The weekend felt very odd. All I had, and all evidently was materially/socially, was in a pile out of direct view in this show house which now housed me, but in which I felt did not fit. The tenant/landlord relationship felt as new as the show house in which it was starting. As far as I could see everything was too shiny for comfort. My past, when I lived in it, had seemed to me to be much poorer materially, but much richer in connectivity. But in the light of the wealth and modernity that now surrounded me my life, as evidenced from what I had brought with me seemed worn out and tatty.
If I had been better organised before I left then I would have an address for Richard whom I had not seen might since that October meeting. But in October he seemed quietly resistant about copying that detail down for me. But no, in the Gainsborough I had come from, what seemed like friendship seemed easy bt evasive. With youth unemployment at high levels young men had more time on their hands than they had money. With the time it was easy to get to know something about other young men using only first names and knowing where they lived by sight, rather than the name and number of the street they lived on. We found it natural to avoid our family background because our families thought we had all turned out wrong again for us not being married off, not having full time well paid jobs, and not having a mortgage and our own house to live in and keep other people out of.
My only company was Mike, who each time he passed me looking at the piles of what I had brought with me whilst thinking what to do next with it all made sort-of-funny but unhelpful comments. My weekend felt more like a very weak end. He was polite towards me, but was distant, making it clear that for him distance was the point. When he drove to join his family for Sunday lunch I was more relieved than guilty at how connecting with him now seemed so difficult. I can see more clearly now what I could not see then; that Mike had taken me at face value when first saw me, because as a landlord he was much nearer being the student he was before he became a property owner. I realised that when I first met and talked to him in the November I had door-stepped him, unaware that that was what I was doing. Even as he had only recently changed from being a student into a property owner, his idea of being a student was always far better supported than any idea about any sort of life, as was witnessed by his comments. It did not help that I could not find a single book in the house with which to talk to him as more of an equal. Even my dad, who I generally thought little of, kept a small pile of paper backs of cowboy stories that he liked next to his armchair. There was not even a recipe book in the house. A house with no books, no house plants, and definitely not any animals in it is surely defines the idea of an empty bachelor pad.
As I looked over the pile and slowly moved parts of it into my room, to be tidy, Mike would make passing comments if he was about. His most perceptive comment was in reply to something I said and have long since forgotten. His comment was about how our first thoughts are not always our best thoughts. His lack of curiosity was clear, along with how he had never met anyone who had built their life out of enduring long term unemployment or living on low pay when working. He was right about first thoughts, though. I could say nothing about how I could not get my head around how I was now having to learn to relate to somebody nearly the same age as me, but whose main interest in life was his work and it was a job that made him detached sufficient to bar him from having anything that resembled personal enthusiasm. I had got myself into being the tenant in a shared house with a landlord whose main enthusiasm was making enough money to live in impersonal secure comfort. If I could work out what and who was I could not work why I'd chosen to co-habit in such a situation.
I don't know when I became aware that my new choice of abode was a mistake. Nor do I know when it became clear to me that my past life was much more of a mess than the lives of the people I met in Nottingham. My first clue came to me with the moving of all my stuff that weekend. Mike looked and walked like a man who did not just wore a suit to work, the suit wore him, He looked uncomfortable not wearing a suit. His casuals at weekends were a white shirt, clean jeans and smart shoes. Whereas if there was a dominant theme with my clothing the phrase 'army surplus chic' would describe it best. For coats I had one suit jacket which I was proud of it partly because the label at the neck said 'made in Scunthorpe', a leather jacket on which the central back panel had survived being painted with white gloss paint which made it quite distinctive, a great coat for which the weather was much too warm nearly all year round which I kept because I liked the look of it, One type of jacket I did not have was denim jackets-I had a complete blind spot about them. My favourite everyday jacket was a light army jacket with lots of pockets, and to go with it I had a small canvas army shoulder bag. If the bag itself was small then it was a good place in which to put carrier bags when I shopped for food. My choice of shirts was ex-German Democratic Republic army shirts with the flag of the GDR at the top of the arm where from top to bottom the three stripes were black red and yellow, where the message the colours conveyed was the phrase 'through the night and the blood comes the light'. finally there were several pairs of air wear shoes worn to varying degrees, which were charity shop purchases which had been donated with wear left in them by delivery men, employees of The Post Office.
I disliked army-style 'camouflage' trousers, they seemed pretentious. If I had reasons to disguise myself then they disguised themselves from me. I had one pair of plain green army trousers with the extra side pockets in them to my name. My favoured everyday trousers were ordinary jeans, which I bought in charity shops, where if a got less wear out of them than if I'd bought new they still 'paid for themselves', with the wear I did get out of them. The jeans were usually topped off with the thick leather belt with the movable Fascist Spain belt buckle.
In the middle class West Bridgford that I had landed in, I was slow to understand the logic of detachment where charity shops were for giving to, not buying from. In the trouser department my prize possession was a pair of wide flared jeans that had been only just past being the height of fashion for me, when I first got them ten years earlier, Where they had become worn they had been patched, several times. The method of the patching being to cover the patch I was going to apply with copydex rubber glue, slap it flat over where the cloth of the jeans had thinned, and putting paper over the jeans in case of leaks, iron them both sides where the patch was applied, to heat the glue to make it adhere better.
As I looked at these jeans I had no idea what was going to make me adhere to the life that was available to me in West Bridgford,
To be directed to Chapter Five please left click here.
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