#bridgetbythebridge

#mersey-able

Where you get to once the Ferry crosses the Mersey

 

“I’m sick of the smell of this fucking shite!”

Every member of my immediate family knows this phrase all too well. There is another, slightly less PG-rated one that I’ll refrain from repeating here for fear of offending Motherbear. The aforementioned smell is that of Sydney. The young female who utters it is a recent child immigrant from Liverpool and had the leading role in a programme I once watched called The Leaving of Liverpool.

That programme informed much of my understanding of the city of Liverpool. It was a place so dire, so murky, so dark and dank that people escaped to a desert on the other side of the world. Liverpool for me was one of those industrial cities that Dickens and Eliot described in their novels; a city where the fortunate children worked in factories and the unfortunate ones were sent to workhouses. Well it was that and a few boys in grey suits that sang a few songs.

 

Lancastrian Architecture does a mean vent.

 

 

My pilgrimage to Liverpool was planned quickly, on a bit of a whim, to fill a few lonely days on a long weekend. It was so very whimsical that I didn’t research my trip at all. I just bought a train ticket and a couple of nights in a hotel. 

I arrived, with half the population of Northern England, on the same weekend as the International Beatles Convention and the Liverpool Folk Festival. Every hippie from here to Hull and back again was in town. With their tie-died t-shirts and scraggly beards, biker vests and slicked hair they are a generation lamenting their music and the lifestyle we youngsters quashed with wifi. There were Baby Booming Brexit Voters to spare…and the omnipresent gaggle of American tourists, loudly enquiring after restrooms and washrooms instead of toilets and loos.

 

Three Big Buildings or The Three Graces - they have a knack for naming things

 

Liverpool, the city centre, surprised me. It was much, much larger than I expected. Very wide streets filled with empiric buildings; a mismatch of bulky, bold architecture reflecting centuries as the leading trade port in the UK and the mouth from which Europe’s immigrants were spat into the Atlantic. Over the course of a little less than a hundred years, forty million beggared their way to the New World and the colonies beyond.

Poking above it all is the oddest looking Church I have ever seen. The architect, a protestant, must have been taking the piss with the Catholics who would worship there when he designed a giant concrete wicker basket that points to the heavens. It is no doubt iconic in it’s own 1960’s kind of way, but very difficult to digest when surrounded on all sides by the red bricks of Liverpool University.

 

I guess you really do have to BELIEVE to get this

 

There is a slightly taller structure, also built in the mid-twentieth century, a radio tower that must have been designed by George Jetson. That was the whole of Liverpool really, very ancient buildings sandwiched next to very new ones. Like in many British cities, a legacy of a Blitz that gutted anything of interest in a city that couldn’t immediately afford to rebuild.

George Jetson's Helipad

 

As in any ancient working port, there has been a regeneration of the old docks. The stolid brick megaliths have been gutted, refitted and are now filled with museums, flats, restaurants, a Pizza Express… and on this particular weekend, families.

Living in London, I do see children, but never in the multitudes I’ve seen them up here. Rarely just one at a time, often in multiples of three, accompanied by the requisite strollers, forging a path up and down the docks with their loud orange mothers, their perfectly groomed tattooed fathers and at least one white Capri-panted grandparent. Hearing the kids call for their mooms in their little mini scouse accents shocked me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m always surprised when I hear tiny cherubic kids with accents I only associate with middle-aged men like John Bishop. 

 

Sir Peter Blake's Dazzle Ship

 

Inspired by Gerry and the Pacemakers and a visceral desire not to be within earshot of quite so many other humans, I took a ferry across the Mersey. Trained as I was on the largest natural harbour on earth, I always think you get a better feel for a city from a boat than on dry land.

They played the song, we had a recorded tour guide pointing out all of the important landmarks and if you ever find yourself in Liverpool, it is a must-do. The banks of the river Mersey play out the history of the city and the many lives it has lived. Centre for emigration, slave port, shipwrights, containers, oil, war, tobacco and tourism. You see it all as the Be-Dazzled* ferry makes it’s way up and down the port.

