Carlisle 24th July 2006.

I had thirty minutes to kill at Piccadilly Manchester so popped into the Ian Allen bookshop. The shop caters for transport nuts of every stripe, from train-spotters to bus-fanciers and all points in between. It even had books at £12 a pop listing every bus operator in the UK with the make and registration of every vehicle in their fleets. Even my step-dad would raise an eyebrow at bus-spotting and that’s saying something. An abiding memory of my teens is regularly returning from a weekend getting out of my gourd with my peers, to a house flooded with the sound of his steam train LPs, played at ear-splitting volume. But each to their own, I suppose.
As trains and buses are to some, so charity shops are to me. Carlisle has plenty of the big hitters, mostly clustered around Bank Street, including an Oxfam where I found a book called ‘Firefighting for Boys’, from the 1930s – evidently a less Health and Safety obsessed era. But what puts a spring in my step is coming across chazzas I’ve not spotted before. On Botchergate I spotted three; the Samaritans, Cumbria Cerebral Palsy, and Eden Valley Hospice. Cumbria Cerebral Palsy were selling a telly for £8. It was labelled ‘Telly, £8’, presumably in case anybody mistook it for a teak effect microwave.
On the same street were two branches of Wetherspoon’s, seven doors apart. I suspect the planning department let this go by because they were otherwise preoccupied by some high-concept mind-game they seem to be having with the shopping public. On Lowther Street they’d allowed the siting of a furniture shop called the Living Room directly opposite a café called the Dining Room. I imagine them going home from the office the day they pulled that off, announcing with a sinister smirk, ‘Guess what I did at work today, dear.’
Carlisle’s got a lot to recommend it. Prices are cheap; bed and breakfasts start around £20 per night, the charity shops sell shirts around £2, jeans for about £3. Fats, a bar on Paternoster Row, which had the leather-sofa-tastic décor beloved of a lot of trendy London bars, only charged £1.70 for lager and happily, wasn't thronged with tossers.
There's enough to see to justify a couple of days stay. The Tullie House gallery and museum had an excellent visiting exhibition on the ground floor, and the Old Tullie House had some nice William Morris related stuff. Both had free admission. Carlisle also has about the only millennium related bit of public art that doesn't make me goroan inwardly. The Carlisle Millennium underpass is far more interesting than it sounds, but then I suppose it would be. Strange engineering artefacts and a sculpture inscribed in Middle English made it one of the best underpasses I’ve ever walked through, by some margin.
Less impressive was Carlisle castle. A minicab driver once complained to me that with babies and circuses, you've seen one you've seen them all. I'm like that with castles. My advice is, find one that’s cheap to get into and commit the details of what you see to memory. Or get a book out of the library with some pictures.