Among The Beautiful People

Eagle-eyed readers may have noted that I ended my last ramble in a deli.  "That's a bit odd," you may have thought.  "A small village with its own delicatessen?"

Thing is, Chelford is slap bang in the middle of the "Golden Triangle".  Bounded by Macclesfield, Winsford and Knutsford, this is the premier region of the North West for the idle rich.  This is footballer territory, self-made millionaire land, home to Coronation Street actors and entrepreneurs.  It's a place where money is the most important topical conversation - who's got it, who hasn't, and what it's being spent on.

The deli was a fine example of a place for people to spend money on stuff they didn't really need, like their wallet was too heavy and they needed to empty out a couple of twenties somehow.  Jars of mysterious oils.  Boxes of delicate chocolates.  Foreign breads "baked to order".  Bags of "kindling" for £3.50, artfully tied up and designed to be displayed rather than burnt.  The proprietress - who I thought had sneered at me as I took my seat, until I realised she was French and therefore couldn't help it - was showing a WAG her new Christmas stock.  The husband looked perfectly normal, ordinary in fact, tapping on his iPhone, but the wife's hair was too white-blonde, her heels were too high, her tits were too big.

I paid up for my sandwich and tea.  It was chicken and pesto, so I wanted something a little minty to take the taste away; there were tins at the checkout but they were £2.50 for a tiny box so I veered away sharpish.  I ended up buying a packet of Softmints on the way back to the station.

Alderley Edge is the glistening jewel of the Golden Triangle, its Fort Knox.  Alderley Edge is full of nouveau riche, tans and necklaces and short skirts and tight trousers.  Alderley Edge is restaurants and estate agents and nightclubs; Alderley Edge got a reality show on MTV about its glowing residents; Alderley Edge was the home of the Beckhams when they were only semi-legendary.

Given all this, I expected its station to be beautiful and scenic.  I forgot that people from Alderley Edge don't take public transport.

The pre-formed concrete awnings that were unloved.  The blocky footbridge.  The closed ticket office.  It was scruffy and uncared for.  The land around it had been sold off for redevelopment, leaving it hemmed in by flats and shops.

The presence of a station probably adds 5% to the house prices, but no-one uses it.  There's nowhere to park your Jag for starters, and everyone knows that cabbing it is infinitely preferable.

I trekked up to the road, the only person to alight, and got my sign picture.

It was laid out in front of me: the village hub.  Like Hollyoaks, but not as common; you wouldn't get far with a Scouse accent here.

I turned away.  I didn't want to wander round the glitzy village centre with my sweaty, in need of a cut hair, and my grey anorak, and my cheap fifteen quid backpack.  I'd lower the tone.

Instead I headed for the Wilmslow Road.  I found a gem out there - Aldeli; another delicatessen, yes, but housed in a giant 1950s glass building.  It looked like it had once been a car showroom - there was a Texaco garage right next door - but it looked like an alien spacecraft, landing on the Cheshire Plain to deliver Klaatu on his peace mission.  It was brilliant, and if I hadn't stuffed myself already in Chelford, I'd have gone straight in.

There were more dining places as I carried on out of town; a shuttered up pub next to a restaurant/hotel next to a luxury dinner experience.  I'm always baffled by these out of town nightclubs that footballers seem to frequent; if you're earning £30,000 a week, I suppose you don't mind paying for a taxi to get you there and back, but what about everyone else?  And they always look awful; terrible music and overzealous bouncers and expensive drinks.  I suppose that you're going there to try and hook up, or to be seen with the beautiful people.  You're not there for a good night out.

A bypass took away most of the traffic between Wilmslow and Alderley Edge a few years ago, so there's now an underused dual carriageway connecting the towns.  Lining the road are the kind of expensive villas bought by people who want the postcode but can't afford the really good houses.

I passed Phillip Alexander, bespoke tailor (two branches: one in Wilmslow and one in Saville Row, which tells you all you need to know about the area) and arrived in the town properly.  I'd prepared for the visit by reading Miranda Sawyer's wonderful Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia.  She grew up in the area in the Seventies and Eighties, and paints a vivid picture of the town and its pretensions.  At one point, it even had its own credit card, the Wilmslow Card.

