The Gran Tour

by Ben Aitken

  I walk to Marine Drive to buy cigarettes at the One Stop. There’s a dry cleaners next door. I’d be better off in there of course, for a spin and rinse, but so it goes. I smoke outside and admire the wide, softly curving, partly sloping street, lined on both sides with the kind of house a Jane Austen heroine might fetch up at. I want to call it gracious, and proclaim it up there in my book with Gray Street in Newcastle, and Regent Street in London, and any number of half-moons in Bath. When I thought I couldn’t be more smitten, Marine Drive lays its ace – a cricket ground, halfway down, wedged between houses, behind back gardens. I look through the gap of its main gate, and smile at the bright untouched grass, the hidden wicket, the empty stands, each waiting on spring. To think that from a third-floor back bedroom I could watch the mighty Yorkshire pad away overs of Somerset turn, or hook at will a Kentish attack, or block a spell of Glamorgan yorkers – all while ironing my underpants. I shouldn’t mind coming back up in the summer when Yorkshire play Hampshire here. Indeed, I shouldn’t mind living in Scarborough full stop. I could rent a flat on Esplanade Crescent. I could go to the cricket in season. Pop to the hotel for bingo. Play the odd round of golf at midnight. Do some bar work at L’amour. And maybe get a dog, so I could walk it and want nothing more.

  Alan says he was about to send out a search party. He says people were getting worried, especially that man over there. ‘Dennis?’ ‘Yeah, him. He reckoned you’d been taken advantage of.’ I order the mushrooms and lasagne. ‘So go on then,’ he says, ‘what happened?’ I keep my confession brief – too long in town, too short in bed. He indulges me, pretends to be disappointed, enjoys hearing me paraphrase the conversation I had through the window at 4am.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself at least?’ he says.

  It’s a good question. ‘You know what, I can’t be sure, Alan.’

  ‘Well, we’ve all done it. When I was 21 I drank a bottle and a half of whisky. I was late for work the next morning. I worked in a butcher’s. My boss said I looked less human than the turkey mince. I threw up on the giblets.’

  Alan goes to the toilet and comes back with two pints. I groan. ‘Give me a break, Alan.’

  ‘Have a couple tonight, then come off it tomorrow.’ He looks down at my book – the unexpected book. ‘Joy’s not something to rush into.’

  There’s no bingo tonight. It’s the first time I’ve felt let down by Shearings. But there is a singer – Marie Sinclair. She’s currently warming up (at the bar, by necking a shot). She’s seen a few Easter Sundays this one, and she’s the better for it: when she does her opening number – ‘Private Dancer’ – you can tell she really means what she’s singing. After her opening number she says that if it’s too loud then we’re welcome to turn our hearing aids down. I seem to be the only one to find this offensive. ‘I’m the right side of 80,’ she says – ‘81. And if you don’t believe me, gents, I’ll blimming well show yer.’ She does another number – ‘Nessun Dorma’ – then another shot at the bar. She takes the mic with her, leans on the bar and asks if any ladies got anything nice for Valentine’s Day. Half a lager, says one. Did I heck, says another. A car, says someone else.

  ‘A car?’

  ‘A card!’

  ‘Well you know where you can put that, don’t you?’ says Marie. ‘And it’s not on the bedside table.’

  I move forward towards the stage and join a table of four women. There’s Lorraine and Donna, and their mums, Jacquie and Daisy. The daughters are in their 50s. They’re used to being the youngest ones on a Shearings. Apparently I’m stealing their thunder. Donna says: ‘Do you know what? We thought you were French. Jacquie was convinced of it. She said you looked like someone who’d go on strike a lot. We thought you might be going through a divorce. We thought she might have kicked you out. No, we didn’t think your wife was French. We thought she might be local – a Yorkshire lass. We had it all figured out. We’re good at sussing people.’

  When the daughters get up to dance, their mothers are like a pair of paparazzi, up on their feet taking endless pictures and videos. It’s nice to watch. It would seem a mother never stops collecting things for the scrap book, never stops feeling proud. There’s something reassuring about Jacquie and Daisy’s desire to capture their children dancing. And there’s also something reassuring about their children’s adult craving to be caught by their parents – to make them smile, to make them feel proud.

