Day one in Treacletown

A couple of years ago, during the lockdown, I came up with the idea that when we were through it, I’d visit a few places that I’ve never been to, with the whole premise of raiding thr charity chops and trying a few nearby eateries and… drinkeries. Last year, I travelled to Skegness with Chris, and this time we headed off to Macclesfield.

As I type this, it’s 7:39AM. I’m laid in bed in a Travelodge listening to the traffic go by. Unfortunately, the traffic seems to consist of large trains, seeing as we’re probably less than 50 yards away from the main train line, the one that runs from here to Manchester. I’d ask Chris which one it is, but he’s snoring merrily away, and by the time I get this online, I’ll probably forget.

Anyhoo, on to yesterday. It started off with a trip to Huddersfield. It’s a place I’d been to several times. One place I remember with a great amount of fondness, was a little record shop known as “Vinyl Tap”. The top part of the shop was unassuming, and not really that interesting. It was all new stock. All stuff that was out of my price range, and also stuff that just didn’t appeal. There was one saving grace, however. A massive basement, that probably ran underneath three other stores, full of 7″s and 12’s, of all different genres. I remember my previous visit in 2016, I spent hours down there and came back with a fairly decent haul.

Sadly, on this visit, the record basement was no more. Instead of a welcoming staircase to heaven, there was instead, the velvet rope, draped across the stairs. I could have cried.

So, after about 2 minutes, aimlessly looking at CDs I was never going to buy, we left. Probably never to return, ever. Sad times

Of course, Huddersfield has more to offer than just one record shop. There were, of course the charity shops. And what a disappointment they all were.

Approximately 2 hours of walking around yielded 4 CDs, and most of those were from a branch of Barnados that had only just opened.

There was also the outdoor market. I don’t know whether Tuesday is “Flea Market” day, but it seemed like it. Not one shred of anything decent. Unless you like horse ornaments.

We then stumbled on what could only be described as a fire waiting to happen. It’s hard to put into words just how cramped this place was, stacked high with tables, chairs, cabinets. If it’s made of wood, it’s in there.

Of course, I had to stumble over a mercury vapour light. Should I have bought it? I certainly didn’t fancy lobbing at around, with no guarantee that it actually worked, so I passed on it.

One of the last few stops we made was to one of those local community / tourist places. Ended up picking a bottile of Carolina Reaper hot sauce. At the time of typing, I’ve yet to try it.

So, that was Huddersfield. It was getting a bit late in the afternoon, but there was still time to head somewhere else, and that place was Oldham.

Getting there was a piece of cake. Getting parked, not so. Eventually we settled on a car park that we’d passed twice. Luckily by that point, I’d discovered two charity shops, so we headed there. It was 15:32, and one of them, the RSPCA, closed at 15:30. Sure enough, the doors were already locked.

That’s definitely one of the worst thing about being a charity shop fan, having to put up with whatever opening hours the old dears beihind the counter can put up with.

The other one is an Oxfam. These are always hit and miss. Sometimes, they’re great and have reasonable prices, sometimes they just slap any old price on stuff.

It was raining at this point. Missing a charity shop by 2 mintes had also not lightened the mood. I was ready to put on par with Grimsby as the most depressing place I’d been to, but thankfully there was no smell of fish in the air.

We found another untapped vein of charity shops, adn I ended up with my biggest haul of the day. Only 9, however, but it was still more than before.

We did find a diamond in the rough, however. Tucked away in the top left corner of the “Tommyfield Market” was a lovely little micropub called the Cob & Coal. I didn’t get a photo of the place itself, but here’s a photo of the doorstop, as we both found it particularly amusing.

And that was Oldham. The rain had not relented the entire time we were there. Thankfully, this meant that there was no dust from the shopping centre they’re knocking down… and it also allowed me toadd to my ever growing collection of shopping centre demolition photos with…. two.


And the onto the final destination. Good old Macclesfield. Sally satnav showed us the way, and after making only one wrong turning, we’d reached our destination. I was quire surprised how small the town seemed. Seemed one minute we were in the country, the next second was the sight of the Travelodge, and our base for the next couple of days.

Even though it was raining, there was a decent view out of the window, both daytime and at night.

We dropped our stuff off. Chris has a cup of tea and I watched The Chase. We then went in search of food. Naturally, we went for an Indian. Of course, before that, we made a stop into a nearby pub, the George and Dragon. What a lovely little place. Not sure if it had just been done out,, but it was absolutely spotless. The drinks were nice… I went for a Dizzy Blonde, and Chris had a pint of something called Unicorn. It was decent. And the bogs were spotless. Not often you can say that about many pubs. they even had genuine brand-name hand soap.

