Misty Village and Small Pine
Birtley Town 2–0 Heaton Stannington
“You’re a groundhopper then?”
My heart sank as Brian, committee member of Birtley Town FC, asks me midway through his boiled onion and beef burger bap. No amount of 20th Century European philosopher quotes, obscure avant garde cinema references or psychogeographic pretensions will get me around it. I wince. I’m devastated. Another man in a very long line of depressed men who tour football grounds, searching for meaning and seeking transcendence in a 90 minute sporting pastime.
Groundhoppers are the footballing equivalent of the anoraks you see at the end of the platform at York station. Ferroequinologists. Notebooks out. Cameras on standby. The groundhopper is interested in a different kind of observation. They travel to as many football grounds as posssible. Their blogs proliferate the internet. These non-partisan pilgrims love football in it’s entirety. It’s admirable and honourable in a world of market forces and a sporting culture that has far too easily lost sight of its roots. It’s easy to tread over old turf though. There’s a repetitive familiarity to the average groundhopper report that is no doubt comforting. The ultimate in groundhopping reportage comes from Middlesbrough-born writer Harry Pearson and his 1994 book The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football. I’m reluctant to read it at this point for fear it will taint my own personal peregrination and drift through the Northern League.
I haven’t got my anorak on today, it’s about 24 degrees and the sun is blazing. Summer hasn’t ended and Birtley’s pitch looks amazing. Everything’s Gone Green.
‘Do I sound like a cunt?’ I ask
‘Yeah, you do’ she said
Was a response a friend gave me after I asked her opinion on the words I’d written so far. This comrade wasn’t entirely wrong, but in her, mostly misanthropic, weltanschauung I reckon 75% of all literature ever written would be discarded. If not binned outright then at the very least included within an increasing taxonomy of Self Indulgent Wank.
A second friend, who I also sent my early season scribing, gave an equally annihilating critique. ‘Mind bending electronica’ was his short reply. He may not have even been replying to my original request for opinion. It doesn’t matter, either way it was damning. The best I could ever hope from these two would be ‘It’s alright’, ‘It’s interesting’ or ‘Not bad’. Validation aside I was looking forward to seeing Birtley play and visiting the ground.
When I started going to Northern League games last season I had a project in mind. I thought about making field recordings of each match, the full 90 minutes, capture the aural nuance and sonic characteristic of each ground and game. I was enjoying the matches and the experience too much though. Why turn it into work and another project? Why did everything have to be a project? Could I not just enjoy the game in and of itself? Overwork had already contributed to my mental health crisis. Why frustrate it even further? One of the problems I have is that I can’t switch off. I need to be doing something all the time. There always has to be a project. Was writing about it another needless stress? One month into the season and I’d already been burning the candle at both ends getting this stuff down. To what end?
My mother always has a project on the go, is always making things and has multiple schemes simmering away. She got ill when I was an early teen. She developed Ménière’s disease, a disorder that can leave you with severe vertigo, nausea and tinnitus. She was bed ridden for almost a year. She’d hear phantom sirens, bells ringing and have terrible anxiety attacks. She could barely walk the vertigo was so bad. Previous to this she’d worked in a bank; for an insurance company, then a supermarket but mostly she brought up me and my three sisters. She wanted to do art when she was younger but married my Dad and had us lot. Me and the girls — as they were collectively and grudgingly known — she knocked us all out between 1975 and 1983 — I was the eldest.
The attack of Ménière’s was transformative for her. When her health improved she enrolled on an Art & Design Foundation Course. She was just a bit younger than I am now. She started making things in the house. Painting and going out photographing things. Our terraced house kitchen was transformed. Acrylics and craft detritus everywhere. It wasn’t a studio, it was the kitchen and we weren’t a bohemian family. I think we were a bit ambivalent towards it all, it just became a thing she did. Post-Ménière’s she always had a project.
Looking back her work was pretty good. It was out there. Real expressionist outsider art material, like the Vorticist artwork of early 20th century mixed with DIY hobby craft. Our financial existence at the time was alright, we weren’t poor, but the money wasn’t ours. The 1980s and ’90s credit was thrown at the working class. People were spending money that didn’t belong to them. Were we working class? I don’t know. We lived in a 3 bedroomed terraced house in Salford — back to backs. The opening credits of Coronation Street would pan down across the back lane (or entry) behind our house. My mam thought Paul Young was in Joy Division. My dad was an electrician who started to work in Film & Television in the 80s. He was away a lot.
It was pretty unusal what my mother was doing, none of my mates parents were up to this kind of thing. My mum was (is) a popular, gregarious personality. She became a weirdo without affectation or pretense. Salford is an oppressive city and you aren’t allowed to stand out but she had the confidence and enthusiaism to pull it off. She is honest and down to earth and people would be drawn to her.
