A Journey to George Scott King
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Fuel For A Future Reminisce: A Journey To George Scott King We still don’t have a blind in our bathroom. Religiously, every week, my girlfriend tapes a new piece of plain A4 paper to the window. In her imagination this works as a temporary blind, stopping the local perverts and sex pests from staring at her while she has a shower. I don’t know why she doesn’t tape up three pieces of A4 to com- pletely block out the window, or why we don’t get a blind. As I stood in the shower a few weeks ago, trying to hide behind the sheet of paper, I was struck by a thought, ‘If we lived by the sea, with no neighbours, we wouldn’t need a blind. Or a piece of paper’. This is my ‘escape fantasy’. Nothing new. I dream of leaving Lon- don a few times every week. I don’t just think about leaving either, I take my fantasy to new heights, I research it, I live it. I’m one of those people you see in seaside towns; one of the tossers who spends their whole weekend looking in estate agents’ windows, blocking the pavement while loudly discussing the relative merits of the Kent coastline, marveling at how many ‘sea glimpses’ you can buy for the price of a basement flat in Finsbury Park. After the shower I go and I sit at my desk. I type ESTATE AGENTS WHITSTABLE into Google. It’s always the same thought process: ‘We could sell this house and move to the seaside. I’m not bothered about moving into a big house so we could buy a dilapidated two-up two down and have plenty of change. I’d then get a big studio and concentrate on making ‘real art’ - not the diagrammatic explora- tions of self pity that I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, not the irony or the diagrams. I’ll make real art. Big bold expressive art. I will become a painter! I will find the ‘real me’! I will become someone else!’ And so it goes on and on like this, and has done for years. After two hours of looking at houses for sale in every seaside resort in England, I tragically and inevitably go on to e-bay to look at sports bikes. Two wheeled speed porn. I look at motorbikes for sale every- day, remembering the easy freedom that my bikes brought me. While I sat looking at motorbikes, seaside homes and plotting my re-birth, my girlfriend came home and said ‘Did you see that George Shaw’s been nominated for the Turner Prize?’ I hadn’t seen that. I’d been too busy, but I’m genuinely pleased for him. He deserves it. Later that day I have an idea. It is this; I will get a fast bike from somewhere, maybe see if Arena Homme+ can borrow one for me. I’ll ask for the new BMW S1000RR, the best bike that money can buy. I will ride the bike to George’s house in Ilfracombe, taking the B-Roads, discovering England at speed, making notes and tak- ing photographs. This will allow me to escape from London briefly, and if nothing else, also allow me look in estate agents windows in Devon, several fantasies all wrapped into one. I email the magazine explaining what I’d like to do. I tell my girlfriend the idea. She says, “Bit embarrassing making a fuss over George now he’s nominated for the Turner Prize isn’t it? You haven’t spoke to him for months - groupie.” The bike arrived later than expected on Friday afternoon. I’d been wandering around the house in full racing leathers for over an hour. I’d spent the morning at my computer, trying to understand the tech- nical data on the bike. It seemed very complicated, different settings of BHP, optional ABS and lots of other abbreviations. I’m terrible with instructions. My mind goes a complete blank when I’m faced with even the simplest technical task. The most basic Ikea challenge becomes a Rubik’s cube in my hands and I have to confess, I was a bit anxious, too anxious to sit and read. The last time I’d been on a fast bike, I’d ended up in hospital and the bike in the scrap yard. But, when the driver pulled up and rolled the bike out of the van, I was instantly transported back to childhood - a birthday or Christ- mas; you know that feeling, the one where your dad wheels your new bike out of the kitchen? The excitement quashed the anxiety. As if on auto-pilot, I headed for the A13, the trunk road that connects London to Southend. Like Billy Bragg, but with a smaller house, I absolutely love that road, especially as it opens up past Dagenham and the now extinct Ford factory with it’s artificial lakes and gigantic wind turbines. It’s hard not to feel like you’re at the extreme edge of Modernity around there, ‘Post-Indust-Reality: artificiality in all its beauty’. I actually thought that as I rode past the dead car plant. It’s a funny thing on motorbikes, like being just a bit drunk, when you find yourself temporarily yet incredibly articulate, bikes at speed can have the same effect. The velocity and the vibration seem to wake up your mind. As I got on to an open straight near Basildon, I wound the throttle back. This is not a bike, it’s more of a jet plane. It’s incredible. I start to think of how I’ll write about the irony of visiting George (from Coventry) on a motorbike that can trace its lineage back to the Focke-Wulf Fw190 fighter-bomber of World War II. No matter how much you tuck your neck into your shoulders, you can’t stop the head shaking sensation that happens on a fast bike. Then somehow, when you really shouldn’t, when you really need to concentrate, your mind starts to wander. The faster I went the more my mind wandered. Fleeting, unrelated thoughts flashed through my head as cars, caravans and trucks merged into a single blur. I started to think about ‘The International Language of Homosexu- ality’. That kind of half sign language Esperanto that some gay men have. Why, wherever you go, be it Rome, Lewisham, Sydney or Scunthorpe, do some gay men, the really camp ones, all speak in the same way? Why do they all move their hands in that butterfly way? Is it genetic or is it learnt? And when did some Mancunians start walking like monkeys? Is that a post-baggy affectation or is that genetic as well? Is it reverse Darwinism? Men turning back into monkeys? As the A13 crossed the top of Canvey Island, I couldn’t resist. I turned off and headed for the Lobster Smack pub. I had to go Down By The Jetty. It was beautiful down there; oil towers set on marsh- land, pylons and ponies - the urban countryside. I took a picture on my phone and made a note for a future project, ‘Travel the world photographing significant yet utterly insignificant places’. Over the weekend, I tried to plan my journey. I was to set off for Ilfracombe on Monday morning, 240 miles from my house if I took the motorway. But I had no intention of going via the motorway. The project expanded in my mind. If I chose to, I could become lost in the south for England for an eternity, like a provincial Easy Rider seeking out old transport cafes and coaching inns rather than LSD and New Orleans. If I wanted it to, this trip could take me a lifetime, lost forever on the ring road around Basingstoke, a high speed archaeologist and Professor of Pubs. The journey became more of a mythical idea that a practical reality. If I were my dad, everything would have been meticulously planned weeks in advance, his fear of getting lost so great that he still won’t venture into Leeds city centre alone. When he visits London he’ll stand and marvel at Highbury Corner roundabout, shocked by the insanity and chaos that only he can see. And If I were him now, the Sat Nav would be checked and re-checked and there’d be several anxious phone calls to George, “Hello. Just me again. I did tell you that I’ll be arriving on Monday afternoon?” Lost in the romance of travel and history, I never really planned a route. How much more exciting I thought, just to set off. Surely I’d get to Devon if I just headed West? I kept thinking about Canvey and the Lobster Smack in particular, one of Lee Brilleaux’s favou- rite pubs and the setting that Charles Dickens chose as Magwitch’s riverside hideout in Great Expectations (meaning it must be on some kind of important pop cultural ley line). I got caught up in the idea of ‘incidental history’, trying to make connections between places and events where none necessarily existed. And I know why. Just recently I’d been reading a lot of Iain Sinclair books and I started to imagine myself as Sinclair On Wheels. I would make a high speed version of Sinclair’s semi-psychogeography, but instead of his am- ble from Hackney Wick to Stratford, I’d power across hilltops and through valleys, I’d seek out heroes’ roundabouts and fast bends.