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        • The Wedgwood Institute
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      • Blackpool (Post Apocalypse)
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    • 2006 Travels
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        • The Krispy Kreme Fiasco
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          • USS Constitution
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        • Beacon Hill
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        • Providence RI
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        • Final Boston Walkabout
        • The Third Time I Nearly Got arrested
      • Oss
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      • Basel
      • Philadelphia >
        • First Philadelphia Walkabout Pt I >
          • The Franklin Institute
        • First Philadelphia Walkabout Pt II >
          • The Liberty Bell
          • Monopoly
          • USS Olympia & USS Becuna
    • 2003 Travels >
      • US Tour 2003 - Fri 25th Flying In
      • US Tour 2003 - Sat 26th Brooklyn >
        • The Brooklyn Bridge
      • US Tour 2003 - Sat 26th Baltimore
      • US Tour 2003 - Sun 27th New York
      • US Tour 2003 - Mon 28th Oakland
      • US Tour 2003 - Tues 29th Sacramento
      • US Tour 2003 - Wed 30th The Sierra Nevada
      • US Tour 2003 - Wed 30th Reno
      • US Tour 2003 - Wed 30th Reno (Later)
      • US Tour 2003 - Thurs 31st San Francisco >
        • US Tour 2003 - Thurs 31st SF Walkabout
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      • US Tour 2003 - Fri 1st San Francisco to Lost Angeles >
        • US Tour 2003 - Fri 1st Hollywood Blvd
        • US Tour 2003 - Fri 1st Hollywood Blvd - Walk of Fame
      • US Tour 2003 - Fri 1st Lost Angeles (South Gate)
      • US Tour 2003 - Sat 2nd Costa Mesa & The Beach
      • US Tour 2003 - Sat 2nd LA (Corona)
      • US Tour 2003 - Sun 3rd San Diego
      • US Tour 2003 - Mon 4th Phoenix
      • US Tour 2003 - Tues 5th Phoenix to San Antonio
      • US Tour 2003 - Wed 6th San Antonio
      • US Tour 2003 - Thurs 7th Austin
      • US Tour 2003 - Fri 8th Dallas
      • US Tour 2003 - Sat 9th Oklahoma City
      • US Tour 2003 - Sun 10th Flying Back
      • US Tour 2003 - Epilogue
    • 2002 Travels >
      • US Tour 2002 - Fri 30th
      • US Tour 2002 - Thurs 5th >
        • US Tour 2002 - Thurs 5th Union & Clifton
      • US Tour 2002 - Fri 6th Providence RI
      • US Tour 2002 - Sat 7th Union NJ >
        • US Tour 2002 Sat 7th Asbury Park NJ
        • US Tour 2002 - Sat 7th Asbury Park NJ (Later)
      • US Tour 2002 - Sun 8th Asbury Park NJ
      • US Tour 2002 - Mon 9th Union NJ >
        • US Tour 2002 - Mon 9th Long Island NY
      • US Tour 2002 - Tues 10th >
        • US Tour 2002 - Tues 10th NYC
        • US Tour 2002 - Tuesday 10th ESB
        • US Tour 2002 - Tues 10th NYC II
        • US Tour 2002 - Tues 10th- Manhattan and beyond
      • US Tour 2002 - Wed 11th
  • Music
    • Phuxubtelty Review
  • Movies
    • Skyfall Review
  • Books
    • Ted Simon
    • Charley Boorman & Ewan McGregor
    • Mike Carter
    • Robert Fulton Jr
    • Zoltan Sulkowsky
    • Simon Gandolfi
  • Artworks
    • Diamond Head - Acoustic Cuts
    • The Skeptix - Hate and Fear
    • Demon - Child of the Dark Sky
    • Demon . Better The Devil You Know
    • Demon - Time Has Come
    • Demon - Live at Tiffany's
    • Demon - Live in Germany
    • Demon T-Shirts
    • Mjollnir
  • The 39 Steps
  • New Page

Blackpool Walkabout 2011

Picture
Blackpool - 'Omega Man' style
There is something about Blackpool. It is naff, shite, full of drunken morons during the season, often dirty (mostly, due to the aforementioned drunken morons), twee, and has a phenomenal drug problem. It is everything I hate. That is during the season. I should know; I used to live here.

