Unicycle Emptiness

Our train steams past clusters of Staples superstores and mega bowling taverns, past TK Maxx’s and derelict houses, moors and lakes, grids of post war houses and McDonalds, a town hides deep in a valley with housestumbling down a semi-mountain then a long dark tunnel. Then Hebden.

You have probably heard of Hebden Bridge. Renowned for hippies, fair trade and an alternative culture. Well, this is what happens when alternative culture grows up, has babies and a disposable income. Well, it’s probably a recyclable income here. It is a beautiful place in a beautiful setting. A valley, canal, woods, steep looming houses and the occasional long chimney, a remnant of its mill town past, probably the only one apart from the occasional estate agent sign advertising penthouse living in a converted mill. The photographs of minimalist rooms with white leather sofas don’t seems so terribly Hebden-and yes, Hebden is an adjective.

Hebden is more wind chimes, cute kids in cutely clashing layers, Non Yorkshire accents, whole food, homeopathy and dogs. Lots of dogs. And white haired lesbians in Millets clothing. And natural fabric, which looks expensive. And cheerful confident bonhomie. It’s lovely. But does not seem sustainable (ironically) to this northerner on minimum wage. Where is the money sourcing from and where are the jobs? It is such an enchanted Nirvana in the midst of the more earthy neighbours such as Accrington and Blackburn, the places where the press go to take a stock shot of the impoverished north and its miles of back-to-back identikit terraces with washing fluttering in the alleys from the train windows.

Hebden Bridge started as milltown, then when that died and the workers moved away, became a sort of commune, a place where the squatters fled, where they could afford a patch of land, a tiny terrace and from there grew a community of like minded souls. Now, there are still battered vans driving by, men with purple flowing capes and long hair wander the streets and are not mocked-narrow boats line the canal and hey, you get the message. But I wonder how the oasis gets its water.

House prices are reasonable-we lick the windows of estate agents where a lovely terrace can be purchased for a hundred grand and rent for a house can be less than four hundred quid a month (far more than neighbouring Halifax). But we wonder about jobs. So lovely to have independent shops and children’s homoeopathists. But this is a small town in the midst of Yorkshire and I suspect that jobs are hard to come by.

There are lovely places to eat and drink and they all seem to be full. On a Saturday. So many veggie cafes and the like, it is like manna from heaven from this veggie, saturated on the generic spicy bean burger option. It is not cheap. It is not that expensive. But in general recession bitten Northern terms, it’s a fucking miracle, never mind an oasis.

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There is dog shit everywhere. Literally everywhere and I mean literally in the true sense of the word, not the bastardised ‘I literally blew up with anger’.

Coils of mesmerising size, shape and variety line the alley leading from the train station into town-we point amazed, strangely impressed-constipated dogs, dogs with diarrhea, big dogs, little dogs, dogs who have clearly eaten something green-all have chosen to empty their bowels here, untroubled by owners with little shovels and small warm plastic bags.

An auspicious start. It gets better once we reach the high street-it is amazingly busy-this is a rather isolated town in the Yorkshire dales, an old town built mostly of grey and it blends in with the winter sky. But where you normally on a February Saturday expect the general shuffling Saturday shoppers, Skipton is bustling like Armageddon has just been announced on North West Tonight.

Throngs of people of a certain age merrily bustle down the narrow high street lined with worthy independent shops-there is a National Trust shop and despite the recession, people are cooing at bird feeders and books about castles. Clothes shops sell either windproof , waterproof and fashion proof coats or smart two-pieces -yesterday’s fashions at tomorrow’s prices.

As usual, after an hour on a train, sitting doing nothing, I am filled with a ravenous hunger. Skipton has a lot of places to eat. They are all full. Full to brim, bursting, saturated. I was keen to go to a veggie café; Wild Oats in the high street-there is an earnest polite queue leading down the staircase into the whole-foods store.  The Italian we try is also full -all around me people eat, shop, eat, shop. And oh so smugly. I decide I hate Skipton. My companion and I have the normal argument over where to eat but then find in a fork of the high street, an Italian called Brodys with a sign advertising pizza, garlic bread and salad for two for a tenner. It is in an ornate Georgian building with a white wedding cake ceiling  filled with ladies who lunch and well-fed wholesome families. The service and the food are excellent and I like Skipton again.

After lunch, the urge for a walk -and suddenly there is dog shit everywhere again. We try to look up at the castle but are too fearful for our shoes. The castle from the canal looks disappointingly well kempt-almost as if it has double glazing-I prefer my castles wild and windswept ruins with chunks of falling masonry, blood and rust stained irons but Skipton castle looks as smug and well cared for as the women in Brodys. My roof is in worse condition. I would have liked to go inside but we have little money, it having gone yet again on pizza and train fares like some low rent Mafioso.

We are on  a winding little path by the canal-a little waterfall appears and some charming little houses and beyond we can see fresh countryside, the sort that looks like it is virginal especially compared to the dog shit and litter but we have little time to stretch out into the unknown due to the haphazard train service.  Maybe one day though.

The Royal Oak  is nearby, near an apparently very famous pork pie shop (‘well, you would think the pies could be hot, at least,’ someone bitterly complains outside in the aggrieved tones you would expect of someone who had found her first born Sweeney Todded in crisp pastry)

I ask in the Royal Oak for a glass of red wine. ‘No, sorry, w haven’t got any’, says the woman in friendly co-miseration. Next to the Royal Oak is an off-license. I can see wine from here.  It is a nice looking pub though, all wooden floors and sofas but the rugby is on loud on a big screen and the only paper is the Daily Mail. Outside someone is dressed as a Christmas tree.

