I AWOKE WITH a faceful of sun streaming down on me through the kitchen-paper curtains. A bright dawn was the successor to a clear and bitter night: I’d slept with hands wedged in armpits, and my nose felt like it belonged to someone else, someone who’d been dead for three days. All that £3.86 worth of overnight heating had achieved was to condense my breath over every window, a process which had resurrected ghostly finger art from holidays past, mostly unfinished renditions of the Cerne Abbas giant at play. Steaming hot ablutions were very much in order, and I left the half-bath’s red tap running while shaving the heads off my facial goosebumps. My shuddering respirations brought to life a detailed finger-art tableau in the mirror, featuring Mr Happy being extremely unwell across the initials of many Premiership football clubs. Then I dipped an appraising digit into the bath and found it filled to the brim with glacial meltwater. By the time I located the switch for the water heater – next to the oven, obviously – I was in no mood for the forty-five-minute wait advised by an attached notice (along with a warning that water could not be heated while the cooker was on, an edict necessary to stamp out voltage-crazed holiday excesses such as washing up after a meal). Pontin’s Southport, my base for a three-day regional craporama, was doing much too well at being awful.
Grimy and ill-tempered, I put on most of the clothing I’d brought with me and heaved open the apartment door. Every other set of curtains was drawn and the exercise yard lay entombed in perma-frost; icicles hung becomingly from every gutter and overflow pipe. The sky was huge and blue and the sunlight pure, pouring gold across the sand-dune crests that rose up beyond the camp walls. Immediately I felt better: it was an absolutely glorious morning, and I had it all to myself.
I walked round the camp’s deserted perimeter, then headed to the beach. Everything down here was vast: the yawning emptiness of the rippled sand, my thousand-foot shadow across it, the boarded-up Victorian hotel sat between the dunes. The sea looked a million miles away, just a fuzzy silver line out near the horizon. It was all so stirring and epic: a big place for big dreams. In days gone by that meant Red Rum thudding across these sands in pursuit of the speed and strength that would win him three Grand Nationals. Now it means that the dunes behind Ainsdale Beach are home to north-west England’s most active dogging community.
I crunched back to the camp through crusted sand ridges and puddles of hard sea – when brine freezes over, hell can’t be far behind. From bumper to bumper Craig was thickly dusted with ice, and I allowed myself a self-congratulatory smile: the night before, taking stock of the conditions and Craig’s related medical history, I’d prudently removed the WD40 and de-icer from the boot and taken them up to my apartment. Feeling – and looking – very pleased with myself I now extracted both aerosols from my bag and lavishly unleashed them over glazed surfaces and into locks, as appropriate. Then I climbed inside, aimed another what-the-hell squirt of each behind the choke knob, and to my immense satisfaction coaxed Craig into a first-time start. A quick flick of the wipers, and off we … oh. I heard frail machinery endure immense strain and surrender with a reverberating twang; I saw the wipers flop limply down on to the bonnet, useless and dead.
And so West Lancashire passed by in a smeary blur, my nose pressed up to the screen and my eyes trying to distinguish oncoming traffic from less potent hazards such as roadside vegetation and livestock. As I weaved blindly about the tarmac, my respect for Craig and the men who brought him to life – nearly enormous following his non-stop transnational marathon – ebbed steadily away. The last dregs of it were drained by a very close shave with a stationary milk float. Soon afterwards, I pulled over in a village and made further efforts to wipe away the semi-de-iced chemical sludge, now topped with the spatterings of gritty slush thrown up by motorists who overtook at speed, honking their rage at my lethargic meandering. All around was flat and cold and lightly hazed in fog: I hadn’t been missing much. Then I looked over the road and saw to my surprise and delight that I’d stopped right outside an automotive electrician’s.
‘First car I ever bought new!’ declared a cheerful man in overalls after I’d nosed Craig gingerly into the yard round the back. ‘Not many of those left now.’ We exchanged manly wonder-why laughs: with his smeared glass frontage Craig was a soap-windowed shop at the end of a closing-down sale.
On his instruction I opened the bonnet and activated the wipers; he cocked a practised ear and immediately diagnosed a malfunction beyond his remit. ‘It’s not electrical, that. Whole linkage has gone. First you’ll need to …’ With much oily-fingered pointing he now embarked on a lengthy account of the remedial procedure. I lost track and all hope with the phrase ‘once you’ve got the scuttle out’, but somehow my head kept on nodding. When he was done (‘And reassembly is the reverse of removal, as they say in the Haynes manuals’) I offered thanks via my full repertoire of toe-curling blokeisms: cheers mate, nice one, howay the lads, look at the tits on that. And then I drove very slowly away into a world steadily Jackson Pollocked by accumulating splatter.
