Sixteen Days (Part 7)

Today I really wanted to go to Southampton. I think everyone has to say that once in their life and mean it. Now that I could walk again, and inspired by my journey down to Portsmouth, I decided to go the other big city of Hampshire to have a walk round and to poke my nose in the horrible areas and take unrepresentative photos of how crap it was, hopefully with yet more pictures of ugly 70s architecture with the sun in the background, for a change. I've been to Southampton a lot, lot more in recent years, simply because it's on the train route home from Cardiff. If I'm getting the train to Winchester, I have to change at Southampton, and because the train station there is relatively close to the town centre, unlike Bristol, then it's no big deal to have a walk around because the trains are invariably shite. Also, because of it's proximity to Winchester, and Chandlers Ford were some of my friends used to live, then I've seen more of it and lived in it a lot more than Portsmouth or anywhere else in the south. This of course, doesn't mean it's much of a city, it's familiarity through necessity. Southampton was the site of my first gig, when I was 13, and also the site of my first kiss, four years later. Both took place at the Joiners Arms, a notorious and slightly famous venue just off the main stretch of town. The band were Joyrider, an Irish indie rock band who had one hit, a cover of 'Rush Hour'. The kiss was with a fucking idiot slag girl Rachel Stamp fan and like nearly every incidence of my life that involved the word 'kiss', I'd much rather forget it as I'm sure she did, three seconds later. There have been many varied and boring events of my life that have taken place in Southampton; meeting Coldplay, getting drunk on the bandstand in the park listening to Violator by Depeche Mode, sitting the same bandstand listening to Use Your Illusion 2 before gigs at The Joiners, someone trying to strangle me in the toilets of the Rhino Club, losing my phone for the first time. My orthodontist who described my fucked up teeth as 'the most bizarre he'd even seen' was based in Southampton, on Bedford Place, a road that looks like it has pound coins melted in the pavement. I'm sure there are many others, although the highlight of any trip is of course, going down the subway that Craig David mentions in '7 Days'

Luckily, although not unexpectedly, the bus to Southampton is still running, and running so regularly that you can pretty much guarantee there'll be one waiting in the bus station almost as soon as you arrive, a collectors item, and also a relief. After a debacle involving my realisation that there isn't a bloody cash point any further down town than Abbey National anymore now that, and I'm away of how much I sound like a stuck record, because they've moved the fucking post office, there isn't one anywhere near the market, I was glad to find a place to sit. Although Wintonian pedants will argue that have just got on the bus right outside Barclay's, but one of the reasons I love the Southampton bus, is the fact that it's a double decker, and if you get on at the bus station, you can guarantee the top row front seats, which as any fool knows, is the only way the travel double decker. I achieved this, and I quite like the ride through town on the top deck, mainly because the drivers don't think twice about piling straight into the trees as any given opportunity, and as the bus swings out of town through St Cross, Compton, where Dr Dre lives, and Otterbourne, which probably doesn't have any Otters, but the residents like to give the impression that the place is teaming with them, since there's a pub called The Otter, and all the signs have pictures of otters on. My friend Tom used to live in Otterbourne, and we went and sat in the woods a few times and everyone got drunk. I think this was during my short lived period of being tee total, as I can't remember it very well. The bus goes through Chandler's Ford at lightning pace, and before long you're on the main stretch into Southampton. It's called The Avenue, and it's fucking nightmare. One of the worst roads in the whole world. It's the sort of highway of utter ineptitude that's about five miles long, and has to have traffic lights every three metres, including those hulking, horrible overhead ones. At any given opportunity, you can look out of the window and see upwards of eight red or green lights. It usually takes half the journey to get to the other end, but today I think the Gods were smiling, because I was in the city centre. Much has changed in the centre of Southampton over recent years, although nothing in the last five years or so, as far as I can tell. The biggest event was the building of the West Quay shopping centre, a building so gargantuan you can probably see it from space. It's bigger than the entire high street and the other two fuck-arsed shopping centres crumpled together. It's a frankly beautifully vile retail extravaganza, it's like one of those out-of-town wallet-suckers like Cribbs Causeway or that one in Sheffield everyone goes on about, only this one's slap bang right in the centre of town, and boy howdy is the rest of the town still struggling to come to terms with it,

