A Merry Christmas to One and All

Apart from the following (Updated for 2025), and the list gets longer every year. I hope your Christmases suck:
The Green party and their Tit Whisperer

The BBC

The TV licence

The 'News'

MOTs 

Two Tier Kier Starmer
The rest of the Labour Government
The nine million people who voted for them
Chris Whitty
BLM
The Socialist Worker
The Media
People who say, "The Government should do something"
TV Adverts with mixed race couples
ASH
Snowflakes
Disney
Alcohol Concern
The British Heart Foundation
CRUK
RSPCA
Smokefree various regions
Student unions
Balance North East
The Government (Including devolved Governments)
Local councils
HMRC
Woke celebrities
The NHS
Brake
Anti-racists
RNLI
E4
The BBC
Insulate Britain
The Guardian
Gary Neville
Black Lives Matter
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Men in women's sports
Those people who keep ringing me about that accident I never had
Facebook
Statue topplers
Adults who go outside in pyjamas
Gary Lineker
Anyone who's outraged
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Tony Blair
All lefties and Progressives
Traffic cops
Boris Johnson
Anyone with equality or diversity (or both) in their job titles
Just stop oil
The terminally woke
Ngozi Fulani
Anyone who thinks dog poop is the most pressing issue of the year
Canada
Claudia Winkleman
Chavs
Social media influencers
Maghan and Harry
Channel migrants and their enablers
Celebrities in the jungle
The triggered
Celebrities not in the jungle
Anyone who thought COVID restrictions were a good idea
Mums against guns
World Health Organisation
Tesco basics bread
Wannabe gangstas
Lazy arse dole dossers and thier snot nosed kids
Greta Thunberg
People with pictures of their kids as their avatar
Sadiq Khan
The X Factor
Anyone who just won't let Brexit go
Matt Hancock
People who believe in Chemtrails and think Bill Gates can track you through the COVID vaccine
Bill Gates
Mask wearers
Conservatives who are socialists
Adults who wear onesies and drink from Tommee Tippee cups
Extinction Rebellion
Directors of Lived Experience
and many other prodnose, interfering, hateful or just plain annoying people.

Our Glorious NHS

 I'll just leave this here

 

ABS Crunches

So my MOT is due. There's one test on the MOT that encapsulates (is that a word?) how governments work. Particularly this current government

Someone invented a safety system called 'Antilock braking'

It was good, so car manufacturers started adding it to thier cars

The government saw it was good and decided to get involved. They said, if you have ABS brakes on your car, the system has to work correctly, so it's now part of the MOT

The MOT testers said, we can't check that without taking the car out onto a track?

Someone else invented the ABS sensor, which checks if the system is working, and provides a computer generated fault if it is not

 

Good job, trebles all round

 

Now cars are regularly failing their MOT because of an ABS fault. 999 times out of 1000, the fault is not with the system, but with the sensor, so the sensor has to be replaced

People who make the sensor, sell a lot of sensors, while everyone's ABS systems continue to work correctly

 

Intervention by the government caused a problem where none exists

 

Meanwhile, the lefties see the number of cars failling on an ABS fault, and tell us that the free market is not working, because private industry keeps making faulty ABS braking systems that are putting lives at risk 

Something should be done, etc...

Youth Unemployment

We took on a 'youth' this week at work

 

She worked one day

 

We're recruiting again

 

Yes I know, you can't judge all the 'youths' by the actions of one, just like you can't call all the Afgan migrants rapists, or demad reparations from all the white people for slavery they didn't do

 

Just sayin'

 

(Disclaimer. Now that I've turned fifty, I think it's appropriate to use the term 'youths' a lot more. Enjoy your weekend) 

I turn fifty tomorrow

 Fuck!

RIP Blackburn 1992 - 2007

We briefly discussed on the Smoky Drink bar this weekend (Everyone welcome BTW) about how people, regardless of their age, tend to believe that the time they grew up, teens to early twenties, were the best times to grow up

The sixties were mentioned, which prompted me to say how happy I am that I never had to go through the sixties as a young adult, and how lucky I am to have experienced the 90's instead. Hence the discussion about always favouring your own time over the nostalgia of others

 

I was lucky in more ways than one, too. Not only did I experience the 90's, I did it in Blackburn, and not only did I do it in Blackburn, I did it when Blackburn was at its very best, which seems to have been a short flash in the pan, so very good timing

 

If you did not see Blackburn in the 90's, but saw it any time from 2008 until the present day (particularly the last decade), you'd wonder what on Earth I was talking about. Not only is it a shit hole, it's the kind of shit hole that makes you think there could never have been anything good there, ever

 

I picked the years 1992 -2007 for my post title, as 1992 was the year I was finally old enough to get out and experience some serious nightlife, and 2007 was the year the town finally died

 

Blackburn was a nightlife boom town in the nineties. There were a lot of decent pubs, and there was actually a circuit you would follow, round the town, from one pub to another, finally coming to a head in one of two major nightclubs

