Only A Northern Soul

This is my Mum on top of the Empire State Building.

Hello Mum.

She has gifted many things to me over the years. Ramrod straight hair (my brother got our Dad's curls). A love of Motown. A habit of sticking my bottom lip out under my top one. And outrageous, all-consuming snobbery.

I am a terrible snob, I admit it. I've already proved it on here. But my Mum takes that snobbishness to new, galactic levels at times.

One of her pet topics is how awful the North is. Every time she comes to visit - which isn't often - she'll marvel at some new element of terribleness that only exists north of the Watford Gap. To her, the North is where people who can't afford to move to the South live.

Example: on her first visit to Liverpool, she was shocked to see a BMW drive by. "How can someone round here afford a BMW?" she mused. "Perhaps he's a drug dealer."

Example: after taking her to the Pier Head, the museums, the Cathedrals, in a tour of the city's magnificence, the one element she chose to give a lengthy monologue on was the now-demolished footbridge over the Strand and how awful it was.

Example: she found Southport "surprisingly alright". "It's like a proper town."

Example: only last week, she watched a film set in Liverpool. "Of course, they tried to make it look nice."

"It is nice," I said. "It's lovely up here."

She snorted. "Someone still got mugged though."

See what I mean? I've lived here for fifteen years now, and she still can't quite understand why. There are some things she likes around here - she once saw Jimmy Corkhill coming out of the FACT - but all in all it's Just. Not. Good. Enough.

For myself, I'm sort of in a limbo between South and North. My accent gives me away every time - talking about "barths" instead of "baths" and "arnties" instead of "a(u)nties", and pronouncing "down" as "dahn". I have an outsider's perspective on some things - for example, I'd love to know how you decide whether to support Liverpool or Everton. I can't work out why people would support the Blues when they don't seem to win anything. But at the same time, I'm passionate about the city, and I'm full of pride about the beauty of the area. Where I live on the Wirral, within an hour's drive, I can be in the Welsh mountains, the throbbing heart of big cities, the Cheshire plains, or on a beach - where else in the country can you say that? I can't think of myself anywhere but here (with the obvious caveat that if Russell Tovey calls me up and invites me to share his flat in London, I'll be on a Virgin Train so fast I'll leave flames on the pavement behind me).

The reason for this lengthy preamble is that I was heading into Wigan, which is about as "Northern" as it's possible to get. I'm not sure how it's acquired this reputation, but if ever there were a town whose name reeked of whippets, flat caps and ee by gum it's Wigan. It's probably Orwell's fault. When he rode a train into the town, he talked about vast piles of slag by the side of the track, mountains of the stuff, and the grim, miserable lives of the put-upon inhabitants.

My ride into Wigan Wallgate, on the other hand, was marked by the view of the back of Currys Superstores and Carpet Warehouses, and by a large wide open expanse of green parkland. I had to stretch my imagination to see this black mountainous hell-hole. To me, it just looked like another little town.

The station was a neat little Victorian relic, nicely preserved, though in possession of one of the grimmest toilets I have ever had the misfortune to pee in. (Blocked urinal, ultraviolent anti-druggie lighting AND mashed up loo paper in the sink? Why Northern Rail, you are really spoiling us). At platform level, it was a bit better, and by the time I got up to the booking hall it was positively charming. I'll forgive anything if there's a porte-cochere. That's proper old-style railway architecture, that is.

I took the usual pic, with another boring GMPTE railway sign, and then headed into the town. The other train station in Wigan, North Western, is only fifty yards away, but I wanted to go into the town to have a wander round this haven of Northernness. To be specific, I wanted to have a pie.

Wiganers are called Pie-Eaters. The theory is that this came about following the General Strike, when the town's residents were the first back to work so they ate "humble pie". Personally, I just like the idea that they eat a lot of pies. Or that they're paying tribute to Dennis the Menace's pal. The town certainly holds a pie-eating championship, to which I say, well done, and I'll be sitting a few yards away feeling nauseous. For today, though, I wanted to go proper Northern, and have some proper pie in a proper Wigan pie eating place.