Sawyer's book was published in 1999, and even then she was shocked by its relentless upscale climb, with a bistro in the sports shop and an empty store by the old cinema turned into a gastropub.  I'd love to know what she thinks of it now, because as far as I could see, there was nothing but eateries, night clubs and pubs.  I don't know what the residents of Wilmslow do when they run out of Cif.  There was a department store, Hoopers, which has only four branches nationwide: Torquay, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and Wilmslow, and so I didn't dare go in because I was afraid they'd smell my working class origins and have me gutted for the pate in the restaurant.

The only other kind of business in Wilmslow was home interiors.  There were furniture shops and lighting shops and designer tile stores and so, so many kitchen shops.  How many kitchens do people need?  Even the most luxurious mansion usually has only one kitchen.  You don't have en-suite ovens, or loft conversions so you have more room for a walk-in larder.  There must be people who change their kitchen on a semi-annual basis, because I can't work out how all these firms can survive otherwise.  I guess if they get one person to pay £300,000 for new taps then that pays their mortgage for a year and they don't need any other clients.

I will concede that Wilmslow seemed like a very nice town, and it was certainly pleasing to find one corner of the country where there weren't boarded up shop fronts and Cash Converters.  It should be noted that the local MP is George Osborne; these two facts may be related.  I wouldn't want to live here - I couldn't afford to live here - because even though it was busy and thriving there was a certain death behind the eyes.  People spending money without joy.  Wilmslow felt like a weirdly upscale ghost town, where the same figures shuffled from one store to a restaurant to a pub and then on again, repeating the cycle, doomed to go round and round without ever really enjoying themselves.  I felt that Wilmslow would be best as I'd experienced it, as a day visitor, passing through and thinking it was decent enough before going home; it seemed like a very small world to live in.

The influx of day trippers probably explained why Wilmslow station was in a much better state than Alderley Edge.  It was neat and well kept - Northern Rail had clearly thrown some money at it quite recently.  I headed up to the platform to wait for the Manchester-bound train, passing a woman who dripped fabulous en route, conducting a heated conversation on her smartphone beneath a mighty hairstyle.

Up top, there were four well appointed platforms, one of which was surprisingly busy.  There was what looked like a group of outdoor-bound students, some well-to-do couples.  They were waiting for the Virgin train to London, which pauses here on the way from Manchester.  Most importantly, as far as I was concerned, there was TV's Les Dennis.

I actually have a sneaking fondness for Les Dennis.  He's the kind of old style trouper we don't seem to have any more - king of the Saturday night variety show, and easily the best host Family Fortunes has ever had (yes, even better than Bob).  His breakdown on Celebrity Big Brother and his self-parodic appearance on Extras just added to the appeal.  Plus it's hard not to like someone who emerged alive from the wreckage of Amanda Holden.  He was keeping his distance from a man who was - let's just say "merry", shall we? - and who was shouting what a great guy Les was.  Which he is, but I'm sure he'd have preferred to be anonymous.  I certainly didn't attract his attention, taking a photo from the opposite track while looking the other way.  Which sounds creepy, now that I think about it.

And that's why I will never be comfortable in the world of the rich and famous.  I couldn't wait for the train to arrive and take me back to where people were normal and ordinary and dull.  Just like me.

Rugby Lads

In a recent blog post, Robert referred to our friendship as "the greatest double act since PJ and Duncan".  I don't necessarily have a problem with this reference; Let's Get Ready to Rhumble is obviously a high water mark for Western civilisation (the "h" in Rhumble deserves a Grammy all of its own).  My objection was that he didn't say who was who.  Am I Ant, the taller, balder one?  Or Dec, the shorter, fatter one?  I can't actually decide which one's better.  It's not like Morecambe and Wise, where one is clearly a genius and the other one is good but not that good (by the way, the genius was Eric, and if you think otherwise, please leave this website immediately).  In the end, I think I'd prefer to be PJ, as his blinding at the paintball game was a significant moment in children's television for my generation, up there with Zammo slumped on the floor of a toilet high on scag and Five Star being asked why they were "so fucking shit" on Going Live. 

