THERE was a chill in the air when I walked into the Waiting Room, New Brighton, the other night.
For I had done what no-one is ever supposed to do on Merseyside.
I’d criticised The Beatles. Actually, I hadn’t, not really, but everyone was convinced I had.
So there was much tut-tutting at the bar when I walked in. The chill turned to a deep freeze as more people clocked me through the smoke-fugged air. Much shaking of grizzled old heads. Fleshy jowls wobbling in indignation.
Yes, the women weren’t at all pleased.

And neither were the men.
Actually, I’d praised The Beatles in my blog of Aug 29 as “a prodigious talent”.
It was all the hangers-on and imitators, 45 years on, that I'd given a slagging to.
No matter. On Merseyside, local pride always comes with a massive chip on its shoulder, and certainly that means everyone has to genuflect before the Fab Four.
Particularly during the Mathew Street Festival. It’s the law.
Well, count me out. I don’t do deference.
And besides, all this wallowing in nostalgia for The Beatles is one of the things that is holding Merseyside back … because it defines the region in the eyes of the world as a cultural relic of the past.
Not that you can convince city councillors of that, but then they are hardly the brightest tools in the box, are they?
Actually, while the Mathew Street Festival was on, I was in Edinburgh visiting my Scottish friends.
Well, I hope they are still my friends because I was highly vocal up there about what a bunch of useless mediocrities are the Members of the Scottish Parliament.
I also opined that the Scottish Parliament was a total waste of (English tax-payers') money, as Scotland was over-governed by gormless politicians even before this new fangled Parliament was set up.
That sort of opinion is all very well when expressed by a Scot (and many Scots do express it, having lived with their mainly thick and strongly despised politicians for decades) but it is not really good manners for me, a mere Englishman of Irish ancestry, to express it while visiting friends in the Scottish capital.
However, I’d had more than several light ales at the time, so it is a wonder I didn’t also start an embittered debate about abortion, too.
Because that is what I do when I’ve had a few too many.
I think it was down to my friend the Dark Booth that I didn’t start ranting about abortion, but only because he kept shouting at me in a loud comedy whisper “shhhh… don’t mention abortion!” in the style of that “don’t mention the war!” incident in Fawlty Towers.
I was up in Scotland to see the Dark Booth and his girlfriend Giselle, who regular readers will remember from their visit to my summer palace in New Brighton earlier this year – and their associated tour of roughneck hostelries and dance halls.
See the posting, A Night of Magic Realism in New Brighton, dated April 25.
The DB and Giselle are off on a world tour soon, and while in their cups, a couple of weekends ago, they invited me to stay with them in Buenos Aires, where they are going to rent a flat on a short lease as part of their glob-spanning adventure. Bet they are regretting that now…
There were other old pals from Scotland I saw during the weekend, including Aled Wildmoors, who was a cub reporter when I worked up there in 1996 but who is now editorial director and proprietor of his own newspaper group as well as finding time to run two marathons every day and write a novel.
Me and Aled and our old reporter friend Nabster Pictish, plus several other old (though not as old as me) Scottish hacks, including Keiron McFly and Kris Legend, went a-drinking in Edinburgh during the last weekend of the famous fringe festival.
I am ashamed to say, however, that I attended not a single cultural or comedy event while there, though I did spend a great many hours in two restaurants, one bar and one sweaty, indie nightclub.
In the club incidentally, I attempted to dance in a frenzied-old-man sort of way to ‘Town Called Malice’ and had to be helped off the dance floor after suffering an asthma attack in the middle of it.
I did get back onto the maple-sprung jigging space later to leap about to The Kooks’ ‘Naïve’, which was a spectacle equally lacking in dignity. Well, I have reached the grand old age of 37.
*** In the next posting from Madford-on-Sea … the Waiting Room woman who got so angry with her boyfriend she destroyed something very, very important to him.
I tell you, the Wirral hasn’t seen such scenes of passionate destruction since the Vikings stopped pillaging us more than a thousand years ago.

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