The Olympic Torch Goes By
I climbed the hill and then waited on the platform on which the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral is built.
The pictures are in the order I took them.
If I’d made a video, you would have heard the bells ring out. Just as they did, when the Relay passed the Anglican Cathedral.
A few thimgs to note in the various pictures :-
2 – This picture shows the platform at the right, where I took the pictures from.
3 – Lloyds Bank TSB’s publicity vehicle was a converted Bedford CF van, that started its life selling ice cream.
18, 19 – You can spot the Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly in full regalia. Admittedly, it was mainly red, white and blue. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but I don’t know whether he blessed the relay.
21, 26 – The giant puppets are from Hope Street Ltd. and represent Beatles characters.
23,24,25,26 – The building directly opposite is part of Liverpool John Moores University. In my day it was a Roman Catholic Teacher Training College. Opposite the building and behind the one with all the columns, used to be the Everyman Theatre, which is currently being rebuilt.
35 – Note the man on the crane.
36,37,38,39 – The torch and a kiss is in there somewhere.
40 – Walking back towards Brownlow Hill and the University.
What it was like at ground level is shown by this video.
Location, Location, Location
With a house, business premises or a restaurant, it’s all about location.
As a coeliac and lover of Italian food, I like Carluccio’s restaurants and eat out in them fairly often.
However, the location of their Liverpool restaurant, is in one of the best places I’ve seen for a restaurant of its type.
I just went out of Lime Street Station walked down the hill for about four minutes, through the bus station and then I was on Whitechapel, a pedestrianised street, that leads between the bus and train stations to Liverpool One Shopping Centre and the Pier Head. The restaurant, is also not far from the Walker Art Gallery and St. George’s Hall.
Incidentally, just round the corner is a taxi rank and Tommy Steele’s statue of Eleanor Rigby.
So it’s in a great location to either start or finish your visit to Liverpool City Centre.
It was also much busier than I expected, as I was at an odd time for lunch. But then I seem to remember that Liverpudlians tend to be very efficient in their trips to a restaurant, as they’ve always got something important to do afterwards.
The BBC’s Description of Today’s Torch Relay Leg
The Olympic Torch is going from Bolton to Liverpool today. I was drawn to their description of the leg on the BBC’s web site.
Through Lancashire and down the coast to Knotty Ash, made famous by Ken Dodd and his Diddy Men characters, via Aintree Racecourse to Liverpool, home of The Beatles, two top football clubs and once known for its wealth as the “Second City of Empire”.
In my view Liverpool may not now be the “Second City of Empire”, but it’s certainly the Second City in the UK.
The description is accompanied by a picture of a horse jumping to victory in the Grand National. I thought for a moment the horse was Red Rum, but the picture is more recent, the colours are wrong and the horse doesn’t have a sheepskin noseband.
Eat your heart out Manchester!
Where’s your historic city centre, world-famous racecourse and amazing river? To name but three!
Rocking Back to the Past
Last night, I went to the theatre to see the stage version of the film, Backbeat, at the Duke of York’s theatre.
It was well-worth the ticket price and I haven’t enjoyed a musical play so much in years.
The only problem is it closes next Friday, so if you want to see it, you haven’t much time.
The play is mainly about how the Beatles formed into the four musicians we know so well and a fair proportion covers the story of their trips to Hamburg, where Stuart Suttcliffe left the band to continue his artistic career under Eduardo Paolozzi. Sadly, Sutcliffe died in April 1962 at just 21. I know little of art, but I have friends who do, and Sutcliffe’s early death may have been a bigger tragedy than we think.
The play catches the mood of Liverpool in the sixties well, although I arrived in the city, after the Beatles had left and they play a lot of the songs that have been handed down from that time.
I did see the Beatles once though, that was at the Hammersmith Odeon after Christmas in 1964. Sadly, I never saw them again. There’s more detsils of that here.
I often wonder what the world would be like, if the Beatles hadn’t happened. I’d probably lose at least a laugh a week, as somewhere I’ll hear strains of their music and it will bring a smile to my face.
I think the saddest thing is probably the death of John Lennon and what would the world be like if he hadn’t have been shot? He might have been the one figure who could have helped stop the disastrous interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan.
But to return to last night. As I walked home after dancing in the aisles of the theatre to the tunes of the Beatles, I almost wouldn’t have minded having a serious heart attack and going then. I’ve seen two of my nearest and dearest have long drawn out deaths, so something fast, when I’m in a happy mood might do for me. But it will have to be medical, as I’m going to reach the span that my body will set for me.
