The Magical Church of St. Luke
I am not a religious person, but I like some places of worship.
St. Luke in Liverpool or the bombed-out church, is one such place for many reasons. It stands proudly at the end of Bold Street, and its state due to a Nazi firebomb, says to many, that times may get bad, but I’ll still be here to cheer you on your way.
On Friday night, as I passed it was open. It was C’s favourite church and she’d always wanted to enter, but it was always locked. So I went in to see the party and auction that was going on.
Long after we’re all gone, St. Luke will still be there, putting two fingers up to the despots, oligarchs, stupid politicians, religious bigots and cruel people of this world.
But St. Luke is winning. Type bombed-out church into Google and you find it immediately. It really is a unique place in the world. And it appears in cyberspace too!
Around Liverpool Pierhead
I walked through the shopping centre, got my hotel for the night and then moved on to the Pierhead and the new Museum of Liverpool.
In the 1960s, the Pierhead was the bus terminal and much of the area was just bus parking. Now it is much better.
An Old Cinema in Liverpool
Liverpool is a city, where I can walk about the city centre and find loads of memories from my time in the 1960s, there both post and after the time I met C.
An Old Cinema in Liverpool
This cinema in Lime Street, was a bit smaller than most of the others and generally showed less mainstream films. I’m trying to remember what I saw there with C, although I can remember seeing The Collector there with another girl.
One memory of the cinema was that in 1968 or so, a film called Sixteen or something like that was released. It was a feature length film made with sex education in mind. You had the strange site of nuns herding school-girls into the cinema to see it.
I wonder if it had any positive effects. No-one knew what the nuns thought of it.
Why Not?
I found this telephone cable cabinet behind Waitrose in the Barbican.
A Painted Telephone Cable Cabinet
Perhaps all of these cabinets, which are always getting damaged by metal thieves should be painted in other designs. After all, it would make them very traceable, if they were stolen.
Queen Elizabeth Visits Liverpool
Not the person, but the cruise ship. Read about it here.
There is rather a war growing up about attracting cruise ships to the various ports in the United Kingdom. Liverpool is particularly well placed in that cruise ships come in directly in front of the Pierhead with the Three Graces and within a short walking distance of the major shops and museums. London’s cruise terminal is forty kilometres down river. Even Edinburgh, which has a deep water port at Leith, hasn’t got its act together and has even discredited its position with the farce over the trams.
Tourism is going to be one of the things that help to grow the economy. Are the various ports around the country, up to scratch?
The Second Tragedy of September 11, 2011
The attacks on this day were awful and no words can express the damage done to individual and collective lives.
The second tragedy of this event, is that Bush and Blair pursued such a misguided strategy afterwards that they made a second serious attack more likely to happen.
To show how badly they performed, you just have to look at how many people think the attacks didn’t happen and were an event staged by the CIA and the Israelis to get at Muslims. Or something else equally false and bizarre!
We should probably have gone into Afghanistan, but Iraq now looks in the eyes of nearly everybody to be a colossal mistake. Although saying that, Saddam was a cruel tyrant and had to go, if only to protect his own people. But the Arab world seems to specialise in people like him. Just look at Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Egypt. And don’t get me going on places like Saudi Arabia and a few others. How many women would like to live in those countries?
The attacks gave us a chance to deal with the real problems of the world. But we just made it worse, by our vengeful actions and our complete disregard for human rights at Guantanamo and other places we are just starting to know about.
Those That Buy The Gun Live Will With The Consequences
The Times today has a story about one child of a couple in Alaska, who accidentally shot a sibling with a pistol, leaving the child a paraplegic. So they are doing what all good American’s do and reach for their lawyer and suing the manufacturer of the gun.
It would have been so much easier and less stressful, if they hadn’t bought the gun in the first place.
After all guns are designed to kill people and when they do, it’s more likely that the victim will be the owner of the gun or one of his friends or family.
Hot Bananas
Apparently, according to Deborah Ross in The Times, yesterday, Morrisons put their bananas under special lights to ripen them. She didn’t like it and expressed it this way.
Do I look like the sort of person, who wants to be wiping banana from the ceiling first thing in the morning?
It was all very funny. But it made me extremely unlikely ever to buy anything in Morrisons. et alone a solitary banana.
As I don’t drive, I’m not sure how I could ever visit a Morrisons. Or an Asda for that matter!
But there must be something very un eco-friendly about ripening bananas artificially, so they are actually hot.
On the other hand bananas are very nice, baked in brown sugar and lemon and served with custard.
Two Pieces from the Zopa Newsletter
The monthly Zopa newsletter is always worth a read. There are some older ones here.
Two pieces from the current August one, I received yesterday are worthy of note.
This is the first.
And fresh off the press today, there is an interesting column in today’s Evening Standard, which states that (and we quote) “maybe a banker-free future will be with us sooner than we think”
I’ve been saying that about banks for a long time. Alternative methods will keep cropping up for their key services. On Tuesday, I went into Nationwide at Islington to use their cash machine and comfy chairs and the place had all the excitement of a morgue.
The second piece is about the people who work for Zopa.
Last but not least, we are very excited in the office as we launch NEED:LESS, our new fundraiser, and we’d love you to join us on our mission! Starting on Friday, 9th September, the Zopa team will be living on just £5 a day, for a week. This will have to cover all food, fun and extras, while the remaining amount that we would normally spend will be donated to DEC in support of the East Africa crisis.
How many of the fat cat bankers would know how to live on five pounds a day? Five pounds a minute perhaps!
How Not To Put Up A Towel Rail
Jerry was, and hopefully now isn’t a very bad builder. I am reorganising my spare bathroom, so I’ve taken down his disgusting wooden fittings, the like of which I’ve never seen anything so bad and putting up quality Miller ones from my previous home.
My Towel Rail and Hooks and Jerry’s Holes
Note the holes drilled everywhere, where he made so many mistakes. I can count eight holes and three he’s crudely filled and that doesn’t count the three I reused.
Does anybody have a good way to fill holes in tiles?
The Anonymous Widower 