Two Big Egos in a Small Car
A passionately laid back overview of the arts and culture scene in York and Harrogate with observations on journalism. This podcast is hosted by Charles Hutchinson and Graham Chalmers and regular guests.
Two Big Egos in a Small Car
Episode 225: Interview Special with Author of The North Road, Rob Cowen
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Charles and Graham are delighted to invite Harrogate based poet and author, Rob Cowen back onto the show to talk about his highly acclaimed new book, The North Road.
About Rob Cowen
Rob Cowen is an award-winning writer and author, hailed as one of the UK’s most original voices on nature, place and people. His first book, Skimming Stones, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. His second book, Common Ground (PRH; 2015) was shortlisted for the Portico, Richard Jefferies Society and Wainwright Prizes and voted one of the nation’s favourite nature books of all time in a BBC poll. His follow-up, The Heeding (E&T; 2021), was the best-selling debut book of poetry in 2021. Rob has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent and written radio programmes for the BBC. He lives in North Yorkshire.
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Good evening, Graham, and good evening to our very special guest tonight, Rob Cohen, our first returnee, Rob, actually. So thank you for coming back to us and not being put off from the first time you spoke with us. That's always reassuring. Welcome tonight. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here as ever. Good. Glad to hear it. So our guest tonight, Rob Cohen, uh written a new book. That's one way of putting it. And uh this is a book called North Road, published by my namesake Hutchinson, but no relative Heinemann. And uh been when was it released, Rob? What was the release name?
SPEAKER_04Uh last week, I think. 17th. No, sorry, two weeks ago, 17th. Yeah.
SPEAKER_0317th. Excellent. So this is um the the latest uh wonderful creative work from uh Rob. And um Graham, maybe just a little bit of background, if you would, on Rob. Uh we can even let Rob do that if you wish. But Graham, maybe you you just have a quick word there.
SPEAKER_00Well well, the North Road is is a is subtitled A Journey Through Time, Place, and Memory, which is sort of slightly what common ground, uh Rob's previous non-fiction book, Lista 2015, was about. But this is a massive step forward, which I think is why it's been received so brilliantly right across the board. Everybody seems to love it. It's getting a lot of attention. It's basically common ground. I was gonna say it's common ground on steroids, but it's just that it's it's better than that because it takes everything common ground had in terms of the style and puts way more detail and way more structure. So when I read the first two chapters of The North Road, I actually started to well up because I thought, oh my god, it's absolutely perfect. He's absolutely nailed the whole thing. It's such an ambitious concept because it isn't just about Rob walking along the A1 all 400 miles of it, it's got everything in it, but it's structured in such a beautifully coherent but always to the point type way. It you can't call it meandering because it's always making a point. Every sentence counts on every single page, it's just an immense achievement.
SPEAKER_03Rob, how do you react to that description from Graham?
