To celebrate, I went off to have a cup of tea and a sticky bun at a place indoors called the Corinthia Coffee Lounge, which boasted, among its many other advertised features, a 'Georgian Potato Oven'. I asked the girl at the counter what that was and she looked at me as if I were very strange.
'It's for cooking potatoes and tha',' she said.
But of course. I took my tea and sticky bun to a table, where I spent a little time going 'Ooh, lovely,' and smiling inanely at some nice ladies at the next table, and afterwards, feeling strangely pleased with my day, went off to find the station.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I TOOK A TRAIN TO LIVERPOOL. THEY WERE HAVING A FESTIVAL OF litter when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrierbags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape. They fluttered gaily in the bushes and brought colour and texture to pavements and gutters. And to think that elsewhere we stick these objects in rubbish bags.
In another bout of extravagant madness, I had booked a room in the Adelphi Hotel. I had seen it from the street on earlier visits and it appeared to have an oldfashioned grandeur about it that I was keen to investigate. On the other hand, it looked expensive and I wasn't sure my trousers could stand another session in the trouser press. So I was most agreeably surprised when I checked in to discover that I was entitled to a special weekend rate and that there would be money spare for a nice meal and a parade of beer in any of the many wonderful pubs in which Liverpool specializes.
And so, soon afterwards, I found myself, like all fresh arrivals in Liverpool, in the grand and splendorous surroundings of the Philharmonic, clutching a pint glass and rubbing shoulders with a happy Fridayevening throng. The Phil (you can call it this if you have been there twice) was in fact a bit too crowded for my liking. There was nowhere to sit and scarcely any room to stand, so I drank two pints, just enough at my time of life to need a pee for there is no place in the world finer for a pee than the ornate gents' room of the Philharmonic then went off to find some place a little quieter.
I ended up back in a place called The Vines, which was nearly asornate as the Philharmonic but infinitely quieter. Apart from me, there were only three other customers, which was a mystery to me because it was a very fine pub with wood panelling by some Grinling Gibbons wannabe and a plaster ceiling even more ornate than the panelling. As I was sitting there drinking my beer and savouring my plush surroundings, some guy came in with a collecting tin from which the original label had been clumsily scratched, and asked me for a donation for handicapped children.
'Which handicapped children?' I asked.
'Ones in wheelchairs like.'
'I mean which organization do you represent?'
'It's, er, the, er, Handicapped Children's Organization like.'
'Well, as long as it's totally legitimate,' I said and gave him 20p. And that is what I like so much about Liverpool. The factories may be gone, there may be no work, the city may be pathetically dependent on football for its sense of destiny, but the Liverpudlians still have character and initiative, and they don't bother you with preposterous ambitions to win the bid for the next Olympics.
So nice was The Vines that I drank two more pints and then realized that I really ought to get something in my stomach lest I grow giddy and end up staggering into street furniture and singing 'Mother Machree'. Outside, the hill on which the pub stood seemed suddenly and unaccountably steep and taxing, until it dawned on me, in my mildly addled state, that I had come down it before whereas now I was going up it, which seemed to put everything in a new light. I found myself, after no great distance, standing outside a Greek restaurant and surveying the menu with a hint of a sway. I'm not much of one for Greek food no disrespect to a fine cuisine, you understand, but I always feel as if I could boil my own leaves if I had a taste for that sort of thing but the restaurant was so forlornly empty and the proprietress beckoned at me with such imploring eyes that I found myself wandering in. Well, the meal was wonderful. I have no idea what I ate, but it was abundant and delicious and they treated me like a prince. Foolishly I washed it all down with many additional draughts of beer. By the time I finished and settled the bill, leaving a tip of such lavishness as to bring the whole family to the kitchen door, and began the long process of stabbing an arm at a mysteriously disappearing jacket sleeve, I was, I fear, pretty nearly intoxicated. I staggered out into the fresh air, feeling suddenly queasy and largely incapable.
Now the second rule of excessive drinking (the first, of course, is don't take a sudden shine to a woman larger than Hoss Cartwright) is never to drink in a place on a steep slope. I walked down the hill on unfamiliar legs that seemed to snap out in front of me like whipped lengths of rope. The Adelphi, glowing beckoningly at the foot of the hill, managed the interesting trick of being both near by and astonishingly distant. It was like looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope a sensation somewhat enhanced by the fact that my head was a good seven or eight yards behind my manically flopping appendages. I followed them helplessly, and by a kind of miracle they hurtled me down the hill, safely across the road and up the steps to the entrance to the Adelphi, where I celebrated my arrival by making a complete circuit in the revolving door so that I emerged into open air once again, before plunging back in and being flung with a startling suddenness into the Adelphi's grand and lofty lobby. I had one of those whereamI moments, then grew aware that the night staff were silently watching me. Summoning as much dignity as I could and knowing that the lifts would be quite beyond me, I went to the grand staircase and managed I know not how to fall up them in a manner uncannily reminiscent of a motion picture run in reverse. All I know is that at the very end I leapt backwards to my feet and announced to the craning faces that I was quite all right, and then embarked on a long search for my room among the Adelphi's endless and mysteriously numbered corridors.
Here's a piece of advice for you. Don't go on the Mersey ferry unless you are prepared to have the famous song by Gerry and the Pacemakers running through your head for about eleven days afterwards. They play it when you board the ferry and they play it when you get off and for quite a lot of time in between. I went on it the following morning thinking a bit of a sitdown and a cruise on the water would be just the way to ease myself out of a killer hangover, but in fact the inescapable sound of 'Ferry 'cross the Mersey' only worsened my cranial plight. Apart from that, it must be said that the Mersey ferry is an agreeable, if decidedly breezy, way of passing a morning. It's a bit like the Sydney Harbour cruise, but without Sydney.
When they weren't playing 'Ferry 'cross the Mersey', they played a soundtrack outlining the famous sights from the deck, but the acoustics were terrible and 80 per cent of whatever was said was instantly blown away on the wind. All I could hear were snatchesof things like 'three million' and 'world's biggest' but whether they were talking about oil refinery capacity or Derek Hatton's suits I couldn't say. But the gist of it was that this was once a great city and now it's Liverpool.