Once the brain surgeons have left, Blackpool reverts to a [largely] empty town, with many of the businesses closed for the winter. It gets wet, windy, cold, and there isn’t a bloody tourist to be seen. Bliss! Blackpool is many things, but the one thing it is, is honest. It is what it is and has never pretended to be anything else. You can love it, hate it, or lump it.

When I lived here, between March and November, I would never go near The Promenade, Hounds Hill Centre, or the first three streets back from the prom between Tussaud’s and Talbot Sq. You just don’t. No point in coming into contact with the grockles; you never know what you may catch. No, I would take the back streets, along Rigby Road, past the bus depot, up onto the old railway line (now Seasider’s Way and Central Car Park), up Hornby Road, and into town the back way.

As the song says, that was then and this is now. Blackpool has changed in the twenty years since I lived here, undoubtedly, but in some ways it hasn’t changed at all. You can still buy your naff shit, drink yourself to oblivion, act like a twat, vomit everywhere, have a shag over a bin in the precinct, eat fish and chips out of a polystyrene tray, and think you can jump in the sea and get out again, only to discover that you can’t and the next anyone will see of you is when your foot is washed up on the beach at Preesall sands two weeks later. So, what is different?

Post Apocalypse

Picture
Yates's Wine Lodge... Not!
Well, if you didn’t live here, or visit regularly (and not for a Kiss Me Quick hat) Blackpool did have a great deal to offer. It used to have a wonderful music scene, as anyone who ever visited Jenks will testify. Come on, hands up if you ever went there to see the young John Sykes in Streetfighter? Post Jenks, there was the wonderful Kite Club, started by my good friend Mick Schofield and, there was always Yates’s Wine Lodge. All are, now, sadly, gone. Sad, except for Yates’s, of course, which was demolished after some turnip set fire to an adjacent building. Come on, no one ever went in there for any reason other than to get shit-faced on their sticky, sweet, sickly ‘wine’. I still remember how the carpet used to squelch… Classy!


Talbot Sq

Picture
This used to be Talbot Sq.
All the crap is still here and, if anything, there’s more of it than ever. Blackpool, as with other town planning departments, has elected to pave everything it can, put in speed humps, traffic cameras, reduce speed limits and, generally, do everything they can to make the motorist’s life as painful as possible. They are well up on the Great British pastime of screwing the motorist for as much as they can. In fact, I understand that screwing the British motorist over is now so popular that Seb Coe is trying to get it added as a new Olympic sport for 2012. You see, there is an upside to it: you can do whatever you want to the car driving populace, as they will always pay up rather than, oh, not use the car for a day. Sure, they’ll complain, but they’ll always cough up, rather than actually take any stance. Oh, and there’s a bonus too. In Blackpool, they decided that if they keep extending the Pedestrian Precinct, then they don’t need to repair any roads. Just as well, as they appear to have spent so much money on slowing and/or stopping the traffic there is no money for road repairs anyway. So, that all worked out nicely, didn’t it?

The Prom

Picture
After the war...
Down on The Promenade (sounds like a Dr Feelgood song!), God only knows what the hell they are doing. Actually, I don’t… What I do know is that they appear to be digging up all the stuff they did last time… Someone said something about building an open-air theatre on the prom… Yeah, sounds epic, that. Just one question. Has the person who came up with that genius brainwave ever been on the sea front at Blackpool? Even on the hottest day of the Century, it will not be anywhere you would want to sit for more than a few minutes without reaching for your cardie!

Nyich! It’s Blackpool. Whatchagonnadoboutit?

I am sure that, by the time the season starts it will all be done… Wait a minute, it’s April now… Ah. So, if you plan on going to Blackpool, remember your hard hat, donkey jacket and wellies.

Sitting on a park bench,

Mark L. Potts
The God of Thunder


5th April 2011

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