Liverpool Tales from the Mersey Mouth - A book by John Williams

• Liverpool's alien nation A short history of discrimination
• Guernica Liverpool Manhattan Time for me to get off the fence
• There ain't half been some clever bastards The mendacious cretins who instigated the Shoah
• The scent of a conman Raising a stink in Liverpool
• Show 'em the door The Phillistines are back in Liverpool
• The fourth Grace A new addition to the Liverpool family
• Those base football players How football taught us to clock in on time
• Liverpool Maze Rainy days and Mondays
• Staying alive Travelling light
• A fundamental error Not all Muslims are terrorists
• Upstarts The smaller they are the harder we fall
• Flake An open letter to Fred 'Fruit-cake' Leuchter
• Black is not the only shade Musings on the language of racialism
• Liverpool's Big Macs what Scousers might have been called
• The world's oldest crime A male point of view of women's violation
• Be a sport Fashion for laid back athletes
• Nobody is indispensible The diminished role of men
• Trees When blossom appears to wither on the branch
• What's cooking? The debt that civilisation owes women
• Know thy self Clipping time's wings
• Once there was a way Aberfan and corporate terrorism
• Me granddad's on a preservation order Liverpool world heritage site
• You say potato I say spud
• Doctor Yes Good doctors are the norm
• Top of the world Ma A man of peace
• Like a bird on a wire I have tried in my way to be free
• The writing's on the wall Little known Liverpool sayings
• Fortress Anfield or Maginot Line? Au Revoir Gerard Houllier
• The leaving of Liverpool Adieu Steven Gerrard?
• Working on the chain gang The age of innocence
• In my life Turn and face the strangers
• Suicide is painless it brings on many changes
• Breaking down the walls of heartache The cementing of hatred
• Danse macabre

The first article I ever published on the net, in 1999, was entitled 'The Long and Winding Road', and since then most of my pieces have been headed by a song title.

There is nothing novel about this as many writers make references to pop music where once they might have employed a well known religious image. Of course, it is true that all that you're liable to read in the bible ain't necessarily so, but that didn't stop Hamlet wishing God had not banned suicide,

"Oh!...that the everlasting had not fix'd

his canon 'gainst self slaughter!"

The Prince of Denmark would have sympathised with Hawkeye and friends from the hit television series M.A.S.H who operated under the idea that suicide is painless.

Again, John Milton was able to reach his audience and discuss the sinful nature of pride on the back of the familiar story of Satan's fall from grace. Modern audiences, largely starved of religious discourse, are more hungry for meatloaf and bats out of hell than the fallen angel of 'Paradise Lost'.

I once taught a class of adults and was wholly shocked and disconcerted to discover that some of the younger students had no knowledge of the creation myth of Adam and Eve. Somebody, it seemed, had paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

It was then that I wondered if we really were on the eve of destruction. Not because I am a believer, but simply because the ignorance of my students was a frightening example of just how quickly and easily the past can be buried while the new is presented as being the eternal truth. The truth is I'm a believer, in the notion that someone is making monkeys of us all.

All the great tyrannical movements of the twentieth century exploited this phenomenon as the world watched mesmerised while men and women were air-brushed out of existence. They're invisible now with no secrets to conceal. Talk about paint it black!

Ordinary people feel confused and lonely. One I heard of, a spinster called Eleanor, kept her face in a jar so as not to offend the possessors of the all effacing air brushes.

So now, whenever I am called on to stand in as an English teacher I no longer make reference to David or Goliath, although any mention of Delilah is likely to be understood. It's not unusual to find that students who know next to nothing of religious figures are easily bored if I try to explain the place in literature of the spirit in the sky and so I tend to talk mainly in pop metaphors, which at my age I find rather uncomfortable.

Sometimes I just want to ask them to take me for what I am, accept me for the things that I do...but no doubt whatever happens I will survive.

My thanks to Tim Kelly and Brigitte C for the new look to my site

© John Williams Liverpool 1999