I had the opportunity to ask Robert who was the Ant and who was the Dec on Saturday, when we took a train to Manchester together.  He said he didn't have a specific role for either of us in mind, which is probably a lie, and so for the rest of this blog I will refer to him as "Tennille", which makes me "The Captain."  Equilibrium is restored.

We were in Manchester to visit a rarely open station: Manchester United Football Ground.  Or, as the BF (a former Liverpool season ticket holder) calls it, "that shithole".  He wasn't at all keen on me visiting the station, perhaps believing I'd come home with Manchester Fleas or something.  I pacified him by explaining that the trains weren't actually being run for a football match: it was the Rugby Super League Final that afternoon, between Wigan and Warrington.

And that is the end of my knowledge of the subject of rugby, unless you count Ben Cohen's arms and an appreciation of the annual Dieux de Stade calendar.  I went to the least athletic high school in the world - my year couldn't scrape together eleven boys willing to play football against other schools, so we just didn't have a team that year - and rugby was only on the curriculum for one year.  There was a Science teacher who apparently had a minor in rugby and who taught us the basics on a freezing cold field in November.  Then he left the school, and I went back to being a really distant fielder in rounders so I could have a nice sit down.

Manchester United Football Ground is tucked away behind the South Stand, and only receives limited services on match days.  It's a hangover from the days when there actually used to be "football specials", four carriages of drunken violence and hooliganism that crossed the nation ferrying louts to the next match.

I've read Awaydays; I know that trains to football stadiums are full of bovver booted maniacs pulling up the seating and spitting on passers by.  I began to get more and more anxious.  It had started earlier, when I tried to find a neutral outfit that wouldn't imply allegiance to either team, and now it was growing.  What if someone asked us who we were there to see?  Or a more technical question?  What if they started a singalong, and took issue with me not joining in?  What if we were the only sober people on board?  I don't like crowds at the best of times, but things are so much worse when you're jammed in the armpit of a twenty stone rugby fan who's been knocking back the Tennant's Extra since 8 that morning.

Adding to my anxiety was Michael Portillo on the platform, looking supercilious in a bright pink jacket (nice way to battle those rumours about your sexuality, Mike).  In my experience, where a Tory politician goes, disaster is sure to follow.  It didn't help that, purely coincidentally, Robert Tennille had actually mentioned Portillo in conversation moments before, raising the very real prospect that he is a minion of Satan who can be summoned just by uttering his name.  Like the Candyman.

If I'd had more wits about me, I might have gone over and demanded that he stop making that Great Railway Journeys programme.  The concept of the programme is fine, it's just his halting, uncomfortable presence as a presenter I can't stand.  The sight of him in a hairnet, attempting banter with some jolly production line worker as they turn out some historic Devon fudge, then pretending to eat it on the Tarka Line, turns my stomach.  Probably because I suspect that his Damascene conversion to liberalism is all a front, and if David Cameron offered him a front bench role which involved herding the first born of welfare claimants into a large pen and dropping them off Beachy Head he'd be right in there.

Still, there's always this.

We finally made it on board the train, which wasn't too busy; we got a seat, at least.  Most of the matchgoers got on at Oxford Road.  A hefty Wigan fan, Carlsberg in hand, installed his two kids in the seat in front of us and then bellowed down the carriage for the rest of the journey.  Much of what he said was either boorish or incomprehensible; apparently he didn't mind if Wigan lost, so long as one of the Warrington players got his leg broken, which doesn't strike me as being a good sport.

The station is on a little bit of side track alongside the main line, which is why it has to have special trains and they can't just let the mainline ones stop here.  TfGM have suggested closing this station and building a new one nearby which could be served by regular services and be more of an asset for the local community.  Their proposed name for this station is "White City", after a nearby retail park, which needs to be stopped for being unoriginal.  There's already a White City station, Manchester, and has been for over fifty years.  Get your own name.

We let everyone else alight from the train then found a handy sign for our photos.