St Helens has been decreed ‘the most traditionally British urban area’, on the grounds that in our last national census its residents ticked the ‘Christian’ and ‘White British’ boxes in unrivalled droves. On a misty Saturday noon Westfield Street certainly had a flat-capped feel to it, a coal-smutted parade of run-down old shops encircled by the gleaming retail dreadnoughts of Asda, Comet and the rest. Its pavements were sparsely populated by aimless, blotchy-faced men sucking the life out of their fags, and its walls studded with shabby and deflating pronouncements: PART-WORN TYRES FOR SALE; NO FLY TIPPING; LEASE FOR ASSIGNMENT; TOILETS CLOSED DUE TO CONSTANT VANDALISM. Through a backdrop of lingering fog I could just make out the chimneys of Pilkington’s, final survivor of the half-dozen glassmaking plants that once defined the local economy. In the 1970s, these pumped out such huge volumes of hot water that St Helens’ canals supported several species of tropical fish and a healthy colony of terrapins. I suspected that today they’d be frozen over. Once again I looked around at the post-industrial superstore colonies and tried to understand how Britain sustained itself, when all the places where we used to make stuff were now devoted to buying stuff. I remembered the archive films I’d seen at Hull’s Maritime Museum, and the fruity, cocksure newsreel voiceover as flat-capped dockers shovelled up wheat: ‘England is the very model of an import–export economy. We buy our grain from abroad, and pay for it with manufactures.’ That seemed to make sense. What I’d seen in modern Hull and almost every town since absolutely didn’t. How could we keep on consuming more and more while producing less and less? I felt myself suddenly weighed down with impending doom: a man who fears for his children’s future, and is about to have a really terrible haircut.
Pawnbrokers, tanning salons and grimy, garish takeaways: all the usual commercial suspects were present and correct. Sandwiched between examples of the last two sat a little brick edifice, its tatty gold awning slung over a sign that read: AVANTI HAIR TEAM. Beneath this and a phone number ran the legend, THE SALON WITH NATIONAL AWARDS IN HAIR FASHION. My eyebrows disappeared behind a fringe that would shortly be no more: it seemed a tremendously bold description of the proprietor’s triumph in a Channel 5 quest entitled Britain’s Worst Hairdresser. ‘Appointments not always necessary,’ said a note on the front door. I pushed it open and walked in.
As a man of middle years, I consider it my duty to regard most developments in popular culture with alarm and bewilderment. It’s not a big ask: I find myself at a moment in history where public display of lavish swathes of underpant and buttock flesh is a coveted young look, rather than a scene from some Freudian anxiety nightmare whose mere memory compels the victim to see out the balance of adolescence locked in their bedroom in a foetal clench of shame. But more inexplicable to me than this, more than even sports utility vehicles or the unstoppable rise of the tattoo, is the British public’s ratcheting desperation to appear on television. We appear to have reached a stage where absolutely any humiliation, personal or professional, is worth enduring if the reward is a fleeting moment on one of the 19,400 channels currently available on Freeview alone. There is no pale left to go beyond; I honestly cannot think of a title that might deter either TV commissioning executives or the volunteering public. Britain’s Ugliest Dunce. Britain’s Drunkest Dentist. Britain’s Deadest Dog.
I recently watched a programme on intimate surgery in which patients gladly disrobed for full-frontal before and after interviews: no pixellated faces, no distorted voices, no PLEASE JUST KILL ME NOW etched in blood across foreheads. One man seemed especially eager to show his relations, friends, work colleagues and fellow Britons what had previously been hidden, even from him, by a pendulous flap of ‘pubic apron’: a tiny button-mushroom nubbin of penile tissue.
Anyway, John Beirne was a hairdresser, an experienced professional hairdresser, who in 2005, without inducement, threat or deception, offered himself to a TV production team for inclusion in a Channel 5 show which – let us just remind ourselves – was entitled Britain’s Worst Hairdresser. I have to report here that I missed the broadcast – it clashed with Christ, I Stink on Sky 11 – and failed to track down a recording. (The revelation that the show was hosted by Quentin Willson, who is a little irksome and almost entirely bald, may have sapped my investigative enthusiasm.) What I did gather, from generally sympathetic coverage in the local papers, was that John’s success had been less to do with any technical shortcomings than his ‘repertoire of withering put-downs and a tongue as sharp as his scissors’. At one point he told the show’s judge that she looked good for her age, ‘considering you’ve been dead for three weeks’.
