‘F-F-FOOKIN LEFT TURN ahead!’
In 2008, a team of British linguistic researchers asked volunteers to estimate the intelligence of people recorded speaking in a range of regional accents. One emerged as the runaway loser, ajudged even less astute than the section of total silence included as a statistical control. Five years earlier, a sociological study found that the same accent ‘consistently fares as the most disfavoured variety of British English’. Or put another way in an online forum discussion: ‘Brummie is so droning and depressing, it makes people sound stupid and lazy, like moaning six-year-olds.’
So it was that via a downloaded package of celebrity voices, I had placed my satellite-guided navigation in the hands – or rather the filthy, stuttering mouth – of John Michael ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, Birmingham-reared lead vocalist of Black Sabbath and fuck-happy, semi-coherent paterfamilias in MTV’s long-running reality series The Osbournes. With the M25 still to be broached, Ozzy’s relentless nasal profanity was already causing my jaw to clench, and my brain to run through the less awful guiding voices that were just a few screen-clicks away: Sean Connery, Darth Vader, George and Zippy from Rainbow (in fairness, a few months later I gave that last pair a go and almost put my fist through the LCD at the first roundabout). But Ozzy had to be and would be endured. The unwritten ground rules of my trip allowed for no backsliding, no weakness. It was the same with the soundtrack: no fast-forwarding, no next-tracking, just a dour vigil through a Bermuda Triangle of bombastic guitar wails and plinking novelty gibberish, the very worst of British music as voted for by us, the public, or them, the critics, or you, the time-rich, poll-happy internet curmudgeon.
Once again, digital technology had made all my nightmares come true. A little memory-card-cum-transmitter wedged in the Maestro’s fag lighter had transformed the humble neighbouring radio into a jukebox packing 3.8 gigabytes of terrible sounds, and with no display screen I never knew what was coming next. Great artistes at their addled, deluded or indulgent worst; total idiots yammering their way through awful one-hit rubbish. The tuneless, the endless, the cloying, the Wurzels: 358 native musical offerings that wouldn’t have me tapping my fingers on the wheel so much as repeatedly dashing my forehead against it.
The compilation process was a grim ordeal with two fleeting moments of joy: the first when I found out that Crazy Frog was Swedish, and therefore ineligible, and the second when I gave up trying to trace a copy of Urban Renewal: the Songs of Phil Collins. (I was initially mystified as to how this collation of hip-hop-inspired covers should have disappeared off the face of the earth, but the explanation turned out to be quite simple: spontaneous combustion and a vengeful god.)
In the pick-and-mix iPod age, we are no longer exposed to the character-building effects of terrible music. We don’t have to tolerate duff album tracks or cheesy chart-toppers, and have therefore lost that shade which lets the light shine through, those dismal troughs that put the majestic peaks in their full and glorious perspective. Thus did I attempt to convince myself that this sonic suffering was for my own good, before giving up somewhere near Stansted Airport, when Mr Lennon and Ms Ono began to address each other thus:
‘Yoko?’
‘John?’
‘Yoko?’
‘John?’
So they went on for twenty-three minutes, unaccompanied by any other sound, except a loop recording of their heartbeats and the steady drip of my puréed cerebellum en route from nostrils to lap. In that time I travelled two and a half miles, and forgot many important online passwords. When the pub-piano intro to ‘Grandad’ struck up, I began to whoop with joy. Then I remembered that Clive Dunn was only five years older than I was when he recorded it, and stopped.
Into Essex, into darkness. The Saturday traffic was thinning now, and for the first time I was able to find out what Craig was really made of. Answer: corrugated iron and chewing gum. I’m not sure exactly when I started to think of the Maestro as Craig. At some point during my obsessive classification of all things rubbish, I’d done a little research into out-of-favour first names and found it near the top of a list of those that had fallen most dramatically from grace. From a peak in the late Seventies, its popularity with British parents had dropped away so steeply that even in the Craigish heartlands of Scotland, fewer than eighty male bairns were given the name in 2009. The original inspiration wasn’t my Craig, Craig’s previous owner Craig, but him out of The Royle Family. It somehow seemed a perfect name for the Maestro – unpretentious and well-meaning, but at the same time pudgy, unfashionable, clueless, shabby and just generally a bit crap.
