Unicycle Emptiness

It feels somewhat pointless to write about Edinburgh. It has all been admired, photographed, written about before, done to death. Camera lenses shine predatorily down the little cobbled alleys, which look untouched and ignored since the 18^th century but whose images are saturated into millions of eyeballs across the globe. Tourists stop in the middle of the road to point or goggle, stride casually out in front of swerving cars and Scottish accents are about as common as a pint under three quid.

But I utterly love Edinburgh, feel like a walking cliché for doing so, like someone in love with a high class escort, want it to be my lovely little secret and not flaunting its wares for everyone and anyone, I should be rhapsodising over the dumpy one in the corner with hidden charms, Motherwell say, not worshipping this overpriced gilded tourist trap museum with the fucking bagpipe music squalling from every shitty tartan splattered shop on the Royal Mile where a can of coke is one pound fucking eighty and you can’t move for some dim-witted buffoon uncurling a map or expensive camera to take a shitty picture of something that Google images will throw up a thousand better images of.

And lurid placards for ghost tours take every inch of mystery or mystique away from the thought of a secret underworld that can now be summoned up by a spotty student on a work placement scheme at eight pm every night once you have paid your eight quid. There is such fierce competition that flyers all but guarantee a free supernatural entity with every booking.

There are mannequins in tartan mini dresses in shop windows and heaven forbid even tartan Doc Martens, what a wonderful way to combine two national stereotypes; over confident students with white made-up faces hurl flyers and extravagant lies about the genius of the fringe shows they are promoting at you whilst talking to each other in strident smug voices.

Oh yes, Edinburgh knows how to fleece you. But it does it so prettily.

Look, how can you be angry when no matter where you are, you can see Arthur’s Seat looming grandiosely over you, when the sea suddenly shimmers at the bottom of every steep hill, when buildings wear their ancientness so damn casually-a wonder down a fag strewn close towards the train station and there is a dark sooty building, not a famous one but just your average Edinburgh building, about as common as a New Look cardigan and I happen to see the date 1563 above the door. It is mind-blowing in its nonchalance.

I love the way the stairs down the steep closes are swayed and humpbacked by the centuries of feet traversing the same journey, such everyday casual history in the everyday not locked behind a museum cabinet.

And talking of museums, the National Museum of Scotland is superb. Utterly enormous and impossible to find ones way around like some sort of Escher doodling bought to life, it contains a formidable amount of Scottish history, the most terrifyingly exciting being The Maiden, a huge iron guillotine used, actually used to slice the heads of the unfortunate of yore. And you can actually touch this antiquated piece of murder, the last thing some people ever saw. That so beats a stuffed fox.

Death begets hunger and so off the main drag where I am starting to loathe humanity, especially posh humanity from the Home Counties and their sodding flyers. And why fly half way round the world to a new country and then queue to go into a bloody Frankie and Bennies?

There are some wonderful places to eat in Edinburgh that aren’t Frankie and Bennies and whereas you are robbed for snacks, drink and booze, a decent meal can be had for five or six quid. Khushi’s Diner is our first port of call, veggie curry, deep fried bread, some wonderful fried heart attack Indian street food with relish and two soft drinks come to a tenner and are served in a gloriously decorated room, all Indian bling and opulence.

In Delhi also comes highly recommended, a dangerously material and candle bedecked room  serving exquisite Indian food for about a fiver a head. It is exotic, womblike and snug, yes the Home Counties accents prevail but it is Festival season and there is no escape apart from when actually inside the magic of the theatre. Henderson’s is another superb vegetarian restaurant and deli, no ethnic nick knacks or clumpy lentil burgers here, it is white, clean yet unpretentious serving excellent food for around seven or eight pounds. I got cheese and biscuits for around two quid and so huge the chunk of cheese, I ate my fill there and then, gave some to my partner, wrapped it up, ate some with the napkin sadly still attached to it on the train going through Penrith then finished it on a crumpet the day after that in bed in Lancaster.

