To me the ticket guy was a Londoner. I didn’t care if he was Moslem, Hindu, Aborigine, Agnostic or Whatever, he had a resigned, friendly welcome and bit of chit chat as he told me, “I’d like to get out of the city. There are too many people now.”
Can see what you mean, mate. Even at seven on a Sunday evening the stations and tube are still busy, a multitude of languages being spoken. It wasn’t like that 30 years ago when I was here as a student, it was almost provincial back then, and run down, and I read in a newspaper that London is now travellers #1 destination in the world, and I'd already seen that many weren’t here just on a fun weekend visit.
These days, this place is ultra-cosmopolitan, gilded in places by ultra-wealth. The 'trickle down effect' of Friedman enacted by disciples Reagan and Thatcher - Push some up, Push way more down; the hidden slogan - .is just about getting going 30 years on, at the expense of countless more. You can smell the money alongside its age-old ally Mr. Dirt-And-Slime.
Talking of that, after one night in an old friend and buddy’s dog shed that he passes off as a house, plus a few pints of Guinness in a village pub, hops hanging from walls and ceiling, the itching and scratching became too much and I got on a train into Lundern Tarn my son, hacked it over on the underground from Liverpool Street to Victoria and wandered up Ebury Street into a warm, comfy room with power shower.
“Ain’t you ever gonna clean this house?” I’d asked earlier that day in Penshurst on the Kent and Sussex border.
“Oh ... well I’m getting round to it right now, Posh,” came the sedentary reply from the toilet as I surveyed a centimeter of dust on his ‘desk’ and cobwebs so thick you could carry a couple of pounds of Pippins in them.
“Righto … I’m off to London, Fergus.”
When I’d landed at Gatwick two days previously it had taken me a while to reach Tonbridge, a town south of the capital where I’d been to secondary school. And compared to Indian Rail charging £2 to travel 700km, British Rail is having a freaking laugh asking £14.50 to go 40km. And in India the sun shines, just going to show that you can’t buy the weather, which had now turned slate grey at dusk and stayed that way all day and night pretty much for the next two weeks at the end of which came a huge Atlantic storm bending the trees and thrashing down water.
Arriving at Tonbridge railway station, looking today like a giant public lavatory, I walked slowly up the High Street, a path I’d trodden often in my youth ... and man it was depressing.
Hooligans outside McDonald’s on a Friday night piss-up/glue-sniffing session ... usual story. Not even half-full pubs whose sole aim was to see lager being swilled ... no change there either. Charity and Pound shops galore. A new piece of pavement. The Christian Bookshop still going strong. In short, as dead as a dodo and so I went to bed and watched some BBC (excellent thumbs up) and kipped solidly until 8am when I asked a scruffy middle-aged female receptionist with tattoos if breakfast was included in the £65 room cost.
“No, it isn’t. It’s fifteen pounds extra.”
“Forget that then. Do you know where I can rent a car?”
“No … you’ll have to go round the industrial estate.”
Now I might have known where that was, but she didn't know that, and the well-dressed Chinese guy having breakfast with his polite and uniformed son off for morning lessons at the posh, expensive school up the road, certainly wouldn’t have known.
So I headed over the road to a 16th century building with a bakery in the shadow of the 11th century castle, established after William of Normandy defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, for a bacon sandwich. Then I caught the number 7 bus to Hadlow, my birthplace, on a nostalgic 5 mile journey that I must have taken thousands of times before. From the window it looked pleasingly much the same. Right turn at the Ivy House pub then through the detached then semi-detached outskirts of Tonbridge that abruptly end, spreading out into farmland and fruit orchards and fields of sheep and then into the village with its resplendent castle tower, grocery shop recently held up by Stew Maher with a machete, mist on the square, and I was home.
Up School Lane where a building I once studied in had become a doctor's surgery and library, further on the Scout hut next to the bowling green, the old school playing fields now a housing development for bankers and stockbrokers poncing about in the bushes with secatares at the weekend.
The council estate loomed large, and still vaguely menacing as the former lair of skinheads and Doc Martens and fists flying into faces. Nothing had changed as the Rose & Crown pub came into view, run now by an Albanian, and I dropped in on a friend who's just become a grandad who wasn't in so I headed out into the fields and up to Oxenhoath, the scene of many a teenage tryst and tustle with underwear on the back seat … where the damp morning air was perfect, just as I knew it.
Downhill on farm tracks and over stiles and past the cricket pitch where summer fun is had by old lags and old boys, and into civilisation via the scrapyard to find a boarded up Harrow pub, whose newspaper I'd once delivered, witness to many a drunken escapade, steak and kidney pie and game of darts. Fluff's bench nearby, up Cemetery Lane. Then onto the final stretch and a look at the Cherry Orchard house in which I'd been born before popping round to Rog's for a cup of tea as usual and a spin in his Porsche down to Hastings-on-Sea where the absent friend of earlier was fishing and had caught jack schitt, as usual. By dusk it was onto a pub in Rusthall and a night in the dog-house. The rest is history.
