Call them all wilderness…

I've just received a first edition of J. B. Priestley's English Journey, his 1934 equivalent of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. In a sense, they're similar - both authors are sympathetic but critical, alive to the misery caused by industrial capitalism, but also to the joys of urban working-class culture.

Priestley isn't interested in the pretty bits of the country - that's for H. V. Morton - and he visits a lot of the places with which I'm familiar. On the Midlands:

Industry has ravaged it; drunken storm troops have passed this way; there are signs of atrocities everywhere; the earth has been left gaping and bleeding; and what were once bright fields have been rummaged and raped into these dreadful patches of waste ground.

The places I saw had names, but these names were merely so much alliteration: Wolverhampton, Wednesbury, Wednesfield, Willenhall and Walsall. You could call them all wilderness, and have done with it. 

As for West Bromwich - here's something for David Cameron to read:

a picture of grimy desolation… If you put it, brick for brick, into a novel, people would not accept it, would condemn you as a caricaturist and talk about Dickens. The whole neighbourhood is mean and squalid… I could not blame them if they [some urchins] threw stones and stones and smashed every pane of glass for miles. Nobody can blame them if they grow up to smash everything that can be smashed. There ought to be no more of those lunches and dinners, at which political and financial and industrial gentlemen congratulate themselves, until something is done about Rusty Lane and West Bromwich. While they still exist in their present foul shape, it is idle to congratulate ourselves about anything. They make the whole pomp of government here a miserable farce. 

The delegates [parliamentarians] have seen one England, Mayfair in the season. Let them see another England next time, West Bromwich out of season. Out of all seasons except the winter of our discontent. 

Just for yow

An extract from George Borrow's 1862 Wild Wales, just for the inhabitants of the Black Country and Birmingham:

At Birmingham station I became a modern Englishman, enthusiastically proud of modern England's science and energy; that station alone is enough to make one proud of being a modern Englishman. Oh, what an idea does that station with its thousand trains dashing off in all directions, or arriving from all quarters, give of modern English science and energy. My modern English pride accompanied me all the way to Tipton; for all along the route there were wonderful evidences of English skill and enterprise; in chimneys high as cathedral spires, vomiting forth smoke, furnaces emitting flame and lava, and in the sound of gigantic hammers, wielded by steam, the Englishman's slave. After passing Tipton, at which place one leaves the great working district behind, I became for a considerable time a yawning, listless Englishman, without pride, enthusiasm, or feeling of any kind…

I'm not surprised. Next stop from Tipton is The Dark Place, home of The Hegemon! Birmingham was indeed an industrial powerhouse - but the workers came from all over the world, particularly Wales and Ireland. The industry is gone now - between Birmingham and Tipton is a wasteland of abandoned and demolished factories, the only vomit that of revellers - usually Gary O'D - drowning their sorrows, the only hammer the one I (literally) used on my wall on Friday night in a fruitless attempt to get my neighbour to turn his music down…

A brief respite

Lunch with Christine is always a delight, despite us swapping details of recent devastations. After that - back to the office to find my new copy of The World of Anjali, something Cynical Ben prompted me to acquire, and my West Midlands Fencing hoodie, with the slogan 'Bend Sinister' emblazoned on the back.

Why, you may ask? It's a triple intertext. Bend Sinister is the title of a 1947 Nabokov novel, of my favourite album by The Fall, and I set my blade to the left. Wonder how many fencers will spot any of these…

Court Short

What an appalling waste of a day. Rather than swimming, writing and blogging, I dragged myself out by 8 a.m. to get to Brierley Hill, where Dudley County Court is based. It's a converted office block in the midst of a depressing business estate (mostly To Let) - but at least the legal toffs have to travel through the concrete jungle to get there.

Once inside, the victim, her mother, their (Lithuanian) translator and I were left in an airless, featureless room for 6 hours. We got over the language barrier and chatted a bit: our first meeting was rather fraught and social niceties weren't observed. I've been to Lithuania so we talked about Vilnius, and the translator studied in the Philology department at Vilnius University, where I gave a paper, so we discovered mutual acquaintances, but after a while, boredom, the upcoming confrontation, and the artificiality of the situation intruded on our sunny dispositions.

Turns our there was nothing to anticipate. First the defendant's lawyer and his interpreter (don't know which language) went to the cells to point out that he was guilty as sin and should give up now in exchange for a lighter sentence. Then there were apparently several hours of legal argument. Then we were informed that the defendant had sacked his lawyer and the new one would need a few months to acquaint himself with the case.

So my day was wasted, the victim was left without resolution and still clearly terrified of this bloke, a professional translator had been hired for the day, plus a night in a hotel, plus the very expensive legal teams (all paid for by the state) - what a farce. And it's all going to happen again at some point in the future. At least I got to read the paper in peace, get a long way through Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and avoid a deathly staff discussion day, though the architecture and decor were virtually indistinguishable from the university. There's a joke about incarceration and Kafka in there somewhere, but I'll leave it to you.

Still, I saw a little bit more of the West Midlands and can tick it off the list of places to visit. Dudley was closed and Brierley Hill had clearly recently been used for a post-apocalypse film (although Survivors made the postwar city look livelier and cleaner). There's something rather sweet about listening to Bach's Cello Suites while gazing out on post-industrial decay, the grey relieved only by the occasional splash of vomit on the pavement.

How's your day been?

Friday I'm in Bed

Well, it's almost the end of a very long week, but one in which I think I've mostly been a force for good, even though I didn't wear my Green Lantern t-shirt at all. I've done some extra-kind counselling and tutoring, marked some essays, been to some great lectures and hauled my carcass up and down the pool even though I have a cold. So to reward myself over the weekend, I'm going to be waiting at a motorway junction in the West Midlands at 6.00 a.m. for a lift to London for a training day on taking sports teams on trips abroad. Deep joy.

Oh, and Stoke are going to beat Everton on Saturday. Ahem