SPEAKER_04Well, that is um that's a very generous and a very um profound reading of it. And he's he's as I would expect from Graham Chalmers, he's really he's really hit the nail on the head, which is it is this kind of if common ground was this kind of square mile of edgeland, you know, the the the North Road is really uh it's kind of like an epic widescreen road movie, you know, it's the it's this interrogation of of of time, of place, of memory, of identity, of of history, of of all these elements that um that are interwoven in what what I what I think of as the great British Mother River, which is the A1, the Great North Road, and its various incarnations. And and this thing is actually, you know, it's it's it's part of the sort of grim gray web of infrastructure necessary for our existence, but fundamentally it's a timeline, it's a repository of memory, and and it is something by which we can read British history all the way back to well, to the Romans as a road as we understand it, but actually far further anyway, um more like 7,000 years. So when there are Neolithic trackways running up through North Yorkshire. So um, no, Graeme's reading is is is is bang on. It is is an it is an urgent book. It is um it's a it's a book that that is written over probably the most politically um kind of fractious and unstable period of our history since World War II. Um, I started walking it in 2016 around the EU referendum. Obviously, COVID was in there, but all these kind of time rhymes and echoes that occur in the book, when you interrogate the history of this road, seem to be playing in the present. And this is a kind of theme that runs throughout is the fact that the past is very proximate on this road. You're never away from it. If you if you remove the kind of the traveling at 70 miles an hour in a self-contained air-conditioned vehicle, if you take that out of the equation and you walk it on foot, then it is like unspooling footage, you know, from an old movie that you look through. And everywhere you go, there is this relics and these um kind of interstitial moments that that leech through the fabric. And so, yeah, I think Graham's Graham's nailed it there. I mean, that that is what it is, but it's also it's a story of this road, it's a story of our history and time, but it's a story of me and my time and what roads lead us to where we end up, and also the story of my great-grandfather, who is a kind of spectre in this book, all the way he walks through and manifests. Bill, yeah, Bill. Yeah, so it's kind of all these three narratives braided together and you know, um, explored. I think in a way, I said this the other day to somebody that fundamentally all of my books, Common Ground, The Heeding, this one, they all kind of have three core questions at their heart. And those core questions are who are we, how do we get here, where are we going? And um, they try and sort of interrogate that a bit, but you know, um in a way that um ask those questions on a per in a personal capacity, but also a national capacity and also a global capacity, looking at ourselves as as as people. Um and I think this road actually is is, if you like, this repository of memory is is a far truer reflection of those of those things than let's say the curated museums or national trust properties that we like to go to for our history and our and our kind of our understanding of of those things.
SPEAKER_03Is that partly that it's a living history? I mean, it's a as a road, it's a backbone of Britain, and obviously the M1 might want to make a counterclaim to that, but it seems to me it's very much the backbone. Um, it's alive every day, as it were. It has the blood running through, obviously, as vehicles moving, has tributaries off off to it, off to the sides. So on any journey upwards, you could you could go off and visit Margaret Thatcher's uh Grantham, you could visit Oliver Cromwell's um Huntington. So you've got steeps, two of the most significant historic figures are connected in their own way with this road. Their living history of what Cromwell did to this country, what Margaret Thatcher did to this country, and that must have been partly influenced by where they where they grew up effectively on this on this route.
SPEAKER_04Oh, it's fundamentally influenced, and it's the reason that the A1 has this aura, that the Great North Road has this aura, that the M1 doesn't. I mean, early on in the book, I I quote a truck driver called Joe Doyle, who is a lifer, if you like, on the on the lorries and the trucks, and he says, you know, um that he that he took he he takes the A1, even though the M1 is far quicker, but he does that because the road has this possessive possessive quality, this idea of possessing him as this aura. And he's a very unromantic human being. But he just said, you know, the the A1 is a disease you can't get out of your blood. And I think that's kind of summed up. There is something about it, and it is, I think, these layers of history, this aura that it has, um, these resonances that you you can't help but feel. And you're absolutely right, Charles, to reference these repetitions, you know. Um you've got all of this history on this road. If you start at London at Smithfield, you've got, you know, we start at London Bridge, you've got the Roman history, you've got Smithfield, you've got the drovers, and the history of, if you like, uh barbarism in a sense, and the fact that you know Smithfield was also where people were killed when they were, you know, when Tyburn was too good for them. So William Wallace was killed at Smithfield famously. Um, various dissenters and heresy gruesomely.
SPEAKER_00He was killed very gruesomely.
