Every six months we take the boys to Aberdeen on a Saturday for a treat.
They get to pick the means of transport, the entertainment, the snacks, the lunch and the shops to visit.
As their birthdays sandwiched this weekend, we thought we’d treat them by making today their city trip.
They chose to travel by train (good as it’s easier and cheaper than the car), to watch a film (Alvin and the Chipmunks, fun — for kids!), to have soft drink, popcorn and sweets (all vanished very, very quickly), to have lunch at Burger King (they acknowledge that it isn’t as good as “real food” but it’s exciting and different), and to visit various toy shops.
The Other Half and I find it very wearing, not just because two over-excited, mega-happy, sugar-rushing, fidget fiends are something of a handful, but because cities are so screamingly mad and stressful.
We arrived at 1053, immediately finding ourselves in a melee of people rushing to get through the station barriers or, like us, queuing to pay a single ticket clerk for the journey (the conductor managed to vanish en route as if abducted by aliens).
Why does everyone have to get through the three gates at once? Surely their lives aren’t going to end if they relax a little, walk a little more slowly to the gates, smile and nod someone else through, and just space things out a little?
Then we wandered out and up to the cinema where we encountered the opposite problem — grindingly slow service from brain-dead zombies and several mums, with crazed children, who were totally dipsy, disorganised and flustered.
Again, all that was needed was to take time to get organised and then get on with it (both staff and customers) but no, everyone had to get flustered, stressed and more disorganised.
And that made things take even longer, increasing their stress levels still further.
We finally bought our tickets, drinks and snacks, went through and watched the film before heading back out into the mad, mad world of the city. (Amid chuckling as we followed the bopping, dancing Big Lad out of the cinema.)
As we did the various things we wanted to do, we were constantly shoved, pushed, knocked and jostled by people who had to charge here, there and everywhere, their plastic carriers bags flailing madly in their wake.
We watched in amazement as groups of women in their late teens/early 20s went past in huddles, not talking to each other as once would have been the case but instead all speaking 3,000 words a minute into their mobiles.
Erm, can’t you speak to each other directly any more?
Then there were the blokes. It didn’t matter whether they were in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s, but the uniform appearedto be jeans, football strips, spiked hair with half a tonne of gel, a hands-free headset superglued to the skull, and a trailing cloud of dangerously volatile BO and Lynx.
The rich ones wore genuine strips and designer jeans, the poor ones highly flammable knock-offs.
What was even more shocking was just how unhealthy, ill, stressed, pasty-faced and peely-wally most people were.
Oh, and about two-thirds of them were corpulent to boot.
Mix a fair few stick insects into the mix, add some very, very dodgy fashions—a size 16 butt squeezed into low-slung size 10 stretch jeans tucked into 1980s style soft-leather ankle boots seems to be the look—and lots of skin disorders, and you have a nausea inducing scene in front of you.
Ugh. City life is definitely not good for them and is increasingly disturbing for us—and we both lived in London for a good few years.
I worked in an office on Oxford Street for a while, but only remember it getting as bad as Aberdeen is now on an ordinary Saturday in the middle of the pre-Christmas rush or during the sales.
Memory is a dodgy thing, but the Other Half and I both think cities are definitely getting worse.
It used to be that the key to survival in a city was to combine wary respect for each other’s small bit of personal space with just the right amount of assertiveness to get things done without causing real aggravation.
Today, it felt like there was much more overt aggression, hostility and barely restrained violence with no respect or time for anyone else. (And yes, it’s exactly the same as I increasingly experience on the roads as a cyclist.)
As the OH, the boys and I were finishing lunch amidst the hordes of hyper-zombies, we realised it was just coming up to 1500.
With a choice of a 1523 train or a 1715 train (as originally planned), we decided to borrow a leaf from the city dwellers’ book and rushed madly to the station.
We made it with five minutes to spare, settled into our seats with huge sighs and escaped two hours earlier than planned.
The chickens and pigs were just as pleased to see us as we were to see them.
Four hours in the city every six months is more than enough for us.
Greetings from California!
I stumbled upon your blog today. Although I’m guessing we live very differnt lives, I enjoyed perusing your site.
Blessings to you and yours.
teeveebee
Oh that was a great story. Our local town, some 43km away is only 6,000 people and that is enough for us these days. Relating to your story, a few years ago we won a Westpac award for the top 10 cafes in NSW. We were the only country cafe to be placed in the top 10, so it was a big deal for us to attend the awards night in Sydney. Well, off we went, driving the 500 km to th event, and booking into a 5 star motel (planning to spend a few days in the big smoke).
