GOING INTO THE BIG CITY

A soggy scene in the Big City

I ventured into the Big City on Saturday. This might not appear at first to be much of a revelation, but I realised last week that it’s actually been a very long time since I’d last been in to have a day just mooching around the shops. To be honest because I’ve kind of got out of the habit in recent years after the changes in my professional lifestyle, and I have the kind of unsettling feeling that it may be as long as three years since I trudged those bright pavements.

As I skulk in my shared hermitage (if that’s not too oxymoronic) out here on the rim, there are very few people who just pass by and suggest a couple of drinks in town and it’s become such an ordeal and upheaval to get myself there from here, even for the most exciting sounding events, that I can rarely be bothered with it nowadays, preferring to flit out rather unlike a ninja when I need a pint or two of milk and flit stealthily up to the keyboard to obtain anything more specialized which then gets the actual lugging by the stout fellows from Her Majesty’s Postal Services.

No wonder they hate me.

So, why did I have this sudden change of heart? Why was this grey old carcass suddenly inspired to slither its weary self into the very heart of the throbbing Metropolis on a soggy Saturday at the tail end of February? Well, t’beloved had to go in to attend a seminar and recently I’ve started to find that whenever I’m left alone in our castle-ette, I tend to get a little bit twitchy and find that those precious hours get frittered away either at the keyboard (which I already spend most of my week doing, so that’s not all that healthy) or parked in front of the TV watching my old tat and waiting for her to come home whilst giving myself a hard time for wasting all that time, without actually doing anything about it.

This is how whole lifetimes just slip away.

So, I thought it might be fun to go in to the city with her. Perhaps we could have a little breakfast on the way, Coffee and a Danish, after which I could see her safely to her mysteriously located destination and then head off alone to potter around for the intervening few hours and see what shops had survived the great cull caused by the recent recession.

Sadly our planning was slightly off because we’d not checked the weekend rail timetables the night before and so the relaxing Coffee and Danish option kind of got scratched even before we set off into the continuous bucketing rain of a typical Blogfordshire day. Having parked the car at the station and done my usual ritual of getting rained on a lot whilst I skittered back and forth a few times to check that I’ve actually locked it and set the handbrake, we stood for a while in the diluted urine puddles of the railway station rain shelter and, only minutes after it was due, hopped on a battered old piece of rolling stock which was only leaking slightly, and within 40 minutes we arrived at the shopping centre that the main railway terminus has now disguised itself as.

We passed unmolested through its shiny, glittery display of wares and headed out once again, into the rain, hoping to catch one of the three free bus services across the city to the other major rail terminus, the old Victorian one that still resembles a railway station and hasn’t yet had its own massive makeover as a retail hub. It took us a moment to realise that the No 2 route which went where we wanted to go didn’t actually start from here, and so, with only a slight pause for me to acquire the soggy foot which would stay with me throughout the rest of my day out, when I stood on a loosely fitting paving slab, we boarded bus No 1, whilst I continued to mull over whether it is possible to get trench foot from a paving slab.

Some might ask why we failed to take advantage of the gleaming newish Metro system to make our journey across town? Well, of course, we were wondering that ourselves, but had been unreliably informed that all services on that particular branch had been suspended, and it was only once I had bid my farewells to t’beloved later on that I noticed one of the metrocities merrily chugging its way out of the station we had achieved by our more convoluted methodology.

Coffee Shop ceiling

For after the free bus No 1 had deposited us at the extremes of its circular route, I boldy suggested that we didn’t wait for the now mythical No 2 bus to come along as we had a line of sight to our destination and it wouldn’t be too far to walk. Several lifetimes later, after negotiating the rabbit warren of pedestrian routes designed to snag the unwary foot warrior into false hope, we arrived at the Victorian gothic pile with a good half hour to spare before the seminar, and had a kind of diluted variation on our planned exciting breakfast by sitting in “Pumpkins” and having a Coffee. It was an impressive space to put a coffee shop in, to be honest, with all the old Victorian trimmings like the glass dome still intact. I sipped at my Victorian coffee and mulled over which part of the Empire it might have originated from whilst grey-haired gentlemen carrying strangely shaped bags which spoke of long-planned Saturday missions and outings mulled around us, and another group of gentlemen discussed their opinions upon the source of the finest Fish & Chips in the North-West of England, which boiled down to either Ramsbottom or New Mills, apparently.

So t’beloved and I went our separate ways for the day. There was one shop I really wanted to visit despite it’s slightly scary position in one of the scruffier neighbourhoods because I’d been considering an online purchase of something that qualified as proper tat, and I thought that the High Street version of the stores might just have it in stock to save me the postal charges. They didn’t, of course, and so my morning was already spiraling into failure. I trudged sulkily around the music and book stores that I remembered and which still survived (sadly very few) but by about 10.30 I’d been to pretty much everywhere I’d wanted to go and realised that I still had about three and a half hours to fill before my planned rendezvous with t’beloved and our planned lunch.

I guess part of the problem was that I wasn’t looking for clothes or pong or household tat but I ventured on, spotting things that I thought t’beloved might be interested in to tell her later, like the four day offer on crockery in a favourite tea shop chain and the details of a book-signing that she might be keen to attend. Then I went back and forth between the bookshops I’d already visited, comparing the prices of some republished Dashiel Hammetts (which rather excitingly - I'm hoping you're getting the irony here - varied from £3.00 to £7.99) and realising that price comparison is so much easier online. I also spotted some enticing books that I’d previously been unaware of but which I’ll probably buy much cheaper online later.

Sigh!

Olde Worlde charm

I needed a coffee. “It’s people like me who are killing the High Street” I thought as I sat down in a bookshop later to drink my Cappuccino, and the thought quite ruined the taste. I did spot a rather lovely run-down looking building from out of the window but had to wait a while for the mother and daughter sitting in front of it to go away before I pointed my phone to take a less than impressive picture, lest I be thought of as being a freakish stalker type.

The times we live in, eh?

So what did I achieve after my morning alone in the big city? Well, I bought some cards I needed to have in, rediscovered a cheap music shop that I’d half forgotten about and bought some DVDs at a bargain price that even the Internet had so far not been able to match, and pondered a lot about the people I’d seen. From the obnoxious, insufferably smug, self-obsessed clotheshorses in the department stores to those other people wearing the scariest looking clothes I've ever seen on a person. I did occasionally wonder whether they had access to actual mirrors in their homes, because I couldn't imagine anyone actually choosing to be seen out and about dressed like that. Then there were the ‘broken’ people who seemed to be everywhere. I saw a man struggling along, carrying his new “Vax” and a girl carrying an incongruous wooden shoe rack, and somehow the time passed. Eventually I met t’beloved for lunch and after venturing around more shops (and starting to feel a touch ill – perhaps my lunchtime pizza was a bit dodgy...) we headed home.

I get told from time-to-time that I need to get out more and it does me good to see people.

Now I’m not so sure…