Let's start by raising a glass to the glam-rock band of those halcyon 2003/2004/2005/2006 years: The Darkness. Not just because they released singles like I Believe In A Thing Called Love and Love Is Only A Feeling to great acclaim, but because the name of their ill-fated second album offered an excellent paraphrasing opportunity for me when coming up with a title for this latest blog.
Of-course, Justin Hawkins et al called it '...Hell', whereas I've gone with that industrial estuary town on the North Sea coast - Hull. This is a funny old place, with striking modern architecture fusing with the usual run-down mundaneness of northern English worker towns - glass buildings weirdly shaped sitting alongside rows of terraced houses, eventually banking on the sides of the River Humber itself, by this point flowing inexorably into the coldness of the North Sea with less of the gentle ripple of a river, and more the unavoidable might of a tidal basin.
Why did I go to Hull? Well, being slightly mentally unhinged, I decided to travel up to watch my beloved Tottenham Hotspur play Hull City in a midweek Premier League football match. Usually such decisions are laughed off by my friends and family, and the Spurs team offer up an ensuing derisory performance, as if to say, "Look, mate, honestly, don't come to an away game in the middle of the week in the north of England. We will lose this game."
Fortunately, Spurs won. In fact, this wasn't just a collection of three-points played out in usual stressful style, but in fact a classy performance, full of attacking vim and vigour, that completely dismantled whatever game-plan Hull had, erm, planned, and catapulted Spurs to the giddy heights of the very top, the summit, of the Barclays FA Premier League. The four-hour coach journey home, inexplicably sticking to the A1 from Leeds down to Essex (a county that is very important to me, but we'll go through that another time), was obviously more bearable because of the success of the preceding 90 minutes. Still, I have to question the intelligence of these TomTom gadgets. The M1 would have been faster, more direct, affording better service station stop-offs, and would have taken us through Nottingham, which has a nostalgic appeal to me that Peterborough, for example along the A1, simply does not. (Although I recall a trip towards Peterborough up the A1 with my school for a football match, I believe at Oundle School, which was particularly amusing. That game finished 2-2 by the way.)
The journey up to Hull, on the other hand, was plain sailing. The M1 was used on this occasion, proving that TomToms have selective memories. I don't need a TomTom. I am very much my father's son, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the UK's main thoroughfares instinctively imprinted in my mind. Anyway, the M1 journey up north was fine and the geek in me was able to enjoy some key icons along the way. If you are doing a similar journey, be sure to enjoy the UK Telecommunications Centre near to Milton Keynes. You can't miss it - it's that weird thing on the left of the north-bound carriageway that looks like a scene from Independence Day, with dozens of bizarre-looking structures protruding upwards. Actually they help all of our mobile phones work, and allow for WiFi internet access in many locations. It is an integral part of our communications systems, and there it sits, like a solitary gym sock on a shower head, on the side of the M1 somewhere between Newport Pagnell and Northampton.
Further up, around my favourite junctions of 24A and 25, is the standard 'welcome to Nottingham' image of 6 gigantic cooling towers at the nearby power-station of Ratcliffe-on-Soar. As you whizz past East Midlands Airport, you can't miss them, spouting their sooty, smokey condensation across the region, ominously positioning itself close to the Brian Clough Way, the A52 itself, as it winds its way from Derby into my old haunt, the ancient city of Nottingham. My cousin recently had a look round Nottingham University (she got her AS-level results yesterday - exciting times for her indeed) and told me she loved it. I'm not sure if she was being polite or not, but the campus at Nottingham University is beautiful, and the town is actually rather pleasant if you know where you are going. Of-course, if you get mixed up on the city centre one-way system you may end up in the suburb of St. Anne's, in which case you are well and truly Robin Hooded. Round there, they'll steal from the rich or poor, and, well, just keep it.
The power-station cooling towers used to mark the end of my journey up to University from home. As I saw them coming over the horizon, I'd know I was nearly back. Sometimes I'd be a bit down about that, as I do love my home very much also, but mostly, and particularly as my time in Nottingham went on, it was a feeling of genuine excitement as to what the next few weeks may bring. That's why I'm particularly jealous of my younger cousin (but of-course very excited for, and proud of, her as well), as she goes through these fairly momentous, life-changing decisions and issues over the next few months, working out what course she wants to do and at what University. Those of us that have graduated, that are working or are in the job market, will know that in reality it feels like a monumental, almost incalculable, decision to make, but in reality tends to work its natural path and ends up being far less stressful than it should have been. I say, embrace the excitement, the possibilities, the intrigue of it all. It's a time in my life that I would dearly love to relive. I think about all these things whenever I'm on the M1 heading north. Odd, I know.
The observant amongst you will notice that I have digressed from my discussion of a trip up to Hull in order to bring in extra thematic ideas. Let's just pretend that the trip is an allegory for, well, my musings. Which leads me on to the arrival into Hull itself. I particularly enjoyed this part of the journey because we travelled along the banks of the Humber, and eventually underneath the giant steel girders of the Humber Suspension Bridge, which my Dad tells me is the largest single-span suspension bridge in Europe. It is fairly spectacular, as it juts out across what is by this point a very wide river. The most interesting point about the Humber Bridge is the fact that the two tips of each girder, at either side of the bridge, are an inch or so wider at the top than at the bottom, and the reason for this helps illustrate its scale. It is, friends, because of the curvature of the earth. How awesome is that?!
The river is populated by heavy industry by the time it gets to the Humber Bridge, with trawlers, and carrier-boats dominating its little shipping ports along the banks and heading out to sea. It has a bustle to it that must have been similar to the Thames when ships sailed right into the Port of London. These days they stop further out near Tilbury and rarely go past the Thames Barrier. There's almost something (probably patronisingly so, I apologise) romantic about the business of Hull's waterway: industrial, mechanical, purposeful.
I like how a simple journey such as that can illicit so many different trains of thought. It bodes well for my planned American road-trip later this year. I'm not sure how many songs by The Darkness will feature on my road-trip playlist, but I have managed to find a nuance to their work, entirely of my own affecting and not theirs, that back when I was my cousin's age, and busy trying to get in to University, I perhaps glossed over.
Sometimes it is difficult to grasp what is, and what isn't important. My good friend Tommy recently tried to offer some perspective to his younger brother, coming up with this rather profound statement: "Life is about how we deal with these small issues that feel huge."
I don't know whether he is right or wrong, but I suppose it's in the finding out that makes it all interesting.
This has been about journeys, and travelling, both literal and metaphorical. It works as a nice segway into one my favourite poems by Robert Frost, entitled The Road Not Taken. I hope you like it:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(poem)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50EALZU4D6A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Nv8CEG6VE&feature=PlayList&p=74D89CE61C51BF34&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=28
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8rTUxtSMRo&feature=related
http://www.humberbridge.co.uk/
http://www.eon-uk.com/generation/ratcliffe.aspx
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/
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