I went home the other day. For a brief visit. To be honest, the main point of the visit was to pick up some prizes that my school had chosen to honour me with. I also felt like popping home and visiting my dogs and/or family and being like ‘cool sup gees’. So that is what I did, I bought a ticket and boarded a coach and set off on my way.
I began to feel nervous about ten minutes into the journey. Has anyone seen that film Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp? There’s this bit at the beginning when Johnny leaves his hometown on this horse-drawn coach and then travels into the middle of nowhere. And then as the opening credits roll you see him looking out of the window of his coach and seeing all this bad shit; like he sees this scary lake and then these creepy trees then these weirdo scarecrows then like these severed heads on sticks or something and you see his face being all ‘Hooooooly shit, dude’. That is kind of what I felt like as I travelled back to London on my coach. Except instead of scary lakes I saw a street with four kebab shops in a row, and instead of creepy trees I saw a guy in a tracksuit walking a mangy pitbull along a dual carriageway and instead of weirdo scarecrows I saw a burnt out car and instead of severed heads on sticks I saw Ashford. Frankly, Ashford is what kind of hammered the final nails in the coffin. I don’t know if anyone from the Ashford tourist board is reading this (probably unlikely) but seriously dudes, sort out your fucking town. It looks like something from a geography textbook about urban decay/tsunamis. The people there have a kind of hopeless look of desperation that clings to them as they crawl and stagger and gibber through the filthy stain-coated high streets and die quietly next to abandoned laundrettes with only the rats to mourn them. Frankly, the stench of death and rot hangs over Ashford like a smog. It’s kind of what I imagine Stoke-on-Trent to be like.
This was all especially shocking to the system considering that I was coming from Oxford, city of gentility and niceness. I mean, we have a lot of beggars at Oxford, who are a bit annoying, and many ugly people clogging up the streets, but equally all of the beggars have pet dogs wearing capes and we have loads of one-legged people hopping about the streets, which for some reason evens it out for me. I love Oxford, I really do. A lot of people in my year are all like THIS ISN’T A REAL PLACE I WANT TO GO HOME and are all fighting against the general levels of weirdness that fill the town, but frankly people like that are oddballs. I frankly like the fact that I can go outside and see a guy dressed in woman’s clothing listen to a bunch of Indian midgets cover Oasis on pan pipes, and then go and buy a venison-and-fig pastry from a covered market that also sells entire deer. It’s good. The worst thing that can happen in Oxford is that your tutor frowns at you. This I like. The worst thing that can happen to you in the outside world is that you get robbed, beaten up, peeled, skullfucked and then sold into slavery and death at the hands of slave traders. They probably make kebab meat out of you.
Anyway eventually after a long-ass bus journey, I arrived home and expected to be treated as some kind of conquering hero. I anticipated that my dogs would go mental and probably run into the walls; as it was they looked at me, wagged their tails, then walked off. I was like oh. The rest of my family were ok, though. My sister was happy enough to talk to me for about ten minutes and my bro was cool. Everyone admired the top that I'd bought from Primark for £6 and my parents both said that I looked very healthy and handsome. This was tempered somewhat with "you've gotten a bit fat" and "Do you know, when you look down your nose bends off at a weird degree?" but y'know, gotta take the ups with the downs. But overall going home was wicked. It’s amazing being back at your house, as it is basically like a huge hotel. There is always FOOD in the fridge and all the surfaces are more or less CLEAN and you can just click your fingers and my mum will make you cups of teas whenever you request them and you get to watch TV (which started to properly fuck me off after 45 minutes as I realised that for the first time in 6 weeks, people were talking down to me; I was like “dude, I’m going to Oxford University, you don’t need to talk down to me when you attempt to sell me ice cream…knobhead”).
Anyway after a bit we went to the prizegiving. I’m not really going to go on about it as I do every time I go to it (which is like three years in a row now). It’s usually the same; old men talk smugly about how good the school is and how proud they are of us, then somebody attempts to make some kind of political point about independent schools being the best – this year the headmaster had a kind of “fuck da government, we is INDEPENDENT TO DA CORE” thing going on which was cute, although he portrayed the school to be some kind of free thinking hippy community of joy and butterflies which to be honest it frankly is not.
