AN eventful weekend that lifted my sagging spirits …
Visits to Hell’s Waiting Room, New Brighton, featured on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
I am more and more convinced that passing through its portals – fittingly designed in the style of classical antiquity, by the way – brings about a phantasmagoric warping of reality.
You just don’t know what will happen in there next…

In recent weeks, as regular readers know, there have been several kick-offs.
My theory is that the pub’s drinks supplier has been changed … from John Smith’s to the Brewery of Bad Tempered Bastards plc.
There was a scrap in the street outside the Waiting Room on Saturday night. I know some of the, erm, social forces that caused the ruck, but I’m not at liberty to disclose the details here.
Anyway, it was all over pretty quickly (handbags at 30 yeards, really) and everything calmed down.
I had met some of my regular posse fairly early on Saturday in the Waiting Room.
The plan was to go off to Est Est Est restaurant on Albert Dock, Liverpool, for a meal to celebrate Quiet Jack’s birthday.
Ah, but several of the party were late (including me, because I’d gone for a jog to Wallasey Beach and the effort nearly killed me).
Sarah Lovelight was even later arriving, and she had her toddler grandson (apparently nicknamed Slutty Littleman) with her.
The tot is a charmer with an impressive vocabulary. His favourite word is ‘lager’, which I suppose is culturally appropriate for a young Brit of Irish bloodline.
Saturday turned into quite a session. We missed our slot at the Liverpool restaurant. Never even went to Liverpool.
But then we couldn’t find a restaurant in Wallasey capable of taking a booking for seven so late on Saturday night.
Not one where the food can be taken internally, anyway.
So what did we do? Well we went to another New Brighton pub, the Vagabond, then down to the seafront for a wine and dance session in the Pay-Up late bar.
Eventually, we did get to eat in a splendid curry house in King Street, Egremont.
It was about 3.30am by the time I had finished my Beef Korma and left with the surviving members of the crew, Sarah Lovelight, Tallulah Swells, the Bacardi Queen, Slutty Hardman and Annette Calms (who had earlier been sick in the bog at the Pay-up bar).
Friday night was a good night too, though I was too knackered and headachy after a week at work to go dancing at the Pay-up.
One woman from the Waiting Room, Dieppe, was very insistent I should accompany her into the Pay-up.
I declined as gallantly as I could. I wanted to go home and sleep. And I did.
Earlier on Friday, while still in the Waiting Room, Dieppe and I had been highly entertained by a young fella called Albie D Mented from Birkenhead and his girlfriend.
The latter sings like a cross between an entire Methodist choir and Whitney Houston at her warbliest. ‘Loud’ just isn’t an adequate description of this girl’s voice.
Talking of youngsters, there’s a group of local lads who’ve started coming in to the music room, and they are most welcome in there.
We don’t know them very well yet, but they seem good sorts who are in some kind of proto-rock band, and one of ‘em works in Gravy Train, the music shop in Mill Lane, Liscard.
One of these youths has a beatific face, which made one of the ladies from the passage bar, Blondie Fantail, call him Jesus.
What better compliment can a young man be given?
It was while in the passage bar, ordering red wine, that I got accosted by William II, who regularly hears me doing the newspaper reviews on BBC Radio Merseyside’s breakfast show.
He says I was wrong to say on the wireless that women don’t feel safe to go into bars on their own. He pointed around the Waiting Room, and he has a point. It is full of strong, independent women.
But then the Waiting Room isn’t an ordinary bar, which is my point.
In a lot of pubs, I’d say it still isn’t safe for a woman to go in on her own and, for instance, read the evening paper, as men often do. And that is wrong.
Anyway, Sunday night was finished off with a session in the Waiting Room, natch. The rock lads were in again and old Billy Bustimes was performing with gusto as his family members from Thornton Hough watched with inscrutable expressions on their faces.
At first I was about to lambast Billy for wearing a brightly coloured kerchief, like some sort of demented bargee but just in time I realised that it was merely a brightly coloured guitar strap that was laying across his throat, which is fair enough.
Hmmm. I will have to find another excuse to call him a ridiculous old tart.
The conversation was restrained on Sunday but one amusing incident did come to light…
Sarah Lovelight told how she was forced to take drastic action after she got locked out of her bathroom when precautions taken to make her flat safe for her toddler grandson went wrong.
In the middle of the night she awoke desperate to urinate. But no matter how hard she tried she could not open the bathroom door.
A solution did come to hand, however. She peed in the mop bucket.
It took me back to my student days. One morning my cleaning lady at uni caught me peeing in the sink in my study bedroom.
Ah well, I was only 19 at the time, and I had consumed much cider the night before.

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