We decide to oh so carefully wind our way past the Tesco’s, Morrison’s and the dogshit and go back home. Good night Skipton-you are a rather lovely place but I don’t think I will be rushing back somehow-and it’s not you, it’s me.  And the poo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I decide I have warmed to Buxton.

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

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

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

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

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It is a punishingly expensive (a chilling portent of what is to come) yet short bus journey from Windermere train station to Ambleside. It straggles off the shores of Lake Windermere and its name says it all. Ambleside. You know things are going to be cosy, pleasant, not too arduous and oh so English in a place called Ambleside.  There will be no graffitied underpasses with flickering electric lights reflecting violent neon orange off gnawed KFC chicken bones in Ambleside.  Thus the violence and death here comes as a surprise. But more of that later.

It is as pretty and cutesy as the name suggests-little stone cottages shuffling quaintly up curling streets, snow capped mountains looming (nicely, not too scarily or gothicly) overhead, the occasional serene twinkle of Lake Windermere between lofty grey Victorian houses.  But the tiny little cottages are for sale at hundreds of thousands of pounds and they are for holiday lets not retired twinkly-eyed women with a penchant for flower arranging- it’s all a grand and tranquil illusion. Of how things used to be.

The stone clad newsagent sells Le Monde and a host of other international newspapers not the parish gazette and so many of the people thronging the streets have strident moneyed southern accents, not the gentle Cumbrian lilt. Should you be local here, I think you would go mad due to a surfeit of overpriced Kendal Mint Cake and the lack of normal shops selling things that don’t have a badly drawn picture of the Old Man of Coniston on them. One cannot live on tea towels with local attractions on them alone. There is surprisingly a Greggs though-personally would rather stick with munching the tea towels but it is scarily refreshing to see a normal chain shop selling reasonably priced normal stuff  but it looks like a carbuncle here.  I wonder if people here saw it as a godsend or a pastry clad anti-Christ. It is still the prettiest Greggs I have ever seen.

I have a justified reputation for being somewhat profligate when it comes to clothes shopping but drop me here with a hundred pounds to spend and I would struggle. People rustle. Gore-Tex is god. I am the only person seemingly wearing not just a skirt but also eye shadow. Yes, I am aware that this area is a Mecca for hikers but there appear to be no shops selling anything non-waterproof. This is middle England Monsoon country but with no sequins or flattering merino wool cardigans.  I yearn for something cheap and nylon. And no, not a Euro Hike tent.

The weak winter sun glints off metal walking poles, something I have an unnatural and undeserved antipathy of, along with the plastic things you somehow put on the bottom of your trousers so the bottom of your trousers do not get any dirty nasty nature on them when out communing with nature –err, there are washing machines available for reasonable prices nowadays. It’s all just so sensible and yet unnecessary at the same time and are brandished with a smug pride by people with sensible haircuts who I suspect never really walk that far into the wilderness but like the idea of being a walker and buy stuff to show the world this startling fact and because they can.

I feel sorry for teenagers here-New Look stiletto heels are probably sold undercover outside pubs for hundreds of pounds. As a teenager, I thought Exeter was the arse end of no-where but at least it sold cheap shoddy goods, not just expensive well made practical wear. A sign in a shop window reads ‘Faux Ugg Boots-25 pounds’.  Faux! How posh! Basically the shop is selling fake Uggs, i.e. nasty cheap blanketty saggy after two wears Made In China boots that can be bought for a fiver anywhere else in the whole of the UK but here are about half the price of real Ugg boots on the internet and they are advertising the fact proudly, I presume not knowing of the fact of the internet or ignoring it or presuming the teens who live here have nothing else to spend their money on here and cheap fake Uggs are practically Jimmy Choos when you are surrounded by stout Merrel hiking boots and mountains and they presume you  have not heard of eBay. I am sounding bitchy. I do not mean to be.  For some reason, Wordworthian settings of timeless beauty and poetry bring out a mean streak. But ‘Faux Uggs’! Faux! It is both pretentious and condescending.

We are hungry and despite it being the Saturday before payday in late January, a time when probably Paris Hilton can’t even afford to supersize it, the numerous delis, cafes and restaurants are absolutely packed. With Daily Mail under the arm chattering classes.   And it is not cheap here.  (And my food budget went to the bus fare-and I still needed to borrow more. A second hand Fiat Panda can be purchased for less than the return fare from Troutbeck to Ambleside –Troutbeck is as far as we walked from Windermere alongside the rather unromantic main road until I had a paddy at it being a bit of a rubbish walk and demanded transport)

I initially decided to come to Ambleside after reading there was not one but two vegetarian restaurants with cinemas attached. That is an amazing statistic for a small isolated town. I dreamt happily of the hideous rivalry the two competing places must surely have, no doubt ending in spilt non vegetarian blood over the purple sprouting broccoli.  It is a crushing blow to find the same family owns them both and they exist in boring mutual harmony.

We go to the first one, Zeffirellis, (not only a restaurant and cinema but a jazz bar) and after a communal sharp intake of breath after looking at the prices on the menu outside, go to the other one, Fellini’s.  It is closed and we intake our breaths a bit more after looking at the prices on the menu there. Very nice looking food though it has to be said. We walk hungrily through the town giving the occasional further sharp intake of breath after looking at menus to end up again inevitably at Zefirellis.