  When the children return to the table, Jacquie starts going on about her grandson, Ted, and within ten minutes I know more about Ted then I know about my girlfriend. He could be my specialist subject on Mastermind.

  ‘In April 2003, Ted was born. In which hospital?’

  ‘St Mary’s.’

  ‘Correct. By all accounts, Ted is a what?’

  ‘Very nice boy.’

  ‘Correct. At the age of fourteen, when Ted saw a lady struggling with her shopping on the high street in Southport, he went straight over to her. To do what?’

  ‘Nick her shopping.’

  ‘Incorrect. To help the lady. Ted’s nickname growing up was—’

  ‘Super Ted.’

  ‘Correct.’

  And so on.

  Donna points to a man on the dance floor and says, ‘Bloody hell. He’s breakdancing.’ She’s not wrong. Or not entirely wrong. It might not be breakdancing, but it’s certainly something.

  ‘There’s life in that old dog yet,’ says Donna.

  ‘Too much I’d say,’ says Daisy.

  ‘That dog needs to be put to sleep,’ says Jacquie.

  ‘He must have new hips,’ says Lorraine.

  Then Marie Sinclair goes around the tables with her microphone. For a bit of small talk. She comes up to me, sits on my knee.

  ‘A little birdie told me …’ – she tilts her head and does something with her eyelashes – ‘… that it was your birthday yesterday.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be drinking that,’ she says, taking my double whisky and coke and knocking it back. ‘Now tell me the truth or I’ll be cross.’

  ‘I was 32.’

  ‘Thirty-two ladies and gentlemen. I’ll tell you something about 32. It’s a wonderful age for a woman. Especially if she happens to be 81.’

  Then Marie Sinclair looks at me, growls, says ‘You wouldn’t touch the sides,’ and grabs my jaw and plants a smacker on my lips.

  ‘How was that?’ she says.

  ‘Probably illegal,’ I say.

  ‘One of your five a day more like.’

  She returns to the stage and does a Patsy Kline number. Jacquie gives me a voucher and tells me to get a brandy for my nerves. When I get back with the brandy, Jacquie raises her glass and says, ‘To absent friends.’ She’s got one in mind – her late husband. She says that since she lost him, she likes to get away, sometimes with Donna, sometimes alone. She says it’s her brandy. Lorraine agrees that it’s good to keep busy but adds that it’s not without its dangers. She tells us about a couple she was speaking to yesterday. He’s 90 and until last year was going out for a five-mile jog each day. Then he had a couple of falls and got lost a couple of times so his wife got him a treadmill and put it in the bathroom so he could get straight in the shower. Since then he’s had a fall but hasn’t yet got lost. Anyway, Lorraine’s forgotten the point of the story. I know the feeling.

  I go outside for a cigarette. Alan’s out here as well. After his second heart attack, the doctor told him his heart was so weak that one a day would kill him. Which is why he has two.

  ‘The wife would kill me,’ he says.

  ‘Did she like the cake?’

  ‘Sod off.’

  ‘No, serious.’

  ‘She did actually. She sent a picture back.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I’m not telling.’

  I tell him I’m off to bed and that I won’t see him in the morning as my coach is leaving at 6am. I tell
him it was nice talking to him. He acknowledges this with a single slow nod, as if unsure, as if doubtful, and then says, ‘Just watch what you’re doing.’

  8 I later showed the book to my grandad and told him to brace himself because what he was about to see was 50 pages of the most outrageous ageism imaginable. He zipped through it and laughed his head off.

  Part 2

  St Ives, Cornwall, England

  5

  Any student discount?

  Megan and I met on Halloween, 2016. She was living on a barge at the time – a rite of passage for History of Art graduates – and was hosting a Halloween party alongside her barge-mate Flora, a mutual friend. I went along and was sufficiently disguised – I had a pumpkin on my head – as to be attractive. When push came to shove, Megan got one of my seeds stuck between her teeth.

