our door one night many years ago, just to see where we lived). Deflated, we drop our bags and prepare for a long wait. This is not, however, the Welsh countryside where buses only run every 90 minutes and to our amazement another pulls in within a minute. Our joy knows no bounds and the day is redeemed as we ease into the traffic and observe the uncomfortable mix of Victorian municipal buildings and hideous 1980’s shopping malls yield slowly to the wider vistas of University buildings, parks, tree-lined suburbs and sooty sandstone villas. Many of the grimy gothic chapels we pass have been converted into nightclubs with pseudo-religious puns for names. Maybe in Leeds God really is a DJ.

We disembark at Headingly together with a crowd of students who appear startlingly healthy. Tom explains that this particular campus houses both the sports and the technology faculties, and as the athletes stride ahead of us in a radiant glow of Olympian vigour I glance round and catch reassuring sight of several yellow-toothed pasty geeks staggering along behind us rolling fags and laughing inanely.

The hill we climb is lined by 1930s red-brick semi-detached houses, from whose front gardens blossoming cherry trees shower the pavement with fragrant pink confetti. Blackbirds are singing among the sunlit branches and at the summit a small copse reveals a carpet of scented bluebells. I’m already falling in love with the place and secretly hope that Tom is, too.

The campus consists of a vast grassy quadrangle surrounded by imposing H-shaped Georgian buildings. Set a little behind them is the small block of ultra-modern purpose-built luxury student flats where we’ll be staying for the duration of our visit, which Tom proudly informs me are ‘so energy-efficient they don’t even appear on the National Grid’. The young female receptionist takes an instant shine to Tom and - tossing her hair a lot and ignoring me completely - addresses her entire instructions to him. Since these are issued in gunfire staccato from which I can glean little beyond the fact that our stay there will be far more complicated than it ever needed to be and involves all manner of electronic security, this is probably just as well.

We are then each presented with an A5 envelope - slightly creased from re-use - containing breakfast vouchers, electronic swipe cards for various doors and blobs of black plastic on neck ribbons and are led at a sudden silent jog away from the daylight and down long, bland windowless corridors where pallid bulbs mysteriously illuminate and extinguish themselves as we pass and the conditioned air prickles the nose with unaccustomed chemicals. Thick glass fire-doors meekly submit to a peremptory wave of her plastic card: she glides through them like a priestess and we hurry along in her wake, a flat carpet wrought of some dark, indeterminate modern substance absorbing our thudding footsteps. Having shown us to the doors of our rooms she vanishes back toward the sunlit worlds.

My sense of having entered an open prison is not diminished by the protracted trial-and-error discovery that the lock to my room only yields (with a bleep and the wink of a green light) to a double pass of the tear-shaped plastic fob from my envelope.  The room itself is pleasant enough, in a featureless, artificially air-freshened sort of way. The atmosphere is pervaded by the faint smell of MDF and an indefinable humming noise, just within the threshold of my hearing. It is the same, constant ambient temperature as the rest of the building and - like the corridor outside - the flooring is brownish and the walls that indefinable colour somewhere between lavender, pink, cream and beige: an unnatural hue so utterly calming to the senses that I suspect it was originally devised as an indoor wall covering for the psychiatric wards in Broadmoor.

I am used to preparing holiday accommodation that conveys the country-chic illusion of home comforts to the visitor: bucolic watercolours on the walls, ornate mirrors, an antique vase of dried flowers on a mantelshelf over a painted Victorian fireplace filled with giant fir-cones, a nicely quilted counterpane, that sort of thing. This student room has dispensed entirely with such concessions: there’s a bed, a wardrobe and a large shelf all made from pale pine laminate and a shiny black vinyl office swivel chair. The one redeeming feature is a large triple-glazed window set into the far wall. That it opens onto an earthen bank supporting the perimeter fence of a running track is a shame, but at least between the slatted white blinds I can see a few disintegrating daffodils outside and beyond them a spindly young tree in a cage coming into full leaf against the watery April sky. With some difficulty I hoist the blind up out of the way and eventually manage to prise the window open by the three inches allowed when a small red lever is depressed. Several disembodied ankles dash past on the track above me, accompanied by the sound of desperate panting.

