Unicycle Emptiness

I really really want a Raspberry Ruffle but I am scared it’s a trap. Above the fireplace of the Royal Hotel are two incongruous jars glistening with foil wrapped chocolates. But are they for the hoi polloi off the street to help themselves to, or for the residents of the hotel only, those stalwart Daily Telegraph reading denizens with cars too young for them and clothes too old for them? Or are they for mere decoration, somewhat at odds with the expensive quirkily tasteful wallpaper, the Country Life magazines, the antique wood, and the designer hand gel in the toilets? (The toilets alone in which I would be more than happy to spend a mini-break in)

The Royal Hotel was a wreck last time we were here-now money has recreated it in to a far more glamorous and tasteful pastiche of its past, where one can feel history but not its rats, poverty and fleas whilst sipping a triple hot chocolate, glass of champagne or whilst delicately nibbling upon a cupcake. I hate cupcakes. So self knowingly kitsch and ‘treaty’, they shriek  ‘ooh, aren’t I naughty!’  All style over substance. Anyway. I loudly yearn for a Raspberry Ruffle then go to the toilet to play with bamboo hand lotion hoping that when I get back my boyfriend will have heroically braved all for me and lolloped up to the sweet jars and retrieved one like the Milk Tray man leaping into the Twin Towers to rescue a coffee crème from the inferno for his PMT struck girlfriend. He hasn’t and I die a little inside.

Indeed Kirkby Lonsdale itself is a glorious pastiche of the past with all the nasty unsanitary bits wiped out. There are independent shops galore selling expensive fanciness, the obtaining of a life style along with your pencil drawing of a dancing hare and some organic truffles. It’s Cath Kidson, pastels, blazers and dogs. Jolly white haired women come here to walk and have nice tea. It’s all very splendid in this bright spring morning. There is not a single eyesore to be seen, not a solitary piece of graffiti about someone being a slag, just grey centuries old stone, daffodils, nice cakes and fancy soaps.

I suspect if I lived here I might hate everybody, they would hate me but we would hate ever so civilly maybe through letters in the local paper and steely gazes. There are placards shouting No! to proposed nasty evil wind turbines outside sweet little cottages which are probably owned by people who reside there thrice a year-I want to cheer the solitary handmade ‘yes to the turbines ‘placard. Then see the flash Landrover outside. I still admire their tenacity though. And love the irony of the fact there is a new nuclear power station being propositioned without much hassle only up the road in less picturesque and far less moneyed Heysham.

In the bakery, an American woman is demanding ‘sticky pudding’. When politely shown the locally famous Cartmel sticky toffee pudding in foil trays behind her, she informs the staff she does not want ‘ in a can’ and repeats her request. We buy cheese and onion pie and cake. It is good.

There is a man playing piano in the Churchmouse cheese shop.  Not even in Bath, do cheese shops feature pianos. I would be lying if I said this was an undiscovered gem of a piano featuring cheese shop and delicatessen- yellowing pages from the Independent and Guardian proclaim its glory-and being given free samples of brie, mint hummus and wine makes me add my tiny voice to its praise. It all creates a wonderful sense of well being, a sense of cosseting, an unreal set of expectations until I realise two days later I really can’t afford crackers featuring dried porcini mushrooms.

Even death comes picturesque and darling here. The graveyard is littered with daffodils, benches, the aforementioned jolly old ladies with white hair (should I be such a age, I would not enjoy visiting graveyards but run screaming from them with a sense of terror ) and informative signs and plaques. The gravestones themselves seem positively whimsical and you have to try really hard on this sunny day to conjure up images of splintered coffins, yellow bones and the agonising deaths and brief lives these dead residents actually suffered with not a organic French brie in sight. -’Ahh look, this person dies of Asiatic cholera, oh look, a butterfly!’ The small cottages they all squeezed in, gave birth in, died in are now Farrow and Balled, minimalist quaint and do not belong to the minimum waged of the village anymore.  I suspect few people here can live on minimum wage; they have all had to leave to find work and a less quaint affordable place to live.

