Shouting Into The Void - Goodbye Facebook

I deleted my Facebook account today. Or should I say I ‘deactivated’ it. It doesn’t let you just delete it. It’s like trying to leave Reader’s Digest used to be or, for a more modern update, trying to get out of LoveFilm or Netflix. Before you are released you get asked whether or not you are sure at least three times, and then you are asked to give a reason for your exit. You are given a list of possible reasons for leaving and are forced to choose one. It’s like trying to get a divorce and having to attend marriage guidance counselling to ‘be sure’. Or at least I imagine that’s what divorce is like. I wouldn’t bloody know. Anyway, If none apply and you just tick ‘other’, you are then compelled to explain exactly what you mean by ‘other’. People have left the military during times of raging conflict with less scrutiny than is placed on you by Zuckerberg if you have the temerity to no longer take part in his world domination project. In the end I declared that I no longer find Facebook useful, which is true but not exactly the main reason why I left Facebook. After all, it has never been particularly useful.
I left Facebook because of people. Me included. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of myself. Sick of shouting into the void at nobody. Time was when I could write a status and at least elicit a response, make someone laugh or start a debate. Not now. Now there is a deathly, whispered silence greeting my every inane wittering. Which is probably justified. I’m not complaining about that. I’ve alienated a lot of people through Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard. I lost one reader because I expressed the opinion that Disability Awareness Day is a rotten pile of bullshit because disability awareness should be every day and become second nature to people. Shouting about it for one day of the year does fuck all. He didn’t agree and I haven’t heard from him since. Probably never will. Other than that it has been mostly just religious types and people who like rugby union and Karl Pilkington who have been offended, but that’s quite a large portion of the population. Oh and the able bodied. Nobody seems to have caught on to the fact that Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard’s liberal use of the phrase ‘able bodied bastards’ is actually a brilliant satire on modern society.

But I’m not arguing that people should want to read my shit. It’s just that frankly I would rather save myself the bother if I know that they don’t. Lately I had been using it just to post these blogs and the pieces I do for redvee but even that was beginning to get futile. I must have been down to about three interested parties through Facebook, none of whom were me and all of whom were probably only reading out of a muddled mixture of loyalty and habit. Twitter is a much better barometer of where you are with your writing, and much more rewarding with it. I have much more interest in my work there and the vast majority of it comes from people who have never even met me. These are the true judges of your work. All bias is removed and nobody is afraid to tell you that you are a bellend if you write something stupid. You get a lot more out of your work that way and you will develop better as a result.

Back to Facebook, and contrast my interaction with that of a former acquaintance of mine who won a Paralympic gold medal in London in 2012. Shortly after his victory he posted on Facebook that he was going outside for a walk and received 592 ‘likes’ for his troubles. Now life isn’t all about likes but there comes a point where you don’t want to spend time mulling over a potentially amusing status which will be ritually ignored in favour of the mundane details of a minor celebrity’s gentle exercise plans. There seems to be an imbalance there somewhere. Nowhere is this more evident than when people post information about their child’s latest bowel movement. You would think that nobody but the proud parents would be interested. Everyone you talk to says they are not interested in ‘baby bores’ yet every post of this kind is littered with responses, ‘likes’ and gushing praise for the individual’s ability to pro-create. You should have to pass stringent tests to be able to have children, but the fact that any old gobshite can still do it doesn’t stop those around them from treating it like a never before seen miracle.

Yet you don’t need to have children to bore the arse off everyone or to do enough to persuade me to fold in my Facebook cards. My last timeline before I zapped Facebook into the wilderness was chock full of what are irritatingly called memes. I don’t even know how you fucking pronounce that, but what I do know is that it usually consists of some drippy truism which the poster has no hope of actually adhering to due to their basic humanity. They’re all about love and honesty and how good people do this and good people don’t do that. Who the fuck says what good people do or do not do? You could argue that good people don’t post pictures of tortured animals to ‘raise awareness’ while simultaneously doing fuck all about it, the net result of which is just to upset people who don’t want to see it on their timelines. You could argue that. You could. Why don’t these people get the fuck off Facebook and get involved in animal charities or put their hand in their pockets to help? Because posting a picture of something dreadful is much easier and is a very public badge of honour which shows that you care, you bloody saint you. Fucking stop it.

So anyway goodbye Facebook. I have enjoyed you, at times. Long ago. I just no longer feel the need to keep in touch with 250 people who don’t give two shits about me. That’s the honesty that Twitter has that you just simply do not. I know nobody on Twitter gives two shits about me and nobody on there ever said they did. I could prolong the agony and just have another cull, but there is only so many times that you can delete anyone you think would not talk to you if you met them on the street before you find yourself with only you, your mrs and your best mate on your friends list. And well….that would just be boring.

Amy Versus The Cinema-Going Public

Britain, I'd like a word with you. I say Britain, I mean anywhere where there might be people bored enough to be reading this on a Tuesday night. This involves you wherever you live. You're all equally bloody culpable.

I've just been to the cinema with my sister to see Amy, a film documentary about the late, great Amy Winehouse. Emma didn't want to go because she's not a fan but that's alright. I'm not here to foist my musical tastes upon everyone. We can't all drive around singing Joss Stone songs at 250 decibels. That would be stupid. I can understand that not everybody likes their drug-addled, deceased jazz singers as much as I do either. That's not my problem, my problem is this.

We never got to see Amy and it is your fault, Britain (and other parts this blog may reach and in which rabid commercialism takes precedence over genuine art). We arrived at Cineworld about 20 minutes before the scheduled start of the film only to be told, upon ordering the tickets, that Amy has been cancelled. A screen has broken. Oh how unlucky, right? On the very night I want to go to see Amy the screen upon which it is being shown is broken. What bad luck. Except it wasn't bad luck, it was bad taste. And you're responsible.

You see, the screen which broke was not the one scheduled to be showing Amy at 7.45 this evening. It was another one, but as a result of this they had to have a 'reshuffle' we were told. Amy was brutally and tastelessly sacrificed so that they could carry on showing moronic guff like Minions, fucking Ant-Man and the latest in a long line of absurd Arnie vehicles. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this is because these turgid titles make more money at the box office than Amy will. And that is because you, Britain and other parts this blog may reach and in which rabid commercialism takes precedence over genuine art, are more likely to spend your money on the latter than you are on Amy. Why would you want to watch a film about one of the greatest musical talents this country has ever produced when you can watch another twat in spandex showing off his bogus, trumped up super power? Or a band of annoying little yellow creatures who tried but failed to ruin the humour in Despicable Me. Or a wrinkly old grope-meister and Republican shooting up shit with Khaleesi by his side.

Not wishing to fly in the face of public opinion in too controversial a fashion I have kept quiet about this for a long time now but the truth is I am bored shitless with superhero films. What is it about our daily lives which forces us to lap up this dense wtfery so regularly? Put a group of caped bellends together in the same film and the country wets itself in anticipation. Even the idea of Ben Affleck in a batsuit has managed to get past the studio bosses who know all too well that they'll make millions out of it. There's no place for realism, even among an audience whom I assume stopped believing in men that could fly a long, long time ago. Often they will have retarded titles like Batman Versus Superman, Alien Versus Predator or A Big Sack Of Cash Versus Worthwhile Musical Endeavour. Are we so desperate for escapism that we want all semblance of reality removed from our cinema entertainment? I weep for a society that places special effects, explosions and dodgy masks above story telling and character. One in which acting is an afterthought and it is entirely possible, advisable even, to start your Hollywood career in the wrestling ring.

I suppose I should be glad that Amy is showing in my local cinema at all. It was scheduled for cinema release on July 3 but only hit Satan's Little Acre this past week. There was no room for it, no demand for it. No money in it. It is still not showing in either Widnes or Warrington, both of which we checked in a doomed attempt to avoid the evening becoming a complete write-off. Which to my mind, apart from being infuriating and a waste of my time and petrol and the ruination of what would have been a perfectly good evening, is one of the saddest things about the world we live in. If there was any justice people would be queuing around the corner to see documentary film making of this kind. Instead the man selling the tickets barely remembered that it was due on, much less that it had been cancelled. He actually had to refer to a sign on the kiosk desk.

Just like you reading this perhaps, nobody working in Cineworld seemed to care. When we asked a member of staff if they could guarantee that it would be shown tomorrow night at the scheduled time she could not confirm. All she could do was give us a direct line to the cinema so that we could ring ahead to check on their latest reshuffle. If the screen cannot be fixed by then it is reasonable to assume that it will be Amy that gets the boot again. And as much as I loathe the capitalist, commercialism behind this sort of decision I can't really blame them. They only exist to make money and I know this and don't expect any better of them.

It's you I blame.

The Ticket Saga Rumbles On

First the good news, because what follows does not contain very much of that. So here goes. I have tickets for the Challenge Cup semi-final between Saints and Leeds on July 31. In the North East corner, which is sort of near the Saints fans maybe. Or something.

So anyway you will remember how I was blatantly misled by the Saints website into believing that I, as a season ticket holder of our exalted and glorious club, would be able to purchase tickets for the game ahead of the general sale just like everyone else who has a season ticket? And then how I turned up to the stadium only to be told that my money was no good there (or words to that effect) and that I would have to contact the RFL. And you remember the ensuing, 1,000 word whinge about this incident?

Well I received a tweet from Saints telling me that they would look into it for me. All very generous, except that all they did was confirm what we already knew, which was that they were not able to sell them to me. They haven’t quite explained why the information on their website was incorrect although I suspect they are not arguing the point. Something has made them feel guilty enough to contact me following my earlier blog.

