Packing up and Moving Out: Portsmouth

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We're going to Mexico!

I'm sitting in an empty, echoey flat on a Sunday morning. My lovely parents, having helped me pack up the remainder of my belongings (which, frankly, felt like the majority of my belongings...bloody possessions...), have left me here to both give the flat a final cleaning and to get over the symptoms of slight alcohol poisoning from Friday night's debacle-filled leaving party from my beloved school (sorry guys, I'm a handful, but I love you.)

Leaving work, moving house, going to Mexico: three things you normally wouldn't do in a week if you had any sense. Luckily, I have some (Friday notwithstanding) and actually moved most of my stuff a few weeks ago to a nice lockup near my folks' house. I've cancelled my rent, utilities, etc. or at least tried to, and am sitting here with my computer, a box of cleaning products, and a complete reluctance to get anything done before I have a Shakeaway 'Tim' milkshake and a wander around the town I have loved living in so much.

Portsmouth is a bizarre place. Aside from the Uni students' hangouts, there is almost mowhere to see live music, and there are no bookshops past the lone Waterstones on Commercial Road. Bits of it are like Brighton - Southsea has the requisite cool little alt shops and bistros, and a festival of its very own every year, and the centre of town is full of studenty haunts, some chain and some indie. Bits of it are like the worst bits of London - my road, despite having the super-new Admiralty Quarter block at the end (which, until today, I have been lucky enough to live in) and the beautiful Historic Dockyard, housing the Warrior, Victory and Mary Rose, is apparently the most deprived area of the city, full of council and Naval blocks, and 16-year-old couples pushing buggies, often in their pyjamas. And then bits of it are Gunwharf Quays - a totally disinfected version of the old quays, now full of chain shops offering warehouse prices, chichi flat blocks (including 'Lipstick Tower', our 'Gherkin') and actually quite alright pubs and restaurants (except HaHa!, which even its own staff hates!). It's an odd old place alright, but I do love to walk through it on a Sunday morning to go and look at the boats and tall ships in mooring, and to get to Sally Port on the chain walk, to watch the ferries and sailboats in the Solent and see the sea-frets roll in from the Isle of Wight, or look back at the Quays from Spice Island, where the first potato landed, and where you can get a nice pint and sit outside waving to ferries if you're that way inclined. I'm not, well not right now, but i think I'm going to go and have the walk at least in a minute, before all the cleaning, to get it out of my system.

That, of course, is Portsmouth from a pedestrian's perspective. I am, and probably always will be, a pedestrian, or public-transport-tourist. It bodes well for Mexico that this is my preferred method of gettng around as we'll be spending quite a lot of our time on buses going "Ooh, look!" out of the window. I like to look, hopefully observantly. To this end I am including a write-up of my favourite Pompey walk - to the Co-Op and back - which I wrote on my fb notes page a while ago. While I go get milkshake, reminisce, and tidy, here it is:

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Queen Street to The Hard

Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 11:24pm ·
Stepping out onto the street, the air is cold and slightly crisp. The night is moving on and the sky is just about to get completely dark. My heels, newly-replaced with metal caps this time, click satisfyingly as I stride out into the street. Glancing back, I see Geoff is on duty tonight, watching tv at the concierge desk in the base of the Tower, on the other side of the funnel-shaped building to the ‘vagina with teeth’ sculpture that Hilary named.

I step across the road to the Municipal Anchors, real recycling, history and climbing frames for tourist kids, and walk on. Across the road, the sporadically open The George is very defiantly shut, almost shuttered, without a light on in the entire building. It’s been a mystery throughout the year that I’ve been here; it seems to have been through a few owners, but the sign has said _H_ GEORGE throughout, and it never seemed to have many punters. Once or twice it seemed to be doing business as an Inn, with a semi-naked and scrawny man smoking out of the upstairs window.

I cross the road, wondering briefly if that Taxi is actually going to stop for me as it careens down the street at well above the 20 limit. On the other side of the road is the abandoned pub, now no lights on - the upstairs light burned for 6 months straight and I wondered who was paying the electricity bill before vandals broke the windows and turned it off for good - and looking even more boarded up than ever. With the empty Brunel Building and the Pall looming behind it, it suddenly looks strong rather than helpless, an old and tired but defensive man, looking up through straggly eyebrows. The upstairs windows, broken, stream ragged nets through them and, inexplicably, hanging mobiles of stars. The breeze swings them gently, and I wonder who played with them last.

