Words Rob Beddow 

‘Look at all the lonely people - Where do they all come from?’

My sister lives in an idyllic hamlet in Shropshire - sure there’s drugs in Shrewsbury, the council never empties your cesspit, and living a long way from civilization pushes your petrol bills through the roof, but, surprisingly, rural England’s still alive. People are generally good tempered when you go into town to shop, the view from the kitchen window can’t be bought even by Barclaycard and the kids keep their knives (generally) for Goth display.

But most of all, people don’t seem to be lost.

 As for me in the South Midlands, almost within vomiting distance of Slough, I shuttle along my concrete triangle, Oxford-London-Cambridge, and it’s the blankness that freaks me out. When my friends come here I tell them that when we visit the retail village they’ll see the ugliest and most maladjusted collection of non-sapient  Homo sapiens they will ever see. They accuse me of misanthropy and then gasp with incredulity as they see what a life of Tennants Extra and Mayfair fags can do. The London overspill, the obese, philistine hinterland of the yob diaspora.

The girl from Milton Keynes who knocks me into a shop doorway, has the full rig - muffin, Croydon facelift, bingo wings - and when I’m hit in the lower face by a wad of pallid, gelatinous, upper arm tissue, I ought to feel angry - but I don’t. I’m not there to her: I’m an oldie.

Fixated on salt, sugar, msg ,and the decent love life they can merely fantasize about in the GP’s waiting room where they wait guessing whether they‘re up the duff or not, this generation of supersize Brits seems to summarize the loneliness and pointlessness of much life here.

Take the exploding woman.

She travels on the 8.15 number X27.  At around 8.10 she receives from a little untidy woman in her 50’s a package, wrapped in foil. The older woman goes to peck Gargantua on the cheek, but with surprising agility she avoids that tiny maternal peck and she’s up the stairs of the bus, top deck, front left. Always the same. As the bus pulls out, she pulls out her Georgette Heyer, and then begins to eat. And eat. 

She is huge, perhaps 18 perhaps 19 stone, face cruelly squashed by the advancing tsunami of chins, and she spreads herself over the seat so as to deter other passengers - with her iPod so loud that her broadcast of Terry Wogan’s morning show even drowns the gangsta rap of the teenagers at the back , she begins her ritual eating. By Wendlebury, three miles up the road, she has eaten two mars bars, three packets of crisps and a bottle of Sunny Delight. Usually the fourth or fifth packet is reached by the Little Chef on the A34 and then the coughing starts - her esophagus can’t cope with the slurry of additives and so now she grunts and splutters all the time reading the homogenized romance of the library book. The velvet and brocaded couplings of a Regency fantasy that in real life must be nothing more than a chimera. Soon she will take one mouthful of Hoola Hoops too many and somewhere near the Hampton Poyle turn she will explode. Gizzards, guts and bloody pages of Jean Plaidy, causing chaos to the school run outside Gosford Hill Comp.

Everywhere there seem to be these grotesques, lost people turning themselves into some sort of lardy icon, not talking but shouting at life as they squeeze into lycra for the brief and bilious English summer. In Rowan Road the Hello Man goes out to buy his fourth Daily Mail of the morning. He has to, because through all the hours of daylight he shuttles round the town, 60 dressed as 15, matchstick legs in jeans from the market, and a hoody top stretched like a ripe plum over a belly that bobs and wobbles as he does his job. His job is to say hello to anyone he meets - he’s sharp eyed and if I cross over and cunningly try to take a detour round by the Seven Stars (‘A Family Pub for all the Family - Burger and Chips £4.65) he’s sussed me out and he’ll face me by the pet shop in Bucknell Road. “Hello.” “Lovely Morning.” Then he’s off on his errand of greeting again, stopping the mechanics at the Ford garage to tell them about the new bypass, into Tesco with little excuse but buying another Mail.

Where do they all come from? You’ll read about the gangs, the knife crime, the teenage pregnancies and rapes, but this is the real horror of the suburbs: lonely people clinging to an ageing parent, widowers, alcoholic mums whose kids have flown. They eat and they watch the shopping channel, they expand to the proportions of debilitated hippopotami, but no-one knows who they are. Sometimes the plasterers’ wives in the new Mitsubishi pause and tut as they register the untidiness of Hello Man and Exploding Woman on our tidy streets, but with little empathy. How can there be? You don’t see these poor injured saps at Homebase or Halfords - they don’t consume the right goods. I saw Exploding Woman and her mum in the pound shop on Saturday, buying past-the-sell-by Angel Cake. They looked blank, looked stranded and motiveless. Where do they all come from?