Unicycle Emptiness

The car parking is suspiciously cheap.

Maybe I don’t want to go to a town that offers four hours of car parking for a pound and free car parking on December Saturdays. This must be a rancid desperate whore of a town.

But I do love a bargain. We leave the car. We will probably never see it again in such a frontier town frowned over by the misty misshapen satanic Pendle Hill, too far away for celebrity, too close for pleasantry.

We slither up the first ice we have encountered this winter. It would be here, darkly shadowing the paths up to the castle. Because how can we not go to the castle first? It has a Grim History. And I do love a Grim History.

But where were once gargoyles heads and revolving smouldering oxen’s bodies are now too bright lights, fake heat, cheery informative placards and MDF plastered over ancient dank walls. I can see why.  Schools will not pay to witness a dank ruin and risk a small modern knee smote through with an ancient rusty nail.

And now here is an over lit room with fossils and timelines. I have always hated fossils and timelines and little displays showing soil changes through the ages. Which is annoying, as I have always wanted to be an archaeologist. But without the boring bits. I find it sad though that the castle looks more like a Little Chef with display cabinets and a good view than an ancient building perched high on a hill.

But now is the Witchcraft Bit, which makes it all ok, and you can hear people with Lancashire accents talk through a speaker about long dead malevolent servants enticing people into a local river. And here is a tiny ancient shoe found hidden in the eaves of a nearby cottage. And the owner of that tiny shoe is forgotten, dead, unnamed and blown to the wind. And so is the optimistic owner of the supposedly charmed shoe.  Heh.

The Keep, also  at Clitheroe Castle has a sound installation based on the Lancashire Witches Trials. In a sleet swept happily unmodernised crumbled building, next to the castle, it is the only building in Clitheroe, which has the height and the bloody history to stare Pendle Hill in the eye.

Sighs and murmers echo and chasten, murmer and fold through the ruined prison where an ancient door on a floor that nobody earthly can access stays forever locked. The sighs and hummings are through a speaker but in this desolate spot so near humanity but so far away, it is hard to tell the difference between the past, nature and a heavily advertised sight specific musical installation. Which means in my head at least it worked. I suspect letters to the local paper might suggest otherwise. Although on my brief perusal it seems the good citizens of Clitheroe are more obsessed with cat murder and dog shit.

A licensed café built into an historical site is what the world needs and the Atrium Café is very impressive with its alcohol list wider than its food range. I think I will move to Clitheroe I decide after soup, chips, and wine which is pretty much all one needs to be happy and alive and with change from a tenner.

I do not want to leave the castle, its over lit history, shops featuring glass bracelets, highly censored children versions of witches, well priced shiraz and crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside chips is pretty much all I have I have ever wanted out of life.

But then I discover a market with cheap butter pies, a shop that sells expensive cheese and bread with fancy stuff in it, the most ludicrously gorgeous trendy café featuring antique rocking horses, flamingo wallpaper and mulled wine tea.

People are so friendly I keep looking for a TV camera. Because this is Islington meeting the North in the shadow, the ever looming and ominous shadow of Pendle Hill.

And I shall return.

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It is nearly Halloween and I am paying a fiver to have a quick revel in misery and death through the ages. I actually wanted to pay eight pounds which would allow me on the Ghosts and Murders tour and thus far more misery and death but it is about to start, I need a wee and more to the point, all the other people on the ghost tour have an enthusiastic school child with them. My baby clearly does not want to know about ghosts and hauntings so to go on the tour would mark me out as being a complete and utter loser. I stare sadly after the small huddle led by a man in Victorian garb and wish I was into something cooler or more age appropriate.

My spirits are however raised in a very real sense when I see the shape of a woman dressed in black old fashioned clothes walk through the doorway to the keep and then simply vanish. This is it! I have seen a ghost! Then I see she is merely lurking in a corner and is wearing too much foundation, hardly the behaviour of the true undead especially when I see her later with a plastic key fob (not even a great big iron gnarly old key) going through (but in a prosaic normal way) a glass door.

But here are dank and ancient stone steps leading down to the bowels of the earth from where guns were fired at attempted invaders. I swear for a minute that a black form appears and disappears in less than a second in the narrow passage ahead but I am tired and in a highly susceptible frame of mind.

I trot through dark passages, up spiral staircases and peer into claustrophobic little hell holes.

