Everything’s premier, except the league — awaydays Wednesday, 20th Nov 2013 00:13 by Awaydays A Saturday in Burnley followed by an immediate midweek return to the North West for a Wednesday night in Wigan? Be rude not to really wouldn’t it? Toni-AnnWe saw Toni-Ann from quite a way off. You could hardly miss her - she looked like the offspring of Ursula the Sea Witch from the Little Mermaid. You could tell she was a talker straight away — eyes darting around a near empty carriage, looking for a victim. Her opening gambit — in Scouse so broad Jamie Carragher would need her subtitled — was that she always went home via Wigan because they "never check your fucghing ticket on this liiiine." She was right about that, and the location of the train's toilet which she spent quite some time in, quite possibly doing things other than the facility's intended purpose. Indeed her logic was sound on other things as well. Certainly no more than a day over 19, she rejoiced in taking two members of the LFW travelling party for Wigan on an in-depth tour around her 15 tattoos. When — being the nice, well brought up, London boys that we are — we ventured it was rather bad luck to have her ex boyfriend Rich’s name quite so prominently across her cleavage she reasoned: "No it's alriaght, cos I've got kids with him innit." An equally large print of "Toni-Ann" in Comic Sans just above the crack of the arse is apparently there "in case they forget halfway through". Her words, not mine. The train — a typical LFW rattly affair adding half a day to the London to Wigan journey in the interests of saving £7 each — filled up a little as it called at a variety of places nobody has ever heard of or been to and sped at little more than 37 miles per hour towards our destination. Toni-Ann reigned it in a bit after a while, sensing not everybody on board was as receptive to her tales of debauchery as we were. She did pipe up again towards the end of the trip though when I suggested, in an uncharacteristically chauvinistic manner brought on by six bottles of Peroni on the London to Manchester leg, that perhaps the LFW newbie I’d bullied into joining me on this fool’s mission might like to invite Toni-Ann back to our Premier Inn later on. Unfortunately beer doesn't always make discretion a strong point and she overheard the remark, prompting her to stop us on our way off to let us know: "I proghbably would ya know - if you'd asghed like." It wasn't even the worst offer we'd had that day. We had arrived in the north. Friends in the northProbably just as well we didn’t take her up on it really. It's impossible not to wake up in a Premier Inn on the outskirts of Wigan - open window masking the overpowering smell of a half eaten pizza you took to bed with you with fumes from the adjacent petrol station - without a sudden and overwhelming feeling that something terrible has happened. It's a relief to find the other person in the room is who it's meant to be — even though the unfortunate who drew the short straw and had to room with me had been placed in a medically induced coma by this stage - rather than some hideous sea creature you picked up on the Manchester to Southport train because it felt like a good idea at the time. But isn’t that just all so terribly snobbish and typically London to pick out the most extreme example of human pond life we found on two quick fire trips to the north and lead in with it? In my defence, this piece could easily have started off with the taxi driver who took us away from Toni-Ann and the middle of Wigan out to our Premier Inn up by the M6 to ditch our bags — a man who spoke to us for the first four minutes of the journey about our trip north and the prospects for the match before casually throwing out there how pleased he was to have two lads in his car who were up for a chat. “You see,” he said, “we get a lot of Pakis and that these days who don’t want to say two words to you.” The moment a taxi driver turns racist…. Still, that was arguably preferable to the driver the following day who pierced our hangovers with William Shattner’s sixth (sixth) album for the duration of the journey. And when I say album, that’s perhaps stretching things a little bit. “Sixth album this you know, sixth, can you believe it?” said the cabby, turning the volume up beyond what was really necessary. Here’s a little taster… And going a little further back, his version of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, which George Clooney named as one of his Desert Island Disks because: “‘If you listen to it, you will hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it just to get off this island.” But it could equally have started with the couple who run the Ministry of Ales pub in Burnley. A grotty, run down sort of a place with rising damp and a selection of beers matched by few other establishments in the country. Three seasons it’s been since we were last in Burnley but they remembered us, and our round (potentially because nobody has been on the Budvar in there since QPR were last in town in 2011) and