You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  ‘Oh, right: well, a bit of both, really.’

  ‘Yiz?’

  ‘Yes.’

  If I’d been paying cash that would have been that, but instead I was committed to a protracted three-way ceremony involving me, the waitress and her little handheld card terminal.

  ‘What bee’s knees?’

  Before setting off I’d toyed with various cover stories, struggling all the while against a lifelong weakness for over-elaboration: when my teenage peers ran away from a ticket inspector, I would stand my ground and offer an explanation in made-up Hungarian. No, simplicity was the thing. That and yawn-enforcing dullness, a rationale that would instantly neuter any dangerous inquisitivity, indeed kill all conversation stone dead. What was the least interesting reason why an out-of-towner might be passing through an offbeat, downbeat place? The most obvious answer had suggested itself throughout my research, and with a growing silence to fill I now duly wheeled it out.

  ‘I’m in sales. On the road.’

  ‘So is no holly die?’

  I muffed my PIN and at once began to slip into the old vortex of blathering cobblers.

  ‘Well, this weekend is kind of like a reward, for, you know, regional achievement, in sales.’ ‘PLEASE RETURN TERMINAL TO VENDOR,’ said the screen. I did so and delivered the coup de grâce.

  ‘Carpet tiles.’

  ‘Oh, yiz! Like you mean Heuga, like you mean Tessera, I have many catalogue, we need replace old carapit here, maybe you advice?’

  The waitress’s kindly features brightened with expectation. My innards shrivelled.

  ‘Right, well, yes, though I don’t deal so much with the actual tiles as … carpet-tile … adhesive.’

  ‘Ah, which best: is spray or liquid?’

  ‘Carpet-tile adhesive … removal products.’ The terminal spooled out my receipt. ‘Spillage and soiling issues. Nasty stuff.’

  I retrieved the card with hot fingers, then fairly leapt to my feet, plunging arms into coat sleeves as I did so. The waitress proffered a little curl of paper and did her best to recap.

  ‘So you are carapit-tile adessive removal product selling-man.’

  ‘Of the year, East Anglia and Home Counties, 2009. Thank you!’

  I was fairly blown back to the Star, past the Poundlands, the Cash Generators and charity shops, past all the boarded-up foyers and the signs reading WE HAVE MOVED! and ENTERTAINMENT PREMISES TO LET – INCENTIVES AVAILABLE. Past the Troll Cart, a pub which looked pretty much as it sounded, wide-necked bouncers stationed at every door but facing inward at the lairy, stumbling patrons, the scene almost visibly simmering with pent-up alcoholic violence. Why did Saturday-night Britain always have to be this way? I wondered, then promptly discovered it didn’t.

  Buffeted off down a side street by a rogue Arctic gust, I found myself before a little café that leaked bright light and happy noise. Through the steamed-up window I could make out a sea of bobbing heads and raised glasses; I located an unfogged corner and peered through with hooded hands. The chalkboard menu on the back wall was composed in a language that I eventually decided was Portuguese, a conclusion compatible both with the cheery, dark-haired throng beneath it and with a news story I’d read a few weeks previously, which revealed that Great Yarmouth was home to a five-thousand-strong Portuguese community, most employed in food processing. Well-paid, stimulating and wholesome: just some of the adjectives you would not choose to describe such jobs. These were people who spent long days shot-blasting the flesh off pig skulls for £5.80 an hour, people who had surely earnt the right to punch away their cares in the Troll Cart of a Saturday night. Yet here they were, in a strip-lit, overcrowded café, showcasing the kind of convivial and carefree Latin merriment you don’t often see outside advertisements for cook-in pasta sauce. They had mastered a skill that had once been a very British preserve – making the best of a bad lot. When did we mislay that national trait? A few minutes later I walked past the Star’s reception area feeling rather ashamed. And a few minutes after that I was back down there, demanding ice cubes and extra pillows.

  Chapter Three

  AS LONG AS they’re not in the room with you – it happened to me once in Jersey – there’s something rather wonderful about being woken up by seagulls. And if the shrill cries of freedom and briny adventure were a sensory call to arms, then so too was the smell of freshly fried smoky bacon. I greeted the gawky black lemon in the car park with a wave and a repulsive belch, replete with a cooked-to-order full English that augured well for breakfasts ahead. Misleadingly so, as it transpired.

