Howdo!
At this point it is customary for me to apologise for the delay and come up with some faintly engineered reason as to why I’ve been absent. This week I have an excellent reason: I went back to Liverpool for a day out and ended up in Glasgow on an extended break to mince about and eat hotdogs. Literally and euphemistically. So, although a week behind schedule, I hope you will enjoy the next instalment of our little mini-trip, with today’s destination being Liverpool (this time with Paul). Do I promise to get through the next 4,000 words without making a ‘calm down’ reference? No. But do bear with. As for the food and books: recipes will be back soon and if you have any of our books, I implore you to leave a review. It really helps us!
Everyone else, enjoy! And as I’ve said at the bottom, any feedback is always welcome. I adore hearing from you lot!
click here for part one | click here for part two
Perhaps the good news for you as a reader is that this entry will be considerably shorter than the previous Blackpool entry. I visit Liverpool on the regular and have seemingly exhausted the more unusual things to do – plus Dolly Fartin’ gets fussy if he doesn’t rest – so this day and night was to be a quieter one.
Before we get to Liverpool, I must tell you about our brief stop at the services between Blackpool and Liverpool. I know, I know, I always prattle on about our pitstops and say nothing more really than how aghast I am at the price for a can of Monster or that I’m glad of a chance to ogle some truckers. Indeed, both of those happened at Charnock Richard services – and if Charnock Richard doesn’t sound like the haughty villain in a Brontë novel then I ask you who does – but that isn’t why I’m mentioning it here. The reason is perhaps even more juvenile. See, we had stopped for sustenance, with Paul dispatched to KFC to get himself a grain of rice and a photo of some chicken to eat (because, as I have mentioned before, Paul is h-e-a-l-t-h now), whereas I was off to Starbucks to get some coffee you could stand a spoon up in. I was a mite tired from all that walking around Blackpool, after all, and there was little to zero chance I was letting Paul drive. We didn’t have his booster seat anyway, so that point is moot.
No, I mention my walk to Starbucks because I passed a bloke in the corridor – one who I admit I would have climbed into his lorry cab and headed for Gdańsk with if he had so much as made eye contact with me – who, as he went past, did the loudest, most troubling cheek-flapper I believe I have ever heard in my life. It wasn’t so much a fog-slicer as an attempt on my life. He could have nipped into WH Smith, positioned himself on the tannoy and bellowed the alphabet and it still wouldn’t have troubled the decibel-level that his room-clearer did. It could have blown a side parting into a bald head. To make things even funnier, he made zero attempt to hide or even acknowledge the fact he had so loudly clouded the issue. It occurred to me, after my own ears had folded back to their usual position, that he may have been deaf – and little wonder because if he did one of those wrong-way-burps in his lorry cab with the windows up it would be the audible equivalent of a plane crashing through the windscreen – but I rather hoped not. I hoped it was done with intent.
See, to me, a colonic calliope is always hilarious. No matter the situation, no matter the person – we all have to do it unless we want hours of stomach pain and cramps, and they should be celebrated. I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should kill the canary at any opportunity, there’s very much a time and a place, but I will never understand for example those couples who refuse to rear-roar in front of one another. I mentioned this anonymous whisper on our Facebook page and someone commented that they’d been with their partner for seven years and never once played the devil’s trombone in front of him. That boggles my mind as well as, presumably, her innards. I’d singed my knickers within about ten minutes of meeting Paul for the first time and we both laughed ourselves hoarse over it, which cemented in my mind that this was a bloke worth keeping. Had he clutched his chest in disgust – rather than clawing at his throat with his hands – I’d have told him I had to go and never spoken to him again. And think: had I done that, then there would be no twochubbycubs and you’d be having sad dinners every night. Gwyneth Paltrow’s life in Sliding Doors pivoted on whether she managed to board a tube train in time: mine all comes down to Paul laughing at my bum trumpets. It really makes you think.
Sustained and gagging, which to be fair is my usual position in a lorry park, we pressed on. We were supposed to be staying at The Arthouse Hotel which, according to the good folks at hotels.com, promised to be Liverpool’s most Instagrammable hotel. You know what that means folks: they’ve had a trolley dash around the tat aisles at The Range and bought some fairy lights from wish.com. High hopes I did not have. That said, I recently had reason to stay at The Adelphi, which is arguably Liverpool’s most condemnable hotel, so a soiled mattress behind a skip would have been an improvement.