Around Haymarket, and up Lothian Road there are enticing charity shops, cheap cafes and takeaways and more an air of shambolicness and grubbiness. There are less tourists here and thus actual real Scottish accents ca be heard. It being Edinburgh there are still plenty of arty cinemas and bars though, cuddled up next to places advertising mighty fry-ups and cheap haircuts. A bakery has luridly hued cakes toppling towards the sky-they have an actual sheen on them. I yearn for the explosion of mock cream in my mouth and the accompanying familiar mixture of nausea and delight.

We treat ourselves to a meal at L’Artichaut, a renowned veggie restaurant but where the lunchtime meals are six fifty. It is wonderful. I have seldom eaten anywhere with linen napkins. They even have a little paper ring with a picture of an artichoke on. I feel a bit famous before realising I cannot afford to eat and have a drink of wine at the same time and reality dawns. Then I realise I am actually eating lime meringues with pink peppercorns and feel like a fatter Paris Hilton.

The charity shops in nearby Stockbridge add to the illusion as I pick up a coat to find its £250. Well heeled is not the word. My partner says he has never seen so many waistcoats in one place.

Then down towards Leith along the river, past beautiful old world cottages, estates and swans. Leith has become more and more gentrified but still has charity shops where things are under a tenner and workers cafes battle with bistros. Nearby Portobello has amusement arcades, a fine sandy beach and an air of old fashioned seaside charm. There are no yuppie flats here. Yet.

A recommendation also takes us to Duddingston a mile or so of curiously countrified walk from Edinburgh. It is an idyllic village but much like the rest of Edinburgh hides behind a façade of normality because I suspect that in order to live here, one must have to be very very rich. Time makes everything quaint-an iron collar outside the church used to punish long dead ne’er-do-wells is a cutesy relic to photograph although there are few tourists here, heaven forbid actually walking, leaving The Real Loch Ness Experience behind and stepping into the Frankie and Benny free countryside…

The Sheep’s Heid is meant to be the oldest pub in Scotland and is certainly dark and antiquated, furnished with what looks like the entire contents of an auction room. The prices are modern enough though.

That’s Edinburgh for you. A place where even the ghosts come at a price but you can’t get your wallet out quickly enough. I would move here tomorrow if I could.

http://www.lartichaut.co.uk/

http://www.khushisdiner.com/

http://www.hendersonsofedinburgh.co.uk/

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Grab a selection of your favourite architecture, whether it be red brick decaying factories with trees growing on the roof, Tudor quaintness, Georgian splendour or immense glassy skyscrapers from the future. Give them a shake, add some grubbily enticing looking Kebab houses and randomly plonk down in a dazzling array of whirls, lines and patterns. Congratulations. You have made a Manchester.

I love this place; it constantly changes and evolves, new bars and skyscrapers soaring from the remnants of cotton factories and warehouses, antiquated little streets, poncy bars next to wholesale fabric shops and curry houses. There is a sense of urgency, something is always happening or about to but with none of the smug self satisfied trying too hard to be edgy side of London. It is shambolic, retro, futuristic, and a living breathing place. The centre is not a ghost town on the weekends; people live here in the gluts of fancy apartments now going for a song and behind the bedraggled curtains of rooms above gyms and takeaways.

The Northern Quarter is my favourite, swanky looking bars but where a bottle of wine can be had for eight quid, dingy merry pubs filled with human flotsam and jetsam, retro boutiques and chi-chi cafes alongside places where the menu is advertised on faded fluorescent stars. The five story shrine to Emo-hood is here, Affleck’s Palace, I feel old here yearning at the multitudes of sparkling hairclips and brightly coloured hoodies as dazzling flocks of over-confident teenagers cackle and shriek past.

You can afford to live here, it is not a tourist attraction for the moneyed, it has not all been developed and redeveloped ad infinitum, real history pokes out on every turn and makes the modern all the more vivid for it. A microcosm, a kaleidoscope, a journey through the people’s history.

Museums often seem only to tell the stories of the rich. The glazed glass eyes of dead animals shot by gouty dead cowards, enormous dingy paintings of a florid bearded man or simpering rich woman in extravagant skirtage, gilt and cornicing, nothing to relate to, nothing to make me feel these were people like me.