It is a pleasant Italian style establishment catering for a rather more upmarket vegetarian clientele than the sosmix and dreadlock brigade (both of which I suspect have not yet been seen in Ambleside) My pizza is nice but is £9.65 for ten inches and I have not before ever spent a tenner on lunch for one.  The vegetables are shockingly naked on top of the cheese not smothered underneath it, which causes some consternation as I fear change but it is a nice pizza. No as nice as the one in Morecambe that can be had for four quid and the thought of the wonderful crisp golden coin of the four-pound Morecambe pizza at the Palatine pub, (see Morecambe review) my eyes practically brim over with grief and a profound sense of loss.  My companion’s tomato and ricotta cannelloni was excellent but again for nine pounds, some sort of accompaniment such as a bit of salad or garlic bread might have been expected.  To be fair, you have to bear in mind we are in a world famous tourist resort with a rich historical and literary heritage and we have instantly gravitated to a place which does not advertise it self as a bargain eatery.

We could have eaten cheaper but I feel weirdly duty bound to go a vegetarian eating place if I can although a choice of more than two options can send me into a veritable kaleidoscope of indecision as not used to choice and it is both wonderful and a bit terrifying especially as I look at what other people are eating after I have ordered with the envy and regret of a wife looking at her husbands younger prettier blonde mistress. And then my poor (literally poor as he’s paying) companion has to listen to me talk about the options that could have been and what I choose is never as good as what could have been.  Sophies Choice is nothing compared to this. You don’t get this hideous terror when you can only have penne pasta but can just self –righteously bitch about the lack of vegetarian options and feel both vindicated and a martyr to your cause. I can see I am selling vegetarianism appallingly so will stop.  The service was excellent, the menu was interesting and it’s all terribly ladies who lunch but a pleasant place to sit and people watch, guiltily read The Daily Telegraph or The Daily Mail  (Ambleside is that sort of place) and stare aghast at the sensible footwear.

For some reason after coming out of the restaurant I feel a deep and intense craving for pie and go in the Apple Pie café and bakery-two pieces of pie (cheese and onion and stilton, broccoli and mushroom) are an eye watering five quid and something but after an hour of bitter complaints, eat them to discover them to be excellent pie.

My companion wishes heartily to leave the streets of Ambleside and do some proper walking. I beg to differ so we reach an uneasy compromise of walking up a hill and then back down again. It is a nice hill though slightly marred by florid faced middle-aged men in pristine black Jaguars driving like idiots up the narrow roads and then back down again.   Either Ambleside has more florid faced middle aged men in pristine black Jaguars driving like idiots than everywhere else in the world (apart from the Cotswolds obviously) or one florid faced middle aged man in a pristine black Jaguar had lost his way.

The beautiful views stretch out in every direction-pointing and clicking my camera pretty much anywhere results in a postcard and it is hard not to be charmed by it all and feel a longing to just start walking into the green beckoning view. But then I see a pub.

And what a pub. It is everything George Orwell wrote about when describing his idea of the perfect pub, The Moon Under Water (hilariously and ironically the name of some Weatherspoons)

Up a little street (Smithy Brow) off the high street, The Golden Rule is modest on the outside-indeed looks like someone’s house. Upon walking in, there is the glow of a real coal fire. Stretched by the fire lie two black Labradors.  It is old fashioned without being a ludicrous pastiche cobbled together from the guts of other pubs in an auction somewhere. It is as it was. There are no chalkboards offering monkfish and halloumi for 13 quid. There is no stripped pine. It is happily cluttered with tarnished brass and black and white photographs of apple cheeked customers in the past raising a tankard up to the photographer. It is frightening to realise they are probably all dead now. It is well priced with a wide selection of real ale. There is a cheapish decent house red wine and newspapers. Three men chat at the bar with the Kiwi barman –they are jovial without being obnoxious, drinkers not drunkards. People wander in and out to friendly words and chitchat are exchanged and everyone has a story to tell.

I am cocooned in a glow of fire and red wine haze and am gently reading and eavesdropping.  Snippets of conversation filter gently through but no, I can’t be hearing this, in such a tranquil little pub in such beauteous surroundings.

‘Banned from every B and B in Ambleside after what he did with the curtains-his photograph is on the door of every guesthouse from here to Grasmere.’

I would still pay upwards of 12.99 to find out what actually happened.

Another half heard conversation and the best line I have ever heard.

‘The fight was so big they put the window of the fudge shop right through,’

Truly the epitome of England.

Things get sadder and more sinister with ‘ of course he was dead when they found him’ about someone ‘who wouldn’t hurt a fly’ knocked over by a car on Christmas day morning.  The story is not told with macabre relish but with a genuine sadness and fondness for the person in question.

I do not wish to leave this place-it is not yet even 5pm and I want to snuggle here and read, chat and listen and stroke the increasingly hotter dogs by the fire but I do not care to waste the outrageously expensive bus ticket so get up. Before I leave, I visit the loo. In the hallway is a poster, which is nothing, but a list of names of people banned from pubs in the area. It is a very long list. I look at it then step out into the unspoilt beauty of a traditional English small town, which isn’t what it so pretends to be.

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Kendal is slippery. So slippery. And uphill. So uphill. It has not been gritted. Well, the pavements and pedestrianised bits (i.e. most of it) haven’t. Heaven forbid you waste grit on a steep uphill busy town just before Christmas filled with old people and families. On the day that we are there, laughing at people skidding  and sliding  as we skid and slide, a young man slips over and dies. All for the want of a bit of salt.

Kendal is generally very picturesque and the snow renders it ludicrously so, Enid Blyton adventures in the snow crossed with pound shop Christmas cards-the terror of death as we slide slowly up the main street nullifies the beauty somewhat. Although as the last thing to see before you die, it’s a view that can’ t really be beaten. A thought, which somehow still fails to soothe. I bet there are really cross letters to the local paper next week about the lack of grit or snow removal. I thrive on local angry letters. I am annoyed at where my council tax has gone and I don’t even live or pay council tax here. I bet somehow cyclists and immigrants and/or dog poo are to blame. They always are.