summoned a pie and pea lunch for five people in double quick time. Or the train ride from Leeds into Burnley, through the winding Pennines valleys and towns like Hebden Bridge that seemingly got cut off by a heavy snowfall in about 1956 and have therefore remained untouched by the internet, Tesco Metros, X Factor contestants or modern building techniques ever since. It’s a beautiful journey on a crisp, bright day, and there’s a wonderful old football ground waiting for you at the other end. Turf Moor is a tremendous sporting venue. Redeveloped stylishly, with two tiered stands, on two sides but left as was on the other. The away end and main stand to its right look like an old Welsh dresser handed down by a great grandmother: all old and wooden and full of musk and must and black and white photographs. The place was absolutely jumping for our visit and it made it hard to begrudge the Clarets their win — that, and the fact they were a whole lot better than QPR on the day. Wigan’s DW Stadium is entirely the opposite. New, shiny, functional, soulless — like a self storage facility your parents use to stock old mortgage repayment notices and bank statements in case they’re required for tax purposes. It had all the atmosphere of the bus station at Brent Cross Shopping Centre and about half as many people inside. At Burnley you sweep in over the mountains by train, and then wind down into the town from a point where you can see everything to the bottom of the slope where the ground sits perfectly in the early winter mist. Wigan’s home is accessed, in the teeming rain and the pitch black on this occasion, via a lengthy walk through an industrial estate and over a canal that looks like an ideal place to quickly dispose of a body — or a shopping trolley, depending on how rapidly your evening escalates I guess. But then Wigan has The Last Orders, which in true David Brent/The Office style closes at one. That had been recommended, off his own back it must be said, by the racist taxi driver as the place to go if “you’re looking for a bit of tit later.” We weren’t, we had Toni-Ann for that, and probably just as well given that the only woman asking for a dance in The Last Orders that night had less teeth than I’ve got QPR season tickets. Wigan, it turns out, also has a late pool bar opposite The Last Orders — and although the pool table was out of action because somebody had stolen the cue ball, it seemed rude not to take advantage of a place that charged £11.80 for three double whiskies and three bottles of Heineken and when asked what the closing time was replied “whatever time you like really.” More than unfair advantage as it turned out. A member of the travelling party who shall remain nameless failed to make the noon checkout time from Lenny Henry’s gaff the day after and then, having finally got himself back on the road, made it all of 15 minutes down the M6 before admitting defeat, pulling off and checking straight back into another hotel for a second night of projectile vomiting and probably best not to ask what else. Unfailingly friendly places. Wigan and Burnley that is — not M6 Premier Inns. Bad MonkeyBack in my very early school days — in Grimsby it should be said, before we get letters abusing me for being southern and writing about the north — there was a chimp they kept in a cage at the Cleethorpes Butterfly House called Chuckles. Now Chuckles quickly became the star attraction of the annual Lyle Marsden Infant School trip the Butterfly House, not only because monkeys were exotic and unusual and funny to watch, but also because word quickly got around the separate groups of previously innocent seven year olds that if you put your finger through the bars Chuckles would hold onto it with one hand and masturbate enthusiastically with the other. Bizarrely I was reminded of that monkey on the Saturday evening at Burnley Manchester Road railway station. There’d been a moment earlier in the day when we realised that the beer purchase at Leeds was excessive even for a group travelling under the LFW banner, so we hid some of it around the back of the waiting shelter at the station and retrieved it after the match, completely untouched, in front of a confused platform of QPR fans. On both occasions — the episode with the sexually frustrated chimp, and the retrieval of beer from a railway bank where God knows what else had been deposited before in front of a crowd who, even though they were football fans, wore the expressions of people who thought that was going a bit far - the overriding message seemed to be the same: just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should. Twats on the trainFor the unsuspecting weary traveller awaiting the post-Burnley Saturday night train back from Preston to London, the revelation that every song ever composed can have Richard Dunne's name crowbarred into it was a worrying development. QPR fans have had terrific fun so far this season bouncing around the terraces of Yeovil and pubs of Shepherds Bush doing the Richard Dunne version of Paul Johnson's 1999 