In London, April is a Spring Month

Best laid plans, and all that. This should have been a deeply thoughtful, carefully considered treatise on the significance of past and future. Mentions of the passing of time, the fragile beauty of a desolate beach, the swirling skies embodying internal torment.

Instead it looks like it's going to be the same old sarcastic rubbish about train stations and beer. Oh well.

It started well. I headed for Birkenhead Park ready for an afternoon of Wirral Line voyaging. I began with a literal high. The man ahead of me in the queue for the ticket office reeked of marijuana. I mean, absolutely stank of it. One sniff of his jacket and I'd have been crouched on the floor air guitaring Purple Haze. As it was, I just got a mild buzz, like when you rub your feet on a nylon carpet for the easy thrill of the static.

Down on the platform, the skies were doing this:

I wasn't too worried. I'd come out in just a sweatshirt, no jacket, but I figured it was the last day of April, and therefore practically summer. The swirling clouds above me would pass.

Somewhere around Wallasey Grove Road, the Gods decided it wouldn't pass, and a constant, heavy stream of rain began throwing itself at the train. By the time I got off at New Brighton it had become a relentless wash of misery.

Now I don't mind the rain. I'm not one of these girlie-men who recoil at the sight of a couple of spots. I hate umbrellas, and I hate hoods even more, so I've regularly been drenched to the skin walking to work or a train station or something. In fact, I find it sort of refreshing: there's something very liberating about being stood inside a downpour, letting the water drive itself through your clothes until you feel it tingle your flesh and the cold slipping into your bones. I've stood naked in monsoon-territory weather abroad, just enjoying the ping of the droplets on my body. I put this down to being born in January 1977, and therefore having been conceived somewhere around Spring 1976: my poor mother had to carry me through the blistering heatwave of that year, and her no doubt horrific discomfort somehow worked its way through the uterus and into my subconscious.

Where I'm going with this is, I didn't mind walking through a bit of precipitation. What was depressing about the weather I encountered was its half-heartedness. It was grimy, grey rain, the kind that just falls onto you as though it couldn't be bothered hanging around in a cloud any longer. It splattered on my skin and face, not soaking me, but not being dry either: each droplet was marked against the stripes on my top. It was miserable rain, and as I walked along I just felt it driving my mood down with it.

The plan had been to visit a relative rarity on the Merseyrail network: a closed station that was probably going to stay that way. Unlike say, St James or Otterspool, where there are vague aspirations to reopen them sometime, Warren station was closed in 1915 and no-one is particularly keen on seeing it come back.

Warren was one of those "in theory" stations. When the railway to New Brighton was built, they built more or less evenly spaced stations, and probably hoped that there would be enough development as a consequence of the new train line to justify its existence. It didn't work that way. Even today, the site of Warren station is isolated amongst golf courses, parkland, and the bare open front of New Brighton. The Wirral is a crowded little peninsula, and the demand for seafront property has never been higher, but round here there's still a sense of wild open land.

So the anticipated passenger numbers never arrived, and soon Warren was only getting one train a day. Finally, it was destroyed by a combination of the First World War and a new tramline along Warren Drive, parallel with the railway line. Warren, barely a station in the first place, was handed back to nature.

(Incidentally, I should say I'm glad it's gone, because I used to know of someone called Warren, whose main claim to fame was that he had sex with some bloke in a glass telephone box on campus while I was doing my degree. Saying that I had "tarted Warren" may have turned my stomach).

I pushed on through the rain on Warren Drive so that I could check out this remnant of the old days. The station was located on the imaginatively titled Sea Road, right at the end. At one point this would have all been the gentle dunes of the Wirral coastline. Now I had the Warren golf course on one side, and a series of nouveau villas on the other. There is some quite marvellous architecture in New Brighton: if you're ever around there, you must check it out. There was a full on Spanish hacienda on Warren Drive, complete with barbecue.

The Sea Road houses were less grand, but seemed to say, "I've spent my life working hard, and now I'm going to retire somewhere with a bit of coast and a view of the 16th hole". There were buttoned up balconies peering over the fence of the course, their patio heaters shrouded in vinyl condoms and the seats upturned on the table. As I struggled along a BMW Z3 went past - it was a few years old, not fashionable any more, but it seemed to represent the "glossy aspirational" air of the place. It was caviar sandwiches on chip butty budgets.

The men on the golf course were fully kitted out with golf umbrellas (hence the name, I guess). I was a bit worried, because I thought you wasn't meant to golf in the rain? Isn't there an increased likelihood of being struck by lightning? I can't pretend that I wasn't mildly excited by the idea of one of them being turned into a pair of smoking Saxone shoes by an errant lightning strike. A quick flash and you become an anecdote and a black and white picture in the course bar. The rain couldn't be bothered with lightning though. That would have been too interesting.

