Sixteen Days (Part 4)

I awoke with a hangover and the taste of burnt pizza on my tongue, and made the appalling discovery that the 69 bus from Winchester to Southsea has been cancelled. Gone, one the best bus journeys ever, and now it's impossible, without having to change buses at Fareham bus station, which isn't advisable, like doing most things in Fareham on foot. So it turned to be that after I'd finally bothered getting dressed, I had to get the train down to Portsmouth and Southsea. It cost £8.80, which is absolutely ridiculous, nothing should cost that much, not even a house, or a car, but since Stagecoach have decided to cancel the final leg of the 69 route, and I'm too old to qualify for the young persons railcard that I've lost anyway, it cost £8.80. The hundreds of reasons why buses are better than trains were made all too apparent by the number of slags, suits and stuffy old gits on the platform. I had to tell a man so posh he probably pays someone to operate his lungs for him where to get the London train from, IE the other platform.

My reasons for going to Portsmouth were simple. In keeping with the two key themes of my holiday which are nostalgia and change, I decided to go somewhere that I've never had a bad time, and see what was how I remember, and what had changed. Apart from the bus, which I've now managed to mention three times, none of the differences are negative at all. Portsmouth is technically three areas for the part-time tourist or day visitor: Portsmouth, which is the main city centre and veritable eyesore, Old Portsmouth, which used to be rubbish and only of any use if you've got an extended interest in sea slime and the Mary Rose but is now the must-visit area of the city, and Southsea, which is a few miles of seafront which somehow manages to get simultaneously more ugly and beautiful each time I visit it. Normally, and this is why I liked that bus route, you could hop on in Winchester and be delivered straight to the seafront and the Clarence Pier funfair. This is impossible now so far as ten minutes of googling and half-assed investigation has proved, so I went straight for the city centre. I have very little to say about the city centre. I think I've only been to centre of Portsmouth a few times before; twice was to go to the Guildhall which used to be an awesome venue to see bands, I remember seeing Super Furry Animals there one Halloween, and 11 years ago I saw Cast supported by Travis. Great times. The only other times I've been to the city centre were pretty insignificant, although for some reason I decided that Portsmouth was definitely the best place to go to spend my birthday. That was during the time that buying CD singles was definitely a good idea, so I bought loads with my birthday money, and then we tried to get a bus to Southsea and left them all on the bus. Being the idiot I was, I then went back to Our Price later in the day and bought them all again. I'd love to know where CD2 of Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp by Mercury Rev, Big Wheels by the Llama Farmers and Solved by the Unbelievable Truth are now, because they sure as fuck aren't anywhere near my CD play. They're probably all festering in a drawer upstairs. The main thing I remember about the centre of Portsmouth, both from a causal meander, and the fact you can't avoid noticing it as you dissect the city by car, was the domineering and ominous presence of the Tricorn Centre. This behemoth of disgusting 70s architecture is, without question, the most repulsive eyesore of a building you could ever hope to see. It was a hulking grey elephant dominating the entire skyline with it's ill-conceived matrixes of concrete staircases, overflow car parks and spiral-system floor manoeuvring. If I can find any pictures that do this terrible happening justice, I'll link them at the end of this post. It was the sort of place that you fear to even go near, in case you get mugged, raped, fall into an open sewer, or shop in Iceland. It looked like something out of Escape from New York. The one time we ventured too far, we found a pigeon that had its neck caught in a loop of chicken wire. If I didn't know better, I'd assume that even the pigeon hung himself after being near the Trion too long. So it was with great disappointment that I approached the north end of town hungrily, armed with my dig cam and a sense of dread to find it wasn't there. I had heard a rumour they were tearing it down, but then, I heard a rumour that Chinese Democracy was due out in 1995, so I thought it too good to be true. What's fantastic though, is that there is no evidence of this holocaust of structural ineptitude ever existing. It's a really impressive job. I was expecting at least one pillar or archway or block of asbestos with flies buzzing around it, to remain, but no. I mean, that area of town isn't special by any means; it's just a big car park, but good job on the Etch-a-Sketch system of destruction. The rest of town is too average to comment on - I went in Waterstones to sneer at how rubbish it was and to mentally tick the box marked "Waterstones Portsmouth are clearly going to have a display of naval-themed novels and non-fiction books" and went in Zavvi, which was one of the worst examples of the chain there is going, and I noticed they'd put the band Johnny Foreigner under 'F', the idiots.