First warning sign was where the bus stopped, near the Guildhall. I can't remember if it's been like this for a while, but there used be two big department stores lined up next to each other in this area, a C+A Fabrics, and a shitty affair called Tyrell and Greens which I used to dread because it's where mum always bought my school trousers so I had to suffer the annual loss of dignity by being pulled by my ear into the schoolwear and had to try on trousers, when all I wanted to do was go in Our Price and flick through the 49p singles. I'm glad it's gone. The other noticeable absence is that the McDonald's has closed down. Seriously, what town has a McDonald's close down. I used to think Winchester was outrageous because our Burger King didn't last, but no High Street McDonald's, something's seriously up. I'll sympathise with Ron and the Hamburglar though, there is still a restauranty-cafe-y thing on the stop floor of the new centre, but you do have to worry. Another flagging point is the state of the Bargate Centre, which is the third biggest shopping centre in the city centre. The fourth biggest is an utterly ridiculous building called the East Street Shopping centre, which I kid you not, only has one open shop in the entire building, and that's a knock-off back-of-a-lorry furniture giveaway which is impossible to even look at without feeling like the furniture's having more fun that you are. The Bargate though, was never phenomenally popular and vibrant, it was mostly a place for alternative kids and college drop outs to gaze wonkily at surf shoes and loiter around the spikey belt shop. Now it's even more barren, the only activity in the entire place was on the basement floor where tattooed banjo fingered web geeks were hammering away at World of Warcraft and gobbling milkshakes. Any other corner, it was like being in a mausoleum. The only shops I went in were a clothes shop, that was either called "NME fashion" or "Closing Down Sale" because the signs were of equal size but either way it was awful and appeared to sell nothing but ugly boxer shorts with cartoons on. I thought, not unreasonably, being an "NME fashion" shop I thought they might sell band t shirts or - here's a crazy idea - CDs, but no The other shop I went in was a book shop, that took me far too long to twig was a Christian bookshop. I think it was the fact it sold DVDs through me, but on closer expection, they were things like Amazing Grace with Ioan Gruffydd, and those ridiculous Bible Stories films with Gary Oldman as Pontius Pilate. I U-turned of there pretty fast. Not because I've got anything against Christian bookshops, but because I thought the woman at the counter might start talking to me about Christian bookshop things.

I did go into the East Street Shopping Centre, for about three seconds. Not even Forbidden Planet is down in that area of town, so there's absolutely no reasons to go there. The place makes the Bargate centre look like the Trocidero. I was actually embarrassed to be in there, especially when, laughably, I saw a security guard. I like to think that he'll remember me, the only customer in the building, on Thursday July 3rd. I wonder if he works Saturday. I ended up going across the park to the Joiners, which felt closer to town that it used to be, but then I guess most of the times I went there, I got dropped off in a car rather than walking across town. It looked identical to how it always was, but a quick scan of the forthcoming gigs neatly summed up the changing of the guard as far as live music in the Hampshire goes. I think I recognised three bands on the entire list, and two of them were playing together. I think the era for one-hit-wonder indie bands and girls with plastic bracelets and crap glam rock shows are long gone. I doubt I'd have gone to anything listed for the entire of June or July, even if I lived nearby. It's become like a lot of Barfly's, all run by promoters who don't actively seek bands, they just seem to wait for bands to roll up and demand to play. That's why the entire listing was clogged up with local shite. It was disappointing, but after that I walked through a shitty market and through a shitty housing estate with a shitty playground, and everything was alright. My overall aim for the aim was to find Ocean Village, which was a marina-based retail and entertainment shitfest before the days that marina-based retail and entertainment shitfests were the done thing. There's also a crappy Cineworld there with only five screens. The last time I went down that neck of the woods was in the year 2000, after going to the dentist. I remember it being awful, so I figured a good photo opportunity would arise. The problem was, as was the problem last time, that I couldn't find the bloody thing, so after bungling around various uninspiring bits of dockland, and then got hopelessly lost in a new residential area that was so posh and stinking of money and yachts that I started to feel nauseous and ill, and after walking the entire perimeter of one building I almost gave up, but then I realised that the cinema was exactly where I'd just been, but for some idiotic reason they've faced it away from the main road, away from the road you walk down to get into the main area, and even after that, they've put a fucking tree up in front of the entrance. I'm not just finding excuses for my own idiocy, I'm finding excuses for their idiocy. But I found it, and I went in, and I saw Hancock, and it was shit. They were playing trendy US college rock in the foyer though, but I couldn't work out what it was, and the chewing girl at the box office said "unlimited card?" like she was asking me to do a shit on the desk. It's always weird when you go to a different Cineword having spent the best part of a MILLION YEARS only going to one particular one, and I don't know if the one in Cardiff is like, the best Cineworld in the entire chain, but all the others I've seen have been pretty poor

My foot started falling off when I got out of the cinema, so I headed back into town I cheated and got the bus, which had just gone up to £1.25 to cover the rise in fuel prices, although the sign on the lamp post assured me that this was only the second price hike in seven years. Nice to know. I can see why the bus services in Cardiff don't do that, because their prices have gone up seven times in the last two years, and they don't give you fucking change, and the bus drivers like to stop in lay bys to go in shops and buy cigarettes. They don't put any of that on a sign on a lamp post. The bus dropped me off just outside West Quay, so even though I was now visibly limping, I couldn’t resist a glance over of the cavalcade of retail extremities that is West Quay. For about a minute, I didn't even pause as I went up the escalator and through John Lewis, where I then realised I'd gone the wrong way and had to double back on myself, which meant the same woman from the haberdashery saw me dragging my right foot towards two different 'out' doors, but eventually I got out, and after wasting yet another 30 minutes of my life at the bus stop near Bedford Place as for the tenth time in a row, the first listed bus never turned up. In a day of few surprises, I shouldn't have expected anything less.