Crinklybee

A treble on the lottery

8:45AM. The school drop-off.  A large, bony Year Six boy is hurtling around the playground, careering like a runaway skittle into gaggles of startled, smaller children. 'Tescos has burnt down!', he's yelling at the top of his voice. 'It's on fire! Tesco's is on fire! There's fire engines and everything!'.  The news is around the playground in two minutes flat, but apparently hasn't reached the checkout staff, who are to be found huddled at the threshold of the blazehit emporium on the A6, sharing cigarettes and casting amused-looking glances at the gaping, smouldering hole where the ceiling above the catfood aisle used to be. Around the corner, the sidestreet is cordoned off and a deputation of Greater Manchester Fire Brigades finest are locked in tactical post-mortem discussion.  It's just another morning in the Old Neighbourhood.  

Pausing only to call into Martins the inaptly named 'Swiss Confectioner' (for old times' sake, and for an impromptu bacon barm), I proceed via 192 doubledecker bus to Ardwick, venue for the first item in the working week's agenda, which is a conference on the subject of social enterprise organised by the National Lottery. I think I may have overdone it on the coffee, because having found the first two speakers quite rapturously fascinating I fall fast asleep for a full two minutes during the third presentation of the morning plenary, and am awoken from blissful slumber by the sound of lukewarm applause greeting the return of the Chief Executive of a noted national charitable trust to their seat at the top table.  Behind it, in seven foot high bold red lettering, a powerpoint slide screams 'Any Questions?'. 'What the Hell am I doing here and who are all these people?' I manage not to scream back out loud.

 

An hour later, having determined at the lunchbreak upon the only course of action consistent with dignity and hopped aboard a further 192 bus rather than risk the insominifying effects of afternoon workshops promising such delights as 'Community Buy Out of Public Assets- the Pitfalls' and 'A Review of Emerging Social Return on Investment Calculation Methodologies in the Nonprofit Setor', I am cheerfully esconced in the second floor of Manchester's Central Library, an iconic citycentre edifice newly renovated at the lotteryticket-buyer's expense.  The prevailing atmosphere of studious, urbane civility is broken by the arrival of a distressed and possibly slightly inebriated gentleman of Eastern European extraction who is brandishing a letter from the Benefits Office demanding his presence at an address in Salford the following morning and wants to know exactly what in God's name he should do about it. Two concerned and flustered computer terminal ladies in smart blouses and Manchester City Council namebadges talk to him in practiced soothing tones, and, appearing to acquiesce in their wise counsel, the new visitor hunches forward into his assigned terminal and proceeds to tap away at the keyboard while muttering ruefully to himself about the inequities of the Universal Credit system as administered by the Coalitiion Administration. 

 

Yesterday, in a Stockport park transported backwards through time to an even more unforgiving era, during which spousely disloyalty was apt to be punished by summary and Royally-decreed head-removal. A municipality-owned stately home of local prominence is offering free admission for one day only in advance of an imminent (lottery-funded, of course) refit, which is all the encouragement needed by half the population resident within a five mile radius to turn out and queue for two hours for the questionable privilege of being corralled by well-meaning Council employees through a series of dark, narrow low-cielinged corridors designed to house a single family of very rich Tudor landowners, none of them above five foot seven in their stocking feet.  The municipality is clearly nervous of sprained ankles and lawsuits, and has employed functionaries at strategic intervals to intone 'Mind the Steps, now' at twenty second intervals to the passing hordes.  In an antechamber, a trio of actresses in period costume (billowing patterned dresses, ornately decorated fans, white-powdered faces, massive, ridiculous pastel-tinted hairdos) affect conversation on courtly matters and accost any passing small children unwise enough to catch their eyes. 'Oh, young madam, what curious footwear! How delightful of you to call by!' In another chamber, a present-day architect in present-day architect's costume (striped shirt with top button undone, tastelful metal-framed eyeglasses, comfortable patent leather footwear) holds forth, pointing with pride to a backdrop of computer-generated drawings detailing the planned refurbishment, which will see the crumbling stablehouse converted into a fully accessible and Wifi-enabled cafeteria with annexed 'Learning Zone'.

 

Narrowly avoiding being signed up for a heritage-themed participatory arts project by a lone rogue functionary hiding in a stairwell clutching a clipboard, we proceeed (or, more accurately, are officiously marshalled) into the shop, where an ill-tempered queue snakes round the walls clutching 'Reduced to Clear' pencils and teacoasters.  Frankie picks up a half-dozen free postcards for his 'Tourist Information' box and we re-emerge, blinking and gasping for air, into the 21st Century daylight.

