Dirty

It must be mid-morning. I’m sitting at a large desk with six or seven others in a meeting room. Somewhere outside Rugby. We’ve been fed tea. We have enjoyed biscuits.

A Health and Safety Manager has just explained that a retail unit that we, collectively, manage has an issue where homeless and/or drug addicts defecating in the alley behind the store. The staff have complained that when they take deliveries into the store, they often have to carry boxes and heavy loads while watching their footing to avoid human turds.

I knew what was going to be discussed in the meeting beforehand. I had responded to a couple of emails. I had already offered a couple of solutions and ways to support or resolve the issue. Regardless, I have been summoned to attend a meeting to offer the same solutions and the same ideas. But this time, out loud. I had sympathised with the staff member’s plight before the meeting and I am sympathising with their plight now.

But the meeting has turned a little bit odd.

We are half way through the meeting. The Health and Safety Manager has deftly delivered a well-planned and informative presentation of the issue. I thought he was about to pull it all together in summary and hand over to the table. But he has saved something to the last. He has saved up something from a site visit that he personally conducted.

He has photographs.

He passes the photographs to the person sitting, immediately to his left. They are being passed onward, person to person. I am immediately aware that I will be the last person to see the offending matter. So, for what feels like an eternity, collectively, we are all forced to watch the furrowed brows and contemplative faces of colleagues that we know, like and respect looking at photographs of 'jobbies'.

And I struggle. But I seemed to be the only person with such discomfort.

It’s one of the most tragically, comic things I have ever seen in my entire life.

Earnest intakes of breath. Heads shaking in disbelief and disgust. Some ‘tut’. Others are silent. Wake like. Professional to the core.

But my insides are churning. As I wait, I just want to laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

Sympathy or no sympathy with my colleagues’ plight, all I think about is my day up to that point. I have had to get out of bed at stupid o’clock, travel across London, hop on a train to Rugby, catch a cab across to a trading estate and all to look at photographs of a complete strangers scat. Stranger still, I’m being paid to look at photographs of human faeces. My focus will need resetting. Right now, I am living in the ridiculous.

I don’t recall this type of event ever being mentioned in ‘Careers’ sessions at school. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t raised in my interview before I accepted the role. I wasn’t prepared for this. This is what my life has become.

The earnest faces continue. And the silence. And then they are passed to me.

And, I can’t do this.

There are two photos. Both of the same piece of shit. Both are taken so that the turd fills the frame, diagonally from bottom left to top right. Close up. Personal. Unpolished and brown.

Here we go:

Me:      ‘This is awful!’

I stare at one of the photos. I’m fidgeting in my seat. I am trying not to smirk.

H&S:   ‘Yes. It’s disgusting. The team are really upset by it’

I nod. As earnest as any of the others in the room.

Me:      ‘I don’t know… er… I guess, that one thing that I think is missing, though, in the photos’

I know what I want to say. And I know that I shouldn’t. I’m fighting. Fighting my own childish impulse.

But, I really want to…

H&S: – frowning; concerned:  ‘Yes? … What?’

Me:     ‘Er… Context.’

H&S: ‘Oh. Yeah. OK. You mean I should have taken a shot down the alley so you could see how close it was to the door?’

I lose the fight. A childlike smirk adorns my face. In for a penny and in for a pound:

Me:      ‘No. I mean, you should have laid a ruler or placed a Mars Bar or something next to it, so we truly understand what type of monster we are dealing with!’

Aside a short lived but – rapidly - muted snigger somewhere to my right, I am greeted with silence. In some cases, disbelief. In others, shocked incredulity. And it seemed to go on for eternity.

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That happened sometime in the mid noughties.

Times change. Things move on. I am no longer paid to look at pictures of excrement. Now, when I do, it is purely as a hobby; an innocent past time.

Walking up Bishopsgate Street in Leeds, I was reminded of the meeting from days gone by. I was weaving around a string of winding, scattered and ‘trodden in’ dog turds. I was paying close attention to my footing. I was carrying a heavy bag.

And I smiled at the recollection. The photo’s I had been shown were taken in an alley behind Commercial Street, right here, in Leeds.

