The Domestic Terrorist - Sent To Coventry

Sent To Coventry

This is the worst Friday night I have had in years. Possibly ever.

7-43pm in Walsall, England. A crowd of twenty or so people wait for a train on a freezing, windswept platform. It is one minute late. The platform is populated with all the debris of society: girls in skirts shorter than the average lifespan of a boy band, men with flimsy shirts thinner than the cheese at McDonalds, businessmen waiting to go home, and others living in a perpetual state of kicking known as the mid-twenties.

There is no monitor to show when the train is due. No announcements, Just wind sweeping through the tunnels. As the time creeps forward - 7-55pm, 8-00pm, and sick of being raped by the wind chill factor, I venture into the tiny, sterile heart of the station. ETA : 2016.

My train is thirty minutes late and nobody bothered to have the courtesy to inform the customers. Only in Britain, where the customer is cattle, could a uncompetitive, overpriced, underqualified bunch of amateurs and professional misers run Public Transport.

I walk to the bus stop. The next bus, in five minutes, will arrive in Birmingham at 20-45. Exactly the same time as the train, but then again, I am meeting my brother at the train station. I wait for the train. A small queue of angry cattle has grown demanding refunds. Twenty or thirty people debate sharing taxis and going to Birmingham at �3 each. Many, fed up with being at best ignored and worst humilated, choose to do so.

I venture a question. If I get a taxi, would the Train Company (British Rail, Centro, Railtrack, Virgin Trains, Acme Trains Ltd.) refund my expenditure with a reciept? It only seems reasonable, especially if the Passengers Charter - which is nothing more than a paper origami tiger - says so. Lee Morton, the nervous, minimum wage-slave behind reinforced glass, needs to check with his Controller. Or his Supervisor. I can�t remember which. But apparently they are not the same man. But since these men live far away from the undifferentiated mass of meat that is the public, working in offices with water coolers late at night to ensure the trains run on time and meet their targets, whatever they say or do to their customers doesn�t matter. In a monopoly the customer has no choice.

Steve Crump, for that is his name, decides from behind his desk that the masses who he cannot see and from whom he is hidden away from, should wait. Even though through their own amateurish incompetence twenty people are now 64 minutes late going home, these people are to wait. Taxi�s will not be paid for, even though contracts have been broken, promises shattered, patience and tempers frayed by simple, pathetic incompetency.

Behind the glass, Lee�s hands are shaking as he writes out names and numbers. I ask him a few questions - Were the monitors working? When did the delays occur? Did you think of using the PA to inform people? He holds up his hands and say he hasn�t done his job properly, but of all the people who needs to do their job properly, Lee is the least important. For one, whomever is responsible for stealing 73 minutes from the lives of the passengers. In that time, I could watch Toy Story 2, listen to a full Compact Disc, read Animal Farm, or watch 2 � episodes of Coronation Street.

By 20-20 the following train - originally just 19 minutes late - has been cancelled as it is due to arrive. The 19-47 train, some 33 minutes overdue, is still 40 minutes from arriving. And someone�s wife is alone in an unlocked car in New Street station, her mobile phone switched off, waiting for her husband to arrive from work when he hasn�t even left Walsall.

This is Blair�s Britain. Second rate, second hand, done on the cheap by a friend, fallen off the back of a lorry. Major - a minor achiever in every sense of the word - at least gave us the vision, the hope of a classless society, a society without class, all of us the same. Of course, he levelled down. His vision of equality turned out to be a nation of poverty-stricken trailer trash, unable to feed their children on the welfare as all the businesses had downsized, and shops nationwide wondered why their stock wasn�t selling. Where nothing worked anymore and nobody had any work.

The trains don�t work. That, Mr. Gordon Brown, is why nobody uses the trains. They don�t run on time if they run at all. They are smelly, dirty, overcrowded, overpriced. And single women don�t like the thought of waiting on underlit, deserted concrete platforms waiting for overdue trains in daylight, let alone in the evenings of a chilly winter.

In the end, with one train seventy three minutes late and another one silently, unapologetically cancelled, I catch the third train that should have come through here. The 20-51 is running on time. Even though just some 400 yards short of its destination it coughs and splutters like an asthmatic on an exercise bike and collapses for minutes, summoning the strength to bring it�s herd of cattle home.

Thank you, Mr. Crump, for wasting 73 minutes of my time. Time I guarantee when I lie on my deathbed, I would crave to live all over again. Perhaps, thinking of it, I should send an invoice based on my professional rates. I would be about �43 richer. I could even issue a penalty fare to them for failing to show the correct train for the journey, I suppose.

But what makes this evening so much more depressing than anything else? For tonight, not even nothing happened. Even on the most mundane of nights, when I curl into the arms of my partner in bed, I feel like a superhero coming home. But tonight, not even that. For tonight I spent five hours at the mercy of the great British way of life, the one that racist curry-eating morons treasure, to find absolutely nothing.

When I get to New Street, any attempts to locate Mr. Crump are fruitless. He certainly exists, but nowhere does anybody know of him, have met him, or is able to reveal where he works. For someone who has so much influence over customers, to not be customer-facing, and not have to justify his far-reaching actions, seems irresponsible. Perhaps I should get some tips from Railtrack/Acme Trains/Centro/Metro/Whoever faxed or e-mailed to MI5. Who can�t even keep their location secret from James Bond, a spy who doesn�t even exist.

And so, eventually, I meet my brother as he is waiting to get a train home and give up on Friday night, as after all, I am only, by now, some 80 minutes late.

