Mandy Romero is a Live Artist, working in the area of transgender and based in Liverpool. She is the self-appointed Liverpool Queen Of Culture and her recent book, “The Great Make-Over”, a free limited edition art-work, can be obtained by visiting her web-site at mandygirl.

The men are at it again! Ranting across the divides of the world, threatening each other with their dangerous toys, preaching division, or unity as long as it’s their unity.

Oversensitive, aggressive, self-pitying – why do we bother with them? The answer is ancient – they help make babies.
It seems that genetic engineering may eventually relieve them of even that useful function.
It seems to me that as America slowly slides from domination, we are in danger of being crushed under the collapsing body.
I can see the Bush boys working so, so hard to make masculinity work, and the more they try the less they succeed. “Being powerful is like being a lady, - if you have to say you is, you ain’t”, as I believe Jimmy Hoffa once said.
And with the realization that violence and coercion aren’t bringing results we have a further male nightmare, the Man As Victim.

Lord help us! – it’s now our fault it’s their fault. Talk about fighting a rearguard action. Or getting your retaliation in first.

Actually it’s gender which is in trouble, the gender which is bi-polar, either-or, male-female. While we’re stuck with a divisive gender-idea we shall always be fighting ourselves.
Those scare-you-off-the streets hen-parties are as much a product of masculinism as soldier-boys and gangsters.

Those of us working in transgender have our work cut out, but we’re going to persevere.

Not terrorists and governments, but humans and their environment – that’s the drama of our times. And Earth has been defined as a woman, our original Mother, by the Gaia fraternity, but maybe (s)he’s beyond gender. I have feeling she’s into balance.

If America’s fading slowly and painfully then China is the new global culture. You can’t move for China-pundits these days. What ever the truth I’m glad to know that the basic belief systems of China are formed round the idea of balance – yin and yang – and cycles – the Tao and Buddhism.

It would be nice if the emergent Chinese taught us how to live that way. They could spread a new civilization. But they could, in the process of replacing America, learn some bad old imperialistic ways.

That paranoia about Taiwan sounds very USA-Cuba to me.

Everybody, rising power or falling star, hen-party terrorizer or scally-victim, needs to start thinking outside of conventional gender limits. We need real this-is-what-I-am individualism not choice-based consumerism. It’s surviving the crash not avoiding it which we will need our capacities for.

I’m based in Liverpool where the crisis of masculinism is very intense, but then the men-work-rule thing has been undermined for rather longer here. So the aggressive-defensive attitude is strong hereabouts. So are the women. It’s all in a poem which I included in “The Great Make-Over”,-

old stones
in
a tent

in Tahiti
an old stone, a figure cut
half man half woman

we go back a long way
we are everywhere

old stones here
older than transition
women gossiping on the street corner
of history

we are the foundation

history is what, here? – since the city began to fatten on the trades
of far come near, since the streets filled out, filled in and
spread onto the hill and beyond, since the carrying and slaving
and slaving and banking and shifting started in earnest?
Three centuries?

Three centuries of man-driven, man-striven, man-directed, man-
managed management, ending in an empty era
low tide on the shores of history

But the long time belongs to women
they are the real rulers
the backbone of an otherwise broken life-time
in the wash-house, the street-shadow, the kitchen, on the
shore, in the off-licence, the in-store cafeteria, the hospital, the
council-chamber, the typing pool, the congregation, the queue
for the night-club, on the shore

and if transition has now slipped out of the hands of men and women
we are still here
more visible now
the transitioneers
the odds in the pocket
the loose change

scholarship records
that we held together
innumerable communities everywhere

and now are here
to ensure
an everlasting city

the gay stonemason raves on, coke-restless, eyes my legs
we are not grave-stones

The answer, for now, is visibility, as so often in this mediated world, so long as you don’t rely on the journalists to write your story and show your picture for you. If we are visible in our individuality we do what anyone can do, while the governments fight amongst themselves. We might open a few minds. Now that’s what I call free-thinking.

