“Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole”
- The Modern Lovers

Last Thursday evening we were driving home from Wales. Clare was sitting beside me and the kids had fallen asleep on the back seat. The two grown-ups were about to have a proper grown-up conversation when a jet black Citroën Xsara Picasso overtook us somewhat aggressively. The grown-up conversation was put on hold. “The Citroën Picasso,” I snarled with mild indignation. “What do you think old Pablo would have made of that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Clare. “Why don’t you tell me. I can see you’re itching to.”

So I did:

“I think he would have hated it. I mean, there he is: this major big-ass icon of the 20th Century, a bona fide cultural heavyweight who revolutionised art and transformed the way in which we see the world. People like that don’t want to end up becoming synonymous with a safe and sensible family car. It’s bad for the image. If you ask me, I think he’d be pretty damned furious that his descendants were so willing to whore his name off so indiscriminately.”

“Really?” said Clare, somewhat dryly. “I bet they didn’t get a penny.”

“Really?” said I, somewhat dimly. “That makes it worse. At least, I think that makes it worse.”

There was a moment’s silence as I gathered my thoughts and watched the red tail lights of the popular MPV fade into the distance.

“It’s all about design principles,” I continued. “If you’re going to name a car after someone like Picasso then at least try to remain faithful to your source of inspiration. A proper Citroën Picasso wouldn’t look anything like that. For one thing, there’d be none of those functionally streamlined elegant curves. The real deal would be cube-like, wilfully asymmetrical and feature oblique references to the Spanish Civil War. Plus, all the wheels would be different sizes.”

“It’d be a bugger to drive,” said Clare. “You struggle with parallel parking at the best of times.”

I was now in full-on monologue mode, so I managed to deftly side-step my partner’s sarcasm: “Why stop with Picasso?” I said. “I want to see a range of family-friendly, design classic MPVs inspired by the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Just imagine a Citroën Dalí! A vulgar egg-shaped monstrosity with a massive pair of waxed windscreen wipers, a melting speedo and a Sat Nav that refers to itself in the third person.”

“Or a Citroën Pollock,” said Clare.

“What’s that like?” I asked.

“It’s like a Citroën Picasso that’s been in an accident.”

We spent yesterday in Wales visiting my old friends Jude & Jonathan at their secluded lakeside retreat located somewhere between Llanidloes and God Knows Where (Dduw Chnotiau Ble). I introduced my old friends to my new family and, for the second time in my life, tried to water ski. It was not a dignified sight.

The journey involved us driving up some ridiculously steep inclines, negotiating some svelte-like country lanes and indulging in the kind of hairy off-road antics that my modest Citroen Saxo is not best equipped for. The Saxo might be fine as an urban runabout, but last time I checked ‘driving through a field filled with sheep’ wasn’t one of its unique selling points.

(It’s sitting outside the house now, looking slightly forlorn and covered in a generous coating of babyshit-brown mud. My neighbours must think I’ve taken up rally driving.)

In any case, as we approached our destination we saw a rather disturbing sight. Next to a particularly treacherous bend on a particularly skinny stretch of a particularly vertigo-inducing country lane sat the corpse of a white Vauxhall Corsa. It was smashed to smithereens and looked as though it had been sitting there for quite some time. The most disturbing thing about it, though, was that it was covered in graffiti. Scrawled all over the car in black spray paint was the following sinister message:

HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA

Maybe it was because I watched too many horror films at an impressionable age, but I couldn’t help but feel ill at ease. Was this an omen of some kind? Should we turn back? Had we stumbled into some weird, Deliverance-style pocket of wrong?

As it happened, the day passed without incident. I can only assume that the white Corsa festooned in HAs was some kind of weird tribute to the late Heath Ledger.

We arrived back home from Hull the other week safe and sound and ever-so-slightly knackered. Or at least I was. Knackered, that is. Clare, Lily and Optimus were just safe and sound. As I mentioned previously, we went to Hull to collect a pram that can change into a pushchair and that’s why we call it Optimus Pram. Or, at least, that’s why I do.

