Temporal Paradox Hotel, and coverage of the Big Busk

  (DISCLAIMER: As an overall nice human being, I do not force entry, vandalize, steal, or disclose means of entry or location if it isn't obvious. I do this to protect locations and respect them. Trespass without forced entry is a civil offence rather than a criminal one, which isn't worth acting on unless one causes damage, steals, has ill intent, etc. I simply photograph and leave everything as I find it. I do not condone breaking and entering, and I do not condone what I do. I'm a danger to myself and a terrible role model. )

I have quite a few blog posts saved as drafts, usually due to them being too accessible at the moment, or sometimes due to writers block, but most often due to being unable to sit down when there is adventuring to be done!

I can't help it! I'm addicted. If I know I can experience something breathtaking, that reminds me of why life is so goddamn amazing and beautiful, and it hurts absolutely no one, and all it requires is a little trespass and slight endangering of my own safety, how can I just stay at home and watch TV? I love life. The more I live, the more I love it, and apart from the continuation of loving life, the only thing I really want to do is help other people to love life too. And yet when people tell me I'm inspiring, it's often difficult to internally process. As much as I love myself, my ego is not delusional enough to trick me into thinking I'm anything more than just another biped, and my shit, both literally and figuratively, smells just as bad as everyone elses. I'm lost for words when I get told I'm inspiring, because in a world where we're taught we can change nothing, to inspire another human being is to literally go against that and have a positive impact on someones life. There's no greater compliment. It's quite a jawdropping one, so thank you to everyone who has ever said it to me.

Todays adventure isn't a jawdropper. In fact, it's the product of temporal paradox and probably shouldn't exist. Let me explain.

Ever since Sweyney Cliff, I've had a bunch of people say to me that they want to know the continued adventures of Sylvester Pookyprootches. I have honestly no idea. When I last saw Sylvester, he had (hand on heart) traveled back in time to the night of his conception to hand a condom to his parents, Terrence and Zebedina, just to see what happens. It's a paradox, because if he unconceives himself in the past then there's nobody alive in the present to travel back in time to unconceive himself, so he must still exist.

So I went to see him at his house, and found that due to a time/space anomaly it had actually been retroactively replaced with a long derelict hotel.
I guess that paradox thing really did alter history or something... Here's the Temperance Hotel!

This photo is stolen from Google. The rest are all mine though! The Temperance Hotel is currently either undergoing a demolition, or is only half-formed due to a temporal paradox causing a rift in space and time. It's not entirely in this universe. Therefore it's possible that this is being written by another me from another universe, but let's not go there. The only version of me I want to bump into is Future Me. I'd so sleep with future me, but I doubt I'm their type.

Nevertheless, this sort of thing is dangerous. I'm a terrible role model, and I do not condone exploring places that are undergoing deconstruction. They are arguably the most dangerous places one can explore

The Temperance Hotel was built in 1865. At least according to this new altered timeline. You won't remember the previous timeline because when Sylvester used time travel and reality changed, you changed with it. My cognitive abilities remain intact due to my poor grasp on reality. Which means I'm either immune to the effects of time travel misuse, or insane. You decide, readers.

So yes, it was constructed in 1865. The first stone was laid by a lady called Miss E. E. Lump, who was the daughter of the Rev William Lump. Rev Lumps wife, Emily, was integral to getting the project off the ground, along with the wife of the Vicar of St Alkmunds Church, Julia Wightman. By the 1870s it was owned by an ex-railway man, Thomas Edge. The hotel boasted “good accommodation for commercial gentlemen, every comfort for tourists, good fishing, horses and traps for hire, terms moderate.” The Edge family remained proprietors until the second world war, when it was bought by the army, presumably as a barracks, but I am not sure. The army eventually let it go in 1951. It was sold to a private owner in 1965, and a sign in 1978 claimed that the building had a bright future to look forward to as a Washteria. Some people do actually remember it being a washteria, but ultimately it ended up abandoned.

While exact dates are hard to come by, a Shropshire Star article from 2013, claims that it's been derelict for around a quarter of a century, and proceeds to blame its ugliness for other properties not selling, because what's media coverage without a villain? The same article also claims that the hotel was on sale for about four years, but had yet to be bought, and was in quite a state of disrepair. One of my readers says it was a nursery in the late 1980s, which means, if the Shropshire Star are being factual about that quarter-century thing, that this may have been the buildings latest incarnation before closing.
Numerous attempts have been made to save it. In 2002 there were talks of having it renovated and making it home to the Shropshire Hills Countryside Unit, but this never came to be.

With the knowledge that it had been abandoned for perhaps 25 years, give or take, I didn't know what to expect. There could be graffiti in there that predated my own existence, for surely over the years someone had gotten in.

Remember, buildings being demolished are very dangerous, but I snuck inside.
The things I do to ensure my friends haven't been swallowed by temporal paradoxes...

 The interior of the hotel had a very bright paint job. I'm surprised nobody has renamed this place "Red Wall Manor."

 Here in the main hall, semi buried under graffiti, were signs talking about a refund policy, and also a star shaped sign that says "Smile, you're on camera." Due to taking these pictures in the dark with no torch, I didn't notice until I got the photo onto my computer. Click it to see it big. The camera sign is in the loop of the E in "Like," underneath the sign with blue font.
It hints at some kind of retail usage in the buildings past.

In spite of this threat of surveillance I felt oddly unsurveilled. In addition, the ceiling was barely there, and the walls were slowly following.

In times like this I comfort myself with the logic that if most of the ceiling is around my feet, there's not a lot left to fall on my head.

