Unicycle Emptiness

Heysham Village does not fit. It does not look right here, a quaint hamlet of 17th century cottages, sandwiched between a nuclear power station and the boarded windows and fleeting seasonal delights of Morecambe. It’s summer though and Morecambe is a town suddenly alive again, twinkling in the sunshine, buzzing, new cafes, bustling pavements, ice creams and hot dogs, not the grey ghost town with the smashed glass and bitter winds of the winter time.  A retro ice-cream van, Sunset Ices proclaims ‘every day is like sundae’, the most post modern gloriously knowing Morrisey related ironic quote ever seen on an ice-cream van.

Anyway, so a walk up the promenade dodging punks, dog shit and burly sun burnt families. There is a café on the battery, all glass and chrome squatting amongst the semi-derilict Victoriana. We accidently stop for a Guinness and white chocolate cake. It is very good cake.

The walk to Heysham is lined with novelty. The regeneration of the area is in metal quotes on the pavement, fountains, giant photo frames, sculptures, an impossible to climb climbing wall like a group of hyperactive children were put in a think tank and given a million quid. Which is perfect for Morecambe. It works. The tacky and the unrealistic, the Christmas cracker fleeting delight in a transient brightly coloured pleasure.

It is cold but people are pretending it isn’t. It’s June. It has to be nice. Just don’t look up at those big black clouds spiraling overhead.

And now the regeneration has ended and a playground has no fountains but just an elderly man high on a battered graffitied swing whilst his wife looks at him worriedly. A police van lurks outside a block of flats.

And then Heysham village. Suddenly we are in Devon. There are hanging baskets outside whitewashed cottages not multiple entry buzzers and blankets over windows.

Gardens are a polite retirement riot of immaculate flowers. There are china figurines and hunched figures in the windows.  Day-trippers eat ice creams and point at things. It’s all jolly nice. Beautiful houses of varying shapes, sizes and ages lie higgledy piggedy up the main street; people expectantly wait outside the pub, as it is not yet noon. Shoulders glow luridly red.

We have a nettle tea outside a tearoom. I do not like the nettle tea because of its resemblance to urine; a thought once thought that cannot be dissipated.  Two small dogs have a very noisy fight causing great consternation and secret delight.

A shop sells old-fashioned crap of such wondrousness, it becomes kitsch then crap all over again. A basket in the window sells spare cuckoo clock parts! A plaster representation of the Apollo space shuttle lurks uneasily behind it along with a copy of The Da Vinci Code, a tray of rings and some queasily patterned aprons.

St Peter’s church perches on the edge of the sea with the gravestones toppling down towards the cliffs. It is tiny, ancient and vulnerable making it seem far warmer a place to be than normal cold lofty impervious churches. One feels almost protective to it and its clutch of old weather beaten gravestones to those who drowned in this calm blue bay so many years ago.

Then the barrows, a cliff with the even more ancient St Patrick’s chapel remains as if to say to St Peter’s, what you are now, I once was and so like me you will be. That’s unless the ever-encroaching sea does not swallow them both one stormy night.

There are Viking graves here, rock-hewn body shaped holes overlooking the bay. They are tiny. It must have been hard work raping and plundering when you’re only the size of Kylie Minogue. Awww. Cute ickle Vikings.   Some say they are not Viking graves but 11th century Christian graves but that ruins the intrigue of tiny Vikings running amok. The graves also feature on Black Sabbath’s greatest hits album cover. The underage kids who drink here have the coolest hangout ever.

You walk some more over the cliff and woomph. That was unexpected. Even though you know it’s there, its gigantic bulk dominates the local coastline, it still comes as a shock.  Heysham Power Station. Pylons strut towards it closer and closer, it is huge, grey, impenetrable and mysterious, so utterly futuristic it looks unreal looming here so, so near the wind lashed church and tumbling cottages like a badly made sci fi movie outtake. Ferries sail past, there is a tangle of roads and car parks, a hum and crackle of movement, people, action, cables, wires, smoke and smells, chemicals and secrecy, danger of the modern kind, not a squall and a fishing boat danger.

I turn and it disappears and head back past the graves of the dead and towards the temporary hedonism and warmth of Morecambe and an ice cream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love Morecambe. I shall go again next week.

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