Unicycle Emptiness

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.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

We are sitting in a ‘café with a conscience,’ the Buddhist run World Peace café and it cares about you very much and also the planet. For a small vegetarian cafe that sells nachos and halloumi baguettes, its aim is somewhat high and I hope Somalia and Yemen are listening when I order my cauliflower and nutmeg soup.  http://www.worldpeacecafe.org/

There are Buddhist books to read and meditation CDs for sale. The sun streams in from the flower bedecked garden and some gentle music is playing. Then a man decides to play all the different ring tones on his phone. Loudly. Sadly Buddhism is not the religion of a vengeful God.

We are in Ulverston on a blistering early June day and I have decided to move here. It is the best place I have ever been to I declare over my second cider and I am so overexcited that I just point at pretty much everything and say it is wonderful. I stop when I realize I have getting excited over some breezeblock stairs (circa 1989)

Ulverston is a pretty higgledy-piggledy market town in the Lake District yet not impossibly cutesy and swamped by tourists. It is grey, quaintly austere and surrounded by hills. Houses are for sale at well under a hundred grand, there are fancy shops including an excellent chocolatier alongside more prosaic ones and those seemingly unchanged since 1902. A bargain food shops boxes upon boxes of crisps spill out onto the street and including those fancy ones they sell in pubs are all for sale for 10p a packet. Cans of Cocoa Cola and Dr Pepper (in a fridge no less) are 30p a can. It is a skint bulimics dream within its shambolic interiors with Thorntons chocolates for a quid and various other delicious unhealthy cheap cheap goodness. It must be amazing to be a child here. A quid in Ulverston could easily tip you into a dangerous body mass index. I feel slightly ashamed of my trans fat spewing plastic bags but impressed that they only came to £2.54.

Anyway the real reason we are here is to visit Harmonic Fields, an installation that is part of the Lakes Alive season of festivity. http://www.lakesalive.org/events/harmonicfields/

I am used to getting somewhat overexcited by amazing sounding things and then being crushingly disappointed but here on Birkrigg common is a piece of magic.

There is an orchestra playing a symphony but there are no musicians here, just the wind, earth and sky. The sea shimmers below and moorland stretches for infinity. Strung up and silhouetted by the blazing empty blue of the sky are musical instruments, 500 of them and all wind powered. Enormous bamboo organs and cellos along with more abstract musical equipment, long strips of rubber, scarecrows, gongs and harps all arranged into four sections with the wind the conductor and dictating which instruments will be playing and when and how loud or quiet they will be. It’s a fantastic idea that seems too amazing and overblown for reality but due to composer and artist Pierre Sauvageot, it works, it really works. It is so alive and interactive, this is not art to simply stare at-by walking around in and out of the bamboo organ pipes is when you hear the different timbres, by putting your head in a gong, you hear the gong. And depending on where the wind is and where the listener is, everyone hears something completely different. Despite loving music I am a tone deaf Luddite with all the subtle complexities of a Sham 69 album but even I can tell this is something pretty damn special. It is classical, natural and spectacular-kids run around, yummy mummies with three wheeled pushchairs natter, there are men with dreadlocks and posh looking people who utter sentences like quotations.  The more people run around the installations, the more they enjoy it-a couple stare at the organ pipes and declare it silent but if they weaved in and out of it like excited three year olds they would have heard it and thus by trying to look cool they make themselves look stupid-like with yoof with overtight neon jeans.

Back down into Ulverston and the excitement of finding yet another exclusively vegetarian establishment-Gillams is a cozy tearoom and café that has been in the family for around two hundred years and is what Americans possibly think all England is like. We have a bubbling oozy rarebit and a cheese and chili jam puff with salad, coleslaw and baked potato, a posh lemonade and an excellent bottle of organic pleasingly strong cider with the bill coming to about seventeen quid which I consider eminently reasonable for a place where the staff have the name of the establishment on their clothes.

