I had just passed my driving test and I ventured out to Rhyl on my own. On the way back I pulled into a layby between St Asaph and Denbigh just before the notorious S bends on the short cut avoiding the centre of town. I pulled into the layby, I pulled on the handbrake of my light blue mini as I had been taught to do on my driving lessons and I cried. My cries turned to sobs. I was 17 and it was 1983.I had picked up the energy of Rhyl and was taking it home with me.
I have always been sensitive to the energies of places and people. To be kind to Rhyl it might have had nothing to do with the bright, garish and cheery seaside town but more to do with the fact that my adolescent mental health was now in crisis and that this was the first visible symptoms of such.
39 years on and I have just returned from Gosport in Hampshire.I went to Portsmouth on a whim and a prayer. I just fancied a change and variety is the spice of life but it appears that there is very little variety in UK PLC. The centre of Portsmouth was like the centre of many impoverished towns. Lively with the spirit of people fighting the odds but visually drab and austere.
Victoriana haunts our major towns and cities. A statue of the overweight and grieving Queen Victoria is not going to do much for the morale of the homeless and drug addicted as they scurry around the base of these bronze statues to an unelected German monarch(Queen Victoria's mother was originally from Germany, so Victoria spoke only German for the first three years of her life)from over a century ago. An era that gave us warships and empires and the right through money to enslave others of different colours. Liverpool, Manchester,Glasgow and now Portsmouth seen with my own eyesight.There are at least 45 statues of Queen Victoria on the National Heritage List for England but there are many more unlisted ones. Why? to remind the former servicemen lying in doorways what they fought and could have potentially died for?
Down in the Harbour area of Portsmouth there is an obscenity of a shopping area called Gunwharf Quays. It is called a Designer Outlet and it is designed to keep the poor and the riff raff out. They go shopping in Portsmouth city centre in the Cascades shopping centre or the city centre market open on a Friday and Saturday.A 4 minute ferry ride from the Gunwharf quays will see you alight in Gosport (God's port) abbreviated. Well it looked like God had forsaken Gosport on the day that I walked down the High Street. It reminded me in no particular order of Newport, Barry, Bridgewater and Rhyl, Ellesmere Port and Birkenhead. It reminded me of my home town of Bridgend. What some of these towns have in common namely Ellesmere Port and Bridgend is that they have Designer Outlet's right on their doorstep and people and politicians are bemoaning the state of the UK's high streets? The North/South Divide is now the North/South 'what we have in common'. Poverty is endemic in every community. London the Capital being a classic example.
McArthur Glen outside Bridgend, Cheshire Oaks outside Ellesmere Port and Gunwharf Quays on the Portsmouth Harbourside. Your own town or city has quite probably got its own Designer Outlet on the outskirts and I bet your town centre is minging despite the success of these car convenience centres? I'm surprised that there isn't a concierge on the entrance to these soulless places offering you pieces of carpet that you can strap with velcro to your shoes so that you can shuffle about the stores as if you were at home going to put the kettle on in the kitchen.
The UK has been 'designed' by somebody to keep the wealthy nice and comfortable in their gated communities with their big cars and their designer shopping outlets where they can rub Armani shoulders with their fellow strivers. I know I know "I didn't get where I am today by writing blog posts bemoaning the state of the nation".
Barry, Newport, Rhyl, Bangor, Holyhead in Wales and Ellesmere Port, Birkenhead, Bridgewater and Gosport in England are places that I have witnessed with my own eyes and when I leave I feel for the citizens of these towns because by now they probably know no different. They have got used to their surrounds. We could be cruel and make jokes at their expense. We could feature them in books entitled 'Shit towns' and put them in Christmas stockings but we live in these towns that have been victims of managed decline by the Conservative Party.
The early 1980s recession was a severe economic recession that affected much of the world between approximately the start of 1980 and early 1983. It is widely considered to have been the most severe recession since World War II.It is the same colour government now as was in charge then. The only conclusion we can draw is that we have become so accustomed to our misery that we no longer see the difference in standards of living. We drive through, around, over the 'Stop the Oil' protestors into the out of town designer shopping experience with the idea that one day we will have the money to shop there. For now it is only window shopping that we can do, bar treating ourselves to a Kumquat from the M&S Foodhall for we are a twat.
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