The ensuite bathroom is a tiny, windowless white-tiled cubicle containing a wash-hand basin above which an uglyfying mirror supports a glass shelf holding complementary shower gel smelling of pine disinfectant and a miniature soap that is mostly paraffin wax. High up on the farther wall there’s a fixed showerhead behind a flimsy white plastic curtain that clings nastily to the face of anyone trying to use the adjacent loo.

Having eventually worked out that the knob-less basin taps work by a movement sensor I approach the shower with some trepidation and much experimental hand-waving, but nothing happens. Despite pushing, pulling and swivelling the chrome bar positioned at waist-height beneath it I cannot for the life of me work out how to operate it. A knock at the door a few minutes later informs me that Tom has encountered the same problem. Hearing a cleaner outside, I enlist her help, but surprisingly she doesn’t know either. She summons assistance from one of her colleagues, who - based on the fact that this looks vaguely similar to her shower at home - launches an anticlockwise attack on the chrome bar so aggressive we are drenched in a sudden blast of lukewarm water. Lending her the towel, I back out, hoping I can memorize the technique. The knack, she explains, mopping her hair, is to creep up on it unawares and take it by surprise from underneath. Leaving the bathroom I look in vain for a light switch outside, and finding none allow the door to swing closed…as it does so the light within the empty room switches itself off, like a fridge.

After we’ve unpacked, Tom and I pad up the deserted, softly-humming corridor to the kitchen area at the far end to make ourselves a cup of tea. We are greeted by two massive, spotlessly clean empty fridge-freezers, two immaculate double ovens, two enormous gleaming steel microwaves and two long rows of empty pine-laminate cupboards: not a spoon, cup, saucepan or plate in sight. Tom spies some paper coffee cups with corrugated cardboard sleeves and white plastic lids near the kettle and a further search reveals a jar of flat wooden tapers. We recognise these from our train journey: they are what apparently pass for teaspoons in modern England: horrible, teabag-puncturing environmentally-friendly sticks that are neither use nor ornament. If twig-spoons and cups are here - we reason - tea cannot be far away and deeper investigation turns up some knackered organic fair-trade teabags (do they make them look pre-used on purpose I wonder), a dozen or so individually wrapped micro wafer biscuits and various tiny cellophane tubes, some of which contain coffee, judging from the pleasing crunch when squeezed.

I send Tom to cadge some milk from the receptionist back in the real world and brew us a panad each in the paper cups, whilst eating all the miniscule biscuits. I’m just hiding the evidence of this when he returns looking both amused and faintly embarrassed.
‘The milk is already here’ he announces. ‘See if you can spot it.’
After five minutes’ hopeless groping around I give up.
’Here it is’ he says and pushes a jar toward me filled with black and green polythene tubes slightly larger than drinking straws.
‘No way!‘ I say.
‘Way!‘ he says.
Each little packet (which claims to ’taste just like real milk and uses 50% less plastic than a typical UHT container thus protecting the planet’) contains around half a teaspoon of milk and therefore I need to use around twelve per cup as the opening instructions don’t work on this particular batch, there are no scissors in this shell of a kitchen and since my front teeth don‘t actually meet in a proper ‘bite‘ I‘m forced to side-chew my way into each one, spitting out bits of wrapper and squirting most of its contents down my front in the process. In the other half of the kitchen meanwhile, Tom tries to operate the plasma TV suspended at neck-cricking ceiling height from the room partition, but it’s a generic remote control that continuously defaults to the Shopping Channel and he eventually gives up in disgust, which is probably a good thing since he would have had to lie on the floor to watch it anyway.

We wander back to our rooms and I spend the next half hour peering over Tom’s shoulder at the images on his laptop of the rest of the accommodation available to those studying here. Tom remarks that there seems to be some kind of inverse proportion at play between the pleasantness of the name and the nature of the location, the least expensive halls ‘Sugarwell Court’ being a case in point. Under this logic I instruct him to see if he can find anywhere called ‘Belle End’ as it’s bound to be wonderful and drift back to my own room to check the minor tic beneath my right eye that started yesterday evening. Just as I suspected, it has progressed during the course of the day from an occasional flicker into a protracted, leery wink. Poking it to make it stop makes it suddenly much, much worse.

