“Many of my friends are dead.”
Jessica Johnson says it without much drama, at 34 years old.
Three of her friends committed suicide when she was younger and a fourth hanged himself not so long ago.
Like her, others have had to learn to live with premature death in Blackpool, the beach town with a suicide rate well above the national average.
What was once the paradise of British holidaymakers is also the place with the lowest life expectancy in the United Kingdom, where a boy will live sixteen years less than someone from a prosperous region in the southeast and where one in five suffers from depression. .
Years ago, Blackpool was something else.
It was an Eden of floats, machine ice cream and fine sand.
Was.
Today it is a place in evident decline, converted into a symbol of those northern cities that fail to take off.
(…)
Johnson is a kind girl with black hair and light skin, who talks while drinking Red Bull (…).
The day I met her, we chatted in the small place she has just opened in Claremont Ward, a tough neighborhood in Blackpool.
(…) She was kicked out of Claremont Ward when she was seventeen, after her friend and roommate stabbed a guy from a rival gang.
Years later she decided to return.
(…) “Here, whoever can leaves.
Some of my classmates at school went to London or Manchester.
Of those who stayed, many fell into alcohol, depression... In London they don't care what happens here."
(...)
Blackpool is like other English coastal towns, a place with a double life.
On the one hand, it is a beach destination with all its accessories displayed along the promenade.
It has its ferris wheel and its pier full of attractions and slot machines.
(…) There is a wax museum with Ed Sheeran songs on a loop in the background and a stand where they sell chocolate bars with customized and supposedly transgressive wrappers with messages such as: “I am anti-vaccine” or “Asshole.”
There are a handful of
fish and chips
, where families queue to buy greasy cones of battered fish with chips and vinegar.
And on the beach, the sea.
Gray, curly and guarded by the famous Blackpool Tower, reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower and which in its glory days was the tallest structure in the British Empire.
One year it was even reopened by Diana of Wales herself.
But behind that vacation façade is the real life of the city, everyday life and the low season.
That of poorly paid jobs and unhealthy housing.
That of the antidepressants and that of the rage towards the London
establishment
that they believe ignores them and that they do not trust because they feel that it has let them down too many times
.
That of the ordinary men and women who believed they saw in Brexit the opportunity for a better life.
In Blackpool, 67.5% of the population voted for Brexit and against what they see as London bureaucrats, who they feel are ignored at best.
In some parts of the north, like this one, poverty is visible and a deep feeling of grievance towards the south emerges.
This is of course an extreme case, but it is representative because it brings together many of the problems present in other cities in the north of the country.
These regional differences have become a machine for creating citizen disaffection, in the amniotic fluid from which monsters like Brexit or Boris Johnson have been nourished.
Because what happened in that cathartic referendum largely explains the territorial fractures that tear this country apart, in which the gap between London and its surroundings and the north of the country is deep.
Here people cried out for change.
There may be much more obvious fractures, such as that of Northern Ireland or Scotland, but the north-south divide, and between London and the rest, is crucial to understanding the United Kingdom and the recent and profound changes that have transformed it. country forever.
Blackpool today is not even a shadow of what it once was, but the glorious past remains very alive in the memories of the older ones.
This place was for decades the dream destination of British families.
I understood it the morning when my eyes were opened by a group of older ladies who had gathered to chat and have tea for breakfast with sliced bread toast spread with salted margarine in a social center in the city.
That morning I learned more from the golden girls of Blackpool than from many brainy books on Brexit.
They helped me understand to what extent nostalgia for an idealized past was a decisive factor in the referendum, especially for those of their generation, those who mostly voted in favor of divorce.
I understood the importance of the weight of memory in the projection of the future and how difficult it is for them to let go of that palpable longing for identity.
Pauline Gedall, about to turn ninety, was undoubtedly the most lucid.
She preserved intact an amazing capacity for analysis.
Maybe because she dedicated her life to music.
(…) She remembers the golden years of Blackpool.
“Summering here was a dream.
It was a very rich city, in which the hotels were always full.
If someone had a free room, she would announce it on the radio.”
Factory workers from the northern cities spent their holidays here.”
(…) The first time she came on holiday with her parents from neighboring Manchester she was three and a half years old.
The boom years came to an end with the closure of the factories and the traumatic industrial reconversion of the north of the country.
The workers no longer had vacations or money to spend the summer.
Then came the
boom
in cheap flights that finished off a city unable to compete with the prices and sun of Spain or Turkey.
(…) In 2014 the coastal city's airport stopped operating because it was losing two million pounds a year.
Shops closed and small hotels ended up divided into room-dwellings that are now rented to entire families.
(…)
The glorious past here and elsewhere in the UK proved a decisive factor in the referendum.
Many wanted to go back and nostalgia crystallized at the polls.
Gedall, like 52% of Britons, voted in favor of Brexit.
“It was about the pride of England, of our country.
We wanted to have power over our decisions, we wanted to recover our identity, which had been diluted.
“We thought we could turn back the clock, but we can’t.”
Now, Gedall realizes that that nostalgic daydream has brought them nothing good.
Especially young people and those who, like in Blackpool, are at the weakest end of the chain of political and macroeconomic decisions.
When cuts tighten, inflation skyrockets and salaries are not enough, in places like this is where the whiplash is felt especially harshly.
(…) Doctors even refer to the conditions of many of those who live here as “shit life
syndrome
.
”
That is, people with anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses, caused or aggravated by the hostile environment in which they live.
The data is not very encouraging throughout the country, but the situation is much more acute in the north.
Ana Carbajosa
(Barcelona, 1974) is a journalist.
This excerpt is a preview of the book
An Island Adrift.
A journey through the cracks of a disunited United Kingdom,
of the Peninsula.
It is published this February 7.
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