Eight hundred melancholic words

I recently had cause to go into Manchester on the train. Having a fear of parking anywhere where there might not be three spaces for me to aim at, the idea of driving into the Metrop has never appealed. Being driven there, yes. That’s good. But driving myself? I think not. Not when there are three railway stations within coughing distance of Chez Moi and the free tram at the other end to get me to Shopping.

It takes about an hour all told to get from home to Shopping. That includes faffing around on platforms, buying tickets from people who seem to think it the height of rudeness to interrupt them filing their nails (which is a disgusting habit – why can’t they just throw the nails away rather than keeping them in cabinets for someone else to dispose of?) and the other detritus of transport. But this column concerns only ten minutes of said journey.

It takes five minutes to drive from house to station. In those five minutes I pass my infant school and my primary school. They don’t look any different (a bit of paint, probably a mission statement where we had to make do with caring teachers) and I think I spent seven reasonably happy years there. I used to have happy years you know.

Then I get on the train and the second five minutes of importance. We first pass the hospital where I was born some twenty seven summers ago. Unlike the infant and primary schools the hospital has expanded and expanded much as the universe did in Eric Idle’s Meaning of Life song. New buildings which I hope someone uses spring up almost as often as a new acre of car parking. There used to be rabbits in the bushes around it. I hope they weren’t a casualty of NHS progress. If there is an NHS funding crisis then my old hospital and the building staff of the local area are not aware of it.

Then, some two minutes later, we speed past my senior school. An eclectic mix of buildings ranging from a very grand main building (built around the time of the Great War though the school dates back to 1487) to what I still think of as the brand new Refectory (even though it must be getting close to 15 years old now). There have even been a couple of expensive looking additions since I left there (cough) years ago. My school (for it is the only establishment in my academic career which I speak of with pride – it is The Old School™ after all) bought a convent because they had a swimming pool and the boys school (as my old place was for 494 years) did not. That’s the kind of ruthless pragmatism that they instilled into us.

So we’ve covered ten minutes of selected time, probably twenty minutes in real time and we’ve seen most of my life. My place of birth, all three of my schools, we could easily have passed my first family home if I’d taken a slight detour. I live in a tiny world. This isn’t the age where people were born, lived, worked and died all within cat swinging distance. This is the Twenty First century. Hover cars, alien invasions, missions to Venus and silver lamé catsuits. The only deviations from this narrow little trap were three years in Coventry (to which most people would say “What was the charge?” but I liked it) and an office a whole six minutes from home when there is no traffic.

But why should this matter now? I’ve mentioned my twenty seven summers – this hasn’t suddenly arisen. True but it has gained some sense of scale recently because I’ve totally fallen for someone who is not just out of my reach because she’s far too good for me (which they always are, obviously) but she’s literally out of my reach as she’s about two hundred miles away. Two hundred miles for someone whose life can be comfortably fitted into ten minutes might as well be Venus. A heavenly body, the goddess of love and so far away that I can only imagine her. Yes – she’s Venus for all those reasons and because she is really hot. She's added a new dimension to the perception of my existence. But, sadly, I end up missing the point. Rather than expand my horizons I will, no doubt, choose to shrink away and pity myself. I look at things through dark and depressing eyes and this makes it so hard to tell the difference between a bucket of water and a bucket of fuel when it comes to putting out the fire of my own abjectness.

I'm also a pretentious wanker at times.

12th December 2003