The best (or worst) part of all of this preamble to actually getting the tickets was the gentleman on Facebook who was arguing with me hammer and tongs about whether I should have the right to buy tickets through the club first because of my season ticket holder status. He had a disabled daughter, he told me, and he has won awards for championing the rights of disabled people and it was his view that it is entirely fair and sensible that wheelchair users should contact the RFL. The argument seems to be that there are only a limited number of spaces and so…..and so what? There are only a limited number of spaces for everyone and that has been the case at sports events probably since the Taylor report made stadia more safe. If clubs can’t sell tickets to wheelchair users then how can they reasonably suggest that they can sell them to anyone? However many you have available, why would you not split that figure between the clubs and allow the respective season ticket holders first dibs, as you do with non-disabled tickets? The reasons why this cannot happen are unknown and my head hurts just thinking about it frankly. Incidentally I’m sure the gentleman on Facebook has done an awful lot for disability in this country but you know, Ron Atkinson did an awful lot for black footballers in Britain and still got the sack for being a racist. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, sometimes we are judged on our one-offs.

And so to today’s absurd correspondence with the RFL over the actual tickets. The semi-final is 25 days away as I write and so there was no other way I was going to get them than to comply with their discriminatory policy and call the ticket line. When I did, and made the booking, I asked the customer service operator why it was the RFL’s policy not to allow wheelchair users to buy tickets for these events through their clubs in the same way that non wheelchair users do. Of course this is an unfair question. Part of my work involves dealing with telephone enquiries and I am all too aware that it is not his decision, and that actually it is just his misfortune to be employed to deal with angry people who are questioning shit decisions made higher up. I know how that feels and I explained to him that I was not blaming him, I just wanted to see if he knew what the reason was for the bizarre policy.

He actually went away to double check it. Double check it? Fuck. Brilliantly, the answer to this now well-worn riddle is that only the RFL know the stadia that are being used to host the events and so the clubs would not have a very good grasp on where the best places would be to sit wheelchair users. Yes, it is impossible in the view of the RFL to train staff employed by a rugby league club to be able to tell wheelchair using customers where the accessible seating might be in another team’s stadium, and to let them make an informed choice on buying tickets based on that information. Forgive me….how do they know where the best place is to sit for non-disabled people? A stadium plan you say? On a bit of paper? Using things like colours, numbers and letters to identify sections of the ground. Fuck off. Can’t be done.

There’s more, as a famous and utterly crap Irish comedian of the 80’s used to say. The RFL’s man had not asked me if I was a season ticket holder before he sold me the tickets. When I pointed this out he adopted what can only be described as the stance of a rabbit caught in a very bright set of headlights, fumbling his words like Mumbles from Dick Tracey and then admitting that actually, it’s a fair cop, having a season ticket has no bearing on whether you get a ticket or not for an RFL event if you are a wheelchair user. Non-disabled season ticket holders at Saints have this week to secure their tickets before they go on general sale to the rest of you next week. I don’t. Wheelchair accessible tickets have been available from the RFL to any Thomas, Richard or Harold presumably since the dates and venues of the semi-finals were announced. It’s an open and shut case. As clear a case of discrimination as having separate shops for selling bread to black people and white people. Everyone gets their bread, but it doesn’t make it right, does it? And isn’t there a high risk that it might not be the bread they wanted?

Does anyone care except those of us affected? You’d be surprised at how many people do not. One person on Facebook accused me of thinking that the world owed me a living which is quite laughable. He went strangely quiet when I politely explained to him that actually I work Monday to Friday the same as everyone else and pay for a season ticket the same as everyone else. Despite some strides having been made in the field of equality, it is clear that some people still assume that to be disabled is to sit around on your ‘arris all day claiming benefit and trawling through social media so you can scream when something goes against you. There may be disabled people like that, in fact I can assure you that there are, but I’m not one of them and I resent the implication that I am. I don’t sit behind a boring desk in a boring office all day to be disrespected by clowns with pre-conceived ideas from 1964.

It’s very likely that I won’t be able to change this policy and the attitudes which perpetuate it with any number of angry phone calls, social media rants or even eloquent blogs. But I’m buggered if I am going to put up with it quietly.

Piss Off Saints....Just Piss Off

I'm characteristically fuming. At Saints. And not about last night's shambolic performance at Leeds. That was bad enough. Suffering through the ineptitude of Matty Dawson and Kyle Amor was enough to drive anyone over the edge, and when you add that to the embarrassing lack of effort on show from the likes of Luke Walsh you could easily start tearing up your season ticket before you have had a chance to think about it properly.

But no, the reason for my unfettered rage at our champion and completely tin-pot organisation is their policy on selling wheelchair accessible tickets for the Challenge Cup semi-final against Leeds at Warrington at the end of the month. I am a season ticket holder and have been since the club moved to Langtree Park in 2012. I'm pretty keen on all things Saints and rugby league. I also work very hard to promote both the club and the game by writing for an independent Saints website at least twice a week. So it was with some anticipation that I was checking the club's website daily this week for ticket information for the semi final against the Rhinos. Now keeping in mind that the club could not be contacted by phone this week as tickets were only available in person at the ticket office, this is what is written on the website in regards to ticket information for disabled supporters;

"Disabled (Wheelchair and Ambulant) are entitled to receive a complimentary carer's ticket upon production of valid ID. Disabled tickets are charged depending on age."

Now let's ignore the offensive and boring implication that all disabled fans need a carer, and focus on what that statement tells us about how to go about acquiring wheelchair accessible tickets. Does it say that they are not available from the club and that you should contact the RFL? Does it bollocks. And if it did say that, would it then explain why this should be? Why are disabled season ticket holders not afforded the same pre-sale rights as their able bodied counterparts? Do the powers that be at the clubs and at the RFL really consider it that much of a stretch to believe that a disabled season ticket holder would bother themselves to travel 20 minutes down the road for one of the biggest games of the season? If I didn't know better I would suggest that some suit full of shite at the RFL and Saints have looked at the DDA over a brew, decided what they need to do to comply with it to the bare minimum and gone out for a round of golf! It won't matter, they probably thought, nobody is actually going to try to turn up at the ticket office and attempt to buy a ticket. Fuck, why would they do that?

Anyone who has stuck by this column long enough may remember that something similar happened to me in my quest to get tickets for the Grand Final in October. The club threw it's hands up in the air and denied any responsibility for the sale of wheelchair accessible tickets and just directed me to the RFL. But at least they did so over the phone on that occasion. When I phoned the RFL they informed me that the only tickets available were in a 'neutral' area of the Old Trafford stadium. Quite when the definition of 'neutral' became 'right in the middle of the Wiganers' I'm not sure. We made the best of it and had an amusing exchange with a Wigan Walker near the end of the game, but if I'm being brutally honest I would rather have been in among the Saints fans on such a great day. I was denied this right despite being a season ticket holder and between them, the RFL and Saints seem to be trying to ensure that I am denied that right again for the Challenge Cup semi-final this year.

It's a shameful, shambolic encore to the tripe served up on the field by the team at Headingley last night.

Our Number One

It feels a bit like a death in the family. Not a shocking, sudden death in the family that might be the result of a grotesque accident or massive and sudden organ failure. More like the death of an ageing relative who had been suffering from ill health for years but who you never thought would actually pass on in to the next world. Paul Wellens has announced his retirement from professional rugby league with immediate effect.

It follows months of uncertainty about his future as a result of a serious hip injury to which he finally succumbed during a 12-4 defeat at Wigan on Good Friday. That he took to that field that day at all said everything about this modern great of a man and gem of a player. He was in no fit state really, but with seven or eight team-mates similarly crocked his home town club, the only club he ever played for in a 17-year career, needed him badly. It was just one example of how Paul Wellens put St.Helens Rugby Football Club and its fans before his own interests.

Yet amid all the glowing tributes on social media and on the forums which seem to focus on his commitment, bravery and inspirational leadership qualities, few have done justice to the standard of his performances. Wellens was easily the best British fullback of his generation and quite possibly the best in either hemisphere during that time. Those of us who wrote him off as a halfback suggesting he was too slow were left looking very silly indeed and with no option but to just marvel at his brilliance from the fullback position. The positional switch was a masterstroke from Ian Millward and changed the course of Wellens' career forever. He never did get much quicker, but any coach who thought this might be a good enough reason to target him with raking territorial kicks downfield soon discovered that having the first defender bring Wellens to a halt was an impossible dream. He was too deceptively elusive and he could make the best of defenders look very average indeed. Go aerial against Wellens and you got the ultimate in bomb disposal, a man so calm under pressure that he often gave the impression that opponents on the field were hardly a factor in his thinking. A minor inconvenience only slightly complicating the task in hand. Just go up and catch the ball, no fuss. Everything from the timing of his leap to his handling technique was just about perfect. If you were at a game where you saw him drop a high ball you got a t-shirt printed as a memento.

Wellens was an excellent support player from fullback also. He scored over 230 tries during his career, 199 of which came in Super League. He used that same deception and elusiveness employed when returning kicks to find gaps in the league’s tightest defences close to the line, and was always on the shoulder of the man in possession when the opposition’s defensive line was broken. In some ways it is cruel that he has been denied the opportunity to get that 200th try, and the five appearances he needed to hit 500 for his boyhood club. Yet these are minor irritations in a career which has taken in a record 10 Grand Final appearances, 5 Super League title wins (including winning the Harry Sunderland Trophy for Man Of The Match in the 2006 final against Hull FC), 5 Challenge Cup wins (winning the Lance Todd Trophy as Man Of The Match in both 2007 and 2008) and 2 World Club Championship titles. There are many, many rugby league clubs who have not and will never win that amount of silverware in their entire histories. He was also named Man Of Steel in 2006, a year in which Saints won everything in their path if you include the World Club Challenge which was played early in 2007.