Craig’s CV – fewer than 15,000 miles patiently accrued over twelve years – pointed to light suburban pottering with the odd leisurely weekend run, no doubt heading a long queue of apoplectic horn-jabbing Clarksons through the byways of the West Midlands. Sustained high speed was a novel experience, and one he reacted to with a touching blend of exuberance and fear. The little engine – a very modestly updated variant, let’s remember, of a 1952 design – seemed eager, in fact over-eager, to prove it was still up to the job.
‘Well, look at me go! We must be doing, what, fifty? Sixty, you say! Gosh – how … how exciting!’
After twenty minutes or so the engine began to race, sounding desperate and overwhelmed; I kept thinking I’d put Craig in third gear instead of fifth.
‘Listen, there’s absolutely no problem here, and I’m definitely coping with this, but I just wanted to check – you do realise those big numbers are miles per hour? That we’re doing sixty miles per hour?’ The under-bonnet skeleton was pleasuring himself with reckless gusto, and I pulled over before he could blow his bony load all over the hard shoulder.
To a man in search of the inadequate and disheartening, few British catering options exert a more magnetic pull than our native garage chiller cabinets. I strode towards this example expecting to be spoilt for pallid, strip-lit choice, but happily there was one stand-out winner. Grabits Original Chicken on a Stick – 75g of impaled poultry, reduced to clear at 90p. As demonstrated by the success of the microwaveable burger, Britain’s forecourt diners do not lightly reject a snack product. I unsheathed my neglected Grabit in ignorance of a recent product recall related to ‘raw chicken meat’, and took a nibble as the trees closed in. A dash of camphylobacter might at least have added a little zing: this was the most tasteless substance I have ever willingly put into my mouth, and that included the many strips of Guardian I chose to ingest during childhood. As drab and watery as the prostrate landscape hiding out there in the gloom, as Craig and I were Ozzied off the f-f-fookin motorway, up the f-f-fookin A11 and into the middle of f-f-fookin nowhere.
The road was dead straight, dead flat and – beyond a blurt of excitement at the oppressively floodlit, stop-who-goes-there entrance to USAF Mildenhall – dead dull. After bypassing the orange glow that was Norwich, we pretty much had the tarmac and its dim hinterland all to ourselves. There was a pitch-black, small-hours feel to proceedings, but a glance at the frail butter-scotch digits on Craig’s LED clock told me that the 3 p.m. kick-offs weren’t yet into added time.
The final stretch towards Britain’s eastern extremity emphasised that no one goes where I was going by mistake. In a protracted silence that I later traced to another long moment of Lennon/Ono pretentiousness, we made an unwavering dash across reclaimed land, atop a narrow raised road flanked by old drainage windmills and red warning triangles. The net effect was of driving down a long, narrow pier to the end of the world. Or Great Yarmouth, as it’s known to online connoisseurs of English seaside decay.
‘No! No, I won’t have that!’ cries the Major, in retort to a fellow guest who has just damned Fawlty Towers as the worst hotel in western Europe. ‘There’s a place in Eastbourne.’ I’d recalled these words when that Leysdown Guinness drinker had nominated the Norfolk resort as one whose depths out-plumbed his own. I recalled them again now, as Ozzy swore me away from the signs marked ‘seafront’ – and the evocative promise of clean and cosy beachside b. & b.s – and off down a gloomy, silent road that arced past shadows of corrugated warehouse sheds and the occasional cargo vessel.
These were the ghostly docksides where Yarmouth had once made its stinky mint as the world’s busiest herring port, home in the mid-Victorian, pre-seaside age to ten thousand fishermen working one thousand boats. My Scout troop used to belt out a dedicated shanty: ‘It was on a fair and a pleasant day, out of Yarmouth harbour I was faring, as a cabin boy on a sailing lugger, for to hunt the bonny shoals of herring.’ Ah, what bitter-sweet emotion those lines stirred within me: both a celebration of the red-cheeked spirit of adventure I’d hoped would define Scouting and a poignant requiem for a hope that died on the Flora Gardens housing estate, when a young Scout realised that hurling huge bin-liners full of collected jumble off a fourth-floor balcony thrilled him in a way that clapping out jokes in Morse code never would.
