Roundhay, Leeds — 2010 (Revisited November 3rd 2025)

I. Dogshit Alley and the End of Grande Civilization

I left the flat for Starbucks on Street Lane. One grande mug of Café Estima Blend® and a brownie later, I’d had enough. Sweet indifference in a paper cup — and no Wi-Fi. So I walked back through what I’d christened Dogshit Alley, the shortcut across the Romans Estate.

They still call it The Romans, though it’s no Rome. A turn-of-the-century suburb sagging into 1950s council spill-over, trailing off into The Bumps — a park more by accident than design. I lived just the other side. “The Romans” felt wrong. More Gypsy than Ravenna. More tired than tragic.

I don’t mind a park’s edges being dumping grounds for dogs, but that path was a wager with disgust — hop, glance, dodge. Miss one pile and comedy strikes. I still remember 1985: I fell flat into a steaming one. Oh, the smell. Oh, the shame.

The “lake” in The Bumps was no lake. A brown puddle with an upturned Presto trolley sticking out of it like some exiled relic. Ribbon-shaped, half a metre deep, seven long — not even a puddle with dignity.

The night before, Paul, Caroline and I had gone to The Adelphi for the quiz. We were on a health kick, which meant we’d earned a few pints. The quizmaster oozed the smugness of yeast. There was a question about Zork, one about the monster eating Cadbury’s, and the usual gallery of faded faces from 1968. We did fine, argued better.

Paul boasted he’d had to tighten his belt another notch. Caroline said she needed a belt. I realised I hadn’t slept properly since we’d moved into 40 West Park Drive East.

That next afternoon I told myself: no caffeine after 3 p.m. At 14:09, I was already breaking the rule, sipping Tazo® Zen™ tea in the Briggate Starbucks — less ethnic, more airport pretending to be a café.

Dinner had been Quorn chilli with rice, virtue by repetition. I’d somehow spent £24 on “nothing” again. Rather than argue, we went to the pub.

I’ve never liked quizzes. They’re the sound of culture on a ventilator — karaoke, curry nights, two-for-ones, all the same CPR on a corpse. Since the smoking ban, there’s no soft anonymity left in pubs. Just noise and events. Fun sold by the pint.

And the beer — indifferent blondes and sterile browns. Once British beer had backbone. Now it’s coorslitecocacolapepsimcdonaldsbudweisernikestarbucksappleproctorandgamble on tap.

I was thirty-eight, already muttering like a pensioner. The Grumpy Old Men book had just come out. I read it like a mirror.

Back at Starbucks: still no Wi-Fi, Scrabble frozen. My opponent had conjured a perfect seven-letter word — I’d lose by forfeit anyway. I thought about going to a corporate photo-shoot but rewarded myself with a McDonald’s chicken burger and fries. Water, for irony.

Problem loading page. Story of my life. Restart required.

Back to the flat.

(Infrared murmurs from the future: you’ve always hated boxes. Even now, you joke that calling yourself Infrared is just your way of refusing them — moving past labels, letting warmth drift. If there’s a Doppelgänger, he must be Ultraviolet. The day you meet, the spectrum collapses — either the universe is solved, or it ends. Possibly both.)

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II. Help the Beigists

Tomorrow, volunteering at Help the Aged — I called it Help the Beigists. Beige people, beige air.

I’d sorted them into types: Alpha Beigists work an hour, efficient, perfumed; Beta Beigists drift in to talk and call it service.

Yesterday, in the cellar — foisty, cobwebbed, thick with the smell of damp paperbacks — I found Data Processing Made Simple by Susan Wooldridge (1976). A whole faith in tidy progress: washing-machine computers, bearded men slotting disks, women in A-line skirts feeding punch cards to humming idols. The future, as imagined by a brochure.

I bought it for fifty pence, along with a perspex Adidas belt from the eighties. History for under a quid.

At one I met the Beigists again to collect the book. Thank you, Susan Wooldridge. I joked about what a “dridge” might be — a dredge, a ridge, d’ridge man. No one laughed.

Outside, the council was landscaping The Bumps again — their version of romance. Soon it’d be “a lush rolling vista,” or another tidy failure. Maybe they’d dredge that six-by-one-foot pond. Leeds always thinks it needs a beach.

Paul took photos of me that week. That’s when I saw the bald patch — little islands of survival at the crown. A quiet reckoning.

That night, I tried Paul McKenna’s hypnosis CD. His voice was oil-smooth, confident. I drifted into the half-sleep between trance and Tim Hecker. Consciousness just visible on the horizon, unreachable.

McKenna’s trance never convinced me — too neat, too middle-management. I doubt he ever dropped acid or danced beside a bonfire. Just give me distortion.

Saturday there was a wedding reception coming up, which meant no Starbucks till Monday. How they’d manage without my arse in the corner sneering at the Red Sea Pedestrians, I didn’t know.

Still, the barista slipped me a free bag of Holiday Blend, a smiley face in the “O.” Quiet rebellion behind the counter.

Bagels all round.

Negativland’s “Car Bomb” still looping — 1987, Escape from Noise.

“Speak! Why do you never speak?”

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(Now, from the far end of time, it’s Monday again. The clock turns noon. You left me at noon in Zaragoza — another Monday, another cup cooling in your hand. Glenn says it feels like a Monday; you don’t know what he means. But we both do. The spectrum has folded over itself — Roundhay to Aragón — Infrared watching its own echo in Ultraviolet. You’re still moving away, still warm.)