Aug 18 2018

Wakefield and the Angel there

IMG_20180817_141419600 Many years ago I used to write for a magazine. I wrote music reviews and it was all I had ever wanted to do in my life. I had always found the more negative review in the NME or my preferred Melody Maker, the more interesting and it is so much easier  and funnier to deride, to condemn rather than praise.

I work in a very different place of work now and the only thing I truly remember and keep thinking about from any course ever was when ages ago,  people at my course had to go up to each other and compliment a stranger on something. As I work in the public sector all the strangers looked the same and wore the same Per Una outfit and I hated what  they were wearing, their bob-cut, their confident smiles and stupid confident faces. It’s almost like I am unconfident or something. My dyspraxia makes me shocking with facial recognition so I was also nervous about saying something bland about an ill-fitting pastel blouse to the same person twice.

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I will get to Wakefield in a minute.

Anyway, the premise was that it was awkward to give a compliment to strangers and even harder to take it even from those you know without saying something like ‘My hair’s nice? No, it isn’t, it’s bleached to fuck, touch it and feel it snap like a grasshoppers leg in the Gobi Desert’,  and thus  kids can sometimes  also not delight in a positive comment and feel driven to take a negative nosebomb.

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Anyway, I wrote a negative review of a band once and they sent me a negative review of my review  and it really shook me. I realised the power of words and what they meant, not just me being all funny and being paid for it. It was very hard to write objectively after that. The band might have been shit but the drummer’s  mum saw me writing and smiled at me! I could write a bland review praising their musical skills but I am  deaf to actual musical skills- music  appeals to me on a visceral level of love or hate.

So after that, trying to write something without worrying about what

the drummer’s mum might think became an uneasy, elusive and dull read.

I have been to so many lovely places since the last post but a lovely place makes you feel all happy and not wanting an angry outlet, you just revel in the memory of the lovely castle  and try not to think about the kids lunchbox from the nice cafe only consisting of one piece of bread chopped into two because two pieces of economy white bread  for a cheese sandwich would only be a waste when  spending only  five pounds on a kids stupid paper lunch box with a stupid jungle/teddybear narrative.

And why is it always Pom Bears?

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Anyway, Wakefield.

Wakefield.

Wakefield driven to through acres of suburban outlets of beds, caravans and urban detritus. Post war, post hope but  definitely pre 1990.  An uneasy aura of Soviet Russia and the charity shops have more kids’  dvds than kids’  books.  There are closing down sales of independent shops featuring strangely contoured M and S trousers on a rail outside with fading neon price tags but then a sudden sheen of a new city boasting the high glass walls of H and M and Pizza Express.

There is a row of small trees pottering down  the street  and I hear such a vivid bird noise I presume they can’t be real. They are. Such joyful overloud chirruping comes from the stunted trees, it sounds like a Disney soundtrack. I see and hear things I want to write down but feel strangely nervous in this alien landscape an hour and a half away from home  and now have forgotten them but know they were an amazing thing to see or write if I could have remembered them. There was something particularly  poignant and fascinating  about a man in a hi-viz jacket…

I am nervously editing as I write, what if, what if…I do not want  to be succumbed to a media hate campaign from Wakefield but am aware this is something that can possibly happen, my views are stunted, stunted , my photos terrible as due to encroaching nervousness and paranoia, all photos are taken swiftly off a bus

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I need a wee at the bus station, 2op a wee, I put 2op in, the turnstile does not work- this is the general life of an idiot with dyspraxia- the futility and anger and humiliation of being so thick they can’t cope with a turnstile. I do not have another 20p, I am cursing Wakefield and everyone in it and a man on the other side of the turnstile offers me 20p. I try again. Turnstile says no. He offers me another 20p and and someone who works there says you can only push the third arm of the barrier to get it to work. So it now works, 6op later. Thank you nice man.

So I feel something should have been positively said about Wakefield or at least visciously hilarious but no.IMG_20180817_141307652_HDR

I left Wakefield quickly to go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park but I hated that too as in the cafe I only got half a stuffed pepper for 6.99 and the risotto inside wasn’t risotto, just over-baked stiff rice for £ 6. 99 and I went the wrong way on the sculpture trail and all the sculptures I saw were shit and all the people annoyingly middle-class.

This is why I don’t write anymore.

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Mar 10 2018

Alderley Edge- welcome to your dystopian future- have a nice day!

 

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Thin overworked countryside lies limp  between town and motorway, scrubby fields overlooked by hundreds of identikit double-glazed window eyes from developments called The Larches but where no no Larches remain and soon even that tree, the one over there trying desperately to be all tree like despite its  tattering leaves of Matalan bags will be gone. Maybe the developers will name the new estate after what it once was.

Ballardian buildings of  glassy sheen, opposing angles and empty bulk sport unknown logos, sinister in their obscurity.

