We are just leaving Blackpool.
We have had the most wonderfully idle day of drinking coffee and milling about.
My father is not staying in a hotel. He has rented a little bungalow in Cleveleys.
It is very modern and lovely, and I liked it very much. I have always liked the idea of living in one of these stark modern grey-and-off-white ice palaces, I have no idea how I have managed to end up in a house which is painted orange and yellow with pink flowers everywhere.
We congregated at the glass kitchen table and drank wine and ate pie.
Then we sat on the grey sofas and drank some more wine before we collapsed into bed.
This morning we thought that we would like to go and wander about Blackpool. I like to do this. It is familiar enough not to be challenging, and interesting enough to keep me absorbed. Also it makes me feel smugly middle-class to look at all the things on sale to tasteless people, obviously I am a cut above them because I do not want to purchase a mug which proclaims that I am thinking about sex at all times, or a T shirt which says that I Love Bald Men, or indeed anything at all which demonstrates a lack of awareness of the correct positioning of apostrophes.
I tried a visual joke there where I added an apostrophe to the plural at the end of the last sentence, but it upset me so much I had to scrap it. Some things are just not funny.
The sun shone.
The sky was arctic-blue, and a gusty wind whipped our hair about.
We parked behind the Tower and walked.
We looked at all the gift shops.
We did not buy anything, although I was very tempted indeed by a stick of Fish And Chips Flavour rock, and a bottle which proclaimed that it was full of sea air.
I have never tried fish and chips flavoured rock. I wish now that I had bought it, because my curiosity remains unsatisfied. Also the cork was not very tight in the bottle of sea air, and I was concerned that it would leak out and be replaced by normal air when I was not looking.
Possibly one of my favourite things that I did not buy was a fishing net game. This was a plastic fishing net with some plastic lumps of poo, of different shapes and sizes. The challenge was to drop the poo in your bath and then fish it out with the fishing net.
We never have baths because they take up too much hot water, otherwise I might have bought one.
We walked along the pier and looked out at the sea, which was grey and a bit choppy, and speculated contentedly about its dark mysteries and cruel indifference. Then we looked at things made out of shells, and admired a bar which was decorated with fibre glass pirates.I thought that I would like a fibre glass pirate in my garden, maybe one day.
For lunch we went to a place called Wetherspoons.
We liked this because it had verses from Albert And The Lion written on the walls, and we could quote it at one another.
I went to a Wetherspoons once before but had forgotten much of what it was like, and I can tell you that actually I was jolly impressed.
It was clean and comfortable and everything was quite astonishingly cheap.
Actually it wasn’t really very clean, now I think about it, although we didn’t mind because of the cheap.
Three of us had dinner and a glass of wine for less than twenty five quid.
Also there was absolutely nothing wrong with the dinner, although the wine would not have won any awards, except possibly as a salad dressing.
The bit that we did not like was that on the menu it told you how many calories there were in your dinner.
This is not information that I want to be given when I am eating. I know perfectly well when I have eaten too much, because my trousers become too tight. I become fat because of ignoring that feeling.
Putting the calorie count on the menu meant that I had got something else to ignore.
I did not manage to ignore it completely. I had fried chicken and chips, which had 1135 calories in it, so I did not eat the sauce, to mitigate the damage a bit.This was a sensible compromise and did not spoil my good time in any way.
We took the dogs for a walk afterwards, and had a look around Waterstones, although we did not buy anything due to a tight budget.
We had coffee in the camper van and drove back through the Illuminations.
I love the Illuminations.
The picture is the author. Can you tell that I am on holiday?
