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.
I do like to be beside the seaside - I've had my chips
By
John Williams
I read recently that cheap air travel will have to be curtailed eventually because our collective desire to arrive at exotic locations post haste is destroying the planet due to jet fuel pollution.
If this is true and we are prepared to suffocate the planet just so we can rush to see the home of Mickey Mouse then it seems to me that our values are just plain goofy.
Thus the possibility exists that the culture of the English seaside resorts, so long on the ebb, might soon be buoyed up by a tide of ecology conscious visitors. I was reminded of the former glories of the small seaside resorts when I was test driving my car that I purchased after recently passing my driving test.
As I surveyed the fleece flecked sky above Liverpool Bay I yearned for a decent old fashioned seaside cafe, because for the past twenty years or so my experience of chips, the so called English national dish, has been almost uniformly disappointing.
Most modern chip shops appear to labour under the illusion that chips are meant to be greasy, anaemic looking and limper than Quentin Crisp's wrist. Sir Walter Raleigh's massive culinary contribution to English food has been consigned to near obscurity by doner kebabs, chop suey rolls or pizza.
I have lost count of the times I have had to hurl away the tangled heaps of grease soaked potato that masquerade as chips.
Childhood chips were golden brown and so crisp that they rustled like autumn leaves. Now this is not nostalgia rampant. You see, whereas the old fashioned chip emporia fried their delicacies in either lard or beef dripping, modern chip shops use only vegetable oil, which, because it costs money to make it reach the temperature required to really brown the chips, merely heats them and leaves them soaked in oil as the surfaces were never sealed by the hot fat.
It's no coincidence that Harry Ramsden's, arguably the best fish and chip restaurant in England uses beef dripping to fry its products.
I daresay everybody has their favourite memories of fish and chips and I am no exception. My fried potato paradise was at the beginning of Brownlow Hill, next door to the last inner city Jewish delicatessen, and was run by a woman called Mary. Looking perpetually harassed, Mary and her assistants, almost walled in behind cases of dripping and lard, served the long lunchtime queues of customers the finest chips I've ever tasted.
There was also a shop in Lodge Lane, owned by a Cypriot, which sold Holland's steak and kidney puddings, so tenderly steamed that they wobbled tremulously, as if in fear of my ravenous bite. His chips were pretty good too, so crisp and sunny that they could have been Liverpool's version of the golden fleece.
Then again, I used to love Furlong's fish cakes, which I used to buy from a chippie near the Farmer's Arms public house in Prescot Road, as well as the dark brown crispy bits which had evaded the proprietor's scoop that were sold off at tuppence a bag. They were the original potato crisps I suppose.
I imagine Paul McCartney must have been an afficianado of that particular chip shop because it was close to his old home in Dinas Lane. Back then he was, as he reminds us in the song, rather fond of establishments that sold ' a four of fish and finger pie', but given his aversion to animal products now he would probably baulk at both. Naughty boy!
How many people know that fish and chips, which I always imagined came from the Lancashire mill towns, were actually introduced to Britain by Portugese Jews?