Apr 10 2013

ZaZa Bazaar-a south western foray into gluttony

This is the end of times. This is everything fanatical preachers rant  and warn you against whilst handing you luridly photocopied leaflets as  you attempt to avoid their gaze and nip into Tesco Express.


‘It’s like being in Las Vegas’ says my awestruck mother and we all agree despite never having been in Las Vegas.


We are at Za Za Bazaar in Bristol.


This may not fit my normal attempt at writing about something interesting and hopefully unloved in the North. We are at the Harbourside in Bristol and we queued for an hour to park the car and then to be seated.


But upon reflection the last place of merit or interest to the passing  Northern residing internet traveller I visited was either TK Maxx or a popular pub with a birds name a few miles away from Lancaster where the food was so coldly blandly disappointingly overpriced and  the waitress so coldly aggressive,  I am too scared to even mention it on this blog in case I get a (tepid) fire bomb through my door.


I think I might prefer a fire bomb to ever spending so much money  on ravioli covered in a surprising topping of  diced carrot again though to be fair.

Anyway. ZaZaBazaar is the biggest restaurant in Europe and features more food than I have ever seen in my life.  A ‘street market’ featuring various world cuisines suddenly appears when you step out of the lift and it is ‘buffet style’ which means to this country ‘all you can eat without or whilst possibly vomiting’.


There is a four sided Vietnamese hut, a Mexican shack, a salad bar, an Italian shed, an Indian joint etc etc. I try and shield my toddler from the pudding palace which has ceiling to floor shutes of jellybeans and swirling greasy walls of cupcakes like some 9 year old lottery winners house.


It is of course clearly brilliant. I am hungry. This is a bulimic fantasy.


There is neon, loud music and hysterical children running around with dinner plates full of smarties and chips.


I am disorientated, don’t know where to turn or what to do.


I am given a map.


This is the zenith of consumer culture. And for £6.99! (with a complicated voucher system)


It is cheaper than the disappointing starter at the pub near Lancaster to eat everything in the world. Possibly literally!


I smirk in my head at the slightly confrontational and bossy waitress at the pub near Lancaster and try to work out what to do.


I eat.  I start at the Indian food stall but accidently put some chips on my plate and then nachos and guacamole. Then marinated mushrooms and hummus. I sit down to eat but am bedazzled by the choices I have not yet made and am terrified of being full so swirl it around into an oily marble effect and then gulp it down  quickly, horrified at the thought of having not yet had the other stuff I can see.


The phrase ‘a paean to gluttony’ is constantly reverberating through my brain. I have no idea why.


My toddler bravely battles through a plate of macaroni cheese. To try to get pizza is like entering a warzone patrolled by 9 year olds with empty plates, forks and patrolling dads as weapons. The music seems to be getting louder.


No-one appears to be savouring their food, the staff all seem to be emaciated but still it is utterly awesome and I bravely mix noodles with pakoras. Because I can.

My partner looks scared, the toddler has noticed the sweet chutes. This is not going to end well.


I start to feel slightly unwell. I try and find the toilets and get lost despite the yellow arrows painted on the floor. This is not a good place for a first date.


I take a handful of breaded garlic mushrooms for nourishment along the way.


The salad bar beckons. Because if you eat some salad it cancels out the flaccid pizza where the cheese slides off like a warm chewy elastic blanket when you bite into it.


The salad bar is good. And there are no feral children there. There are lentils! Soups! I am immediately baptised into health, new life and well being and all for 6.99! 6.99! (with the complicated voucher system)

I am reborn.


Until I see the ice cream machine.


The phrase ‘a paean to gluttony’ starts singing louder.


I am spoilt now. Ruined.


I can disfavour and sully  every pleasant well thought out locally sourced meal  in a quietly attractive Northern establishment  by unfairly comparing it with the orgiastic extravaganza of Za Za Bazaar in Bristol, the biggest restaurant in Europe.

I have however gone off pizza.

And pasta with boiled carrots never works no matter how pretty the setting.

2 comments

Mar 31 2013

Ahem.

I went away.

I went away and decided Unicycle Emptiness was no more.  You probably didn’t notice or have roamed far away to other blogs that rhapsodise about well priced cheesy chips and standing stones in the North that also have far more of an affinity with placing a semi-colon in a correct place. Bastards.


There is a limit also of how much someone can write about local accessible well priced places of interest, excitement and history  but are not popular and where cheap cheesy chips and large house reds can be had but also a toddler can be taken to easily and quickly.


And are haunted.


I stopped doing my blog.


Suddenly the North West area abounded in unusual and unnatural glories. Every overheard conversation was sparkling yet poignant . Everything I saw looked like it would make a artistically gritty yet humorous capsule of love and life in the frozen North.


I missed writing. That little chasm to delve into that was just me, looking at stuff I liked  and writing about it, rather than the Me of making lumpen sliced packed lunches, badly photocopying at work and bidding for boots on eBay I would inevitably be slightly disappointed by.


I went to Oddendale stone circle (otherwise known as Sunkenkirk) a few months ago when the hint of spring sprung and was then cruelly removed like some sort of cost cutting exercise by the Conservatives.