I thought there'd be hundreds of them. I thought it would be like trying to find a tea room in Devon, or a pasty in Cornwall. I thought there'd be people on the street waving photos of their baked goods at you as you passed, trying to seduce you with their crusty edges. I headed down the main street of the town, and it looked very pretty - there were some gorgeous arcades, real Victorian beauties, coming off the main street, and a thriving shopping centre. There was even a pub called The Moon Under Water, which was very tempting. After all, if there was going to be a place which embodied George Orwell's perfect boozer, wouldn't it be in Wigan? Then I spotted it was a Wetherspoons, and I realised that it was unlikely that it would be the alcoholic nirvana promised in the name. And an advert for free wi-fi didn't help add to that olde-worlde charm - I doubted it sold liver sausage sandwiches, anyway.

There was a couple of Greggs, and a couple of Greenhalghs, and a couple of Galloways, but all of them were takeaways. I didn't want to come all the way to Wigan and bite down on a steak and kidney pie sat on a bench surrounded by pigeons. I wanted a plate and a seat with my pie. Where could I go?

I came across this place and it seemed perfect. I mean, Lancashire Tea Room - & More. It's named after the frigging county, for goodness' sake. Inside, it was clean and modern. I went to the counter and asked for a meat and potato pie and chips.

"Do you want peas and gravy with that?"

Are you kidding? Of course I do! Give me the whole damn experience!

My tea came. There was a china cup, and a little stainless steel teapot, and it was beautiful. For all my love of beer and wine, there is nothing - nothing - as wonderful as a good cup of tea. If I end up on one of those fictional islands where you get a choice of beverages, I'll go with a teapot over a bottle of champagne any day.

Next came my lunch - or rather, since this is the North, my dinner.

Pie. Chips. Gravy. And the peas were mushy, something I hadn't requested but which came as a singular thrill. I laid in with gay abandon.

Reader: I was disappointed. I'm sorry. This might be my own fault, because, for me, the best thing about a pie is the crust. The crunchy, hard beauty of pastry, infused with the subtle juices of the pie inside, yet retaining its own structure, and a firmness between your teeth. I like to bite down on pastry and feel it crumble in my mouth. This pie, however, was soggy and unpleasant. Part of that was the gravy's fault, but part of it was down to the way it was cooked. It felt like a frozen pie that hadn't been cooked long enough, and was still in the process of defrosting. It was wet. I just couldn't get on board with it, and considering I had come all this way expecting the ne plus ultra of pies, it was a big let down. Still, the chips were lovely, drizzled with salt to give it a tantalising tingle, and the mushy peas slipped down delightfully.

I staggered out of the Lancashire Tea Room, stuffed - I'm not used to guzzling that much food in the middle of the day. I'd thought about going to Wigan Pier, to complete the Orwellian experience, but since George couldn't be bothered going there (he says in the book that it had been demolished, which wasn't true) I didn't see why I should bother. Besides, I'd been once before, about twelve years ago with some friends from Edge Hill. We went bowling, and I embarrassed myself by leaping about like a girl when I got a strike. So I considered Wigan Pier "done".

Which only left me with the seventh worst train station in Britain, Wigan North Western. After Wigan Wallgate's Victorian charms, a 1970s brick hole couldn't hardly compare. There was a very nice new multi-storey, recently built by Virgin, alongside, but the station itself is indeed a dump. What is it with the bricks made in the 1970s? Why do they age so badly? There are Victorian brick buildings that still look majestic, while buildings from the Seventies look like they've been built out of blocks of algae and despair. It's just plain nasty. Inside, it didn't get much better. I'd been here once before, about eight years ago for a training day, and they'd revamped it a bit since then. The main thing they seemed to have done was close the toilets.

