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Travelling by train a lot this month has proved to give me Proustian rushes back to the 1980s where, if I didn't hitchhike and there wasn't a coach, I'd go by train. Coventry station, the other day (for the Warwick Arts Centre gig) brought memories of University interviews and year off tourism flooding back. I am not sure if it's because Coventry station looks particularly 1980s, but I suddenly thought of those first forays into freedom and remembered smoking some cigarettes I'd bought (pack of 10, I am sure) which improbably I smoked whilst sitting under the stairs at a train station somewhere (I am pretty certain it wasn't Coventry).
I think this was during a trip to York for a University interview, which would have been one of my first tastes of adult freedom. I was on my own and could do whatever I wanted without being viewed by parents, teachers or friends. So what I chose to do was smoke cigarettes in a train station. There was a brief period where I would very occasionally have a cigarette at a party and I doubt that I smoked more than 12 cigarettes in total (and bet I threw most of that pack away). It was more about the thrill of freedom. Even if it was the freedom to do something I actually did not enjoy in the least. I am very thankful that I didn't take that up full time. Turned out I was pretty good at getting cancer without the help of cigarettes.
On that trip to York I had had to stay in a bed and breakfast or cheap hotel. I can't even remember how we booked accommodation in those days. I presume I had to ring someone up. Where did I get the number of cheap accommodation in York? It must have been so difficult. I was too scared to go out the night before or after my interview and went out to buy some cheap food and, again enjoying my freedom, wracked with guilt and shame, bought a porn mag from a newsagent.
So this was adulthood. Smoking in train stations and reading (not sure how much I was reading it) Fiesta. Then back to my six form virginal life, with no one ever knowing about my shame. All those copious erections and ejaculations that might have been shared had I been capable of finding someone to share them with, wasted alone. Were they wasted? I mean, pretty much.
Someone out there must surely have been up for enjoying them with me, probably one of the other weird men in the York B and B I had found myself in.
I am sure I binned the porn mag the next morning - and almost certainly not in the bin in my room, as that could be traced back to me somehow. Maybe some lucky York teenager or man found the material in the bin and got to have a free wank. They're free anyway. If you have a visual imagination.
The shame is all I remember. Imagine feeling shame for such minor infractions of public decency. If I could go back and tell myself that I'd one day publish this seedy and sad tale for potentially anyone on the planet to read...
Or tell him what else you'd be able to access readily for free.
Or that I was still sorting myself out and wasting less frequent erections and much less copious supplies of gametes...
It would take a lot of explaining. Maybe time travel does exist, but everyone is just too embarrassed to come back, because of the stuff they'd have to explain to us.
Anyway provincial railway stations make me think about porn mags and cigarettes, of University interviews and Bristol Temple Meads. No one can say I didn't make the most of my teenage years...
