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.
The boys are back in town - I 've had my chips
By John Williams
Yesterday I was reflecting on my conversion from being a techno pauper to becoming a relative Croesus of the computerised world.
Throughout the seventies my embrace of modernity only extended to the possession of a record player, large cigarette papers and, because I was a zealous believer in the cause of the sexual revolution, a king sized water bed.
That all changed on the eve of my son's birth in 1985. At that time I didn't even have a telephone, because as a flower child I was probably banking heavily on telepathy becoming mainstream; so trying to find a working telephone kiosk, or one that wasn't thronged with amorous teenagers proved difficult and my partner needed an ambulance.
That night was my technological road to Damascus. Within a few years of acquiring a phone I had taken possession of an Amstrad word processor, ostensibly to aid my teaching of English Lit in a local college.
Exhibiting my usual impatience, a characteristic so entrenched that it would shame a two year old in Toys R Us, I couldn't wait for John, my techno savvy mate, to guide me through the process; and so, because the manual was clearly written by a Klingon, for a Dalek, I discovered, after an hour of furious one fingered typing, the first flaw in the process.
You see, early Amstrads didn't offer the `are you sure you want to delete this?' facility, and so the only draft of what was potentially the greatest novel of the late 20th century slipped noiselessly into the eternity of cyber space.
After that I was careful and was thrilled when I was able to print out a copy of my second creative work, which was, as I remember, an excuse for taking a week off work.
I can still hear the racket made by the printer which was so loud that I used to escape into the garden to avoid it and the only way I knew the print run was over was when the birds returned.
By 1990, because one of the more traditional methods of communication was functioning reasonably well, we had two children, and that Christmas we bought an Amiga games console. With it came three games, but I can remember only two of them. There was a Bart Simpson game that was so badly designed it was impossible to get beyond the third level much less finish the damned thing; and there was `Lemmings' which was a game in which multitudes of tiny green-haired people sought to kill themselves in myriad ways, but largely by blowing themselves apart with assorted explosive devices.
We all of us loved that game and spent hours ensconced in my sons' darkened bedroom laughing hysterically at the antics of the miniscule Kamikazes. Of course, what was new in the virtual world of gaming very soon became commonplace in the real world in places as far apart as Chechnya and Sri Lanka and so the spectacle of self immolation rather lost its novelty.
In 1997, in spite of the fact that I didn't own a PC I enrolled for a course at `Connect', a university based project to teach internet skills. Whenever I recall those six consecutive Fridays I am instantly reminded of Chris Rea's song, The Road to Hell, because it almost precipitated my first technological breakdown.
There were forty students in a large lecture room. I found myself sitting at the back of the class, next to another computer-less hobo, and between us we struggled to keep abreast of the instructions given out by a man at the front, whose only teaching aids consisted of large sheets of white paper and a marker pen. The confusion we enjoyed was worthy of a Marx Brothers movie.
The instructor would issue commands but by the time it had reached us two it had been corrupted into a techno version of Chinese whispers.
I remember vividly one day when the command had apparently been to `copy and paste'. However, by the time it had reached Dumb and Dumber it had been mysteriously transformed into `Cotton waste', which left us both wondering if it had something to do with cleaning Microsoft windows!
I kid you not, we were to computer literacy what Attila was to a neighbourhood watch scheme.
Then, in 1999 I bought our first PC and I started to fiddle with the internet. I say fiddle but because of the cost of dial-up it was more like a quick scrape across the strings.
Eventually I was able to get a surfing package with BT and, because a fragment of HTML from my days at Connect had somehow lodged itself in my brain, I was able to send up a web page consisting of thumbnail of a clown's head.
It looked for all the world like a postage stamp stuck on a handkerchief, while my web address, because it was hosted by BT, had more characters in it than the source code for Adobe Photo Shop, but I was thrilled with it!
Looking back on it I think the choice of a clown was somehow prescient because that's largely what I've been ever since.