It is a place where I actually felt a sense of what other people consider  religion. Awe, peace, magic and the vanquishment of the self. I grubbed around in mole hills looking for ancient artifacts and as usual found nothing but the potentiality of promise was the reward in itself.

Oh and then I went to Bury market where the mystique and tranquility of a perfectly rounded stone circle, surrounded by mountains,  buffeted by the wind but where  lay recently  picked offerings of  flowers  was utterly overruled by large fresh ciabatta bread for 80p and where fresh herby olives and parched peas made a 2 quid feast overlooking the ring road and a JJB superstore.

I thought of you dear reader. I thought you needed to know about Bury market’s surprising effluence of Greek and Italian food items for the same price as a McFlurry. Its a middle-class recession. I would be letting the side down if I did not. Poor squeezed middles.


And it was there I discovered there was such a thing as smoked shoulder fat.

I think I might have lived better without that discovery. I just clutched my well priced rosemary and garlic olives slightly tighter instead whilst being  slightly more intrigued than the situation actually justified.

But this weekend was the clincher. I went to the grave of a witch in Woodplumpton and thought the internet must know about this!

A small boulder on top of an otherwise unremarkable plot and a plaque stating in an unembellished and tragically fancy free way that an ‘alleged’ witch’ lay underneath.

Nothing to say that the stone was there to stop her rising again! To do bad things to crops of corn! Despite being dead!  To move vats of milk cruelly around a farmyard despite the thwartingness of being buried! To make your pants slightly too tight and your curry slightly too hot! To put your Nectar card somewhere it takes you just over a minute to find whilst  a man smiles politely behind you but in a slightly cold way!

The ‘alleged’ bit in commas on the neat brass plaque is neatly and coldly  mocking me for my hopeful belief, sneering in copper but some dead daffodils lie on the stone, someone felt sorry for Meg and her old dusty smothered bones and only recently so.

Outside the churchyard there are old stocks supported by carved stones of such antiquity the average Australian or American might possibly explode in sheer disbelief. And the fact they were there unremarked and unmuseumed and uncharged make me stop bitching about the fucking weather for nearly an hour.

Then I went to Preston and took  some photos. I was happy. Then cold. Then I bitched about the weather and was over sentimental about dead lambs.

It is all business as usual.

4 comments

Jan 24 2013

The unrelenting ‘Meh’ of nothingness

Its snowing everywhere except here. Here lies sleety Lambert and Butler fag ash grey, soggy pavements, the overfamiliar and the uninspiring.

Nowhere is going to be nice and I hate everywhere. I can’t afford to go to the other sorts of everywhere that might be nice but charge an admission or that consist of high falluting foods I can’t afford or understand.

On BBC 24 lies snow covered Nirvana. Children on sledges woooosh down Narnia hills in Luton. In Peckham, gangs lol with snowballs and all join in together to make snowmen with slightly larger than expected testicles.
Oh, its such jolly jolly fun everywhere. In the snow.

Or with money, not in the snow.


I hate January. I hate January in the only non-snowy place in possibly the world. I hate people in January with their festive new hats and coats on. I discover a new hatred of people who wear scarves wrapped smartly round their necks.
A dog walker in neat jeans and a turquoise scarf should be dead by now if ESP actually existed.
Oh and wellies when the ground conditions are really not all that bad at all-they can all die as well (this also applies to beaming girls at summer festivals)

Anyway. I am cross. We are skint.  My sister has arrived from Bristol demanding to see snow but with her only footwear being stilettos. Well to be fair, two pairs.

We try and find snow.

Shap, the devilish  bleaker than bleak Cumbrian fells of Shap will deliver snow. Everyone knows that. Shap has snow, death, and horseless carriages on your average July noon.

We drive to Shap. My sister looks at the snow in Bristol on her iPhone. Shap remains for ten miles of driving, completely free of weather, just that overhang of forbiddingness like a particularly bad hangover or before you visit the bank machine.

There are many stone circles on Shap that require a foreboding walk.

I have always wanted to be here with a day ahead of me to explore a dark Neolithic past, to touch the stones put up centuries ago and try to imagine the landscape how it used to be, to think of hunched grim figures etched against the moonlight, their rituals, loves and deaths.
But some of us have innappropiate footwear.

My sister and I have in common a guilty enjoyment (one more guilty than the other) of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding in which Appleby is featured prominently due to the annual horse fair meeting in Summer in which Channel Four cameras record continuously revel in every tiny seedy speck of the travelling community they can possibly find and then BOLD, HIGHLIGHT and RECORD.

It being a freezing depressive day in January, I am quite interested in seeing Appleby. In my head, it is summer there because I saw it being summer there once on Channel 4.

It is not summer in Appleby. And there are no travellers. There is possibly the best cat I have ever seen there though although I appreciate this may not make a popular television show.

Appleby for possibly  summer related reasons has no signs to carparks or parking spaces so we stopped in a street where if you were paranoid you could feel every eye in the street looking at you. The best cat in the world came up to us-light, fluffy and friendly with big fluffy cat pantaloons, she followed us until I imagined her dead under a car when we crossed the road so thus my partner hissed at her and she ran away.The crisis in Syria has not upset me so much as seeing a lovely cat hissed at.  This is why I am English.

