get out of denver baby

horsemouth is reading lynsey hanley's estates: an intimate history - she moans on at them for their soldification of the english class system. but to horsemouth they represent the kind of housing he can afford and if he is very very lucky (and boxes very very clever) he can get - otherwise it's a grand a fucken' month to live in fucken' leytonstone (believe). (ok ok leytonstone's not so bad but a grand a month and the work to pay that would seriously tax horsemouth's will to live).

horsemouth is grateful to the estates - and when they have a fearsome reputation doubly grateful (it keeps the ponces off). not that horsemouth is some hardcase urban survivalist nutter you understand (he just talks that way after he's worked). lynsey shows us a photo of her grans house in the rhondda valley and expects us to tut tut at its poverty - to horsemouth it looks pretty good - it looks like the kind of terraced house most of his friends lived in.

horsemouth is a child of the suburbs - both sets of grandparents were farmers and lived in the countryside (and there were holidays with them) but horsemouth grew up on the edges of towns - just outside llansamlet near swansea then near bedwas just outside of caerphilly - the estate horsemouth's parents lived on was row after row of new build bungalows on hill overlooking what was soon to be the motorway. horsemouth (and his friends) played in fields that backed onto newer estates and on river banks blackened with coal dust.

later horsemouth's parents moved (in their minds moved back) to the deepest countryside they could find - it didn't suit him - he got the bus to the local town and to the sixth form college at 7.30 in the morning and got the last bus back out at 6.30 at night (herefordshire was an early adopter of bus privatisation) - it hardened his solitude and he read a lot of books. he hung around two years and some months and then came to the seaside towns - first to go to university and then to stay first in hackney and then tower hamlets (with stints in brixton, ladbroke grove, hoxton) ... and then back to hackney again and then away (before the full horror of gentrification hit). he likes it here - poplar - it's still fucked up, poor and boring - and despite horsemouth's gangster neighbours and a murder within 50 yards it feels fairly safe.

now horsemouth's parent's place feels like where horsemouth is from - somewhere not quite wales but nearly - horsemouth is proud of knowing about ten words of welsh - the walls of the classroom at school were covered with pictures of welsh rock bands - man, budgie, horsemouth forgets the others...

horsemouth never learnt to drive, this makes 'returning' to live in the countryside problematic.

horsemouth's parents generation was the generation that left to go to work, that tasted social mobility, as did horsemouth's father's parents who after the second world war moved down from yorkshire to devon emboldened by the nhs and the new welfare state (a plan to go help found an agricultural commune in new zealand had fallen through).