A cleaner knocks to ask if there’s anything more I’d like for my room. Since the previous cleaner had dried her hair with my original towel I request a fresh one and my eye gives her a slow, deliberate wink. She looks worried.
‘No, I'm sorry, I'm afraid we can’t give you another towel’ she says, backing away slightly, ’but would you like another pillow?’
‘Um, no thanks, just a towel please’ I reply, and wink meaningfully at her again.
‘I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to give towels out. Is there anything else you’d like? A pillow, perhaps? We are allowed to give out those.’ At this point I notice the large aluminium trolley behind her. It is stacked with pillows.
‘Er, no thanks…I just wanted...just a towel, really.’
I realise we have got stuck in a loop and close the door, thanking her and winking madly.

Alone in my cell again, I am suddenly filled with a kind of deep, spiritual exhaustion for which I can find no remedy. I want normal. I want strong tea brewed from Welsh lake water in a big china mug and milk from a plastic bottle in a fridge. I want heat with yellow flames that lick and flare from wet, dirty coal and draughty windows and doors that open with real handles and lock with metal keys. Thick rugs, warm furry cats kneading the bedcovers, light switches that click, cushions to cwtch into, wobbly furniture made of real wood and held together with nails and dovetail joints. I want cooling mist coming silently over the mountains and the tender cry of ravens on the wing. I’ve been away from England too long and am not equipped for this strange modern world in which I find myself so suddenly and utterly adrift. I recall my late father expressing something similar when he returned to the UK on his retirement after forty years' Civil Service in Africa, which is why he elected to return there and spend the remainder of his days as a lowly janitor for a charity in Kenya rather than face a life of modern comfort in Filey.

After an hour’s break to restore energy levels we meet up to make our way through the half-light and electronic doors to the great outdoors where the sun still shines, a fresh breeze blows and carefree students relax on the lawn. They are an eclectic lot and I find myself staring. One tall, gentle-looking lad in beige shorts and 1960‘s style ‘Brains’ fashion spectacles has such a dreadfully executed indigo tattoo on his right calf that we can’t stop surreptitiously glancing at it in mirthful conjecture as we pass.  It looks something like a penis tree, but then again it could be a couple of blurred kayaks, or some kind of handicapped dragon…we really don’t know.

Within moments of reaching the main road a crowded double-decker bus pulls in to take us back into Leeds city centre where Tom hopes to familiarise himself with the layout of the streets and I want to quiet a rumbling tummy. Tom insists ‘We’re here!’ long before we actually are, and we tumble out into the middle of bustling, noisy God-knows-where. I feel like a midget in this town: the buildings are all so tall, the streets so wide and all things look alike. It’s impossible to see any landmarks from our position on the pavement but when Tom decides he wants to return to the train station in order to begin mentally mapping the place from there, my excellent sense of direction kicks in and I’m somehow able to guide us toward it without problem, detouring through a mall on the way to purchase a replacement scarf for the one I left at home that morning in my haste. As I’m paying for it a diminutive Chinese girl who has just attended an interview at Leeds University asks for directions to the train station in pulverised English. I tell her where I feel it probably is, but Tom subliminally instructs me not to take her with us…afterwards he explains her moustache put him right off. He can be a tad harsh at times.

We are just approaching the station - I can see the bridge - when Tom insists that it is actually in completely the opposite direction. For reasons only those readers from dysfunctional families who were conditioned into denial for the first fifteen years of their lives will understand, I readily accept that this probably is the case and we turn our backs and set off downhill. After thirty minutes of striding around the dusty streets Tom gives up in despair and admits he’s lost, so I take us back to the station again.

