February's Child

Lordshill, Southampton

A February heat-wave is not something you expect to experience in Britain, but a record temperature has been broken twice this month, setting a new high of 20.3 Centigrade, with temperatures rising over 20C for the first time in winter "since records began". Which, officially and surprisingly, is only 1914: although the Met Office holds amateur records going much further back, that's the extent of the verifiably accurate archive. Still, it does seem like another polite cough from Mother Nature, before she cranks up the serious retribution for our reckless ways. It's so irritating, to have this ominous, anomalous phenomenon reported as if it were an enjoyable stroke of good fortune, as opposed to the rather unsettling "straw in the wind" it actually is.

If, like me, you were born in February, with its short stature and leap-year variability, you can't help but feel a little bit of its eccentricity has rubbed off on you. Add to this left-handedness, a few more brain-cells than are strictly necessary, and a deep-seated creative urge, and you have a recipe for an acute sense of personal exceptionalism. You're just different, an outlier, the joker in the pack. In my case, I suppose if I'd turned out to be gay, I'd have had a full house of square-peggery; as it was, I was never entirely sure how to play the hand I'd been dealt, and probably folded and cashed out my winnings way too soon. It doesn't help if you grow up in a background where difference is not valued as an asset, and regarded by many with grave suspicion. However, I had good, supportive parents, a forward-looking and effective state education, and the good fortune to grow up in one of the post-war New Towns, the very embodiment of "Beveridge Britain". It's sad to think how much things have changed; I wouldn't want to be a bright little square peg growing up right now.

Tanner's Brook, Southampton

Wednesday was the first day I ventured outside without a coat this winter, having made the mistake of going for a lengthy walk on Tuesday wearing one. Usually in February, if it looks sunny outside that simply means there's going to be an exhilarating, keen edge to the wind, not that the temperature will climb by mid-afternoon to somewhere around 20C. So when I decided on Wednesday's walk, through a part of Southampton known as Lordshill (as in, Lords Hill, not Lord Shill), this time I made it coatless, which turned out to be a wise choice, as it was even warmer. Lordshill is an area that always reminds me acutely of Stevenage, the town where I grew up. The rolling chalk hills of South Hampshire are quite similar to the rolling chalk hills of North Hertfordshire, and Lordshill is a large area of mainly "social housing" built in the 1960s and 70s, out of much the same architectural handbook of off-the-peg council-house designs. It also has a network of cycle-paths and underpasses, not to mention substantial remnants of the former forested and agricultural landscape, both hallmarks of my home town.

Around mid-afternoon, you start to pass kids in uniform on their way home from school, and this inevitably leads to reflections on where life is taking them. My own children were lucky enough to go through their schooling just before the mass uptake of smartphones, and just before state education took yet another dip in standards (for example, the sad state of foreign-language teaching, now that the offer of one [!] foreign language at GCSE at state secondary schools is no longer compulsory, with the predictable outcome, something which makes me very angry indeed). Today's state pupils in a mainly working-class district like Lordshill are getting a pretty shabby deal, and anyone achieving outstanding grades nonetheless is, frankly, showing world-class determination. Not least in resisting the downward pressures to conform with the norm imposed by peer pressure, social media, and cyber-bullying.

I noticed a surprising number of the younger ones returning home accompanied by a parent, or in little adult-shepherded groups; I presume there are problems with real bullying, not to mention the contemporary obsession with "stranger danger". This is not entirely unwarranted, of course: the heavily-wooded fringes of the walkways and the neglected underpasses do have that brooding sense of threat that always haunts such liminal spaces, even in my day, and it's true there have been a couple of recent murders of young girls, locally. But it's a shame there's so little remaining of that freewheeling sense of end-of-school, out-of-doors play. Despite the unseasonably fine weather, the woods and playing fields are silent, and you get the sense that most kids are heading straight home, in order to shut the door on the real world and put on the TV, play computer games, or open up the door onto an alternative, online reality. No doubt any bright little square pegs feel a lot safer, and a lot more welcome in there. I'm sure I would, too, today. And if you were the sort of kid bursting with questions you wanted to have answered, I'm pretty sure you'd be waiting to get home, too, in order to ask them of your good friend Wikipedia, rather than risk attracting the attention of the ever-vigilant levellers at school. The ones whose only question is always, "Who do you think you are?"

Lordshill, Southampton