Abbey Road Station
In the next few days or so, cable thieves permitting, the new extension of the DLR will open to Stratford International.
This will mean there will be a new station called Abbey Road.
I wonder how long after it opens, the first tourists turn up looking for the famous recording studios, where the Beatles made most of their records.
Perhaps the station should have been called Abbey Mills or Bazalgette, in honour of the Northern Outfall Sewer and the Abbey Mills Pumping Station nearby.
Dedicated To All the Lonely People
Eleanor Rigby is one of the Beatle’s most famous songs and one of the few songs, with its own sculpture.
Eleanor Rigby, Stanley Street, Liverpool
The sculpture was created by Tommy Steele, who is better known as a rock-and-roll singer and musical performer. He gave the sculpture to the City of Liverpool in honour of the Beatles.
I sat for a few moments with Eleanor and thought of C, who never saw the modern Liverpool.
Just Another Boy Band!
A texter has just described the Beatles thus on Radio 5.
They obviously never saw them live as I did, or watched as they saved a city from self-destructing, as Liverpool most likely would have done, if they had never come along!
They also inspired me, as in my years at Liverpool University, enough of what they created rubbed off on me, so that I became a modest success. Would I have become the same man without Liverpool and the Beatles? I doubt it!
Back to Square One
I had thought that I’d found a house to move to in Canonbury in North London. But it failed the survey yesterday, and so I won’t be buying it.
But at least there would seem to be lots of suitable places for sale in the area to the east of Highbury and Islington.
So I’m going to start looking again.
I would really love to live in de Beauvoir Town, as C and I nearly moved there years ago, but instead we went to the flat in the Barbican.
I remember that we looked at a house owned by the writer, Alun Owen. Strangely, I’d met him before when he was a guest at dinner in the Liverpool University hall of residence, where I lived in my last year at University. Owen is probably best known for his screenplay for the first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night!
Nowhere Boy
I went to see the film, Nowhere Boy last night. It is all about John Lennon growing up and was well worth seeing.
Whether Sam Taylor-Wood intended it I don’t know, but I found it an almost claustrophobic film as it was mainly set inside. Only in a few cases were Liverpool’s magnificent buildings and parks shown. Having been in Liverpool just a few years after the period of the film and visited several times lately, there are still a lot of places that have hardly changed since Lennon was growing up. I would have used these settings more.
But it is only a matter of personal taste and the fact that I knew Liverpool at that time and Taylor-Wood did not, as she is too young.
I wasn’t too sure where Lennon was actually brought up, but after looking it up, I found it was within walking distance of our first marital home at Rosehill Court in Woolton. Quarry Bank High School which gave the name to the Quarrymen, the forerunners of the Beatles, where he was educated is now Calderstones School. That wasn’t too far away either. But in those days of 1969, you knew the Beatles were good, but didn’t want to doorstep where they had lived.
I often think I owe a lot to Lennon, the Beatles and Liverpool. I wonder what would have happened to me, if I had gone to say Nottingham, Exeter, Southampton or even Cambridge Universities. I may not have acquired my robust attitude and could have wandered into research, which may have suited me, but then I don’t suffer fools gladly and there are many of them serving time in Universities waiting for their pension. I certainly wouldn’t have acquired my wife, who put up with me for over forty years.
I hope though that I wouldn’t have ended up a nowhere boy. But I know that I could have! Luckily I was rescued by Liverpool and my late wife.
Perhaps, I am frightened of ending up sad and lonely for the rest of my life.
River Lea and the Beatles
The television except for QI tonight is/was total crap. I suspect that when people get home from work on Christmas Eve they are/or get so legless that they don’t notice. That’s why the good television starts at ten, as those that are sober then, probably need something to stimulate their brain with all their friends/families around them.
I’m alone tonight, so I really do notice when the television is crap.
Whilst preparing two fish pies; one for tonight with sprouts and the other for the freezer, I delved into the Sky Box to see what I had recorded. I started by watching Gryf Rhys-Jones on the River Lea and followed this with Help, the Beatles film.
Both brought back memories of adolescence. Many a day I fished in the Lea and I was lucky enough to see the Beatles live. Should that last bit be old enough?
These memories all date from before I met my late wife in early 1967. But it just seems a few years ago.
A couple of times recently, I’ve walked the Lea. It is one of London’s treasures and Gryf brought a lot out in his program; the New River, Abbey Mills and Crossness pumping stations, the Royal Gunpowder Mills and all the greenhouses in the Lea Valley.
Help is in some ways dated and very much in the sixties. But the music is still as fresh as ever.
