City on the Edge鈥 of the Future.
This is the first of my guest 'blogger'. Jonathan Raisin is a composer/musician/writer. He's presently working on a number of projects in development and has very kindly agreed to stick his neck out in the name of free thinking.
I hope he gets your juices flowing.
.............................................................
Where to begin? What is worth talking about at a time when everything can be spoken of and nothing in the world remains unread?
Well, here in Liverpool there is an interesting thing going on just now. Interesting as in the old and over used Chinese curse; 鈥渕ay you live in interesting times鈥. (But if ever there was a time for an unreliable clich茅 then now is that time. Here鈥檚 another one. 鈥淭o joke about the present is a sign that we take seriously the past鈥. You like it? Great. I made it up!)
My point? Outside my window they are burying history.
Liverpool is a city that, for years, has sustained its bruised ego with stories of a well trod past. Trading city. Melting pot. Point of embarkation. Slave-pool (our myths of greatness do not necessarily have to equate with being 鈥榞ood鈥 in the world). Musical legends鈥 Yet, for most of the nigh on twenty years that I have lived and worked here the prevailing order of the day has been dereliction and decay. (William Blake, of course, was there first- 鈥楲iverpool and Manchester are in tortures of despair.鈥).
And we, the inhabitants of the post-industrial 鈥榗ity-on-the-edge鈥, dancing (post-prandial), on the monuments of that glorious history鈥 Bonfires on the statues of liberty鈥 Drum and abasement on the neo-Goth steps of Victorian positivity鈥 (The old, self-deprecating Liverpool joke would go; 鈥楩ree-thinking? Liverpool? Surely some contradiction here.鈥).
And now they are pulling it all down and starting again. Apartments, hotels, offices, car-parks.The . The largest gated community.
Figures are bandied about in the press releases and spidery web sites of the regeneration artists:- so many acres, so many millions, so many storeys (as in, 鈥榯ake the turbo-lift to the twenty-first floor鈥, but we might as well say 鈥榮tories鈥 as in, 鈥榟ave you heard the one about the phoenix rising鈥?鈥).
But the reality is that, day-by-day, whole regions of a city鈥檚 heart are being removed. Lobotomised. And we struggle to remember where (and, therefore, who) we are.
Does it matter, this erasing of the history of a place? I think so.
Liverpool, when I arrived in 1988, was the fastest shrinking urban centre in Britain. In that one year the population of Merseyside diminished by 50,000. As I drove westward, northward, Liverpool-ward, at the fag-end of the Thatcher years, along the emptiest stretch of motorway in Albion鈥檚 fair land, the opposite carriage way heaved with Scousers on their bikes, madly pedalling toward the newly promised lands of the beautiful south; call-centres in Peterborough and the building sites and fast food franchises of 鈥楾he London鈥 (as we say up here).
And here in Liverpool, I must admit, a certain, youthful, nihilism thrived on the sense of decay. Of boarded up shop fronts and the iconic Liverpool image of a tree growing from the upper floor of an abandoned warehouse. .
But I also sensed the residual heat of what this town had been. A centre of the white hot furnace of the industrial revolution. Gateway to the world. To the future. And all of this only a few generations past.
A historical process initiated here in the North West of England that changed the world so profoundly and yet, after only a few generations (my grandfather鈥檚 grandfather walking out of the fields of Lancashire to find work in the growing metropolis), the docks are filled in and the crowds have all gone home. That seemed the first principle of Liverpool life. We live in aftermath. This is the environment we learned to move within.
I met, some years ago, at the bus stop outside the old (abandoned) cinema on Park Road, an old man struggling to retrieve something from the gutter. And as I reached down to help he said to me; 鈥業ts just a penny but I pick them up every time I see one because, you know the problem with this town? It鈥檚 waste. I know it鈥檚 just a bit of copper in the gutter; no use to me, but people here throw things away to easily. There used to be a hundred ships each night passed close by here and now they鈥檙e gone. They threw them all away鈥 such a waste.鈥
The question then...? What happens now when boutique hotels rise from the ashes of an old man鈥檚 boozer and the empty windblown city centre squares are filled no longer with the derelicts of history but with chain store shops and a whole new breed of money-ed clientele?
I guess we acquiesce. I cannot both proclaim the value of history and then deride its current manifestation. This is, after all, another historical process. The way that things are happening now. And yes, something needs to change. But, I for one, find it hard to view the construction of 鈥榯he largest gated community in Europe鈥 or the most expensive retail development with the same wonder as the warehouses of the Stanley Dock, the Three Graces of the Liverpool waterfront or the Manchester Ship Canal.
For that sense of a city at the cutting edge of history we have to look further afield. In Shanghai at the moment, the biggest industrial and commercial development the world has seen is taking place. And all the descriptions remind me of the accounts of mid-C19th visitors to the great industrial cites of the North-West of England. The astonishing shock of the new.
Another Liverpool tagline of today is, 鈥楾he World in One City鈥. Now this could, of course, be taken as arrogance. The last ditch hubris of a once great town, but I鈥檇 rather go with Blake again. (You can鈥檛 escape him here.) 鈥楾o see a world in a grain of sand鈥 eternity in an hour鈥. (Look close enough around you and, yes, you鈥檒l find a microcosm of the whole world). And, I guess, part of what I鈥檓 interested in is placing Liverpool, the small town by the sea, in the wider world context.
As others have said about previous freethinking Liverpool blogs, Liverpool鈥檚 image within England may be problematic but in the wider world it remains iconic. Rana Desgupta鈥檚 blogs from Delhi about the future city remind me that Edward Lutyens, whose grand designs for the Metropolitan Cathedral here in Liverpool remained unrealised (apart from the marvellously vaulted Crypt, beneath the old Liverpool workhouse site), was one of the key architects of the 鈥榦ld鈥 New Delhi.
A key component of the new Liverpool One development (love it or loath it; I鈥檓 cutting to the chase now) will be a tower by Cesar Pelli, architect of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. And, and check out the Bund; the old, European waterfront. Surely, there is something familiar about those facades?
As the webcam pans across the scene there is a double-take moment when it seems you see the Liver Building dropped out of the sky and transplanted to the Orient鈥 and then its gone. A mirage of the virtual world.
And by the way, if any of you should defy the new world order and actually make it out to Shanghai you will not hear the well worn 鈥榗urse of the interesting times鈥. At least, not from the lips of anybody Chinese, because that one was made up to. By an American science fiction writer鈥 or was it JFK鈥? But hey鈥 You know the sources. You check it out. )
And home again. What of the future here? Another parable鈥
When I first arrived, a defining image of Liverpool鈥檚 stagnation was of the main clock in Lime Street station, forever stopped at鈥 well, now I mention it, I forget at what time鈥 but stopped it was. For years. And you start to reflect on the moment when it stopped.
Writing this now I remember that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year, and the flooding of the city of New Orleans, when teams of scientists attempted to understand the process of the breaching of the levees, they hit upon the idea of recovering clocks and watches from around the city, all stopped at the precise moment when the water breached their mechanisms, and so were able to construct the time line of the rising tide.
So. The stopped clocks tell us when decline set in. But how do we mark the moment of rebirth? When the clocks started again? But when was that? How is that moment recorded when time just starts to flow again鈥 Tick-tock.. tick-tock鈥ick-tock.
Whilst I share you sentiments and nostalgia too Johnathan (I arrived in the 'pool in 1943) we do need to acknowledge man's insatiable desire to knock down and rebuild either by war as in Lebanon or in Liverpool, and Leeds, and Glasgow and every other town in England.
Even the villages remain unscathed but just knock down and rebuild at a much slower pace. I have lived in both. I also have loving memories of life in Hong Kong once in the '70s'. Alas I only have memories and photos - damn it they have changed HK again!
What did someone once say "The only unchanging certainty in life change!"
I've found a few places that don't seem to change very much - Barmouth in Wales was one and the Lake District was another and I'm sure there are many more. But here they have become 'show pieces' of historic tourism and all the young have left - no jobs they say and so the oldies remain and enjoy the 'no-change'
But why do cities and towns need to change at all? Well some of the simplier answers seem to be - increased populations demanding more services and 'better' (for better read swankier - now there's an old scouse word) ones. We want to look smarter and copy the next - yes we do tend to be a nation or is that global herd of copiers!
Then there are the professionals - straining to make a living - the architects, (never met a good one yet) the town planners, the town councillors, the builders (bless their cotton socks, me grandfather was one - a master builder he was called in his day) the carpenters and don't forget those ubiquitous concrete makers - they have to put it somewhere and it's so cheap! - all looking for work -
maitaining old villages don't bring in the money.
And then there is just the destructive nature of man - more so than woman I think. There must be something in us - that human blemish that just can't resist knocking down and starting again.
How many times have you seen a father labouriously build a leggo building with his son, only to see the boy with excitement and glee knock it down?
It's only as we get older and hopefully wiser that we see the beauty in preservation - that's why there's usually not many young folk who belong to preservation societies.
Yes for me it does seem to be an inplanted facet of human nature, the human psychi, call it what you will that we build and we knock down and not always for any logical or good reason.
There are a few neat little words with which they attempt to take away our rights: that an area is now private property, and public use of it can be withdrawn at their whim. Magna Carta gone in a sentence.
Yes the removal of our rights have been going on since time immemorial. There has been no greater removal of "our rights" as that imposed by all colonial powers on "their colonies" and the results are still richoshading dawn the decades of time.
Terra Nullis comes to mind. It would seem that Magna Carta is not exportable!
Thanks for your responses. I hope you don't mind if I reply to the collective mind...
A couple of points.
For myself, I am not really talking about preservation orders or trying to promote a culture of 'heritage', simply reflecting that, to me, there is more sense of the energy and dynamism of 'progress' and belief in the future... more 'heat', in the old stones of a Victorian warehouse than in the pre-stressed concrete and cold glass facades of the identikit, post-modern city.
The debate is not about whether change is 'good' or 'bad', but about the particular nature of the change.
This does connect to the issue of 'removal of rights', you are... right! But we must acknowledge that we continue to live in the thrall of money. The creation of wealth for a wealthy few. This is what dictates the removal of rights whether it is the 'right' of access to common land, overturned by the acts of enclosure in C18/19th Britain and so precipitating the movement of peoples from the villages to the cities, or the removal of 'rights' of freedom and independence that resulted from the processes of colonialism and slavery...
