Unicycle Emptiness

I am sitting in a temperance bar. This is not my usual habitat. My usual habitats offer to double up for a pound extra rather than give a free scoop of ice cream with each cream soda. Fitzpatrick’s in Rawtenstall is the only temperance bar left in Britain and is kept exactly how it would have been a hundred years ago even down to the clientele. There are old tiles, jarred sweets and a clanging till with the friendliest young man in the north behind it. An old woman shuffles in for a honey and ginger. She lacks enough money to buy some one-pound ice cream after she carefully counts her change and I wish to offer her the difference but do not wish to insult. I wish I had now.

Rawtenstall is like a big tourist information advert for The North. It is friendly, bedecked with strings of terraced houses like bunting, full of butchers and little independent shops, a bit scuff marked at the edges but where isn’t?

I am forced to go in front of people at the queue in the enormous spaceship Asda because I have less than them, women in charity shops cheerily grab my babies legs and a woman behind a meat counter in the market says his crying (not connected with the leg grabbing, he is a hardy five month year old) is because he needs a meat pie. I do not mention we are vegetarian but do notice he instantly stops crying. This bodes ill for the future.

I do that annoying thing of walking around every little independent shop declaring everything marvellous and then walking out without buying anything. If I were a struggling small business I would want to scalp people like me. At least I didn’t loudly decide to look for it cheaper on Amazon. Rawtenstall is friendly but there are limits.

Diehard fans of Unicycle Emptiness will already have noted my love of south Indian food and during some bored perusing of food websites in Lancashire, I noted there was one in Ramsbottom, a mere four miles up the road. This excites me a great deal, the menu states somewhat paradoxically that it is open from 6.30pm and then somewhere else that is open for lunch so as an eternal optimist with a song in my heart and some excellent butter pie from the market in my stomach, we enter Ramsbottom (no pun intended) to walk around the very closed south Indian restaurant with a sign saying closed and the opening times firmly saying it is open.

But Ramsbottom itself, a place dimly thought of to be a fictional place on a northern soap opera is a revelation. It is pretty much everything desirable in a small town having local charity shops, licensed cafes boasting ‘award winning bitter chocolate torte’, a printmakers selling utterly wonderful frighteningly expensive prints, cafes selling meat and veg four quid dinners and all the other periphery of small town commerce, not yet crushed by chains or boarded up forever.

We go into The First Chop, a trendy yet laid back bar on the high street with good strong welsh cider and the most complicated array of special offers on the menu ever. I am still working out whether the two tapas for the price of three work out better than having a ‘larger plate’ but with half the price of my cider taken off. It was excellent-halloumi and veg kebabs with salad, the biggest crispiest chips in the world, beans with maple syrup and Lancashire cheese, sourdough bread and salad, spicy tomato ketchup, garlic mayo and something amazing with coriander in it, one of those posh expensive Fentimans ginger beers and the afore mentioned welsh cider come to under fifteen quid. We did not eat for the rest of the day; it was friendly, relaxed and effortlessly cool. I decide I want to live in Ramsbottom-it is Hebden Bridge without the hippies, the cool part of a city without the hipsters and the city, a country town without the misery, isolation and lack of award winning bitter chocolate tortes. And near enough to Manchester to escape to upon a picturesque railway. And the delight of finding somewhere unknown, unexpected and delightful is even better than the chips. And I do like chips.

We go through Leigh on the way back and it is a reminder of what really is. I do not like Leigh. It feels like shooting fish in a barrel to not like Leigh, snobbish, southern and unnecessary to bray about an ex mining town on hard times not being darling enough and not selling foccacia by the hand-woven bucket load. But it is everywhere town. Places where the chains have fled to the malls and the mall is given a name to show the heritage and history of the town it has plundered (in this case Spinning Jenny Arcade) and ailing independents selling cheap pastry, cheap shoes and hazardous looking maxi dresses with sale signs in the windows.  I am startled by the amount of kebab shops open at 4pm. I clearly startle only too easily.

The library however has manga, goldfish,  Bollywood and art and also offers book and baby sessions to get babies used to enjoying books not orally but visually and a book at bedtime session where you take your pyjamas clad kid to listen to a story then be given a biscuit and a glass of milk before being sleepily dragged off home past the aroma of kebabs.

The red brick is remnants of an industrial heritage and the tall chimneys are still being demolished. But new soulless estates are given names about what used to be there, like when ‘Orchard Close’s smother what used to be orchards in mock Tudor and overly large conservatories. I wonder what the factory workers of yore would think of Spinning Jenny Arcade and think they would probably love it because their equivalent job in this day and age would be unlikely to treat digit fingers as a luxury. One has to be careful not to romanticise the past but then again looking around Leigh it is hard not to.

http://www.thefirstchop.co.uk/

http://www.fitzpatrickstemperancebar.co.uk/

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I do not like Gisburn forest. We have traveled through undulating wildness-the vast windswept expanse of The Trough of Bowland to arrive at somewhere with a range of differently named carparks and colour coded walks. There is dog poo in the carpark as a small child calls joyously out about but no toilet for humans, just extravagant family saloons with mountain bikes strapped on the top and a small girl weeing against a tree. I want a wee too but here there is all the inconvenience of humanity without the good bit of municipal toilets.

