Once Upon A Time On A Lane

A few of you - but probably not loads - will have read this before but, while I put a few finishing touches to a new piece ready for Sunday, I wanted to post it again, in slightly spruced up form, for those who haven’t. It’s one of my favourite things I’ve written on Substack, and ties in as background to a couple of pieces I’m planning to post in the near future. PLEASE NOTE: It works a lot better if you read it to the very end. (Of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I, but, trust me, it really does.)

POTENTIALLY USEFUL ASIDE: You can listen to me reading it here if you are busy operating heavy machinery or just can’t be arsed to read it yourself…

Once upon a time on a lane I walked, with Julie, away from the wreckage of the music festival we’d been attending, leaving behind sloping fields full of empty bottles and crisp packets and sanitary towels and old lunchboxes and lipstick tubes and soggy half-finished toilet rolls and lonely undesired cocktail onions and laceless footwear and abandoned tents and soiled underpants and scratched jewel cases that had once housed Apache Indian and Sheep On Drugs CDs, and the laces from the laceless footwear, which was all depressing to see, but not in the way it would be now, because this was 1994, and somebody would soon be along to clear up the mess then post it through the Magic 20th Century Litter Door, where it would vanish forever, without being compacted in a landfill or doing anything terrible to the planet or needing to be composted or burned or recycled. A queue of cars was at a standstill on the lane and we followed the queue, on and on and on for what we believed - in our raw-nerved state, estranged from sleep - was about 12 miles but was probably like two at the absolute most, passing hot parents in cars, parents that is who were hot in a 1990s way - not sexy or buff or MILFy or DILFy or hench, just sweaty and uncomfortable - and looking for the one containing my dad, which would transport us 182 miles home to Nottinghamshire. What might we have done, that day, to amuse ourselves, as we searched for my dad’s car? At my urging, to the critical acclaim of onlookers, Julie might well have done her strident and uncanny impression of a crow, which was always guaranteed to raise my spirits. We probably would have talked about the dance moves of Jarvis Cocker from Pulp or the fire I built on Saturday night or Nick Cave’s baleful performance of ‘Red Right Hand’ on the main stage. But mostly we’d have just walked on, in a silent and zombielike fashion, not attempting to hatch any plan other than “Try to find my dad and his car, somewhere in Somerset” because everyone’s telephone was permanently attached to a wall in their house and there was no possible other plan, but also thinking “Where the fuck are you, Mick? Where are you and your spectacles and your obscure Senegalese cassettes and your baggy corduroy trousers and that Vauxhall Astra you bought secondhand in Lenton in 1986 in preference to the Ford Sierra you test drove on the same day which smelled suffocatingly of German Shepherd and cigarettes?” and “How can there even be this many cars in the world?” and “How can a lane be this long and still not lead to anything of use to a young exhausted human who has arrived at the regrettable epiphany that the offputting smell they can smell, the one competing with that of the slurry in the surrounding fields, is himself/herself?”

Once upon a time on a lane at night I walked home with a cat inside my coat. I had been expecting to walk home alone, without a cat inside my coat, but after I’d said goodbye to my friends at the pub and walked along the riverside footpath my cat had appeared out of the bushes to greet me with an overexcited meow, which was a surprise because we were over a mile from home at the time and my cat was - and, for that matter, still is - not particularly intrepid or geographically broad-minded. The overexcited meow had an overdub of panic to it and, when we reached the lane, where there would probably be cars, even at this time of night, I put my cat inside my coat, but then after about another quarter of a mile, I heard a group of drunk teenagers approaching along the lane and, knowing that my cat was easily spooked, I ducked quietly into some bushes, out of sight, until they had passed, the whole time feeling exaggeratedly conscious that I was a man, at night, in some bushes, just off a lane, with a cat in his coat.

Once upon a time on a lane - which was barely a lane at all any more - my mum and I walked parallel to the seashore, gazing in astonishment at the huge serrated chunks of the lane that had been uprooted by a storm a couple of months earlier and scattered across the beach. The Storm was called Emma, which, when I considered all but two of the Emmas I’d met, seemed an innocuous name for a spell of weather that had been responsible for such violent structural damage, but I suppose it is possible that the people who name storms were now reaching a point of barrel-scraping, having had to name so many, always being required to lean heavily on the first part of the alphabet, plus not being legally permitted to use names beginning with Q, U, X, Y or Z. According to the Met Office, storms get named because it means the public are “better placed to keep themselves, their property and businesses safe”. On the lane, with assorted nuggets of tarmac scattered around me, I questioned this philosophy. If I heard that a dragon was approaching over the hill with the intention of attacking the village where I ran a delicatessen, would I be more likely to guard against the dragon’s assault on the delicatessen if people were calling the dragon Bernadette or just calling it “a dragon”? I suspected the latter. A month later, when I was swimming in the sea, about two miles east of the lane, I found a weird-looking bit of rock and took it home but didn’t name it and after a little while I realised the reason it was weird-looking was because it had once been part of the lane.