We knew we were in trouble, fairly early on, when we couldn’t understand the shop assistants (they spoke at such a speed and in a drolling monotone, unrecognizable to us, we wondered if we had somehow traveled to another planet. So, so many people, and as you say, all rushing everywhere and no- one talking to anyone. I got the giggles when we were walking down one of the main streets and I realised that every single person was talking on mobile phone, hundreds of them. Mmmm makes you wonder, seemed strange to me communicating with the unseen, while in the presence of so many potentially interesting other people.
Oh well, off to the award night, DH donning a kilt (which was another interesting story - maybe another time) to be faced with more people talking but not communicating, still rushing, although there was nowhere to go and one of the most mixed cuisines that I have ever tasted (funny as many of the people attending were chefs) - pretty awful in fact, most flavours clashing. Anyway, after the awards we decided to go for a drink - I won’t go into that experience ha! but only to say that city people certainly entertain themselves in an entirely different manner. Back to the motel with the decision firmly in place to return home asap. We decided at that point, city life really wasn’t for us at all, booked out the next morning to RUSH back home.
Since I am never going to be in a position to understand the daily trials and tribulations you endure, it is a little funny to see you go through mine. I guess a little “taste” of the city a couple of times a year is enough for you.
What about the lads? How did they take to the frantic nature of the city?
I can appreciate those feelings. 30 years ago I lived in Worcestershire and the lure of the big city (London) was great. It took about 9 months of living there for all the attraction of being where everything is and happening to wear off. I’ve gradually managed to live further and further away from ‘civilisation’. It’s calmer, I’m calmer.
There is just no comparison to being where you can hear the birds sing, experience silence and above all take time to smell the flowers.
Your boys are lucky to experience both, they may get the urge for the big city when they are older but they at least will know there is another way too.
We can’t go into Aberdeen any more, especially not after 11am on Saturday, as my lad can’t take the hustle and bustle and shuts down. But it is manic isn’t it. Perth is not so bad, mainly traffic. Dundee is in between the two.
We go once a year to Edinburgh, using the park and ride at the bridge, to the annual panto. But we try to avoid busy Saturdays and rush hours.
you’ve managed longer than i could stoney, well done mate.
I’ve watched the odd horror film with a post-apocalypitic vision of decaying cities occupied only by flesh-eating zombies, plague survivors and feral mutants. Well, Aberdeen increasingly resembles those films.
We were amazed by how many buildings were boarded up, falling apart or crumbling into disrepair. The back streets, where we went to escape the hordes, were even worse!
Add in the mobs of frenzied, brain-dead people, and it felt like increasingly like we were on a really disturbing film set.
I’m starting to think the survivalists have got it wrong. The End Time isn’t coming — it’s already happened!! Or at least it has in Aberdeen…
By the way, heading for the other extremity of the weekend, Happy Bithday Wee ‘un and Happy Unbirthday Big Lad…
By the way, heading for the other extremity of the weekend, Happy Bithday Wee ‘un and Happy Unbirthday Big Lad…
You are so brave to choose to go into a city on a Saturday. I live in a city and have not gone in to the city on a Saturday since I can remember! Actually now try to work out the quietest day of the week to go in (if there is such a thing). Even my teenage daughter only goes in for the cinema and unavoidable shopping.
The whole problem has been worsened by a decision to stop all cross city buses. This means everyone crossing the city changes buses in the city centre. Not in a bus station but actually on the streets, thus increasing the human traffic and haste to get to the bus stop, plus the number of people queueing at the bus stops.
Roll on retirement and escape to a quieter space.
City life in general is not for us either. In our tiny hamlet, too small to be even a village (my definition) things are calm and most of the sounds comes from farm animals and birds with an occasional car or three.
In places like Sydney, London, New York or Paris I find life too hectic and rushed. So they have been enjoyed in small doses, but home always beckons and it is fantastic to open the gate and step into our version of heaven on earth.
We are over 40 km from the nearest rural city in NSW and each visit means a lovely drive on a winding country road, with the return trip always the best.
I too am amazed at the number of mobile phones stuck to ears as well as earpieces hooked to various types of electronic (battery) gadgetry when I visit busy places. The funniest sight recently was two teenagers sharing the one IPod (I think) with each lass having one ear piece as the wandered along the street.
“size 16 butt squeezed into low-slung size 10 stretch jeans”
Here in the States, that is called a Muffin-Top, for the way the…er…well, you’ll figure it out.
I agree with your post100%. Why are people so hurried and rude? And please tell me I’m not just saying that because I’m getting uncomfortably close to age 50….
