I alluded to Memphis, and Beale Street in particular, in an earlier posting. I was using it to support an evocation I was drawing about the Notting Hill Carnival. It's passion, it's swagger, rumbustiousness, and so on. Tenacious place, Beale Street, as a locale and as a memory. I went there once in the early nineties, during a month long sweep through the US. Not a Sherman's march through the South, much more sedate than that all done using what I regard as the unsung hero of American transport - Amtrak. The semi private, semi public (least I think that's the set-up) railway network. I can't think of a more romantic way to see the US unfold than this. Almost like being a pioneer. The only other long-distance trip I've taken in the US that's topped this was an epic drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a Jaguar. That's an aside, but one I will return to at some point because that in it's self is a potent, happy memory, aching to be celebrated. Today it's Beale Street though.

I saw Beale Street through the same lens as I guess many others have, or certainly seem to in the songs, stories and tales: sweaty, frustrated, weary, and frightened. I'd arrived there with no place booked and no chance of finding anything since every available room in a twenty to thirty mile radius had been long ago taken by delegates to the annual Christ in God convention. One front desk obviously thinking I had a set of wheels suggested moving south into Mississippi and trying to find something there. No car. It was the visitor's centre on Beale Street that pulled the rabbit out of the hat. They found me a room at the Long / Lowenstein hostel.

The cab there passed an enormous citadel of a police precinct; ambled down poorly lit roads, fringed with breeze blocked liquor stores, with metal grills and probably blast proof doors; past pawn brokers, bail bond shops, and a steady procession of gun stores; on through corridors of abandoned, gutted buildings, all just waiting for the arsonist, until we pulled to a halt outside something I thought only lived on the pages of Anne Rice, a Gothic, cone-topped, wooden mansion. More for the Manson family than a whimpering Brit.

It could have been excised none too cleanly, with the roots and tendrils still showing, straight from the pages of Poe's House of Usher, and messily re-potted in the midst of chronic deprivation. I have an overwrought literary sensibility at the best of times, so not being kept awake by the agitated pacing of the madwoman / madman in the attic was the only consolation of a very tense and miserable day there. That part of Memphis, and I'm trusting in the fifteen years since I was there, that things have improved perceptibly for the people who spend their lives there, was not pleasant at all. It had a background hum, a pervading sense that bad things were only ever a short distance away, things could happen that you really would not want to see nor become involved with however marginal you were to the event.

An area of forbiddingly dark side streets, with just the odd thin glare of a street light. I'm certain that crime rates fall when streets are properly lit, certainly more people have the cojones to walk along them when they are. I'm talking about London here as much as anywhere else. If anything did ease out of the murk of these streets it was always a low-slung bass rich car carrying unknown numbers of people. No pedestrians anywhere even at the nearby mini-mall which I ran through opposing streams of traffic to reach expecting to find something like a Pizza Hut. Not a one, not a fast-food or quick service eatery in sight. I starved that night; the hostel only served breakfast. Sleepless too, since the door to my room would n't lock (well, how can they if they don't actually have a lock).

I fled early the following day, paid up and simply left. I got out of that area by walking again into the middle of the highway, traffic pounding in each direction, and waving down the first cab I saw.

I was lucky, I am lucky. I was there for a day and a night, thousands of others, decent, generous, hard-working people spend their lives in this environment. And it's an atmosphere of menace, of intimidation, of dilapidation, of people being forgotten and ignored. It's shameful and it's not unique to the US. It's as deep-seated in Europe as it is the US. What do we need to do to enable people to live in decent surroundings free from fear and rid them of this sense they've been swept away under the carpet?