The enticingly named Devils Bridge is sadly also not dark and macabre. Although the toilets are. The English have stripped off in the first hot day of the year and motored here to eat bacon butties and ice-cream and look at nature from the safe confines of near the car. We step into the wild blue yonder (albeit with a map of the walk) and I am smug until terrified by an inquisitive cow. The two and a half mile walk to Whittington is pleasant but be warned that you have to walk through a stream, a quite pleasing sensation unless you realise you are wearing shoes that cost nearly as much as the crackers.

The Dragons Head at Whittington is an actual old fashioned as opposed to a fake old fashioned pub – there is no chalkboard advertising a starter of cheese and redcurrant tart but a haphazard clutter of pub deitrus like bad paintings, old brass and chipboard. It is pretty and quaint without the contents having being bought wholesale from an auction and replaced in the same pub but with stripped pine floorboards and a sense of irony. Soup is two quid a bowl and there is a post office surprisingly crushed in a corner. I like this idea. I could happily queue to pay a cheque in if I could also have a house double.  It is not the friendliest of pubs – they are talking about the purchase of bridles and The Grand National and I dare not ask if the soup of the day is vegetarian.

Walking back to along the Lune riverbank, and the footpath crosses a horseracing track, incongruously alone in the heart of the countryside. We too walk back completely alone; everyone else has come to admire the countryside from afar nestled in the expensive cosiness of Kirkby Lonsdale, the motorbikes drowning out the birdsong.  We go back to the Royal Hotel to wait for our bus and I stare at the Raspberry Ruffles above the fireplace and hopelessly yearn for raspberry flavoured coconut in waxy dark chocolate and for actual real life to really be like this.

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The dead pigeons have gone from Carlisle station. Once when looking upwards in the station you would see slumped in nets, little flumpy bodies, wings waving in some gross parody of flight as they gently rotted-not rotted to oblivion, there were no pigeon skeletons, this was fresh, lively decomposition above thousands of unsuspecting heads and I found it rather upsetting being officially the only person in the world who likes pigeons. It also threw up lots of questions as to why there were rotting pigeons in the air at Carlisle station, who cleaned them up and when, do bits fall on people and were their (pigeons) deaths deliberate or a result of net/wing entanglement and other enquiries of a morbid pigeon related nature? I used to tell myself not to look up but the second I alighted the train, my head would ping upwards desperate to be upset and revolted, all the better if I could draw some unsuspecting commuter’s attention to the fluffy mid air carnage. It wasn’t quite as exciting this time without the lofty suspended graveyard above Café Ritazza.
There were no police either for a change. I start to regret my £17.50 train fare. There are often lots of police to be seen lurking vaguely around the vicinity of the train station giving a further sense of danger and excitement to this border town but the somewhat prosaic reason for their absence is probably to do with the lack of a football match today, a cold rainy Tuesday at the arse end of December so the cosy little charity shops filled with what can only be described as landfill are closed, crowds are searching out bargain bounty with frightening intent and everyone is wearing a nice new coat.
Carlisle is grimly pretty with utilitarian antiquity. It is old, it is grey (with red overtones)it has a battered bloody past and a somewhat wild west reputation but The Aga Shop nestles near boarded up buildings, swish bars rub up against cavernous poster bedecked pubs where most of a cow can be fried and consumed with chips and a pint of Stella for the price of a ramekin of olives somewhere further south and quaintness and cobbles vie against B&M Bargains and Soviet concrete.
