You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  I turned a few lonely corners and wandered up to the cemetery, trying to conjure a more positive rationale for the defeated air that hung over Easington. Perhaps it was just the December rain, I thought. Perhaps the citizens’ spirits weren’t crushed, just comfortably anaesthetised by the soothing beauty of their surroundings, horses gambolling across tilted pastures, the coastal walk that was such a bracing delight, or certainly would be once the last mountains of coal slag and discarded mining machinery had been cleared off the beach.

  At the churchyard I gave up conjuring. The polished new headstones honoured dearest fathers and beloved husbands struck down at 49, 52, 50, 53, 42 … The statistics had forewarned me, but it was still a shock to witness the reality. It felt like a scene from some personal remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, being shown how things would pan out if I went ahead and made that fateful decision to do nothing but eat crisps and smoke. Mining was an old man’s game by 1951 – the average age of those who died in the Easington disaster was forty-three, with twelve victims into their sixties. But looking around the graves I grasped that if there’s one thing worse for your health than working down a mine, it’s not working at all. The shadow of death that hung over every mining community had been lifted, yet the graveyard was filling faster than ever. When the pit closed, 1,400 Easington men had nothing to do but grow old and die. It wasn’t much of a job, and sixteen years on they were all opting for early retirement. I drove away in a mood of sombre reflection that Cliff Richard’s ‘Millennium Prayer’ came worryingly close to complementing. Thanks be to Cliff’s buddy upstairs that I wasn’t a miner, or an ex-miner, or a miner-to-be: one day, you can be sure, we’ll have to prise off Easington’s little pithead memorial in a desperate search for the 8.4 million tons of fuel that still lie down that very deep hole, but when that day comes I’ll be at peaceful rest in a rather shallower one.

  I spent the balance of the morning pressing deeper into the unknown, that huge swathe of upper northern Britain only previously experienced through the window of a train or the windscreen of a much faster car. Craig-pace afforded me a ruminative drive-by of the Angel of the North, wings out on a neighbouring brow; I assessed it with an enhanced appreciation for the message inherent in its rusted majesty, and prayed that its head wouldn’t fall off under the influence of my malignant forcefield. Other than that all was deeply, defiantly traditional. The sun came out and varnished the timeless wet hillsides. Every other pub was called The Shoulder of Mutton. Doyenne of novelty hits ‘Lily the Pink’ oompahed out of the speakers, nestled in my discography’s timeline just behind David Bowie’s youthful stupidity ‘The Laughing Gnome’ – the oldest track in there, and such a durable magnet for Bowie-baiters that in 1990 he scrapped a public telephone vote that had been set up to decide the playlist for his forthcoming tour.

  Grange Villa, another erstwhile mining community, had been included in Sky 3’s Britain’s Toughest Villages by virtue of an apparently ugly record of leek-envy allotment riots. December clearly wasn’t a hot-spot month for such activity, but the allotments I drove past – hundreds of them, like some sprawling shanty town of sheds and greenhouses – were still dotted with stooped potterers. Nurturing vegetables to prizewinning enormity was a pastime self-evidently honed to obsession in the time-rich forty-two years since Grange Villa’s nearest mine closed (and since ‘Lily the Pink’ topped the UK charts). The village had indeed become defined by its leisure pursuits, if not in the way Sky 3 wanted me to believe: I was bidden farewell from it by a rather fetching roadside bas-relief of a racing pigeon rampant above a trug of gargantuan produce. (I’ve always rather liked the whole peculiar concept of racing pigeons as a hobby, if not its guano-steeped reality – it’s just one of those things I’m glad somebody does, as long as it’s not me, like clearing gutters or giving a prostrate derelict the kiss of life. In any event, I was pleased to discover that the Royal Pigeon Racing Association still issues over a million identification rings a year.)

  ‘Bulldozers are due to start the demolition of Gateshead town centre today.’ It’s difficult to imagine a more damning admission of civic failure than that reported by Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle back in 2007. Not just a few offices or shops, not even a couple of streets – a town that 190,000 people called home was to have its entire heart ripped out, and just forty years after the last transplant.