Bad driving of expensive cars seems to be A Thing.

 

Welcome to Alderley Edge

 

I only came for the charity shops.

 

‘Well, what can you do? They just steal stuff and walk out. You can’t even say ‘Oi! Come back here, thief!’ anymore’ someone behind the till says to someone else in such world weary resignation, I nearly fuck off with the till.

 

The much discussed in the Daily Mail designer bounty of the charity shops of Alderley Edge gave me the impression I would be swaggering home looking like Beyonce- sadly I fall between the demographic of neon stiff mini-dresses in size six and  bobbley navy Jaeger in size 16.

Men in upper management’s pulling shirts are expensively lurid and Posh Spice remains nowhere to be seen.

‘It’s wonderful here, isn’t it?’ a woman beams at me. ‘ Look, a Jaeger skirt!’

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There are no pubs but there is a place called The Bubbles Room. Fairy lights, spas and stupid shit twee quotes on canvas abound. There is a business in the middle of the high street dedicated to age reducing plastic surgery-of the hand. Of the hand.

 

No homeless people clutter up the doorways of Alderley Edge. I suspect if one did appear, they would be cutely ruralised with a scruffy suit, winsome eyes  and a faithful battered saucepan and puppy.

I decide to keep things real and walk to Wilmslow. Wilmslow, the paean to obsolete eighties glamour. A fucking Jaeger shop! A Bang and Olufsen shop, a ‘luxury’  travel agent because just going abroad for a fucking holiday isn’t luxurious enough. Still no homeless people but at least there is a Greggs. Even the people walking into Greggs have a suspicious all over luxury holiday sheen.

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And housing developments are named after the countryside that isn’t there anymore and plastic bags like bird’s wings flap in a grotesque parody of flight. ensnared in the remaining trees, overlooked by the encroaching tide of mundane excess.

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Jul 10 2017

I only walk the Coffin Trail because it’s called the Coffin Trail

I only want to walk the Coffin Trail because it’s called the Coffin Trail.

 

Happily it’s not called the Coffin Trail for some disappointing mundane uncoffiny reason but because it is the ancient  route the coffin-bearers took  in order to bury their load in consecrated ground.

 

The start of the walk is quintessentially Lake District. This means saying ‘Fucking hell!’ too loudly in front of a prim pink faced family of five when looking at the prices to park your suddenly shabby looking car, being bemused at to why someone would pay those prices to throw a bag of used nappies by a lake and to wonder if the group of Asian tourists chattering excitedly and snapping everything (probably including the random picturesque  fly-tipping) with enormous Nikons have come straight out of the National Stereotype Annual.

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Nevermind. I have read or at least thought happily about the dark atmosphere of the coffin trail, the sense of past and present drifting, ebbing, merging into that final dark grim walk into the black cold earth.

 

No Parking signs in Chinese don’t quite feature in this bleak fantasy but it’s cool. I close my eyes, start the steep descent up the coffin trail trying to ignore the constant  arrogant woosh of over confidently driven spotless 4 by 4s driven by people I hate without knowing.

 

About a metre up the coffin trail (and I do dislike walking ‘up’) I regret wearing a long white dress and flip flops as I repeatedly stop to pull over as a steady stream of octogenarians with gnarled brown legs and futuristic walking shoes overtake. I am an old shit cheap car on a busy A road not a mystic traveller into legend and darkness. Typical.

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About a metre and 30 seconds up the coffin trail, I am sweating more than when I saw the car parking prices sign and wondering why the hell people bothered.

 

If I knew I might have to take a dear beloved person up this incline who is just sliding unhelpfully around in a box, possibly with the path less shingled and no booking at Zefferillis at 2pm in Ambleside to ease the pain because vegetarian Italian restaurants were thin on the ground back then- and I suspect Pinot Grigio at £7.40 a glass  and a meal primarily based on aubergine would not go down well with a sodden shattered grieving fellsman -I might feel somewhat short-changed. Literally.

 

About a metre and 35 seconds up the incline I am generally confused as to why people did not make their nearly dead family or friends walk themselves to Ambleside on  the pretext of a nice non aubergine based meal out and then leap out at them shouting ‘SURPRISE’ or ‘OH MY GOD, IS THAT THE GRIM REAPER STANDING OVER YOU JUST NOW?’ in the hope that Nature would take its course thus saving them a tiring slight incline.

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Maybe just off the verges  by the start of the trail, there is a pile of annoyingly heavy bones chucked there centuries ago, like that bag of nappies and the coffin- bearers acted all innocently when they arrived fresh-faced and sweat-free in Ambleside. ‘Aye, she was on that new diet, that new fangled err Sticky Weed based one she read about in yon fashionable Almanac, looked good so she did apart when she died. Anyone for an overpriced Ploughmans? ‘

 

Maybe the second a portly but loved one started to slightly sicken or reach 30, the people around them thought of that incline and were all like ‘Mary, love, that’s quite enough pottage for you, have some nettle juice instead for the rest of your life, aye.’