The house was always full of women around this time. My gran, auntie, my sisters, their friends, my mam’s mates. A veritable House of Women. Her friends were an ecletic bunch, it wasn’t ever one group, age or type. Just a steady stream of people, always a myriad of different personalites. Art and film students she’d befriended; Karen — the mortician’s assistant who told stories about twitching corpses, post mortem farts and misadventures in auto-erotic asphyxia laid out on the slab, Donna (who I had a huge crush on) — ate hash cakes in Beruit, wore all black and had an amazing Isabella Rossellini haircut, Marina — who would send Polaroids of her eyes to the film director David Lynch, Cheryl (who I also had a painful teenage crush on) — was into The Smiths, had boyfriend trouble and struggled being different. I’d overhear this stuff as I feigned invisibility to get a drink or snack from the kitchen where my mother held court.
Across my early to middle teens it felt like an open house. My mother got involved with all sorts of creative excursions. She’d drag the girls along to be part of community theatre productions. It’d be called immersive theatre these days. I remember they were part of an open air theatre production on Kersal Moor about the Peterloo Massacre. This all might be happening around 1989. Where was I? Either in my room listening to tapes of the 808 State radio show or out until all hours smoking cannabis and drinking.
One project of my mother’s at the time was photographing and drawing Agecroft Pit. The pit was a huge colliery site not far from where we lived in Salford. The landscape around the pitheads was an interzone of quasi-science fiction. Immense futuristic Tetris-like rectangular building blocks dropped from the sky between the slag and coal heaps. Acres of derilict space, disused trainlines and wasteland flora. The site was adjacent to the four 200 metre high hyperboloid cooling towers of the Agecroft Power Station. LS Lowry meets Tarkovsky in The Zone.
The pit was at the end of its life when my mother blagged access to the final miners’ shift. She photographed the miners and sketched the colliery’s closure and demolition. Unbeknownst to her I was also exploring the Agecroft site too. Summer solstice, in the midst of my first experience dropping LSD, I camped out within this post-industrial hinterland with two friends. It was the singular most frightening experience of my life. This was the summer of Italia 90, Gazza, New Order, purple Nike shell suit bottoms, green Fila boots, Acid House and the blue England 1987–90 third shirt. I was 15.
Even after the horror of that first trip I continued taking LSD, completely oblivious to what it was doing to my head and what was happening at home. I remember the summer being hot and humid. The nightly football matches on the fields next to the M602 motorway interrupted only by the regular high speed parade of car chases. Stolen Ford Seirra RS Cosworths being pursued by low flying helicopters and police Ford Seirra RS Cosworths.
I arrived home one night during this summer, out of my head. It can’t be that long after the World Cup semi-final in Turin. My Dad is home and he sits me and the girls down. He informs us my mother has left. He doesn’t know where she’s gone. A couple of nights later he informs us all that she has met someone else and is living down south. I remember feeling absolutely nothing. I didn’t see or speak to my mother again for another 2 years and I had no idea where she was.
My parents had divorced when I was around 10 then got back together. 1986 to ’89, as I remember, was a relatively calm period for us all. There was a consistency. Family holidays to Lanzarote, Majorca, Portugal and Yugoslavia. School life was also stable. From 1990 onwards it had all started to unravel again.
Loves got the world in motion
And I know what we can do
Loves got the world in motion
And I can’t believe it’s true
New Order, World in Motion, 1990
Like Salford of the 90s Birtley is a pure sci-fi vortex. Another interzone. The Misty Valley. It was home to the Royal Ordnance Factory across two world wars and later the global market arms dealer BAE systems. The interlacing tracks and sprawl of Network Rail’s Tyne Yard divide Birtley from West Gateshead and the Team Valley Trading Estate to the North. The totemic Angel of the North is in Birtley. The millenial symbol of every North East development corporation’s pipe dream — Passionate People, Passionate Place.
You can see Birtley Town’s home, the Birtley Sports Complex, from the train down to London. The ground hugs the East Coast Main Line. In a blink the green pitch flashes by after row upon row of bright yellow, newly assembled, diggers and construction vehicles. The dormant heavy machinery sleeps in the yard of the Japanese Komatsu factory next door. Named after the Japanese city of Komatsu, this global multinational exports all over the world. The yellow behemoths are loaded onto HGVs and driven the short distance down Durham Road, the old Great North Road, to link up with the A1(M) motorway and the man machine network. The factory has been in Birtley for over 30 years. In Japanese Komatsu means small pine tree.
The large air circular conditioning units of the AEI Cables factory were a previous sign you were passing Birtley Town’s ground. The factory adjoined the south side of Birtley’s pitch and these rooftop and rotund blackened forms were an impressive sight. I was excited about seeing them and not being on a train. Unfortunately they’ve gone. The AEI factory closed in 2017 and its demolition was near complete. Brian, the commitee member with whom I chatted about groundhopping, used to work there. 26 years before redundancy, 2 till 10 shiftwork. He told me the air con units never worked and it was as hot as hell in there. The management supplied the workers with salt tablets and painted the glass roof blue to try and combat the extreme heat. Temporary green shipping containers now line the south of the pitch and separate the demolished factory site from the ground.
Where are you going?
This work has not yet reached
Cessation.
The Fall, Shiftwork, 1991
