Unicycle Emptiness

I hear the words ‘Shipwreck Walk’ and my mind flows rapidly and exuberantly through tragedy, romance and death. And everyone likes romance, tragedy and death.

It is a walk starting in Fleetwood, guided by and funding the RNLI through the treacherous Morecambe Bay and my main concern is when all the earnest men in woolly jumpers are staring earnestly at the barnacled ribs of ancient galleons I might seem ignorant over whether it is from the 16^th or 17^th century as they tramp over the treasure chests peeping out which somehow only I can see and thus get the acclaim and oh the huge amounts of money somehow for finding.

What I was not expecting was no shipwrecks. And a sellout of crisps in the middle of the sea.

Fleetwood is out in force and they are determined to have a good time.  I see few furrowed brows looking at antiquated maps but there are a lot of cans and I am the only one with a rucksack. This makes me embarrassed and I hope for a sudden squall so I can be all resourceful before realising there is only cardigans and a hideous brown banana in the rucksack. Most people here look like they would chirpily die before wearing a somewhat bobbly Bay Trading cardigan.

We walk out into the bay, always an exciting experience when knowing of the ‘treacherous quicksand’ and towards a distant lighthouse. Upon arrival it is Escheresque in its bold hold onto existence, its wooden shackles snapped in so many places it seems impossible it is still standing. Underneath its shadow, a folk duo is suprisisingly playing and crisps and kit Kats are being sold but have sold out by the time we fight over whether with our solitary gold coin to have a packet of Walkers cheese and onion crisps or a Kit Kat.

I see brown skeletal ribs of long sunk ships poking enticingly out of the sucking sucking sand. I cannot wait to touch them and imagine Tragedy.

But when the walk continues, it snakes merrily back to the starting point. The route has changed to encompass no shipwrecks. I was not aware of this and am saddened but nobody else seems to care. This is an impromptu party in the sand and the hiss of opening cans of beers fills me with envy. I have only water and sensible footwear, dammit. It is an unusual situation for me to be in and I resolve to carry beer and crisps with me at all times. Just in case.

The earnest men with maps and books do not exist, the shipwrecks remain a mirage but I have walked across the bay, dodged quicksand, touched the fragments of a lighthouse and soon I will find that the North Euston Pub does a large house red for three quid something.

And it will have been a good day.

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It is Jubilee weekend and I am determined to avoid the queen. I do not like her reptilian smile and beady eyes. I do not like her slight sanctimonious smirk. I do not like her gently folded hands and I do not like anything she stands for, whether it be her and her extended family bopping wildlife on the head or hee-hawing around their Lovely Houses when I yearn to afford laminate flooring from B and Q.

And thus I end up in prison.

And it’s all the queens fault.

Lancaster Prison contained within the castle complex is open for the second time to non-offenders as part of the Jubilee celebrations since it was decommissioned a year ago. I could give you some fascinating facts about the prison being the oldest continual prison in the country and how the courts sentenced more people to be hung there than anywhere else in the country besides the Old Bailey in London but in my excitement and enthusiasm about PRISONS and DEATH and WITCHES I will no doubt spectacularly exaggerate and not bother to look up actual facts and dates  because who would when the subject matter is PRISONS and DEATH and WITCHES.  And then instead of my steady stream of Spam I might, if I’m lucky get an annoyed missive from a local person on a Hotmail account informing me that I am incorrect about something significant and I should correct my facts and I will be all embarrassed and angry at the same time.

And it will be the queen’s fault.

Everything is.

The huge old wooden entrance door to the castle, the ancient wall containing it splattered with musket shot is opened slowly to show the fascinating jumble of archaic cruelty, torture, murder, graffiti in ballpoint pen and toilets separated from the room by a mere screen.

