Bolton

It’s been a while. Inertia creeps. The same places, the same constant confusion about how to add a photo to a post. But then I went to Bolton and saw an advert for a fish stall featuring a dead shark with a crab in its mouth and thought more people should delight in such laminated items of glory .
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I had a pleasing time in Bolton possibly due to the fact I was not expecting to. Nobody ever rhapsodises about Bolton in the Guardian. I suspect nobody ever rhapsodises about Bolton in the Bolton Guardian.*

It’s just that place near Manchester. Hey, Manchester! Let’s go to Manchester! But on a grim wet Tuesday, the thought of heading to Bolton seems impossibly glamorous. I possibly need to get my passport renewed at some point.

 

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In Bolton, an old man is playing a tape recording of the Pogues and playing a recorder along with it.No mean feat.  I wonder if he has been the victim of a hipster in a second hand record store. I would have liked to have taken a closer pic but did not have the nerve. This is why I am poor. Yes, you, old polite gentleman with an upturned hat dully glinting with a few coppers and a saliva drenched recorder. I blame you. Somehow.

In a  lacklustre charity shop I hear the decisive snip of a label being pulled off by the woman next to me then I hear her ask the price of the item in question causing the flurry of anxiety an unpriced item in a lacklustre charity shop can cause on a dull Thursday afternoon. People are called ‘from the back’, they all insist the price is definitely inside the bag despite numerous frantic searchings. I am paralysed by indecision and English nerves. Do I say I heard her rip it out ( a known scam so a dithering volunteer on the spot can price it for 20p) but what if I am wrong? What if the nylon twang was from something else at close range somehow? I leave the panicking cluster with a feeling of guilt and disquiet. I have only been in Bolton ten minutes but have potentially assisted in robbing a charity shop and will never be able to listen to Rum, Sodomy and the Lash again without thinking of the desperate parping of a recorder accompanying it.

 

 

Sanctuary is sought in The Old Man and Scythe- tumbling and beautiful- ancient beams, stone floors, hot pasties and a large range of strong perries. It’s pretty much everything that is wonderful and good.
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I try not to eat all the pasty as wish to try to sample something exotic and glamorous in Bolton Market. But it is a pasty. A hot pasty. I keep putting it back in my bag. It steams lustrously back at me in its nylon cell. I am defeated.

Bolton museum is a thing of even greater glory than the pasty. Especially after a Raspberry perry at 7.7%. There is an aquarium, an art gallery an Ancient Egyptian room and 50% off certain things at the gift shop. I decide I love Bolton. And bug keyrings for 50p.

Then, then, then, Bolton Market! Not only is there the previously mentioned laminated dead head eating a dead  crab tableau but it has a craft ale and cheese stall and wooden stalls in the middle of the market means you can sit in a strange otherworldly existence of drinking a glass of wine (2.90 for a large glass of Chardonnay) watching Wimbledon on a big screen, some genial African  men selling curried goat and plantain, women in burqas walking past, a really really pissed off looking woman drinking a cup of tea from the tea stall and some cheery blokes at the ale stand, so happy and comfortable in their own bubble of Northern bonhomie  that they  look like they belong to the stall and get folded up at the end of the afternoon.

In a glow of cheap refreshment glory, I admire puns on the stall names and declare them worthy of Dickins himself then float home with a bag of short dated premium goods for a pleasing price and a dry mouth.

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bolterino*In my head, furious readers will write in to complain that Bolton does not have a Bolton Guardian but in all actuality I could say that the Bolton Pound Bakery was a hotbed of Isis insurgents and still not have this post merit a comment apart from someone who is determined to sell me viagra at a good price.

 


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