Wellens’ leadership qualities earned him a chance at the club captaincy in 2011 when he was appointed joint skipper alongside James Graham. It was a very difficult time to be handed the role with greats like Keiron Cunningham, Sean Long and Paul Sculthorpe recently departing the playing scene. All of that added to the temporary move to Widnes that season as Langtree Park had its finishing touches applied meant that Wellens was charged with helping to lead the team through a transitional period. Wellens still managed to help his team to the Grand Final that year, losing narrowly to a Leeds Rhinos side which had won three of the previous four Grand Finals, all against Saints who had managed to stay competitive almost despite themselves and the events conspiring against them. By the time Graham headed to Canterbury in the NRL Wellens was left to lead the team in his own right as they entered a new era in a new home in 2012. The first two seasons there continued to be turbulent on the field but as the team improved under Nathan Brown, so Wellens' influence on it grew and grew. His performance (ironically in the halves in the midst of yet another injury crisis) in the 14-6 Grand Final success over Wigan last year was heroic, and his emotional, exhausted reaction to it remains an iconic image for the thousands who were at Old Trafford that night or who saw it on the television.

If we are talking about Wellens the man aswell as Wellens the rugby league player, then perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay him comes from the reaction to his retirement from outside the Saints bubble. Fans of other clubs on social media have been unanimous in their praise and respect for one of the modern era’s greatest players, while former team-mates and opponents alike have followed suit in paying tribute to his achievements and wishing him the best of luck as he enters a new chapter in his life. BBC Sport are reporting that he has already been welcomed on to the Saints coaching staff alongside former team-mates Cunningham, Long and Ade Gardner. If so it is a shrewd if rather obvious move by the club’s hierarchy. Players with Wellens’ level of game intelligence seem the best placed to make the transition from player to coach and if he can pass on half of what he knows to the next generation then the club will be developing home-grown stars for years to come.

Paul Wellens should never have to buy another pint in his home town again. So many of us are indebted to him for the great entertainment, the glory and the wonderful memories that he has provided us with for more than a decade and a half. Wello, we salute you…

5 Talking Points From Saints' Loss To Castleford Tigers

5 Talking Points From Saints’ Loss At Castleford Tigers



If You Live By The Sword……



Ben Roberts’ last gasp drop-goal was a perfectly wretched way for Saints to lose a match they had been in full control of. Particularly in view of the fact that they had a scrum feed deep inside the Tigers’ half of the field with barely a minute and a half on the clock. You could argue that a professional rugby league team should never lose a game from that position. But a sneaky glance into the history, indeed the very DNA of Saints reveals that they have been doing exactly this sort of thing to others for years. Who can forget Sean Long’s winning one-pointer in the 2002 Grand Final against Bradford Bulls, or a similar effort which put paid to Warrington’s hopes of ending their losing streak against Saints in Ian Millward’s last game in charge? Warrington were a serial victim as Saints mastered the art of winning games that they had barely bothered to turn up for. It was almost a sport within a sport. The Castleford defeat just shows that if you live by the sword you are occasionally going to die by it. Best get it out of the way now than have it happen when the pots are on offer in August and October. So let’s cheer up just a little bit, eh?



The Humanity Of James Roby



Not to labour a point, but Keiron Cunningham has declared twice recently that in his opinion James Roby is a better hooker than Cunningham himself used to be. Now this might be false modesty on the part of the head coach. He’s probably not going to come out after a game and say ‘yeah, he’s alright but have you seen who’s on that statue outside the stadium?’ However, it is nevertheless an indication of just how brilliant Roby is that a legend such as Cunningham is prepared to concede ground even if it is politeness combined perhaps with a desire to boost his star man’s confidence. Whatever the truth of the Cunningham-Roby debate there is no doubting that the latter is a freak of a player in his own right. All of which makes it all the more shocking to note that the normally robotic Roby broke down a little at The Jungle. His 40-20 attempt sailed out on the full at a crucial time for Saints, and the winning drop-goal was only made possible after Roby failed to pick the ball up cleanly from the base of the scrum. In mitigation he did have Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook doing his level best to confuse the situation by plodding around clumsily in the vicinity of the ball as it lay on the ground, but the fact of the matter is still that Roby should have picked the ball up and that, had he done so, Saints would likely have run down a fair proportion of the clock and not conceded the possession and territory which allowed Cas to set up for Roberts’ winning effort.



So that’s his two errors for the season out of the way, then. You wouldn’t want to be Widnes Vikings…..



Does Anyone Have A Spare Fullback Lying Around?



I really had hoped to avoid banging on about injuries AGAIN in this column but fate has again conspired against me. Shannon McDonnell is the latest to join Saints’ long-term injury list and in so doing becomes the fourth fullback to be forced out of action this season. Jonny Lomax’s season ended early amid fears for his future in the sport, before time finally caught up with and overtook Paul Wellens. Tommy Makinson filled in ably before McDonnell returned to the club, and now both face months on the sidelines in any case. Adam Swift has been mooted as a possible candidate to take over the role but he suffered a nasty bang on the head at Castleford and will presumably need to pass all of the concussion tests during the week if he is to make the starting line-up for this weekend’s cup quarter-final with Widnes. There are no more cabs left on the rank and everyone is getting very angry about it indeed. It’s like town on a Saturday night before the advent of 24-hour drinking. Step forward Mark Percival who, it has been suggested, will be the last line of defence against Dennis Betts’ side on Sunday. If he can handle the defensive side of the role it could work out wonderfully well. Percival needs to get his hands on the ball more and where better to do that than at fullback which often affords players with his sort of gifts all the time and space they need to prosper. It might just work…… Or if not it has also been suggested that Saints could move for former New Zealand international Kevin Locke, whose resignation from Salford Red Devils has been accepted by Marwan Koukash at a press conference this week.



And So To The Good News……



Just as Saints were out losing fullbacks, they also acquired one of the best scrum halves in the Super League and one of its emerging back row talents as both Luke Walsh and Joe Greenwood made try-scoring returns to action against Daryl Powell’s side. Ok so it was in vain, but it was still uplifting to see Walsh scheming in tandem with Travis Burns, even if the latter is still too fond of a step back on the inside and a drop ball to a barely moving front rower. With Walsh now committed to the club for 2016 what we would really like to see is him enjoying a lengthy spell without injuries. It’s abundantly clear that the men in the red vee are a transformed outfit in attack with Walsh out there directing traffic, while Greenwood’s form before his broken leg was impressive also. If he can reach those heights again at the back end of the season then there is every reason to be optimistic for the Super 8’s and the subsequent play-off series. It just doesn’t feel a lot like it when you have just lost to a last minute drop-goal.



Wembley Dreams



Saints are regulars at the Grand Final. We’re still Super League champions in fact, which is something you might want to ponder before you sink into despair watching re-runs of the Tigers game. However, we haven’t been to a Challenge Cup Final since 2008. A full seven years ago. Even if you just miss having the chance to crack open a beer at 6.00 in the morning before the coach leaves you must be as desperate as I am to get back down to the capital for the more traditional of the game’s showpiece events. Opportunity is knocking with a home quarter final against the Widnes Vikings coming up this Sunday (June 28). The Vikings have slipped out of the top eight of Super League in recent weeks following defeats to Hull KR and Huddersfield Giants and come to Langtree Park with confidence somewhat shaken. Yet it was a very competitive struggle when the two teams met there in the league earlier this season, with Saints pulling away in the last quarter to record a 34-16 success. These stakes are higher this time around, with the winner’s Wembley dream alive while the loser goes home to ‘concentrate on the league’ and gaze longingly into the distance with thoughts of another crack at it in 12 months time. Every minute matters in Super League, but none more so than the 80 that will be played in the Challenge Cup between two old local rivals this weekend. Saints have their best chance of reaching Wembley in recent years. They just need one big performance…

And maybe a favourable semi-final draw……….

The Raheem Situation

Just a quickie today. I've heard all the evidence, read all the headlines and I just wanted to make my point about the burning issue of the day. It won't be popular, but then neither is Spina Bifida so what the fuck do I care? The only thing on the sports pages today is the news that Raheem Sterling is refusing to sign a new contract with Liverpool and will likely end up on the bench at Manchester City/Chelsea/Real Madrid/Bayern Munich/Delete As Appropriate.

I can understand fans being unhappy about this, but really the level of indignation thrown at Sterling while the club continue to get away with passively allowing their best players to sod off elsewhere is making me gag. OK, so Sterling is greedy and it probably is all about money and blah blah bloody blah. But to pretend that paying that amount of money to a player is an affront to Liverpool Football Club and it's unique classy-ness is what Stephen Fry would have called loose stool water and arse gravy. They've paid dozens of players that amount and more. In all likelihood they have no desire to keep Sterling and, instead of coming out and saying so and admitting to their fans that they have become a mediocre selling club in the manner of Spurs or fucking Everton, they want instead to bang on about the well-known evil of agents in football and greedy boys from London who have no connection with the club and are probably just bored of the lack of ambition that is associated with the belief that Martin Skrtel is a serviceable Premier League player.

