You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  Local lad Chris Rea once imagined himself standing next to a stagnant, poisonous river. In lyrics that I’ve been forbidden from quoting directly, he articulated these ponderings in a tribute to the Tees, whose concrete-walled banks lay just to my right. That was in ‘The Road to Hell’, his biggest hit, a song inspired by pairing the M25 rush hour with this very stretch of the A66. Though it might just as easily have been a premonition of The Road to Hell – Part 2, the follow-up album whose opening track now appositely burbled from Craig’s under-dash speakers.

  Chris Rea seems like a decent bloke who did pretty well for himself by appealing to the durable MOR millions – you know who you are – who like a bit of husk on their vocals, and a lot of slide with their guitar. The Road to Hell – Part 2 duly kicked off with a good long minute of quavery axe-twang. But it was the dumbfounding minutes that followed – all seven of them – which explained why the album peaked at number ninety-six in the Swiss chart, and did much, much better than that in Q’s Worst Ever rankings. Random electronic bleeps, warbling lift-music saxophone, no fewer than twelve consecutive repetitions of one phrase … this was a work of startling, fanbase-bewildering lunacy, the sound of MOR going AWOL. Like his home town, Mr Rea struck it rich, then completely lost the plot.

  It was difficult to tell when I’d arrived: Middlesbrough is less of a stand-alone city than the central chunk in the industrial agglomeration known as Teesside. One minute I was following signs to Middlesbrough, and then I wasn’t. Last stop on the road to hell. The sleet had devolved to steady rain by the time I found the station, with its Hull-ish encirclement of dead hotels and empty streets. The taxi drivers queuing in the rank outside had their chins on their chests, and might have been lightly shrouded in cobwebs.

  There was a curry house at the end of the road, next to a drop-in centre with a couple of doorstep smokers who jeered unkindly as they watched me secure Craig with the Autolok (this was always happening: I felt I should have some flyers printed out, explaining that the most commonly stolen cars are both old and crap). It was a tiny place with blotchy red carpets and a wobbly table that would shortly account for the top fifth of my pint of Kingfisher. A certificate by the bar read 2002 Middlesbrough Curry Chef: semi-finalist, and the only other customer was an unsteady wobble-chops in a paint-spattered puffa jacket, awaiting a takeaway order. Hunger may well have diminished my critical faculties, but I’m nonetheless prepared to state on record that this unpromising environment yielded one of the finest meals it has ever been my pleasure to cram into a nan-crumbed, jalfrezi-smeared maw.

  As a bonus, halfway through the unsightly dining process two glamorous and wealthy-looking young Sikh couples came in and were deferentially ushered into a curtained-off side chamber. While I dabbed the last rich and spicy sauces into my hot mouth, wafts of rich and spicy conversation lodged in my hot ears.

  Wife B: ‘Stubborn, angry depressive he was – typical Taurus. He ripped them off for four million.’

  Husband A: ‘I heard it were five.’

  Wife A: ‘We’re bad, bad people, but we’re not the worst. We’re the best of a bad bunch.’

  Husband B: ‘You know, I like this town. It’s not complicated. None of those Hartlepool mindgames.’

  I came away enthralled and replete, and extremely pleased not to have been caught eavesdropping, which would have meant being bundled into a boot and driven away to Hartlepool for some complication. There was clearly more to Middlesbrough than met the eye.

  On the other side of what I had to assume was the town centre, I at last found a hotel – a squat Travelodge that looked spanking new but did have an en suite Aldi, which for my purposes seemed a decent compromise. It was a predictably soulless establishment. The reception area – shiny white floor tiles, slightly overbearing illumination – felt like somewhere you might end up if you were apprehended trying to enter Norway illegally. I had the opportunity to savour this ambience at length, while a man in sweat-circled pale-blue poly-cotton arranged the loan of ironing apparatus with the moon-faced receptionist. Their negotiations were conducted with the brisk urgency of rustics appraising a half-finished drystone wall. There was the question of what time he’d need to return the board by, and who might be on duty when he did, and precisely where to leave the iron and in what position, depending on the temperature of its metal surface, with a run-down of all associated hazards to flesh and furniture. Cheerfully oblivious to my increasingly mobile proximity and gathering tuts of exasperation, the receptionist moved on to a ruminative tutorial on the iron’s steam function, and how it was still a little temperamental despite the recent descaling. I’ve seen mortgages drawn up and signed off in less time. At last the man patiently coiled up the iron’s flex and put the board under his arm. I surged forward but it was a false alarm: he had neglected to request instructions on how to adjust the board’s height, a wrong that was now fulsomely righted. When, finally, I was allowed to pose the receptionist my simple question, it came out in a strangled voice pitched an octave or so above my usual.