Dolphins and Near Death Experiences

Off to the Llyn Peninsula (Anglesey's lesser-known and slightly wilder cousin) for a week. We have booked the same cottage as three years ago and are determined as near as possible to have the exact same holiday again, so are slightly put out to discover on the eve of our departure that quite without our permission the Gwynedd tourist board has granted authority for the beach at the bottom of the village's only street to host a three-day summertime soul festival featuring a lineup of half-forgotten 1980s dancefloor acts.

Needless to say our misgivings soon give way to excitement at the prospect of coming across the bass player of Soul to Soul in the meat ailse at Pythwelli Asda- an eventuality which, despite concerted and daily efforts on our behalf, never comes to pass.  Forced therefore to make our own entertainment (the option of paying £35 a head to attend the actual festival is never one discussed seriously) we head via precarious semi-overgrown  pathways to 'The Tin Man', a rather rusty and poorly exectuted statue perched atop a windy cliffside, which seems (at least on the day we visit) to have become a must-see attraction for a procession of retirees from the Merseyside professional classes in sandals and checked shirts, accompanied by their pre-teen grandchildren, also in sandals and checked shirts.  On the ascent Frankie deals serenely with the constant near-death experience of tottering on the edge of a fall to our certain death, while I sweat profusely muttering a series of desperate curses , having remembered half an hour too late that rather severe vertigo features among my many interesting neuroses. 

At the summit I cling on to the Tin Man for dear life, silently praying that the joiner appointed to nail him to the rockface in 1983 was more adept at his trade than the sculptor.. and suppress with some difficulty the urge to yell out loud, as a frail and bespectacled boy maybe seven years old wanders absent-mindedly to the very angle of the cliffedge and peers over at the crashing ocean waves 200 ft distant.  After what seems like half an hour, the grandfather intervenes. 'Holy flying fuck you daft little sod get away from there you'll kill yourself!', he doesn't scream at all, this being the Llyn pensinsula, tourist mecca of the retired Liverpool professional classes. What he actually says- very quietly and with what I can only imagine is affected nonchalance, unless he's an actual psychopath- is 'Come away from there Ethan, would you darling? That does seem rather precarious. Yes, that's it, thank you. There's a good boy'.

Ethan and his grandfather having comprehensively shot my nerves to pieces for the duration of the week, we stay on dry land for the rest of the holiday, and mostly a good thirty yards from the unforgiving seas, although admittedly this includes a perhaps ill-advised drive to the end of the peninsula where the single-carriage country lane gives way without warning to an open field and an impromptu campsite peopled by a half-dozen tents' worth of extreme holidaymakers (or possibly, by the rythym section of Soul to Soul, we didn't stay long enough to find out, and in any event were concentrating on not driving our Toyota Aygo into the Irish Sea). I say only perhaps ill-advised because the beach at the bottom of the cliff (which, having managed to conquer a car-full of terror and engage the handbrake, we accessed thankfully by foot) turns out to be perhaps the most spectacular stretch of sand in the Northern Hemisphere, and during one of the week's intermittent breaks from the cloud we get to see a party of dolphins cavorting in the swell of the waves not one hundred yards from our beach towel. (Well, Frankie and Charlotte get to see a party of dolphins; I just about make out a half dozen or so sleek silhouettes which, the old eyes being what they are, may be either dolphins, driftwood, or the rythym section of Soul to Soul executing a leisurely communal backstroke).

A couple of days later it was time to pack up the Toyota Aygo for the return journey 'Back to Life, Back to Reality', as a certain dancefloor act of brief 1980s renown might have had it. Today we are on the very cusp of reality otherwise known as the last day of the school holidays.  Frankie is bearing up very well to the imminent arrival of Year Six (Year Six! The last year of Primary School! Where did the time go) and was even spotted an hour or so ago looking up 'World War One Facts' on the computer in a bid to complete his rather grisly holiday homework.  I'm in the cafe round the corner, where the only other customers are a pair of old dears who - if my eavesdropping skills are half as good as I think they are- went to the same school here in the neighbourhood fifty years ago and had not seen each other since (marriage had taken at least one of them out of town), until they happened across each other in the queue at the post office earlier this afternoon. 'I could have been a concert oboeist you know', the more talkative one is just confiding as we speak.  'My mother always said I had the talent... 'I didn't realise my potential really'...  'so many hopes and frustrated ambitions, you know.... '. Back to Life, back to reality, oh yes indeed.