After a couple of these were necked, we went onto the Indian. Now, we ended up going to a different one than we originally planned, a place called Lazeez. It was over the road from the George and Dragon, and seeing as the weather was still ‘inclement’, we ended up here because it was closer. The food itself was absolutely lovely. There was some sauce that came with the poppadoms. Now, anyone who knows me will know that I could quite happily bathe in the red sauce that you usually get. This time, it was like a brown sauce. No idea what it was, but it was beautiful.

I went for a vindaloo, naturally. Ended up getting loads. Only downside was that the beer wasnt great., it tasted like it had been in the pump for a while. If you go here, It’s probably an idea to get a bottle, but that was genuinely the only downside to what was otherwise a decent place. 7.5 out of 10.

So, the night was getting on. We went to a place for one more drink, namely Alfred’s. They had Beavertown Neck Oil on. Its lovely stuff. Expensive, but worth it. I ended up trying to teach some of the intricacies of Pokémon Go, but I don’t think he could have been any less interested!

So, back to the Travelodge. Thankfully the rain had stopped at that point. A couple of episodes of Family Guy later, and time for sleep. Turns out that the bed seemed slightly smaller than a normal single bed, and it felt like I was going to keep falling out. The trains going past didn’t help. Chris later explained that the rail appeared to have a loose fishplate, which was causing the “Th’dunk” sound every time anything ran over it. So, I’d say it was a below average sleep. Not terrible, but not great either.

And so, onto the main event… day two!

Back To the Greaseweazle

A title that makes this sounds like either the greatest movie of all time, or quite possibly the worst. Anyway, as the title suggests, I have returned to imaging some more Amiga disks that turned up on ebay. I think I’m up to my 7th batch, and they seem to get better with each iteration. The last ones I purchased appeared on ebay a few weeks ago, and some of the disks themselves sertainly piqued my interest. They were slightly different to the normal batches of copied disks and coverdisks. I have plenty of those now, but these looked like they actually had some “productive” stuff on them, at least some interesting utilities that I could install.

There was one disk, however, that certainly piqued my interest…

3,000 database records… the previous owner had even taken the time to say how full the disk was, and how long it took to load. Sadly, no mention of what software was going to be used to open it.

The box arrived. I feverishly opened the box, and looked for this particular disk. There is was, in all its shiny blue glory. The Greaseweazle let out a little cry of pain, as I stuck the USB cable into its back passage. I fired the software up, and within minutes, I had an image of the disk. I loaded it up, aaaaand….

Yep, the previous owner had thoughtfully formatted the disk! I could have cried. Ofcourse, anyone who knows anything about computers knows that formatting a disk doesn’t actually delete anything, it simply clears the areas of the disk such as the file allocatuion table, or whatever the Amiga equivalent was. The data is usually still there.

Aware of this, I opened “DiskSalv”. As the name suggests, it salvages data from disks… no other way of making that interesting, really. I let it work its magic, and within a minute or so, it had recovered the files!

This is where the trail went slightly cold. I had the files, but didn’t know how to open them. the file names didn’t ring any bells, it certainly wasn’t anything I’d used before. Helpfully, the next disk in the box was labelled as the following!

Now, I won’t waste much time on this, because… the disk was once again formatted so I went through the same procedure of salvaging, but sadly, the only file on the disk was unusable. I might dig into it a bit later, but I have a feeling the file is corrupt.

About 5 seconds of forensic investigation led me to find that the database would open in a package called “Mini Office 2″…10 seocnds of downloading, and 10 minutes of trying to get the bastard thing to boot. Eventually, there it was! Mini Office in all its glory, and the database turned out to be someone’s music collection!

Oddly, the majority of the records appear to be duplicated over and over again.
Maybe the previous owner was using it to “benchmark” his Amiga, hence the writing on the lebel?

Of course, this is very likely something I’ll never find out. There’s plenty more disks in this box for me to go through, but I doubt they’ll be as interesting (for want of a better word) than this one. Meh, it kept me entertained for a few hours at least.

I bought a new Amiga!