Some mesmerizing  intricate carvings can be seen on a wall but are annoyingly behind the glass door that the fake ghost went in and locked behind her. I have a sudden terror the ghost tour party are allowed in this bit and am filled with a wholly disproportionate sense of anger and horror.

Then down in the dungeon, we catch up with the ghost tour who are listening to the grey haired guide cheerily inform his captive crowd that upwards of three hundred bodies could be crammed in this small space and points at the grooves in the rock, said to be from the tongues of desperate Jacobites trying to moisten their mouths with the damp running down the walls. I want to hear more but am scared I will be accused of trying to steal some Ghost tour so lurk uneasily around until they file past me.

The grey haired guide as if to show me what I am missing by having not handed over the extra three pounds, orates grandly-‘Next, we are going to see THE HAUNTED ROOM! ‘

I want to see the haunted room too, more than anything else ever even though it must be one I would previously been in but stupidly not sensing its hauntedness. I am sure with a grey haired guide and some sensibly dressed parents and slightly less enthusiastic children, I could not fail to have a face-to-face meeting with a portal into another dimension. An extra three quid seems a positive bargain. I want to follow but there must be some sort of rule about following ghost tours without paying the extra three quid. I look mournfully after them then begin the ascent back from hell into the sunny courtyard.

I read later than the ghost is said to be a woman found holed up clutching the skeletal remains of her child. It doesn’t seem so much fun then and the growing realisation of mans inhumanity to man is frankly more terrifying than any ghost I can possibly imagine.

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I like the concept of a walk until I have been actually walking for a bit, slipped in some mud and had a bit of a fight about being lost. Then I see something like a deer or an abandoned cottage and I like walking all over again until I slip in some mud and get a bit lost.

This walk was in Lancashire Tea Shop Walks, a book that must be about two decades old and it was not the teashop or the walk that attracted me although that is how I presented it to my partner to get him to drive there. It is a good old  fashioned  tale of misery, betrayal, suicide and ghosts. Which is also licenced.

Lizzie Dean, a servant at the Sun Inn in Chipping was having a romance with a local man. He dumped her to marry her best friend in a true cliché of wankerness and on the day of the wedding, rather than make gestures as to the small size of his cock from her window overlooking the church, slag him off on Facebook or go on the Jeremy Kyle show, it being the 19^th century, she chose to hang herself and her ghost is well reported as being said to haunt that very same pub.

I feel sorry for Lizzie. There is now a Lizzie’s Lounge in The Sun and although I wandered wide eyed around the pub hoping something ghostly might happen, there were only well priced pub meals and posters advertising a Halloween event featuring bats. It was a nice pub though and even nicer for having completed the six mile walk in the aforementioned Lancashire Tea Shop Walks.

A woman came in when we were there and when told about the sausage hotpot, asked grimly how big the sausages were to which the confused teen attempted to measure with his hands and then perform a clumsy chopping motion.

The walk itself was soggy, muddy but ultimately wonderful due to a sudden fold in the hills opening up into a heathery glen, the sort of one you just want to lie spread-eagled in and shout ‘aaaaaah’ at the skies. It is muddy though so I do not. There are wooded copses of the sort that hide bodies and treasure, creepy glens of stunted trees where surely wraiths must glide when not disturbed by the sound of an argument over which way is next whilst holding a sodden charity shop guide book and there are crumbling barns. The fells overhead are magnificent and it is like being in a budget Glencoe.

Back in Chipping, we  peruse the village store which is antiquated and excellent, selling local cheese, faded birthday candles and Wispas. There is another pub, The Tillotsons Arms that ahem, has to be explored/drunk in and I am delighted by its gothicness until realizing it is preparing for Halloween and the skulls are not permanent. It is a friendly pub though with decent ciders and awards by CAMRA.

On the way back, we go to see Lizzie’s grave. According to her suicide note she wanted to be buried at the front of the church so her ex lover and friend would have to step past her grave every time they went to church, which has to be the ultimate in passive aggression.

Oh Lizzie. Seeing your grave you made me realize you were real and I apologise for nosing excitedly for your unhappy ghost. You were too dignified in life and I suspect you regret it bitterly now that your only outlet now is to attempt to spook over a Meal For A Fiver menu.

You should have just killed them both.