Actually no that isn’t fair, I had a great night at The Adelphi. The only thing I knew about the Adelphi prior to my stay was what I remembered from watching Hotel on BBC One back when I could count my pubes with two hands and being in awe of the boss shouting and screaming at her staff in what I assumed then was Russian but now know to be the Scouse accent. She wasn’t quite up there with Jane Boulton from Airline in the ‘just as likely to glass you as help you’ customer-service stakes but she was certainly close. Fun fact for you: Eileen, the woman from Hotel, went on to manage Pontins and famously tussled with Anne Robinson on Watchdog about the clip of their hotels. If you would like to watch a masterclass in deflection and looking like the evil twin of Anne from The Chase, you can watch it right here.
The Adelphi is very much an on-brand Britannia hotel in that all the furniture looks like the kind you’d see loaded into the back of a forensics lorry after a nursing home expose, but it was charming in its ramshackle ways. My friend and I had booked a suite which was about four times the usual hotel room size with half the usual furnishings plus some genuinely mystifying darkened cupboards which you wouldn’t have been surprised to see a taped-up corpse fall out of in the dead of night. The bed creaked when I lay on it, but that’s no surprise: I could take a kip laying down on the A1 and the concrete would protest underfat.
I do feel a touch of sadness when you see these big Britannia hotels falling into disrepair – they’re beautiful old buildings that are usually fabulously ornate inside and true fallen out of time relics, but they’ve become tatty and worn with not enough money flowing backwards to restore them back to former glory. How do you raise enough capital to completely renovate a 402 bedroom hotel and then run it successfully when you can only reasonably charge about £60 a night and even then, have people turn up expecting glory and splendour only to get your bog-standard hotel room with added shouting outside? I mean, I’m not giving it a free pass here, there’s plenty of things that can be done to improve things with minimal cost. I’d start by, and I appreciate this is a level of niminy-piminy above and beyond, getting someone to remove the wads of chewing gum stuck to the mirrors in the hallway. I know, I’m a fusspot. But those people who rush onto tripadvisor and leave a one-star review because they’ve found a speck of paint in the sink or their reflection looked at them funny in the lift? They can bore off. Cut the hospitality service some slack, you self-important arses.
Anyway, I digress. Actually I digressed twice – first to the Adelphi and then onto moaning about tripadvisor. Where did I leave us? Ah yes, approaching Liverpool in our car heading for The Arthouse, only no, they had rang to advise us the hotel was ‘undergoing works’ and so, with our permission, they wanted to move us into their sister hotel The Shankly. The lass on the phone, misjudging my lifestyle a smidge, excitedly told me it was a football themed hotel dedicated to Liverpool’s best football manager, Bill Shankly. Well I could barely mask my excitement, because it was barely there. It will come as a surprise to no-one that football holds very little interest to either of us – it’s true that I can name plenty of footballers from the nineties but that’s only because I used to collect Panini football stickers because I was just too cool for Pogs. That’s bollocks too, I had Pogs coming out of my arse. She reassured us that the hotel was easy to find and parking would be no problem so we took her up on the offer. After a brief but exciting ten minutes of driving around Liverpool city centre with Paul providing counter-navigation to our Sat Nav (“I think the navigation probably knows more, dear”) and me reacting calmly and without fuss (“It’s fine, honestly, I’m fine”), we were there. Had I not spotted the hotel before driving into the car park I’d have assumed I’d driven onto the set of Hostel 4 but luckily, we were OK.
Check in took a wee bit longer than expected as the lady checking us in had just started, but I’d have forgiven her killing my parents frankly because she was so wonderfully cheerful. You know when someone just lights up a room? That was this lady and we were delighted to take our time whilst she fumbled the card machine and misheard my car registration number three times straight. After a fashion we were given our cards and headed up to our room which was up four storeys, through the Mersey tunnel and over the Irish sea. I’m not saying it was a trek but we had to set up base camp by the potted ferns halfway. Of course when we got to the room neither cards worked so we had to head back, but mistakes happen and, as I said, she was so delightful we had no real opportunity to be cross. We laughed gaily and both raised our eyebrows in a mutual ‘what are we like’ gesture and agreed that ‘we really ought to stop meeting like this’ before we said our goodbyes, walked back to the room with our suitcases and realised, again, the cards didn’t work.