Appleby is an ancient small town, greyly pretty and wide-streeted and it would take but an hour for a film producer to make it into a film set from a few centuries ago. There is a village bakery which happily produces vegetarian cornish pasties, a few independent clothes shops you feel guilty for looking around and not buying anything and a glorious butchers which features suprisingly enormous animal parts displayed neatly on matt white paint. I think of serial killers and loft apartments, the neatness and the blank clean space.


Along a cobbled alley is a cafe and a wine bar. We are the first people there that day and eat simply and cheaply (the old chips/soup /wine combination) but it is good and we watch the snow finally properly fall against the window.

And for one minute, I like January again.

2 comments

Dec 21 2012

Bad porn in Preston Market

(some bad camera pics to follow)

A woman who looks older than she probably is, is trying to sell a wilting 50 Shades of Grey rip-off for 50p.

‘Its dead good-there’s like a dead good plot and that and yeah, the plot’s really good.’

I do not see whether the over-deliberating potential purchaser ever purchases the dog eared clit lit  but I would still quite like to know what the plot is.

Maybe the sharp suited enigmatic older man and his beautiful naive protegee go to Preston Market and buy some slightly peeling and ill-fitting PVC hotpants before having a baked potato with a toppling pile of chewy  grated cheese and coleslaw in a polystyrene container with a cup of parched peas from the baked potato man with the calloused hands before going for a quick bad shag in the bandstand in Avenham Park.

Recession Erotism Northern Style. And for under a fiver!

I am at the Flag Market in Preston. The Flag Market remains in these strange impoverished yet relentlessly upselling times resolutely itself.

There are no pastel frosted cupcakes and there is no artisan bread sold by a beaming yet vaguely harassed looking woman with slightly frizzy hair and a Home Counties accent.

There are instead cold defeated looking women in niquabs selling fuzzy Per Una skirts for four pounds. There is the occasional amazing gem (in my case of a brand new black furry mini-dress with grey fur sleeves for three quid  recovered from under a Tsunami of bobbly George at Asda)

There are sticky and garish kids toys in plastic with the peeling stickers from their previous small owners stuck firmly  and faithfully to the  cracking neon.
Split cardboard boxes show yellowing pictures of thatched cottages at Buckfastleigh. No-one could possibly expect to find the advertised 1000 pieces still remaining. It is a recipe for disappointment but only three pounds. Everything has a price.

I like the 50p stall where the bad porn resides and buy a flowery hair-clip, a not unattractive bowl and a china brooch featuring the Virgin Mary.  I realise the brooch fitting element  is broken when getting it home but I am still pleased with it. It is now a Project That Will Never Happen.

I will skip down the stairs in a good mood, the sad face of Mary with the sticky bit I can’t remove will look at me sadly from the sanctity of the fruit bowl containing no fruit and I will be depressed at my inability to Be Crafty or even find and do a Something with some Blu-Tack which are pretty much one and the same thing in my sluttish book (not the 50 Shades of Grey one)

Antiquities clutter for space with hookahs, racing bikes, sexy dresses, foul cardigans and goth boots. There is a genial chatter, occasionally with a hint of threat. No-one is selling a ‘Keep Calm and….’ piece of merchandise and for that alone, Preston Flag Market, I salute you.

I am glad you still exist.

Trans cultural mass produced Victorian street selling should never ever die.

12 comments

Dec 9 2012

I have been nowhere and done nothing

I have not been anywhere so have nothing to write.

However this makes me feel a bit guilty for my twoish loyal followers and the hopeful hundreds who find my blog by googling ‘Dogging in Skipton’ or ‘Sexy Sychronised Swimming Scarecrows’ and are then left bereft and possibly annoyed by the paucity of such lurid content apart from a photo of a straw stuffed hag in a sagging elderly cossie as part of the  Wray Scarecrow Festival and a Word Document moan about dog poo in Skipton.

I like looking at my stats but it also makes me fear for humanity and the dark thoughts that dwell inside the average Google surfer who lands upon my blog.

If you are not thinking about sex, you are thinking about the undead. No wonder the Twilight franchise is so popular.

Chingle Hall, an allegedly splendidly  haunted house near Preston which used to be open to the public but now is not and something I wrote about many moons ago, crops up foremost with feverish viewers asking ‘Is Chingle House open to the public?’ , something I should have typed in myself before driving twenty miles to watch the owner slowly  gardening from a public footpath quite a way away.
Someone could benefit from registering ‘Car boot sale Dumfries’ to help those poor souls possibly writing on a Dell Keyboard with several letters missing (‘Aye,  you can get them letters cheap online’ who want to just instantly find the time and place of a cold Scottish car boot sale on the Borders (and possibly the seller of the cheap laptop) but then get about 1000 words of Southern waffle about Clairol Foot Spas instead.
Today someone  was desperate to find a phallus shaped stone in Liverpool and thus found my blog despite my haziness about writing about willy stones in the Wirral.

When you are not thinking about porn, car boot sales and ghosts, (a happy combination which should surely become a bestseller should I add a few connectives and adjectives) hippies in Totnes seduce you and there has either been one desperate individual or 13 sad unimaginative or perverted souls  (hiya!) who have found my blog by Googling ‘Inspector Gadget costumes’, strangely something I have never ever written about.

