Ice cream and wobbly planks

Ice cream on the pier

Today, we travel out to Southport for ice-cream, on the much beloved pier. We’re celebrating! We have a new PM who’s going to have our economy blasting off again, heading for the moon faster than an Artemis rocket. Where budgets have been slashed over the past decade, they’ll be slashed again to the benefit of all. As for the boring old energy crisis – I admit I was getting really worried about that – I’m confident it’ll all be sorted in the next few weeks, and I can go out and buy those new walking boots instead of being a tight wad and hanging on for news of my next energy bill. As for the benighted NHS, all that damned waste still bulking it out after twelve years of Operation Ongoing Austerity, will be purged with the strongest of laxatives, and then I’ll be able to see my elusive doctor right away, instead of sending his nurse a picture of my ailment, more in hope than expectation. No, only joking. Satire works best with a straight face.

Actually, I’m here because it’s a nice afternoon, with a hot wind, and the promise of thunderstorms tomorrow, so it’s today, or not for a while, and I don’t actually give a flying thing about who’s pretending to be in charge. The little blue car knew at once where we were going and could barely contain her excitement.

My good lady and I were also in the dentist’s chair this morning, having our teeth “deep cleaned”, and we wish to forget the experience. Heavens, what an experience that was! You’d think there’d be an easier way by now, something without all that whine and water. Indeed, I had to change my shirt when I got home. My good lady discovered, long ago, and by coincidence we were both traumatised by the same dentist, when we were children, for such is love. The downside is that, even now, in much later life, a trip to the dreaded tooth puller is never a relaxed affair, so we join forces, and find strength in mutual anxiety. The young man at the tool-end of this morning’s business is of an entirely different sort of course, and perfectly pleasant, perfectly good at his job, but much as it pains me to say it, his nurse – sweet voiced as she was – could have done much better with that damned sucker.

It’s a small private business, still begrudgingly servicing die hard NHS patients like us, while refusing to take on any more of the unwashed. Incidentally, I note it has a tree growing out of its chimney – several, actually. I would have mentioned it to the dentist, but I suppose, in these private corporate concerns, that’s always someone else’s department. Similarly, I note these private corporate concerns also have a high churn of underpaid, overworked talent, so it’s always a different dentist every time I visit. There seems to be no sense of continuity any more, with anything. Have you noticed?

Anyway, I regret I was not a good advert for their services, when I walked back through the waiting room with my wet shirt front. Twenty-three quid for a checkup, now, and then they always sting you for that deep clean at forty-two, and they want you twice a year, and that’s on the NHS. The gentleman who went in the chair ahead of me refused a clean point-blank, and good for him. The dentist scared me with a patter about gum disease, and teeth dropping out. But the name of the game is to play the game, if you’re brave enough. One checkup a year, not to get yourself struck off, for then you fall into the pit of private provision, and from which, I fear, there is no recovery.

Southport pier, September 2022

Anyway, the ice cream is truly delicious, and the memory of that dentistry, including the drowning, is fading. On the downside, it was three quid a small, single scoop. No one else is buying, and I’m feeling guilty at splashing out on luxuries, but I think we deserve it, my lady and I. The pier is looking a bit wobbly, planks coming up, and screws working loose. Some planks look to have been replaced by that legendary firm of Bodgeit and Scarper – ends rough-sawn, wonky, and a quarter inch over-cut. It does not fill one with confidence. I read Sefton council needs over two hundred thousand to replace them all properly, so for now it’s all about patching and making do. Thank heavens, plucky old Albion is not sending anyone to the moon, or it would all be gaffer tape and blobs of glue, and the inevitable consequences.

But that’s all in the past now. The economy will be booming again by Christmas, I’m sure. All it needs is a stiff upper lip, a bit of boosterism, and that good old Dunkirk spirit. As soon as those wealthy chaps have had their tax cuts, they’ll be showering us with the crumbs from their table, starting up high-tech, high wage businesses all over the place. One could almost be forgiven for forgetting we’re into our twelfth year of a Conservative administration, with the sunlit uplands always just over the horizon, that we’ve heard it all before,… that things have actually grown worse and worse and worse,… but no, I’m quite sure, this time,… oh, stop it!

Delicious ice cream done, we saunter down to the end of the pier. The tide is out a long way. Opened in 1860, it’s the oldest of our traditional iron piers, and is beaten only by Southend for length. It caused me a panic in the nineties when I had written it in to a scene in my novel Langholm Avenue, only to have the council pull it down. Fortunately this was for a major refurbishment, and they duly put it all back up again, saving me a serious re-write. It was a close run thing, though, the pier’s existence saved by a single vote, and a public subscription. The pier starts quite a way inland, which is puzzling to many visitors, but old photographs tell us this is due to the coast, which has been steadily expanding due to silting, the pier having to reach further and further out in order to get its pilings wet.

The rather modernist café, at the pier’s end, has undergone some sympathetic internal refurbishment during the covid years, and was used as location for filming the final scene of the recent BBC drama “Time” starring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, who in my humble opinion were both utterly compelling. It wasn’t an easy watch, though, being set mostly in a generic, northern prison that was barely under control, and in a way I saw as a microcosm of civic society: underfunded, understaffed, everything cut to the bone and, for the inmates, a life of boredom rendered tolerable only by drugs, interspersed with episodes of horrific violence. Our hero, Bean, is a drunk driver who killed a man and is imprisoned for four years. It was a deeply moving story, and a surprise for me, Bean’s redemption coming as it did in the café at the end of our beloved Southport pier.

I’ve had a few good shots of the pier over the years, but it’s at its best during the golden hour. In the middle of the day, like this, it’s actually better in the rain, when you get reflections of the structure, and the lighting, off the wet planks.

We came up by the Marine Way bridge, opened in 2004, a cable tied suspension bridge, and a difficult structure to frame in one go. It’s better shot from underneath, by the marine lake, which grants it a certain dynamism. This is a massive architectural gesture, and quite beautiful. One doubts it would ever get past the planning stage now, but I have to stop talking Albion down. It’s just that I can only find these sunny uplands we are forever promised in my head these days. Once I leave the bounds of imagination, it’s hard not to trip up over all those loose planks!

The Millennium Bridge, Southport, 2022

Thanks for listening.