Oh god! What am I doing here!?
Gazing sensibly right, I have stepped out
in front of so many oncoming vehicles that the streets and highways of
northwest of England are clogged with cars whose drivers have had to
pull off the road they were laughing so hard at the amazingly freakish
faces and acrobatic leaps that I have performed as their bumpers
grazed my patellas.
Emergency workers are finding them in their cars,
draped over their dashboards, weeping with laughter and doing the
little whoop I make as I leap over their hood ornaments. It's humiliating.
Oh god too. Here was my worst day: March 7. First, I got
yelled at by a street musician. A flautist! and then I was asked to never
come back to a particular on-line Liverpool chat room because they
thought I talked so much and so erratically that I was spam.
This is not my pond.
But it will be. I'm off now to Hightown where there is a train
station, beautiful dunes, a submerged and ancient forest, old
asparagus field ....Gee it has suddenly begun to gush rain from all
directions...weirdly, the sky is blue......it is quite a nautical
town. I guess I'll wear a hat.
Monday 19 March 2007
Wednesday 14 March 2007
The Liverpool Cathedral is Just Like A Ship
The Liverpool Cathedral is exactly and in every way just like a ship. A huge, mossy, Gothic hulk of a ship, with falls and gushes of stained glass windows, made of chocolate, and bobbing out there among the chimney pots and shining slate roofs on a ridge above this sea-faring town.
The ridge on which the Cathedral was built, provides a beautiful river vista. It was once the place the townsfolk would promenade of an evening, and was, simultaneously, it seems, a quarry (prime promenading terrain, in my book) and a garden, and is now, for some reason, the carpark for the John Moore's University Business Department, so on this, one of the first sunny afternoons of the spring, the Peugeots and Audi washing up at the cathedral's feet were sparkling like surf.
I'd come at it broadside from the west, its starboard side, which is not the direction sanctioned by the Tourist Board or the Liverpool Police Department I'm guessing. I set off through a tricky, but ideal-for-body-dumping construction site, through a mews of apartments, its dog shit and garbage sacks duned up against a maze of prison-y fencing, and bumbled around through the kind of spiny landscaping planted mostly to deter forced entry full of ensnared and shredded plastic grocery bags and Lucoade bottles, and twelve year old boys huddled by some daffodils, industriously scraping swastikas into a wall.
I had to ask directions twice, which seemed ridiculous, since the structure was looming right over us like a cliff, once from a man with eyebrows as long as my pinkie, which is pretty long for eyebrows, who, when I chimed, "Excuse me!" and came at him across the sidewalk, he looked like I'd just caught him murdering cats. But, for as hunched and hooded as everyone was, they were cheerful and helpful, and when I said, "Oh thank you, very much," they said, "Yeah. Ta luff," which means either, "Why, of course, you delightful woman. It's my pleasure to present my magnificent town to you." or "Yeah, whatever." until, at last I staggered out like a battered pilgrim, pulling shredded grocrey bags from my ankles and leaves out of my hair, and into the John Moores parking lot where there's the damn building right there. The John Moores people going to their cars in the afternoon probably bump their shoulders against it getting in their Hondas butting right up against the foundation stones that boil right out of the licheny rock all tumbled with lavender and birch and heathery shrubs. Both imposing and invisible.
The Liverpool Cathedral is shaped like a ship with a gargantuan central tower with louver blinds, forty tons of bells, and a bow and a stern and eighth of a mile apart. It is crammed with nautical imagery like dolphins worked into the wrought iron and corvettes and clippers in full sail ornamenting the copper downspouts, and gaunt saints, like Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, standing on little shelves, gazing quietly onto the top of my head. I sat on the steps under the vast western arch in the afternoon sun with the dolphins and the Audis. Little bits of mica twinkled in the stone all around me, and the arch was like a big quiet cave, or a cove, maybe, where I and a lot of twinkly flotsam had washed up. Very pleasant.