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Here speaks the usually silent photographer. Set loose from my usual job of photographing stuff that Cyberfairy points out as curious, winsome or tragicomic, I had free rein to indulge myself in my chief delight. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a short photoblog where I ignore pretty things and give you instead mould, concrete and aging roofs out of context. Don’t worry, I shall return to Penn-like (or is it Teller-esque?) silence now and your enjoyment of our heroine’s adventures in unlikely places shall continue unsullied.

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A small swarm of blonde female clones wearing North face jackets, jeans and slightly pinched expressions surrounds me.  It would be nice to surmise they are also bitterly resenting paying six pounds to park in the car park but I suspect this is more a bugbear for me than for anyone else. And it will continue to be a bugbear for me until my last dying breath.

We are in the café at Grizedale Forest in the Lake District. One family has bought along a shape sorter for their baby just in case she is not intellectually stimulated enough as her parents rustle seriously about in branded waterproof clothing, sensible hiking shoes and rucksacks. My baby is happily gnawing on a packet of Morrison’s own brand wet wipes.

This is all my boyfriend’s fault for not letting me Google places where there was a murderer or a ghost for us to have a walk about in. He walks a ‘pleasant aesthetic walk that’s not all murdery’ apparently. So we are here.

I am wearing a turquoise minidress from which the crotch of my tights appears underneath so already the aesthetic pleasure of the walk is somewhat diminished. Good.

But never mind-there is a sculpture trail! I am looking forward to seeing big singing ringing things aloft suspended, abstract and mesmerising, walking through ancient woodland, communing with nature.

But there is a choice of three routes. Red, green or Yellow.

We follow the Red route-it is described as ‘Strenuous’ and uphill, hence the red for danger and I am excited and scared. Will we get lost in swirling mists, our desiccated corpses found years later? No because the Red route is clearly signposted, micro managed, pristine and the path could easily fit an Eddie Stobart lorry down it and the majority of the route is identikit pound shop conifers. Or the wasteland where they used to be which makes you feel sentimental over identikit pound shop conifers.

I keep looking for the amazing singing ringing sculptures but I have got them mixed up with a dream or something and just find the occasional small carved bird.

It is a scramble to the top but not a Strenuous one and we have a baby gazing wide-eyed on our unwaterproofed backs and a heavy rucksack filled with nonsense and junk food. There is a pleasing circular sculpture and a view, which nearly makes the car parking fine worthwhile. Nearly. But I am materialist to the core and eye the glorious nature surrounding us angrily and beadily spying all the potential free car parking spaces.

And now we have come off the empty perilous Red route we come face to face to people who have driven miles in sensible branded outdoor clothing to plump for the Yellow route.  And face-to-face means the perilous comedy of manners, which is  ‘To Say Hello Or Not To Say Hello.’

That is the question. Whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by not saying ‘hello’ first and either thus replying too brightly out of guilt and seeming a bit mad and Jehovah’s Witnessy or muttering something like ‘heyllaaa’ because you haven’t formed your brain to mouth action quickly enough and it all goes a bit wrong and you spoil the walk for yourself. Or neither of you says ‘hello’ first and you feel desperately guilty in case the other walker was hoping you would say ‘hello’ first and is now despairing against haggard looking inappropriately dressed people for their rudeness and disregard of pleasant greetings on nice autumnal days.

Or you take arms against a sea of troubles and say ‘hello’ first and risk seeming a bit mad and Jehovah’s Witnessy when some people slink past saying either nothing, ‘heeylla’ or an appreciative response and a bright elderly smile.

The youth don’t seem to do ‘hello’s anymore. I know this because I nervously scout the oncoming pedestrian and try to work my greeting/lack of greeting/’heeylla’ accordingly.

It’s a minefield out there. A minefield with occasional carved birds, an overpriced car park and a lot of pinched blonde women in North Face Jackets. I shan’t be returning soon.

But I shall look for real nature.

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It is recession time and it is bleak. Remember when this blog was started? Unless you are my mum you probably do not. I wrote about boutique hotels in major cities, I critisied canapés and described third courses in words stolen from Sunday newspapers. Now I have a baby, no money and a part time public sector job. I am a vox pox of 2011 and my roof is leaking, the camera is broken and to cut a long whining story short, my blog has not been updated in a while, I can’t afford to go anywhere so I will walk around Lancaster with a pushchair and hope for something exciting to happen.