MANDY ROMERO

Dr. Glynn Thomas - a consultant psychiatrist who has worked for the National Health Service for over thirty years & his wife Andrea Earl -a playwright & also writes for TV.

Gynn & Andrea hope their blog inspires much freethinking debate.

As we watch our two year old toddler joyfully playing with his favourite cars and garage set as he utters his first words we are appalled at the existence of state backed mechanisms to cleanse society of his kind.

We are also aware that a politician reading the above would argue that they have no intention of such a cleansing but that these mechanisms exist merely to allow families choice.

Do eugenics deserve such acceptability in twenty first century society?

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtdag/bioethics/writings/eugenics.html

Were we right in allowing such a beautiful human being into our midst or should we have done our bit to cleanse the human gene pool?

Will the first generation of Britons with Down’s Syndrome embraced by main stream schools and routinely becoming literate and numerate be the last?

With advanced genetic testing more and more unborn infants carrying Trisomy 21 are being aborted. Will our world be a better place without people with Down’s syndrome?
www.downs-syndrome.org.

He's posted some amazing photographs by a Chinese artist called Li Wei

And poses some very interesting, insightful comments.

They post info on events at places such as The liverpool Everyman Playhouse -

the Liverpool Royal Philharmonic -

Liverpool Tate gallery and

The Unity theatre

To name but a few. The idea is not only to spread the word on what's out there but also to arrange regular visits
to events so that the rich, cultural life of the city is not exclusive to the 'usual suspects'.

It's also a great way of giving people who live alone, the chance to go to an event and have the opportunity to talk about it afterwards.

I mention all this for one reason only. I've got a digital camera and I wanted to show you my first feeble attempts at taking a photograph and...wait for it....embedding it into this blog.

As it's a photograph of the Anglican Cathedral on Hope Street - taken on the day of the Hope Street Festival I thought Vinny & Luan's new venture suited it perfectly.

Just hope it works.

Johnathan Ree but on a basic level of being mis-informed and duped by those in positions of power we have to be pro-active. We have to examine what we are told more carefully.

If we are told that a war is necessary for a particular ideal (democracy...yeah I know we've done that one) or as self-defence....or as a way of saving a people under threat...then our sons fight, kill maim & lose little bits of their souls with some semblence of humanity in tact.

(it always astonishes me when I watch Rememberance Sunday on t.v. - old, old crippled men being pushed by old men, being followed by middle-age men being...well you get the picture? It's a never ending parade of damaged war veterans. What happened to the war to end all wars then? Are they having a laugh?)

Would we go to war to line the pockets of the fat cat corporations? Of course not. That would be obscene wouldn't it? Perish the thought.

To kill, maim & destroy for profit....that wouldn't go down at all well with our 'Christian' leaders - they may come across as....well less than Christian.

And that wouldn't elicit the required response from the electorate. (I'd like my sons safe, alive and well please. Any chance of me opting out of this war?)

Why are we in Iraq? Why does Mr 'History Will Be My Judge' Blair insist on playing the 'I'm a good Christian man and there are things I know so....I can't go into too much detail..ahem. ' 'the first casualty of war...' blah blah.

Well lets be a little more pro-active in our 'search for truth.'

'Iraq For Sale. The War Profiteers'. -

'Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed and Uncovered) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so.'

'Brave New Films' are both funded and distributed completely outside corporate America.'

I await accusations of - well all sorts really.

THE IDEA OF THE CITY
There are too many words about, and an abundance of expression neither guarantees the presence of thought nor freedom in thinking. In times when we inundate ourselves with self-expression it is reasonable to require an underpinning of ideas, for culture is surely more than a collection of individual outpourings, and needs for its efficacy a sustained engagement with formalized thought without which society cannot progress.

The relationship between ideas and cities is an interesting one. Do cities produce ideas? For W.H. Auden ideas proceed from landscapes and climate,-

“to own
That surfaces need not be superficial
Nor gestures vulgar, cannot really
Be taught within earshot of running water
Or in sight of a cloud.”