  In the days after the party, Flora told Megan to avoid me because I was unreliable. But Megan wasn’t deterred; she spied the outlines of a kindred spirit; now we’re unreliable together. We currently conduct the relationship (which is, I suppose, akin to an electrical charge, albeit an erratic one) over ten days a month between London and Portsmouth. Very occasionally, Megan will complain she doesn’t get enough of me. The rest of the time she won’t. Whenever she cooks, it all happens in one pot, and whenever she picks up the phone (which is seldom), her tone is doubtful, as if she’s never done it before – ‘Hello?’ That’s all you need to know really. I love her very often.9

  It might be claimed without upsetting the apple cart that people of different generations tend to prefer different things – clothes, music, food. Without putting too fine a point on it, Megan’s taste is roughly in line with that of someone born between the wars – and I’m not talking about the Gulf Wars. Her idea of a good night is a radio adaptation of a Virginia Woolf novel and a suet pudding. So I’m not surprised that she has assimilated quickly to her new surroundings – the waiting lounge at the foot of the M1. She’s already in conversation with her neighbours regarding the three times they’ve circumnavigated the world – one for each of their sons.

  ‘What, you mean on each occasion you went with a different son?’ asks Megan.

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘We do it for them, not with them.’

  Our driver is Michelle. Youngish. Londoner. As we reverse out of our bay, I spot Roger taking a fresh load up to Scarborough. Judging by the laughing faces of the passengers, he’s just made that joke about today’s being a small group. Michelle doesn’t start with a joke. She starts with a confession – it’s only her third trip, and her first to St Ives, so buckle up. When we hit the M25, and with Cilla Black on the radio, I make a start on the crossword. I’m soon stuck on ‘egg white seven letters’. I turn to the chap behind for help. ‘Dunno, mate,’ he says. ‘Stopped doing ’em years ago. I’m not up to date anymore.’

  We slip between Slough and Windsor and hit the M4, which runs all the way to south Wales, via the Prince of Wales Bridge that spans the Severn. I know this not because I’ve used the M4 much but because of Gavin and Stacey. The M4 is one of the show’s main characters. It is a crucial artery connecting the two titular hearts. I think the Prince of Wales Bridge should be called the Gavin and Stacey Bridge if I’m honest. I mean, what’s Charles got to do with it? He’s probably never been on the thing. I might get a petition going: civic works named after popular culture favourites. Call the Midwife Viaduct. One Foot in the Grave Suspension Bridge. People have been elected on worse platforms than an Only Fools and Horses Tunnel.

  I’ve been to Cornwall before. There was a holiday when I was young to Polperro, and then there was a short stop in Looe (a Looe stop if you will) in 2009, during a tour of the UK I undertook in a campervan called Roger. As well as a campervan, Roger was an early example of a food truck. I sold avant-garde omelettes through a side window, because I studied English literature and it was the only career path available to me. The business was called Eggonomics. My first gig was at a campsite in Dorset. I got tipped a fish. That fish was the equivalent of Alan Glanville’s tuna. Things went downhill from there.

  So yeah, I’ve been to Cornwall. And yet I remain all but ignorant of the place. Which is how I like it, to be honest. Prior to a holiday or trip, I try to accrue a decent amount of ignorance in relation to wherever I’m going so that I stand to gain more by going there. I’m pretty good at it. The accruing, I mean. It comes naturally. But even so, dodging knowledge is like dodging oxygen – you’ll avoid most of it, but not all. For example, I know that etymologically, the ‘corn’ bit means peninsula and the ‘wall’ bit means foreign. So Cornwall is the unusual knob, or the unknown extension, or the odd extra bit. I also know that the Romans didn’t really bother with the place, because the sitting tenants (the Celts) weren’t in the mood for straight roads,10 and that the region is officially ‘undeveloped’ according to the EU, which is why it’s had more funding than any other part of England over the last twenty years, and presumably not why Cornwall overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. I ask Megan why she thinks Cornwall voted to leave. ‘So the pasties can be irregular,’ she says, then goes back to sleep. It is on such characterful interventions that love rests.

