Trip Advisor: How Not to do a Northwest Christmas Art Marathon

My partner in crime is a friend from uni, now artist and carnival organiser extraordinaire. A typo on her website describes her as ‘The Sculpture (insert name),’ so, in the style of restaurant reviewer AA Gill whose shadowy dining partner is only referred to as ‘The Blonde,’ she will be referred to accordingly as ‘The Sculpture.’

The responsibility of The Sculpture is to turn up on time and be generally jolly. My responsibility is to book tickets, design a tight itinerary and steer the ship with military precision. Alas, the previous designated ‘planning’ night had been spent gatecrashing a Christmas party and imbibing a certain amount of tequila. This means that when The Sculpture finally turns up I have had little sleep and, train tickets aside, have only the skeleton of a clever and organised plan. So we’re going to wing it. It’s Christmas, right? Fuck it.

Our adventure was one of indecision, missed trains, un-open shows, delightful distraction and… well, gin. At least we got that bit right.

Day One – Saturday

09.00. London. I’ve been in Margate and The Sculpture lives in London so we meet at Euston. Virgin Trains are chucking away first-class tickets at silly (i.e. reasonable) prices and I am rather partial to all the fuss and pomp of the hierarchical system so we are travelling, remarkably, not by Megabus but in style. We raid the first-class lounge and come away with three chocolate cookies, two lemonades, two bottles of water, four croissants, two cappuccinos, two apples, a banana and some butter which undoubtedly will be forgotten and ruin various items of technology in my bag at a later date.

11.00. Canoe Death. Find Friday's Metro on the train. Much horror over the story of the man accidently locked in the oven of a canoe factory and baked to death by his son-in-law.

11.40. Cornerhouse. There is a crowd outside Manchester's Cornerhouse. We have stumbled upon Naomi Kashiwagi's performance for the Playtime exhibition, which opened last night. The exhibition asks artists to respond to Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, which has just been re-issued, and this performance is inspired by the film's last scene. Four groups of people, carrying orange umbrellas, are stationed at the junctions outside the gallery. Francis Lemarque’s L’Opéra des Jours Heureux plays into the streets as the performers stop at the red lights, adopting theatrical poses before skipping around the umbrellas. The whole thing is quaint but rather underwhelming, less Tati and more Von Trier’s The Idiots. Upstairs in the show proper, Gabriel Lester’s series of saloon-like doors take up the first gallery. You walk through them and they shut behind you like a clacker toy. More interesting is Rosa Barba’s empty projection upstairs – a hole has been cut in the floor for the film to be sucked up into a plastic tube. We spend some time playing on another Kashiwagi work, Swingtime. Two swings make funny (not funny-ha-ha) noises as you gain momentum. As we start to try to get them to make increasingly weird noises the steward starts to look worried. “Do you want us to stop?” we ask. “Kind of… I just don’t want to set a precedent.” Fair enough. We clear off.

13.00. Castlefield. Manchester is starting to wind down after ATM14 and it’s the last day of Hardeep Phandal’s Maggots… exhibition. Neon pink, some old men, stuff about Camp Coffee. They served it at the opening, I remember; it was fairly nasty.

13.20. Deansgate. The Atlas Bar has a sign outside: 'Gin of the week: Whitley Neill.' We’re sold. Start talking about the scariest certain-death-type activities – potholing, diving in the world’s deepest holes... diving in general actually. Being in the middle of the ocean and, on surfacing, discovering that your boat has gone off without you…

14.00. Manchester Art Gallery. The Sensory War, on 'til February, is great. Horrible, disturbing, depressing and great. 

15.00. The Lowry. Tram off to The Lowry to see Akram Khan's One Side to the Other. The exhibition apparently brings together performance, painting, film, sculpture. I say ‘apparently’ because we get to the front desk and the man says, “Oh what a shame, we shut the exhibition on Saturdays to do live performances… If you had come five minutes earlier I could have let you in.” We spend the next 20 minutes listening to promising sounds emanating from the forbidden gallery space while we look at photographic portraits of Keira Knightley on the balcony.