What seem to me to be happening at present is the proposal of a shallow sham; namely that, because we have access, as consumers, to the shopping malls and cafe bars of a vast retail development, we are somehow empowered.
What has changed, in a few generations, is that the vision of a humanity liberated from want and therefore free to grow in new and unexpected ways, exploring the true depth and extent of its emotional, intellectual and creative powers, has become so degraded that what we are offered today is the idea that simply to consume is enough.
Jonathan Raisin
It indeed seems more sensible to judge those running our planning by their actions, and not their pretty words.
When I was in my final months at just a common-or-garden grammar school, 35 years ago, I gained the impression that the world outside was EXPECTED to be a playground for the privileged -- not just "public" schoolboys now -- but the lads who would become the new directors, with only limited liability.
Fifty or a hundred years ago the truly privileged would answer that they had values along with their inherited wealth. Ten years ago I really believed in Blair's Britain -- now I no longer know what it's about. Maybe it's those grammar school boys having come home to roost, in their gated high-rises. It's more sad, than bad or mad.
P.A.
And then there is the other view - I'm not sure whether the young as opposed to the middle-aged and elderly give a second thought to old castles, cathedrals, monasteries or the like.
They certainly seem to identify and be more interested in the edifices that are produced on the cellulode screen in 'star wars' etc. Those bizzare but often interesting models or futuristic buildings, they even existed in Orson Wells time 'War of the Worlds time'!
Maybe it's just us oldies that like the old and not the new. And as us oldies have limited life spans, perhaps so to do the buildings.
Majestic though I may consider St Pauls Cathedral to be or even Chester Cathedral for that matter, they are indeed very expensive places to up keep and keep warm on those chilly winter nights during evensong!
Modern architects and builders do consider costs; internal environmental controls for heat and cold and general overheads as well as tear and wear. Small wonder that the great cathedrals are always draining the coffers and holding their hands out to their poor parishioners for more!
So maybe the old buildings just come down because - they're falling down anyway; cost too much to up keep and as the oldies disappear no one wants them anyway?
I think we need to take a wider perspective on the developments of Liverpool II. When Laocoon hurled his spear at the wooden horse outside the gates of Troy and said do not bring it in, people called him "mad" (I paraphrase), but we know eventual consequence for the city's inhabitants.
The importance of the changes in the city of Liverpool are not one of simply knocking down and rebuilding, but of public space being sold into private hands and consequently public spaces becoming private spaces. Ok the land has not actually been sold to the developers, they have a leasehold for I think one hundred and fifty years.
Bereft of funds but seeking a better economic future for the city, Liverpool City Council had little choice but to accept the leasehold offer by the developers, but the social consequences of bringing them into the city will not be known for some time. The changes to the architectural landscape are indeed dramatic but already the most common sentiment I hear in the city is "It's no longer our city" a fundamentally sociological rather than architectural observation.
Liverpool is not alone in this privatisation of public space, it is an international development and evidence suggests that in some respects we are returning to a more medieval approach to city planning.
Perhaps everything that goes around - comes around?
Are Fitz & Peter one and the same?
Of course! Why didn't I see it before? Poor characterisation, and perhaps an explanation of why "they" frequently resort to provocative one liners. Given the frequency with which they post all over the forums "they" can't get out much. To think that "there's" is the kind of job a public school education gets you, bit like MI6 I suppose - very dull for the most part.
I can assure you as will Peter that we are not one and the same.
But your "of course" exclamation is evidence of a poor lack of detective work and the ultimate human behaviour of junmping to conclusions.
Given the frequency.............I would have thought that any posting (baring blaspheme) was welcome, considering the paucity of postings anyway in a country of 62 million and a world much larger.
And Your final resort of 'character insulting' simply points to a lack of good schooling and parenting.
This blog I assume is for anyone and everyone from North Korea (assuming they can access it to the small island of Bali.
Making comments about who is who and the quality of their postings, does nothing for the continuation of the site at all and if there is a moderator around I would suggest that you nip this in the bud pretty quickly or perhaps your sparse postings will become even sparser!
One and the same be **!
My name might be Jane in some pennings;
But it's never Fitz (or Jennings).
No, Esther. What we have in common is that we've met before. He passed through my Cheshire village and we met on its website decades later...
I remain unconvinced, and your sarcasm is unbecoming, what does Peter think?
""Of course! Why didn't I see it before? Poor characterisation, and perhaps an explanation of why "they" frequently resort to provocative one liners. Given the frequency with which they post all over the forums "they" can't get out much. To think that "there's" is the kind of job a public school education gets you, bit like MI6 I suppose - very dull for the most part.""
I ask you dear posters and Esther in particular - is this what serious debate is all about?
is this a superb example of free thinking - or just another caricature of suburban, inner city living at its worst?
""I remain unconvinced, ""
YES we know for ever and ever and ever and ever - Amen!
VENGEANCE OF THE KING OF SIAM
Are we posters or are we pose-rs?
Is it here or is it now?
Right here and right now.
"Shall I divide you?" says Solomon.
"Well, not really. Let it be."
Just let it be.
What is there to say, this August day?
"What is worth talking about at a time when everything can be spoken of and nothing in the world remains unread?"
Why are changes, the next stage in history, being according to the developer's wishes? Liverpool surely has an identity, held mainly in the hearts and minds of its people but also in those who've just a passing aquaintance (like me), who popped in for the Garden Festival, likes the idea of Liver Buildings and docks, might come and walk round and hope for more than boring malls.
So what is this "old identity"? Why should it be ... continued, rather than replaced? ("Lobotomised" as our guest blogger, Jonathan Raisin, puts it.)
Money seems of more value than history. Little is seen to count in the old man and his sayings: "an old man struggling to retrieve something from the gutter. And as I reached down to help he said to me; 鈥業ts just a penny but I pick them up every time I see one because, you know the problem with this town? It鈥檚 waste. I know it鈥檚 just a bit of copper in the gutter; no use to me, but people here throw things away to easily. There used to be a hundred ships each night passed close by here and now they鈥檙e gone. They threw them all away... such a waste.鈥"
There's not enough kindness in the world, that's what Beryl Reid's character said, in the Killing of Sister George. These old people have experience. It doesn't seem very valuable, not very financially rewarding. Like rainforests, cities hold memories.
"But, I for one, find it hard to view the construction of 鈥榯he largest gated community in Europe鈥 or the most expensive retail development with the same wonder as the warehouses of the Stanley Dock, the Three Graces of the Liverpool waterfront or the Manchester Ship Canal."
Thanks, Jonathan
'I ask you dear posters and Esther in particular - is this what serious debate is all about?
is this a superb example of free thinking - or just another caricature of suburban, inner city living at its worst?'
I'll try to answer.
Well to be honest Fitz- I came to debate late.
It was only when I went to university (and I was the first in
my family to go) that I was able to differentiate between debate & kick-offs.
Seriously, I really did want to cry when I first sat round a table 'debating' a particular issue.
My dad was dead by that point but as he'd been the person I'd 'debated' with the most, in our house, I wished him alive so I could say
'Dad, guess what? All those times we fell out? Well it's ok. We were just debating.'
So you can imagine....intellectual stimulation, nostalgia coupled with 'an out of my depth, lack of confidence' sort of feeling (it's a class thing) over-whelmed me for a while. (I grapple with that stupid ghost from time to time)
Also I have to confess to a penchant for on absurbist outlook on life. I try to find the essence of absurdity in everything. Naturally like, not 'cause I'm trying to be arsey or anything.
It's just how I think/see.
So I don't know what 'serious debates' should be about but I don't think one has to be entirely serious to engage in an enlightened discussion
South Park & The Simpson tell us more about the state of society today than most social commentators)
I think it is an example of free thinking though. Cause I just free thunk.
Really Esther - well that's truly amazing!
What is "truly amazing" fitz ? That is not a sentence, there is no subject? It seem that the game is reduced to provocation rather than debate. Jonathan's original post was about "change" let's get back on topic.
I thought about my earlier post to fitz, was it trivial, was it irrelevant? Two other occurrences that same day made me think not. Instead the now three occurrences reflected directly upon Alan Turing's proposed test for AI - essentially a box contains a person who communicates with a keyboard are they a man or woman? (nb. they can lie)
My conversation with fitz seemed of a similar order.
The other two events I refer to are I think equally interesting and equally reflect a major change in the contemporary hierarchies of knowledge, away from the monolithic organs of power and knowledge to the freedom of democratic communication; and i would hope of "free thinking"
The first event was an entry I had made on Wikipedia which i discovered had been vandalised. I wrote the entry some years ago and it is only occasionally that i reread my entry and over time many people have made useful amendments, but this instance annoyed me for it's irrelevent attitude to academic knowledge. Now wikipedia stores all edits and changes which have been made to a subject entry, so it was easy to discover the author, whose profile I discovered included a litany of complaints from other authors "How dare you?" "This is an unsupported assertion" etc etc; but notably he hides behind a cryptic six letter acronym and he is on freeserve (ie can't be blocked). What kind of person, I thought spends their spare time messing up other people's work, forcing them to make repeated corrections, (because our cryptic author comes back the next day to repeat his devious work).
The second instance of the day concerns a web site which I edit and administrate, on behalf of the Liverpool Independents Biennial (www.independentsbiennial.org). Here I have the power, with a simple click of my mouse, to BAN anyone whose opinions and words I don't like. Now I put up with drunken artists writing in the Chat Box at 3am, frustrated anarchists posting abusive rants on the Forum Page, and those who think it's all and wish to make the world aware of this "fact". But I accept all of this, and while I have occasionally "pruned" mesages I have never banned anyone.
Thus in one day I had three instances of on-line communication, all quite different but all focussing on the different hierarchies of power, deception and simple cloak and dagger evasions which the new communications of the www social networks bring.
It is perhaps worth noting that Turing's test is very fallible, notably twelve high court judges were duped when put to the test.
Oh dear Hagerty you've been posted off into cerbyspace! - bon voyage!
Look forward to your next lengthy tirade or is that a Turing?
Ok. I am tempted to say; 'enough...', but we have to go with the debate as it occurs... It is the first lesson of creativity that, once you have put your ideas into the world then they belong, no longer just to you, but within the public realm. You cannot demand a particular response; that would be fascism.