Hmm, nothing exciting has happened as yet. I walk past the quay where there were gypsies camped but they have left it relatively clean. Apart, surprisingly from a baby bath.

The quay is wonderful to me and I try to walk past it every day-I like its urban dereliction, shattered boats, adverts for long defunct businesses and the history behind these mammoth facial slabs of building-behind which now lie broken office chairs, badgers, feral cats and tumbling nature. The river Lune shoots past, grey and angry possibly because it is heading towards Morecambe and nobody likes Morecambe on a bleak October day. Sorry Flotsam. Sorry Jetsam. You were washed down here from the more cerebral heights of the Lake District and now are passing a grave to British industry. To the right across the river is Skerton, which makes these 19^th century derelict warehouses look positively antiquely charming.  Over there lies all concrete ‘office space’ where nobody has taken an office, snarled up roads and an enormous spaceship Asda to which I am attracted to more than I should be.

But we are still firmly on the left side and so we pass the Maritime Museum, a wonderful pillared place, formerly the town hall and a place I spend so much time in, the staff recognise me. My baby’s first words will hopefully be anchor. It is a cosy place where people are pleasant at all times, has a changing room full of painted fish and a quiet café where you will always be chatted to. There are wooden replicas of ships, terrifyingly realistic 18^th century figures rolling barrels (one of which I rather fancy) canal boats you can sit on and one for the children, a replica stagecoach where a disembodied voice narrates the deaths of people who traveled the treacherous sinking sand of Morecambe bay.

I should really take the baby to Stay and Play sessions at the nursery a bit more but I want him to be aware of mortality and also I don’t have to make asinine conversation about the weight and cleverness of other babies. He seems to like it anyway.

We walk along over the Millennium Bridge, a wonderful piece of architecture shaped like a ship’s sail which everyone else in Lancaster hated and is still a feature in angry letters to the Lancaster Guardian along with the traditional favourites of dog poo and cyclists.

In town, filled with happiness on this bright Autumnal day, I enter a charity shop and then leave frozen and still by the talk of misery, illness and death and also by the prices on bobbly Primark dresses.

We go to NICE, a bar and café that unlike most others on the high street does not offer pie, chips and peas for under four quid. And thus the middleclass flock to it.

It has quotes from clever books embossed on the wall, Japanese beer on draught, sporadic poetry and music events in the next room, an art gallery overhead and an air of well-fed middle class gentility. A meal is about a quid more than a large house red and nearly as good- think date based cous cous recipes with foreign names for under six quid. Think women in Monsoon clothing with large lattes and a general sense of wellbeing.

I prefer The Merchants pub next door but the baby hates it because it is dark and thus bedtime. It is underground, an old wine merchants, does the best chips known to humanity and has a variety of newspapers. It is my idea of Nirvana and I miss rainy Sundays there very much and is the only reason I resent the baby sometimes. I like the combination of students, alcoholics and random people who have missed a train (possibly due to alcoholism)

Sometimes it has the Evening Standard or The Scotsman left by a weary (alcoholic) commuter which makes it a portal into another glamorous world when you did not have a baby in a pram you can’ t quite fold up, a bank balance that equals zero and memories of when a meal out was not eaten with fingers in a cold Northerly wind and your life did not take place within half a mile. I blame the Conservatives. Because they are easier to blame than contraceptives and far far less cuter than babies.  And in short, just because I can.

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You know you have hit rock bottom when you catch a train just to go to the next  station along the line. And then don’t even leave said station. But if you have ever been to Carnforth you will understand why as it is a grim straggle of a town where the goods in the shop windows appear to have stopped being replaced in the mid eighties. There is a pub called The Canal Turn where someone has painted out the C on the sign. This is the second best thing about Carnforth.

But within this windy hinterland of £3.95 Sunday Carveries and wretched looking charity shops lies simmering passion, thwarted carnal desires and unmentioned love.

The waiting and refreshments room at Carnforth station is famous for it appearing in the 1940’s film, Brief Encounter where two well-spoken people gaze longingly at each other, talk about nothing and you wonder why they just don’t get some bloody Durex and get on with it. Although this would make it another sort of film entirely and one possibly less desirable to the pleasant grey haired people sitting  in its restored interior eating toffee and date cake. There is a gramophone playing quiet jazz, a wood burner and a general air of gentility and pleasantness. The Comments book is unsullied by rude words in childish hands and we are called young by some nice old people by the fire who natter on about their childhood. What better place to go on a rainy Sunday morning? And it’s licensed. That always helps. There are sticky cakes of the old fashioned no nonsense tray bake variety and a short stodgy menu. It is always raining outside and the nice old people are always instantly replaced by other nice old people. Or the occasional grumpy looking cyclist in Lycra.