I’m not going to besmirch Leeds. I’m not going to suggest that my only memories of the city are tainted with keech. They’re not. I’m not a regular visitor but I’ve very few bad memories; from being out and about in pubs and clubs with an ex-girlfriend in the mid 90’s or having adventures with various employers’ right up to the present day.

It’s just that I have never really explored. It’s easy to get to; so I guess it is also easy to leave. So, I’ve never just sat and watched the world go by. Even back in the day, I always seemed to use Leeds as a stepping stone to the Yorkshire Dales or the coast at Bridlington. As a result, Leeds is one of the largest cities in the UK that I know near nothing about. So, my knowledge of the city is driven by the media and popular culture. And my exposure to that makes it far from a romantic, idyll.

Strangely, much of my knowledge – biased by my chosen reading and listening matter - appears to be where the two merge or clash. To a point, I’ve probably always lost sight of where fact and fiction begin or end… assuming that you can ever truly tell the two apart.

I’m old enough to recall Peter Sutcliffe. I have memories of the shock and horror of the latter stages of his campaign and – I suppose – clearer memories of the trial and post mortem of the debacle that was the Police’s investigation, being broadcast night after night into my living room. So the gritty TV images live with me. The scenes of his crimes are a far different Leeds from the one I have seen since the 1990s or more recently. Grey, cold and harsh. 1970s TV news colour. Cheap. Washed out; feeling slightly over exposed. Colours ridiculously vivid or muted to a dull grey. They leave memories and impressions of run down, decaying streets. Of boarded and shuttered houses. Of even more, boarded and shuttered warehouses and factories. David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet stories and subsequent TV series have done little to banish them. They are the embodiment of this concrete Leeds. Dirty Leeds.

And then there is Jimmy Saville. Even if his empire may have been based elsewhere, Leeds is where he was born. Leeds is where he died. His coffin was laid out on public display in Queens Hotel. Even before the paedophilia was confirmed and the grisly facts came to the fore, he was a man that I loathed and despised from childhood. Saville flaunted his wealth in the public’s face. He appeared to be… No! He told us that he was the perfect self-made man, who made his own luck and own opportunities to drag himself up out of his working class roots and away from the – littoral – coal face. To me, as a kid, he was just a creepy man whose behaviour instinctively appalled me. Whatever his story, whatever his success, he always seemed to flaunt it and brag about in an ostentatious, selfish and classless manner rather than ‘inspire’. It’s apparent that his success was as much fuelled by intimidation and bullying to make the most of his opportunity at others expenses rather than through any real talent. I may have been oblivious to the bullying, and although the rumours were always there (see Half Man Half Biscuit’s – ‘I Left My Heart at Papworth General’ (1986)) cannot claim to have known for sure that he was a sex offender. 

My memory of him is as a dishevelled, apparently talentless, sneering and rather disturbing looking clown on rubbish TV. But regardless, rightly or wrongly, he wore his upbringing as a badge of fact, if not honour. To me, as an untraveled and unworldly teenager, Jimmy Saville was Leeds.

More recently, Peter Robinson’s ‘DI Banks’ stories offer a different view on the city. Robinson always hints at darkness in the City but relies on it being a ‘cultural’ respite for its jazz and opera loving hero. A place that he escapes to; to get away from rural life. And the city comes out of the story way more positively. A modern take, noting the city changing in its appearance and, perhaps outlook.

But, it’s almost too late. Music has reinforced my preconceptions; any misconceptions. Like a tidal wave.

The Smith’s ‘Panic’ is rumoured to have thinly veiled references to Jimmy Saville in its lyrics. This year’s ‘Junverbrecher’ album by The Indelicates casts Saville as ‘Mr Punch’ and decides to try and banish him from our National Consciousness. A noble goal. Luke Haines ‘Leeds United’ is… well; its references aren’t even oblique. It just lists, discusses, backs up and reinforces everything that I had thought or thought I knew.

I paused writing here.

I quickly googled ‘Bands from Leeds’. And a quick scroll through the names and it all makes sense. There are some great names, but few offer a shining light of happiness. From the sparse industrial synth and Motown covers and seedy sex tales of Soft Cell to The Wedding Present who’s sound is as limestone, solid and uncompromising as any of Leeds Municipal Buildings. But my favourite reference is ‘I Like Trains’ website by-line; ‘Miserable since 2004’. That just about sums it up.