In the year 2022, you’d think it’d be impossible to walk into a shop, and pick up a brand new Amiga 500 off the shelf…. Well, that’s what you’d think if you don’t follow the world of the retro reproductions, but yes, last year, a company called “Retro Games” brought out a mini Amiga, much in the line of similar devices, such as the mini archade machines, and mini consoles that have came out over the last few years.

Now, I’ve known about this for quite a few months, and watched quite a few videos on it, but have never seen one in the shops until this weekend. Besides, a certain chain of betting shops have been very good to me recently, and due to the sad news of our dear old Queen Liz passing, and my place of employment wanting some poor saps to cover the bank holiday (this wasn’t through choice, might I add), I have a little more disposible income this month., so I’m considering this a gift to myself…

So, as the box says, it comes with 25 games, a mouse, a joypad, and the dinky little Amiga itself. It does come with a USB-C power cable, but no adapter. To be honest, if you’re interested in this product, you’re going to be swimming in the bloody things anyway, so I don’t consider this an issue, and neither should you.

So, let’s take a first look at the games themselvles.

Soem classics, some in there that I’ve never played. The one obscured by the light reflecting of my fantastic photography is “Alien Breed 3D”.

Out of these, I’d say I’ve played about a third of them. There’s lots of Team 17 ones in there, and this, to me, isn’t a bad thing…. Arcade Pool is in there, and if you follow this blog, you’ll know this is where this whole love for Amiga emulation was rekindled a couple of years ago.

“Worms: The Directors Cut” was also another one I bought back in the day. I had great fun with that, and some of my level designs even still exist on Aminet.

There were a few more that came to me with… ahem… “handwritten labels”, shall we say. Qwak was one of those, a cutesy little platformer.

Anyway, I don’t want to get bogged down too much on the games for now. I’ll do that in a follow-up post. For now, I’m just going to blather about me opening the box and exploring its contents

I broke the seal to display a rather charming piece of kit…

It’s almost 30 years since I caught eyes on something so beautiful… that fateful day on 25th December 1993, when I opened my Christmas presents to see an A1200 staring back at me…. Despite this being an A500, I still got a lump in my throat. It was a beautiful moment.

Despite my permanent Amiga being an A1200, I did own an original A500 for a very short amount of time. I think we got it given, possibly for spare parts I remember my dad powering it on, getting the picture, then a plume of smoke coming out of one of the chips. Ooops. It did live on, however. I assume the drive went on to replace either mine of my dad’s floppy drive… I swapped one of the keys out on my A1200 to keep its memory alive, and to this day, one of my keys is slightly yellower than the rest. Finally, the ROM went into my mate Wayne’s A500+. He’d inserted the ROM incorrectly in his, frying it, so he ended up with the only A500+ I’m aware of that ran the 1.3 workbench,

Anyway, I’m rambling a bit now. Back onto the star of the show. It comes as no surprise that the keyboard is just for show.

There is, however, an official keyboard, limited to a run of 500 units, which I have, of course already ordered too…. That was about 6 months ago, and I’ve heard very little from them, so I’ll be interested to see if and when that arrives. Sigh.

Also in the box are the mouse, controllers and associated cables, all neatly packaged.

I can’t decide if the mouse is slightly smaller than the original. It’s certainly lighter, as it’s obviously optical now.

On the back of the unit are the ports. There’s a full-size HDMI port, three USB ports, and the USB-C power port. Got to admit, three USB ports is a bit of a quiz, and maybe the first oversight. Maybe there’s a reason that I’ve overlooked that they couldn’t add more, but to use the system to its fullest extent, you’ll need the mouse, joypad, external keyvoard, and a memory stick, taking up 4 ports. I’m reliably informed that you CAN use a USB hub to support all of these, but it just seems a little bit odd…

Onto the pickiest gripe of the lot, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have been any the wiser if I hadn’t stuck my macro lens in places where it shouldn’t have been, but in some places, the printing/etching looks a little “unfinished” between the keys.

I do, however have to applaud the Caps Lock key (words I thought I’d never type), but despite the fact the LED is just printed on and will never illuminate, the printing texture they’ve used has made it appear to have the “Rowntrees Fruit Gum” texture of the original… an accidental bonus there!

Wow, I have no idea how / why any of the last two paragraphs ended up in the final edit.. Well, I do, I have the photos there and didn’t want to waste them, but let’s just go to part 2 where I stick a power supply up this puppy, and see what she can really do….

Car boots and Castlegate

Now, it would be remiss of me to not start off this post by mentioning the passing of our dear old Queen Elizabeth II at the ripe old age of 96.

