434: George Formby (or 'I'm fed up coming up with blog titles again')

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393: Nightclubs n that in Blackpool

Blackpool Night Life

Last Saturday: my first time ever on a night out, club pub or otherwise, in a sober state of mind. Upon arriving at Blackpool's Sanuk 'sober' was the word: I felt bloated, confused, scared. Slutty couples frugging viciously against one another on the dance floor – welcome to Blackpool, baby! - face on tit, hand up skirt; bird giving it Beyonce-promo – legs open, crouch ass to the ground; shaven-headed Ben Sherman thinks he is the king pimpdaddy. 

Blackpool's predatory males have – by necessity, in battling against the visual feast of hen and stag costumes – taken peacocking to an absurd level. A man about town, with the sweet scent of hot young lady in his vibrating nostrils, must dress in full combat fatigues or a fireman costume. He approaches a target knowing she will want to try on his hat; this is his substitute for genuine charm, personality, wit or likeability. Peacocking.

Being in a night club with just a glass of water in my hand, and clarity in my mind and eyes, is seriously strange. The place seemed lighter than expected. Everyone's behaviour, speech, movements, everything was too ludicrous for words. Despite feeling hugely self-conscious I needed to dance; every time I stopped for a moment I realised how dreadful the environment was. 

Desperately disgusting and annoying people clawing and climbing over one another; absurdly unsexy posturing at the end of every eye-line. That bizarre duck-face pout that women seem to have adopted en masse as being a desirable look. For some time I was able to forget myself and step away from my tedious I'm-better-than-all-you onlooker status, and get lost in an extended mix of old school hip-hop and early-90's pop rave.

Sanuk seemed to have all the properties of a good nightclub: three rooms (one playing rock, pop and hip hop classics, one urban, and the third was Hed Kandi. It was not bad. There was also an outdoor terrace with sheltered seating, a bar, and a kitchen selling bacon butties – fantastic! All they need is a metal night, and for me to be ten years younger, and I'd be a regular. Anyhoo, I fancy I may not be the target audience for a place like this, so it's just one of those things where I'll have to come to terms with the fact that my opinion on the subject is of no value. Good night :)

391: Yesterday and Today

SO yesterday, I sounded like an old man going on about this is a disgrace, but on the other hand one finds this marvellous when I should have had better things to do. The next stage of my downfall is contacting the Points of View television programme to put this and that to rights. The first thing I would like to complain about is the incorrect use of the of the term 4d to describe cinema experiences that as well as including 3d glasses also include smells, spraying water and other silliness. As everyone knows the 4^th dimension is time; as far as I'm aware there has never been a film without this element. That's what seperates moving pictures from photographs. It's not important; I'm just saying.

monkeyshines

On Central Pier, an elderly couple sat on the decrepit wooden benches framed with rusty cast iron that form the outer boundary much of the way around. I told you we shouldn't have come to this pier, she said. It's all the same, it doesn't matter, he replied. That's you two, my sis'-in-law said to my fiancee and I. On the glass floor at the top of Blackpool Tower I found myself picturing falling and smashing, dying in an explosive puddle of gore; not afraid of heights, but an overactive imagination inducing vertigo. In the lift to the top I looked out through the windows and observed endless metres of heavily rusted iron (or steel, or whatever), almost fully eaten through at some points. The glass floor at the top is robust and powerful, but the tower itself is likely to snap in a high wind.

Today I got off the bus near work and all around me seemed to be comedy chaos; a sudden surge of unlikely unlucky mishaps. Firstly a gentleman in front of me received his Metro from the hand of a Metro-person; he was perhaps too eagre to stick his nose in the day's news, and neglected to look where he was going. He crashed knees first into an item of street furniture (some box containing telephone or electric junctions) outside Dawsons. Almost flying over the top, like a wrestler sent crashing into the steel steps with an Irish whip, he clutched his legs. I suspect the shock and embarrassment was worse than the pain, but he stumbled and limped, and thanked me for my concern in a please leave me alone to deal with this kind of way.

