Wednesday, September 19, 2018

NO SENIOR SCOWLS IN THIS FUN-LOVING TOWN



My family pilgrimage to Hampshire this week included a search for the grave of a grandfather I once saw fleetingly in early childhood. It’s in the neat town of Eastleigh a little to the north of Southampton.
The train I was using seemed averse to Eastleigh’s station, so I left it at Southampton airport and walked the mile and a half to the town. The route through Eastleigh to the cemetery took me through the sunny and busy shopping area.
Only a few miles divide Eastleigh from its neighbouring big city, and yet how different were the views.
The vaping and tattoos quite de rigueur in the big smoke seemed to be considered beastly in Eastleigh.

ONLY THE GROWN-UP STUFF

As I saw, when people smoke here, they puff only the grown-up stuff, real costly cigarettes in smart packets that prophesy the most horrible of deaths for inhalers.
Eastleighites seemingly aren’t easily put off by modernity, I noticed, and nor at a coffee place I was passing.
It seemed to be treated as a sort of latter-day milk bar where the reverie and actions echoed the extraversion from far away days of milk bar cowboys. The celebrants included the only possessor of tattoos - armfuls of them - that I saw in this town, compared to the scores in Southampton.
 The people I saw might be mostly of advanced years, but they were decidedly Anglo-Saxon.
 This senior might have been the owner of a mobility chariot decked out in Hell’s Angel style.

 AS EXTROVERT AS THE TATTOOS

As extravert as the tattoos, ribbons and a flag or two fluttered defiantly from the chariot’s commanding position across the footpath.
Apart from the prevalence of mature faces here, the crowds possessed another feature radically different from their Southampton neighbours. It didn’t take long for the penny to drop. It was the colour and the shapes.
The people I saw might be mostly of advanced years, but they were decidedly Anglo-Saxon.
That’s very unusual in much of Britain these days. In nearby Southampton, the percentage of non-Anglos is high. I even saw a taxi driver in what I took to be traditional Moslem clothes.
However, in Eastleigh, the outfits in the sun were mostly charity shop-esque or Marks and Sparks from a year or two ago. Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com

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