Unicycle Emptiness

Hall i’ th’ Woods.

Has ever a more evocative name been heard? It has a sense of place, a fascinating history, regalness and ancient romance. Open at irregular times and of course reputed to be so utterly haunted it has even featured on that grand portal in the unknown, Most Haunted.

We enter via the council estate to a genial woman inviting us on a bug hunt.

This is what happens when  haunted houses are owned by Bolton council.

The genial Northern woman is so genial I at first want her to be an ambassador for the North, such is her lovely burring tones and quiet enthusiasm. Once she gives my boy a silhouette matching worksheet, I have quietly raised her above Jeremy Corbyn in the Prime Minister stakes.

Sorry, Jeremy, I tried to imagine you patiently explaining to a cross four year how a spit worked in the kitchen of an ancient hall but I can’t. Well, I can definitely visualise you more than the other Labour candidates doing such a thing but Genial Northern Woman could probably ward off ISIS with a twinkle in her eye and a local wildlife worksheet.

I try to soak up the atmosphere of the history ( and definitely ghost) soaked building but it is slightly marred by the loudly enunciated complaints of  the job in question, boss and fellow workmen by a man by a ladder in a yellow tabard staring grimly and unromantically at the ancient walls.

I think if a headless white woman appeared, he would tell her she ‘wasn’t in his job description.’

Burnley

There is a singing ringing tree in Burnley. I have read about it often and wanted to see it. On a Trip Advisor review of the Singing Ringing Tree, someone is angry about the free and beautiful attraction. He says he could have done it for sixty quid instead of the actual cost of the installation. Whilst looking and listening to the art installation, instead of listening to the finely tuned pipes sending glorious music across the landscape, I am being cross about the stupid review and decide I will offer him sixty quid to make exactly the same installation. It will be worth not eating for a week.

Bury

There is a pub, the cosiest pub in existence that sits next to the East Lancashire Railway in Bury. Steam trains puff past, there is a sign at the door that says badly behaved children will be made into pies. Pleasingly, my child believes it and sits still and terrified.

Someone has been so shocked by the menu of a pub nearby they have painstakingly photographed the menu on their phone  to further shock other locals  not acquainted with the menu in question.

The  entire menu ( yes, entire menu) is read out with great solemnity and fanfare ending in outrage when it comes to the price.

‘Cheese and Onion Pie’- ‘How much do you reckon?

People give prices from the seventies.

Fanfare- ‘£8.95!

People gasp.

‘Yes’ says the grand orator wielding his old Nokia. ‘£8.95’!

‘Now,’….an expectant pause.

‘How much do you think for a cheese toastie?’

Silence

‘I’m telling you, £3.95!’

There is shock and awe.

He continues.

‘So four quid for cheese on toast!’

Someone intervenes.

‘So cheese on toast is more than the toastie?’

‘No! I’ve rounded it up to show you the actual price!’

A low mutter commences.

‘Now, get this!’- The phone is wielded around like an oracle of God.

‘There’s a children’s menu!- that’ll be half a sausage then!’

People nod wisely.

‘Four quid!’

This creates a low hubbub.

Someone else chimes in the price of a scotch egg he once had but I am tragically unable to hear it due to the quiet roar.

It continues. Every single item on the menu is listed to a shocked pause. Meals are  discussed  as to their constituent ingredients to prove the shocking price of it combined, cooked and served. I know more about this averagely priced menu than I do about my own family. I listen in a bubble of steam train smoke and strong perry (£3 a pint 7.5%)

THEN the outrage over a sign by a nearby gastropub.

‘Well, it said free beer but it was a trick!’

‘It said Free in big letters and wifi in small letters and beer in big letters’.

Everyone is disgusted.

‘I won’t go to a place that lies’.

‘To resort to those tactics shows the sort of place it is-they’ve reduced themselves and shown the sort of place it is.’

Tragically, just as the conversation turns to the death of Cilla Black, I have to leave.

This, more than even a stuck ghost belonging to Bolton Council  will forever haunt me.