In the 1880's, wanting their own cathedral to one-up Chester down the road, but worried that a puny classically styled cathedral would be upstaged by all the silvery domes and columns and huge clocks (the biggest clocks in England, I have read) of Liverpool's knock-your-eye-out-grand waterfront, the diocese chose to build it on a ridge of rock just south of the city, a prime vantage point from which to glower down disapprovingly on the worldly workings of the counting houses and insurance buildings of the world's busiest, and wealthiest port.
It took something like forty years to build full of waxes and wanes of money and interest and direct hits from German bombs one of which smashed through the four feet of the church's copper-coated concrete roof, lost some omph when it fell onto the curved vaulting ceiling just below, rolled off hard enough to smash through an upper vestry wall, shoot out into space, and blow up in the cemetery smashing all the windows on that side. It was finished in 1968, just as Liverpool was really going down for the count and unemployment was at 30%. It oversaw the Toxteth riots across Parliment Street when the Rialto Ballroom was set on fire and its copper dome glowed all night. The Georgian townhouses lining Hope Street, now a painfully posh address principly because of their stunning views of the cathedral's sunrise side, were just ten years ago being given away so derilict and rife with prostitution were the cathedral grounds and its wilderness of a cemetery, that settees were put out for those waiting their turn on the mattresses under the bushes. Ew.
You wouldn't know all that by looking at it now, unless you come at it from the starboard side.
The ridge on which the Cathedral was built, provides a beautiful river vista. It was once the place the townsfolk would promenade of an evening, and was, simultaneously, it seems, a quarry (prime promenading terrain, in my book) and a garden, and is now, for some reason, the carpark for the John Moore's University Business Department, so on this, one of the first sunny afternoons of the spring, the Peugeots and Audi washing up at the cathedral's feet were sparkling like surf.
I'd come at it broadside from the west, its starboard side, which is not the direction sanctioned by the Tourist Board or the Liverpool Police Department I'm guessing. I set off through a tricky, but ideal-for-body-dumping construction site, through a mews of apartments, its dog shit and garbage sacks duned up against a maze of prison-y fencing, and bumbled around through the kind of spiny landscaping planted mostly to deter forced entry full of ensnared and shredded plastic grocery bags and Lucoade bottles, and twelve year old boys huddled by some daffodils, industriously scraping swastikas into a wall.
I had to ask directions twice, which seemed ridiculous, since the structure was looming right over us like a cliff, once from a man with eyebrows as long as my pinkie, which is pretty long for eyebrows, who, when I chimed, "Excuse me!" and came at him across the sidewalk, he looked like I'd just caught him murdering cats. But, for as hunched and hooded as everyone was, they were cheerful and helpful, and when I said, "Oh thank you, very much," they said, "Yeah. Ta luff," which means either, "Why, of course, you delightful woman. It's my pleasure to present my magnificent town to you." or "Yeah, whatever." until, at last I staggered out like a battered pilgrim, pulling shredded grocrey bags from my ankles and leaves out of my hair, and into the John Moores parking lot where there's the damn building right there. The John Moores people going to their cars in the afternoon probably bump their shoulders against it getting in their Hondas butting right up against the foundation stones that boil right out of the licheny rock all tumbled with lavender and birch and heathery shrubs. Both imposing and invisible.
The Liverpool Cathedral is shaped like a ship with a gargantuan central tower with louver blinds, forty tons of bells, and a bow and a stern and eighth of a mile apart. It is crammed with nautical imagery like dolphins worked into the wrought iron and corvettes and clippers in full sail ornamenting the copper downspouts, and gaunt saints, like Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, standing on little shelves, gazing quietly onto the top of my head. I sat on the steps under the vast western arch in the afternoon sun with the dolphins and the Audis. Little bits of mica twinkled in the stone all around me, and the arch was like a big quiet cave, or a cove, maybe, where I and a lot of twinkly flotsam had washed up. Very pleasant.