So anyway, I have been nowhere far because it is extremely cold and we lack money to go somewhere else-and we’re talking Ulverston here, not the Carribean.

Christmas is coming so Lancaster is heaving, I will probably kill someone or indeed anyone  if I hear the over exaggerated overdramatised over played shriek of ‘IIIIIiiit’s CHRISTMAS!!!!’ in the middle of Slade’s hideous seasonal (and only) hit.
There is a Chestnut seller who roars in a cheerily Victorian way but he is ignored due to the shove towards the Calendar Club shop.
Christmas has already been here for far too long-I started seeing the cards displayed in August and due to the weather got confused and panic bought some christmas cards of Highlander Terriers in the snow.
I saw the first flurry of Easter eggs, the small Creme Egg and Caramel Egg displays that hint at Easter the other day in a Premier shop. Somewhen soon, the relentless  advance of selling will start to chase its tail and it will be at least three years fast forwarded unless the Mayan Calendar has its delighful apocolyptical way.

In which case we are all dead.
Now!

I think?

6 comments

Nov 18 2012

Dabbling in Naval Terror whilst eating chips at the Golden Ball

I’m doing it again.
Delighting and positively revelling in misery, jumping into big muddy puddles of horror  with a splash and a grin and savouring each little drop of disenchantment and despair.

And eating chips.
This makes it even better.
It would have been cheesy chips but I’m on a diet.

It is not a very good diet to be fair.

Ironically enough, I hate all that stupid misery porn so popular with idiots nowadays. Books with titles like  ‘A Figure Over My Cot’ or ‘Please, Mummy, Stop’.
Why the hell would anyone wish to read stories of abuse and misery?
I sigh sadly  to myself before picking up a book about murdered prostitutes in Victorian London. That is different- it was foggy, long ago and there were gas lamps and corsets involved which makes it far less prurient and slightly more sexy. I’m sure you understand.

Anyway, I am eating breakfast chips at The Golden Ball in Lancaster, known for centuries as Snatchems for the delicious and  horrific fact that people who used to drink here were often press-ganged.

Imagine a really shit hangover.

There is no liquid left in your body. You are scooping with shaky hands, 9p economy curry flavoured noodles into your parched arid mouth. You cannot find a spoon.

The noodles are slightly underdone and have a slimily crunchy texture like a nest of tarantulas that have been both rotting and baking under an Arizona sun. The Hollyoaks omnibus is on the telly and it is on too loud but you can’t be arsed to look for the remote.

You need to be leave for work in ten minutes.

That is definitely a shit hangover.

Now imagine this.

You were having a night of much diversion in  The Golden Ball Public House-some fellows came and gave you strong ale and many songs were sang and much merriment was to be had. There were fiddles and raucousness and ale kept arriving in heavy foaming jars.  You had new friends, new jokes to definately not tell the Missus and a glorious feeling of well-being.

Then.

You wake up and you are still, yet moving – timbers creak, the air is freezing,  your head pounds and you try to find a place to urinate, stagger up and up to find that Lancaster lies behind you, disappearing mistily by the second, vanquished by grey angry waves.

There is nothing at all to be seen in front of you apart from more of the same.
And for seemingly eternally so.

Your wife and children will be waiting for you and not know what has happened. You have no phone because they do not exist  and you cannot even write. Your wife is broad with child.
You will probably never see her again. Disease  and death stalks these rotting planks.

A man appears across the deck. He does not smile and carries a whip. More figures start to merge through the freezing driving rain that drives sideways across the deck.
You have been press-ganged.

That is definitely a shitter hangover.

For the slaves that entered and left here, or just died unmourned and left in the quayside morgue that is now The George and Dragon across the river, I suspect Lancaster was never a place of beauty.

The Golden Ball Freehouse has featured on Most Haunted,  possibly has the cheapest house wine in Lancaster and also a loyalty card and a new conservatory.  These are  generally twisty old rooms though, you go down stairs from the carpark to enter the bar area and a big dog is shouting somewhere very nearby.

We are surrounded by estuary, claggy bleak estuary and this pub is sometimes cut off by the tides, seaweed hangs shrivelled and drying from barbed wire fences guarding nothing. Across the River Lune, Lancaster Castle soars and looks fantastic and I sit here and am happily horrified at the thought of old misery.

And the chips are very good and crispy and only £1.65.

3 comments | posted in Lancashire, Uncategorized

Nov 7 2012

And now, a post Halloween story by Nunmoreblack-a loyal reader

This so beats spam about viagra…Thank you Nunmoreblack-you have made me very happy. And I will soon be seen wandering around in fields near Preston 🙂

 

LANCASTER, JACK AND ME.

The thing is, I’ve moved from west London and I live in this place called Lancaster. It’s way, way up north. It’s a city, only small. I work for Dave. Dave’s a builder. He hasn’t got no City and Guilds or nothing, but he’s got ladders so that’s alright.
A while ago we did this job for this old bloke. Jack. He’s the oldest person I’ve ever known. Dave says he’s about ninety five. I like him. Dave says Jack makes up stories. Tells fibs. Whoppers.
While we was working there Jack did tell us stuff. About when he was young and that.I used to listen to him. Once he told us about being in some war. I think he called it the Second World War. That or some other one. That was when he told us about the ammunition.
See, in Lancaster, there’s this little hill. And on it is a castle. Or a jail. It don’t matter ’cause soon it’s gonna be a Primark. At last. I need knew trainers. Anyway, during this war, they melted down the cannons from the castle to make ammunition. Jack told us that.
Also, he says he got something called Victoria’s Cross. I don’t know what that is. But I didn’t tell him. He says ho got it for something he did in Tunisia. Or somewhere like Tunisia.
Later, in the pub, I asked Scarface Ray what Victoria’s Croass is. He said it’s a medal of some sort. Made by some queen. I pulled my phone out and looked it up. I found Jacks regiment, the Duke of Lancaster, and they’ve got what they call an Honours List. Only Jack isn’t on it. Fibber. I don’t mind though.

 

One time Jack tells me and Dave about this crime that happened. It was in a place called Dalton Square. This fella goes nuts and kills his missis. Then he kills the maid. Then he chops them both up in the bath. It was 1935.
There was this song that everyone sang in the pubs about it. Jack says it was him that made it up and wrote it on the bog wall, in a pub called the Square. He sang it. I didn’t know it. Something about red stains on the carpet. Jack says the tune for it came from “Red Sails in the Sunset”. I don’t know that niether. But I think it might have been Coldplay.
Later, in the pub, I asked Scarface Ray about it. He says he thinks he heard about it at school. So I pulled out my phone and looked it up. The fellas name was Doctor Buck Ruxton. He was from India. Or somewhere like India. He gets jealous ’cause his missis might be playing away. She’s called Isabella. So he strangles her. Then he strangles the maid. She’s called Mary Jane Rogerson. Then he chops them up, wraps the bits of bodies in newspapers, and dumps them in Dumfriesshire. That’s in Scotland. Or Ireland. Same thing.
Antway, he screws up. One of the papers is a special edition of the Sunday Graphic. You could only get it in Lancaster. Plod traces it straight to him. It says on my phone that this started modern police forensics. I thought that was CSI.
In the bit I read, it says they took the bath out of Bucks house, took to somewhere called Preston, and put it in a field so police horses could use it. Northern horses must be very small. I’m only joking. I think they were really talking about his hot tub.

Another time Jack told us about this lady called Ella. She sang on the stage. Jack knew her. It was 1952 and she snuffs it during a show. Jack says he was there. He says it was in some theatre called the Grand. At the time Jack was a member of something called the Footlights. I don’t know what that is.
Later, in the pub, I asked Scarface Ray about it. He dosen’t know what I’m talking about. So we both pulled our phones out and looked it up. The Grand is the third oldest theatre ever. Some people formed the Footlights in the 1920′s to support it. They bought the whole place in 1951 to save it from getting knocked down. They’re still around. I might go and look at it. I’m not gonna see a show or nothing. Don’t be silly. I told Scarface Ray.

Scarface Ray said he might go too.
The ladys’ name was Ella Shields. She was from Baltimore. That’s in America. Or somewhere like America. Early on, she can’t make a living over there ’cause of something called the ‘Depression’. I think my brother had that once.
So what happened was, she came over here and got famous. She was bigger than Adelle and everything. She played the very first night at something called the London Palladium. I’ve never been there. I think it might be near McDonalds. Also, in the 1940′s, she did the Royal Command Performance. That’s a big show for the King. I think Ant and Dec presented it.
In her act, she dressed up as a fella and sang a song called “Burlington Bertie from Bow”. Bow’s in the shitty east. At the end of the song she collapsed, and died later. She was seventy two. The bit I read said a nice thing about her so I read it out to Scarface Ray. I said, Ella showed great courage in the face of adversity, and her fortitude was an inspiration to women everywhere. Scarface Ray said, was she a dyke.

 

This week, me and Dave have been working on this womans house. She’s alright but keeps talking about her son which is boring. He’s in the army. And Afghanistan. There’s a picture of him on the sideboard. He’s a right ugly sod. I didn’t say that to her though.

Next to his picture is stuff about his regiment. He’s in the Duke of Lancaster regiment. Same as Jack. Except here it says the regiment was formed in 1970. That can’t be right. So I pulled my phone out and looked it up.
Before it was the Duke of Lancaster regiment it was the Loyal Regiment (North Lancashire). They’ve got an Honours List too On it is Jack. I wrote this down ’cause I knew I wouldn’t remember the letters.

CAPTAIN JOHN(JACK) STOKELY CRAGG. VICTORIA CROSS. 10th MARCH 1943. GUIRIAT EL ATACH, TUNISIA.

I told Dave I was gonna go and see Jack and tell him he wasn’t a fibber.Dave said I might not get a response ’cause Jack died a couple of weeks back. I felt bad about it.
Later, in the pub, I told Scarface Ray. Scarface Ray said I shouldn’t feel bad about it ’cause Jack was well old. Scarface Ray said the only fibber was Wiki. He’s quite clever sometimes. Anyway, I got myself another lager and sat on my own to think about it for a bit.

And here I am.

See, it’s about this. Since I met Jack I look at things differently. I see things around me more. Sometimes, if I’m bored, I just wander about. If I see something I like,like a big building, or a street or something, I pull my phone out and look it up. There’s nearly always a story about it. That’s ’cause Lancaster is a city full of stories. Jack told me that. I think I’ll stay in Lancaster.
Next week, me and Scarface Ray are going to the library. I’ve never been to one before. Scarface Ray went to one once. The internet was down so he left. Obviously. A library is the best place to look things up. Jack told me that too. He said I should go there. So I will.
So it don’t matter that I didn’t tell Jack that he wasn’t a fibber. Or that I didn’t tell him I found the stuff about Victoria’s Cross. All that matters is that I don’t forget all the stuff that Jack told me. So I wont.
I feel better now. I’m gonna get myself another lager and tell Scarface Ray about it. Tomorrow I’m gonna tell Dave.

Footnote.

For Ella.
Ella Shields (Ella Catherine Buscher)was touring the UK for the last time and her show in Lancaster was the last show of the tour. I am not certain that it took place at the Grand, but I cannot think where else it could have been, given that she was such a huge star. I stand to be corrected.
She opened with her trademark ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’ but instead of singing “I’m Burlington….”, she sang “I WAS Burlington….”. She finished the song, collapsed, and died three days later in Lancaster without regaining consciousness. Her body was taken to Golders Green crematorium where there is a plaque dedicated to her. She remains relatively unknown in her native United States.
A popular myth at the time suggested that the line, “The Prince of Wales Brother, Along with some Other”, in Burlington Bertie, referred to Jack the Ripper……

For Buck Ruxton.
Red stains on the carpet, Red stains on the knife, Oh doctor Buck Ruxton, You murdered your wife.
Then Mary she saw you, You thought she would tell, So doctor Buck Ruxton, You killed her as well.
I believe the bath is still in a field near Preston where it is used as a trough for police horses.
Note. Horses to NOT bathe in hot tubs whilst sipping Martinis.

1 comment

Nov 1 2012

Halloween, Samhain and murder by the state.

In a place where hundreds died in agony, superstition and fear, a nylon witch in a pound shop triangular hat is pretending to sweep away leaves in the gift shop.

In a place where hundreds and thousands saw their family members enter in chains and never saw them again, a cartoon cardboard skeleton represents fear and terror. The skeleton is giving a jolly rictus grin.

We are not allowed to take photographs here despite it not being a prison anymore.

I take photos of the gift shop. No one has ever been slung in jail for hovering a mobile phone over a £1.99 Celtic ring. Apart from possibly in America somewhere.

Tonight is Halloween.

I love Halloween. I love the sound of the words Samhain and Allhallows Eve, beautiful mysterious antiquated words that should not exist in a time of Argos, Amazon and Haribo.

 

To really portray the horror of this castle, where many innocent people died in terror in front of their family, the tour guide of this special Halloween night time tour pretends he is an undertaker.

Undertakers are scary.

 

He is a jocular undertaker and I think that no one anywhere has ever wanted a jocular undertaker. But I am a misery and on this darkened sudden winter eve, I wanted to hear in hushed tones about spectral icy fingers on prison wardens’ backs, not genial laughter at a girl in a sexy pussycat outfit.

‘Leave spookiness alone and stop making it sexy and silly and with cheap flattering accessories!’  I want to shout.

Because I want to close my eyes in a silent ancient terrible place and think of what has happened here at a time of year when worlds and spirits are meant to collide but instead a girl with suspenders and a ‘sexy’ bloodstained nurses uniform is giggling with the smirking cat.

The dead are quite justified in staying dead. Unless they are slightly lecherous.

The fake undertaker walks us through shadowed toppling history and sometimes someone with green hair jumps out and shouts ‘BOO!’ just as we were cheerily admiring real scolds bridles and ankle chains.

The fake undertaker does try to portray the horror of a not so recent past and we are to be fair here at an event where ‘prizes are awarded to the best costume. ’

I did not read the small print.

But I find it a queasy amalgamation of light laughter and miserable deaths.

We hear gut wrenching horrendous history about people, real people who were hung a mere step away and it is hard to then suddenly do a LOL at a light joke.

At a place where witches who probably weren’t witches died a hideous death.

And where people like us stood to watch.

Will Auschwitz have tour guides with jocular banter once enough time has past?

As it was Halloween and as Lancaster Castle is famous for it’s supposed supernatural activities, I was expecting the emphasis on the many many statements of people who have stated they have seen or felt ghosts here over the centuries.

But a sheet over the head is more terrifying than centuries of torture.

And legends mean nothing anymore.

But we will still stand to watch.

3 comments | posted in Lancashire

Oct 20 2012

Romance is Dead

It is about six years ago. I have just moved to Lancaster. I am in my twenties, have rented a tiny prettily shambolic terraced house with a dodgy boiler but a walled garden.

I set out to explore my new territory. I was living in Bath and was thus residing in rarified glorified surroundings. Every time I went for a walk, I saw picture postcard beauty, calendar shots and soaring white wedding cake architecture. And tourists.

I was living in a city which did not feel like mine. The rent was impossible without help from family and few seemed to live in Bath without help from family, whether alive or deceased.

A leek from the farmers market would come to such a price that I would back away nervously and pretend I had been mugged and thus had no purse. I loved it very much but I could not continue to live in a theatre and did not have the funds to do so, only the debt.

My boyfriend lived in Fleetwood in a flat big enough for two but after an embarrassing experience involving looking for feta cheese in the town, I did not want to live there.

Lancaster looked nice on the Internet so I gave in my notice at work in Bath and trusted my life in the safe hands of Google Images.

In our new snug (tiny) terrace, which cost less than a leek in Bath per month to rent, when my boyfriend went to work, I was suddenly alone to explore my new city.

I wandered along the road to the quay-neglected and empty where toppling red brick factories surrounded me, smashed windows and such urban dereliction that I nearly wept for sheer delight.

And on a parched stretch of weedy wasteland, there was a boat. A tired old fishing boat, paint shattered, broken yet jaunty and with its name still written on the side. I phoned my boyfriend to tell him, forgetting he was working and he could not understand my excitement.

I saw the boat before the river and at first thought it was parched and dry on an inland isle.

Then I saw the huge river Lune over the sudden drop. There is something so magical about seeing something unexpected and unknown-every road in Bath was worn-out by semi-empty tourist busses.

There was no magic left, even despite the beauty it was a worn out to well traversed and photographed husk, a dry fake representation of a fake past where nothing apart from Georgian elegance had apparently ever existed.

A parched wreck of a fishing boat would not have existed in a city like Bath; it would have been cleared for a new All Saints shop.

I was somewhere different.

And I loved my little fishing boat.

I walked past it every day. I became pregnant and then walked past it with my baby every day.

There was something about the incongruity of a pretty major city with two universities, three theatres but yet still yet a few minutes from town, the dry weedy Strongbow can bedecked dock of a little boat, crumbling gently against the shadow of the old factories, their old windows disintegrating gently in the wind.

I saw a local performer, Rat Bit Kit’s accordion punk video performed in the wired off area of wasteland around my little boat and even though in some strange way it felt like my little secret, it made it more romantic and anarchic.

The little boat dilapidated over the years but you could still see her name.

When the planning permissions about the old factory buildings were plastered up, it meant little.

It’s a recession. Nothing will happen to change this Ozymandius walk to the city where the great red buildings crumble and slightly shatter, where a fox or feral cat might be seen skating from one behemoth industrial building to the next.

But now suddenly it has gone.

Were this Bath,  this would have been Heritage. But Heritage does not exit unless women in multi tiered gowns have gently supped tea in it- not the working class so now the bulldozers have been removing real peoples lifetimes by the scoop.

I saw them coming towards my little fishing boat. It was on the other side of the road, that tiny strip of wasteland between the road and the river. No good for building, no good for anything.

They kept coming closer but my little boat was solid and sensible just like it always has been, a barometer for my life, no matter how I’m feeling, that little boat has always been there, this little jetty of jetty of romance and mystery.

I walked past it every day, every day and thought about it and how it came to be here. I walked past it when I was unemployed and bored, pregnant and scared, then with my little boy.

I thought about who owned it and when, where it used to go and how it came to be here-so high up on concrete it could only ever hear the river, its bright blue paint disintegrating.

The diggers came nearer but I watched carefully and they didn’t travel far each time.

My boat was still there safe on its concrete tide.

They came closer and then it was gone.

It had evaporated. I visually searched the huge piles of dirt left where it had sat and concluded that someone had rescued it. There was no sign, not a single shattered weather-beaten blue board to show that a little blue fishing skip had once sat here, so close to the river it had not felt in so long.

Someone has saved it.

I talk to a friendly man who is working on the site.

‘It’s been smashed into smithereens,’ he says and smiles at my son.

You can never make a new beginning.

 

5 comments

Oct 18 2012

Blog North Awards-Deaf Institute, Manchester

 

I am only here due to an epiphany in the second quarter final of The Great British Bakeoff.

When I found out I was shortlisted for The Blog North Awards and had an email asking me to attend the awards, I was initially suspicious, then nervous then a fleeting thing called glee flashed quickly across my narrow slightly smelling of damp horizons before deciding that A, I won’t be going to win anyway with my sporadically updated three year old WordPress themed ramblings about pizza and ghosts, B, I can’t go anyway because my boyfriend is working late, there is the existence of the Bad Toddler and even if I found a babysitter, no-one in RL would want to travel to a blog awards as it seems akin to inviting someone from work to a Minecraft convention.

And no way can I go on my own to Manchester as everytime I attempt to catch the train to Morecambe I seem to end up on an Icelandic trawler.

Oh and C- I actually look at the other blogs and feel slightly guilty to be lumped in with them like a tramp in an ill-fitting coat smelling slightly of piss sidling up against elegant cashmere (i.e. capability to use different fonts and a working knowledge of English language)

 

Anyway, it was the second quarter final of the Great British Bakeoff. I was having a guilty mumsy crush on a 21 year old nice young man with sensible knitwear, big glasses and tempting foccaccia whilst spooning slightly stale pickled onion Monster Munch into my mouth.

I was becoming Emotionally Involved in a television programme about baking and I may have even shouted at a judge at one point. I suddenly realized the actuality of a quarterfinal meaning closing to an end and thus nothing to look forward to in the week. I actually felt a chill of self-hatred and terror-the realization of becoming everything I hate.

 

I decide to go to the blog awards. On My Own.

 

There is a babysitter and a very good friend who knows of the worst of the Bad Toddlers proclivities and I mean to warn her of more but then instead of trying to make myself look less of an obvious blogger by using hair straighteners and stuff, I spend two hours trying to unscrew the battery compartment of an Early Learning Centre cash register. It then does not work.

There is a special place in hell for those who give away broken stuff to charity shops.

The issue of the overpriced £4.49 cash register has occupied my mind overmuch and then there is suddenly a babysitter and I am barefoot, underdressed and annoyed.

 

I am dyspraxic and fearful. My boyfriend has patiently shown me how to use Google Maps several times to get to the Deaf Institute-I still fuck up and walk forwards and backwards in a sweaty panic outside Manchester Oxford Road in my one pound charity shop coat whilst mumbling and confused. The comparison with option C in the opening paragraph is startling and worryingly relevant here.

 

The Deaf Institute I have imagined in my head to be an actual deaf institute and thus a draughty hall with plastic chairs. I was not expecting chandeliers and cocktails. And people. Too many people.

I am nervous and turn to a woman by my side and cheerily say that I was expecting a crappy old back room in a pub and then find out she is tweeting the event for Blog North. I feel a slightly rude faux paux may have been committed by me and resolve not to speak again. She is very lovely though.

I had been invited to speak at the event and declined as the thought of speaking to more than two people panics me. I did think that it would be other nervous socially unacceptable people clutching a sweaty piece of A4 and muttering miserably into their microphone in front of a silent awkward market clothed audience of several so at least I would not look quite so bad but I still declined as I would be even more nervous and neurotic than them.

And in a triumph of confidence, I can happily state that my decision to say no and be pitifully insecure was the best decision of my life. The other bloggers readings were amazing. Annoyingly amazing.

Hello, Amy, pretty girl in black with the wide smile and casual eloquence- I don’t read many blogs due to work, the death of my computer and the Bad Toddlers behaviour and subsequent crashing out fully dressed in bed covered in Wotsit dust at 9pm. Thus I was not expecting a confident and humorous account of being forced to wear swimwear when not swimming as part of a crappy job in a sportswear shop

http://inksam.tumblr.com/

 

Then an unassuming guy comes to the stage and brings to life an average day in Huddersfield with such concise vivid yet unassuming detail I was able to quote him the next day. This is a big thing for me as my memory is such that we often go for weeks without washing up liquid. http://themostdifficultthingever.blogspot.co.uk/ He is the winner in his category and I am glad.

Then a man with the aura, confidence and hair of someone famous came and recited smart modern sonnets on modern literature. http://sonnetreviews.tumblr.com/ He is like a good feature from The Guardian come to sudden springy haired life and why Tim Dowling is paid to write and he isn’t makes me confused. And angry. Or maybe that’s the second large house red. I find out the judges include Stuart Maconie and Someone From The Guardian.

In the interval I go outside and conscious that I am on my own and slightly embarrassed by it as other blogs have entourages and I am a female on my own, I try to chat to a guy next to me. He smiles coldly and says he enjoys observing. I go back indoors.

A blogger has recorded the first year of a baby from Moss Side. http://herfirstyear.co.uk/ He speaks professionally, eloquently and compassionately and the family he has blogged about come to the stage-despite the multi tiered crowd, they are a natural family and act as such, the little girl grabs the microphone and beams. The couple on stage are united in the affection and concern of her and are thus are not embarrassed by the audiences attention.

I wish I was like that. James from The Great British Bakeoff was calm and jolly in front of millions. He made Turkish delight for the first time in front of the black blank glares of  television cameras.

I am too nervous to get up to go for a wee.

 

The awards are announced. The screen shots make me cold inside. There are graphics here. This is serious business. There are entourages cheering. I have a WordPress blog, which should be updated regularly, but as I write about vaguely Northern places of interest and since the Bad Toddler, I am terrified of public transport and am also utterly skint and too shattered to write so my blog is sinking in a mire of despondency, boredom and inertia. And so am I.

Apart from when James makes a good pastry on the Great British Bake Off and then blinks in a confused sexy way.

 

I am runner-up in my nominated category of ‘Best Neighborhood Blog’ and nearly fall off my chair-and this is nothing to do with the house red. I am an occasional stabber at an elderly desktop and this to me is blogging. The winner of this category is a blog that speaks passionately and informatively about Liverpool, a place both trendy and loved but sneered at and misunderstood-the Essex of the North

http://www.sevenstreets.com/

 

I get a bit lost on the way home and see a slight fight. I feel guilty for feeling a bit excited about it. Then I go home, sleep and am vacuuming by 8am.

But this time I am smiling.

Until I see that fucking cash register and reality beckons.

 

Thankyou to all at http://www.blognorthawards.com/ for a fantastic night. 

5 comments