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It’s been a while. Inertia creeps. The same places, the same constant confusion about how to add a photo to a post. But then I went to Bolton and saw an advert for a fish stall featuring a dead shark with a crab in its mouth and thought more people should delight in such laminated items of glory .

I had a pleasing time in Bolton possibly due to the fact I was not expecting to. Nobody ever rhapsodises about Bolton in the Guardian. I suspect nobody ever rhapsodises about Bolton in the Bolton Guardian.*

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

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

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

Sanctuary is sought in The Old Man and Scythe- tumbling and beautiful- ancient beams, stone floors, hot pasties and a large range of strong perries. It’s pretty much everything that is wonderful and good.

I try not to eat all the pasty as wish to try to sample something exotic and glamorous in Bolton Market. But it is a pasty. A hot pasty. I keep putting it back in my bag. It steams lustrously back at me in its nylon cell. I am defeated.

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

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

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

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

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Yes, I know that he is a scarecrow. But I still would.

This is terrifying. It is not the first time that scarecrows have terrified me or my loved ones at Wray but normally they’re flammable zombies or creepily trying to be sexy or something ( (Poldark scarecrow doesn’t count- Poldark scarecrow worked it)

This time a scarecrow is doing a straw poll (sorry) to see which way people are planning to vote in next week’s elections. I hate the fact the faded blue child’s  ballpit balls overflowing in the Conservative tub might actually have some actual impact in my actual real life scarecrowless life. A sentence I should not have to ever say.

I have a  urge to wee in the Ukip tub and then watch them bob all around in a sea of wee but refrain. Only two people in Wray vote Labour. This so beats a swingometer. I wish all voting was done with plastic balls at Scarecrow Festivals. It would make Newsnight far more colourful.

I don’t know what this Angel of the North is meant to represent. I like to think the people who made it are aloof and alone- possibly the  Barclay Brothers and people are scared of them and the sinister message the scarecrow is somehow conveying to the village and the village’s children and the villagers’ childrens’ children.

The theme this year was ‘fantasy’ and this animatronic scarecrow diorama shows a man actually ironing and holding a child. Sorry, suffragettes. It is fantastic of course. I have however got to the stage where I am eyeballing scarecrows to work out the creator’s political persuasions in the hope I can discover the two Labour voters in the village. This is not one of them.

There was a similar Scottish/ anti- Scottish themed scarecrow in this pleasant little nook by the river last time. I like to think it is an embittered husband and wife (one of whom is Scottish)  with different political persuasions  fighting each other through the medium of Scarecrow.

This is just the real Nigel Farage.

I hope the real Nicola doesn’t see this.

No, THIS is just the real Nigel Farage. It’s made even better by the slight suspicion that Nigel Farage is made out of last years Bilbo Baggin’s scarecrow. And look at his toes! His toes are terrifying and I see them at night sometimes in the dark.

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I am not allowed to take photographs in a museum in Settle.

It is a small museum that you have to pay to enter. There is nothing of particular interest in the museum in Settle apart from some Okish chairs and a vaguely pleasing window which I am afraid I can’t show you because you are not allowed to take photos in the museum.

Maybe those stacked plastic chairs are of particular interest to ISIS? I hope they are. I would quite welcome a violent insurgency right now due to the lack of a nice licensed tearoom.

I try to take my time to get my three quid’s worth of value but after a look at some pottery shards, I just want it all to end in a massacre of gunfire so take a quick photo. Sadly I remain alive, I don’t even get tutted at so I go to look at overpriced bronze hares in a shop that sells overpriced bronzed hares and Farrow and Ball paint.

A bakery named The Naked Man is sadly not what it purports to be but a feta cheese  and spinach pasty numbs the pain despite the  disturbing lack of gunned insurrectionists. I suspect they have seen the sad remains of spinach residing in my teeth, noticed the fact that people will pay sixty pounds to have their walls in the same shade as ‘Elephants Breath’ and been told off for not paying Gift Aid when storming the museum.