If he is right then there is a set of ideas which have emerged, maybe uniquely, from a windy riverine enclave in the North-Western corner of Europe. But it would seem more logical that ideas proceed from individual human beings who just happen to live in a particular place. Our city is not poor in a history of inventions and discoveries, from the uses of lasers and the electroencephalograph to radio and the neutron, from the precursors of Age Concern and the RSPCA to school meals, but all these are products of individual initiative and energies and each has been produced in response to a particular problem, good solid practical ideas. Has there been an overall idea, intrinsic to our city, which has made these things possible? Not one that is unique, probably, except in the city’s singular determination to use knowledge to solve problems and therefore to take advantage of a culture of education and learning. Nor were all these initiatives and discoveries those of local-born individuals, although each was more or less welcome to work here. Is there a “native genius” here, for more than humour and making-do? If Birmingham excelled in the small machinery workshop and ancient Rome in government then our city’s pre-eminent skill seems to have been in value-added handling of goods and money, cargoes and insurance accounts, and more recently in capitalizing on its cityscape for film-settings.

But these are activities not ideas. Athens is seen as the cradle of democracy and modern Beijing the triumph of bureaucratized communism and much of their structure and appearance as cities expresses these ideas. Do ideas shape cities then, rather than the other way around? Hedging our bets we might say that ideas and cities grow in symbiosis based upon local experiences. Somewhere in a city is a generator of thoughts and realizations which become the history of the place and can be read in its physicality. So, we had a river, and sometime a few centuries ago the possibility of reaching out to the wide world occurred to its inhabitants. The thought then, the idea, was – the world exists for our profit. What followed was two centuries of trade, expansion, building and prosperity, - but not for all.

We could say that the 19th Century thought hereabouts was – with prosperity comes civic power and with civic power comes civic responsibility. We could say that, but a deeper delving into the times and personalities involved might suggest that the thought, the idea, was – civic power is an exhilarating experience, let us deploy it as fully as possible, even if not all of its effects are good. When prosperity waned and civic power became emaciated the burden of responsibility remained together with a taste for that power. The sum did not add up, a new idea was necessary, which even to the present vies with a disempowered civic authority – people can manage their own lives. But to live in a city which cannot function as it did when it invented itself is to be lost, in the present and in the past. The Beatles gave us the complementary thought, the idea – nothing is real and nothing to get hung about – and John Lennon its surrogate – above us only sky. All those people living for today – no need to imagine, come and see the idea in action.

So much for our city and its ideas. Unless perhaps we remember one other idea which has underpinned so much of our history here – the family is paramount. It would be hard to find a thought more crucial to the economic and emotional survival of our city than this. Come power, come reality, or witness the loss of both, family has been the presiding force within our urban life, its salvation and its vulnerability. But many things have finally weakened the dominance of the traditional idea of family here – greater social mobility within the country as a whole, the decline of organized religion, unemployment, the arrival of families from other cultures, questions about the relationship between poverty and parenting. Whatever their impacts we might see all of these developments as the cue-lines for the entrance of new ideas, if, and only if, we are prepared to see our city as unique.

At present our city – and in this it is not unique although maybe uniquely vulnerable – is the Capital of Imitation, the Capital of Cliché. Off-the-peg and overworked strategies for recuperation from the low decades of the 20th Century are rife here. The service economy, industrialized education, new apartments, bars, clubs, tourism, heritage, tall buildings, are all fine in their way, but they have little or no relation to the city as a unique location in the world. Of course it exists in that world and cannot ignore it but neither fight nor flight will produce the self-sufficiency within diversity which will secure our city a place in a sustainable future. So, at present we are in a frenzy of self-searching. Our premier arts event, the three-month-long Arts Biennial, is once more requesting artists from elsewhere to give us a view of ourselves. Our city with yet another mirror held up to itself. Tell us who we are, please! Yet it is the mark of a city which is secure in itself that it doesn’t need to ask that question, and the answers will not make us more secure. When does self-reflection become narcissism? When does a city re-emerge from an anxiety to give the correct answers into making strong confident statements about itself based upon a clear self-determination? When it has ideas, of course.