The prisoner in cell one should he/she have pleaded Not Guilty might have had narrowed eyes aimed at him in the unlikely event the judge came to his/her cell and seen the cannabis leaves drawn carefully on the wall. I watch my toddler cheerily attempt to thwart the wire and forbidding notices and go up several flights of forbidden  stairs and feel a sudden pang of guilt that we are not at a petting farm. Then he has a huge tantrum due to not being allowed to dangerous forbidden things in a prison and I want to leave him here.

The cell where the ‘witches’ and other poor unfortunates were kept is almost Disneyesque in its over the top caricature of terribleness.  A stone time worn flight of steps curving into a small hellhole of utter darkness, dankness and depravity. I jokily threaten loudly to put the badly behaved baby in there and no-one smiles. Which is embarrassing. I guess they are too busy thinking about sad and lonely deaths centuries ago or trying to hear the guide to enjoy a weak pun about making a child suffer. Bastards, I will put them in there as well. And the queen. That’ll learn em.

Somewhere a convict is reading this because they Googled ‘escape from prison tips’ or something and my languid prose appeared and they are laughing about the stupid idiots who pay nine quid to go to prison on a sunny bank holiday weekend. For nine quid I was pretty much expecting a ride on a broomstick but the reality was better and I say this rarely. I loved the angular lines of stark modernity against the crumbling walls of the medieval, I loved the Health and Safety notices next to where people were murdered by the state for stealing a handkerchief and I love the way where for a brief minute when recoiling in the sudden sunlight outside the castle, our government, our recessions and even the queen didn’t seem quite so bad.

Then I shivered in that sudden stream of bright sunlight,  told myself to man up and went home to play The Sex Pistols and to try not to think of the living deaths I paid nine quid to gawp at, like a viewer at the Roman Coliseums, excited about misery and death as long as it is diluted by Time.

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The hippies have taken over and I can’t afford a thing. The prices in the chain charity shops * are so ludicrous I feel like pushing an old lady volunteer over smartly in the back whilst screaming ‘Are you fucking insane? It’s a kid’s plastic drum with no stick! No wonder people still have cancer! ’ But I am English and thus look at a Primark dress tag in a slightly sarcastic way on the way out. That’ll learn ‘em.

Totnes is not in the Northwest. If it were, people would come on coaches to point and hark. And maybe throw rancid butter pies. It is in Southest Devon, near rubbish Plymouth but edging away discreetly and burning some Nag Champa to hide the smell. It has history, centuries of it but more recently as being a hippy colonized town, banning carrier bags, having its own currency and the rest. The first person I see when alighting out of the car at Morrisons (I could not find a Fair Trade car park and I like their cheese selection) is a dreadlocked man on a skateboard. When walking up the happily antiquated high street, my boyfriend hears someone say extremely earnestly to a child around six years old, ‘how is your chakra feeling today?’ As a professional Wiganer, he is delighted by this and falls to his knees in delight but as we are on a hill, nobody notices.

After going in the Riverford Organics deli and coming out with a whopping big Homity pie, a mustard and cheese pastry, some posh Italian something and a massive chocolate truffle for under a fiver, I decide I want to live here. I’m quite shallow. There is a cat sitting under a war memorial and there is well-priced pastry from a fancy organic shop I have read about in The Guardian. My wonderful life forged in the North can go to hell. I decide to keep this thought quiet for a bit.

And then there is suddenly shopping like my eBay saved searches. Cutesy old fashioned exterior shops selling within dresses with unicorns on, Spanish designer coats and Scandinavian babygros. Three shops in a row sell Moomins handbags. I love Moomins handbags! I run to find the boyfriend and baby who in the general excitement over cheap organic Guardian pie I forgot ever existed and hyperventilate gently at them whilst pointing wildly.

‘Yes, I know you like them but you can’t afford them.’ Oh. I had forgotten about that. ­ The happy bohemian gentility of Totnes comes at a price even a well-priced pie can’t save. The babygros are 30 quid despite and because of their quirky retro patterns. The coats are two hundred. And we are in a small town in Devon in a recession.