dance track Get, Get Down but there is much untapped potential in the genre. M People's 'What have you Dunne today, to make you feel proud?' required no work at all and was swiftly followed by The Killers, "All these things that I've Dunne" as the train crawled through Crewe, the black night passing by the window at a snail's pace, the crate of beer diminishing alarmingly quickly. Things disintegrated rather after that, but not before a full run through of It Must be Dunne by Madness - “I know that it's you I need, to head the ball away, Dunne, Dunne, Dunne, Dunne, Dunne, Dunne, it must be Dunne, Richard Dunne, DunneDunne.” And a reworking of several historical speeches. And a Shakespeare sonnet. Classical literature not withstanding, you'd be forgiven for thinking this all sounds rather moronic. Beered up football fans being lairy on a train home, surrounded by people who just want to read their newspaper and eat a £4.30 vacuum packed sandwich from the buffet car. And you'd be absolutely right. Coming home from Huddersfield earlier this season a reasonably vulgar game where everybody in the group had to describe their sexual parts as a Premier League football team — Simmo’s was Stoke: unashamedly direct, doesn't care who it offends — later, for unrelated and illogical reasons, descended into a prolonged round of 'Kevin Gallen's magic'. A passer-by asked us to shut up. Poor, annoying, alcohol induced behaviour. Harmless, yet no doubt intensely irritating for everybody other than us. But you know what? Every other day of the week it's me on the receiving end. The suited herbert heading from the city to the suburbs who last week engaged a whole First Capital Connect carriage of tired commuters in a needlessly loud, in depth analysis of why little Hercules hasn't settled well at his £60 a day Montessori 'learn through play' school, all the way from Essex Road through to Oakleigh Park and beyond — for example. An anecdote so loud and inescapable that people in the immediate vicinity started to take their own lives north of Finsbury Park rather than listen any more. Or the youth on the Victoria Line on Sunday evening who went one step further than having his music on too loud through his headphones and simply played whatever obnoxious rapped bile it was out loud, on maximum volume, in a full carriage, while sitting next to what, for the benefit of this story, I'm reasonably certain was a Korean War veteran. Or the pimple faced, ginger haired, scrawny shouldered weasel who gets on the Northern Line in a Virgin Active uniform every morning and talks like every other middle class white boy from Woodside Park until his mobile phone rings at which point he immediately morphs into Tupac, punctuating every sentence with "blud" and "Nigga" and meeting every positive assertion from whoever the braindead oik is on the other end with an enthusiastic airborne finger slap. Or Toni-Ann for that matter. Or the man who got onto the Sheffield Super Tram and blew in my ear from Nunnery Square to Ponds Forge and then gurned in my face when I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Or that bloke who came and sat next me for the duration of a New Year's Day trip to Norwich when I was nursing the mother of all hangovers and longing for a quiet, silent death and waited all of 30 seconds before opening with "Of course, I don't live here, I live in Alicante" and followed it up with a three hour lecture on the region's property market, complete with slides. Or that woman who gets on the tube at East Finchley and very deliberately tuts at anybody who doesn't give up the disabled seat for her, and then loudly asks them to move to shame them in front of the carriage when her only obvious physical issue is the fact that she's got a fat arse. You know what, if I want to sit on the train once a fortnight and sing about Kevin Gallen and loudly compare my cock to Everton (notoriously slow to get going, prone to a big finish) then I will. Once and a while, it's nice to be that twat on the train. On the pitch (Burnley) >>> QPR performance 4/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10 >>> Match 7/10 Off the pitch (Burnley) >>> QPR support 7/10 >>> Home support 9/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 8/10 >>>> Stadium 8/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub (Burnley) >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 8/10 On the train (Burnley) >>> Journey 7/10 >>> Cost 4/10 Total — 87/140On the pitch (Wigan) >>> QPR performance 5/10 >>> Referee performance 5/10 >>> Match 2/10 Off the pitch (Wigan) >>> QPR support 8/10 >>> Home support 5/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 4/10 >>>> Stadium 6/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub (Wigan) >>> Pubs 8/10 >>> Atmosphere 8/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 9/10 On the train (Wigan) >>> Journey 7/10 >>> Cost 5/10 Total — 85/140Tweet @loftforwords Pictures — Action Images Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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