Unicycle Emptiness

Elvis IS Blackpool and Blackpool is Elvis.

Glitz and glitter hiding the cracks and a three carb meal.

Everyone loves Elvis in Blackpool. My toddler is wearing a designer tank top bought from a carboot which says ‘Bring Back Elvis’ in letters big enough for the eldery and/or inebriated to read and eyes mist over and people smile and chat and I pretend my toddler and I like Elvis and I like my toddler.

I go to The  Worst Charity Shop In The World first. I have learnt that if I tell my toddler there might be a Marble Run inside, he toddles inside like a lamb to the slaughter whilst I cast a quick practiced eye down the aisles looking for something that is not bobbly George at Asda. I am an eternal optimist, frequently dissapointed.

This local charity shop makes me fear for the ‘Kids’ they are raising money for as if that is all the ‘Kids’ are relying on, they are pretty much fucked unless instead of cold hard cash they really like extremely wide polyester ties and faux velveteen chairs that someone has clearly died in.

We were planning on seeing some of Blackpool’s much feted ‘attractions’ but they proved to be staggeringly expensive so the toddler was purchased a lollipop in a minature plastic sandcastle for 29p from Cheaper 4 U instead of going to the aquarium which saved us approximately £37.88.

Blackpool to be fair is utterly beautiful today. The view stretches for miles and miles of grey sea, the harsh wind merely snaps occasionally like a disgrunted chihuahua and people are happy. This may be because of the unseasonal weather and because it is not stag night season or because of the toddlers top. Or maybe they are older and not pissed. Or older and pissed.

We go to an American Diner because I am incapable of walking past one. Blackpool must be the only place where a a two course dinner costs £5.95. The food is vaguely  fine, there are few places you can get veggie enchildas, fries and a toffee sundae for such a price) and  I order a glass of wine.

I have drunk many bad things in my time, scrumpy from a car boot in Cheddar, Vodkat, battery acid etc but this wine made me yearn for new words in the English language to describe it. The smell hits you first. I had paid £2.50  for this glass though so was going to drink it.  Each sip was new aromas. Rancid Vimto, dead rat, something vaguely Italian.

This post was meant to be about how wonderful Blackpool today was.

Reader, today was wonderful. But do not drink wine in American Diners.

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Today was going to be A Nice Day.

I was getting mildy bored of Terrible Days where Marmite flung itelf out of cupboards to dash itself to a sticky oblivion on the kitchen floor, the toddler would lie rigid, stiff and angry on the floor of Home Bargains, seemingly covered in Teflon when I tried to lift him out of the pathway of shame and curiously flavoured crisps, my cardigan would not only be inside out but also upside down and suddenly too small.

Today was going to be a Nice Day. The bank account details were certainly Not Nice but I bravely decided to carry on having a Nice Day with the help of a bag containing a fivers worth of ten p’s saved for an emergency. I felt almost rich with a weighty old-fashioned feel to carrying around a bag of silver. That was me Being Positive.

I decide to take the toddler on the bus to Lancaster University. I like going there because it is £2.40 for a longish bus ride, Lancaster University seems very Other, huddled away on its hill with its weirdly seperate but the same shops, like a familiar yet unfamiliar dream. It also has the best charity shop ever, consisting of awesome International Student garb, often involving anime and priced at under four pounds, cheap food and drink and a park where no other children are to be found so I do not have to apologise for the toddler’s Death Stare when someone tries to engage him in conversation or give him an imaginary ice-cream.

I am expecting much for my five pounds worth of ten p’s.

We board the bus and sit down to hear a well spoken voice arguing desperately with the bus driver. ‘Please, please, I am being met at the other end by someone with my bus fare. Today is the first day of my new life! Please, I beg you!’ A student is clearly desperate to begin his new adventures in learning and has not yet been given his loan. He is being met by someone with money. I am having a Nice Day and thus am feeling full of happiness and benevolence.