I have to confess on our third visit to the counter the eunoia between us had dissipated a little and, slightly concerned it was laughter that was interrupting the tricky business of coding the keys correctly, we kept things a tad more businesslike. Though I will say this – despite blood pooling in my shoes and half of my ankle skin hanging off in blisters – when her supervisor came over to ask if there was a problem, we saved her bacon by saying we’d put the cards next to our phones and wiped them twice over. I’m not suggesting we are heroes, no, but we ought to get a medal. Not least because Paul had shrunk by two inches with all the walking.
Thankfully, the cards worked on the third attempt and we were in our room. It was…interesting. Absolutely nothing wrong with it, very clean, but absolutely massive. It had a full sized lounge, a kitchen, a bedroom that could accommodate a coach tour. My personal favourite was the free-standing shower over the giant bath with bubble jets, which I immediately filled with every bottled unguent in the room and spent a merry twenty minutes sloshing frothy water all over the floor. It sounds mean to say it but the room reminded us both of those videos you see online where a visitor gamely and cheerfully assists with an entire pissed up rugby team, most of whom are standing around looking disinterested and drinking warm lager. I appreciate that’s a niche reference but it really did! I had to hope that was dried PVA glue making the mattress protector crinkle.
A quick stop for Jennifer Beals to freshen up
Now, mindful of the fact that I said this would be a shorter entry and we’ve spent 2,000 words getting to the hotel – coupled with the fact that this stay involved a lot of walking around a city that I’ve written about at length in previous blog entries – I’m going to write about the things we did rather than all the minutiae between.
In the evening we had noodles and kept our heads down.
First on the list of things to do were two escape rooms, both at Breakout Liverpool, one at the start of the day and one at the end. The first was Heist, your standard break into a vault affair which was pleasingly linear. Sometimes that can be a good thing like this, where you see the solutions generally in the order you require them, although I tend to prefer rooms where you can see lots of puzzles and solutions at once and have to spend time marrying them up. After a brief moment at the start where we stumbled over a translation exercise, we motored through without help and claimed the record for the quickest room completion that day. I mean, they’d just opened, but still, it felt good to finish first. Certainly unusual for me in Liverpool I can tell you. Our victory was short-lived though as by the time we had returned for Reclassified, we had been knocked off the top spot.
Naturally Paul and I were devastated and spent the entire time in Reclassified with our fists balled in our mouth trying not to succumb to sobbing, but this is another fun room with plenty to do. Reclassified is a single room experience which is increasingly rare in escape rooms these days as they all feel they have to have hidden rooms and big reveals. Reclassified shows you can do a lot with a small space and a good mix of physical and mental puzzles, even if one of the puzzles made absolutely zero sense at all. The lass in charge of the room came in and explained it afterwards to which Paul and I made appreciative noises, agreed that we could totally see the solution, and then made what-the-fuck faces to each other. All I’m saying is this: if you’re relying on two people with one working set of eyes between them to solve an optical illusion, then you’re in for a long wait.
If you’re thinking of doing an escape room in Liverpool, rather than the big chains, may we point you towards Cluefinders? They’re an independent escape room business and run by the most enthusiastic, cheerful people you could ever hope to meet. I’ve never played a bad room there and for a ‘small’ company, the rooms are always very inventive. You will need to set aside two hours per one hour room because you’ll be chatting so long afterwards with them, but trust me when I say this is no bad thing. Any support you can give them, please do. You can find their website here – and please do mention that you came via twochubbycubs. It won’t give you a discount or anything but it will give you the opportunity to interrogate them as to what the sight of the top half of my arse looks like pressed up to a security camera.
