Dad took this early — it’s a bench back home. Says more than I’ll try to.

We turn up, eventually. Our hosts live in a beautiful terrace in Dalton – part of the in-Furness chain of towns, and not long from the beach. The hosts, they’re a lovely pair, stupidly handsome and very funny besides. You could look at them all night and never get bored. My girlfriend collects friends like these to show me what life could be like with a better personality.

We watch a pirate copy of Paranormal Activity. It’s got an uncomfortable quality of voyeurism — the same you get watching an old relative’s home video collection. You’re always waiting for a boob to flop out. For the tape to click on to some footage they thought they’d recorded over. I suppose that means it’s good.

Too many wines and giggles and cold cigarettes in the rain after that, we fall asleep, get up again and head out towards Barrow.

You can see it’s Barrow from the sign that says BAE Systems. This is where the country builds its wars. The facility complex is a town in itself, slowly assimilating the terraces in all directions around it, growing from the inside out. They’ve built the place so convincingly that Barrow looks like it came second. You get the idea that if this area were to flood, BAE Systems would simply take off.

At its heart is the dockside hangar where they’re making the last of several new Trident nuclear submarines. It’s a pale structure, the plant, and stakes its own claim to size: the doors on the front are the biggest in Europe. Hysterical newspapers would measure them in football pitches. These doors, they sum it up though. This place employs the town, stands sentinel above the town, skylines it.

As we cruise around it, I’m torn between leftish indignation and boyish excitement, and the latter just edges it when I’m told how long it’s taken to build the subs; how many years the subs are on a seawater shelf for tests out the front.

Pulling away, I’m thinking in bulkheads and pressure hulls and warheads. Not how many people they could turn into glass. It’s a fun kind of cognitive dissonance.

A few miles down the road, we’re into Ulverston, and up to the A-pillars in traffic.

By the glance, Ulverston’s another attractive little market town, made quaint by Victorian emblems and a sense that the locals are too proud to let visitors stay long. There’s a pub for every square foot – pubs set into the kind of crooked, leaning buildings you find in all places north of Lancaster; looming over the narrow streets on just the right side of precarious.

We’re here for the annual Dick Fest – the Dickensian festival that is – and it’s pavement to pavement filled with adorable children and people rolling about in carriages and doilies and capes and Russell Brand wigs. Old men who should know better. If it says a lot that there’s a single solitary Asian guy handing out fliers for curry nobody wants, it says even more that the main smells are mulled wine and freshly minted chips. And even though you start to get a kind of quaint fatigue in this kind of place – a sense you’ve seen it all before – it’s got that traditional magnetism; that cross between nostalgia, heritage and self-preservation; the pull of a place fuelled by its own small weight in history.

The main thing is that the people here don’t care what you think of their town. And I really like that.

So we pick at stuff, lanky pigeons around the stalls, dodging horseshit and inconsiderate smokers. We buy a cone of chips, too hot and salty to properly enjoy on account of I’d burnt my palate a few days before. We pootle some more and quaff a load of mulled wine and cashews and other Christmas things. Every stall’s a bit lost in time, selling flat caps and fluorescent leg warmers simultaneously. Eventually we stop to play at one of those stressful games where you’ve got to get a metal ring over a long coiled wire without setting off the buzzer. It’s part of the local Cub Scouts’ recruitment drive.

I win a fun-sized Mars Bar and give it to my girlfriend. Always prepared.

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Photo credit: Tom Bullock @ Flickr

Canterbury is Hollyoaks with more church. It’s walled on all sides and powered in turns by attractive students, Christian pilgrims and publoads of locals who pine for the old days, the older ways. Groaning with guest ales and strung with flags, it’s also handsome city – though if you whisper, you can easily argue it’s a town.

I get into Canterbury East early evening, half expecting to find nothing but flower gardens, Chaucer graffiti and giddy vicars. Actually I don’t see a wrinkle for half an hour, surprised by the amount of road traffic, the number of fringes, and how green stuff is.

True to stereotypes and the ravings of smug southerners, green really is Kent’s theme — and Canterbury’s the masthead. If Monty Don pulled a coup at the Faraway Tree, he’d stick Kent at the top. It’s very rustic and very fairytale, and if you like flowers and plants and bushes, it’s where you’ll want to go. You set period dramas here – period dramas and classic science fiction. You can imagine triffids shuffling about; War of the Worlds unfolding. It’s a land of boarding schools and military compounds; St. George’s flags and hill rallies. But it’s friendly. It’s the place you get if you invert Derbyshire – it swaps bleakness for scrumpy grins.