  It was twilight by the time Ozzy stuttered out the news of our arrival. Never before had his valedictory imprecation sounded so heartfelt. Squatting thuggishly atop the bluff that crowns Gateshead, Europe’s ugliest public building loomed over all it surveyed like a medieval fortress. The twelve slitted storeys imparted an air of narrow-eyed, thick-set menace, and the service shafts attached to opposite corners made convincing fortified observation towers. In the sodium streetlight I could see its flanks streaked and pock-marked with scabby decay, like a beached whale after a fortnight on the sand. I saw what the Chronicle had meant: Trinity Square car park might be defined as a single building, but in scale and in bearing, it was the whole town centre. Imprisoned behind blue-painted building-site barriers the car park now stood vacant, but two years on those bulldozers still hadn’t dared to confront it.

  A slashed canvas smeared with pus and swastikas, atonal cries of fury: I’d have no issue with a Brutalist movement in art or music, safely confined as its artistic output would be by gallery walls or headphones. Brutalist dance I might even actively encourage. But you can’t take or leave architecture. It’s rather forced upon us. We have to look at it and walk around in it. It’s there to be lived in, worked in, shopped in, parked in. As such, I will never understand how an architectural movement that dubbed itself Brutalism was ever allowed to exist, let alone thrive as it did in Britain for two fateful decades. ‘Kids, wait till you see our new flat. It’s so brutal!’

  With an effort I can just about forgive the forbidding and repetitive flanks of raw concrete that went up all over Britain in the 1950s. Cities needed rebuilding, and there was no cheaper, quicker way of doing it. Heck, I’ll even cut some slack for those architects and planners who convinced themselves that such grimly functional structures embodied the progressive, honest and classless fresh start the nation needed after the war. Their hearts were in the right place, even if their brains – and eyes – weren’t.

  But that rationale was wearing thin by 1969, when Gateshead council finally declared the Trinity Square complex open. It was partly their own fault for taking six years to get the thing built, six years in which Brutalism’s brave future had curdled into a dour and cowering present. Because as it turned out, people didn’t quite feel at home in an abstract environment of bald cement. Reinforced concrete, which aged so gracefully in Le Corbusier’s pioneering Brutalist blocks in Marseilles and India, wept tears of rusty mould when asked to cope with north-European winters. Those tempting blank canvases didn’t cope much better with north-European vandals. ‘Britain’s first major free-standing multi-storey car park to incorporate a shopping centre,’ trumpeted the original Trinity Square proposal, words that in 1964 might have dampened pants across Geordieland. By 1969, they effectively translated as, ‘People of Gateshead, look upon me and despair.’

  The first calls to have the car park knocked down rang out before it was even finished. After opening, Trinity Square wasted no time in acquiring the ambience that came to define its breed: that heady air of lawless neglect, scented with solvents and urine. The building had yet to celebrate its second birthday when the Get Carter crew arrived to film some of its more iconic sequences, but already bore the ravages of ‘spalling’ – a fragmentation of concrete surfaces typically seen in structures that are very old, and have been burnt to the ground. Its upper storeys were soon declared dangerously unsound and closed off; the glass-walled rooftop cafeteria, as smarmily patrolled by a corrupt property developer in the film, would never find a tenant.

  You’ve got to hand it to the Get Carter location spotters, who perceptively connected the north-east’s doom
ed and desolate past with its doomed and desolate future. Blackhall Colliery is no more, and – finally – nor is Trinity Square. It’s rare to find a local with a good word to say about the film, though, as its belated discovery by Loaded-reading New Lads kick-started a noisy campaign to save the ‘Get Carter car park’. Gateshead council had first proposed knocking it down as early as 1981, with outline consent for demolition finally granted in 2000. Three years after that, Trinity Square came in at number seven in a national poll set up to find candidates for Channel 4’s self-explanatory 2003 series Demolition (I won’t spoil the suspense by revealing the winner, or the life-changing adventures I was soon to enjoy in its considerable shadow). One internet forum voted it the ugliest public structure in Europe, and another declared the car park ‘Britain’s most hated building’.

