change trains, so I just sat and trusted that I could catch an onward train at Manchester.
British Rail was having a bad day. We crept a mile or so out of the station, and then sat for a long time for no evident reason. Eventually, a voice announced that because of faults further up the line this train would terminate at Stockport, which elicited a general groan. Finally, after about twenty minutes, the train falter-ingly started forward and limped across the green countryside. At each station the voice apologized for the delay and announced anew that the train would terminate at Stockport. When at last wereached Stockport, ninety minutes late, I expected everyone to get off, but no-one moved, so neither did I. Only one passenger, a Japanese fellow, dutifully disembarked, then watched in dismay as the train proceeded on, without explanation and without him, to Manchester.
At Manchester I discovered that I needed a train to Preston, so I had a look at a television screen, but these only gave the final destination and not the stations in between. So I went off and joined a queue of travellers asking a BR guard for directions to various places. It was unfortunate for him that there were no stations in Britain called Fuck Off because that was clearly what he wanted to tell people. He told me to go to platform 13, so I set off for it, but the platforms ended at 11. So I went back to the guy and informed him that I couldn't find a platform 13. It turned out that platform 13 was up some secret stairs and over a footbridge. It appeared to be the platform for missing trains. There was a whole crowd of travellers standing there looking lost and doleful, like the people in that Monty Python milkman sketch. Eventually we were sent back to platform 3. The train, when it arrived, was of course a two-carriage Sprinter. The usual 700 people squeezed onto it.
Thus it was, fourteen hours after setting off from Porthmadog that morning, that I arrived tired, dishevelled, hungry and full of woe, in Blackpool, a place that I didn't particularly want to be in anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Two
BLACKPOOL - AND I DON'T CARE HOW MANY TIMES YOU HEAR THIS, IT never stops being amazing - attracts more visitors every year than Greece and has more holiday beds than the whole of Portugal. It consumes more chips per capita than anywhere else on the planet. (It gets through forty acres of potatoes a day.) It has the largest concentration of roller-coasters in Europe. It has the continent's second most popular tourist attraction, the forty-two-acre Pleasure Beach, whose 6.5 million annual visitors are exceeded in number only by those going to the Vatican. It has the most famous illuminations. And on Friday and Saturday nights it has more public toilets than anywhere else in Britain; elsewhere they call them doorways.
Whatever you may think of the place, it does what it does very well - or if not very well at least very successfully. In the past twenty years, during a period in which the number of Britons taking traditional seaside holidays has declined by a fifth, Blackpool has increased its visitor numbers by 7 per cent and built tourism into a £250-million-a-year industry - no small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, provincial and dire.
It was the illuminations that had brought me there. I had been hearing and reading about them for so long that I was genuinely keen to see them. So, after securing a room in a modest guesthouse on a back street, I hastened to the front in a sense of some expectation. Well, all I can say is that Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid. There is, ofcourse, always a danger of disappointment when you finally encounter something you have wanted to see for a long time, but in terms of letdown it would be hard to exceed Blackpool's light show. I thought there would be lasers sweeping the sky, strobe lights tattooing the clouds and other gasp-making dazzlements. Instead there was just a rumbling procession of old trams decorated as rocket ships or Christmas crackers, and several miles of paltry decorations on lampposts. I suppose if you had never seen electricity in action, it would