I was a student at Hull University between 1990-1993, so returning to my old stomping ground for the first time in a long time was always going to be weird. Over the years I’ve carefully maintained a massive stockpile of rose-tinted recollections associated with the place. I suppose that’s something that most people who went to college do, with the possible exception of graduates from Sarajevo Poly.

Still, Hull was where I met some of my closest and most trusted friends. In that respect I’ll always have a lot to thank it for. During those three years there were good times, bad times and some extremely batshit crazy times. This was, after all, the place where I was interviewed on a local radio news programme after fleeing for my life from an exploding aerosol factory. It was where I spent every Sunday afternoon at a workingman’s club that offered a regular line-up of bingo, live yodelling and striptease. It was where I shared a house with three friends and a 6-foot tall mechanical bear. It’s a place that’s hard-wired into my history and has helped make me the person I am today. In that respect, then, it probably has a lot to answer for.

As Clare, Lily and I approached Hull the other week and I caught my first, still-breathtaking glimpse of that ridiculously long suspension bridge spanning the Humber Estuary, I found myself thinking of all those other times I did this journey, back when my Dad did the driving and I just struggled with directions. My dad passed away in 1995, and now – years later – it was my turn to be the responsible adult sitting behind the wheel. I mused on the way that life has a funny way of throwing up such ironies, until I remembered that I still struggle with directions.

After picking up the pram from Hessle, we made our way towards the city centre. As I’d expected, things had changed in the way that things invariably do. Having lived in Birmingham for most of my life I know that modern British city centres are more than a wee bit partial to extensive plaster surgery. Hull, it seems, was no exception. The change in the retail landscape was the first thing I noticed: the Jacksons chain of regional supermarkets had all turned into Sainsbury’s Locals, the Armadillo comic shop was now a coffee shop and the sight of the massive new St Stephen’s Shopping Centre (next to the revamped Paragon railway station) caused my eyes to do a reasonable impersonation of Marty Feldman’s. Hull’s been hit hard by High Street homogenisation, I alliterated wistfully to myself.

This feeling swiftly passed as we swiftly passed the neighbouring LA’s nightclub. From the outside, at least, it looked exactly the same as I remembered it from 18 years’ ago. This was quite an achievement, as back then it looked rather dated.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” as they say in South Yorkshire.

I’ve never been a design nut, architecture addict or buildingophile, but when I first saw Le Grand Rex in Paris I was reduced to the state of a lovesick puppy.

It was years’ ago (don’t ask how many), during my first trip to Paris. I was staying at a far-from-swanky hotel just a few far-from-swanky streets from Gare du Nord station and, on the first day, went for a reasonably long walk. As someone who only started travelling abroad when I was all grown-up and could afford to pay for it myself, I was doing then what I still do now: getting intentionally lost as whilst immersing myself in the alien ambiance of it all.

I can’t remember the specifics of the route, possibly because the route was far from specific. I headed in a vaguely southerly direction on the basis that I was pretty certain that the ‘Nord‘ in Gare du Nord meant ‘north’. By my standards, that’s about as sophisticated as it’s ever likely to get. Anyway, at some point I must have ended up wandering down the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière because, when I reached the point where it intersects with Boulevard Poissonnière, I saw it:

It stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t need to be a design nut, an architecture addict or a buildingophile to know that I was looking at one Goddamned sexy building. For one thing, it couldn’t have looked more outrageously French if it tried. It was so quintessentially cool, so effortlessly elegant and so proudly Parisian that I half expected it to light up a Citannes, raise a pair of eyebrows and shrug. I was captivated. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I might even have fallen in love.

The fact it was very obviously a cinema probably had a lot to do with it. I’ve been embroiled in a long-term and occasionally tempestuous love affair with the cinema for most of my life. ever since I first saw Star Wars at the Birmingham Gaumont at the tender age of seven. The Gaumont – in case you don’t already know – was a grand, two-tiered, Art Deco picture palace that once boasted the largest screen in Europe. I spent many a Saturday afternoon there, feeding my growing celluloid addiction by greedily devouring movies, often indiscriminately. I can still remember the walnut panelled foyer, the huge velvet curtains and the ladies selling ice cream in the aisle. There was something almost sacred and ritualistic about it all. It will always be one of my favourite places in the world.

