But I guess you can shop there.
I don't go home for Christmas. That is to say, I don't return to the town of my birth to spend it with my family, since only my father remains there. The rest of us all live in London, so he comes to us.
I'm glad about this. My schoolfriends (from that hellish provincial market-town grammar school) have nearly all moved to London too, over the years, and they never seem to relish the trek back to the shires for Christmas. A small village on the outskirts of a small town is extremely dull whether or not you've come to visit your family. Even the relatively populous conurbation to which I would return holds little in the way of interest for me now, beyond housing my father.
In fact I was there last weekend. Two-and-a-half hours on a weekend train through grim afternoon giving way to oppressive dusk puts me on the familiar platform, and I surrender immediately to autopilot, barely thinking about how to get out of the station on which I've not set foot for five years. In the tunnel under the tracks I remember how this was the final part of a journey I made every Friday night when my grandmother, blessed beloved, lay dying. Out of habit, or something deeper - muscle memory perhaps - I light a cigarette as I make the double doors, and opposite, drearily unchanged, is the station hotel, and I catch my first blast of authentic accent: "Cost gezza nand, youth?"
My sister meets me. She went ahead the day before, and has already run out of patience with the city. She describes coming back here as like putting her life on hold. It's impossible, I have found, to retain long-term antipathy for this city, but when you pull into it on a miserable December evening, not even the fact that it was your childhood and adolescent stamping ground can disguise its unremitting bleakness and its classic industrial town decline. Not even being able to do the accent like the native I am can make me feel at home here any more. So disconnected from real life do I feel that when D rings, her beautiful cut-glass vowels sound like another language, and her easy metropolitanism seems like another country. From then on I'm just riding it out, counting the hours to get back on the train.
Of course, had I known the disgusting fucking mess Virgin had made of that train, with their relentless overbooking, I would have looked forward to it a little less. Still.
I'm glad about this. My schoolfriends (from that hellish provincial market-town grammar school) have nearly all moved to London too, over the years, and they never seem to relish the trek back to the shires for Christmas. A small village on the outskirts of a small town is extremely dull whether or not you've come to visit your family. Even the relatively populous conurbation to which I would return holds little in the way of interest for me now, beyond housing my father.
In fact I was there last weekend. Two-and-a-half hours on a weekend train through grim afternoon giving way to oppressive dusk puts me on the familiar platform, and I surrender immediately to autopilot, barely thinking about how to get out of the station on which I've not set foot for five years. In the tunnel under the tracks I remember how this was the final part of a journey I made every Friday night when my grandmother, blessed beloved, lay dying. Out of habit, or something deeper - muscle memory perhaps - I light a cigarette as I make the double doors, and opposite, drearily unchanged, is the station hotel, and I catch my first blast of authentic accent: "Cost gezza nand, youth?"
My sister meets me. She went ahead the day before, and has already run out of patience with the city. She describes coming back here as like putting her life on hold. It's impossible, I have found, to retain long-term antipathy for this city, but when you pull into it on a miserable December evening, not even the fact that it was your childhood and adolescent stamping ground can disguise its unremitting bleakness and its classic industrial town decline. Not even being able to do the accent like the native I am can make me feel at home here any more. So disconnected from real life do I feel that when D rings, her beautiful cut-glass vowels sound like another language, and her easy metropolitanism seems like another country. From then on I'm just riding it out, counting the hours to get back on the train.
Of course, had I known the disgusting fucking mess Virgin had made of that train, with their relentless overbooking, I would have looked forward to it a little less. Still.
posted by Novus at 16:58
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