Now, normally I have plenty of things I want to write about each week and have no problem putting pen to paper. But this week, I’ve found it quite a struggle. Not that I don’t know what to write about. I do.
But it’s because I’m not quite sure how exactly I feel about it. It’s got me in somewhat of a dilemma. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, rather than writing. However, deadlines loom. Friday comes around all too quickly. In fact, I’ve found to my cost that it’s at exactly the same time each week.
So here it is. This last week I made a flying visit back to the UK, to Croydon to see friends. I don’t get to travel back much, so it’s nice to go and it’s nice to catch up on things I miss when I do. It was great to go back, to see friends, to see old places, to have a Sunday lunch and a proper Indian.
But I was also very aware of how odd some things seemed. In fact, how depressing they actually seemed in some cases.
The first thing was a pub in the centre. It’s a pub I’ve often been in, it’s a pub I like. It opens for breakfasts every morning and there are tables and seats outside the front for the smokers to congregate. But on the morning I walked past it this week at about 9.30am, the tables out front were packed with a dozen old men in various stages of scruffiness. Each one was gulping from a pint of lager and dragging on a roll-up fag. Not a breakfast between them. Even the one old man, who I’ve seen there many times before, and who dresses like some 1920s dandy, complete with brightly-coloured waistcoat and beige jacket, corduroy trousers, orange flower, smartly polished brown shoes, an elaborately decorated walking cane, and a hat that makes him look like Terry Thomas or a well-turned-out Dick Dastardly.
And most of them were still there when I walked past again at about 4pm, each with a pint and a roll-up. This, it seemed, was their life. No doubt many, if not all of them, would be there at closing time and would then be back again the next morning at opening time. I wouldn’t be surprised that at least a few of them have requested in their wills that they be stuffed and mounted on the bar when they finally pop it (which I would guess, won’t be long now). It totally depressed me.
The second thing on my visit back was the darkness. It seemed dark, darkly obscure, blackly dim. Darkly black. It wasn’t raining. It was just dark, like the sky was lower or something. I don’t know, maybe it was because the clocks went back and it was dark at 4.30pm instead of 5.30pm. But it seemed to have the effect of closing things in.
Both these things made me feel uneasy. I found myself questioning how I felt about coming back. Was this how I remembered Croydon? Was it as grim as this? Was it as depressing? Or was it simply the perception of an expat flushed through with two-and-a-half years of sun and ice-cold beers in Seville? Was I just seeing it from a different point of view now? Maybe during the time I lived in Croydon I had become accustomed to it and so had become desensitized. I had witnessed this year’s summer riots in Croydon – where a decades-old family furniture shop had been burned to the ground – through the news websites while in Spain. I had read about the pessimistic jobs forecasts and the poverty gripping the nation on the same websites. And yet even then, when I was reading about these things from 1,300 miles away, it hadn’t seemed that depressing to me. It was as if I almost expected it. After all, it is Croydon. It’s not exactly Chelsea or “Poshington-on-Sea”. I had never felt like that living there. Other people who knew me thought I was mad to live in Croydon, because of its reputation. But not me, I thought it was fine. I was only ever threatened with being stabbed twice in the whole time I lived there. It was great.
Maybe that’s why I was so taken aback at how grim it seemed to me this last week.
But, here’s the funny thing. I knew the moment I stepped back off the plane at Seville airport on my return, that I missed it. Even though it seemed grim. Grimmer than being locked in a shed with perpetually bubbly Timmy Mallet and having no weapons to hand. Grimmer than being kicked in the bollocks by a one-legged donkey who then proceeds to poo on you as well. Grimmer than being trapped in a windowless room where you’re forced to watch endless re-runs of Jim’ll Fix It (yes, I’m sorry he’s died too, but let’s be honest, he was weird wasn’t he?)
So what does that say about me? I don’t have a clue. Even as I’ve sat here and written this, as I’ve tried to explain what I felt, I still can’t work it out. Answers on a postcard please.
Maybe I’ll find the answer by buying a lottery ticket again this week. Perhaps this blog does have special powers, but it just skips a week now and again.
I’ll let you know.
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