IT’S been raining on the pitiful cobbles of New Brighton – and it has been raining in my heart.
I can’t explain why I felt so down while driving to work along the M53 this morning.
Er, well, I always feel a bit down when travelling to work but this time I was in the Trough of Despond before I’d motored even as far as the Clatterbridge turn-off.
Waking up to the news of a serious terror alert and the airports being all balloxed up as a consequence - that's what started my spiral into depression.

Any anyhow I just can't shake off the feeling that terrible things are coming our way, mainly because there are so many extreme Islamist terrorists within our country and without (i.e. not ordinary good Muslims, I will make that distinction) who absolutely hate us (Britain, the USA, the West generally).
They despise us with such a passion that they will not baulk at spilling our blood. Lots of it.
That fact is going to make life increasingly difficult for a nation such as ours, a beautiful country of immense historical and cultural achievements.
Because the terror threat from the Islamo-fascists is going to mean ever tougher action and restrictions on personal liberty in Western nations that are used to granting their citizens all sorts of freedoms and human rights, and quite rightly granting those rights regardless of skin colour or religious faith.
I remember writing a news feature for the Hull Daily Mail on 11 September 2001, that very day of infamy when Al-Qaida terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon building in the USA.
And as I wrote that colour-piece (for a special same-day issue of the paper) I remember feeling, profoundly and with a heavy heart, that a new chapter of world history had opened and life would be nasty and uncomfortable for all of us for many years to come.
I hope and pray that our country – a special country by any standards, and a spiritually and physically beautiful one – can be spared bloodshed and cruelty if it is possible.
But I doubt we will be spared it. I feel in my water and in my bones that cruel times are coming to our beautiful country.
And we will have to deal with the consequences with our traditional fortitude.
For the time being, I commend the British and international security services who appear to have foiled a terrorist outrage, involving bombs being carried on to planes flying from the UK, which could have killed hundreds and hundreds of innocent people.

ANYWAY, my gloom didn’t leave me until I had nearly reached my office this morning and was halfway through playing a cassette of favourite songs I made some years earlier to cheer myself up.
Some of those songs were of little artistic merit, such as Jeepster by T Rex, Cum on Feel the Noize by Slade. I had included them simply because they were anthems of my happy and carefree youth.
Others numbers were secret guilty pleasures such as the tracks by Wet Wet Wet, Bonnie Tyler, and Dr Robert and the Blow Monkeys, Hot Chocolate and Katrina and the Waves.
Usually, such tapes boost my spirits no end but this one didn’t until a certain track from The Style Council burst through with a power that dissolved my cafard (come on, look it up in the dictionary) in an instant.
That song was Shout To The Top, and it is uplifting not because the lyric is particularly profound (words of songs rarely are) but because there is such a relentlessly upbeat defiance to Paul Weller's growly-voiced singing of it.
Here’s a reminder of how the song starts …
“I was half in mind, I was half in need,
And as the rain came down , I dropped to my knees and prayed
I said ‘oh heavenly thing - please cleanse my soul’,
I’ve seen all on offer and I’m not impressed at all.
I was halfway home - I was half insane,
And every shop window I looked in just looked the same.”

The song also includes the memorable line: “There is nothing certain in these days of mine” which might well be adapted as a slogan for our troubled times.
Because as the beleaguered Home Secretary (and I believe, our next Prime Minister), John Reid, warned the other day: “There is insecurity in the hearts of our communities.”
Aye, and there is hatred too, stoked up by a most twisted version of one of the world's great monotheist religions.
Christians, Jews, Muslims ... we are all sons and daughters of Abraham. How I wish we could all cooperate in building the kingdom of love and justice here on Earth that is God's great commission of us.
Can't see that happening anytime soon, unfortunately.
MEANWHILE, something a bit lighter ... Life goes on in Hell’s Waiting Room and in The Lost Weekend music bar.
I was in the Waiting Room on the other night and was amused by the story-telling of a neighbour of mine.
She’s a regular in the pub as well as living across the street from me in New Brighton.
Well, the tales she tells of the coming and the goings of the neighbours and their shortcomings and eccentricities are as detailed as they are deliciously indiscreet.
She has great powers of observation – better than any professional journalist I know.
Quite simply, being a neighbour of hers is like being under 24-hour CTV surveillance. She doesn’t miss a trick...
Your every transgression and embarrassment is recorded in her photographic memory.
This lady is particularly irritated by neighbours of hers who feed the pigeons. I sympathise, because that must be very annoying.
Pigeons are flying vermin. They should be shot or eradicated not encouraged to grow and breed by gormless pensioners forever scattering torn-up bits of Warburton’s Toasty.
I once told off a pair of pensioners who I saw feeding pigeons in a park in Liverpool. The old grumpies flew into a rage at that, saying they hadn’t “fought Hitler” so that a “Mr Fancy Specs” such as me could go around sticking my nose in other people's business. Charming.
Anyhow, this woman in the pub continued to bend my ear about the minutest actions of her neighbours.
She said of her neighbours across the street: “They didn’t think I could see what they were up to but I could.”
I couldn’t resist cutting in at that point and saying: “Aye, silly of them not to realise that you were perched on top of your wardrobe and training your high-powered binoculars on them.”
Then I had a horrible thought... this woman also lives across the road from me, albeit diagonally.
Now a week or so, on one of those very muggy nights, I had been in my living room (more or less facing hers) with my curtains open, sat naked (apart from my shreddies) on the sofa, swigging red wine and eating a giant bag of Cheese Puffs while watching The Bill.
(Hey, I know how to live...)
But if she saw me there in my under-kecks, it would not have been a pretty sight.
And come to think, did I or did I not, at regular intervals, thrust my hand into my boxers for a scratch and a rummage of my sweaty doo-dahs so as to get more comfortable?
Now, let me see... A man wearing only his underpants while drinking and watching the telly. Is he likely to scratch his gonads? Well, whaddaya think?!
It’s a wonder that woman didn’t fall off her perch on the top of her wardrobe...

• Post to:
•  del.icio.us
•  Digg
•  Newsvine
•  Nowpublic
•  Reddit