  Great Yarmouth seemed a little sorrier for itself by daylight. It looked sorrier still when a gust of fat raindrops clattered the windscreen, with the glowering overhead prospect of many more to come. Nothing paid more fulsome tribute to Craig’s manufacturing ancestry than his performance in foul weather. The footwell rugs were soon blotted with damp, and squishily waterlogged before we bypassed Norwich. The arthritic wipers shrieked and juddered across the windscreen, smearing it with arcs of damp mud that the impotent, dribbling washer jets weren’t about to shift. All the while I had to remind myself that I was asking Craig to do something he hadn’t been designed to do: cover a very large distance without falling to pieces.

  At least the conditions were taking the shine off his alarmingly pristine appearance. Without wishing to cause Craig excessive offence, it was frankly embarrassing to be thought of by all who saw me as someone who cared that much about something so very silly – a bit like having a Cliff Richard tattoo. I still remembered my neighbour Sha’s expression as he watched me parking up on my return from Slough, and the words that emerged from his gaping jaw: ‘Good God.’

  Britain is rather larger than many people appreciate, particularly those who’ve never driven around it in an Austin Maestro. After setting to work on the sat-nav I was dismayed to find that Hull, my next overnight stop and just a pootle up the coast in my mental road atlas, in fact lay 222 miles off. Though admittedly not via a direct route, as ahead lay a far-flung festival of fail. The road skirted the big wet square that is the Wash, and dead-flat, grey-green Norfolk evolved to dead-flat, grey-green Lincolnshire, with nothing to leaven the persistent vista: a churned arable plain sporadically marked with a muddy cairn of harvested sugar beets. It was the sort of drive that screamed for musical distraction, a raucous singalong through a medley of old favourites. Instead, hell’s own jukebox coughed up the Rolling Stones’ horrifically dull 1986 album Dirty Work, the rent-a-riff sound of cynical has-beens with nothing left to say taking the cash to say it anyway. Critics at the time generously concluded that Mick Jagger had kept back the best material for his forthcoming solo album. As I was about to discover, he really, really hadn’t. After a cheery blast of Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie’ – now there’s a proper, honest-to-badness novelty hit – a turgid twang of steel guitar was joined by a familiar cocksure drawl. It was forty-nine long minutes before either of them shut up.

  If Dirty Work represented the Rolling Stones’ creative funeral, Primitive Cool was the embarrassing uncle who ruined the wake. Not the most ear-bleedingly awful music I’d endure – Q Magazine’s readers had after all found seven worse albums to vote for – but perhaps the most dispiriting. Part of my love for the band – the real band, the pre-jumpsuit, pre-opiate Rolling Stones – died with each over-produced, under-written five-minute drone-a-thon. The entire album was like a soundtrack to the most awful scene in the most awful 1980s buddy-cop film. The DA’s in cahoots with the mob, my girl’s kicked me out, and that maverick sidekick of mine just traded his badge for a bottle of Jack: cue music! I heard myself ask Mick a simple question, repeatedly and increasingly loudly. Why? Why? WHY, YOU TREMENDOUS BUM-FUNNEL? Then the rain intensified, and we were both drowned out by the rubbery screech of double-speed wipers.

  Old Leake, Wrangle, Friskney Tofts: the village names told their own tale of deepening isolation, places where there was nothing to do but watch potatoes grow and take unnecessary risks at unmanned le
vel crossings. The landscape seemed to hunker down further still, readying itself for submergence. There’d be no dramatic cliffs or river deltas when I hit the coast, just one damp, flat surface giving way to a slightly damper, flatter one.

  I’d be hearing a lot of ‘Agadoo’, the pineapple-pushing million-seller performed by bleached-mullet serial cack-merchants Black Lace. The song made the upper echelons of almost every poll I’d sourced my playlist from: it made the top five in dotmusic’s Most Annoying Songs, and took gold in a Q Magazine vote to nominate the Worst Song Ever. Because of an administrative failure on my part, double entries of this sort were not culled. I think in the end I listened to ‘Agadoo’ four times. Yet after the ponderous, complacent guff my ears had just endured, I found chirpy cheese hard to hate. How can you despise a song whose Wikipedia entry includes the sentence, ‘It was produced by Barry Whitfield, who also appears in the video as a pear’? Yes, it’s inane and crass; yes, any public occasion, from school disco to wedding reception, is damned to death the moment that chorus bursts out of the speakers. But there’s a reason why ‘Agadoo’ sold a million copies, and why Primitive Cool failed to dent the top forty, and that reason explains why I’m not ashamed – not too ashamed – to admit that I sang loudly along, and even pushed the odd pineapple when road conditions permitted. At any rate, as a paean to tropical beach-life cooked up in Castleford, West Yorkshire, it seemed a fitting welcome to Skegness.