The People’s History Museum in Manchester is different. It shows the lives and deaths of the real movers and shakers, the strikers, the martyrs and the rioters, the people in the street trying to earn enough money to pay for tea.  There are coffins you can open, clothes to try on, vintage Gay Rights banners and not a dead polar bear in sight. It is interactive without being patronising, interesting and ambitious and makes you realise the gaping void at the centre of how history is normally presented. People whose lives we look on now because they actually did something, something important and brave and innovative that actually affects us now, were not just inbred lucky sperm with silly hair* poncing around on horseback.

We go to look at Art next but the art galleries are all closed because it’s Monday so we go to the Odd Bar in the Northern Quarter and have veggie black pudding kebabs and happily eavesdrop on the swarms on conversation from the chattering classes around us.

The Grade two listed Marble Arch squats on an unattractive road on the way to Ancoats. Inside, one is dazzled by a multitude of tiles mosaics adorning the walls, ceiling and floor. The interior seems almost untouched from its beginning in 1888 apart from the waft of Nirvana and the chalkboard advertising very nice looking food indeed but with the eight to ten pound mark putting it outside the average 19^th labourers pay packet. There is a microbrewery attached (Marble Brewery) there is chocolate and ginger flavoured beer and the chips look excellent. Ergo it is a Good Pub.

I will never learn to get my bearings in Manchester, no matter how many times I go, there seems no rhyme or reason to it, it is fluid, changeable and malleable. I just walk, watch, listen and admire.

*The person, not the sperm is the one with hair.

More Manchester pics here

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Moniaive is in the official middle of nowhere, the prettiest middle of nowhere to ever exist, shimmering through the rain and accessed by a winding road through sparsely populated yet lush countryside unadorned by agricultural clutter and sprawl, just modest white crofts and the occasional imposing driveway leading no doubt to some utopian idyll buried slumbering in the woods. It is countryside that doesn’t reek of money, second homes, stiff new Barbour’s and people from Islington. It is country not countryside and a crow is strung by the neck on a gate in the old tradition of warning other crows of their fate should they try and encroach on what was formerly theirs.

An avenue of trees leads down to Moniaive: it seems almost a vast urban sprawl, this delicate smattering of houses along the road compared to the empty journey but we were driving past a McDonalds in Dumfries less than an hour ago watching big seagulls and people squawk and litter and search for the last salty chip in the red rectangular boxes.

Moniaive has apparently become a haven for the artists, artisans and bohemians of Scotland, a gushing piece about it in the Galloway News led me here and yes, here is the chocolatiers looking like the witches house in Hansel and Gretel, so alluring and pretty but I fear to step within, not because of witches but because I suspect the prices won’t be from a halcyon past. Here are the quiet modest bistros next to spotless simple houses with fake flowers in the window and The Georges Hotel with a beer garden that is simply a field, benches and nature. It also has an excitingly named Tramps Hole and is one of those quintessentially Scottish places that are so steeped in blood and history, it is taken as a modest given, not to be wrapped up in ribbon, glorified, sold to tourists and made into a paying attraction.

There are monuments to martyrs here, graves to the murdered religious dissenters known as covenanters but this is not a hewn from the rocks ‘authentic Scottish Experience’. Many of the voices heard are of the well-fed English variety and charming bistros with prices in the teens are not an integral aspect of every small Scottish town.

But a sign in the village store amongst the ads for folk festivals and art events  warns people that they will not be served alcohol until 10am.

We have heard good things about the Green Tea House cafe  but I am suspicious, as The Galloway News never seems to write anything actually negative about Scottish food establishments. It is however an exercise in how to make your tea room the best damn tea room in town. I did have a slight yearning towards the pub as tea rooms make me think of old ladies in an overheated florid room gorging on crumbling old cakes and talking with sweet venom about their relatives but this tea room is lofty, minimal yet cosy with a garden, a fireplace and big shuttered windows overlooking dark dark trees. The organic menu is a good blend of veggie and non-veggie and my aubergine and tomato bake, salad wedges and salad an immense thing of wonder for under six pounds. There is a slightly awkward moment when having tried the healthy herb salt on the table and declaring it like something used to cut cocaine with, I ask for real salt and am politely yet firmly refused. Not that it needed it to be fair. The cakes are of the sort that would be served at high tea to beaming mop haired children from Enid Blyton, groaning with cream, jam and chocolate and it is everything one could ask for but has spoilt me now as I use it to measure other places and they always come up substandard which fills me with a grim pleasure as I do not know how and if I shall ever be able to find my way back to this strange little oasis in the middle of nowhere.