The hippies have taken over and with them came counter culture, with the counter culture came the trendiness, with the trendiness came the aspiration, with the aspiration came the desire, with the desire came the money to fulfill the desire. Thus the desire to be counterculture drives out the true hippies, those with the ideas and ideals but not the brand that determines and markets it.

I hear a woman fluting the words ‘positive energy’ with the elocution, and confidence to make it a statement of fact like the Ocado delivery arriving at 12 rather than an ideal found somewhere hidden within oneself. A small terraced house here now costs a Lot.

But The Performing Arts College has closed, many say the hippy heyday is over and my boyfriend declares the chippy we end up going to, to have a slight hint of menace due to a mushy pea related mix up. Somehow, however I am still alive to tell the tale.

But if you go to Totnes,  remember it is a fairy tale version of hippyness, wonder how the fuck people afford to live there and be very very  clear about your order to the softly spoken man in the chippy who has the faint aura of menace.

* the local charity shops  for local animals were sadly all closed

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Today I saw something which ashamed me and filled me with glee. It roused me from torpor and filled me with passion. It made me want to hang garlands of flowers around it, spray-paint bold red Anarchy signs next to it. But of course I did nothing. I was a (very vaguely) respectable looking woman with a baby sleeping in a pram and nowadays I don’t fight the state, I just  bitch about it.

But there is something about seeing menacing signs being subverted by the simple means of spray paint that brings out the spring passion in everybody.

Freeman’s Wood does not soar splendidly. You do not gaze at great gnarled oaks here bearing silent stories and majesty. No. In this strip of wildwood betwixt housing estate and derelict mills are spidery old trees, the only trees for miles around but they still whisper and rustle, still change with the season, wild creatures still live their lives amongst them and people, city people, edgeland people, Marsh people walk or cycle past and feel better for just having seen a glimpse of nature.

And now they are fenced off with spiky topped fencing. They are now being felled despite having a Tree Preservation Order being placed upon them.

There used to be a BMX track here amongst the woods, a kids place, made by and for kids. That has been cleared away and fenced off in a place that used to belong to the people. Well, they thought it did. Now Shadow People have claimed it as their own and despite acting illegally by felling the trees are getting away with it. And for more box like housing in areas where people are desperate to sell their own homes.

When Occupy Lancaster occupied the derelict Railton Hotel opposite the train station, a place I have had to apologise and explain about to every non local friend or family member arriving on the train and always ending with ‘but the rest of Lancaster is lovely’, the police arrived at night and in force to the peaceful people trying to make the eyesore habitable (owned by a Shadow Person who apparently live continents away and has not touched the once beautiful building for many years.  Although the splendid rose bushes were suddenly sprayed with weed killer one unhappy day)

Many police came, many people were arrested, a knitting vigil was held outside the building and this was felt dangerous and anarchic enough to have a police car watching the knitting at all times.

But now, illegal destruction is going on in the woods and nobody cares. Well nobody in authority. But somebody has spray-painted slogans, one of which, the common land and the goose, has been a slogan of disenchantment and anger about stolen land for centuries.

And it  is sad the slogan has had to remain in public use. But in some way wonderful because people still are angry and aware enough to use it.  Tradition lingers and centuries old anger against the state still suddenly flings itself against a metallic sign even though we now have mobile phones instead of geese and apathy reigns supreme. But  some stranger somewhere with a can of spray paint knows about the history of common land and about how it can so easily be stolen from the common person.

If you reside in Lancaster, write to the council about Freeman’s Woods. Look at the blog and  website below to find out more. Get angry. And do something.

If you don’t live in Lancaster, the great land grab is still happening and has happened around you.

And now there is not much land to grab anymore.

http://virtual-lancaster.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catastrophic-damage-to-protected.html

http://savefreemanswood.wordpress.com/

http://occupylancaster.org.uk/

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This post is dedicated to Lemons who replied to my blog when I thought I could not be arsed to write anything and after the realisation I had a reader, I wrote….

