Me: OK, one last question.Man: In a fist fight between you and Jarvis Cocker, who'd win?Me: Er . . . I've never met him, but from the pictures I've seen I'd have to fancy my chances.Man: He's outside.
It was the start of the summer. I was sixteen. I got a job in a cardboard-box factory, worked eight till seven every day and Saturday mornings as well. It was a shit job with shit pay, but there was nothing else to do, and anyway I was saving up for America. Stubbs and the others, they'd still got a year to do. It was the holidays but I only saw them at night, a game of soccer in the schoolyard before it went dark or a bottle of cider in the bandstand. Then it was winter - they'd got their homework, I'd got my cardboard boxes. I was wishing my life away, waiting for my friends. Twelve months went by, until the day arrived. At three-thirty I turned up at the school gates with the same lighter. The summer stretched out in front. A summer like the year before last, the five of us going wild all over again. Then America, me and Stubbs and the rest if they wanted to come. Thumbing it from state to state. Occasional jobs. Getting into situations, getting out of scrapes. That was the plan, and today was the first day. I waited, but Stubbs didn't show. He'd sloped off across the playing fields. Like a traitor. And Tony Football went by on the top deck of a school bus, looking the other way. Like a thief. And Winkie was ill. I clenched the little green man in my fist, dug my nails into the jade. Only Pompous turned up, his blazer torn to shreds by the rest of the morons in his remedial set.
'Barney. Throw me the lighter.'
'Where are the others?'
'No idea.'
'Where's Stubbs? I told him I'd meet him here to do the business.'
'I don't know, all right? But he's not going to want his jacket tatching, is he?'
'Why not?'
Not if he's staying on next year. What's he going to come to school in - his vest?'
Colne Valley once had a reputation as a hotbed of radical thought and political activism. It figured strongly in the Luddite uprisings. Enoch Taylor is buried in Marsden, whose looms were pulverized by the hammer of the same name, and William Horsfall was, aptly enough, shot from his horse in Milnsbridge, after saying he'd rather ride up to his saddle girths in blood than give in to the demands of the rabble. Out of the dozens of mills along the valley floor, a handful are still working with wool. The rest are converted into units, full of New Age hippies brewing patchouli oil and making ear-rings out of circuit boards, or moored at the side of the river, rotting away like decommissioned ocean-liners. Weavers' cottages with their double-glazing look down from the hillsides, like old faces wearing new glasses.
In the 1970s, the Valley fell into a long, pleasant afternoon nap. In their sleep, electors stumbled along to voting booths in junior schools and village halls, and put a cross next to the name of Richard Wainwright, Liberal, who held the seat for donkey's years. He was a good man, and that was all anybody needed to know. On your eighteenth birthday he sent you a signed letter on House of Commons stationery welcoming you to the electoral register, and you sold iy to your fifteen-year-old friend for ID in the pubs in town . . .
Current reading:
"You inherited a succession of your father's cars. The Austin Princess with its leatherette seats that performed skin surgery on bare flesh in hot weather. The two-litre Datsun automatic that rode up at the front when you hit the accelerator, like a speedboat. Your mother borrowed it once but couldn't find the knob to turn the cassette player down, and drove her Mothers' Union friends to a meeting in town with The Fall's Hex Enduction Hour in wrap-a-round stereo at full tilt on looped playback." (Quoted from Simon Armitage's All Points North)
How was Simon Armitage to know that over twenty years later art would be imitating life? OK wrong album, wrong continent and wrong lifestyle, but you get the gist.