Thus Settle remains quiet.

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It smells of wet pedigree and everyone rustles briskly in brightly hued waterproofs.

The fabric bunting capital of England.

The quaint little cottages are blank eyed and empty with a ‘Holiday Home To Let’ sign prominently displayed in cursive script.

Everything is fifty shades of grey. The cottages are stone and slate, the sky a glowering ‘Off Black’, and the pubs and restaurants all clad in  Farrow and Ball ‘Murky Gusset.’

Two Lotuses parked cheerily  close in a pub car park make me dwell on if the plural is ‘Lotii’, something thats never had occasion to bother me before visiting Keswick.

It’s a genial friendly place- a middle class frontier town where the gold seam never diminishes- a place to chortle over a long lunch, not to peer and say ‘how much?’ at a price. There are no e-cig shops here but all the whimsical china sheep one could ever possibly desire. It’s like something Cath Kidston vomited up in a wet dream.

I’m having the best time ever of course. Pretending I’m au-fait with the price of the wine, reading the Times in a corner and pretending I have been for an actual walk in some never ending stretch of blasted bogland peppered by multi million pound crofts and venomous hills.

I’m just pretending it’s shit outside for pure inertia driven guilt of course. There is a hole at the heart of my being that has plumped for grilled halloumi and dukkah over climbing a mountain.

Or indeed a small incline. I did try. I chose the path that didn’t go Up because I don’t like Up and then followed the wide gravelled track  right along the side of the surprisingly busy road until after a mile I found a tea room and purchased a 7 Up for £1.80.  Alfred Wainwright, eat your heart out.

In a horrible fake gastropub ( clearly Wilkinson’s  ‘Found Dead in a Bedsit Grey’) they don’t serve chips unless as part of a meal. You are a small pub with uncomfortable seats and last October’s tattered Cumbria Life, not L’Enclume. Oh do piss off.

It’s a theme park of what it means to be English- the ‘locals’ starring roles played by people who live in the Midlands or London happily jollying it up in a pub with staggering priced wine and a wet dog fug.

It was brilliant. I love a bit of commodified selling of Nature with some avocado and panki fries and a large house red. I love the fact that teenagers don’t appear to exist and you are either in five and in Boden or forty in Trespass. It was a retreat from the confines of Town with all the all the attractions of Town and a staggering backdrop of actual Nature.
Sorry Nature. Next time I will walk in you until I see a dead pheasant or there’s a slight incline. Then I will retreat in indignity to a place with no primary colours and demand a Pot Noodle ‘Bombay Bad Boy’ in my poshest voice.

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Oh stop it, you. It will probably be fine once you’re in there. It will be better than this lashing January sideways rain of misery and despair  and the next train is not for another hour. To walk slowly around the Co-Op one more time just in case the white chocolate cookies  have been reduced by another 10p is not ‘cool’ either.

Oh. ok then, me. But a Co-op in the rain in a small provincial Northern town is somehow strangely soothing.

Five Minutes Later

Oh carpet. Generic pub carpet from decades ago. One day you will rise again due to a hipster from Bristol with a twinkle in his eye, an ironic retro vision in his head and a trust-fund.

Now I sink my feet into your red, pink and orange overlapping flowers and smell Dog. No, Dogs. Dead Dogs. Dead Dogs on an eternal slobbery march through the aforementioned carpet. They also had a jolly Dead Zombie Dog Romp in a stagnant mire beforehand and made sure they never achieved dryness. It’s a good life for Undead Zombie Dogs here.

Last week, I walked into a nice looking country pub and then left in disgust at its ‘locally sourced’ smugness, size six staff wearing smart black, bespoke ‘ olde’ floorboards and ‘LOOK AT ME- DEFINITELY FUCKING  FARROW AND BALL’ muted undertones. Other people might say I left because there was not a table. They are of course wrong. I yearned for a generic pub in the countryside unbesmirched by menus with a ‘to begin’ option.