Anyway, I don’t have much of an internal compass, so as soon as I’m in town proper, I get lost in the grid. In ten minutes I’ve covered most of it by foot – taken by the amount of Saints who live here, baffled by some of the niche shops set in original buildings, and getting damp on account of a fine drizzle.

Eventually I wind up the wrong side of town, pausing by the West Gate as if I need to make sense of my life. I want to take some photos, but in Canterbury, restaurants have spread like weeds, so if you want a decent shot you always have to aim up. And that’s when the biggest church – the elephant on the landscape – really steals your attention.

The cathedral, home to our country’s grandest wizard, rules Canterbury from the centre, as much a waypoint as a relic. As a symbol, I’m indifferent. It’s a lesson in status, and, leastways to me, little else. But as architecture, it’s beautiful: a gaggle of golden towers made much taller by the flat city spread-eagled below; detailed so finely you’d think every brick was filigree. I suppose it’s a grand signpost upwards, a very obvious biblical headquarters, and from so many spire tips, God looks down on everything.

If he’s real, he doesn’t miss a trick.

Students and tramps and affluent skinheads own the night. I hear about six different regional accents, most of them offensive, and everyone’s dressed down, so you know there aren’t really any clubs. One pub, the Parrot, has a real parrot. Another, the Dolphin, has a library of board games. Every pub is a variation on the friendly CAMRA-approved local, and in all cases the bar staff are real charmers. You’re allowed to try ales before you buy them. Do that in Manchester and you’ll wind up swallowing teeth.

By weekend proper, the market stalls open and church bells ring forever. We drink and drink. And then, with a thunderous hangover, I’m back into Victoria, always-brown Victoria — as sharp on the eyes as any broken bottle.

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Photo credit: Galfred @ Flickr

They say break a mirror and you’re looking at bad luck for seven years – but drink a hot chocolate in Prague and you’re looking at bad spots for twelve.

That’s about the best way to sum up Prague. It’s all hyper-tourism meets snogging couples via beautiful, astonishing architecture. It’s the dregs of Communist fashion saying hello to the mink coats of new money.

Prague is sitting on your hotel bed, flicking through three hundred channels to find BBC World and catching lots and lots of German porn on the way.

Prague is also singularly stunning to look at and almost too overwhelming to process.

It’s older than most of the places in Europe because the Americans only slightly bombed it, which means every angle’s a decent photo, and every street’s got something in it, like bullet holes. Every pavement’s a stone patchwork. The bridges are preposterously mint; the river wide; the Communist buildings as much a spectacle on account of they’re exactly what the rest of the place isn’t. You wonder what the Iron Curtain did to eyesight, really. You think, this is Stockport plus Lego minus colour. You think gulags scattered below spires and stained glass.

It’s an amazing city – they killed a high ranking Nazi here, those leftish fops – and at the same time it’s almost bordering on a grim city.

But I loved those commie buildings as much as I loved Charles bridge – I loved the old cooling towers and rotten mechanical things poking about as much as the gargoyles and cobbles and towers.

Elsewise, the Czechs don’t do much save throw restaurants and meat at you. Every corner’s a special offer; every sidestreet’s got a cheerful bloke trying to fan you into his chairs with a leather-bound menu. If you want to postulate here you’ll need Kafka’s collected works in one hand and a fist full of dumplings in the other, and if you want healthy living then you’ll pay twice as much for bottled water as you will a half-litre of beer.

Me, I’m fond of those creatively named and massively jingoistic ales you’ll find in Morrisons – Bastard’s Finger, Burning Witch, Gulf War Veteran, whatever. But as with most of their consumables, they keep it simple in Praha. ‘Light beer or dark beer,’ they’ll say, sometimes expecting a tip just for opening their mouths. ‘Dark beer?’ Their eyebrows raise. ‘Okay. Dark beer.’ And I’m saying: Czech dark beer’s better than Jade Goody’s narrative arc. It’s smoother and sweeter and ale-ier than anything our allotment tenders come up with. The beer’s made by a people who open their doors gracefully and give you information about public transport pragmatically. It’s the kind of beer made by stout men with moustaches and tracksuit tops. I get the idea it isn’t lovingly made – it’s engineered.