That's another rarity knocked off the map.  The rest should be dead easy.

Now we had the problem of getting out of the station.  The crowds had thinned, as passengers had passed through the turnstiles.  Turnstiles.  I worried that as we didn't have match tickets we wouldn't be allowed to go through, and we'd be stuck on the platform until the reverse services started up after the match.

Luckily the turnstiles were a relic of the old stadium, and were unmanned.  We passed through and emerged in the shadow of Old Trafford, its high glass frontage and bright red signage everywhere.  Even though it was a Super League final, they hadn't really bothered covering up its footballing day job; I thought there might be some banners or signs to celebrate the rugby match but there were still vast portraits of Wayne Rooney everywhere you looked.

I texted that picture to the BF, with a message saying "Look where I am!"

"Does it stink of shit?" came the extremely mature reply.  Football can turn grown men into 13 year old boys.

Now we had to get away from the station, which was difficult, because we were going in the opposite direction to everyone else.  Waves of fans were streaming closer, good natured enough, but still a hefty mass.  We dived down a side street and found ourselves in what seemed like a perfectly ordinary suburban avenue.  It would probably be quite nice living here, I thought, apart from the absolute hell of every other Saturday.

As though to emphasise the point, two women emerged from a patch of vacant ground, hoisting their knickers up.  "There'll have been loos in the ground," said their friends, waiting politely on the pavement.

"I know," said one of the al fresco pissers, "but I just couldn't hold it in any more!"

Pure.  Class.

We were headed for Trafford Park station for the train home.  We'd considered staying in Manchester, but on top of the Super League final, Manchester City were playing Everton at home, so we decided the city would probably be nightmarish.  We were also trying to time our return visit so we wouldn't get Everton fans on the train, or Crystal Palace fans at Lime Street, or Liverpool fans in the city's pubs; Saturday afternoons are a minefield if you can't stand sport.

Chester Road's a big, busy thoroughfare here, so I was fascinated by the idea that they'd close it on match days.  I should imagine the inconvenience to traffic is worth it to get 60,000 people out of the way as quickly as possible.

There were still signs that a big event was happening.  Crowds of supporters passed us, dressed in their teams' strip (I still didn't know which one was which, and the presence of away kits just muddied the issue).  Outside a social club, the car park was crammed with people clutching plastic glasses of beer, and at the kerbside men in high-vis jackets beckoned passing cars into private compounds behind hotels and pubs.  They lazily rolled their arms, over and over, like really bad interpretative dance.

Meanwhile, there weren't so much shopping precincts, as strips of grease.  Chippies, kebab shops, Indians, Chinese - every kind of takeaway was here to ensnare the passing fan with tempting wafts of fried food.

Down a side street, we got another sign of the horrors of being a local resident: parking permit signs with dot matrix indicators to tell you when the next match was.

I quite liked that.  I always find it thrillingly futuristic, a little bit of Blade Runner come to the present day.  I get similarly excited by LED screens showing ads; if that one outside Lime Street ever featured a massive Japanese lady putting a pill in her mouth I'd be ecstatic. 

Tennille was at my elbow, complaining, doubting my navigational skills.  It was not a little triumph that I pointed at Trafford Park station on the horizon; of course I knew where we were going.

It was a sad little station.  A ticket office had been constructed when it first opened at the turn of the 20th Century, but it had been closed a long time ago.  For a while it was a taxi office, but now it seemed to be abandoned altogether.  The windows were boarded up and iron bars were over that.

Behind the building was a long pathway up to the platform level.  The station doesn't get much of a service, and there was a real peace to it.  When we reached the platform level we were hit by a bright orange sun, lighting the platform and the tracks.

Tennille hammered away at his phone - he's just got an iPhone 5C, and needed no excuse to bash at it - while we waited for the train home.  The rest of the line could wait for a quieter day, some time when I wouldn't have to run the gauntlet of burly men in shorts.  Back to Liverpool we went, for a pint or two.

You can read Robert's account of the trip here.