So I pushed on to the site of Warren. "Nothing to see" is about right. I suppose, in fairness, it has been gone for nearly a hundred years. There's no reason there should be anything here. But I was hoping for some kind of sign of previous life, having battled my way through tepid moisture. A bricked up flight of stairs. The foundations of a ticket office. The ghost of Bernard Cribbins blowing a whistle. Anything.

There was nothing except some over elaborate brickwork and some borderline pornographic graffiti. If I'd scrambled up the bank, apparently, and stuck my head over the fence, I might - might - have been able to see the remnants of an old platform which was uncovered during engineering works. Possibly.

I'd had enough though. The pissy rain, the grey skies, the men clearing the rubbish from the path ahead of me - it wasn't exactly "breathtaking vistas" but more "drab". I felt fed up. I was wet, and cold, and my ambitious plans for the afternoon were gone. I'd planned on venturing further along the coast, right to the site of the proposed Town Meadow station, between Moreton and Meols. It would have been a really symbolic "past/future" kind of thing. I couldn't be arsed. It was too much to bear.

I slinked back to the moistened surroundings of Wallasey Grove Road station (even when it's a bad weather day, I still hate turning back on myself). There I was able to board a train that was dry, with the heating on, and after a while I started to feel human again. I needed a pick me up though. I needed something to make me whole again. What could that be?

(This is where I would normally insert a HILARIOUS close up of a pint of beer. I forgot to take one this time, so you'll have to use your imaginations).

Yes, I headed to the pub, or more specifically, I headed to the Wetherspoons in West Kirby. As I've said before, they have free wi-fi here, so I could Twitter and so on from my iPod touch to my heart's content: always a good way to pass the time.

Secondly, they have some, ahem, characters there. While I was in the pub I listened to the conversations of a group of "professional" drinkers who, it seemed to me, spent all their days working their way round Merseyside comparing the various different Wetherspoons for price, service, and comfort. High point for me was one of them talking about some woman who'd had the temerity to bring a baby into the bar, a baby which had subsequently wailed. As the man said to the manager (according to him) "If I made that kind of noise, you'd chuck me out." Well, quite.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I could get Jamie and Chris out to buy me drinks chat to, which is a far more pleasant way to round off a Friday afternoon than pressing up against fences in the middle of a rainstorm. They presented me with a genuine, one of a kind piece of Merseystuff: a real Merseyrail map, formerly sited at Meols station until it had faded beyond recognition. The City Line is hinted at, rather than actually being legible - it adds a frisson of excitement, if you ask me (where will my train go? What station is next? The thrills!). It's surprisingly big. You don't realise how large those posters are when you stare at them on the platform.

Unlike last time, we managed to keep the conversational topics reasonably clean until I had to dash off to Sainsbury's for my Friday night shop with the Bf. Which was a shame because, as always with me, once I start drinking I find it very difficult to stop. I had to go home and drink lager until I slipped into a coma to make up for it.

Plus One

It's goodbye to intimate shots of my nose hair; yes, for this trip, I have a guest photographer, in the form of The Boyfriend. He's been curious about my little jaunts for a while and now I thought it was safe to let him in on it.

Plus, I needed someone to hold my hand, as today we were venturing into dangerous territory: the North End of Birkenhead. There are some areas that are just more than a little bit intimidating, and the North End is one of them. A council estate clustered around the docks, this is one of the most deprived areas in England, and is certainly not the kind of place that is kind to naive trainspotter types. If I'd been on my own, I'd have been quite intimidated; as it was, I was just apprehensive - after all, we were two unfit homosexuals, so the odds would be against us in a gang fight.

We walked through the estate unmolested, only spotting one tattood thug with a rottweiler, and just the two druggies. Birkenhead North station itself is down a side street, behind a row of burnt out shells of terraced houses - it's clearly going for that hot this season, downtown Basra look. It was at this point that The BF chose to inform me that he had been to this station before, when he was a loyal Liverpool supporter waiting for his train to North Wales, and he had been forced to flee from a baying mob of locals who threw glasses at him. Timing is not his strong suit. We got the pic done in double quick time, and managed to hurl ourselves on the New Brighton bound train.

Today's session was designed to knock off the other northern branch of the Wirral Line: this way everything north of Hamilton Square would be done. As a result the next station was Wallasey Village, which is perched on an embankment. This meant I could get a high level shot which is probably as arty as this site will ever get.

The station name, however, is a complete violation of the Trade Descriptions Act - Wallasey hasn't been a village for decades, and the road away from it was choked with traffic and lined with burger bars and discount shops. Definitely not in picturesque Little England here.

It was barely a ten minute walk to the next station, Wallasey Grove Road, which had a car park and a bus stop and seemed surprisingly busy. It turned out this wasn't because there was a rush of commuters utilising this handy transport hub, but instead it was because there was a cash machine here, and people were turning up in their cars to use it. The station building's vaguely picturesque, but in terms of signposting, the best we could manage was the car park sign; the Merseytravel post you normally see there was way out on the main road, and we needed to dash to catch our train.

