Sixteen Days (Part 5)

I used to own this Japanese Ash CD which had three singles from 1977 on it, and one each of their respective B sides, all three of which were awful. The lyric sheet thought, was interesting, and the booklet actually had the lyrics to Girl From Mars wrong, with a pair of lines which aren't actually in the song. These were actually much better than the ones sung by Tim Wheeler, and I've never been able to work out whether the problem came from being lost in translation, or whether these were the original lines. I mention this because more than any other album, 1977 by Ash is the one album that dominated summers, namely the summer of '96 with the football and the Olympics and not being old enough to see Trainspotting. Next month, I'm going to see Ash for the first time. Listening to 1977 that summer was precisely what being young, being a teenager and having six weeks off school was about.

I wasted most of the day doing boring shit like going to the awful post office in WH Smith, an activity I couldn't recommend less if I tried, it was a soul destroying experience, and I'll tell you for free that the people that work there are categorically not holograms, nor are they good examples of the human race. If and when aliens invade, I hope to God that they don't need to buy any second hand stamps. I bought some uninteresting things like cookies and pasta sauce and The Hampshire Chronicle, so I could be reassured that nothing really interesting happens in Hampshire. I also sat for a bit in the Abbey Ground, which is interesting because there isn't an Abbey there. These small areas of parkland's greatest hits in my lifetime include going there to sit on the swings and get poisoned by the Blue Dolphin, a time when I ripped the back of my Beck t shirt trying to climb over the railings during the Hat Fair, and getting caught on the spikes at the top. Everyone used to always call the old people who lived in the flats overlooking the playground perverts, as this is what teenagers do, but I'm sure they weren't, and I hope I'm not wrong. Teenagers aren't known for their perceptiveness when it comes to accusing people of paedophilia. They have stuck some ridiculous looking new cultivated bushes in the flower beds that look like Fusilli pasta though, so it's good to see this area is still being kept neat and tidy. There were a lot, and I don't use this word lightly, a lot of total motherfuckers sat around me though, so instead of killing them all, I went home via Blockbuster and rented the original German version of Funny Games to satisfy at least a few of my sadistic tendencies. Evidently the governors and deans of the Winchester School of Art must read the blogs of bored idiots on holiday, because they've taken my advice, and as I walked down park road, I discovered they've scrubbed all the pretentious "would you, could you" monkey shit off the walls. I'm sure the rest of Winchester are relieved. Maybe the culprit graduated with honours and they're going to sell off the design to a load of Hollywood titans, a la Banksy. Or perhaps not.

At home I raided the cupboards for fusilli pasta but I was disappointed not to find any, so I resorted to cooking tortellini and watching Funny Games, which was every bit as unnerving and sickening as I was expecting it to be. I can't imagine the recent US remake being much different apart from having Tim Roth in it, but for startling uncomfortable viewing, then this is great, although I was watching it in the front room where people walking past can look into the windows and see the TV screen (and trust me, they do, especially if the cat is sat in the window) and there were a few times I was hoping nobody was looking in. It's also got Ulrich Muhe in it who is a massively underrated dead actor. I quite liked the way one of the charismatic young psychopaths kept breaking the fourth wall.

I felt guilty in the end for not scaling St Catherine's Hill on Sunday. I hindsight, if my bike hadn't spontaneously destroyed itself at the Park and Ride, I'd have probably have gone up there in the end on Sunday, but I didn't want to. Today, I did, but I decided to wait until late afternoon, with the intention of climbing to the tallest point in the city and watching the sunset. I followed more or less the same route as I did on Sunday, through the cathedral grounds, which had loads of signs up offering "books! books! book!" but I couldn't find any "books!" anywhere, unless an oversized white marquee had been housing any "books!" earlier in the day. I walked through the cathedral close and then around the back of the college, past the strange round house that looks like a single turret, and then across the college green with the tennis courts, along by the river. The tennis courts were full, and the grass was littered with small groups of people, playing football and rounders, some just sat on rugs, most, if not all, full of the intense feeling of being young, and in love. Like all good hills, there's a variety of different ways to climb to the top, and being lazy, I took the easy one. There's a path which curls up through the trees, and some others where you an approach from an alternate side and climb a staircase. I just climbed up the north face, which is in full view of the city, meaning if you have to stop and wheeze and sit down and spit, then anyone with a telescope and meaningless life, can watch you do it. It's enough motivation to keep you going, although I didn't need it because, compared to the last time I came, the climb was a lot shorter, to the extent that when I reached the top, I ran back through my music player to see how many songs I'd listened to since leaving the house, and it was a lot less that the distance would suggest. The top of St Catherine's hill is almost completely unspoilt. There was a grand total of three people up there as I arrived; myself, a man in shorts and white socks who was sat reading in the spot I really wanted to sit in, but I found some shade anyway. There was also a slightly cranky Doc Brown stick-gatherer who arrived in the wood just as I was wandering around and thinking about going on the rope swing. I'm not sure of the social etiquette of rope swings. Is it social no-no to go on a rope swing alone, or if you use a rope swing in the forest and nobody's watching, does it make it OK? Anyway, I felt distinctly unnerved with him wandering around alone on the forest collecting sticks, and not just because of Funny Games, so I went back out and sat out watching the view. I decided it was be a really good idea to get drunk watching the sunset, but I'd only brought one book with, and trust me, God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens is not a good book for this sort of occasion. Luckily I didn't need it.

