Our school had a long tradition of celebration of the arrival of the end of the 5th year final exams by the School Trip to Blackpool. The key reason (for the pupils at least) for it’s popularity was because it was run by the pupils. Ergo, no staff. I’ve no clear idea of exactly how this was blagged, but it boiled down to being an organised piss-up for 16 year olds under the guise of a perfectly reasonable trip to the Pleasure Beach. The fact that the bus left Blackpool for Preston at 11:30pm should have been a clear message as to exactly what the plan was, but parents either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it.

The first couple of hours of the trip genuinely did involve a pile round the Pleasure Beach. At the time, me & rollercoasters didn’t get on due largely to cowardice (I still don’t like heights, but an addiction to speed – as in going or driving fast – has sort of got me over it) so I was the right Johnny No-Mates during that part of the trip. Eventually, we repaired to a nearby pub. I wasn’t a big drinker at that point but had braved several pints of dad’s Home Brew and was convenient for the others to send to the bar (being tall and having a loud voice and therefore less clearly 16 than everyone else, not that the pubs in Blackpool minded a spot of underage drinking but it paid not to be too blasé about it).

A veritable feast of thrills and spills, not for the faint-hearted though.

The next bit is a touch hazy – possibly for beer reasons – but I guess that I managed to lose everyone else partly because I was interested in heading for the arcades up at Central and North pier, partly because the girl I really really liked was clearly on the pull for one of the guys from 5R, and partly because I was a social liability at the time.

Now, South pier (where the Pleasure Beach is) is a rather long way from Central pier. I thought it was about a mile – the ‘Golden Mile’ as t’were. However, it turns out that this refers to something a bit closer to the Tower. So I walked the two-plus miles up to Central, dived into the arcade there, found some of the machines I remembered from a ‘walk part of the Blackpool Lights’ trip with the family a couple of years back (Mach 3, Roadrunner, Indy, R-Type, Vulcan Venture) and played those for a bit. Carried on walking up to North as well.

By this point my feet were hurting, and I was facing a long lonely boring walk back to the bus rendezvous and my 16-year-old hormones weren’t helping. I thought I was a clinical manic depressive in those days, but no, I was just an ordinary teenager. “She was mine!” surely, but no, she wasn’t.

Fortunately, things were about to start looking up. I walked into an arcade on the way back and ran into an all-male group of friends who were also off the beer and onto the videogame lurve (or fruit machine lurve in at least one case). Immediately, the two-and-a-half miles back seemed a little easier – assuming that we could stick together. Now, I was never the crowd puller in the arcades. I wasn’t one of the guys racking up a million points on Defender; I couldn’t get past level 3 on Nemesis regularly; I couldn’t complete more than the odd scene on Dragon’s Lair. However, I was ‘OK’ at everything. With a bit of luck I could make a quid last the best part of an hour in an arcade, but there was no danger of ever reaching the ninja skills needed of a flash bastard.

That day, however, that was destined to change. I found a sit-down Star Wars cab in nearly perfect condition – which even in 1988 was no mean feat, most vector cabs were well past their sell-by date by that point. I hadn’t seen a Star Wars for a couple of years and a sitter for longer, but here was a game I could play. Taking the seat, a couple of the guys were watching through the glass on the back. “He’s picked Hard!” I heard one of them say.

Look how ‘hard’ you can look sat in here.

I’d developed a kind of dialogue with the Star Wars machine in my younger years when I had first encountered it, and I piled it on that night. I joined in with “Red Five Standing By” and “Look at the SIZE of that thing!” and when Alec Guinness’ cultured vocals prompted “Use the Force, Luke” I decided not to, exclaimed proudly “Fuck the Force!” and started firing immediately, explaining to my listening friends how you got a 50,000 point bonus if you didn’t fire when going down the trench but I couldn’t be arsed. KABOOM goes the Death Star as I casually sit back and act the Han Solo (everybody by that point thought Luke wanted to shag his sister). A couple of waves later the game was over – about on schedule for my ‘quid an hour’ rate’ – but I Starred from that Wars, emerging from the cab to much appreciation.

“You DO want to allow that bloke in your class to put
his hand up your skirt…”

After that the night went just peachy. Another pint, a stroll back up to the pleasure beach and the collection of a bunch of our girls to share the walk back to the bus. Was slightly gutted that the one of them I fancied said that if I had been scared on the Pleasure Beach she’d have been happy to take my mind off it. Arse.

I’ll save everyone the story of the two hour journey home, via Blackpool A&E…

September, 2005

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