 

Maybe that’s how MDF was invented.

 

I try desperately to dwell on death on a sweet early July morning but cheery walkers in sensible clothes keep ruining for me with their chirpy ‘hellos’ and the nervous etiquette that such things beget.

 

When does one say ‘hello’ first?

What if they don’t respond and you feel slighted by someone in too brightly coloured clothing that you never actually wanted to say hello to in the first place?

Do you say hello to all of the rusty retired healthy happy people in brightly coloured Gore Tex who live in pleasant tree lined streets in houses called ‘The Villa’ or ‘The Gables’ or just their amicable yet cold-eyed leader?

 

I am asked if I am allright by a concerned looking person a lot older than me as I slide down an embarrassingly small outcrop of pebble on my bum because I don’t trust my sandals or legs.

 

This is not walking a pilgrimage of the dead into the past.

 

All these stupid people people flocking somewhere beautiful and natural ruins it for someone like me trying to go somewhere beautiful and natural.

 

We walk to Hawkshead. A long winding road past  empty, whitewashed farmhouses with  old names etched recently in old font into modern slate outside to be clearly visible to the next booker. These farmhouses without farms, these houses without cats, dogs or chickens, these cottages with security alarms and pristine empty gardens, identikit windows with an identikit tasteful ornament in the middle, white curtains and a sign outside telling you how to book it.

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Oh how we sneered at all the rural fakeness of it all when we arrived back at our pristine tasteful hotel.

It’s so easy to sneer. I think next time for authentic authenticity, I shall take the dead mouldering body of someone I love, scrabble desperately with it through mud, black and slime, my hands bleeding and calloused, my belly empty, my head fearful as I hear the hideous heavy thump of bones against wood roughly thwacking me off balance as my feet slide on some unholy slither as the woods creep slowly in and I don’t know if it is the the branches of a tree or something , something else clutching me as I fall.

 

I think this might be a unique marketing idea.

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Jan 29 2017

Accordion Crimes

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I saw it in a charity shop. It was a beautiful unnatural thing to find in a Lancaster charity shop

and inside its battered grey case it shimmered with mother of pearl like a trapped butterfly.  It was sixty pounds which was too much at that time for me to spend. I looked at it again then left the charity shop. Nothing else seemed interesting anymore.

I kept thinking about the accordion. I knew it would soon be gone. I went to a pub and had a  gin and thought about the accordion again. The answer was suddenly obvious. I should just buy the accordion!

 

I went back. Someone else was looking at the accordion whilst speaking into a mobile phone. I felt sick. It was mine.  I went to the counter and asked to buy the accordion and staggered home with a huge unexpected weight around my neck along with  excitement  and fear.

 

I love accordions. Alway have. That discordant perfection, the animalistic wailing combined with that mesmerising chanting  Klezmar beat. The history, the beauty. The potential. The way accordions bluster their mouthy way through history, unrefined, refined, their handles held in the hands of beggars and buskers, anarchist, punks and songwriters, the way they can change from a tragic long solo squeal  to a Bordello opera in seconds and in the hands of one person in a theatre or on a street corner.

The Tiger Lillies use accordions in rambunctious frenzies that suddenly turn into personal pain and extended misery . One note on an accordion can last forever. I am not a dancer and the accordion makes me want to dance to a heritage I do not have but I think I must, the way I need to move, to bellow discordantly  yet joyfully. The accordion is techno music and tribal sounds, classical, chaotic, and historic.

 

‘I will be able to learn this’, I say the next day, picking it up and wincing due to the fucked up neck from taking it home. I look at it.

 

Oh.

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I struggled with the kazoo, my recorder dripped tears,frustration,  spit and snot, I gave up on the guitar ( too small fingers) and the ukulele ( just a bit tricky) and the drum kit from the car boot sale  (three quid as they wanted to leave without it) is in the attic.

 

But the accordion despite the charmingly professional ease of the Hungarian busker is a bastard.

 

I am dyspraxic. I should not have bought it. It was pretty and i was aware of the sounds it COULD make  so I did.

 

The accordion is all instruments in one neck hurting twist. I have bought a professional Scandelli which has more chords than usual. So without looking looking down I need to play piano, use the fifty thousand chords and do that see sawing thing bellow ALL AT THE SAME TIME WHILST PRODUCING A SONG. Some bastards even sing. And some people do this in high streets for loose change which is pretty much the same as being the CEO of a major company  working on the street and having 20 pence randomly thrown at them by a harassed mother because their kid approved of  the data.

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I will learn it on youtube.

