North

Poised between an election victory and a two month parliamentary recess, a triumphalist government tried to galvanise the economy and mollify the natives by coining the opiate 'northern powerhouse' which, depending on your perspective, can be either patronising or comforting.  A veil of impenetrability is essential for political phrase makers: if no one comprehends the meaning, how can they challenge it?

Denied the opportunity to go further north, I had already decided on Yorkshire for my walking holiday, and jocularly referred to it as 'going North'. When weekends trips to Budapest or Dubai are commonplace, there is an enduring poetry to travelling by reference to the points of the compass. Why else would a celebrity name a child North, or a pop group entitle itself The Beautiful South?

Londoners are burdened with a new connotation for East. No longer does it conjure oriental exoticism; now it signifies the burgeoning arriviste East End, still the cheapest (so necessarily the coolest) zone in the capital. Of the four compass points, confusingly South is the most alluring to Londoners for holidays, but the least for residing.  The Thames is London's unforgiving hinge: those living above it disdain the South as fervently as the superior Eloi enslaved the subterranean Morlocks.  Denizens of those lower reaches, bereft of efficient public transport merely through geological happenstance, are abandoned by friends on the favoured side of the great divide.  As Will Self has observed, they cling to the comforting illogic that it must be simpler for their acquaintances to amble northwards than for them to trek to a wilderness serviced only by buses and, probably, stage coaches.

Unpacking the concept of West is more complex. My schoolfriend aspired to be a rocker - as the biker gangs of those days were known - but he was a timid chap with a weak heart and his most dastardly exploit was going 'Up West' on a Saturday night where he would join co-religionists revving their machines on Chelsea Bridge and glaring at passers by. Occasionally I would see him on his way home visiting the Blackheath tea hut, a traditional biker haunt, looking disconsolate. The West is London's exit door. In the fifties we would embark on the interminable journey to Cornwall's dank beaches, condemned to driving through the night along ribbon-developed A roads before the relief of the motorways.  In the sixties, West London Air Terminal in Cromwell Road was the anteroom for Heathrow. My mother would deposit my father there for his annual trip to Chicago, solicitously ensuring he bought life insurance from a self-service machine in the ticket hall before departure.  Comets, with their fatally flawed windows, were still flying then and the chances of getting safely across the Atlantic were only slightly greater than winning the pools, or so the machines dispensing comforting reassurance would have you believe.  And now the West still means Heathrow. More and more of it if runway 3 gets built, so that as the city becomes more accessible, by a delicious irony, there is less and less point in going there: tarmac in London much resembles that in New York.

My North is a concatenation of childhood stories and adult experiences. I sense the freezing blast of the Snow Queen, the lattice landscape of ice, valleys and summits air-conditioned to within an inch of their life, like a summer office in the US, the only time it's necessary to wear more than a teeshirt indoors. The air in my North jangles with the clatter of ice-sheathed branches tickled by the wind. I glimpsed this North briefly in a Swedish Christmas and a New England winter solstice. But as my train rattles through lurid green English farmland, irredeemably agrochemicalled by ejaculating sprayers, the fantasy subsides and grim reality takes hold.  This North will be damp and windy, poverty-stricken and hopeless.  So far forgotten is the North that the idea of releasing London as a separate sovereign entity is gaining traction. There may be brass where there's muck, but where there are bankers there's gold. Hence the need for the soothing phrase 'northern powerhouse'. Despite the abandonment of steel manufacture, the slaughter of coal mining and the migration of ship building, the UK's economy, we must believe, can still be resuscitated by dour sons of toil in overalls and flat caps. Decades of under-investment and denial of existence, in no way prejudice this fantasy. In this island, North it seems, is misspelt: the 'r' and 'h' are superfluous. For everything that the South is, the North is not; everything the South has, the North has not.

© David Thompson 2015