SPEAKER_04It was it was a uh he he was um, yeah. I mean, there were a few killed in that manner, but he was it was a way of yeah, it was a way it was he was killed on the on the eve of what was the equivalent of Glastonbury at the time, which was this greatest congregation of people in England at St. Bart's Fair at Smithfield, and he was killed there as a way of the crown and the and the city making a point, which is that you don't mess with us. And if you do mess with us, this is this is what happens to you. Um so there was an early power-based dynamic, but you've got the crushing of the the peasants' revolt in the same place 70 plus years later. But then you've got all of these histories coming up here, you know, you've mentioned it, you know, Cromwell, Charles Stuart, the civil wars, which are which are so present and and and you know, uh they echo through our time to this day, and certainly with Brexit, the fact that you could overlay a map of the people who are for the king and who are for parliament over a map of Brexit voters, and it's exactly the same split. Um, you know, those for the king voted to leave, and those for those for parliament voted to remain. And you can overload those two maps, and it's a really extraordinary echo. Um, so you have that. You have, as you mentioned, you have you have, you know, you've got Isaac Newton at Woolsthorpe, literally beside the Great North Road, making these enormous discoveries, which not just changed physics, but changed everything. Because in England we had a closer link, we only we took Newtonian physics and we we applied it very early on. In France, there was still Descartes, they were still using other physicists and other thinkers, but we early on adopted Newtonian physics and said this is the truth, this is the only truth, and then we therefore disseminated it for entrepreneurs, for factory mate, for factory owners, for shop floors. And so there was this Newtonian physics pushed England and Britain into being the first industrialized country in a way. So we were industrializing a decade before anyone else, which meant we had the steel and everything. You know, that was that was all down to the discoveries that he made on that in that house beside the road. You know, you've got the Mayflower, you know, the pilgrim father, William Brewster, and the man who organized the Plymouth colony, William uh Bradford, both living close to each other on the Great North Road. William Brewster was a postmaster on a on a leg of the Great North Road between Scrooby and uh and Doncaster. And that was massively influential on his life and how and why he left for America. Um, but yeah, all the way you've got these histories that are just sort of profoundly nation-shaping and altering all the way up. And that's before you even talk about battles and and conflicts and engagements. So it's yeah, and it's you know, we think of it, you're right, we think of it as this kind of and it is a working road. It is a working road, but it's working in that other sense too, as in cogitating and fomenting and alive. And that that's why it's it's kind of fascinating as a thing, and it's also why people feel connected to it, I think.
SPEAKER_00Graham? The book's called the book's called the North Road, but in a way, and Rob has just illustrated what I'm about to say because he's packed in lots of information there, and that's probably only one page of the book in total. But the book, in a way, isn't really about the road at all. It's more like a tapestry of life, or even more than that, it's more like an alternative history of of Britain. Yeah, it's not the Times history of Britain, it's not the Henry VIII and the Six Wives history of Britain that most of the mainstream historians and newspapers go on about. This is the real wide, encompassing all angles, real history of Britain.
SPEAKER_04And it's I think thank you, and I uh but I think it's also it's where those histories influence the present, still, I guess, is a way of thinking of what's distilled in this book. Is you know, um when I was walking through Scrooby and and looking at this this Mayflower trip, you know, um it was at a time when Elon Musk was promising to send uh people to Mars, and he was calling it the Mayflower Moment, you know. And um you think of that colonizing of that coast of America by the pilgrim fathers, and then you know, and to them, you know, they were religious extremists. A lot of people don't realize they were extraordinarily extremist religious people. They weren't um they weren't going out there for venture capital, although they were funded by the city of London and they bought stocks in their own company that was funding them. So, you know, this stuff was nascent venture capitalism, but they went out there and they took the risk of having to survive, having to get on with the indigenous populations, trying not to be killed, trying to survive through through the seasons, um, because they wanted this religious kind of community they could build that where they practice their faith freely and live freely and according to their terms. Um, the problem was they were only half the people who went. The other people weren't the safe people. They were people who were trying to get out of England because they had other reasons to leave, and you know, they were escaping the law or the or debt or whatever else or scandal. And so you had this, it was a doomed project from the off, in the sense that you had this kind of and William Brewster writes about it how how kind of