‘You have raiched your f-f-fookin dustinoition.’
I pulled over and looked up: ahead reared the stately clock-towered bulk of what looked like, and proved to be, Great Yarmouth town hall. To my left, gazing out at the long and empty quayside across a matching taxi rank, stood the half-timbered, monochrome-gabled frontage of the Star Hotel. It was a disarmingly grand face for an establishment that had attracted my attention as the most poorly reviewed hotel in town, indeed in all of East Anglia. TripAdvisor’s contributors laboured to trump previous criticisms: ‘The worst I have ever stayed in’; ‘I can safely say that I will never stay in this hotel again’; ‘Although most hotels in Great Yarmouth are in need of a lot of TLC, this one exceeds them all’; ‘Falling apart’; ‘I felt uneasy about sleeping in the beds, using bathroom, etc.’ The only consistent positives were praise for the staff’s Dunkirk spirit.
I bullied open Craig’s increasingly reluctant boot catch, pulled my bag out and made towards the Star’s entrance. Shortcomings now asserted themselves: the window frames were flaky and crevassed, as if they’d been knocked up from driftwood, and the columns supporting the first-floor veranda were set at a jaunty tilt. A certain sort of guest would already have been making unkind mental notes, but as I pushed through the mahogany revolving door and walked into a panelled, low-beamed lobby dominated by a big old fireplace, I felt a prickle of excitement, a sort of nostalgic anticipation. I had entered a building of character, marinaded in salty marine history, a place with tales to tell, where adventures had begun and ended. It wasn’t built for your kiss-me-quickers or your stag-weekenders, or the self-loathing, churlish carpet-tile sales representative who I’d already begun to think of as TripAdvisor’s archetypal hotel reviewer. The Star dated from the days when Yarmouth was indubitably Great, when the people who checked in here were shipping merchants and fishery administrators, when the civic ambience was more Onedin Line than Quadrophenia. I saw it all encapsulated in a sepia photograph on the wall opposite the little reception desk: a throng of smart and happy Edwardians promenading across the quayside on an early summer’s evening, with a line of horse-drawn carriages in front of the Swan and the town hall clock at ten to six. And a one-night slice of this heritage could be mine, as the quiet old chap at reception now gently informed me, for £33 including a full breakfast. Stick that up your Travelodge, carpet-boy.
There had been a suggestion of it in the receptionist’s strained smile, the smile of a good man making the best of a bad job. There was another when the lift revealed itself as one of those manually operated, double-shuttered, concertina-door-grate affairs, which meant my ascent was preceded by an entire Porridge title sequence of clanking and creaking, then accompanied by the terrible conviction that an errant trouser hem or coat sleeve would billow out through the open grating and snag in some protuberance in the lift shaft, ensuring I’d arrive at the second floor one limb down. But full realisation that the TripAdvisor misanthropes might in fact have had a point only took hold when I yank-clunk, clunk-yanked my way out of the lift. The corridor was a study in mothballed neglect, panelled with the flanks of a derelict caravan and carpeted in mismatched strips of rusty doormat. It was so cold I could see my breath, a phenomenon I hadn’t experienced indoors since a week spent re-enacting 1474 at a castle in the Alsace with a party of living-history fundamentalists. Two dungeon-weight fire-doors later, I heaved my way into a post-war annexe and a thick wave of old heat, heavy with the fetid legacy of waste-water mismanagement. The silence was deafening. I opened my door with something close to morbid curiosity.
Compact would be the first word that sprang to mind, with regard to everything but the beefy old telly that teetered on an occasional table at the foot of the bed: I could have changed channels with my big toe – and later did so. Everything else seemed to have been designed for the very little. The bed itself was a thinly padded church pew: in the morning I didn’t so much roll out of it as off it, winding up flat on the floor. Of such modest plumpness was the pillow that I initially took it for a folded towel; the folded towel I initially took for a flannel. I stooped to open the wardrobe, expecting to find Peter Rabbit’s waistcoat hung up inside. Instead there was a blanket the size of a dishcloth.