So... The interesting thing (to me) is that the 'debate' has come to be mostly about the medium in which it takes place. And, in a way, this makes perfect sense. We are all familiar with the debates about regeneration, about 'progress' and 'change', about whether we instinctively focus on the past or the future... (if one thing remains constant in the world it is that we age and our perspectives change as we do so)... What is new is this virtual space in which to discuss things.
And, perhaps inevitably, there is both a sense of freedom and of playfulness that comes with communicating in this arena, devoid of the responsibilites and cautions of something more face-to-face... Were we in the more familiar surroundings of the pub this would be the moment to look around the table and say; 'anyway... who's round is it?'... (at least that's my old fashioned debating chamber of choice and- me getting personal now!- I'd hazard a guess that at the grand age of 41 I'm the youngest participant in this particular forum?)...
But here we are.
And what seems to have arisen is a series of questions about identity and trust...
Who are we? Faceless voices posting messages in the same impersonal font. The only identifying signs; a given name, the personal information we choose to reveal, and, perhaps most revealing, the ticking clock that tells when we have posted...
If we are to take this discussion as a microcosm of communication in the internet age... surely the most profound change of 'landscape' of all within all of our lifetimes... then;
Where do we go from here?
Peter H.: My answer to being unsure who's behind what on blogs is to answer the piece of writing, not the names. If someone raises a reasonable point, no matter what a **** they've been in the past, then answer it for the sake of other readers; if someone you know/respect/love has an off day and says something dim/obvious (as even great writers have done from time to time) then just ignore it.
For utter, destructive, malice, we just await the technical means to lock it out. (Who fancies going out into that locked-out world, that no go area, to help those casualties, is yet another matter.)
Timothy Garten Ash, in the Guardian a few months ago, suggested that blog entries be rated by readers and given a weighting which made them appear more prominent.
I'm very reluctant to cut people out altogether. It seems like cyber-execution.
I don't know where we go from here. I used to think that the worst that could happen to me in this country, in cities, would be getting thumped, or kicked, or slashed (in Glasgow) - but now something sinister's entering the equation. I used to see the tube as the ideal mode of transport in a city.
Do I avoid offending people then? I've been doing it too long to stop now. Offenders are what my life's been about. They're too often the ones who determine the course of things.
Look at your city centre. It's sailing close to the wind that reaps the profits, causes our consternation. Offenders are fascinating.
(I'm choosing my words carefully: DON'T think I'm saying "dangerous people are fascinating" or "criminals are fascinating". You have rules, my dearest offenders will try to go to the limit without being collared.)
Very interesting. This seems to be moving forward.
We live in times when our safest sanctuaries in the 'real' world have come to seem dangerous. In comparison, this virtual place appears reassuringly beyond these concerns, and we may, therefore, speak freely. But maybe our concerns and fears from the ouside world intrude... Maybe anxiety expresses itself within this most angst-less forum...
It is not a question, I would say, of offending (though I am interested in your angle, Peter... Is that a professional position 'offenders are what my life has been about'?); causing offence is always the possibility when we allow ourselves to speak freely... In the age of political correctness and the 'self-censoring' that it engenders, any forum that permits free expression is welcome... But a basic human issue remains; how, in the face of disagreement, do we get on? How do we avoid destructive conflict? How do we move beyond simple articulation of our viewpoints, our 'angles', our prejudices, and get into the really interesting stuff... the meat of it... Our common ground, the dialectic that moves us forward, towards some mutual understanding.
My sense is that we all, to a greater or lesser degree, treat this forum as that opportunity, rarely achievable in other spheres, to spout our viewpoints. We become, in some way, children once again. And, optimist that I am, I choose to think that this is good... a refresher course in saying what we think... And then; inevitably, after the excitment of such freedom, we must become interested in true dialogue.. in understanding each others' views... understanding our histories... just understanding...
I believe Michael Foot once said one should deal with one's opponent's strongest points, not choose the weakest. I have a detestation of not only violence in particular, but attempts to subvert more considered decision-making in general.
I don't believe we can get rid of dirty tricks without systematically trouncing them. Occasionally catching people is not enough.
Three years ago I was on a jury. To my delight I heard the words that we could ask to be enlightened on anything we felt had not been covered. Usually I have a measure of sympathy for the inept offender. However, people's eyes tell a lot, and one defending barrister would keep looking at me when trying to make out the attitude of the jury was prejudicial to his client's receiving a fair trial. More like prejudicial against his stratagems to conceal the truth. He just made me absolutely determined to discover whether they'd done it. (Which, I believe, was all we were supposed to be there for.) That was all, in the end, we did. But it was in the teeth of centuries of technique, of making awkward jurors feel small, isolated, and having to go along with the view they each believe the others hold, and will prevail anyway.
After four weeks of it I was very tired, coming away in the security of the train, contented. Criminality might be fun for crime writers but it's wearying.
Yesterday I took my mother shopping to Ellesmere Port (same neck of the woods as Liverpool - where that Wirral bit sticks out of Cheshire to any of you with a map handy, who haven't already heard of it). She likes markets. It's not just a matter of getting things cheap - she likes talking to people.
It's months since we last went, and the massive new supermarket has now opened on the old market car park. At the moment cars are milling round the not-yet-completed new arrangements, shepherded by white arrows and men in yellow coats. I don't get the same feeling of ease I had at the old place.
The trend nowadays seems to be to put limits of two or three hours on the parking once owners realise there's congestion. That might suit the pockets of the store's US owners, but not my nerves. I hope it doesn't go that way.
Perhaps what we're talking about is a new sort of conflict between the "law-using" and the old-fashioned, law abiding. I'm not saying we're particularly whiter-than-white, as regards saintliness - but it's that thing of agreeing, in your bones, with the spirit of the law. It's better that we co-operate rather than fall out.
I can see that the huge car parks adjacent to the old market building (no matter who owned them) were a massive attraction to developers. Whether developers by profession or just those with a development-cum-progress bug in their hearts. Maybe it will be good for the town.
The market stalls have been shunted off into the old supermarket building's shell. Perhaps it will be warmer in winter.
I feel sad. A thin line of trees remain of the bushes that we used to park beside, when things were less organised.
And the people? Still calling it a pound.
Another market I remember well - and further back - is Warrington. My mother and her mother went there, back in the pre-"Golden Square" days: when you reached it via a narrow alleyway past the old Barleymow pub. Now Warrington's being redeveloped in that area again.
We get attached to things. From our very beginning we're growing used to this world around us. Perhaps we feel certain things are exceptions to change - can be relied upon. The sun will rise and the flowers will come, no matter what men may do - that kind of thing.
Builders are just doing what developers ask; developers are responding to a climate created, in part, by politicians. But where does this background, where some things are viewed as more precious, and worth making sacrifices for, originate?
Are the politicians - most of them - just coming out with the most vote-winning things they can think of, and so, effectively, leaving the public to think up totally new directions? So, in fact, such as freethinking festivals could be doing as much "leading" as anything?
It just struck me that we SHOULD take account of our psychological nature: that our need for some constancy has as much right to be considered as do the physical needs dictating redevelopment.
I bought "Spellbound" (my mother loving Ingrid Bergman) yesterday. Hitchcock is such a vivid storyteller. How different the black-and-whites are from the world we live in now. Perhaps I could concentrate more if it wasn't playing now. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it."
I'm the classic drop-out. You don't pass exams by walking to the front and putting the paper down (that's more theatrical).
Snow. The moment of revelation (in the film). Science lives for its eureka moments.
Which puzzle do we try to undo? I have faith that the country that has tried so hard and made films like this isn't bad at its heart. Freud was part of our history - is part of our history.
Begin at the beginning and ask what we're going to be spending the next several million years doing. I think plays are going to feature more centrally than house prices.
When the house I live in was built, over fifty years ago, a generous garden was thrown in - even though it was a 'council house'. No one used to think of metering water! Not many had cars. Now the street's littered with them.
But when we've got over these problems, almost the teething troubles of ceasing to be poor, I don't see future generations exercising themselves making money on property, the way they are round here at the moment. That's why I think it's daft to start sowing discord in the world over these things. They're not worth fighting wars over.
There used to be maths problems like: If two men can build a ten-foot long wall in a day, how many men would be needed to build twenty feet of wall in a week? The answer isn't four-fifths of a man. In other words, absurd answers aren't allowed. Even in my day, at school, we were allowed to point this out. Many possible futures can be ruled out by avoiding silliness. (Oh, there was plenty of both that and fun - which is something we can all learn from.)
There've been TV programmes like Tomorrow's World, highlighting various technological innovations and what might flow from them. We can be given hopes like being told we can be frozen and then resurrected one day when our particular ailment has yielded to a cure! There's a more widely-accepted way of coming up with brand new people, hadn't they heard?
Thinking about the future has to take into account "human nature". Perhaps boffins in white coats appear to have been pushed into the back room, advertising toothpaste, but science is here to stay. It's so successful at delivering the goods that no government worth its salt will turn away.
We can't ignore China (and India) and our country's attempts to hold its own in the international market will affect what happens in our cities, Liverpool being no exception. What I would hope for though is to recognise that you can't "do being Shanghai" better than the Chinese - and they've probably the sense to realise that "being Liverpool" is done best in Liverpool. Let's just hope we have.
The year's 2050. WPC Petra X puts on her body armour, radios in, and gets on her bike.
It's uncomfortably hot. The cooler threaded through her clothes kicks in.
She can never be sure what the day will hold. The sunlit Liver Buildings look beautiful, a distant Taj Mahal, and there are no cars around like there used to be.
In emergencies you get the electric vehicles out. Someone discovered how to pack a lot more power, and punch, into a small space - so petrol and diesel just became redundant. But it still got hotter. It would be a long time before things changed.
She's running early, dismounts on the waterfront and looks around. The light dazzles her. Just no ozone to hold it back. Everyone is hidden behind shades now - just no eye-contact on the streets anymore.
The past? Her grandfather told her not to dwell there. It had gone.
"So what are we looking for this morning, sarge?" she asks the middle-aged man on arrival.
"Smart - smarter - smartest. Love to have seen you on a real bike. Instead you've a fighter pilot's head on a penny-farthing!"
"Now sarge, I've chased many an old tearaway down back alleys on this - as well you know."
"Just watch the young tearaways, that's all. --And there's plenty been going on, just look at that." He handed over a list.
"'Nother fight at that philosophers' bar again.... I was there - plain as ever. Somebody tore up Nietzsche."