I think of the fact we have resolved not to eat out ever again after finding all the water in the attic and feel somewhat guilty but as a vegetarian, to find an exclusively vegetarian establishment and not enter it, seems somewhat wrong. Not as wrong as the Armenian genocide I admit, I am making poor excuses but I like food, am a lazy cook and am sick of years of eating out as a vegetarian having less chance of a happy outcome than playing Russian Roulette. Unless you like paying nine quid for a fucking goats cheese tartlet the size of a babies fist as all your companions merrily delve into a cacophony of farmyard.  http://www.gillams-tearoom.co.uk/

Ulverston saves its best for last, one of those obscure haphazardous charity shops down a little lane which practically scream ‘here be treasure’ but it being 2011, the treasure not being antiquarian maps of long lost counties but a Thomas The Tank Engine pop up book where the pop up bits have not been savagely ripped off and eaten for 50p. And a dress from the pound hanger (something tragically disappearing from the modern charity shops in favour of stupid expensive calendars featuring grinning Balinese children in woven hats) that will look lovely once I can fit my arms into it-I suspect the precious owner might also have been delighted by the array of close to expiry enchantments within the Bargain Food shop. Oh and some sunglasses for 30p. 30p! Only in Ulverston does 30p give you a veritable choice of things to purchase.  Or indeed the knowledge that your purchase goes towards making the world a better place for the earth and all residing on it should you wish to spend two pound something on a delicious fresh smoothie from an ethical establishment rather than rot your teeth on nasty tasty cheap yummy carcinogenic 30p diet coke. Although they did also have Appletiser.

And in a small town, who could ask for more?

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

I am jealous but have no reason to be. Again. Several years ago I did a joint degree in Creative writing and English. Some of my fellow students have now had novels published and I am bitter and jealous despite not having even attempted to write a novel.

And now I am looking around artist’s studios and inwardly screaming with bitter envy and resentment despite the fact I got a D in GCSE Art and my last attempt at drawing made my sleeping baby look like a mutant potato with a face like when people send photos to Take A Break magazine of a crisp which looks a bit like Cheryl Cole.

We are at the Spring Fling in Dumfries and Galloway – an annual event when artists open their studios and houses to showcase their work and people come to talk about the creative process with fellow artists, buy original art or stare balefully at boho kitchens with handmade tiles then remember to look at the actual art, decide they can actually do better or at least as good, then realise that drawing a tree is actually fucking hard.

I suspect that is not the purpose of the Spring Fling.

I suspect I am a shallow monster who true Art shuns.

I am already envious of people who live in Dumfries and Galloway-an understated Nirvana, which makes Devon resemble Hackney. It is so unspoilt and empty that all signposts point to each other due to the winding intermingling roads and small farms are highlighted on the atlas.  And it is absolutely beautiful. There are mountains, forests, lochs, sea and moor, standing stones, beaches, crofts and places where you can buy feta stuffed olives.

Anyway, the Spring Fling. An enchanted place becomes even more annoyingly enchanted because of the realisation that artists live there, millions of artists who all know each other and have a jolly bohemian time together without you unlike in Devon say where ‘artists’ reside in houses that cost half a million pounds and you know you could never afford to be their friend.

Then again these artists are not struggling. I want them to be, it’s so romantic but then I clock their Aga. Although to be fair some of the artists have studios in purpose built blocks so hopefully they live in desperate garrets where you only have a glimpse of the sea and their oven is a cheap white Beko.

The art itself is diverse veering between spectacular and ‘how the hell can they pretend that’s art?’ Looking at art and then seeing its cost makes you look at it in a purely financial sense-a painting you would admire in a gallery has you peeping at the label and then comparing it against another piece of art as you flit between picturesque studios as you fly down narrow winding roads following haphazard signage, as you chitchat politely and snaffle free cake and envy and admire and peep.

I saw amazing things. I saw Jacobs Ladder in mosaic, I saw vases featuring guns, I saw oil paintings of empty assembly halls, and I saw wicker mermaids and pearl necklaces. Self-portraits of moody tattooed men and watercolours of pretty churches, cows and fields. In a cottage in the middle of nowhere, a precocious child showed me her mother’s studio and made me a free badge. I saw luminescent self-portraits and bad abstracts, studies of the sea, pretty watercolours and angry splatters. Clay, pearls and wool. And I saw and I envied and I admired.

And as those who can’t do, teach, I wrote about it.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

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…

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

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.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

I have always had a strong interest in ghosts and witches. Unlike with most people however, it did not stop when I was nine.

It is an interest on the periphery of my life, I do not spend vast sums of money on occult paraphernalia or obsess over ‘orbs’ which are clearly dust but I like the thought of ghosts existing. It is pleasing. I also like witches.  I believe in witches less than ghosts and feel faintly guilty being interested in them at all as I think a lot of slightly eccentric women who loved cats and had an interest in herbs died very nastily as a result of people believing in witches.