Anyway, I mention this, as it meant that plans for this weekend were a bit sketchy if they went ahead or not.

Let’s rewind a new days. I got sent a flyer on facebook… there was a car boot sale in an area of Stockton I’d never visited. Now, Stockton is a couple of towns over, and this wasn’t a journey that could have been made by bus. I asked Chris if he fancied it, and the answer was to the affirmative.

Evenrything was planned… until the sad death of our former monarch. Pretty much the country stopped. Horse races were cancelled. Football was stopped. Even the BBC dropped their coverage of the final Diamond League athletics meeting of the year halfway through their coverage of the women’s 3,000 metre steeplechase. The country had ground to a halt.

Understandably, there’s a period of mourning, and I was wondering if this car boot sale had been cancelled. I asked on facebook. Nobody got back to me.

Saturday morning rolled around, and I took a chance. Yeah, we’re going. The entire journey for me had a nagging, painful memory of a car boot sale that didn’t happen,back in… oooh, let’ws say 1996. Back then, I’d arranged with Chris to go to a similar car boot sale in Billingham on an early Sunday morning. Now, this was long before Facebook was a thing, and real-time information on events was non-exisent. Either way, Chris’s dad drove us up and down this road where it was meant to be… aaand no sign of it. Absolute waste of a journey, and I felt awful for it.

As I mentioned, I ‘took the plunge’ Google’s sat nav guided us to the destination. The church was there, and there were some stalls set up. Phew.

Overall, there were meant to be 33 stalls. There might have been than many, I didn’t count. I’d been though a few stalls, and picked up 6 from one at 50p each.

Now, the next stall I visited was… shall we say, awkward.. I’m going through some more CDs, at 50p each. While flicking through, and picking one or two from a particular artist, I heard the words “He liked those”. My heart sank. I knew what was coming next.

The sellers were two women, probably late 60s, early 70s. I’m clearly looking through some of the CDs that a late son had once owned. Oh my.

I was in too deep at this point. I’d picked some out, but I clearly wasn’t going without a few more, was I? Admittedly, I had a couple of them which I left behind, but the rest of those came home with me. “Think Of [Dave] While you’re listening to them!” were her parting words….

Shortly after that, the heavens opened. Thankfully, we’d managed to go through the entire car boot sale before the rain started. It was time to go, and head into Stockton’s town centre itself.

Now, 2022 is a bit of a time of change for Stockton. The “Castlegate Centre” that has been “at the heart of Stockton” for at least 40 years, is getting flattened. I have very good memories of this centre. And I hope you’ll excuse me if I go on a bit of a ramble. I’m archiving memories of a (now defunct) shopping centre….

Let’s go back to the 80s. I remember being there, must have been something like October or November, as the Christmas decorations were being put up. the fluorescent lanterns that were used to illuminate the external walkways were 4ft Thorns. At this time I don’t have an exact model number, but they were the same that were used in Hartlepool, and that’s what made them stand out to me.

Let’s fast forward to the 90s. In 1991, before I even owned a proper record player, I picked up my first “proper bought” single, “Carribean Blue” by Enya. It was either this, or “World In Union” by Kiri Te Kanawa. The Rugby world Cup had been happening at the time. There was something like 20p difference, which made me choose Enya. Plus, it had “Orinoco Flow” on the B side. A song I vaguely remember liking at the time. I remember going back to my cousin Julie’s house, and listening to both sides on her record player, as she lived near the Stockton railway station at the time.

So, as I mentioned, it’s getting flattened. Like a lot of shopping centres, it’s suffered a massive decline, and Stockton council think it’s going to be better off replacing it with a park.

Here’s a “few” photos I took at the weekend.

A brightly lit, modern shopping centre, with three people in it.

This was Kitsons butcher’s last day.

This left one shop still open… Herons. Quite surprisingly, this was the last shop before you hit the barricade of where they were demolishing the place. I asked the ‘lady’ behind the counter how long it had left. “A few more weeks”, she grunted, as the new shop in “Welly Square” was still being prepared. I genuinely don’t think she was much into conversation, or communication in general.

Even the parking meters had been “evicted”…

Did this mean the car park was free? I’ll never know. There was, however, a “graffiti wall”, where memories could be posted of the place… I was very disappointed with the complete lack of actual vandalism, and people posting actual memories of the place.

