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Steve Regan is a writer who lives in New Brighton. He’s a performance poet and a rebel. He drinks in a pub he calls Hell’s Waiting Room and a late bar known as The Lost Weekend. Steve has an unusual take on modern life – as you’ll discover …

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July 2007 Archives

Sod-cutting, Wirral's 'Death Star', and a most important battle

July 30, 2007 6:51 PM

SO IT was official sod-cutting time on New Brighton’s seafront recently. Well, whoop-de-do.
Several overweight, overpaid pen-pushers from the public sector – in this case the bloated Wirral Council and the North West Development Agency – got together with a publicity-seeking MP for a photo-opportunity. Er, that’s it.
There they all were, cutting “sods” with a shiny spade, supposedly to mark the start of work on rebuilding the Floral Pavilion and associated shops and civic furniture in New Brighton.
I wasn’t impressed. Not when the entire seafront, its railings, its fantastic Victorian shelters and the theatre, have simply been left to rot for years. The shelters, especially, are severely corroded.
However, I can think of a few thousand sods that are surplus to requirement and which need cutting out of the Wirral scene – most of them are sat behind desks, shuffling paper clips and eating tea and buns all day long at the Death Star HQ of Wirral Council in the former Wallasey Town Hall.

The trouble with the NHS

July 23, 2007 5:58 PM

ALMOST every time I have contact with the NHS the experience proves very dispiriting.
Why? Because the culture within our state-run health service stinks, that’s why.
Here's a for instance. A few days ago I had to take my mum to a big specialist unit in Wigan.
The appointment was made for 10.30am and we turned up about five minutes early.
But then we were expected to sit and wait in a stuffy, overcrowded waiting room for very nearly three hours before mum got to see the specialist.
We couldn’t even have a cig to relieve the bloody boredom.
Opposite where I sat was a big poster on Erectile Dysfunction, showing a very depressed man with his head in his hands.
By the end of two hours I knew how he felt.

The Protestant pipes playing in my Catholic ears

July 13, 2007 6:51 PM

SO there I am, just after eight o’clock last night, walking past the north end of St George’s Hall in Liverpool, and heading for the BBC studios in Hanover Street.
I hear a tremendous racket, shrill pipes and drums, and sure enough a MASSIVE Orange Parade comes into my field of vision on Lime Street.
Instantly I get a memory of a summer’s day some 40-odd years ago when I was just a lad and my dad had brought me from our home in Wigan to Liverpool to see the pictures in the Walker. He was that sort of dad, bless him.
What dad and I witnessed back then was, of course, an Orange march. It was probably a 12th of July parade (just like the one I saw yesterday), held to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne.
As a kid I was baffled and a bit frightened by what I saw and heard on the way to the art gallery that day. To a small boy it seemed very aggressive.

THEIR truth is out there

July 12, 2007 12:04 PM

EVERY SO often astronomers come up with a supposedly tantalising new discovery out in deep space.
Most recently it was announced they might have detected the light from some of the earliest stars to form in the universe.
Apparently, that’s evidence of very faint galaxies that shone more than 13 billion years ago.
The scientists are all getting in a right tizz about the latest findings – though hardly anyone else is.
What most of us want to know from astronomers and scientists is this: “Are we humans alone in the universe or are there other intelligent forms of life out there?”

Don't try to make Liverpool look like everywhere else

July 10, 2007 6:41 PM

IT OFTEN falls to me to play the role of the cheeky little boy who in the famous fable told the truth about the Emperor’s clothes – namely that he wasn’t wearing any.
Something of that feeling came over me today as I passed through central Liverpool and glanced up at the ugly new shopping centre that is spreading its protuberances outwards and upwards from Paradise Street.
Some commonsense observations from me on this one…
The Paradise Project, or ‘Liverpool One’ (or whatever silly name and/or logo the developers and publicists have given it) ain’t going to work.

Cruel consequences of the new state fascism for working class Scousers

July 7, 2007 2:33 PM

EVERY ten days or so I drive through the Wallasey Tunnel and out through the soulful north-eastern suburbs of Liverpool, bound for the M58 and Wigan, where I visit my mam, Teresa Philomena, and my sister, Princess Stephanie of Wigan.
I last made that journey, through gusting squalls, on the evening of Sunday, July 1.
It was the very evening that the weird modern liberalism of England passed its critical tipping point and turned into a form of civil fascism.
Yes, it was the first evening of the hated Smoking Ban.

Smoke Ban's plastic police – meet your spiritual leader!

July 2, 2007 1:25 PM

adolf.bmp

I MAKE absolutely no apologies for comparing the current anti-smoking lobby in the UK to the fascist authorities that did such harm to Europe 60 years ago.
Because, you see, the controversy about the ban on smoking in enclosed public and work spaces in England is not really about health at all.
It is about something that is ultimately much more important to humanity – namely personal freedom.
It is a cruel irony indeed that the new repression is being pursued by people from the liberal persuasion in modern politics.
Ironic but not entirely unexpected …

This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Steve Regan’s Last Resort in the July 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.

June 2007 is the previous archive.August 2007 is the next archive.

Many more can be found on the home page or by looking through the archives.