The salon was the size of a small studio flat, made smaller by its border of chairs and basins. The chequered floor tiles were lightly bestrewn with hair; tinny hits of yesteryear issued forth from a radio on the reception desk. Two women were at work: a junior stylist stood twisting bits of foil into an old woman’s scalp, while a more senior colleague snipped tenderly away at the gingery curls of a toddler, wide-eyed and rigid in his father’s lap. I took a seat by the door and waited. On cue a middle-aged man with short, spiky and rather aubergine hair strode briskly in through a door at the back of the salon and installed himself at the reception desk in a proprietorial and excitingly ill-tempered manner. He flung open the appointments book and tutted all over it, then slammed it shut and huffed at the ceiling. I raised myself slightly off my chair and let out one of the vague preludial mumbles available from an extensive repertoire. The effect on Britain’s worst hairdresser was immediate. He wheeled round, glowered imperiously down at me, then grabbed a coat from the peg by the door and with a whoosh and a slam disappeared into the misty street.
‘That’s him gone for the day,’ murmured the junior stylist without looking up from her work. Here we go again, I thought. Eyes on the rusty prize, watching it once more snatched away at the last. Could I walk out now, without looking rude or weird? I was weighing it up when the ginger child, still stiff with terror, was carried out past me, tucked under his father’s arm like a small surfboard. The oldest present member of the Avanti Hair Team turned to me and proffered an expectant hand at her now vacant chair. I’d come for a bad job; might as well make the best of it.
As someone who really hates having their hair cut – the stilted banter, the spiny offcuts down the back of the neck, the nagging conviction that with three mirrors and a slightly longer right arm I could be doing it myself for free – my tonsorial service regime is a strictly binary affair. Every eight months I go into the barber’s looking like James May might if he brushed his hair with a balloon, and come out of it close-shorn in a style my wife has compared to a covered button.
Cut all of my hair off, please: it should be a straightforward process. But it never is, because although I’ve been to the same barber for almost ten years, he still plainly has no idea who I am, and greets my simple and unchanging request with considerably more bewilderment than it merits. It is one of my fondest wishes to patronise an establishment, any establishment, that I can go into and ask for the usual, but it’s not going to happen there. Frankly, unless a shop selling nothing but big bags of cheap crap opens up down the road, it’s not going to happen anywhere.
‘Half an inch long all over,’ I say every time, and every time he asks if I mean to take off half an inch, and I correct him, and then I look up at the mirror and see something close to panic pass across his face. Because my regular barber only really knows how to do one haircut, a style prevalent in the land of his birth in the troubled era that he departed it. His every reflex flick of comb and snip of scissor is made with but one archetype in mind, and which I’ve since seen immortalised on a great many black-and-white heads at the Museum of Occupation overlooking Famagusta: a 1970s Cypriot schoolboy.
Anyway, this time it was going to be different – and obviously better, with Britain’s worst hairdresser now out of the picture. ‘What’s it to be then, love?’ asked the stylist, draping a plastic shroud around me and fastening its Velcro strap behind my neck. Together we looked in the mirror at a head weighed down by eight – in fact nine – months’ worth of grizzled haystack. I figured I might as well say what I’d intended to say to her absent boss. ‘Up to you. Whatever you think will suit me.’
Liberated by these words, and soothed by the salon’s cocooning warmth and the low monotone of my stylist’s small talk, I eased back into the chair. The stylist’s fingers fluffed and tugged my overgrown busby into some sort of order, then with practised ease she began to snip away at it. If I was ever going to enjoy an experience that involved bits of me being cut off, it would be now. ‘Just taking some of the weight out and layering things in a bit at the back and sides,’ she said, her hands almost a blur in the mirror as a cascade of shorn locks slid down my gown. ‘So what you doing in Sinellens?’
I blew hair out of my eyes and looked in the mirror. Curious things were happening, and happening fast. A rogue shelf of hair leapt free from my left temple, and I could see a patch of scalp just above the opposite ear.
‘I’m, er, just kind of looking around and doing things.’
‘Oh, right.’