 

I didn’t learn it on youtube. I tried but nobody can possibly ever learn it on youtube.

So I  kept my lovely accordion closed tight in the box it came in to keep it safe.

Now I keep the box open with a novelty light to stop the hinge shutting. I wipe the dust off with a sense of utter shame.

 

A few months ago I went to a folk festival in Ulverston. People quietly came into a local pub, shyly clutching their various instruments. All these single various people without any words spoken, just a few nods, transformed into one piece of music in some sort of musical alchemy. There was an accordion there. The accordion gently harmonised itself into a background part of a folk music ballad. Its raucous murderous shriek ( when I try to play it) gentrified  itself into a quiet forlorn backdrop redolent with history and regret.
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I thought of my dust covered accordion.

 

It is a crime to keep it as a pet. My pretty little object was desperate to be in the hands of someone who could treat it right, make it soar, make it sing, transform it from a novelty item in a corner to an instrument of beauty.

But if I let go of it, I will never get it back. I dust it and feel sick with guilt but if I sell it,  I will never have another accordion and all the potentiality and wonder that now resides in a corner of the living room.

 

But it’s a crime that it doesn’t sing anymore.

 

IMG_20170129_172935557I wipe the dust off and show it as a pet.

Then I wipe the dust off and show it as a pet.

 

It is a beautiful object that twinkles at me that I am a failure.

I wipe the dust off and show it as a pet.


Oct 1 2016

Relating a pleasant apple based day to the misery of politics

It is 11.20am and Apple Day is doomed. bunt An over-officious and over-wrought woman who looks like Theresa May is explaining the various catalysts that have occurred since Apple Day’s official starting time of twenty minute ago to a volunteer Apple Day assistant who has  the contorted, confused but benign face that reads ‘Why did I agree to help on Apple Day? In fact did I ever agree to help on Apple Day?’ apple ‘It was a lot busier than this last year, a lot busier at this time,’ Overwrought Managerial Apple Day woman who looks like Theresa May says staring with bleak despair at the happy throng skipping towards the Apple Day festivities. ‘I think the problem is is that people looked at the initial weather forecast and planned home-based activities instead.’ I think about the concept of looking at a weather forecast and planning a home based activity in the unlikely event Apple Day in Ulverston  is called off. I think about the concept of a planning a home based activity. Either Overwrought Managerial Apple Day Woman who looks like Theresa May  knows better people than me or they don’t get CBBC in Ulverston. boar Overwrought Managerial Apple Day Woman who looks like Theresa May has not finished explaining yet. I wonder when she actually started. She shows the volunteer a basket of lumpen sturdy apples and explains the concept of the game. The concept of the game is to peel the longest unbroken piece of apple skin. Then the health and safety kicks in. ‘This stall can’t be left for a minute. Because of the peelers’. apllllll Suddenly all I can see through the warm October shards of sunlight are cruel twisted faces of evil. Evil that given a chance will peel you with an unguarded peeler and leave your broken slimy entrails dangling by the apple related bunting whilst it goes to to peel and peel again.

 

Serious faced people trundle past with manky apples in wheelbarrows to see them transformed into what strongly resembles the viscous  first wee of the day. There are Morris Dancers! There is bunting, apple cake, apple pie! It’s like if the Great British Bake-off and that poem about spinsters on bicycles playing cricket or whatever has all become one great ‘Brexit’ dream about the identity of England. rot A Blackcurrant Fruit Shoot adrift in a fake purple shoe on the vaguely apple themed tombola is Judas and all the genial looking men proudly holding warty but honest apples are definitely Jeremy Corbyn. shpot A polite well dressed man smiles amicably as his dog has a shit near the playground and suddenly I remember the heady days of Nigel Farage. Oh England. Oh Apple Day. Oh Blackcurrant Fruit Shoot on a raft of fake shoe with a trail of bedraggled peeling glitter behind you. I do like you.   lat


Sep 10 2016

A train station pub in Weston Super Mare.

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I thought I’d hook you in with that pithy title full of promise.

I think the world is jaded by clickbait offering breathy questions as to who  was having sex on drugs with what and the disappointing answer being someone you have never heard of but with some impressive bronzed breasts that reach to the sky and you haven’t even heard of the actual drug and it’s all a bit safer when you go to bed listening to Radio 4  at 9pm apart from all the mass murders they insist on telling you about when actually all you want to hear is a pleasantly spoken person speaking anything as long as it stops you thinking.

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I tried to think of a clever or interesting title about the train station pub in Weston Super Mare to reel you in. I’ve not written for a while and sometimes thinking of a good, funny or clever title for an article can make the article write itself.

This has not yet happened.

I don’t normally even write about Weston Super Mare, Unicycle Emptiness being predominantly concerned with the North West of England but I can’t think of a pun-laden attention drawing title that encapsulates that. I’ve not written for ages due to finding myself lurching despondently around the same postcode but again, not a snappy title.