There is no other female here. There may never have been. Around eight men sit around a table and stop swearing briefly to stare at me before reinvigorating their candid talking with extra vigour. The racing is on. I suspect the racing is always on.  An elderly man on his own picks up a tiny leather dog toy in the shape of a shoe and comes up to me with it as he thinks it might belong to me then retreats to his lonely table to listen to the vigorous swearing.

There are pinstripes on the walls and a corniced ceiling. Dry pot plants point crispily towards the floor. The rain slaps against the stained glass of the windows.

Last week, I was the hoi-polloi, thrown out on the  flagstone pavement, sneering bitterly at the Barbour clad over loud and over confident ‘country’ people shrieking to each other over professionally battered old oak tables.

Today I slink out, after retrieving my sleeve from the sticky Melamine surface. No-one says goodbye but I’m sure I hear a burst of laughter when I leave.

I’m not sure where ‘real country’ lies anymore.

But I liked it when I was in the Co-Op buying reduced coleslaw.

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‘Tinned mushrooms or fresh?’ she asks. ‘Err, ‘fresh’ I answer wondering if this is a quick stealthy question to ascertain my class. Then I realise that is unlikely.

She slops the mushrooms onto my plate, the mushrooms from the same stainless steel vat, the only stainless steel vat containing mushrooms. I feel I have only been given the illusion of choice. I am already angry about the mushrooms. More angry than the situation merits.

Starving on the outside of an industrial estate at 9am on a Sunday due to an ill-fated walk to a car boot sale means I am here. Being angry about a meat- free breakfast in Asda as an unsteady queue forms behind me and a beautiful morning forms outside.

I refuse to ask if the eggs are free-range in case I sound poncy.  Instead I ask for mushrooms instead of the clammy looking eggs.

‘Can’t do that, mushrooms are extra.’

‘But it is instead of the egg- I don’t want the egg.’

‘Mushrooms are extra.’

‘Ok, I’ll have no egg and extra mushrooms.’

Then I stew in middle-class annoyance, spite, pettiness and thrift.’

‘Actually, I’ll have the egg then IF I HAVE TO PAY FOR IT’.

Then I realise I have the egg.

It bleeds anaemically through a snotty white viscous.  I try to shove it away from my shockingly highly priced tinned/fresh ‘extra’ mushrooms ( I do not want to pay four pounds for a meal under this level of light) but it spurts a sad yellow pus with the fury of a bad horror film from Mexico over my lurid tepid beans, my ‘Glamorgan’ sausages and a hard half of raw tomato.

And how much pus there is! The yellow fingers slide and seep under every item, veritably lift it up and sweep it along in congealing tentacles. It is the colour, the just off white Dulux ‘ Jaundice Dawn’ seeping towards me in jellyfish waves, flecks of raw albulum floating like jetsam to come to break gently on the wreckage of the slimy mushrooms.

I wish I did not have to pay for toast.

I wish I had not walked two miles with a three year old to have nothing but this and a scratched DVD of Fireman Sam to show for it.

I wish I had not eaten it.

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I am not allowed to take photographs in Lancaster Castle.

I have taken a photograph.

Because I was not allowed to take a photograph all I thought about was taking a photograph. Amazing photographic opportunities swam before my eyes. My elderly Samsung 3 was getting moist in my hands. Gargoyles leapt, angles pointed towards an obvious frame with a definite Interesting Thing inside it. But I am not allowed to take a photograph.

I am about to witness some ghost stories inside Lancaster Castle. I love any opportunity to be in Lancaster Castle in the dark. I also love ghost stories. The crowd annoys me as I feel I am the only person in the world to love ghost stories and also Lancaster Castle and the crowd do not treat the experience with the relevance the occasion deserves. Some of them are with friends. Some of them smile and joke.

We are split into separate groups and we go to the a room where people were hanged to hear some ghost stories. This seems strange to me. Here, in a room where so many people shuffled through in mortal terror to die a horrible death, where so many stories and lives are left dangling, we listen to ghost stories about somewhere else.