On she snipped, fashioning a wallpaper-brush fringe with a single drastic thwick, then busily eradicating any vestige of symmetry from the curtains that flanked it. I watched my reflection settle into the now familiar blend of horror and exhilaration – the face of a man who has gone in search of the truly dreadful, and found it. ‘Of course, John’s big into his competitions,’ I heard her say at one point, which should have been my cue for some artful probing. If it had, I’d have discovered that John Beirne has in fact won over three hundred awards for being good at cutting hair, but by then I was transfixed into silence. What had until recently been a head of hair was now something else – a helmet made out of old cats. And very badly made. The whole of one ear stood out proud and free, while the other skulked unseen beneath a silver-tabby side-flap. Tufts and clumps erupted at will from the lopsided crown.
‘There you go. How’s that?’
I swivelled my head from side to side in the mirror, raising a hand to pull a slab of neighbouring hair over the lateral scalp-patch.
‘What in the name of Mr Keith Harris have you done to me?’ I wailed passionately, in my head. ‘Absolutely perfect,’ said my mouth.
‘Want any product on it?’
She waved her scissors at the bottles and tubs of styling gels and unguents lined luridly up beneath the mirror. A hundred sticky ways of making everything much, much worse.
‘Lots,’ I said. Five minutes later I walked outside wearing a crested grebe plucked from an oil slick.
I followed a pylon-flanked dual carriageway towards Liverpool, the Irish Sea glinting behind its distant skyline as the sun dispersed the last wisps of fog. It’s a city that boasts an impressive portfolio of urban tribulations, and I expected to find most of them showcased in the metropolitan borough of Knowsley, a feature of the Location, Trumpet, Brantub bottom ten. The Future is KNOWsley! shouted a huge hoarding by the road, which was a promising start. I’d come to understand that the most strident regeneration slogans took a city’s true plight and turned it completely on its head, so that when Hull declared itself Stepping Up, you knew it was actually falling down, and instead of Moving Forward, Middlesbrough kept sliding back. ‘The Past was THENsley!’ I cried, above the distressing sound of Joe Strummer finding out that he couldn’t write songs without Mick Jones.
But the Knowsley Ozzy led me to was an entirely unobjectionable village set in greenery some way outside the city. No matter how hard I stared at the hefty Victorian church it doggedly refused to turn into a derelict factory, and the pensioners seated in neat rows at the bus shelters didn’t look like they’d be resuming a brutal turf war as soon as I was round the corner. So I flicked Ozzy off and aimed Craig towards the largest concentration of close-packed roofs, which as later geographical enquiries revealed took me almost immediately out of the challenged borough.
Knowsley’s evasion seemed somehow typical of Liverpool, a haughty and insular city that you sense would happily cut itself off entirely, reluctantly emerging every few years to show the outside world how to play football or popular music. Without wishing to come over all Boris Johnson – there’s a phrase you don’t want to get wrong – I find Liverpudlians rather a contrary bunch. The default civic mentality is a strange blend of chippiness and superiority: most Scousers feel desperately hard done by, even as they’re belittling their own neighbours with casual disdain. Southport and St Helens might both lie within Merseyside, but by virtue of falling outside the tight and rigidly defined borders of Scouseland, the residents of each and all points between are sneeringly derided as ‘woollybacks’, a nickname that dates back to the days when Lancastrian shepherds arrived in Liverpool’s markets toting fleeces on their shoulders. (Though I do accept that it is quite funny.)
In a civic delusion that today, with Beatlemania and Bill Shankly now distant memories, seems at best curious, Liverpudlians remain quite convinced that it is the secret and dearest wish of every world citizen to have been born a Scouser. To keep these wannabe billions at bay they’ve had to install a number of metaphorical barriers to entry. Some, viz the woolly-back belt, are geographic: residents of the Wirral – an area comfortably within Liverpool’s metropolitan area as it’s demarcated on the maps – are dismissed as ‘plastic Scousers’, or just ‘plazzies’, for living on the wrong bank of the Mersey. It’s a bit like the appellation contrôlée system, but with pot-smoking layabouts in grubby sportswear instead of fine French wines. And some are linguistic: when I stopped for petrol halfway from St Helens, with Liverpool already a blatant presence on the horizon, the till attendant and everyone in her queue spoke flat, straight Lancastrian – not even a hint of the mile-a-minute, phlegm-rattling singalong that would assail my ears just up the road. There’s no dialectical overlap, no halfway Scouse. It’s apartheid by tongue.