So, yeah. this will almost certainly be my final trip into Castlegate. I’ve just had a couple of memories come into my mind while typing these. There used to be a “Cash Generator” in there. I remember picking up some great vinyl from there which they were getting rid of, for 20p a pop. At some point, it moved across the road, became “Tyne Bargains”, and became of little interest to me, as they stopped selling music.

This was also one of the sites of my final “That’s Entertainment” pilgrimage when I found out they were closing. I picked up a box of empty CD cases from there for 50p. To this day, the cardboard box full of empty CD cases is still cluttering up the kitchen. Whoops. This very same store wa also the one I picked up “Now That’s What I Call Music! 4” on CD, for 49p. I’ve seen it go for hundreds of pounds with the case… sadly, mine was just the CD and therefore probably worth nowt.

Oh yeah, I also bought “Faithful” by Go West from there. It was exactly a week after my mother’s funeral, and it was also the first time Id ever been over the Transporter Bridge…

Right. We’re getting a bit too deep into the memory banks there, so let’s just draw this bit to a close. I hope that somewhere down the line, these photos remind someone of The Castlegate shopping centre…

UPDATE OCTOBER 2022: I can confirm the shopping centre has now closwd down, though B+M, Barclays and maybe another one will remain. Can’t remember. These are all accessible from the high street. No doubt these will go in the future too.

UPDATE FEBRUARY 2023: the demolition continued. They’ve taken a fair chunk out of the old Swallow Hotel now too.

There’s a chance I’ll be going back at the weekend for a proper look at the weekend, so I’ll post a proper update if I manage to get any decent shots. I’m not sure how much of it is fenced off.

Is there anything better than a surprise record fair?

Saturdays. It’s hard to say that you can genuinely enjoy just a seventh of your life, but yes, seeing as Saturdays only come round once a month, it’s hard to put it any other way. Fridays still involve work, and Sundays are spent dreading work, so yeah. One day of enjoyment a week.

This particularly depressive attitude means that I have to make the most of my Saturdays. I went to bed particularly early the night before, as “Totally 70s” was off-ait this week. It’s an online radio station that… Yep, you guessed it, plays 70s music, and has live videos, usually with a video stream. Unfortunately, the Friday night DJ couldn’tt make it, due to real-life commitments, so it was left to their automated system to dish out the tunes. And without the interactive element, it’s just not the same, so I went to bed.

It did mean, however, that I could wake up early enough to actually do something with my one enjoyable day, so thought I’d jump on the bus and go to Stockton and then Middlesbrough. It’s a good while since I’d done a full day of “charity Shop shit”.

I disembarked at Stockton, and quite literally the greatest sight that could ever be projected into my shiny little eyeballs, the sight of a marquee, and those magical words…

It was like some type of beautiful waking dream. It was free too, which was just the icing on the cake.

One complaint I’ve had about recent record fairs is that there’s been very few boxes to rummage through, namely random boxes of singles. This time, I was not disappointed. In fact the very first box I went through, I pulled out this….

It’s a song I don’t expect anyone reading this to know (much like the entirety of my collection), but I first heard it probably back in 2014, from this particular episode of Ron Gerber’s “Crap From The Past”. It was also used in the film “Playing For Keeps”, which I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised to learn I haven’t seen.

I picked up a few other bits from this particular stall, and ended up paying £8 overall. I think this marks a significant moment, as I’m sure it was the first time I’d paid for anything at a record fair using my card.

I went through a couple of other stalls and picked up a few bits and bobs, (including Now 1 on CD, the 2018 re-release though), and came out highly satisfied with my haul, considering I didn’t even know it was going to be there.

Of course, this record fair ate into the time that would have otherwise been allocated to the charity shops. This wasn’t much of an issue, as these days, the quality of the musical merchandise you can pick up from Stockton’s shops has gone slowly downhill recently, so I didn’t come out with that much.

Despite the fact that time was getting on, there was still enough time to grab the bus to Middlesbrough (there’d have been even more time if I hadn’t have forgotten which pocket I’d put my bus ticket in, meaning I had to wait for the next one).

I think Middlesbrough has to be my favourite place for charity shops. They’re plentiful, and a couple of them had even came back from the dead. The “Age UK” had reopened (despite it having a big “To Let” sign on the door, and also the “Cats’ Protection” which had closed at some point before the lockdown, I believe. I didn’t buy anything from either, but good to see they’ve been resurrected, at least for now.

There’s also a new “Amazing Grace” shop, in the place of Scope/Sense (Can’t remember which) in the shopping centre. Again, nothing of any interest.