I am also aware of how precarious our finances are but put my trust in humanity.

I give him two pounds in ten p’s. He smiles and thanks me in a Hugh Grant accent. Then realises he is still short. The only other passenger gives him the rest. He beams at her.

I spend the rest of the journey worrying about why he has not phoned his friend up. Before the main stop at Lancaster Uni, a dark Hades like underpass, he leaps off, smiles and me and vanishes- I then notice he has a smartly folded copy of The Times under his arm.

The Times! The fucking Times!

He has given his cash to Murdoch in the expectation that someone will give him his busfare.

I feel conned and cross that I have given two quid to a lieing Tory upstart blagger who can spend a quid on the Times when I have thirty quid to last the weekend.  I suspect he will almost definitely  become an MP.

Lancaster University is shadowed by the loss of my two pounds and my money bag loses its jangly promise. I purchase some 50p sunglasses from the excellent charity shop and try to console myself with the idea of them being worth at least £2.50 but they were clearly a promotional freebie from a downmarket magazine retailing at less than two pounds.

I put my card in the bank machine with that sick hollow feeling of not being allowed any more money but ten pounds comes out so the toddler and I go and buy cheesy curly freis for £1.65. It could have been an enchilada dammit. Tory Boy has ruined the day.

I am embarressed by the thought of people looking at me and judging what my child is eating so I keep loudly saying, ‘what a naughty treat! Aren’t we naughty! We’ll have nice healthy  Hungarian Goulash tonight!  You love Hungarian Goulash don’t you?’

The toddler looks at me as he has never heard of Hungarian Goulash before. That might be because we have never once had it.

Sometimes Performance Parenting is not parents showing off. It is to try and cover up the fact they are actually a Bad Parent by lying in public.

With another two pounds, my child might have eaten a toasted sandwich with curly cheesy fries.

I see a tramp on the way home and can not give him any money because I have given what I could ill afford to an entitled posh boy with a copy of today’s Times. I feel like telling him to stop shivering and looking sorrowful because nowadays the way to take money is to be wealthy, jaunty and well-spoken.

Or maybe I have just met the Dickensian ghost of David Cameron on the X1 on the way to Lancaster University on a breezy smoky September day.

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Oh bugger. It’s that sort of the time when I see I have not written anything on my blog for a while, no-one has bitterly or evenly politely complained as the most eager searchers for this blog are wanting the undead or sex.

This is probably something which is not unique to my tiny part of the internet.

I wrote about not being able to access Chingle Hall, the allegedly most haunted house in the UK and also a couple of years ago, mentioned on a post about Blackpool, that you could could get lighters that stated, ‘Fancy a F*ck’?’ The lighters were so classy that they were  not asterixed and the picture on the lighter was such that looking at the lighter should have been enough to ahem, extinguish the flame.

Most of my readers now leave saddened at the lack of actual ghosts or actual fucks (this sentence is purely a prostitute one to embiggen my hits)

I hoped for discussion about stone circles, abandoned manors and folklore. But more people are interested in fucking in Blackpool, and I would like to mention if you have to consult obscure blogs if you want to get a fuck in Blackpool, then you clearly have no idea what Blackpool is like. I was offered a fuck in Blackpool when pushing a pushchair along at 9.30 on a Sunday morning.

I tried to think of something exciting in the North to tell you about that I have previously banged on about to a disappointed brief audience of those who want sex or the supernatural.

Yesterday I went to Kendal museum, a place I have already written about but even as admin, I can’t find many old posts lost in the dark dusty tunnels of WordPress.

I still disliked it. It consists of a lot of animals that have been shot in the head and taxidermied. The baby elephant reduced me to near tears  when considering its mother and the stuffed dodo with dodo egg made me go and read The Westmoreland Times in the gift shop and consider spending the last thirty quid in my bank account on a pleasing necklace featuring a fake bronze age arrowhead instead.