We follow the ‘blue trail’ around the reservoir along a track wide enough to get vehicles down and with the forest tucked politely away along the side like an embarrassing afterthought. The forest looks a bit rubbish but I am only looking at it in terms of a suitable quiet weeing experience rather than looking at its history, flora and fauna. I like ancient snarled woodland, not tall immaculate conifers, factory farmed and non-life giving. Forests are dead on the inside where evergreens flourish and you hear little birdsong. No rabbits bob ahead and you know you will not come across a ruined hermits hut or ancient burial mound. It is the Ikea experience of a day with nature. We follow the blue markers, do not veer off the beaten track, have a nice time and natter but it is a strangely sterile way to commune with nature when we are surrounded by mile upon mile of moorland, wild, cold and desolate. I do not know what the rest of Gisburn forest is like. It may be stunningly diverse, humming with wildlife and dripping in history but I shall judge it from my hour spent poncing about its periphery with people who want to escape the beaten track but don’t want the inconvenience of the unbeaten.

To Slaidburn and The Hark To Bounty, http://www.harktobounty.co.uk/ an olde olde pub and former court room dating back to the 1300’s in a rambling grey village where little seems to have changed for hundreds of years although peoples teeth are probably better. The Hark To Bounty is comfortable, friendly and quaint without making a big song and dance about it. There is free homemade bread and butter, which makes me more excited than it should. As a vegetarian obsessed with bargains it upsets me more than it should that there is roast dinner offer –two Sunday dinners including two soups for fifteen quid but with no vegetarian option. But an artery-clogging dish of two baked eggs with cheese, cream, leeks and spinach for a fiver is the ultimate in comfort food and my boyfriend has a slab of cheese and leek pie the size of a sharks fin.

We drive back trying not to pulverize bunnies whose tiny pathetic corpses litter the winding road through valleys and mountains, past streams and copses and just the vast vast majesty of nature that makes Dartmoor look like a children’s play park. Maybe the immense emptiness of it all scares people. There are few walkers or tourists here in the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It is almost claustrophobic in its intensity and we feel very very small, fragile and temporary as those tiny furry scraps bleeding onto the road.

And maybe this is why people stick to colour coded trails and look at nature from a safe distance.

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As the rest of the country slithers deeper and deeper into recession, Morecambe smiles. Because now gap toothed high streets snaggle every town, those who used to sneer at the crumbling ‘four for a pound’ decay here find the pox has spread to their own towns. Morecambe smiles, for now everywhere has the desperate failing small businesses and boarded up shops of Morecambe but no-where else has the view. Morecambe has won. Again.

It’s a tenacious old place. Like a zombie, it repeatedly rises from the dead – in winter it is desolate yet strangely compelling as its snapping sandy wind howls around post-apocalyptic urban bleakness contrasting with the clichéd perfection of the Lake District mountains across the churning sucking bay.

Now it is summer and the desperation has been sellotaped over with shops open again selling buckets and spades for the gritty sand and unflattering nylon clothes in lurid patterns.

People have tried to make Morecambe posh again, how it used to be back in the day when consumptives and grey factory workers came to ‘take in the air’  in a futile  swipe against sickness and mortality. The Midland Hotel, an art deco beacon resurrected from decay throngs with people gawping at the retro futuristic poshness, its optimistic pricing and elegantly uncomfortably seating but those who have chosen to spend a few hundred pounds on a night here are stranded on a windswept island of indulgence. Should they choose to leave their king-size bed and go for an expensive meal out, they would be faced with eateries that advertise the price as the main recommendation or with ‘meals of the day’ written on cardboard stars.

The Kings Arms goes one better and it is not the price, not the food but the sheer amount of it that is boasted about-‘King Size’ portions of pie and chips! Monstrous lashings of puddings! Buckets, troughs, mountains of fried delights-drown under a roast dinner tsunami and have change from a fiver. There is no jus here.

But should that shell-shocked couple peruse the streets of Morecambe a bit more, they would find cafes selling smoothies, beetroot and feta soup, croque monsieur’s, all for more than a fried 10 item breakfast on the prom but less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee and sandwich somewhere else. There are shops selling vintage fabric and handmade jewellery, real ale pubs with newspapers and leather sofas overlooking the bay, nice things, things that people like but presume Morecambe, the butt of every loud Southern joke would never have.

Delis, pound shops, restaurants come and go but the essence of Morecambe remains. In a giant Polo mint highlighted by blue sky. In a Guinness and white chocolate cake in a glass fronted café, in the sound of a hacking cough outside Festival market, in shops selling bags of Thorntons misshapes and cheap unpopular flavours of celebrity endorsed pasta sauce, in beautiful boarded up Victorian terraces, in its pure potentiality that never quite comes to fruitation and in its view, that glorious view that cannot be sold, sullied or changed.

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Visit Morecambe in wintertime…

Walk to Heysham

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This is something I have been looking forward to for a very long time. When perusing a library copy of Lancashire Pub Walks I discover that not too far away lies Chingle Hall, a 12^th century house, positively dripping in evil entities and reputed to be the most haunted house in England. I watch a documentary on youtube, which makes it apparent that if I leave without seeing at least one ghost, I am clearly not paying attention.

There is not one priest hole but two, not just one ghost but many undead-all drifting around in a big ghostly X-Factor, all competing to be the most tragic. I personally am rooting to feel the presence of Eleanor Singleton who was imprisoned, raped and forced to bear children by her uncle and finally murdered. Apparently in her bedchambers, a terrible sensation of fear and loss can be felt and what better way to spend a breezy summer day by getting titillated by the tragic story of a rape victim and hopefully being filled with utter utter terror?

I forget that I need to leave the bathroom light on at night despite being 32 years old and decide this sounds like a splendid day out and even more of a delightful trip into other peoples misery is the fact that the walk takes in an old abandoned mental hospital. I imagine stepping through gothic ruins carved with intricate crazed graffiti with gnawed straightjackets lying about. It is going to be the best day ever I decide.