heartbroken he is that all these kind of crimes occur in this savage community almost immediately, like hideous crimes, you know, bestiality. He he's complaining about having to whip people for stuff, you know, and very soon the project fails. But what it does do is it succeeds in this new kind of um opportunity, which is that profit leaps and bounds because they start to make great kind of inroads into America and they start to take land which doesn't belong to them. So the deals they make with the native population soon they only really last as long as the the settlers want them to, and then they break them and then they push for more land, and they have this huge war um which uh which which is decisive, and then they just as soon as this word gets back along the north road about success in America, about freedom, about the potential to make money and to do well, people are flooding over and they are pushing and pushing further west. And of course, this eventually results in the manifest destiny of the 19th century, the pushing west, and this kind of justification for robbing land and taking off indigenous populations because it's not being worked properly, this kind of Protestant mindset. But you see, and you see this kind of American model where colonizing, dominating, just obliterating and driving all the way to the west, then turning around and going, Oh, well, what else is there now? We've got all this land. Um, and then you have this sort of this parallel with with Musk saying, Oh, we want to land on Mars and we want to colonize space, we want to do this, and and you know, um what there isn't ever in this mindset is a focus on making heaven on earth, you know, uh, which is what the original pilgrim fathers were trying to do, is to create a piece of heaven on earth. And we live on this earth. And it was a kind of a moment where I was walking through Scrooby where there were these two headlines, and one was Musk saying, Oh, 2050 is the day, the date by which we will be on Mars. This will be the Mayflower moment for our for our world and for our space travel. And then on the other headline, it was 2050 is the is the is the date by which the earth will rise to 1.5 degrees and large portions of it will be unlivable. And you had this kind of weird tension, which is so present to this day of are we trying to make this world, are we trying to sort out the problems of this world, or are we just allowing this world to go to hell in a hand cart while these elite billionaires build new colonies on their own terms somewhere else? And it just, you know, it strikes you as terrifying when you go when you see time just flip into the present like that.
SPEAKER_00It's all going very blade runner, basically.
SPEAKER_04Sadly so, yeah. I mean, it's um the you know, it's it the dystopia that you you sense um in these kind of historical rhymes. You know, I was reading something today where I it struck me um the because when I started writing this, there was all this narrative stuff going on about the about the EU referendum, and a lot of what I was reading was just cartoonish, it was just fake and it was lies, and and this kind of constructed narrative about British history that was picking and choosing moments of glory and then sort of twisting them to say, well, these are reflective of certain things, and of course they're not, and they are a very one-sided and minuscule kind of uh perspective on British history, but even today it seems like we've given up on truth being important, and you know, I watched a debate on TV today where you know Nigel Farage can go on camera and say, Oh, there's no point doing you know green energy because um it's more expensive and it's the reason energy is rising. Now, that's been disproved by every single body that that is not the reason that energy is is is prices are rising. We know that's not the reason. The reason is because we're dependent on gas, and gas is very expensive because of the Ukraine war. But he can say something that's patently untrue and say it on national TV and not have to justify the fact that it is untrue. What a bizarre situation. Because suddenly they're winning by-elections reform based on what is fundamentally untrue and a lie. And I really worry about that because in our history, and the road will point this out to you, when something like that happens, there's only one ending, and it's not a good one. You know, if you just allow lies to manifest and be told and retold as truth, and you aren't challenging it, and the mainstream media isn't challenging it and saying, I refuse to allow you to say that because it's untrue. We let it go with Brexit and look what happened. You know, we let it go. Untruth after untruth. No, no, it doesn't matter, it's just an opinion. But no, because people are led by these untruths, because people are hurting at the moment, and you know, I find that extraordinary, but you know, it to your point, Graeme. I think um what I'm trying to get to in this book is a truer analysis of history, a more rational analysis of history, an objective analysis of history that that says, look, yes, there are moments of great glory in our history, and who would who would deny that? Of course there are, of course there are. Most of my ancestors are involved in them. But there are also great moments of shame. And you can't just have the glory without the shame. You can't just have half an understanding of how we ended up where we are right now, because you'll never address the issues and you'll never find a road ahead.