The bathroom ventilation fan paid thunderous aural homage to the last moments of a stricken Lancaster bomber, yet did nothing to disperse the stench that had annexed the corridor and was in here, too, seeping from every orifice in the sanitary ware. Though the hot water was hot, so too was the cold. I ran the blue tap at full blast and felt its output warm ominously from hour-old coffee to freshly drawn blood. Any connection with the smell didn’t bear thinking about, so for some time I thought about nothing else.
Still, the fixtures gleamed, and beside the kettle lay a brimming basket of beverage sachets. The presence of a Corby trouser press expressed the spirit of a nobler, more genteel executive era, and I established that the olfactory badness could be effectively contained by wedging the bedspread under the bathroom door. While doing so I noted and admired the refreshing honesty of the mirror-mounted notice regarding towel reuse, which simply asked guests to place towels they wanted laundered in the bath. No recourse to the gut-pumping hypocritical blackmail that’s become de rigueur in the hotel industry.
‘Have you ever stopped to think of the ecological damage caused by unnecessarily washing towels? Please help us to save the bunnies hopping about an Alpine brook in the drawing beneath these words by using your towel again and again and again.’ Heavens, that gets my goat, then punches it hard in the stomach. Why can’t they just be upfront and admit their only concern is saving themselves a few quid on Daz? For that matter, why don’t they go the extra mile and roll out the initiative across every area of guest-related budgetary management? ‘Have you ever stopped to think about the pigs that died to bring you this breakfast buffet? Just have toast, you bastard. Oi, Fatty – one slice.’ Anyway, I saluted the Star’s management for not setting off down this road, and a minute later pushed through the Victorian airlock of its revolving doors with a modest spring in my step.
Great Yarmouth, I came to learn, is effectively two towns. The old one, home to the Star, lay clustered around the docks. I stuck my gloved hands in my armpits and walked stiffly across to the empty quayside, that spring in my step swiftly rusted by the elements and a haunted silence. This part of Yarmouth has certainly endured more than its share of tragedy, most of it improbable. On 2 May 1845, the townspeople crowded on to their new suspension bridge to watch a clown in a barrel being pulled down the River Yare by harnessed geese; as this memorable convoy passed beneath, the audience rushed from one side of the bridge to the other, triggering a collapse in which seventy-nine people drowned. In the First World War, Old Yarmouth beat off more obvious targets as the first English town to suffer a Zeppelin raid, and in the Second, its unfortunate proximity to the Luftwaffe’s cross-Channel airfields established it as the most-bombed town in Britain per capita.
More drawn out but far more damaging was the death of the maritime trade that once kept these docks and the Star so busy. Over-fishing seems a strange concept. You can’t imagine an agricultural labourer lying in bed at night worried that he might have been over-farming, or tradesmen being ticked off for over-plumbing. Over-curating is not the scourge of the museum world. But then few of us contemplate the bigger picture when considering the consequences of what we do for a living: if we did, every hedge-fund manager in the land would come home from work and immediately plunge a fork deep into his own thigh. The mundane truth is that as a natural resource, fish stocks are rather tricky to monitor. You can see a forest disappearing tree by tree, or a lake drying up, or a herd of wild animals being hunted to extinction. But in Great Yarmouth’s pre-ultrasound golden age, by the time the sailing luggers noted a certain shortfall in shoal-bonniness, it was already too late. A tipping point had been passed, and from the 1920s the decimated herring population just shrank away into oblivion. No mean achievement when you consider that a single shoal of North Atlantic herring could contain four billion fish – enough to give everyone on earth a hearty kipper breakfast. Certainly everyone who actually wanted one. By the 1980s the Yarmouth fleet was down to twenty boats, and a fortnight after my visit, Great Yarmouth’s last remaining fishermen, a pair of brothers in their thirties whose family had been in the business for four generations, gave it up as a bad lot.
