The Idler

Woking

04 August 2005

Famous residents: Shakin’ Stevens
Everybody says: “I ain’t being funny or nuffin’”
Amenities: A pond
Entertainment: An old man with Alien Hand Syndrome

The first thing you will notice when you leave Woking train station is a sign which reads - ‘Welcome to Woking, Home to All-Weather Shopping’.

You will then confronted by an underground thoroughfare which you must go thorugh to get into the town proper. This being part of the main route for a legion of WKD swilling, acned, YSL-shirted young Herberts, the passage is permeated by the stench of piss, puke and rotting kebabs.

Thus you will be initiated into Woking culture with a game played by all of its inhabitants - trying to hold your breath long enough to make it out onto the steps at the other side.

On these steps on the other side there is usually a paralytic tramp, peeting three litres of White Lightening, contentedly pissing himself and creating a quite beautiful stepped waterfall effect, the like of which you might see in say the Brecon Beacons for example.

So perhaps it is that - the noxious cocktail, the Eau de Gutter, that causes the synapses in your brain to click and shudder or perhaps more simply the other end of the tunnel really does open out upon some whole new dimension. A new dimension where morality and intelligent thought become redundant (or are “fucked off out the window” in Woking-speak). Whatever it is, when in Woking you are subject to some terrible evil force.

So you are alone, alone to shop, whatever the weather. Unless there’s a very heavy downpour, in which case the public conveniences tend to flood. You wander around the Peacock Centre aimlessly, you find yourself being hypnotized by pan-piped Roxette. Your eyes glaze.

Before you know it you’ll be “sporting and cavorting”, attending stripper’s nights and dry-humping oiled-up Tom Selleck lookalikes with the best of them. There wi’ll be no stopping you.

A month or so later and you’re out of control. You’ve taken one alcoholic Irn Brew too far and you may have forgotten that there is indeed a world beyond the Peacock Centre, which you will now refer to affectionately as ‘Peacocks’ . To slowly reintegrate yourself into society, you start going away for the odd weekend, to Calais, to Brugges or Charing Cross police station where you manage to land yourself after a particularly tremendous day at Notting Hill carnival.

When you return to Woking, everyone will of been extremely worried about you because they “don’t venture out much and it’s dangerous up in that thar smoke” and they say they heard about a girl who got gang-raped by ten men and you say, some girls get all the luck but you don’t mean it.

So the rain beats down rhythmically on the Peacocks roof and the toilets slowly overflow and Roxette is ‘Dressed for Success’, in some kind of Bolivian poncho by the sounds of it, and you know, you may never leave again.

Sarah Janes