Around by the cathedral, is all MR James territory, sightless arches half buried in manicured grass, spotless yet ancient church dwellings cluster serenely-there are cobbles and a smattering of shivering tourists with cameras smiling bravely through the dim cold light.
Down little Dickensian Abbey Street where a yellowing England flag flops in the window of a formerly grandiose house, gleaming overly wide doors of solicitors are housed in Georgian splendour and we arrive at Foxes, a wonderful shambolic boho and oh so cool café/bar where harps, pianos and gold paper-mache pigs lie effortlessly around its fairy light lit interior. Last time I was here, I drank cocktails and red wine and luxuriated as the sky turned dark outside. This time I am pregnant and have chai latte and toast, yet still feel snug and tranquil in the cluttered interior listening to a man with a full fry up, a glass of wine and a copy of the Daily Express (was there ever more a microcosm of little England?) berate a posher old man for not using a bus pass. I feel like I am on holiday and yearn too for a full fry up, a glass of red wine and rather concerningly a copy of the Daily Express. I will come back here when I am not encumbered by baby and sink into a sofa with a bottle of wine I promise to myself. I know it is unlikely to happen.
Then a tumble into shopping hell, brash overcrowded overheated chain stores, where I feel old and whale like, blocking the narrow aisles of cheap nylon and sequined frills with my enormous black clad bulk. There is a smattering of more individual shops and businesses in the area, resolutely middle class and attractive looking but I can only afford something tarnished and mass produced, mauled by vultures and with a ten pound red label adorning its hanger. I queue for half an hour to purchase it and wonder why I am doing this when I could have immersed myself in history by visiting the grimly stoic castle, bussed to Hadrian’s Wall through frosty unknown countryside, visited the museum and buried myself in a battle scarred past. It has such cute little pockets though.
The TK Maxx is quite splendidly, terrifyingly anarchic, strangely perched above the market and arranged with no rhyme or reason, freshly reduced red labelled Christmas produce toppling over on shelves, already so archaic and ludicrous looking on the 28th December. The market itself grins somewhat toothlessly with so many stall owners presumably away doing something old fashioned like actually spending time with family over the Christmas period. Or maybe they too are baying for reduced calendars in Calendar World, queuing in Game Station and eating chips like most of Carlisle seems to be doing. Chip shops hold prominence in the centre of town and their alluring smell permeates the streets. I don’t recommend the ‘cheese and onion fry-it’ though. Trust me on this.
We are made of better things and seek the finest fare Carlisle has to offer. At a reasonable price. So I am dragged past the place, which has a menu full of exotic looking fripperies like marmalade foam and into the bustle of La Mezzaluna’s happy hour, one of the Italian restaurants clustered near the train station.
It is cheap (asterixed meals on the laminated menu at £4.75 all day) friendly; there is not an Italian accent to be heard and a huge somewhat un-Italian painting of a chalet in the snow dwarfs our table. My garlic and cheese mushrooms are obscenely rich, like something Jamie Oliver would shake his head over in a self-regarding documentary before admitting how good they are in some pathetic attempt to show how hey, he’s just like one of us really. My pasta is fresh, creamy and calorific and I am excited by my first ever viewing of an electric Parmesan grater. My boyfriend’s pizza excitingly has potato on it, which feels very daring and glamorous but could just be because they like their carbs up here. Customers are asked as routine they would like salad or chips and the chip option reigns supreme.
A missed train and the sinking feeling of abandonment and rootlessness it brings. We sit in Bar Solo opposite the train station and listen to varying degrees of accents, loudness and inebriety intermingling as the cold rises and the night closes in on this town on the periphery.
http://www.lamezzalunacarlisle.co.uk/
http://www.foxescafelounge.co.uk/