If it is Liverpool's policy that they will no longer pay any of their players that kind of money then they have already joined the also-rans and will never win the league again. Ever. Perhaps they are waiting for Platini and his boys to give them a helping hand, but that looks unlikely given that his restrictive, cartel-protecting Financial Fair Play rules are about to be legally challenged into oblivion. I mean, I ask you, who in their right fucking mind wants to watch a league in which the traditional giants dominate and nobody is allowed to clumsily happen upon an oil-generated fortune and spoil their party? You can like Chelsea and Manchester City or not, but to my mind there is absolutely no doubt that football is a lot more interesting for the fact that they have been allowed to buy and pay the best players on the planet the big bucks and ritually tonk Crystal Palace and Hull City to pass an otherwise boring Sunday. If you block this from happening then you guarantee that everyone who is currently outside the elite will spend eternity playing for the privilege of avoiding relegation or a fate worse than that, the Europa League.

So no, I'm not saying Liverpool should pay Raheem Sterling. I'm just saying they should fucking grow up and stop whining about what it costs to be competitive in the Premier League these days. If they don't pay Sterling then the reason that they should not is because actually he's been crap this year, not because of how much money his agent wants him to make. Now I realise that this goes against all my every day political beliefs which lie somewhere to the left of Josef Stalin, but football is not remotely related to real life. Nobody in football has to go to a foodbank because Chelsea just bought another £50million squad player. And in any case, a football club trying to deny the fact that it is a capitalist behemoth masquerading as a socialist vehicle of the people is vomit inducing.

That's all. Bye Raheem.

Blackpool Part Three - Sunday

If you’ve read much of this rubbish you will probably know that I have been to the top of both the Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building in New York. I have spent time looking out over the city from both which offer mesmerising views of everything from the Statue Of Liberty and the Chrysler Building to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. The Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building are high. Very high. And I don’t like high. But if you’re going all that way….

Compared with all of this the top of Blackpool Tower was going to be a breeze. Hopefully without too much of an actual breeze considering high winds had stopped us going up there the day before. But easy. No bother. It stands 158 metres high, or 518 feet which must be some sort of mathematical anomaly. Surely not all heights and distances can be converted from metres to feet using the same digits? No, they can’t as we will see but it should be remembered that I failed GCSE Maths twice. When I say failed I mean I got a D when I needed a C. I got it at the third time of asking, which I still believe is down to the fact that nobody marks maths papers and instead names are drawn out of the education authorities’ equivalent of the FA’s velvet ballbag. Once they have the required number of successful candidates the rest get sent back to re-sit. In my case I re-sat with one-time Saints centre and winger and noisiest person in the class Andy Haigh, and Andy Mikhail who once carried Sonny Nickle on his shoulders in a particularly exuberant celebration of some Saints win or other and can now be found managing the affairs of St.Helens’ middleweight boxing contender Martin Murray. I’m an administrator for a wonderful organisation I am still not allowed to name. Maybe you had to be called Andy to go on to greater things from that maths re-sit class.

Which name dropping bullshit does nothing to lead us to where we should be going. Which is comparing heights of well known global landmarks in tenuous preparation for my telling you about the day I went to the top of Blackpool Tower. So allow me to continue. The Empire State Building is more than twice the height of Blackpool Tower at 381 metres or 1250 feet, while Rockefeller Center stands 266 metres high or 872 feet. So given that, the 158 metres or 518 feet of Blackpool Tower was small beer. Except for the glass floor. Glass floors tend to freak me out a little bit. At the Yorvik Centre in York I had trouble crossing a glass floor which overlooked about a three-foot drop to a model of the old Viking digs beneath the glass. I was ok if I looked straight ahead but when I looked down at it and was hit by the optical illusion of nothingness beneath me I struggled a little bit. The glass floor was going to be interesting.

Getting there wasn't straightforward, however. The set-up is quite similar to the New York landmarks in that you are led from queue to queue by the staff before you actually reach the lifts to take you to the very top. There is information about the tower on the walls to distract you from the fact that you are waiting but the truth is that you are not waiting nearly long enough to be able to take it all in. Just long enough for it to annoy you. Included in the price of a ticket for the Blackpool Tower Eye, to give it its proper name, is a 4D show. So before you get to where you need to be, but after you have finished queuing and failing to read the end of the paragraph on the wall that you had started reading to make the waiting time go more quickly, you are given a quite absurd pair of 4D specs and ushered into a small theatre. Whatever happened to 3D? Is 5D a thing and if it is, is it hurtling towards us? In the 4D theatre there is a bar at absolutely the right height to stop someone at my eye level from seeing at least a quarter of the screen. None of which turns out to be particularly disappointing as the underwhelming 4D 'show' consists of a small boy who seems very taken by the tower, the ballroom and the circus and experiences some deranged fantasy about the whole thing launching like a rocket. Kylie Minogue's 'All The Lovers' is the soundtrack to all of this for reasons which are beyond my comprehension. But then I could only see three quarters of the screen so perhaps I missed something. Perhaps the names of all of Kylie Minogue's lovers scrolled across the screen like headlines on the Sky News ticker.

On the subject of tickers (another seamless link) the lift to the observation deck is not for the faint hearted. It's fairly transparent so you can see the framework of the tower as you go up to the top. We also had the bonus view of the scaffolding which currently envelopes parts of the tower as they carry out some refurbishments. If anything needs refurbishment it is the 4D show. Regardless, Blackpool Tower currently (at least at the time of our visit but bear in mind that I am writing this six weeks later) looks like an enormous version of my house, which is currently unrecognisable due to all of the building work going on. On the first day of work the builders phoned Emma and told her that they would have to remove my ramp, as if that wasn't really important and we could do without it. After all, Emma can help me inside and why the fuck would I want to go outside anywhere on my own given that I am a disabled retard who is a danger to himself and society? It's bad enough that I have to park my car at my mum and dad's house.

Back to the Blackpool Tower lift. I had a sneaky peak outside but I spent most of the ascent looking straight ahead at the door of the lift. Unlike the windows at the side you can't see through the door in front of you so it becomes just like any other lift if you focus your gaze straight ahead. We were let out at the top and advised that when we were ready to go back down a member of staff would assist us in using the lift around the other side. Normally I get irritated when there are signs on lifts asking you to refrain from using them without a member of staff to assist you, but in this case I'm reassured by the idea. If this were a free for all and little Johnny was allowed to press the call button whenever the mood took him, and then the lift broke as a result, well then we'd all be buggered. Or at least I would. I don't know how many steps there are from the top of the tower to the bottom of it but in the event that the lift breaks no emergency service worker is assisting me in descending them. I'm waiting it out on the top deck, on the glass floor, until they fix the fecking thing. I don't even know if this thing has steps any more. Nobody uses them. And this a listed building. Progress, that.

The glass floor is on the west side of the tower and offers some very special panoramic views of the seaside town. Directly in front of you is a huge glass window overlooking the sea. I focused completely on this and rolled over the glass floor without giving it half as much thought as I had in York. Perhaps the views of the sea and the town were a useful distraction. In the Yorvik Centre I don't remember there being much to look at other than the glass floor and the model beneath it. If you looked in front of you, you might catch a glimpse of a pre-historic stool from some ancient bowel. In a frame. Or an interactive touch-screen offering you information about the history of the horned helmet. Certainly not Blackpool beach.

Having gained in confidence I decided to look down at the pavement below. It's at that point that you realise just how high 158 metres or 518 feet really is. You can expect to lose at least part of your stomach but hopefully none of your breakfast. On the ground below there is the comical sight of the outline of a human body, the kind that you see drawn around dead bodies in crime dramas on television or film. Nordberg, all of that. Beside the outline it just says.....'ouch...!'. Which is amusing but I suspect inaccurate. I'm not sure you would feel anything if you fell 158 metres or 518 feet on to a concrete pavement. It's not long before I stop contemplating this and go for another wander around the viewing deck. It's far easier to look at tall buildings in the distance than it is to dwell for too long on the pavement and the ant-sized people traipsing across it.

Predictably, the ride down in the lift takes a long time. Since you cannot operate the lift yourself you have to just wait until a member of staff becomes available to do it for you. By which time everyone has had enough of the views and the heights and wants to go back down aswell. You do get to go straight to the bottom though, so at least you are spared another viewing of all Kylie Minogue's lovers. Any more of that and you could be tempted to try to find out whether you'd feel anything if you jumped off the top of the tower.

With nothing too vital to get home for we decided to spend part of the afternoon in the Tower's other major tourist attraction, the dungeons beneath. Adverts dotted around the town promise 10 live actors taking you through the history of various types of horrific punishment in England, going back centuries. The actors take their responsibilities very seriously, which they should do for £15 a throw, never once showing even the merest hint that they might exit their characters at some point. They've zoned out completely, and become medieval peddlers of torture and instruments of torture. No expense spared in the special effects department either as at one point one lucky punter is sprayed with fake blood from a body lying prone in the centre of a small room. All of which is surprising given that the body is both a dummy and supposedly dead. In another scene a young girl is shown the delights of some ball-crunching instrument of pain before being invited to lock herself into a small cage while another tour guide character finishes telling us the about the many and varied painful ways there were to impose justice in those days. But just to prove that the old ways can still be effective and at a much cheaper rate, one man almost vacates his skin at the beginning of the tour when an actor dressed as a monk leaps up from behind a desk and shouts something along the lines of 'boo'. Or something.

Upon being led from room to room in the dungeons we also manage to get lost among a maze of mirrors, which has to rank as one of my worst nightmares.

Of course, if you go to enough of these sorts of things you are going to get picked on. It seems everyone loves a bit of audience participation. And so it was that inevitably, after one lady who had declared herself to be called Fred and was found guilty of fornicating with a horse or something, I was called upon to move forward into the spotlight to face a bit of medieval justice. The judge reminded me of David Schneider from I'm Alan Partridge and The Day Today. Except he had a robe on a stupid wig on, of course. He asked me my name...