The Pendle Witches have made the victimisation, persecution and murder of women a tourist trail featuring a witch on a broomstick.  I have though always wanted to visit Pendle hill, scene of their alleged naughtiness because of the way it glowers over East Lancashire, always in the distance, always dark and long and strange, it being not a hill as such but a long looming landmass.

We finally have a car and it is my first destination, it previously being pretty much inaccessible via public transport from Lancaster, the scene of the witches’ sorry demise.  It is annoyingly a beautiful day. Even more annoyingly, the fact it is so beautiful thwarts us. I have a small baby, even more annoyingly a small ginger almost translucent baby and the sun beams unseasonably down and there is no shade whatsoever on the cold dead slopes of Pendle hill. Apparently people with a dark side climb Pendle hill on Halloween night. Maybe they are just ginger and freckle easily.

Reaching the no doubt impossibly eerie summit of Pendle hill is out (for now) but there is a Pendle Inn at nearby Barley featuring a pub sign of a witch on a broomstick. It’s practically dancing widdershins with Aleister Crowley except for the fact it sells tagliatelle for 9.95 and has self-catering cottages in the car park.  Oh, and was built in 1935.

The picnic area opposite is pleasing in that it looks like a poster in Nursery Times magazine celebrating diversity. There are saris and old men in shorts and sandals sitting in deckchairs.  Kids run around with nets on sticks, big scary looking men enjoy strawberry ice creams and don’t litter.

But I am still in search of the unknown and so we head to Newchurch in Pendle, home to Witches Galore. The name should perhaps have given away the fact there are no dark grimoires to be had here but esoterica lite, incense and car stickers that say ‘My other car’s a broomstick.’

And among the fluffy black cats, gemstones and wind chimes. a display of royal wedding memorabilia, Kate Middleton’s bland face next to some rune stones and books on walking in the northwest. It’s what Alice Nutter would have wanted.

We head to Burnley to a vegetarian café so meticulously researched on the net that we can’t find it and even of we had it would have been closed anyway.  The rest of Burnley looks to be honest, fucking awful so we head to Colne as the Internet says it has a ‘restaurant quarter’. A restaurant quarter must have some nice veggie inoffensive fare but we search the streets of Colne in vain. There are a surprising amount of butchers, deep stretching grey terraces than make Coronation Street look like Kensington but no restaurant quarter. Is Mr Chips the restaurant quarter?

We finally find an Italian restaurant offering three courses for ten pounds. It appears an oasis in the desert and I rhapsodise until the food arrives. I never learn the whole quantity versus quality thing. The ice-cream (third course) remains untouched and research on the net suggests that the restaurant we are in and the two closed ones nearby are in fact the restaurant quarter. I curse council press releases. And the meal costs with two drinks and the garlic bread thirty quid, which is actually more than we have ever paid in our lives for a meal. My partner leaves most of his and we bicker the whole way home about whose fault it was that we went there. We both admit we should have known from the plastic ivy. And in retrospect the angry people on the Internet who say they went to environmental health after a meal there. But first the toilet.

A new day beckons and the search for adventure and somewhere to take the taste of the oily orange pasta away beckons. First Sedburgh, a wonderful market town also nestled under hills but more benevolent hills-God seems to smile on Sedburgh, its higgledy piggledy quaintness, bookshops that still exist like their patrons have never heard of Amazon, a church and graveyard in the middle of the town and a charity shop where after chatting to the people within, you feel like sending them a Christmas card. We have 90p chips which are far pleasanter a dinner than the thirty quid horror we are still apportioning blame for.

We have a picnic today and yomp into the wilderness albeit with a printed map outside Kirkby Stephen (another almost too quaint market town which in Devon would be heaving with tourists with cameras but in Cumbria, just is) we walk along viaducts, past abandoned cottages, through moorland and woods and everything is utterly perfect. People say hello when we pass and it is all so utterly English and pleasant.

But even more excitingly in the car on the way back I see not only ghosts but also murder. In one of my guiltily read books about ghosts I read of a pub ensnared in Northern wilderness, perched amongst moorland and with a dark bloody history and with a name I instantly recall as being the name of the self same pub.

The car screams to a halt, we enter, I try to stop the baby shrieking. I sense no evil presence but to be fair it is a sunny bank holiday. And maybe the undead feel at unease where peach vinyl wallpaper still exists. Its one of those pubs where the décor may be stuck in the seventies but the prices are definitely Now. I always think of a tenner for a meal in a pub to mean it comes with coulis, foams and all the other things I read about in out of date Good Food magazines at the doctors. But I am clearly old, poverty struck and out of touch and an old skint vegetarian needs to bring her own picnic or suck it up.