He shook his old head. "You young things'll be the death of me. Keep away from those philosophers. 'Told your dad I'd look after you. They're the ones turned your grandad---"
She gave him a look to kill. The shades were off.
It's late. Petra's back home with her cat. She likes the view over the city. Puss has never known a garden.
It's going through her head what her life is now. Most people her age, early twenties, will live to a hundred-and-fifty. So much has been learned about the ageing process.
Does she want to meet a man or concentrate solely on her career? After all the confusion around the turn of the millennium it became law that a government could not introduce major amendments to criminal justice bills within five years. It became an incentive to get it right. The advantage to her was that she knew where she stood. Forty floors up looking at the lights.
There wouldn't be any complications from any relationship: fertility could be handled with certainty now. She wasn't sure what she wanted though. And those philosophers seemed the last people to guide her.
She appreciated what her parents had done, but had become estranged from them. Only her grandfather's words kept ringing in her ears. He'd been daft enough to write for websites back in the Nervy-noughties - as the first decade had got called.
They never had found him. He'd just gone out for a walk. Some of the family had joked that he'd be part of the foundations for one of his much-derided redevelopments. She intended to be more careful. The European Union was good, but a lot of ruthless ways had come along too.
She was starting working nights the following week, so the cat would have the bed to himself. But, for the time being, they could just curl up together, counting sheep, or mice, or whatever it is hunters do, while electronic eyes watch the city.
Believing in order keeps you at a distance. Some of Petra's instincts trouble her, even among those she works with, let alone those she works against.
The city of the future will need order. This is already apparent. A few years or a few decades after the famed 9/11 and our thoughts are circling round safety in ways with no peacetime parallel. Neither Petra, in her humble position, nor anyone else she listened to, could see this going.
It's to do with interdependence, not just big structures you can knock down. You only have to look at what happens when a few fuel protesters block off a refinery, or the supermarkets with their "just-in-time" delivery systems get mucked up.
The people on the street might complain, at the delays going on holiday, but come to the crunch and they consented. Part of her wasn't happy. She joined to chase bad people, not police society.
The forty-and-more years since her grandfather had written things she was reading hadn't helped matters. People go down their entrenched routes. She had to go out now, with a colleague, not so much walking Liverpool as walking the fine line between inflaming prejudices and letting be.
"Are you coming?" said the young sergeant, who'd got the short straw when it came to who took her.
Down the years, a few new drugs had come on the scene. There were criminal chemists designing for particular effects, with sometimes terrifying results.
"We're just going to show the flag among people leaving clubs - one or two where we've had a problem. I've been before. People would rather have us standing around than trouble. They'll get to know you."
They leaned against their electric car.
"Who's your new girlfriend, Andrew?"
He introduced her. "Mmm," said the girl.
"Are you usually this familiar?" she whispered as the girl walked off.
"You'll learn."
Nice one Peter - I think you're mellowing and blossoming with age!
I love your mind!
Education had changed. It was understood far better what the obstacles were to successful learning. The system could never breed geniuses, but the vast majority were now intelligent and knowledgeable. There were overwhelming numbers of doctors and lawyers. The police was an unusual choice.
Petra had it worked out, if not like HG Well's Mr Lewisham, who planned to pass everything. But she had a sense of what was happening. There was something undecided about Liverpool, like her. There was an intractable minority that her colleagues avoided, except when locking them away. She didn't want to play games with flirty clubbers, like her young sergeant. Nor did a fight at the philosophers' club strike her as the place to be. But it was the only start she had, and quite unofficial.
She deliberately bumped into the older sergeant in the canteen. "How's your bike-riding?" he asked, grinning.
"Can I sit with you?" she answered.
Perhaps he sensed she wanted a father figure, even if that didn't chime in with what the younger officers were saying about her parenthood. He'd heard her mother had been ill.
"How's your mother?"
"I've been to see her - at the hospice."
"Oh, I didn't know it was that bad."
She looked guilty for a moment. "No, I didn't till I had a call from my father. I told him I'd go if he kept away while I was there."
The moment seemed to be passing, her family problems seemed to have pressured her, made her realise she had to move. The canteen was filling up and she didn't want anyone sitting at her back. He looked into her face, waiting.
"The really problem people, the druggies, thugs, gangsters - these frauds we've had - it hasn't always been this way has it? So what's going on..?"
He smiled. The moment hadn't passed at all. "You're asking an old sergeant, passed by for promotion--"
They caught each other's glance. "Wisdom," she said, as if the one word explained their conversation.
"Ah. You're getting biblical on me."
"No." She looked for her words, knowing it decided her life. "Those above us are full of their initiatives--"
He raised his eyebrows. "Don't be overheard, little lady."
She heard, but went on, "I want to do something with my life."
He was nodding. "Grandfather's grandaughter." He put his face to her ear and whispered his address.
She knocks on his door. It does not remind her of the past, this place, it is the past. A garden and a few gnomes. One of them has a different face. It's Margaret, she recognises her from old British prime ministers, a page of a book she'd been thumbing through last night.
His wife answers the door, at least she presumes it's his wife. She's already imagining how many years they've walked these rooms.
"Have you lived here long?"
"Thirty years."
He sat among his cups. So much silver. He smiled: "I could win things once."
"More than once, it looks like."
Then his wife left them, saying she'd bring some tea.
"So why are you worrying about us? The great British Police?"
Perhaps she shouldn't have come to him. She had to stick by her judgement now.
"I wanted your recollection of how things have come about. I don't trust what's written."
He looked over at the budgie in its cage. "People's views change, don't they. Don't think we should have birds in cages, don't think we should hunt foxes. It's all the same to me. There's always been cruelty - some crueller than the rest of us. But we're going forward aren't we?"
She was surprised he seemed to be asking her. Perhaps he thought she should already have been pushing some revolutionary view, or asking what the chief constable liked - off the record.
"I don't know," she answered. "I feel lost. So many seem so definite - like on this website of my grandfather's - they seem to know what they want, or at least what's best."
"You're thinking a lot about him, aren't you? It doesn't do to over-idealise people you've never met--"
"You think I'm doing that?"
"Don't be so easily roused."
His wife came in with mugs of tea. "Conflict's easy," she commented. "I was an actress. It hides a lot. But I'll let you get on with it," she added, closing the door.
"Don't mind Meg," he said. "She's my guardian angel. Did you notice the gnome? Not a bad little artist either."
"So you're not frightened of--"
"It's a free country," he butted in. "We don't say who we're frightened of."
He opened a cupboard and took out a photograph album. "No computers here," he told her. "Pure photography. Look...."
She knew who it was.
She didn't know whether it was what she'd half-expected, that mysteries can't be concealed, but go into hearts that one day have to release them; or was it just his face again, her own father messing and meddling as he always had - but caught here. Sergeant Cox knew she had to mind, that it humbled her, all these photographs of the wrong people.
The internet was blind from this. These men met in a space unrecognised, off the scale. "How did you get these?"
"Old equipment that still worked."
"And you joined them?"
"I went along."
Deja vu. "Like me with the philosophers."
"Welcome to the dinosaurs club."
There was a tap on the door. Meg had painted her face. Was Petra so uptight she wouldn't accept it?
"She's a mad Liverpool woman," he hardly needed to remind her.
But the madwoman danced, intriguing Petra, who half-expected John the Baptist's head to arrive on a plate.
Finishing, whirling her tassles, breathlessly informing the two, with their heads together, that they'd needed some light relief, she plonked herself down. "Oh, that album again. Dirty old men."
"One's her father," he cautioned.
"I might have known. That kind of thing doesn't go away. Give me some decent belly-dancing any day."
Petra didn't like the way things were turning. "I need to go," she said. "I have to see my mother." The photographs had been taken years ago, there was nothing recent. She kissed Meg's painted cheek and shook her sergeant's hand, clasping it hard. "I'll get back to you."
The faces stuck in her head all the way to the hospice. Thankfully her father wasn't there. Things didn't seem to be changing. The surfaces had been cleaned, the atmosphere was full of regulation. Welcome to the eternal present. She took her mother's hand.
"What question are you asking?" the voice said. "What question?"
She froze, became aware of the nightmare, but knew she had to answer it.
The city lay like a village, with its candles: And all that was there about it, in her head, that she'd been taught, was technical and distant. It didn't look the same, close up, when you were on the street.
She got up, and dressed, and went out.
It was better lit than it had ever been. There were few blind spots from the cameras. If she carried no mobile phone, gave out no signal, she would merit special attention. She might be stopped, and if she didn't identify herself satisfactorily, be searched.
Like signals out of the past she saw girls standing, as they used to. Some of these knew her.
There was a book she had, Angels and Fairies, and she carried in her mind the images of these mischievous second ones when confronting the artful ladies of the night. But tonight she did not confront. It was satisfaction enough to walk the street and pass by.
The beast had moved on. He wasn't where she thought he'd be.
What was this place? A warren for the disaffected souls. You could be unwanted anywhere and come here. It was full of yearning. It groaned with it.
Step Three - was there a step three? She needed to put matters on a proper footing. Everyone was all over the place, doing their own thing. She felt like running. It wouldn't do. That was what Jane Fonda had done and ended up with the pimp, and Klute, fighting over her. Thou Shalt Not Run.
So where had the Beast gone? These bad things keep happening, and we give a name to it, before long hang it on someone's face. You may like my mind, she thought, I don't.
Her mother was rambling, dates, things that had happened. The vicar turned up. "The beast's moved up a frame or two," she whispered, beginning to talk to herself. Mother, friend. Friend, mother. The dark man moved behind her. She saw the white of his collar and began to come to.
"Petra," he said. "Go home, you're tired."
People die here, she thought, looking back from the car park. It's like the portal to another universe. But then there was the street. Empty of cars now.
But soon there was the van following her, coming up close. She tried to shake it loose but couldn't. She felt them staring down at her. She slammed on the brakes and ended their illusion.
She didn't want it to end like this. Only service vehicles, or various kinds of carefully screened public transport, were allowed after all the past troubles. So it wouldn't be just joyriders out on a lark.
Help should already be on its way - everything being linked to everything - via the crash sensors in the vehicle, hers at least. But it could be a deadly few minutes. Curiosity killed the cat, she remembered. Still, she wanted to talk.
"Driver's licence?" she snapped.
"But you slammed your anchors on."
She wanted to argue, but persisted. Was in the mood for a fight but resisted.
She clicked her fingers and he handed it over.
"So why were you following me?"
