The stay-at-home nation

There was a movement within academia back in the 1980s that remains influential to this day. It was called “New Historicism” but was really just old historicism with a newer Marxist fixation on power structures. It argued that to understand anything made by human hands you had to understand the social, economic, and cultural contexts from which that work emerged. Put simply: we are products of our surroundings, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. We discovered this week, for example, that members of Boris Johnson’s cabinet didn’t understand the significance of free school meals to children in the UK because, unsurprisingly, none of them had experienced being hungry at school. 

Number 10’s Director of Communications, Lee Cain, explained it like this: “I remember asking in the Cabinet room of 20 people, how many people had received free school meals. Nobody had – resulting in a policy and political blind spot.” 

It’s those social, economic, and cultural contexts. They are important to how we think. 

All of which is a long-winded excuse to tell you that I went to the movies on Tuesday.  

It was Halloween and I had free tickets to a double bill at the local cinema for two “mystery” but “classic” horror movies. I’m not a huge fan of the horror genre but I had a suspicion that one would be very special, so I headed into Warrington, a town famous for rugby, vodka, and Kerry Katona (but ideally not all on the same night). 

The first mystery movie proved to be a disappointment. It was the classic “video nasty” (laughable now to think of the moral outrage it caused back in the 1980s) which is only nasty for one exploitative scene involving a tree and some stop-go animation. The Evil Dead has a shocking title but is otherwise a low-budget quasi-student film made by the young but talented Sam Raimi with help from one-half of the Coen Brothers before they went on to become two of Hollywood’s biggest names.  

I emerged from the screening a bit disappointed, and that was only compounded when I heard a young woman rush up to her mother and exclaim “I know what the next movie is going to be… It’s Doctor Jekyll!’ 

I groaned inwardly and probably audibly. The awful Eddie Izzard dud was not the special movie I’d anticipated. I’d much rather go watch Jeremy Corbyn in Smotherhood and I would rank watching that beneath “being mugged” on my list of favourable outcomes for my night. 

As I made my way to the screen, I was already thinking about heading home but an usher took pity on me when I told her what I’d heard.  

“Oh, no,” she said. “That’s in Screen 7… I know what the mystery movie is… Do you want to know?” 

Well, of course, I did! 

“It’s The Shining.” 

Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece was the very special film I’d hoped they’d be showing. But herein lay the problem. It’s 146 minutes long in its original cut. It would finish just after 11 p.m. and I faced a long 4-mile trip home. Would I make it? 

4 miles, you say? Yes. 4 miles. More on that later. 

For the moment, I could only think about Kubrick and a chance to see The Shining on the big screen in a 16:9 aspect ratio (Kubrick shot his films with an open matte allowing them to be also shown in the cramped and horrible 4.3 ratio of old-style TVs). These chances rarely come around. I could not resist. The Shining on the big screen is a different film, an even better film. The landscapes feel epic, the Overlook Hotel more claustrophobic. The groundbreaking Steadicam weaves more of a spell, Nicholson’s performance pops from the screen, and his dynamic relationship with the fragile Shelley Duvall is even more shocking. The old stories of Kubrick bullying her to produce that performance make sense when you realise how her visibly trembling performance is key to the whole wonderful movie… I could write another 10,000 words about Kubrick’s most satisfying movie. No wonder Stephen King hates it. Kubrick stripped all the awful stuff involving possessed topiary from the novel and made it his own.  

146 minutes later, I left the cinema dazed, elated, but also needing my bed.  

I emerged into an empty town. This was Halloween night and quite late but not so late as to explain how dead it was. For some inexplicable reason, Warrington is served by twice hourly trains in the day via a major line that links North Wales with Manchester. During the evening, it’s served less well with huge gaps in the timetable. I’d missed the 10.50 p.m. train and there wasn’t another train until 12.30 a.m. And that wasn’t even a train but a bus replacement service. (Or, as the great Wirral-based band, Half Man Half Biscuit, would ask: “Shouldn’t it be a train replacement service?”) 

