Friday, July 01, 2005
Blackpool - In Unspoken Celebration
Blackpool.
Me and Craig having been making this trip for 15 years, and always on the first weekend of July. It has become a tradition embedded into our hearts and souls and there is no-one alive who understand the significance or meaning of the smallest or stupidest tradition.
We stay in the same room of the same dingy B&B. We go to the same bars in the same order and sit in the same chairs. We do all the pubs in the Pleasure Beach in the same order then we do the bars at the end of each pier in the same order, though incredibly, we have never managed to do all three piers in the same day before for one reason or another. We always go to the Tower Ballroom and make toasts. We have a list as long as your arm of tiny traditions that must be done or the equation doesn't balance. Remove anything or add anything and it just does not work.
That is why, I am not going to say any more about Blackpool. It is the one weekend of the year - and this is not meant in a bad way - that I can be truly me. There is no pressure from family or relatives to conform. There is no work. There is no need to dress in a certain way or talk in a certain manner. It is a time I look forward to because I never laugh more than I do this weekend, as opposed to any other time of the year. It is a time for touching base, getting back to zero, talking about the last year and thinking about the future. It is the ultimate battery recharger.
It is to this extent, I am not going to write about our annual trip to Blackpool. All I will say it was a good one; full of the expected and the unexpected.
In tomorrow's blog I will post some photographs of our weekend to give a taste of the ridiculousness of it all. But I hope you understand why it is, that no words can be used to tell the story.