"Don't get much excitement in my life."
"So you wait there and follow people coming out?"
"You look a bit of a goer to me."
"Get out," she said. She wanted to teach him a lesson. Yet there was no freedom to do anything like that, everything round her and her vehicle being recorded.
She felt his eyes feasting upon her frustration. Other cars were approaching. She looked away, and he must have hit her.
The tarmac felt slimy and figures in similar uniforms to hers fussed over the scene, sitting her up in the road. She didn't want to explain it, why she felt better. It began to rain. There was no sign of the man, any man.
Made to lie on a stretcher she wondered if 2084 would leave them as hemmed in by surveillance and regulation, punctuated by seemingly inexplicable outbursts. Who had wanted this?
The man had taken his licence back - or at least it wasn't there. And people were wondering why she'd been so provocative, causing a crash. But she couldn't bear being followed.
They got this doctor to come and see her, not for her bump on the head, but about her attitude. People have these attitudes and don't fit in, that's me - but she didn't say so. You can think what you like, but I'm still looking.
So all the hi-tech equipment scanned her and out she came. Brand new.
Except it wasn't the same. She knew they were there. Scratch the surface of life, because they were tracking her under it.
Back she went to Sergeant Cox. "We've both messed it up."
"Have a drink," his wife said.
"I'm not going down that road."
"Suit yourself. We are."
She watched. They'd come to a deal. Don't push it, you'll not get promoted, but we'll leave you alone. Draw the curtains and do what you like. Just don't write it or speak it outside. No electronic evil.
So which wise monkey would she be today? She was reaching the point where she'd have to switch off, forever - or go on.
The sound of the birds eventually came. They were up in the roof garden.
Whatever was happening at street level, the occupiers of the towers had their gardens. Some of these were lush and covered. There could be tropical plants but the line had to be drawn when it came to animals. Bats in the belfry might be one thing, snakes coming down the stairs was quite another.
So Petra took an early walk in her shared garden, lifting her depression a little with its scents and flowers. And the views from the edges were superb, there being such a distance before the next tower was allowed. What did it put her in mind of? Was she awaiting the vultures? No, it was too light. The greens suffused her, tranfusing her with the gardener's spirit - someone who evidently loved his job. It was a good place - a Godly place almost. She sat on the seat, hearing the fountain.
Things could be cobbled together in this modern Liverpool. Sometimes people complained that they couldn't do their own thing for someone else's getting mixed in. But somehow it worked. Her isolation felt all the more acute.
She'd never done any gardening. But now she longed for the life to burrow among these flowers and get her fingers dirty. Like people, like some of her distant relations, who worked in forests and other people's gardens.
Yet she was knotted and tied into other lives now, into something that mattered for other reasons - a garden that had its own fruits, and predators. She didn't fear meeting them now, her taste of the jungle was making her anticipate their dark red welcome. A few more heartbeats and she'd walk back down, to begin again.
Very glad I found your blog, Esther. And great to read Jonathan's thoughts, very engaging. A Liverpool-born playwright, I'm one of the generation that moved away in the mid-80s, and have charted this culture- and retail-led renaissance (if we can call it that) on visits back. Tate is great, FACT is cool, the theatres are taking off. But have those clocks started ticking again?
May I remind all commenters that contributions should be pertinent and succinct.
Southendian - Radio 3 Host
It's certainly right to be as pertinent and succinct as possible. But what if you feel, as I do, that part of the problem is that we've first got to agree on what we're REALLY asking. If we're asking about living, repeat, living in a city then that involves the human element, not just the buildings and the streets, the waterways and bridges, the lighting at night. A hundred, let alone two hundred years ago, most citizens would have been mainly concerned about their safety, food, and shelter. The design of places was left to "them".
There seem to be a couple of new generations since mine that have moved on, who are not just concerned with survival. I sometimes don't think we appreciate how much our mentality is changing. It's not a hundred years since young men flocked to join up for the Great War. How differently things are reported today.
The police are a group I wonder about. They're stuck in the middle. And I increasingly feel that philosophy can lose itself when talking about things (not between philosophers of course, but it loses the rest of us). I don't feel I'm really anything, not highly-educated or uneducated, not a ruler or ruled, not really all with the law - but certainly not against it.
At night the city lights her mood. It's a reflection of what's happening in her. City lights in water. Bridges, echoes of Venice. Her conflicts over, she's back on the beat.
Somewhere out there, an obstacle on the route to the Isle-of-Man, is the statue of Lennon. He's been finally left to the birds now, since a deranged pilot tried to fly into him.
Closer to home, the music churns on. She's an eye for the dysfunctional of this newest of new ages. Out went belief, in went hedonism, spiced with the new economics. This was an entrepreneurial place, still a port.
What of course it led to was revolutionary. Britain didn't make things, it just made sure you made it. The legal way to get out of your head. The shows were inimitable.
She lived on the edge between her own life and understanding this other one. The way psychology had been employed to make more and more successful "experiences". The conflicts of the past seemed trivial, the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain like the fall of Rome. No one would have it said that the barbarians ran the show though.
Did people want to see into the darkness or just satisfy themselves it wasn't going to bite them? Did they want people who would solve these problems (without offending the lifestyle to which they'd grown accustomed) or was it some deeper interest - that we might find a way of reforming ourselves too? There's something magnetic about the quest Petra found herself fast-tracked onto.
Is human nature this immovable object, this obstacle which will finally do for any and all utopias? She was there, gambling with the best of them. Was it a new super-casino? Or is it playing politics now, making her way up the ladder? Cities are about intensity.
Did people truly want to talk openly, unbend the unspoken from its knots. This was as thrilling as it was chilling. It's written through our culture that we destroy people who analyse us effectively. One misplaced grand explanation outweighing a thousand paedophiles, being the one thing we really hate.
The law brims with words. They're the grain in the photograph and the things on the road to being our death. It's the ideas that matter.
She didn't fear the people on the street outside her car. It was different illusions than theirs she was intent on shattering.
She is saying goodbye to an era, an era of simple, ordinary, ways of saying things. Her mother had gone now.
How was crime different? What did people want? She went on courses, read what had been written, and it lead onto the same streets. She walked corridors into offices, where the powerful hid, keeping the lid on the world. It wouldn't be statistics that had the answer.
Who did she want to talk with now as she knocked, preferring to leave the computer behind? What's the thrill as she talks of his trade, souls conveyed beyond the city limits, into international waters. Minds moved beyond, below decks in a ship under different jurisdiction: trips allowed. Is this the crime of the late 21st century?
She finds herself wandering the streets again, later, pondering the connexions.
Are you asking?
Then I'm dancing.
She didn't want to recall any more. The computerised past made parts of it easy. "The Liver Birds" could come tumbling back.
She watched how the problem had grown. How glossy the presentations had become.
She read again her grandfather's warning from the past:
MUSICAL AIRS
They have the power to stop the game whenever they wish, to their advantage.
Much as we might not want it to happen, it will. Our trick is not to let it matter. (There will never be anything there while they're thinking of stopping.)
Logic isn't a trick, but portraying it as existing innocently in space, affecting nothing in a partisan way, that's their trick.
Those people who would run the cities of the future, they who would be king, want the logicians to be just blind enough.
The gamble wouldn't be with her people's safety. She would begin to oppose their licences.
And though the noisy tide lapped round her feet, walking, watching the changes, it wouldn't bury her, only taste of salt, this time.
""May I remind all commenters that contributions should be pertinent and succinct.""
May I remind you too that if you want us to jumpt through blogged hoops then you have to show us where they are and what size they are - simple calling them pertinent and succint is vague to the extreme.
given as I have commented on before the parcity of posters on this wonderful site I would have thought any reasonable and non- blasphemous posting would be welcome.
the title is inviting 'city on the edge ..........of the future
Peter I would think is responding in his usual elequent way to his views which are always pertinent in my book, of the title that has been provided.
If you don't like some of the postings southendian then provide a rules books or stop trying to be a control freak.
Peter - it seems they want 'real life' on here - as they see it not ' fiction' as we see it in the city of the future.
god I'll be glad when this free thinking thing is done - it's been a bit of a damp squid don't you think
Societies have to have their rules, I suppose, in order to continue existing; so I don't rail against the existence of any rules at all. Freedom's a difficult ideal to live up to (which is partly what this blog's about, I think). Petra would say she promised to keep the peace, for all the (by then) king's subjects.
ever heard of the just being ruled by the unjust - it happens the whole world over - the most successful society on earth once, had rules but they were fair to all and the groups were self-sustaining - and eveyone knew the rules too and didn't make new ones up each day or hide behind pseudynoms
but I guess that was called the primitive world - we are oh so far more advanced now, have all the weapons of mass destruction at our finge tips and hell bent on destroying the world that the primitives learnt to preserve so well.
Yes we do need rules but let's make them nice and bold and clear instead of hiding behind website screens in the south somewhere!
What can I say? Although Britain doesn't have a written constitution some (including me) would argue that it's done a better job of protecting freedom than some of the beacons of liberty you're referring to.
Just as making laws shouldn't be rushed, nor should judgements of such dimensions.
The pieces were beginning to fall into place. At night the cruise would leave the Mersey and sail round the Irish Sea while the revelry continued below deck. All over the world these anomalies occurred - anything to evade the eyes of puritanical laws. The smuggling in of pleasure.
Petra found it amusing at first: a new version of the speakeasy. It was what went hand-in-hand with the laxity and forbidden fruit that nagged. People drawn by the bright lights, perhaps not speaking the language... disappearing. In that respect she could be back in the 19th century, after Jack the Ripper.
No headway could be made and the Chief Constable was becoming more frustrated, so they booked in for a Turkey and Tinsel weekender. His wife didn't understand, so that was alright.
At the bar on the first night a red-haired man, name of Fritz, whose party trick was a hat with corks and an Aussie accent, latched onto them. "I'm back," he said.
"Where's your crocodile?" Pertra asked.
He raised his eyebrows. The CC was not amused, his free swing at Petra's conker in jeopardy.
Fritz saw his chance and asked her out for a walk on deck. "Friend of the captain," he whispered, touching his nose, as one who knows.
Promenading was discouraged, surveillance being the fine art it now was, but the brazen and foolhardy would do it, and get in police files. Petra couldn't resist. She wanted to know his game.
The moon was reflected on the calm sea and the occasional drone passed by to reassure them they weren't forgotten. She'd better not kiss him or she'd be looking at the clinch across the chief's desk. Nothing was free anymore.
