Blackburn Excursion

Over to Blackburn this morning to pick up the Ford Galaxy I've hired for the holiday. My Japanese family arrive at Manchester at six, so blogging might be a bit 'thin' over the next several days.

It is a long time since I was in Blackburn, I used to work there for years but now I hardly recognise the old place. In fact there were slices of the town centre that I couldn't remember what was there before and half the road system seems to have been pedestrianised. Someone I once knew used to refer to Leonard Cohen's songs as "music to slit your throat to" and a grey drizzly winter morning in Blackburn is pretty well in the same mould, from the same stable. Just think, there I've been stuck in the Japanese countryside all these years and with a few different life-choices I might have been living in a bed-sit down Darwen Road and still working at the brewery. Except that has gone of course, knocked down to build a Morrison's supermarket. What used to be 'High Street' which ran between the brewery and the bottling hall now ends in two 'skips' and a traffic bollard and a brick wall.

I have to say though that however terrible the old Dutton's Brewery site was - and it really was terrible, maybe the ugliest building I ever saw - a nicer bunch of workmates I never met. It was a joy to work there as long as you didn't look at the background too closely, I could imagine bits of Calutta are like that. Not that you could compare Blackburn and Calcutta, obviously, Blackburn is much colder and wetter.

They both have great statues of Queen Victoria though! Here's the Blackburn version. It is in the little park next to the bus station and I often used to admire it, Lowry-like, on darkening winter evenings from my office window. Somehow they captured Her Majesty in a kind of Blackburn frame of reference, she looks wet and cold, like she is there encumbered with orb and sceptre waiting for the next bus to Whalley.

I liked this new pavement sculpture though. Actually it is so convincing and I was paying so little attention that I walked right by it thinking it was real people but then I realised they weren't moving. Yep! Well done Blackburn! If you are sponsoring civic aren't like this you aren't all bad.

Despite appearances.