  It was a personal pick. No one had said anything particularly bad about Skegness, other than a throwaway reference to ‘the UK’s Devil’s Island’, and that was probably more to do with its position on a stretch of the most barren and thinly populated coastland in Britain. I couldn’t even call upon any first-hand experience to justify its inclusion on my itinerary. I’d simply decided that a seaside resort in south Lincolnshire must, by definition, be both grim and ridiculous. Its grim and ridiculous name didn’t help, even before the locals shortened it to Skeggy, an appellation with all the come-hither holiday allure of a hoof-rotting livestock disease. To paraphrase the prancing fatso who put the place on the map, Skegness sounds SO ghastly.

  It didn’t look that bad, though, especially after the sun came out on my final approach. The fields around here were once considered the richest grazing land in the country, and they certainly looked the part with a rainbow stretched over them, their resident cows nose-down in glistening green. Like so many of the places along Britain’s Scandinavia-facing coast, Skegness is of Viking origin. As my Icelandic wife likes to remind me, her adventurous forefathers can claim naming rights over anywhere that ends in ness, by, wick or any of the brough/borough/burg variants. Skegness, then, means either ‘forested headland’ or ‘pillagey rapeville’, depending on whether you’re more interested in etymological fact or winding up the in-laws. Still, as an unappealingly named fishing village of four hundred hardy souls backed by vast flat tracts of rural nothingness, Skegness seemed an unlikely resort-to-be when the railway arrived in 1875. Fittingly, its success is the legacy of an unlikely duo.

  The Earl of Scarborough was the dominant local landowner, and a man who saw something in the lonely dunes around Skegness that others didn’t. Spurred on by architects and builders with guinea signs in their eyes, in fifteen years the Earl boldly blew the family fortune in laying out promenades, gardens and a new main street across the windswept foreshore. He built houses, a church, and a pier that strode far out into the cold grey sea. To friends, relatives and anyone else hoping for some action in the Earl’s will, the whole scheme must have seemed an act of hubristic folly. For thirty years, it was. In contravention of the Field of Dreams maxim, he had built it, but they didn’t come. No one came. I picture the Earl of Scarborough standing alone on his weed-decked pier, stovepipe hat clutched to chest, mutton-chop whiskers belaboured by the chilly gusts, cocking his ear at a lonely call from the distant, empty promenade: ‘Nice one, Granddad, you div!’

  Finding themselves saddled with an unprofitable branch line, the Great Eastern Railway shared some of the Earl’s pain. The company’s early attempts to capture the would-be resort’s appeal produced what may be the most anti-magnetic tourism slogan of all time: Skegness – Nottingham by the Sea! Crestfallen at its failure, in 1908 GER changed tack, paying illustrator John Hassall 12 guineas to depict the town’s appeal. Hassall, who had never been anywhere near Skegness, felt curiously inspired to anthropomorphise the place as a fat old fisherman, skipping camply along an empty, puddled beach with a pipe in his teeth and an overbearing leer in his mad, mad eyes. Unveiling this extraordinary character to GER’s publicity executives should have procured a long, uneasy silence, followed in due course by anger, then legal proceedings to recover the 12 guineas. In fact, the board decided the only thing this deranged and alienating image needed was a matching strapline. Those pools of standing water were a start, but they didn’t communicate the south Lincolnshire coast’s full spectrum of holiday-hostile deficiencies. ‘Think, chaps, think – I’m getting scary weirdos, I’m getting bleak, I’m getting rain … But come on, I need wind, I need cold, and I need them now.’

