Friday, September 25, 2009

Blackpool

I had never been to Blackpool and I hope I never go again. It is ghastly. In fact is ghastly in every way. If it were not the nearest conurbation to the golf courses of our desire I would not have broken my fifty-eight year Blackpool fast.

The first problem is getting there. You know you are close because of the damned Tower. This is cast iron (presumably) and very ugly but you can see it from miles around from pretty much any direction. So you are close to your destination but all you can find is a car park. The hotel we were seeking was on the front (along with thousands of its fellows) but you couldn’t drive to the front for bloody miles. Every turn left which promised to take you to the sands, piers (there are three of these) and donkeys just dumped you in a car park. However we soldiered on and found a left turn just past the bloody tower that took us to the promenade.

We would have better off staying in the car parks. Everything I thought was essential for a tacky British seaside resort is in Blackpool in spades. The place is also time warped in the seventies – or is it the sixties, or the fifties or ……who knows. Is it possible that the ‘amusement arcade’ still attracts punters? Are there still people who want to try and push coins off the Niagara Falls? Those who wish to win tacky pink fluffy monkeys? Do people still eat candyfloss? Buy ‘Kiss Me Quick ‘ hats? Well, presumably all this still goes on because the place was heaving.

Drive past all this tat in order to find a roof to place over the head for five days. No shortage of these. I have never seen so many hotels in my life. There are hundreds of them. There is a Hilton that looks like every other Hilton the world over. There are couple of grand old Edwardian monstrosities; if one wasn’t called the Imperial it should have been. But the bulk of the accommodation on offer was an endless stream of Fawlty Towers type establishment. These all have completely forgettable names in the ‘Mon Repos’ mould. To be fair a very agreeable couple that were not at all Basilesque and for whom nothing was too much trouble ran the one we were staying in. But their hotel was just typical of the genre. It had a bar that ran out of its one draught beer on the first night. It advertised a ‘sun lounge’ in which the residents could partake of tea and scones or something stronger and watch the world go by on the promenade. All the hotels had these and they all seemed to be populated by people of an indeterminate age greater than sixty-five drinking tea and guarding their Zimmer frames.

If you sat in our Promenade viewing salon you saw the Promenade but not the sands and Irish Sea that you would expect just beyond. This is because we had our own private bit of Blackpool’s world famous (sic) illuminations just outside the window. This triumph of the seaside decorator’s art was a flashing animated pirate ship that bobbed up and down on its hydraulic sea whilst its cartoon pirates complete with cartoon wooden legs and cartoon eye patches avoided cartoon sharks snapping at the gunwales and brandished cartoon cutlasses. The ship ‘fired’ broadsides at nothing in particular about thrice a minute by dint of red flashing lights up its cannon’s muzzles. Hideous in every regard but more than that as it kept me awake because they didn’t turn the bloody flashing lights off until after midnight. The pirate ship was absolutely typical of the general standard of the ‘world famous’ Blackpool illuminations. They have no standard whatsoever.

My biggest disappointment in going to Blackpool was none of the above however. I expected all the tacky garbage. My biggest let down was not being able to find a postcard with a ninety fifties drawing of a fat woman with a crab hanging off her toe. There were the saucy British seaside postcards aplenty but I wasn’t interested in smutty double entendre. I wanted a fat lady with a crab on her toe and I couldn’t find one.

Fylde District Council should do the whole world a favour and bulldoze the entirety of Blackpool into the sea.

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