Our city is still a windy riverine enclave in the North-Western corner of Europe but the ideas it embraces will now need to be more global. No-one can impose ideas on a place but it would be good if a few suggestions took root here. Here then are some proposals as to thoughts, ideas, which might shape our urban destiny in this new century,-

With independence comes achievement, with openness quality of life
Others’ cultures are valuable and the more valuable for our embracing them
Keep looking over your shoulder and you will continue to trip over
It’s possible to remember your future – seek your roots
As long as there are questions to answer there is always something to do
The relationship between human beings and their environment is the most important issue to address – get on with it!
Home is many places, many and one

And if the city is to reflect its new ideas its appearance will be rich in images, greenery, space, water, poetry, gateways, pathways, colours, contrasts, contributions.

Two quotes to finish with – both second-hand (thanks to Ursula Le Guin),-

From - Lao Tzu – the Tao Te Ching

The ten thousand things arise together
and I watch their return
They return each to its root.
Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.
Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.
Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
To ignore the constant
is to go wrong, and end in disorder.

And from Claude Levi-Strauss,

“The societies which best have protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence”

Currently the venues are in the Liverpool area and are run on a weekly or monthly basis.'

The next meeting is on 29th August at Suzanna's Wine Bar in Waterloo, Liverpool.

Visit the site for further info.

Record Companies only had to check out the site to see which unsigned band was getting the most hits and 'bobs your next dylan'....or that seemed to be the intention anyway. The Arctic Monkeys are the usual example

In fact Rupert Murdoch (ahem) loved the company sooo much...he bought it. Last July in fact.
It's been quite a phenomenon. Not only can you sign up, create your own page, with videos, graphics, photgraphs and profiles but you can also invite other people to be friends.

There's supposed to be around 20 million members of the site. Not all unknown musicians like. There's comedians, actors, Hollywood A list celebs, writers, poets and very, very famous musicians.

But those sites are usually called the 'Official' site of ....(insert the name of your favourite musician.) or the 'tribute' to.

It matters not that a musician, writer, actor is actually dead. They are still eager to share their music/musings via cyber-space. And of course they advertise re-releases of their 'new/old' hits. You'd be suprised how many 'previously un-released' master peices are constantly showing up on the site.

What seemed, at first, like a great idea (Yes. Those greedy fatcat record company bastards may not have it so easy now) has suddenly started to make me feel uneasy. Not least because Mr Murdoch is running the show, though that did make my heart sink when I heard.....but the insidious plugging of already established multi-millionaire musicians feels like a bit of a con.

The publicists treat everyone like they are thier mates. They invite people to be their friends, ask them to spread the word about an album or a gig or a new video and word spreads like wild-fire.

All around the world at virtually no cost. So the site FEELS like it's one big world cafe-bar for the young and trendy to talk free and easy about themselves but the posts of their likes and dislikes are actually great market research tools. All well and good but it doesn't feel entirely upfront.

It's also quite addictive. Because the site has a 'no rules' policy anyone can log onto anyone elses site. Some of they younger members can be quite explicit about their lives and form 'relationships' - you can watch these relationships blossom....which sometimes feels like cyber-stalking.

I suppose what makes me uneasy is that the idea of 'a no rules site where everyone can make express themselves and make friends' without involving the big corporations doesn't actually exist.

Now, apparantly, myspace is being marketed as a 'life-style' brand. (shouldn't that phrase be pre-fixed with 'luxury' as it is, of late, in Liverpool)

In fact the advertisers are so keen to 'get down with the cool kids' that Honda, Unilever and Wendy's actually have profile pages on the site.

And just to keep the message that the site is still full of the raw sexual energy of youth Crest toothpaste opened a page called 'Miss Irrisistible'. (they moniter the site and remove any 'raunchy' new friends)

So....who does technology put in charge? And as myspace ventures into tv & film are the artists of the future going to be free to express themselves without fear of censure? Or will the current obsession with a corporate myspace train us to accept a homogeneous 'light entertainment, brought to you by our sponsers, Trueman Show style' existance?