But, but but- a fictionalised account of a hanging would make a mockery of the suffering that has actually occurred and a true account would nullify a jolly evening of ghost stories because the actual truth of death and suffering is not something to spend seven pounds on-especially on a first date.

I think the woman opposite me is on a first date. Her pure exquisite boredom rolls off her in impressive sneering waves. Her  slightly awkward but pleasant young ‘partner’ puts a comforting hand around her. I feel her flinch from across the room. Her eyes roll like waves, the whites a flash of ocean. She slumps further and further towards the cold stone floor. I have forgotten what the story is about and probably look a bit stalkerish.

A jolly lady with white hair informs me she is related to Alice Nutter. This impresses me more than it should.

There are no MR James stories this year. This saddens me more than it should.

A well read story surrounded by instruments of torture about a couple going to a Cornish village  and finding it strangely deserted and empty makes me want to leap up and shout ‘That’ll be the second homers, lol!’

Fortunately I don’t.

The eye rolling woman has collapsed extravelently yet taughtly in her nervous paramour’s arms.

I become mildly xenophobic when an American woman reads a ghost story. No ghost stories should be read in an ancient crumbling haunted castle and feature fucking Cape Cod. Yes, I am channeling the spirit of Nigel Farage right now. A sentence I never thought I would say. The eye rolling girl is slumped somehow sarcastically grimly defying the nervous arm of the nice man. I suspect if an actual spectre appeared, she would sneer at it and say something sarcastic.

I wish I was her. But instead of a spectre, I have taken a sneaky picture fortified by a 125 ml glass of wine in a plastic cup of a ceiling. A ceiling in the castle.

This may be the last thing I ever write.
Anyway, got to go- someone is knocking in the door.

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All I want to do right now is insert my hand. I need to. I am in a slightly sticky pub somewhere near Lancaster, I hear the slight suck of my hand leaving the table and wonder at who wants to spend £13.99 on Gammon and Pineapple here. Maybe to read last Tuesday’s i paper. I suddenly feel depressed and think of all the things and places in the world I have not seen because I am in a slightly sticky pub near Lancaster. I have ennui but I cannot revel or drown in it because someone is trying to chat to me. He looks a bit BNP. Meanwhile my child is trying to insert his hand in the machine.  I wait to see what occurs.

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I’ve just paid £2.20 for a hot chocolate, a cup of premium tea and a glass of wine in an artisan cafe in Garstang. This is it, the pinnacle of my life, there is no going back now. I have jumped the shark of my life.

Booths  ( or Boobs as my three year old keeps ‘hilariously’ calling it loudly in front of teenage boys) makes Waitrose seem a bit on the slummy side. In fact, I heard once on Radio Four on one of those mid- afternoon programmes that nobody actually listens to unless they’ve got crippling Norovirus, a hangover, bad reception or are retired that Booths is actually posher because they stock more types of expensive caviar than Waitrose.  This has become one of my ‘Actually I’ll think you find..’ quotes about the North  I repeat like a pub bore every time  I go down South.

Being the owner of a black embossed Booths card (free when you enter your email address into the website form) makes me feel a bit special. I hold it out casually with a smile, a triumphant smile like somehow I have made it into that special club. That special club where you have to write your email address into an online form.

It is quite sad my life has become to this really. BUT ACTUALLY NO!  Because with the Booths card comes free hot drinks-even hot chocolate. Yes, even hot chocolate.  EVEN FUCKING HOT CHOCOLATE! It’s the beverage equivalent of climbing Mount Everest but without the death and stuff.

So the hot beverages are free so I can absolutely justify a small bottle of wine for two pounds whilst I sit in laminated splendour, the queen of my brightly yet attractively lit domain.

Until the random envy and spite directed at the other plebs with their free hot beverages.

I go downstairs and pretend to think about purchasing luxury pickles. That’ll learn em. I accidentally purchase a luxury pickle.
I think I understand how marketing works.

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