I am in a train station pub in Weston Super Mare.

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My brother is here and asks me why I don’t write anymore. I explain that everything feels moribund and I have found a grim pleasure only in looking at stranger’s  complicated parking arguments with their  neighbours on Mumsnets’ Am I Being Unreasonable page. He looks disgusted and talks about his forthcoming trip to North Korea.

I attempt to show off myself so detail the price of the short yet pleasant trip to Ulverston  from Lancaster when using a Family and Friends Railcard but I don’t mention how I now take the trip too frequently so it becomes something more of an OCD tinged embarrassment rather than a nice day out and how I feel I have forgotten how to write and my friends and family are sick of going to fucking Ulverston again.

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He looks around and tells me I should write about this place, the train station pub in Weston Super Mare. I sip on my three pound double house vodka and lime and soda and think about it. He warms to the theme and tells me I should change my horizons and write about train station pubs.

There’s a whole new world out there of pubs on the periphery, where locals go to watch frazzled strangers arrive, frenziedly neck an overpriced pint of Stella and depart, the over-lit chain pubs with Meal Deals and a pretense of friendliness and places like this, the train station pub in Weston Super Mare.

It is connected to a shop, the shop is now closed but a bobbing cardboard cutout of a large ice based confectionary remains swinging in the breeze in the periphery of my eyesight.

It is friendly. Whilst I wait for my brother, I chat to a quiet voiced regular from Durham about the astonishing price I paid for a can of G and T at Birmingham New Street after four hours of the usual terrifying train chaos of what should have been two hours swooshing genteelly through the Midlands.

Someone appears to be dying outside. She lies resplendent in the road by  the bus stop. It is not yet 5pm. Paramedics arrive and the scene is watched and commented on with varying degrees of sympathy, knowledge and sarcasm by the regulars. I seem to be the only person who is not a regular, an unusual occurence for someone at a train station pub.

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The choice of cider is superb and I suddenly wish to live in Weston Super Mare, to come here on weekday evenings, chat to the locals and feel like I belong, become a permanent fixture in a building built for transience.

Emboldened by Red Square doubles, I decide my brother’s idea is fantastic, rivers of fantastic, obscure and banal conversation drifts over me, all gold, all pure gold. I take photos, banter, watch the girl on the floor and think of all the things I can write about.

I can’t remember them now. And my photos are terrible.

I will probably go to Ulverston again next week.

Although I have now just wasted a perfectly good title for the next blog post.

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Feb 25 2016

Lancaster’s history is being stolen and sold to the highest bidder

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I used to look at picturesque ruins and think of them in their glorious heyday, long dead people suddenly moving , blank stone arches alive by the sun splattered pattern of long smashed stained glass.

 

Now I look at the present and see a dead  future.

 

Ever since my child was a few weeks old we would go to the Maritime museum in Lancaster. A grandiose yet cosy building with smiling staff who knew my child by name- I watched him grow there by the way he stared then grinned at painstakingly made model ships, shouted then talked to the model stagecoach whilst I  listened to the smooth pleasantly spoken recording  of deaths via quicksand  on Morecambe Bay as the rain lashed outside.

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He crawled then walked around the museum, noticing more every time he went- each time we watched the ‘History of Lancaster’ film getting a bit more of the way through it. And I can recite the first ten or so minutes off by heart- a party trick no-one will ever want to see.

 

He will probably never get to see the end. The Maritime museum has been closed since December due to the flooding but a man-made disaster wants to close it to ‘save money’.

 

A canny trick that, in a small ancient city reliant on tourism.

 

In the summer months, I can’t remember an occasion when I have been out and about and not been asked directions to the city’s museums by tourists. Sadly due my dyspraxia, despite being eager to give advice, there are probably some lost souls from Tokyo and Plymouth still wandering around looking for that promised ‘up a bit, then down a bit then left, no right, past that good pub’ golden path.

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Maybe I did it.

 

‘Never go to Lancaster, my good friends, they don’t know their left from their right but they pretend they do.’

 

Now it will be, ‘Don’t go to Lancaster, my good friend. All the interesting things about its history you can see on the internet only. It has a new Primark though.’

 

‘But new Roman roads were discovered in Lancaster last year!’

‘ Yes, they have been covered over and you can’t read about it or see what was found because the museums are closing.’

‘But  amazing ancient treasures have been found near Lancaster!’

‘ Yes, they are in London. The museums stay open in London. London is the SOUTH. Things are a bit different, once you get past Crewe, my good friend. Only one museum per city is sacrificed there’.

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The Judges Lodgings has already gone, fallen under the knife. Fortunately the finances of the country are not in such perilous straits that the MP’s can’t award themselves pay-rises and hurray, they still have subsidised lunches and booze. Phew.

 

Nevermind that the handsome Judges Lodgings was an amazing multi-tasking museum of stunningly intricate and local Gillows furniture, a treasury of toys, interactive Victorian playrooms and costumed guides who lead generations of kids around its ancient rooms and told them all about their own local history. A history now denied. It saves money, you see.

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The cottage museum. A tiny little portal into the past, one wee terraced house preserved from the past for the present and the future- a chance to see for two pounds, a slice of history shadowed under the great castle. No. One person in a waistcoat or pinnie to smile and take your two quid, to show you around three floors of untouched past,  tell you about wattle and daub and give you a chance to add to a rag rug using an old clothes peg? No.

In the City Museum, right in the centre, Anglo Saxon and Roman artifacts rub shoulders with waxworks of Victorian men on the toilet and has a whole room dedicated to the First and Second World Wars. Meh. Who need to know about that? Who needs the original art displays and sweeping staircases featuring oil paintings of the entire history of the area? Who?

 

Right- now think of Lancaster.

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What do you think of?

 

Is it student housing, the new Primark or that massive historical structure that dominates the city?

 

That’s right, the castle.

 

Lancaster castle.

 

That looming  landmark that has decided history, changed history, been the death of many and the birth of legends. Where so called ‘witches’ died to earn the council a fortune in perpetuity and crude drawings of witches in black hats on broomsticks rule sublime over a rather more unpleasant actuality of elderly women dying in the dark dark cells.

Dark dark cells you say? Market them!

Imagine an eternity pool in the black of a witches cell! With Jo Malone candles- only rich people who mostly aren’t local will die to come to a place where many local people actually died!!

What Lancaster needs is a luxury hotel.

 

Museums are old-fashioned.

 

Oh what a joke! Oh the hilarity! Oh the despair!
‘Don’t go to Lancaster, my good friend-the past has gone and so has its future. But soon, soon, it will have a fucking Primark and a maybe a cocktail in the Castle called a ‘Long Drop’.

 

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http://www.lancashireatwar.co.uk/save-our-museums/4591249007


Dec 9 2015

Flood

 

Two days ago I lay in the dark with no electricity or phone signal listening only to the sound of sirens and rain.

 

I say only. Both sounds were vivid and pulsating, unsettling and foreboding. And they continued all night. In the day it wasn’t so bad. Their noise was diminished by the grey glow of dawn but the night went on and on and on and I wondered what story they were telling.

 

It’s weird to be cut off, to be left adrift in the middle of a city, fingers instinctively tapping at light switches, grazing down darkening unresponsive phone and computer screens.

 

It takes a long time for morning to appear and when it does it is not with the bright chaos that normally accompanies it, a cacophony of alarms and cBeebies, kettles and toast. No, we get up and wait for the morning to come to us, huddled under a blanket as candles flicker, waiting for the dark of the sky to lighten, slowly so slowly lighten.

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By seven am, we are desperate for something to happen, some news from the Outside. We live near the river and have no idea where it is and what has happened , how safe we are. My four year old and I get dressed haphazardly  in the dark. I can’t find anything, spill tealight liquid  and one Thomas the tank engine sock hugs tightly around my foot.

 

Outside is a relief, brighter and warmer than inside. I want to look at the river but my child is scared to. I have an idea that Wetherspoons will be open. It must be. Wetherspoons is always open. Wetherspoons can survive anything. We walk towards town in the expectation of lights and warmth.

 

Town is closed. Wetherspoons is closed. These are clearly the end times.

 

I never before knew how many noises alarms could make. There are sharp peeps, loud Whaas, stoppy starty screams, panicky bips all intermingling into a onslaught of Not Normal. It is still raining. You never normally notice how so many things are lit up- bus stops, shop signs, roads until they are gone.

The traffic lights are blank- I go to get cash out to be met with an impassive grey screen. I never thought of that.

 

My child is crying, desperate for somewhere to sit down, we are flotsam in a familiar yet unfamiliar environment, aliens. Home is not Home anymore, we keep walking- we are at the top of town, no idea of what lies at the bottom. I think of places that might have their own magical power supply that aren’t Wetherspoons and thus we head like cockroaches to the hospital.

 

It is not yet 8am.

 

I am annoyed at myself for getting so concerned. I have not seen any floods as yet and it might just be a power cut.

 

Then I see the army.

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The army appear to doing Selfies outside the hospital which allays my fears somewhat especially as my first point of contact today is an elderly Lancastrian who tells me it  ‘owt but a few puddles’.

 

Inside the hospital I parasitically charge up my phone expecting the whole generator to go off and a few thousand people to die as a result but an elderly lady tells me  when I am being indecisive about this potential transgression that ‘you pay your taxes, love’ which convinces me. I am worryingly easy to convince.

 

The cafe opens and and a coffee and baked beans on toast has never been better. Then my child drops a bottle of Lucozade bottom down on the floor and my head erupts in surprisingly painful Lucozade lava. More NHS supplies and staff help me. I resolve never to moan about taxes again whilst leaving the hospital sticky and reeking of glucose with a Thomas the Tank Engine sock slowly cutting off all circulation in my right foot.

 

Lancaster is now full of zombies. I have never seen it so busy. With the absence of phones, people are sharing new rumours and gossip and queueing for public phone boxes. Every shop and cafe is closed and we head down to the bottom of town, our town to see it is pretty much afloat.

 

Abandoned cars with their numberplates dangling at unnatural angles, the insistent discordant squeal of a thousand alarms punctuating the air.

 

No-one is on their phones. Strangers stop to talk. There are water bottles for sale on trestle tables and a Samaritans van has a long long line of people who are not smiling and gossiping.

Everything familiar is unfamiliar. I want to take pictures but want my phone, my unresponsive phone to still retain its charge. I can’t believe how lost I feel without it.

The bus station is a river, the fire engine has a boat going down the road. Still people surge, never knew there were so many people in Lancaster. I see through windows of flooded student accommodation, people huddled in blankets in the rank mud of their living room.

I don’t want to go home.  I like the safety of people, like hearing second hand the rumours ( ‘the power station is on fire,’ ‘Lancaster is an island’)  the guilty sense of excitement.

 

Home is dark and cold and empty.

 

An enormous queue forms outside the one tiny corner shop open. It Is hard to believe how different things were yesterday.

 

But we are tired. We walk through a changed small city, a city where everyone is outside and where the alarms punctuate the cold air, a place of mud and water where Christmas and commerce seems to have suddenly vanished.

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Then in the typical black hole of a formerly brightly lit establishment, the Robert Gillow we see candles. And hear music. We step inside into the black. A jazz band is playing lit by tea lights. A table is full of sandwiches and biscuits and at the bar, a man offers me warm beer or wine. He tells me not to bother about paying ‘as we are not counting pennies at a time like this, we just want to help people.’

I nearly cry. We sit in a corner and swap stories with strangers. My child drinks milk and smiles.

 

Outside,  it is turning out to be a beautiful blue sky day.
Then I go home back to the dark and the unnatural noise of sirens, alarms and the river in my cellar.


Sep 8 2015

Real vintage hell at Morecambe Vintage Festival

m1

I don’t really know why Morecambe feels the need for a vintage festival. Morecambe sells nylon slacks for £3.99 in the street and five bedroom houses for eighty grand. Morecambe has crumbling ghost signs and liver and onions advertised as an actual selling point on blackboards outside cafes.

Now Wayne Hemingway has driven up from Islington in his fancy sports car (conjecture-don’t sue me Wayne or I will show  you the broken hinge on my twenty pound Red or Dead purse- WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?) to DJ in a tent and Morecambe is surprisingly populated by an uncanny and unnatural mix of fur stoles, heels, red lipstick and overstretched Primark leggings and cans of Polish beer.

m2 I am somewhere in the middle.

It is a beautiful day and Morecambe looks resplendent, it suits men in cravats playing ukuleles outside the Midland Hotel. Inside the Midland, I see that a glass of house wine is seven pounds and go to steady my nerves in the licensed Wacky Warehouse. It is less glamorous here but I have saved three pounds and twenty pence although lost any semblance of dignity and romance.

In the world’s most sullen funfair, I wait patiently whilst a stall-holder has a fight with another stall-holder about a lost dog, child or husband and notice that salted caramel has definitely jumped the shark as now one can purchase an oversized salted caramel dummy for £1.50.

m3

Queues for the food stalls are long and we meander through the dim recesses of back streets until we decide to stop at the Worst Cafe in the Universe. The Worst Cafe in the Universe is all the unpleasant elements of Vintage- varying shades of brown, at least 46756766 sticky place-mats featuring paintings of unexotic expired brown fruits, a menu seemingly inspired by the more desperate age of rationing but with prices from the Midland Hotel in 2015.

There I could have had a nine pound vegetarian platter featuring spinach falafel and olives and other such glamorous things whilst also engaging in gin and flirtation with men with a sardonic twinkle in their eye in a fashionable well lit Art Deco environment.  Here, in the dark, a fucking omelette is £8.95. Incredibly, some of the 4768 tables have brass triangular Reserved signs on. I have a minuscule soup  with cubed carrot bobbing miserably in and out of the salty broth ( my tears)  and sulk bitterly. It says a lot that I decide not to try the wine.

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I go wincing back into daylight and return to a brighter prettier version of Vintage with flounces, ruffles, poodles and Prosseco.