I walk on, past another anchor next to the lurid green Ship and Castle, still advertising that “All our food is cooked with ‘fresh’ ingredients” and completely immune to the titters caused. On to The Hard itself, The Warrior is happily sitting set as usual, surrounded by adoring tugs, and wheeling seabirds scream. The Hard is sedate; it’s not yet half time, and glancing in the window of The Ship Anson shows ranks of men with their faces aglow to the screen, breath baited. The Fat Man, his girth quite literally to his knees, a foot at least past the bottom of his ever-beige polo shirt, is standing in his usual place, leaning on the bin with a pint in his hand, and staring out to sea. Well, to Gosport. When he’s there I can never not look; I wonder how he gets himself around, the weight of his own flesh must be so much to bear. Don’t they let him sit in the pub? Or does he stand here, leaning to take the weight of his weight off his back, alone and ignoring the stares of passers-by because they are easier to ignore than the stares inside the pub. He is so loney.

I pass him, and the white flats - Something House - seeing that their ranks of postboxes have been battered and some are broken half-open. I’m nearing the Co-Op now, the object of my jaunt, and passing the boarded-up Ship Leopard and the closed Expo. Expo houses real dinosaur eggs and, apparently, a 20-foot dinosaur called Boris. I say apparently because I haven’t been in to see it yet. It’s closed on Sundays and Mondays, the only days I remember it’s there, and by 4pm, about the time I normally take this walk. It’s a mystery as to why it’s there at all and how it sustains itself, as it doesn’t seem to have any links to the area - we’re not exactly the Jurassic coast - and I’ve never seen anyone go in. I keep promising myself I will.

Arriving at the Co-Op, I say hi to Silvia and find my treats, before coming back to the counter. On the way I pause to observe that girl who was in Eastenders and was the bionic woman’s wonky eyes on the front of TV Quick, as she stands next to an alarmed David Tennant (incidentally, that’s how my landlord spells ‘tenant’, not a great sign he’s very competent at this renting lark, as is neither the fact that he both sent me my new tenancy agreement two months late and still hasn’t put up a wardrobe bar in the hall cupboard a year after I moved in).

Silvia is alert to the woman who came in after me, twitching like a bird each time she hears the clink of bottles in the alco aisle, and after I’ve paid my pennies for my treat she tells me the woman is going to kick off when she refuses to serve her; she can tell she’s wasted. Silvia’s eyeliner is electric blue today. Silvia’s lovely, and gives me free things when they won’t scan. We’re having a nice chat about the poor lady next door who has mental problems and who has taken to wearing disguises when she comes in so they don’t recognise her and refuse to serve her after she came in in a rage and broke things, whose husband is constantly coming in to look for her, poor love. Then the other woman, swaying, dumps two magnums of Lambrini on the counter. Silvia waves me off, and I’m back on the damp street, facing the Pompey Stand Up, still selling treats and hot dogs at 9pm. The metallic shriek of the Brighton train arriving into the Harbour pier-come-station is faintly reassuring, as behind me the woman starts shouting, as Silvia said she would.

Back down the street the way I came. I breathe in the air and get a nose of seaweed and fresh, salty air, cooling and calming. Passing the broken postboxes at Something House I wonder if the poor mental woman might have had something to do with it. The Fat Man is gone when I pass the bin, but the door of the Portsmouth Harbour Net Fisherman’s Association, which forms one half of the tiny Seafood Shack on the harbour front, is open and the light is on, so maybe he’s gone in there. There’s hardly any traffic on Queen Street or The Hard at this time, and what little traffic there is creates a warm, rushing sound, like waves shushing the shore.

Rounding the corner again, looking up to see the beautiful sign across the road under the golden ball-topped gates of the Historic Dockyard that tells me that 'Thif Walle was Finifed Friday the 13th of December 1711', I think the dockyard wall at this time of night looks like the wall of a prison, and the barred and vacant windows of the buildings built into it seem to echo that opinion. I never see The Invincible pub on the way out as it’s tucked down Wickham Road. Apparently it’s rough, although lately they’ve had signs outside advertising hearty homemade lasagne, which doesn’t sound too hard to me. Next to it, its wall sweeping down the street as I walk past it, is the house with the Mobility Scooter parked outside it and Norrey’s The Caterer. I have never worked out if Norrey’s still operates. It looks strangely old fashioned after the new flats and bright-green pubs. But then, this area was very old fashioned until very recently; apparently my flat is built on an old brewery, or a customs house if you listen to Major Vokes at school, and the whole of Queen Street used to be, according to the Fish And Chip man up past Zooz Tattoos and The Demon Barber, full of pubs catering for the Navy families. The George is all that remains, not even catering to the remaining Navy/council blocks mixed in with the shiny new-builds, aside from the more robust public houses on The Hard that look out across the Harbour to Gosport. Knowing this, passing the abandoned pub, with its mysterious door in the top floor that opens out onto nothing in the abandoned open lot next to it, makes the road feel sad. But then I’m past Drake House, the delightfully cheery non sequitur of a building with its boat-themed fence that always cheers me up, and I’m home. I wave at Geoff, and he smiles back.

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