Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel
‘Are you sorry because you’re meant to be with your wife, and you’re late because you’ve got drunk?’ I asked.
‘My dear dear darling wife has come to expect that of me, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘No, I’m sorry because I have to be at a college function and I’m not sure where it is. I don’t suppose you know where it is, do you?’
I tried to get a clue as to how I could help, but it was always unlikely that I’d be better informed than him about the whereabouts of a function in a college in his city to which he’d been invited.
We carried on in this surreal fashion for about ten minutes, then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Well, it’s been lovely talking to you. The main reason I wanted to talk to you is that I was a bit lonely, I’m afraid.’
As he walked off, I concluded two things. Firstly, if I ever have a sick pet I should look him up, as he’d probably be a lot of fun, and even if he was a little shaky with a scalpel, he’d appreciate the company. And secondly, while glorious spires, immaculate lawns and vast gothic wooden doors are inherently more beautiful than smoky putrid power-station cooling towers, I think I prefer Didcot.
Wilmslow, in Cheshire, is ridiculous. It’s known as ‘the Knightsbridge of the North’, but if Harrods tried to set up a branch there it would be refused planning permission as it would lower the tone of the area. When I first arrived to survey the place for one of the radio shows, I was slightly sceptical of its reputation as a haven for the prime of new money – its population couldn’t just be soap stars, ex-criminals and Premier League footballers; there aren’t enough of them to fill a whole town.
To start with I went to Alderley Edge, where the cream of the area’s over-privileged twattery is said to live, and popped into the post office for a stamp. In the window, just as you might see in any post office, were dozens of little cards, which would normally advertise ‘Pram for sale’ or ‘Carpenter – no job too small’. But in this window the first card I saw said, ‘Ring me if you need a butler.’
And that seems to be Wilmslow’s essence. As you enter the main street there’s a vast Aston Martin showroom, which boasts that it sells more cars than any other branch in Britain, including the one in Mayfair. I went inside, and it was hard to adjust, because none of the normal car-buying etiquette applies. If you circle the DBS 6.0 Volante model, throwing it the half-interested semi-scowl you’re supposed to adopt when sizing up a car for sale, kicking the tyres and scornfully looking under the bonnet as if to say, ‘You’ll be lucky if anyone takes this off your hands,’ and ask disparagingly, ‘How much you asking, mate?’, you’ll get the reply, ‘One hundred and ninety-one thousand, five hundred pounds sir.’
The salesmen are so ‘high class’ they don’t even bullshit you. ‘They call this a four-seater, but I don’t know what size of person would fit in those back seats,’ one told me, adding, ‘But one feature we do offer with these models is the option of customising the upholstery to match the colour of your hat.’
With not a hint of disdain, or that he was thinking ‘Don’t waste my time, serf, you couldn’t afford the fucking wing mirror,’ he demonstrated how the speakers have sensors that automatically move when you get in, adjusting themselves to the direction and height of your ears. Then he perkily told me that one of his customers keeps his car in the garage, sits in it each evening listening to classical music, and never takes it anywhere.
Mostly the High Street is full of beauty salons, dozens of the things, as if the residents leave a beauty salon, walk fifty yards and go, ‘Oh my God, my nails haven’t been done for nearly a minute, they’ll be corroding,’ and dive into another beauty salon.
Each of these emporia needs a unique way to market itself. One, called ‘Esthetique’, has a subheading on its sign that says ‘Beauty – wellbeing – science’. So presumably as they’re manicuring your toenails they’ll tell you that according to quantum mechanics the varnish they’re using has no fixed resting place in the universe. Another has a board outside that says ‘3D eyelashes’. I can see why that would be useful, as it’s so irritating when bits of your body are only in 2D. Those normal eyelashes, you go to brush them and your hand passes straight through them, the awkward two-dimensional buggers. What a delight it must be to have eyelashes that seem like solid objects, rather than looking as if they’ve been projected by film onto your eyelids, though presumably when you’ve had the 3D eyelash treatment you have to hand out special glasses to everyone around you, or the effect doesn’t work.
There’s an endearing old tailor’s shop on the stretch of road to Alderley Edge, full of tape measures and dummies wearing semi-sewn suits, and crisp folded shirts packed on mahogany shelves. In the window was a purple smoking jacket, seductively eccentric. Once you’d put it on, whoever you were, you would surely start flowing with witticisms about the nature of women and reciting captivating anecdotes about your trip to Bermuda with King George VI. ‘I’m just, er, out of interest, asking, er, about the cost of that purple jacket, please,’ I enquired of the immaculately grey, slightly theatrical tailor.
‘Ah, indeed, the purple jacket,’ he purred. ‘That is stitched with such exquisite precision by my dear friend who goes by the name “Dashing Tweeds”. Do you know him?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘If you peruse the lining you catch a sense of the inner strength of the cloth, and up close you can feel it almost breathes with pleasure. It will never lose its shape, that item, sir.’
‘Roughly, er, roughly how much?’ I asked, as if the price was just an incidental piece of red tape I had to clarify to satisfy the bureaucrats in my office.
‘That particular item is priced at £1,800,’ he said. ‘Plus VAT.’
‘Hmm,’ I said, as if I was barely interested, and if anything that was disappointingly on the low side, but he must have been able to read in my eyes that every bit of me was going, ‘FOR A FUCKING JACKET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’
But mostly Wilmslow’s money is about property. Football stars such as Wayne Rooney, Peter Crouch, Rio Ferdinand, Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham have all bought land there, along with Andrew Flintoff and an assortment of Coronation Street actors. And invariably, once the deal is settled, the first thing the happy buyers do with the new house is to knock it down. Then they’re free to build a modern structure in its place that doesn’t have the embarrassment of being second-hand.
So along the roads that surround Wilmslow are lines of skips and teams of builders catering to this demand. Trades such as interior designer flourish in this environment, more than they probably would in Moss Side, so the place abounds with the likes of Dawn Ward, who designed the Rooneys’ pad. Her proudest creation, she revealed, was a glass floor in a hallway, which enables anyone standing on it to see the snooker table in the room below. I bet one day we’ll all have them, and will look back on the days when if we wanted to know the score of the snooker match downstairs we had to walk down the stairs, with the same incredulous pity we feel now when we learn of villages in Uganda where they still have to fetch water from a well ten miles away.
Every one of these properties boasts a ‘media room’, as if anyone needs a special separate room for when they’re reading a paper or watching the darts. They’ve clearly got so many rooms their owners have to invent purposes for them, which all the others will then want. So there are probably arguments, with Mrs Rooney going, ‘It’s not fair, how come the Flintoffs have got their own particle collider? I want one.’
But it would be hard to beat the estate agent’s leaflet I saw, from ‘Property Confidential’, that oozed pride as it announced the sale of a ‘luxury bungalow’ for £1.75 million. The property included, it said, a swimming pool and sauna, and added, ‘This luxury bungalow also boasts an additional feature – a second floor.’
Occasionally some of the older locals initiate a spot of official grumbling