  A room? A room for the night? Her ample brow furrowed as if I’d asked for the name of Britain’s smallest owl. After some consideration she turned to the PC monitor before her. A minute of tapping fitfully at the keyboard’s down button procured a brief sigh and a single word. Shortly after I was slumped behind Craig’s wheel, weighed down with chicken jalfrezi and hopelessness.

  I’d given up on Middlesbrough by the time I found a bed. The Metro Inn Teesside lay across the river in Stockton, and just after 10 p.m. I spotted its illuminated sign while en route to a twenty-four-hour Asda, and the car park I was resigned to calling my home for the night. The hotel, a noun I could already sense the Metro Inn would not have dared claim for itself, was hidden away at the back of an industrial estate, its architecture very much in sympathy with its environment: a two-storey pre-fab with tiny windows, like a cardboard box someone had stabbed holes in with a biro. I parked between a rusty Transit and a stack of broken pallets, and pushed my way into the reception. It was dingy in the extreme, and smelt as if someone had wrapped a jumbo sausage roll in an old sock and wedged it behind a radiator. The avuncular but rather defeated chap at the desk gave me an apologetic smile and told me it would be £24.50, ‘for up to three people’. Handing over my debit card I experienced an epiphany. The location, the design cues, the ambient odour and that quirky pricing policy …

  ‘Did this place used to be a Formule 1?’

  He winced, then replied in the tone of a man recalling a disastrous first marriage. ‘Few years back.’

  If you’ve stayed in a Formule 1 more than once, you’re either a French lorry driver or a career skinflint whose grim enslavement to economy has flayed from his soul the last clinging shreds of dignity. I’ve stayed in five.

  ‘I’ll be taking breakfast in my suite,’ I announced airily, scribbling the room’s six-digit entry-code on the back of my hand with a flourish, then heading off to Staircase B.

  I approached my room increasingly baffled by the reluctance with which the receptionist had confessed his establishment’s ancestry. Apart from the sign outside, every fixture and fitting shamelessly flaunted its origins as a branch of the French-centred chain of ultra-budget motels. Blue carpets, red handrails, yellow doors: spartan but aggressively colourful, the mood pitched somewhere between the lower decks of a cross-channel ferry and a prison for Teletubbies. Many years of targeting the cheap-slob market had taken its toll. The corridors appeared to have hosted a keenly contested race between a drunken horse and a motorcycle powered by gravy. Opening my bedroom door I was confronted by a wall of stench, the nasal equivalent of finding out the hard way that last night’s half-finished can of cider has been pressed into use as an ashtray.

  Women don’t stay at a Formule 1 (unless, as suggested by some of the more shell-shocked TripAdvisor reviews I later read, they’ve been paid to). These places are grubby monuments to a kind of anti-Gillette masculinity, a lowest-common-denominator celebration of the wor
st a man can be. As toilet attendants the world over can confirm, leave a man to his own devices and he will rarely do himself credit. In a budget hotel environment, it’s men who steal the batteries from TV remote controls. They etch bed frames with terrible words and crude depictions of sexual acts. They get drunk and forget how to operate the electric radiator’s control panel, then get more drunk and kick it off the wall. They spot the little sink in the corner and think: That’s my en suite sorted out. And in a Formule 1, up to three of them share two bunks, egging each other on to new excesses of slovenly vandalism and alcoholic flatulence.

  In fact, the Metro Inn’s management had thoughtfully provided an insight into their painful experiences of a very British strain of male-pattern badness. It came in the form of a checklist by reception, detailing behaviour that would lead to the forfeit of a deposit (a deposit the receptionist hadn’t asked me for – more fool him!).

  Any inconvenience that is caused to other guests that would result in a refund, by means of noise level.

  Any damage to your rooms, or any hotel property (external and internal).

  Setting off fire alarms/interfering with smoke detectors.

  Interfering with fire extinguishers without due cause.

  Smoking in a non-smoking room.

  Bringing illegal drugs on to the premises.

  Any abusive or physical harm to any guest and any member of staff.

