Christmas in England – Not what Sir Cliff has in mind anyway.

Christmas seems by common conception to be the time of year when people are most friendly. Boundaries are broken down, conversation is struck between the unlikeliest of participants, smiles are exchanged where glances of alert disdain would otherwise have been traded, generosity pervades our everyday lives, this is a good thing.

Waiting for a friend to buy me a drink in a crowded pub in Poulton-le-Fylde last weekend, I found out first hand why all this festive spirit is a bad idea. I stood awkwardly a few metres from the bar, nervously being eyed up by a swaying middle aged woman when a youngish looking couple approach me from the dirge of grey-skinned revellers, ‘Excuse me, I know this is a really bad question to ask you but do have coke?’ The girl says. No, I say. ‘Erm, can you get coke?’ No. ‘Well, do you know anyone who can get coke?’ No. Then the orange face retreats behind her boyfriend who bends his almost 7 foot frame down towards my ear and shouts, ‘Sorry mate, she’s already done 4 grams tonight and is off her trolley!’ Through the misery I managed to force a smile, as much for its pacifying effects on him as it was for my own safety. For the life of me I had no clue whether 4 grams was a lot of coke or not. The pair faded away back into the crowd, jigging along to the version of Barry White’s ‘My first, my last, my everything’ being howled by a 5 foot 2 man who was presumably the landlord.

The balding queen stood atop a table and had whipped the airheads into a positive frenzy with his gyrating and pointing. Every so often he’d let out an ‘Aaaaaaaaalright!’ he was like the shrivelled reanimated corpse of Jim Morrison or something, most unsettling. My friend still hadn’t been served at the bar, whether that had anything to do with the fact that the barmaid moved as quickly as though suffering from cerebral palsy I’m not sure but nevertheless I had to endure another few moments standing alone in the wilderness of the council estate mob.

The drunken middle aged woman was still eyeing me up so I turned around 180 degrees to avoid her gaze whereupon my eyes fell on the unfortunate sight of a man’s buttocks. In the spirit of Christmas (presumably, hopefully) a solitary man had seen fit to come to the pub dressed as a Spartan warrior and a pack of frenzied women were devouring the already regrettably sparse material that made up his costume like hyenas feasting on caribou, revealing almost his entire body.

Soon enough the middle aged woman approaches me from behind anyway and after  pinching my arse by means of an introduction, proceeded to shout directly into my ear some incoherent babble about her son being ‘about your age’ and how I had ‘lovely dimples’. My friend could not arrive soon enough, I prayed for some kind of intervention, a fire alarm, a fight to break out, a biological weapon attack; anything to halt my slide into oblivion at the mercy of this wrinkle faced predator.

Ironically the balding karaoke queen came to my rescue by launching into a rendition of what I assumed, on account of her reaction, was her favourite song. She scuttled away to embark on a surreal dance routine consisting of bending over and receiving a feigned spank from the giant sausage fingers of her obese friend. I shudder to think what the consequences might be for some unfortunate lad a little weaker willed and younger than myself.

My head was spinning and I could barely hear myself think, it was all I could do to maintain my breathing pattern and stay alive. The singing seemed to grow louder, the dancing grew weirder, the temperature rose and I was enveloped in a film of sweat underneath my jacket. I observed a man, must have been in his fifties at least, slide up behind a girl, in her twenties at most, his shirt out and forehead glowing red, and place his hands around her waist and hoist her onto his crotch. He began grinding up against her derriere during the latest song; I think it might have been Mustang Sally. The queen growled his way through the number that was being interpreted by the dim-witted patrons in the pub as some kind of mating call, not least the fifty-year-old man who pouted with aggressive anticipation of something and the ribbon of a girl seemingly attached to his belt. They stooped and swayed in unison in a sensual dance that somehow managed to make me feel nauseous and captivated simultaneously. I can only presume that the girl had no clue as to the age of her dancing partner, either that or she was only as discerning as my suitor from a few moments earlier when it comes to age.

My friend arrived with my drink but by this point I had already taken too much festive nonsense and pined for the usual air of stand-offish disdain that prevails during the rest of the year in England and said I was leaving. I love Christmas as much as the next man, but last weekend in that pub was truly a harrowing experience. The thing is, your choices in Poulton-le-Fylde are limited. You either have to brave the pubs of the derelict idiots, such as the one in the account above or you stand around and pose in the bars of the wannabe-nouveau-riche and allow your spirit to be crushed. Tonight being Christmas Eve I think I’ll go for a mixture of the two, at least then I might have something to write about.

That In-Between Age

How often do you hear people say things like, “Kids are looking older all the time,” and “Kids grow up too fast these days”? Whilst it is true to an extent (I have to admit some 15 year old lads achieve a more convincing facial hair look than me) this apparent early ‘maturing’ can only be attributed accurately to superficial facets of their personalities i.e. the way they can hold down 3 whole Smirnoff Ice’s without puking; just like a real grown up! Or the way they carry their Blackberry like they are anticipating an important phone call any…moment…now (Of course they’ve probably just ‘pranked’ their mum so as not to waste any precious credit).

I say this because I believe there is a point in an adolescent’s life when they reach that in-between age, caught in flux between being a child and believing themselves to be a young adult. Now this age does not necessarily mean 15 or 16 etc, it simply means that stage in their lives when they are consumed by an unrelenting, fanatical drive to convey to all that they are no longer kids; nay…they are adults! However these contrived attempts to do so ultimately, in my eyes anyway, serve to fortify the fact that they are indeed still childlike in all but attire.