I'd been to Euston and Lime Street in the preceding couple of days, so I knew what Virgin were capable of in terms of providing customer services. If this was a suburban station with a couple of trains a day, this was awful. For a station on the West Coast Main Line, with services to Glasgow and London and all points in between, it was dreadful, and completely unjustifiable.

What's worse, they had tried to make it look better by painting it lime green.

Note to any interior designers out there - lime green is not, and never will be, a colour to instil joy in all comers. It just makes you think of the 1970s all over again.

I'd been meaning to have a wander round the station, to fully evaluate its status as a bloody awful station. But I have to be honest, it was too depressing. The idea of waiting twenty minutes for the fast train was just too much to bear. I leapt on the slow train which might have taken a while to get to Lime Street, but at least it left Wigan sooner. Sorry - but my affection for all things Northern has its limits...

Spring Awakening

I was typing in my pin at the MtoGo in Central when the girl at the next till said, "I hope you're going to write nice things about us."

At first, I didn't really process it - I thought she was talking to the customer at her till. Then I realised that she didn't have a customer. She was talking to me! She was talking about the blog! I had been recognised! I said, in a moment of suaveness and wit that 007 would be envious of, "Erm, yeah. Course I will."

"I was only talking about your blog the other day."

"Good things I hope?"

"Of course!"

"Glad to hear it."

And that, ladies and gents, was my first brush with fame. I feel like Nicole Kidman. So yes, Rachael at MtoGo, you and your colleagues were all very good. The service was brisk, the store was clean and tidy (I had a better look round than, ahem, the last time I was there) and the staff all looked lovely in their little grey and yellow ties. Marvellous.

Oh, and Rachael? I do normally buy really cool magazines, like Stuff and Attitude and GQ and things. My purchase of Doctor Who Magazine this morning was a total aberration. Cough.

Blushing furiously, I made my way down to the platforms for the Kirkby train. Yup, it was time for another day's tarting, and it was another attempt to slice a whole line off the map in one go. Now that the weather had been relatively fine for a couple of days, I felt brave enough to plunge into the countryside and have a crack at the Kirkby to Wigan branch line.

The line's another of those "almost, but not quite" Merseyrail stories. Electrification to Kirkby was done pretty quickly, with the obvious intention to send the trains onwards to Wigan. Then - nothing happened. For thirty odd years, passengers wanting to carry on into Lancashire have been forced to get off the train at Kirkby and walk along the platform, past a buffer stop, to catch a different train. It's a daft arrangement, and one that's obviously unsatisfactory for everyone, but until the money's there not much is going to happen.

Merseyrail do have plans to build a station a little further along, at Headbolt Lane in Kirkby, and as my Northern Rail train moved through the town en route to Wigan I could see how there would be demand for it. The suburbs stretched way beyond Kirkby station, and they looked like a new service direct to the city centre would give them a valuable economic boost. Then the houses fell away and we were surrounded by fields and trees.

We were still in Merseyside - just about. The "County" boundary extends out beyond Kirkby to take in the little town of Rainford, our next stop, meaning that the station there is one of those curious outposts like Heswall and Meols Cop - on Merseyside, but not claimed by any of the "coloured" lines and left stranded on a grey one. I can see how it can be overlooked. It's a proper country station, previously called Rainford Junction as there was a long-gone line to St Helens here, with a pub opposite and even a signal box. It certainly didn't feel like your usual Merseytravel station. Perhaps that's why they haven't installed a yellow and grey sign here: they don't want to break the spell.

The soundtrack for this part of the trip, incidentally, was Kylie Minogue's Kylie. At the weekend I was in the studio for the UK's Eurovision selection, and I wanted to remind myself of happier times when Stock Aitken and Waterman produced nothing but pop gold.

With Je Ne Said Pas, Pourquois's tinny synth in my ears, I crossed the railway bridge and headed down a side track onto a public footpath. I was using my crumpled Ordnance Survey map to guide me between stations, mashing it into shape so that I could easily get to the bit I needed, and the path tracked the railway line for a while before heading off into the fields.

