Possums

I don’t know if you find that from time to time the good Lord clouts you around the side of the head and leaves you gibbering upon the floor, and then comes through with the odd goodie to make up. 

I spent most of last week in and out of clinics and hospital emergency departments.  I was having a bad attack of shingles across my only functioning peeper.  Shingles is what happens when you have chicken pox as a child and the swinish virus descends to the roots of your nervous system and then rushes out screaming when you are old.  It has spent seventy years studying the libraries of hell.

The pain is dreadful, I told the doctor.  I was on my knees.  No, I didn’t cry but I sobbed eight times.  You must give me something for the pain or I shall lose my reason.

The thing about shingles, said the young doctor, is that it attacks the nerves direct and blocking the pain in the receptor areas of the brain does not help.

Give me the heroin, I said, the morphine, the cocaine.  Anything but this.

THERE IS NO PAIN RELIEF FOR SHINGLES, said the doctor.

By the time I got home I looked like the fungus man from Alpha Centauri – my face swollen and covered with sores.  Then things started to get bad, but I imagine you have already got the general idea. 

An email from my agent.  Transworld my publisher thought Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier looked great.  Publication in eighteen months, I guess.

Here is an extract about Liverpool.

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I’m not sure a rural heaven would be reward enough for a chap who has hung about in Hong Kong and caught the breeze in Carcassonne and loitered in London and tarried in Taipei and pissed about in Paris.  I might get impatient with the bluebirds. 

To design my own paradise I would start with a street.  The name is always a problem – Excellent Avenue – Perfection Parade – Beautiful Boulevard – Celestial Crescent – how boring – why not just Paradise Street?  That’s better – let’s all know what is going on.

            You need a variety of levels – walkways up interesting steps where you can sit and drink beer from cans and watch the people passing and chat with Jim Francis and Doctor Ian and the others.

            There would be a lawn, but not too big, and many restaurants, including a Thai restaurant that makes that green curry with coconut.  And a French one that does mussels and muscadet, and a pub round the corner that does Timothy Taylor’s Landlord’s Bitter.

            Many shops, with marine polos, and T-shirts with really interesting slogans like I’M THE BIGGEST BITCH ON THE BEACH, and SALE, and SORRY  I’M TAKEN, and trainers and shorts so anyone can look like a fourteen-year-old African-American junkie.

            There would be street stalls, but not many, and the fruit stall would sell sweet grapes and cherries.  There would be light and space and colour.

            Just over the road from Salthouse Dock is one of the world’s biggest retail developments, just completed on forty acres around Paradise Street.  It has everything I have mentioned, except Jim Francis and Doctor Ian.

Fifty years ago I was an executive with Lever Brothers, and I would travel to Port Sunlight to argue about deodorant soap with chemists who were probably no more interested in the topic than me, but in the Adelphi I was a prince.

The Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, was built in 1826 and refurbished in 1912 to coincide with the launch of the Titanic.  She is titanic indeed, taking up the whole of a Liverpool block. From her elevation in the centre of the city her pillared and majestic proportions look towards the Mersey, back a hundred years before it all went to hell.

I would wander her halls and swim in her marble pool.  I marvelled at the chandelier in the Sefton Suite, which is a replica of the smoking room in the Titanic.  I was startled by the Masonic meeting room as big as a Congregational chapel that held the corner looking out over Lewis’s store.  Masonic devices in the plaster of the breakfast room under the ceiling puzzled me as I addressed my kipper.  Behind the main concourse room after room, some well lit from high windows, some internal and dark with coloured pillars six feet thick like an Egyptian tomb. But most of all I enjoyed my marble bath with the gold-coloured taps, and the hot water pouring and gurgling.  I am a big chap but I could stretch out and float.  I have been around but I never found another bath where I could stretch out and float, and I always had plenty of soap.

            Thirty-five years later Monica and I went to Liverpool to see Brian Ferry before he died and were surprised that we could not find the Adelphi in a book of hotels but we managed to ring and book a room there, with a spa bath.  It didn’t cost very much.  The room was dismal and the spa bath was plastic with holes in the side and didn’t work.  The hotel was still titanic, but to quote Thomas Hardy

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indiffererent

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’

            We had made friends with a Liverpool antique dealer.  What happened to the marble baths in the rooms?

            Torn out – they skipped the lot.

*

So it’s intergalactic farewells from the fungus man from Alpha Centauri and from Monica, Jim and Jess