The elegant manor house hides nothing more sinister than flip board charts featuring ‘mind maps’, corporate slang and possibly some comic sans handouts in the cheap tin bins. I don’t know. I never went inside but ghosts do not appear wherever there is designated parking.

Haigh Hall near Wigan looked very haunted on ghost hunting sites on the Internet where in some Ballardian scenario it is now more scary than in actual reality. It was owned by People of Pedigree and a delve through its old parkland, skirting dog poo and having to reply to cheery people saying ‘hello’ did not diminish my enthusiasm and trust in coming face to face with some wraithly ancient nobleman-would he have a 19^th century Wigan accent? And how would I be able to tell?

Then I saw the designated parking. My heart sank. For ahem, some strange reason I never get to actually see any undead but the conference rooms on the first floor looked despicably modern for being in such a glamorous sweep of antique façade and the function rooms downstairs were too red napkinny looking to harbour a visitor from another realm. I suspect he would be asked to pay a sixteen pound a head surcharge in case of potential ectoplasm stains on the canapés.

The view across Wigan is glorious and tinged with a little irony, as now, it is the slightly shabby around the edges manor house, which works for a living. The chaise longues have been carted off to auction and replaced with well-lit fire escapes and I imagine precautionary laminated signs possibly with warning Clipart near the hot taps.

And now the people who used to work at the mills whose chimneys still stand untouched, admired and part of the landscape come to t’ manor to sit in rooms now stripped and unsmocked of velvet and learn in a different less physically grubby way of how to make more money for someone richer. But at least there is probably a coffee machine. I was too scared to enter the building, it being a Sunday morning and looking neither bride or slightly over eager trainee at Footlocker who really wants to maximize her potential by getting there a day early.

The parkland surrounding Haigh Hall is still (apart from the dog poo dodging) timeless (actually I suspect dog poo dodging or the lack of dodging and thus resultant swears might be the only thing that links all of humanity throughout the ages)

A handwritten sign states that the small gauge railway described and pictured on Haigh Hall’s website in a charming glossy chugging photograph is not working today. A look at the rusty tracks says that the small gauge railway has not worked since Chesney Hawkes was number one.

The enshrouding managed nature is extensive and beautiful though and free to wander around in. I liked the high barbed wire walls surrounding the abandoned zoo-such things are a delight to the macarborous viewer imagining the entombed lion skeletons which clearly do not lie within. There is a derelict crazy golf course; surely the perfect setting for a first novel that nobody ever buys. There is a walled garden for people to read in, surely the best use of council tax to ever exist, apart from boring sanitisation.

I like Haigh Hall and respect to the ghost hunters on the websites I guiltily peruse who profess to have found the undead here hanging around the Douglas Suite, possibly like me, wandering what the hell is a slide carousel? I suspect it is not as fun as it sounds.

And what is more terrifying? The possibility that ghosts exist in this Hall or the actual realization that people are forced to sit in a room in it, visualising not the past but future profits and how they can be a key marketer and upsell, upsell, upsell.

This is why I like the past more. But even now the Past has to work for a living.

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I blame the recession and the baby. Well, mostly the baby. I loathe the term ‘mummy blogger’ and pointless baby orientated witterings but to be fair, he does exist and a combination of childcare fees and a one year old who emits ear piercing shrieks when forced to stay still for upwards of a second means perambulations around real ale pubs, musings on the generosity of pizza toppings and well, just general fun are currently curtailed.  I have gone nowhere interesting or done anything interesting for a considerable period of time apart from look at the internet, walk zombie eyed around the utilitarian racks of Wilkinsons, pick toast up off the floor and mindlessly eat kettle chips.

I miss writing the blog, I miss writing but my muse has currently deserted me-everything is familiar, pleasantly so but familiar nonetheless and I can not describe it in interesting terms to the badly punctuating spammers who converge like hungry hyenas on Word Press thinking that a year old post on Morecambe needs a comment advertising Xbox cheats.