My toddler loved the museum and thought it was a ‘zoo but the animals were quiet’. It was also a considerably cheaper entry than to see actual live unshot ones so we might go there on his birthday with a CD soundtrack

We went to Heysham last week, another place I have previously written about but might be lost in the dark annals of WordPress (see, another spelling and I would probably get a lot more hits) and I frolicked joyously in Viking graves, was surprised at the lack of people picking the luscious juicy blackberries before I saw the big fuck off Nuclear Reactor I always forget about and spent some time looking around what must be the tiniest most local museum in the world, chatted to some elderly ladies and was infused with a love of humanity until they told me about the thefts.

Today, I wandered through the streets of Lancaster and thought of how there is nothing new to write about and what I have not already seen. I did not see the ancient mounting block because it was a road I was used to walking down and thus I saw it but did not witness it or comprehend it.

I had soup and cider in a pub which had 1688 scrawled across its low entrance but I had seen it before (maybe quite a few times to be honest) and it left me unmoved.

I walked home past Lancaster Castle, an ancient fortified site and prison that sentenced so many people to be hung, it was second to only the Old Bailey. I only found out recently that  the hill I walk home on used to be known as Sobbing Hill, due to the despairing cries of those witnessing their loved ones slowly and publicly die.

What shall I write about I think?

I have been nowhere and done nothing.

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Christ, this is depressing. The only lights on in the ‘mall’ are on the unrelenting flashing of the empty multitude of children’s rides. An Asian  woman is setting up a stall of wooden motorbikes and smiley long limbed cats that nobody is going to buy. Her face is impassive. Her movements are slow.

There is yet another e-cig stall staffed by a man in a turban but no newsagent to buy an actual pack of real fags. The shops are all closed or about to be closed. I feel for the staff behind the Perfume Superstore, Schrodingers Cats waiting to die. Everything with a slight aura of desperation, futile hope and half price ‘Intimate’ by David Beckham.

The market is rammed, people rifle through piles of clothes that fashion and Lenor has ignored for a decade or more.Chelsea Girl clothing still exists here on a Tuesday morning for a pleasing price.

A sign reads ‘Gooch for Gold’. A woman in a niquab jokes about ‘sexual harrasment’. An outraged female voice retorts, ‘ I was just kissing my cousin!’ The cousin is female and laughs quietly as they all disappear down an aisle of sun bleached Early Learning Centre toys.

Like a sleep walker I stagger to a a favourite place or shop to find it gone, wander around like a zombie to find something familiar, safe, nice.  Preston is interesting, unique and wonderful if you know where to go but someone has changed the map and I am dyspraxic and confused.

I can’t cope when the goal posts are changed, removed and covered in a ‘To Let’ sign.

I am happy enough wondering around, gawking at poverty and modern ruins in a JG Ballard style and The New Continental Pub still exists so  I sit with a large glass of wine and think about how Preston will look next time I pop over on the train.

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It’s really quite refreshing to see people smoking heavily at a family attraction. One of those things that seem to have died out and been replaced with being forced to spend two pounds on a bottle of Elderflower Presse because Pepsi Maxx has  mostly been declared illegal by the sort of jolly people wearing wellies no matter the weather conditions; people who are happy to spend twenty quid during a recession to look at some depressed Lop Eared rabbits shaking in a hutch as long as there is organic flapjack to be had.

The Wild Boar Park needs to reconsider its name. When thinking about whether to spend ten pounds upwards on a family day out, the concept of wild boar don’t normally top the fun-ometer. Water-slide World may have a slight edge.

Strangely enough, the actual cutesy animal money-spinners are under-recognised or ignored on the brochure, and it is rare to have an attraction where the animal in its title  can also be purchased in burgers or fillets replete with squidgy blood in sealed plastic bags in the shop. That would certainly liven up the Shire Horse Centre.

