A scorching weekend in Blackpool with my bezzy mate Sam. We kicked off with the Pleasure Beach (or Pleasure Bitch, as he insisted on calling it).

He was hopping around, making impatient noises about going on The Big One.  In case you don’t know, The Big One is an absolutely massive, ginormous roller coaster. It’s so big, it has its own warning light to stop aeroplanes flying into it and it can go at 80 something miles an hour.  The company who made it doesn’t exist any more which begs the question, who’s going to fix it if it breaks down? A student on work experience with a tube of superglue?

Anyway it was shut. And praise be to the Goddess of Scary Rides for that.

‘Aw,’ Sam said in a peeved voice but cheered up quickly when he saw some sort of gigantic contraption with people hanging upside down off it.  I don’t know about you but I’ve got to be in the right mood to hang upside down. And I wasn’t so we went on the Grand National instead. The Grand National is a roller coaster with two carriages that race each other. It feels like being stuffed inside a barrel then dragged at 9 million miles an hour over boulders and stones so it’s either horrible or really exciting, depending on your perspective.   So being an up-for-most-things kinda gal I climbed gamely into the carriage.

It was then that I learnt a valuable lesson:

In a rattly downward plunge, at silly miles per hour, a halterneck dress and bra are just not up to the job and my boobs, delighted to be free of their moorings at last, decided to make a break for it.
‘Yay! Freedom! This is great!’ they yelled to each other in boob language while I made panicky, ineffectual scrabblings to keep them inside my clothes. So while everybody was screaming and waving their hands in the air, I sat hunched and cursing, my arms wrapped round my chest like a straight jacket. Still, the mortification of flashing my boobs round Blackpool was a welcome distraction from the sensation of having every bone in my body shaken to dust. I just hope Google Earth didn’t have any snap-happy satellites out on patrol.

Next stop, the Big Dipper. In the queue, Sam was still gazing longingly at the dangling upside down people.
‘That ride looks awesome!’ he said in a hopeful, hinting sort of voice. He never says ‘awesome’. Clearly this was designed to sway my opinion  but I was busy fixing a wrap around top really tightly across my chest and tying it in a boob-imprisoning knot so I ignored him. The cars of the Big Dipper were well padded and so are we so we were wedged in good and proper. This, and having taken control of my willful boobs, made for an uneventful ride.

Like maniacs, we rushed from one attraction to the next, alternating adrenalin rushes with dreamy, pink-lit water rides with things like dry ice, glow-in-the-dark toadstools, ice grottoes and pretend Egyptian pharoahs.

At regular (bloody annoying) intervals, Sam kept saying ‘Squeeeeek!’ in my ear and

The Big One, Blackpool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

pointing at the Wild Mouse. I went on the Wild Mouse 30 years ago and promised myself never again. Ever.

But I did anyway then spent the next hour slotting my vertebrae back into place and pointing out that the ‘mice’ painted round the top of the ride are, in fact, rats and that should be warning enough that the ride is not what it seems.

Finally we bought plastic capes and stood sweating in line for the Valhalla ride. I was hoping it involved getting mauled around by a bunch of hairy Vikings but the notice informed us that this was a wild, white knuckle ride with sudden turns and plunges. Not suitable for anyone with bad backs/necks or nervous problems, pregnant women or anyone with a plaster cast.

The boy in charge of the queue assured me that Valhalla was ‘nowhere near as bad as the Wild Mouse.’ He said it with some feeling, like he knew what he was talking about, and as the insidious Wild Mouse carries no such signage, I concluded the Valhalla warning was meant to work with the scary opera music they were playing to get you in the mood.

You get precisely 3 seconds to leap into the Viking boat before being swept towards a curtain of water. Everybody crouches down, prepared for a good soaking but the water stops and whoever designed the ride goes ‘ner ner, had you going there’.

Valhalla ride, Blackpool Pleasure Beach. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I forget the  details because it was all so weird but there were balls of fire, kicking out heat and a snowy part with scary animals and freezing wind.  At one point the boat stopped in the dark and everyone said, ‘huh? What the ….?’  Then we came out into daylight – high up, facing just a small fence with er, nothing, on the other side, leaving everybody perplexed and a little anxious because it really did seem that we’d gone the wrong way.

Then …. very cunning…. the boat nudged, very gently round and we were facing backwards at the top of a dark plunge, nothing but blackness behind us. This unsettled everyone and there was a sort of collective bracing as we waited. But the plunge never came. We slid slowly for a short distance in the dark, swung round a corner then stopped dead with a load of spooky green eyes looking down on us. After a few minutes the mood was ruined by the arrival of a damp and harassed manager on the metal steps saying, ‘Sorry, it’s broken down, you’ll all have to climb out.’

Despite that, Valhalla was a top ride. It’s easy as anything to build the biggest this and the fastest that but anything as atmospheric as that which unsettles people by messing with their minds is a darn site cleverer and gets my vote every time.

Starving and knackered, we headed off to find a pub the B&B recommended. Second important lesson of the weekend:

Never ask for directions in Blackpool after 7pm because anybody you ask will be drunk as a  skunk.

And third valuable lesson of the trip:

It is entirely possible to sleep through a fight in a Bed & Breakfast if you’ve consumed enough wine. (We had).
‘What a carry on. We were up till five o clock in the flippin’ morning, cleaning the blood up,’ the indignant owners informed us at breakfast. ‘It was up the walls, the doors, all over the stairs. But the police were great, they rolled all the bedding up so we didn’t have to touch any blood. It was soaked.’ (I’m not making this up, honestly).

Sunday, we strolled on a pristine beach, went gaga over the vintage Penny Arcade then boiled ourselves alive in sun chairs at the end of the North Pier before driving all the way home at 5 miles an hour with all the other pink and sweaty Blackpooler-goers.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a new bra.

Please find below some vikings re-enacting a night out in Blackpool:

Some Vikings I found on Wikipedia.