A new Sainsbury’s has replaced the old one in Lancaster. Will that do you? I have not stepped through misty wilderness looking for ancient Celtic standing stones but it was a bastard trying to find out where the reduced shelves have gone. And even if they still exist. There. A cliff-hanger to keep my readers. And I am glad there is still some mystery in my life.

Walking over the hill and seeing Lancaster Castle with its flag flying, always cheers me up because what is more picturesque than seeing the sanitised reconstructed reboostered portal to misery-where more people were sentenced to he hung than at the Old Bailey, where the trapdoor to death is cooed at in six pound guided tours and where people, real alive people, sons and daughters, wives and children shook and trembled, their legs giving way before being toppled to their long miserable deaths-sometimes for stealing food to keep their families alive.

Yes, I do love Lancaster Castle. Really. I feel guilty for loving the historic misty-eyed wolves howling at midnight version of the past and being bored of the present where even despite the Conservatives, no one in this country is currently entombed in a black sulphurous cell awaiting their time to be murdered by the state. Nowadays is more a form of prolonged psychological torture in the form of Workfare and Kafkaesque paper forms of eternity and when you realise that in your house there does not exist a black pen for the Form Reading Machine to read and the Form Reading Machine spits black flames at your lilac glitter pen found in a drawer and thus you have to reclaim and you try to phone up to explain but there are no people anywhere to speak to anywhere and you think of standing stones and the mysteries and enchantment there used to be. But at least you have your teeth.

It is cold and every weekend is the same. Yesterday we went to Carnforth Station and had coffee and cake in the refreshment rooms, a paen to the past where an elderly man plays piano and spiky old peoples’ writing in the visitors book reminisce and rhapsodise about a place that only exists because of a made up film, Brief Encounters where the characters in the film go back to their lonely short unhappy lives because society dictates that is how things should be.

I wish they had had excellent sex passion fuelled sex and run away together but that would have only resulted in a different tedium without the thought of ‘what might have been’.

In a small room for children there is a slightly grubby Thomas The Tank Engine Tent which my baby refuses to go in and on the window ledge is an even grubbier Tigger the Tiger, a battle worn much loved children’s teddy, forgotten and unclaimed in this interchange of trains and destinations. Somewhere, a child wants his Tigger.

So (she says in a sparkly hairdresser voice) have you been anywhere nice? Show me you are not a spammer only looking at this blog in an ill-fated desperate attempt to advertise wedding dresses or brides. Tell me about where you have been-and I will shoot bitter envious shoots of green if you go on about Tuscany or somewhere as I have no passport or money. Make the uninteresting, interesting. Because it is for a stranger.  I want to know about Tenby, Kidderminster, anywhere else but here. Standing stones would be good but I love this country because history abounds everywhere. My blackest mood can be lifted by walking along a miserable arterial road blackened by pollution, encrusted with Lambert and Butler packets and seeing an excellent graffitied image of an owl, a dark anonymous building, huddled behind the endless procession of lorries but which has the insignia of ‘1829’ above the door. Imagine the story behind that house! Imagine who carved that insignia, their life, their death, what and who used to traverse in front of that bowed sunken hulk and what was there before.

History is fascinating. The future is terrifying. I will sit here and think of the past because despite the lack of dentists, the dying in childbirth, the babies buried for want of a piece of bread, the harsh gritty reality of it all is softened by time-my baby lacks no food despite the fact I consider myself poor but my eyes soften at a house where probably a woman died in childbirth. Why? Because the Other is always more preferable.

Tell me about your Other. The mundane is only mundane if it is known.

Please?

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I am so far behind the times with this I might as well be espousing the joys of Abba, the pill and flares. Basically I was at my parents in Devon for Christmas and there was an article in The Guardian about the best budget places to eat in Lancaster appearing to be by someone who’s idea of ‘budget’ was whatever place he spotted on a brief perusal of the town before sodding back off to The Ivy.