SPEAKER_00Well, they're abusing the past to win the present day to change the future, is what they're doing. So, as usual, history is used as a weapon in a political battle. Correct. Correct, yeah. I was gonna say something quite long-winded, so I'll I'll try and make it short, but I mean it's the map the the Northwood's a massive work of research. There's probably like 15 bits of research on every page. It isn't just inspiration and imagination, it's got archaeology, architecture, culture, politics, economics, social history, autobiography, family stories, family history. And I was watching the film of the weekend by Chris Pettit and Ian Sinclair, made in 2002 for Channel 4 called London Orbital, based on Ian Sinclair's book about the N25. And J.G. Ballard pops up, and the film's very impressionistic and non-linear. It's a bit like an art installation, really. And I suddenly thought, although Rob writes award-winning nature books, I don't think Rob really is a nature writer. He's more in the lineage of, say, Ian Sinclair or J.G. Ballard, who all were influenced by Guy Debor and the situations in France in the 1960s in psychogeography. He's he's more he's more in that lineage than strictly speaking a nature writer. Do you think that's a reasonable interpretation?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, well, I've never, as you know, Graham, uh, after our many nights together in the pub, but I've never called myself a nature writer. I'd I think it was a A term that was attached to me because um common ground was about a patch of I mean I've been in I've always written about people and place and time, and they're the thing the things I write about. It's just that um common ground covered a patch of this wild, kind of exuberant natural edgeland, if you like. So most of the characters in it were connected to to nature, if you like, in that in that very profound sense. But nature writing, I think, is a is a is a form was a genre that developed uh 20 years ago as a as a concept because um there was an absence of descriptive describing genre that that fit what you're talking about, the kind of psychogeographical situationist, but also you know, uh the interweaving of memoir and the writing about a natural world, particularly at that time, in a way that wasn't just dry history or um, you know, um kind of you know, compendium of birds or whatever. Um, there was a profound imperative to engage with the natural world at that point because of the crisis that was looming. And also to kind of bring in new forms of literature. So, you know, when I wrote Call of Ground, it was doing something different in that it interwove fictional chapters and well, you know, they're kind of creative nonfiction, to be honest. They were based on real people, but they were written from the perspective of not my perspective, but their perspective. So um, people put it into nature writer because I think they felt it wasn't they weren't comfortable calling it nonfiction. Um, so it kind of I fell into that genre because what I was doing was was different to everybody else, and now funnily enough, this this has become accepted because this book is described as non-fiction. Okay, so it's not nature writing, it's described as non-fiction. And I was very clear that that was important to me because I don't see it as nature writing, and I I don't see myself as a nature writer, I see myself as a writer on people, place, and time. And I I think that's it's an interesting point, but but but what's also interesting in that point is that I interweave these fictional chapters in this book too, and you know, you have chapters written about the harrying of the north, which is like very in the present, and people trying to escape this kind of uh this being killed by William the Conqueror's man in 1069, 1070, and you know, you have chapters written from the perspective of Captain James Hind, the highway, giving his last testament in the in a jail. And you have you know, these various chapters, the chapter the perspective of a salesman traveling up the road in the you know, trying to live with memory and music, and all of them fit with the road because what I'm trying to do here is tell the road story, and and in so doing, tell a story of of all the people who've passed up and down it's countless unremembered that have moved up and down this road for the last you know, God knows how many centuries. So, yeah, it's funny, but but that's now accepted. People aren't going, hang on a minute, it's not nonfiction because there's weird fiction chapters in it. They're now going, no, no, that is non-fiction. And I think common ground opened the doors for that in a way. Let let that be be accepted.
