The Road to Little Dribbling (41 page)

Fifty thousand people lined the funeral route for Huskisson in Liverpool, and the city’s shops and factories shut for the day as a mark of respect. Seventeen years after his death, his widow commissioned a statue of Huskisson, incongruously dressed in a Roman toga, and presented it to Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market. Lloyd’s didn’t really want it and, once Mrs. Huskisson was safely dead, gave it to the London County Council, which didn’t want it either, but found a home for it in Pimlico Gardens, one of the smallest and least visited parks in London, where for the past one hundred years it has been prized as a lavatory by pigeons but otherwise not noticed much at all. And that, I think, is as it should be.

—

At Manchester Piccadilly station, I went to the men’s room for a pee (it’s what I generally do first upon arriving anywhere these days) and discovered that it now costs 30p to wee in Manchester. Even more annoyingly, the turnstiles into the men’s room don’t give change and only accept 10p and 20p coins. How hard can it be to make a machine that gives back 20p if you put in 50p? Really, how hard?

Sighing, I went to the food court area to buy a cup of tea in order to acquire the proper assortment of small coins, and as I was hungry I bought a sandwich, too. I paid takeaway prices even though I took the food to a seat just ten feet away, a shorter journey than I often take when dining in. It seems a little strange to be taxed on the basis of whether you have passed through a door or not. I have to say I have never understood the concept of Value Added Tax anyway. Consider my sandwich. Where’s the added value? I’m certainly not adding any. With every bite I take, I must be reducing its value, until finally there is no sandwich at all and no value either. Clearly, any added value is coming from the sandwich vendor. So why am I paying their tax? You see why I’m confused?

The idea of charging tax on food eaten in a restaurant but not on food taken away from it is completely backward, if you ask me. It rewards people for taking packaging out into the wider world where much of it ends up as litter, and imposes a surcharge on those whose leftovers are responsibly disposed of indoors and whose plates and silverware are more likely to be washed and reused. That seems the wrong way around to me. Altogether, Britons spend £12 billion a year on takeaway food. VAT on that would raise £2.4 billion. You could build a lot of schools and hospitals with that, or just sweep up streets more effectively. Perhaps you could use it to buy some litter bins. There is no country in the developed world—not one—that has fewer litter bins on its streets than Great Britain. And there is not one country in the developed world—again, not one—that has more litter on the ground than Great Britain. Does anyone here see a relationship?

VAT on food would be just the first of many new taxes I would bring in. I would also introduce male jewelry tax, stupid ponytail tax, carrying an open umbrella even though it’s stopped raining tax, texting while walking tax, earphone music leakage tax, walking much too slowly in crowded places tax, tattoos on knuckles tax, dribbled paint on the pavement tax, answering a question by saying “how long is a piece of string?” tax, having an irritatingly small dog tax, and vending machines that don’t give change tax. Taken together, I believe these would erase the national deficit within months.

As I sat eating my sandwich, I watched people coming and going through the 30p toilet turnstiles across the way. All three turnstiles were constantly engaged. I estimated that one person went through each turnstile every ten seconds. That’s £5.40 a minute, over £3,000 a day. If you figure, conservatively, that the turnstiles are active for ten hours a day, six days a week, that comes to roughly £1 million a year, just to let people pee, giving a whole new meaning to the expression “income stream.” I wouldn’t tax that money. I would appropriate it.

—

I had decided already not to stay in Manchester. It was a Sunday and I couldn’t face spending a Sunday evening wandering around a dead city center. I wrote about Manchester at some length in
Notes from a Small Island,
and I have been back many times since, and I am happy to state here for the record that Manchester is vastly improved from what it used to be. You should go and see it yourself. Just don’t go on a Sunday.

I had somewhere else I wanted to be: Alderley Edge. I had read in
The Economist
that Alderley Edge is one of the ten richest towns in England, with seven hundred high-net-worth individuals (which is another way of saying millionaires) in a population of forty-six hundred. Alderley Edge is in pretty countryside fifteen miles south of Manchester and is famous as the home of many famous soccer players. Among those who live or have lived there are Cristiano Ronaldo, Rio Ferdinand, Carlos Tevez, David Beckham, and Wayne Rooney. If a Google news search is any guide, many of them seem to spend their time crashing Ferraris, collecting speeding fines, or doing something to their houses that their neighbors don’t want them to do. But many of them live quietly, too. I once met someone who lived in Alderley Edge at the same time the Beckhams did, and she told me that they often saw them in the local supermarket or on the high street, just going about their business. This was in the days when David Beckham couldn’t step out of a limousine anywhere in the world without being mobbed, but at home in Alderley Edge he could walk around just like a normal person. I thought that was grand.

I was delighted to find that Alderley Edge is a very attractive place, with a handsome, well-maintained high street. It doesn’t have a bookshop or a huge amount in the way of practical businesses like ironmongers or butchers, but it was dazzlingly well provisioned with cafés, bistros, and wine bars. I thought it would be like Beverly Hills, filled with overwrought houses with high walls and automated gates, but there wasn’t much of that at all. Most of the houses were big, but not ostentatious, and on the whole seemed reasonably restrained and tasteful. In a strange way, it was disappointing and comforting at the same time.

—

In the evening, I called in at a pub called the De Trafford and was pleased to find a table with some discarded sections of weekend newspapers on it. I don’t usually read English newspapers anymore, so it was a bit of a treat.

