Jamie Dobson

My last date was in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire.  We’d stayed the night before in Preston, with Mark’s parents.  We got crumpets and bacon and eggs and tea and ginger nuts.  I mentioned I couldn’t get Ginger Nuts in Holland and so, the next morning, his Mum picked me up a double pack from ASDA.  They lasted a day or so.

The gig in Sowerby Bridge was in an old pub – 1751 – in a low ceilinged room with dark furniture and Yorkshiremen.  Hoggart wrote that there is an overemphasis on the working classes.  We at once have a strong admiration for their potential and therefore feel pity when they don’t manifest it.  But we, the working classes, are just like every other class: mediocre.  Exceptional people, as Baldwin liked to tell us, are, well, exceptional – ‘white people often seem to expect Negroes to produce nothing but exceptions, the fact is that Negroes are really just like everybody else.  Some of them are exceptional and most of them are not.’  Replace white people with the middle classes and Negroes with Yorkshireman and you have England. So pity can transmogrify – easily, in my experience – into heartbreak.  I am never more at home than I am in Yorkshire.

To acknowledge your suffering is to invite mockery.  There’s vast quantities of both in the heartland.  The electric wit – ‘he’s got his fuckin’ Songs of Praise jumper on’ – is a side-effect of this.  We give up who we are in exchange for membership to the group.  At the same time, the people in the room that night for Signe and Peter have, at least momentarily, rejected the mainstream and demanded something more diverse than Corrie vs. EastEnders.  They want a rich life.  The Full Catastrophe.

The gig moved forward.  It was, uncharacteristically, riddled with errors.  This served only to endear the artists to the crowd.  (To show vulnerability is to create a contract of coercion, to give these bastards bullets to fire; or, put differently, is the beginning of trust – Yorkshire people like this for it is us (human) and them (perfect)).  The crowd demanded an encore.  We got picked up by an old Indian man in a minivan.  He played – I don’t really know for sure – a sort of Bollywood CD.  It wailed.  I howled with it doing my best imitation of Shiva.  The Dobson Shiva.  We couldn’t stop laughing.  We drank all the Whiskey.  I tried to sleep.  Steph was like a crazed Orangutan.  The night fizzled out with an drunken argument about Labyrinth and its soundtrack, which the girls have played everyday in the car – ‘dance magic dance, jump magic jump’.  Bell’s whiskey had obliterated all superegos.  Control was gone.  The three amigos ruled.

The next morning I awoke.  To my right was the empty bottle.  It’s back was facing me.  It said, ‘Enjoy Bell’s Responsibly’.  I remember thinking, ‘it depends on your definition of responsible’.

The morning reestablished some sort of normality.  We all looked rough.  I got the guys to pose for one last photograph.  It ended where it began.  With Yorkshire in shot, with all her potential, and pity, and all her heartbreak.  They are Steph Guy, Mark Coleman, Signe Tollefsen and Peter Schuyff.  I am Jamie Dobson.  Good luck, and goodbye.