YMCA always have some goodies on offer, and today was no exception, along with Farplace. They had some “100 Hits” boxsets, at a quid each, snapped up three of those. I probably already have, like 95% of the songs, but I’ve always found a couple of obscure gems on the other ones that I’ve not seen anywhere else.

That concluded my journey pretty much. The last stop was HMV. I considered getting a James Blunt “Greatest Hits” CD for his song “Bartender”, which I like, but don’t own, but it was too close to payday to consider paying £5.99 for such an item. Good lord, inagine going overdrawn because of James Blunt? It stayed on the shelf.

Last stop was the bakery near the bus station, where I picked up some lovely sausage rolls.

The bus ride was particularly uneventful, until the bus got to Asda, when a load of kids got on, who decided they want to make a nuisance of themselves, with water pistols and the like.

A teeny, tiny bit of water hit my hand, like maybe three drops.

“If you even think of aiming that at me again, I’ll jump over there and shove that down your throat”. Of course, I said that about 30 seconds before I got off, otherwise I’d have no doubt got completely soaked off them.

Just as I was getting off, the driver came out of his cab and bellowed at them to behave, or they were getting kicked off. I do wither what happened after that!

I then stocked up at lidl, and returned home, just in time to see the build-up of some insignificant football match, which The Liverpools lost, I believe.

It was an early night for me, as there was something exciting happening that following morning… A radio rally!

A veritable smorgasbord of East Coast misery (Day 3)

Sunday morning came, and it was time to say goodbye to the quaint little B+B that had been our home for the previous two days. Micl/Mike was there to see us off (and to waft the credit card reader under our noses), we had a brief chat, mainly about Seaton Carew and John Darwin.

And with that, we left. We put the bags in the car, but left it there,, as it was still a bit early to set off. And of course, Chris had to make sure there was no beer circulation, as he’d be the one driving.

There were still a couple of places we hadn’t visited, such as the shopping centre. There wasn’t much there, except for a Home Bargains, and a beer shop. I stocked up on crap from Home Bargains, and beer from the… Er, beer shop. Naturally.

I think it must have been about 11am at this point. As we left the beer shop, we both caught sight of the drunkest “woman” I think we’d ever seen. Clearly still worse for wear from the night before, she was staggering about, trying to hols onto, what I can only assume is her long-suffering boyfriend, whilst clutching onto a McDonald’s cup. I genuinely felt sorry for the bloke, as she exits the shopping centre, and throws the cup to the ground. The boyfriend, admitting defeat, picks the cup up, and deposits it into a nearby bin.

Stay Classy, Skeggy.

We popped into a nearby cafe to grab a bit of breakfast, whilst recapping the events of the weekend, and where to go on our way home. I wanted to go the Humber Bridge way, as I’ve never been over it (except in Euro Trck simulator 2) and then stop off at Beverley, a place I’d heard of, but never been to. Never even looked at it on Google Maps. It shall be a surprise.

We waved goodbye to Skeggy, and typed Humber Bridge into Googley Maps. Apparently it was about an hour from where we were, and I’m not sure which way we went, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the most direct route. We must have hit every twisty road going. At one point, the maps gave up, went off, came back on, and said “Do a U-turn.” You know what? Nah, we’ll just keep going, how’s about that?

So, Sally Sat-Nav was silenced, and eventually, the roads opened out into proper A-roads, and a few miles away, we could see the towering structure of the Humber bridge

It’s certainly impressive as you go over it.

I hope the photo was worth it, as it cost me £1.50 for the toll.

Beverley was a short ride away, and before we knew it, we were parked up. I tried to befriend one of the nearby resident, but he didn’ t want anything to do with me.

I must say, I have to give a full 9/10 to this place. I liked it a lot. It reminded me a lot of Thirsk, but bigger. Just as quaint though, with its market square and knitted characters on the pillar boxes…

Of course, there were charity shops, but to be honest, even I was getting a little burned out with them. I didn’t keep a tally on how many we went through, but I’m certain it must have been a record. It was approaching 4PM at this point… The time when everything closes on a Sunday, so I made one last stop into an Oxfam. The last CD I purchased turned out to be the best!

Yeah, Neil Sedaka. I know. I only bought it for the one song though, “Bad Blood”. A jolly little 70s tune, which reached number 1 in America, but failed to chart over here. Has Elton John on the backing vocals so I’m surprised it didn’t do well over here.