  Yet Get Carter enthusiasts successfully shouted down much of this accumulated opprobrium: one cheerleader went as far as to claim that ‘Trinity Square is to Gateshead what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris’. This procured a local online response heavy on phrases such as ‘pathetic middle-class gangster wannabes’ and ‘Mockney cockhouse’, along with multiple offers to help re-erect the car park ‘in their fucking back gardens, if they love it so much’.

  I found a guest house which in daylight might have afforded a view of Trinity Square. It was a stout old Victorian building run by a stout old landlady, with gloriously horrid orange carpeting and fire doors that parted with a drawn-out, abandon-hope creak. I was about to enter my room when the door next to it flew open, releasing a cloud of thick soot. Through this emerged a young man in overalls, looking like the survivor of a cartoon explosion. ‘Areet,’ he said, teeth agleam behind blackened lips. Then he inhaled hugely, plunged back into the room and slammed the door behind him.

  Somebody had thoughtfully cleaved a jagged hole through the partition wall that this miniature mining disaster shared with my room, about the size of a firmly swung fist or rifle butt. But when I lowered my face to it, there was only blackness and the unmuffled sounds of masonry and joists putting up a decent fight against the blunt and bladed tools of destruction. The heftier blows forced a coil of sooty dust through the hole. I decided the sensible thing was to wodge newspaper in it and go out.

  It probably didn’t help that I experienced Gateshead’s after-hours scene on a Wednesday in December, and from the gutter of a dual carriageway that I’d somehow ended up walking down. But my, it was dead. I’d girded myself for the Mockney-cockhouse showdown that seemed inevitable in any pedestrian encounter that required me to open my mouth (preparatory mantra: never Newcarsle, always Newcassle), but even when I scrambled across a concrete roundabout and six lanes of tarmac to a proper street with a proper pavement, there were no pedestrians on it to encounter. Regional-degeneration FACT: the north east is the only area in the UK with a shrinking population, and no other town within it is leaching citizens faster than Gateshead.

  Crossing the River Tyne felt like crossing from East Berlin to West in the 1980s, or passing through some strange portal on the International Date Line that took me from Wednesday to Friday night. At the Gateshead end of the High Level Bridge I walked past a pub whose doors emitted a desultory, decrepit, old-man mumble. Its counterpart at the Newcastle side was a heaving, riotous Babel of life and young laughter. Even halfway across the bridge I knew I was set to reacquaint myself with almost forgotten urban excitements. Gateshead bid me farewell with a notice urging would-be jumpers to telephone the Samaritans; Newcastle said hello with a breathtaking vista centred around the floodlit Tyne Bridge, Middlesbrough-built sister of the Sydney Harbour crossing. It was all bright lights and bustle and the beckoning promise of boozy, big-city fun. Who was I to resist?

  My evening explored the overlap between happiness and bemusement, as pub crawls are wont to. What a heady thrill to walk down streets where the shop windows were filled with cashmere and porcelain, rather than dead flies and some crack-head’s old microwave. Where watches sometimes cost more than £4.99, and parking bays were sometimes fully occupied. Where the festive illuminations were kookily naive as a knowing act of arch post-modernism, rather than just being really old and crap. Where the buildings were scrubbed and the pavements a-throng with bands of hearty merrymakers, some laughing, some singing, and, OK, some trying to smash in a glass door with a dustbin.

  I dutifully went in search of terrible places, but it wasn’t easy. The bar-lined cobbled oblong that is Bigg Market seemed a good bet: whenever the Daily Mail runs a photograph of a girl with one shoe on slumped in the gutter, that gutter is generally outside a Bigg Market binge-barn. Hopes were raised by a rash of promisingly catastrophic encitements in the relevant windows (All house doubles £1 every night until 10 p.m.! Have two large glasses of wine and get the whole bottle free! Spend more than £15 and wet yourself in an unlicensed minicab on the way home!), but when I put my head round a few doors I saw just a light smattering of restrained and thoughtful drinkers, resembling young librarians on a staff night out. The music didn’t even seem especially awful, though having only hours before endured Duran Duran’s covers album in its soul-stabbing entirety I was in no position to judge.