As tourism took over from fishing, so the civic centre of gravity tilted towards the seafront, which I now discovered to be rather a long way off, into the sharp teeth of a vicious wind. The bulk of this journey was down Regent Road, a long, broad thoroughfare rendered claustrophobically festive by a low-slung net of wind-whipped blue fairy lights. A pedestrian zone, at least nominally, because at 7.30 p.m. on a Saturday, there were no pedestrians.
In planning my itinerary, I had made a conscious decision to see bad things in the worst possible light: for a seaside resort, late November was surely as bad as it got. The days of sunburn and candyfloss already seemed woefully distant, yet in grim reality the off-season was barely into its stride. Trembling above the cold and silent street, the Christmas illuminations seemed a bitter parody of the garish neon winks and flashes that would have jollied the crowds along on a balmy, boisterous summer evening. Every chilled gust seemed to carry before it the whisper of a harsh and vindicated Leysdown laugh.
All retail premises were comprehensively shuttered up: some for the night, some for the off-season, some for ever. A mothballed gypsy clairvoyant. A discount store trading under the poorly conceived slogan: £1 and much much more! A tattoo parlour advertising daily specials to a customer base that had clearly come to consider permanent skin-stains as an impulse purchase: Thursday: spend £30 or over on a tattoo and get a free name in any script font! And a lone, dark, haunted-looking Victorian villa, set back from the shopfronts, shooing away the curious with a stark signposted legend: WAX MUSEUM – NOW CLOSED. I gazed at its dim frontage for some time, expecting Scooby Doo and Shaggy to pelt out through the front door, wailing.
Regent Road terminated before the radiant façade of the Britannia Pier. Huge billboards advertised the seasonal attractions at its end-of-pier theatre, one of the very few to survive. From these I learnt that the Chuckle Brothers would shortly be in town for their Christmas Chuckle, after which there was nothing on until 28 July, when the Chuckle Brothers would be in town. It’s difficult to despise the Chuckle Brothers, though over-exposure to their breezy inanity on CBBC did once cause me to refer to them in a rhyming appellation ill-suited to the family environment. On the other hand, it’s much, much easier to despise the performer who was booked to take to the Britannia Pier stage on 1 August. If I’m honest, Great Yarmouth’s close association with Jim Davidson was a dominant reason – all right, the only reason – why I’d happily accepted all negative pronouncements on the town. What hope was there for a place that not only welcomed Britain’s Horridest Man year after year, but charged people £20 to see him? That allowed this man to buy up a number of their most iconic seafront leisure facilities, including the town’s second pier? That commiserated when his local investments backfired and the pier was demolished? That smiled indulgently when he chose to blame the resort itself, in these endearing terms: ‘Great Yarmouth is full of overweight people in flip-flops, and fat children of all colours and no class’?
But it was too cold to sustain fury for long, and after shuddering along the pier’s boardwalk, and around its trim but very closed entertainment booths and deep-fried, sugar-crusted snack stalls, I trotted down a side staircase and jogged back to the promenade across the soft sand. The beach was vast: you couldn’t even hear the distant sea, let alone make out any silvery breakers. Marine Parade, the beachfront esplanade, was laid out on a sympathetically grand scale. On the seaward side, a broad pavement lined with hibernating food stalls (ROD’S SEAFOOD SHACK – SHRIMPLY THE BEST). On the other, across a generous sweep of under-trafficked tarmac, a parade of well-kept three-and four-storey Victorian residences – ex-boarding houses by the looks of them, now converted into apartments. Every other ground floor was home to a doggedly traditional restaurant, or more precisely a ‘steak house’, the kind that advertises ‘English and Continental dishes’.
Like Emmerdale or a pint of Baileys, Marine Parade went on for ever and steadily leached appeal as it did so. The stolid old buildings gave way to garish and flimsy-looking Vegas-lite contemporary amusement arcades, embellished with pseudo-classical façades and slogans like: The Atlantis – Open Every Day Throughout The Winter! Why had they bothered? The mirrored walls, intended to amplify the flashing and colourful excitement, served instead to emphasise the total absence of humanity within. Every so often an old couple would shuffle past, triggering open the automatic doors and letting out a waft of heat and bleeping jingles. It was as if the owners had based their business model on the works of Edward Hopper. Somebody was losing an awful lot of money here, and I was struck with a sudden tragic thought: it might not have been Jim Davidson.