That afternoon, driven to despair by the synthesised brass blunderings of The Clash in their death throes, I listened to a lot of BBC Radio Merseyside, and discovered two things. Firstly, that in contravention of the BBC’s much declaimed stance on deregionalised, equal-geographic-opportunity, no one without a very strong native accent is allowed behind a Radio Merseyside microphone. Secondly, despite the evident and clearly audible assumption amongst those blessed with this accent that simple possession of it imbues everything they say with a cheeky-chappy, streetwise wit, it really, really doesn’t. This may partly explain the very poor opinion of the city and its residents I appear to be expressing here. The rest is down to a simple and unedifying desire to get some retaliation in first, for I now became gradually aware, via road signs, shop fronts and community halls, that I had strayed into the scally badlands.
Croxteth and Norris Green: two places nationally synonymous with deadly territorial feuding. Crocky and Nogzy: their local nicknames, two deeply guttural utterances guaranteed to have a Scouser hacking his tonsils right out onto the pavement. A good old grudge falls right in the sweet-spot of Liverpool’s personality matrix, the one with sentimental, never-walk-alone tribalism up one axis and aggrieved, no-surrender stroppiness along the other. Ask a Scouser to bury the hatchet and he’ll immediately oblige, deep into your radiator grille. So when these insatiable bearers of enmity reached vendetta saturation point – not a town, national newspaper or football club left in the land that they didn’t already hate for ever – they had no choice but to turn on each other. Hence the ridiculous and tragic Nogzy/Crocky feud, a long running battle for ‘respect’ fought between neighbouring gangs of crop-haired junior Rooneys on stolen mountain bikes. Tragic because it culminated in a completely innocent small boy being shot dead in a pub car park, and ridiculous because – as I now discovered – these badlands weren’t at all bad. No smouldering mattresses on the pavement, no wheelless wrecks on bricks, not even a single boarded-up house – just street after quiet and well-kept street of Forties and Fifties council terraces, each with a freshly washed car on the crazy paving. Every hedge was clipped square, and every wheelie bin – each household had three of each, in a range of exciting fashion colours – stood in geometric alignment. The lavish areas of parkland were trimmed and attractive, bearing no relation to the churned and needle-strewn joyriding arenas of my imagination.
Put together, Croxteth and Norris Green would form one of the world’s largest council estates, but here there were none of the many environmental inducements to anti-social behaviour that characterised the likes of Bransholme in Hull, or in fact half the streets in half the towns I’d been through. There was deprivation, of course – the estates were built to house workers at a huge English Electric factory whose demolished remains I’d driven past on the way in – but really, for the gang-affiliated youth of these areas to carry on like nothing-to-live-for South Central desperadoes is frankly embarrassing. I might even have told them as much had they been about, but as luck would have it the entire neighbourhood was currently just up the road at Goodison Park – partly to support Everton FC, but mainly to heap abuse upon Manchester United in general and Crocky-reared traitor Wayne Rooney in particular.
Soothed by afternoon sun and a deep purging of pent-up Scousophobia, I drove under the Mersey with a smile and a whistle – an incompatible demeanour for an unwashed man with a terrible museum and a filthy beach to visit. But contrary to every indication on the Wirral Borough Council website, and indeed the stubborn insistence of the plazzie-Scouser desk sergeant on duty at a police station directly opposite, I found the Wirral Museum closed, and keeping its ‘laughable mess of random artefacts’ very much to itself. In fact I’ve just discovered – the Maestro-driving Angel of Death had struck once more – that its scattergun exhibits (think mayoral chains of office draped over Viking blankets) will never again see the light of day.
The museum was housed in Birkenhead Town Hall, a granite and sandstone edifice of a heft and grandeur tremendous even by Victorian standards, with half a Parthenon stuck on the front and a mighty 200-foot clock tower. I stepped over the chain strung across its leaf-scattered portico stairway, walked up and looked out across a gracious and expansive stretch of grass, statuary and noble old townhouses: Hamilton Square, home to more Grade 1 listed structures than any address in England but Trafalgar Square. A now familiar pathos took hold. Another symbol of a city’s bustling prime reduced to an abandoned mausoleum, another painful contrast between mighty, munificent past and fumbling, impoverished present. The fate of Birkenhead Town Hall – an enormous structure that fills an entire block – now lies ominously in the hands of a Strategic Asset Review panel. As things stand, the only active part of the place appears to be the magistrates’ court round the back.