My tummy is now protesting loudly at the injustice of having had to travel a hundred and thirty miles and walk five on the fuel supplied by twelve individually wrapped micro wafer biscuits. Employing some kind of gastronomic sixth sense I’m able to lead us up a side road to where a Wetherspoons has taken possession of a large Victorian bank. The hand-painted pub sign hanging from the upper stories depicts a Regency-clad Mr Wetherspoon smiling with benign idiocy against the menacing backdrop of a stormy sky. The artist obviously didn’t ‘do’ hands because despite being blatantly repainted many times over, the left one is horribly deformed - like a bunch of soft pink bananas - and his right has been conveniently tucked into his tight trousers, the after-painted bulge giving the unfortunate impression of pocket billiards in progress.

The only empty table is on the upper floor beside the door to the Ladies, which means our seating constantly bounces on the juddering floorboards as an endless succession of strapping great Northern lasses in leggings and killer heels pound their way to the loo and back in shrieking pairs. Each time the door is opened it swings closed with a deafening slam, the table jumps and the distinctive odour of Izal Rim Block wafts over us, so when another table becomes vacant we lunge for it with unseemly haste, beating the newly arrived - and therefore still slightly dazed - competition by seconds. This second table is perfect, overlooking the customers seated in the cordoned-off pavement area across the road outside the Slug and Lettuce where a fascinating drama begins to unfold as we tuck into our food.

The main party consists of a slender middle-aged man, his fluffy blonde partner and their female friends, all enjoying a quiet outdoor pint in the setting sun. Their idyll is soon interrupted however by the unwelcome arrival of a large, greasy, straggle-haired drunk in his fifties, his arse all gone in dirty jeans, clutching an outstretched can of Special Brew at shoulder height and laughing uproariously at his own jokes. He seems to like these people very, very much. He leans precariously across the flimsy fabric cordon to flirt with the ladeez and bellow comradely confidences into the face of the man.

Halfway through my plaice and chips I glance down again to observe their progress. The members of the little group now appear frozen in various attitudes of recoil, but Drunkman is evidently on a mission to wow his brand new friends with witty banter and their increasingly desperate body-language is falling on deaf eyes.

Every so often he starts to lose his balance and staggers toward the seated guy who evidently thinks that smiling faintly and nodding with polite disinterest will eventually convince Drunkman to back off and move on. Seated Guy’s blonde companion is obviously in a quandary: she doesn’t want to encourage Drunkman, but neither does she wish to risk giving offence, and he looks the type to take offence particularly easily. He also looks the type to get his willy out and wave it at them all very easily too, and no-one wants that. The dark haired woman opposite her has no such qualms: she is visibly annoyed at having their evening ripped apart by this social seagull and would happily stab Drunkman to death with a plastic spork, but he is far too big for her to tackle alone so she confines her glares to the male of their party instead, whose ‘balance points’ are plummeting by the second. ‘If he was a REAL man he’d have put a bloody stop to this a long time ago’ I can see her thinking, through gritted teeth. To her left, the rest of the group are beginning to ostentatiously put things into bags - they have realised that the only way to bring the situation to any kind of non-violent conclusion is to get up and run down the street faster than Drunkman can. A few minutes later I see that the Slug and Lettuce is now eerily empty and am caused to conjecture that Wetherspoons might actually be employing Drunkman to sabotage the competition from their nearest rivals.

As the evening advances we begin to yawn and a short bus ride brings us back to our rooms. I shower and retire to bed to study the feature-length text from my faintly hysterical cat-sitter back home, who having been brought live prey to play with - possibly a snake they thought - had failed to pounce quickly enough and promptly lost it beneath the sofa. Relaxing between crisp sheets I listen to the long-forgotten night sounds of a city and munch my way through a pack of recently purchased chocolate chip cookies, which have evolved since the last time I encountered civilisation to the size of small dinner plates.
‘Mmm, yum! Not everything in this brave new world is bad’ I tell myself.

The distant chromatic wail of a police siren is mixing with the subliminal hum and gentle electronic clicks of my room as I begin to doze. It’s the music of the future and curiously comforted at the end of this strange day, I peacefully drift off to its heartless, automated lullaby.