But now lets’ look for atmosphere! I have no blue light to hold under my chin and the sun is still blazing, there are no bloodstains but I can envisage the ghastliness of the murder, the horror on the windswept night, the restless spirit still prowling. Then the baby starts crying and we have to go.

I am trying to convey the sacred terror of the place to my partner who sneers as he has seen the residents lounge enshrouded not in unearthly terror but in brown velour. I look it up on my phone to show him the true unearthly bloody history of the car park we now reside in. Then realise we are in the wrong pub.

I decide not to ghost hunt anymore.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

To the unitiated this looks like a Clairol foot spa convention. We are in a field surrounded by lilac hued hills and mountains on the outskirts of Dumfries on a beautiful spring morning. And what does one want to do on a beautiful spring morning? Haggle over a dog-eared My Story by Katie Price and hark at the sheer amount of pre-loved Clairol foot spas.

I love carboots.  I am cheap and greedy, enjoy quantity over quality which stands me in good stead at a carboot where a tenner in your hand proclaims you king of all that surrounds you- like an oil baron in Harrods, you know that practically anything you see can be yours. I like the excitement factor, the possibility of finding a stall peopled by an upper market version of me selling stuff I have always wanted for 10p an item. Occasionally this happens, in a low level way- a frenzy of books about ghosts, wind chimes and faux fur ensues and I guiltily realise I am shaking.

There is no esoteric nirvana here in prosaic Dumfries. There is however a large framed poster featuring a silhouette of a man playing the saxophone. In big writing it proclaims ‘Women love me, fish fear me.’ It is a phrase so mysterious and complex I am still mulling it over today like some sacred text in the Koran. And where does it fit with the saxophone?

It’s all so exciting and added to the normal excitement of seeing the laden trestle tables of Lean Mean Grilling Machines glinting in the sun is the fact that we’re in Scotland!

An aura of exoticness and a slight sense of danger pervades. A man behind a stall makes a comment about the weather and when I reply I am aware I sound like the queen. There appear to be platform leather vibrating slippers for sale for a fiver. Sadomasochism and comfortable indoor footwear finally together as one.

Of course the guiltiest pleasure of carboots is the sheer incredulousness of some of the wares the vendors are trying to market. In 2010 a Lisa Stansfield single is not marketable currency. Neither is a 1996 Schotts almanac. The sheer perverse in nature might however enjoy completing their World Towers jigsaw puzzle  (1000 pieces, no planes)

I feel for those vendors with their sorry empty stalls who believe in some TV programme mantra where clutter is the enemy. No! Clutter is good, foraging is expected at a carboot because of that underlying treasure hunter within you who thinks that underneath the New Look lies Vivienne Westwood even though the seller is size 24, covered in tattoos of the names of her children and smoking a Lambert and Butler. A bleak stall selling some used fairy lights, a copy of How To Give Up Smoking By Allan Carr and some Next blue baby dungarees with their large optimistic prices attached is going to make me fly by to the stall next door where ‘here be treasure’ might lie in the guise of a bobbley yet cool top with skulls on.

And now here is a stall which has all the music I loved ten years ago and now I see it again I want it again even though I got rid of it and it is probably the same Cornershop promo I sold so many years ago. But at a carboot, surrounded by CD singles of people who won the Xfactor once, a Mudhoney album is so gloriously incongruous and exciting. Mind you, I am now so overexcited at being at a carboot in Scotland, that an ice-cream van nearly makes me pass out in the sheer delight of it all.

Of course there is nothing I want. That tends to spoil it, the gritty determination to find a magnetic cat flap, the knowledge of your living room being filled at that very moment with very naughty cats makes you feel guilt at lingering over a lava lamp. But treasure does indeed lie underneath. I am now the proud owner of a limited edition copy of Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy. It was three quid. And now every time I play it (not that I have as yet) it will make me think of that sunny spring morning surrounded by nature’s bounty and Clairol foot spas.

The surroundings are so glorious it almost feels mocking. The mountains, hills and fields rich with history and bloodshed beckon gently but you are in a field, yet not communing with nature, but bartering about neon hued plastic and mulling over a poster that proclaims that women love you and fish fear you and featuring a silhouette of a man playing a saxophone.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

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.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

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.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

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/

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites