CROYDON, FUCKING CROYDON

I pass through Croydon every day, albeit from the relative luxury of the 8.23 from Hassocks. Croydon, more than any other place on the Brighton to London line, makes me fucking angry.

My personal attachment was limited to having lived nearby (in Carshalton) for three months at the start of an extended sabbatical from North London. I knew a few people from the area, who lived in East Croydon or Sutton or one of the smaller round-about Harvester towns. All of them, bar one or two, were nice enough people. The withering fingers of Croydon had left them largley untouched. My feeling were therefore neutral. Croydon was no bastion of fun and games, but it remained resolutely on my uncaring list.

This all changed with a birthday night out to a restaurant known as Jim Thompsons – a sickening lurch towards off-the-shelf bohemia; a cosmopolitan tribute to the bulk-buy Irish trinketdom of the O’Neill’s bar and bastards chain. Whatever they were trying to do with that place (and heaven forbid we should ever read the wiccan text that is their the design proposal), the failure was spectacular. Either because the bloated BoHo committee simply couldn’t agree and launched a silo of compromise, or the bevvy of corporate dullards turned the conceptual veto over to a compelling retard.

My brain struggled with the notion of (a) the place being full and us having to wait for a table, (b) the startling lack of naviagble food on the menu and (c) the creeping realisation that I would have to pretend to enjoy myself. So instead I got drunk on vodka and Red Bull and put on a show of desperate bravado and extreme selfishness.

The evening, and hence Croydon, was made memorable by a greedy, gurning harpie at the end of the table insisting that she pay Two Pounds less than everyone else when it come to splitting the bill evenly. Part of me had to admire her gall – a woman of spectacular girth trying to claim that she had eaten less than the rest of the table. How we laughed, then how we seethed , then how we prayed that she would just get the fuck out of our sight.

Croydon was tarnished further that night when, indulging in some harmelss adult tomfoolery involving the attempt to de-trouser the birthday boy, we were lambasted by a bitter wreck of a woman who flung open her hamster-cage window to berate us for making merry. In the middle of the town centre. Betwixt the entertainment pantheons. Dodging the fleet of Ford Escorts. In this vortex of peace and quiet, where nothing stirs, nothing barks and nothing cries. Here we were making such an audacious deposit of noise, rousing the dead from their Saturday night with John Thaw.

And as the train now carries me through the town, I witness patch upon square-cut patch of back gardens and I see Hell. Hell is, indeed, round the corner, albeit just past the naked end of the southern Northern line. In each garden lies a trophy of a life lost to the town. A child’s overturned tricycle, a B&Q shed, a £100 barbeque set, a wash-house menagerie of pastel t-shirts and football shirts, the ubiquitous Delorian nightmare of endless static vehicles, Laura Ashley curtains and sunflower blinds, creozote fences tilting in their misery, binbags and binbags and binbags muttering around their whiter Sainsbury cousins, a never-ending parade of despair– the place where Hope comes to die in peace because no one even cares that it exists.

I used to say that the reason Brighton was so full of drunk Scotsmen was that they staggered out of Glasgow in such a shambolic comic stumbling fashion that the momentum they picked up simply carried them south until they met an impass. In the case of Brighton, they hit the sea - and could do nothing but sit on the beach and wait for salvation. In the case of Croydon, it’s full of people who couldn’t bear to be in London, but didn’t have the imagination to live anywhere else. The countryside was simply too remote, too rural and too far over the wrong side of the M25.

Croydon was a place therefore that could hold no imagination. It was a place of idiot resignation, a home for the ‘might-as-well’ naysayers who defend the undefendable. And it therefore represents one of the many curses of the modern age – the invisible wasting disease that gnaws away at the belly of the society – namely, ignorance. Croydon becomes a terrified bubble, a refuge for people who don’t know better.

And angry though I get, every single fucking day, I’m resigned to the fact that Croydon isn’t going to change. It’s a perfect calamity – a memorial to how ignorance can become so savage, loaded with evil and unlikely ever to cross over into the realm of peace and understanding. It’s a testament to our sour, sour times – a necessary reminder of the dangers of complacency.

Croydon, fucking Croydon. I can’t belive I named it twice.


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