I tried the door where I used to live. Locked.

Philip Larkin lived a lie.  Many lies in fact.  The poet, the librarian, living in an unfashionable town at the end of railway line.  His personal life was torridly complex, with loves and lovers and the echoes a f***ed-up up childhood ringing through his verse.  But it is the verse that's the most remarkable thing.  I knew nothing about Larkin before I lived in Hull.  But I did visit his grave in Cottingham and write badly about an 'Arundel Tomb' and remain struck as much today as then by his line about "traffic heading all night North."  I was back in Hull this week with friends I seldom see.  But friends I spent much of 24 hours a day with for a couple of years 25 years ago.  It was not the cliched University reunion you might imagine.  Sure there was a sense of nostalgia and old-haunts visited and much drinking like it was 1987, just for a day.   Rather nervously (why?), I stood outside the house where many of us lived.  14 of us then.  It was now smartened, with conservatory extension, manicured lawns, double gazing and smoke detectors in every room.  Changed.  

The house features in a screenplay I wrote called THE VIVID, though the setting was moved to the more photogenic Cambridge and the inhabitants sexed-up appropriately for a Producer to be able to cast 'beautiful people'.  In THE VIVID, a re-union many years later brings to the surface passions and guilt and a terrible murderous secret that haunts the lives of them all*.  Back in the real world, we played pool, bought snacks from Tesco and went to an '80's disco.  The real revelation of the weekend was not how brilliant, warm, entertaining and fun friends remain many years later…they were and are…but that the town we knew grown up in had decayed so badly.  Step outside the environs of the University and Hull is a mess.  In 2003, Hull had the ignominy of being voted No1 is a poll of Britain's crap towns.  A decade later, it seems to have dipped again.  The issue is, you have to have a reason to go to Hull.  The University is one, the other is?…the other is?  

There was some early noughties investment, but despite Premiership football, and a few local heritage and Arts gems, Hull has not had the attention and dollops of cash bestowed on Liverpool, or Leeds or Manchester.  As Larkin said 40 years earlier, the traffic on the A1 heads North all night, not even glancing over it's shoulder as it passes.  You need a reason to turn right and head over the Humber, or skip eagerly through Goole and Hessle to visit Kingston Upon Hull.  But it is a City that was home to Wilberforce, John Godber, Paul Heaton, Anthony Minghella and every year it generates a university alumni who are fiercely proud of the City as just about the friendliest and least pretentious place on the planet.  Thankfully, that remains.  Unchanged. 

*See more on creative writing and current projects here.