I decided to give up newspapers a few years ago after reading a long news story in
The Times
about a journalism student at a college in Cornwall who had come up with an idea to go to the United States and challenge all those zany laws that we all know exist there. The article helpfully gave thirteen examples of these amusing laws—that it is illegal to fall asleep in a cheese factory in South Dakota; that it is illegal to say “Oh, boy,” in Jonesborough, Georgia; that it is illegal in Carmel, New York, for a man to go outside wearing a jacket and trousers that do not match; that it is against the law to take a lion to the movies in Baltimore, Maryland; and so on. The idea,
The Times
reported, was that the student would travel all across America, get himself arrested repeatedly for breaking the laws, then come home and write a book about it.

It happened that at this time I had been invited by a friend at City University in London to deliver their annual lecture on the practice of journalism, so I decided to look into this particular article as a way of discussing the commitment to accuracy of the British press. I got in touch with twelve of the thirteen places cited by
The Times
and inquired about their odd laws. I couldn’t find anyone to contact in Jonesborough, Georgia, because there is no Jonesborough, Georgia. For the others, I phoned or wrote to the police chief or mayor or whoever else seemed most likely to have an answer. In two cases, I couldn’t get a response from anybody. In all the others, the local officials assured me that there was no such law and never had been. As someone from the Baltimore mayor’s office explained, if you take a lion into a movie theater there you can expect to be arrested, but they have never enacted a statute for that specific offense for the obvious reason that it is unnecessary. All the laws, in short, were made up.

So if we consider the article again, the situation we have is that a young journalism student who hadn’t gone to America, hadn’t written the book, hadn’t been arrested, and hadn’t gotten a single one of his facts right still managed to get almost a full page of coverage in
The Times
of London. I would give that boy an A. As for the
Times
news editors, I think somebody should sit down and have a little chat with them.

Now I am not quite so shallow that I would stop reading newspapers over one foolish article, but I did stop reading them regularly and quickly discovered that I didn’t miss them very much at all. There was a time when the highlight of my week was coming home with the
Sunday Times
and
Observer
and sitting down to read amusing reports from far-flung places by Clive James or television reviews by Julian Barnes or long essays by Martin Amis. In those days, the most gifted scribblers in Britain worked for the newspapers. I don’t want to be dismissive of a whole generation’s journalistic endeavors, but, well, just look at the weekend papers now. I picked up one of the magazines.

“If yellow is good enough for Amal Clooney, it’s good enough for Anna Murphy,” read the strapline on the lead article. Now I have nothing whatever against either of these people. I don’t know anything about them and hope they have nothing but happiness in their lives. But with respect to what color clothing they’ll be wearing this summer, I don’t give a paramecium’s shit.

“I learned early on never to wear yellow,” confided Ms. Murphy in the opening sentence of her report, then with candor added: “Which just goes to show how much I used to know.” That was too overpowering a thought for me to try to assimilate, so I turned the page and found an article suggesting sixteen ways to “pimp up” my salads. I took a moment to wonder what my wife would say if I suggested to her that we should pimp up our salads. Elsewhere I found guidance on what to look for in facial serums (a very big price tag apparently), how to acquire a sexy pout, a solemn report on transgender issues which was really an excuse to run some new pictures of Bruce Jenner in drag, and much more in similar vein. Is it really just me getting old or is it actually the case that all people under the age of thirty are basically now about ten years old? I looked at a couple of other weekend sections and they were much the same, so I put the papers to one side and pulled a book from my bag and read it instead.

I do have a little David Beckham story, by the way. It involves my publisher and friend Larry Finlay, whom we last encountered, eyes pulsating, in the prologue. Well, one day not long ago, Larry had been to the London Book Fair and stopped for a drink on his way home at a pub in Maida Vale. He was sitting at a table reading a manuscript when somebody said:

“Do you mind if we sit here with you, Larry?”

Larry looked up and it was David Beckham with another man.

“Of course,” said Larry in amazement and moved his papers to give them some space.

“Thanks, Larry,” said David Beckham.

“How do you know my name?” asked Larry, mystified but proud to be recognized.

“Because it says ‘Larry’ on your name badge, Larry,” David Beckham said brightly.

They had a nice chat and Larry told me that David Beckham was an extremely nice man. And I can tell you sincerely that I was very, very pleased to hear that.

I thought about that happy story now as I sat with my book and my pint, secretly hoping that somebody famous would come in and sit near me, until gradually it dawned on me that I wouldn’t actually recognize them because I don’t read newspapers anymore.

Chapter 22

Lancashire

I

I
TRAVELED BY TRAIN
to Preston, then transferred to another so rattling and threadbare that I think it may have begun its life in a coal mine.

Outside, an endless run of industrial estates and general cruddiness flashed past and then suddenly we were in a little oasis of comeliness: Lytham. I disembarked to find myself at a strikingly handsome station—actually a former station, now converted into a bistro, but with a still-functioning platform. Just beyond, leading into the town, was a small park.

Lytham is a neat little town of rosy red brick: prosperous, neat as a pin, comfortably Victorian, with a great sward of lawn standing between the town and the estuary of the River Ribble on which sits a picturesque white windmill with black blades. Beyond, across the shiny mudflats, were hazy views to the town of Southport, ten miles or so to the south.

I dropped my bags at the Clifton Park Hotel overlooking the sward, and immediately set off on foot for Blackpool, the most celebrated and traditionally raucous of English seaside resorts, eight miles along the coast. It was a trek, but splendid. The seafront was lined with a paved promenade all the way to St. Anne’s, another little outpost of coastal elegance. The sky was gray and heavy, like a pile of wet towels, but the day was dry and the sea air felt great. I was very happy.