Q) Global ABC: Hit The North

Hit the North.

"The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion,
myths, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the
hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban
sociology and demography and architecture."
Jonathan Raban, 'Soft City' 1974

Monday March 26th 2001

It was a different century the last time I was in
Newcastle. End of the twentieth, start of twenty-first. About a year
and a half in 'real', objective time but on my own scale it could be
decades or just yesterday. I have the sensation that a great amount of
time has passed but, at the same time, none at all

For a long time I've avoided the actual physical Newcastle
while more and more flirting with a psychic Newcastle, Newcastle as
concept, Newcastle as idea. Now is the time to go back, to check how
much of the Newcastle of my mind is really there.

Increasingly I have begun to feel my past, my memories, my
being, turning into stories, converting to language as if I had read
them somewhere, as if they had not happened to me at all. I feel as if
I am disappearing in the present because I have lost the solidity
afforded by a past. I fear looking down at my hand, to see the table
through it. Eventually I will end up with as little substance as wind
down an empty street.

My life at present is empty, sterile, small. I don't go
out. My moods are subject to constant, shifting chaos, swaying like
seasick decks in dark storms. Contact with people is problematic. I am
occluded, stopped, halted. Simply being alive is a struggle. On the
horizon hovers the possibility of my mental state worsening, at which
point I will disappear forever. I feel like a candle ready to be
snuffed, the light it casts growing dimmer and more erratic as time
goes on.

It is at this point that nostalgia would be understandable,
the slipping back in time to a warmer, more comfortable place, sliding
into the skin of a happier, more well rounded self.

"I am afraid I cannot convey the particular sensations of
time travel. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling
exactly like that one has on a switchback - of a helpless head-long
motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation too, of an imminent
smash."
H.G. Wells 'The Time Machine', 1895

The best way to explain my experience is incontinent
nostalgia. It is not the same as normal reminiscence. It is not
voluntary or pursued. It is as if the past rushes in to fill the void
of the present. This is the past as nauseous dislocation rather than
comfortable retreat. The past does not offer solutions but thousands of
questions. It does not make me feel more real, it does not flesh out my
character, it abstracts me further.

I am dogged by such a sense of unreality in my everyday
life that I feel cut loose from conventional time, constantly at a
point between past and present where I am both conscious of my actual
location and portions of the past at the same time, as if I was
stretched between two points in time.

For example, there is a council estate next to Brookmill
Park in Lewisham made of brown, rough cut brick, three tower blocks
with maisonettes kneeling around them like ladies in waiting. The
towerblocks have a sloping area of grass around them, flecked with
brightly coloured wrappers and newspaper. Underneath a few of the
second level maisonettes there are gaps where the maisonette beneath
should be. The pavement is grimy grey. This is so similar to what
Benwell in Newcastle was, just off Adelaide Terrace, that I am
transported back there. It is not that it reminds me of Benwell, to me
it becomes Benwell as if the two are the same place. The present
becomes the past, I move into time. It is like superimposing one image
over another that is similar but not exactly the same; it is the points
of similarity that are reinforced, not the differences. I am, in
essence, in both places and times at once.

This is what I talk of as mythic Newcastle. My vision of
Newcastle protrudes through into my actual surroundings in London, as
if it were a vision of another world. This is, I suppose, a result of
the massive dislocation between my past and where I find myself now.
Newcastle IS another world, or so it seems at my distance.
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I feel strongly, fiercely, that I am a product of Newcastle
but cannot truly trust my memories anymore. I feel so distant from what
made me that I began to doubt myself. Recently I have received a
diagnosis, a title. I am manic-depressive. I have bipolar (II)
disorder. Mental illness is difficult because it is not something you
have; it's something you are. Reading a definition of the manic phase
of manic depression, I felt a black hole open inside of me, Lewisham
library began to fade around me, everything on the verge of collapse.

"Mania is characterised by an extraordinary sense of
well-being, over-activity, and elation and is usually accompanied by a
conviction of great self-importance which causes the individual
effected to make grandiose pronouncements? His talk is profuse and
prolix; flitting from topic to topic with an unstoppable stream of
ideas interspersed with puns and feeble witticisms. His jollity may at
first be infectious, but before long he becomes overbearing and
tiresome?"
'The Oxford Companion to the Mind' edited by Richard Gregory. 1987

The description was of what I thought was me. If what I
think is me is part of a condition, what is me?

Since I passed into the realm of medicine, of psychiatry
and psychotherapy, I have realised more than ever that I am fighting to
maintain a sense of self. Repeatedly during psychotherapy real, wider
problems were rationalised by the therapist into problems of my own
thought processes. To reduce it down, my own past and experiences did
not really exist, they were like images in a fairground mirror, skewed
and unreliable and unreal in an objective sense. My defence is that my
feelings and motivations actually come from a true and lived experience
and are both understandable and justified in response to that
situation.