Tweet and Lowdown

Don't get me wrong: I love Twitter.  In the few years I've been using it I've become an addict and a devotee.  I rarely go a whole day without firing at least one idle thought out into the ether - for example:

It's all become a bit of a strain lately, though.  Some of the fun's gone out of it.  Between rape threats, calls for moderation, Russian boycotts, racist vans, Sun front pages and the continuing presence of One Direction in the Trending Topics, it's all got a bit stressful.  My timeline used to just be people tweeting their dinners and sarcastic comments about Gail Platt's hair; now the vortex of hysteria which sometimes engulfs Twitter is demanding I sign petitions or boycott the platform for a day.  Plus I follow Mia Farrow, and though she tweets a lot of great fun stuff (including the revelation that she was watching Sharknado with Philip Roth, which may be my favourite thing ever) she also regularly tells you about the latest Third World atrocity.  Bit of a bummer.

Thank goodness then, for the odd little ray of sunshine, like Tim and Andy at Northern Rail.  There's a bunch of tweeters employed by the rail company to keep passengers informed about delays and cancellations, and frankly I'd rather be minesweeping in the Afghan foothills than do that job.  Every day you have to put up with this kind of shit:

That was following a theft of overhead lines in Stockport.   I'm afraid I might have responded with something a little more direct, like "What do you want me to do?  Come down there and strap you to my back and run you to work?"

In the old days, of course, people would have just tutted and rolled their eyes and gone back to reading the Metro.  Twitter has enabled direct, one to one conversations with the rail companies in real time, and so frustrated people on the platform just start venting wildly:

I wouldn't put up with that kind of crap.  I am a real loss to the customer service industry.

There are a whole bunch of people who do the tweeting on behalf of Northern Rail, but Tim and Andy are my favourites.  They're relentlessly upbeat, unfailingly polite, and sometimes wilfully surreal:

Now that's good social networking.  Engaging, pleasant and fun.  Or this one:

which is just plain camp.

I might feel different if I had to put up with cheery little gags when I'm getting drenched on a platform in Arnside because the promised train hasn't turned up, but sitting at home with a cup of tea I appreciate the moments of levity.  I can't decide who my favourite is though.  On the one hand, Andy often begins his weekend shifts with "Sunday Sunday, here again in tidy attire" so we clearly share a spirit animal.  I couldn't find an example of him actually saying it, sadly, because I went back through Northern Rail's timeline and I hit all their apologies to people incensed that they were refusing to run trains following flash flooding at Walsden and I had to go and have a lie down because RAGE.

On the other hand, I got this response from Tim:

so you know: there's that.  Tim is also the one running the current #NorthernView contest:

It's a nice little competition, and he retweets the best shots, so you get a little moment of pride.  I haven't entered because I rarely take photos out the window of trains - I'm so boring that England's magnificent scenery is so much blah to me; I'm just waiting for the next station to turn up.  It seems to be something Tim's done off his own back, even though he's doomed to be unappreciated:

Twitter's an informal medium so it's good to have companies being friendly and a bit more "dress down Fridays", even when they're telling us that something horrible has happened.  Merseyrail's Twitter account is a lot less fun.  It's mainly used to tweet bad news - trains turning back at Hillside or the continued loop closure - so you start to think bad things when that yellow M pops up.  It's never a joke about the heat, put it that way, though now and then they'll have a competition to win tickets to see Jessie J in Chester or something, which is somehow worse.  And, worst of all, they stop tweeting at four o'clock, and don't tweet at all on weekends - they actually admit to it in their profile.  I can see why people get in a rage when they're waiting for their delayed train home and Merseyrail's front-facing services seem to have knocked off.

Yesterday, they did tweet something fun and interesting though:

It seems that the poster dates from 1962, when the Beatles were regulars at New Brighton's Tower Ballroom.  It ended up being the tweet that was heard round the world, thanks to Scouse actor David Morrissey.  He retweeted Merseyrail's picture, and then followed it up with this:

Good on you Dave; this more than makes up for Basic Instinct 2.  (And thanks to @sebpatrick for the heads up).