Knowing there was no train, I rushed to the bus station thinking I might be able to get a bus. But the departure board was already empty except for the last four buses of the night. None were going in my direction.

So, I walk across the dark deserted town to the railway station.  

At least the waiting area was warm and well lit… Until they turned out the lights and kicked me out.  

The station was closing despite there still being a replacement bus service due in another hour. Only I now had nowhere to wait.  

Some cities only start to get interesting around 11 p.m. but here in one of our larger towns I felt like one of those characters in a vampire movie who find themselves outdoors as the sun begins to set. I stood outside in the dark in the rain. I was the last traveller. All the taxis had gone but I couldn’t afford £20 on a taxi except in an emergency. I needed the bus to arrive. I’m a fairly big guy but travelling alone. Even I didn’t feel particularly safe. I was left again to reflect on how rare it is to see women travelling alone at night. None of this is acceptable. 

In the past, these bus replacement services hadn’t always shown up or had gone flying past the station to ensure they kept to their timetable (timetables are clearly more important than passengers in our psychologically warped nation). If they did that this time, I’d have no choice but to get a taxi. Walking was out of the question. Four miles doesn’t sound far but that is a crow-flies measurement. There are no walkable routes that don’t involve miles through parks, down unlit country roads with no paths, along canal banks, through woodland, under motorway bridges, past scrap yards and notorious dogging spots. The lit route, on a narrow footpath along a fast A road, is a 6-mile hike. A good two hours in the cold and rain, in the middle of Halloween night.  

Even Kubrick isn’t worth that. 

Thankfully, the last bus did arrive at half midnight. “Rescued me”, I think would be the accurate description. I was also the only person on the coach. I talked to the driver: a pleasant South African who told me about his life as a casino manager, safari tour guide, and now a driver of through-the-night coaches. He told me about stag do’s and hen parties. The latter are the worst, he assured me. The best parts of his job: European skiing tours and driving at night. After he arrives in Manchester, he’d have a couple of hours to refuel the coach before he headed to Llandudno in Wales. A storm was due. He might be needed for the morning commute. 

We also talked about the continuing crisis in transport in the North. He explained how quiet it is, and how people no longer trust the transport infrastructure, so they don’t travel. And because people don’t travel, the transport companies claim there’s no demand, so they take away staff and services from the less popular routes. It’s the classic cycle of how to run down a business. 

The bus takes twenty minutes and I have another half mile to walk at the other end. I get home about ten past one in the morning, a “mere” two hours after The Shining finished. 

And if this is a very dull subject for a column, then blame New Historicism. This is the kind of experience cabinet ministers don’t tell you about. We are our surroundings and sometimes to understand people you have to understand bus and train timetables, recycling schemes, library provisions, the life cycle of the sedentary council road sweeper, the beauty of having chips and baked beans for your free school meal. These incidentals lie at the heart of big arguments about the kind of nation we hope to be, with a citizenry who are engaged in culture, communication, and that not-to-be-overlooked thing we once called “being civilised”. It’s about having social spaces and communities, and people so engaged in ideas that they leave their homes to go watch movies that aren’t about superheroes and might involve subtitles. And if that’s too woolly for you, it’s also about revenue from which profits can be derived. 

Towns rely on footfall to generate income but if public transport can’t reliably get the public safely into town, then restaurants do no business, the theatres do no business, the cinemas do no business, and shops have no incentive to stay open. We talk about the death of the high street and our towns failing but it’s not entirely a problem caused by out-of-town shopping or Amazon or even Netflix. It’s about the very simple business of delivering ordinary people into towns safely and reliably. 

We’re becoming a stay-at-home nation and if Kubrick’s The Shining teaches us anything, it’s that being stuck indoors over a long winter (with or without the complications of ancient burial grounds) just isn’t healthy for any of us or, indeed, for the country. 

@DavidWaywell 

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