I remember last August Bank Holiday Monday, after a particularly careless Creamfields, sitting atop a bale of hay, looking down on Wirral’s fields of gold, flaggan of ale in hand, looking for all the world like a walk-on in Cider With Rosie.
After two nights gurning to watery trance under the big tops of Daresbury, this was the perfect antedote. If a doctor had seen me (and, really, there were moments when it came close) this is exactly what he would have ordered. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2009
In the Line of Beauty
I was driving towards Walton yesterday and saw something so stunning I had to stop the car and park up. And that’s not a decision you take lightly.
It was a warm afternoon, and I’d caught the sunlight bouncing off the glass of Stanley Park’s renovated conservatory. All 1,500 panels of it. And it looked beautiful.
Abandoning my suddenly squat, functional-looking Skoda to the whims of the traffic cops, I strolled over. Clipped terraces of box hedges, rose gardens and grassy lawns swept up past the bandstand. To my left, small children raced around in a well-maintained playground.
I could have been in Versailles. Continue reading
The Best Possible Taste?
Laughing all the way to Embankment. AA Gill.
AA Gill is an excellent writer. He’s also a recovering alcoholic. It’s a condition we understand that, but for a twist of fate, could befall any of us. It is, in short, something we have no control over. Like being black, ginger, or Northern.
These days, who we are, where we come from, what makes us ‘us’, is something we’ve fought for the right to own. And, equally, we have the right to defend when ignorance tempts some to use our differences to separate us, or single us out as less culturally significant.
So it’s always puzzled me why Gill persists on treating Northerners like (and I quote) “stupid bastards”. And it disappoints me that one of our best food critics remains so bullishly disinterested in the flavours of the entire nation. Continue reading
Private. Members Only.
200 years of history. And that's just the members. The Athenaeum.
Most weekends, my route into town takes me down dark alleyways and quiet side streets. It doesn’t have to. I have to make a detour to some of them. And, whatever route I take, there’s always a doorway, with a ‘private members’ plaque, or sulphur-lit stairway, descending below street level to a club. But not any club - one that you have to know about to get into. In my mind, the goings-on behind these members-only meeting places hidden in the city’s half-lit backstreets are like that party in Eyes Wide Shut. Masks, chanting, secret hand signals and flagrant disrobing. Like Primark, but with less polyester. Continue reading
Old Dog. New Tricks.
Absorbent kitchen roll to be used for life drawing classes only
So, I’ve got a bit of time on my hands. And, after a summer spent writing travel guides while listening to Ken Bruce’s Popmaster, I’m figuring it’s time to give my head a bit of a workout. I consider myself a lifelong learner. Just these past few months, thanks to a daytime TV correspondence course, I’ve become an expert at working out the value of random Franklyn Mint plates snatched from the walls of poverty-line pensioners. I can put a fair estimate on any three sink estate houses in Sunderland, and, thanks to Deal or No Deal, understand perfectly which floral prints work with inappropriately bleached hair. And they say Daytime TV’s the last refuge of the smackhead and the out of work journalist.
Continue reading
The Illusion of Choice
Paradise
Those goths swarming like a cluster of black holes around the Liverpool ONE galaxy – why didn’t they make it onto the artist’s impression? We were lead to believe it would be smug white couples, parading hand-in-hand, laughing and swinging their tote bags in the sunshine across the park. Thank God it’s not. I like the goths. They’re so undemographic. Their off-the-shelf angst suits the plastic grass nicely.
Liverpool ONE’s been with us a year now. And, to celebrate, the ‘other’ Liverpool – confusingly calling itself Liverpool City Centre – has launched an advertising campaign, bragging about the region’s ‘history’ (well, you have to find a USP somewhere. And if it’s not going to be outdoor elevators, history’s a decent card to play). Continue reading
Random Harvest
Leeds Liverpool Canal. Or, lunch.
There are better ways to economise in the kitchen than sell your soul to Sainsburys’ ‘Feed Your Family for a Fiver’ Campaign. I don’t need to watch Economy Gastronomy either. Which pleases me no end, because it’s the kind of programme where the presenters talk to someone off camera, instead of talking to you. Which is hateful.
No, I don’t need to do any of this because I live on Merseyside. God’s larder. And I’ve been down the Leeds Liverpool Canal, just as it passes through Bootle. Honestly, there’s more fresh herbs along there than in Nigella’s store cupboard.
Antisocial Media
Chuck up or shut up
“I care about people more than I care about myself…my gift is my curse…yeah, clap that up because it’s the real shit…”
Gary Veynerchuk has over 800,000 followers on Twitter. And he’s giving a keynote at a Web 2.o Social Media Conference. And it’s about ‘monetising your personal branding’. And I think he’s American.
The audience are loving it. Every. Single. Word. Continue reading
The Northern Way
Something wicked this way comes. The Yule Lads.
You think Icelandic popstars are strange? Maybe it’s got something to do with their twisted childhoods.
See, up there, they don’t bother too much with big fat Coca-Cola branded Santa Claus and his merry band of minimum-wage elves. No, up in the cruel north, kids are brought up in fear of the 13 Yule Lads. And they’re not a seasonal charity football team. They’re a bunch of mischievous, criminal, maladjusted pranksters – intent on making the 13 days before Christmas as tortuous as possible for little Bjorks and Jónsis. Continue reading
Time, Gentlemen, Please
Sorry Dad, wrong number. Mystery Jets.
Are the Mystery Jets really breaking barriers employing a Dad on guitar? Not really. They don’t take him out on tour. That would be more Victorian Freak Show than NME Shockwaves.
The band’s Will Rees tells it like it is: “He’s still a band member, but he stays at home. He just doesn’t play live with us any more ‘cause I think he’s like 56 or something. Not having him on tour has allowed us to do what young bands do – get on the razz. We always have fun on the road, but we’ve just been having a little bit more fun.”
Fair enough. And, let’s face it, he was also, like, almost as old as Tom Watson, that man who, against all the odds, made it to 59 and is still able to hit golf balls more or less in a straight line. Continue reading
