Liverpool Stories
The stories on this site are not included in my book.
The tales are snapshots of my life in Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, and the echo chamber of the Mersey Sound that in the sixties resonated around the planet like an acoustic Tsunami. The stories cover a period of 50 odd years and so they touch on every aspect of my life from the rites of passage to the passing of youth. I hope you enjoy them.
Emporia Fantastica - Memories of a Liverpool store
By
John Williams
There used to be a department store in Liverpool called Blackler's. It was an old fashioned emporium that sold everything from books to bed linen, and it used to afford me hours of innocent pleasure as I wandered though its crowded aisles marvelling at the diversity of its products.
One section in particular held an allure that I could never explain beyond the fact that it invariably made me laugh. It sold kitchen gadgets such as tomato slicers, herb cutters and bizarre contraptions such as a multi pronged fork that was designed to be stuck into a peeled onion, and the tines were then used to guide a knife blade, thus facilitating slicing of the said vegetable! I mean, would you?
My favourite gadget ever, and there were many contenders, was a mushroom brush. Yes, a mushroom brush! It comprised a mushroom shaped handle with pure white bristles and was used to brush any soil that may have been adhering to the fungi. The logic behind its design was simple.
Mushrooms are among the most absorbent organisms on the planet, so if you wash them they just absorb water and end up being soggy and unpalatable. What we are supposed to do is brush them clean, and then add the cut mushrooms to a sauce, which will then permeate them with the desired flavours.
Isn't it comforting to think that there are highly trained designers thinking about the welfare of our mushrooms, ceps and fungi in general? And I suppose when they are not engaged in designing cutting edge technology they design the packaging it comes in. Packaging! The curse of modern life. Landfill sites, (what a bizarre notion, filling land!), groan under the weight of plastic containers with a life span measured in millenia while the products have long since vanished.
And can you open this packaging with the same ease that you once un-wrapped a paper parcel? Can you hell! As I get older I get increasingly alarmed at the thought that one day I will have food in the cupboard that is as difficult to access as BT internet on a bad night. I picture myself lying on the floor staring, defeated, at a packet of biscuits that has defied my feeble attempts to rip open the shimmering rigid plastic shrink wrapped sustenance.
I thought I had cracked it when my mother bought me a beautiful pair of kitchen scissors, but I couldn't open the blister pack...
CITIES BENEATH THE SEA
Paper cups and plastic bags
cast-off clothing turned to rags
toilet tissues by the ream
choke city streets
and mountain stream.
Inside the mouths of rivers wide
rusting prams ride out the tide,
while strangely sluggish little fishes
snooze in long abandoned satellite dishes.
Splintered bottles and jagged tins
designed to quench an endless thirst,
lie in wait for exposed skins,
to do their very worst.
Stream feeds the river,
river feeds the sea,
sea feeds the clouds
that rain on me!
1999