Upon turning the corner I saw two glaziers working on fitting a massive new window into the space left by the rioting mindless. The window was clearly an expensive custom job; incredibly thick and upward of fifteen-feet tall. They used their little gaziers vacuum-cup handles to hold the pane vertical about a foot from its destination. They shared a look of panic as they discussed the huge crack running horizontally from one side to the other about two foot from the ground: shit, what are we going to do? I don't know. This is the last thing we need... They had obeyed the first rule of being a glazier: always park the van on the same side of the road as the job, but still they had been unable to prevent comedy smashage. Poor bastards. Back to the tin bath and lehr kiln.

390: I, Feedback

Had a really good weekend, celebrating two birthdays of two great people. As a result I am exhausted. Today's blog post will therefore consist of a slightly edited copy of an email I sent to Blackpool Tower via their contact-us form. It's miserable old man complainy, cos I was grumpy, hungry and tired when I got in. At some point soon I'll redress the balance, because there is a lot of fun to be had at Blackpool:

After leaving the Tower Eye we were asked to use the "tell us what you think" survey machine to offer feedback (as it has just re-opened after the Council bought and renovated it). My first feedback would be that the touch screen on the machine was next to unusable, so I was unable to type my comments. I'd tap R and nothing; repeatedly tap R and then eventually a 4 would pop up on the screen. I gave the whole affair up as pointless, assuming the same survey would be available on the website. If it is there, it's well hidden.

The comments I wanted to make are as follows:

The cost of £12 per adult was extortionate, and actually reaching the top of the tower required standing in seven or eight queues (lift to 5th floor, queue to buy ticket, queue to hand over ticket, queue to sit on a girder (compulsory!), queue to get into a holding pen, queue in the holding pen, and finally queue to get up the last lift).

The holding pen (waiting room to get into the 4D cinema) was an offence to human dignity. There were no seats or toilets (children audibly worrying to their parents about their inability to hold it in, and elderly people in need of a rest. Some people even made jokes about Zyklon-B gas being pumped into the room - that's how much of a nasty surprise the holding pen was!).

There was nothing to do in this room save stare at the TVs mostly showing thinly-veiled adverts for Blackpool attractions. There is plenty of boasting about the rich history of the tower (lots of facts, figures, photos, and film) yet no actual artefacts. The holding pen would have been an ideal space for a mini-museum with display cabinets showing interesting Blackpool or Tower-related memorabilia.

By the time we were let out of the holding pen we were primed for the 4D experience to be dreadful. Fortunately it was not; the 3D was exciting and the extra 4th D was a surprise. However ; must one be subjected to that annoying kid in the helmet every time one wants to enjoy the beautiful view? I fail to see the logical connection. £2-3 seems like a reasonable price to go directly to the top, without the rest of the nonsense. Essentially the film was a compulsory advert for the Towers' other attractions, badly disguised as an "experience".

Finally the £6 cost of the keyrings and magnets (featuring the photos of us sat on the girder) is disgraceful. The cost of these novelty items at privately-owned theme parks is bad enough, but at an attraction owned by the Council it is a disgrace. I have never understand why one cannot pay a couple of pounds to have the picture emailed (or I could apply for it under freedom of information!).

On a positive note, the renovation of the Top of the Tower (the Walk of Faith) is marvellous, and were it not for the cost and the subjection to the 4D cinema, I would be a regular visitor.  

313: BLACKPOOL - Wish you were here?

Blackpool today, and I got through ten handy-packs of Kleenex and had to resort to stealing loo roll.  (Compulsory retort to obvious masturbatory-themed joke, “Yes, it was that exciting”.)  Crippled by a summer cold/severe hayfever, but the jolly uplifting fun of Blackpool still allows me to say C’est la vie and live and let live to the cold virus and the plant pollen.  Aside: no it doesn’t; despite the fun of Blackpool I still cry death to common colds and all anemophilous plant species.  But, erm?  Oh, yes... Blackpool!

Things I saw in Blackpool

• As we were arriving the car in front had a Blackpool FC scarf which boasted We Are Premier!  No you’re not mate.  Get with the now granddad.