"Geoffrey." I replied. No, I don't know why. It was just the first name I thought of.

"And where are you from, Geoffrey......?" he asks, in a voice that would have been at home in the local shop for local people in The League Of Gentlemen.

"Skelmersdale."

No, I don't know that either, except to say that I thought about saying Wigan and then felt like that was a bit too predictable. Believe it or not there is a point where even I start to think that hammering Wigan becomes a bit stale. I've known two people in my life who have lived in Skelmersdale, on the other hand, and both have assured me that it is an unblemished, perfect shit hole. Either way I was going to answer the two questions with anything other than 'Stephen' and 'St.Helens'. I can't remember rightly what I was accused of. It may even have been more equine fornication, but naturally enough I was found guilty. But he'd already punished me by sending me to audience participation hell for the last ten minutes and charging me £30 (there were two of us, remember) for the privilege.

There was nothing more he could to me now.

Election Catastrophe - Is It 2020 Yet?

I feel more than a little depressed. As I write all but one of the UK’s 650 constituencies have returned their result from yesterday’s General Election. Shockingly, the Tories have secured an overall majority of seats in the House Of Commons. Only a small majority (maybe around 12 seats) but a majority nonetheless. This is not how we were told things would turn out.

We were told by every leading media source in the weeks leading up to the election that none of the parties would secure a majority. All the talk was of what deals could be done between the parties to try and form a new coalition. No doubt all the major party leaders had been in talks with each other on the subject, and they spent long hours fending off questions from the media about possible alliances.

And then we had the exit poll. Remember that cricket match analogy I strangled yesterday? The one about four days of rain and everyone trying to force a result on the fifth day before going home early? Well perhaps we can think of the exit poll announcement just after 10.00 last night as the moment when both sides forfeited an innings before one captain or the other offered a ludicrously generous declaration. The exit poll had it that the Tories would win 316 of the 326 seats they would need to secure an overall majority in the house (technically 323 as Sinn Fein don’t take up their seats in the UK parliament – what are they running for then?). It also had Labour floundering way behind on 239 and the Liberal Democrats facing perhaps a more predictable clobbering, losing 47 of their seats to slip to just 10 in the entire house.

It was so preposterous that in the early hours of the BBC’s election coverage the great and the garbage among UK politicians queued up to tell us that the poll was wrong, that 11 YouGov polls had previously predicted a fiendishly tight race that would likely end in another hung parliament. Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown declared that he would eat his hat if the exit poll was anywhere near correct, but only if the hat was made of marzipan. It was that sort of night. The shiver down the spine upon viewing the exit poll had clearly been enough to consume Ashdown in witlessness. Tory bastard Michael Gove agreed, however, advising caution to all the watching bastards. Let’s not celebrate just yet, was the message. The SNP were similarly quick to play down the outlandish exit poll which had them winning 58 of the 59 seats in Scotland. That result would all but sink Labour hopes of an overall majority, but there was still the hope of some involvement in a coalition at that point.

And yet somehow the result is even worse. I was only seven at the time, but this is how grown-ups must have felt when Margaret Thatcher won a second term in 1983. The Tories currently have 331 seasts, Labour only 232 while the SNP have made off with a staggering 56 of the 59 available in Scotland. Five more years of Tory austerity it is then, and five more years of Tory austerity that is likely to finish us off. Without a junior partner in government beside them they will be free to make even more wild, savage cuts than they have over the last five year parliamentary term. They can work uninterrupted on their thinly veiled dream of privatising the NHS in a system which will ensure that the state of your health will have a direct correlation with the state of your bank balance. The poor and, dare I say it without coming across like I’m feeling rather too sorry for myself, the disabled, will be favourite targets for Cameron, Osbourne and the despicable IDS while those with the most will continue to get tax relief. At the very least, their tax dodging, loophole finding chicanery will be allowed to take place with a blind eye turned. I think I’m going to vomit.

So how did it all happen? How did a race that was not supposed to be won outright turn into 316 Tory seats in an exit poll to 331 in reality? There are a few explanations offered. One is the bewildering dominance of the SNP in Scotland. Led by elf-like, ubiquitous ballache Nicola Sturgeon they stated before the election that they would help keep the Tories out of Downing Street. If anything, their obliteration of Labour north of the border has all but sealed the deal for Cameron and his cohorts. I can’t really see how the SNP thought that their success would have any other outcome. But then you can’t criticise a party for winning seats and playing a part in the democratic process. That’s what it is there for. Still, it’s quite baffling to me to note that just months after voting to stay in the UK the Scottish people have elected a squillion MP’s from a party whose sole aim appears to be to leave the UK. All of which leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps Labour’s stock is just that low in Scotland. Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy lost his seat, which gives us some indication of the state of the party up there. The Scottish clearly can’t bring themselves to vote Tory but they have done the next best thing. In droves.

Incidentally Murphy was not the only, or even the most high profile MP to lose his seat in the carnage. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has gone, as have Liberal Democrat heavyweights Danny Alexander and Vince Cable. Somehow Nick Clegg managed to hold on to Sheffield Hallam but that hasn’t stopped him from falling on his sword and resigning as Liberal Democrat leader alongside Labour leader Ed Milliband and frog-faced UKIP clown Nigel Farage who was also defeated in his constituency. Though Clegg was given a reprieve in his own constituency, he was always likely to pay a heavy price for the betrayal of the party that was hopping in to bed with the Conservatives after the 2010 hung parliament. He will argue that he and his party colleagues played a vital role in limiting the damage that could have been done had Cameron had free reign, but had he left the Tories to try to form a minority government he would arguably have had as much power or more to vote down anything that had too much of a right-wing whiff about it. What he would give for that opportunity now.

There is more head-scratching when considering how it came to be that those Liberal Democrat voters who furiously abandoned their party turned Tory blue rather than Labour red. Where were all the left-leaning Liberals voting Labour to punish their erstwhile leader? Surely not voting for Nige and his band of bigots and gaffsters? UKIP only won one seat as even Farage hilariously got ran out of town in Thanet, yet their overall 12.6% share of the vote is the third highest of any party behind only the Conservatives and Labour. Thankfully they are a long way behind the big two, but they will argue that their rise continues. But you can’t help but wonder how much of their 9.5% increase in vote share was gained courtesy of furious protest voters abandoning the Liberal Democrats, whether they had previously leaned left or right. Even voters who are left wing in most aspects of politics are not immune to succumbing to their inner racist.

There are fewer laughs in this piece than I expected to be honest. I thought maybe I could bring a kind of gallows humour to it, but another five years of Tory savagery is a baron featureless desert for comedy, particularly in the hours after they have claimed what is still a shock overall majority. All that can happen now is for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to re-group, and find new leaders who will convince the electorate and particularly the swathes of new SNP voters that they can again be credible opposition to Cameron, currently sat smugly aboard his runaway toff train, no doubt thinking of new ways he can annihilate the poor.

I did say I felt more than a little bit depressed……….

A Massive Election

Have you been to vote yet? Today is that day. The day that comes along only once every five years when you have the opportunity to have your say on who is running the country. I haven’t been yet but I will. After all, my local polling station is near to the chippy so what more incentive to get out and exercise my democratic right do I need?

In the unlikely event that you haven’t noticed or in the even more unlikely event that you haven’t noticed and actually want to know, I’m voting Labour. I’m in the fortunate position of having a party which more or less represents my political views so it’s what is now irritatingly referred to as a no brainer for me. Not only that, but my constituency of St.Helens South and Whiston has had a Labour MP since the last Ice Age. In the last General Election in 2010 they held a majority of 14,122. Even with Tory defector Shaun Woodward standing as their candidate, Labour were unmovable in the seat. You could stick a red rosette on Gary Glitter in St.Helens South and Whiston and he would still enjoy a sizeable majority.

All of which leaves some of us feeling that we maybe have a little less influence on the overall outcome of the General Election than others. If you live in a marginal constituency then your vote really, really matters. It could be the difference between five more years of Cameron and austerity, or packing the posh knob back off to his country club to guffaw about his personal fortune with all the other pheasant-shooters. When the financial crisis hit Cameron told us that we were all in it together, that it was going to be painful for us all but that together we would get through it. What he meant was that it was going to be painful for you if you were poor or unemployed, but a bit of a hoot if you happened to be already among the country’s top earners. All I need tell you about Cameron’s Britain is that despite more money being lost to this country by non-payment of tax by…say……snivelling Tory pop stars than by any amount of benefit fraudsters making bogus claims the fawning, right wing media spotlight remains on the latter. By ensuring it stays there Cameron can focus the minds of the undecided on that problem, divide the working classes, turn them on each other and conquer them. I’d give him credit for the brilliance of it if it were not an ancient Tory strategy.

Not everyone has been vocal about who they are voting for and why, turning their attentions instead to trying to convince everyone that they must vote, whoever that might benefit. The argument goes that the right to vote was fought over for years and that if you do not take up that right then you are being ungrateful in the first instance and that secondly you are forfeiting any right to bang on about how shite things are after the next government makes everything even worse than it already is. It’s an argument that troubles me. Surely the fight was for the right to take part in the democratic process, which you should be able to do just as well by not endorsing any of the current rabble. If you are not as fortunate as I and you find that none of the parties represent your personal political beliefs then what do you do? Vote for a party you do not support in the hope that it will damage the one that you hate the most? Possibly. Tactical voting will play a part in today’s election. But what if instead of that we had an option to abstain on the ballot paper? If the returning officers announced the number of abstentions registered in each constituency it is likely that many winning MP’s would nevertheless have secured a tally of votes which would be dwarfed by the number of abstentions. At that point perhaps the politicians, many of whom have become murky, arrogant shysters in the comfort of their huge majorities, might realise quite how unpopular they are and lift their game. If the low quality of the choices on offer is the reason for low turn-out rather than a lack of interest from the individual, then that individual has every right to moan for the next five years.