And so, eventually, we board the train to Coventry where, for most of the journey, some blonde in leather jacket with eyes that say only two things cold and turkey jitters like some nervous kid playing Operation with Parkinsons disease.

The mission this evening was to see Therapy? in Coventry, at the Colloseum venue. But the mission changed as the night went on, ending in little more than a desire to go home sometime before dawn.

Therapy? are a band who created their own genre of music, only to see it co-opted and borrowed by lesser talents with greater fame. Too indie to be metal, too metal to be indie, they instead plowed, independently a third way between the two. One now adopted by the biggest names in music. With their automaton drumming and crunching, clipped guitars, Therapy? adopted the pose of the eternal adolescent, the permanently angry young men. This is not the Therapy? I hear tonight. In fact, all I hear of them is 20 seconds of �Tightrope Walker� through a locked door.

As I approach the Colloseum, in the sunny Hillfields area of Coventry, I remember the last time I was here. Then it was called the Tic Toc, and as I stood in the car park then, I can remember being offered by, at least three people, �anything I wanted�. But oddly they didn�t have World Peace, and End to Poverty, or a non-receding hairline on offer.

I almost didn�t recognise this place. It�s only by the trail of broken glass, tower blocks, and syringes that I manage to get my bearings. Where the council have invested millions landscaping a fenced park, there used to be a wasteland of junkie paraphenalia. Now the wasteland of junkie paraphenalia is safely behind sharpened steel fences and landscaped greenery.

And so I wander up to the entrance. Imposingly the doors are locked until two massive eyes appear in a vacant window. The door opens. There, standing in a grey suit reminiscent of 80�s synth pop, and with a chin or two concealed between a greying, passe goatee, a bouncer, or doorman asks if he can help us. Through a locked door I can hear Therapy?, playing �Tightrope Walker�. It has taken me three hours to get this far.

We�re on the Guest List.

I�m sorry gents you can�t come in.

Why?

The guest list was wiped off twenty minutes ago.

(Wiped off what exactly, a blackboard?)

In the background Andy Cairns is screaming �I GET THE FEELING I�VE BEEN CHEATED�. Haven�t you got a copy? Can I speak to � (name of road crew friend)?

No. It�s after 10. You can�t come in.

He shuts the door. What a gentleman. Three hours to get here, and only one word to turn us away. A crowd gather, local students. Friends of the promoter, unable to enter. We are given an option. We can pay ten pounds to get in, but Therapy? have already been on for an hour and finish in forty minutes. Hmm. 25p a minute. Half an 0898 number that terminates in Guyana or Anglia or Amnesia. I tell him that I�ll never come here again. He replies that he�ll miss me. The Tic-Toc Club, on this site, closed because nobody went there anymore. He should choose his words more carefully.

We turn and go home on a March Friday evening. Two underage, trailer trash, jumpsuited GCSE-avoiding girls chat us up, meanwhile calling each passing pimp �gorgeous� and asking us if we are gay. Under our feet glass crunches. The two girls fade away, peeling off to invade other territories F36C-cup bombers in search of an easy, rich, ride.

Meanwhile, high on the love of Jesus, fighters for the Lord, The Jesus Army, launch an offensive on our ear drums with some truly offensive busking. These are God�s children - the geeks that shall inherit the earth - wasting their time. After all, the Afterlife is forever, so all time is meaningless. Though, of course, not one of them wants to see Heaven until they�re at least 98, irrespective of how wonderful it might be. I�m not convinced by their fervour. Kind of makes me know what I don�t want to be more than what I do.

As we pass through the town at 10-40pm, passing the women who wear little more than a bra, open shoes, and a perm, and men who taunt the elements with shirts that show exactly how they are impervious to nature, I begin to pity them in some respects, thinking no further than their next pay cheque, their next night at the pub, the next footy match. Then of course, I feel jealous of them. They�re happier than me. Maybe ignorance is bliss.

And so the debris goes on. The train station is deserted bar drunkards, tottering youths in black and Fubu with mobile phones talking to someone or something - though the quality of their conversation is certainly not worth paying for. What? Where are you mate? Really? Wicked! It doesn�t matter what technology we have. Whatever medium we use, if we talk gibberish it�s still worthless. Women brave the elements in outfits that require less imagination than Jackie Collins inch thick paperbacks.

And so it goes on. Police riot vans cruise the streets breaking up drunken scuffles. They ought to be glad the people are fighting amongst themselves and not taking out their aggression on the source of their frustrations - the legalised theft of credit cards bringing a nation to its knees, the dull, crushing meditative grind of factory work, the world of TV comas, the hypocrisy of advertising, where you can buy anything except happiness.

But this, now, is when we should feel most alive, on a Friday night. Smiling, like animals that bare their teeth before they strike, looking for suitors. This is a world at closing time, disappointed, incoherent, cheated. A nation at closing time, kept dumb by TV, beer, and dreams of love. An office worker hands a dried, castrated rose in a plastic wreath to his prospective partner, who is also drunk and, still in the uniform of the wage slave. A man would crawl in a sea of broken glass with a hard on if he could get another notch on his pathetic little headboard. Every time we make love with someone new, it could be the last time we make love ever�

A plague of men queue in the chip shop. A night club pounds out a pulsing heartbeat through it�s dumb walls, before the mix CD breaks down to a series of descending blips, like a heart monitor signalling the death of a patient. The beat returns for a couple of beats, before again the nation slips into a self-induced, Mixmag-approved coma. This is Friday night in the year 2000. This is the shape of the future.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws