I am nervous and insecure. I am scared to do things in case I fuck them up. I rationalise my fears, make adjustments, plans and safety nets but still things fuck up. I give up trying to be independent and stick to ambling around Lancaster, looking in the charity shops so frequently I am slightly embarrassed at myself.

But I am 33. I am a mother. I can Do Things.

And I Am Going To Kendal.

I think about and am excited by the thought of Staff Of Life artisan bread sold from the genial Dickensian shop in an alley. I cannot sleep for fretting over whether to have lunch in the cosy wholesome vegetarian Riverside café or have feta cheese pizza in the slightly more stylish Brewery. Or to just have a pasty because I cannot really afford to do either but it is the last Friday at the end of the month which means riches, sweet riches for a day.

6,00 am: I plan things meticulously, packing a bag of chocolate, nappies and mascara.

My friend and I are meant to be getting the later straight train at 11am

8.00 am.  I am so bored and nervous and sick of Mike The Knight on Cbeebies, I text my friend and we arrange to meet an hour earlier and change at Oxenholme.

9.30 am. I am so stupidly earlier due to fears about being late despite us being able to hear the train announcements from our house,thus the toddler is already bored and threatening to revolt.  The train I meant to get is late so we hop on the one beforehand.

I try to keep the toddler quiet with threats and Cadburies Buttons but a man grabs his can of Carling and moves to another seat like its not bloody 9.57 in the morning. I feel somewhat wronged in the whole social etiquette of the scenario.

But everything is going to be Ok because I planned this operation with meticulous efficiency.

Far before we need to stand, I stand, gathering pushchair, bag of bribes, baby and friend to hustle them towards the door. We wait, I can almost taste the Elderflower sour dough bread.

Oxenholme speeds by.

Kendal speeds past.

Wrong fucking train.

I am shit.

10.20: I am swearing at the pushchair as Jay Rayner walks surprisingly past.

10.37: Nothing good is going to happen in Penrith because it has All Gone Wrong.

But I like the under embellished red brick castle opposite McDonalds and I do like these little twisty grubby old alleys and charity shops so busy, the filthy Button smeared toddler is parked in corners left to poke at unflattering tweedy Per Una dresses as I delight in a ‘10p table.’

More places should have a 10p table. It makes kings out of paupers.

11.30: It is lunchtime because the grimy toddler who due to sweaty desperate train bribes is now covered in a light coating of cheese flavoured dust and chocolate has now furiously fallen asleep, still clutching the side of his pushchair in a grim comatose rictus grip.

The red brick streets of Penrith throw up No 15 -art gallery, bar and café where a vegetarian mezze featuring from memory, garlic oven baked mushroom, sweet potato cakes, falafel, olives, Turkish salad, flatbread, tzaiki, potato salad, sundried tomatoes and something with courgettes is £7.50 and I still have half of it left leaking pleasantly and herbily into my handbag.

I read today’s newspaper, a rare and exotic treat until a primal roar resounds from the pushchair and we swoop into the sudden rain to leave the other quiet good customers to continue to enjoy sanctuary and such wonderful, fresh and decently priced food I want to take a picture of the menu and clutch it to me at night on my damp and Basics instant noodle sodden pillow. I might even gently weep at the sweet sweet memory of it all. At least I will still have my handbag to sniff.

1.30: I have been to a posh grocers shop in an intimidating embossed grandiose shop on the square and now paper bags leak Good Oil into my handbag. I have a leek, blue cheese and mushroom pie for £1.65, a £1.10 treacle tart and a £1.75 sun dried tomato foccaccia-and I have possibly moved up a social scale.

2.30: An ancient charity shop up a little side street. The two elderly women behind the counter are chatting. ‘I think I might have just heard a car beep there,’

“Oh dear, people are so impatient these days.’

3.00: Another little charity shop and I buy a lovely wooden truck for a tantrumming toddler trying to fling china saucers about as people try to be polite about his vile behaviour. It is £2.00.  Upon arriving home I see the original price of £30 is still on the bottom. I suspect another Bad Toddler only wanted Fisherprice.

3.15: The rain has cleared and what a staggering beautiful place Penrith is. Its Tolkien country with forests looming over the little staggering town and mountains looming beyond.  But it still has a Bargain Booze. I like Penrith. Not entirely cutesy chintzy prostituting itself to tourists, not entirely four drinks for the price of two in a bar that flashes a cocktail glass every two seconds.

It has a Tapas bar featuring a tiny diorama of bulls being killed with toothpicks. You can spend 10p on an unpleasant plate or £10 000 on a nice ring within minutes in this shambolic town, neither here nor there, neither posh or not but where nature surrounds and the trains stop more frequently than at Oxenholme Lake District.

4:00: The toddler is screaming, a bag full of charity shop bounty swings him in the face every time I try to pick him up/smother him/quietly swear into his evil ears. I cannot get down these steps and then up those steps to get the train. A group of about five loud girls in loud clothes surround me. They then fight about who is going to carry the pushchair for me. I nearly weep in gratitude and embarrassment as they shove to carry the pushchair aloft even when there is a flat surface it could potentially be rolled upon.

4: 12: Then I realise I have automatically chosen the platform I arrived on to go back to. The wrong one. I am so scared of upsetting, annoying or confusing the lovely loud girls on platform 1, the antithesis of what you expect you expect loud girls in velour to be like and what my response to their benevolent actions turns them the other way?

I told you I over think things and am nervous.

4:18: So back down the stairs, smack smack smack smack.

Toddler has a tantrum. Headwhack, headwhack.

Back to Platform 1, smile guiltily at the teenagers, open the train door, close the train door, nowhere to put pram, thank fuck for Cadburys Buttons, apologise to people with iPads as the toddler is very keen on them, give him to my friend, sweat heavily.

4.45. I’m Not Going On An Adventure Again.

But it was worth it.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

‘I’ll turn Hitler on while you take the photo,’ my boyfriend smilingly says to some strangers.  They are delighted by his kind offer and pose in front of the Fuehrer, as his arms raise and an electronic voice shouts ‘nein, nein, nein.’

This is definitely the best fun it is possible to have in Blackpool.

We are at the Grundy Gallery, which is currently running the Crazyland Golf exhibition, a fully interactive crazy golf course designed by artists including The Chapman Brothers and David Shrigley. Saddam Hussein is also immortalized here, a statue in perpetual fall, arms held aloft in perpetual victory.

Outside and the drizzle of summer has disappeared and it is a bright blue mid September morning-not yet half eleven yet the pubs are busy and several men recumber outside topless and clutching their mid morning beers which is probably the second best fun it is possible to have in Blackpool.

Look behind you and you can see tattered filthy perennially closed curtains, empty industrial cooking fat containers and the general detritus of urban squalor.  In front of you lie modern sculptures, bleached sands, glittering sea and the far away blue hazy promise of mountains.

People are desperately trying to squeeze this last little swansong of summer dry, licking ice creams with furious intent and spending spending spending on kids carousel rides and lager. Everyone is smoking with cheekbone chiseling intensity.

Two creosote tanned middle-aged women sing an old fashioned sounding song gently to each other at a bus stop, three female generations of a Glaswegian family tumble off a bus and into the Metropole loudly looking forward to ‘an enormous Baileys in the sun’.

We too enter The Metropole, a grand old hotel, all ambitious curly wurly Victorian plastered glory through the high grand foyer, all collect your own cutlery and meals for under £3.95 in the conservatory bar area. An elderly couple pristinely ironed, smile at each other over a coffee. A punk is talking about stabbing someone at the bar. Oh Blackpool, I do have a soft spot for you.

The Victorian penny arcade on the North Pier with black duct tape over half the coin slots is enough to make anyone’s heart sing as a tattered hundred-year-old ghost half heartedly flutters to life when I place my genuine Victorian penny in the slot of the Ghostly Tales machine. A few metres away in the modern arcade, urgent orange lights tell you to NUDGE!!! or KEEP!!! and shimmy upwards in ever increasingly bright orbits. I like my flaccid grey and silent ghost best.

My heart does not sing to wannabe upmarket tourist resorts, desperate to appeal to the Farrow and Balled and cutesy, chintzy and over-priced. Blackpool is the only place not to attempt to sell ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ tea towels and overpriced oversweet over-embellished cupcakes. Blackpool has poppers, Willy lollypops and chips with gravy and cheese. For which Blackpool, I salute you. Blackpool has genuine Victoriana with duct tape or ‘Danger’ emblazoned across it, not a ‘Victorian Experience’ costing seven quid a head and all the chaos, malfunctioning, unmarital sex and working class people removed from the equation.

Blackpool with its hideous aura of post war surburban houses has two quid a pint lager overlooking the best view in the world and is not selling aspirations, anything polkadot or anything pastel. Blackpool is a place to have dirty cheap neon nylon fun and maybe be a bit sick into your full English breakfast.

There is no pretence or aspiration here. People from all over the country who are either ignored, hated or pitied come here and have a fucking brilliant time, like they did a hundred years ago.

And be a bit sick in their breakfast.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

I have been nominated for the Blog North Awards and if thus if you like, you can vote for me babbling on about ghosts and cheesy chips instead of a more deserving, better punctuated,  professional more regularly updated blog. 🙂 Other people will have real life friends voting for them, I’m stretching out a hand to all my loyal spammers-Canadian Pharmacy, vote for me! RedHotRussianGirls, I’m looking at you! To show my technical expertise and commitment, I cannot even make the link work apart from when I put it in the blogroll list down the side. Quite frankly, even I am now too ashamed to vote for me.

http://www.blognorthawards.com/the-shortlist

UPDATE: LINK FIXED BY TECHNICAL SUPPORT! VOTE HERE!

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

Pics might follow.  

I happened to be at the bestest most unusual place in the North recently. As someone who writes a blog about about unusual and bestest places in the North, this was of course a Very Good Thing. I strode about making sarcastic, flowery or erudite sentences in my head. And as this place was actually unusual, I did not have to search for new and good words about for example, standing stones which are all spellbinding, grey and aloft and stuff but you really need to be there to witness a megalithic portal to a lost past and thus reflect upon life, death and mortality and other pleasant concepts  you can dwell upon on a Saturday morning rather than look at slightly reduced ties in TK Maxx.

But every time I tried to write about this place, this really interesting unusual place, the blank Word document danced and mocked me-with every attempt to describe this place, all adjectives and excitement disappeared.

I felt like I had lost a child.

I am generally pretty shit at everything. My maths development stopped at the big number eating the little number, in fact that might be when I became vegetarian. I am dyspraxic, thus clumsy and forgetful. But I was ‘always good at writing’.

Now suddenly I am not. I have tried to write about the best place in the North but suddenly words are just symbols to stumble and trip on, there is no flow. I killed my beloved old laptop with a harsh spill of Pepsi Maxx oil and I feel sitting bolt upright on a charity shop dining chair, my head stretching upwards to the monitor as a sunflower is to the sun does not help. No one has ever written well with good posture in mind.

Anyway, the best place in the North I have never written about shouts at me whenever I am in an upmarket supermarket. You see posh crisps. I see Buddhists…

I will try and write again.

It is summer. I see a leaflet for Coniston Priory in a supermarket or somewhere and I am a glutton for leaflets detailing tourist attractions I would rather die than go to. Sometimes I am so bored with my life I laugh at the errant apostrophe in ‘wellie’s for hire’ (surely the worst thing to ever be amongst a star feature at an attraction?)  I mock the cartoon pigs wearing an article of clothing and wonder if a tearoom has ever not been ‘award winning’. And then re-evaluate my life.

We go to Coniston Priory because it is an intriguing mixture of an old manor house and a Buddhist retreat and temple.

A Glaswegian monk serves us English Lakes ice cream at a pound a cornet. And I wonder about his life and how he came to be here. Here in this crumbling Gothic building where gargoyles are silhouetted against the sky, orange robes and shaved heads walk stately through tangled gardens, the grave of a dog called Satan lies in a pet cemetery snarled and poignant in woodland.

I have not previously been in a Buddhist temple. I expected to take my shoes off and look at shining gilt statues. I did not expect to see dotted around the temple in attractive positionings, offerings to these deities that consisted of premium crisp brands.

We are talking Tyrells tortillas here, in understated yet pleasing middleclass flavours I had not previously witnessed before. Bottles of Belvoir Press are also enticingly displayed, one with a Ferrero Rocher neatly placed on its lid, which delights me more than it should. There are no Wotsits or small forlorn Smart Price ready salted crisps in this religious sanctuary-Mature Cheddar and Chive in upright confident oblongs lounge smartly on shining surfaces. It is utterly fascinating. I imagine golden gods in the darkness of night gorging on Thai Red Chilli and Pepper discs as owls swoop outside and a forgotten ghost from the old manor house opposite peers quizzically through the window.

I yearn to know what would happen were this sanctified place be besmirched by inferior potato based snacks and imagine the resultant rioting featured on BBC News with images of flapping orange robes and blazing placards with angrily painted pictures of NiK Naks with a red line harshly slashed across it.

I decide it’s probably time for another pleasingly priced ice cream.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

I have been guiltily rereading a book called Lancashire Magic and Mystery and the county is apparently so overwhelmed by boggarts, headless horsemen and other such dark nefarious characters I am amazed the Daily Mail has not started a campaign to send them all back somewhere else.

In this book Round Loaf Hill is described as being mysterious, atmospheric and possibly home to modern day covens of witches. I thus want to go to this place very much. I want to see sacrifices (not of animals though, I am a vegetarian, maybe eye of potato and tongue of quorn?)

I also have a suspicion that modern day covens might feature purple tie dyed dresses with elasticated waists and cars with bumper stickers that say ‘My other car is a broomstick’.

The tumulus is hidden deeply on Anglezark moor, there is no foot path, not even so much as a sheep track and my insensibly clad feet sink deeply into dank deep ooze and murky crunchy gorse from which protrude bleak white wooden bones as gnarled and twisted as ravens feet.

So I tell myself as I tramp grimly onwards thinking about the undead whilst stuffing my face with Wotsits and slightly stale Cadburys caramel cake bars, which were reduced at Morrisons. The scenery is spectacular, peak and troughs of harsh mountainous nature at its best, ruined farmsteads, a river with a sudden splash of waterfall, hills collide with the sky.

And there is no one else here. Beyond that hill range we are heading to, look, just over there, lies Chorley, somewhere nearby is Preston. A hundred years ago this view would not have been so pastoral due to the belching red brick chimneys of Wigan also somewhere deep in a valley below us. The modern world encroaches as to find the Iron Age Round Loaf Hill we orienteer using the glinting behemoth telephone masks rising on another ancient hill in front of us.

And then we are here, boots being hungrily slurped by the ooze hiding under the pretty but treacherous green.

And it is good.

There is a cairn at the top- it is a small hill, a tiny little thing, clearly man made but neat and self contained. I look eagerly for witchcraft-to have travelled all this way you must yearn for proper hardcore witchery, not just your neighbours’ cow running dry or in the modern age, your neighbours Renault Clio being hexed to need new windscreen wipers. There is a smashed polystyrene cup on the top, maybe used to transport blood but I suspect lukewarm tea from a thermos. The views are astonishing from somewhere, which is so near population and tameness but somehow beyond. And it stretches for miles and miles and miles.

I peer closely at a piece of wood which might have initials inscribed of someone who is soon to die a mysterious death. But it turns out not to be initials, just marks on wood. There is a rusty lumpiness of metal poking forth from the top but it does not want to come out easily and this hill has suffered enough from people trying to excavate it over the centuries, taking any treasures home and then if they ever existed then being used to prop up that dodgy cupboard in your house in 1897 and in 1901 being flung at the wall and demolished when a foot hit it the way to a chamber pot.

Round Loaf Hill is good and I am glad it has never been officially excavated and hope shitloads of mystery lie underneath.

I have however bought my copy of Lancashire Magic and Mystery with me, the day is yet young and there is a murdered grey clad priest at ancient Headless Cross just up the road in Addington who is just dying to meet us.   Oh. He is late. Or maybe the only sunny day in August is not conductive to meeting the undead when your subconscious is more tuned in to finding a reasonably priced Magnum Enigma.

But it is a waste of petrol to come all this way and not find a ghost so I consult Lancashire Magic and Mystery and hark! There is a pub nearby, the Black Horse Inn, which has been pulling pints for over a thousand years and is clearly literally bogged down in ectoplasm.

Also I fancy a pint. Ghosts are a good excuse.

Hmm. Ghosts would not appear anywhere that has this carpet. Or plays this music. Unless they died on the way to a Now That’s What I Call Music Through The Eighties concert. There is a quiz machine flashing angry neon in the corner where I envisaged gnarled floorboards, a trapdoor and a flitting hooded shadow. The smell of fish and chips pervades the once dank gloomy corners where now lie cardboard cutouts advertising a new form of Carling that might have a slight taste of lime. There are to be fair many real ales at the bar but the only cider is Strongbow, which might make me haunt the fucking place too. That’ll learn ’em.

There are whimsical things painted on the wall and there is no way there is or has ever been a ghost here.

Then.

I have read eight pages of the Chorley Advertiser then decide to get another drink. I am at the bar from which my seat is clearly visible. I return and my paper is now sat with the front page facing me. I was reading something boring about Tiny Acorns nursery and suddenly a blast from the five minutes and eight pages past ago and I am now suddenly spookily reading again about Bradley Wiggins having his hair cut at a local barbers as the paper is neatly back at the front page instead of the sprawled flurry I left it in when I went to the bar. The bar visible from my seat and the flustered bar man who has been shooting around fielding questions about sticky toffee pudding and carting traditional pie and chips about has been nowhere near. It is a hot still day.

Lancashire Magic and Mystery talks about unexplained occurrences at the pub which I took to mean the price of their house white but I was expecting (as documented in the aforementioned book) ghostly cold caressing hands not such a dull mystery it is almost embarrassing and boring to even mention like talking about a particularly heavy period or a long and confusing dream.

I did not expect a paper to be neatly folded back to the front page. I can’t utterly swear I did not do it myself but as an avid reader of unfamiliar local newspapers it would not be something I would do when at page eight and stopping briefly to get a glass of wine. It was my second, not my thirtieth drink (sadly) and this will remain a tragically prosaic mystery.

Why ghost, did you not do something creepy at the ancient satanic mound? Why did you not fling something in the ancient pub that wanted to be Wetherspoons to make it certain? Now I have the bloody undead weirdly messed up in my head with Bradley Wiggan’s sideburns, something about a bloody nursery and citrus flavoured beer.  The uncertainty and urbanity of it all annoys me but there is still the intrigue.

Ghost. If you are reading this, I can offer you a lift in a battered Kia to a dark hump in the midst of a moor where a ghost would be very well suited to lurking. But it is a bit chilly out and you obviously prefer to sit back, chill out and cause ever so slight confusion very now and then. Your horizons are small, Ghost but to be fair maybe you just don’t like the cold.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

It is ruined and it is perfect. Prettily  greenly ruined and without the unpleasant detritus ruins often attract such as suspiciously sodden and bulbous looking condoms, smashed Vodkat bottles and colour bled Walkers crisps bags shoved into ancient crannies.

And there are so many ghosts here that I can’t breathe for fear of inhaling a Grey Lady.  There is obscenely good homemade cheese and onion pie, mushy peas and gravy for £3.50.

I am now suspicious. This is too good to be true and thus I am probably annoyingly dead, smashed under a Vauxhall Vectra in an embarassing part of town and not even wearing clean pants.  I am sad about this but appreciate the irony of an afterlife full of ghosts from another dimension written about enthusiastically on plastic covered information boards.

Then the badness comes. ‘Is there a pub?’ ‘No.’

Fuck. I am clearly in Hell.

But such a lovely hanging basket bedecked one. Wycoller is a village prettily planted deep in East Lancashire, the perennially dark hump of Pendle Hill nearby. But Wycoller is ablaze with flowers, Cotswold grey stone quaintness and death, murder and vandalism.

It is a place that is mired in tradition, village life and industry but where high heels from Burnley replace the tired clip clop of centuries of  weavers heels and dark dark deeds still occur at night.

Wycoller Hall is paradise in decay. A ruined manor house is the epitome of smugness to an alive and financially broken viewer-ha ha you are dead and someone has had sex and a Snickers bar in your fireplace. It makes the Conservatives’ evil financial thrust almost bearable. Almost.

Yes, the fireplace in your hall that servants had to knock to timidly enter now has the working class from industrial towns poking about in short skirts whilst drinking Pepsi Maxx whilst you are dead, dead, dead.

Oh how I love it. There are the most worn steps in the world (and you can quote me on that) leading to nothing and well worn steps leading to nothing are probably my most favourite thing on earth (I would not be good at speed-dating) and you have to envisage what once was by looking at grand heraldic shields where the emblems on the shields have dissolved due to time and East Lancashire weather and nothing but the generic shield shape remains, truly the most ludicrously lucid and stonily obvious sign of wealth, fame and mortality being so pathetically transient.

Ha! You are still dead! And I am alive and poor and laughing because I can.

Despite the peach tiles in my small bathroom, you now envy me because I am alive and you are not except in a weird way because all the dead in Wycoller are now ghosts. It said so on the well displayed laminated board in the barn. Even the animals.

Yes! If I thought a well priced quaint tearoom (although sadly unlicensed) selling the aforementioned cheese and onion pie with glistening metal trophy-like tureens of pickled red cabbage, raw onion, mushy peas and gravy (it’s a Lancashire thing) for £3.50 was not quite wondrous enough, now here is a man who is a manager or owner or something (I forget easily these days) who tells me in a no nonsense Lancashire way the story of how a regular at the tearoom sensed the bad vibe in the backroom where we are now stuffing chocolate fudge cake down our gullets and would never enter.

When the renovations were over and the bull keep was uncovered, from a previous farmer notorious for his ill treatment of his animals, she walked in and without knowing what had happened, said she felt she could be in this room again. This is an appalling third hand transcript and I can see you rolling your eyes from here. I am not good at relaying anecdotes and my badly recollected memory has made you all now disbelieve in ghosts. Sorry. But if you were in that tearoom, listening to the dark haired, dark eyed owner/whatever talking soberly about That Experience you would be shitting yourself every time you ate a Big Mac. Good.

The barn next to Wycoller Hall is donated to information and harking at well kept beams.  A woman talks sourly about vandalism. There is so much vandalism we can only wonder at what was ‘chucked into the river’ to a Greek chorus of sighs. There is an animal missing from the wicker garden. The inner globe is missing from the Atom, a top of the hillside sculpture, all eyes and mirrors of the encompassing four dimensional landscape with the inner globe for you to gaze upon, witchlike to see all the countryside reflected in its mirror sheen, Well, you would of, it had had not been merrily broken and stolen.  Again.

But Wycoller is multicultural when it comes to its ghosts – there is also a West Indian lady, a bride of a Wycoller who chose her in her native country, married her and then thought ‘fuck that’ and threw her overboard. We’ve all been there…

But rather than just be dead or have a whine on Mumsnet, she followed him home and apparently still haunts the place. I would go back to where it’s warmer, love.

More ghosts! This one is spectacular as it is not just a ghost. Everyone gets a bit bored of just one ghost misering about the place. Wycoller Hall has a ghost murdering another ghost and you can hear him kill her and her scream and die and everything! This is pure ghost porn!

It apparently happens but once a year upon the darkest most appallingly weathered day of the year and that ghost must be really suffering right now studying the long term forecasts or just be prosaic and pop out doing a light stab every week or so when the sky is yet again black and cold. I suspect he was not counting on global warming or just does not want an audience.

There is a Grey Lady too who flits about sadly, the epitome of passive aggressive, “I was wronged, I am sad, I hope you are scared when you see me, that’ll learn him…”

The Neolithic slab bridge in the village is a gloriously slumped and sturdy ancient rare thing and is said to be where Druids lead their human sacrifices over but I think the Romans used the whispered rumours of face eating chanting Druids in some kind of propaganda method to hide their own barbarity. I still quite want the Druids to have existed though. They are such romantic sounding murderers. And I do love a good ritual.

But hark! Dear reader, Wycoller has yet more tricks up its heraldic Druidic Romantic well priced cheese and onion pied sleeve- There is yet another ghost and it is the spectre horseman who goes galloping along that ancient packhorse bridge by the ruins of Wycoller Hall and that self same bridge and Hall is also said to have been the inspiration for Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Make of that what you will. A man imprisons his mentally ill wife in the attic then lies about it and has an affair. That is no romance, that is sordid but the best a woman could possibly ask for.

Apart from a well-priced cheese and onion pie whilst gazing misty eyed out at ancient misery.

It was a good day.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

I am looking at the excellent breasts of dead women whilst making polite conversation with retired genial couples.

I can see why people join the National Trust. My partner had a panic attack in the car park when seeing the amount of well groomed cars and the fact that some people were drinking tea from fold up tables by their car (surrounded by 30 acres of parkland)

A Land-Rover  driver does not hold up a hand in the traditional thank you greeting when we swerve to avoid him which nearly sends us hurtling back to the nearest friendly working class ex industrial town but we resist. Then look at the entry prices and grimace. I was actually more interested in Levens Hall nearby but the entrance fee there made me want my name on the deeds.

There is a hard sell on the door which makes me grimly upgrade from eight pounds entrance fee to nine pounds due to ‘optional’ gift aid. A nasty hard part of me wonders why I am paying more to be charitable to an organisation which owns hundreds of lofty mansions dripping in ornate walnut carved four poster beds whilst I live in a small house with a bathroom with peach tiles we cannot afford to replace. Then I berate myself for my smallness of mind and am concerned how I keep adding up the extra cost of the gift aid whilst looking blankly and joylessly at the kitchen gardens hours later.

We are ever so politely but in a steely way told about the joy of being a National Trust member. I smilingly say we are poor and point to the baby currently chewing a wire which he has pulled out of the carboot pushchair but the woman at the counter still thrusts a flurry of papers at us saying that ‘circumstances might change’ in the grim determined voice that makes me think that my parents might be found dead tomorrow in mysterious circumstances next to a will that has been written in their blood.

And of course I am only in this for the ghosts.
I have heard about the unearthly screaming from the poor starved to death woman of yore locked in a tiny room and left to die. I saw there was a YouTube clip about ghosts at Sizergh castle although I may have not have been so enthusiastic if I had actually looked at it and seen it was a still photograph of an ‘orb’ with the soundtrack of the Ghostbusters theme.

The grounds to the castle are indeed splendid and if one can ignore the occasional incongruous hum of the motorway, would be a splendid way in which to pass away a day relaxing under the orchards, parkland, lake (maybe not under that to be pedantic) and rock garden. Unfortunately we still have the toddler. Two hours later and some excited people are even now telling people about the unearthly screams they heard from within the bowels of the castle.

It is a good castle as it goes. I just find the whole National Trust experience leaves me slightly cold. Nothing is left to the imagination. Everything is so well recreated, remade, well signed, and busy that you cannot let your imagination run riot and imagine the past because the past is there before your eyes in vivid 3D and whilst an over enthusiastic volunteer tells you about a family you don’t much care about and some rare but quite unpleasant sub B and M Bargains vases you had not even noticed.
There are portraits of rich dead people which make you feel a bit smug because when when briefly perusing the laminated sheets in each room you notice how brief their privileged life was compared to the antiquity of the building, something to reflect upon if your child was not trying to pull dBown a stuffed kookaburra off the wall. At least they didn’t have peach tiles in their bathroom.

Nothing on the laminated sheets mentions ghosts, death or murder. It’s lucky there are good boobs. It is a lovely building and I am glad I came. I would though quite like to see it smashed up and dishevelled, stripped of all its laminated sheets, eager knowledgable volunteers and chairs that have signs on saying if you can sit on them or not. I prefer a ghastly old hag of a ruin, plundered and piteous and without photographs of the owners beaming brightly and richly from the parlour.

I like the National Trust and am glad that this building is here and not owned by some oil magnate and kept private. I have had a lovely day in beautiful surroundings and am glad a replica of the past is kept to show people what used to be (unless you were poor of course, nobody wants to be reminded of that unromantic element of history abounding in dead babies, filth and servitude to the people of the manor, that is not nine pounds well spent when you could instead be admiring rhododendrons)
But next time I go somewhere I do not want a laminated sheet, just an old old memory and my imagination. Oh and that sells well priced house red.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

A lone pic shot on a camera phone to follow…

I want to go to the Kirkstone Pass Inn because someone tragically died there of course but long enough ago to make it romantic and nice not all horribly miserable and actually deathy. It is up a squizzle of a road through the Lake District, which is surprisingly not too hideously filled with middle class children, crammed into people carriers with an unfeasible amount of mountain bikes carried proudly and smugly aloft. On one such occasion we worked out there were two bikes per winsomely grinning face (we were in a queue and bored)

The rain is of course pouring down because it has never ever ever stopped.

So the woman who died trying to traverse the Kirkdale pass with her baby many years ago, long enough to make the suffering romantic is of course a ghost. I am bored and would like to see a ghost to brighten up conversational gambits I occasionally have to make and also because its raining and I can’t think of anything more interesting than to see a ghost and a large house red in hospitable surroundings. Instead of going to reduced bit at Asda again. And I already have far too much slightly rancid but well priced tzaiki.

I am by nature slightly credulous, hence the guilty library rental of local ghost books with their unfailing belief in Bogarts and bad photographs of gateposts to old manor houses but before the arrival of our Kia in the car park I was thinking ‘how could anyone die two hundred or so (the library book has gone back and I have a vague memory) years ago in a place where there is English Lakes Ice-cream for sale every few miles?

Then I nearly died walking from the car park to the pub.

It is enticingly windswept, grey stoned and ancient looking and I look forward to meeting a tragic ghost clutching a baby to a cold cold breast and letting her know that mother to mother, she is not a bad parent for giving up her life going to see her sick father and nearly so nearly killing her beloved babe in arms and that I have left mine in the car asleep with his neck at a unfortunate angle and his father murmuring crossly at the cricket on an appallingly tuned radio.

But then the chilling realisation that I will not see a ghost in a pub which sells key rings, has a rhyming poem telling people not to use the toilet unless they are customers and where some loud women are cackling about how they thwart the school packed lunched rule by hiding chocolate in lunchboxes underneath sandwiches. There is no magic left anymore in the world, dear reader.

Until my second glass of wine by the fireplace, the discovery that there is no phone signal and the finding of The English Book Of Ghost Stories by the fireplace.

In fact I am still there now.

If you, dear reader, ever travel up that squizzling zigzag path to the Kirkstone Inn, look out for the ghostly red dented Kia from which the sounds of an ancient cricket game can still be heard. And give the baby a packet of Wotsits.

I’m on the house red. Ta.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

Cartmel is the poshest place in the world. Seriously.

And I used to live in Bath.

This scares me.

I do not know where 20 fags and some Tampax could possibly be purchased here. The residents here must live on over embellished cupcakes, unpasteurised ewes milk cheese cut from a block and a sense of their own self-satisfaction.

It is undeniably a staggering beautiful village, the sort of village you imagine in a trench when about to be shot to death because it is the Essence of England, like something Cath Kidson has spewed up in a dotty bunting bedecked dream in the Cotswolds.

Being sort of hidden somehow between Lancashire and Cumbria, on minor A roads, you are expecting a small village that excels in its rightly famous sticky toffee pudding and the Priory that you have read about somewhere and feel you should really go and look at and pretend to be interested in even though you are actually only interested in the haunted gatehouse that you read about in a rubbish local book about ghosts you were embarrassed to be seen ordering from the library.

Oh and L’Enclume, the famous Michelin starred restaurant which has unlikely foams and things and you secretly hope that there might be a two for a tenner lunch special even though you are actually aware that won’t ever ever happen.

There are waving meadows in front of hanging basket-bedecked cottages, the cottages all have names engraved on little slabs, and tasteful dust free antiquities are displayed on quaintly gnarled windowsills.

A woman is splashed (oh so slightly) by a car and when I smile and make a sympathetic joke, she keeps repeating the word ‘idiots’ and she is very angry indeed. It was only a small puddle but the car had young people in which I suspect may have been the problem.

The centre is bigger than expected; should one wish to have a nice cup of coffee, there is so much competition there is clearly controversy galore as one coffee shop also delighting in the excitement and daring of selling sodding cupcakes, (prostituted tarted up fairy cakes) has a sign that says ‘best coffee in town or your money back’. I like Community in Action.

I am nearly run over by a Bentley, which I am a bit pleased by. There is a fiver in my purse and some coins and I feel rich rich rich with my paper money knocking splendidly about but a sticky dense loaf of three cheese and marmite bread from the bakery and a Cartmel Apple and Toffee Crumble Bake has knocked me into overdraft.

The Priory is glorious but I feel guilty as do not have the politely requested three pound donation so post all my remaining cash through the slot where it gleams with accusing copperiness. The bread won’t fit through, anyway the marmite and three cheeses will surely jam up the hole so I run around quickly, trying not to get three pounds worth of viewing. If it crumbles into a ball tomorrow, it is my entire fault. But the bread was worth it.

A Farrow and Balled pub up a side street has the classic meal deal of soup and sandwich but for a tenner. The nearby L’ Enclume is indeed so classy and non ‘two for a tenner’ there is not a menu outside, nor indeed any sign it is in fact a place to eat. It could be a media hub in Shoreditch or an Anorexic clinic for supermodels in Richmond were it not for the fact that there is an ancient cat on a windowsill opposite sticking its tongue out at me and yet another pony has just gone past.

It is hard here, to imagine the reality of the recession, which is why it might be so bustling.

If you can afford the petrol to get here and a tenner to spend on cupcakes and coffee, you feel like a Barclay Brother. A woman cheerily bemoans to the staff in the bakery (a bakery so posh it sells virtually only bread) that she will simply never get the time to read her ‘papers’- (the Daily Telegraph was tucked under her arm) but she ‘buys them anyway’.

I look at my toddler leaning dangerously and angrily away from me, coated in Smartie Batter and consider leaving him here. Like a pub cat, he would be fed on lovely tit bits by tourists and well heeled locals, be patted and smiled upon and probably be extremely happy.

Then as I look upon a cheeseboard and wine platter, displayed vividly and erotically upon a chalkboard, I decide to simply sell him instead.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites

I do not like attractions aimed at families. They normally seem to feature bad Clipart, an extortionate price for a Ribena Light and a cafe which is unlicensed.

Oh and other families.

This means occasional brittle smiles, small talk and quiet competiveness whilst the Other Children are always over enthusiastic as the Good Families over enunciate and over explain to show what Good Parents they are and frozenly smile when my baby is cheerily hung upside down for perhaps slightly too long.

I am of course just jealous. I envy and bitterly admire their fluid unselfconscious discourse, their nice but not too nice cars and ability to not say ‘Fucking hell’ when seeing the price of the Soup of the Day.

I do not like family attractions where a badly punctuated laminated sign is waterlogged and thus the protective laminate has come free, bellows emptily into the swirling wind and the Comic Sans ink has bled into a red then pinkish  swirl.

I do not like the children’s menu being cheap bland fatty shit sans any veg and consisting of battery-farmed animals, the like of which £5.95 has only an hour ago been spent upon petting and loving.

And I totally fail upon visiting petting farms. Other people see cute calves. I see their heads piled in vats in an abattoir. And don’t even mention the chickens. It’s gnarled piles of tangled whorly feet or bloody  yards of spiky shards of blue and grey beaks in my head.

It’s like that thing where people taste colours but with misery and death. To be fair I am the same anywhere and can spin a story of glistening spilt organs from a trip to TK Maxx.

Having a car means no looking at the glistening view of the Trough of Bowland snaking foggily into the far horizon but more of all encompassing sense of tragedy as I vividly imagine the death of a cat very soon under the wheels or look back despite my partner barking at me not to, to ascertain from the velvety ears still so poignantly visible from the red mush on the road whether it was a rabbit or a hare so recently killed.

I have been to a few petting farms before and the jolly peeling signs about ‘These male cows will be leaving our jolly farm when they are 9 months old!!!!’ makes me want to pleasantly ask if we can visit them in their new home. I scrutinize eggs so much I pretty much need to know the chickens by their maiden name.

But Docker Park Farm does not feature ‘wellie hire’ in a star shape as one of the attractions as did one leaflet I picked up in Morrisons that made me consider infanticide if my boy pointed at it and said ‘Dat’.

It is pleasingly remote and the shattered tree debris of a shit June litter the road.

It is a £5.50 entrance fee for the adults who would definitely not be here unless it was for their children whose entrance is free. I could labour upon the inherent irony here but I have donuts to put in lunchboxes and gin to drink.

And I like Docker Park Farm. I like it a lot. There are no stupid families who I actually just envy here because some parents think their kids melt in the rain. I am liberated which means I let my toddler get soaking wet and as I am in my own private parkland I thus attempt a climbing wall. I will not do so again.

There are alpacas, my best of animals due to their ‘should not actually exist’ quality. Or when Disney has swept up all the cute bits from the abattoir floor and reassembled them with extra long eyelashes.

I like the goats which if they were rebranded and remarketed as ‘God’s hoofed angels’ would still have people going ‘Satan Satan’. It’s something in the Satanic eyes. I feel like that about Boris Johnson. But I would rescue a goat from a fire first. An unlikely but intriguing hypothetical event.

There is a large soft play area in a barn and we were warned about the puddles beforehand. There is an isolated bouncy castle swinging and banging into itself in the harsh unsummery breeze. I   like this very much. The background is blue hills coated in swirling rain heading this way.

The signs about the animals are neat, well punctuated and informative without being patronizing. And in a grown up font with no  bad pictures of a cartoon pig with a fork holding sausages.

There is a lake, Shetland ponies, a donkey and her baby and the Millionaires Shortbread is big enough to bury a body underneath. Which is all I look for in a farmyard attraction. And the chocolate is not waxy.

We spend a good few hours here wandering around without being force-fed into a clearly designated track with ‘No Picnic’ signs. My boy loves the plentitude of plastic JCBs, I love the snuffly rabbits and the lack of smiling at other mothers and asking polite forced questions.

We will come here again. But only if it is raining.

Share this with the world!

Hide Sites