Kingston-upon-Hell

The city of Hull is not for the lily-livered. Before arriving, while driving past the spectacular engineering achievement that is the Humber Bridge you may be forgiven for expecting a modern and exciting city. This notion is quickly dispelled, however, once you find its landscape littered with monstrous derelict factories. They all seem abandoned, these gigantic structures. The only evidence that some of them may still be operative is the air density, which is thick with gaseous and toasted grains smells. It is intoxicating. Literally. And may go a long way to explain the creatures well on their way to becoming the mutants that shuffle listlessly about the place.

Hull was apparently heavily bombed during World War II and rebuilt with the hideous concrete boxes that the 1960s architects were so fond of. It’s really not possible to over-emphasise how ghastly the place is. Some parts of Hull would easily reduce your average tough Baghdad ‘insurgent’ to a convincing impersonation of the Cowardly Lion. In these dodgier areas, even the pets carry commando knives (always a sign of a bad neighbourhood), and I don’t need to tell you the consequences of straying into one of these areas by accident…

Your bosom will then be swelling with pride and admiration to hear that the other night you would have found your intrepid and all-round hard motherfluffer of a blog-keeper perched perilously on a roundabout in said city setting up his cameras in order to earn a crust. 

In such a vulnerable position (my boss refused to cave in to my request for a stab-vest), you can imagine I am a little wary of my surroundings. I am setting my cameras up late, it’s past midnight, and here I am, a lonely figure parked on a large roundabout. For company, I have Radiohead’s OK Computer blasting out of the speakers.

A six-wheel juggernaut pulls up on the approach to the roundabout. I turn and watch the driver hop out. ‘Airbag’ has just ended and now ‘Paranoid Android’ is in full flow. He strides purposefully towards me. Did I cut him up earlier, I wonder? He has something in his hands – possibly a weapon of some kind? There is something familiar about his look and gait, something Napoleonic in that low-centre-of-gravity kind of way. I glance past him at the lorry and read the writing on its side. It’s a Portuguese lorry. Once within earshot, he starts talking excitedly in Portuguese while waving his piece of paper and pointing to an address on it. They sent him thousands of miles to deliver goods to another country without even bothering to equip him with a map. When I calmly reply in Portuguese, with the intro to ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ for accompaniment, he frowns and shakes his head almost imperceptibly and takes a step back, with the startled look of someone who has just witnessed his wife remove her mask to reveal she is in fact a grotesque alien from outer space. He turns and looks at the buildings on the edge of the dual carriageway, as though to ascertain that he has indeed travelled to the right country. Days on the road can play tricks with the mind. I can see him thinking ‘yeah, come to think of it, this place doesn’t look like England at all’. Once he realises that my speaking Portuguese is no more than a coincidence, he lets out a little relieved laugh, presumably thinking what a great piece of luck this is. But that’s where his luck ends: I have no idea where his intended destination is.

‘I don’t live here, you see. Only here for the day’, I explain.

‘Oh, can’t you phone one of your friends and ask if they know it?’, he asks.

Now, I don’t know about the company you keep, but I think if I went around phoning friends after midnight on a weekday to ask if they know the address to an obscure industrial estate in a city hundreds of miles from where they live, it is fair to assume it wouldn’t be long before I found myself devoid of the few friends I still have.

‘They’re not likely to know either’, I say, with the chorus to ‘Let Down’ in the background, and feel quite sorry for him as I watch him walk dejectedly away. Who knows if he’ll ever be seen again? I picture his bloated body being winched out of the Humber, and me arrested and charged with his murder on account of being the last person to see him alive.

I turn away and carry on working. ‘Sing us a song, a song to keep us warm… Today, such a chill, such a chill’…