I was going to write an excellent retort and link to it on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free page but I never got around to it, being too busy doing sweet FA. Apart from eating an impressive mix of carbohydrates eight times a day.

The article pissed me off because some of the places the reviewer espoused were not remotely budget for most of the population. For example, The Sun Hotel, which was mentioned, is an upmarket establishment frequented by quite loud people in suits who have no Farm Food carrier bags and do not shuffle. It is a nice place to eat but your open topped ravioli will be around eight or nine pounds and a medium glass of wine is four pounds. That is not budget. That is a first date.  Genuine budget establishments do not have leather sofas and iPad clutching clientele. A true budget establishment is somewhat sticky and has spelling mistakes more eye catching than the food. Or is just a great place that does not charge through the nose.

So anyway, a month late, here is my definitive list of the best budget eateries in Lancaster.

1.     The veggie food stall in the market every Saturday. Oh yes. Here be griddled Nirvana for only three pounds. This is the ‘veggie mix’, a calorific delight consisting of fried halloumi, falafels, freshly made potato cakes and a choice of sauces all wrapped up in pitta bread then deposited in the somewhat more downmarket polystyrene tray by an immensely cheery man. Should I ever get married, this will be the wedding fayre. Please provide your own plastic Spork.

2.     Windy Hill Bakery, King Street –Excellent bread for around 1.50 and vegetarian pasties for the same price consisting of glamorous un Greggsy fillings like spiced aubergine and feta. Run by the friendliest woman in the world who appears to be from an Enid Blyton book. An aura of bonhomie pervades.  Also do exceedingly good cakes for the magic price of 1.50 or under.

3.     The Merchants. A cosy underground pub which has the papers, good wine for under four quid for a large glass and the best chips in existence: crispy, yet also curiously soggy behemoths and a veritable steaming Everest of them for 2.50.  If you are trying to impress or have recently won the lottery then why not spend an extra three quid on the soup then you can have the endless possibilities that the soup, piece of bread and portion of chips entails. Shall one mouthful be a mini chip butty and the next a soup dipped chip? Or shall I go for the elegant tapas of the more traditional soup dipped bread before having a margarine-smeared chip? I know how to live. Oh yes.

http://www.merchants1688.co.uk/

4.     The Gregson. The main food menu isn’t enormously cheap and the veggie menu seems to have suffered somewhat since I first came here but the light bites menu with all things 4.95 has garlic mushrooms and chips where the garlic mushrooms joyously spurt out boiling hot garlicky oil when you bite into them. It is a cosy bohemian pub/community centre with an always-lit fire with a dog often slumbered in front of it, the papers, a toy chest and friendly staff.

http://gregson.co.uk/

5.     Here, I admit a grudging allowance for one of the establishments on the original Guardian list. The Sultan of Lancaster café has an excellent spicy tamarind and chickpea soup for 3.25 and pleasingly also has curly fries along with more traditional Indian fare.  Many establishments that serve Indian food and curly fries are relentlessly awful but this place manages to be classy and have one consider curly fries a traditional Punjabi delicacy.  http://sultanoflancaster.com/

6.     Sainsbury’s café. A full veggie English with free-range eggs and a slight air of misery for under four quid. See also Wetherspoons. The Sainsbury’s café features fewer alcoholics in suits sitting alone and adrift at their island like table perches with a trembling hand on an empty pint glass but more people with bandages strangely. The Daily Mail is the most popular paper here, which is why I don’t frequent it often despite the excellent value for an admittedly slightly joyless wizened breakfast.