There is a museum devoted to trains of yore and in the gift shop a woman is re-imagining the Cumberland sausage she had at lunchtime with the dreamy eyes of the film heroine. No-one appears to be buying anything train related, they just wonder around in the romantic daze only tonnes of combustible metal and coal can arouse in people of a certain type. There are no teenagers sneering, there is no rubbish or complaining but reality trickles in with a sign saying the steam train excursions are now cancelled due to security issues at Sellafield. I suspect al-Qaeda would not stand a chance trying to infiltrate a steam buffs excursion-especially if they were not wearing corduroy and making genial remarks about the wetness of the summer.

The Harry Potter train is here but lies hidden in a tunnel after teenage vandalism several years ago. Other trains in various states of antiquity and dishevelment lie around like a big rusty elephants graveyard. Within the station museum, the TV screens endlessly show Brief Encounter, the black and white images of unconsummated love flickering silently as people shuffle around and are delighted with the safe comforting representation of the past in politeness and British steel not the reality of the Anal Turn and a merrily smashed Hogwarts Express.

I like it too but find nearly three pounds for a piece of cake a slightly too high a price on nostalgia but am comforted by my glass of wine and bowl of chips, an uncouth meal compared to my white haired neighbours cups of tea and slowly sipped soup but it is cosy in here and foul  outside so I too shall hide from the present for just another half hour.

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I should save this for the new year but I have not updated this week as all we did was attempt a nice walk but went the wrong way and ended up back at the car park and had a bicker and I really could not think of ways to make that interesting as it wasn’t even for me.

Plus the new year exists only for those really bad hangovers from mixing alcohol and cream and regurgitated media where a writer reminds you of that time last month when all those people died, look, here’s that photo that affected you in July and remember when that film came out in September? I feel short-changed reading newspapers in the New Year.

I have  been writing this blog for a good few years now and some older entries are lost in the annals of time (well, actually filed under ‘Older Entries’) so I thought I would do a quick retrospective of the Ten Best Things So Far Discovered in the North-feel free to send in your own. It would make me very happy.

10. Steals- Blackpool. A nylon paradise of fashions that never were, the zip fell off or were just vaguely wrong to the general public. But you are not the general public, you have your own sense of style and panache and for a tenner you can buy a new wardrobe. Then discard it after seeing a full length mirror and cry.

9. The Coven- Wigan Possibly, just possibly the only (mostly) vegetarian café associated with witchcraft that also dabbles in raw gluten free food haute cuisine in the whole of Wigan. It is excellent. Not many establishments take your baby off you when you are eating your dehydrated mushroom burger and take it off down the street. More places should. Friendly, bohemian and excellent food at unsilly prices.

8. Williamson Park- Lancaster– Sit on top of a sundial and look across Morecambe Bay to the Lakes beyond. Healthy romping people walk their dogs, teenagers snigger, there is a dank butterfly house which suddenly makes butterflies seem a bit scary and should this be in London, the press would never stop raving on about utterly amazing and wonderful it is, whilst interviewing not that famous actors looking all windswept on the sundial. As it’s Lancaster, it just exists.

7. The New Continental-Preston-I like a pub that encompasses the gap between death metal nights and oak smoked rainbow trout on a bed of fennel. Light, large and with a massive beer garden to let your beloved children roam free as nature intended as you drink real ales because they have funny names.

6. The Palatine-Morecambe- It has newspapers from right wing to left, excellent pizza, excellent views across the bay and decent ciders.  Should the baby not have been born, you would have had to take me out of here in a body bag, Which to be fair would not have taken long.

5. Kirkcudbright Swimming Pool Charity Shop- It has tableaux in the window of topical events but with the items from the charity shop. The royal wedding was a godsend but sadly I was not in the vicinity on September 11^th. Kirkcudbright is also the best town in the world. But be wary of its pasties.

