Up North

Went up to Lancashire for a week or so, pleasant family time. Visited, briefly, the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, Forest of Bowland and Morecambe. I had to look Morecambe up in the 'Crap Towns' book. It's deservedly at number 3. We drove through a derelict seaside resort, parked on the seafront carpark and walked along the prom. The wind was strong and the sky was grey, although that's not Morecambe's fault. The Midland Hotel has been restored to its deco glory. There was an amusement park in between the closed down amusement parks. We had coffee at Costa, I looked in a bookshop.
Superficially disorganised, rooms coming off rooms and stepping over piles of books to get from one place to the next, it reminded me of the way secondhand bookshops were thirty years ago. Masses and masses of books you can't imagine anyone ever buying, which is exactly the sort of place you need when you can't find what you want through more straightforward means. At some point over the last twenty years, bookshop proprietors have reasoned 'instead of charging what I think this is worth, I'm going to charge a generous percentage of the price were you to buy it new'. This particular bookshop proprietor has then added another percentage, so you get to search longer than you need to to pay more than you want to.
I enjoyed visiting Morecambe. It makes the seaside resort I live in (Crap Town 18 in the second book) look tolerable.