Real vintage hell at Morecambe Vintage Festival
I don’t really know why Morecambe feels the need for a vintage festival. Morecambe sells nylon slacks for £3.99 in the street and five bedroom houses for eighty grand. Morecambe has crumbling ghost signs and liver and onions advertised as an actual selling point on blackboards outside cafes.
Now Wayne Hemingway has driven up from Islington in his fancy sports car (conjecture-don’t sue me Wayne or I will show you the broken hinge on my twenty pound Red or Dead purse- WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?) to DJ in a tent and Morecambe is surprisingly populated by an uncanny and unnatural mix of fur stoles, heels, red lipstick and overstretched Primark leggings and cans of Polish beer.
It is a beautiful day and Morecambe looks resplendent, it suits men in cravats playing ukuleles outside the Midland Hotel. Inside the Midland, I see that a glass of house wine is seven pounds and go to steady my nerves in the licensed Wacky Warehouse. It is less glamorous here but I have saved three pounds and twenty pence although lost any semblance of dignity and romance.
In the world’s most sullen funfair, I wait patiently whilst a stall-holder has a fight with another stall-holder about a lost dog, child or husband and notice that salted caramel has definitely jumped the shark as now one can purchase an oversized salted caramel dummy for £1.50.
Queues for the food stalls are long and we meander through the dim recesses of back streets until we decide to stop at the Worst Cafe in the Universe. The Worst Cafe in the Universe is all the unpleasant elements of Vintage- varying shades of brown, at least 46756766 sticky place-mats featuring paintings of unexotic expired brown fruits, a menu seemingly inspired by the more desperate age of rationing but with prices from the Midland Hotel in 2015.
There I could have had a nine pound vegetarian platter featuring spinach falafel and olives and other such glamorous things whilst also engaging in gin and flirtation with men with a sardonic twinkle in their eye in a fashionable well lit Art Deco environment. Here, in the dark, a fucking omelette is £8.95. Incredibly, some of the 4768 tables have brass triangular Reserved signs on. I have a minuscule soup with cubed carrot bobbing miserably in and out of the salty broth ( my tears) and sulk bitterly. It says a lot that I decide not to try the wine.
I go wincing back into daylight and return to a brighter prettier version of Vintage with flounces, ruffles, poodles and Prosseco.
Give me artifice or give me death.