I do so hate it when someone mispronounces or mispells my name - it's not Fritz - for God's sake man - it's Fitz! or if you want the fullname - Fitzgarabaldi - an infamous - German in the Amazon once!
but whatever - Fitz comes from another 'Amazon' the Ozzie bush - a place where there are no cities and men are men and the kangaroos know it!
Petra was really out of her depth here as she took out her Broome Pearl layered cigarette lighter and inserted one of her favourite Sabranie blacks. These had been unavailable for some years now - but you could still get them of course if you had the contacts.
Fritz (Fitz) struck his match on his leather shoe sole and lite here cigarette. He noticed a faint quivering of the lips and recognised the same response from the kangaroo as the marksman raised his rifle in the pitch darkness of night illuminated by the shining florescent long reaching beam of the hand held torch that picked out the females to kill - they were always tenderer than the males!
His corks swung seductively and he placed that rire smile on his face that always seemed to amuse the sheilas.
"What's a pretty Petra like you doing out on a rare night like tonight he asked - and such a long way from the ranch?"
she blew out the Sabranie smoke and smiled before replying
She can have doubts, terrible doubts, as she walks down the corridor with Mr dangerous. This isn't how it's supposed to be, policing in the twenty-first century.
The charming man taking her arm, the nihilistic mood of the place, even down to the appropriation of part of the 大象传媒's licence fee for speed dating, it gave her the collywobbles. He was laughing.
You can be out of your depth and watching it happening, watching the criticism of discourse rising and swallowing your cherished democracy like a serpent, and then come back down for more; because you're not a man, my daughter.
Where was she now? In the ship of iniquity, below the waterline. She wasn't back in her office, the sun glowing on the Liver Buildings, now. He could pull the rug from under her and wrap her in it at any moment. The scars of her past brought her back, like writing on her mind.
"It's this way, my cabin," she told him
"I thought you were coming to mine."
"We didn't say that. You were telling me about what you did in Australia and then I said if it was a long story we'd better finish it in comfort. That's when I said 'my cabin'."
"Oh. I thought you just meant the nearest place to rest our heads. Mine was nearest."
She weighed him up. "But it's all the same thing, here, isn't it?"
"Why are you thinking that? That the only people who come on these boats are in some kind of void... that you're superior and can avoid this?"
The dizziness was coming, but more deeply than it should. She knew pain - in the brain - but this was a Mickey Finn. She hit the fire alarm.
As soon as she'd hit the fire alarm - Mickey Finn came running - straight into her sagging arms- 'have you seen me old mate Fritz from down udder?" he bellowed. But she had already feigned an faint and was swooning wildly.
He held her limp body and something told him he was in trouble - and then the guards swarmed around with dijideroos set at stun - they'd been successful for years on the kangas of the bush.
He slowly lowered her to the deck and raised his hands gingerly - dijiderros he could handle but if the pulled out those boomerangs he was in deep s..t. They were deadly and always had a habit of coming back just when you least expected them.
And then from behind a swaying lifeboat Fritz appeared sauntering towards the group and exclaiming 'put the dijids down lads, this one's one of ours................
They have locked her down in the depths, where she can hear the machinery. It is oil and water and darkness. And she is chained.
The water swills around her party dress. The engine smell presses in. "I'm not going to scream. I'm going to wait."
There is a glow from her wristwatch. She can watch the hours pass in oily slime. How primordial, she thinks.
There is a chink, then a blaze of light and the beast Fritz has her by the throat: "What's your game, lady? You're fine and pretty now, aren't you!" And he smeared her face with an oily hand. "You belong in the depths, here, mine." He went away again.
She was a prisoner of the system. So she needed to understand the system. He might come back to satisfy his needs, but he wouldn't be the killer.
She looked at her watch, they would be docking in Liverpool soon. Docking at the door.
A crate arrived at the police headquarters later that night, complete with air vents and livestock stickers. Petra and the chief, stuck together.
"I've heard of close cooperation," one of the constables unpacking muttered.
Someone, somewhere, has a sadistic sense of humour, thought Petra. It's not quite fatal.
Medics and forensic men hovered and messed and eventually they were apart and she could wash. The past drained like water down Psycho's plughole. The chief constable would be trying to make his wife understand. Someone else too, had got his measure.
Cheek-by-jowl, in boxes.
Petra blew out the florescent smoke from her contraband sobranie and stared inquistively at the chief Constable........how's your wife taking all the news she quizzed?
Don't know really he replied she's taken off to her mothers on the Isle of Wight. What do you make of Fritz he asked her?
When he held me there was something distinctly odd she said that I couldn't put my finger on she replied. And then it came to me as we were wrapped together - sheep manure - he definitely smelt of strong sheep manure.
haven't seen a sheep in years said the CC - God I'd die for a lamb chop right now.
I heard you could still get them out Southport way said Petra but it's risky and expensive. But that's what he's up to rustling. He thought we were on to him. We need to keep a closer watch on ships logs around here.
The CC looked suddenly very tired and hagard - she thought this was getting too much for him and his marriage was beginning to crumble too. she learned across and gently touched his knee - why don't you take a holiday too and catch up with someone on the Isle of Wight.? she felt he was beginning to cramp her style.
She could deal with Fritz and his sheep much better alone - she had the know how and equipment to do it with - he'd be in leg irons before he could whistle "waltzing Matilda"
How quickly the days went when you were doing what you wanted. Perhaps it's almost a religious faith, that private property has liberated, but she believed the possibility of wealth could distort vision, and close the eyes even, at its most extreme.
It seemed strange that religion had returned to bolster hedonism. People mustn't have felt safe in taking without a friendly pat on the back, from a father figure they evidently still needed. It was supposed to make no difference to her job - but if she saw things brushed under the carpet, how could it not excite her beliefs?
People like Fritz were almost an irrelevance compared to the business culture that had blossomed. Building things is a statement, not just a statement, but a statement that might want to conceal itself for a while.
It appears the two worlds are separate, the clean uplifting architecture on one side and the lower depths on the other. But she didn't know what she wished to happen, and it certainly wasn't her job. Perhaps it was no-one's.
She lay in her bed that night tossing and turning as the ever present arc lights kept moving across the sultry sky, ever present; ever watching.
She felt secure in her own beliefs - she was a defender of the common people -she'd seen capitalism and greed destroy the cities and leave them in the shells they were now.
But what of the future - there was no rallying cry - no defender of the faith - just tired Chief Constables who had had enough.
She had glimpsed the brave new world in her half awoken dreams and had hoped beyond hope that it was there for the taking. But she grew tired with each waking day. Her family had long disappeared or denied her existance. she was alone with her quest.
She needed something to renew her spirit - revive her energies and her thoughts turned again to Fritz.
He was everything she loathed and yet.........there was something there that beckoned her........ something new......... something different.
Yes he was brazened and rough but he had no hidden agendas and there was something in his smile and that unresolved stare that told her that he could see the future, and it was something he was fighting for.
The promised land perhaps - a land that promised renewal, a fresh start. A new model of sustainability - were man could live with nature again - not challenging and fighting it but nurturing it.
Yes she might just take a chance with Fritz, if only she could locate him again? And then she sighed and dropped off into a troubled and fitful sleep.
The trouble with reality is that it can't do (for us) what we'd romantically like it to. That much as we'd like to write a happy ending, we have to write the one we believe.
The problem isn't just that we can't write the defeating of dragons by heroes (or heroines) but that we might not be seeing the true dragon. So that when the incorrect tale is read, it misleads, and enlightens hardly anyone.
A lot of polished dialogue gets written, but are we sure it's what's at the bottom of things? It's far and away more interesting, to me, to write about a character who wonders why events have happened, than one who is continually trying to write the word success across reports of what he did.
to coin another phrase Peter "the trouble with reality is that it's only an illusion"
The Aborigines of Australia have a great tradition of 鈥榮tory telling鈥 which serves many purposes, the least of which is to just to tell a story. Their 鈥榮tory telling鈥 ensured that they conducted themselves in a harmonious way with their environment and their fellow men 鈥 well at least until the 鈥榠nvaders鈥 appeared with their disease-ridden stories.
Their stories (the Aboriginal stories) were their bibles, their books, their maps, the principles of democracy, their universities and their history. Each story was told to the young as a means of educating them, and each story had hidden and different meanings on four levels of initiation. Young people would move through these levels, rather like completing their high school diploma, first degree, and then masters and then PhD. Very few completed their PhD鈥檚 鈥 this was the level for the elders, the wise men and women.
Europe of course has its own history of 鈥榮tory telling鈥 but today this has been reserved for the amusement of the young. If however you go back and study these stories say for example Hansel and Gretal, you will find that they can still today be used as a means of primary to university education. They are in fact timeless and invaluable, priceless but we have lost sight of all this.
So today we turn to the scientists, to tell us about our 鈥榬eal鈥 world, our philosophers to suggest where we may be going to next, our politicians to tell us how we should live our lives and how we can prosper.
The Aborigines and their story telling guaranteed that they would survive in a harsh environment for thousand and thousands of years. The British with their superior knowledge and expertise soon destroyed all of that in the name of 鈥榮cience and progress鈥
I would be interesting to see a masters or PhD of story telling emerge in our modern seats of learning. Perhaps it would remind us of the better things in life and the simpler truths and messages and reduce this obsession we seem to have developed with the so called pursuit of scientific knowledge and technology ( so who call the 鈥榬oad to perdition鈥)
I鈥檓 all for story telling around here as you may have guessed but not just for amusement.
As Petra tossed around in her fitful (or was that fritzful sleep) she found herself in the 鈥榙reamtime鈥 world of the aussie outback with Fritz. She was transported back to the 鈥榥ever never land鈥 were the grass and trees and rocks seemed timeless. Here there was no need for time life just evolved in a never ending cycle. She could smell the freshness of life as never before, could see no pollution for miles around and felt at peace with herself, something she hadn鈥檛 felt for a long long time. She realized that she didn鈥檛 need the cities, these were relics of the past, mausoleums, like gravestones pointing to the past. This was real life as nature had intended.
You view the world in an endearingly simple way. The "developed" and the undeveloped.
Perhaps our philosophers think all they have to do is extol the virtues of reason and excoriate prejudice.