Anyway, it had started to rain, we had to drive in and instantly pay on the way through which terrified me as I wished to have a panic in the car park about whether to go in or not for twenty minutes, judged purely on a laminated poster featuring bad clip-art attached to a fence or a family who look far too confident, expensively coated and shrill going in before us.

This decision was snatched from me far too quickly and I realised only too late, I had not recently looked at the Trip Advisor reviews. Maybe everyone else felt like this and that’s why they were all smoking?

I love looking at local attraction and eating establishment reviews on Trip Advisor. I am aware this shows me up at a complete and utter loser and will be something I regret on my death-bed (see also Rightmove)

It is particularly exciting when owners respond with vitriol and definitely makes up for not having a social life.

The Wild Boar Park should be renamed MeerKat Mansions because no-one really cares about wild boar. Their noses are slightly too long but I do like the juxtaposition between their hairy squat pigginess and their sad soulful eyes. Maybe they have heard about the shop.

I like them but not quite enough to spend nearly 20 quid on looking at them. I was mainly determined to drive twenty miles to have an egg butty with chips and bread and butter for an attractive price (£3.60) as seen on the website.  It was only 11am and I had already had breakfast but I am hardcore.

I utterly recommend a trip to the Wild Boar Park. The TWO free range eggs were a perfect marriage to the large amount of freshly fried over salted (by me) chips and mopping up the yellowy congealing mass with proper white bread and butter whilst sitting on a picnic bench in the sunshine pretending I had not seen my toddler shoulder charging another toddler to get to the swirly slide was possibly the highlight of a summer spent enjoying saturated fat in a variety of picturesque locations.

But then I saw meerkats! Meerkats! Meerkats trying to eat butterflies with sharp snatchy teeth, meerkats trying to sleep then one jumping on them for a cuddle and being chucked off, all the meerkats deciding to have an enormous fight just for the lols, the one bad meerkat strolling around being bad and eyeing up disgarded fag butts.

However it saddens me that I felt guilty for enjoying the meerkats due their advertising presence and plastic figurined occupation in down-market shops. Despite their utterly appalling behaviour ( a quick bite at a fellow sunbathing spread-eagled meerkats penis is Bad Meerkats main occupation) they have become a wide-eyed Disney figure for commercialisation and thus are unworthy of the admiration of someone who owned limited edition Huggybear seven inch records.

I go and pretend to like the wild boar. They glare at me suspiciously. I’m not surprised really. I have just squeezed their brethren in a shop nearby. I try to explain that I am a vegetarian and it was for someone else who wanted me to purchase it but they look at me with eyes that know that no meerkat has ever been sold with chips for four pounds a few hundred yards away.

I tell them to frolic, to be the star of an insurance advert, to assume quirky identities, have a funny spelling, maybe Wyld Borz but they snort, smell and the Danger signs are really not helping their cause if they want to be re-branded.

One looks at me. In his surprisingly over-lashed eyes, I see his contempt.

‘Who is the star here?’ he snorts. ‘The wallabies are not even in the informative brochure. What’s the name of this joint? The Wild Boar Park. That’s it. WILD BOAR. People love us. We do not need to sit atop of a small wooden castle with a flag cutely looking around. We are wild boar. This place is named after us and because of us. By the way, have you seen my dad anywhere? Been gone a few days now.’

Sometimes, your offers of help are just flung back in your face.

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The concept of somewhere being ‘the third most haunted house,’ in the country interests me greatly. Who and by what means accurately and resolutely measures ghostly phenomenon into some sort of Supernatural Pie chart?

Does one Screaming Lady irregularly seen push a stately home up a chart past some turreted building where phantom monks have mournfully chanted for centuries  but have not been seen since 1956?

Is a faithful phantom dog worth more than the occasional lament heard from a child lost in a well?  I want a Venn Diagram.

The elderly guide speaks in calm convinced  Lancashire tones. ‘We have been measured by The Pschosomething Association (I am not quite sure what he said but it sounded all proper  and Sciency) and we were third.’