Actually, that's slightly misleading; we only needed to dash because of The BF's reticence at passing on information. I was stood on the platform, trying to work out which was the correct one for New Brighton, as a train pulled into the one opposite. It was only then that The BF told me we were on the wrong one - leading to us making a mad dash up the overbridge and hurling ourselves on the train as the doors sidled shut.

So from there it was a reasonably long distance to New Brighton. The view from the train is actually very scenic here - there's a whisk round the corner, and suddenly you can spot the sea, and the beaches. New Brighton is right at the tip of the Wirral, and as the name implies, it was intended to be the North's version of the resorts on the South coast. It was too late to be gentrified, though, and so it headed rapidly downhill, becoming a day trip destination for the workers of Liverpool and Birkenhead.

The station's a pretty impressive terminus, and it was obviously built to handle a large amount of holiday maker traffic. It also featured today's only ALF which, at the request of a Mr JH of Chester, has been framed face on in the pic instead of at my usual jaunty angle:

There were a fair few people disembarking here, as there was some sort of car rally going on on the Parade down by the front; it meant that our wanderings were constantly accompanied by the roar of car engines. This doesn't sound too bad but it's like having a swarm of bees loitering next to your ear. We collected the station though, with The BF doing his best David Bailey impression to try and avoid catching the glare of the sun.

Though it was grey, it was warm, so we walked into the town and down to the front. New Brighton is on its last legs as a resort, and it's a shame. The whole place has the air of having given up being an attraction, and instead is starting to become more and more residential. The main road from the station down to the sea is now lined by small Barratt homes, and a large, impressive looking building on the front has been converted from a nightclub into apartments. The views are still good though, with Liverpool's increasingly impressive skyline in the distance, but everything is tawdry and half-hearted.

Like a lot of people, I have a great fondness for the seaside resort, and I'd like to see them work; but New Brighton doesn't know what to do with itself. While West Kirby, on the other side of the peninsular, has gone the upmarket route, New Brighton's trying to be Blackpool when it just doesn't have the same (dubious) charms. A bowling alley has been built on the front, which is a start, but it's architecturally hideous, and turns its back on the promenade in front.

This aqua amusement arcade has the right idea, showing a bit of glamorous leg, even if its best days were somewhere around the Coronation. If New Brighton had a cinema, perhaps, and a couple of chain restaurants - a Pizza Hut, a Frankie & Benny's - it would get people visiting. No, it wouldn't be classy, but West Kirby does the classy end. I'd rather see this place with a decent history and actual attractions made into a destination again, rather than the depressing retail parks where cinemas and nightclubs are shoved nowadays and which look the same no matter where you are. The latest plans to regenerate the place certainly don't sound promising: constructing a Morrison's supermarket on the front and filling in the Marine Lake to do it. Sorry, did I say unpromising? I meant fucking awful.

Anyway. New Brighton also features Fort Perch Rock, a fortification built to defend the Port of Liverpool from Napoleon, but finished once the Napoleonic Wars were over. It looks pretty good from the outside, and deserves its place on the ALF, but it was two quid to get in and The BF and I are determinedly tight. Plus the sign outside absolutely forbade photography. I think that's just being mean and I have no intention of encouraging that sort of behaviour. I took a picture of the outside though, as a yah-boo-sucks to the killjoys inside, and we moved on.

Back up the hill to the station to go home, going past some pretty villas which obviously once housed terribly rich people but now seem to all be in the process of being chopped up into apartments. There was a single hotel en route, but sadly it seemed to be the kind of place asylum seekers get dumped in rather than a destination.

Instead of going back to Birkenhead North, we continued on to the final station above Hamilton Square: Conway Park. When I first met The BF, many many many years ago, I used to travel every Friday from Ormskirk to Birkenhead Park to see him. On the way, I got to see this station being constructed from the train. It was fascinating to watch it being revealed, a little more each week, peeling away the tunnel around us and forming platforms and circulating areas until finally there was a new, gleaming station waiting for us.

It still does gleam; considering it's now nearly 10 years old, Conway Park still looks pretty clean and tidy. The tunnel roof was opened up when they constructed the station (apparently this is because if the station were underground, the costs of maintaining it would be astronomical) and at its head is a nice, modern looking building. We rode up in the lift to the surface - The BF shamelessly eyeing up a lad in the elevator, the big tart - and then went and stood outside so I could get the name pic. The name, incidentally, is complete rubbish. It was named after the development it's in, even though it's right next to the town centre, and "Birkenhead Market" would not only be far more apt, it would be a lot more attractive. But I expect the developers contributed some money to its construction, and wanted some payback for it. Ho-hum.

So that's another five down, and the whole of the north of the Wirral is wiped out. The map below shows all the stations I still need to do; through use of MS Paint I've wiped out all the ones I've done, like some sort of Nazi commandant (go back into the archive to see what's missing). It still looks like it could be a while before we're complete!