  Skegness is SO bracing! It should have been the stillborn resort’s epitaph, but somehow the twin promise of fat nutters and terrible weather proved irresistible. ‘The Jolly Fisherman’ singlehandedly put Skegness on the holiday map: almost overnight, day-trippers pitched up in droves, and within five years, the town’s population had more than quadrupled. The Earl made millions, then millions more when he sold up after the First World War. In 1936, the grateful townspeople finally gave John Hassall a reason to visit Skegness, hosting a ceremony at which he was presented with the freedom of the foreshore, and a silver model of his camp creation. ‘The reality of Skegness has eclipsed all my anticipations,’ he told the assembled crowd, in an address with all the sparky authenticity of a prepared confession at a Stalinist show trial. ‘It is even more bracing than I had been led to expect.’ He never returned.

  If Great Yarmouth had slunk off into hibernation, Skeggy seemed like a resort in a state of seasonal denial. At half twelve on a bright but very bracing Sunday in late November, the pavements were thronged with weather-resistant families in varying states of undress: chilblained young girls in halter-necks and short skirts, Jolly Fisherman-sized fathers in football shirts. There were a few pound shops and ‘fashion clearance outlets’ along the Earl’s high street, but not a single boarded-up economic casualty. The whole place exuded an almost palpable sense of civic defiance, hardy locals sticking two fingers up at the weather, hardy shopkeepers tweaking the nose of recession. It was all rather infectious, though enthusiasm levels dipped a little after I parked Craig up by the pier and experienced the elements first-hand. It was a battle to heave open the door, and another not to berate the red-haired fibreglass clown I then found myself confronted by. ‘Have you no respect, Mr McDonald? This is a British seaside resort, I’ll have you know, the very cradle of terrible greasy crap. Now be gone, sir! Though, um, not until I’ve nipped into your place for a wee, and had half an hour’s free parking.’

  Eyes slitted, trousers a-flap, I leant into the wind and struggled along the promenade. Gale-torn half-snatches of bored bingo lingo blew out from the ‘Skeg-Vegas’ arcade’s Tannoy: on its own, number legs, clickety-eight. The pier, rationalised by fire, storm and commercial reality, was now little more than a stub that stopped well short of the tide line. Puddles shimmered in the wind. Benches and bins cast long shadows across a deserted beach pock-marked by the morning’s rain. Way out into the excitable grey sea, a white forest of wind turbines rotated as if set for take-off. I braced myself against a handrail and looked back at the town. A sign that read HEATING! in a snack-bar window, the warning beside me detailing the fatal risks of tidal conditions and areas of sinking sand – everything screamed out Withnail’s forlorn words to a neighbouring Lake District farmer: ‘Excuse me, we’ve gone on holiday by mistake.’ All this, and yet the scene was a-buzz with happy families, red of cheek and blue of limb, queuing
at the six-for-a-quid doughnut stall and striking comedy poses by the Jolly Fisherman statue near the clock tower. There was an almost perverse, bring-it-on dedication to having a great day out despite everything. The Windbreak Generation’s forgotten tribe, a people who didn’t just weather the storm, but went out in it with a towel and a grin. Along with the trouble I had making myself understood at the doughnut stall, all this made one thing very apparent: I was now in the north of England.

  Skegness gave way to huge fields of static caravans, geometric ranks of white on green, like war cemeteries. In a moment of weakness I shut down my in-car Radio Awful and twiddled along medium wave in search of football commentary, but out here Five Live sounded like Alexander Graham Bell doing a bungee jump in a cave full of angry bees; the only decent signals were being pumped out in Dutch and German. That meant a deep sigh and Tin Machine II, voted the worst album by a great artist, doing for David Bowie’s reputation what that clown in a goose-drawn barrel did for Norfolk’s bridge engineers. If my spirits rose, it was only because the view did: after hours and hours of pan-flat nothingness, the landscape was now rucked up into plump, green, sun-kissed hillocks. It felt like driving across a giant Windows XP desktop.

  I was going to North East Lincolnshire, which as well as being the third worst place to raise a family (after Reading and Waltham Forest), also bagged a bottom-three slot in the definitive quality-of-life survey carried out by Channel 4’s Location, Location, Kneecap (sorry, I’ve cracked already). But what with North East Lincolnshire being a whole county, I’d put my trust in Google: I typed those three words into their map search box, clicked return, and zoomed in on the little red marker flag that confidently popped up just below the Humber’s gaping mouth. So it was that I now found myself driving up Wellholme Avenue, Grimsby, deemed by computer algorithm as the unhappy county’s epicentre.