My drinking so far has taken in solitude and excess, two extremities which I’ve found interesting. It was quite novel appearing to be suicidal and the hazy recollections of being wazzocked on 7% Scottish ale made me laugh the next day, so it’s a thumbs up all round. Unfortunately this means that thinking of something to top these experiences is quite difficult, so it took me having a guest drinker to come up with something new and niche to match them.

To the golf course we go. Five minutes from home but a world away. Terraced houses turn into long lines of trees and homes seem twice as large. This is a typical northern town, crafted at a time when you lived and worked near the mill or you owned the mill and lived on the green hills overlooking the endless terraced streets. Revidge golf course sits at the top of one of these hills, two minutes from my house. Even though the mills are gone, the difference is still distinct.

And so we go back to a place I spent many nights during my youth. Right back at the beginning I drank whatever I could afford, normally either two bottles of red wine for a fiver or whatever cans were on sale. A few years down the line I had money and started to buy drinks I actually liked – two bottles of red wine for a fiver and whatever cans were on sale. The company changed over the years but not much else – I’d quite happily just go out there to sit and have a drink with whoever was around that night.

I went back to the golf course after years away. Nothing has changed. The path down still covers mud, concealed dips, aggressive branches and the house that looks like a millionaire footballer’s. At the bottom you still come out to clear skies and the smell of fresh grass, an expanse of green opening up before you whichever way you look. To the right are the holes where I used to play javelin with the flags and to the left are the men in polo shirts talking about business. Nothing has changed in all these years I’ve been away.

We went to the left, to the steps by the trees lit by the club car park. In the distance is Blackpool Tower, the sea and the sparkling lights of the motorway heading north. In a sudden rush all of this comes back to me. The grass in front of me fills with my friends leaping about, laughing, bottles clinking on the floor. The old tensions come back to me even though I don’t feel them any more – wondering what she thinks about you, wondering if he found you funny, old neuroses bouncing back like balls thrown to the bottom of the sea bed hurling back up to be seen again.

The bottle of lager in my hand feels unfamiliar and I’m with someone who wasn’t there back in the day, but everything else feels the same. The view hasn’t changed and it’s still eerily quiet when you stop talking. The only thing that’s really changed is me. My instincts associate this place at this time of night with a chaotic lifestyle, romantic uncertainty and building up the friendships I still have to this day. But those things don’t feel real any more – they’re just cold memories of being someone else. Drinking here, with a different drink and a different person, feels almost like fraud – trying to latch myself today on to something that belongs in yesterday.

Drinking on the golf course was not an unpleasant experience, but it did feel wrong somehow. It was like watching a cartoon from the 1980s and discovering it was really quite bad – it’s not nice to have your rose-tinted memories tarnished unexpectedly. As much as I love the place, I think it’s somewhere that really belongs in my past.

The day: 10.
The drink: two giant bottles of lager, one mostly thrown across the golf course, and an organic ale.
The place: Revidge golf course.
Positives: enjoyed the view on a pleasant evening.
Negatives: experienced a strange series of flashbacks to a drink-fuelled chaotic youth.
Conclusion: I’m glad I’m not still 19.

Blackburn · golf course · Revidge

Mondays to me are typically a halfway house between feeling slightly jaded after the weekend’s beer exploits, crossed with not really being too bad because I tone things down on Sundays. It’s like that first day feeling vaguely human again after having an irritating cold for a week. This being the way it is, it’s not often I fancy a dinnertime pint on a Monday.

Having had a quiet weekend, though, I got the taste on the Monday just gone and tried a bottle of Theakston XB with my dinner. It wasn’t cheap; £3.15 for the bottle, and this is from a council-owned cafe (Blakeys if you happen to know Blackburn). That’s more than double the price in the shops round here and leaves a bitter taste in your mouth before you even taste the beer; it wasn’t even pulled from a cask, for Christ’s sake.

I went for XB because of the label, to be honest. I don’t like hoppy beers with food and judging by the label I pictured this being a big bastard of a beer with really strong flavours to live up to the food. Medium malty beers don’t work for me either – I always find the only ones that work are dark beers that punch above their weight. Picture what I had on Monday, a Lancashire cheese sandwich, with a flowery beer – does that seem to match up for you? Perhaps it does, taste being individual of course, but for me cheese works best with something sharp and biting, full of its own flavours rather than just a compliment to food.

XB does, I must say, work well in these situations. The flavour is intense and lingers even while eating. It lasts just around the right time to match an easy-paced dinner break, so a fifth or so will be left for you to finish off when the food’s out of the way. I wouldn’t call it a great beer if I was out drinking – its strength and potency make it a slow one to get down and it’s definitely more suited to a casual dinner hour. However, on the occassional evenings where I knock together a few cheeses, breads and fruits and fancy a couple of beers to go with it, I’d definitely give XB another go.