Can see what you mean, mate. Even at seven on a Sunday evening the stations and tube are still busy, a multitude of languages being spoken. It wasn’t like that 30 years ago when I was here as a student, it was almost provincial back then, and run down, and I read in a newspaper that London is now travellers #1 destination in the world, and I'd already seen that many weren’t here just on a fun weekend visit.
These days, this place is ultra-cosmopolitan, gilded in places by ultra-wealth. The 'trickle down effect' of Friedman enacted by disciples Reagan and Thatcher - Push some up, Push way more down; the hidden slogan - .is just about getting going 30 years on, at the expense of countless more. You can smell the money alongside its age-old ally Mr. Dirt-And-Slime.
Talking of that, after one night in an old friend and buddy’s dog shed that he passes off as a house, plus a few pints of Guinness in a village pub, hops hanging from walls and ceiling, the itching and scratching became too much and I got on a train into Lundern Tarn my son, hacked it over on the underground from Liverpool Street to Victoria and wandered up Ebury Street into a warm, comfy room with power shower.
“Ain’t you ever gonna clean this house?” I’d asked earlier that day in Penshurst on the Kent and Sussex border.
“Oh ... well I’m getting round to it right now, Posh,” came the sedentary reply from the toilet as I surveyed a centimeter of dust on his ‘desk’ and cobwebs so thick you could carry a couple of pounds of Pippins in them.
“Righto … I’m off to London, Fergus.”
When I’d landed at Gatwick two days previously it had taken me a while to reach Tonbridge, a town south of the capital where I’d been to secondary school. And compared to Indian Rail charging £2 to travel 700km, British Rail is having a freaking laugh asking £14.50 to go 40km. And in India the sun shines, just going to show that you can’t buy the weather, which had now turned slate grey at dusk and stayed that way all day and night pretty much for the next two weeks at the end of which came a huge Atlantic storm bending the trees and thrashing down water.
Arriving at Tonbridge railway station, looking today like a giant public lavatory, I walked slowly up the High Street, a path I’d trodden often in my youth ... and man it was depressing.
Hooligans outside McDonald’s on a Friday night piss-up/glue-sniffing session ... usual story. Not even half-full pubs whose sole aim was to see lager being swilled ... no change there either. Charity and Pound shops galore. A new piece of pavement. The Christian Bookshop still going strong. In short, as dead as a dodo and so I went to bed and watched some BBC (excellent thumbs up) and kipped solidly until 8am when I asked a scruffy middle-aged female receptionist with tattoos if breakfast was included in the £65 room cost.
“No, it isn’t. It’s fifteen pounds extra.”
“Forget that then. Do you know where I can rent a car?”
“No … you’ll have to go round the industrial estate.”
Now I might have known where that was, but she didn't know that, and the well-dressed Chinese guy having breakfast with his polite and uniformed son off for morning lessons at the posh, expensive school up the road, certainly wouldn’t have known.
So I headed over the road to a 16th century building with a bakery in the shadow of the 11th century castle, established after William of Normandy defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, for a bacon sandwich. Then I caught the number 7 bus to Hadlow, my birthplace, on a nostalgic 5 mile journey that I must have taken thousands of times before. From the window it looked pleasingly much the same. Right turn at the Ivy House pub then through the detached then semi-detached outskirts of Tonbridge that abruptly end, spreading out into farmland and fruit orchards and fields of sheep and then into the village with its resplendent castle tower, grocery shop recently held up by Stew Maher with a machete, mist on the square, and I was home.
Up School Lane where a building I once studied in had become a doctor's surgery and library, further on the Scout hut next to the bowling green, the old school playing fields now a housing development for bankers and stockbrokers poncing about in the bushes with secatares at the weekend.
The council estate loomed large, and still vaguely menacing as the former lair of skinheads and Doc Martens and fists flying into faces. Nothing had changed as the Rose & Crown pub came into view, run now by an Albanian, and I dropped in on a friend who's just become a grandad who wasn't in so I headed out into the fields and up to Oxenhoath, the scene of many a teenage tryst and tustle with underwear on the back seat … where the damp morning air was perfect, just as I knew it.
Downhill on farm tracks and over stiles and past the cricket pitch where summer fun is had by old lags and old boys, and into civilisation via the scrapyard to find a boarded up Harrow pub, whose newspaper I'd once delivered, witness to many a drunken escapade, steak and kidney pie and game of darts. Fluff's bench nearby, up Cemetery Lane. Then onto the final stretch and a look at the Cherry Orchard house in which I'd been born before popping round to Rog's for a cup of tea as usual and a spin in his Porsche down to Hastings-on-Sea where the absent friend of earlier was fishing and had caught jack schitt, as usual. By dusk it was onto a pub in Rusthall and a night in the dog-house. The rest is history.