I love that it's been uncovered completely accidentally, and I really hope it's not going to be disposed of too quickly.  Maaaaaaaaarten Spaaaaaaaaaargaren, Merseyrail's Grand Chief Poobah, tweeted:

My suggestion is that they frame it and put it up in a station, either Bidston or New Brighton.  I wouldn't want it to just be handed over to the Beatles Story (who've probably got hundreds of these things) or auctioned off to some American who'll stick it in a glass case in his mansion.  Frame it and put it up on Merseyrail: make it a treat for passengers and tourists.  I'm sure it'd be an attraction in its own right; all those slightly scary Japanese tourists you see doing V-signs outside the Cavern would love it.

Of course, some people had alternative suggestions:

Sigh.

On Her Majesty's Kirkby Service

Robert e-mailed me this pic, and I had to share it. It's the 25th October 1978, and the Queen is officially opening Merseyrail by riding to Kirkby. (Not that I'm trying to score points or anything, but they could only get Prince Charles to open the Jubilee Line, and that was named in QEII's honour).

First of all, I am loving that hat. HM was quite groovy in the Seventies, wasn't she? It seems to match her scarf too. She also looks like she's having a rollocking good time, more so than that lady-in-waiting next to her, who looks like she's afraid of catching Working Class.

It's interesting to note the grime, mud and general air of misery outside the window, too. One of The Richest Women In The World obviously hasn't.

I'm also pleased to see that even when a train has been buffed, scrubbed and polished in readiness for a Royal visit, they still couldn't get those awful yellow and green seat covers to stay on properly. Look at the ones in front - I bet the Kirkbyites who rode the train back into the city had them off and chucked round the carriage before they reached Fazakerley. The Queen didn't ride back on the train; her limo was waiting for her at Kirkby station. Two standard class rail journeys in one day? Are you mad?

In short: this is ace. Any more photos on this theme would be much appreciated. Perhaps a shot of Liz getting a corgi stuck in the door, or having her ticket checked by an over-enthusiastic inspector. Or a photo of the exact expression that came over her face when she got off the train in Kirkby. I would like to see that one, very much.

Fabulous, Sweetie

In the first of what will no doubt be a very occasional series, we bring you Celebrities on Merseyrail. Yes, it does happen, now and then. Today's special guest celeb is Agyness Deyn, fashion model, fashion muse, and general all round fashion person, who for some reason is in Liverpool. This may have something to do with her on/off relationship with Miles Kane from the Last Shadow Puppets, but I haven't bought Heat in years so I don't feel qualified to comment on that. What I can comment on is La Dean's Twitter feed, which threw up the following yesterday:

Liverpool has an underground!!! It's the friendly brother of the London underground but on dreamy hallucinogens.

to which I say: eh? "Dreamy hallucinogens"? I've never ridden the Tube while smacked out of my head, so I'll have to take Aggy's word for that. Admittedly all that brown melanine in the station can make your eyes go squiggy after a while. Still, I have to agree about it being the Underground's friendly brother.

She then went on to say:

Merseyrail moto... 'It's fine because it's fair'.

Isn't it though? Well done Aggy. And well done Merseyrail for getting a free ad for your penalty fares scheme from a supermodel with 22,000 followers. Admittedly, out of context it doesn't make sense, and she's spelt "motto" wrong, but we all get the gist. Unless she'd just got caught without a ticket at Conway Park, and was being ironic? Perhaps Agyness was tweeting from the back of a meat wagon on its way to Birkenhead police station. We need to be told.

It's nice to see that she was positive about her Merseyrail experience, though, and as a result she has gone up in my estimation. I'm even going to forgive her for spelling Agnes wrong now, which I'm sure she'll be pleased about. I hope that this is a regular occurrence, now, and we get a swarm of supermodels all over the network. Naomi Campbell assaulting a ticket inspector at Blundellsands and Crosby. Kate Moss snorting "substances" on a six-car train to Chester. Tyra Banks and her Fierce Weave scaring the schoolkids at Aigburth. The possibilities are endless. Do let me know if you spot Cindy Crawford, or indeed, anyone famous on a Merseyrail train. Then we can all bask in the knowledge that they're just like us.