Just over 6 years ago, I moved into the wide open world of Mill Road. Above Pippa’s Blinds and right in the heart. You can hear the traffic and the people and the conversations. There’s Bernard and Frank. I miss Frank because I live further up the road now and I think Bernards off somewhere at this time. And yes, for many years it was a great place to live and when someone was like ‘there’s nothing going on here’, or ‘Cambridge, it’s shit’ I’d beg to differ . But, my differings aren’t like this anymore and it’s depressing. They’re more like ‘Cambridge, you’ve lost it’. And here’s just ONE REASON why. Maybe I’ll do another, some other time, if I decide to.
If you want to buy material, for making clothes or a new hat or a burka, you can’t. Well, you can, but you gotta go to John Lewis (hey, wasn’t this Robert Sayle’s?). You wanna buy a record, well finally there’s some decent stalls on the market, but there’s no independent record shop. Your options are HMV and Fopp (see the difference). But that’s the town centre and its always been pretty heavy on the well-to-do middle class pouring forward in their masses over the weekend, sitting in their cars like rats waiting to get some discarded piece of pork from an empty bin knocked over the night before by revellers after their fun at Weatherspoons. Its OK though, we work, so we’re gonna spend. It’s the system. You’ve heard about commerce right? Anyhow, let’s talk about Mill Road. Yeah, I loved it, it played a big role in my life, shit, without moving to Mill Road, I’d never have written music like I write now (well, maybe). At least some of the songs wouldn’t have existed: The Frank Song, The 3rd Dune, Voices, Decisive Mind, probably more. But that’s not it, it was kinda special, like Mill Road was OUR bit of town. A bit that ain’t the omnipresent university, it ain’t those shops you see in the town centre and on the TV and shit, maybe yes, its slightly fucking cool. It’s like when you’d walk into the shop and they’d know your name and the post mistresses would place the stamp for you. Yeah, that type of deal but its fading fast and can’t you see it? And even that wouldn’t seem like the end of the world, but, why is it seen to be so fucking extreme to want to keep a street REAL?
The thing is you’re so fucking brainwashed you don’t take your lunches during your working day. You’re NOT PAID for that hour, you get it? Your work isn’t that important. No one’s work is. If you really enjoy your work that much, just go right ahead, but I know that most of you don’t. Get some fresh air. And if you question whether shopping at businesses that make billions off FOOD PRODUCTS while paying the farmer fuck all, isn’t really a good thing, then you’ve got to question your existence and this ridiculous society and the system which we live in, and that’s just too much. You can't see that the loss of the high street is the SYMPTOM OF A FAILING SYSTEM. It’s just a flag. The system doesn’t work for YOU. It works for the other. That’s the big boys up there with their suits and houses in multiple countries who read the Financial Times and they believe in the markets, fanatical style. You want to talk about the new religion? And yes, there is far more important stuff going on in the world and our living conditions are very high, but you know, working conditions got better for slaves, but did that make the slavery system just?
And once we loose this ability to realise that the system isn’t acting in our interest, there’s nothing to hold onto. Chains push up rental prices so independent shops can’t survive, like the ones that families run and their grandfather started and worked through man and boy. But the worst part of it is, this city doesn’t WANT to exist in this way, and that’s what I’ve realised. There’s not enough people here who feel like that. Maybe there’s not enough people in the world that feel like that. They say Cambridge is largely recession proof, so you gotta ask why, because it ain’t for people like me. It’s being built for people who commute to London and work 14 hours a day because they need more money and they want their penthouses and their handy supermarket up the road. You see all those buildings going up?
Someone told me the other day that they had a visitor from Turkey and they took him to a big shopping mall, telling him he could get everything there because he needed trousers and shirts and food and electrical goods and he stopped and looked over from the first floor up on one of those escalators and said ‘THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD’. So he saw beyond the threshold of ‘its OK, it’ll provide more jobs’ or ‘it’ll just offer some competition’, he saw the dark end, when everywhere looks like everywhere.
This is a failed attempt to sum up my dismay and the beginning of the end of a love story between myself and my home town. Meanwhile I’ve been to a Tesco’s car park and I’ve seen a thousand people who look just like you. Maybe I’ll go back to Java and play on a Gamelan or take locals for rides on a tuk tuk with a Union Jack dressed as Prince Philip.
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