Kendal has many individual little shops and boutiques, think Islington with kagoules and sensible footwear. Although I have just realized how hellish this sounds. We buy a loaf of bread from the Staff of Life bakery-it is £2.90 and in my head my mother is fainting in horror and disbelief. But it is exceptionally good bread and will be at least two main meals. The bag is so heavy I can barely hold it up the Dickensian little alley (if Dickensian alleys had delicatessens called Baba Gounash on them selling organic fresh tit-bits for seemingly, according to the accents present an entirely Islington crowd, who amazingly seem to be wearing heels. I suspect a helicopter pad.

There is a chocolate shop which makes me hysterical as it is historically themed, unknowingly kitsch being belief and amongst other hysterically named chocolate produce (anyone for a cup of His Majesty’s Eminence?)  sells a hot chocolate with the most gloriously un-pc name of The Slave Trader.  Teenagers in nylon pastiches of Tudor costume look embarrassed as they serve it and (white) Americans look delighted.  The hot chocolate is really not very nice at all, faux pineapple and  powdery hot chocolate should never ever mix but the building is quaint, overwarm and oh so clichédly English.

There is the crappest charity shop in the world where faded unfashionable velvet evening wear is daringly priced at ten pounds or more near a shop which sells darling little chairs at four hundred pounds. There is a terrifying pub, which looks quaint on the outside, but inside is a bare cold room selling foul tap wine at four quid a glass to drink as you are either ignored or stared at nastily. I do love Kendal. The outdoor market is selling chilly Brussels sprouts and frozen jumpers.

We normally go to the Riverside café, an excellent little vegetarian café by the wide clear shallow river but have to resist this time, as we are skint.  And I can’t deal with the thought of downhill. It is a wonderful place though wholesome without being earthy, friendly without being overfriendly, well priced and a meal there (which comes with a choice of buckets of salads that alone could sustain life in the individual for several months) is about six quid. And they have strong cider.

The ruined castle overlooks the town and is a steeply pretty treacherous walk-it’s a very well groomed ruin but the other side of Kendal shines through with its empty bottles of cheap cider stashed in little open to the elements rooms and in the glass of booze bottles shining prettily and lethally as we walk back down that have been thrown off the top of its tiny turrets. Bet it was fun to do that though, I think guiltily.

The high street is your usual high street but prettier and today slidier and with a splattering of independent shops-I buy a pretty and impractical dress from Oxfam-it’s a tenner-a lot for a little dress made of lace but it seems cheap in Kendal and I want to escape from all the waterproof and wellies of the hearty people around me. Still not many local accents can be heard but this is no complete oasis-council houses surround, this is a bigger place than it initially appears and in the local papers, there are many fights documented in the quaint looking little pubs on the high street. There is a licensed Home Bargains, pioneer of cheap pleasing random crap, a McDonalds and the like and a rather forlorn indoor market. There is Kendal mint cake everywhere. Well, in the shops. A variety of Kendal mint cake is sold and I wonder at how the marketing skills required to try and make one slab of sugar with peppermint oil in sound different and exotically so from the next.

We slide precariously to the Brewery Arts Centre, a veritable complex which has a cosy snug café filled with spilling leather sofas and serious people on the latest apple Mac, a cinema, an exciting looking restaurant which we still can’t afford (although if I had not bought the silly dress, we could have had starters and tap water) and the brewery itself, which excitingly has big hops barrels with seats inside like some big fun fair ride where nothing actually happens. Nothing is going to spin around when wine is £4.50 a glass (a large one to be fair and according to the leaflet on the table, the wine is supplied by a local wine merchant with awards and all that sort of thing one positively expects in Kendal-well apart from in certain pubs in town that one is too scared to be openly be snide about even on a blog in case They come and get me and drown me in a vat of deep frozen garlic mushrooms and cheesy chips -and this is from me, who has openly laughed at hells angels hairs and beards at a hells angels festival.  And actually, I am very partial to garlic mushrooms and cheesy chips being forced down my throat)

We step out less gingerly, bravado and locally sourced wine fuelled to instantly fall over. Hard.   It’s going to be a long hazardous yet oh so pretty walk to the train station.

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How to start writing about a city that comes burdened with so many preconceptions? Everyone thinks they know Liverpool, they patronise or fear it and it’s inhabitants-they are ‘surprisingly pleased’ with how lovely it is as if they expected a rat filled festering sewer or talk of the inhabitants in sneery snobbish tones-thieving scallies one and all come here to steal your hubcaps.

Liverpool is glamorous-admittedly I have not spent much time or indeed any in the outskirts but stepping off the train there are so many women dripping in jewelry who actually make tracksuits look sexy. There does seem to be a Liverpool look but hark, I am now in danger of lumping people together myself so will desist and say instead that there were penguins, everywhere. There, now, you didn’t expect that did you?

Our first point of call was not one of the exotic cocktail bars or five star restaurants but up three flights of stairs down a side street into a green room filled with plants from which an old Pulp album was loudly playing. This is vegetarian The Egg Café, cheapish and cheerful, with a merry haphazard vibe and artwork lining the walls. I have broccoli and thyme soup with garlic bread with cheese (£3.25) and my partner in crime has a broccoli quiche the height of the Titanic with some rather pleasant salady things, which is about five or six quid.  It is busy and lovely and I feel like I am in San Francisco, a place I have never been but like to use as a comparative measure.

