Buildings fall but I’m still standing
I’VE decided the best way to gauge your age (apart from chopping your heed off and counting the rings) is to do an accurate count of how many of the significant buildings from the backdrop your life have subsequently been pulled down.
This obviously applies more to working class people, as Eton, Harrow, Oxbridge and the House of Lords tend not to get bulldozed to make way for a new Aldi.
Aye, it’s a bittersweet feeling when the place you had your first nativity play, pay packet, exams, snog, marriage or mortgage payment – is now a car park, budget supermarket or student accommodation site.
It’s almost like they’ve demolished a bit of you; as if the physical removal of the place somehow diminishes the memory too.
Now there’s often just a grassy knoll left standing (no, not THAT grassy knoll, kids – that’s a different story) so my memories remain childish and fuzzy.
It’s hard to explain what a place looked like to my own kids when we drive past a ‘what used to be here’ site. Not that they’ll be listening to another of dad’s time-travelling rants. By now they probably think olden days of my youth is a fictional place like Brigadoon or Coronation Street.
Surprisingly, me primary school in Dunston still stands, but it is abandoned. Is that worse than pulled doon?
A ghostly red brick Edwardian monument to generations of working-class kids whose shrieks, footsteps and laughs must surely echo in a place that was never meant to be silent. Forget Madame Tussaud’s or Chillingham Castle – there’s nowt spookier than a school with no kids.
Anyway – having doorways still engraved ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ would probably ‘trigger’ some snowflake these days and be cancelled as being inflammatory and offensive.
My secondary school has also been demolished in the last year or so. The boiler room where we happily shrank Tudor crisp packets, the house block where Mad Malla and his sidekick Hoss taxed our dinner money, the art block roof where the aforementioned ‘heed – the balls’ threw the specky ginger kid’s Adidas bag are now consigned to history.
A bit like the ancient art of wrapping textbooks in wallpaper, that tracing paper bog roll or the big telly on legs in a wooden box.
They’ve also pulled down the barracks in Aldershot where I did my basic training.
Givowwer! It was relatively new back in ’86 – but since then the army has been criminally depleted, until its numbers are roughly that of the average gate for a Dunston Fed match. If the politicians have their way, it’s only a matter of time before every soldier is trained in a rented paint-balling venue by Ross Kemp, Robson Green and Civil War reenactment blokes from Scunthorpe.
Sadly, my (and many generations) first sticky carpet nightclub has gone too; the Oxford, Tiffany’s, Ritzy, icon or Liquid – whatever you called it.
No longer will the dark alcoves upstairs be alive with the heady brew of overactive hormones, Hai Karate fumes or phone numbers hastily scribbled on McEwan’s best scotch beer mats in lipstick…
Aye youngsters, make the most of the Diamond Strip or your domestic science block; it’ll be an Amazon drone-landing zone or Virgin teleport portal before you know it!