That’s a serious piece of life advice by the way…….whatever other things you do and however depressed you are feeling never ever go to Peterborough…..trust me, I’m a nurse !
Nor is just me that detests the place : there is, for example, a YouTube channel called ‘Turdtowns’ – the presenter’s main shctick being to highlight the worst of the towns in any area. If you think perhaps that Devon and Cornwall might be clean, pretty and touristy areas then think again : Cornwall got at least 5 hits for really rough and depressing areas with surprisingly high crime but one of the worst of the worst was given as being Peterborough. As having grown up there I heartily agree : when I was growing up there it had a kind of grimy charm but then it got cleaned up a bit, had huge ribbon estates added, the crime went up but it had all of the remaining charm sucked out. Today……it’s a faceless and soulless place….sort of a poor version of a Milton Keynes but less fun.
One of the town’s smellier features is that it often stank of Sulphur from the local brick kilns, that or the sickly sweet stink of sugar beet being rotted down in huge outdoor vats. The regular deliveries of sugar beet out of big lorries also made the roads unaccountably slick so sliding down the road off one of my bad handling motorbikes was a regular occurrence. Another feature of the town was petty crime in the shape of regular break-ins on the ribbon estate where my best biking mate lived
The last time I was there three slightly strange things happened so ……before that though one of the odd things about P’boro is that it doesn’t appear on any road signs until you are almost in it and then most of it is bypassed by the strange road system that they were building back in the 1970’s It didn’t help that we subjected ourselves to the delights of an overheated Travel lodge being run by a couple who clearly didn’t give a flying f*** and all they wanted from us was a positive review….which they certainly weren’t in any hope of getting. We’d been on the road by then for at least 300 miles of British motorway pleasure and service stations so I might well have been a bit salty.
Anyway….some of the peculiar things that happened that evening.
First is that we, somehow and by accident, found ourselves back in the inner outskirts of the town and parked at one of the big Pizza franchise outlets, – remember that I wouldn’t normally touch a Pizza franchise offering with my partner’s walking pole but then we’d been on most of the country’s excellent Motorways – which being a Sunday most of them were somewhat closed for maintenance so situation normal for summer Sunday travel.
Unusually, for a Pizza franchise on the outskirts of a very dull town there was a very red and, a bit later we found, very loud Ferrari that didn’t so much go vroom but snarled and spat like a tomcat on heat. One at our table I tried a guessing game of whom the car might belong to – definitely not us and probably not one of the staff so my best guess was the young dark skinned and dark sunglassed yoof whom I expect was trading in medicinal chemicals of some kind. Biased and definitely un PC…who me ? Who knows – the kid might have a really high paying job or the full race Ferrari was an 18th birthday present from dad. It wasn’t envy by the way as i’m a bit meh about cheapo red Ferrari’s
The next thing that amused me was the slightly faded and jaded white woman who came in with , I guess some fine P’boro progeny in tow ; the slightly interesting thing to me was that not only did she have over-tight leggings and a muffin top but was also sporting a continuous glucose monitor. Of course, and biased again, I assumed some variety of metabolic disease such as Type1 or 2 DM and apparently actively managing her blood sugar. Actively managing I thought until she pulled the monitor off and promptly ordered a bucket sized Coca Cola for her and her progeny. From thinking ‘actively managing’ I quickly changed my mind to ‘actively gaming’ but equally wondered how she would have explained either the gap in readings or, had she kept it on, explained the stratospheric blood glucose reading that would have ensued.
Here’s how I see that – I’m a nurse obviously and I happen to think that continuous blood glucose monitoring coupled with a bluetooth style smartphone recording app is just about the best thing since sliced white bread. You might use such a device to help treat unstable Diabetes and get a much better outcome than if you had to do random ‘sticks’. You might also use it Attia style to tryb and work out which foodstuffs are giving you a high insulin spike…..or you might, as in the case of the P’Boro chav just game it and then lie to your GP or Diabetes CNS about why you had no readings for several hours coincidentally just as you consumed a bucket size cola.
Here’s the last thing that happened that day and this one worried me more than a little.
If you know any nurses they might often comment that they suss people out fairly quickly and usually what they are referring to is something about their body language, posture or behaviour that doesn’t seem quite right – as was the case with me that day. So, we’re at the table and the young lass taking the orders bounces up to take our order except that she ‘read’ as a bit over keen and brittle – almost a bit desperate somehow. I ‘switch on’ to that kind of thing and it was then that I noticed the multiplicity of scars starting at both wrists and running up her forearms – some of the scars were obviously old and some were fresh looking. Iv’e dealt with the aftermath of self-abusers many times when they have tried and succeeded to cut themselves and this girl stood out a mile as a self abuser and I don’t think it had been a one time thing but looked more like a regular occurrence.
I thought to ask her whether she was OK but then also felt it best not to and leave her be, as an employer or manager I would have definitely taken her aside for a discrete chat but as simply another member of the public I felt that whatever it was it was only her business and I suspect would have seemed intrusive to her…..It was a kind of 50/50 thing and I felt it best to let her be and do her job…….you have to wonder though.
Now, you know you’re going to get a double entendre, very non PC coment or the like so I won’t disappoint you all today.
-Peterborough is the kind of place where, if you’re young and vulnerable and say got something abusive going on in the background then it’s exactly the kind of place that you might be driven to taking a razor to your wrists.
My abiding memory of P,Boro is what a casually violent place even on the moderately upscale housing estate where we first lived : I got my first smackdown just a week into going to a new school there. After that, a fight and a bloody nose were regular features of being at a secondary school where easy violence was just normal. Apart from that the town had a very bad football team – my first job was at the ground – and large scale gang fights were average for a home engagement. My last beating was on the way home from working at the ground and the ‘perps’ were just a bunch of skinheads looking to roll a local on their way home to somewhere as equally depressing.
If you remember anything about the 1970’s it might be that you remember football being a ‘nasty’game and at the time was played in a very dull way – especially at the bottom-feeder clubs like Peterborough. One thing that I remember from actually working there was that we had special squad of police ‘specials’ whose job it was to keep the tribes in check. One of the specials was a big Lincolnshire lad, name of Geoff Capes – sort of a cross between a grizzly bear and a tank – his job, when trouble kicked off was to wade in and drag the trouble out. I actually saw him one time wade into a chanting crowd and wade out again with a troublemaking skinhead under each arm and casually throwing both of them into the back of a police van……justice was a bit direct in those days
The town (actually a shitty city) has changed a lot in the 50 years since I made my escape, now it’s just another mediocre place with samey same shops that has been enriched by diversity as the press would have us believe. In fact it’s been so hugely enriched that my late mother’s life was made immeasurably richer when she was violently assaulted by a young, black and out of work petty criminal who was already well known to the local plod.
Yeah that’s Peterborough for you.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 