Until we have an option to abstain on the ballot paper I can’t see how compulsory voting is fair or sensible. I have seen and heard lots of people professing to know nothing about politics and have no interest in learning anything about it. One woman who was interviewed on the television recently did not know what a manifesto is, while another could not quite put her finger on who Ed Milliband is. Do we really want people with this level of ignorance to influence something as important as the decision on who forms the next government? Wouldn’t that be like asking me who should coach the England rugby union team, only with much graver consequences? It strikes me as particularly absurd to wait until the day of the election to encourage the politically disinterested to vote. The damage has already been done. Surely the way forward would be to try to find ways to engage these people in politics long before the General Election so that when it comes around they can make an informed choice? Quite how we do that is one of life’s imponderables. Russell Brand’s Park Life blathering doesn’t help, nor does the primary school jeering of MP’s every week at Prime Minister’s Question Time. But in the end the onus is on individuals to turn away from Joey Essex and Embarrassing Bodies and towards political engagement. I’m not hopeful.

As for the result itself, despite the declaration by every single news source that this is the most unpredictable election in years, most experts firmly believe that nobody will win outright by securing a majority. It’s like a cricket test match which has had four days of rain. Everyone tries to force a result on the fifth day but very often they give up early and go home. A party needs 326 of the 650 seats in the House Of Commons to secure a majority. That did not happen in 2010 which is the reason we have had a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government since then. This time around the permutations for possible coalitions are dizzying with Con-Dem, Lab-Dem, Lab-SNP coalitions and indeed everything except for a Lab-Con coalition within the realms of possibility. If none of these parties can work it out between them then the Conservatives or the Labour Party could attempt to form a minority government alone if they acquire more seats than any one of the other parties but less than the others combined.

Complicating matters further is the recent rise to prominence of far-right, Thatcherite foreigner-hating UKIP under Nigel Farage. Shockingly, UKIP have managed to seize the support of Little England. The kind of people who want to stop anyone who isn’t white and 100000% British from living in this country except for when they or their child needs that life-saving operation or that top quality education. I can speak from personal experience about receiving high quality health care from extremely clever individuals who are undeniably none-whites. The truth is that ideologically, and to paraphrase Will Self, UKIP and the BNP are an anorexic cigarette paper apart. If support for UKIP is a protest vote against the current government, against Labour, or against the current immigration situation which I think we all would agree needs further examination, it is a very dangerous one.



Whatever the outcome I am personally very excited about voting. There’s a chip barm involved.

Blue Badge - Blue Mood

Let me just give you some backdrop to my mood as I write this. I’m £100 lighter having just settled up a parking charge with some company whose name escapes me and which seems to exist only to collect parking charges. It’s my fault. Who else is to blame for neglecting to display his blue badge in the window of his Ford Focus while parked in a disabled bay at Boots on Ravenhead Retail Park? I was in there for less time than it takes for Steven Gerrard to get his marching orders but there’s no getting away from the fact that I did park in a disabled bay without displaying my blue badge. For this reason my heart wasn’t in it when it came to an appeal. If people don’t pay parking charges for parking in disabled bays without displaying their blue badges then how am I ever going to find a disabled parking space again?

The problem is they probably don’t and the fact that I, a genuine wheelchair user, got caught being absent minded rather than lazy or inconsiderate is still rather irritating me. How many able bodied bastards get away with pulling up at their local Tesco, heading straight for the disabled bays and winging it completely while they nip in to get their night’s supply of Red Stripe? What’s grinding my gears (sorry, but we are on a motoring theme here) further is the fact that the money goes to some faceless debt collecting entity. If it went to Cancer Research or some other well intentioned charity I’d have paid it without hesitation and probably felt better about my day in the process.

I’m further culpable for the amount I have had to pay. When the ticket was issued a month ago it was only worth £30. But I did what I have always done with any problem I have ever had in my life, including stage four kidney disease until the heart palpitations started, and ignored for as long as was humanly possible. I received a letter yesterday telling me that it was too late to appeal against the judgement, and too late to settle it by paying just the initial charge of £30. This was followed by several vague threats of court action. Apparently the ticket stipulates that you have 14 days to pay the £30 before it then becomes £100 and you have no right of appeal regardless of the condition of your spine/legs/torso/head. There was a brief moment when I thought about waiting for the inevitable summons and then making my appearance in court, if only to prove to the faceless debt collectors that I am in fact a disabled person and not a boy racer stopping off for Red Stripe. But again it came back to the question of what happens if everyone starts finding a reason not to pay their parking charges. The boy racers would have an even freer reign of the disabled bays at Tesco and then where will we be? In a bay that is too narrow to allow you to get out of your car and into your wheelchair, that’s where.

So I’m to blame. But remembering a situation I found myself in when I lived in Barnsley many years ago I can’t help thinking that a degree of common sense should come into the law here. I was parked in a disabled bay outside a branch of Halifax Bank in the town centre. I was sat in the car eating my lunch. I practically lived in my car when I was a student, mostly because it was a good deal more accessible than my house at the time. So I was munching away on my sandwich and reading my magazine when someone knocked on my window. I looked up and saw a 60-something woman gesturing for me to wind the window down. When I did she asked me where my blue badge was. The bald truth of that matter was that I didn’t have a blue badge at that time. Blue badges cost £2 even then, and as any student knows £2 is £2. Or four shots of whiskey to put it another way. I did have a wheelchair though, which I pointed to for her benefit. It probably didn’t help that I made a face which indicated that only the most brainless moron who ever lived on Planet Earth would ask a person as to the whearabouts of their blue badge when they clearly had a wheelchair sitting in the passenger seat beside them. To my mind my wheelchair trumped her blue badge, which was probably acquired following a particularly nasty grazing episode outside of Gala Bingo. Anyway, she was not convinced and angrily reminded me about the law on blue badges and how wheelchairs don’t count. But in the absence of faceless debt collectors I won this battle, refusing to move my car until I was good and bloody ready, by which time she had harrumphed off to tell all her grazed friends about the injustice of it all.

But the point is this. Surely there are other ways than the presence of a blue badge to demonstrate whether an individual is genuinely in need of the disabled parking bay they have just occupied? The person who issued my ticket at Boots would not have seen my wheelchair because I was in it elsewhere, but surely it is not beyond the realms of human endeavour for a record of blue badge holders to be kept somewhere so that forgetting to display said blue badge is not such a problem. You don’t have to display a tax disc any more. The DVLA know exactly which cars are taxed and all you have to do is go online to make sure that yours is one of them. This wouldn’t stop time-wasters hogging disabled bays because as I alluded to earlier blue badges are no doubt absurdly easy to acquire, but it would at least stop forgetful people in genuine need from being punished. If the authorities can see their way clear to catching the odd Boy Racer along the way then that's a bonus. I'm just asking not to be punished for being careless.

I suppose that as long as absent minded piss-hats like me continue to forget to display their blue badges then there is always going to be a perceived sense of injustice. I’ll take the hit, but just do me one favour. Do not make a patronising comment on this link about how I have been ‘naughty’ or include the phrase ‘tut, tut’ in your response. If you do I will remember it to my dying day and one day, when you least expect it, even if everything is fine between us for the next 20 years, I will come around to your house and punch you full in the face.

Now fuck off away from my page.

Neighbours - Nostalgia Overload

I don't watch Neighbours. It's not really aimed at grumpy men approaching middle age. It's aimed at what I used to be, grumpy teens approaching whatever age comes before middle age. It hasn't always been this way though. For a surprisingly long time I was completely hooked on it. This was not only because teenage boys who didn't want to look at Natalie Imbruglia in a bikini are a figment of your imagination, but because I was genuinely absorbed in its crappy, cliched storylines.

Imagine my delight then when I stumbled across a special programme on Channel 5 last night celebrating 30 years of it. Is it really that long since I was consumed with the pointless non-existence of Mike, Scott, Jane and Charlene? If you think that my obsession with all things Ramsay Street in the late 80's is a little bit peculiar then I would ask you what else was there to do at that time anyway? When I wasn't watching Neighbours I was pushing (or being pushed by over-bearing friends whose only actual discourse with me was to ask me the time every twenty minutes) to the local shop for a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch and a Supercan of Coke. Or hanging around on street corners to absolutely no effect. People complain about the fact that children nowadays don't have any sense of adventure since the invention of the X-Box, but before the X-Box those same people were terrorised by young people with absolutely nothing to do except bully and grope each other while kicking footballs at the nearest window.

Anyway, back to the 30th Anniversary special. I wasn't expecting much in terms of production values so I wasn't disappointed when I was confronted by a rather tired format of interviews with stars of the show past and present, interspersed with classic clips and all linked together terribly by Stefan Dennis and some lad who now plays the son of Scott and Charlene. He's about 47 or something. I'm not sure what the casting director was up to with this lad. When you look at him you don't automatically think Kylie and Jason. You think Brad Willis or some other two-dimensional Aussie beach bum. Is that racist? Feck off.