It's more worrying. There might not be honour, but there's common cause, being made amongst thieves.
the true world is endearingly simple and also complex at the same time. The problem we all have is that we have stopped relying on intuition and are now listening to the so called 'experts' usually scientists, professors, researchers and politician bringing up a second last best.
Who would I put as last on the list I hear you ask?
why philosophers of course - those harbingers of confusion and mayhem!
Those Aborigines I spoke of earlier were scientists, educators, researchers, professors but certainly not politicians or philosophers. And they ran a smooth and cost effective community and country.
No -- politicians and philosophers have been our downfall and all those who want to study life in a test tube
It would be easy to see in us a dreadful arrogance, but it's my belief that our people have been deprived, moved away from the land and thrown the consumerist dream. Development could have happened in a different way than it has.
People get careless when they think they have it all.
I was talking to a local Aboriginal Professor the other day - yes a real modern day PhD professor and she as well as being Aboriginal and still tied strongly to her land and family has also studied extensively the western ways of life.
Her comments on this matter were simple and eloquent. The western world and the western world order of Australia have lost something that Aboriginal people to this day have not. The strong spiritual and cultural ties to their land and family.
When Aboriginal peoples are living far from home overseas they alway miss their land and their people in a much deeper and spiritual way than westerners do. They feel that their spirit is weakening and dying.
That's what's wrong with cities and western society it has tried to replace a deep need by humans for the land and the family and has failed miserable.
And yet this same professor has a cousin who is Aboriginal and loves city life - he is young 28 and enjoying the excitement of life - but eventually he will need to return as he gets older to his land and kin.
Look at any documentary about the life style of the old westerner in the countrysides of Greece, Italy, Spain etc etc - they still have this same connection with the Aboriginal model of survival
give a man a small plot of land and he will survive - give him a slab of concrete as part of a block of tenements and it will not sustain him.
we have gotten too smart for our own sense of survival
At times when things got impossible she'd turn out the lights, look out from the eyrie she still inhabited, look at other people's lights, and imagine their dreams. It hadn't worked for a long time. It didn't bring rest.
There were no spectacular answers. Architects could build to the sky, but be faced by the same creatures, at ground level. The dreams don't need that kind of technology to come true.
She wasn't going to give up with the problem she had. Someone had let her live for a reason.
She wanted to understand them, their emptiness, the need to appall. She broke through the floor of order and swam in the cellar, fluently, like a fish. The cellar of unconscious acceptances. The space beneath our lives she had to question, because no-one else would.
The world was fragile, she might smash the glass and go through, but tread on its coral, damaging it forever; rendering her life worthless. She pulled herself up, knowing it couldn't go on, her love for the dissolute, the other side of life.
The hours do not pass easily, as she sits by the opened window, in that place in the north-west, neither sunlit nor bleak, but merely a river, built upon.
Petra fell into a deep but disturbed sleep. She awoke feeling confused and could just make out the dim light of dawn appearing. Her vivid dream had left her puzzled and wondering what to do next:
"She had dreamt that she was in a prison, a vast prison composed of many different levels 鈥 on the top floor people were living in luxury, in penthouse type splendour while in the basement others were undergoing terrible torture.
In the intermediate floors the rest of the inhabitants were engaged in various activities in diverse conditions. Suddenly she realized that no matter what level people were on they were all nevertheless trapped in a prison. With that she found a boat and decided to escape taking as many people as Ishe could with her. She went all over the prison telling people of their predicament and urging them to break free.
But no matter how hard she tried they all seemed to be locked in an awful inertia and in the end only two people had the will and encourage to come with her."
Matters had progressed somewhat. Watching the love boat had kept many hands busy on deck for weeks, but at least now they knew what was going on.
Something in her wanted to meet the villain, the one who'd decided she lived on - in a packing case.
There was a party at which the great and good had gathered, so she engineered an excuse to be there. To get in his hair.
"Crime," she said, "now there's a thing..."
"It's been around forever, since Cain slew Abel. It's part of life."
At the side, under an expensive painting, no-one could overhear them. He was watching her heart beating above the edge of her dress, the faintest movement.
She put it to him: "You have all this, yet you want more?"
He was waiting for no man, and certainly not for her, before answering. "It's a lovely city, but it needs something extra. My boat - I know your nickname - is just another place of mystery, of intrigue - a way out of Casablanca. Sit at the bar and chat somebody up. Play them at roulette," he breathed. "It's excitement."
"There's been trouble though."
"There'll always be trouble with clubs. --We can just throw them overboard - a joke. Love your dress."
"We'll all have to swim better then."
"I remember you when you were a WPC riding a bike."
He was taking her back. "I'm not taken aback. Just thank you for letting me live, that's all. Don't expect any mercy."
He ran his eyes over her. "That's your decision. Gaming's mine."
"That's your wife over there?"
"I don't keep her in a box."
She returned to her cabin angry and confused - you couldn't get through this man's thick psychi, but she knew there must be a chink in the armour and once found the coup de gra could be played.
she lay on her bunk and then the second part of her dream emerged:
We got into a boat, and even though there were prison guards around, nobody stopped us as we sailed out of the prison to the world outside {maybe there was a way out on THIS boat - a way out of the mesmeric clutches of Fritz}
As she looked over at it she could still see all the people in the windows busily engaged in their different activities, not the least concerned about the truth of their situation { a bit like the people on this 'love boat' of Fritz's. Was the dream leading her to the final solution perhaps?}
She ran for miles and miles on a path parallel to the prison which seemed never ending. She became increasingly exhausted and dispirited and felt that she was never going to get beyond the prison and the she might as well return and go back in.
She was about to give up when she realized that the two other people who had followed her out had their hopes pinned on her and that if she gave up they would be doomed as well. She couldn't let them down - so she kept on going. {Perhaps Fritz and the Chief Constable were symbols of these two and she was their only hope of life beyond the prison of the city and the 'love boat' [yet another emotional prison]
She began to sift through her thoughts - how many layers of prison are there in our lives - how many cages of 'chattering moinkeys' that need quieting to let us think our way through this morass?
Noir (black - bleak). Perhaps we can laugh. Should we?
If you'd just watched Jane Eyre being so proper, and suffering in the process, and then watched the latest instalment of Prime Suspect - well, we seem to be on the way out. England has been taken already by texting schoolchildren. Only an aggrieved black face with a gun tears through the fabric. (But those of our generation, Fitz, are on the verge of alcoholism, retirement - or worse.)
Somewhere in my heart is a soft spot for [Dame] Helen Mirren, who plays this ageing detective. I confess I've not followed her progress, since her first youthful episode, so it came as a shock to see such a haggard character - even down to attending Alcoholics Anonymous.
There is no answer save to put down the bottle and turn our minds to the problem. Otherwise we're truly past it.
She dozed off into one of those pre-dawn exhausted sleeps and awoke again with the yellow dust laden sun high in the sky. Strangely she felt refreshed for this second sleep and abuzz with excitement - she had dreamt a 'dream connection' Her previous dream which she had barely understood had continued!
She and her companions came to a T junction beyond which was a completely different landscape. It was like suburbia . there were these neat houses with flowery borders and trees. We came to the first house and knocked on the door.
A nice middle-aged woman opened it looked at us and said 鈥樷漮h you鈥檝e come from that place. Not many people get out You鈥檒l be OK now but you must change your clothes. To go back would be dangerous but you must try to help others also to get out鈥.
At that point I had a great surge of inspiration 鈥 I have tried but no one wants to come 鈥 I told the woman she replied 鈥樷漷hose in power will be helping you鈥 at that I said 鈥淚 dedicate myself to working with them so that I can help free all beings鈥
That was the mission simple but complex help all sentient beings to free themselves from the chains of their minds - throw off the shackles of the old world and old mind and be born again!
Even Fritz was now savable!
Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Can someone serve three masters? I've heard of these things written by two people: it can make great comedy. Liverpool, Fitz and my dreams might make me slightly frantic!
Arthur C. Clarke talked of there being two types of failure in our imaginings about the future: failures of nerve, and failures of imagination. Which things in the fifty years since, show those up?
Futurology hardly needs unnecessary embroidery: we can only go from what we know - and part of that is what we SENSE is happening.
Yes I like that concept - failure of nerve and failure of imagination. Most of us have some sort of imagination - some more vivid and expansive - but all of us must day dream at times. Even those poor characters locked up in their minds and in mental institutions still let their imaginations go wild. (they'd make some great films!)
but nerve ah - now there's another thing - I think the majority of us have a 'failure of nerve' most days and are often disappointed when our 'dreams' 'imaginations' don't come true - they can't of course without the 'nerve to realize'
'petra'' dream was taken from a 'real' life situation and the real life 'petra' did have the nerve to make her dream come true, which she is still realizing to this day.
When I think about my own life, the last fifty years, and ask whether it's buildings or scientific discoveries or works of art that have changed things - it's not them. There's a self-regarding intensity that was not there before. A cult of celebrity. Kids getting angry because you look at them the wrong way.
Changes such as the mobile phone make certain behaviour easier, but haven't made it happen. And I don't think the buildings of our cities are going to change our nature.
It nags at me as to why there is a trend toward horrific violence. There have always been terrible crimes, but there now seem to be deliberate attempts to terrify. Both in fact and fiction: video beheading and serial killer storylines.
Similarly, there's been a market for gory horror films for decades. Make-up artists have their buckets of blood. But whereas once there was some attempt to face up to each single, horrible, murder - possibly see the troubled character that had made it - now there is a train of ingenious technique for inflicting suffering and death. No more character than a computer game.
I'm the last to want to censor these people. There are better ways of writing about conflict.
I agree - many, many gurus have relentlessly told us - that if you are looking for true happiness and satisfaction, the only place to find it is within ourselves NOT outside somewhere.
Someone else once said "when we can't face God with embrace the rest" - meaning technology, buildings, unhealthy relationships, drugs.
Build as many space-aged cities as you can it won't change human nature one iota but it may accelerate it into an abyss of dispair!
Isn't it amazing that the great sages of our times and the dedicated monks and nuns can be part of this world and get involved in it at a human level but not be CONSUMED by it. Perhaps we've forgotten that consumerism means just that 'being consumed'.
Who was it that once said 'be in the world but not of the world'? - wasn't old JC himself was it?
The world will not wash out. No matter how hard she tries, the marks are there. The steaming water pours and pours, starting at her head, cascading down her body, anaesthetising memory with warmth.
Why should she care about destruction or death outside herself, nobody cared about her? She wanted to purify the world with fire, hand the empire over, like Tippett.