The viability of redevelopment declined as the promenade continued. Grubby, long-dark windows advertised OAP menus or the availability of a commercial lease. Pubs had died, been renamed and reborn, and died again. I later read that half of the town’s public houses had closed over the previous five years, a decline one local councillor explained through a forthright demographic analysis that cast an unflattering light across Yarmouth’s social scene: ‘Pubs in Yarmouth are largely populated by older people who are prepared to stand out in the wind and rain to smoke. Younger drinkers prefer to get a case of cheap lager from supermarkets and stay at home.’
The civic pulse grew weaker, then flat-lined in a long parade of moribund retail premises (NEW INTERIORS – CLOSING-DOWN SALE). The wind was getting colder, compressing my features into a clenched grimace. It occurred to me that I’d eaten nothing since that reduced-to-clear handheld meat snack. I squinted into the dead distance, then turned back towards the gaily lit realm of English and Continental dishes.
It had always seemed likely that any day’s final meal was going to provide my stiffest challenge. The traditional reward for enduring grim travails on the road is a really nice dinner, a reward entirely incompatible with my mission statement. Before setting off I’d decided that if the absence of sufficient related reviews and opinions prevented me from selecting a restaurant of certified ill-repute in advance – as was the case in Great Yarmouth – I’d do a quick tour of the local options on arrival, and select the least appealing. But even as I made that vow, I feared fulfilling it would demand mental reserves of self-denial and self-discipline that, deep into pampered middle-age, I wasn’t sure I still possessed. I imagined myself striding into cosy little candle-lit bistros, and having to trudge out with a thwarted sigh. Gazing at mouth-watering, belt-loosening menus clustered with dishes I loved or knew I would, swallowing hard, and moving on. And keep moving until at last I came upon a catering establishment that no one in their right mind would voluntarily wish to enter, serving food that no one in their right mind would voluntarily wish to eat. Happily, for my mental reserves at least, Great Yarmouth seemed to offer nothing but.
I could probably have selected any of the seafront steak-houses, but plumped for the one that displayed the doughtiest disregard for developing fashions in catering ambience, and as a bonus served spam fritters.
As I took the first of the four tiled steps to the entrance, a plump old couple squeezed out through the door. ‘See you tomorrow, then,’ called the husband over his shoulder, in a flat tone disguised by the unlit fag already wedged in his lips, but which certainly originated far to the north-west of Norfolk. I walked inside and found myself alone in a dim red room with a matronly grey-haired waitress. It was looking as if the town’s entire off-season economy was shored up by an inevitably dwindling population of retired gentlefolk, come to smoke away their twilight years by the sea. How would Great Yarmouth cope when they were all sparking up outside that big pub in the sky?
From the swirly carpet to the Festival of Britain typefaces, the dining experience that lay in wait could have been styled by Martin Parr, deadpan photographic chronicler of decaying seaside kitsch. Not seedy or surly, in other words, just deeply traditional and curling up slightly at the edges. Well-meant but careworn: an old-fashioned place for old-fashioned people. The waitress handed me a menu heavy on gammon steak and fried liver, served with every possible permutation of chips, beans and peas. Heart FM jangled out from the kitchen. A little display case by the till housed a pair of Barbie-sized plastic dancers in Greek national costume, which along with the waitress’s rolling, guttural greeting suggested a family-run business dating back to an early wave of post-war economic migration. Only in the atlas index would you find Great Yarmouth anywhere near Greece. It was terribly sad to think that the search for a better life had led her from the glittery, sun-dappled Eastern Mediterranean to the muddy, windswept North Sea, and just at a time when Great Yarmouth’s steakhouse-based tourism boom was on the cusp of a drawn-out, forty-year decline. That instead of serving souvlaki to a throng of sun-drunk, big-tipping Scandinavians, she was here kicking the front-door draught excluder back into place and taking a lone order for spam fritters and a pint of Carlsberg.
