glancing down Bath Street and across the train-tracked valley as the light goes
up the other way a widened Silver Street unrecognisable the thuggish multistorey car park that’s got Bearward Street and Bullhead Lane God only knows what else beneath it somewhere looking out across the grim sprawl of the traffic junction with its lights and colours brighter in the falling twilight almost magical it’s funny when you think that this where it started the whole civic process in Northampton when the Boroughs was the whole town and this was the town square so I’m told with the first guildhall the Gilhalda wasn’t it up at the top of Tower Street here it used to be the top of Scarletwell before Beaumont and Claremont Courts went up in the late ’sixties and there
there they are
the high-rise flats the two giant fingers raised as if to say fuck off
who to though is it them to us or us to them I don’t know what I even mean by that
a window lit up here and there light through cheap curtains coloured squares on the dark blocks darker against the last remains of day over the railway yards the dimming west the tops of higher buildings last to catch the sun and you can still make out the sideways metal N in NEWLIFE with the lettering running down the side I thought that looked quite smart, no, what it was when I was council leader someone made out they were eyesores two monstrosities that shouldn’t have been put up in the first place and proposed we pull them down but I said no that’s not the way to go for one thing social housing in the Boroughs people haven’t got a clue just how precarious it is those towers they house a lot of people and don’t think that when they’re pulled down there’ll be anywhere to put the tenants or there’ll be new housing built dream on that isn’t how it works those towers are all you’re going to get and when they’re gone they’re gone, no, what I said, we ought to do them up refurbish them so that they’re fit to live in and okay you may say where’s the money going to come from but what I suggested was we sell the flats for next to nothing a housing association that I knew was interested at least that way the council’s spared the costs of demolition not to mention all the headache of rehousing so it went ahead and Bedford Housing picked them up at fifty pee apiece I know that there were people at the time and since who questioned that but they don’t understand how much the people here have benefited when you think of the alternative have genuinely benefited and alright that was in 2003 when I stood down from council after speaking out against the situation in Iraq not that the two things were connected it was more that being on the council stopped me from pursuing other ventures shall we say I mean how many companies is it where I’m secretary or director ten something like that so it was proper I should stand down otherwise it might have looked as if I’d got a vested interest and you know how cynical it is these days the view the public have of anyone in politics, no, I stood down so that I could take care of Anglicom in Basra me and Colin though that didn’t work out obviously but also after stepping down that left me free to take up my position on the board of Bedford Housing well if someone’s going to make a profit from it then you tell me why it shouldn’t be a Boroughs resident that’s better surely than it going to someone outside the area and anyway it’s done, it’s history, the other options were much worse I talked it through with Mandy and I don’t see why I need to justify myself
along the walkway on the west side of the Mayorhold making for the crossings that will get me over to the Roadmender in two or three hops when the lights are right it’s like a game of Frogger and down on the left there’s Tower Street and the NEWLIFE buildings and past that you can still just about make out the school Spring Lane those years I was a teacher there back when you couldn’t live on what you made as councillor I mean some of the kids some of the families they were beyond help some of them it was horrific sometimes frankly and that’s really I suppose where I first got a peep into the way these people’s lives work if they work at all and thinking back that’s probably when I first got the horrors just a shudder every now and then about the area and what was going on behind all the net curtains honestly you should have heard some of the stories although by and large the kids were nice I liked them they respected me I think I had a reputation as a decent bloke a decent teacher that was who I was that’s how I saw myself and I was happier then I think I don’t know, can I say that, there’s a lot of benefits to being who I am today but even so perhaps you could say I was happier in myself I think I thought more of myself and everything was more straightforward everything was simpler then not such a moral maze I think that was a program on the television or the radio they asked Cat Stevens Yusuf Islam or whatever he’s called now if he would personally carry out the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and I think he said he wouldn’t but he’d phone the Ayatollah what’s his name Khomeini anyway when you’re a teacher there’s the satisfaction when you feel you’ve made a difference how can I describe it it’s like when you feel as if you’re a good person deep inside beneath it all, it’s not like politics it’s the reverse it’s the exact reverse of that nobody trusts you they’re prepared to think the worst of you they hate you everybody hates your guts and the abuse the personal abuse you get is it a wonder if it gets to you affects your self esteem I don’t mean me specifically just public figures, political types in general what it is it’s hurtful and it makes your blood boil you find that you’re muttering to yourself settling imaginary scores it wears you out and it
crossing St. Andrew’s Street so that I can cross Broad Street makes me think of Roman Thompson who I think lived round here until recently I would see quite a bit of him back in his union days when we were both on the same side well nominally anyway and even more of him when I was on the council his Tenant’s Association bollocks he called me a wanker once right to my face he said I’d always been a wanker and that didn’t make me very jolly I can tell you fucking militants the fucking pickaxe-handle tendency with their more-socialist-than-thou they don’t see that the kind of socialism they believe in they’re anachronisms all that’s dead that was the ’70s and Margaret Thatcher smash the National Front and we were out of office the best part of twenty years it was demoralising all the splits and schisms in the party it was cunts like Thompson radicals to blame for all of that stuck in the ’60s and refusing to accept that times change and the Labour Party if it wants to be electable it changes with them now I’m not the biggest fan of Tony Blair I think that I can safely say that now but what he did whichever way you look at it he got us back in government he modernised the party he’d learned lessons from what Thatcher did and it was necessary redefining Labour values and the Tories had a winning formula you have to deal with the reality it’s no good being off in some idealist never-never land after the revolution no you have to work with what you’ve got adjust to different ways of thinking different ways of doing things and Roman Thompson calling me a wanker Roman Thompson, people like that, Marxist throwbacks they don’t understand real politics the compromises and negotiations that you have to make they’re not prepared to give you it, benefit of the doubt, they’re ready to believe the worst of you a wanker he’s the fucking wanker and it’s that it’s the abuse you get I shouldn’t think about it, more stress on the heart, what does he matter anyway he’s