The Boulevard

I was on the CB radio before there was an internet. Before apps, before profiles, before any of it. And we figured out how to meet strangers safely anyway — because the community worked it out. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody had to.

When I was a kid, all my closest friends were much older than me. Some of them were older than my parents. Some were probably as old as my grandparents. They were kind. They took me in. They answered my questions without making me feel small for asking them. They gave me parts of themselves — their time, their experience, their honesty — and I've carried those parts ever since. They're all gone now, because they were old as hell when I was young, but they still live with me. That's what nobody tells you about the people who teach you: they never actually leave. You choose the people who make you who you want to become, and they stay.

I was also told, like every kid, not to talk to strangers. And I did anyway. Because strangers were interesting. And I instinctively understood something that I didn't have the words for then:

The CB radio community understood this without anyone having to say it. The Blackburn eyeball — the meet-up — happened on the Boulevard. The big meeting point was the Queen Victoria statue, because the boulevard was wide enough that you could walk amongst people before committing to anything. That was the whole point.

Here's how it worked. We did it the way spies do it.

The person with the descriptor was the one who could be seen. You'd say: I'll be carrying a newspaper under my left arm. I'll have a flower in my lapel. I'll be the one in the silly hat with the white headphones. The person who needed to feel safe got to walk. They'd clock you from a distance — see you standing there, readable, visible, exactly where you said you'd be — and they'd decide. If they didn't like what they saw, they walked straight past. You never knew who it was. You never found out. They stood you up clean, and that was absolutely fine. That was the system working perfectly.

I got turned down plenty of times. Girls would clock me, think — look at the state of him — and keep walking. That's not rejection. That's consent. The person with more to lose controlled the encounter. Nobody had to have an awkward conversation or explain themselves. They could just not show up. And that was honourable.

And sometimes people weren't who you expected. There was one woman — I won't tell you her name — who had the most extraordinary voice. Sultry. The kind of voice that made men stupid. She was in her sixties, built like a house, and she knew — completely, cheerfully, without any apology — that she looked more like a man than most men. And she'd do this voice on the CB, and the guys would melt, and they'd all come running around to see her. And she'd watch them arrive. Watch the penny drop. And she'd be in absolute fits. She was a friend of mine. Because she was honest — not about what she looked like, but about who she was. She owned herself entirely. That's worth more than any profile photo.

I used to obfuscate. Said nothing real about myself on the CB when other people were listening. Nonsense. Misdirection. Red herrings. But I wasn't lying.

The CB community didn't have a safeguarding policy. It didn't have a terms-of-service document. It didn't have an algorithm deciding who was trustworthy. It had a boulevard, a statue, and a crowd of people going about their lives — and that crowd was the safeguard. You were never truly alone. The tribe watched.

And here's the part nobody talks about: the stood-up eyeball wasn't always the end. It was sometimes just the beginning.

Because you'd still talk on the CB afterwards. And once you'd clocked someone — even if you'd decided they weren't for you that day — you could picture them when you were talking. They were real now. And sometimes a girl who'd walked past without stopping would come back on the radio and say: I saw you. I thought you'd be taller. And you'd both laugh. And she'd offer you another eyeball. Because she'd decided, actually, you were funny. Actually, you were alright. Actually, let's go for a coffee.

It gave the lads a chance to look their best. Put themselves forward. And sometimes you'd misjudge it. I went to one eyeball dressed like a b-boy — full face, white paint line, the lot. Thought I looked the part. I did not look the part. I looked like an idiot with paint on his face.

But we laughed about it. Nobody was cruel. Nobody made it a thing. I'd tried to be something, it hadn't landed, and we were all still friends. That's what a healthy community does with awkwardness. It absorbs it. It laughs. It moves on. The algorithm doesn't know how to do that. It would have filmed it, captioned it, and made it viral. The boulevard just let it be a funny story.