Case in point; I was on the train from Manchester to Poulton-le-Fylde the other day, sat on a table all by myself happily reading the news (If you can call what the monkeys at the Metro write news) when all of a sudden I am joined by a pair of girls, seemingly of around 20 or so years if their look was anything to go by. They had the typical ‘BFF’ dynamic of one of them being the dowdy one and one of them being the bubbly one. Of course these ‘friendships’ only work through a careful distribution of esteem between them; the more salacious one of course gets a larger share of male attention and the other one piggy-backs her way into ‘cooler’ social circles whilst acting as an almost omnipresent confidence boost for those tough private moments when the glamourous one stands in front of her full-length mirror and stares at her reflection; wondering “Will Jason fancy me if I lose some weight?” Before being convinced that she is attractive enough already through a quick glance at the photograph of her drab ‘BFF’ that’s stuck on the mirror.

The dowdy one wore her brown hair in an inoffensive, unremarkable style. What initially convinced me of her age was her clothing; a corduroy jacket over a light blue t-shirt that seemed too understated to be adolescent. Her friend on the other hand just looked older. For a start she had one of those massive handbags that are so popular, made of shiny black leather with a large gold buckle on it with the name Chloe engraved in Black lettering. I believe a Chloe handbag that size would set you back around £600; surely therefore this girl had to be a grown-up? Her hair certainly seemed grown up; wavy, red, shoulder-length all combed the right way unlike a tell-tale adolescent hair style at the moment; the back-combed ‘out-of-crackden’ look (It used to be the ‘out-of-bed’ look that was trendy wasn’t it?) made popular by Winehouse et al. Her clothes were decent too; black t-shirt with gold lettering with sensible brown jacket over the top. My point of course is that to the eye these two girls looked like adults.

What shattered the illusion was just the small matter of their speech and behaviour. A couple of stations went by without incident; just the incessant pecking of their whiney voices to contend with. We then reached Bolton where quite a few passengers alighted, which must have given them the confidence to up the ante in the ‘acting adult’ stakes. The red-head reached inside her Chloe handbag (Which after what came next I can only presume was a fake or paid for by Daddy) and produced a pregnancy test. You can imagine my disbelief at her wanton flaunting of such an item in the first place, but the conversation that followed it was just unbelievable.

“I’m so glad I’m not pregnant,” Said red-head.
“I know,” A typically non-committal retort from dowdy brunette.
“Do you think I should tell him I did one?” Red-head stares imploringly at the stick.
“I don’t know.” Brunette answers for it.
“No I’ll just leave it. Besides, he probably wouldn’t sleep with me again if he knew I thought I was pregnant.” Red-head clearly has her adult priorities straight.
“What are you gonna do with it now?” An important issue raised by dowdy brunette.
“I don’t know. Can you re-use them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, if you wash it.”

At this point I think my mouth was actually agape cartoon style at the sheer air-headed stupidity of these girls. Clearly they weren’t grown ups after all; a fact hammered home by the red-head’s subsequent disposing of the negative (phew!) pregnancy test under one of the seats across the aisle.

The dowdy brunette alighted at Horwich Parkway taking all the red-head’s bravado with her, reducing her to rummaging feebly around inside her Chloe handbag. You see at this point, an adult would be too embarrassed to do anything other than sit in silence, sat opposite a stoic man who played witness to such a public atrocity as she had displayed mere moments earlier, but her inescapable adolescent pining for acceptance into the adult world beseeched her to take out some more sundry grown-up items. I was then privy to a fumbling attempt at switching a SIM card from her 2G iPhone into her new 3G iPhone, and then back again; heaven knows why! When it came time for her to alight at Chorley, the whole gruesomely cringe worthy episode was concluded with her hurriedly attempting to throw all her belongings back into her Chloe handbag, resulting in her spilling at least 4 bottles of perfume onto the floor and table. I was too mortified to help her retrieve said bottles, which resulted in her leaving a couple behind to avoid missing her station. Just as well really, the one that fell onto my lap was Christina Aguilera’s stunning fragrance: ‘Inspire’. Wasn’t very grown up of me was it?

Manchester: Reducing Britain’s Road Rage

I suppose as this is my first ever post I should begin by telling you where I’m from; it’s Blackpool. I’m not actually going to write about Blackpool; my unfortunate birthplace, I’m here to write about the place I now live and work: Manchester.

I noticed today from my vantage point atop City Tower how its citizens move around efficiently like ants. They alight their trams and move in one group like ants rushing from a nest, before dispersing to their individual places of work. Most people seem to walk at the same brisk pace in Manchester too, which is something I greatly appreciate and one of the city’s major plus points. As an able-bodied citizen; it is frustrating and galling to be stuck behind a pavement snail. Blackpool is literally full of pavement snails, meandering and pausing right in front of you; they know not the psychological damage they cause to the unfortunate walkers sharing the thoroughfare behind them. Blackpool, Cleveleys, Fleetwood, Poulton-le-Fylde; all breeding grounds for the psychotic road-ragers of the future. And can you blame them? I certainly can’t, being stuck behind these sloths is enough to inject a dangerous level of intolerance for the speed-shy into any virile young man; putting him behind the wheel of a car is just the next step to ensuring a deadly smash at some point in the future.

I propose; to ensure the future safety of Britain’s roads, that every youth at the key stage of their psychological development be sent on a course (Similar in structure perhaps to the Cycling Proficiency course kids used to do) to learn how to properly negotiate a pavement. They would learn about pacing, how to use peripheral vision so as to avoid agitating collisions and abrasions, how to walk in a straight line, how to text WITHOUT stopping dead in their tracks aswell as general etiquette like avoiding eye contact with anybody.

I propose that the only place for this course to be carried out successfully and to it’s maximum civic potential, is Manchester city centre, and that I Andrew Hatch take on the responsibility of examiner from my vantage point atop City Tower.

It’s the right thing to do.