The Road to Little Dribbling (4 page)

“But I barely paid that for the watch,” I sputtered.

“That may explain why it’s not working,” he said and handed it back with a look of majestic indifference.

I waited to see if he had anything more to say, if there existed within him the faintest flicker of interest in helping me to get the right time on my wrist and possibly in the process keep his business going. It appeared not.

“Well, I’ll leave it for now,” I said. “I can see you are very busy.”

If he had any appreciation for my rich instinct for mirth, he failed to show it. He gave a shrug and that was the end of our relationship.

I was hungry, but now had only twenty minutes before the next bus, so I went into a McDonald’s for the sake of haste. I should have known better. I have a little personal history with McDonald’s, you see. Once a few years ago after a big family day out we stopped at a McDonald’s in response to cries from a backseatful of grandchildren pleading for an unhealthy meal, and I was put in charge of placing the order. I carefully interviewed everyone in the party—about ten of us, from two cars—collated the order onto the back of an old envelope, and stepped to the counter.

“OK,” I said decisively to the youthful attendant when my turn came, “I would like five Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers, two chocolate milkshakes—”

At this point someone stepped up to tell me that one of the children wanted chicken nuggets instead of a Big Mac.

“Sorry,” I said and then resumed. “Make that
four
Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers, two chocolate milkshakes—”

At this point, some small person tugging on my sleeve informed me that he wanted a strawberry milkshake, not a chocolate one. “Right,” I said, returning to the young attendant, “make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers,
one
chocolate milkshake, one
strawberry
milkshake, three chicken nuggets…”

And so it went as I worked my way through and from time to time adjusted the group’s long and complicated order.

When the food came, the young man produced about eleven trays with thirty or forty bags of food on them.

“What’s this?” I said.

“Your order,” he replied and read my order back to me off the cash register: “Thirty-four Big Macs, twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, twelve chocolate shakes…” It turned out that instead of adjusting my order each time I restarted, he just added to it.

“I didn’t ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times.”

“Same thing,” he said.

“It’s not the same thing at all. You can’t be this stupid.”

Two of the people waiting behind me in line sided with the young attendant.

“You did ask for all that stuff,” one of them said.

The duty manager came over and looked at the cash register. “It says twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers here,” he said as if it were a gun with my fingerprints on it.

“I know what it says there, but that isn’t what I asked for.”

One of my grown children came over to find out what was going on. I explained to him what had happened and he weighed the matter judiciously and decided that, taken all in all, it was my fault.

“I can’t believe you are all this stupid,” I said to an audience that consisted now of about sixteen people, some of them newly arrived but already taking against me. Eventually my wife came over and led me away by the elbow, the way I used to watch her lead jabbering psychiatric patients off to a quiet room. She sorted the mess out amicably with the manager and attendant, brought two trays of food to the table in about thirty seconds, and informed me that I was never again to venture into a McDonald’s whether alone or under supervision.

And now here I was in McDonald’s again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald’s is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.

“Do you want fries with that?” the young man serving me asked.

I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: “No. That’s why I didn’t ask for fries, you see.”

“We’re just told to ask like,” he said.

“When I want fries, generally I say something like, ‘I would like some fries, too, please.’ That’s the system I use.”

“We’re just told to ask like,” he repeated.

“Do you need to know the other things I don’t want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.”

“We’re just told to ask like,” he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day.

I realized that I probably wasn’t quite ready for McDonald’s yet.

—

The bus service from Bognor Regis to Brighton via Littlehampton is advertised as the Coastliner 700, which makes it sound sleek and stylish, possibly turbocharged. I imagined myself sitting high above the ground in air-conditioned comfort in a plush velveteen seat, enjoying views over bright sea and rolling countryside through softly tinted glass, the kind so subtly colored that you feel like turning to the person sitting beside you and saying, “Is this glass lightly tinted or is Littlehampton ever so slightly blue?”

In fact, the bus when it wheezed in had none of these features. It was a cramped and airless single-decker filled with hard metal edges and molded plastic seats. It was the sort of vehicle you would expect to be put on if you were being transferred between prisons. But on the plus side it was cheap—£4.40 for the journey to Hove, which was less than I had spent on a pint of lager in London the night before.

I was still cautiously excited for I was about to travel through a succession of small and, I hoped, charming resorts: Littlehampton, Goring-by-Sea, Angmering, Worthing, Shoreham. I imagined them as the sort of happy villages that you would find in a children’s picture book from the 1950s—high streets with pleasant tearooms and shops with bright striped awnings selling pinwheels and beach balls, and people walking along holding cones with globes of yellow ice cream. But for the longest time—a good hour or more—we never went near the sea or even any identifiable communities. Instead we rolled through an endless clutter of suburbia on bypasses and divided highways, passing nothing but box stores, gas stations, car dealerships, and all the other vital ugliness of our age. An earlier passenger had discarded a pair of glossy magazines in the seat pocket beside mine and I lifted one out now in a moment of bored curiosity. It was one of those magazines with a strangely emphatic title—
Hello!, OK!, Now!, What Now! Not Now!
—and the cover lines all seemed to be about female celebrities who had gained a lot of weight recently, though none that I saw looked exactly sleek to begin with. I had no idea who any of them were, but their lives made fascinating reading. My favorite article—it may be my favorite thing in print ever—concerned an actress who took revenge on her feckless partner by charging a £7,500 vaginal makeover to him. Now that is what I call revenge. But what, pray, do you get with a vaginal makeover? Wi-fi? Sauna? Regrettably, the article failed to specify.