Goosnargh is not the ancient windswept village I imagined but a modern smattering of suburbia cloistering around an old village green. There is The Grapes pub, the one famous for being in not only Lancashire Pub Walks but also Lancashire Pub Strolls but it is hemmed in by Audis and Mercedes and people in very expensive looking clothes, tans and laughter celebrating a very expensive looking wedding. I fear they can see and indeed smell the baby vomit down my left shoulder and we do not enter The Grapes.

I am not good at navigating but we successfully follow the Lancashire Pub Walk up someone’s drive, through a field, over a surprising variety and style of styles and then we see the abandoned mental hospital. It looks like a boarded up Toby Carvery and is a crushing blow. Then it starts to rain.

We get a bit lost until seeing the ghastly white veneer of Chingle Hall shining like a beacon of terror; I roll under the electrified wire that is blocking the alleged footpath.

A strange walk through strips of field that have been heavily creepily fenced seemingly at random and with no expense spared to height, cost and general forebodingness. A squat tin building sits surrounded by more looming fencing and gates bigger than my house. There are no windows or doors to be seen but a very expensive looking vehicle sits emptily in our path with blacked out windows. I think the alive are sometimes more scary than the undead.

We continue to walk through our fenced in strip until there it is. Chingle Hall. Recognisable from a thousand bad paranormal forums and websites with black background overuse of exclamation points and ‘dripping’ fonts. A smaller than expected white building almost slumped in the ground with an archway so swallowed by time that the top of it is nearly in the grass.

I am even more desperate for the toilet than to see proof that science and thus everything we know is wrong and hope there will also be ice cream. It doesn’t look like there is ice cream here. I suspect there are not pencils embossed with ‘I had a spooktacular time’ style puns here. I suspect that something is wrong.

There is no-one fleeing screaming down the driveway. There are no signs, no entrance charges, no people and err no entrance. I walk around bewildered but it is clear. I am at Chingle Hall. But I cannot get in. Well, at least without walking around the building but I can see I am as unwanted here as an exorcist at a spiritualist group. This is not a place for the esoteric day-tripper anymore. My partner points out yet again that the pub walk book is quite an old edition and asks yet again if I had phoned up to verify ‘Chingle Hall is open to the public between 10 and 5 pm.’

I reply somewhat testily but my whole world is crumbling away and not in the manner I had hoped. And I still really really need the toilet.

A last doleful look at Chingle Hall as we walk down the driveway to the main road just in case a White Lady pops sympathetically out of the shrubbery but nothing. My partner who is not a fellow delver into unknown realms but prefers technology, smugly shows me a page from the BBC website which states that ‘Chingle Hall is now a private residence and not even open for charity events’. (Chingle Hall used to kindly let spook hunters give them cash in return for a night of hopefully being scared shitless or photo an ‘orb’-even I scorn ‘orbs’)

I begin to get angry.  Why buy the most haunted house in England to then close it to the public? There are lots of ancient lovely old piles around-why pick one that is so famous and then shut it down? I wanted to see the priest holes nearly as much as a transparent monk. It is a piece of history and intrigue- now like its’ strange neighbours, fenced off and closed to those who can’t afford it. A part of heritage swamped in legend and stories the proles can now only read about in obsolete library guides. Meh. And I still need the toilet. A lot.

A stomp down the main road, we see a pub advertising real ales and the like and we enter, I order a hot chocolate and dash to the loo. My hot chocolate comes sans cream and with a stupid biscuit instead of a chocolate and such is my general anger that it makes me feel like dashing my head in on a mock beam. It is a normal historic (a fancy sign says so) pub that has been vampirised and made into fake history. Main courses at fifteen pounds but old unread books from an auction on a ledge to make you feel you are in the past despite the piped music and the cheery blackboards and the sachets of condiments, people with fake tans and white smiles talking loudly over expensive white wine. But it does sell butter pie, a pleasing and random find when boredly looking at the menu we can’t afford and there is also strangely a large selection of sweets for sale in the foyer.

And in a small village, there is a modern shop development opposite which features a modern trendy looking sweetshop which optimistically and so Englishly has chairs and tables outside cowering in the shade of June thunderclouds. A sign for ‘natural’ ice cream draws us within and I am surprised to find that Vimto is a ‘natural’ ice-cream flavour. We share an ‘Italian Eton Mess’ ice cream, which tastes a bit aniseedy and I do not like it. I do not like anything today and am cross. I wanted the paranormal, ancient history and oil paintings with tragic stories attached to them and I all I got was a hot chocolate with no cream and a weird tasting ice cream.

I buy a ‘lucky bag’ from the strange sweet shop for 50p looking around me at all the lovely handmade fudge and chocolates. I get a bag of gelatine filled sweets, which was to be fair all one can expect for 50p but I am a vegetarian, and in a bad mood. A really bad mood which even animal bones and colourings moulded into the shape of a mouth and teeth can’t alleviate.

We decide to leave Goosnargh.

We sit in the car and are sad. The early promise of summer besmirched by rain, high fencing and privacy, all such English diseases.

A silent journey and then a sign, which states Barton Grange-its attractions, are garden centre, restaurant, café and farm shop. So desperate am I to salvage something from the remains of the day, we perform a dangerous u-turn as I pretend to need bread, thinking of meandering though an antiquated artisan farm shop but instead we enter a 4×4 bedecked car park with colour coded parking areas. My boyfriend has a panic attack and a life crisis as we enter the Pink Zone but I feel curiously young and attractive as I look at all the other denizens of the Barton Grange Experience.