In my head, Leeds is permanently grey. And it’s raining. And it’s dark. Even on a warm, mid-June evening, it cannot help itself.

So, I find myself with a few hours to kill on a Friday afternoon. A few hours in the City Centre. A few hours to explore. No maps; no research. But a chance to have a look and see if it is the grim, gritty words and images that jump out of the page and screen or whether it is a place of energy that has just had its unhealthy share of woe.

Probably neither. Possibly both.

As I walk, the sun slowly fades behind the buildings. Cloud covers the sky. Drizzle sets in.

Streets and lanes. Arcades. Dirty limestone. Bustle. The Biffa Bin lined (legendary) alley behind the old retail store. It’s still there. Still with its ‘architecturally and historically listed’ gas lights. But, now with access to a bar at the end. The space feels light and visible. Perhaps, even, secure.

Blue plaques point out the cities heritage at every other street corner. The Quaker Meeting House plaque on a building destined, one day to be the HS2 terminus. The plaque by the Biffa Bins showing that it was where the guy who patented concrete had lived.

I like what I see. I like the austere architecture. Seemingly built to live in its physical environment. Tough. Hardy. Durable. Grey and grey and red. Eroding and changing shape, naturally. Rain and wind taking their toll on brickwork and concrete. But everything still stands. Stands like the hardiest trees atop a hill or the most stubborn of limestone outcrops on the moor. Battered, but proud.

I like the individuality. I like the relatively narrow streets. I like how tall the buildings are. Not New York tall, but slightly disproportionate to the roads on which they stand. I like their grand motifs and detail. Each slightly individual. The original owners wanting to make their mark. Marks that live on today. To stand out from the crowd. The old shopping arcades that survived the 1970s brutalist assault on all cities. They stand, with an easy glamour that White Rose or St Johns Centre can never compete with. The municipal buildings point to an era when money spoke. And spoke loudly. You walk among them, but you feel as if you are being told to ‘know your place’. I like the boldness. Because, even if the money has slowly returned, it disappeared, for a while. The bold statement is there, but there as a memory and note to a Greater time. Whatever the owners’ original intent, it feels reclaimed. It feels more inclusive, more welcoming.

The city has shaken itself down and buffed itself up again. Not reinvent, you understand, but built on its own sense of history and identity. The blue plaques on walls talk of real history. They talk of events that have real resonance the world round. Leave the grand religious and political history to York. Concrete is understood by nearly everyone across all continents. Christianity and Viking invasions are irrelevant in comparison. And Leeds claims that it all stems from a small yard set-back and away from the main thoroughfares. Like plastic and petroleum first being created in anonymous streets in London’s Lea Valley. It seems right. It feels more exciting to me that such world changing events and discoveries took place so far from the Palace’s and Cathedrals of our ‘old’ cities and ‘old’ money. Real life. Real people.

Walking on, I realise that I have unconsciously seen areas transform from dark, foreboding, grim and run down – the arches and River Aire underneath the station – into light and open spaces where it feels relatively safe day or night. And that’s a good thing. Isn't it? I mean, I liked how if you stepped around the wrong corner, it quickly became less sanitsed...

https://being42.org/2014/07/28/blast-from-the-past/

But there is an edge that I don’t quite get. It’s not that it is unfriendly; I’m not sure that would be true. But, walking Leeds streets it feels a bit combative. Something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It is possible that it was my imagination. I was cold. I wasn’t feeling too well. Worse, perhaps it those cultural preconceptions clouding my ‘poncy’ and effete, southern mind. But, it could also be that it’s because I’m getting old; Leeds feels like a young man’s city.

I walked on. I explored. I enjoyed.

But I still ran away to Scarborough as quickly as I could for a wider horizon and a decent portion of fish and chips.

Some things don’t change.

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Cut back to Rugby. The mid noughties.

After a period of eternal silence, the Health and Safety Manager decides not to rise to my childish remark. He attempts to pull the team back together and refocus on the issues in the Magic Kingdom.

“It’s not just the homeless defecating that the team have complained about.” 

He talks on: “They told me about a morning when a prostitute was with a client in the doorway when they arrived. I won’t go into detail, but…”

He is cut off by an HR Manager.

“Please! No photographs!”