SPEAKER_03Rob, we think of um a world of the north-south divide, but the great road, of course, its job is to connect north and south, south and north. And I wonder if the history of this road actually goes against the idea of a north-south divide. So that's too simplistic an image of the north is such and such, the south is such and such. By actually walking this road and seeping all these stories into you, it's a more complete picture that isn't of a north-south divide, it's something different, actually.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, I think it's been a search uh uh and that you know it's been a stitch, it stitched these the north and the south together. And you know, and I I think that's true. I think um, you know, when the Romans invaded successfully, um, Caesar tried to invade twice and failed, but when when they invaded successfully, and Claudius um did his little show trial and took the southeast, um you ended up with the situation where the Romans built the first roads, they looked at what was happening in Britain and they regarded it as separate principalities that were all interlinked, and they were. And up here we had the Brigantes, as we know, you had the southeastern tribes. Yeah, um, every single area was localized, it worked in a local kind of methodology and and thinking, you know, roads, apart from these kind of old Neolithic, Mesolithic trade routes that ran up and down and to the coasts. You had these roads made sense on a local scale, and the Romans came along and said, This is crazy, you're one province from south to north, you're one province, and we are gonna build this new point where the Thames and Watting Street meet, and you can bring all the empire shipping up the river Thames, and we're gonna build this crossing point, we're gonna make it the center of a radial pattern. We're gonna have roads going north and south and east and west, and they're still the major roads that exist in Britain today. When you look at the A to Z and the North Road, the original North Road went straight north up to Lincoln, didn't need to come up any further because the Brigantes were a client state for the Romans. Then only when that revolution happened did they push to North to York and then further, but they regarded this island as as one province, and then the people who lived here regarded it as all these tiny, weeny principalities. So I I always remember that you know, and and you have various nation-shaping battles that occurred on the North Road, you know, um, which altered the geography of these islands, but fundamentally, I I've always kind of uh felt that the road what the road does when you follow it is take you through these kind of extraordinary localities, you know. Um so for example, you know, the the atmosphere changes when you move through certain places. If you're walking through, you know, London, you have this intensity and density of all this this city, this history of the city of London is just completely overwhelming as soon as you start investigating it. But as soon as you're out of it and you're into the hinterlands, you know, past the North Circular, past the M25, you're suddenly in a different space. Um, and and the atmosphere changes. And we, you know, we found on those first 50 miles, you get to sort of you know, Bedfordshire, um, it's a completely different atmosphere and it feels different. Um, but you know, the the color of the stone and the earth changes. So you get to a section where, you know, near Stretton, for example, uh, where the Ramjam Inn is, the stone just becomes butter colored, and it's this Clipsham stone, which is very famous. But then go further north, you know, you start to see the first red brick stuff happening. So you you you move between these different localities that are much kind of more um interesting than just saying, yeah, north and south. And of course, you know, when the coaching age, which was the really when the road was in its heyday, yeah, lastly 1780 to 1830, roughly. Um it was essential that these coaches moved through the villages and towns. That was essential because you had to change the teams of horses, you had to refresh, you had to do all this stuff. And so these towns were extraordinarily important. And what you would have seen if you were riding on those coaches was a completely different, you would have heard an accent change, you would have heard the seen the the walk, the colours of the buildings change, you know, the food would have been different because it was all local food and whatever you so it would have been extraordinary to travel through, but you wouldn't have thought of a north and a south, particularly, you would have thought of where you where you were at that point at that point because it would have been different. Um, and so yeah, and then when you get further north, of course, you know, um, I think what's the other interesting thing about locality is that even in Scotland it was called the Great North Road, but obviously it was a great south road to Scotch Scotch people. Um so it's it's it's funny how it was it it had its own kind of very real identity um up to that point, and you know, you know, depending on because the Scots, the Scott, the Scots are mainly populated in the central belt or even a bit below it, they look on anything beyond Sterling as like the North anyway.