So I decided a year ago that I’d visit Coventry, the city my grandad grew up in. I had golden ideas of arriving at 14 Lavender Lane and taking a Polaroid photograph to send to him (he has never returned to England).
And: I hate to say it, but, I can see why he left… I mean, obviously the city that stands there now is not the city that he left in 1950, but you can tell from the architecture that the remains after the blitz were…nothing. Fucking skeletal. A handful of buildings in the city centre, and patches of suburbia that were outside the ripple effect and survived the incendiaries. But if I was expecting some sort of beautiful modern city, gothically haunted by a medieval ruin here and there, I was wrong. It’s grim, but in a dusty, sad way. It’s the grimness of a lot of people in dirty unfitting clothes, shifting their feet at the bus stop, and of the rigid, lightless functionality of fifties architecture, and of all the vacant shops.
I sound really melodramatic I know, and I am, but to make matters worse our trip to the city involved a massive 45 minute trek with our back-packs (we had *no idea* how far away from the city centre). This started with us kicking our toes gleefully through the fallen snow on the footpath, but it ended with us feeling totally drained. I think if you expect a long trip, or better yet you know the distance, a long walk feels a lot nicer than when you keep thinking your destination must be around each corner, and it’s not, not, ….not. Eventually we gave up and caught a bus (that we could have caught from the start for the same price) 🙂
And then! After a brief happy lunch-time, which involved a lot of ice-cream and hotel tv, I got a major migraine. Haha, I know what you’re thinking; it wasn’t an ice cream headache. It was me coming hard off my dispicable caffeine addiction. I had forgotten to grab a coffee at the hostel that morning in Oxford, and I kept my mouth shut, hoping it would go away, until I had to drag Daniel through the abandoned city streets like a crack addict, literally talking about my “stash” of coffee that I had left behind in Wales, and I’ve gotta be more careful man, won’t let it happen again, there must be a store open around here somewhere, right? Somewhere? ANYWHERE?
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