Now we are healthy we can ruin it by drinking and after all it is nearly noon so we go to The Philharmonic Rooms-to call it a pub makes me think it would challenge me to a duel to reclaim its honour-so dining hall it is. It’s ostentatious yet elegant with it, every surface, every wall is corniced, painted, scrolled, beveled, lopping the loop or doing some pretty plasterwork fandango. It is beautiful and bizarre and the men’s toilets apparently put the rest of it to shame. One day I will see them. And maybe my head will explode. The Philharmonic screams that ‘More is More’, a phrase, which could belong to Liverpool.  We recline, drink wine and feel like landed gentry for an hour in the pastel and gilded splendour. The food also looks excellent here and despite this being a famous historical beauty, you are not fleeced when you walk in-good wine is about a tenner a bottle and the food also seems eminently reasonable. But I am still burping thyme.

Then a stroll past the old cathedral, such old graves and names, a plethora of Eliza’s and Jabez’es, sea captains, war victims and long dead diseased children tangled in the grass only a stone’s throw from John Lewis.

Designer shops and pound shops mingle in the centre-It is busy, big, modern and makes me anxious. I like Bold Street with The Soul Café’s brilliant selection of food to make you die earlier, News From Nowhere, the independent political bookshop where even the wrapping paper sold is for civil ceremonies and children’s book are on Rosa Parks rather than the Gruffalo. Trendy clothes shops and nasty clothes shops, a fruit and veg man, an American diner, ubiquitous Beatles crap and Maggie Mays tea shop-take your pick according to your status as shopper, tourist, anarchist, person who loves the idea of deep fried cheese or just plain happy sight see-er slightly frazzled on wine and over the top Georgiana and still burping thyme.

We pop into Fact, an art gallery off Bold Street, an interactive exhibition of computer game art is on and the place is packed with all nature of humanity, playing incomprehensible games in darkened rooms, drinking tea downstairs or wine in the bar upstairs or ignoring the art to buy a card with a cat dressed as Amy Winehouse in the gift shop (sorry)

We go to The Baltic Fleet next-a place you will be amazed to hear is a pub. Another famous old landmark, it perches against broken desolate mills, abandoned forgotten architecture of the past, a motorway, new apartments and gated communities and of course the harbour. As places to perch go, it’s great. Not a scrap of nature can be seen apart from the strip of Mersey beyond the gated yuppie flats.  The Baltic is also a brewery, much loved by the Camra set for it’s array of ales, well it was until the prices went up-then the local Camra publications talked about the Baltic like it was the devil incarnate (an enormous bottle of blue WKD perhaps?)

It is flagstones and old chairs, woodstoves and hand written notices without cutesy overtones and makes you want to stay all day talking rubbish to the jovial stranger next to you. But we need culture now and so on to the harbourside, huge blocks of flats here on Alexander Wharf used to be industrial buildings-where once people slogged away their life, cried and died, now are oversized white leather sofas and balconies and uncalloused hands. Boats, barges on chundering barely contained water sulking and rolling angrily alongside as if embarrassed by its tame Phillipe Starke  surroundings.

The Tate is enormous, sleek and strange.  The people here are as unfathomable as the art. Strange looking, at odds with their surroundings, just weird.  There is some excellent stuff to be seen, world famous exhibits from the likes of Picasso and Dali, some happily pretentious crap and I like the view of the Mersey best from the upstairs window as it angrily scowls and froths. We miss the exhibit we came to see about mechanical beasts because we are too late. Hmmm, I wonder why… And then an hour later once we are back in the cold grip of reality and January the realization that wine and expensive gift shops are a fatal combination. It was such a cool robot though…

More food is needed and thus onto the Everyman bar and bistro underneath the Everyman theatre. It is canteen style food at its best-excellent quality local food plonked on your plate and a well stocked cosy bar. Superb for vegetarians’ too-I have spinach, mushroom and feta filo pie with three huge portions of salads that are a meal in themselves (pasta, couscous and beetroot) again, an excellent meal for about six or seven quid. The place is busy and friendly with more pint glasses on the table than bottles of wine and a range of accents, both international and national swirl in the hubbub.

Outside, the night is dark but the streets are getting busier despite the freezing icy rain, lights go on the empty looking flats and Liverpool is just waking up.

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Actually no whistles were involved. In fact not many trains were. But from the train through dirty semi opaque double plastic we look at the Lake District-sheep look frozenly resigned or dead, the Lake District Mountains are so soaring and glorious that they seem fake.

Then a car ride from Dumfries. Dumfries with its turrets and troughs, its pinnacles and desolation. Home to Robbie Burns, wife cheater and poet.  Crumbling yet beautiful, well some of it is. It is recession beaten yet grandiose-closed shops line the ancient high street from which Robbie’s statue looms over. Gothic architecture melds with red brick and utilisation and I feel sorry for the tourists but I hope they go outwards to where all is beautiful. The backdrop looks photo shopped, a set from Narnia, snowy mountains reach forever and the sea glistens faintly and oh so coldly.

And onto Castle Douglas-Islington in the back of beyond.

It is labelled The Food Town. Guardian award stickers are on the doors of delis, which are next to ships selling antiquated nighties ‘with 10% off-short time only.’ I would rather die than wear the nighties in the window. Thermal quilting, nylon and lace are not a good combination. Even in Scotland. They do not appear safe next to a naked flame. I suspect that they would be safe next to any man. Unless the sparks rubbed off. I wonder how much long the short time only is. It all looks rather dusty. That could just be the asbestos from the faded quilted ruby red dressing gown though.

Next door is a portal into organic halloumi, an enormous selection of olives, fennel flavoured crackers and chilli and lemon flavoured everything. I suspect people do not shop at both shops.  A sign outside says ‘New-Slush! As we skid in the grey snow and ice. A newsagent is surprised and confused when asked if he sold Orange mobile vouchers but nearby a shop happily thrives selling occult lite. Wind chimes and nice smelling fake spells and silver necklaces. A charity shop is open selling nighties from the nightie shop but more faded and with the faint suspicion that someone has died in them.