7.     Nice Bar. Not the cheapest place in town but by far the most glamorous if your idea of glamour is wallpaper featuring a Sistine chapel fresco and literary quotes from books you have never read embedded on walls and ceiling.  A meal can be had for around six pounds, which in my book is eminently reasonable. And this is an excellent place to sit and eavesdrop on artisans, intellectuals and the pretentious. http://nicebarandrestaurant.co.uk/

8.     Verdes. For five pounds twenty five you can have a slightly forgettable pizza or pasta and snigger at the slightly lurid painted interpretations of Italy on the walls.

9.     Greenhalghs bakery. Butter pie. 1.20. Job done.

10.  Soupernova.  Another place mentioned in The Guardian, it does big bowls of good soup for around 3.50. You can feel your life expectancy rise as you eat it. Thus it then makes perfect sense to go back to the pub.

http://www.veggieplaces.co.uk/list_reviews.php?place_id=620

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/dec/14/budget-eats-doing-lunch-in-lancaster

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I like the concept of a walk until I have been actually walking for a bit, slipped in some mud and had a bit of a fight about being lost. Then I see something like a deer or an abandoned cottage and I like walking all over again until I slip in some mud and get a bit lost.

This walk was in Lancashire Tea Shop Walks, a book that must be about two decades old and it was not the teashop or the walk that attracted me although that is how I presented it to my partner to get him to drive there. It is a good old  fashioned  tale of misery, betrayal, suicide and ghosts. Which is also licenced.

Lizzie Dean, a servant at the Sun Inn in Chipping was having a romance with a local man. He dumped her to marry her best friend in a true cliché of wankerness and on the day of the wedding, rather than make gestures as to the small size of his cock from her window overlooking the church, slag him off on Facebook or go on the Jeremy Kyle show, it being the 19^th century, she chose to hang herself and her ghost is well reported as being said to haunt that very same pub.

I feel sorry for Lizzie. There is now a Lizzie’s Lounge in The Sun and although I wandered wide eyed around the pub hoping something ghostly might happen, there were only well priced pub meals and posters advertising a Halloween event featuring bats. It was a nice pub though and even nicer for having completed the six mile walk in the aforementioned Lancashire Tea Shop Walks.

A woman came in when we were there and when told about the sausage hotpot, asked grimly how big the sausages were to which the confused teen attempted to measure with his hands and then perform a clumsy chopping motion.

The walk itself was soggy, muddy but ultimately wonderful due to a sudden fold in the hills opening up into a heathery glen, the sort of one you just want to lie spread-eagled in and shout ‘aaaaaah’ at the skies. It is muddy though so I do not. There are wooded copses of the sort that hide bodies and treasure, creepy glens of stunted trees where surely wraiths must glide when not disturbed by the sound of an argument over which way is next whilst holding a sodden charity shop guide book and there are crumbling barns. The fells overhead are magnificent and it is like being in a budget Glencoe.

Back in Chipping, we  peruse the village store which is antiquated and excellent, selling local cheese, faded birthday candles and Wispas. There is another pub, The Tillotsons Arms that ahem, has to be explored/drunk in and I am delighted by its gothicness until realizing it is preparing for Halloween and the skulls are not permanent. It is a friendly pub though with decent ciders and awards by CAMRA.

On the way back, we go to see Lizzie’s grave. According to her suicide note she wanted to be buried at the front of the church so her ex lover and friend would have to step past her grave every time they went to church, which has to be the ultimate in passive aggression.

Oh Lizzie. Seeing your grave you made me realize you were real and I apologise for nosing excitedly for your unhappy ghost. You were too dignified in life and I suspect you regret it bitterly now that your only outlet now is to attempt to spook over a Meal For A Fiver menu.

You should have just killed them both.

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Here speaks the usually silent photographer. Set loose from my usual job of photographing stuff that Cyberfairy points out as curious, winsome or tragicomic, I had free rein to indulge myself in my chief delight. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a short photoblog where I ignore pretty things and give you instead mould, concrete and aging roofs out of context. Don’t worry, I shall return to Penn-like (or is it Teller-esque?) silence now and your enjoyment of our heroine’s adventures in unlikely places shall continue unsullied.