In the 1880's, wanting their own cathedral to one-up Chester down the road, but worried that a puny classically styled cathedral would be upstaged by all the silvery domes and columns and huge clocks (the biggest clocks in England, I have read) of Liverpool's knock-your-eye-out-grand waterfront, the diocese chose to build it on a ridge of rock just south of the city, a prime vantage point from which to glower down disapprovingly on the worldly workings of the counting houses and insurance buildings of the world's busiest, and wealthiest port.
It took something like forty years to build full of waxes and wanes of money and interest and direct hits from German bombs one of which smashed through the four feet of the church's copper-coated concrete roof, lost some omph when it fell onto the curved vaulting ceiling just below, rolled off hard enough to smash through an upper vestry wall, shoot out into space, and blow up in the cemetery smashing all the windows on that side. It was finished in 1968, just as Liverpool was really going down for the count and unemployment was at 30%. It oversaw the Toxteth riots across Parliment Street when the Rialto Ballroom was set on fire and its copper dome glowed all night. The Georgian townhouses lining Hope Street, now a painfully posh address principly because of their stunning views of the cathedral's sunrise side, were just ten years ago being given away so derilict and rife with prostitution were the cathedral grounds and its wilderness of a cemetery, that settees were put out for those waiting their turn on the mattresses under the bushes. Ew.
You wouldn't know all that by looking at it now, unless you come at it from the starboard side.
Monday 12 March 2007
Is it me?
Odder and odder, the old women of Liverpool talk to me like we've known each other for years. Since I've been here, they have been popping out from the bus shelters asking me to tie their shoe strings, saying sweetly, "Scuse me luff. Would ya fasten ma lace?" Or they turn to me in the scrum of the Tesco dairy aisle and say, "Activia 3 pound 50! In Prescot last week, they was 2 pound 90." And I do what you'd do. I tie shoes, and cluck at the Tesco people taking over the planet.
Recently, I was trudging through Blundellsands, just north of Liverpool, once a Victorian seaside retreat, where, now, as it turns out, a creepily beautiful sculpture by Anthony Gormley is. Composed of 100 cast iron men scattered down two kilometers of flashing silver coast, the men (casts of Mr. Gormley) stand hock-deep, waist-deep, and -alarmingly, if you don't know what they are- neck-deep in the surf gazing out as the last trickle of shipping in the Mersey estuary slides by and people walk their dogs and gaze out too.
Well. I was walking down toward the beach through a neighborhood notable, I would say, for its remarkably oppressive bungalow-garden-driveway endless-loop uniformity, like a bad cartoon. As I approached one driveway, there was a lady in a flowered dress standing by her garden wall while her husband placed the recycling bag (marked Recycling Bag) neatly beside the sidewalk to match the neighbors' yellow bag recyclng bags, and as I passed, she turned to me and said, "I was walking with groceries just down there, and the man ahead of me allowed his dog to foul the sidewalk." I paused, like anyone would, but kept moving, like anyone would, and said, "Well, really. Gosh. Some people. Really." which rather egged her on and she said, "Yes! That's right! Some people!" but she veered off topic with, "Are you're from Canada, then?" and I said, "I'm from the US." to which she replied, "I have a sister in Canada." She was having to yell now, " Helen in Ontario." "Oh," I yelled back. But then she called, "Are you on your way to see the iron men?" which made me stop. "The iron men?" I called. "Yes," she said, "Horrible things," which made me not only stop, but come back a little, and say, "Really? Why?" And she said, looking rather pleased I'd come back, "Well, they have their... things, you know...." which was sweet (sort of) in a up-tight, priggish, annoying, Puritanical sort of way, so I said, "Oh. They're anatomically correct, eh? Ha ha!" rather randily for me, and the spectre of 'things' was swinging around over our heads. And she said, "Yes. Horrible. The children hang things from them." and we both laughed, which was, not just sort of, but in fact, sweet. And so I said good-bye, and went to go look at them.
