Huddersfield to Brixton
August 14th 1995
On the Monday, a week after i'd arrived in Huddersfield, i left. I'd checked out the possibility of catching a train to London, but at forty-odd pounds for the one way trip, i just couldn't afford it. The bus was eleven - a quarter of the train fare! It was amazing what had happened to public transport in Britain over the previous couple of decades, and especially the train system. Forty pounds for a journey of a couple of hundred miles, at the most, was ridiculous.
Long distance buses were still quite cheap - certainly compared to the rest of the public transport system - but local buses were really expensive. For example, it cost me about two pounds fifty to get from Maldon to Chelmsford, which is a distance of ten miles. Huddersfield to London was twenty times as far and cost four times as much. In London, the buses were expensive and the underground was extortionate. The shortest journey on the London underground cost one pound thirty - which was over thirty times as much as the longest journey on the Mexico city metro! It was no wonder that the traffic in London was at a virtual standstill almost all day every day.
It was a disgusting waste of petrol - which had no doubt got something to do with the fact that the petrol companies ran the government. And of course the phenomenal levels of pollution that result from having millions of cars sitting in traffic jams with their engines running constantly were one of the most disgusting things about that filthy and polluted city. You hear all sorts of things about the pollution in Mexico City, but when i was there it wasn't anywhere near as bad as an average day in London.
Anyway, polluted or not, i arrived there from Huddersfield quite pleased to be back. I stayed in Brixton for a week and visited one or two friends in north London too. The beautiful weather looked set to carry on for a while and temperatures were well into the thirties which made the place quite bearable.
In fact, the good weather transformed Britain into a different country. The normal constant and universal greyness was nowhere to be seen. Not in the skies. Not in the streets. Not in the faces of the people. And not in the unusually relaxed and happy atmosphere that seemed to have come over that normally miserable little island. I could almost have considered living there if the weather was like that all the time. But of course it wasn't and it wasn't likely to be either. Global warming or no global warming, i thought, i'd never be able to stand the british climate all year round again.
I went to a gig at the 121 anarchist bookshop in Brixton that Friday. It was some ancient punk band called Oi Polloi and an all-women band called PMT. The gig was in the basement of the bookshop and was pretty crowded. A lot of the people there were punks from the mainland, on their way back out of the country after the punk festival in Edinburgh and there was a really good atmosphere. It was good seeing Oi Polloi, but i preferred PMT.