http://www.moniaive.org.uk/

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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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Everyone loves a good bakery. Seriously, everyone. We are not talking your flaccid squishy Greggs pasties with their slushy acidic filling but a proper non-chain bakery with green trim and windows with baskets of goodies in. A long counter where hikers queue for sandwiches for picnics, and piles of pastries, cakes and pies topple like an anorexic’s wet dream. And not your normal French horns and dry cheese and onion pasties containing a thin floor of dense mush with a cavernous pastry hall of air.

We are talking vegan dragon pie, cottage cheese, spinach and almond pasties, beestings (a custard filled bread bigger than my head) Cumberland Rum Nickies (an oozing delight I regret not purchasing with the bitter regret of one who has accidently smothered their firstborn) and knobbly squat loaves. Hazelemere Café and Bakery is an Aladdin’s cave of calories.  And my reassuringly heavy bag containing two pasties and two cakes comes to just a fiver.

Grange Over Sands is so genteel it makes Windermere resemble Brixton. Everyone has politely flocked here determined to have a ‘simply lovely day’ and nothing, nothing is going to stop them. Apart from slow service at a tearoom.

It is interesting for the lack of actual sand, a seaside holiday town where the sea is reassuringly far away and unthreatening. There are no fag butts in the sand here because Grange has cunningly got rid of the underclass with their noisy shrieking kids with lurid plastic accessories by having an estuary instead with dead crabs and rare birds stretching prehistorically in its vast human unfriendliness down to the far away flickering of the bay.

Looking across you can see the ghostly bulk of Barrow Upon Furnesses’ decaying industry but here is all old-fashioned pleasantness, grey rinses, unflattering floral skirts and Christian fish logos on B and B’s advertising morning coffee instead of happy hours.  Even the  ‘sea side’ train station looks like it was stolen from a model railway and of course comes with attached antiquarian bookshop.  A memorial park stretches along side with waddling ducks and babies, ponds, flowers and a lone sulking emo in black on the bandstand.

Up the high street lie more tearooms, ironmongers, grocers, all the lovely old fashioned shops one would expect here-although I suspect a Tesco’s MUST lurk somewhere nearby for the more prosaic. A pub advertising Sky Sports and house doubles is a delightful abnormality, my eyes hurt from so many hues of pastel shades.  Ice creams (the nice creamy local sort not horrid plastic wrapped ones) drip down quivering blue veined arms; there are children but nice ones, ones who no doubt enjoy bird watching more than Waltzers with parents dressed in Gap.

We disappear like Alice down the rabbit hole up an enticing footpath and tramp through Eggerslack Woods, empty of day-trippers here, just birds, trees and scurrying in the undergrowth and emerge on sunny limestone pavement far, far above the town. It is beautiful here, wilderness within a few miles of a politely bustling town where pound shop fudge costs £2.75 and where people have gone to get away from it all.

Find some walks and stuff in the locale here

Click for more pics of Grange and lovely neighbour Arnside

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Do you ever get that urge to disappear? That burning desire to hear an automated female robotic voice announce destinations glamorous only in their distance from you, when Kidderminster becomes a beacon call, when you have lived, worked and slept in less than a square mile for five days and you just want an adventure, to get on a train, feel it slide away underneath you and to arrive into somewhere new?

I had that craving on Saturday. It was a floridly hot unnatural May morning and the  crowding shouting  different possibilities of a wonderful day were all too much.  I could not make a decision without thinking of all the other ones left to shrivel and die. So we went to the train station to let fate take its course.

Leeds.

I had been there once before and disliked it. Found it bland,  concrety,  commercial and a bit nothingy. But it would be a pleasing train journey through Yorkshire and it would be the difference I craved. An adventure.

