The Ouseburn Valley

Brown light, brown beer … The Free Trade, above the quayside, and W. feels his life has peaked. Do I? Oh yes. There's nowhere finer. This is it, this is the moment …

We look out along the river to the town. Every evening I come here for a sundowner – isn't that what I told W.? Every evening! No wonder I write nothing anymore. No wonder I don't read. – 'How can you stand it? All that beer …' Every evening, I begin here with a pint or two and then head elsewhere for some more, I tell him. He shakes his head. It's madness!

But when I take him on the road that rises alongside the factories, and then down again, along the boats on the dried-up Ouseburn, he can see the charm. He could lose himself here, in the Ouseburn Valley, as I seem to have done, W. says. It would complete him, too; it would answer his needs. He'd never leave, he understands it all now.

Isn't that what I said I took from the Situationists?, W. says. The importance of eating well, of drinking only the finest beers, of wandering open-endedly through the city? He's horrified to see what psychogeography has become with me, W. says. Some spurious accounts of local history and a series of pub-crawls. What happened to politics? What happened to the desire to change the world?

It's left-wing melancholia – isn't that what I told W.? It's left-wing melancholia that leads us to drink? No more politics. There's nothing left. And so: the pub. And so: nights in the pub, nights looking for lock-ins so we can drink our way till dawn. Is this how it ends? The Ouseburn Valley is a trap, W. says. It's closed around me. I need to escape. To struggle against it. The very appeal of the Ouseburn Valley is a sign of its danger, W. says.