Brown pebbledash

Visiting friends in Oxford at the weekend. I normally park around the corner of their house and was struck this evening by how perfectly suburbanly Oxford it was, and how I didn't like that. It was so strange as on trips back to Oxford I have been heartbroken by the 1930s-ness of it all and how much of that was there in the life I spent there, but this had so many memories of how mangy a lot of that was, and in particular how old fashioned those houses are. 

It is as if they have fared worse than Victorian ones and they speak so much of a homesickness of some sort for me. In the grey afternoon the dirty brown pebbledash was not attractive and they looked even worse in the dark as I returned to my car and saw the interiors illuminated in Saturday-night-dom.

There was something about the round window in one of them that should be a lovely 1930s feature but which just looked old and decrepid and second hand and had such an Oxford ring road suburn vibe about it that I never wanted anything to do with when I lived there all those years ago.

I am perplexed how strong my reaction is at times like this and also how at odds it can be with the idealised version in my heart that is tied up with the music of James (the band) and Virgin 1215 and all that all-i-tude of STUFF that just flavours my life all the time.

Being back there, there was something about being transplanted there and it not being the land of milk and honey that remains from the original move to Oxford, but also that tired out Oxford thing of the beautiful town and the blighted suburbs with bad buses and traffic queues and high rents and impossible prices and brown pebble dash and ugly replacement windows and old rotten gates and cars piled up on grass verge pavements and the acceptance of liberal Oxfordians that this is worth it for living in a town that demands high prices but doesn't really pay them back in wages.

I never liked that vibe years and years ago, long before I even was able to think about buying a house and long before I moved away, which, despite its problems has to have been driven partly by that. 

I am trying my best to explain it and not getting anywhere even close to it either.

Happy New Drear

Well here I am, start of a new year, Coughing my way out of a terrible cold, tired from being ill and a DIY project that isn't going well, and the isolation of dark old early January.

I should be painting the walls in the spare room but I wanted to write something down. 

I think January never shapes the rest of the year, either by decision or even perception. But effort put into January can often make the outcome of the year seem very bittersweet; I feel sad about the version of me in 2014 who was trying to turn things around and who got swallowed by the rest of life. The drifter in 2018 or 2020 was probably in a better spot - clueless about what would happen, but just making the most of the time of the season.

"Going For Gold" was always on after Neighbours in the late 80s. This symbolises my A-levels and that whole 6th form thing of not having to be in college if you weren't studying. 

The theme tune sounds like just having had lunch, peanut butter on toast and a yoghurt and an apple, and there being no one in the house, and being old enough to lock up and leave it to bike off to an afternoon of lessons, or just stay at home "studying" (usually reading old magazines or painting or playing guitar, everything but doing college work). 

The tune was 100% synthy and brassy but it sounded so modern and clean and 1980s, nothing nostalgic or 70's or anything, just NOW and VCRs and walkmans and the charts and perms and stonewashed denim and Ford Fiesta XR2s.

If you were there you would know, immediately, of the naff optimism of those keyboard brass sounds and the massed vocals. 

This is without even considering the programme itself - it was a sort of a sign to me of switch the telly off and get out and do something else. 

But I know this also sounds so incredibly old fashioned now, with there being people like nurses and shop managers making decisions about my life who were not even born in 1988. But just you wait, you'll start to feel old soon...