There is something called along the lines of a ‘tasty cabin’ but more alliterative as we enter. This sells small chocolate lollipops in the shape of footballers for £1.75 and other small expensive chocolate novelty items along with gourmet jellybeans, inertia and despair.

The entrance to the ‘farm shop’ has farmyard implements embossed impractically into a fake wall. Trowels and hay forks are haphazardously swirlingly embedded into the wall of a modern purpose built block on a major A road. Within the ‘farm shop’, a big airy modern shed are rustic plastic displays of wheelbarrows with over spilling unseasonal fruit, chickens, more trowels, all a glorious cacophony of what used to be on this land before it was paved over to assemble a farm shop selling overpriced luxury crisps, jam and dry cake to antiquarian idiots. There is a queue at the till. It is a day out.

We do not enter the garden centre. In my head the flowers will be plastic and all the same shade of pink. We do not enter an adjoining shop, which has a bright array of expensive bolshy umbrellas, and foul jaunty or understated clothing. People who seek a fake idyll of Britishness swarm here, who romance a hideous past but instead of looking for a ghost, buy a Victorian chutney for three quid and thus feel a faint faint sense of immortality before getting into their Peugeots and driving back home back to the same old boring boring present.

I hope whoever owns Chingle Hall absolutely pisses themselves every time there is a faint thump in the background as we the hideous poor public drift like ghosts in search of a past we can never find, but can only attempt to purchase ourselves, where the real past is hidden and a fake sanitised past given to us to overspend on as we drift between past, present and a future that we don’t want to think about thank you very much because it won’t be picturesque and pretty so best to bury our heads in cheese with an oldie name when we have a ‘free’ weekend, to rhapsodise with starry eyes over others deaths a pleasing century away and try like hell to not think of the horrors that await for the alive.

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We are here again at the Wray scarecrow festival and I am sensing anger from deep within this picture postcard village. The theme is all things royal, it being the time of the royal wedding but we are in a recession and even though the average house price in Wray must be quarter of a million, people are resentful.

And taking it out in scarecrow form.

This scarecrow looks at Kate Middleton in a purely financial way stating that ‘she must be worth a pretty penny’, like some drooling Victorian pimp. I suspect Kate would be more annoyed about her lumpy legs.

I am proud to be English when I see the amount of ingenious ways in which the recession was able to be snuck in to a scarecrow festival about the royals. With a staggering and slightly scary attention to detail there is a Whitehall sign on this wall and a sign that says ‘Latest De-Fence Cuts’. And there is cutting! Well, technically sawing but let’s not pick holes in this ingenious display of scarecrows, punning, anger, politics and the military.

This won first prize it appears and I can see why. It is simplicity and cynicism at it’s best. Does Ian Hislop live in Wray?

Again this is wry Wray humour at its best. It must be scary deciding to do a topical scarecrow as when do you leave it until to be the most topical? Do some good citizens of Wray stay up all night on News 24 with a sack of straw and a feeling of impending terror in case nothing scandalous happens that night?

Elton John (the queen!) and his child, the first five-month year old to be immortalised in scarecrow form.

A simply wonderful scarecrow corgi.

I find it so impressive that someone had a three-piece bathroom suite to spare to utilise but am concerned it is a better bathroom suite than the one in my house.

I like King Edward’s potatoey yet provocative pose.

Now this was brilliant in its blood splattered depiction of the royals being not in charity shop wedding dresses but royals about to face hideous deaths.

The guillotine looked like it actually worked and a slightly concerning amount of work had been put into it and it was entitled ‘Come the Wray-volution’. And there was a head in a bucket on the other side! The effect was somewhat spoiled by being outside a house so grand that commoner Kate would shirk at entering (especially if she saw the guillotine)

This one is about life on ‘the breadline’ and features people so poor (including a feckless young one with a baby) that they have had to cancel their Sky subscription! Imagine that!

Another award winning one, very cyberpunk in style but was something about living life in a shoestring.

Best use of a village light I have ever seen. Note the tiny plane and Barbie and KING Kong! Get it?

Probably my favourite as such an underrated royal. It is King Ethelred the Unready and he is unready as he has not brushed his teeth etc (there is even fake toothpaste squirting out of the tube) he has not shaved and there is an awesome note from the Vikings! From someone who knows how to use their fonts to awesome effect.

I never thought the queen could possibly look more malevolent (and I once saw a photo of her beating a pheasant to death with a stick) until now.

Pleasingly, another royal execution with a pop up snake in a basket to surprise young children who were only expecting a boring old severed head.

The same house that featured members of the A Team last year have cleverly used them again with ‘crowcuts’ which is clever in so many ways I cannot even begin to begin.

Click the Queen of Hearts for more pics from this years festival…

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It is the day of the royal wedding. I had previously hoped most people immune but suddenly certain thickets of The North have become middle England and bunting spreads like Japanese knotweed.

We are in Rufford to go for a walk starting in its Old Hall. The Old Hall is closed. So then to the cringingly named ‘Owd Barn’, teashop, craft shop etc. It is also closed and the bunting in the window suggests why which makes it even more annoying.  We turn around to escape in a suburban cul de sac and there is a street party being set up with a bbq being wheeled out which is probably worth more than our house.  I suspect our U-Turn will be discussed for many weeks.

It’s my own fault-I should not expect too much anarchy, mayhem and cheap house doubles when perusing an ancient copy of Lancashire Tea Shop Walks when deciding what to do with the day.

We try to escape through miles of flatly pretty landscape but there still remains bunting, Union Jacks, smart lawns on detached post war houses with neatly manicured lawns.  I fear suspicious eyes, weak Pimms, Daily Mail headlines considered truth and to end up here bitching emptily until I die and even Neighbourhood Watch don’t realise despite the terrible smell. It is blandly terrifying and I am glad and relieved when I find evidence of witchcraft in the woods.