The minute I put my card in the machine to pay the forty quid I knew I had made a bad decision. Suddenly as if through a tunnel to heaven I saw the Morecambe train bathed in luminescent glory. Golden children with buckets and spades, happy beaming adults with tattoos and beers, joviality, happiness on golden sand (and of course with the Palatine serving the best pizza ever-see Morecambe review) and for 2.50 return.  Then I had one of those devilishly bad moods clamp down like a personal thundercloud.

Suddenly I felt I was heading to Auschwitz. The train was hot, cramped and we were facing the wrong way. And I then found the journey was over two hours.  I sat looking out through reinforced plastic at people having fun as I sweated in a metal coffin, felt hot, tired, hungry and thirsty and ended getting out at Skipton after an hour travelling as could not bear to simply witness the day as a guest and not a participant any longer.

Skipton was hot, crowded and annoying. Old dears kept stopping dead in the narrow swarming high street to point at stupid carved wooden ducks and sweating cheese. Women pushed prams bigger than my house with malevolent arrogant fury through red burny ankles. We went to a veggie place with decent reviews (I will not give the name as just cannot bear to be rude about a nice veggie place) but my mood and my ankles were on fire and when the ‘bruschetta’ arrived-thick cut brown bread with toppings rather than the light dainty Italian snack I expected I turned into sub Paris Hilton, sneering quietly and angrily about it whilst beaming at the waitress. It was the same price as the pizza in Morecambe, which actually made me feel sick. Or maybe that was the veggie pate.

So that was Skipton. I did not want to continue to Leeds. But I had a blog to write! Well, more to the point, I was not wasting that forty bloody quid even though there was a direct train to Morecambe, now the Champs Elysees and Mecca combined.  Despite the fact neither of us wanted to go to Leeds, we went.

And it was crap. Feel free to comment on how wonderful it actually is and why didn’t I go to this that and the other place, it will make a change from spam and I am aware there must be nice bits but the centre was busy and filled with anger, Lobster red people barged, there was no trace of greenery, just chain shops, sunburn and aggression.  A bar down by the riverside offered an overpriced respite but still the anger remained. And the dreams of Morecambe.

I had to salvage the day. I looked up an historic walk and tried to follow the route but that was also shit.  Oh look, a building covered in scaffolding. A church. Not even with the cold damp sweet decay of a graveyard next to it. Just concrete. I argue with my boyfriend about where the exciting named ‘dark arches’ were to be found and we returned on separate trains (both filled with racists) and I saw Hebden Bridge roll past and wish we had gone there, think of Morecambe, think of sitting in the garden or Williamsons park in Lancaster (see Lancaster review) think of my utterly diminished bank balance and watch the day so full of promise gently prettily die  from a prison window.

And I decide that sometimes, only sometimes it’s good to be unadventurous and to be somewhere you can lie, relax and just be, rather than to seek relentlessly  after something or somewhere else.

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I love the works of MR James. He was an eminent historian at Oxford and renowned in his time for his meticulous research into the medieval period. He also almost as a sideline wrote ghost stories. Ghost stories where no blood was ever spilt, only darkly alluded to and bumbling academics who only believed in truth, evidence and tweed would stumble across a holy relic on a windswept historical place of importance, jovially pop it in his tweed pocket not listening to any dire warnings from mumbling anxious yokels and then suffer the consequences of dark history and dark forces trying to reclaim what was rightfully theirs.  And rational scholar tweed man realises that not everything can be relegated, categorised and understood.

Which is the scariest thing of all.

A View From A Hill is my favourite. I have read the story and watched a TV adaptation of it-his books work better with their oh so fastidious stiff upper lip Englishness of a time now gone rather than the rather garish TV which has to show you not allude-and of course one’s imagination is the darkest thing of all.

A View From A Hill is about a historical academic specialising in the medieval period (I told you! They ALL are!) who comes across some binoculars when studying in some crumbling country manor. He goes for a walk and looks through the binoculars to see a glorious abbey rich in complexity, detail and utterly real and existing. He touches it, he draws it, and he knows it should not, does not exist in his present. Then a shadow appears…

Cockersands Abbey made me yearn for and fear those binoculars. I feel so alone, so at the mercy of Nature that I feel a bit scared and agoraphobic. It was meant to be a short cycle from Lancaster along the cycle path past the wonderful prehistoric Conder Green, all marshy tufts, boat skeletons (and The Stork, an utterly excellent pub specialising in of course, South African cuisine) through to Glasson Dock, a weird yet sublime place, boat masts reaching to the skies yet no sea, ice creams, motor bikers, hundreds of them it seems, a couple of pubs, a café, no particular centre but water, canal, fisherman’s cottages, graves, boats in a pleasing trippy jumble like a dream of a place you once visited.