In the face of such of such an attack on my very self it
has become increasingly important to establish my history, to prove
that existed at all. This is where Newcastle comes in.
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I no longer understand where I am or how I got here. All I
have is a record of either calamitous illness or self-negating
stupidity. I need to go back to my past to prove that I was there and
am therefore here in the present. I also need to prove that my version
of Newcastle exists, that it isn't just an artefact of a deranged mind,
that what I saw, growing up, was really there. I need to make sure that
my foundations are not laid in sand, that I have not founded my entire
life on a series of misconceptions and misunderstandings. I need to see
that what is inside my head is also outside too.

I am Newcastle.

Recently I have found holes in my mind, blind spots. I
worry that the past will disappear but also the present. I purposely
severed my ties with Newcastle when I left; attempted to escape its
influence, which I felt was destroying me. The farther I got, both in
time and space, the more I realised that I was trying to leave behind
the very essence of myself. This is a rift I have spent much time
trying to heal, trying to reconcile who and where I am now with who I
was and where I come from.

I feel physically sick at the thought of return to
Newcastle, at the knowledge that it will be so different, both from my
current life and from the way I remember it. Is it possible to be the
self that I have become?

Newcastle is the lens through which I have viewed my life,
Newcastle was my school. To understand me you must understand it.
Returning to the place of your education will always bring on profound
emotions.

I always hated school.

I am so lost that I cannot even conceive of how it will
feel to get off the train. All I can see is the tracks disappearing
into darkness, the journey incomplete. I cannot see myself in the cold
air of Newcastle, pavement solid under my feet. It feels like trying to
revisit a dream or walk around inside a film, walking around the corner
where the camera doesn't travel. I simply do not know what will happen
and how it will feel.

Alison and me set off tomorrow morning, followed by ghosts,
and I travel into myself, or so I hope.

Tuesday march 27th 2001

For years there was some graffiti on a small brick hut at
the edge of a field next to the railway line between York and
Darlington. Written in white paint daub were the words "Scargill is
God", plainly visible as you travelled past.

Now as I glanced out of the window, those words had been
replaced with "Tony Blair", followed beneath by "Scargill is gone".

Throughout the journey I felt a nausea. Possibly this was a
result of being unaccustomed to travelling other than by foot. I was
painfully aware of the headlong motion of the train in a way I never
previously had been. However, the nausea began before that, began as I
stood on the platform at New Cross, so it was not entirely motion
sickness or was motion sickness but in a more abstract sense. This was
a travel sickness, and actual physical response to the idea of travel
rather than the conditions.

On the train between New Cross and London Bridge I point
out to Alison the estate where my psychotherapy takes place. A minute I
point out that London landmarks look less and less real the more you
look at them. A health centre nestled among high rise estates seems
infinitely more real than an image I have seen on television and film a
thousand times. My landmarks, the shapes I have created for my London,
are the only things that seem real.

Walking along the side of the stationary trains at London
Bridge, weaving between people, Alison in my wake, my legs will hardly
move. I don't want to go back. Even a few miles from my home I feel
naked, exposed and awkward. The terrain is uncertain, unsteady. Inside
I rock and sway like a cornfield in the wind. In comparison to other
people who stride down escalators, swooping across the concourses,
occupying their space with confidence as they wait for the tube, I am
inadequate, ill-adapted. Fundamentally, the point where I differ from
these people around me is that these people KNOW that they have a right
to exist in the space they occupy. They are comfortable in their own
skins. This is where they have one up on me; I'm not even comfortable
in my own body, never mind in a situation. I've built myself a sort of
life where I can insulate myself from anything, a place to hide away
from my inadequacies. The further I get from my semi-safe space, the
more naked I become, the more exposed.

The train journey itself is unremarkable. Compared to the
city, the countryside has a special desolation, an emptiness. Mist
seems to follow us for the majority of the distance, lying in a layer
over fields, softening the lines of farmhouses. Random details appear
through the window; sewage plants delicately decorated with dark green
shrubs; a wood of pale, twisted trees which seem scorched and blackened
like the last forest after the bomb; an industrial works, grey against
the grey sky, which has thrown out yellow dust around it like sherbet,
coating the trees like snow.

Travelling out of London we travel into the stories which
have dominated the news. Fields seem empty, an occasional notice
flutters on a gate, so few animals. The journey we are making brings
unhealthy images of carriages unzipped, ripped open, spilling people
and briefcases and mobile phones out onto the gravel of the siding, of
that split second of knowledge that the future is entirely out of your
hands. Passing through York it is easy to pick out the piles of left
over sandbags along the tiny banks of the river.

Stepping off the train and walking over the shiny tiling of
the platform, I could not have felt more exposed. People seemed harder,
sharper. Immediate cold nipped at me. Everything had a clarity, a
hard-edged immediacy. Alison and me walk slowly. I shake slightly.
There has been little change to the station, floor still cold grey, the
sandstone outside seeming no older; people still milling or walking
purposefully.

