Like a ten year old pretending summer isn't really ending - part one

[millionreasons]

Onto the train with ten seconds to spare, locate the quiet carriage (which means only three people making mobile phone calls) and travel Pompey-wards. I have previously been through Portsmouth on the way to catch various ferries and found it a dank and depressing place and, as we walk towards Southsea, I see no reason to change my view. The B&B looks like my student rooms of yore and smells of cat wee. The landlady is surely the model for Mrs Overall. There are incontinence sheets on the bed. I'd like to say at least it's clean, but it's not clean. At least it's quiet. Deathly so.

However, I'm forced to revise my position on Portsmouth as we wander through the town. Albert Road is a lively mix of restaurants, pubs and antique shops. Towards the front, there's a giant fiberglass dinosaur and a small seasidey area of arcades, minigolf and candy floss. Onto the Millennium walk and into the old town and harbour with its Nelson memorabilia, old forts, and Georgian houses. We eschew the Spinaker tower for the historic dockyard and the Gun Wharf Quays where we visit the Cadbury Factory shop but don't buy anything because I'm too depressed that advent calendars are already in stock, and a pasty/coffee shop that really wants to be a franchise, but hasn't quite got there yet. I keep a lookout for any 40 year old black men who look like they joined the navy aged 10 so I can ask them if they voted Tory, but then David points out that he was in Plymouth.



I am surprised by how nice everyone is  - you'd think that as they live in Pompey, they'd be miserable, but apart from a few drunkards, the people are all really pleasant. I start a coughing fit in the pasty/coffee shop (I am recovering from pleurisy/bronchitis/TB/woman-flu) and the woman working there offers to bring me a glass of water. You don't get that in Oxford Street Starbucks. We eat lunch in a bog-standard soup 'n' sarnie kind of place and the woman comes over to ask us if everything's Ok with our meal. Later on, because it's raining, we go to the cinema and the man selling the ice-cream explains to me which flavours David has chosen - usually the minimum wage multiplex workers look like they'd kill you given a quarter of a chance. We went to see Scott Pilgrim which I thought I would hate, but I adored it (review).

Eat at Wagamama (honestly, this is like a first date to an out of town provincial shopping centre). I'm pleased to see that the franchise has barely changed its menu since I first ate in the Tottenham Court Road outlet some 14 years ago (although the juices now taste watered down). We walk back through the rain soaked empty streets and what with meandering through the student area and the film we've just seen being about people in their 20s, I feel a deep nostalgia for being 22 and a profound ennui at being 37.



You've hardly said a word since you set eyes on the horizon

I change my mind about the niceness of Portsmouth when we arrive one hour early, as instructed, at the ferry terminal. You'll be boarding in half an hour, they tell us. At 8.55 a.m., we're still waiting whilst the security guards argue about which door we're going to board through. At 8.56. we're finally allowed through, or rather the people in front of me are, I'm stood waiting for the woman to tear off the perforated part of my ticket whilst she shout on her walkie because she's forgotten to take the boarding card of a man in a wheelchair who's already gone through. After several minutes of this failing to multi-task two simple things, I snap at her to canyoujustletmethroughplease. Fortunately, we're not going to miss the ferry because it sets off 40 minutes late, eventually explained by confusion between cargo for Jersey and cargo for Guernsey. They do this trip every day, you'd have thought they would have got the hang of it by now. Considering that ferries have long been losing customers to cheap airlines and it's a real mission in terms of time and money to go by boat, you'd have thought that they would make an effort to provide an efficient and pleasant service, especially as ferries have the reputation of being like the last days of Sodom (and sometimes Gomorrah as as well); I remember one particular Hull to Hook-of-Holland hellscape in the days before the Eurostar.

We nab a seat at the front of the boat in the Quiet Lounge (which means only two out of three televisions are on). Someone should set up a Guardianista ferry service for the guilty rich who want to reduce their carbon footprint. Instead of lasagne and fish 'n' chips in the brasserie cafeteria, there'd be locally produced organic cheese and tomatoes, filtered water and highly trained baristas. Instead of a loud kids' area, there's be a reading room where people could borrow one of the Booker longlist and sit in silence, emitting knowing chuckles from time to time. Instead of the bar-casino, there'd be an interpretive dance group acting out a period of local history of the destination country.

Anyway, seven hours later, we arrive in St Peter Port, Guernsey and walk up the esplanade to our hotel which is quite the opposite of yesterday's and our room even has a seaview. Set off to explore the town. The Channel Islands are supposed to be France-in-England but unless you count the Victor Hugo Boulangerie and some of the street names being in franglais, it looks more like a large coastal town in southern England. Penzance, perhaps. It looks like Cornwall, if the industries had changed from fishing and tin mining to cream teas and Rick Stein a hundred years earlier. There're all the high street shops and the same amount of road traffic you get in British towns - give the English a narrow cobbled winding hilly street and they like nothing better than driving a SUV down it. Dave tells me that the original Channel Islanders were Norman and that's how they 'became' English when Guillaume le Vainqueur took over our fair isle. I think it's Ok to call the Guernsians English. As long as you don't call them Jerseyites. Or god forbid, a Sarkese a Hermian, or vice versa. As for those Alderneyans - well, everyone hates those drunken bastards. Dave thinks that Guernsey is like Gibraltar - ex pat community, fortifications, £ sterling that you can't actually use in Britain and a VAT-free shoppers' paradise. There are also English phone and post boxes but in Swedish yellow and blue, respectively.



Indeed, when we go out to eat at one of those 'bistro' places (English masquerading as French) that always raise my ire (lack of bread to go with pate, lack of freshly squeezed fruit in my 'freshly squeezed' juice) the people behind us are talking about Richmond, Surrey and the other table about the photoshoot they've just done - we could still be in Hackney.

Following on from this Olde Englisheness, we go to watch Swtizerland vs England until I get bored and go home on my own to write a rant (honestly, if there weren't a deficit, the Tories would still be making cuts "to keep the market stable and remain competitive internationally" and anyone thinking Nick Clegg and his chums will pull out of the coalition is like Winston Smith putting his hopes in the proles. In the latest Private Eye, there's a tale of Vodafone managing to wriggle out of paying £6bn worth of tax, but I don't see the BBC (or other television channels or indeed newspapers) reporting on that. It's just asylum seekers eating swans in their half a million pound council houses. I'd rather my tax dollars go towards asylum seekers, not (just) because I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but because I don't want to trip over homeless people every time I leave the house.



To be continued...

Comments

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

In the latest Private Eye, there's a tale of Vodafone managing to wriggle out of paying £6bn worth of tax, but I don't see the BBC (or other television channels or indeed newspapers) reporting on that.

It might have been reported in "Have I Got News For You" if they had shows broadcasting at the moment.

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

Hmm, not sure. I don't think Hislop has much to do with the content - they tend to stick to the main news events.