I’ve just survived two weeks in my wife’s delightful home town, Grodków, located in the Silesian Lowlands of the Oder basin, the administrative seat of Gmina Grodków.
If you’re a regular reader of my (somewhat irregular) blogs, then you will know that when I’ve not got much to blog about, I resort — like the playground bully who steals your sausage rolls — to a bit of gratuitous Grodków bashing when the mood takes me.
This pastime dates back to the pandemic, because the family home in Grodków was where we were confined to barracks. And to be honest, there’s not a lot of difference between Grodków when Covid is and when Covid isn’t in town. Pandemic or no pandemic, there’s precious little of interest to occupy oneself here, other than a church and a petrol station.
Oh… I tell a lie: a new restaurant has just opened. It boasts local food for local people, enjoyed to the background din of an enthusiastic local oompah band. Truth be told, thus far I’ve fought off my wife’s keenness to try it, and if I can manage to do so for one more night, then I’m safe until at least September, by which time it will almost certainly have closed down because no one goes out in Grodków.
Let’s run through a few of the old Grodków jokes: did you know that NASA have a base in Grodków? Ha… bet you didn’t. And nor did I until I bumped into three guys outside the local supermarket speaking an American version of proper English and wearing NASA uniforms.
‘You guys really from NASA?’ I ask incredulously.
‘Sure thing buddy. And the reason we’re here is to prepare ourselves to live somewhere with zero atmosphere!’
Boom Boom… as Basil Brush used to go.
And during the pandemic I finished writing a book I’d been working on and showed it to my wife.
‘But it’s simply a cover and two hundred blank pages,’ she observes correctly.
‘Ah, indeed it is,’ I reply. ‘It’s called The Joy of Grodków.’
There are others but, on the off-chance that my wife reads this, I think I’d better restrict myself to two.
Anyway, the rather laboured point I’m trying to make is that boredom and I are frequent reluctant bedfellows during my stays in Grodków. So, when my wife suggests that I should go through the items of memorability in my old school trunk, taking up valuable space in the unused spare bedroom, I decide this isn’t such a bad idea.
It took me a day and transpired to be a somewhat sobering experience, because ploughing through sundry documents, letters, newspaper cuttings and school essays only served to remind me what a complete and utter dickhead I was, fifty years ago.
Now, while I do realise that I have laid myself bare to the comment: ‘not much has changed since then, has it?’ but in the interest of objectivity, let’s just say that fifty years later I am less prone to expressions of self-opinionated arrogance, and to deeds of crass stupidity, than I was on the late ‘70s.
Let’s start with these two (badly written) newspaper court reports regaling readers about the circumstances of my car accident and its aftermath, as a consequence of which I was stripped of my driving licence for thirteen months.
Let me supply a few details which neither report provided:
During the Troubles, pretty much the only way one would lose your driving licence was to walk into a police station full drunk and give yourself up. Crashing my car into a traffic island directly opposite Antrim RUC station was as close to that as it was possible to get.
While I don’t condone drink driving, I had laboured emptying bins for Antrim Borough Council all morning, and then played cricket for Muckamore 1st X1 against a British Airways “Executive” team in the afternoon. Said BA team was stuffed full of ringers, one of which was a young West Indian fast bowler named Winston Davis who would go on to take forty-five test wickets for the West Indies. Thankfully he didn’t run in at full pelt, and I managed to survive his spells of bowling to finish with thirty-five undefeated runs, earning us a draw. While I’m not using this as justification, the free beer laid on by BA proved too much temptation. Why didn’t I just leave my car at the cricket club and go home with my dad? Well… that’s one of the things about crass stupidity. And I never got the fish and chips.
I was driving an MGB roadster of which I was inordinately proud, and had only owned for one week. I was heartbroken.
Now, a good journo would have interviewed me, obtained all of this relevant detail and woven it into an evocatively written colour piece. But not in Antrim.
Moving on to the letters, Fergie (my dad) would religiously write me a letter once a week using an office duplicate book. He would tear out the top copy, post it to me, and retain a carbon copy of what he’d written. He would then insert any letters I had sent home at appropriate junctures in the duplicate book. There are around five of these archives in the trunk, and there are rather more copies of his letters than originals of mine.
My letters would normally start: “Dear mum & dad, sorry I’ve not written for ages but I’ve been really busy” (a lie), and they would go on to say how broke I was (but I was trying to save some money) how expensive everything was, and could they see their way to lending me a few quid (which I’d work off in the summer holidays)? Then there’d be a bit about how well I was doing at rugby, and that was pretty much that.
Fergie’s letters would be an invocation to save more, work harder and study more diligently (none of which I had the slightest intention of doing).
I was very fond of Fergie, but that never stopped my exploitation of the fact that he knew the value of most things but the cost of absolutely nothing. For example, once back in the late ‘70s, when I was a student at Borough Road College, he decided that — as I didn’t get a student grant — I should have a properly calculated weekly allowance, and so we went through my daily expenditure.
‘Let’s start with breakfast,’ he’d said. ‘You need a good breakfast son, so what would you spend on it?’
I’d thought for a moment before replying that a fiver should just about cover it.
Most students, back in the late ‘70s would have happily got through the week on a fiver. And for the record, a full English with a mug of sweet milky tea and two margarine coated white slices would have cost around fifty pence in The Station Café (better known as The Shack) in the late ‘70s.
“If so, you are wasting your time attempting to study English Literature and would be better employed as a censor in the USSR.”
Robert Hort (overly critical) teacher of English Literature at Portora Royal School, 1973
The final discovery I’m going to share with you serves as an example of my self-opinionated arrogance.
As an A Level student of English Literature, I was required to write an essay on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the time, I disliked Shakespeare’s plays in general, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in particular, and instead of doing what was required of me and answering the question in a prescriptive and objective manner, I scrawled around five hundred words detailing my opinion that Shakespeare was a fortuitous but substandard playwright who was only successful because everyone else with talent was too busy being thrashed by a bailiff or dying from starvation or the plague.
I was graded with an e++ accompanied with almost as much comment in red ink as I had written in black.
One comment in particular stands out:
“Do you really dismiss as valueless any poetry that fails to be the expression of a social conscious? (Yes, fifty years later, I still do). If so, you are wasting your time attempting to study English Literature and would be better employed as a censor in the USSR.”
I’ll probably have that framed. And for the record, my self-opinionated arrogance was rewarded by a grade D at A level.
Oh… the foolishness of youth.
Chic@s, I’ve passed a delightful couple of hours writing this blog in Grodków, but now I must lay out my summer clothes, wishing I was gone… going home, where the Grodków village winters aren’t a-bleeding me…