I say that there is a clarity but this is deceiving.
Certainly everything seems sharp and focused, but in the same way that
films or photographs are, only as a representation of the real.
Although my perceptions and sensations of arrival are very clear I am
completely abstracted from them. I was experiencing myself
experiencing.

Walking out of the station, out from under the shadows of
the great sandstone canopy, I am struck by an interruption of my sense
of scale. Looking around as I wait to cross Westgate Road I feel as if
I am two, three times my normal height. The ancient blackened church,
which once looked imposing, seems quaint and dainty. The old Wenger's
building covered in scaffold seems small and insubstantial. Distances
that had once seemed real and correct now seem ridiculously truncated.
Standing at the crossroads, the top of Westgate Road looks a few steps
away, Grey's monument within arms reach.

As we get to the monument, facing the Monument Mall with
its fake Edwardian fa?ade and what was once Dillons, now Waterstones,
Alison says that she feels all wrong. Skewed, she proclaims, that's how
it feels. "Everything feels wrong."

I could hardly speak as we walked up Northumberland Street,
mouths slightly open, heads and eyes constantly moving, shops on either
side of us. There was only minor changes that I could see but it was
the shock of recognition that was blocking my thoughts and stuffing my
throat. It was here, it was all still here. I had lived here for
nineteen years then left, now I was back.

Walking through Eldon Square, which was once the counties
largest shopping complex, I realise that I know so few of Newcastle's
street names because I have never had to use them. I smell the
disinfectant from the fountain under the sunlight coming through the
glass of the roof. Is the smell chlorine? Old people sit on the benches
surrounding it, looking on disinterestedly at the shoppers tramping the
tiles. I think as to the absence of the need for street names. It's
because, from childhood, Newcastle has been structured by associations
and landmarks not maps.

Waiting at the bus stop people glance at Alison and me. The
grey sky and wind give their skins a mottled, greasy look. There is a
marked difference between the people carrying bags of food shopping and
those without, in that they look more pressured, less well appointed,
poorer. I've noticed how smartly presented and well dressed a lot of
the people in the city centre seemed, but I also noticed that these
seemed, on the whole, to be young people.

The bus is a packed single decker when it arrives and
Alison and I stand at the front, me resting my rucksack on the luggage
rack as the people move down the bus. I feel much older, much more
abstracted than I have at any other time in Newcastle. A little kid
with a cropped blond head looks at me suspiciously as the bus pulls
away.

From what I can see from the bus, bits of Newcastle that I
can remember have just winked out of existence at random, as if bombs
had fallen in the dead of night, levelling certain buildings to the
ground and leaving others standing. This has the disconcerting effect
of making you more aware of the building because it has gone.
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All of these disappearances have given an increased feeling
of flat space to the town but not in a good way. Newcastle to me looks
like a town after the goldrush, deserted and flat. The town centre is
becoming empty. It is like amputation to save an ailing patient, to
save their life at any cost.

When I get off the bus at the top of my Dad's street, I get
off in front of another absence. A large part of the General Hospital
is gone. What had been there was one of the oldest parts, all tall
windows and sandstone turned black by fumes. Now nothing. Standing on
the opposite side of the road in front of the sixties police station I
can see all the way over almost to where my mother died, eaten,
slipping out of consciousness then out of life all altogether.
Newcastle seems to be removing unwanted parts, but what will replace
them? Once you start levelling it can be hard to know when to stop.

What was the Edwardian nurses home at the top of the street
is now a hostel for people seeking asylum to remain in the UK. I wonder
what they make of this desolate, strange place with its red bricks and
grey pavements and grey faces, can this be better or worse than London
for them? Walking past I notice the net curtains up at the rows of tall
windows.

Down the street the rise of the other side of the Tyne
valley is slate grey at the horizon, an amazingly odd sight after the
enclosure of London. It feels as if Newcastle is clinging to the land
for survival, huddled against the emptiness of nature outside. In my
head I can see Newcastle covered in grey ash, like snow, coating
everything, deadening sound, piling up in drifts against walls and
cars. It feels as if Newcastle is constantly fighting for survival.

Coming to the house I slow down, frightened to make the
trip real by crossing over the threshold. Alison forges ahead, spending
ages fiddling with the lock on the new (to me) UPVC door. For some
reason I feel the need to inspect the dustbin, anxious to know what has
been thrown out, whether anything treasured of mine needs to be saved.
I am so desperate and unreal that I would search through bins for my
memories. I lift something out to show Alison and realise that she is
talking to someone. Hastily and with great embarrassment I stuff the
bin back shut and go into the front door. First I see a saxophone,
shiny and greasy, propped against the wall, second I smell paint and
turn to see Sue, my Dad's new girlfriend, framed in the light down the
hallway, stood on the threshold.

"It's all real," I thought. "I'm back."

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