We also spent a merry time looking around the Museum of Liverpool, after waiting twenty or so minutes for them to open. We stood away from the door as it can look a trifle unseemly to be itching underfoot to finally see what a difference the docks made to Liverpool – you don’t want to look too keen. We distracted ourselves by watching a tourist taking endless photos of herself posing in front of the museum. She pulled every single expression you could make with a human face and then went back through the range for another go. Tell you what though, what started off as comical to watch fast became exhausting and then, ultimately, genuinely, quite sad. I’m by no means someone who is afraid of a camera but even my endless selfies are a three-shots-and-done business, whereas I genuinely wouldn’t have been surprised to see her pull a dolly track and a drone from her Hello Kitty rucksack in the pursuit of the ‘perfect photo’. She must have took over a hundred snaps over the course of the time we were sat and not once did she actually look happy. Smiling absolutely but entirely dead behind the eyes. It put me in somewhat of a pensive mood as we went in.
See, one quick pose and you’re done – Paul wearing his Nelly plaster to hide a zit
That pensive mood lifted the moment I caught sight of the older bear wandering around behind the counter, who was all grey beard and sparkling eyes. He was a delight! So too was the museum: local museums can be very hit and miss but given Liverpool’s extensive history in trade, industry, football, music and entertainment, the museum has a lot to draw on. I mean, did you know The Beatles were formed in Liverpool? Well fret not, because fuck me you’ll know within four seconds of arriving, three if you’re coming in via Liverpool John Lennon Airport. A Beatles reference as the name for an airport – Imagine. I confess myself disappointed that there wasn’t a Cilla Black statue, though modelling those lift-door teeth out of brass would probably bankrupt the city.
Oh and I know there used to be a statue of Cilla in the town before you write to tell me. I hope it was made into bottle-tops. My favourite ‘queen of the common folk’ Cilla story comes from Twitter – so probably as made up as Cilla’s pretend accent – where she was sat in seat 1A in first class on British Airways and refused to speak to the air stewardess, demanding her PA spoke for her instead. The stewardess, tired of being looked down upon, leaned in and said ‘Cilla, I knew you couldn’t sing, but I had no idea you couldn’t talk’. I hope to goodness that is true.
We must have spent a good ninety minutes rattling around the museum, pressing buttons and trying to catch the eye of the chap we saw earlier. Among the exciting things we learned was Liverpool comes from ‘Muddy Pool’ – it’s always interesting to learn the histories of why places are called what they are. Hopefully one day I’ll solve the mystery of Newcastle. What could it mean? Liverpool is also the home of the biggest clock in the UK, though I confess I misread that and had started browsing Rightmove for houses to buy before Paul corrected my error. Either way, I’m putting two hands and my face on it, ayooo.
Liverpool also has a stone ruin that is older than Stonehenge – I know him as Martin – and the two liver bird statues on top of the Liver Building are known as Bella and Bertie. Bella faces the sea to protect those on the water whereas Bertie looks over the city to keep those on the land safe from harm. We have the same idea in Newcastle: Denise Welch stands on top of the Monument at night to drunkenly wave her knickers at the trains arriving at the Central Station and Robson Green poses at St Mary’s Lighthouse pretending to visitors that he’s a proper Geordie. For the record, he’s about as Geordie as I am. And lives in a matchbox. With a drawing pin as a dining table.
With the museum completed, we wandered around the Albert Docks, although we would have been substantially drier swimming straight across because the heavens didn’t so much open as flood the Earth. I haven’t seen rain like that for a long time. Not wanting to take the risk of having a flash flood catching Paul’s feet and swirling him down a crack in the pavement, we dived into the Tate Liverpool. You know what’s coming don’t you? Yes! My usual statement about us having no culture and art galleries leaving us cold and my desperate, fervent desire to actually ‘feel’ something other than discomfort and boredom in an art gallery.
Paul practising his gallery face
Well…gasp, it ALMOST happened. I’m not going to pretend I had some epiphany because I didn’t, but there was a genuinely interesting exhibition on all about climate change called Radical Landscapes. Naturally, it was the only exhibition you had to pay for, and I didn’t half wince when Paul handed over the card, but I’m glad we did. It gave us something to focus on whilst we lightly steamed dry under the bright lights of the gallery and I admit right here it was lovely to not feel like an empty husk for once.