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I have decided that I don’t like it here-it is foggy, I am hungry and there appears to be nowhere to eat apart from very very expensive places or places with laminated menus and pictures of burger and chips combos. Or Tea Shops filled with silver haired people and the smell of cinnamon.  Exciting looking shapes loom out of the mist and I want to walk, to see Buxton in all its unfamiliar glory but the impenetrable fog continues to snake in, my hunger rumbles and I yearn for a soft chair and a large house red.

It begins to snow.  My companion and I have an argument for the pure sake of it, rejecting each others choice of eating establishments and their menus with scorn, loathing and derision until finding an Italian restaurant, St Moritz sitting on a  rather busy road  but with that much revered signage of ‘Two course 6.95.’

It is strangely an Italian cum Swiss joint with fondues and Swiss named pizzas and pastas and is packed with red-cheeked Buxtonites on this grim Tuesday February afternoon. I have soup and pizza, both perfectly agreeable and my partner has bruschetta and pasta, the pasta being somewhat reminiscent of a child schools dinner, slippery tubes of penne in an oval china bowl loaded with stringy cheese but its certainly agreeable, there are ooh, chocolates with the bill, breadsticks, wine and thus my spirits lift with the fog.

And talking of spirits, I read in the ever affable Stuart Maconie’s book, Adventures On The High Teas, that Buxton has a bookshop with a ghost and we go back up the hill of disappointing eateries and into an Alice In Wonderland bookshop where stairs go up and up and down and down in a wonderfully discombobulating way-there is a little Victorian museum in the cellar amongst the piles of toppling unloved books who’s time is so clearly past but no ghost-the handwritten poems about the ghost ruin the ambience somewhat-when the word ghost is chirpily refrained with toast, a sense of mystique and terror is gone forever.  But one can have a cup of coffee here in this crumbling soothing part of a vanishing world, listen to the traffic outside and wonder how much longer such lovely places will continue in the modern word where everything is free,  downloadable and does not smell faintly of rot. The real ghosts are embedded on the fly leafs of the books-faded yellow copperplate wishing dear Edward a happy 21^st from Auntie Gertrude and you realise from the date that they are both dead now. Only this remains of them, an antiquated three-pound novel in a dusty plant filled bookshop and it is both upsetting and exciting.

Back down the hill, an undrinkable glass of wine in the otherwise lovely The Old Sun Inn’s understated antiquity and one could easily imagine they were Charles Dickens blagging a drink in return for dashing off some prose if it were not for the fact that the radio is playing eighties pop classics, clashing horribly with the quiet old men and old quiet stone.

The high street is pleasingly adorned with independent shops-the charity shops are filled with sensible clothes for the older person but I find a pleasingly impractical cardigan which in no way serves to warm me from the invasive chill coming down from the peaks and you can see how easy it would be to feel trapped here.  A few hoodies walk their pit bulls and attempt to look menacing but they just look rather chilly and you expect a ruddy-faced lady to tell them to pull their trousers up. I would not like to be young here.  It seems a happy conservative well heeled sort of place where small vandalisms would be talked about with horrified fascinations for weeks afterwards-a hermetically sealed part of little England which is however slowly becoming unwrapped.

The Buxton museum is great-delightfully shambolic with tables devoted to learning about pearls next to abstract art and information on the mining history of Buxton. There is a replica Victorian library which reeks of disapproval and must and then a time travel tunnel (we go through accidently backwards and come out as cavemen) with rather surprising hyenas and bears along with a real skeleton and the normal bits of annotated wood and the like. Middle class children run amok, being somewhat loudly over excited by history-it’s all very very jolly indeed.

I decide I have warmed to Buxton.

Outside there is a classic car auction next to the botanical gardens and the Opera House (who says culture is dumbing down-Charlie and Lola are playing next week-the children of Buxton are surely spoilt) Everyone looks like Lovejoy and talk so poshly I think they must be being filmed. Old Jaguars are fondled with sheepskinned-gloved hands. It’s hard to reconcile such Englishness with England anymore but there is still a queue outside Greggs and people are still talking in surprised and somewhat annoyed tones about the weather so we are still here after all.

The park is magnificent and with a joyfully spurting fountain-a rare occurrence. There are strange looking birds, kind of like multi coloured ducks which mingle with the suddenly drab and austere mallards, miniature lakes and it is easy to step back in time here, to imagine parading through with a parasol, delicately revealing an ankle and looking around, things do appear as they used to be except for the boarded up crescent of the Pump Rooms blazoned with EU funding posters.

And then misty eyed with a genteel vision of yesteryear, we step back centuries. The Old Hall Hotel is straight out of an MR James story. We retreat inside for a glass of wine before the train and it is magical. A guest book is opened on a month and a year in the eighteenth century and you wonder about the assignations, adulteries   and secrets it contains with people’s comments that had faded even before Aunt Gertie had even been born.

Apparently Mary Queen of Scots stayed here and it is reputed to be the oldest hotel in England. I can well believe it-it reeks of faded grandeur and lily of the valley yet has retained a vestige of youth with its wine bar and contempory food menu-a newspaper rack has the Guardian and the Daily Express nestled side by side-unlikely bedfellows.  Another amazingly well spoken elderly gentlemen is languidly chatting in the corner-would make David Attenborough look like someone out of Shameless and a hassled car dealer from the auction is talking into a mobile. It is warm, well lit and utterly fascinating-empty parlours and other bars and rooms are dotted around the place, it is a veritable thickly walled maze, a piece of true history and I want to stay the night here, ensconced in an armchair by the fire with my MR James book and a brandy listening out for one of the ghosts that must surely frequent this island in the past. I would feel like an exhibit in the roped off Victorian room in the museum.  But I have no money left and the train is nearly approaching so I shrug unhappily off this warm shroud of the past and step into the freezing neon glow of 2010.

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