I mention Samlesbury Hall as possibly also being in the top three. I am stared at again and my question about Salmesbury Hall, a close neighbour and potential rival to Hoghton Towers is not replied to.

This is intriguing. Like Eastenders played out in places with  turrets  and tea rooms. I have been to Samlesbury Hall and there were no sly digs about Hoghton Tower’s ghosts being a gamekeeper in a white sheet- a reference found on yet another shadowy website. The mire gets thicker ever minute.

But then again, there was a loud vacuum cleaner on at Samlesbury Hall so I did not hear much.

A bit of internet research does not have Hoghton Tower on a top three of the most haunted houses unless the phrase ‘reputed to be’ is used and then normally on a Lancashire based portal of knowledge.

I want Maths dammit!  I want vague use of numbers and  pretend science! This will instil in me a fake sense of trust.

I only found out the two hour guided tour was two hours long and not suitable for children after nearly two hours spent trying to console the toddler with a forbidden  iPhone (‘please remember to turn your mobile phones off’,’  whilst looking at a succession of chairs. I was happy looking at chairs, my partner was mutinous about the chairs and they roles they led in a monarchic privileged society that fed on the blood of the workers and the toddler lay spread eagled on the floor and demanded Percy Pigs with increasing volume and ferocity.

I finally desperately ask the guide to release my family and he seems suspiciously happy to shove them out of an studded oak  door somewhere in the quagmires of a floor somewhere. I wonder if I will ever see them again.  But for eight pound a ticket, it would be churlish to expect more value for money.

It is the price of a ticket to the Odeon to instead  spend a day wandering around such dizzying time-scales of history, legend, royalty, loyalty, death, war and romance  that it feels like something the Americans invented for Disneyland- the Full English. The guide is superb, his dotage such that leads one to believe he might have witnessed the explosion of the Norman Keep during the Civil War from a personal vantage point and might not last the actual tour.

William Shakespeare used to work here, many kings and queens have resided here such as James 1st. It has been stormed and that most romantic of things, a tumble down ruin for a century.  Charles Dickens wrote about in a short story, George Silverman’s Explanation.

There is a cot which apparently still swings in the empty stillness of the ancient interior. It does not swing for me. I would happily have paid an extra £2.50 for that (Samlesbury Hall, take note)

Tables longer than my house and older than countries, the sudden cold chill of the morgue, the claustrophobia induced by the first priest hole, utterly voided by the second one down down down the bohemoth shadow of the giant well, for me the most visually exciting path into history and one that was used by people who never had flattering oil paintings to ease their way into a slight immortality.

A brief view of antique dolls houses and then dungeons and dankness, a tableau ever so slightly supportive of the concept of  the Lancashire Witches being spell chanting instruments of Satan, and  who  were apparently meant to have stayed here on the way to their execution but fear of curses laid upon the Tower meant they stayed in the cellar of the pub down the road. The pub down the road seems to be quite un-cursed sadly with well groomed recession busting  clientele blonde  arriving in sports cars. I wonder the witches cellar was Farrow and Balled.

It’s what they would have wanted.

A hunched over skeleton lurks desparingly in the Wine vaults. I find it quite horrifying to discover it is a real skeleton kindly donated by Lady Philomena (or somesuch name, I refuse to forelock tug by actual research)  when she was done with him/her after her medical training.

I wish to remove myself from The Donar Register if all I get after donating my body to Science is waking up in a fucking dungeon owned by the gentry and  being looked at by bored children who should not actually be on the tour in the first place.

Then if I give a sign of my distress, it brings more of the bastards to come stare at me, the entrance fee rises and I am dead and on The One Show.

Salmsesbury Hall would not be pleased. It might end up in hardcore ghost warfare engaged in headless combat.

I was not allowed to take photos inside and by the end of the tour, I could not be arsed as was starving and had a Doritos Grab Bag in the car.  So have a few crap ones to go with my monologue, go to Hoghton Tower, look for a swinging cot and do not take a child or a partner unless they are better than mine.