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It is recession time and it is bleak. Remember when this blog was started? Unless you are my mum you probably do not. I wrote about boutique hotels in major cities, I critisied canapés and described third courses in words stolen from Sunday newspapers. Now I have a baby, no money and a part time public sector job. I am a vox pox of 2011 and my roof is leaking, the camera is broken and to cut a long whining story short, my blog has not been updated in a while, I can’t afford to go anywhere so I will walk around Lancaster with a pushchair and hope for something exciting to happen.

Hmm, nothing exciting has happened as yet. I walk past the quay where there were gypsies camped but they have left it relatively clean. Apart, surprisingly from a baby bath.

The quay is wonderful to me and I try to walk past it every day-I like its urban dereliction, shattered boats, adverts for long defunct businesses and the history behind these mammoth facial slabs of building-behind which now lie broken office chairs, badgers, feral cats and tumbling nature. The river Lune shoots past, grey and angry possibly because it is heading towards Morecambe and nobody likes Morecambe on a bleak October day. Sorry Flotsam. Sorry Jetsam. You were washed down here from the more cerebral heights of the Lake District and now are passing a grave to British industry. To the right across the river is Skerton, which makes these 19^th century derelict warehouses look positively antiquely charming.  Over there lies all concrete ‘office space’ where nobody has taken an office, snarled up roads and an enormous spaceship Asda to which I am attracted to more than I should be.

But we are still firmly on the left side and so we pass the Maritime Museum, a wonderful pillared place, formerly the town hall and a place I spend so much time in, the staff recognise me. My baby’s first words will hopefully be anchor. It is a cosy place where people are pleasant at all times, has a changing room full of painted fish and a quiet café where you will always be chatted to. There are wooden replicas of ships, terrifyingly realistic 18^th century figures rolling barrels (one of which I rather fancy) canal boats you can sit on and one for the children, a replica stagecoach where a disembodied voice narrates the deaths of people who traveled the treacherous sinking sand of Morecambe bay.

I should really take the baby to Stay and Play sessions at the nursery a bit more but I want him to be aware of mortality and also I don’t have to make asinine conversation about the weight and cleverness of other babies. He seems to like it anyway.

We walk along over the Millennium Bridge, a wonderful piece of architecture shaped like a ship’s sail which everyone else in Lancaster hated and is still a feature in angry letters to the Lancaster Guardian along with the traditional favourites of dog poo and cyclists.

In town, filled with happiness on this bright Autumnal day, I enter a charity shop and then leave frozen and still by the talk of misery, illness and death and also by the prices on bobbly Primark dresses.

We go to NICE, a bar and café that unlike most others on the high street does not offer pie, chips and peas for under four quid. And thus the middleclass flock to it.

It has quotes from clever books embossed on the wall, Japanese beer on draught, sporadic poetry and music events in the next room, an art gallery overhead and an air of well-fed middle class gentility. A meal is about a quid more than a large house red and nearly as good- think date based cous cous recipes with foreign names for under six quid. Think women in Monsoon clothing with large lattes and a general sense of wellbeing.

I prefer The Merchants pub next door but the baby hates it because it is dark and thus bedtime. It is underground, an old wine merchants, does the best chips known to humanity and has a variety of newspapers. It is my idea of Nirvana and I miss rainy Sundays there very much and is the only reason I resent the baby sometimes. I like the combination of students, alcoholics and random people who have missed a train (possibly due to alcoholism)

Sometimes it has the Evening Standard or The Scotsman left by a weary (alcoholic) commuter which makes it a portal into another glamorous world when you did not have a baby in a pram you can’ t quite fold up, a bank balance that equals zero and memories of when a meal out was not eaten with fingers in a cold Northerly wind and your life did not take place within half a mile. I blame the Conservatives. Because they are easier to blame than contraceptives and far far less cuter than babies.  And in short, just because I can.

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