Farewell Spiteville. It was nice loathing you.
A piece of brick whizzing past your head as you return from the shops at night. A car pulling up with the occupants making threats about knicking your bike, the strangers entirely full of anger as they hear a southern accent. Being spat at when you refuse to give a stranger money. Would you want to live here? This is a post-script since leaving Skem, after having been in Wigan for four weeks. Leaving behind the grim concrete buildings, a populance full of hate to any one perceived as an outsider, or heaven forbid, someone who works.
I suppose you might ask me what the plan was, moving there? Simple-I wanted somewhere with cheap rent, not wanting to waste my inheritance, so thought I was being ever so wise. Deep down I think it may have been my equivalent of the wool shirt monks used to wear as a self imposed sufferance. I had that sufferance for a year and don't intend to return.
An airless, noiseless vacuum is what it feels like. It's neither a town, village, city, but a sprawl of houses of unemployed families built around warehouses that were intended to provide work for the over-spill from Kirkby. Now the overspill are stranded. And they're angry, very angry.
After moving there I had a brief moment of respite when I found work in a hotel ion Guernsey for 5 months. When I got back I enjoyed my time off-for a while. Went for a three day trip to Amsterdam with work mates from Guernsey. It was 5 months until I got out. I coped with it through drinking in Ormskirk, sometimes starting at four in the afternoon. Seven miles separates the two places, and to avoid taxi fare I'd cycle, and I'd cycle back pissed, sometimes being stopped by the police.
I was very anxious and depressed from the situation-the dual problem of being unemployed and trapped in Skem, and would gaze longingly at job vacancies in foreign destinations as a sweet escape. From head to pillow and getting up in the morning, the days seemed to run in an endless chain. I even trekked for hours around the labyrinthine industrial estates, nearly getting run over on a bizarre one way system, in an effort for work. I returned fruitless. On the way out of the estate I walked up some concrete steps which were overrun with weeds, and looked like no one had walked up them for years. It looked like something from Chernobyl.
I suppose you might ask me what the plan was, moving there? Simple-I wanted somewhere with cheap rent, not wanting to waste my inheritance, so thought I was being ever so wise. Deep down I think it may have been my equivalent of the wool shirt monks used to wear as a self imposed sufferance. I had that sufferance for a year and don't intend to return.
An airless, noiseless vacuum is what it feels like. It's neither a town, village, city, but a sprawl of houses of unemployed families built around warehouses that were intended to provide work for the over-spill from Kirkby. Now the overspill are stranded. And they're angry, very angry.
After moving there I had a brief moment of respite when I found work in a hotel ion Guernsey for 5 months. When I got back I enjoyed my time off-for a while. Went for a three day trip to Amsterdam with work mates from Guernsey. It was 5 months until I got out. I coped with it through drinking in Ormskirk, sometimes starting at four in the afternoon. Seven miles separates the two places, and to avoid taxi fare I'd cycle, and I'd cycle back pissed, sometimes being stopped by the police.
I was very anxious and depressed from the situation-the dual problem of being unemployed and trapped in Skem, and would gaze longingly at job vacancies in foreign destinations as a sweet escape. From head to pillow and getting up in the morning, the days seemed to run in an endless chain. I even trekked for hours around the labyrinthine industrial estates, nearly getting run over on a bizarre one way system, in an effort for work. I returned fruitless. On the way out of the estate I walked up some concrete steps which were overrun with weeds, and looked like no one had walked up them for years. It looked like something from Chernobyl.
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