And before you donate your body to Science, sign a clause to ensure you will not be enslaved in a dungeon for all eternity.

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It is a bad sign when I can’t cope with a picturesque ride into the Lake District. It is a worse sign when I am by far the youngest person and can’t quite hack it. To be fair it is a trifle warm.

The 555 is a double decker bus that rocks serenely into Lancaster Bus Station about Every So Often  O Clock and I glimpse it out of the corner of my wild eyes as I shuffle to the Co-op opposite to buy nappies or stale foul donuts to feed my family with.

The 555 bus ride of promise; spritely octogenerians with stout brown footwear and ruddy cheeks and sensible lunches chortle to each other whilst clutching their Daily Mail and heading into a landscape of poetry and beauty.

I have always yearned  to go on it like I yearn to do anything I think I won’t do but today I am at a loose end, the child is at his childminders, I am on holiday, the house needs immediate attention and many boringly important things need to be done.

I get on the 555.

My chest is pounding as I pay for my pleasingly priced £10.30 Day Explorer. I know now why people take such terrible risks and get beheaded in Pakistan. It is the fear and excitement of doing something exciting!

‘ Bit busy today, int it? Going to be at least ten minutes late into Milnthorpe,’ says someone in her at least seventies next to me.

I feel slightly less exotic.

But the Lake District awaits! The pure delight in getting value for money means I will go to Keswick, have a brilliant poetic arty time, maybe be a muse to someone, paint some watercolours, get discovered, sleep with lots of fellow artists whilst being feted and then loathed by the press and on the way back after having a wee, stop off in Ambleside and have as brilliant a time as can be had in a place that just sells unflattering walking boots for an inflated price and then Kendal for artisan bread and a well deserved drink on the way back home. Oh, what a day will be had!

By the time we slowly drove to Carnforth, five miles on, I was hot and bored and slightly sick from attempting to read.

Twenty minutes on and Cumbria is constantly  throwing old carved signs on houses swirlily saying ‘built in 1610’  at the slightly sickly viewer in a 555 as if to say, ‘ you’re not even on a carriage, you fucking lightweight.’

I am yearning for a footpad at this point to be fair to brighten up the stupidly relentlessly bucolic journey and stop me thinking about my bladder.

I try and seek salvation in staring fixatedly at badly tanned men in their mid sixties with their tops off standing in front of their well proportioned and individually named bungalows and pointing to something in a neighbouring garden in an angry way to someone I can’t see from my vantage point.

I want a wee.

I am bored of bunting. I am bored of fields. I am bored of people on the bus pointing at fields.

I get off at Kendal and feel the shame.

It is akin to a member of Guns and Roses being given a pint of Guiness by a fan in Dublin then getting drunk on it and being sick. Not cool.

But I really really need a wee.

My day is however made by a chance eavesdrop in a charity shop.

‘What size is that dress in the window?’

‘It’s a 14 love.’

‘Ooh, I’m a size 14, may I try it on please?’

‘Hmm (looks woman up and down) It’s a small 14, I’m a size 14 but you have far bigger boobs than me. See?’

(The whole charity shop as one turns around to see)

I think the dress might well still be in the window. And rather than get the 555 back, I made a phonecall with the dying embers of my mobile phone and went back in a car like someone from the future.

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I have still been nowhere and done nothing. The rain it falls, the money it disappears, the weekends vanish in a miserable mist of buying enormous economy packs  of toilet rolls in Home Bargains which bounce joyously against sodden knees on the long trek home. An attempt to liven up these limited horizons by going for a pub lunch ends up in apologising to other patrons and then going home covered in lime and soda and clutching the toddler slightly too hard by his wrist and whispering angrily into his unreceptive ears. My partner talks about how he could have made the same slightly disappointing vegetarian option at home for 20p.