With this logic concerning the ceiling comforting me, the sillier side of my mind decided I wasn't living dangerously (stupidly) enough and upon discovery of a cellar, I couldn't get down fast enough!

I love cellars.

Back on the ground floor, there were some stairs leading to the upper floors.

 But these stairs, in spite of the promise of inspiring genital related graffiti, had to wait, because there was a second staircase of even more intrigue.

 The door to these stairs had a nice big question mark slathered across it. What awaited me at the top? Zombies? Other names of genitals? Sylvester Pookyprootches???

 The stairs were horrendous in quality, and at the top a nasty hole in the floor awaited, granted, not big enough for my whole body to fall through, but it could certainly trip me up and the floor doesn't exactly look like a cosy thing to land on. Given that this was pitch black, I did have a near miss. My arch nemesis, Gravity, up to its old tricks.

Ultimately the stairway led to this room, where there was a lot of furniture

So there's a question mark painted onto the screen of the TV. What am I supposed to make of that? It looks like the set of a horror movie!
In all honesty, Samara from the Ring is my freakin' idol. Why? Because she has the right idea, albeit a technologically obsolete one. In the future we'll be able to replicate our brains with computer programs, and download ourselves, thus bypassing all that morality nonsense. We'll be able to say to our kids "Don't forget to back up your brains before you go out to play."

I'm sure that this place does have better toilets than some of the ones that we see in clubs and bars, but I couldn't go find out because there was no floor. Or at least, not one I'd take a chance on seeing as I was in a pitch black demolition site with no torch.

An incredibly trashed Kitchen.

Another bedroom, still partially furnished.

Eventually I did come across the graffiti-riddled stairway that I'd originally found. The writing on the walls was of all the profound inspirational literature you'd expect it to be.

Wait... whats that??

How have I been doing this for as long as I have and only just seen this reference now? Where was this in Camelot? That place closed down in 2012, while the Walking Dead TV series started two years earlier! And there wasn't a wall there that hadn't been scribbled on. You'd think someone would have come up with this. For shame, graffiti kids of Lancashire, for shame! The kids of rural south Shropshire know their stuff!

But whats behind that door???

Well, if there are any zombies, they've long since fallen to ground level, because the floor itself is kinda absent. What's left of it seems to be partially plugged with ceiling rubble. During the day I'm fairly confident that I could make it down here, but in the pitch black darkness without a torch, it wasn't something I was eager to attempt. Let's be honest, a building that is being demolished is perhaps the most unsafe building I could possibly explore. I don't condone what I'm doing at all.

 In the final room I could access, there was a lovely view of the street. Without a tripod, there was no way I was going to be able to get a decent photo but that's it right there.

The Temperance Hotel has unfortunately got more days behind it than ahead of it. By now they may even have torn it all down, and Sylvester Pookprootches remains elusive. I would love to have seen this place when it was more explorable. It must have looked amazing, still furnished as it is.

I just want to make a final reminder that going into demolition sites is not recommended. Ironically my love for life puts me in danger on a regular basis. But I know that there will come a time in my life when I'll no longer have the physical ability to do what I do now, and when I'm old I'll be proud that I took the opportunities available to make life the adventure that it is. An again, thank you to everyone who says that it's inspiring. Remember to love life and to love yourselves. There's no harm in loving yourselves. All the people in the history of the human race who have ever hurt any other human do it because they secretly hate themselves. Those who truly love themselves are the ones who just try to get on with enjoying their lives, and try to help other humans achieve the same inner peace, and the words like "Arrogant" and "egotistical" get thrown out there to make us ashamed of achieving this inner peace, by people who can't find it themselves. So love yourself. And help other people to love themselves.

Meanwhile, Shrewsbury recently had it's annual "Big Busk" which saw the town come to life with music, positive vibes and awesomeness. It's all for a good cause, raising money for the Shrewsbury Ark, which helps the homeless and downtrodden, and it's also all in memory of a local busker who tragically died some years ago. I did something I very rarely do, which was take to the rooftops in the middle of the day to snap some photos of the Big Busk from a totally different angle. You see, down on ground level there were all the photographers with decent equipment who knew what they were doing. The ground perspective was well and truly covered. My perspective of the Big Busk was unique, although I did take ground-level photos too. So here are some of my pictures from the day.

 A view of Pride Hill.

 A view of Butcher Row.

 Views of the square.

The last two photos are interior but still relevant to my blog because this is the Stop Cafe in what was once the Music Hall, one of my areas of interest for years before it was fixed up. Just to the right of these images are a couple of steps that lead to the office that was once a nuclear bunker, and beyond that are the ancient jail cells where people were temporarily held while awaiting their trials in the cinema on stilts in the square. The Music Hall was thoroughly explored by me and my old adventuring group, but the ground floor and below was always inaccessible due to motion sensors and alarms. However when the place reopened I did explain to the staff that I was doing this blog, and they let me check out the prison cells, office, and the cellar. The older blog posts covering the Music Hall can be seen here and here. Today the Music Hall has a really lovely cafe and a really interesting museum, including a taxidermied dodo in the main hall upstairs, where the Beatles actually once performed in the 1960s when the Music Hall was the place to be. It's great to see new talent filling this building with music again.

But that's all I got today. Please follow my Instagram and Twitter, and share this post on any social media platform of your choice.
Also if you can spare any pennies for the adventure fund, please click the donate button at the top. All proceeds go towards equipment that will make this blog better in the future. However, it's far more important that you get out and make the people around you happy, so go out and compliment someone or do your best to turn someones bad day around. Bonus points if you get a hug, but remember, happiness is not a competition.

Thanks for reading! Stay awesome!