I know, I know, I assured her: I had been back at work for a whole four weeks after six months of swanning around doing nothing and knew exactly what she was talking about. It was a whole two weeks until my next week long holiday. I mean, just imagine how worn down we must be!
Luckily, though, I had a solution: let's go to Liverpool, I suggested. And we all clapped our hands with glee for we had never been to Liverpool and what better place to cheer us up than the cold and grey of the North?
Obviously, if we were going to Liverpool we would have to do it properly and be utter tourists about the whole weekend so we started off on Friday morning by visiting Abbey Road and taking some essential photographs:
If you zoom in, you will see how inane my grin is because I am so extraordinarily happy about walking across the Abbey Road zebra crossing at 8:15am having found a parking spot and avoided paying for parking because it doesn't kick in until 8:30am.
We then spent four hours in a car on motorways, which wasn't very glamourous or fun, but we talked about boys and plaited each others' hair and eventually, we ended up at Crosby Beach, famed for Anthony Gormley's 'Another Place' art installation.
Now I had wanted to see this for some time after my curiousity had been aroused by a friend who had visited Liverpool some years ago and taken some arty photos. God, I want to be arty and cool like her, I had thought. Nothing I do is arty and cool! I will only be arty and cool if I travel to Liverpool and take pictures on Crosby Beach!
This 'Another Place' business is really rather eerie and ominous. I had been expecting a sort of fun frolick amongst naked iron men but the way that they all stand and stare at the horizon with their dead, metallic eyes, all in the same direction, combined with the fact that the rain and sea and sun and fog has weathered their skin so that they all look like some sort of nuclear burns victims makes it all very apocalyptic and frightening.
... This didn't stop us pretending that they were our metal boyfriends, though... Because we are mature... and you can see their willies...
Also, when the seagulls sit on their heads this is less scary and more funny. Hehehe.
So it looks like the apocalypse will have its gags after all.
We then spent about twenty minutes desperately trying to find somewhere nice in Crosby to have lunch and feeling very southern indeed.
Me: that pub?
Grub: um... no, full of drunks. That bar?
Me: uh... oh, no, full of scallies.
Grub: fish and chip shop?
Me: ugh! Oh dear, no.
Eventually, we found something that was more our style. We like to refer to it as 'the only civilized place in Crosby', but it's actually called Penny's Tea Rooms and they've only been open six months and it's a lovely mother and daughter owned place and such independent cafes are just being swallowed alive by Pret and Costa and Starbucks so if you are ever in the area, you should visit them (FB page details at the bottom!)
One of the main reasons for choosing Liverpool as our mini break destination of choice was because it is the current residence of the lovely Kate and Rob, who you may remember from Saigon, which is no more exotic than Liverpool, as I'm sure you are realising.
Kate introduced us to the incredible unnatural phenomenon that is a night out in Liverpool and, attempting to blend in as much as possible with the locals, wept on as much make up as possible and engaged in some pre-drinking despite the fact that we are all long out of our arisen days and should really not respectably engage in pre-drinking anymore.
This 'Another Place' business is really rather eerie and ominous. I had been expecting a sort of fun frolick amongst naked iron men but the way that they all stand and stare at the horizon with their dead, metallic eyes, all in the same direction, combined with the fact that the rain and sea and sun and fog has weathered their skin so that they all look like some sort of nuclear burns victims makes it all very apocalyptic and frightening.
... This didn't stop us pretending that they were our metal boyfriends, though... Because we are mature... and you can see their willies...
Also, when the seagulls sit on their heads this is less scary and more funny. Hehehe.
We then spent about twenty minutes desperately trying to find somewhere nice in Crosby to have lunch and feeling very southern indeed.
Me: that pub?
Grub: um... no, full of drunks. That bar?
Me: uh... oh, no, full of scallies.
Grub: fish and chip shop?
Me: ugh! Oh dear, no.
Eventually, we found something that was more our style. We like to refer to it as 'the only civilized place in Crosby', but it's actually called Penny's Tea Rooms and they've only been open six months and it's a lovely mother and daughter owned place and such independent cafes are just being swallowed alive by Pret and Costa and Starbucks so if you are ever in the area, you should visit them (FB page details at the bottom!)
One of the main reasons for choosing Liverpool as our mini break destination of choice was because it is the current residence of the lovely Kate and Rob, who you may remember from Saigon, which is no more exotic than Liverpool, as I'm sure you are realising.
Kate introduced us to the incredible unnatural phenomenon that is a night out in Liverpool and, attempting to blend in as much as possible with the locals, wept on as much make up as possible and engaged in some pre-drinking despite the fact that we are all long out of our arisen days and should really not respectably engage in pre-drinking anymore.
If you are from the North, the sight of very blonde women wearing all the make up they own, the tallest heels in the works and ball gowns in your local cocktail bar may not seem exciting to you, but for us (I was comparably dressed like a resentful lesbian in what I thought was my 'chic' blazer-chemise-chunky-necklace combo) it was a full on David Atrenborough-fest of observation of the manifestation of femininity. Wow. These girls really take their nights out seriously and even though it was about 0•C outside, they rocked those tiny skirts and plunging necklines.
What Liverpool has that London lacks in terms of nightlife (other than in Soho I suppose), is one of those pinball strips where a partaker in Bachian activities can literally zig zag and bounce from one trendy bar to the next. Pinging back and forth in this way we obviously had a rip-roaring time before ending up in a kebab shop at about 3am with all the other beauty queens who, strangely, did not look out of place in the glaringly white lights and greasy tiles.
Those who have known me since being converted by Lizzie Usher and further schooled by Risk or Death in the sacred art of 'not wasting the day', however, will know that an eventual 4am bedtime does not impinge upon a fully productive start the following morning. Thus, by the time the Grub appeared, snugly bleary-eyed, I had already planned our very own authentic Magical Mystery Tour of select Beatles sights that did not involve spending £15 on this tour bus or these taxis:
Though, let's be honest: we're all pretty glad I got a photo, right?
Whilst I insisted, à la Frenchie, that we play it cool and did not just mill along with all the other fans, the massive tourist in me will never die and so I insisted (insisted) that we have our photos taken next to all of the following Beatles monuments:
1. Eleanor Rigby's grave. She was a real person!
And here is the church where John and Paul first met. Cool.
2. The gates to Strawberry Fields where the children's home used to be:
3. Mendips, where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi:
4. An unassuming working class terrace house where Paul McCartney grew up:
(Please note the pervasion of the inane grin).
5. Penny Lane!
After this, we were exhausted fromtrying singing Beatles' songs and slightly disenchanted to realise that in fact, our parents had been a generation a bit too late and had actually brought us up on Paul Simon and Pink Floyd and actually we knew all the lyrics to 'Boy in the Bubble' and could almost do a perfect imitation of that weird ticking clocks track on 'Dark Side of the Moon' but could not remember the words to 'Yesterday'. Next fan trip will obviously have to be to Graceland then, if that is even a place.
We finished our weekend with a rousing trip to the Maritime Museum where we learnt all about the many people who died on the Titanic and watched a harrowing video about the Middle Passage. Hmm. Cheery.
What made the whole museum even more depressing (before it was depressing on a good, reflective, historically traumatic way. This was just depressing in a is this the state of the nation? way) was the poor literacy of our general student body across the country. I think this was absolutely the message the curators intended me to take away from the slavery reflection board:
Dear Lord, children! Learn to spell!
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