When I joined the RAF back in 1989, I did so because airfields are generally located in the countryside; so my chances of a city job were therefore (I believed) almost impossible. So it was inevitably ironic when my very first posting was to MoD London! Could not wait to leave…
Since then I have avoided the city at all costs; although I did quite like York (NOT on a Saturday though) & Bath had its tentative merits. These days I make an enforced monthly excursion into our nearest big town - Carmarthen - but rarely into the centre itself & more often to the farmers’ co-ops on the outskirts.
Last week we had to go to Cardiff to visit brand designers as we begin work on promoting the goat dairy produce we’ll at last be selling from our smallholding, this year - & that once, I’m afraid, was enough. There’s been a lot of impressive regeneration in Cardiff of late but it made me realise I could NEVER be a city person & not even sure I could manage suburbia these days.
And what’s happened to people….?? Nobody seems capable of having a conversation these days unless it consists of an abbreviated abhorrence of a ‘txt msg’.
To pay for our downshifting my OH works from Heathrow - he can’t stand standby duty, these days: cannot sleep for the noise & the light pollution! We know just how you feel…..& congrats for enduring it for as long as you did.
Bug Girl, you’ll be pleased to know I thought you were much younger! I initially thought late 20s/early 30s, but after reading bits of your blog thought late 30s. But close to 50? Not with your style and attitude!!
“Peely-wally “?? What means, this word?
It’s Scots vernacular to describe someone who looks pale, sickly and green about the gills.
Thanks Stonehead! One of the pleasant side effects of being an entomologist is that you stay (mentally) young forever, since turning over rocks and mucking around in ponds is still exciting and a chance for play.
My real age does make my application for adoption by your family a bit awkward, though :p
If you think its bad on a Saturday afternoon you’d get a fair shock to see it at night! total mayhem… armies of bleezin shirted lads, under aged lassies lyin/vomiting in the gutter, etc… was always a bit dicey (unsafe), especially if you’re not of the common shirted/booted variety like me, liable to get a random punch up the westend of union street but now its all out chaos, not a time and place i like to be these days. i stayed in edinburgh in the past (pubic triangle) where thousands party every night of the week and violence was a very rare sight, but in the ‘deen you can smell it round every corner and read the sickening stories in the paper the week after… well anyway, thats the view from my idyllic little cottage on the hill
Where I grew up the city was Liverpool. When I was a student shopping trips meant Manchester or Leeds and later Newcastle. Sheffield was the shopping centre of necessity when I lived in Derbyshire. So, Aberdeen doesn’t bother me.
Aberdeen’s problem is its catchment area. Inverness, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee serve a huge area of the country. You’ve only got to look at the queues of people for the long distance buses and the trains. Those people can only get into town on weekends.
Luckily I work in town and can do ‘town shopping’ on thursday nights. And as Paulos says above, I wouldn’t go into to town of a saturday night. I have better things to do with weekends.
Aberdeen happened to be the city we went to. It could have been almost any other city although a handful are worse and a handful are better.
What I find startling is that, like many other aspects of modern western society, city life has developed an aggressive, nasty, spiteful edge.
The Other Half and I have lived and/or worked in a fair number of cities in a number of countries (including England, Scotland, Australia, the US and Egypt), and have noticed a shift from assertive, busy indifference to aggressive, nasty selfishness.
Despite living and working in rundown areas, the bad incidents used to stand out as they were relatively far apart (you might see or be involved in something one or twice a month, if that). But, over the years the incidents increased in frequency and we stopped noticing them unless they were gob-smackingly shocking (like having kids pull out a handgun in playground in the middle of the day).
Then we moved away from cities, except to visit from time to time. When we return now, after an absence of six months or so each time, we notice the continuing escalation of mean-spiritedness, spitefulness and aggression.
I’d expect some aggravation and nastiness of a Friday or Saturday night, but to find it a constant theme of day-time shopping is a but much.
And it’s not just the younger crowd. In fact, they were often better behaved than people in their 30s and 40s — even if they were glued to their phones and iPods.
Whether it was parents screaming “I’m going to f****** kill you” to their kids, people shoving each other out of the way, jostling to get to the front of the queue, spewing abuse at shop staff (and vice versa), frequent facedowns between different groups (over who was at the door first, in the queue first, crossing the road first etc), and more, it was all a bit much.
Reading this made me ever more glad to live where I do.
My local farmer comes to my front door every Friday morning with fresh seasonable vegetables and a cheery word…
The butcher in the village welcomes me with a happy “Bore da, Lesley, and how are you today?” …
Even in the small ’supermarket’, I am welcomed as a regular customer.
In the local garage, I am recognised and made to feel welcome.
City life was great for the first four years of my career…. but it was a phase… something to get out of my system….
Life is SO much more fun in the slow lane.
Hope both boys enjoyed their birthday outing, though!