How to Walk Home From the Pub

All that talk about Debord in the comments yesterday – or at least his idea that nowadays nothing is real unless it is on the telly – got me thinking about his other famous idea; the derive.

The derive is simply – stripped of all its Situationist hyperbole and psychogeographical mumbo jumbo – walking home when you are drunk. This is something I know a fair bit about.

Debord decided that when you wander around a city inebriated, or intoxicated with some other mind misting substance, or even under the influence of a lack of sleep, you would encounter things that more sober, rational, purposeful commuters would generally miss. And you would be in the right state of mind to encounter the unexpected without the fear-flight-fight instinct kicking in.

I think Debord was onto something with his derive. Though I don’t think he invented the idea – people have been shambling home pissed ever since some cave-man discovered alcohol – and I never saw the need for all the painfully contorted theorizing about it. Psychogeographers have ruined the simple pleasures of missing the last bus home because you couldn’t resist the last pint.

I indulged in a derive last night. I’d spent my last few quid on a cheap bottle of wine and shared another bottle when a friend turned up unexpectedly. We left the cool, cavernous air-conditioned pub and emerged into the delicious warmth of a still summer evening. I left my friend at the bus stop and headed South, my mind reduced to a residual background hum and my balance frankly precarious.

There was a barrier stopping me walking past the Trinity shopping centre and I faced a choice, left towards Leeds Bridge, or right to Neville Street.

The rules of the derive are that you don’t engage the rational consciousness, and in my condition I wasn’t about to question the rules. Without thinking, I stumbled left toward the bridge.

I can’t say that I remember much until I reached the pedestrian bridge that crosses the railway track and then the motorway separating South Leeds from town, just a jumble of images – tight leopard skin outside The Viaduct, a nervous woman lighting a cigarette on the corner near the Malmaison, two taxi drivers shouting in a foreign language at the bottom of Water Lane, dozens of expensive cars behind the high, sheer glass of a showroom, and lots of tatty hedges and overgrown weeds.

When I reached the bridge and crossed the first stage I may have been humming to myself. As I turned onto the rail section, my footsteps clattering on the metal walkway like the sound of a steel drum that hasn’t been tuned, I noticed a figure about fifteen feet away, crouching in the shadows.

I stopped humming. Then I stopped walking. I squinted into the dark.

I must have passed this spot thousands of times and can’t remember ever encountering someone doing what he was doing. He was writing on the railing.

Of course I have seen the product of his penmanship – scrawled messages about immigrants, gay people, black people, the police and some amusing fantasies about “Ulster” – but always assumed that he committed his thoughts to metal in the dead of night when nobody would disturb him.

Here was my chance to deepen my understanding of the nastier side of human motivations, I thought, and what better time to do it than half-drunk, half a mile from Beeston, on a four foot wide strip over a barely used railway.

He stood up and turned toward me, pulling his hoody tighter.

“Evening!” I said, brightly. “You writing something?”

“What do you think!” he said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t inviting me to an intellectual debate.

“Hmm, yeah …” I said, glad to see that my rapier-like wit had not abandoned me. “Right.”

“I got a right,” he announced.

“Indeed …a right,” I said, “well, I can’t argue with rights … rights are myriad, aren’t they? You have a right to learn Flamenco guitar, or Polish … you are perfectly free to build a replica of the Starship Enterprise out of chewing gum or paint your bedroom pastel peach or plant geraniums in your back garden … you can still borrow a book from a library, and I don’t think there’s a law against a misplaced apostrophe.” I pointed to the the nearest scrawl, “That should be Immigrants out, not immigrant’s, by the way.”

He looked at me blankly.

“But you, my Sharpie subversive, my felt-tipped fascist friend, choose the right to self-expression on a freshly painted public surface …”

“Eh?” he said, fixing me with a look that was a mixture of incomprehension and loathing, “…what?”

He bent down and set to work again.

As I passed him he muttered, “is there an ie in eternity, mate?”

I didn’t have the heart to correct him.

The rest of the walk home went by without incident and when I got home I poured a large glass of whisky to settle my nerves. Next time, derive be damned, I’m taking the bus.