As the world gawps at posh people in terrible hats, I am looking at cairns and mini standing stones bedecked with curiously fresh wild flowers. It is the work of children I sadly conclude and continue to walk but the constructions, deep in Fairy Glen, near Appley Bridge become more elaborate. Here is the outline of a horse filled with leaves and now a human shape bedecked with bluebells and dandelions that have not yet withered in the unseasonal Easter heat.

It is exciting yet annoyingly unsinister here in this strip of well-managed woodland. Too pretty to be anything dark yet too well executed to be the work of children it is a beguiling mystery that is probably easily explained but I do not wish it to be. I suspect Emos on art foundation degrees. I want it to be ethereal sprites working whimsical mysterious charms in this snippet of ancient woodland besmirching suburbia. But I still wonder at why the flowers were not dead-we were there before midday and the art in the woods must have taken some time-it can only have been done at night. I hope I never find out.

Southport is in the throes of royal wedding fever but it is the sort of place I can’t imagine not being in fervour over moneyed gentility. A charity shops’ red white and blue wedding display has the cunning adornment of blue and red dog bowls presumably in the lack of anything more genteel and royal coloured.

Indeed, like the royal family, Southport is grandiose, fashionable but laughable as it keeps up its pretence of modernity. There is some amazing architecture here, art deco, Victorian, Georgian palaces, slums in varying states of decay and modern redevelopments shoulder each other along the boulevard which was the inspiration for Paris. Apparently. For a seaside town, the sea is kept at a distance, nasty dirty sea. We don’t even see it. It is finally tamed, entrenched, hidden politely behind ornate arcades of dying posh shops you are too scared to enter in case the proprietor is too enthusiastic and you know you can purchase it cheaper on the net but feel so bad about it.

We are hungry, have a baby and limited funds- there is a plethora of lovely looking places to eat in Southport but we find a vegetarian café/restaurant on the net and fly to it with a song in our hearts.  It is closed. So Pizza-Fucking Express is open on the day of the royal wedding but not a vegetarian café. And now the plethoras of places to eat mock me with their meagre vegetarian choice. I am in a sulk, we argue, a friendly scouser gives us a flyer for two courses for a fiver at a place on the promenade (which is of course a long way from the nasty sea) I scoff, having since Colne, resolved never to eat anywhere which has prices rather than the food as the main attraction advertised but then go past the place, an unprepossessing solid Victorian hotel and looking on the menu outside which looks suspiciously good for somewhere advertising all food for £2.50 we enter.

And immediately suspect we are in a trap. It is too good to be true. I was expecting some Blackpoolesque crumbling slum but we are in ‘The Dining Rooms’ a pleasant conservatory with women in big hats drinking champagne. The menu is amazing looking. The vegetables are apparently locally grown and there are many vegetarian choices that aren’t sodding goats cheese tart. We order and wait for the catch.

But it is better than we thought it would be. Far better. Scarily better. There are dabbles of balsamic vinegar, flitterings of salad, basil oil arranged provocatily around spinach and cheese roulettes and mixed bean pate on French bread with chilli sauce. It is too good for £2.50 and it makes me tense. I order a large house red and glumly assume it would cost £78.99 to make up the cost. The main courses are also worrying excellent, we both have crepes, filled with locally grown vegetables and they are divine, then fruit waffles with raspberry coulis and ice-cream which is of course also sublime and this three course meal for two comes to twenty four quid and a good proportion of that is me being greedy with the very good wine.

I assumed the people with hats and champagne was here for a wedding; they were- the royal wedding. I realised this when my baby cried and instead of the normal ‘isn’t he beautiful?’ we are given a dirty look, as his cries are louder than the BBC commentary about Kate’s dress.

It was a nirvana of a meal, and will spoil me forever, as I will live in fear of missing another such curiously priced oasis and be forever disappointed.

We are fatly lunging onwards however to Crosby and the Antony Gormley statues who stand in the sea there. Again reality exceeds expectation-there are so may more figures than expected dotted around the coast and with a backdrop of a hazy Liverpool docks. They are simple yet mesmerising, unpretentious and humane-the further out they go the more encrusted with barnacles they become, less flocked by children laughing at their sculpted genitalia until you can only see their simple yet oh so human silhouettes not outlined in wild flowers but clad only in sea and sky.

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I have always been under the impression that having a baby grounds you but happily so in a vommity cosy nest of your own making, your neighbourhood transfused with a new misty-eyed glow, the familiar now unfamiliar when a small hand is entwined with yours and contentment generally reigning supreme.

I however am bored. The house smells of sour milk, I am sick of Lancaster and I miss the thrill of somewhere new where the exotic and the ancient clash side by side, where narrow cobbled streets lead to the unknown, new shops, restaurants, smells, boutique hotels with handmade chocolates on the bed.

So I decide to go to Preston again.

It is just far away enough for it to be a journey somewhere else (a breathtaking fifteen minutes) but near enough to be affordable and for me not to be lynched by a baying Carling fuelled mob should the new baby, clipper of wings decide to emit that undulating endless cry for which babies’ are justly renowned and feared.

I initially wanted to go to Wigan and eat at The Coven, the pleasing juxtaposition of witchy shop and vegetarian friendly café but finances are tight and it would cost an extra seven pounds in train fare.