I was hooked. I found myself absorbed in the sumptuously mismanaged lives of minor celebrities whose common denominators appeared to be tiny brains, giant boobs, and a knack for entering into regrettable relationships. A little further on in the same issue I found the arresting headline “Don’t Kill Your Baby for Fame!” This turned out to be a piece of advice from Katie Price, a former topless model with a pneumatic chest who has refashioned herself as a thinker and magazine columnist, to a rising star of similar pulchritude named Josie. Ms. Price is not a writer to mince words. “Listen up, Josie,” she wrote, “I think you’re absolutely disgusting. Having boobs and getting an abortion doesn’t make you famous!” Though intellectually and emotionally I was inclined to agree with Katie on this point, it did rather seem from the article that Josie was living proof of the contrary.

The photographs of Josie depicted a young woman with breasts like party balloons and lips that brought to mind those floating booms they use to contain oil slicks. According to the article, she was expecting “her third son in two months,” which I think we can agree is quite a rate of reproduction. The article went on to say that Josie was so disappointed at having another boy and not the girl she had longed for that she had taken up smoking and drinking again as a signal of displeasure to her reproductive system. She was even considering having an abortion, which is why Ms. Price had leapt so emotionally into the fray. The article noted in passing that young Josie was considering book deals from two publishers. If it turns out that my own publisher is one of them, I will personally burn down their offices.

I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness, and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don’t even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.) As I read the magazine, I kept hearing a voice in my head, like the voice from a 1950s B-movie trailer, saying: “They came from Planet Imbecile!”

From wherever they spring, they exist in droves now. As if to illustrate my point, just beyond Littlehampton a young man with baggy pants and an insouciant slouch boarded the bus and took a seat across from me. He was wearing a baseball cap several sizes too large for his head. Only his outsized ears kept it from falling over his eyes. The bill of the cap was steamrollered flat and still had its shiny, hologram-like price sticker attached. Across the brow in large capitals was the word “OBEY.” Earphones were sending booming sound waves through the magnificent interstellar void of his cranium, on a journey to find the distant, arid mote that was his brain. It must have been a little like the hunt for the Higgs boson. If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn’t have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.

I turned to the second magazine,
Shut the Fuck Up!
In this one, I learned that Katie Price was not perhaps the paragon of wise counsel that I had to this point assumed. Here we were given a guided tour of Ms. Price’s dazzlingly commodious love life. This included three marriages, two broken engagements, several children, and seven other earnest but short-lived commitments—and this was just the most recent fragment of her busy existence. All of Ms. Price’s relationships were stupendously unsatisfactory, none more so than the latest. She had married a fellow named Kieran, whose chief talent, I believe, was an ability to make his hair stand up in interesting ways. Not long after they moved into Katie’s 1,100-room mansion, Katie discovered that Kieran had been romping with her very best (now presumably formerly very best) friend. As if this were not enough (and in Ms. Price’s world very little ever is), she discovered that
another
of her very best friends was also road-testing Kieran. Ms. Price was understandably furious. I think we could be looking at the Buckingham Palace of vaginal makeovers here.

Turning the page, I found a heartwarming profile of a couple named Sam and Joey, whose talents I was genuinely unable to identify. I would be interested to know if anyone could. Sam and Joey were evidently very successful, for they were looking for a large property in Essex—“ideally a castle,” a friend reported. It was at this point that I realized that my brain was dripping onto the pages, so I put the magazine down, and instead watched the passing suburban scene outside my window.

Gradually, helplessly, and with many fitful jerks of the head, I lapsed into the deepest of slumbers.

—

I awoke with a start and found myself in some uncertain place. The bus had stopped beside a town park, large, rectangular and green, and busy with people. It was bounded on three sides by small hotels and apartment buildings, and was open to the sea on the fourth. It was very fetching. Immediately outside my window and running away from the park was a pedestrian lane that looked appealing, too. Perhaps this was Hove. I had heard that Hove was very nice. I stumbled hastily off the bus and wandered about a bit, wondering how I could find out where I was. I couldn’t bring myself to approach anyone and say, “Excuse me, where am I?” so I just wandered until I came to an information board that informed me I was in Worthing.

I explored the pedestrian lane, called Warwick Street, and had a cup of tea, then strolled down to the seafront, which was dominated by a sensationally ugly multistory parking lot. You do wonder what planning officials think. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Instead of having attractive hotels and apartment blocks beside the sea, let’s put up a giant windowless car park. That’ll bring the crowds in!” I thought about walking the rest of the way to Brighton, but then I realized that what I could see in the hazy, uttermost distance was Brighton itself and it was clearly a long way away—more than eight miles, according to my trusty Ordnance Survey map, and that was considerably farther than I cared to go on foot just at the moment.

So I got on another bus, all but identical to the first one, and resumed my journey by road. The trip began promisingly enough, but soon the coast road became a long string of scrapyards, building supply outlets, car repair shops, and finally a giant power station, as we made our way into Shoreham. We got caught in a long tailback because of roadworks and I fell asleep again.

—

I awoke in Hove, exactly where I wished to be, and exited the bus with my usual stumbling haste. I had recently by chance read about George Everest, the man for whom Mount Everest was named, and learned that he was buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Hove, and I thought I might look in on his grave. Until I read about old George, I had never paused to wonder how the mountain got its name. It turns out that it should never have been named for him. For one thing, he never saw it. Mountains, in India or elsewhere, hardly played a part in his life at all.