• Moments after parking the car we saw our first hen do.  The oldies walked with their sashes reading mother of the bride, mother of the groom, and the like.  The youngies trailed behind with their bride to be and bridesmaid sashes.  All wore blue denim skirts, black tops, and pink deely-boppers.  We turned the corner and outside the first B&B we passed, sat a stag-do drinking blue WKD with their breakfast.  Welcome to Blackpool!

• Of course everywhere we looked there were stag and hen parties, all dressed to match one another, and all having a huge time in the North West’s capital of the pre-nuptial celebration.  One group of young women were dressed from head to toe in black robes; sort of like a shapeless colourless sheet, that even covered their heads and faces leaving only a small slit for the eyes.  They weren’t wearing sashes so I couldn’t tell which one was getting married.

• You now have to pass through security scanners and undergo a bag search to get into Blackpool Pleasure Beach; bit weird.  They confiscated my spanner which I had cruelly calculated to throw into the works.  As it turns out I didn’t need to, as the heat was doing its best to shut down all the rides.

• In the queue for the Big One a large dark-haired woman in a black flowered summer dress had an entire ‘knitted’ sleeve of self-harmed scar tissue, unbroken from shoulder to wrist.  And she wasn’t even close to being the weirdest looking person there.  No offence Blackpool, but your gene pool is dangerously shallow.  There are a lot of sand-scraping knuckles, Neanderthal brow-ridges and overly hairy faces... and that’s just the women... the orange women...

• A spectacularly good collection of seaside postcards.

• Hot dogs, fish and chips, ice cream, chips and gravy, candy floss, seagull, cockles, muscles, whelks and oiks.  Snotty tissues.

311: Summer breeze, please

The heat has dropped splodge like sweaty lettuce and hot greasy bacon slapping repeatedly against your cheeks and rubbing itself in your armpits.  Who put this swelt in the sky, and who melted the line holding it above our heads?  Comfortable chill has been usurped by gasping airless buses and window burn.  Personally I’m stuck to the sofa and the walls around me can no longer support their own weight; I don’t know about you, and the structural integrity of your anthropomorphic home.  How could I presume to such knowledge?

As the water goes down your gullet it immediately evaporates from the top of your clammy pate and mixes with the tissue of your socks to form a richly dense cheesy pâté in your shoes.  Oh, the joys ofsummer.  “Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind...”  Yeah?  Oh really, where’s that fucking breeze?  I’ll take the breeze if you’ve got one, but you can keep your bloody jasmine and all that darn pollen.  Nope; I’m your typical modern small-chested asthmatic weakling, riddled with allergies.  Common cold in summer and allergy in winter.  But beside that I’m fine, thanks for asking.  And how are you?

Time for a song:

And again on spotify!

Let's have it again, but better:

And... on spotify!

Oh, go on then. One more time!  And cranked up a further notch of awesomeness:

Spot' it!

Says me, and the searing keys of my burned up laptop.  There is nothing that is not a source of uncomfortable heat - the fridge radiates burning plasma; the cold water tap drips superheated fire-water; and the coolant systems of my biomechanical organs are magma chambers ready to explode.  Everything runs sweat, except my sinuses which are concreted up and abandoned.  But beside that I’m fine, thanks for asking.  And how are you?

 Blackpool tomorrow for some Pleasure at the Beach; and a day spent eating rock, floss, and dog.  There will be cool summer breeze with a slight smell of Blackpool’s dirty water, and the jolly sight of a seagull cheekily pinching an ice cream from the hand of an elderly gent wearing a knotted hanky on his head.  The breeze will blow gently through my long flowing hair, lifting up my fringe exposing a slowly receding line; follicles abandoning their posts one by one.  Fortune will have sent all thrill-seekers to join the same queues at Alton Towers, leaving the Big One free as my own personal play-thing.  All these things will happen.  I will them to happen.

Tomorrow I can report back the power of will.  The demands I have made the universe will be met, you betcha.  I’ll bring you back a donkey ride and some hen-night filth and a Wish You Were Here tattoo on my arse.