But then once on the train I am filled with a searing clarity. I WILL go to Wigan. I will have an adventure! Go somewhere a bit different, go to a different branch of TK Maxx! And eat a well-priced Stilton and walnut lasagne whilst perusing a book of spells on Wigan high street. I am impressed with my fortitude and independence. I ask the conductor for my ticket to be extended to go to Wigan, pay the extra seven pounds, we go through Preston and I remain seated, amazed at my own daring. Then realise the train doesn’t go to fucking Wigan.

The world comes tumbling around me. The excitement of alighting at Wigan with a baby in a sling and a song in my heart had been akin to Cook first stepping off in Van Diemens Land, the Statue of Liberties’ torch first seen silhouetted in the sky by a ship full of immigrants nothing in comparison to seeing the sign for Uncle Joe’s mint balls on the brick wall near Wigan station.  I had even sent people texts saying I was going to Wigan so they could also be excited on my behalf.

But no. Next stop Chorley.

In the rain.

Not even the pedestrian crossing works and I stand clutching my baby watching traffic whizz past into a grim grey horizon whilst thinking ‘This would never happen in Wigan.’

Maybe it’s because my excited independent mood has been replaced by the knowledge I am an utter idiot and baby and I are hatless and wet but Chorley appears to be quite rubbish. Where might I consult a grimoire and eat a well-priced vegetarian meal? There is a lack of cafes immediately visible and the ones I can see are of the type offering bacon butties and yesterday’s Express not portals into unknown dimensions and homemade tzaiki.

I go in a charity shop and am filled with the usual anger at the paucity of boys clothing that is not blue, bobbly and containing some hideous slogan as to the purported horribleness of the wearer. If I see something unusual it must be purchased, hence me deciding to buy a far too big, over washed furry Dalmatian outfit for the poor poor baby. I was not expecting this to lead to the woman behind the counter chirpily informing me she called her son ‘the Dalmatian’ because he’s  ‘half caste and he’s white but black down below.’

I smile politely and run. It beats discussing birth weights at any rate and I had to fight the urge to ask to see a photo of him in the bath.

In another charity shop, a man in a motorised disability cart is angry because he can’t get up the steps into the second floor, which seems to mostly be womenswear and mugs extolling the joys of golf. He is saying that Thatcher passed a law to make sure this sort of thing didn’t happen. The elderly lady remains stoic behind her counter and refuses to carry him up.

There are more charity shops selling cheap mass produced clothes for 75 % of their original cost lining the streets along with second division chain stores and struggling independent budget shops of one form and another like a pictorial backdrop of ‘recession hit Britain’ on the BBC.   I know I sound churlish but my hair is frizzy, I don’t want to spend seven quid on a three-year-old Primark dress even though I like it and I am nervous at finding somewhere to breastfeed.

I have pleasingly strong cheap filter coffee (£1.50 for about a pint) in a cafe and discretely attempt it but baby is on hunger strike possibly after seeing the grotty Dalmatian outfit. I am sure Chorley has its nice bits, I see some enticing looking church arches at the end of the high street but I decide to cut my losses and go.

Preston and the excitement of a different branch of TK Maxx awaits. This is what I have been reduced to, my great adventure ending waiting yet again at the never changing traffic lights dreaming impotently of the golden spires of Wigan.

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I love the works of MR James. He was an eminent historian at Oxford and renowned in his time for his meticulous research into the medieval period. He also almost as a sideline wrote ghost stories. Ghost stories where no blood was ever spilt, only darkly alluded to and bumbling academics who only believed in truth, evidence and tweed would stumble across a holy relic on a windswept historical place of importance, jovially pop it in his tweed pocket not listening to any dire warnings from mumbling anxious yokels and then suffer the consequences of dark history and dark forces trying to reclaim what was rightfully theirs.  And rational scholar tweed man realises that not everything can be relegated, categorised and understood.

Which is the scariest thing of all.

A View From A Hill is my favourite. I have read the story and watched a TV adaptation of it-his books work better with their oh so fastidious stiff upper lip Englishness of a time now gone rather than the rather garish TV which has to show you not allude-and of course one’s imagination is the darkest thing of all.

A View From A Hill is about a historical academic specialising in the medieval period (I told you! They ALL are!) who comes across some binoculars when studying in some crumbling country manor. He goes for a walk and looks through the binoculars to see a glorious abbey rich in complexity, detail and utterly real and existing. He touches it, he draws it, and he knows it should not, does not exist in his present. Then a shadow appears…

Cockersands Abbey made me yearn for and fear those binoculars. I feel so alone, so at the mercy of Nature that I feel a bit scared and agoraphobic. It was meant to be a short cycle from Lancaster along the cycle path past the wonderful prehistoric Conder Green, all marshy tufts, boat skeletons (and The Stork, an utterly excellent pub specialising in of course, South African cuisine) through to Glasson Dock, a weird yet sublime place, boat masts reaching to the skies yet no sea, ice creams, motor bikers, hundreds of them it seems, a couple of pubs, a café, no particular centre but water, canal, fisherman’s cottages, graves, boats in a pleasing trippy jumble like a dream of a place you once visited.

But we are not having an ice-cream today-we leave the pleasantness of Glasson Dock and cycle forth into the past.

Through fields, past farms, cows and then sea, sand, quicksand at that, howling mean wind, rubbish which somehow seems exciting when it’s sea tossed battered plastic, desolation and wilderness. I feel agoraphobic when all I can see is unfriendly coast and behind me sulks the huge blue presence of the Trough Of Bowland. No synthetic strawberry ice creams here. No inane chat and roar of Kawasaki’s. It feels a long long way from home-I have cycled 7 miles from bustling Lancaster, a city.

And black clouds loom overhead. And the cows are starting to look malevolent.