I have this actual album on LP, but was very surprised to see a CD release of it, so snapped it up. Definitely paid over the odds at £1.99 but I’ll probably never see a copy again.

And that pretty much concludes the trip. We headed back to the car (unfortunately my feline friend had long gone by this point), and completely guessed at the route home. Turns out we went a but further south than we needed to, but it took us through a couple of picturesque little villages, so all was not lost.

We somehow ended up going through the outskirts of York… Not sure how we ended there, and it was here that I learned that Chris does like a little bit of road rage! Not quite sure if it was the actual other drivers, or my choice of music after three days. I suspect a little from column A, a little from column B…

Thankfully for Chris, the journey ended shortly after. I was home, and the rest of the night was spent watching snooker and cataloguing CDs…. A process that took roughly a week, and the main reason you’re reading all of this long after it happened!

Of course, the big (and final) question is, where to next? I doubt anyone has reached this far after three days, but feel free to leave a comment….

A veritable smorgasbord of East Coast misery (Day 2)

And so, onto a nice, sunny day 2. It was time to explore some of what Skegness had to offer.

The first stop would be the pier. As I mentioned yesterday, the B+B we stayed in was really close to the seafront. A single street away, in fact.

The scooter rally thing was in full swing by the time we got there, and a huge long row of scooters were parked along the front. I probably should have got a photo, but scooters don’t really interest me that much. instead, I got a photo of this amusingly named hotel…

I wonder if they had beef curtains… Ahem.

Onto the pier itself next. It’s funny, I live about a mile from the sea, yet I still chose to fill my phone up with pictures of exactly the same sea…

On the way back, I noticed this sign on the floor…

I said to Chris “I like the way that they put the ice cream sign on the floor so the dogs could read it”…

“Oh yeah, good idea that”, he replied. I don’t think he was really listening. I just shook my head.

Time for some breakfast next, and we went to the lesser known cousin of Harry Ramsden for some chips.

A bit pricey, but I guess that’s what you pay for in a seaside resort.

Of course, a trip to any seaside resort wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the arcades. It’s nice to see just how many of them had error messages on the screen…

I was not disappointed.



We also picked up some candy rock. Haven’t had any of that for years. Must admit I’m a bit partial to the old Aniseed flavour myself.

Time to hit the fine charity shops of Skeggy, then. The first one we went into was the Butterfly Hospice shop. I was quite amazed to find an actual decent pile of records. Every single one of them from the 80s / 90s, and unfortunately, every single one priced out of my range. The lady told another customer that a relative donated them, so they looked them up to see what they’re worth and priced them accordingly. NO, charity shops. NO. Stop doing this. If I wanted to pay whet something was worth, then I’d just get them off ebay / Discogs. Anyway, rant over.

Turns out there were more charity shops there than I’d imagined. None of them could change a tenner, meaning I was picking up maybe a quid’s worth of CDs and then having to pay with card. Wonder how much they got charged for that.

That was that for the charity shops in Skegness. Of course, there were other shops, including this one that seemed to just sell animals made out of resin

And that was that. We went back to the car, and headed to the nearby town of Boston. It’s about 25 miles south of Skeggy, but I’d been informed that it was possibly a good place for charity shops.

Despite it only being 25 miles, the fact that it’s all just one twisty road made it feel like 50. I don’t think my choice of music helped either. I’d exhausted the “good” songs on the way there (My Spotify favourites list), so I went through the Top 40. I can quite categorically say that today’s music is shocking. Luckily, Lincolnshire is very flat, so there were no cliffs for Chris to drive off.

We endured another brutal one-way system, and got parked up. Time for another two hours of charity shop mayhem.

While there was no shortage of CDs, three was a shortage of things to carry them in. Now that carrier bags actually have some monetary value, charity shops have stopped giving them out, and cleverly, I forgot to bring one, therefore most of the day was spent swapping CDs between us, Chris would hold onto the horde while I ferreted through the shelves of whichever charity shop we were in.

There was quite a considerable collection picked up from the last shop we were in (the name escapes me), only to find out they didn’t do carrier bags either. Aaargh, I could have screamed. Thankfully, the lovely lady behind the counter had a rummage (oo-er) and picked out one. It was the most effeminate looking bag you could have imagined (not quite as bad as the Guisborough bag), but it held CDs and was sturdy enough, so problem solved.

It was going onto 4PM at this point, and things were starting to close. We headed over to the “Boston Stump”, a huge spire. I don’t think anyone knows why it was called a stump, as there’s nothing stumpy about it.

