style="font-size:15px;"> If Terry didn’t show I had already had the thought that I might take my little green fabric friend with me. (He has the voice of a very squeaky Irish jockey and sings the hits of the day, particularly at Christmas. Well, no, actually, all he sings is ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’.) My singing leprechaun comments on the action now and then but can’t influence it. If I’m doing something wrong, or he wants to say ‘no’ he’ll sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ (possibly recorded by the wheelchair synth player of Fulham Palace Road) when I press his belly. If he’s feeling happy and positive, the singing leprechaun stays quiet. I think. I can never be sure. The singing leprechaun would be Jack Kerouac and I would have to be Neal Cassady, which meant a hell of a lot more work for me. I went out to pack the car. I must have been out for no more than ten minutes but when I got back there was a message on the answer machine from Terry.
The message on my answer machine from Terry:
‘Hello hello. Yeah, er, hi Tim, it’s Terry. Er, I’m afraid I’m going to have to be really boring and middle-aged and blow you out this weekend. Yeah, er, I’m just feeling really knackered at the moment. Sorry mate. Speak to you when you get back. Erm, give us a bell sometime if you get a chance cheers bye.’
Terry had phoned from some pub in the centre of town. Which meant I couldn’t ring him back to try and get him to change his mind. The singing leprechaun looked up at me with searching eyes. I pressed his little tummy and he sang me a beautiful version of that old Irish song. I collected the rest of my stuff, turned off the heating and went out to the car.
One o’clock in the morning and it was just me, the car and the cold inky-orange streets of West London – incredibly, I’d managed to get to the top of Fulham Palace Road without running over a tramp or one of those pale but high-spirited late-night youngsters who sometimes hang around outside twenty-four-hour shops shouting at each other in cod-Jamaican accents and looking as though they’ve recently overdosed on casual sportswear.
Feeling just a little hypnotised by the enthusiastic purr of the Corsa’s 1.4L engine, I shifted up and down gears with all the grace of a bull elephant doing needlestitch, then coasted up through an almost deserted and ghostly Shepherd’s Bush to the roundabout, then up the A40. Hammersmith is a gateway in and out of London: big roads take you west, the tube and the A4 take you into town. It’s good for country boys like me who don’t know where the hell they want to be – in the city or out in the sticks. I paused for a moment to change down into second, then a manoeuvre so simple even a little kid in a pedal car could do it – get onto that motorway and head for Wales. But not me – God knows what I was playing at but I soon realised I was heading back into town towards the West End and the City. Wrong direction again. The Singing Leprechaun in the passenger seat said nothing as I came off at the next slip road at Royal Oak station, did a U-turn near some claustrophobic-looking Georgian townhouses then back out onto the road underneath the A40. Is it left or right? Left or fucking right? ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, sang the Singing Leprechaun, which I took to mean a left. I had another three hundred miles to go along the A40, M6 and loads of other Ms and As. I knew I was bound to get lost now and again and didn’t really care, but if I fucked up like this every three or four miles I wouldn’t make it to the ferry for at least another couple of days.
I’ve never liked driving much. Not in cities anyway. I’ve never really trusted myself with all that metal and glass. When I was seventeen my parents give me a choice of driving lessons or a record player for my birthday. To have a car was a passport to success in Lincolnshire, particularly with women. The more sought-after girls lived out in the back of beyond, the daughters of farmers or village schoolmasters. By choosing not to drive I was also choosing the town girls (or, in reality, choosing no sex), choosing fresh air, choosing two feet, choosing music.2 While some of my friends got into wing mirrors, exhausts, turbo brum-brum camshaft wheelie gauges etc., I was into free jazz, new-wave pop, electro and Northern industrial music. In a way it was still an attempt at pulling – a girl would come round and I’d leave my Teardrop Explodes French import EP, Ornette Coleman Atlantic albums, or Cabaret Voltaire and Afrika Bambaata twelve-inch singles somewhere obvious for her to see (like on the front doorstep, or perched on the toilet bowl). A not very successful technique, naturally. Perhaps I should have hung them from the ceiling.
If there was a party somewhere out in the sticks you had to befriend a gang which had a designated driver. Gangs were like little tribes and were made up of different character types who had specific roles to play. You’d have the son of a respected teacher or lawyer who might know some of the local cops and sweet-talk them. You’d have a hard nut in case your gang was challenged by another gang (particularly from another town) – he was a sort of champion. You’d have a good-looking babe magnet who would lure the females or act as a frontman when the gang went hunting as a pack. You’d have a leader, the charismatic brains, a talker and ideas man who would say let’s go here, let’s go there. You’d have a hippy drop-out alternative culture kind of guy who would be the comedy character. And finally, and most importantly, you’d have a driver. The driver was a monklike figure who had eschewed the pleasures of alcohol in return for approval amongst a group who otherwise might not have given him the time of day. It was a social transaction. The driver got camaraderie and social acceptance. The gang got someone to ferry them from village pub to town pub to party to nightclub. There was a small group I knew who would occasionally let me hang around on the periphery and smile inanely at their antics, who had a driver known simply as ‘Driver’. We’d all be completely plastered and he’d just drive, with a big happy grin on his face. I never understood it. Never got inside his head. Perhaps I never really worked out the rural vibe. It exists in Ireland too, that need and importance to have a car (like horses would have been to my great grandmother’s people). If you’re out in the country and you don’t have a car you’re fucked. Or, in the case of trying to get off with the daughters of village schoolteachers, not fucked.
I adjusted the mirror, got into cruise mode, got comfortable. A straight run, give or take a few confusing motorway exits in the West Midlands. Undeterred by my dysfunctional directional sense, I put some lachrymose alternative country sounds onto the stereo and turned up the volume as much as I could without the dashboard vibrating out of its position and the car falling to pieces. First up, ‘Windfall’, by Son Volt, ‘Houses on the Hill’ by Whiskeytown, ‘Snow Don’t Fall’ by Townes Van Zandt, ‘Oh Sister’ by Dylan. I got a tingly feeling at the romanticism of it all, until I remembered I was still inside the M25. As the car rumbled out of west London towards Hanger Lane, then through the tunnel as though escaping from some concrete nightmare and out onto the motorway and freedom, the harmonies got richer (‘Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel, let the wind take your troubles away’).
Driving through England on motorways is not an exciting thing to do. Driving through England on motorways at night is incredibly boring. Like Phil Collins singing about watching paint dry on a continuous tape loop on the radio. I sometimes wonder what proportion of the countryside you can see from a motorway is actually attractive. Motorways were specially designed so the country would look shit and people would think the motorway is more attractive so they should build more of them. I accept that the country hasn’t been completely covered in motorway and concrete. After all, when you’re lost in the countryside you can drive around for days looking for a way out – you won’t even find a pub or shop or person who speaks with a recognisable accent, never mind a motorway. But when you are on the motorways it does seem as though that’s all there is. Especially around Birmingham. Everything is motorways and junctions, lights of the road, lights of cars, more junctions, road signs, concrete, cars, tarmac, more cars and more lights,
