Lincolnshire

I had the pleasure of visiting Lincolnshire today, although the actual pleasure was that I was able to leave there afterwards without being mugged or having my organs harvested.

I’d been to the place twice previously. Once I saw Gainsborough from the safety of a train and there was a childhood trip to Skegness that left some deep emotional scars.

The trip today was really as a favour. An elderly relative needed a lift home to a village near Louth. It was, according to my girlfriend’s mother, “only an hour away”. This proved to be false.

Either:

a) the Dutch human satnav was telling porkies,

or

b) due to rapid tectonic shift, Louth is now much further away.

It took close to two hours to get there and ate away significantly at the afternoon we’d intended to spend looking around Lincoln. So much so, that we decided to just have a bit of a drive around and see if we could see anything interesting on our way home.

Louth started out nice on the outskirts then began to resemble the definition of urban decay as we got nearer its centre. The one saving grace was that there is a pub there called My Father’s Moustache. Seriously. I assume it specialises in facial hair-themed drinks, such as Bloody Hairy, Sol Patch and Harvey Walrus.

We decided to pop into Grimsby to see if it was as bad as the name suggests. It’s actually worse. We also wanted ice cream.

Imagine the worst thing you can think of. Now cover that thing in shit and set it on fire. Congratulations, you’ve made your own scale model of Grimsby.

It had the usual things you’d expect from a crap town: a Wetherspoon’s vomiting toothless shell suit-wearers on to the streets and a strong underlying feeling that a large-scale riot was about to break out.

We decided against stopping, even at red lights, for fear of losing the car’s mirrors, wheels and engine to local “entrepreneurs”.

It became apparent that ice cream wasn’t going to happen, particularly when we passed the docks. Unless “ice cream” is code for a wrap of heroin or a handjob, there’s no way you’ll get any there.

At least there’s a good fast road away from the place.

The true measure of how awful Grimsby was is that I actually felt happy when we approached Hull.