Once upon a time on a lane near the house I’d just started renting I saw a sign telling me that the name of the lane was ‘Teapot Lane (Worms Lane)’ and, not being a person anaesthetised to the palimpsest of small histories that can be found everywhere we go, inevitably became intrigued. I discovered, via an amateur historian in my village called Allen Cotton, that the lane’s name had been officially changed from Worms Lane to Teapot Lane a few years ago because locals had been calling it that for decades in reference to two spinsters who’d lived together in one of the poorhouses there in the early 1900s and had a reputation for collecting used tea leaves from their neighbours and “always had a warm teapot on the hob”. Glaring questions remained surrounding the worms, however. What had they been like? Were their descendants still here, doing their bit for the local ecosystem? Why had the public turned against them?

Once upon a time on a lane there was an old black dog with a beard. All day, the old black bearded dog sat on the corner of the lane with his chin pressed to the tarmac, watching cars and trucks and bikes go by. When we drove past we’d always wind down a window and say hello to the black dog. I asked the black dog’s owner if she ever worried that the cars might hit the black dog and she said she didn’t, and that the black dog had been personally responsible for traffic calming in the area for many years. But I was concerned: What if a reckless driver, maybe a teenage boy, unaccustomed to the area, with a self-image of invincibility, on his way to a party at a big house up at the top of the hill, owned by the parents of a vague acquaintance from university, who were away at their other, only slightly smaller house in the Dordogne and knew nothing of the adolescent carnage poised to occur, came hurtling around the bend, not suspecting that an old black dog would be there? Then one night my friend Ben was driving me and some other friends home from a walk between around rock piles and reservoirs and he drove carefully around the bend and, out of the night, the dog appeared, running directly at the car like a hellish apparition, teeth flashing, a moorland legend electrified into life by the moonlight, causing Ben to swerve and only just miss the dog and the brittle wall of a part-renovated barn. “Holy shit, what was that?” asked Ben. “That was Zip,” I told him. “He’s 17 and belongs to Sue who runs the dairy farm.”

Once upon a time on a lane a man was watering the Agapanthus in his garden and, because his garden was raised by a tall bank of earth from the lane, he watered me too. It was a hot day, so I didn’t mind. Further along the lane, with my hair quarter-dried by the early afternoon sun, I walked into a shop selling secondhand items with no discernible theme and, in a neglected rear corner, beneath a rug I didn’t like, found rug I did like, with a £40 price tag on it, and took the rug to the counter. I noticed a parrot, apparently not for sale, in a large cage beside the counter. “Could you be persuaded to take thirty for this rug?” I asked the lady who owned the shop. “What do you think, Peanut?” she said, turning to the parrot. “Is thirty ok?” Peanut took a pensive moment or two to consider the matter then gave the transaction the go-ahead.

Once upon a time on a lane I was driving home through ice and flurries of half-arsed snow in a fabulous 1970s Toyota, with moss growing up its sides, which had formerly belonged to my granddad Ted, and I saw a naked couple sprawled across a car bonnet enthusiastically nailing one another, although not the bonnet of the Toyota, as that would have been significantly more awkward for everyone. About a week earlier, to save petrol so I had more money to buy lo-fi albums and singles made by disgruntled Americans, I’d switched the engine of the Toyota off to freewheel down the lane to my mum and dad’s house but then because I turned the wheel on the bend the steering lock had been activated and me and the Toyota had ended up in the hedge almost exactly adjacent to where the shagging couple were right now, and I thought, as I passed the couple, about what a good thing it was I’d learned that lesson a week ago as opposed to this evening. Instead I drove the Toyota the remaining half mile home in gear, seeing the remnants of the car that vandals had set fire to near our front garden and the amphitheatre of dense woodland where, until recently, armed men had been hiding from the police, and our shotgun-owning loner farmhand neighbour looking out his bedroom window with his night-vision goggles. But none of this was particularly unusual. It was just another 1990s January in north west Nottinghamshire.

Once upon a time on a lane I was walking home in the dark from a town - a famous West Country town definitely not unassociated with drug culture - after misjudging the potential duration of a long, long walk, when I saw that the hedgerows on either side of me were full of tiny specks of light, which made me strain my mind to remember whether I’d left my pint of ale unattended in the pub earlier in the day, until I realised that what I was seeing, for the first time in my life, were glow worms, and then, a few hundred yards on, spotted a familiar road sign, the one which told me I was on ‘Teapot Lane (Worms Lane)’. I walked on, so changed by the experience that, even many steps after the tiny lights on either side of me had petered out, I still felt lit up by something, all the way, in fact, to the house I was renting, past the junction of lanes half a field’s length to the north where the salty smell of slurry always threw its weight around and which, as soon as I’d seen the junction for the first time, a month ago, had seemed oddly familiar, leading me to believe it was an image from one of my dreams, until the penny dropped and I realised it was the precise spot where almost a quarter of a century earlier, just when we felt like giving up, Julie and I had located my dad and his car.

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