So many pubs have To Let signs; the paper is full of fights yet so many olives are plumply poshly for sale. At under a hundred grand, is a huge beautiful old building in the centre of the high street  -The pub I wanted to buy last time I was here –it has been sold, closed and is for sale again. Possibly cheaper than the sundried tomato stuffed olives.

The high street thrums with accents-posh women with capes and radio four voices walk next to women shouting at their kids in impenetrable (to these southern ears) Scottish accents. Castle Douglas is simplicity and beauty. There is a high street, which sells things. There are streets which run alongside it which are just houses, often of the one story croft variety. There is a huge park leading to a loch. There is an enormous Tesco’s for those who can’t afford the olives and then there is the seemingly untouched land surrounding it reaching into all directions until the enclosing mountains.

Kirkcudbright. This is not an unbiased review. I want to live here. It is the artist’s town as apposed to the food town of Castle Douglas. It is a higgledy-piggledy old town and harbour with a castle, a good castle looming up in the centre, a higgledy piggeldy museum, and little art galleries by the score and huge pasties for 60p. It is all I have ever wanted (cheap heavy cheese and onion pasties that turn a paper bag translucent and glistening within seconds)

It is vaguely famous for being a centre of the arts, (little galleries line the streets) and also for being where The Wicker Man was filmed. I gaze with suspicion at the little side streets in case an animal mask suddenly appears and try to keep my English accent to myself.

The Swimming Pool Charity Shop has displays in its window according to current events. The excellent Wickerman Festival is held nearby and around the time, the display is all tie-dye, hippie and rock, faded denims and headscarves on its ancient mannequins. On Scottish days of importance, the varying shades and lines of unloved tartan can make your eyes steam.  I have come here several times and seen bag pipers in the Town Square, cheerleaders and crowds of hundreds, possibly thousands. The sea lies nearby, the mountains still soar, house prices are affordable but there are few jobs since the dairy closed and there are no trains. One day, though, one day I will live here. If they’ll have me. It quite frankly pisses on every overpriced overcrowded Devonian village where tourists flock to eat yellow congealing scones and cream for four quid and try to ignore the industrial estates. I’m from Devon. I should know. A pasty for under four quid is Nirvana in my book. One for under a quid means I would live anywhere and the magical setting comes as a bonus.

Stranraer-It’s scary. We have travelled down an icy road for miles and miles from Kirkcudbright. It is Christmas day. The view is clichédly beautiful, frosted silver glittering trees, the white calm sea, and the mountains topped white like a Christmas pudding. The few cars skid and slide on the shiny iced deadly road. I think it will be a lovely place to die. Then Stranraer-an isolated yet international port by the sea. It’s hey day is over, grand houses lie desolate yet glorious overlooking the huge ferries to Belfast. The highs and the lows, little hippy fisherman cottage painted in bright pastel colours, bedecked in wind chimes, a one house Toblemory next to a shop which has in its window a grand display of cheap tinned goods so reverently displayed its as if they are gold, frankincense and myrrh.

It’s like stepping back in time.  The cold is so cold it hurts, proper physically hurts. The harbour is slightly frozen over. The sea is frozen and no one bats an eyelid here on the edge of the world. A few pubs are open and the occasional man (its always a man) walks or sways past. No one says hello or merry Christmas.

The Mace shop is open and I get my christmas lunch, some beefy Monster Munch and try to eat them with my frosty gloves delving into the packet and making it all mush. It could be beautiful here. So many shops are boarded up, even Internatiale, the cheapest chain store known to humanity. There are cracked and boarded up windows, cracked windscreens on old cars with flat tires and it’s cold, so cold. But there are tea shops (closed but to be fair it is Christmas day) and lovely cared for houses next to broken houses where people might be hiding within or could just have been simply abandoned and forgotten-its hard to tell and all my concentration is in trying to stay upright in the ice and snow.

I think there is a real community here, a hardened no nonsense community who would not spend four quid on a punnet of olives. I wish them well and respect them. I cannot see Stranrear ever being gentrified. It maybe once was as I look at the crumbling Miss Havershams houses on the hill but I think I shall leave and not beautify it. I think that Stranrear would prefer it that way somehow.

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The train station is castellated. Who can resist cheap fake concrete castle especially when you can look up and on the hill, see the real crumbling ancient artefact, somewhat embarrassed as if it has a really rubbish tribute act.

Lancaster is a city that can be whatever you want it to be-it has a veneer of middle class respectability-walking past houses with harps in the window is not uncommon but a house can be purchased in the ‘wrong’ side of town (all of ten minute away from the centre) for about sixty grand-there is an expensive olive stall in town which seems to rub along with the ten lighters for a quid and the nastiest cheapest cards known to humanity stall. Junkies and school kids congregate by the museum steps and shout. I have to avert my eyes from the hog roast stall-the empty eyed pig slowly being shaven of flesh stinks of ammonia.

