I had a gig near Southampton last night and had stayed overnight in the delightful Holiday Inn. I had planned to make my way to Cheltenham early, so I could spend the day there before my next gig, but the headlights on my car had failed again last night (
they seem to go about once every 18 months - is that normal? Always both at once) so I had to go to the garage to get them replaced. The man looked a bit harrassed and said he had so much on that he couldn't do it til 3, so it looked like I'd be spending most of my day in Southampton instead. And without wanting to offend the people who live in this shit-hole, it wasn't quite as pleasant a thought as being in the spa town of Cheltenham.
I was a bit tired and hungover and when I asked if there was a cafe nearby another man in the garage excitedly pointed me in the direction of Debenhams, which he promised me had a nice restaurant.
He had lied to me. Or at least had different parameters as to what consitituted a reasonable place to eat. I had a very unpleasant bacon sandwich (it's hard to fuck those up, but Debenhams in Southampton managed it) and some diet Pepsi and spent half an hour looking at the pale and sad faces of a dozen or so people who have chosen to live in Southampton and at no point in their lives thought, "What am I doing? Why don't I move somewhere nice? Perhaps there are nicer cafes somewhere else in the world!"
If they have thought that they have then immediately thought, "But what if the cafes are worse? We'd better not take the risk."
It was another of those days where the sheer volume of humanity depressed me. Everyone I looked at was weighed down by their troubles and the relentless misery of going shopping and having to prepare for Christmas. What was the point of any of it? Would the Christmas they got at the end of all this be worth it? Or would it just be another day of pointlessness and misery? Fat, vacant eyed couples sat munching on their disgusting food, not talking to each other. Frazzled mothers spat out insults at their misbehaving spawn. Even the babies would catch my eye and stare at me with a mirthless glare that seemed to say, "Surely ultimately our entire existence is pointless. Times two because we have been unlucky enough to be born in Southampton."
It made me question the accepted notion that human life is the most sacred of things. Most of it is so mundane and profane. On days like this when the centre of Southampton is thronging with these soul-less husks, humanity does seem like a disease, spreading its tendrils across the world, snuffing out all other life and beauty and you do start to root a little for Al Quaida. If they could only succeed in wiping out our race then maybe the world would have a chance to go back to something less ugly.
But it was only a temporary mood of enlightenment and slowly I felt less appalled by the existence of all these shitting, pissing, scowling, fucking slabs of meat. In any case in three hours I would be able to escape the Black Hole and pretend that it was only the case in this unpleasant port city.
By three my headlights were fixed and I was on my way.
But the truth is that none of us can escape Southampton. The whole world is Southampton. We pretend that it isn't, but we pretend so much in life.
And I shouldn't be complaining, I'm going to Leicester tomorrow. There's a place that makes Southampton seem like the garden of Eden, before the fucking humans came along and spoiled everything, the selfish apple-eaters.
WIN A PSP
November quiz - Question 18
What was the name of the bar in Balham that I used to visit quite regularly when I lived there and where I celebrated my 30th birthday? It has now closed down and last time I looked was an Asian restaurant.