These aren't ancient, apple-bearing hooded crones, they're just women, seventy-ish. Not obviously insane, although maybe a little spittley and thick lensed. The thing I find odd and would like an explanation for, please, is that it's as if they've been waiting for me. They step out, or turn around, or straighten up and just continue our conversation about shoe-laces or yogurt or "things, you know...". Do they see me as one of their own? Just since I've arrived with all the various worries of leaving and arriving, I've acquired these new frownlines braided down through the soft puckery skin at the corners of my mouth. In a beauty, lips' corners turn up even when they're frowning, but in me, soup and beet juice is going to run down into these gullies some day I just know it, and someone will have to pat it dry. But who? They're there even when I'm smiling.
So it appears to be age, loneliness, or dementia we have in common. They can see it.
In contrast, the old men of Liverpool hate me. Jeez. Yesterday, B and I were walking up the exhaust pipe that is Mount Street, along Lime Street station past the homeless shelters and the Asylum Seeker advice centers that are housed in magnificent chocolate sandstone Georgian wrecks with No Loitering messages posted on the finely fluted columns, when coming down the hill, a little old toad of a man came barrelling at us all bow-legged in giant boots with crazy hair like frayed wire, and the fingers of his filthy gloves cut off, and his chin folded up like a second nose, and as we passed, he turned to me and stopped. And I stopped. And he looked at me, and blew what can only be called a raspberry. Jeez.
Recently, I was trudging through Blundellsands, just north of Liverpool, once a Victorian seaside retreat, where, now, as it turns out, a creepily beautiful sculpture by Anthony Gormley is. Composed of 100 cast iron men scattered down two kilometers of flashing silver coast, the men (casts of Mr. Gormley) stand hock-deep, waist-deep, and -alarmingly, if you don't know what they are- neck-deep in the surf gazing out as the last trickle of shipping in the Mersey estuary slides by and people walk their dogs and gaze out too.
Well. I was walking down toward the beach through a neighborhood notable, I would say, for its remarkably oppressive bungalow-garden-driveway endless-loop uniformity, like a bad cartoon. As I approached one driveway, there was a lady in a flowered dress standing by her garden wall while her husband placed the recycling bag (marked Recycling Bag) neatly beside the sidewalk to match the neighbors' yellow bag recyclng bags, and as I passed, she turned to me and said, "I was walking with groceries just down there, and the man ahead of me allowed his dog to foul the sidewalk." I paused, like anyone would, but kept moving, like anyone would, and said, "Well, really. Gosh. Some people. Really." which rather egged her on and she said, "Yes! That's right! Some people!" but she veered off topic with, "Are you're from Canada, then?" and I said, "I'm from the US." to which she replied, "I have a sister in Canada." She was having to yell now, " Helen in Ontario." "Oh," I yelled back. But then she called, "Are you on your way to see the iron men?" which made me stop. "The iron men?" I called. "Yes," she said, "Horrible things," which made me not only stop, but come back a little, and say, "Really? Why?" And she said, looking rather pleased I'd come back, "Well, they have their... things, you know...." which was sweet (sort of) in a up-tight, priggish, annoying, Puritanical sort of way, so I said, "Oh. They're anatomically correct, eh? Ha ha!" rather randily for me, and the spectre of 'things' was swinging around over our heads. And she said, "Yes. Horrible. The children hang things from them." and we both laughed, which was, not just sort of, but in fact, sweet. And so I said good-bye, and went to go look at them.
These aren't ancient, apple-bearing hooded crones, they're just women, seventy-ish. Not obviously insane, although maybe a little spittley and thick lensed. The thing I find odd and would like an explanation for, please, is that it's as if they've been waiting for me. They step out, or turn around, or straighten up and just continue our conversation about shoe-laces or yogurt or "things, you know...". Do they see me as one of their own? Just since I've arrived with all the various worries of leaving and arriving, I've acquired these new frownlines braided down through the soft puckery skin at the corners of my mouth. In a beauty, lips' corners turn up even when they're frowning, but in me, soup and beet juice is going to run down into these gullies some day I just know it, and someone will have to pat it dry. But who? They're there even when I'm smiling.
