Blackpool: The Pleasures of English Seaside Towns Part 2 of 3

The day after Hilbre Island we went to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. As you can see from the pictures above, the weather was great, people were on the beach, and everything was good.

And then we went into the Pleasure Beach (which is a bunch of rides and stalls). There were big queues, a massively diverse crowd in terms of ethnicity, and it was fun, if rather expensive - £23 for a wristband. Land of Hope and Glory played on the carousel organ and the questionable strangeness of the attractions was something to behold.

 And then a cold front came in, the temperature dropped ten degrees in seconds, the rain came in off the lake district and things became distinctly crap, especially when all the best rides (which we hadn't gone on yet) were closed because of wind, weather and technical problems.

So we did what all right-minded people do and we went on the pier. On the pier they have slot machines where you can spend your money. My daughter still remembers when she bet 4p on a 20/1 shot in the horse racing game and won 80p. But they didn't have that game on Blackpool's South Pier so we put our 2p pieces into the penny falls. You put your money in and hope that it pushes money over the fall for you to win. Basically it's a slow way to lose money. You think you're winning but all the time you're losing as slowly your money drips away. It's a bit like photography. It's a bit like most of the jobs I have.

But it's a fun way to lose money, almost as much fun as the horse-racing derby rollerball game. This is a game where you roll balls into holes and (depending on what score the hole is) the horse moves on a certain distance. First to the finishing line is the winner. We played on the pleasure beach and my wife won it twice. The joy of the game comes from the commentary and the sheer fun of the performance of the guy commentating. On the pier they didn't have horse racing. They had camel racing and it was getting a lot of attention from visitors of Asian background. On the day we were there no visitors of Asian background went on the horses. But they did go on the camels which was interesting. 

And why not. Going to a theme park is a performance - it's live action role play where you play the part of being a theme park visitor. In fact everything is live action role play, including the writing and reading of this blog, and absolutely everything to do with photography.

So that was that and off we went into the driving rain, slightly disappointed because of the weather but resigned to that fate because when have we ever been to Blackpool and it hasn't been tipping it down with rain.

And that was Blackpool, a place where playing the part is everything, where losing can be winning, where a camel is not a horse and where disappointment is part of the game.

West Kirby: The Pleasures of English Seaside Towns Part 1 of 3

This summer I found myself in West Kirby visiting my Aunt Jennifer, and my cousin Kevin, his wife Hojung and daughter Hanna, all down from Jeju Island in South Korea for the holidays.

Above is the view from my aunt's front room. It's the Dee Estuary you see - if you imagine a map of the UK, this is that little finger of land (aka the Wirral) that sticks out just below Liverpool. At the northern end you find New Brighton where Martin Parr photographed the Last Resort. At the southern end, you get West Kirby, the classy end where nature is the draw rather than seaside delights. You can see Wales in the background and at low tide you can walk to Hilbre Island (visible on the right) and see seals.

That's what we decided to do, at 7 in the evening. The sky was clear, the weather warm and the tide was out.

So we walked and as we walked and we got to Hilbre Island. Once we'd got there, the sky got darker, clouds rolled in and lightning started flashing in the sky and the tide started coming in.

So we started walking back. And then it started raining. Really raining. It was miserable and there was lightning flashing overhead. The rain came down, and we got soaked. And more soaked. Soaked until we couldn't get more soaked.

And then things changed. They couldn't get any worse because we couldn't get any wetter or more miserable.

And it became funny. A truly terrible day at the seaside became absurd. We relished that absurdity, it became almost a performance of absurdity. And we sang and danced and headbanged our way back to Aunt Jennifer's house where we dried ourselves off and drank tea and hot chocolate and ate biscuits like the Famous Five at the end of another day of mad adventures.

And that is a typical day at the English seaside where the awful can be good, and the absurd becomes enjoyable because if it didn't, you would simply die of misery.

The World Cup: A summary

England, circa 1938, giving the Nazi salute is from a game in Berlin when the Foreign Office ordered the England team to give the Nazi salute before the game. 

I don't know why but I get the feeling things haven't changed that much since then.

 

Henry Iddons Lake District

It never rains in the Lake District in the same way that it never rains in Wales - never. The nice thing about the Lake District and Wales is the mountains they are classy in an understated kind of way - . Snowdon or Scafell Pike, the tallest mountains in Wales and England respectively, do not have the vulgarity of the mountains of India, Nepal or even France. They stand a modest height, 1,000m or so, and you can climb them in morning. Which is why I found myself up Scafell Pike this summer, sitting in the mist on a pile of rocks with Chris Bonnington and 200 other people next to me.

Henry Iddon's Spots of Time project captures the remoteness of the Lake District while also pointing to the lack of a real English wilderness. Shot at dusk, they show the Lake District at peace, without visitors, a recollection to a time when only a poetic few walked its pikes and fells.