And we come, past the lighthouse, past the signs telling us this might all be soon lost to the sea, past the campervan (how the hell do they sleep at night-its like the beginning of a horror movie, the garish vulnerable synthetic white starkly hideously exposed on the edge of nowhere) to Cockersands Abbey.

There is of course very little left of it-it was founded in the 12^th century and abandoned in the 16^th. The sheer weight of those years whilst looking at part of it is enough to make you start to gibber.  And why here? Why do monks who love God find His most blighted spots to dwell in-and how the hell did their hoods stay up in this penetrating wind?  (Apparently it was to show renouncement of worldly materials and comforts)

Anyway I wanted those MR James binoculars and I did not. The Charter House was closed, indeed is errantly frustratingly closed, houses only dead bodies impervious to the wind and has been rebuilt but is still such a lonely spooky outcrop surrounded by the skeletons of the abbey, tapering blighted rock formations outlined against the timeless dateless sea and sky-Nature holding two fingers up to crepuscular humanity.

You can see where the huge abbey once stood and we are informed by a notice that metal detecting is forbidden and all I suddenly want to do is METAL DETECT! This bursts forth in a glorious vision of finding ancient religious relics and so I try to find one myself without the aid of a machine but its all-animal shit, grass and stone, not even exciting engraved stone. I yearn yet still fear those binoculars for this is pure MR James territory.

And what is weirdly scarier than the ancient morbidity of a derelict abbey that sheltered and died from the plague and leprosy, was a relatively modern farmhouse (in retrospect, think around a hundred years or two-terrifying a new born child compared to the antiquity of the Ozymandias abbey) built within the walls of the abbey and even containing some of the same brick. Its windows were hollowed up chipboard eyes as it faced the ferocious North Sea wind and huge unromantic aluminium sheds stood cavernously and creepily empty.

A tiny caravan squatted nearby, one of those lamps with a bendy neck silhouetted within looking at something or nothing-it seemed modern next to the blank empty farmhouse, I half expected to see a gnarled angry face stare angrily out at the windswept intruders mouthing silent curses.

The abbey fascinated and moved me but I was trying to look at it through MR James’s binoculars into the past, imagining not seeing. The farmhouse was there.

It actually existed, was board and mortar, terribly vulnerable and naked but for the mere present, actually existing. Existing from the very real future which is about to submerge it in water (the flood defences are not up to the job and are not being given support or cash by a government which has never even been near or heard of or cared about this area) The abbey might soon disappear under the crashing waves and detritus of plastic bottles on the shore and along with it the blank eyed ex farm.

I want to live here, I want a kindly farmer to tell me it’s mine, and somehow the cash to be able to afford to replace the windows (some of the ancient abbey’s stained glass windows have been purloined and are now in place at other local farmhouses, a fact I find fascinating, the amalgamation of ancient history and day to day living, breathing and dying. But should I live here, I would be bowed under wind, remoteness and the threat of the sea.

And ghosts, There must be ghosts here. I would hear on yet another windswept night (there is no other such night) a faint chant of the faithful from so many centuries ago, a requiem to the dead and I would not need those binoculars from MR James and I would not want them because to romantise about death and ghosts and history is exciting and glorious but to confronted with it would be the most terrifying thing ever. Because if ghosts exist, it makes a mockery or untruth of everything we believe in.

Yet I still want this blank eyed farmhouse. Just so I can actually see.  And be suspended between the past and the present. Because there is no future here. The waves will take over and there will only be left a briefly summarising laminated notice board of what was once.

But I still want those binoculars. The future has no excitement or mystery to me. But the past, oh the past…I want to look through those binoculars. But not to actually see.

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Wray is a neat pretty little village buried deep in the Lancashire countryside, half an hours bus ride from Lancaster. There is a school, post office, two pubs, a garden centre and cafe. There are woods, moors, hills, footpaths, a river and everything you could ever ask for in a countryside idyll. It is pure Enid Blyton but with the house prices of today. Every year it hosts a Scarecrow Festival with a central unifying theme. The entire village seems to take part and the results are spectacular. I have chosen just a few of the many pictures we took and more can be seen here.
The official theme for the festival this year was a mystifying blend of ‘TV Detectives,’ ‘Reality TV’ and ‘Topical’ and the pictures below are grouped accordingly.
Topical and Celeb!

Oh dear, not only are the unhappy couple being pursued by paparazzi and celebrity magazines but now their unhappy plight over betrayal, lies and infidelity has been faithfully renditioned in glue, old newspapers and a Matalan top. The attention to detail is superb. The signs at the bottom say ‘Cole’s been given the red card” and something along the lines of ‘Now you’re off’.’ Take that, Cole! I bet when you were bedding the attractive blonde, you never considered how the residents of Wray would render you in scarecrow form. Mark Owen, take note.

The makers of this Jordan do not approve of such a blatant Jezebel with her false breasts and money making ways. It is a curious sight to see, a plastic huge breasted Jordan dangling out of a beautiful old village house decorated with bunting. I imagine the Cotswolds must be like this.

The owners of the house are clearly on Team Peter. The straw sticking out of his chest shows his hirsuteness and his flat shrivelled face is instantly identifiable as Peter Andre. Imagine watching your marriage breakdown portrayed on a white stone wall! It would be awesome! Sadly no cagefighter scarecrows as yet.

Andrew’s cushiony pockmarked face looks somewhat flabbergasted and there is an unseemly bulge in his trousers whilst Dorothy looks suspicious, open mouthed and won’t catch his bulging eyes. Hmm. Naughty Dorothy.