There is, thus, this place for the devil in things. He can hide his horns and come under the guise of cleaning out the stables. Her nostrils flared at the thought.
Criminals had temporarily taken a back seat. The city cared about its image. It wouldn't do if she couldn't chase the unfashionable fox. Individuality was fine, just so long as they had control of it. She turned off the water and felt the cold.
meanwhile back on the foreshore Fritz lay beneath the decaying pier and peered through the bare spaces were once there had been planks and happy skipping kids out for the day at the seaside. The Pier head had long been abandoned and left to the river rats. The large imposing banks and merchant buildings still standing but surrounded by 12 foot weeds. The Liver Birds had long toppled and lay in ruins untouched, unloved.
Fritz, tipped back his Coolabah and drew long and hard on his cherott, he was a bushman with a mission. Return the cities to the bush.
They were decaying anyway and had become citadels of despair, the majority of the population lived in the 'bush' and survived in their own ways. The people were beginning to develop better survival skills, they had long learned to live with the trappings of central heating, electricity, although some still tapped into the grid with their own devices. Foxes had returned in large numbers and made a tasty meal. Deer had been spotted around the outer suburbs. smakes were on the increase. Nature was returning and providing food again.
The city people were clinging to an outmoded way of existance, he could either just watch until their energy supplies ran out and then pick them off one by one, or do it swiftly with a range of subtarranean devices.
His masters had been told to do it swiftly but not necesarily cleanly, but Petra had got under his skin. He needed to make contact, convince her to change sides - she would make a good ally.
maybe this time he should meet her on her own turf
Imagination was the only way left. Then there's pain. As you get older it hurts more to do new things.
The glow in the night was fading. To pretend there aren't limits is folly. Each chase down a blind alley is costing more and more of what little is left.
Whatever people want, and what this world is making... we're not the same, she thought.
The world lay scattered like so many bright jewels on a dark disc. A platter in space. Who would eat off it?
No-one would solve the one little mystery laid on her particular plate either, if she didn't bother. The time available was shrinking: she was in touch with a terminal case again, but she'd survive. Consciousness seemed to go on. Baby, teenager, old woman - all these had been, or were there, for her. Liverpool wasn't hers forever.
She tidied the files away. There didn't seem much more on this case. Wrap them all up in legal technicalities. Let them stew in jail. But she wouldn't write her memoirs. She just wanted to look at what she'd been writing about.
A new pair of hiking boots stood in the hall. A new camera tucked in a coat pocket (how small they were now). She'd walk Liverpool, then England - get it out of the system. Post photographs of it. Maybe she'd even end up in Australia. Everything was upside down.
She woke just before dawns break, dressed slowly for the last time in this lonely flat, put on her hiking boots, checked she had here 'window to the world' viewfinder, gave one last glance around her neat and tidy world and then was gone. One last look at the sinking 'pool and then she was home free!
Were these the "end days"? Were things coming to the final curtain? How do you change things so that it's less catastrophic?
Liverpool hadn't changed from changing in years. It had become an addiction. Things would go up and things would go down. Go away from a street for a while and it might be gone.... The way of thinking carried on though.
Petra believed that human beings aspired to permanence. The only problem was that permanence for some was the "development" of others' lives (whether they wanted it or not). That's why she hadn't taken sides, had just kept the peace.
So she was sitting there in retirement thinking about rounding up the gangsters (the Isle of Man by this time having been turned into the world's biggest penal colony -- and of course a major centre for enterprise, which goes without saying).
The government had, again, found a way of legalising love boats. Money, wine and women flowed round the Irish Sea like no-one's business, much of it within sight of the new Alcatraz. There were even rumours about the tax-free, rent-free lifestyle of the prisoners, and of a floating casino that was moored somewhere....
as she walked around this once proud city for the last time - memories came flooding in of a hummng friendly city, where cheerful drinkers emptying from the pubs would give a kid a 'sxipence'
Where you could go next door and 'borrow' a cup of sugar. Of street parties where almost all participated except 25 down the end of the street who just gloured behind her faded curtains. Of car less streets and friendly drunks.
Yes Liverpool had once been a family city, a human city without it's skyscrapers and only the Liver Birds to look down and guard our humanity. Even the seagulls had left now unable to cope with the sulphur laden skies.
She adjusted her face mask and starred at the yellow coated weeds growing from the pavements - what had we all become. And then she headed for the pier head, she had made a decision this was the end of city life for her - she would find Fritz and join a new order. A new order of 'freedom fighters' fight for the land, the air - happiness and fight against the decaying cities.
As she approached the landing stage the gangplanks were being raised on the last 'pleasure cruise' for the night - she ran the last few yards up a 30 degree plank and land wiith a sharp thud on the deck of " The Mersey Madame"
she flashed her polic badge and the crew waved her on.
She wandered aimlessly around the boat, nodding to old acquaintances both legal and illegal - she noticed that the hypodermy booth was very busy tonight - there would be trouble later and many would be found floating in the Mersey next morn with a sensless grin on their faces!
And then she spotted Fritz - sitting at a card table cheroot in lips as usual and then ubiquitous Coolabah angled backwards - his eyes wouldn't miss a beat. he noticed her enter and winked and then his eyes were back on the green velvet.
she sat in the background watching his every move and waiting for him to make the first one!
Petra couldn't follow these who wanted to stay up late discussing impossibilities. They would sail round and round the point, denying her any chance of a good night's sleep. There is something absurd about it all, men parrotting on. She imagined him being turned into a parrot, and he wondered what she was smiling at.
But it served no purpose. The crime at the next table went on. The roulette wheel spun, the ill-gotten gains flowed like the drink, and no-one was any the wiser. No, she didn't mind retirement at all.
The free thinking in Liverpool would doubtless get freer, but there was that strange propensity for the essential enigmas to remain, indecipherable.
Fritz knew he was being watched, but he had some old scores to settle first before dealing with the enigmas and indecipherables that were playing on his mind. And then the words came flooding in his mind as the smoke swirled about his brain and the brandy laid burning in his guts:
'give me back my broken night
my secret room, my secret life
it's lonely here
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living sould
and lie beside me baby
That's an order'
Petra sensed the vibrations that ripples through her pours and then she silently replied:
'things are going to slide in all directions
won't be nothing
nothing you can measure anymore
the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned the order of the soul'
And then their eyes met once again through a smoke filled haze and he through away his cards, collected his chips and beckoned her to follow him
Background music played, classical music, and then a lecture came on. Fritz blew smoke rings, Petra dreamed.
The Mersey flowed slowly past into the bay. The music in the streets beneath the apartment throbbed and sighed. In the dream Fritz made his play: the stuff of western man had been only temporary, a far older order was coming.
Petra dozed, half wanting to wake from this dream. It hypnotised her. Her reason wanted, but yet rejected. She was sad, but not mad.
If she still had rage it was for other things, things that had never been put right. Truths have to be faced, otherwise the falsity corrodes and buckles the future.
She had so little strength now, having retired under a cloud, being tenacious, uncooperative, seeing virtue in values she might love more than life itself, but nonetheless hanging onto life, turning a key here and there, frustrating a design cut in such a fragile glass, a tower of Babel.
And as she lay her drifting in and out of her memories and delusions she heard the faint sound of the closing song on the Mersey Queen, they would dock soon and then she had to make a decision:
"so we're drinking and we're dancing
and the band is really happening
and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high
and my very sweet companion she's the angel of compassion
and she's rubbing half the world against her thight
Every drinker every dancer
lifts a happy face to thank her
and the fiddler fiddles something so sublime
all the women tear the blouses off
the men they dance on the polka dots
and it's partner found and partner lost
and it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops
it's CLOSING TIME!"
and then she drifted off again into a dream called never never land where even time was timeless.
petra finally rested well and then awoke and found herself back in her flat. Liverpool bustled below as usual - the taxis ran the buses interfered and the street hawkers were about.
Nothing had really changed - this was Liverpool in November 2006 - Petra after a long bout of flu and a week in bed on antbiotics and painkillers had awoke from her hallucinations and illusions.
She was back to 'normal' and some free thinking festival was just about to terminate and she had missed it all!
Do people want you to wake up when you've been so awkward? She lay on the stretcher and this went through her head.
You can't change the world by firing off angry remarks hither and thither. You won't last the course, like Petra.
She could hear them talking about her. "Awkward old biddy," one of her neighbours was saying.
She didn't care. Neither she nor the neighbour cared for each other. She hadn't grown up loving her neighbour. Maybe it should be -- but the politics of getting on wasn't about that. So the world had gone down the tube.
The pieces had never fitted, for her. The country and the city weren't given over to being loved into movement. It was something else.
And as she lay there she knew that Fritz was the key to her next existance. He had been speaking in riddles, but if she could just find the 'riddle key' she would connect and the rest would be plain sailing. That was it, find Fritz and fiddle the riddles!
that was it she'd decided she was leaving this pub soaked town for good. she donned her riddle coat, slung her riddled handbag around her shoulder -didn't even bother to lock her mouse riddled flat and headed off on a riddle bus to the wharfs to look for 'riddle head' fritz himself.
Together and with a bit of help from Stephen Hawkins himself, they would solve the riddle of the universe and sheep farming would be famous again!
She was not going to be led astray by voices she could hear, that way madness lay. She would go by the stars like the old sailors.
Her heart might be metaphorically broken, but it still pumped. Her head might be in a spin, but that was nothing to the world around.
She hadn't given up on love, it was just that something else, a fruit, a spice in the mix that was missing.
she headed downhill - this could be a slippery riddle, and as she headed for the wharf she felt a spring in her step and starting doing something she hadn't down for many years the 'riddle skip' which lead to humming and then bursting into a fully fledge song - 'riddle across the mersey' sung to the tune of the Marsden version.
She was happier than she'd been in many an eon, the voices had stopped and as she neared the wharf her heart missed a beat - there was the riddle man himself, akubra half cocked and that old cheroot stuck in his wife and he waved.
Is it possible to listen again to the voice of stephen Hawkins we heard on the radio on the 2 december I did not find it on you website thank you
Given Jonathan Raisin's concerns about history and identity, I find his use of the phrase "The Three Graces" to describe the Liverpool Waterfront somewhat ironic.
The phrase "The Three Graces" has no historic, traditional or local basis. It was coined four or five years ago by an architect from outside Liverpool.