There was one last stop, a clothes shop, as Chris wanted to pick up a shirt, and we arrived back at the car with about 15 minutes to spare.

We drove back a slightly longer, but more picturesque way. It added about 10 miles onto the journey, but it was better than the flat scenery of the journey there.

We arrived back probably about 5PM. Enough time for a bit of a sit down, and decide which eating establishment we were going to sully with our presence. Just along from the Indian restaurant we attended last night, was… Another Indian restaurant. This one was slightly cheaper, and arguably the nicest of the two, and the nicest naan bread I’ve had since the trip to Blackpool many, many years ago. The curry was nice and the beer was cold too. 10 points all round. If I had any complaints, it was a tad slow, but it was packed, and as the old saying goes “Good things come to those who wait”…

Onto the pubs. Now, it was still pretty busy thanks to the mod weekend that was continuing, so the majority of places were once again packed out. We even gave the Tipsy Cow a miss. We wanted to explore some of Skegness’s culture. there was only one place for it. And yes, I’m having to rely on Google Streetview for this one.

“Oh, Smithers! Let’s go slumming!”

We walked through the door. The bloke behind the glass cabinet / fishbowl asked us to sign in. Chris did the honours our names and the town we were from… “Remember to spell ‘Artlepool with a H”, I quipped wisely. Crickets chirped. The guy inside the fishbowl stared blankly. Well, I laughed.

Unfortunately, the Bingo was on. Now, I’m from such an upbringing to know that nothing, and I mean NOTHING interrupts bingo. We got a drink from the bar, and it felt like 120 sets of eyes were glaring at us. Chris went to the bog, came back and gestured there was another room to the side where there was no bingo! Hurrah! this room has even less atmosphere than the bingo room. There was a completely empty bar, the optics had been stripped clean. It didn’t look like anyone had stepped foot in there for a decade. At this point, I spied another room. Something with a bit more atmosphere. There was a games room! Praise the lord. 80s music, the sound of other people talking, and it looked like there was a darts match going on.

As we were in a games room, I suggested going to the bar, and asking if they had any dominoes. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek if I’m honest, but Chris did the honours, and I was a little more than surprised came back with a set. The games commenced. In the first couple of games, Chris laid a 5-2…. and I also laid a 5-2. Wait, what? Yeah, it turned out these particular dominoes had some duplicates. By the time we’d weeded them out, we were playing with a set of 21 dominoes…. and call be paranoid, but I’m sure that Chris memorised some of these, because he absolutely trounced me. Maybe he was seeing the reflection in my glasses? I will never know. We need a rematch with a full deck.

While this was going on, I was keeping my wonky eye on the pool tables. I’d not played for an exceedingly long time (6 months), so I was itching for a game. A group of teenagers had been hogging the tables for most of the night, but seeing as it must have been their first ever night out (they’d never had Jaegerbombs!), they lost interest in the pool table pretty quickly. I inserted my 3 20p pieces (that’s inflation for you!), and racked the balls up. I went to retrieve the white from the other end of the table, aaaaand nothing. Not only did the dominoes not have a full deck, the pool table didn’t have a cue ball. What type of insanity was this? Chris asked the guy behind the bar. “Oh, I’ve already given the white out”, basically saying we were shit-out-of-luck. Naaaaah, not having that. I went over and commandeered the cue ball off the other table, which was also now sitting vacant.

Halfway through the first match, the barman produced a cueball… Apparently, he’d given it to the people on the snooker table, thinking they wanted to play pool. Oh well, not that it matters. I lost the first rack of 2022, after potting the 8-ball in a particularly elaborate, yet unintended trickshot. Not only did I lose at dominoes, was I now going to lose at Pool?

No, I didn’t. The next two racks were convincingly wrapped up, and I ended up winning 2-1 before the 20p supply ran dry.

And that, as they say, was that. Time was pushing on by this point, and the afore-mentioned vindaloo and beer was giving me acid, so we headed back.

We walked back through the main room where the bingo had been held. The sound of clattering balls and 89 old ladies sinulatenously shouting “Fuck!” had been replaced by an Elvis “impersonator” in the loosest sense of the word. The spirit of Phoenix Nights is still alive and well.

This concluded our final night, and yes, once again, I couldn’t help but take a photo of the SOX lighting…

And while Skegness was over, there was still the journey home to enjoy. Would there be more charity shops?

Well, what do you think….?