Toilet Reading To Put Your Mind At Rest

I'm still nostalgic about Yorkshire. I had a dream that I was back in Harrogate a couple of nights ago, as if I’d never left. Everything was the same as it was back in 1999 (nine years ago! Nine!) and it was perfect.

This dream wasn’t really anything too interesting – I was drinking in Crabtrees with Col, Dave, Trelly and some others, listening to She’s a Star on the jukebox when we decided to go Monteys but then I ended up on my own and had to try and find my way back to Crabby’s, which wasn’t there anymore, and there was probably a bit where I got naked. You know the kind of thing - and then yesterday I was sat atop the shitter, thumbing through the vast variety of reading matter kept there when I came across the Good Pub Guide 2008. I headed for the Yorkshire section, to try and see if there was anything in there I recognised, when I stopped myself. Why was I going for Yorkshire? Why didn’t I head for the chapter on Berkshire? For the whole of my adult life (and for ‘adult life’ read ‘legal drinking life’) I’ve lived in the Royal County, with the exception of three years at university in West London, yet I still consider myself a Yorkshireman. That’s even overlooking the fact that I was born in Cardiff.

So why? Why do I keep this connection with Yorkshire and Harrogate and everything in it? I’ve only ever been back a handful of times since I left, and whenever I did there were less people there I knew and everything had changed more and more each time. The Royal Baths has been turned from what I always thought of as an impenetrable fortress of history and splendour into an (admittedly visually impressive) Wetherspoons. Where there was once the Royal Hall car park/ big white tent thing, there is now a architecturally misguided oversized garage-like structure. Where once you could have innocently strolled through the Valley Gardens of an evening, or enjoyed a game of Headers and Volleys with your mates, you’re now more likely to have to run from hooded gangs and heroin addicts, both of whom after your wallet (or so I’m told). The truth is, the Harrogate in my dream doesn’t exist anymore. The long shadow of the cenotaph following you down Montpellier on a late sunny afternoon; the endless summers; the chips and scraps from Simpsons on the way home from school; riding my bike up to the Valley Gardens to spend the evening talking and laughing. All of that is gone.

But that’s the point. All of that is my childhood and my adolescence. And everyone craves that.

The fact that my adolescence happened to take place in a completely different town to where I now find myself means that I now attribute all the longing that everyone feels for their youth to that place. It’s not that I don’t miss Harrogate and everyone up there, of course I do, but I know that the strength of my feeling for it is distorted by the memories of my youth, and my desire to be 16 again. If I had grown up in Sandhurst, I know I’d have a much stronger connection to that place than I do now.

Probably as a consequence of my recent acknowledgement of this, I now feel a bond forming between myself and Reading, where I now live. I’m starting to feel a sense of place, and of civic pride. I’m becoming attached again, and thank god, it doesn’t feel like I’m cheating on anyone.

Of course, all nostalgia has the majority of the shit helpfully filtered out - like when you squint at Madonna - but does that really matter? I mean memories are all that are left of the past, and if they have been squeezed dry of all their negative juices then surely they’re all the better for it?

By the way, the only Harrogate pub in the Good Pub Guide was The Boar’s Head in Ripley. Stayed there once in the honeymoon suite. Textbook.