“Taylor Made Fun” is an amusement arcade in Cleethorpes.
Taylor Made Fun
Spotted in Cleethorpes.
It was just about the only thing open on a cold and damp October Friday evening. It’s funny, you visit Cleethorpes as a child and remember it being big, exciting, and great for fish and chips. Then you go on your own as an adult and find that it’s none of those things.
I took the train from London to Cleethorpes so that I could walk along the sea wall to Grimsby Town’s stadium to watch Bradford City thump them 1-3. My hopes for having visited a “new” stadium were dashed when my dad told me that he’d never taken me to see Hull City when I was about 10 years old… I remembered going somewhere on the east coast to watch Bradford draw 1-1, but it turned out that it was Grimsby – so I managed to revisit a stadium I’d already been to, rather than visit a new one.
While looking up the route between the train station and the ground, I found some online reviews of some great fish and chips – so made sure to plan a route accordingly. The chip shop mentionned in the reviews had closed, but I managed to find a reasonable alternative. I was finishing off the chips when I walked by the first away fans’ entrance to the ground, and then paid at the turnstiles for the second entrance.
The only problem was that there is only one away fans’ entrance: I had entered the home end. I asked the stewards if they’d let me go through into the away fans’ end, but they didn’t believe me that I was a Bradford fan. I only had a train ticket from London to Cleethorpes, so couldn’t prove that I was from Bradford. I don’t have a Yorkshire accent any more. I had my Bradford scarf, but since I’d been eating hot chips I’d put it in my pocket so it didn’t look very convincing when I took it out of my bag. In the stewards’ defence, I didn’t present a very good case – especially when he decided to give me a ‘test’ and asked me which building was currently being demolished in Bradford. I didn’t know, so he asked me which road a particular cinema was on in Bradford, but I didn’t know that either.
He let me though eventually, after I claimed that he could tell that I was from Bradford because I didn’t have a Grimsby accent – not because he believed me, but I think because he realised that I wasn’t going to give up and I’d interrupted his conversation so if he let me go through, he could carry on.
Ironically, there was some crowd trouble at the end of the match and some fans ran onto the pitch – but they were Grimsby fans from the home end.