Horror of Reading

Reading University campus. W. is full of dread. He has the feeling that it's about to go terribly wrong. What, our presentation? No, no — more than that, W. says. Something catastrophic is about to happen.

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell him. How could it be otherwise? On the bus out to the campus, he was already squirming. Driveways packed with Range Rovers and 4X4s … Mock Tudor houses … Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows, in great estates at the edge of everywhere … All the styles of history and mocking history, laughing at it. All the styles, and all at once. This is the end of the world, W. says. The eternal end.

Did it ever have a history, Reading? Did anything ever happen here?, W. wonders. But he knows it did. He's read about the Abbey, and he knows Oscar Wilde was imprisoned here. He might as well be imprisoned here, W. said on the bus. He might as well write his own Ballad of Reading Jail.

Of course, it’s very hard to explain Reading, the horror of Reading, W. says. What happened here? What failed to happen? He could think against Birmingham, W. says – it was easy enough: the city looks disgusting. It’s easy to think against the Bull Ring, all the more so since it’s been rebranded as BullRing. But here, where I was brought up? You can’t hold Reading apart from you in the same way as Birmingham, W. says. It isn’t as obviously repugnant. There’s nothing in particular on which to focus your disgust.

Nothing in particular … but there’s something wrong, W. says, you can sense that. Something colossal, but at the same time, hidden. – ‘The horror of Reading is yet to come’, W. says, mystically. What rough beast is slouching towards Reading to be born?

Even I have a sense of it, W. knows that. Even I am saturated with disgust when I come back here to my hometown. Even I know there’s something fundamentally wrong. Wasn’t that what drove me towards philosophy, the attempt to diagnose the horror of Reading? Isn’t that why, despite everything, I have a taste for philosophy – for European philosophy – and for the more philosophical of the European novelists, W. says.

Reading and the southeast made me think the whole, he has no doubt of that, W. says. Reading led me to philosophy and abandoned me at its doors as a foundling. And who was it who opened the door to admit me? Who who swaddled me and took me in?