I say major nightclubs, because it wasn't just us locals who frequented them for a couple of late drinks, people used to visit Blackburns club scene from all over the north west. Which is another reason I was lucky, being only a £5 taxi ride away from one of the biggest clubs in the area

 

The death knell for Blackburn came when the then Labour government brought in relaxed drinking hours for pubs in 2005. A policy that was supposed to help the licenced trade actually threw the system into chaos and turned Blackburn into a victim of it's own huge success

 

The town circled the drain for a couple of years, before finally kicking the bucket in April 2007, when Peppermint Place (and other names) nightclub, the magnet that drew everyone to the town, closed it's doors for the last time 

 

A few months later, the smoking ban came along and pissed on it's corpse

 

As strange as it may seem, a self imposed system of 'structured fun', is what gave the town it's success. You would get off the bus at the bus station, and go into The Brewers for a pint, as it was right there. Then on to The White Bull on the corner, and over the road to Yates Wine Lodge. Next it was Toffs, then over the multi storey car park and into Blakeys. There was another one right over the road, called FJ Nichols,  then one down some stairs and underneath it, whose name escapes me. O'Neills up the road, the Borough round the back, then on to Peppermint Place or Manhattan Heights nightclubs

 

Depending on how rigidly you stuck to the circuit, it was about eight or nine bars before the club. These bars made about 90% of their total takings during the three hours between eight o'clock and 11 o'clock, Friday and Saturday night (Most of them were open during the week, but at those weekend times, they were incredibly busy)

 

Towards the latter half of the 90's, other investors could see that pubs in Blackburn were shitting money and they wanted a piece of that action. For a time, every vacant property was being turned into a pub, and a lot of these simply didn't bother trading in the week, they just wanted the weekend action

 

The circuit became a wandering mess and the punters, happy to have a bit more variety than what they were used to, were split up among the old and the new. With a lot more venues, but no additional punters, the money being spent also got divided further

 

This went on for some time and started changing the face of the towns nightlife, some pubs started shutting or changing hands, while still others were being opened

And then the relaxed drinking laws came in, and all the pubs started opening until two o'clock in the morning. The available weekend drinking time doubled over night, but the punters and their spending power did not, and facing the option of paying a tenner to attend a club and drink a couple of over priced beers, or stick around the pubs and save a few quid, most chose the pubs

 

This killed the clubs frighteningly fast, but also, it wasn't enough for the pubs. There were still too many of them, they had doubled their staffing costs and they didn't have the option to charge entrance fees or put up their prices. Pub doors began to shut, the survivors were dotted all over the place, the town began to loose it's appeal, and the smoking ban mopped up what was left

 

I'm going to say there is not currently a single night time pub open in Blackburn. This is just a guess, I know it was true the last time I checked, a few years ago, and I see no reason why it might have changed 

 

But I was there while it mattered

 

Peppermint Place was an unusual night club. A plain building that was part of a multi storey car park, and covered on all sides by white ceramic tiles. You wouldn't notice it was there from the outside

Inside were two huge rooms, with a total capacity of 2000 people

 

   

It went through a few names during it's time: The Cavendish Club when it opened back in 1968, followed by Romeo and Juliets in 1970, then Peppermint Place in 1983, and Utopia in 1995

 

 

It was Peps and Utopia when I used to go there
One side, named 'Kaleidoscope', was home to DJ Gary Gee, who played the underground electronic dance music, while the other side, 'Reflections', played more mainstream and charty stuff

 

Peppermint Place was hugely popular, and it's success was not just good for it's owners and employees, it was also good for the town. Nobody travelled by taxi or coach to go straight to the club, they went round the town first

 

There was a time when Peps for some reason, decided to do a 70's disco music night on Wednesdays. Suddenly everyone was out in the town on a weeknight and all the pubs that would normally shut early, opened their doors and made an extra killing

 

It was a strange time, because it contradicts what I've been saying about the number of punters and their spending power not increasing. I went to a couple of these nights, but working 9-5 meant I had to book Thursday morning off, so I could have a few beers. It was clear that everyone in that packed out club had not booked time off work to do so, and had not had pay rises to cover the cost of their pints of Carling, but there they were 

 

There was another large nightclub in the town, which did it's best to rival Peps, but never quite succeeded. It started out as Manhattan Heights, was briefly still called that when I started going, then changed to Northern Lights. Those were it's two most popular incarnations, although it was Millennium for a while, then did a short stint as Club Euro, before shutting it doors and being repeatedly burned down by local yoofs

 

And we had a few lower capacity clubs to compliment things: Cest La Vie for the rockers, Mr G's and Never Never Land for the dance round your handbag trendies, Jazzy Keks for the alternatives and 'Slutty' Sutties if you fancied a more flying bottle atmosphere

So that's why I consider growing up in the 90's to awesome, because I had a huge pub and club scene right on my front doorstep, right at the time when I could enjoy it. The music of the time was also awesome. Electronic dance music was just coming into it's own, and thrived before it was co-opted by the producers who just wanted to cash in on chart cheese. We call it Old School music now. Back then we just called it music

 

And we also had an olympic sized ice arena

 

 

 

 

 

Not that any of you asked...