  It was an odd experience to turn corner after corner and not once find myself frowned down upon by some towering eyesore: Newcastle naturally suffered lapses of post-war architectural judgement, but owned up to the worst and had them removed from the skyline. Westgate House featured alongside Trinity Square in the Demolition series, an enormous concrete phone directory wedged into a shelf of regal old leather-bound façades on the city’s showpiece thoroughfare: possibly the single most unsympathetic urban development ever approved in Britain. Now it was just a hole in the night.

  A gold-framed restaurant review posted proudly in the window of a curry house caught my now practised eye: ‘Tandoori night proves a qualified hit’ ran the headline, an actually rather generous summary of the experience described beneath: ‘Our house special side-dish went back largely untouched … the service was not what it could have been.’ Yet I went in and found the place packed; a waiter told me I’d have to wait at least an hour, then eased forward my trouser waistband and tipped a plate of leftovers into the gap.

  In the end I settled for an all-you-can eat buffet warehouse called Gekko’s, in a food court atop a busy but bland glass-walled mall that styled itself as Newcastle’s premier leisure and entertainment centre. The two-for-£3 cocktail menu swung it: there between Leg Spreader and Monkey Brains was Bloody Awful, which I felt duty bound to sample. It certainly didn’t disappoint, revealing itself as an ingeniously repulsive blend of sambuca and something called Red Aftershock, which had the ring of a petrol additive for boy racers, and the taste of Benylin’s foray into the liqueur market. The young East European waiter raised one eyebrow when I ordered a brace, and the other when – after a tiny, face-crumpling sip – I summoned the cider chaser that at the time seemed the only sensible way of washing the stuff down.

  The 50-yard flank of stainless-steel tubs that comprised the Gekko buffet had at first glance seemed brimming with bewilderingly random comestibles. But approaching it with a bellyful of strange alcohol, the whole set-up made perfect and beautiful sense. Sweet and sour pork, balti chicken, glistening towers of chips: here, in steamy profusion, was all that a young man desires to feast upon when drunk. Around me, whole convivial tablefuls of just such people were doing precisely that, interspersed with rather quieter pairings, a girlfriend wanly nibbling naan while her partner belched seven shades of Worthington over some pick-and-mix heap of spiced fodder. With Red Aftershock nudging the doors of perception ajar, I looked about and realised I’d been wrong to fear a Newcarsle shoeing. Geordies weren’t so much hard as incorrigibly debauched, to the point of reckless derangement. They get unbelievably drunk and do unbelievably stupid things, like surfing trains, jumping into rivers and taking their shirts off at football matches in the depths of a hard winter. They are, in essence, Paul Gascoigne. For the Geordie male, life is one long, out-
of-control stag party. Though obviously not that long.

  As the first of my many trips to the Gents made plain, Gekko’s was not a place where decorum stood tall. At one point the self-service cutlery station ran out of knives and forks, but rather than complain or wait, the punters simply shrugged and bullied their bhajis to bits with fists and teaspoons. Content that no one was interested in whatever I might get up to – after my second cider, even the waiter seemed to forsake me – I set about indulging to unsightly excess. I returned to the silvered tubs again and again, first with eager vigour, latterly with the grim, stumbling resolve of a contestant at a 1920s dance marathon. Ciders came and went. For a while I neutered their effect through sheer calorific input, a dam of carbohydrates to keep the alcoholic flood at bay. Modern technology permits me to reveal that this defence was breached at precisely 8.18 p.m., when I chose to take a phone-camera self-portrait. Focus and composition issues make definitive analysis a challenge, but it looks very much as if that’s a prawn on my shoulder.

  Out in the street I found myself in a whole city full of new friends: debonair, attractive, happy people, my people. They were there in that lovely bar with the light sculptures and the big glass something or other, a wonderful and cosmopolitan establishment I simply don’t recognise in the review I’ve just read that damns it as ‘over-priced and full of pretentious gits’. They were there – hello again! – in a pound-a-pint Wetherspoon pub. They were even there in some Seventies club on Bigg Market, where I nosed into inebriation’s ugly end-game by very nearly dancing.