But we are not having an ice-cream today-we leave the pleasantness of Glasson Dock and cycle forth into the past.

Through fields, past farms, cows and then sea, sand, quicksand at that, howling mean wind, rubbish which somehow seems exciting when it’s sea tossed battered plastic, desolation and wilderness. I feel agoraphobic when all I can see is unfriendly coast and behind me sulks the huge blue presence of the Trough Of Bowland. No synthetic strawberry ice creams here. No inane chat and roar of Kawasaki’s. It feels a long long way from home-I have cycled 7 miles from bustling Lancaster, a city.

And black clouds loom overhead. And the cows are starting to look malevolent.

And we come, past the lighthouse, past the signs telling us this might all be soon lost to the sea, past the campervan (how the hell do they sleep at night-its like the beginning of a horror movie, the garish vulnerable synthetic white starkly hideously exposed on the edge of nowhere) to Cockersands Abbey.

There is of course very little left of it-it was founded in the 12^th century and abandoned in the 16^th. The sheer weight of those years whilst looking at part of it is enough to make you start to gibber.  And why here? Why do monks who love God find His most blighted spots to dwell in-and how the hell did their hoods stay up in this penetrating wind?  (Apparently it was to show renouncement of worldly materials and comforts)

Anyway I wanted those MR James binoculars and I did not. The Charter House was closed, indeed is errantly frustratingly closed, houses only dead bodies impervious to the wind and has been rebuilt but is still such a lonely spooky outcrop surrounded by the skeletons of the abbey, tapering blighted rock formations outlined against the timeless dateless sea and sky-Nature holding two fingers up to crepuscular humanity.

You can see where the huge abbey once stood and we are informed by a notice that metal detecting is forbidden and all I suddenly want to do is METAL DETECT! This bursts forth in a glorious vision of finding ancient religious relics and so I try to find one myself without the aid of a machine but its all-animal shit, grass and stone, not even exciting engraved stone. I yearn yet still fear those binoculars for this is pure MR James territory.

And what is weirdly scarier than the ancient morbidity of a derelict abbey that sheltered and died from the plague and leprosy, was a relatively modern farmhouse (in retrospect, think around a hundred years or two-terrifying a new born child compared to the antiquity of the Ozymandias abbey) built within the walls of the abbey and even containing some of the same brick. Its windows were hollowed up chipboard eyes as it faced the ferocious North Sea wind and huge unromantic aluminium sheds stood cavernously and creepily empty.

A tiny caravan squatted nearby, one of those lamps with a bendy neck silhouetted within looking at something or nothing-it seemed modern next to the blank empty farmhouse, I half expected to see a gnarled angry face stare angrily out at the windswept intruders mouthing silent curses.

The abbey fascinated and moved me but I was trying to look at it through MR James’s binoculars into the past, imagining not seeing. The farmhouse was there.

It actually existed, was board and mortar, terribly vulnerable and naked but for the mere present, actually existing. Existing from the very real future which is about to submerge it in water (the flood defences are not up to the job and are not being given support or cash by a government which has never even been near or heard of or cared about this area) The abbey might soon disappear under the crashing waves and detritus of plastic bottles on the shore and along with it the blank eyed ex farm.

I want to live here, I want a kindly farmer to tell me it’s mine, and somehow the cash to be able to afford to replace the windows (some of the ancient abbey’s stained glass windows have been purloined and are now in place at other local farmhouses, a fact I find fascinating, the amalgamation of ancient history and day to day living, breathing and dying. But should I live here, I would be bowed under wind, remoteness and the threat of the sea.

