I'm going to miss the Cock

My six month tenure at Pentair is coming to an end. On Friday I will say goodbye to Walkden, and a few hours later, the country too. As it happened, I didn’t spend the full six months in Walkden as planned; for three of those six months, I was living in a hotel down in Penkridge, Wolverhampton. Nevertheless, despite having not spent a lot of time in Walkden, there are things about the place that I will miss, and things that I won’t.

It was mid-November when I went to Pentair for a job interview. And it probably says something about Pentair and Walkden that the most memorable part of the interview was the journey home. I was driving back through the town’s main housing estate, and a car was making its way towards me, swerving eccentrically from one side of the road to the other. It all seemed a bit ominous, so I pulled over and stopped behind a parked van. Meanwhile, the car continued to meander its way up the road, and as it got closer it was clear what was going on. Lying on the bonnet was a man in just his boxers. He had his arms out stretched, clutching on to the wind mirror, desperate to hold on. Conversely, the woman driving the car was doing her upmost to throw him off.

‘Get off my fucking car. . . I never want to see you again.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until we talk.’

‘There is nothing to talk about. Get off my fucking car.’

A domestic Walkden-style.

The guy displayed super-human strength in being able to hold on in the way that he did. Aside from veering left to right, right to left, the woman was piping her horn, shouting and swearing, but the guy was just not for budging. They passed me, got to the top of the road, turned left and carried on. God knows how it all ended.

For a while afterwards I found the whole thing hilarious. I still do. But Walkden’s foremost predicament - of which semi-naked men clinging on to car bonnets is a behavioural symptom - isn’t funny. For Walkden suffers from an American level of urban decay and deprivation. Gone is the Britain which built the rows of terraced houses and their accompanying communal back yards that make up the bulk of Walkden’s housing stock. And in its place, is a meaner, more austere and individualist Britain.

Just a mile up the road is Worsely, and Worsely is lovely. Big houses, big gardens, big cars – all very affluent. I suppose the people who live there are those who the Labour party are trying to appeal to when they talk about the ‘aspirational’ voters. There isn’t much wrong with that. Nor is there, principally, much wrong with the Thatcherite, anti-taxation mantra of, ‘letting people keep more of their own money.’ It’s just that there should be a greater balance. The other week, for example, as I was driving through Worsely I was trailing a white Range Rover with a private registration plate that read ‘PU55AY’. Let ‘hard working people’ buy fancy houses with plush gardens, and let them buy expensive white Range Rovers to park outside them, but surely challenge them (morally) over spending money on gimmicky, pointless, materialistic crap like private registration plates. Especially when, as is the case, there are hundreds of people languishing in the old, inadequate housing stock, unemployed and without hope just a mile down the road. I shan’t miss this about Walkden or the UK, not least because Germany has its own social and economic problems.

But I will miss the humour, the self-depreciating humour. I don’t know whether naming the largest pub in the town ‘THE COCK’ exemplifies this, but I think in some way it must.

I don’t think there is much in the way of self-depreciation in Germany – it just isn’t the done thing. There is that stereotype that implies the Germans have no humour, but it is neither true fair nor true. Germans can be funny; Germans can even be very funny. They can often be dry in the typically British way, too. But when it comes to self-deprecation, though, it seems to me like they just don’t get it.

I won’t miss Walkden’s deprivation; I will miss its self-deprecation.Read more