Finally, after two days wandering, watching and weeping, I did what I came here to do.

Living is easy with eyes closed

 

 

Roll Up, Roll up for the Mystery Tour!

I was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t get an actual Mystery Tour Bus, she was in for repairs, but I did get a guide with an accent who knew someone who knew someone who once walked past Ringo and he had all the stories the eager tourists could stomach. I was the only one alone; there was a family of Brazilians, two young Asian girls and the requisite Americans. One regaled us all with her tale of being the great-granddaughter of Irish immigrants who sailed from Liverpool. She was none too impressed when I let her know that Irish immigrants who sailed from Liverpool populated most of her country and even less impressed when I explained that mine was too.

The music went on and off we went.

The tour takes you well outside of the city, to the houses where Ringo, George, Paul and John lived as children. You immediately understand that their houses belie a childhood spent in relative comfort unlike the image John described in Working Class Hero. You see the church, in front of Eleanor Rigby’s grave, where John met Paul and became the Beatles and then you drive down Penny Lane and stop at Strawberry Fields. That’s where I cried.

The song Strawberry Fields starts with a flute refrain that always reminds me of the Mr Men theme. After the flute burst it becomes a lament for childhood and would be among my top ten favourites. As the bus turned down towards the city and our final destination, the Cavern Club, they played In My Life. Then I really lost it.

My Dad loved the Beatles and his final journey was played out to In My Life. The words and music of the Fab Four were the soundtrack to my childhood. I’d wanted to visit and see where they were from, I wanted to experience a little bit of what they had, the city that inspired so many songs that live on today. I’m glad I came; I don’t think I’ll need to again.

 

And in the end.

 

*The Mersey Ferry is currently a floating artwork, a Dazzle Ship, designed by Sir Peter Blake who famously designed the cover for Sergeant Peppers

 

#scarlettwoman

 

 

I like the colour red. Actually I love the colour red. I love red things, crimson things, scarlet things (even letters) and I really, really love to wear red. Red makes me happy, it is a flaming reflection of me, bright, angry, passionate, in your fucking face and hot. #ofcourseimeantemperaturehot

But what never ceases to dazzle me is the number of people who comment on it. It happens almost every day. FFS I’m wearing red; I’m not naked, I’m not wearing a latex unitard, I’m not daubed in tangerine tan, I am most definitely not wearing anything with the shoulders cut out of it, I’m not wearing religious attire, I am not wearing my underwear outdoors, I just choose to wear red.

Wearing red in London, or previously in Paris, is so conspicuously unique as to be remarkable, as in, people vocally, loudly remark upon it. In the lift at work, in the dentist waiting room, as I leave my apartment to go to work and most remarkably, two weeks ago, on the tube.

I’ll come back to the tube incident, but the lift comments always amaze me.

 

The First time I saw this I was a teenager...

I've wanted one ever since.

 

 

“Wow, look at you! Always so colour coordinated!”

“It is so funny the way your shoes and your phone match your outfit”

“Here she is, the lady in red”* 

It isn’t funny that everything matches; it is not a fortunate accident, nor is it a coincidence. I do it on purpose!

 

You may have read an article about Obama’s suits, or about Steve Jobs’ polo neck t-shirts, or about Diane Keaton’s pantsuits. It is not by chance that these people wear the same 5 items of clothing every day. They do it so they don’t have to think about what they are going to wear, one less decision to fret about in an increasingly busy life, saving all too precious time in an all too busy day. And lets be frank, unless you are a fashion model, or an extra in The Devil Wears Prada, when you dress for work, who is giving an actual f**k about the minutiae of your outfit?

