Educating Peter - Softcover

Tom Cox Tom Cox's writing has appeared in The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer, Mail On Sunday, Jack magazine, The Times and The Guardian, for which paper he was Pop Critic between 1999 and 2000. He is the author of two books: Nice Jumper, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Sporting Club Best Newcomer Award, and Educating Peter. He is twenty seven and lives with his wife in Norfolk.

Mama Told Me Not to Strum

The way I remember it is something like this.

He drags himself into the room, eyes to the floor, hands buried in the arms of his long-sleeve t-shirt. Jenny says, 'Pete, meet Tom'; he mumbles hello. He roots around in the cupboard for a packet of crisps. I ask him what CDs he's bought recently; he mumbles something about the second AC/DC album. He shuffles away, back to his bedroom.

I say, 'So. I'll pick him up a week on Tuesday, then?'

Jenny says, 'If you could, that would be wonderful. He's got fencing class from ten till eleven, then he's all yours.'

I say, 'Right, er, cool. I guess I'll be off.'

Jenny says, 'Mind out for those roadworks on the North Circular.'

And that's how it all started.

Did I miss a bit out? Possibly. There's a chance he picked up one of his bass guitars and plucked disconsolately at it for thirty seconds before he rooted around for the crisps. Perhaps we even shook hands. What's pretty certain, however, is that our first meeting couldn't have been described as 'unforgettable'. Nothing screeched, sparked or went 'Kapow!' Nobody called the police or drove a 1969 Aston Martin.

Like many men who'd grown up playing with too many model cars and watching too many films starring Warren Oates, I'd often fantasised about this moment: the beginning of my Great Road Trip. I'd pictured Jeff Bridges haring out of nowhere in a Dodge Charger to save Clint Eastwood from a shower of bullets during the opening scene of Thunderbolt And Lightfoot. I'd pictured a big sky, a fast car, a hopelessly romantic meeting of inseparable outlaws, perhaps with the added bonus of a couple of loose women looking for a ride to nowhere in particular. But now this was it: I was here, finally embarking on my adventure, and all I could see was a North London kitchen, the first flowering of acne, some rather fetching Ikea units and a Slipknot t-shirt.

Outside the window, a wicked wind took a running jump down Alexander Palace hill, whipping along Crouch End Broadway, making a couple of local underfed aesthetes unsteady on their feet. Double-parked, my slightly-lower-than-middle-of-the-range Ford Fiesta waited for some action beyond the hot wax it had been lavished with earlier that day. Upstairs, in his room, the Thunderbolt to my Lightfoot attempted to master the riff to Metallica's 'Enter Sandman'. North London slept. Nothing continued to not happen. I decided, on balance, I'd settle for it.

Then again, by this point I would have settled for just about anything.

*

My whole life, I'd been planning some kind of four-wheeled journey into the unknown, but as the years piled up - that is, the years when it is still dignified to drive around for the hell of it while dressed in a loud shirt, listening to even louder music - my Great Rock And Roll Road Trip had become in danger of turning into My Great Bag Of Hot Air. The original idea had been something fairly vague that I'd dreamt up on receiving my first plastic pedal car as a seven-year-old: I would drive, anywhere, mindlessly, just for the thrill of driving. In my late teens, this was modified to the cliché of all Great Road Trip clichés: I would fly to New York, buy an ineffably cool second-hand car and drive cross-country to San Francisco, picking up hobos, buskers and itinerant jazz musicians on the way. However, in 1997, as I was travelling back from an Italian holiday, the plane had been struck by lightning, plummeting 1,000 terrifying feet before righting itself. As a result, I'd vowed not to take to the air for the foreseeable future, thus making America a less viable option. Additionally, I'd finally got around to reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road, rather than just talking about it, and discovered it was a vacuous pile of antelope droppings.

More recently, my thoughts had turned towards the winding B-roads and endless Little Chefs of my homeland. Everyone talked about the American Dream, but what about the British equivalent? Did it exist and, if so, what did it look like? How come you never saw rootless outlaw types cruising through the Lake District just for the existential hell of it? Was drifting banned in Britain, and had someone forgotten to tell me?

I wanted to discover the real Britain. Whatever this was, I felt certain it was out there: a rock and roll place every bit as weird as the backwoods America that writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe had discovered. But more than anything I wanted an excuse to drive around aimlessly, getting lost in places with names like Snafbury and Little Piddling. All I needed was someone willing to ride shotgun: a relentlessly up-for-it soulmate - the kind of partner who'd be willing to help me out of a gambling debt, come to my aid in a tussle with Hell's Angels, or, more importantly, navigate me out of a council estate on the outskirts of Hull. But circumstances had changed since I'd begun to lay down the plans for my Great Rock And Roll Road Trip. Many of the friends who'd shared with me in the nihilist's vision of films like Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop as twenty-year-olds now held down steady jobs in insurance and the civil service. Most of them simply couldn't afford to up sticks and abandon their jobs and girlfriends for six months. The ones who could, meanwhile, just couldn't see the same romance in driving up the M4 listening to Fairport Convention as they'd once seen in cruising along Route 66 listening to The Byrds. There were still the isolated loose cannons I knew I could count on, of course: Colin and Surreal Ed, a couple of relentlessly cheerful womanisers with a penchant for jumping out of cars at red traffic lights and running into nearby woodland for no apparent reason. These, though, were the kind of insatiable single and free party animals for whom 'a good book and an early night' meant the latest issue of Mayfair and only two nightclubs instead of the normal four. In other words, great company in moderation but a veritable health hazard if you were talking about six months on the road, and not one I could afford as a married man with a mortgage and five pet cats to support.

In short, I was beginning to lose hope.