My favourite was this photo of me attempting dogging for the first time
Speaking of feeling like an empty husk, Paul advised me as we were leaving that he would need a brief moment to go make a deposit in the porcelain bank. We retrieved our coats from the basement and I sat down to wait in the cloakroom whilst he went off to the loo across the corridor. All very routine. I sat for almost ten minutes before I realised Paul had seemingly vanished. I went into the gents to see if I could spot his size 12 Naff Co 54 trainers poking out the bottom of the cubicles but the doors were full length and plus, I didn’t fancy being arrested for being the world’s fanciest pervert cruising the bogs of the Tate, so went back to my seat for another five minutes. Paul has been known to take his time with his ablutions so I wasn’t too concerned but once almost twenty minutes had passed I threw up my arms and stomped upstairs so I could get a signal in order to text him to hurry up.
That’s where I spotted my dear husband perusing the gift shop without a care in the world save for finding some overpriced tat that I’d need to carry around for the rest of the day. He looked entirely surprised by my curt enquiries as to where the fuck he had been, and explained that he had assumed I’d gone into the toilet after him. That didn’t quite appease me given a) he would have walked straight past me on his way out of the toilets and b) I’m a very efficient shitter, in that I’ll be in and out without any significant delay. I asked how long he would have waited before coming to check on me and he replied thirty minutes. Half an hour! The only time I’ve spent half an hour in a public toilet was when I was a teenager and testing out the knees on my C&A trousers and even then I’d be wrapped up and smoking a cigarette after twenty. Minutes that is, not blokes.
We agreed that it would be best to fit a bell onto his collar and left, thankfully into sunshine, towards our next destination: the Liverpool Wheel. As you might expect from the name, this is a hedge maze in Doncaster. Well obviously not, it’s one of those giant ferris wheels that have sprung up all over the UK that give you the chance to coo over a cityscape from your own pod as it slowly completes a revolution or two. Newcastle is getting its own very soon called The Whey-I. It doesn’t work so well spelled out but if you say it in a Geordie accent (ask Robson for tips) it sort of works. Curiously, they’re planning on putting it so it overlooks Byker on one side and er…a concrete mixing plant on the other. I know they’re stymied a bit about being able to build it somewhere where it doesn’t block the view of something beautiful – and mind, Newcastle is absolutely awash with amazing views – but they definitely need to rethink its placing.
Liverpool’s wheel doesn’t have that issue though – the views were wonderful. Admittedly, it took me a revolution and a half before I plucked up the courage to fully relax and enjoy myself. It’s the most curious thing: heights don’t phase me in the slightest but put me in one of those pods – and mind, it really is only ferris wheels where this happens – and I get a pain in my kidneys and tense right up. I think it’s a combination of knowing you’re trusting your life to a couple of bolts and a chap whose mind is probably still preoccupied with his Tesco meal deal. Either way, I’ll sit bolt upright, clinging onto the seat with my fingers, legs and bumhole, until we’ve done one full pass and I know we’re not going to tear off and tumble into the Mersey like we’re in the world’s shittiest version of that gyrosphere ride in Jurassic World. Once I had relaxed it was marvellous and thoroughly worth the £16 or so fee to board. It’s certainly the highest I’ve been in Liverpool for many months.
See? Relaxed. It’s all fine!
It does baffle me somewhat that they need to put a warning sign on the door expressly telling you you mustn’t wrench the doors open mid-turn and step outside. Who is that for? Who becomes so bored by a trip around a wheel that they think the most sensible thing to do is to add a 196ft free-fall drop into their afternoon? And yet, at Ferris HQ (they never get anything done, they’re just going round in circles) (sorry), they must have considered this a big enough risk that they needed to counter it with a warning sign. The mind boggles and the body splats.
Who is this for?
And that, my lovely readers, is that. We did do other things but we’d be here all day if I was to recount them all and I’m keenly aware of my promise to keep this short. What can I say, I’m a terror. The next stop on our trip was Manchester, where we would drink too much and beat off a bloke with peak meet-me-at-McDonalds hair. I wish I could tell you it’s not what it sounds like, but it absolutely is.
Hope you enjoyed! As ever, really would welcome your feedback. I know we’re a food blog and we’re slightly more absent on recipes than you’d expect but it really has been lovely taking a break. Part four will be next week, assuming I don’t see something shiny and end up driving across two countries like I did last week. I’d apologise, but I’m shameless.
James x