Pre-Travel
After the amazingly good time I had at the 2022 Poetry Festival in Morecambe I signed up for the 2023 event as soon as the tickets went live and also booked in to The Sanderling Guest House as it was such a perfectly located place to get to and from the events from, being just a ten minute walk away from the main venues, The Winter Gardens and Johnnie’s Bar.
My plan was to go a day before the festival and add to my already existing pub sign photo collection. I have a book out on this subject and a second one close to completion. I had only a few signs to still capture in Morecambe and Lancaster and planned to spring out from there to capture signs in other areas of Lancashire and Cumbria.
Weeks before the festival, disaster struck when my external hard drive containing thousands of my pub signs from over the UK, frazzled out. Several lovely people offered to help retrieve my data but couldn’t access it. A third of my work, including Morecambe, Lancaster, Birmingham and London signs, seem gone forever.
I now had to recapture most of my Morecambe and Lancaster images from scratch.
I packed, sorted out dozens of poems for possible readings and worked out a detailed pre-festival itinerary and prepared for my adventure.
The Day Before – Thursday 21st September 2023
With Lancashire buses going for a bargain £2 a trip, I got to Lancaster on a relaxed two bus journey for just £4. Soon after arriving I found one of my shoes was splitting open so I popped in a city centre shoe shop and bought some new ones that seemed initially comfortable. I dumped my old pair in the nearest bin, put the new ones on and but as the day went on they started to crunch my toes in painfully.
I called in a few Lancaster bars, notably Ye Olde John Of Gaunt. From Lancaster I got a bus over to Carnforth, the only completely fresh area I was to cover over the weekend as I really enjoy the old David Lean weepie, from 1945 Brief Encounter, largely filmed on Carnforth Station, especially in its tea rooms, which are wonderfully preserved as a museum as well as still serving the station.
As it would be over an hour to the next bus from Carnforth to Morecambe I got the train to the seaside town, and still dragging my suitcase round on castors I took more photos up to 3pm when I could check in to The Sanderling.
Check in went smoothly and I was soon out again chasing more photos of the lovely town, its street art and especially its pubs. I got drinks in The Midland Hotel, where Laurence Olivier filmed The Entertainer, The Masons (which has some lovely rum characters to chat to), and Embargo, one I visited last year and where astonishingly, the barman remembered me from thar visit. I rounded off the night with a curry in a Thai restaurant, Thai Black.
The pain from my new shoes was getting so intolerable I took them off and walked back to my guest house in my socks. I went to bed about midnight.
Friday 22nd September 2023
I got my first full English breakfast at The Sanderling on the Friday morning, and headed out to catch the last handful of Morecambe pub signs on my list (I use Pubs Galore listings as a checklist on visiting any area). I then headed into Lancaster again to get more signs there. I also bought more new shoes, this time in a charity shop and these were comfy enough. (I still have the toe crushers too). The weather went pants so I called in a randomly picked pub, The Royal Hotel, which was great and all the more so when on chatting to the barman about writing books on pub signs I got him intrigued enough to buy a copy of one of them off me, my only direct sale of the weekend.
I got back to Morecambe about an hour before the festival launch and found many were already in Johnnies so I headed in. I found these were not so much early attendees but volunteers helping prepare stuff for the opening and just as I was about to slip away to return later I found myself helping fold hundreds of programme flyers and got my attendance badge which showed I had paid to be involved in the whole show.
I also got a copy of the festival poetry anthology which I happen to have a set of Haiku in.
And what a show it was, from Matt Panesh’s opening welcome through a stunning talk on the history of spoken word poetry around the World presented by Pete The Temp, to readings by Atilla The Stockbroker and at the magnificent Winter Gardens there were sets by Brian Bilson and Henry Normal.
A late highlight was the jaw dropping comedy and verse set by Thick Richard, accompanied by a state of the art robot (not really just another poet dressed as one, honest).
This was followed by the first of the weekend’s They Shoot Poets Don’t They poetry round robins, with a generous cas prize for the poet performing when the bar called time. I won twice in 2022 though other poets won this year. It was still a great reading opportunity and my contributions were well received by the audience.
Night over, I returned to The Sanderling about 2.30 am.
Links
My Brief Encounter Review https://www.mylot.com/post/3570693/film-review-brief-encounter
Brief Encounter – The full film on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LguRis_h1qc
All photos taken by me.
Arthur Chappell
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