Additional note: this would be a very efficient beer for getting banjoed in a short space of time.

Beers · Blackburn · Blakeys · Theakston · XB

Tomorrow is Wordy’s birthday, a day which I like to think of as a walking trip. That there happen to be about 28 pubs on the route we take is just by the by.

For 20 years or so now he’s done the Revidge Run, a pub crawl in Blackburn that goes right from the northern edge of the town into the centre – that is, for the few who make it to the end. I don’t think I ever have, usually tapping out somewhere around the Hole i’th Wall. Out of curiosity I knocked a Gmap together…

You can see it in full size over on Google Maps. Not bad eh?

Beers · Blackburn · Brownhill Arms · Bull's Head · Charles Napier · Hole I'th Wall · Knowles Arms · map · pub crawl · Revidge Run · Rising Sun · Royal Oak · Sportsman's Arms · Wilpshire Hotel

The Malt has had a chequered recent history, feeling to be in decline for the last decade. I caught the very tail end of its busy years at the end of the 90s, when there’d be a decent dinnertime crowd and a queue for the bar at weekends. Both of these are fast-fading memories. Stephen Hughes of the Blackburn & District Pubs (Past & Present) Facebook group reported that barrelage fell from 238 in 2004 down to 102 for 2007, where less than 150 barrels a year is seen as a bad sign. It isn’t just the Malt that’s suffered in this way, of course – much of the rest of Blackburn town centre has gone down the same road and it creates a kind of gravity effect with the combined pull of mass decline dragging individual pubs that try to break free down with it.

The subject of the town centre is something I don’t mean to go into here, though, as there are many things to consider about that which need more attention. Returning to the Malt, it appears it may be re-opening soon as it has been removed from Fleurets. It was listed on there for £175,000 which many agree was a good price. It has either been sold or withdrawn for unknown reasons, so we can only hope it’s the former and will be re-opening soon.

The Malt as it stood in 2009. Photo courtesy of Robert Wade on the Blackburn & District Pubs (Past & Present) Facebook group.

I’ve talked with many people about this particular pub and it seems something of a quandary. Everything feels like it adds up to a great pub:

• the central location near college and the office side of town,
• it sits in the middle of the run across town (roughly a line from the Postal Order to O’Neills),
• it’s a decent sized building,
• people still have good memories to associate the place with…

…but in recent years it just hasn’t worked. I’ve noticed that in other nearby towns, the real ale pubs are busy but I just can’t imagine that kind of thing working here. There’s no real ale “community” in the town centre – Blackburn has somehow ended up being a desert for it and has no reputation to speak of, so you get the gravity effect again – one pub going it alone isn’t enough to get people down into town for.

Whatever happens to this place, I hope it works out.

Beers · Blackburn · Fleurets · Malt and Hops · The Malt · town centre

A frankly terrifying photo from the Lancashire Telegraph.

The demise of Blackburn and Accrington’s annual beer festivals means that at the moment, the nearest to home for me is the Pendle festival in Colne. This sounds close but it’s still about 40 minutes on the train so I could pretty much be in Manchester in the same time. Still, Colne muni is a decent venue and at least it’s one I can get to without having to leave early to get back, or end up staying over in a grotty B&B, staying out ’til 4am and coming home £130 poorer.

It’s interesting to wonder what happened to the other festivals in the area. My last memory of a Blackburn festival must be from around 2001, at a guess. I remember it was before Barbara Castle Way was extended through to connect with Montague Street, as after the festival I ended up wrestling with my mates on the field which used to be there and my neighbour nearly called the police because he thought we were in a fight. Suffice to say, ample amounts of 8% scrumpy were involved in that particular night. There was going to be a festival in 2009 at King Georges Hall but it was cancelled due to lack of sponsorship.

Somewhere at home I have a t-shirt from the last Accrington festival which judging by this report was in 2004. My memories of that one are good – it was upstairs in the town hall, quite a big room and with a balcony overlooking the main road into the town. I’m not sure why that one ended but there’s been no word of another since, to the best of my knowledge.

In this part of the world we seem to have lost the bigger festivals in favour of smaller, more local ones. Take for example Clitheroe, which has had one for the last few years at the tiny St Mary’s Centre in May. There doesn’t seem to be any word yet whether they’ll be doing one this year, but I’m hopeful as last year’s was a good day out. The Aspinall Arms also hosts the Middle Earth beer festival, which I fully intend to get to this year; it’s quite a remote location but easily done if I can get a few people together.

It would be easy to worry about why the bigger festivals have died off around here, but I think there are particular circumstances in each case and they’re not part of a larger trend. The fact that smaller ones have thrived in their absence should, I think, just be appreciated.

Accrington · Aspinall Arms · Beer festival · Beers · Blackburn · Clitheroe · Colne · Middle Earth · Pendle · St Mary's Centre