Sending Myself to Coventry


I go up to Warwickshire to see my cousin


22 July 2000: Sending Myself to Coventry

I hate the Virgin trains. I like the stores and love the airline but I loathe the trains they do in Britain. Here's why.

B drives me to Watford Junction. Many people in the North note that peole south of this point forget there's anything north of it. There's even a paper called NOW--North of Watford. That's how pejoratively Londoners regard the north, and of course people up North resent it.

Well, there I am on time, but there's engineering work along the line to Birmingham, and the prospect of waiting 50 minutes was daunting. The man at the ticket window was confusing, so I took the next Silverlink train up to Coventry. Except I didn't. The Silverlink train terminated at Milton Keynes. The station there is a massive steel-and-glass cube. But it's windy and chilly today, completely overcast. Better to spend 50 excess minutes in this gigantic cube, rather than on the cold platform back in Watford, or in its tiny station.

A Virgin train awaits, and I ask the trainman on the platform if this train goes to Coventry. "It does." I buy some crisps and a still mineral water and take my seat. I am listening to Terry, Anouchka and Blair as they sing "Lucky in Luv" into my earphones. Everything is smashing, until the conductor looks at my ticket and says, "We don't go to Coventry!" I am outraged, of course, which is probably why he asks a woman working for Richard Branson (CEO of Virgin) to "help me off the train."

Thank god for mobile phones, Palm Pilots, and my BT card. I have all my addresses and phone numbers in the Pilot. The BT card had plenty of mileage left on it, so I ring everyone up. I call cousin D on her mobile phone to let her know I am stuck in Milton Keynes. She doesn't know the way to Rugby, which had been an option, and she says that if I had stayed on the Silverlink train, I could have gone to Birmingham Internation Airport. Oh well. I have Christopher and His Kind to keep me company.

The next Virgin train to Coventry does come on schedule, but it's packed with people. I am forced to stand next to the loo in the part of the traincar that meets the adjacent one. I maintain a strategic balancing act, what with my backpack and my European carry-all and my Isherwood book, as people go in and out of the loo, plus new people boarding with lots of luggage, as they are headed to the airport, and a few small children sitting crosslegged on the floor, just waiting to get brained by my European carry-all.

But all's well that ends. Forty minutes later I arrive in Coventry. No small children were hurt. My feet remain blissfully unstepped upon. The train station at Coventry looks a lot like the Student Center at Hofstra University, my alma mater. Lots of poured concrete, wide stairs, and thick wooden bannisters. I half expect to wait on line for my new student ID.

I soon meet my cousin D. It's her birthday today and she rings up a lot of her friends for tonight's festivities on her mobile while I wait to make a reservation for my train to Leeds tomorrow. I don't quite trust Virgin Trains at this point. I buy my ticket on one line and then queue up elsewhere for the reservation.

D and I go to the Acacia, a guest house near the station. I drop off my bags--taking only the beloved European carry-all with me, and off we go to lunch. D is quite fun, and takes me to a pub. It's her birthday but she refuses to let me buy her lunch. I've only met D once before, last year in New York. She tells me more about her life. She lived in London for a while, but she has been up here in Warwickshire for years now, and quite loves it.

After lunch we go to the community stables where she keeps her horses. She has two. One's much older than the other. Billy is the older one, about 13 years old; Bronwhedda (I know I spelled that wrong) is a big Welsh beast who's about six. I go with D as she takes them out of the high grass where they are grazing so they can get their feed. While the horses eat, D does their feet--gives it a coat of moisturizing wax, as well as cleaning out there shoes with a hoof pick.

We're the only ones in the field. D explains all about the horses. It's a nice peaceful time on a bleak day. Some of D's friends are people who also keep their horses at this stable. They horse-sit for each other when they travel, as I have U sitting with my cats back home.

D and I hand around her house for a while before dinner. I take a wee nap--15 minutes or so--after trying in vain to get the cats, Linus and Joe, to love me. They, like many a man, were reluctant. Who can blame them, though?

D lives in a nice little community of attached brick homes under the immense presence of a real Victorian watertower from the 1890s. It's massive, it's impressive, but it's too big. It's like putting a real log in among Legos.

D had told me earlier that she had not told her friends that I am gay; not that I make it a general announcement upon meeting new folks. D has seen the world. When she visited NYC in 1980, her gay friends took her to places like the Mineshaft (a notorious sex club), and as she put it, "My eyes were opened at an early age." D is rather cosmopolitan, but some of her friends, many of whom are considerably younger than both of us, have not really left Warwickshire much.

Our dinner was at Frankie and Benny's New York Italian Restaurant & Bar . Apparently it's a chain. Meanwhile, in New York, I usually stick to the one place that is most like the Italian food I had in Italy. Being that we are in England, there is a a considerable portion of the place that acts as a pub so you can drink while you wait and wait and wait for your table. We waited for more than an hour. Being New York-style myself, I was the first to complain to the manageress (hey, that's what they call them there; authoress, actress, station manageress). Then D complained. Then we waited up to an hour for the food to arrive. After the first 45 minutes I went to the manager (a different person) and asked about the order. D got her hackles up as well and when the manageress came by, D let her know that it was her birthday that was being ruined. The bill turned out to be 50 percent of the actual total. Had we known that we might have had an extra pudding! (Not really, we're not greedy buggers.)

Meanwhile, at least four of D's friends put me through an odd little ritual. They asked me if I liked London, so I went on and on about liking it, and then they all said at the end of my soliloquy, "I hate London." Not to bait me, but to let me know in a friendly way that they liked staying put, or liked Warwickshire best. Many of D's friends had heavy hard-to-describe-in-writing accents. The word "bucket" was pronounced "book-it" and I had to have it repeated for me a few times.

There was one man who I was warned in advance might be a bit intolerant, so of course, since he was quiet and eyeing me suspiciously, I did the one thing that could only make matters worse: stare at his crotch! He eventually did talk to me.

Now by the end of the evening, it was freezing. It was also midnight. We were in a commercial park across the street from one of the largest movie theatre complexes north of Watford. Possibly the biggest thing of its type I had ever seen. It was the coldest summer I have ever gone through since 1991, when I visited San Francisco for a week. D had had a few, and when we dropped her off, she said, "have fun at the march tomorrow." So of course her young friend, was the designated driver, asked, "What march?" when we were in the car. So I told her it was a gay pride event in Leeds. "Oh." That was her reply. But I could hear the gears slowing down to grapple with this new information, as I am most often presumed heterosexual before proven otherwise, no matter how many foofy floral shirts I wear.

Back at the Acacia, I couldn't sleep. First I watched a hilarious "This Is Your Life" style interview with Boy George. When he declared that Prince looked "like a dwarf dipped in public hair, I nearly died laughing." I couldn't fall asleep, so I watched a god-awful TV movie starring Patty Duke Astin called A Killer Among Friends. It featured a lot of bad acting and a poor-man's version of Michelle Lee. A very puffy Michelle Lee with a lot of mascara and frosted hair. That probably kept me awake for an extra half hour.

Posted: Sat - July 22, 2000 at 01:48 AM        

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