The story of how Spam got its name offers an insight into a more innocent age of brand management. Desperate to revitalise his Minnesota-based firm’s ailing range of Flavor-Sealed canned pork products, the Hormel meat company’s MD announced to guests at his 1936 New Year’s Eve party that all their drinks would have to be ‘bought’ with suggestions for a fresh name. ‘Along about the third or fourth cocktail they began showing some imagination,’ he later told Life magazine. ‘Finally my butler came over with a slip of paper marked Spam.’ That’s my kind of focus group. Why couldn’t British Leyland’s management have similarly incentivised their production-line staff before the ballot that christened the Austin Maestro? Actually I know why: it’s because they didn’t fancy marketing the Austin Cockhouse.
Spam, like the Maestro, was a product of its time – a time, you would think, which had long since and deservedly passed. As a reminder of grim austerity, Spam should survive only as a special-interest foodstuff, purchased either by tittering culinary ironists or by old people who leave a forlorn and accusing tin on the kitchen table when relatives visit, in the hope of being taken out for a guilt-fuelled slap-up lunch. But somehow, I was astonished to discover, thirteen million tins are still sold in the UK every year.
My own previous experience of spam fritters dated back nearly thirty years, to a time when strict regulations ensured that educational establishments served dishes proven to be both repulsive and unhealthy – that’s to say not just nutritionally barren, but actively deleterious to well-being. Those battered roundels of mechanically recovered meat absorbed whatever it was they were fried in with rapacious efficiency: you pressed one with the flat side of your knife and a shiny, viscous puddle seeped out across the plate. To look at, and if it came to that to taste, a spam fritter seemed less like a human-grade victual than a discarded filter from some lard-powered canal dredger.
I’d figured on priming myself with at least two pre-fritter pints, but the food turned up before I’d raised the first to my lips. The waitress laid the plate down with a slightly helpless smile, as if to say: ‘You asked for ’em, you got ’em.’
The spam used to create my last fritter had emerged from a gigantic cylindrical tin, hewn from the flaccid pink bollard within by a fat-armed dinner lady. The fritters nestling in a bed of chips and peas before me had been cut from a different cloth – a much smaller, squarer one. A pair of crusted oblong pouches, like Brillo pads would look if you used a lot of magnolia emulsion in your cooking. Other than that it was pretty much business as usual: I prodded one with my knife and it wept grease. That spectacle was enough for the waitress, who retreated swiftly back to the kitchen.
It was just me, the maroon-walled gloom and the fritters. I gripped the cutlery with purpose, then systematically dispatched everything on the plate that wasn’t spam or a spam covering. I downed the pint. I wondered how long a man could live by spam fritters alone (answer Googled up later: six a day would fuel you nicely for three months, at which point scurvy would kick in, and do for you within the year). At length I bisected the first fritter, and was contemplating its oozing layers of badness when the waitress emerged. She went straight to the door and turned round the ‘closed’ sign, taking a sideways look at my plate en route and allowing herself a ‘told you so’ hike of the eyebrows. I seized the moment. ‘Sorry, have you got any mustard? English mustard?’ She nodded, and I knew then that everything was going to be all right.
If the Lord had wished us to shun terrible food, he wouldn’t have given us condiments. Especially not the fearsome, vengeful condiment-god that is mustard, proper acid-yellow, nose-twitching, palate-flailing English mustard, as manufactured by Colman’s of Quite Near Great Yarmouth. The agent orange in any war against bad flavour, laying waste to the most menacing gustatory jungles. A generous smear did for the fritters, shouting down their many provocative tangs and textures with a long, strident, fire-breathing roar. I might have seen evil, even heard evil bubbling greasily out when I punctured the fritter’s crust, but with a savage angel trying to pull my tongue out through my nostrils I wouldn’t have to taste it. In a moment there was nothing on my plate but a yellow skidmark. I looked at it and sensed I might be eating a lot of mustard in the weeks ahead.
‘Bee’s knees?’
The waitress placed the bill before me and smiled mildly; I creased my brow. ‘You come to Yarmoat for bee’s knees or holly die?’