Lancaster is in a permanent state of transition. Sadly the transition has recently been from great shop with nice dresses and earrings shaped like spectacles to Cash Generators and Iceland.

The mills have been knocked down to make room for Barrat homes whilst pleasant and cheap stone terraces for well under a hundred grand have eternal ‘For Sale’ signs outside them.

Those who choose a Barrat home over a 19th century terrace deserve be smothered under fuscia painted MDF.

Art and beauty still exists in Lancaster and I love this small city  very much. However for the purpose of this photo blog, I have chosen to dwell in a slight sense of mundanity and inertia.

Because it is late June and raining heavily.

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I did not particularly need anything. I am aware this means I am a person with limited horizons. But the sun had finally come out towards the twilight of the day and I yearned to walk but just not too far and somewhere where there might be some surprisingly reduced Brie I could purchase slightly too much of.

Then I can watch it for days spreading out of its wrapper gently conquesting,  sliding oozily over what were once its neatly wrapped perimeters. I will go off it a bit as it will start its sophisticated stink but I will not want to waste it so I will continue to pop a bit in my mouth and declare it excellent whilst feeling a bit sick inside and looking with pleading eyes at the smooth neat corners of the Seriously Strong Cheddar. I want to be the sort of person who loves oozing Brie.

That sort of person has bookcases made of wood, not MDF and their socks are partnered in pairs in their underwear drawer. They probably host dinner parties where confident laughs spill out over the big wooden table.

But after day four, I will realise I am not that sort of person, the smell  pervades over the fridge and in my mind, the whole house and along with my dreams of an aspirational future, it will be sunk quietly in the bin to do battle with the pooey nappies and I will pretend I have eaten it and enjoyed it.

And for four quid per kilogram, I will do it again.

I think Bob once had a dream too. He was described as the North West’s ‘ Top’ in red board marker and will be playing ‘tonight’ in this pub which stayed open for three months and soon the blu-tac will be pulled down along with his dreams and aspirations of a better ‘tonight!’ and he will be relegated into a rented skip along with long ago consumed bottles of Fosters Ice.

I fought the sharpened elbows to get to the reduced labels of victory and managed to get some Mexican Sweetcorn Dip reduced to 34p. I walked home along the quay triumphant but queasily thinking of the point when I would actually have to eat it.

I don’t like sweetcorn.

But for 34p I will do it again.

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Gatehouse of Fleet is my favourite place in the world. Probably after a week of living here, I would have an argument with someone over something like, ‘if you’re vegetarian, why do you eat vegetarian sausages?’ at which  I would become overly obsessively furious and paranoid over the prospect of meeting them again and forgetting the succinct, clever yet  wittily cruel personal comeback I formed at three am when staring wild eyed and angrily at the ceiling.

And then I will bump into them in Spar, smile politely and in a slightly too fast babble, apologise  for being vegetarian and say that meat smell lovely on a barbeque and ‘LOL! Stuffed peppers don’t quite cut it do they?!’

Then I will go back to my house in Gatehouse of Fleet and throw things at myself.  Then decide to move.

Gatehouse Of Fleet is a fantasy place of residency for me. I do not drive. It lies somewhere slightly to the left of the back of beyond. If I had the urge to change my hair to an unnatural hue, it would probably take several hours on a bus then maybe a train and a train change to find ‘Electric Blue’.

I simply cannot live like that.

It is a piece of Scotland that has been ever so slightly groomed for the English and the ‘artisans’ (these often are one and the same)

There are a few small art galleries where you can purchase a lovely local painting, the seemingly ubiquitous  metal hare or a Nice But Surprisingly Expensive Thing.

Or go to my second favourite ever charity shop ever * and buy boys clothing for 25p an item. In this charity shop, the hand-woven woolen designer kilts of dead Scots and metal studded nylon dresses from Primark with plunging bust lines are both of a similar price. A fiver makes you feel king of the world. It closes for lunch. I remember when places closed for lunch. It makes me feel safe to think such places still exist.