Despite the lack of any real innovation in the format there was nostalgia quite literally dripping from every pore of this production. Impressively, they had managed to snare interviews with the really huge ex-Neighbours stars which gave it all that extra bit of gravitas. Where I was expecting the woman who played Mrs Mangel we actualy got Mike, subsequently known as film icon Guy Pearce. And Charlene, who still manages to get away with hot-pants and some increasingly dodgy pop music well into her 40's under the ludicrous pseudonym Kylie Minogue. Then there is Margot Robbie, last seen alongside Will Smith in Focus but perhaps even more famous for regularly showing her bits in God-Awful and offensive idiot-fest The Wolf Of Wall Street. They even got Delta Bloody Goodrem to say a few words. And of course Jason Donovan, although his star has fallen slightly to the point where a few short years ago he played some of his 80's hits at Chicago Rock in St.Helens and Emma complained because he only did a few songs. I would have thought that a short Jason Donovan gig was a merciful thing, but what do I know?

What pleased me most about the interviews is that Pearce,Donovan, Minogue and all are as enthusiastic about the show now as I was then. I had expected Pearce in particular to flatly refuse to appear, or if he had to then I had thought he would tut mournfully about what he'd had to do to make a name for himself in the manner that George Michael talks about Wham! But he only had good things to say about Neighbours, as did Kylie, Jason and Margot. Craig MacLachlan didn't appear to be taking it as seriously but when did Henry ever take anything seriously? No Neighbours anniversary show would be complete without several gut-twanging shots of Henry wearing nothing but those old dungarees or, in one or two clips, running around in nothing at all. And all set against the backdrop of a montage of clips in which Ian Smith (Harold Bishop) shouted 'Oh Henry, how could you?'

Disappointingly, there was no sign of Natalie Imbruglia. Not only that, but while the superstar careers of Pearce, Minogue and Donovan were celebrated there was no mention of the torrid pop ventures of Dennis and MacLachlan. Don't It Make You Feel Good? Mona? Eighties pop classics both, right? Maybe this where I should bow down to the producer's better judgement and admit that these abominations are better off left to old episodes of TOTP2 with a music Hell theme. Imagine the fun that bloke off the radio could have delivering whithering quips about them over the top of their videos...

The phrase 'rocking the mullet' inevitably cropped up as Pearce and Donovan reminisced about their characters Mike and Scott, while Anne Charleston (Madge Bishop) rightly pointed out that Henry's was the worst because it was curly. You can have a mullet, and you can have curly hair, but even in the 80's I'm not sure that both at the same time was a good idea. Oh Henry, how could you? The girls didn't fare much better in the hair stakes though, with Daphne Clarke's short spikey number and Charlene's blonde frizzy effort. Did my sister and her friends genuinely try to copy this or was it just the case that any female with blonde hair in the 80's was inexorably doomed to have it frizz up like that? Either way it was no barnet for a self-respecting car mechanic.

One of the things about nostalgia like this is that it plays havoc with your memory. The clips were littered with characters who I recognised in some dark recess of my mind but couldn't bring fully to mind. Who was that best man at Joe Mangel's wedding? The female doctor who gave Des Clarke the awful news about Daphne's death (at which you cried, you baby). And who was that young lad who was the first person to bump into Harold in Ramsay Street when he returned from the dead? 'It was a little bit stretched' understated Smith by way of explanation of that particular storyline. On further inspection I discovered that it was Brett Stark who first met Harold. Stark is notable only for being a Stark long before Game Of Thrones' creator George RR Martin got the idea, and for having a sister called Danni who, for a time during the mid 90's, was in my opinion the only reason to watch television at all. If all you wanted from your youth was a pointless crush on someone unobtainable, Neighbours was your first stop. The actress who played her (Eliza Szonert) has faded into obscurity now, which might be a good thing. She couldn't possibly have retained such paralysing beauty and I'm not sure I could have coped with the shock of her deterioration. Annie Jones (Plain Jane Superbrain) hasn't aged all that well as evidenced here and in a recent episode of raucously stupid but brilliant Aussie drama Wentworth Prison based on the even more raucously stupid but brilliant Aussie drama Prisoner Cell Block H.

If you had asked me before last night's show how long I had been an avid Neighbours fan I would have probably estimated something around the five year mark. That just about covers my teenage years, taking me to the point where I'm too old for it and it is all a bit silly. Yet a segment on the unlikely affair between Doctor Karl Fletcher and a character called Sarah revealed that I had been a fan well into my 20's. Sarah, another classic and unrealistic megababe in the greatest of Neighbours traditions, appeared in the show between 1996 and 1999. Or to put it another way, her affair with the Doc took place somewhere between my 21st and 24th years on Earth. All of which means that I was a fan of Neighbours for something north of a decade. I took GCSE's, A-Levels, passed my driving test and represented my country at wheelchair basketball at junior level while all the while fretting about whether Susan would find out and what would happen if she did. Terrifyingly, Neighbours was the background noise to an alarmingly large chunk of my life! At least I stopped before Margot Robbie got involved in 2008. I had to be told by a bloke on the radio a few days before this show that she used to be in Neighbours. Does that mean I'm cured?

So what, other than babes in bikinis, held my interest for such a preposterously long time? It was alluded to on the show that Neighbours is a good deal less depressing than the English soaps. A few weeks ago I sat down to watch an episode of Eastenders to see if I could catch up with the storyline after several years of completely ignoring its existence. I thought it might make an interesting blog. But frankly 1,000 words on the inactivity of Danny Dyer's hugely punchable face and an absurd death scene by the previously excellent Timothy West was beyond me. I just couldn't do it, not if I wanted to avoid jumping in the bath and cutting up every major artery immediately afterwards. Neighbours was never like that. Nobody ever moped around wondering why their brother had slept with their mother's dog at The Arches. They talked of barbies, yewts (check spelling) and Bouncer (pronounced bee-ann-sah).

A staggering 20 million people in the UK alone watched Scott and Charlene get hitched in 1987 or 1988. Now the show attracts only 250,000 to 350,000 viewers which is either because my generation were freaks and the show was doomed when we became old freaks, or because of the invention of the X-Box again. Several million rubbish television channels showing a variety of boiled reality shite don't help either. Then there is the fact that nobody watches anything that isn't live at the time it is broadcast any more. It's all in the planner. Even suicide-fest Eastenders has suffered a dramatic drop in ratings in the Sky+ age.

If young people aren't watching in the same numbers now then it is probably their loss, but on the flip side of that they will never reach 39 and develop a headache trying to remember the name of Joe Mangel's best man at his wedding.

Blackpool Part Two - Saturday

I didn’t tell you about our room with a view in the first part of this piece. From Room 102 on the first floor of the Ibis Styles Hotel you get an almost perfect view of the sea. Almost. For your own safety there is a clunking great panel covering a large chunk of the left hand side of the window, but there is still enough glass there to enable you to see a long way out to sea. It would be possible to see even more of it if this were not the beginning of March. Still, there is scope enough for gazing out at the sea, drinking tea and eating shortbread and, if you want to be really pretentious about it, putting on a very thoughtful, scheming facial expression in the manor of Nucky Thompson looking out over the Atlantic City boardwalk. Across the corridor the Ibis Styles also has a Room 101 but we skipped that. I’m not a particularly superstitious man but to go there would be just asking for trouble given our propensity for balls ups.

As I looked out on to the sea I saw two suspiciously person-shaped figures in the distance. They looked to be walking along and then sporadically bending down to pick something up. The distance between them never changed for a time and for those moments I thought I was seeing things, that they were just objects bobbing around in the sea to no effect. But then they walked back towards the prom, huddling together to no doubt discuss whatever they had been out there doing. They could have been cockle picking. Do they have cockle pickers in Blackpool? They certainly weren’t just out for a pleasant stroll along the sand and a wade into the sea at this time of year. It might have a prom and a hotel with a big glass window you can look out on to the sea from, but Blackpool is not Atlantic City.

I’ll tell you what Nucky Thompson wouldn’t put up with. The lack of hot food available at breakfast. Continental only. I shudder to think what Jeremy Clarkson would have done in these circumstances. Not being an arrogant Tory bore myself, I managed to resist the temptation to punch the receptionist and threaten him with a trip to the job centre. It was a bit much though. It wasn’t as if the room was cheap. The least they could offer you is a couple of fried eggs. Emma assured me that there was no option to book a room without breakfast online, which makes sense because she would not ordinarily book breakfast in a hotel. We’re Wetherspoons top early-morning customers when we are on our travels in the UK. Us and the old men who take their first sip of bitter at 8.30 in the morning. How do they do that? Hoovering up our underwhelming breakfast cereals, pieces of toast and croissants we resolve to go out and buy breakfast the next morning, even though we have already paid for it here.

We headed out towards Blackpool Tower. It was only five minutes from the hotel so we reckoned we could go up there, and then be out in plenty of time to have a stroll towards the football ground. Stopping at one or more pubs along the way. More on which later. You’re ahead of me if you have guessed by now that getting to the top of the tower was not exactly routine. Having bought tickets yesterday we ignored the queue of people buying them and immediately got lost. I spotted a small corridor with a reception sign pointing towards it. It led us to a girl who informed us that nobody would be going up to the top of the tower at the moment because it was too windy. It was very windy, but it hadn’t occurred to us that they would close the Tower Eye, as they call it. By the way did you know that the Rockefeller Center in New York sways in the wind? This was a thought that made Emma feel a bit queasy as I recall, in fact it still does. I remained sceptical. Surely you would feel a building swaying? Evidently not. It has to sway anyway for reasons that I don’t understand and which you have to be a science nerd to grasp. Or at least faintly interested.