Bred as I was in an Anglican Private Day School for Boys and Girls^, I wore the same thing every single day for 8 years; a navy wool skirt, a navy wool jacket, a navy silk tie and a lemon cotton blouse. A uniform provides safety, security and reliability and it saves about 8 hours a week otherwise spent deciding whether to wear the brown one or the coffee one or the fawn one or the chestnut one or… I would also contend that the majority of men waste but a nanosecond of their early mornings determining the combination of armour with which they intend to cover themselves before attacking another day behind a desk. I am sat down, I’m on a mobile phone or I’m typing emails; no actually gives a toss what I am wearing…oh but they do!

There is another reason the Famouses wear the same thing every day, it’s their brand, it’s their marker, it’s their calling card. They do it so they are easily recognisable; they do it to be unique. They do it because their bob and big sunglasses (Anna Wintour), their gloves and stiff white collars (Karl Lagerfeld) or their tan and just-a-little-bit-too-undone shirt (Simon Cowell) are harbingers of their specific personal avatar. Like the Spice Girls, or Voltron, or the characters in Cluedo; everyone has their colour, everyone has their specific toon and everyone shoulders their unique carapace.

In my case, in the grand tradition of the most fashionable of fashion designers, Valentino, I chose red.

 

 

Signor Valentino

 

I chose red because it goes with my skin. I wasn’t permitted to wear pink when I was a small person. Motherbear wasn’t hot on dressing her little red-faced girl in a cloud of pink flounces; she said it clashed. I was always the blue while the Art-sist-ologer and her olive-er skin got the pink. I have blotchy red skin that coordinates perfectly with my red tops, my red dresses and my red jeans. I chose red because it matched.  

I chose red because it’s the proverbial “red rag”. When I approach, flaming, spitting and stalking, the bulls (read the bullIES) scarper. It’s less of an effort to argue with someone who’s running away. It’s easier to blindside someone who is blind. It’s easier to win if they are already on their back foot.

I chose red because I live in Europe. When the sun is so bright it burns away your retinas, colour is not so much a choice as requisite. Neon rashies, white hats, white clothes in general, all of it protects against the harsh light of a Sydney day. Here in Europe, everyone wears grey. Their coats are woven from grey wool to protect against the grey rain that falls from a grey sky upon their grey souls. Motherbear did once comment as I left the house wearing a Fuchsia wool coat and red Dr Marten boots; you must really stand out in London, looking the way you do, compared to the rest of them. She’s right, I do. 

As the minions march across London Bridge, their grey coats wafting in the wind, me and my brights are bouncing. As the pointy-shoed, tight-trousered dudes saunter into their offices, ready to make a mockery of one and t’other, I stomp in sneakers with purpose and punch. As the little ladies twitter in Topshop, and totter on tiptoe, I revel in rouge, ready to rage for another day, another day at war, but at war in comfort.

So about that girl in the tube.

The sparkle that started it all.. #rubyredslippers

 

She was about 20, she had mermaid multicoloured hair. She was wearing ironic acid-wash jeans and an ironic rock T-shirt of a band she wouldn’t have been old enough to have ever seen live. She looked cool AF and if I noticed her during the 4 stops we shared a pole, it was because she really did look that awesome. I wanted to look like she did’ footloose and fancy-free. I wished I didn’t have to wear boring work clothes so I could look like her, like myself.

And then...as I jumped the stairs two at a time, earning a few extra heartbeats in a heartlessly boring day, she popped up beside me and said, “is red your favourite colour?” Somewhat taken aback that an actual human being with all their sandwiches in their proverbial picnic had spoken to me in London’s Underground Labyrinth, I wavered, “Yeah, yeah it is”. “Well you look so cool, you really do!” she burst out.

She proffered no clichéd reference to an 80’s song by Chris de Burgh, no sly giggle, no malice, no mirth, just genuine appreciation of another someone dancing to their own tune.

And that, dear reader is why I always wear red. I wear red because it’s me; it isn’t you, it isn’t them, its me… and there’s no syrupy 80’s ballad for it.

 

 

 

*I do love that people always offer Lady in Red, never Scarlett O’Hara, Ruby Tuesday or Red Red Wine, or anything else really

^That is what the website says #rollsoffthetongue