If I lived here, I would probably be annoyed that it closed for lunch.

I have in my hand, a freshly printed leaflet for a local attraction. This could not make me happier. I love a leaflet for a local attraction. Often I have no desire to go to ‘Dinoland’ or ‘’World of Steam’ but will still look up the vegetarian provisions in its cafe if it has a PDF menu online and try to talk to my partner about whether they represent both an original option and an attractive price. I am aware this is probably very sad. He certainly is. And the vegetarian choice is normally a ‘Quiche of the Day’ with the average price of £6.75 which includes a lacklustre side-salad but some quite pleasing home made coleslaw but the overbearing sense at the end is anger, guilt and an all pervading hollowness  at spending ‘how much?’ when getting the bill. A sense slightly numbed  for an hour if the premises are licensed.

We follow the instructions on the leaflet, walk through the white-washed town, up a drive of lovely houses but where the lawns are slightly too manicured. Strangely a ten year old Fat Boy Slim track with a refrain that appears to contain the word ‘fuck’  is being played very loudly somewhere. I do like it here.

We follow the arrows through various stages of Nirvana, hazy bluebell hills, screamingly yellow gorse (a hair colour name I would happily pay upwards of four pounds for) ancient trees with sprawling limbs, then up and up and up to Trusty’s Hill.

I am glad I did not over research this because it comes as a shock.

A large flat stone covered by a rusting metal cage in the middle of no-where (but slightly left) with no parking facilities, no guides, no entrance fee.

It never used to be the middle of nowhere. Stand here and you can see the fort behind it, the well next to it- it is a vivid  glimpse into the past where the present does not intrude.

The stone however is a portal.

Why try and explain it or detail it? Look at the pictures and wonder, imagine, remind yourself of your own insignificance -possibly why so many other people over the years chiseled their own initials into the rock until the arrival of the metal cage.

Other people might well disagree but I think it makes it more significant and fascinating that there have been parades of people over the centuries up this steep track to  write into this rock, to show their own mortality and immortality.  The changing of carving style from  Victorian to semi-present I found wondrous but the actual Pictish carvings just made me stop and stare in disbelief.

I marvel at stone circles but do not get a chance to think about the person behind them as they are old stones hoisted sweatily by many. They are an act of force and beauty but they lack a sense of individualism.

Here, the history is personal. Here are  beautifully carved mythical creatures designed and painstakingly carved  by someone or a few, dead thousands  of years ago.

A  whirling sea monster is caught mid lash for eternity. A cheery fellow with a triangle on his head, straight out of a cBeebies logo pops out of the ancient world to say hello.

There is a chirpy alienish figure strongly resembling a Teletubby which gives me the chilling feeling that maybe David Icke might have  been right after after all. **

I resolve never to think that again.

I am also reminded of the swirling smiling black inked tattoos or murals  seen on all crusties’ legs/busses in the mid 90’s.

I am not sure what has chilled me more.

But one day I will live here and come to this spot every day (unless the weather is unpleasant)

One day I will live here. (And walk here once every six months when the weather is pleasant)

One day I will live here and moan to the wind about the lack of vegetarian sausages and bad hair dye.

And maybe, just maybe a voice from through the ages will whisper back to me…

‘Stop bloody whinging, at least you’ve got dentists and discovered quorn growing in a field near Marlow. Oh and if you see David…’

http://www.gatehouse-of-fleet.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=185%3Aexcavation-on-trustys-hill&catid=24%3Anews&Itemid=8

* If no-one cares what my first one is then I shall sulkingly admit that blogging is a pointless vain affectation…But you will have missed out on where the best charity shop in the UK is so I will have had the last laugh…

** Upon aliens being witnessed and drawn by people thousands of years ago, not about Teletubbies being a portal into the past. Although having accidently seen links to his blog by people on Facebook who should know better, I can’t cancel the second option out.

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