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.
Whoever invented Pokemon was a real card
By
John Williams
I was forty-one when my oldest son was born and I was about as prepared for fatherhood as I was for middle age. As a heavy smoker and a moderate drinker I was so unfit that his buggy had to be fitted with power assisted steering. One of the good things about my general lack of fitness was that I would often be glad to stop pushing the buggy and engage him in conversation.
This happened about every five hundred yards and in the course of a week we covered such major topics as the varying quality of sausage rolls, to which he was partial, ways to avoid traffic fumes when you are more or less living at ground level or the danger inherent in hanging heavy shopping bags from the buggy handles and then letting go of the damned thing. The poor little lad must have thought that being violently catapulted skyward in the direction of the Mersey without warning was quite normal!
Small wonder that he is such a fearless fan of white-knuckle rides. It's quite an apt expression, because when I once watched him ride the 'Big one' in Blackpool my own knuckles looked like a miniature version of the Alps. In case anybody is wondering why I was a spectator it's because when I shared his first ever ride, on the 'Cyclone', an old fashioned wooden roller coaster in Southport, my jaws were so tightly clenched that my crown was shaken loose!
By the time he went to School my boy had long since discovered that his dad was better suited to passive games, like "I spy" or "what patterns can you see on the ceiling now?" It wasn't that I didn't want to play football with him, but after 5 minutes of 'one on one' with an energetic four year old I was shattered. While other fathers were happy taking refreshments to the park, I toyed with the idea of taking a nebulizer.
My son was a prime candidate for the non-athletic crazes which swept his school, and before long he was well and truly immersed in the intricacies of Teenage Mutant Turtle Heroes. The adventures of Donatello, Leonardo and the rest of the anthropomorphic bunch were the very air that he breathed.
I was rather concerned by his passion for them but his mother pointed out that his ability to engage his peers in informed conversations about a gang of pizza eating turtles would mean that he was part of the schoolyard 'in crowd', and therefore less susceptible to the bullying that often ensues when children are rendered vulnerable by their parent's principled stand against themed or violent toys, which sometimes leaves kids isolated in the playground because they don't 'speak the lingo'.
By the time our second son was born I was even less fit for football, but better equipped than ever for his fads and crazes. In the last nine years I have witnessed the dethronement of the turtles, the rise and fall of 'Power Rangers', the early retirement of Postman Pat and, lately, the birth of the most pernicious craze of them all, Pokemon. For those adults who don't speaka da lingo, Pokemon is short for pocket monsters, and as far as my pocket is concerned they have proved monstrously expensive.
The Japanese firm of Nintendo manufacture the Pokemon empire, and the single most expensive item they sell is called a Gameboy, which is a battery operated hand held route to obliviousness. If bought with the various accoutrements a Gameboy can set you back over a hundred pounds, and then you have to start buying the games. Simple enough you might think, but you reckon without the shortages and heartaches that go hand in hand with popular toys.
Every Christmas there is a rush for one toy, which inevitably causes shortages of supply. Remember Cabbage Patch dolls and Tele-Tubbies? It's nobody's fault because toy makers have no idea whether or not their particular toy will be the big one that year, and so they maintain normal levels of production. By the time they are aware that their product is more sought after than a cup-final ticket we are probably buying Pokemon Easter eggs.
When we managed to get all that our youngest child desired we were ecstatic, as all parents are when they have narrowly avoided having a less than merry Christmas. But where Nintendo are concerned it doesn't end there. Before too long they had sold a cartoon series to ITV and our child had found another road to oblivion as he put aside his Gameboy and Pokemon for the joys of the Pokemon cartoon.
As if that wasn't enough Nintendo started promoting, highly successfully, Pokemon cards, which were essentially no different from any other cards that are sold to children, be it football stickers or whatever. The big difference with Nintendo is the shamelessly exorbitant price they charge for their small rectangles of pasteboard. They are approximately three times the price of the football cards that had so preoccupied our oldest child, and I had thought they'd been a rip-off!
Of course, the same premises that had applied to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and our first child were still valid, and so we had to go along with the most ferocious exploitation of children since the employment of infant chimney sweeps in the eighteenth century. The final insult Nintendo delivered was when they licensed some cretin to make a movie of Pokemon. I took my youngest to see it, and by God it was dire! I would say without the slightest hesitation that it was the worst cinema experience I have ever endured. Shame on you Nintendo! You ought to apologise to every parent in the world who had to sit through that interminable drivel. Go on apologise,
"Gomen Nasai all papasans and mamasans!"
As if the movie wasn't bad enough, on our journey home my child prattled on endlessly about the characters he'd seen. By the time we reached our house, just in time for the damned Pokemon TV cartoon I might add, I would have willingly taken a machete to Charmander, Squirtle and Peekachu et al.
The irony in this is that way back in the years before Japan became a techno/industrial monster Nintendo manufactured only playing cards. So, just as they produced the means for us to play 'Strip Jack Naked' they now manufacture the means to strip us all naked. Whichever way you cut the deck it is a bloody cheat! Oh heavens, the next craze will probably be Poker-Mon!!!