And ghosts, There must be ghosts here. I would hear on yet another windswept night (there is no other such night) a faint chant of the faithful from so many centuries ago, a requiem to the dead and I would not need those binoculars from MR James and I would not want them because to romantise about death and ghosts and history is exciting and glorious but to confronted with it would be the most terrifying thing ever. Because if ghosts exist, it makes a mockery or untruth of everything we believe in.

Yet I still want this blank eyed farmhouse. Just so I can actually see.  And be suspended between the past and the present. Because there is no future here. The waves will take over and there will only be left a briefly summarising laminated notice board of what was once.

But I still want those binoculars. The future has no excitement or mystery to me. But the past, oh the past…I want to look through those binoculars. But not to actually see.

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Wray is a neat pretty little village buried deep in the Lancashire countryside, half an hours bus ride from Lancaster. There is a school, post office, two pubs, a garden centre and cafe. There are woods, moors, hills, footpaths, a river and everything you could ever ask for in a countryside idyll. It is pure Enid Blyton but with the house prices of today. Every year it hosts a Scarecrow Festival with a central unifying theme. The entire village seems to take part and the results are spectacular. I have chosen just a few of the many pictures we took and more can be seen here.
The official theme for the festival this year was a mystifying blend of ‘TV Detectives,’ ‘Reality TV’ and ‘Topical’ and the pictures below are grouped accordingly.
Topical and Celeb!

Oh dear, not only are the unhappy couple being pursued by paparazzi and celebrity magazines but now their unhappy plight over betrayal, lies and infidelity has been faithfully renditioned in glue, old newspapers and a Matalan top. The attention to detail is superb. The signs at the bottom say ‘Cole’s been given the red card” and something along the lines of ‘Now you’re off’.’ Take that, Cole! I bet when you were bedding the attractive blonde, you never considered how the residents of Wray would render you in scarecrow form. Mark Owen, take note.

The makers of this Jordan do not approve of such a blatant Jezebel with her false breasts and money making ways. It is a curious sight to see, a plastic huge breasted Jordan dangling out of a beautiful old village house decorated with bunting. I imagine the Cotswolds must be like this.

The owners of the house are clearly on Team Peter. The straw sticking out of his chest shows his hirsuteness and his flat shrivelled face is instantly identifiable as Peter Andre. Imagine watching your marriage breakdown portrayed on a white stone wall! It would be awesome! Sadly no cagefighter scarecrows as yet.

Andrew’s cushiony pockmarked face looks somewhat flabbergasted and there is an unseemly bulge in his trousers whilst Dorothy looks suspicious, open mouthed and won’t catch his bulging eyes. Hmm. Naughty Dorothy.

You are an American with big dreams, a love of Madonna and bizarre clothing and you dream that one day you will break through and make it. You persevere, you work hard, you pray, you wear glasses made out of cigarettes and one day, you finally make it. Welcome to Lady Ga-Ga’s first appearance at the Wray Scarecrow festival. She is in a tantalising melding of genre, fact and fiction in a cage and covered in snakes and spiders as a contestant in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. That programme is often represented at the Wray Scarecrow Festival. I think the villagers like the thought of cowering big breasted celebrities in cages being humiliated and teased.

‘Help, my arms have turned to bubblewrap!” “Never mind that now dear, get me another glass of Chateau Neuf De Pape.”
This delightfully detailed scarecrow tableau is Celebrity Come Dine With Me (I think) The celebrities appear to be Pob and Marie Stopes. And someone with no head. Charles the 1st?
Biting Political Satire!

I loved this. I first thought it was a scarecrow who had hung himself but it is ‘The Floating Voter” and he has a very good pastiche of a ballot paper in his lumpen hand. The residents of Wray are united in their politics by the fact they (well, their scarecrows) seem to hate all political parties although it is mostly Gordon Brown their creative rage is wrought on. Should Labour lose the next election by a very small minority, I shall think of the thousands of people who walked through Wray being pleasantly bombarded with anti Gordon messages and I shall wonder if scarecrows in a village in the North changed history.

This one had me hysterical. It was all context-the Gordon Brown scarecrow (below – how to make him look more sacky and scary than the real thing?) was a work of art-I thought he was canvassing for a minute but the tiny chirpy mass produced Nick Clegg in a plant pot just seemed so weirdly perfect.