  At the Menbury services we gain a passenger – Chris, who needs a lift home. He introduces himself over the public address system. ‘Hello everybody. I’m Chris. I’m a driver for the company, but I’m on holiday. Just need a lift home. I’ll be pointing out things of interest, so you might not hear from me again!’

  But we do hear from Chris again. Plenty. Which I don’t mind at all because there’s a nice West Country lilt to his speech. His delivery is also accidentally or oddly poetic. Here’s an example: ‘Bristol imported slaves and has two modern shopping centres. The M32 is shorter than a chantenay carrot if you know the sort, and said carrot will connect us to the M5, which binds Exeter to Birmingham and is heavy going in summer. To your left are the Mendip Hills, whence the stone of Bath was quarried. Behold Somerset – the land of cider and willow. Note yonder Willow Man. A 40-foot sculpture that was reduced in size by 20 per cent in 2012, in accordance with the government’s austerity programme.’

  The trouble with being a youngish couple is that people think you’re into each other. I mean, they think you’re self-sufficient in terms of entertainment, and therefore not keen for mixing or chit-chat. So far, no one has said a word to us – apart from that guy who hasn’t heard of egg white. We’re not being left out of the banter deliberately or unkindly. People are just sticking to what they know, and what they know is each other, is their generation. I was thinking about this over the weekend – about intergenerational relations, to put it grandly. It’s not much of a survey, but I asked a load of friends if they had a mate over 50 who they weren’t related to. The answer was no across the board. Evidently we are inclined to our own age group. Sayings such as ‘don’t match May with December’ aren’t exactly helpful in countering this inclination. I guess the logic behind that particular idea is that a common age promises a common disposition and common interests. That may well be true – or true to an extent – but it doesn’t mean that May– December matchings are without value. In my opinion, having less in common is an attractive deficiency, because it means there’s more ground to cover, more learning to be done. May can speak of flowers, and December of snowflakes. And the pair can unite in their distrust of August. Sounds good to me.

  For my part, I’ve had two significant May–December friendships. I say had, because both of my mates are dead now. Richard Flynn I met in Adelaide in 2010. I’d just finished studying and went out to South Australia to spend some time with my family (my dad’s first two children moved to Australia with their mother before I was even an idea), and generally vacillate in good weather. I got a job in a café and started reviewing plays for a local website. Richard was the editor. He was about 80 when I met him. He could spot a dangler from a hundred yards, sloppy thinking from a mile, a weak turn of phrase from— you get the picture. Because of his
keen editorial sense, and my generally messy writing, we gave each other a lot to think about. When he had a plus one for a play I’d sometimes go with him, and when I had a plus one he’d sometimes come with me. We’d go to a Chinese restaurant on Gouger Street after the play and debrief. Richard liked me well enough but could see I needed reforming. Over the next five years or so, he’d send me occasional emails dispensing what I suppose you’d call encouragement. He reckoned I needed to pull my socks up; that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; and that I really must start responding to his emails more promptly. I wrote back to his last email three weeks after receiving it, by which point he was dead. I still write to him sometimes, just a line or two. They don’t bounce back, which is nice.

  I met Julian Edwards at Liphook Golf Club in the year 2000. A few times a year, the golf club pitted the juniors against the seniors, and it so happened that Dr Edwards and I were drawn against each other several competitions on the spin. On each occasion, I’d show him how to get up and down, or play a bunker shot, or where his ball was, and in return, he’d tell me, quite like Richard Flynn, the various ways I needed to transform my character, starting with a subscription to the Telegraph. When I reached eighteen, the fees ballooned and I could no longer afford to be a member. Julian and I kept in touch and would meet once a year or so, either for a game of golf (until his ankle went AWOL), or lunch at the Hawkley Inn, where he’d dust off his preferred theme – that I really ought to have serious job by now – and present it to me anew. I remember one time moaning to Julian about how boring working at Café Rouge was proving to be. He heard me out and then said: ‘I’ll tell you what is boring. Cancer.’ At his memorial service, someone asked how I knew Julian. I said we played golf together, albeit terribly. She said, without pausing for thought, as if it were a given, ‘What matters is that you played.’