4. Hazlemere café, Grange Over Sands– And talking of pasties, here is pasty nirvana, a flaky heaven of cholesterol. And with more than the normal prosaic cheese and onion choice for the vegetarian. I felt like the only gay in the village reaching the fleshpots of Soho when having a choice between spicy lentil and Homity Pie. The cakes will end your life sooner than anticipated but it will be worth it. Not stupidly priced either.

3. The bargain food shop selling cold cans of Pepsi Maxx for 30p In Ulverston. I possibly gained half a stone on the 10p posh crisps as well.

2. The Dining Rooms, Southport– Fancy and delicious food and everything is £2.50. Yes, £2.50. I assumed a catch but several months later and I’m still alive. But still slightly suspicious.

1. The random manor house buried in the woods somewhere in Lancashire-Because it was a random manor house buried in the woods. And haunted. And had a shrine. Nuff said.

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Two people are earnestly looking at a rock. One of them is talking knowledgably about the rock with an air of great authority. The other one is taking photos of the rock with an expensive camera. I sneer inwardly and then realize I am here to look at the rocks as well. And my boyfriend is photographing the rocks.

These were not always rocks though-they were WITCHES! It’s true. The naughty witches  led by Long Meg (the long stone of course- see it all fits together)  dancing (no doubt widdershins) on the Sabbat were turned into stone by a furious anti-revelry God who really needs to see what is going on in the average Wetherspoons on a Sunday afternoon if he wants to get enraged and do a bit of good old fashioned smiting.

Apparently it is impossible to count all the stones correctly but if you do the magic of the stone circle is lost forever. This leaves the reasonable supposition that someone over the ages might well have counted the stones correctly because delightful as the stones are, there appears little in the way of Magic, more drizzle, rabbit burrows and earnest men talking knowledgably about rocks.

Long Meg and her daughters are made even more pleasing due to the fact that a weather-beaten sign points to ‘Druid Stones.’ Everyone knows that the prefix of Druid makes everything more exciting, mysterious and swirled in the shadows of an ancient past that was all sunsets, chanting and dark dark sacrifices like some sort of real life Dungeons and Dragons but without the acne.

But just when the novelty of patting each standing stone has begun to wear off slightly, we come to Long Meg and nestled against her in a hollow lies a shrine.

Against the sombre greys and greens of a wet day is a cluster of colour-a Hindu statue, two playing cards which must have some amazingly exciting occult significance but I am buggered if I know what it is, a letter, flowers and trinkets like some tiny little pagan pound shop. Finding an impromptu slightly hidden shrine at Druidy witchy standing stones is impossibly exciting and I am happy.

Little Selkirk Mill, a ‘biodynamic’ tearoom and mill is nearby and we decide to go in, enchanted by the bright paint and tumbling flowers surrounding it. Ducks waddle, chickens huddle and we discover that ‘biodynamic’ means bloody expensive. It all looks very nice but a fiver for some soup and bread is just too much. We buy a loaf of £2.20 bread. It is heavy, earnest and joyless. I demolish it sadly and butterlessly in the car. Now THIS is what they mean by middleclass poverty.

The house is a tip and there are many important things that we really need to sort out like stair gates so we decide to not go home and keep driving. As far away as we can. And that means Alston.

Alston has to be the remotest place in England. It is a happily long way away from a house with an unfixed stair gate and little cairns of baby sick on the carpet. We get there along a long winding hilly road through high moorland and warning signs. The town itself is a small grey nestle on a hillside. A little shop that sells all that cutesy homely stuff like slate hearts on ribbons is closing. As has a ‘artisan’ bakery. Alston is one of those places that straddles rural poverty and Cath Kidson- there are boy racers revving up the high street and old men in sadly over-smart clothing booming ‘hello’ as they slowly pace up and down, up and down. The isolation hits home when seeing people with full sized heaving trollies going around the small Co-op which is clearly the only ‘supermarket’ for a long way around. This scares me more than it should.

The thought of living in a beautiful rural setting but only having one or two brands of ketchup to choose from fills me with a claustrophobic terror. I fall in love with a quaint detached three-bedroom house with wood burning stove, dining room and walled garden for under a hundred grand in the estate agents. But it would feel a hollow pretence at life to live there with such a sparse range of branded products for sale nearby. I realize there is an echoing void where my soul should be as I look over the now sun drenched moors and mountains and suddenly have a burning desire to get in the car and fuck off to the nearest Asda.

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=101

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-27372022.html

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