By lying on the bed with my head at a certain angle, I can look out through three of the five arched glass panes that make up part of the Victorian bay window to my room. This is most definitely a ‘Room With A View’. A view across the spectacular Irish Sea. Spectacular not in movement or activity, but spectacular in the vista of almost complete stillness and perfect serenity. Tranquility. This is not the sea of Conrad, nor is it that of Turner. No more is it the poetry of Masefield. This sea, my sea, has a quality which is almost lunar in manifestation.

Grey – there must be over a hundred shades of grey here – broken only by the odd splodge of white grudgingly provided by an odd wispy cloud or two. From the heights of the heavens right down to the faintly visible beige tips of the sands below via a far, far, far off distant horizon. A gliding sea bird provides a token disruption but serves only to underscore this completely naturalistic panorama. Beauty so innately natural that it is suggestive of a world where Nature is omnipotent in her beauty and splendour. This must surely be a water-colourist’s dream, just aching to be transferred on to a piece of crisp, clean white cartridge paper.

Shades of Grey.

By shifting my head ever so slightly, the hard reality of the world outside my window brutally hits me. Garish multi-colored garlands of light bulbs hang precariously from lamp posts and Technicolored tableaux scream at me from the seaside promenade. This veritable feast of eclectic, electric magic – for these are the Illuminations – burn uninvited on to my retinas. And they aren’t even turned on yet!

This is Blackpool. BLACKpool. The clue is in the first syllable. The colour of depression; of lack of hope. Despite these man made fluorescent fancies the town remains essentially black. A town breathing what is possibly a final breath. This is ‘Costa Del Dole’, a place where the sun seems hardly even to rise let alone shine. Migrants from Manchester and Liverpool have long since arrived here with their own personal economic skills. Thievery, begging and cheating for the most part. This is the black shadowy world of the smackhead and the shop-lifter, the beggar and the alcoholic. Once grand and majestic hotels have been converted into ‘Houses of Multiple Occupation’ to accept the unfortunates one and all. Disgorging them out in twos and threes onto streets that accept them as the new norm. The very bricks that make up these grand Victorian dames seem to weep white, salty tears into the dark, damp and miserable streets in which they sit.

Forced into squalid little rooms lacking the comforts of modern life their modern inhabitants find their future hopelessly black. The only light in their dark depression laden days is to be found at the bottom of a can of Tennants Super Lager or wrapped in a scrap of cheap tin foil.

For they are VICTIMS. Victims of a state which lines the pockets of unscrupulous landlords with government rent cheques and provides the claimant with the bare, most meagre of subsistences.

Shit. Seagull shit.

It plops on my window. A mucky colour with a modicum of white. But mostly grey.

Shades of Grey.