We are in Blackpool.
We are stealthily parked on a back street just a little way from the Promenade.
We don’t think that anybody has noticed us.
We are having a truly splendid time.
We arrived a little after two in the morning, and fell exhausted into bed like gateposts in front of a bulldozer.
When we got up it was to meet my father, who was staying in rather more spiffing style in the Hilton just beyond the Pleasure Beach.
It was only a little bit more spiffing, because it turns out that it is a new Hilton, and it is a special down-market grade designed to produce low budget holidays for impoverished tourists.
My father is not impoverished, but even a down-market grade Hilton is better than anything else that Blackpool has to offer. Blackpool, alas, is something of a Poundland to the hospitality industry, and there is a marked lack of anywhere at all with an incomprehensible menu and kippers for breakfast. There is no gnocchi or aioli to be found for miles.
Hence we were entirely happy to be in the camper van. We have not got gnocchi either, but we have got home made chocolate biscuits and some good wine and it does not cost fifty quid a night. We chugged smokily down the sea front and collected my father from the hotel with the greatest of excitement.
We parked in the centre of Blackpool, just behind the Tower. Blackpool has recently developed an unexpected antipathy towards camper vans. All sorts of parking spaces have become closed to them, and places where one could once stay overnight have sprouted threatening notices warning of fines for illicit camping.
We keep saying that this is unkindly unwelcoming, and that we will go somewhere else for our holidays, just to teach them a lesson, but of course we never do. So far we have pursued a general policy of ignoring the signs, on the principle that nobody enforces them in Windermere and so probably Blackpool will have a similar level of enthusiasm.
So far this has proved to be correct. All the same, today we parked in the car park where they still don’t mind, and took the dogs for a quick empty on the beach.
The sea was excitingly rough. There was a storm brewing, we heard, coming to Blackpool for a holiday after trashing somewhere exotic which might have been the Philippines. We sat in the cafe halfway up the Tower and watched the waves hurling themselves to fragments on the grey sand.
Almost nobody except the storm seemed to be having a holiday here at the moment. Apart from several rubbish bins, sliding slowly along the Promenade like Daleks before the gusting wind, the sea front was empty. We gazed out at the slate-coloured sea and my father told us stories of his grandfather, who had been a music hall artist, and performed in Blackpool, amongst other places, before he died, horribly young, having been gassed in the war.
The gas stole his voice away and exiled him from the stage before it choked the rest of the life out of him. Until the war, when the gas silenced him, his name had been on the bright sea-front billing alongside Marie Lloyd, opposite the tram stops and the waxworks and the cafes, where the Rock Legends and the Secret Masters Of Magic and the Amazing Hypnotists have got their names today.
We explored the Tower a bit after that, as the picture suggests, and finished up in the Dungeon. None of us had been there, so obviously we had to give it a go.
This takes the form of a guided tour, where various enthusiastic youngsters pretend to be judges and torturers and smugglers. Mark was summoned to the front to demonstrate having his tongue pulled out, along with a graphic description of how this might be achieved. I will not repeat it here, because I would not like anybody else to be haunted in the night by our savagery to one another. I am jolly glad to live in Windermere during an undisturbedly peaceful moment of our history.
The end involved a startling drop. There was a picture taken of us, in order to boost the takings, which we liked so much that we bought one. I have saved that to show you another day.
We had a little snooze at teatime, and reconvened in the evening for cheese and wine and a last, late night drive through the lights. We all admired these heartily. My enthusiasm for the Illuminations never seems to wane, they are brilliant, bright and vivid against the dark emptiness of the sea beyond.
In the end it was bed time, and we are here in our swaying camper van, listening to the wind crashing around us.
It has been a splendid day.