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And there's a great line in the um I put in the book, which was a quote from someone which is like, you know, where is the north anywhere? Well, if you're if you're you know, if you if you if you're you know if you're on the Humber, it's the tweet, it's the uh the tweed, you know. If if you're on the tweed, it's the orcades, as he calls it, or whatever. Like you keep going further north. So um, no, it's an interesting question. I d you know, I think there are times when there were definitive ideas of north and south, and one of them was during Thatcher, uh, when she uh took a match to the uh the the the Keynesian consensus and and just you know closed down mining and manufacturing in the north. And at that point, I think you had this kind of you had this very real split between north and south, where the north anything beyond the M25, and the south was basically south, east and uh the city, and you know, uh you had traveling fans going up to um you know Sheffield, who were coming up from London, football fans who would throw money in the crowd, like loads of money, you know. Oh you're all pommers, you know, and so you had a very real sense of north and south at that point, I think. And of course, obviously, in certain periods of our history, you know, the north and the south was was was was a was an identity that you would uh attach yourself to, but um, yeah, it was it it it it changes like the road does all over. It depends what epoch you turn the clock back to, as does the root of the road, though. So, you know, one of the things that's fascinating about the road is that it was constantly evolving, it was this enduring thing. What remains? The road remains always, you know. Frank Morley in his book about the road was picking about the rubble of the blitz, and he said, Oh, he asked the question, what remains? And he looked at this road running north, which had been exposed by the blitz bombing, and he said, Oh, the road, that's what remains, it's still there, it's still running, and it is still running now, you know. And so, yeah, I think um it's this strange enduring line timeline that that's also evolved and had different identities and multiplicities, and that's what makes it interesting, and that's also what makes it navigable on foot because you don't have to always walk the howling carriageways, you can go off on the old roads.
SPEAKER_03Is it um too simplistic to suggest that the Great North Road is an organic road and the M1 is a manufactured road?
SPEAKER_04No, that's exactly what it is. That is exactly it isn't a committee-agreed road, it isn't a sort of pre-designed, it's an evolution of Roman road, pilgrim path, medieval trackway, uh, you know, um, coach road, turnpike, um, motorway. It's all of those things, and it's done through use. So, you know, it was called the Great North Road. You know, you had these various incarnations. It was called the North Road, it was called the Old North Road, it was called the Great North Road, depending which map or time you're looking at. But what was agreed was that this was um the most important arterial route in in Britain, because in 1921, after World War One, um there was a there was a shying away from calling anything great because of the Great War, and the Great North Road had to alter its identity, and it became Alpha One. They started this this record of what all the roads were going to be called, and Alpha One was the first, the most important road, and that was given this road for that reason because it was the most important, and I would contend that it remains the most important, really.
SPEAKER_00I've got a silly question for you, Rob. A silly question. One of the things that distinguishes you from other great writers like Robert Robert McFarland is that I think at your heart you're a bit of a rock and roller. So when I got to page 34 and you suddenly put time flows on within us and without us, I went, Yay, Sergeant Pepper. Then you reference Dark Side of the Moon on page 87. Then you talk about the time you were in a band years ago, and you played the Hope and Anchor in London where the clash had played and you two and the police. And I just thought, you know, good on Rob for getting his great love in. But my silly question is this if you'd stuck to the band, could there have been the clash? Could there have been you two? Ha, it's a good question.
SPEAKER_04You know, the funny thing about that question, Graham, is that I was talking about you this week as well. Um, because yes, there is there's all this music. Music is, you know, I was, you know, one of the things the book deals with is my parents getting divorced when I was 15, and the kind of emotional, um, you know, uh destructive elements that that brought upon my life. And part of the book is me at the age of 40 with two children of my own, trying to ensure that I'm not passing those more destructive traits on, you know. And one thing people don't tell you when you have children is oh, it's also a way of reliving your own childhood through them. And um, you know, those roads ahead suddenly become back roads back through memory. So there is an imperative to process uh our own history, not just our national history, but our own personal history, and to come to terms with it and with its glory and shame and everything else, and then to to make sure that we're not handing these things on the more destructive things. You've been listening to the podcast Two Big Egos in a Small Club.
SPEAKER_03Your host was Gwen Channelist and Channel's happy sending. This was a politics of production.