The moment Craig’s former keeper had asked what I’d be using his treasured car for, I realised that any local curiosity regarding the nature of my trip would need sensitive handling. Honesty was probably not the best policy if I wished to avoid ushering in offence and its hand-maiden, the ugly scene. It had all gone swimmingly when I’d fielded the very same question from the Star’s receptionist, so I now delivered the very same dead-batted, non-committal answer that he had wordlessly accepted.
‘Oh, right: well, a bit of both, really.’
‘Yiz?’
‘Yes.’
If I’d been paying cash that would have been that, but instead I was committed to a protracted three-way ceremony involving me, the waitress and her little handheld card terminal.
‘What bee’s knees?’
Before setting off I’d toyed with various cover stories, struggling all the while against a lifelong weakness for over-elaboration: when my teenage peers ran away from a ticket inspector, I would stand my ground and offer an explanation in made-up Hungarian. No, simplicity was the thing. That and yawn-enforcing dullness, a rationale that would instantly neuter any dangerous inquisitivity, indeed kill all conversation stone dead. What was the least interesting reason why an out-of-towner might be passing through an offbeat, downbeat place? The most obvious answer had suggested itself throughout my research, and with a growing silence to fill I now duly wheeled it out.
‘I’m in sales. On the road.’
‘So is no holly die?’
I muffed my PIN and at once began to slip into the old vortex of blathering cobblers.
‘Well, this weekend is kind of like a reward, for, you know, regional achievement, in sales.’ ‘PLEASE RETURN TERMINAL TO VENDOR,’ said the screen. I did so and delivered the coup de grâce.
‘Carpet tiles.’
‘Oh, yiz! Like you mean Heuga, like you mean Tessera, I have many catalogue, we need replace old carapit here, maybe you advice?’
The waitress’s kindly features brightened with expectation. My innards shrivelled.
‘Right, well, yes, though I don’t deal so much with the actual tiles as … carpet-tile … adhesive.’
‘Ah, which best: is spray or liquid?’
‘Carpet-tile adhesive … removal products.’ The terminal spooled out my receipt. ‘Spillage and soiling issues. Nasty stuff.’
I retrieved the card with hot fingers, then fairly leapt to my feet, plunging arms into coat sleeves as I did so. The waitress proffered a little curl of paper and did her best to recap.
‘So you are carapit-tile adessive removal product selling-man.’
‘Of the year, East Anglia and Home Counties, 2009. Thank you!’
I was fairly blown back to the Star, past the Poundlands, the Cash Generators and charity shops, past all the boarded-up foyers and the signs reading WE HAVE MOVED! and ENTERTAINMENT PREMISES TO LET – INCENTIVES AVAILABLE. Past the Troll Cart, a pub which looked pretty much as it sounded, wide-necked bouncers stationed at every door but facing inward at the lairy, stumbling patrons, the scene almost visibly simmering with pent-up alcoholic violence. Why did Saturday-night Britain always have to be this way? I wondered, then promptly discovered it didn’t.
Buffeted off down a side street by a rogue Arctic gust, I found myself before a little café that leaked bright light and happy noise. Through the steamed-up window I could make out a sea of bobbing heads and raised glasses; I located an unfogged corner and peered through with hooded hands. The chalkboard menu on the back wall was composed in a language that I eventually decided was Portuguese, a conclusion compatible both with the cheery, dark-haired throng beneath it and with a news story I’d read a few weeks previously, which revealed that Great Yarmouth was home to a five-thousand-strong Portuguese community, most employed in food processing. Well-paid, stimulating and wholesome: just some of the adjectives you would not choose to describe such jobs. These were people who spent long days shot-blasting the flesh off pig skulls for £5.80 an hour, people who had surely earnt the right to punch away their cares in the Troll Cart of a Saturday night. Yet here they were, in a strip-lit, overcrowded café, showcasing the kind of convivial and carefree Latin merriment you don’t often see outside advertisements for cook-in pasta sauce. They had mastered a skill that had once been a very British preserve – making the best of a bad lot. When did we mislay that national trait? A few minutes later I walked past the Star’s reception area feeling rather ashamed. And a few minutes after that I was back down there, demanding ice cubes and extra pillows.