It’s polar opposite is the Whale Tail in Penny street, a vegetarian café filled with happy /posh/hippy parents dressed in Monsoon or tie-die. Free range children run amok, adverts for mooncups with biro’d exclamations of delight as to their comfort and capacity adorn the rather grotty toilet doors and the menu seldom changes. It is always busy.  But so is the Wetherspoons up the road-elderly men dressed in suits and ties sit still and alone at island like tables with straight backs and ties in front of a pint at 9.30 am.

bridge

Architecture wise, Lancaster is mostly Victorian grey and looming with the occasional swing into sixties modernism, eighties wrongness and sudden ancientness. The Job Centre on a cobbled winding street winding down from the castle looks like it is from a BBC adaptation of Jude The Obscure.  The quay is superb, eighteenth century warehouses in various stages of decrepitude line the muddy river Lune and The Millennium Bridge raises lofty prongs to the sky in an eternal two-fingered salute to the purists who hated its modern skeletal design. But it is elegantly tall and ambitious and reminiscent of the great boats that once sailed up here. Of their slave cargo we shall say no more.  One of them, ‘Sambo’ is buried at Sunderland Point, an isolated windswept projectory at the tides mercy-a lonely figurehead such a long way from home battered by cold foreign elements for an eternity seems worse somehow than a quick miserable slide into mud and oblivion. But maybe it makes us just feel uncomfortable to remember.

Lancaster changes, has peaks and troughs, a living city, not one frozen by expectations of tourists or rent asunder by industry. Not anymore anyway. It is a ghost city-people not from it know of it, have vague fond memories-it is not emblazoned on the memory with the majesty of Edinburgh, the Georgian antiquity of Bath, the cloisters of York. An independent shop selling glorious slutty dishevelled clothing for under twenty quid a pop makes me decide I will be very happy in such a place. I move into my spartan new home and bang, the shop is gone, another to let sign in its place.  There are many.  It is local and international due to the university (the university known for excellence and high suicide rate) isolated yet an hour away from about five major cities, the disputed centre of the UK. People dissipate; gather here, some throngs remain the same, transient yet stable. An enigma of a city. And it does not feel like a city. The cathedral pops humbly up a hill on the outskirts that only the locals walk up. It is not a centrepiece. TK Maxx is. Literally.

Lancaster is students who keep to their Yellow Door houses. I always think of Jews and the plague when I see these doors (also a ludicrous open invitation to thieves who can burgle many people at the same time)  and people who get cabs for half a mile to the same few clubs. Like living at home in a small town but minus suspicious parents. Homely but minus home. They do not seem to mix much, keep to their loud circles in pubs and rarely chat to the stranger huddled up in a corner, reading the paper but actually eavesdropping and conjecturing wildly, lambasting, critiquing and bitching. Sorry.

The canal is often mentioned in the Lancaster Guardian as a place to walk along to get accosted by tramps living on ‘our taxes’. I have walked along there on my own to be accosted by tramps concerned about me walking on my own. I can never see how people get so angry about this that they have to write the obligatory letters to the Lancaster Gazette bemoaning and hating the people who sit, drink and chat with their dogs all day as the army planes swoop over, as the media drips with murder, as the property developers flats stay empty whilst their pockets drip with money and as people with money desecrate the town.

And so people sit and write venom filled letters to weekly papers about other people who have no homes.  And also people on bikes and dog shit-both of which appear to have equal footing in local paper’s letters pages-a particular highlight was when someone wrote in to complain not just about the amount of dog shit in the street but the actual size of it along with a published photo showing a large coiled turd and a twenty pence piece which has been carefully placed next to it for scale. I often think about this when receiving change.

‘Luxury’ developments along the same canal have bikes or washing draped on the tiny patio or on spindly fake designer chairs and tables who no one ever ever has brunch or beam gaily at each other over a glass of chardonnay as they do on the faded ads.  The For Sale posters read ‘sexy in the city’ in the same font as ‘sex in the city’ –ironic as the bird has flown in both cases. We are in a recession, it is 2009 and the occasional solitary light twinkles, lonely across the canal from a little box with no neighbours or garden.

An apartment in central Manchester with Philippe Starke taps can be had for £500 a month-an old stone two bed terrace here is around £450 a month. With a garden. There are no hoards of loft space desiring gays with labradoodles in Lancaster or laughing rich blonde friends-they have moved to a real city apartment or a real home.  Lancaster is for children and solidity, sensibility and good common sense. Not so many jobs here you see.  It is a houseboat or a house. I like the houseboats, always so merry and jolly looking with bikes and plants on the roof and a general aura of bygone simple happiness. I could probably stroll past one as someone was being murdered within with a gentle smile and a whimsical gaze.

Williamson Park is the pinnacle of the north. Every time I read a national paper extolling a vague pleasure for something god forbid, out of W1, I look for Williamson park and it makes me angrily evangelical because it is a simply spectacular place. Were it in the South, there would be books about it, Oasis would play a gig in it for BBC2, things would happen. But this is Lancaster where important people don’t live. And thank fuck, neither do Oasis.

But it is a dream. Huge parkland with woods high on a hill overlooking the world, where the Lake District beckons hazily above a blue cold sea, where the Trough of Bowland, a wilderness of moor which makes Dartmoor seem like Soho stretches to infinity reaches out forever in the other direction. Out on top of the world here.

The Williamson Memorial is a beacon on top of this. A white soaring pillion in the middle of the park, stairs and stairs and stairs stretching to a room to which to contemplate the view. Far better a way to remember a life than a dark underground memorial. Surely better to reach to the sky to remember a life once lived than to mourn a worm filled mound. -They do it differently here.  This grief filled monument to a dead love has now become a wedding venue. Ironic and sublime.

There’s more-woods, a huge sundial, big enough to live on, cliffs, grottos, in which plays are performed and bands play in, lakes, a big children’s playground, lawns stretching down with the bay twinkling in the distance and a butterfly park.

Everyone loves this except for me. A hot house of ethereal beauty, you walk in and there are dead tropical butterflies on the floor-you want to tell someone-hello, this is dead, can you get a vet but life and death are side by side, an enormous bat like form can shoot by and you can almost touch it, an exotic flittering presence can drift past and you see its twin shedding powder on the floor as it weakly twitches. Life and death-transient, beautiful and quick and it’s scary, a microcosm of human life. We normally hide death,  gloss it up, use different names for it, lie, but here are pretty butterflies dancing and fluttering and pretty butterflies dead. Children with their innate morbidity love it here.