There was an alternative to the Tower Eye. We’d also bought tickets yesterday to Illuminasia, an indoor lights exhibition located in the Winter Gardens. We were going to visit on the Sunday but events had conspired against us and so we’d have to change tack. If breakfast was underwhelming then Illuminasia was either closely related to underwhelming or it was its doppleganger. Illuminasia contains around eight rooms within which are various representations of landmarks, land and sea creatures and Chinese lanterns. Lots of Chinese lanterns. It was mostly assembled by Chinese workers using a gazillion bazillions tons of steel and oh….I don’t know….some old rope. The lanterns are accompanied by the story of a Chinese city which was about to come under threat from the evil Emperor (not Sir Alex Ferguson) but which staved off said threat by lighting up lanterns and setting off fireworks to give the impression that they had already been, to use the technical term, bombed to shit. Apparently it worked and now there are lots of lanterns in a moderately sized room in Blackpool to commemorate the fact.

Of slightly more interest were the landmarks. Models of Tower Bridge, the leaning tower of Pisa (amusingly referred to by one small boy doing the rounds as just ‘pizza’), the Sphynx and the Statue Of Liberty are diverting enough, but we could have well done without the laser show which some poor girl has to rock up on to the stage and perform every 15 minutes or so. Her bizarre green wig is clearly designed to glow in the dark but frankly made her look like a transvestite with very poor taste in head-dress. Her dance moves were meant to give the impression that she was moulding and shaping the lasered lights in spectacular style but actually indicated that she was filling time until the summer begins again and she can go and sod off to be a redcoat in Minehead. If none of this nauseates you quite enough there is an accompanying quiz to complete as you go around the rooms to view the exhibition. I say quiz, it looks like a £2 Lotto scratchcard with multiple choice answers to taxing questions, the gist of which is basically ‘can you count?’. I suspect this might be aimed at a younger audience rather than a grumpy biff approaching 40.

Within a merciful amount of time we were on our way down to the football ground. This was the reason we were here, after all. Well, it is the reason we picked this particular weekend. Blackpool FC, currently languishing at the very bottom of the Championship, were hosting Emma’s Sheffield Wednesday. Sheffield Wednesday could very well be a term meaning mediocrity in a foreign language, but I always enjoy going to see their games. Just for the experience. I’m priced out of going to Liverpool who, in any case, probably operate a similarly scandalous policy to Manchester United and Everton when it comes to disabled fans. Basically they tell you which games you can go to because they haven’t got enough space to accommodate you. Only two or three Premier League grounds have stadia which meet the minimum requirement for the amount of wheelchair accessible seating which is a bloody scandal. Liverpool are not one of those who comply. Why would they? It’s expensive and they have got Kolo Toure’s wages to pay. Blackpool, on the other hand, is a club which is relatively easy to visit as an away fan. Probably because they are not very good.

After around 20 minutes ambling up the prom towards Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road ground pointing out potential chippy stops for the way back to the hotel, we happened upon a pub which we thought might be a nice spot for a pre-game beverage. The Lifeboat Inn is situated just off the promenade, a fact which had already attracted several Sheffield Wednesday fans. You can spot Wednesday fans a mile off. Well, you can if you are aware that Wednesday play in blue and white vertical stripes. What I was not aware of was a sign on the door which read;

PLEASE MIND THE STEP

Ignoring this completely and focusing only on whether the pub would have wheelchair access and a spare seat for Emma, I crashed through the door. If you hadn’t seen the sign you could be forgiven for thinking it was all on one level. The step was very small. I thought about this as my front wheels went over it, dug into the carpet and lifted the back end of my chair inexorably up into the air. It was one of those moments which I am sure all wheelchair users have experienced when they know they are going to fall out of their chair but they don’t really have an awful lot of input into the question of how to stop themselves. It being such a small drop I knew I wasn’t going to hurt myself as I put my hands out to break my fall. But I also knew that the embarrassment was going to be considerable. That’s quite something to have to contemplate for the one or two seconds it takes to hit the deck. In a flash I was on my hands and knees, my ankles in their traditional fall-out-of-wheelchair position, trapped inside my footplate. After much wriggling and trying to avoid eye contact with the girl sat directly opposite the front door who must have been quite startled by the man literally falling through the door, I managed to free my ankles from my chair. Half of Blackpool rushed to pick me up which, as fellow wheelchair users will also know, is the absolute slowest way for anyone who has recently fallen out of their chair to get back into it. Politely declining all offers of help and continuing to avoid eye contact with anyone, I clambered back into my chair.

We left.

Further up the promenade there is a pub called The Manchester. It sounded very much like the Wednesday fans had taken residence already as we passed it. You don’t hear ‘Hi-ho Sheffield Wednesday’ in The Manchester on a normal day, I wouldn’t have thought. Yet the front of the pub was not accessible and so we were directed to the side door and advised to go up in the lift to the family room. This meant missing out on the loutish sing-song behaviour of the Wednesday fans first hand (although we could still hear them from upstairs) but after falling into The Lifeboat I was prepared to settle for less. We sat at a table and drank soft drinks, partly because of last night’s exploits and partly because by this time there was only going to be time for one, and I don’t really do one. At least it was reasonably quiet and there was no problem getting served. Getting to the toilet was a little more problematic, principally because a young boy was getting an absolute scolding from his mother for failing to notify her of the fact that he needed a wee. Across the room was a young man wearing a Saints jumper. We get everywhere. I doubt very much whether he was here to see Sheffield Wednesday.

We found the ground just by following the crowd. We’d been before on our last visit but we couldn’t remember the way. On that occasion I had my photo taken with the statue of Stan Mortenson. We’d wanted to buy tickets for the football then, for a game against Hull City, but it had been moved from the Saturday to the Monday by the game’s governing body, Sky Sports. Outside the ground this time there was a loud protest against the Blackpool chairman Karl Oyston. Oyston has presided over a string of disasters over the last few years since the club spent the 2010/11 season in the Premier League. Two weeks before this campaign began they only had eight registered first team players. Then manager Jose Riga performed relative miracles to get a full team out on to the pitch for their season opener with Nottingham Forest in August but couldn’t mould them into a winning side. He was predictably sacked, since when Lee Clark has struggled similarly which, as far as this group of fans chanting for Oyston’s removal are concerned, is primarily down to a lack of investment and broken promises from the chairman. Blackpool are rock bottom of the Championship and are almost certain to be relegated to the third tier at the end of the season. It is all a far cry from Charlie Adam's set-pieces and the Premier League.

Hindering Blackpool further is the state of their pitch. It’s like a farmer’s field. It cuts up horrifically and from our position just behind the advertising boardings at ground level we spend a lot of time avoiding chunks of turf that have been dislodged by sliding players. It’s a sideline view for away fans at Bloomfield Road. My Blackpool supporting friend had warned me that it was grim and, though it wasn’t exactly palatial, I was pleasantly surprised at how bearable it was. My friend has obviously never been to Knowsley Road in January. Chief turf-flinging culprit is Wednesday’s Jeremy Helan. He’s normally a winger but today he is doing a passable impersonation of the worst left-back in league football. It’s not so much that he is easy to get past. It’s more that when he wins or receives the ball he treats it like a hand grenade and smacks it as far and as aimlessly down the field as possible. To be honest the entire 90 minutes is a masterclass in head tennis and over-hit crosses. Wednesday striker Atdhei Nuhiu is in familiarly hilarious form, falling over with prolific regularity, smashing one chance straight into the legs of Blackpool goalkeeper Eliot Parish and missing the target with another from a free header. In the end the game is won by Lewis McGuguan’s inswinging free-kick from the Wednesday left, which Parish cannot decide what to do with as he waits for someone to get a touch. He ends up doing nothing as nobody gets a touch and it nestles in the far corner.

As we leave the ground the Oyston protestors have decided not to renew hostilities with the chairman and all is quiet. Apart from the murmurings of the fans as they amble away discussing one of the least eventful games of football in living memory. Like many other Wednesday fans we call in at a chippy on the way back to the hotel. I don’t normally eat fish from chippies but decide to give it a go. Fish and chips seems like exactly the sort of thing you should eat after you have been to the football. It’s quite nice as chippies go, with table service included. You don’t get table service in my local chippy. You get to shout your order at them from the bottom of the six foot step they have actually inserted since a refurbishment. DDA. Here in Blackpool the bloke serving us ruins it slightly by getting tetchy when I remind him that I ordered bread and butter. I genuinely thought he had forgotten because he brought our food over and then asked us to remind him what drinks we had ordered. So I mentioned the bread and butter and he told me, helpfully because I couldn’t see this for myself, that he only has one pair of hands.

We go out late Saturday night. Unlike last night there is no rugby league to get to the pub for and we are unlikely to get chucked out early on a Saturday night in Blackpool so there is plenty of time. We start at Yates, where the same girl comes over three times and offers us Jagerbombs. We decline every time, but are reminded of Bob Willis’ withering assessment of Gary Balance’s drunken antics in a Nottingham nightspot. His emphasis was very much on the word ‘Jagerbomb’ as if he had never heard of it before and was at a loss to understand why anybody would want such a thing. Similar to how I regard anything from the Fast And Furious franchise. Or Jeremy Clarkson.

From there it was on to The Layton Rakes, another Wetherspoons pub naturally enough. It’s much quieter than Yates’ with not a Jagerbomb or an England cricketer in sight. Although there is the odd roudy hen party to contend with. There is apparently a roof top bar but it is a little chilly to try it out tonight. For those of you who read this column for access information the toilets are upstairs but there is a lift. When I used it I was surprised also to see that there is another bar area on the upper floor, one which was even quieter and more Jagerbomb-free than the one on the ground level. If you want to get served quickly this is for you. Had I known I probably would have suggested we sit there to save me getting in and out of the lift whenever the need arose, but you live and learn.

As we made our way back to the hotel the weather had improved, with very little wind. Perhaps we would get to go to the top of Blackpool Tower on Sunday.