Chaz and Mike do....Derby!

A skip and a hop and a £4.60 Zig Zag away lives Nottingham's rival sister city Derby - a nice change for an average shopping day trip to Nottingham busy centre - or so we thought.. Actually yes, yes it was, it turned out to be an interesting and productive day out. We started our adventure on the extremely commendable Red Arrow service, which serves Nottingham, Derby and Chesterfield (another possible 'Mike and Chaz do' destination perhaps?) every 15minutes. It's advertised as a 20 minute journey between the QMC and Derby, but in reality it was more like 25/30.

Derby's main attraction is the new Westfield shopping centre [the advantages of which being pretty apparent in the already baking sun] a recent controversial development containing all the usual high street chains - Marks and Spencer, Topshop, H&M and so on and also a luxury cinema and a large food court - the latter being our first destination. It was pretty futuristic with its high ceiling and "Mexican-fusion" and "Asian Noodle" food. There was a large variety of choice, with many places to sit (often the downfall of a shopping centre food court) with choices ranging from "KFC" to "Jacket Potatoes" and "Pie and Mash!", after not much consideration we plumped for a "Burger King" meal of Cheese and Bean burgers. Mine was pretty average - a bit too dry for my liking. After lunch a bit of retail therapy temporarily soothed our empty souls, Mike bought a bargain of a suit from H&M for a mere £22 and I made good use of my discount.

Outide of the bright, air-conditioned Westfield, we found clear examples of the 'doughnut effect', i.e. many of the surrounding streets are filled with pretty grimy cheap shops or sad empty buildings. What appeared to be the central square, complete with grumpy goths and skater teens of course, was a concrete nightmare, with for some reason had a large screen showing a Wimbledon matches for an audience of no one. Even weirder was a small shrine underneath to the recently deceased King of Pop himself. Walking over, we had expected it to be a local death, but nope instead we found a few framed pictures of MJ. Resisting temptations to steal one, we wondered further around the city finding what would probably be one of the main reasons to visit again - an amazing guitar shop.

Foulds actually consisted of more than just guitars, but other instruments were located in a separate room downstairs, which we did not visit. The guitar part however, was good enough containing enough beautiful guitars for us to drool over - I myself enjoyed a black custom tele and Mike a black and red Ibanez and the lovely Jaguar. Also, of interest was a fairly strange bass, I've not come across before with some rubber strings, which looked quite fun to play. The shop itself, was set across many small rooms, across 3 floors, with a very extensive classical and acoustic room and a jazz guitar room that was closed, it felt a bit like a very strange house. We also enjoyed a room full of lovely Orange amps, a sight rarely seen in music shops outside of London, which made a nice surprise, another being the range of pedals, which as well your usual tasty range of multi-coloured Boss pedals and also not usual elctro-harmonix range there was also a welcome selection of Behringer pedals, for your not so discerning povo guitar player. While not as pretty as the aforementioned Boss range, these plastic beasts are overdraft friendly at more than half the price and the delay pedal has been quite tempting to me for some time, however, I have only seen them on the Internet - thus far. Whilst musing over the matter, Michael decided to jump right in and shit over my deliberations and decided to buy one for himself. As fate would have this be, it was the last one in stock. Typical. However, it also meant i still the money and also have the pedal to play with. Move over Mono indeed.It was definitely one the best music shops I've ever been in, more tall and cosy than your usual boring ones. Apparently, the first store was opened in Nottingham and was one of largest music stores in the country but sadly closed down during the depression, tis a great shame indeed.

As we walked towards the Cathedral we walked past the most grandiose and palatial Wetherspoons I've ever seen:



The picture here doesn't really do it justice. As you might have guess from its name, The Standing Order was once a bank with the old 1930s hall now as the main room complete with booths and books. Sadly, we didn't stop, but I would definitely like to go back for a drink one time. There seemed to be lots of interesting hidden pubs/bars around that might make it worth a good drinking trip someday!

Onwards from the Cathedral - which itself was a nice visit, but you know pretty much your average church and not really worth its own paragraph - we headed towards the 'Derby Museum and Art Gallery' , the ambiguity of its name a clue to the utter randomness of the shite that hid inside.



Reluctant at first to go and scared off by unwelcoming foyer and old people, I was finally persuaded when Mike pointed out some fossils on the floor. Our first point of call being the china/pottery gallery (see facebook for picture references). It was pretty boring, unless you're into that kinda stuff, my mum woulda liked it. The website tells me that it is a collection of 'international importance', I didn't really see it. We've similar stuff at home. Next, was some paintings by some famous Derby painter. Then we stumbled into the 'natural history' part, a wollaton-park-lite esque place, that was pretty 1970s BBC science, all dark and musty. This obviously led on to a military gallery featuring uniforms and a tank, a quick pose in a old army jacket and we then learnt about 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'. This was probably the only section where I actually learnt something, um, something about someone invading somewhere and then Prince Charles wrote a letter in a room and there was a storm. Other points of interest included the mummy room (a corner with two, count them, two mummies - British Museum eat your heart out) and a picture gallery about landscapes and then random exhibition about music. And there you go. All in all, pretty damn strange. For all its present over usage, random really is the word to describe the place.

And that was mostly it. Had Michael actually taken his finger out and actually done his contribution, this would have been published several weeks ago and be a bit more relevant. Although, we did drop by Derby the other day coming back from Insert Coin to have a cheeky pint whilst waiting for our connecting train to Notts. We stumbled across the infamous pub/venue the Vic Inn, which I had heard had shut down, but it was indeed alive and kicking and seemed a really nice place. I definitely vote Derby for the next pub crawl!