17.45. Korean BBQ. Ban Di Bul. We get the left-overs boxed up and the box leaks all over The Sculpture’s rucksack and, later, all over the sheets in the B&B. The girl next to us has lined up a little army of cute baby squid on her plate which seem to blink at us.

22.20. Blackpool. The plan is to stay in tonight so we can be at the Grundy first thing, then take the train to Southport for the Atkinson, then go on to Liverpool. The Christmas lights have just been turned on. They are sponsored by Beaverbrooks. The taxi man entertains us with stories about drunk people getting in his cab having forgotten which hotel they live in and only remembering details like “It’s red” or “It begins with W.”

22.57. Hotel. Get to the hotel three minutes before check-in closes. Lobby is bathed in those blue lights you use to stop people shooting up. Our room is through at least seven clacky doors which are not unlike, and a bit better than, Gabriel Lester’s work at Cornerhouse. There's no heating, no towels and, bizarrely, a chair is placed Poltergeist-style on the bed. Think about hitting the town but, instead, fall asleep watching Samantha Morton as a strange water-creature in Minority Report. Rock and roll.

Day Two – Sunday

10.20. Blackpool South Beach. Wake up late. Watch Benjamin Zephaniah on breakfast TV moan about how crap Christmas is. The sea is dark and evil-looking.

11.00. The Grundy. Over £3.75 breakfast, check my phone to see when the Grundy opens. “Closed on Sundays,” it tells me. Super. The Grundy is the only art gallery in the whole of the UK to be closed on Sunday but open on Monday. Decide to visit the Blackpool Tower, stop off at Southport, then Liverpool. Wakefield had been part of the plan at some stage. It is now definitely not. 

12.00. Blackpool Tower Ballroom. The Ballroom is like a warm delicious cake crossed with a doomed Titanic. Lots of couples are dancing. The Sculpture prefers the sexy dances like the Salsa and the Samba – lots of leg and drama. I prefer the Emmerdale Waltz and the ones that look like old people just walking around. Strictly Come Dancing was here last week and the filming took eight hours according to yesterday’s taxi man. Apparently, good old BBC hospitality meant after four hours the audience got a “cup of orange juice and a biscuit.” We order two gins and it comes to an amazing £7.

14.30. Tower Eye. Realise Southport is now out of the question. Not quite ready to leave Blackpool so procrastinate and go up to the Tower Eye where we watch a 4D film that involves being sprayed with water and a lot of cleavage.

15.00. Supermarket. Now really late. Run-walk to the station, stopping off at the world’s biggest Sainsbury’s for snacks. They are selling Christmas dinners for £5.49. If you buy a coffee you get a free mince pie.

16.00. Blackpool North. Finally on train to Liverpool. Check Tate website on phone and realise it closes at 17.00. No Andy Warhol today then. If we get in on time we should have half an hour to see Art of the Lived Experiment at the Bluecoat.

17.40. The Bluecoat. Train is delayed into Liverpool. Run to Bluecoat. The DaDaFest show is better than expected. Brian Catling’s awkward bodily machines upstairs are good, nasty flappy tongues slapping on bony jaws… wish we could look at them for longer, wish they weren't up all those bloody stairs.

18.00. Crackers. There is not a Christmas cracker to be had in the whole of Liverpool. Everything's shut. We give up and look for Christmas dinner.

18.30. Yates's Wine Lodge. With a train back to London in one hour we have now been to no fewer than eight pubs (the only ones with a festive menu in November). Yates’s and Wetherspoon’s have all run out! Disaster! Finally we get to the last Yates's on Queen Square and they have a couple left. Hurray! We order two turkey dinners, extra cranberry, a much-needed bottle of wine and, on the suggestion of The Sculpture, a woo-woo cocktail that is served in a Christmas bauble. It tastes of plastic and sweet battery acid…

19.30. Liverpool Lime Street. On the train with minutes to spare. We polish off our Christmas dinner wine with cheese biscuits and congratulate ourselves. We did it. Kind of… well not really at all, actually, but it’s been fun. Happy Christmas!