Whether our current decade comes to be defined as the age of austerity remains to be seen. One thing, however, is absolutely certain, in Britain at least, this is the age of weirdness.
It’s easy to look at how people lived in weird eras of the past with a mixture of bemusement and horror. Take the 1970s: the massive hair, platform shoes, the IRA, strikes, flared trousers, orange wallpaper and cars that looked like they’d been designed primarily so they can be torched by riot mobs in TV dramatisations.
But at least the 1970s seemed aware of its own surrealism and shortcomings. Britain in 2015 is oblivious of its own status.
Today, like back then, there are no seams of unifying or coherent identity but, instead, fragmented and disorientating slivers of material culture, language and humour ruddered by an unco-ordinated sense of the direction we ought to be going, the thoughts we’re supposed to be thinking and the people we are supposed to be.
When Margaret Thatcher told Britain there was “no such thing as society,” perhaps this is what she dreamed of: noise and confusion where once sat things like community and functionality.
On the south coast of Britain where I spent the weekend I caught glimpses of the undefinable modern British psyche.
If one were to take the south coasts of Britain and Trinidad one might see a similarity in the fantastic wilderness—life frozen in time in the briny air, the salt-crusted houses, people taking a well-earned seat away from the mayhem and rat race so many Brits and Trinis exist in.
Travelling back to London on Sunday evening, the train stopped as planned at a town a few miles inland and all the passengers exited the train to get on what’s known in Britain as a rail replacement service: A bus, basically.
Sundays in Britain are the designated day when railway lines undergo “improvement works.” Try not to travel on a Sunday. Don’t do anything on a Sunday that doesn’t involve the pub.
“Is this the replacement bus to Three Bridges?” I asked the obese man wearing a Southern Railway uniform and garish fluorescent jacket. He didn’t so much answer as tilt his head back slightly and twitch his nose so that his glasses rose and fell slightly.
“Thanks,” I said, and boarded the double-decker vehicle, heading straight upstairs. A few minutes later the archaic death trap vehicle with lurid green seats was rattling down the motorway, swaying in the 50 mph wind.
On the back row of seats, a young man with a pot belly and ginger beard, wearing tight, black emo-goth clothes was listening to The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album which spilled audibly from his headphones.
As he listened he opened a screw-top bottle of warm South African chardonnay and swigged it straight from the bottle.
For the 40 minutes it took us to reach the next station from which a train was physically able to operate from, he glugged away, staring out the window then reading the label on the wine; perhaps looking for a serving suggestion: “Perfect when warm. Drink on public transport. Decant straight into throat.”
The usual rule is that you should always go upstairs on a bus in Britain if you want to avoid people who appear to have escaped from a mental institution. This man was subverting the usual rule.
“What is happening to this country?” I texted my friends and family.
Later, in the supermarket doing the weekly shop, in the butter aisle I see packets of lard and beef dripping.
Dripping is the fat that drips off roasted beef and congeals to be used as a cooking oil or even spread in lieu of butter.
“Is this what we fought the war for?” I texted again.
Earlier in the day in a different supermarket I had spotted the shop’s noticeboard and shown my mother a poster for “Walking Football For Over 50s. A non-running, non-contact sport.”
An old bloke with a long white bushy beard and long white hair shuffled over and said: “Oh that’s really good that is. I do that…”
He reeked of tobacco, but I took kindly to the glint in his eye.
“There’s females go to it too,” he went on—my mother now thankfully out of earshot— “Oh,” I replied, “well good luck at your next game.”
“Yes,” he grinned. “But no hard tackles!”
And as he said “hard tackles” he winked and gestured vaguely towards his groin.
And suddenly my optimism soared. You see, it’s that kind of joke that we did fight the war for.
It’s that sort of double entendre (the kind you Trinis have singularly adopted as your own national humour) that makes you think maybe, just maybe, everything is going to be okay after all.