  If removed by staff or the police you will also lose your deposit.

  Bed wetting.

  With the thankful exception of the last, each transgression had featured in the TripAdvisor reviews. How glad I am that I only read these after I left. Three separate guests reported that they’d woken in the night to find strangers stumbling about in their room.

  Why did the British have to behave this way? As I knew from experience, the typical guest at a French Formule 1 was an unshaven boor who left smouldering cigarillo butts in the shower and felt uncomfortable wandering the corridors in anything more than pants and an Amstel T-shirt. He’d have the TV on too loud, and would consider it a point of principle to piss in the sink, but he wouldn’t assault anyone or systematically destroy property. Violence, vandalism and drugged-up incontinence were our own gifts to the low-end accommodation market, and I couldn’t help thinking that the parent group’s decision to offload its UK outlets might be connected to them.

  ‘Awake? Then sod off.’ From the strip lighting to the bright blue walls, from the single plastic stool to the relaxation-proof foam mattress, a Formule 1 room is a seven-foot cube of joylessness, purpose-built to deter the lingerer. It feels like the result of some painstaking scientific study to establish the environment in which caged rats exhibited the most profound levels of unease, stopping just short of the point where they began to eat themselves. The Metro Inn variant added a patina of neglect and abuse that blurred this boundary. Huge and complex stains blotted my carpet. The malodorous air was also frozen, with the equipment to render it otherwise rendered impotent. Those unwholesome assumptions regarding the en suite sink took on the horridest possible significance when I ran the tap and watched the water immediately back up.

  I pulled back the blind and peeked out through the little square window. Below was a patch of frosted grass bordered with rodent-baiting stations and the odd shoe, engulfed on all sides by a misty sea of tarmac bestrewn here and there with a skip or a stoved-in shipping container. I removed some clothes, reappraised the conditions, and put most of them back on. Then I flicked off the horrible strip light, and made a painful error of judgement by flomping back on the bed.

  A dusty little telly hung from a ceiling bracket, craftily located in the one place I couldn’t see when I lay down. The sound was no more than a forcefield buzz of interference, and someone had saved themselves the bother of levering off the battery compartment by having away with the whole remote. I wearily rose to switch it off, a movement that introduced my forehead to the edge of the top bunk. As I levered myself back into the chilled and stinking darkness, a tattoo of muffled thuds rumbled up from the floor below, crowned by a ragged, furious shout and a heavily pregnant silence.

  Chapter Five

  ‘SO DARK AND quiet, always wind and rain; I was cold and I cried every night. I felt it was a strange, terrible place and I hope I never have to return.’

  It wouldn’t be fair to damn Middlesbrough on the histrionic say-so of a single Brazilian WAG, obliged to relocate to Teesside during her husband’s brief stint with the town’s football team back in the mid Nineties. But shivering by a deserted, mist-wreathed bus stop at the edge of the industrial estate, I was at one with Andrea da Silva. When at last my bleary, bloodshot eyes pulled the timetable into focus, I found that it wasn’t a timetable at all, but a notice explaining that service information could be procured via a text message, at a charge of 25p per enquiry. This sort of thing irks me at the best of times, and on the back of a night interrupted by sheer cold and the encroaching sounds of drunken violence my reaction was intemperate. To passing commuters it must have looked like Sir Alex Ferguson addressing a player he has just watched lob his own goalkeeper from the halfway line, twice.

  I knew I’d be in Middlesbrough all day, and didn’t fancy wasting half of it parking, but abruptly decided – then loudly announced – that the overweight self-abuse enthusiasts who ran the bus company had left me no option. Turning on my heel I let the freezing fog have it all the way back to the Metro Inn. Not for the first time Craig translated my righteous, right-foot fury into a pathetic sequence of staccato wallaby hops.

  Once again Middlesbrough did its best to hide from me. There was no cathedral spire or other lofty structure to aim at, just a lot of demolition sites interspersed with more of those discouragingly anonymous retail halls that define so much of the British urban experience these days. Largely because of the magnetic lure of their attached car parks: by default I ended up at the Hill Street shopping centre, where I enjoyed a Gregg’s breakfast roll as much as you can enjoy any experience that incorporates microwaved bacon. Shopping brightens up your day! yelled a desperate pennant strung above my head.