On the whole, the people of Prague don’t say very much. Ask a question, any question, and they won’t waste their words. You haven’t even learned to say thank you, so you’re only one short of the tourists who put on the accent to try and smooth communication. ‘Where is the tram?’ you ask politely, and they’ll point and say, ‘26 Koruna’. Then again, putting it like that makes them sound stout, or obnoxious, but they’re the magnetic south to Parisians, and anyway, they’ve got tables to mind.

Actually, the accent you hear most is American. We’re greeted by an American the first day, and she’s pretty blasé about living. She can’t be much older than us and she’s got the kind of sour face that footballers find attractive – slim, yawning, tan. I don’t really say much since I’m still excited by the trams (they make lots of Tamagotchi bleeps when they’re stopping) but my dear companion’s happy to chat away as we walk up a ponderous hill to Prague Castle, which we’re staying opposite. Eventually the American girl takes our money, patronises me about the room keys, and summarises the rest of the Americans staying there. They’re just hanging out. She’s going to go drink coffee someplace. That or, I don’t know, take pictures of her tits and blackmail somebody about her visa.

Another thing. The beggars think they’ve walked straight out of a Biblical relief. They all crouch over on their knees, heads bowed, and raise their hands, shaking, repenting. I promise to give all my loose change by the end of the holiday but – and this sounds crueller than it’s meant to – I forget. The street culture is this, portraits, amazing sausages and people asking if you want to buy weed. It’s also art. Art art art. Art and classical music, and concerts, and drama. And tourists falling over each other by the Astronomical Clock – which is a lot like my Casio only big.

I read before we went that Prague’s full of prostitutes, a seedy place where pissed up Stags and their dos lose their brains just before their wallets. But about all we saw of that, and Wenceslas Square, was a nice man outside a strip club – they have names like NEMESIS and PENDULOUS and BREAST MEAT, by the way – who approached us and announced of my companion, ‘A lady of mysterious glamour!’ before inviting us to watch a few girls getting slithery on poles, or Poles. Afterwards my companion paused from laughing and said, ‘I’m not even wearing make-up.’

The best bit comes last, as it should – as men should, as zealotry should. The best bit was and is the city’s TV tower – a gigantic rocket-ship building with giant black babies crawling up its flanks. Really.

Sentinel over most of the city, the Žižkov TV tower’s this bilious grey thing made in the 90s to celebrate the 70s, and it’s smooth and pointless and absolutely majestic. I love towers at the best of times but holy health and safety regulations, this thing was immense. Immense and grey and covered with pewter-coloured crawling babies – who, as it goes, don’t even have faces. Probably it’s the greatest tower on Earth. No other planetary intelligence would think to build something so stupid and then decide to decorate it with enormous crawling babies.

Maybe some clever bod might claim the tower’s about birth – about McDonalds and modernity getting to the city after all. But actually it’s just a superfluous and silly thing. It’s just there. It’s a tower for a tower’s sake – and I’m also guessing it’s the home of German porn in Prague.

See, Stockport’s the bit that missed the toilet — bounced off the rim, the M60, the Manchester ringroad that is — and settled into the carpet halfway between the Pennines and the Cheshire set.

Stockport was where you shopped before you grew up and found Manchester. It’s a parallel world of discount shoe shops and roadsweepers and pastries, and most people wandering about it look fit to die any moment. It’s not really anything at all, which is why it doesn’t know what it is, and the second you leave you forget everything you did there — which is why you end up going again.

Like most of the North West it’s grey and distorts time, and you pay through your arse to park.

Stockport’s where I remember most things about my mother and father together. I remember buying trainers and shoes and wellington boots with them — ones that flashed and others that didn’t. I remember the sizing machine in Clarks that always seemed a small error away from completely mangling my feet. I remember getting my legs cracked for hiding in the suits section of Marks and Spencer while Mum tried her best to hold everything, family included, together.

I doubt Stockport’s ever gleamed — it’s not a paragon of new North West or future anything — and there’s not very much to thrill trade-unionists and industriophiles save a museum of hatting and other heritage-y things like tall brown call centres and car showrooms. What the council won’t tell you about is having your car broken into, and at weekends it’s some kind of grim safari with kids whose music taste and style is three years behind central Manchester.

But having said that, and because of the Victorians and silk factories and the water supply and the second world war, it has some positives, and the only one is the viaduct.

