Into the Fourth Dimension
Crook Town 5–2 Ryton & Crawcrook Albion
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Carl Jung
My mate sends me this Carl Jung quote. I’m on the X46 Sapphire to Crook in County Durham. Gateway to Weardale. I haven’t properly read any Carl Jung, just snippets, stories. Like his dream about Liverpool and the Pool of Life. Carl had never been to Liverpool but the city entered a dream he had in 1927. The dream told him the Pool of Life was in Liverpool. Carl Jung never dreamt about Crook and like Carl Jung I’ve never been to Crook.
On the top deck of the bus my mind drifts as rural Durham opens up. I have Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint through my headphones. I’ve never taken the time to listen to it in full. I have heard it before though. It’s been hanging around at the edge of my awareness for the last 25 years. Sampled in the 90s by The Orb and given a nod by another ambient house outfit — Global Communication aka Tom Middleton, Mark Pritchard — The Jedi Knights.
As I move through time and space, we pass through Willington. The Gold and Tan Salon below the Masonic Hall. Foods 4 Less. Head Rush Vapours. E Liquids only 80p. Public Art sculptures break up the short High Street, the kind that proliferate the Durham and Northumberland hinterlands. In the late 90s artist tenders started going out and community consultations enacted in a bid to regenerate the towns and villages of the former coalfields. Abstract metal work twisted around cogs; flowers, maybe the odd poppy or two, reverent nods to erstwhile industries in fabricated ferrous. Social Deprivation Indicators my friend calls them.
More often than not the commissioned artist would live nearby, maybe studied in the region, back when you could get a student grant from the Local Authority. They graduated and decided to stay or maybe they came back home after studying somewhere else, back to their roots and to the places that inspired them. The injection of heritage cash post-millennium helped them buy a cottage on the outskirts; set up a studio or forge, print the business cards and buy the 4x4. They got a mortgage, when the housing market was good, it got paid off years ago. But then the cash dried up and there’s only so many metal work interventions a place can take before the community realises the village hasn’t been socially activated.
These artisans teach at colleges and universities now, they bemoan the state of art education. It all went wrong when David Milliband lost the leadership contest they say. The cottage is rented out and they’ve downsized. Second home. Investment for the kids. From time to time maybe the odd commission pops up, after the old ones get stolen for scrap metal. It’s all so so terrible for the arts since the cuts.
Altogether Better reads the strapline of the Durham Area Action Partnership (APP). What does Altogether Better mean? There are 14 of these partnerships across Durham. Crook, Willington & Tow Law are represented by the 3 Towns APP. £100,000 was allocated to it in 2017/18 and a quarter of it went into helping people understand Universal Credit, the new ‘simplified’ welfare payment rolled out across the country.
For Durham Bus Station it feels like time stopped in 1993. People look done in, as if drained by some malevolent psychic inertia. As I smoke outside the entrance, amongst a crew of vaping emphysemics a limping Labrador passes me. The Salvation Army shop sign opposite reads Belief in Action. It sits in between a bookies and another charity shop — The Children’s Society. Next door there is a WARHAMMER store where you can spend escapist hours gaming and fighting the Aether War or engage in battle with the Disciples of Tzeentchand. Beasts Of Chaos must be included in a Phantasmagoria of Fate battalion. Ether. Vapour. Belief. Chaos. Fate. No fear though. It’s all OK. The Kharadon Overlords are in charge, everyone round here voted for them. Everyone has their control back. Move on to the next level, await further instructions.
In 1993 I was at sixth form college. De La Salle. A former grammer school run by monks or brothers as they were known. De Salle Brothers. Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. The late Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson used to attend it in the 60s. My mother remembers him. She recalls him asking her friend Christine out. She was a pupil at Adelphi Girl’s Grammar up the road. Adelphi was run by nuns. Mad nuns who ran it like an ecumenical gulag. Fear, terror, sin and the devil were fixed on the curriculum.
The grammar school system at De La Salle was a distant memory in 1993. Fed by all the Catholic secondaries in Salford it was a melting pot of middle and working class kids. Everyone was doing A levels or resitting GCSEs. The students from Salford’s wider suburbs; Swinton, Worsely were broadly seen as being a bit more well off than most. The ones from inner city areas; Langworthy, Weaste and the estates of Ordsall tarred as scum.
A group of us were out on one of the old college recreation areas one afternoon. Two lads from Swinton, one who dealt cannabis, myself and a friend from school, Phil. Smoking we noticed a woman and man emerge from undergrowth near by, then two more men. Clad in mountaineering jackets, they looked like ramblers or people who work on outside location shoots for TV or Film . Prime Suspect wasn’t being filmed near by and the radios in their hands should have been a clear indicator of who they were.
It’s safe to say Salford at the time was 99% white. Phil was the only black lad in our school. The police made a beeline for Phil as he was smoking the joint we’d all been sharing. A more vigilant, possibly less racist, cohort of cops would have apprehended the lad from Swinton with around an ounce of fiver deals down his briefs. But they concentrated on Phil and took him away. When questioned later he was asked where he got the joint from? A mysterious Rastafarian sat in the Take Five cafe near the Arndale Bus Station was his comical and firm reply. Phil received a caution and left college not long after.
I only catch the second half of the Crook match but it was worth the trip. Attendance is around 150. The lubricated crowd are in good humour with the kind of self deprecation that I used to love hearing at Maine Road. ‘GO ON LOVE ISLAND!’ shouts one Crook fan. Love Island is Crook’s No 4. The Tall midfielder has a deep tan that looks more Gold Coast than from a half hour blast under the tubes at the Gold and Tan. He cuts an unusually fashionable figure on the pitch with his salon friendly coiffure. ‘COME ON LOVE ISLAND!’
The game turns wild for the last 20 minutes and the mockery doesn’t abate. Cheers and laughter go up as Crook’s centre forward clears the cross bar of an open goal. Ryton’s keeper curves a goal kick almost 90 degrees into the main stand. Later on he narrowly avoids a red card and their No 10 recieves a sin bin for dissent as Crook are given two attempts at a penalty. From 1–0 to Crook at half time the final score is 5–2. It appears that the whole of the Ryton & Crawcrook team have been body snatched since I saw them the previous week.
I get back to Durham around 5.30 and have a 30 minute wait at Durham station for the next train back home. The contrast between the bus station earlier couldn’t be more stark. Fashionable couples, straight from the pages of a weekend supplement, sit drinking and taking selfies outside the station bar. Students ready themselves for a night out. Touchy feely academics in matching Gore Tex pet each other and say farewells, transparent water bottles with nipple-like spouts hang from their rucksacks. A boisterous group of young men in dinner jackets, dickie bows, cans in hand arrive on the platform, their numbers increase as I watch them over the next 20 minutes. They are one can away from shouting ‘BULLER! BULLER! BULLER!’ The fresh face of privilege. I wonder what they’ll become? ‘WHAT A LEGEND!’ one cries. They look very young, no more than 20 years old, but now and again their mannerisms betray it. They age before my eyes.
The train arrives, the fluorescent lighting within the refurbished interior of the Trans Pennine is severe. The intense strips of white light make me wince as I find a seat, maybe I’m in a particle accelerator? The blue-grey seating and carpet is factory new and will no doubt be soiled before the end of the night. Finally seated I stare out of the window into nothing and zone out.