 

Give me artifice or give me death.

 

m5


Aug 25 2015

Dismaland

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The thing that shocks me is the sudden realisation I have not been shocked and surprised for so long. This is sudden sensory bombardment and I can’t cope so do what everyone else is doing- take out my phone to take bad photos of it instead.

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From a bright white entrance airport style cubicle where my child and I are not smiled at and told to walk separately, we enter the vast concrete expanse of Dismaland. Cracked tiles and broken shopping trolleys, bins artfully already overflowing.

 

A gargantuan installation of a dancing truck pirouettes against the gloom of a grim  August sky. The tannoy crackles with bursts of sinister noise, disembodied cold speech and slowed down fairground music. I am stupidly excited.

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A rusty Ferris wheel stands in the centre, seats blowing emptily in the breeze. I have been yearning to go on this Ferris wheel since I saw it being constructed in a few days from across the cold grey walls surrounding the former Tropicana pool.

We get on. A man in mickey mouse ears looks grimly at me as I nervously clamber on, pulled by my excited four year old. ‘Be careful’, he states dispassionately to my child.  ‘I would hold on to her tight if I were you.’

We start to elevate. I start to notice the rust. We go higher and faster, rocking in the wind and I am annoyed by the prospect of dying before seeing the rest of Dismaland yet slightly impressed by the manner and glamour of my imminent  death.

banks4

 

I never thought I would say that about Weston Super Mare.

Things are not helped by the fact a camera man is recording my terror and my child’s glee every time we swoosh around the bottom of the wheel. Everything is being recorded here.

 

Leaving alive, we stagger over the cracked tiles and a man lurches up at me shouting, ‘it’s not right, it’s not right, they’ve not even cleaned this place up’, and points angrily at an artfully placed broken child’s scooter in a pile of mirk. I beam at him presuming he is part of the event but notice the ‘local’ wristband on his arm as this is the day 1000 locals have been allowed access with a coupon from the local paper.

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This is the confusing bit for me. I appreciate the detail with the unhelpful glum attendants (and they are delightfully glum) but you get sucked in, I presume deliberately, into a topsy- turvy world of what is real and what is not. I ask for directions to the toilet, they are barked at me, I smile and simper the ruder people are to me, become politer and more English like some weird Stockholm Syndrome victim. My child is so excited when I nearly reach a duck in the Hook a Duck and beams at the stall attendant who glares at him and throws the nearly caught duck away into an oily mire. I strangely appreciate the casual cruelty so far from the pasted on smiles and bored eyes of most theme parks.

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I walk into a tent and try to work out what spectacular Look at Me! multi-media installation to look at first. Another grim faced woman in mickey mouse ears comes up to me and asks me to leave through the entrance.

Aha!

I have cottoned on to this deliberate confusion and cruelty!

 

I smile and continue to feast my eyes and take bad photographs. Then two grim faced women in mickey mouse ears come up to me and ask me to leave through the entrance. They really really mean it this time. One of them angrily points to my cider.

 

I leave through the entrance.

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The grey broken spire of a Disneyesque castle has been greatly appealing to my child so we  enter into the pitch black to see in stuttering strobe lights a dead princess hanging out of a pumpkin carriage being photoed by creepily real paparazzi models.  The  child worryingly declares this wonderful and wants to go in again. He is also under the impression this is actually Disneyland but is perfectly happy. This might possibly affect him in later life.

 

What I thought would be a novelty few hours is in fact an eyeball bleeding onslaught of magnificence- every tattered  billboard is  artfully designed to execute a statement of political intent, fairground attractions are cruelly witty- we win a fish finger in a plastic bag and my child tries to crash into a boatful of refugees with every anguished desperate face vividly executed.

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Banksy has stated that the Tropicana meant a lot to him as a kid and the media attention and subsequent cash from Dismaland and all its attendant artists hopefully means that it will be restored to its former glory. There  is well meaning anarchy at work here in every broken stone,  a finger up at the system in every tattered poster, in every artful splatter of random graffiti. Some might say the messages are obvious but if the media can convey simplistic messages and agendas every day to appeal to suit their viewpoint and agenda then why can’t Art for once give a sudden differently skewed perspective to those who don’t generally frequent art galleries?

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And the artwork itself is truly unique- loud, flamboyant, angry, kitsch- the embodiment of crumbling seaside towns desperate to keep the neon lights still flickering.  A model town featuring the aftermath of a riot in mesmerizingly intricate detail, paintings of urban dereliction with uncanny observation and cruel twists. I walk around mesmerised, can’t trust my eyes, take bad photos.

banks 8

 

My phone camera memory dies under the onslaught and the next day in a local paper I see a photo of me in the background of a room of art, my head bent low, desperately trying to delete photos so I could take more but not looking at the art itself- a parody of a parody.