Stockport Viaduct on paper is nothing if not an abortion of a structure. But actually it’s just immense and beautiful and made out of bricks. You can’t see it from space but bless them they tried. It stands astride the M60 and backdrops the whole place — sums up history and stagnancy in big fuck-off italics, and it makes the Stockport Pyramid — the town’s other landmark object — look pathetic, pretentious and ever so try-hard.
And if all that’s left you lost for inspiring images, well, it’s practical too — come to Manchester on a train and you’ll go over it.

Fact: When a pilot threw his plane at the place in 1967 and killed seventy-odd people, I think he did his best to miss it.

Stockport Viaduct is over a hundred feet tall and it’s absolutely everything the Pyramid isn’t. The Pyramid, well that’s just this awful great blue glass thing just screaming out for another bad pilot. All it does is summarise how shit roads look by sitting and rotting in the middle of a massive roundabout, lording it up.

It’s a Jabba the Hutt of a building, or it’s the poor wife of the businesses who’ve fed its growth — and now it can’t go anywhere or leave the house because it doesn’t know what it’s for. It’s highly visible like a McDonalds sign, like a bomb going off, and it’s a lecture on the failings of 90s redevelopment. I think it’s even got a bank’s name on it, which says more than I’ll bother to.

People have two cars, drink wine with their prozac, subscribe to Sky Sports and still think the internet’s biblical.

It’s slippy when it’s cold and the train station wasn’t earmarked for improvements anyway, so nobody cares that Manchester voted against the conjection charge.

It’s good if you like nothing else in the world; good if you like looking at hills in the distance or watching fat women running circuits before and after school.

Where Mum lives, every house has its Wii, every man his chamois, and if you’re wanting to see a black guy you’ll have to watch Eastenders.

And then there’s this one house, sandwiched between another pair just like it, and its owners, well they keep a leggy shop mannequin in their window.

I’d tell you its name only I’ve forgotten — but it went and signed my mother’s Christmas card, didn’t it? It just stands there, quite shapely, big eyes on it, and it’s dressed in a skimpy santa outfit — the kind you’d expect a bigger girl to wear; the kind of girl who you reckon’s still got teddies on her bed at home.

What kind of a person signs a Christmas card from a shop mannequin?

Most times I don’t look at it — it’s just there, and they’ve adjusted the mannequin to hold a curtain open like it’s looking out at the morning or the afternoon or just nothing at all.

I’m told they’ve got two.

There were five of us and three rucksacks and too many bottles of water to worry about describing.

I was dressed like a prannock and the plan was to go to Stonehenge and take pictures of other people taking pictures and prove to the world that we’d been – which is obviously the point of going to any tourist attraction that you’re somehow massively familiar with beforehand anyway.

We thought it best to first have a night of drinking and rolling down hills in Bristol, so we did that. Then we got up and I applied my factor fifty and off we trundled to the foot of my good friend Edd’s drive where we’d wait an hour for a taxi to actually find us.

And lo, we did catch a train to Salisbury.

Salisbury’s nice – one of those nice places that’s full of nice architecture and stranger people; a big mish mash of groups; young lads, signet swans, Japanese well-travelleds and idiots like me. Many buses. Shops of signficant meaning to somebody, but evidently not to the people who’ve come to take pictures of something they’ve already seen a million pictures of in the years preceeding their arrival.

So is it more authentic to have a picture of Stonehenge with you in it somehow? Isn’t that what Photoshop’s for anyway? Isn’t that what Stalin did with pictures of Lenin to win popular Russian support?

Either way we paid £Stupid to get to the site on a clumsy set of bus seats with a clumsier set of wheels to get us there, and when we arrived it was baking and most without shade, and I began to melt precisely as a snowman might not. That is, a snowman does not melt from the feet up, does it? Or have I taken leave of my wits?

After paying another disgusting fee in what I justified was a manner befitting the discovery of Merlin, we were admitted to the site itself, roped and pathed as it was and without a single wizard in view, save for some crows pecking away at Arthurian legend.

It was terrific, peering at those enormous heaps of stone. You’re quite able to see why so many lunatics go there at the height of summer. I spent a number of minutes questioning where Merlin might be, before sulking about the sun destroying my body and giving me face cancer or what have you. I had a hat though. Did you?

So we didn’t turn a single cartwheel and we got photographic and it was jolly, price-anger besides. I wouldn’t claim to have had a spiritual moment because that’d be untrue, but there’s something humbling about a large pile of rocks much bigger than any usual kind, and that the whole assemblage is older than things like the Humber bridge.