We caught the last minutes of operation, but already the feeling of shutdown had settled and we didn’t ride anything despite the lack of queues. Everyone working there looked tired and ready to leave—some already had; strings of once-bright light bulbs hung dull and lifeless. At the fast food place they had run out of napkins and ketchup and half the menu. We wondered when the cut off date for ordering had been, how many days had the essentials been deemed non-essential.
We went back to our hotel room which had been upgraded from a double to a superior family room with a playstation and extra bunk beds. We were young enough to think this was cool, but old enough to decide this change had been more convenient for the staff. The corridors were eerily quiet, even in the early hours when the hen/stag parties of Blackpool would normally be dragging themselves back to their beds, laughing, squealing and shoving like kids on a school trip. A goodbye of sorts, some of them more ready than others.
The next day the wind shocked us with its vigour, and forced us into side streets, hanging on to each other to stay out of the road. These streets were quiet, inhabited only by the few locals who knew which shops would still be open, and charged past the closed ones with stubborn determination, desperate to get home to their teapots. But we were thinking only of the wind which took our words away but reminded us of Tintagel and the last time it had forced its way into our bodies. When it felt like our love emerged, trembling; forced from our cells by the invading air and unable to hide anymore.
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