It was coming up to ten o'clock, and there was a stillness in the air, the feel that spring was gathering itself ready for an onslaught. The fields around me were freshly turned, the earth rich and brown in deep valleys, and the trees seemed to be ready to burst into life. By the end of the day I would see my first crocuses, but here it was just a promise; a deep sigh of relief that the snow and ice were finished with.

The path was straight, and uncomplicated, following the edges of the fields. Normally I'd begin to get bored of it, but there was just something about it that kept me feeling up. Perhaps it was the warm sunshine, or perhaps I was just happy to be out and about, Tarting. Strange though it might seem, I do miss it sometimes.

With a detour around what I can only describe as a massive heap of shit, I soon began to see the end of the countryside looming up ahead. The pretty fields ended abruptly in walls of corrugated steel and fences, as I arrived in the comically named district of Pimbo. Let's be honest: that's not a geographic location, it's a character from In The Night Garden. And strangely for such a cuddly-fuzzily named place, it's utterly charmless. Pimbo is a huge industrial estate, just to the south of Skelmersdale, and so it's just a load of shapeless warehouse blocks and HGVs and wide ugly roads. In an effort to make it a bit more human, the Council had ambitiously laid out pedestrian footpaths - but these were broken up, and full of weeds. I guessed that no-one used them to commute to work.

Pimbo was ugly, just functional, without any human elements to blunt the edges. I suppose it's an industrial estate next to a motorway, not the Lost Gardens of Heligan, but still, it just felt unpleasant and boring. I got out of the pedestrian network so I could stay close to the railway line, to keep my bearings, and found that I'd have to trudge along grass verges without pathways while the factories showed me their faceless rears. There was a burger van, tethered behind a Ford Escort in a layby and doling out a slab of grease; I shuddered at the thought of working out here in this no-man's land, spending eight hours a day miles from anywhere.

A pathway took me away from the road and to Upholland station, clinging to the side of a railway bridge. I was pleased to see that I was back in the land of the Red Rose railway signs for Lancashire County Council, though there was no station building of course, just a couple of bus shelters either side of the line. I was the only person to get on or off at Upholland, and I almost felt embarrassed for making the train stop in such a quiet backwater.

Again, there are plans on the table for Upholland to take on a greater prominence - someday. Skelmersdale, just to the north of here, is a large town with no rail link at all, and the County Council has suggested that Upholland would be the spot to send a branch line into the town centre. However, there's a rival scheme, from Network Rail itself, which would see services extended from Ormskirk down an old branch line and coming at the town from the north. Both plans are full of ideas for park and ride and so on, but frankly, I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, I jumped on the train and took it through the Tontine Tunnel (another children's TV character, surely?) and onto Orrell.

Steel yourselves, folks: take a deep breath. In fact, fetch yourself something boozy. Because getting off at Orrell meant I was taking my first Round The Merseyrail We Go excursion into Greater Manchester. Previous trips into the city itself had been whims, and valueless; Orrell was on the map, though, so it had to be collected, despite it belonging to Merseytravel's mortal enemy - the GMPTE. In fact I have to applaud Merseytravel's restraint on the map - you'd have thought they'd have stuck a "Here be dragons" or "Enter at your own risk!". The hatred between Manchester and Liverpool is one of those ancient rivalries that will never be resolved. Liverpool hates Manchester because it's bigger and richer and more brash nowadays, while Manchester hates Liverpool because it's classier and more beautiful and more famous. Manchester has dark Satanic Mills; Liverpool has the Three Graces. Case closed. (As you can tell, I'm not entirely unbiased).

And even though I am biased, I have to say that Merseyrail treat their stations a lot better. The building was boarded up, access was round the side, down an alleyway, and there was a large sign on the platform warning that there was No Loitering Allowed. In addition, the station sign was just rubbish. It was basically a bus stop sign on a twenty foot pole, far above the head of any normal person and barely discernible. Ok, in its favour, GMPTE uses a lovely font, but that can hardly compare with the Merseytravel box signs, can it? Of course not.