The Gaumont, like so many of its kith and kin, was closed in 1983 and bulldozed out of existence in 1986. Others didn’t even last that long. Located a mere ten minutes’ walk from my family home, the magnificent Kingstanding Odeon might have been a serious rival for my affections if it wasn’t for the inconvenient fact that it was turned into a bingo hall eight years before I was born. As you drive through the suburbs you’ll often catch a glimpse of other, long-abandoned cinemas, now nothing more than fossilized remains of splendour. In Birmingham, they are a thing of the past. In this part of the world ornate picture palaces and movie temples are about as rare as rocking horse shit.

But not in Paris, it seems. As I looked at Le Grand Rex I was reminded of those Saturday afternoons at the Gaumont. The buildings, after all, were of similar age: the Parisian cinema first opened its doors in December 1932, some 18 months after its Brummie counterpart. Like the Gaumont, the facade of Le Grand Rex was bold and classically Art Deco, while the Haussmann-endorsed pan coupe corners gave it a distinctly Parisian flavour. And while the Gaumont once had the largest screen in Europe, Le Grande Rex was (and still is) the current holder of that title.

Inside, the scale of the main auditorium – 2,800 seats with two balcony levels – left me in the same state of awe I felt as a child. The baroque decor, the otherworldly elegance and the vaulted ceiling festooned with stars transported me to another place and another state of mind, somewhere that I thought no longer existed. This was somewhere special, somewhere sacred, somewhere timeless. This was something else.

I can’t think of a better place in the world to see a Tom Waits concert.

I almost forgot to mention… after leaving Hafod Elwy Hall in Denbighshire last Sunday, Clare and I embarked on a Keruoac-lite drive around North Wales. We headed west along the A5 and through Betws-y-Coed (or, as my brother prefers to call it, “Betsy Cohen”) before veering off in a random direction to see where the Road would take us.

Well, it took us past Moel Siabod and Snowdon and through some of the most rugged and gorgeous landscapes I’ve seen in quite some time. We stopped at a few places, took quite a few photos and ended up in Portmeirion. As you do.

In the popular imagination – well, in mine, at least – Portmeirion is the place where Patrick McGoohan’s famously numerophobic, former-government agent was sent to prison for a resignation he didn’t explain. As a huge fan of the cult 60s show The Prisoner, it was weird walking past all those odd buildings, so many of which have been hard-wired into my imagination since Channel 4 repeated the series in 1985. I was pleasantly surprised at how little The Village had changed in the 40-plus years since the show was originally made: Portmeirion’s Pantheon, for instance, was still recognisable as the green domed home to Number 2, while the stone boat on the shore still looked as mad and as incongruous as it did back then. Then again, it’s a boat. It’s made out of stone. How could it not look mad and incongruous?

Anyhow, here’s Portmeirion:

And there’s me, up there, by Number 2’s ornate lair:

And there I am again, outside Number 6’s home, cheerily refusing to be “pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.”:

I guess it pays to put your trust in the Road: sometimes it can take you to where you’ve always wanted to go.

This weekend Clare & I are off to Snowdonia. We’ll be stopping at Hafod Elwy Hall, deep in the gorgeous Denby moors. This is what it looks like:

Yummy.

The hotel owners were kind enough to email us instructions on how to get there. It’s not located in what you might call the most accessible of places. In fact, the quaint Irish expression “The arse end of nowhere” springs sluggishly to mind:

You will pass Cerrig-y-Drudion. A few miles after that you will take the A543 signed ‘Denbigh’ on the right. (just before Pentrefoelas). Go 5.6 Miles. You will see a telegraph pole on the left with wires going over the road toward the right. Turn right in to the track at that point. (Italics mine)

I don’t think I’m clued up enough on telegraph poles to recognise one from another. I certainly couldn’t identify one in a police line-up, let alone whilst driving in the dark. Proper dark, that is, not city dark. It never really gets that dark in the city.

The last mile or so of the journey will be along a rough, suspension-knackering country track. In the proper dark. I hope my functional-yet-fashionable Citroen Saxo finds it in its bonnet to forgive me.

Needless to say, I can’t wait…