You are an American with big dreams, a love of Madonna and bizarre clothing and you dream that one day you will break through and make it. You persevere, you work hard, you pray, you wear glasses made out of cigarettes and one day, you finally make it. Welcome to Lady Ga-Ga’s first appearance at the Wray Scarecrow festival. She is in a tantalising melding of genre, fact and fiction in a cage and covered in snakes and spiders as a contestant in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. That programme is often represented at the Wray Scarecrow Festival. I think the villagers like the thought of cowering big breasted celebrities in cages being humiliated and teased.

‘Help, my arms have turned to bubblewrap!” “Never mind that now dear, get me another glass of Chateau Neuf De Pape.”
This delightfully detailed scarecrow tableau is Celebrity Come Dine With Me (I think) The celebrities appear to be Pob and Marie Stopes. And someone with no head. Charles the 1st?
Biting Political Satire!

I loved this. I first thought it was a scarecrow who had hung himself but it is ‘The Floating Voter” and he has a very good pastiche of a ballot paper in his lumpen hand. The residents of Wray are united in their politics by the fact they (well, their scarecrows) seem to hate all political parties although it is mostly Gordon Brown their creative rage is wrought on. Should Labour lose the next election by a very small minority, I shall think of the thousands of people who walked through Wray being pleasantly bombarded with anti Gordon messages and I shall wonder if scarecrows in a village in the North changed history.

This one had me hysterical. It was all context-the Gordon Brown scarecrow (below – how to make him look more sacky and scary than the real thing?) was a work of art-I thought he was canvassing for a minute but the tiny chirpy mass produced Nick Clegg in a plant pot just seemed so weirdly perfect.

Oh very good. This was a real audience pleaser. Tattooed young families, old women and seemingly everyone were all delighted by this all saying in varying sorts quintessentially English accents, ‘Well, they’re all the same aren’t they?” before nodding sagely and resignedly and going to get an ice-cream. I felt sorry for Gordon with his dark baggy face and suit next to tiny happy Nick Clegg in the primroses. It was like the telly debate all over again.

This one is quite baffling but I am sure there is a cutting rebuke against the Labour government here somewhere. I was going to say the scarecrow presence is rather sidelined and who is going to scare the crows away but fortunately there is a picture of Gordon Brown to keep the crops safe. I like the attention to the lines around his eyes.

Just excellent. It features my favourite drink, is both topical, political, makes a dig at a celebrity, all in a rhyming format and in under thirty words- I spy the new poet lauriette! It was outside one of Wray’s two pubs and we shall leave aside the fact the 10% duty idea was happily, quietly and quickly abolished-and the fact that depressed alcoholic scarecrow tramps surrounded by cider bottles was the main reason the idea of the tax was introduced in the first place.

Sleep well, children! This was part of a bigger tableau randomly set up in a dingly dell outside the village featuring Batman, and an amazing MDF Batmobile etc. It had been cunningly made political by laminated sardonic print-outs about how the various figured represented each political party. I can’t remember who the Joker represented-probably according to Wray’s no nonsense scarecrow politics-everyone! If only Newsnight were here-you don’t need any Swingometers in Wray. They could save a fortune on pie charts alone.

And in true Nostradamus/Chaos Theory, thousands will die in a terrorist attack on a new Country, many many more will die in the aftermath leading the world into political unstability and war and the hidden ring leader will be finally found in a battered bin in a village near Lancaster. I do not know what the other sign means. It is either clever political satire or something snarky about local recycling. Or something else.

The residents of this house are so topical it hurts. People at the time of writing are still stuck abroad and don’t even know they have been portrayed in scarecrow beer swilling form. There was another one but I chose this because the other scarecrow looked sad. I like the crow pecking the goggles as well.
TV Detectives!

In which leading fictional detectives are portrayed fighting in a water butt. There is nothing else which needs adding.

Miss Marple would love Wray-it is St Mary Meade and revels in it. There were many images of Miss Marple herself but I liked this one for its simplicity, absence of Miss Marple and jolly delight in the concept of someone being killed.

It’s Inspector Gadget looking like he is now in a Russian Intelligence Squad-careful now-his gloves contain high levels of cancer causing chemicals!

Crowjak-Nothing else needs to be said. The ‘Crowlumbo’ was also good. I love Wray.

This was a masterpiece. Inspector Clueso was not only himself personified in straw but the Pink Panther music played from hidden speakers, the pink abnormal beast leared over him and there were pink wooden paw prints dotted around the outside of the house.

How can one get over a hangover without watching Poiret twiddling his moustache on ITV 3 on a Sunday afternoon? There were quite a few of him in Wray but I liked this one as it was in the sort of grand central village house that you just know has had many a body flop lifelessy to the floor in the library. The bunting, the figure in the window and Poiret’s eyes gazing sightlessly over the village makes you just know that someone is gasping their last breath inside-Good luck Poiret! I hope you untangle the sticky web of intrigue before another scarecrow dies.

The house in which this is set belongs to a proud Scotsman who always has detailed and Scottish scarecrows on the theme of choice.Which must take some doing. His ‘Captain Crowscarer’ was a masterpiece…

Wray Village

Not only is this a surprising faithful rendition of a googly eyed Nessie outside a barn but check out the faint chalk graffiti on the wall. It’s what he would have wanted. Micheal and Nessy togeva foreva -both misunderstood legends prone to rumour and hype bothered by tourists and unrealistic depictions in the media.
The sadness, loneliness and hope in rural communities as depicted by a sack, an old floral dress and the waiting graveyard. There is no vicar in Wray anymore.

When buildings have faces…

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A selection of pictures from an April trip to Morecambe.

Read the Unicycle Emptiness view from Morecambe in winter and find more pictures here

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