The filthy beach proved a happier let-down. I parked Craig up on the promenade at Hoylake, by the tablecloth lawns of a crown-green bowls club, and saw at once that the rippled sands running off to the distant waters of Liverpool Bay had been ill served by whoever deemed this beach the second horridest in Britain. Little knots of weekend walkers were dotted across the enormous sunlit shore, Boden families in pink wellies, couples arm-in-arm behind hearty, panting dogs. The sky was big and the hilly fields to the west lay becomingly sprinkled with clean white snow. To cartographers, the Wirral Peninsula; to locals, the Scouse Riviera. Neither name did justice to this entirely wonderful prospect, and I couldn’t wait to walk far out into it and take wanky album-cover self-portraits with the new camera I’d got for Christmas.
Down on the sand I wandered past shells and seagulls and puddles full of starfish, and generally failed to find myself clambering over bloated livestock carcasses or kicking a path through drifts of faecal coliform and rusty hospital sharps. I was a good 400 yards out before I confronted my first item of human detritus: a single grey sock. To give the survey compilers more leeway than they probably deserve, I concluded that filth was truly in the eye of the beholder. As I gaze out of my window now, I see a back garden that some would doubtless view with disdain. Yet others might nod approvingly, and think: Here lives a man who knows a thing or two about bicycle maintenance (thing one: how to take a bicycle to pieces; thing two: how to pile those pieces up under an enormous blue tarpaulin).
I looked up from the sand with a start: the sun was almost down and I was miles and miles out, nearer to the windfarms and container ships than Craig and the crown-green bowlers. The local paper headline tolled up before me: PLAZZIE COCKNEY WHO WENT TOO FAR, above one of my recovered self-portraits (Woollyback haircut – the final straw?). I briskly pursued my lengthening shadow back across the sand, stamped half the Scouse Riviera into Craig’s footwells and set off back for Southport, full of ozone and good cheer. Driving in through the Pontin’s security gates felt like returning from day-release.
The heating had now been on for twenty-six hours straight, but my apartment was still no cosier than a branch-line waiting room. After a huddled half-bath I hurried away to the warmth and noise of the entertainment zone, where the previous night repeated itself in Orville-free form. Same failure to secure a dining table, same cheerless handheld roundel of flash-fried flesh, same pervasive air of beery unease. A dance troupe up on the stage stamped and smiled their way desperately through a medley of Barry Manilow hits, utterly ignored by an audience focused on texting and alcohol. Gum-chewing security operatives with headsets cast their dead-eyed gaze across the profane clamour. All the kids were either shooting zombies in the face or watching Ultimate Fight Championship in the bar. Those in the thinnest T-shirts were outside in the dark frost, amongst them a red-cheeked youngster of about seven or eight endeavouring to cajole some smoking teenage girls – I assume his big sister and a few friends – into a game of chase. ‘Come on, come on, I bet you couldn’t catch me even if I was just walking!’ As he hopped expectantly about beside them one of the girls half-turned to him, her face screwed up in disdain, and said, ‘You on the weed or something? Shut your bleeding head and piss off.’
I crawled into my tiny, tomb-cold bed feeling queasy and hollow, as if every scrap of those happy-camper fantasies had just been plucked from my childhood memory banks and nasally extracted. All through the night I imagined cheerful thoughts seeping out of my scalp, though the bathroom mirror at dawn explained this sensation in more prosaic terms: twelve hours after the stylist laid down her scissors, new things were still going wrong with my haircut. Even as I watched, two Yiddish ringlets bounced free from a craggy temple, like springs through an old sofa.
Light overnight snow had laid a patchy white veneer over the exercise-yard mud. Every window looking down on it was steamed up and curtained. Standing there wrapped in my bedding, hair akimbo, I looked out and suddenly felt desperate and alone, as if I was on the run and holed up. ‘Police traced Moore to a Pontin’s holiday camp in Southport, Merseyside,’ I said aloud, and in that instant resolved to leave this place at once and for good, even if it meant passing up a night’s accommodation that I’d paid for in advance, and a thick wad of unused electrocards (they’re still in my wallet: any offer over 25p per kwH considered). Five minutes later I was throwing my bags into Craig’s boot. And half an hour after that, with the legacy of my frenzied efforts at manual frost dispersal smeared and streaked across the windscreen, I finally inched out of the compound. Matey nods were exchanged with the security guard, though I might as well have given him a great big slobbery kiss of death: within a year, Pontin’s found itself in receivership.