So it appears to be age, loneliness, or dementia we have in common. They can see it.
In contrast, the old men of Liverpool hate me. Jeez. Yesterday, B and I were walking up the exhaust pipe that is Mount Street, along Lime Street station past the homeless shelters and the Asylum Seeker advice centers that are housed in magnificent chocolate sandstone Georgian wrecks with No Loitering messages posted on the finely fluted columns, when coming down the hill, a little old toad of a man came barrelling at us all bow-legged in giant boots with crazy hair like frayed wire, and the fingers of his filthy gloves cut off, and his chin folded up like a second nose, and as we passed, he turned to me and stopped. And I stopped. And he looked at me, and blew what can only be called a raspberry. Jeez.
Wednesday 7 March 2007
We're off to Pontybodkin!
It's a clear day in Liverpool! Newsworthy enough, you say, but the real news is that
we're off to Pontybodkin just over the Wirral peninsula in the shire
of Flint and the neighborhood of Mold.
We'll stop by Pontybodkin- we think it is
known for its pottery - but really, our goal is the village of
Llanarmon-yn-ial (there's a circumflex over that 'a') to stretch our
legs on Offa's Dyke the 8th century, 177-mile berm built by good(ish)
King Offa to keep out the Welsh. King Offa required every vassal and helot to contribute a tenth of a meter of wall, which we didn't think was such a bad deal, until it was noted that the dyke is 27 feet wide and about ten feet tall, with a big ditch in front to make it seem even taller. Evidently, the vassals and helots were displeased with the prospect of contributing even a tenth of a meter, so the requirement was changed to either building a tenth of a meter of wall, or - you'll like this - bring lunch.
The good(ish) folks at National Train hooted and guffawed and loped
around in their glass cage when I showed them where we wanted to go
(showed them, principally because I can't pronounce 'Llanarmon-yn-ial'), and said,
"Naw loof. It's a non-stationed town, ye see." In fact, according to
the National Train people, Llanarmon-yn-ial can only be gotten at by
taking the train to Rhyl twenty miles away and then taking a bus for
70 minutes. Twenty miles in 70 minutes, eh.
We learned a lot from the web site www.unforgettablelanguage.com. It seems that the Welsh word for 'cheese' is 'caws' and the word for 'Welsh' is 'Cymru' since 'Welsh' means 'foreigner' in Welsh.
Thursday 1 March 2007
How Civilized Liverpool
Today is World Book Day. Out on the walking street, a pretty girl was handing out books from a big plastic bag:
"Would you like a free book," she said. Jaded and world-weary I, wary as a wack-a-mole when it comes to people handing me things on the street slowed only to turn up my nose and gave her my usual, "Hurumnghunghunh," which means "I am too jaded and world-weary and thinking of important things to fall for your chicanery." But then, my brain kicked in and said, "Geez, Liz, she seems to be giving you a book." and another woman stopped and said, "Oh! Free books. That's great." So I said, "How can I turn down a free book?" and the pretty girl said, "It's World Book Day today. We're part of a world-wide effort to get people to read the same book together." She said they'd passed out 150 books today in Liverpool and another number rather big if I recall in the nation.
In fact it's the 10th World Book Day
"Would you like a free book," she said. Jaded and world-weary I, wary as a wack-a-mole when it comes to people handing me things on the street slowed only to turn up my nose and gave her my usual, "Hurumnghunghunh," which means "I am too jaded and world-weary and thinking of important things to fall for your chicanery." But then, my brain kicked in and said, "Geez, Liz, she seems to be giving you a book." and another woman stopped and said, "Oh! Free books. That's great." So I said, "How can I turn down a free book?" and the pretty girl said, "It's World Book Day today. We're part of a world-wide effort to get people to read the same book together." She said they'd passed out 150 books today in Liverpool and another number rather big if I recall in the nation.
In fact it's the 10th World Book Day
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