I resisted further pedantry and decided to walk down towards Old Portsmouth. Like most other cities in the 21st Century, Cardiff being a notable example, most of the council’s money is being ploughed into this area, throwing down landmarks and shopping arcades and nice orderly marinas and cafe bars, like a game of Sim City. Old Portsmouth still remains, and as I walked down towards the sea you can't really ignore the maritime tang in the sea breeze; there's pictures of boats, a bunch of new flats called Admiral's Quay or some such shit, and you can see the Victory and the Mary Rose from a mile away. But the landscape is almost completely dominated by the Spinnaker Tower, which was Portsmouth's single token effort for the Millennium, and it's a very good call. Being situated on Hampshire soil, the idea to build a monolithic white tower in the shape of a boat's sails on the edge of the harbour was naturally met with snotty mouthed bored who claimed it would ruin the landscape, and that the money would be spent if everyone in Portsmouth were given an extra £10 to spend in the bookies. Even my Gran moaned about, God rest her soul, but since she lived over 15 miles away and as far as 'ruining her view' it's like saying that an earwig at the foot of a garden is a reason not to like a house, she had no excuse. But I defy anyone; especially local residents who get to go up it and look down their noses at the peasants below for a reduced fee, to deny that The Spinnaker tower is anything less than impressive. I didn't go there straight away, instead I moseyed down to the harbour and upon discovering I had exactly the right amount of money to get the ferry across to Gosport on the other side of the harbour, decided to, despite not having a particularly good reason to. I also probably wouldn't have bothered if I didn't have exactly the right change for the machine, I mean, it's Gosport for God's sake, but I enjoyed the trip anyway. I was sat on the ferry next to two people who sounded like they'd never been on a ferry before, possibly people who hadn't even see water before. They were American, so it could have been all concerning the unbearable tweeness of it all. In America, of course, they have trillion dollar cantilever bridges and era-defining support structures to get from A to B, and in the event of route C, you've got ferries the size of Battersea Power Station to get you across the body of water. So I guess this rusty balsa-wood excuse for water transportation was quite fascinating. Unsurprisingly, there were more people waiting at the other side to get to Portsmouth rather than the other way round, and this is because Gosport is awful. It's mean to say it, it's like comparing Barry to Cardiff, or Andrew Ridgely to George Michael. I stopped in Gosport for about half an hour, which was more than enough time to realise it was a boring, average, extremely faceless little part of the world, permanently living the shadow of the city across the harbour, to the extent the whole high street seems built sloping down towards the ferry terminal, so that even if you spill a bottle of water, the liquid will drip and run away from town. I bought some fish and chips in a takeaway, and somehow got involved in the life of the woman behind the counter, as we ended up talking about her daughter’s holiday to Eurodisney being cancelled. My parting gesture was "well, I do hope it all gets sorted out", which in hindsight is ridiculous, but then, it was the longest I've spoken to anyone since last Friday, so I cut myself some slack. The fish and chips were TERRIBLE.

I crossed the harbour back on the ferry, to the amusement of the drawbridge operator who had probably bet his workmate how long I was going to stay in Gosport. Yes, perfectly rational ferry operators make bets about my life which they're fascinated in. I got annoyed with the layout of everything along the Portsmouth side of the harbour because I found it much more difficult that I should have done to find the entrance to Gunwharf Quay. Gunwharf Quay is the all-encompassing title for the megacomplex built in blocks like New York City, but full of all the usual tat like Fat Face, Chiquitos, I would stake my life on there being an Old Orleans there somewhere, but to be honest, lovely and very pretty and spectacular the whole whizz-bang moneymoneymoneybags experience really is, I couldn't be bothered to look at a bunch of shops and bars when I didn't want to buy clothes or doughnuts and I didn't want to sit underneath a thatched umbrella with an overpriced cocktail. I toyed with the idea of going up the Spinnaker, but having forked out £8.30 on getting to Portsmouth, I didn't really feel like paying more or less the same to stand a few feet above it. There's a glass floor up there though, so you can see everybody below, so I did what any normal person would, and walked around the perimeter for about twenty minutes meaning the top of my ridiculous red and black hair will be in loads of people’s photographs. You ever stopped and wondered how many photographs of you exist in the world that you're unaware of, and any given time, photographs with you in the background could be sitting on shelves or even in frames, in cities and houses right across the globe. I added a few more, and then as I was trying to leave the compound, I added more again. I had difficulty trying to leave the other side of the marina, partly because the sun was so hot and everything in these new complexes tends to be made of glass so it was like walking the plank in a day-glo laser show of bright light, although, as is the case every time I'm ever somewhere I've got no idea where I am, someone asked me for directions and then thought I was fobbing them off when I said I didn't know.

Southsea though, is the best part of the whole city. I have various memories of this stretch of coastline, most of which revolve around me being an idiot as all good memories should. The two main venues for seeing bands in Portsmouth The Wedgewood Rooms and the Pyramids, are both in Southsea. I've seen many bands in both, all of which were fun in their own right, but the occasions I most remember are when I took the 69 and just sat watching the sea drinking cider on one of the benches or in the shelter and while away a couple of hours before going to watch the bands. One afternoon I took this to extreme levels and sat in one of the shelters on the promenade for upwards of 5 hours before going to see Poison the Well at the Wedgewood Rooms and falling asleep in the car on the way home within seconds of sitting down. I revisited this shelter, and the bench on the other side of The Pyramids where I sat writing a letter to Anna during the summer where I tried to grow a beard and wrote 50 letters, What was interesting about the walk from Gunwharf Quay to the pathetic parade pier, was how each place I stopped at along the way was exactly one notch more rubbish than the previous stopping point. It was literally a parade of old fashioned seaside dross. The fairground, which from memory I remember being really really awesome, and was the biggest fairground in the world, and I used to tell people at school that it was bigger than Blackpool Pleasure Beach which is ridiculous exaggeration. Somehow, and this is going against the norm for all these fading seaside amusement parks, it's better than it was last time, although it's still crap, and I definitely wouldn't pay to go on any of the rides. The arcades hadn't changed at all. The rollercoaster is still there. There's a famous story about this rollercoaster, where come of the carriages came off the track and fell into the sea. I'm assuming it's true, it's all very plausible, and it does add an extra level of nail biting terror, having the potential to drown. The Pyramids Centres is of limited interest to me now. I don't think they even have bands on any more, at least, there weren't any adverts or anything or posters advertising events there, so it's gone back to being just a swimming pool. It's not even a good swimming pool - two shitty flumes, an average one in the shape of a snake, a wave machine, a water fountain, and nowhere to fucking swim. I did stop to look at the crazy golf for a while Nobody was playing it, but it looked like a good course. I'm fortunate enough to be able to tell a good crazy golf course from a bad one. A bad one is one that's pirate themed, or has a "ring the bell on hole 18 to win a free round of golf" hole. These are corporate, multi-national crazy golf courses, they're as bad as Subway and McDonald's and Nestle. This course was straight out of the 'yeah right' school of crazy golf, with seemingly impossible holes involving jumps, loop-the-loops and various unlikely looking ramps. Pretty good looking. The best crazy golf course I've ever played was at Shanklin Chine on the Isle of Wight. This is a course so sacred you aren't even allowed to stand on the holes to take your shots. Fantastic. By the time I got the pier on the far end of the promenade, my feet were about to give in, and I could already tell my face was sunburnt, but dare not look at any car bonnets or gift shop windows to have the awful truth revealed to me, so I didn't stop long, which was a good idea, because this is the worst place in Portsmouth, a place so ruined by the stench of inferiority that the penny arcades have been boarded up, I'd had enough, and was in no way going to walk back in the other direction. I'm glad I didn't, I probably wouldn't have any skin on my skull by now. As I write this, the newsreader's lead into the weather was commenting on how spectacular the weather was in Portsmouth was today. How nice of him to point out, it's clearly written all over my face.

As a near-perfect end to a nostalgia driven excursion, as I got off the train back in Winchester, I walked down the stairs to the Platform 1 exit and walked past the girl from school that I was in love with for 5 years. By "in love" I of course mean "Had a pathetic crush on" The conclusion of this passionate adoration resulted in me making her a mix tape with loads of great songs on it (by which I mean 'mix tape only I would ever want to listen to') and this was met with the decision to never speak to me ever again. 9 years later, the vow of silence wasn't broken, and she still offered the same minor smirk of superiority she used to exercise all the time back then. I pretended I didn't see her and kept on walking.

The Tricorn Centre: http://www.thejetsetter.co.uk/concretejungle.html