To quote, yet again, one of my favourite comedians Bill Hicks

''When did mediocrity become something to aspire to? At the end of the show, I want my musicians dead, with a blood bubble coming out of his nose....play from your heart.'

Thank God the Son House's and the Nina Simone's of this world honed their craft the way they did. Otherwise people new to their music wouldn't be listening to the same stuff. Which is of course, along with Mr. Hicks ( R.I.P) available on myspace.

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; “may you live in interesting times”. (But if ever there was a time for an unreliable cliché then now is that time. Here’s another one. “To joke about the present is a sign that we take seriously the past”. You like it? Great. I made it up!)

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 ‘good’ in the world). Musical legends… 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- ‘Liverpool and Manchester are in tortures of despair.’).

And we, the inhabitants of the post-industrial ‘city-on-the-edge’, dancing (post-prandial), on the monuments of that glorious history… Bonfires on the statues of liberty… Drum and abasement on the neo-Goth steps of Victorian positivity… (The old, self-deprecating Liverpool joke would go; ‘Free-thinking? Liverpool? Surely some contradiction here.’).

And now they are pulling it all down and starting again. Apartments, hotels, offices, car-parks.The ‘largest retail development in Europe’. 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, ‘take the turbo-lift to the twenty-first floor’, but we might as well say ‘stories’ as in, ‘have you heard the one about the phoenix rising…?’).

But the reality is that, day-by-day, whole regions of a city’s 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’s 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 ‘The London’ (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. Look at Peter Hagerty’s photographs of the changing city here.

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’s 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; ‘Its just a penny but I pick them up every time I see one because, you know the problem with this town? It’s waste. I know it’s 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’re gone. They threw them all away… such a waste.’

The question then...? What happens now when boutique hotels rise from the ashes of an old man’s 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 ‘the largest gated community in Europe’ 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, ‘The World in One City’. Now this could, of course, be taken as arrogance. The last ditch hubris of a once great town, but I’d rather go with Blake again. (You can’t escape him here.) ‘To see a world in a grain of sand… eternity in an hour’. (Look close enough around you and, yes, you’ll find a microcosm of the whole world). And, I guess, part of what I’m 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’s image within England may be problematic but in the wider world it remains iconic. Rana Desgupta’s 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 ‘old’ New Delhi.

A key component of the new Liverpool One development (love it or loath it; I’m cutting to the chase now) will be a tower by Cesar Pelli, architect of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. And take that virtual tour of Shanghai, 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… and then its gone. A mirage of the virtual world. For a Liverpool-Shanghai exchange project look here.

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 ‘curse of the interesting times’. At least, not from the lips of anybody Chinese, because that one was made up to. By an American science fiction writer… or was it JFK…? But hey… You know the sources. You check it out. )

And home again. What of the future here? Another parable…

When I first arrived, a defining image of Liverpool’s stagnation was of the main clock in Lime Street station, forever stopped at… well, now I mention it, I forget at what time… 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… Tick-tock.. tick-tock…tick-tock.

The Liverpool Lantern Company are in the process of creating a leaflet of some kind which inform people about the project and will give them the opportunity to offer up little anecdotes, poems or stories about their streets and the people who have lived in them. It's important that these stories are told and remembered. In this 'everyone' for themselves culture it's good to look at how we got here - the journies people made and the journies they are about to embark on. Being displaced - for whatever reason- can be a traumatic experience. We have ties with the places we have come to know as home. If you've lived in a particular street for twenty or thirty years no doublt you'll have some stories to tell. The Liverpool Lantern Company would be interested to hear them. For those of you who didn't make the last Lantern parade - check out their web -site. They finish the parade with an absolutely gigantic finale involving fireworks & music. It really is quite spectacular.