Anyway, after that groovy love-fest I went to the pub with Curry and Julian and Joe and Patrick and Tom and Joe and Jack and some other people that you do not and never will know. It was really nice to talk to some people who were slightly less intelligent than me (I’m joking I’m joking) and catch up on old times, which mostly revolved around talking about me and the fact that I am studying English at Oxford. Frankly everyone was so impressed with my educational superiority that their eyes were like saucers and they kept asking if they could touch my skin. I generously said that they could. Because I am a nice guy at heart.
I nearly had a heart attack when I went to the bar to get a drink though. “How much is your cheapest drink?” I asked (I am a catch); and she said ‘Fosters, it costs £2.85’. TWO POUNDS EIGHT FIVE PENCE. IMAGINE HOW MUCH DRINK I COULD BUY WITH THAT ON CRAZY TUESDAYS (75p shots… I can’t even work out that sort of maths). I am not joking, I started to cry softly as I handed over my money and took my pint of weak-ass Australian shit beer. Every sip felt like acid in my throat (and not just due to the levels of sulphur used during Fosters’ production line) as I imagined all of the money I wasting. Kind of like in one of those cartoons when the really hungry shipwrecked sailor imagines his friend as a big juicy chicken, I was looking at my pint and just imagining the pound coin ten p that I’d lost on the deal. However I still needed to drink so I went to the bank, earnestly pleaded with my bank manager, worked out a small fixed interest loan, came back then bought another few drinks.
That was bad. What was worse was that, upon my exit from the public house, absolutely broke, I discovered I’d missed the last bus. BUSES. BUSES. WHAT IS THIS SHIT, I cried out aloud. Buses are not an issue when you go to Oxford. In Oxford, everything is at most ten minutes walk away. Anything more is simply obscene. I was thinking about phoning my mum and getting her to pick me up but then I figured that I couldn’t actually be fucked with that shit so I set off on the 4 mile walk by myself. Oh, did I mention that it was cold? It was fucking cold. It was so cold that when I had a wee against a fence, the coldness of the metal froze the stream of wee and it went inside my belly and I nearly bled to death.
As it was, I luckily had my iPod and so I listened to some absolutely superb hardcore music while kind of dancing along the road (nb: yeah I was a bit drunk). Even so I was steadily getting more and more cold. I am sure if I was a better writer I would be able to come up with a better set of similes than something along the lines of “I was as cold as ICE locked in a FREEZER made of ICE in THE SNOW” or something similar (Tennyson aint got shit on me). I got so cold that I briefly tried to hitchhike. As it was, nobody was in the mood to pick up a dishevelled looking 19 year old in a suit and a monkey tshirt who was randomly jumping up and down and hollering. Bastards. I couldn’t help thinking “In Oxford they would have seen that I was a fellow student and then picked me up”. As it was, as I trudged on through the arctic temperatures I got more and more annoyed with being home. The television was patronising, the alcohol was expensive and the drivers were mean. Frankly, fuck it all.
Eventually I got to within 5 minutes of my house and yeah, I was feeling low. But then something happened. Something amazing. Debaser came on my iPod. Now, if you don’t know me you won’t know about me and Debaser by the Pixies. It is frankly my most favourite song in the history of the world; that song has direct hardwires into the centre of the happy part of my brain and when it comes on I can’t help but go insane. So it came on. And I started running. I started sprinting down an empty country lane at 1 in the morning, steam rising from my skin, screaming the lyrics to Debaser into the night air. I ran past a horse in a field and frankly, it was astonished. Two foxes bounded joyfully out of a thatch and ran around me in little joyous circles. When I was running along I saw a puddle in the pavement and instead of just sidestepping it I launched myself into the air and did a little Billy Elliot style pirouette before landing. And all of a sudden it all made sense. It was amazing. No matter how shit the world, no matter how many twats and knobheads and Mike Younises that clog the streets and oil their way through the system, Debaser by the Pixies will always be here and this street will always be here and I will always be able to run down this street screaming this song and that is just awesome. And I like Oxford, but you can never run down a road screaming the Pixies at the top of your voice. Only at home. It is only when you have silence that you can break it. And I sprinted all the way home screaming these lyrics and just being happy that I was alive. Of course, I was so cold when I got in that I got chilblains on my legs. Seriously, fuck that shit. But it was worth it.
Anyway, I am back in Oxford now. Literally thirty seconds after I got off the coach, I passed two tramps wishing each other Happy Birthday. Fried Gold.
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