Somehow it has become the middle of the night again without my noticing.
Everybody is in bed, and I do not think I can keep my own eyes open for very much longer.
Blackpool has not changed in the least. It is tawdry and noisy and tasteless and wonderful, a riot of colour and splendidly potent cheap music. There are still donkeys on the sands and Elvis impersonators and penny arcades. We did not avail ourselves of any of the above, but enjoyed looking at them all the same.
We did not actually go into Blackpool until lunchtime, because Mark was fixing the fridge, which has been struggling to get cold enough, and I was painting flowers on the wardrobe door. The children were doing things on their computers and hoping not to be obliged to get dressed.
Once we got there we cycled on to the promenade and bought some doughnuts, which is an obligatory part of the Blackpool experience, and then went to Sea Life.
I have got mixed feelings about Sea Life, because it is an aquarium with actual fish in it. I like to look at the fish, and was very interested to hear everything the keepers had to say. They were young, and enthusiastic. There were not very many people there, so they told us a lot.
It turns out that stingrays, and sharks, have a sense that detects the electrical field given off by a beating heart, which is why they stick their noses out of the water, to sniff for your heartbeat. They crunched up some shellfish whilst we were there, which was startling in a creature so soft and flappy. The octopuses were hiding in their dens, and would not come out at all, for which I do not blame them, although it was disappointing. There was one fish which had an enormously swollen eye, which the keeper said was called PopEye, the problem, not the fish, that is, and that it was something that happened to some fish when they get old.
We had an extremely close encounter with a tarantula, closer than I have ever come to one apart from one time when I caught one in a jar, in the wild. It did not do much, unlike the one caught in the jar, which wagged about very crossly. In fact, it was rather more appealingly fluffy than I had expected, although I was not in the least tempted to stroke it.
All in all it was a pleasant visit, except that I do not like keeping things in glass cages, even if they are only fish. I suspect that in some ways they might have a better life in an aquarium than in the wild, because of not having dreadful worms and other parasites, and occasionally being eaten alive. All the same it is a bit grim. Sharks cannot stop swimming, ever, because it is how they breathe. They can’t stop to look at things, or to sleep, or to talk to one another. Imagine the awfulness of swimming round and round a small glass tank, for your whole life. I do not like that bit.
After Sea Life we had a walk on the pier, and visited a shop which was full of gypsies. When they had gone the lady told us that there were a lot of gypsy travellers in town, because of a Christian revival meeting especially for them. She said that they were so badly behaved that the gypsies who live in Blackpool would not let them in any of the shops. Apparently there are very clear social classes amongst gypsies, and these were not out of the travelling top drawer. I was fascinated to hear this, so I thought I would share it. You can learn some very useful things on these pages.
We ate dinner at the little Italian pizza restaurant, and cycled back to the camper for a walk on the beach before watching another film and going to bed.
This one did not have David Attenborough in it, but might have been better if it had. It was about two wicked witches and was a sequel to Snow White. It had some exciting special effects but not much in the way of story, as if a committee of people had got together to think of lots of ideas for a story and then just strung all of them together.
All the same, it was lovely to sit and just watch a story, which is one of my best things to do, it is ace just to sit back and be entertained.
I have got to go to sleep. Enough is enough.