  Greasy, bilious and wassailed by piped carols, I conducted a detailed survey of Middlesbrough’s retail survivors. Let me tell you now they’re a rum bunch. In a single parade I found no fewer than three tanning salons, and by the end of the day had become well acquainted with the city’s curious two-tone populace: half the young women hewn from waxy lard, and half from a solid block of microwaved bacon. And while their girlfriends are broiling themselves under coin-op melanoma grills, the flower of Middlesbrough’s manhood is browsing the peculiar plethora of novelty shops, devoted as these are to equipment facilitating the rapid and prodigious ingestion of lager: a seven-litre pressurised ‘beer rocket’, a ‘Russian roulette beer bong’ and the ‘Extreme Beer Funnel and Tube’, a grimly surgical device that looked as if it might have been used to force-feed hunger-striking suffragettes. And how did all those mobile-phone shops ride out the storm? In fact, how did they even ride into it in the first place? At one point I could count four, without even moving my head. Each was replete with young staff in crisp shirts, bobbing about looking dynamic and urgent – no mean feat in shops completely bereft of customers. Clinton’s Cards: another mysteriously durable high-street success. In a just world, every branch of Clinton’s Cards would be burnt to the ground at once by state decree, for the public good. Something is intrinsically wrong in a transaction that requires people to pay £2.15 for a folded piece of cardboard that might as well read, ‘I have absolutely no taste and an appalling sense of humour. Happy Easter to a Very Special Nephew.’

  The retail thoroughfare opened out into a broad grassed square crowned with a modest observation wheel, farthing to the London Eye’s penny. This was evidently Middlesbrough’s pre-eminent public space, but it was lined with civic and commercial structures of bullying concrete soullessness and engulfed by yawning, long-vacant plots (LAND FOR RESIDENTIAL OR COMMERCIAL USE – FRANKLY, AT
THIS STAGE WE’D LISTEN TO FARMERS). Beside the wheel was a big glass box that identified itself as the new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, bright and studiously contemporary, but in the circumstances no more than a bold gesture. Middlesbrough – moving forward, read the inevitable regeneration slogan above its automatic doors. I went through them to learn that all the galleries were closed, and later discovered they were still clearing away an exhibition of fanciful motoring art, curated by the hosts of Top Gear and filmed in their presence a couple of days before. ‘We’ve been away in Middlesbrough,’ I heard Jeremy Clarkson sneer at his studio audience a few nights later, ‘and it’s good to be back in England.’ Biographical note: Jeremy Clarkson was born and raised in Doncaster (see Chapter 13).

  MIMA, as of course it’s known, presided over a lumpy sweep of green that looked suspiciously like a hastily turfed-over demolition site. To one side was a small lake whose ice floes were home to thuggish seagulls. I kept walking and at last spotted a proper throng of citizens, trooping in and out of an institutional edifice and gathering on the pavement outside. It’s slightly more than twenty-five years since I last walked into a Job Centre, and walked out with a position in sanitary management at an IBM warehouse. I’ve no idea what forklift drivers eat for lunch, but I do know that it clearly isn’t good for them. Still, cleaning those toilets was the making of me, or might have been had I stuck it out for more than six hours. The establishment I entered now announced itself as a Job Centre Plus, which offered the promise of additional on-site facilities: something wholesome and uplifting, perhaps a petting zoo. In fact, the subtitle simply acknowledged the sheer size of its customer base. The place had the feel of a busy multiplex cinema foyer, smartly carpeted and dimly lit, its open-plan acreage bestrewn with interactive screens. Young men in sportswear ambled about, chatting in low monotones, occasionally leaning over a monitor and tapping at it with the expression of unimpressed channel-flippers. The security guard notwithstanding, there was none of the brooding despair that defined the last Job Centre I’d been in, the sense that at any minute some donkey-jacketed Yosser might dash his forehead into something or someone. Here everyone just seemed profoundly resigned. I found a spare screen and saw why. Of the 211 job vacancies it offered me, five were local opportunities in retail security (£6.10 per hour) and food production (£5.85 per hour). The rest – page after page of them – were ‘independent sales representatives’ based in the lonelier parts of Scotland, from Inverness to Perth. All sounded comfortably more terrible than any of the fictional related positions that I’d been stuffing into my CV of late: successful applicants would find themselves hawking cosmetics or replacement windows on a door-to-door basis, in areas where those doors might be separated by a couple of glens and a loch. The reward for this activity was described as ‘meets national minimum wage’.