The path onward was another off-road affair, but I made a minor detour. It was on the route anyway, but I took a chance and loitered outside the gates of the Co-operative Community Stadium, home to the Wigan Warriors' Rugby team's training ground. Well, you never know, do you? There may have been a slight chance that there would have been dozens of burly men there, working out. Or possibly they were all in the showers, when an unexpected fire alarm forced them to all run out into the car park, naked and soapy... Sorry. Distracted myself with Dieux du Stade type fantasies there. Sadly, there was no sign of the Warriors, so I disappointedly trudged away down the footpath.

After a while walking alongside the railway tracks, the path took an upward turn, heading into a little copse and then into a field punctuated by a winding stream. For the first time in this relatively flat landscape I found myself climbing a hill, up and up, while ahead of me the distant roar grew louder until I could see it: the M6.

It's strange standing by the side of a massive, fantastically busy motorway, with just a few planks of wood separating you from the carriageway. I walked right up to the fence and watched the traffic speed by. The field was at the spot where the M58 diverges from the main route, and there were all sorts of manoeuvres and interweaving of traffic. I stood there for a while, then realised that my presence might be a distraction for the drivers - they might have thought I was contemplating topping myself under the wheels of a Tesco lorry, or something - so I backtracked. Besides which, I had to find a way to cross the thing.

Tucked away to one side was a series of grim, graffiti-soaked concrete steps, which took you down below the roadway. At the foot of the steps was a melted rubber tyre, and a couple of smashed beer bottles, and then you were plunged into complete darkness for the tunnel. With metal bars either side of me, and the constant thud of the traffic overhead, it was a bit like being stuck in a particularly cruel game on the Crystal Maze. I was waiting for Richard O'Brien to pop up alongside me with a harmonica. If I'd have been in an inner-city somewhere, I would no doubt have been fretting about what was at the other end - smackheads, or muggers, or worried that I might tread on a needle. But I was miles from anywhere. The graffiti artists probably had to make a special trip.

With the tunnel safely conquered I could continue towards the edge of Wigan and the beginnings of the town again. For the first time, I shared the path with someone else, a middle aged woman who shamed me for my lack of exercise by jogging past at speed, and the fields began to close up with trees. I was accompanied by a stone wall for a while, and a broken down part led temptingly into the woods, except there was a giant Strictly No Trespassing sign posted at eye level that I couldn't in all conscience ignore. So instead I carried on, acquiring a couple of dog walkers on the way, until I climbed a slope and entered Pemberton, once a town in its own right but now just another district of Wigan.

I was in true suburbia now. The houses and the curved streets were exactly the same as the estate I'd grown up in, two hundred miles south. Little cul-de-sacs named after birds (it was hills where I grew up), neat paintwork, gardens that had been tastefully block-paved or concreted to accommodate a second car. A man was up a ladder, fixing a Sky minidish (down the side of the house, not at the front, naturally) while the postman trotted back from front path to front path. It was so familiar, and so boring. I remembered growing up in the suburbs and how quiet and safe it was, and how I'd just accepted it as being the norm. It was only when I started to venture out on my own, on trips to London and so on, and I realised how much more was out there than a three bedroomed house with integral garage. That was all very nice, but I wanted something else.

Having said that, Pemberton grew more interesting as I headed towards the station, and encountered a pretty church and a couple of old pubs. The weather had turned a bit grey though, and I think it soured me to the place - I just wanted to get away.

Pemberton's station sign was better than Orrell's, I'll give the GMPTE that. It was still just another station sign though, and I refuse to get excited about it. Poor Pemberton. It had the feeling of having once been loved, but then got chucked for someone more interesting. There was a sad little bit of concrete art, with Pemberton picked out in pink, but which had been allowed to fade. Aw.

I suppose, with their gleaming tram network (grrr) Manchester's transport peeps have more important things on their mind than a few boring old train stations. Which is a shame. On the plus side though, it means Merseytravel win on points...