Oh very good. This was a real audience pleaser. Tattooed young families, old women and seemingly everyone were all delighted by this all saying in varying sorts quintessentially English accents, ‘Well, they’re all the same aren’t they?” before nodding sagely and resignedly and going to get an ice-cream. I felt sorry for Gordon with his dark baggy face and suit next to tiny happy Nick Clegg in the primroses. It was like the telly debate all over again.

This one is quite baffling but I am sure there is a cutting rebuke against the Labour government here somewhere. I was going to say the scarecrow presence is rather sidelined and who is going to scare the crows away but fortunately there is a picture of Gordon Brown to keep the crops safe. I like the attention to the lines around his eyes.

Just excellent. It features my favourite drink, is both topical, political, makes a dig at a celebrity, all in a rhyming format and in under thirty words- I spy the new poet lauriette! It was outside one of Wray’s two pubs and we shall leave aside the fact the 10% duty idea was happily, quietly and quickly abolished-and the fact that depressed alcoholic scarecrow tramps surrounded by cider bottles was the main reason the idea of the tax was introduced in the first place.

Sleep well, children! This was part of a bigger tableau randomly set up in a dingly dell outside the village featuring Batman, and an amazing MDF Batmobile etc. It had been cunningly made political by laminated sardonic print-outs about how the various figured represented each political party. I can’t remember who the Joker represented-probably according to Wray’s no nonsense scarecrow politics-everyone! If only Newsnight were here-you don’t need any Swingometers in Wray. They could save a fortune on pie charts alone.

And in true Nostradamus/Chaos Theory, thousands will die in a terrorist attack on a new Country, many many more will die in the aftermath leading the world into political unstability and war and the hidden ring leader will be finally found in a battered bin in a village near Lancaster. I do not know what the other sign means. It is either clever political satire or something snarky about local recycling. Or something else.

The residents of this house are so topical it hurts. People at the time of writing are still stuck abroad and don’t even know they have been portrayed in scarecrow beer swilling form. There was another one but I chose this because the other scarecrow looked sad. I like the crow pecking the goggles as well.
TV Detectives!

In which leading fictional detectives are portrayed fighting in a water butt. There is nothing else which needs adding.

Miss Marple would love Wray-it is St Mary Meade and revels in it. There were many images of Miss Marple herself but I liked this one for its simplicity, absence of Miss Marple and jolly delight in the concept of someone being killed.

It’s Inspector Gadget looking like he is now in a Russian Intelligence Squad-careful now-his gloves contain high levels of cancer causing chemicals!

Crowjak-Nothing else needs to be said. The ‘Crowlumbo’ was also good. I love Wray.

This was a masterpiece. Inspector Clueso was not only himself personified in straw but the Pink Panther music played from hidden speakers, the pink abnormal beast leared over him and there were pink wooden paw prints dotted around the outside of the house.

How can one get over a hangover without watching Poiret twiddling his moustache on ITV 3 on a Sunday afternoon? There were quite a few of him in Wray but I liked this one as it was in the sort of grand central village house that you just know has had many a body flop lifelessy to the floor in the library. The bunting, the figure in the window and Poiret’s eyes gazing sightlessly over the village makes you just know that someone is gasping their last breath inside-Good luck Poiret! I hope you untangle the sticky web of intrigue before another scarecrow dies.

The house in which this is set belongs to a proud Scotsman who always has detailed and Scottish scarecrows on the theme of choice.Which must take some doing. His ‘Captain Crowscarer’ was a masterpiece…

Wray Village

Not only is this a surprising faithful rendition of a googly eyed Nessie outside a barn but check out the faint chalk graffiti on the wall. It’s what he would have wanted. Micheal and Nessy togeva foreva -both misunderstood legends prone to rumour and hype bothered by tourists and unrealistic depictions in the media.
The sadness, loneliness and hope in rural communities as depicted by a sack, an old floral dress and the waiting graveyard. There is no vicar in Wray anymore.

When buildings have faces…

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A selection of pictures from an April trip to Morecambe.

Read the Unicycle Emptiness view from Morecambe in winter and find more pictures here

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Just a small selection of pictures from a visit to Preston recently. You can see the full set of pictures here

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