You brush yourself off and step outside in the sudden cold and see the occasional flittering prisoner who has escaped, a Schrödinger’s cat, free and doomed in the early fatally cold autumnal sunshine.  The bay glistens prettily , the castle looms squat and  protectively over Lancaster, filled with other incarcerated prisoners and memories of death as the moors stretch on and on.

This is the last view the Pendle witches saw and I wonder if the beauty consoled or worsened for them, their fate. And for ‘Sambo’ I think there was never any beauty here.

Click for more pictures of Lancaster

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A busy train. I didn’t expect it and am strangely disappointed. A thin girl punk and discarded copies of Metro.  It’s one of those trains that doesn’t seem like a real modern train-it is dirty velour, nothing slides open and there is a breeze and a drip. I prefer that sort of train somehow. Feel more connected to the outside with such a thin tin layer between outside and me. Then a shudder and we go over a bursting Lune, the nuclear power station highlighted to the left across the marsh, past the council estate and the bewildering array of children’s toys thrown over the embankment and ooh countryside! For almost a minute there are fields and animals until an instant suburbia as bungalows appear with the lurid colours of the TV singing through the midday dusk.

And then Morecambe where no sea can be seen but a Frankie and Bennies in lurid technicolour against its imagined backdrop. And not fitting in with its cheery chilly bobbing balloons and American breeziness.  You are an outsider Frankie and Bennies and you won’t last long. The locals will never forgive you for the parking ticket travesty of your early days-the letters dripping with vitriol, bewilderment and sadness when you charged people to park.  They trusted you, you see. Not again, not for all the bbq steak ribs you can eat-they’d be cheaper down Rita’s café anyway. Not that you can get such things there-but you can get ham, egg and chips, a roll and a cup of tea for 3.99. So who wants your starters and fading balloons and cheery smiles?

It is cold. I walk down the brassy swirly promenade with embossed quotes and riddles and poems from famous writers who I suspect people never actually read.  Maybe lurid Daily Mail headings would keep people moving fascinated further into the mire. And towards the sea.

The view across the bay to Nirvana. White capped mountains across a grey sea, a promise of beauty so near and so far away. A clichéd beauty that doesn’t seem real because it’s so ethereal, magical. Especially when looking at it from Al’s Den.  Eric Morecambe is dancing his merry eternal jig on a plant-bedecked plinth, cafes are offering ever cheapening selections of dead things, fried things, rolls and tea. I wish to buy a wedding cake hotel boarded up and decaying surrounded by bedsits and closed pound shops. It is for sale by auction and will be cheap.  It’s quantity and quality but in the wrong era. Many dreams will have been forged and died in its no doubt once grandiose lobby. But Morecambe is a town of ghosts. Nobody should venture to venture here.

The charity shops are filled with supermarket label clothes at optimistic prices. The ladies in them chat resignedly and /or chirpily about cancer. The Methodist church has a stall in the rain of old lampshades and rubbish.  It is an enthralling place to be.  I go for lunch in the Palatine, a place with pretentions, a cocktail list and papers. The same two old soldiers are talking as were there last week. I eat my excellent pizza with toppings worthy of a trattoria in Roma (capers, olives, spinach, aubergine mozzarella) and have a glass of wine (total seven quid) and listen for the sea over the sound of passing traffic.

B and M bargains is the chain store where famous brands go to die. At pleasing prices. Jamie Oliver’s brand of pesto, olives and pasta are for sale at 49p so I have a happy portent that his chirpy star is on the wane. B and M bargains knew it first.

I don’t go into the Midland but I like it-it is alien yet squats as comfortably as it ever did here-cocktails are £6.95-that’s about four portions of pie’n’ peas at Rita’s café. But it is James Bond in the interior and overlooks the best view known to humanity as the sun sets across the bay and the Lake District Mountains slowly dissipate into the nuclear glow. You can see the Wacky Warehouse from the rear window-a glass of wine here costs more than a bottle there. But there is only one Midland.  And I am scared of the Wacky Warehouse.

The sea whips up and the north wind blows. I see a ginger cat cowering in Morrison’s car park, a place inhospitable to humans, cars reversing and forwarding as random as machinery, where no house can be seen and grey roads stretch to infinity or at least to Heysham. I go to Customer services, my head filled with cats innards strewn across Ford Kias, screaming children, a desperate pensioner searching forever for her lost cat. ‘ Is it the ginger one? He comes around a fair bit-belongs to them estates at the back. Nowt we can do.’

I feel sorry for and angry to the cat. I hope he or she is ok.

In Morrison’s a woman is buying San Pelligro mineral water and I stare at her and am guiltily surprised when she speaks in a Lancashire accent.

I miss the train by one minute and get a bus that wheedles its way around every depressing outcrop of Morecambe for an hour. It is grey; children suddenly run in front of the bus which brakes and an old lady falls over. People say that it is ‘a crying shame.’ A woman listens patiently to and answers every single question her toddler asks. Another woman tells her child that he is ‘driving her up the wall’.  People seem to know each other. A poultry factory blackened by fire is a highlight, almost romantic in it’s gothic intensity as it looms above the single story pre-fabs and the caravan park which stretches into infinity. I know it from Court Watch in the local paper.  I don’t get off.

I start to envy people with cars. A Fiat Uno acquires an almost glamorous aura. Coming into Lancaster is like arriving in LA. The lights, the soaring bridge over the Lune, the old warehouses.

I love Morecambe. I shall go again next week.

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