Then there’s the ‘booze league’ that’s been all over the news. John Moores University conducted a study about our nation’s drinking habits and discovered that Liverpool is second only to Newcastle as the nation’s biggest binge drinkers. But, oddly, Liverpool beats Newcastle in the ‘admitted to hospital for alcohol-related conditions’ league. (What’s that about then? Are the Geordie’s harder than us?)

Or what about the Latvian European MP, Oskars Kastens, who recently branded Liverpudlian tourists ‘savages’ – Ryanair launched it’s flight to Riga from John Lennon Airport last September and people have been visiting the city in droves. kate.mansey@liverpool.com

On the surface it looks like Liverpudlians belong to the ‘axis of… well, something really, really terrible.’ But if you look a little closer…. ‘the war on drugs’ as we all know is a nonsense. Whether we like it or not recreational drugs are here to stay. They are everywhere and are part of popular culture. Young people go to Ibiza for the experience of dancing all night while off their heads on something or other. The dance scene there is a huge industry – people go from all over the world. Models, celebrities, bands, actors and actresses, ‘our’ role models, are regularly ‘spotted’ at some club or other, throughout the Summer on Ibiza. The cool factor is deliberately hyped up by the entertainment industry. (What a huge boon to the tourist industry in general) But as the gear is smuggled in from South American countries it figures that it’s a multi-national operation. What no Americans involved? No Canadians? No French? No Germans? No Welsh? ‘A multi-national gang-including some Scousers- ply their evil trade.’ doesn’t have the same ring to it does it?

It’s the same with the booze figures. Both Liverpool and Newcastle are cities with universities and have a huge student population. The businesses reflect that. The clubs, the pubs, the bars and the student unions capitalize on that. Most of the initiation rituals into student life involve alcohol. It’s positively encouraged and is a part of British life now. In Liverpool there are new bars opening all the time. (You know when you’re on the map when Celebs are spotted drinking in the bars you go to. Didn’t Gazza’s latest fracas take place in The Carriage Works bar on Hope Street? How cool is that?) Binge drinking is a national problem and the stats show we are close to the top but come….it suddenly feels like we are holding our hands up to the whole caboodle. ‘Yeah, it was me what done Gov.’ The drugs, the alcohol, the bloody invasion of Riga! Would somebody tell Mr Oskars Kastens that John Lennon airport serves a wider area than Merseyside and on any given day you can hear accents from all over the country, when you’re there? (In the bar!).

I’m not saying that all is rosy in the garden of the ‘pool, like. But if there is to be a renaissance in Liverpool then we have to get over this culture of self-loathing. It can’t just be a surface thing. If we change the way we see ourselves we can change the way others see us. Instead of owning up to every vile accusation thrown at us we should want to question it and not just accept it like it’s some Scouse self-depreciating clichéd behavioural trait.

Bad news stories sell more copy. Fact. But if, for example, you chose to actively concentrate on counter-acting the negative feelings you get when reading a bad news story about Liverpool by searching for a good news story...it'll make you feel better in the moment and may have positive lasting effects.
If you fancy being part of the country’s biggest multi-cultural carnival parade head down to the Community College, Myrtle St at mid-day. It’s the second part of a trilogy about the slave trade. The festival organisers, Brouhaha, have brought together various community groups to explore the ‘Middle Passage’ of the slave trade. The event will tackle the darkest period, a time of inhuman suffering. It has involved artists and participants from Germany, Bristol, Belfast, Luton, Oxford, Stoke, Preston and Manchester. The parade snakes its way round the city and ends at Princess Park, Toxteth at 2 pm. There’s going to be bands, dancing, visual art installations and some amazing costumes from all over the country. And it’s one of the final celebrations of the annual Brouhaha International Street Festival which began on July 15th working with various artists and companies from Cape Verde, Costa Rica, Ireland, Morocco, Palestine, Poland, Spain, Tobago, Trinidad and Turkey …to name but a few. Should be a good ‘un. And it’s where I’m off to now.

You can check out their website for more info future projects.