Southampton

 The daylight needs to be disposed of, the bus pass can take you anywhere. At the pace of its own choosing, admittedly. I lived and worked in Southampton for a time circa 1983 or 84 and then more happily worked there 1987-91. While I go through it on trains from time to time I've not got off much in the last ten years. Eight years ago for the Jess Davies Band on the release of the one and only record I had a hand in writing and then to see/hear Isata Kanneh-Mason play Clara Schumann. I'd have to check older diaries to see when it was we went to see Bowling for Soup. A free bus ride to see it again, then.

It was never an unpleasant place but it's always lacked charisma. Two 'careers' that I only ever regarded as jobs sent me there but I never wanted to stay. I arrived just in time to find a Corals and see Planters Punch, the only runner for Mr. Henderson at Bangor, steered home by Nico. Then it was lucky I went to the Art Gallery first because it closes at 3pm, somewhat weirdly. They have an early Hambling, an Auerbach, Van Dyck, Renoir, Gainsborough. There was an exhibiton by Emma Richardson but sadly the painting about ghosts isn't available on the internet to put here. It was far and away the most captivating. 

But, all these years on, the places where I lived and were employed are all gone. The dive where I lived has been replaced, or maybe only remodelled into an updated building of similarly compact living spaces. I followed the walk into Above Bar and wasn't sure of the precise premises where I'd suffered the indignities of junior retail management in an unsuitable job with wildly incompatible colleagues. While they seemed to think salesmanship was an honourable profession, it was clearly pathologically absurd to me. 

And the office block I worked in later in the first glory days of a life in the civil service has been replaced, as have so many buildings, with apartments. And yet there is still a housing crisis.

At first I thought it was The Dolphin we sometimes had our liquid lunches in and it seemed like the ultimate degradation that it is now a gym but on the way back The Red Lion was still there. But all trace of the imposing administrative centre overlooking the park has vanished, as by now have several of the friends I had in there 35 years ago. At least in Nottingham the houses, school and church I knew were still intact along with Trent Bridge, Meadow Lane and the City Ground.

But, notwithstanding those golden years of introduction to the civil service culture to which I owe so much, Southampton never had it for me. I'm not saying I feel at home in Portsmouth but one loses such affiliations by moving about too much and instead become a ready-made outsider, especially if one's temperament suits it so well anyway.

So, no, in spite of the several good people I ever knew who had Southampton allegiances, I'll know to keep on passing through and not go back. It featured on my university applications as first choice in 1978 for reasons that are hard to think of by now. I'm not convinced I missed much, or that Southampton University did, when nothing came of that.