After I'd stared out across the city and played the whole "what the fuck building is that?" game with myself, and then moved onto the "where the fuck is that building... oh wait it's behind that one" game afterwards, the man with the white shorts and socks left. I should have mentioned that despite being a mind-you-own-business book reader, the colour of the shorts and socks were also terrifying me because of Funny Games, so I was glad that he went and was replaced by two unthreathening horse girls and faithful Lassie dog. They didn't last long, and then another group of two boys and girl arrived, and they invited me to come and join them. I didn't really want to, but they were clearly better company than Christopher Hitchens, and Winchester kids are usually posh and rich, and don't ask for cigarettes and don't have much need to beat me up and steal my camera. The main protagonist of inviting me over was called Joe, and I honestly believe that every generation of Wintonian Youth has one of these figureheads amongst them. They're usually phenomenally intelligent, witty and strong-headed people who are enormously affable sociopaths, yet for some reasons are honked up their eyeballs on narcotics and don't really 'do' college, work in a garage and borrow money off their friends all the time. Joe was this to a tee, and had posh boy good looks, like a less Neanderthal and simian Johnny Borrell, and if only didn't claim that John Frusciante was a genius, then he'd have a terrific future ahead of him, if he hadn't dropped out of college. They asked me if I'd come to the party, which was a ridiculous question, since I wasn't even aware there was a party, and at any rate, why would someone who was 8 years older than the next most senior partygoer be there on his own, when he didn't know anyone. The party was all over the internet, apparently, it was one of these guerrilla parties that get shouted out on Facebook or Myspace and usually result in peoples houses receiving multimillionpound damage, and everyone likes watching Skins and has casual sex with each other. I decided to stay. One by one different groups of teenagers swarmed around the summit and sat in groups. Joe seemed to hate almost everyone there, including tow girls he didn't know because they were wearing stupid shirts, one girl because she had ginger hair, and almost anyone that didn't come and sit in our group were threatened with something or other. He made us take a vote on whether he should beat up this dopey looking toff called Peter because Peter bitched him up. I refused to vote because I didn't know what "bitching someone up" entailed. The vote was carried over, and Peter survived. I drank about half of Joe’s vodka which was sickening because there wasn't any mixer except warm, flat, caffeine free diet coke, which is so far from good coke that I don't even want to think about it. We talked about Winchester, apparently my old headmaster Mr Jenner is no longer the head teacher of the school, he retired, and his son got busted for dealing drugs. OF COURSE! That's how it should be. Apparently the Blue Dolphin closed down ages ago, I just didn't notice, and Susie told me, but apparently it wasn't due to people getting poisoned, it's because the owner emigrated to Spain with their dirty money. They told me about how much they hated the police, because you're not allowed to drink in the grounds of the Cathedral, or at Oram's Arbour anymore, and now these have these mini-police people who can't arrest you or fine you, but they can issue warnings and stuff on the spot. They were a little worried that some of them were going to come up the hill and ruin our party. I wasn't sure whether to believe any of them, especially when they goaded me for not going to Reading to see Rage Against the Machine. They weren't interested in the fact that I'd seen them before. It started raining, and after sitting under the trees and watching Joe singe his face on a bonfire and pretend he'd be blinded, I decided to go home. It might have been fun to stay up there, merely because groups of ten and fifteen people were turning up almost every five minutes. But I'm not a party animal, and I know my place in life, and that place is not partying with children on top of a hill, so I made my excuses to leave. I said "see you at the Hat Fair" to Joe, and surprised myself at how much I actually meant it. As I travelled back down the hill, kids with backpacks and polo shirts, all of them, asked me what the best way to get up the hill was. I took delight in telling them, and even told them; from the few names I picked up, who was there. They clearly thought I knew everyone. Maybe given my age, they thought I'd organised it. I could have told them anything. One kid, who for reasons unknown was carrying a tennis racket, invited me back up the hill once I'd reached the bottom, and I was almost tempted. But my time in the sun was over, time to go back to being old. When I got home, I found that after my excursions to Portsmouth, and hillwalking today, I'd clearly flown too close to the run. I can't walk now, my feet are totally fucked. But that's the price you pay for partying for 90 minutes in the summer rain.