Las Vegas, hardly

I am supposed to be going to Blackpool next week with a friend, just an overnight stay and a piss up really. Some friends of mine have a hotel there. Nice lads one of whom used to be in a band called paper lace, or is it black lace, anyway the hotel is their retirement home after spending many years as agents for some of the biggest acts in England. Usually when I stay I have a drink or two in the bar before going out on the town. Or at least that’s the idea, but so entertaining and friendly are these two that I often end up staying in the bar all night. Paul’s rendition of “I’m a little teapot short and stout” has to be seen to be believed.

As much as I love travelling abroad, Blackpool holds an attraction for me that goes back to my youth. I know it’s tacky, expensive and even predictable, but the excitement I feel when approaching from the north or south pier road is the best part of the journey to that tatty Disneyland. I took a Canadian friend of mine there once for a whistle stop tour and she was left almost speechless at what she saw.

We came in from the tower end and drove leisurely down the front, she looked open mouthed at groups of women dressed as schoolgirls or police women, guys dressed in BDSM gear with their arses hanging out of their leather pants calmly having a drink in the afternoon sun. At one point fourteen or so Elvis’s paraded past making completely un Elvis type sounds. As we neared the pier a girl jumped out of a car, slid across the bonnet Starsky and Hutch style and proceeded to beat the shit out of another girl on the pavement.

Further down as we approached the pleasure beach a man and women came tumbling out of a pub scrapping much like Popeye and Bluto used to do in the cartoons. My friend thought this was all hilarious, and to put the cap on it as we pulled into my friends hotel Paul was outside watering the imitation trees outside reception. As he saw us approach of course he did his teapot routine; my companion must have thought the English mad. “We have nothing like this in Quebec” she said, of course not I replied, you cant have this and Baton Rouge.

I remember a few years ago going to Blackpool for a three-day break before going the week after to Spain, I spent six hundred quid in three days there. The trip to Spain was for a week and I only spent three hundred.

Even so I am looking forward to my mini break in the Las Vegas of the north, no doubt we will do the usual places after stuffing ourselves with inedible orange chips in the pleasure beach, and no doubt at the end of it all I will need a beak.