SO I went to see Everton beat Wigan Athletic in the season opener at Goodison – my first visit to the doomed stadium.
I was up in the top balcony of the main stand and suffered a mild attack of vertigo as I shuffled into my seat.
The ticket cost me £31, which was a terrible shock. The last time I paid to see the Latics it only cost me a shilling.
The game last Saturday was not great football but I think the best team won. Wigan played a bit dirty at times, I must say, though they showed some admirable battling spirit in the second half.
Despite Wigan being my home town, I was never a proper Latics fan. Ever since I was a schoolboy, my team’s been Man City – though of course they’ve been up and down more often than a bride’s nightie, giving their incredibly loyal fans much heartache down the years.
Last Saturday, however, I chose to watch my home town team so I went along to Goodison Park with my Blues fan pal from New Brighton, Commuting Mitch, and his mate, Jedi Wirral from Eastham.
We had quite a few pints of cider in a sports bar in town before cabbing it to the ground.
And as soon as I got through the turnstile and up the dingy stairs of the main stand, I needed a pie to settle my stomach.
The kind Jedi bought me a pie, but dear me, what a disappointment it was. It was a Scouse pie, but very bland. Certainly not a patch on the Pooles pies you get at the JJB.
I think the pie stands at Everton matches should carry a warning: “Pies served here are not to be taken internally”.
I shall pass a note to that effect to my chum Bill Kenwright next time I meet him during a musical theatre evening in the West End of London.
It’s time to get Back To Basics with British Culture – get the pies right and everything else will fall into place.
At half time during the Everton v Wigan clash, like thousands of others, I shot off to the bogs, but it’s so long since I’ve been to a proper big stadium that I forgot the drill for the urinals.
You go in one entrance, queue, piss, and then shuffle out through an exit at the other end. That way you keeps the flow of men passing smoothly in very crowded conditions.
But, like a fool, I tried to get out of the toilets the way I came in, forcing my way though a crowd of men all shuffling in the opposite direction to me.
Most didn’t react, but one fella did shout that I was a “f***ing kn**head” and, since I felt he had a point, I didn’t bother to correct him.
There was a subdued atmosphere at the match, I thought. Maybe the Blues fans were preoccupied with their bosses’ attempts to relocate them to a new Tesco Superbowl in the badlands of Kirby.
Or perhaps they were just miffed to be meeting such a mediocre club as Wigan at the start of the season.
Anyway, after the match off we trundled onto the County Road and drank a few more ciders in several distinctly working class pubs. Not a suit from the Met Quarter anywhere to be seen, and no Culture Fat Cats either.
The pubs we tried out were nice and homely, a bit like Hell’s Waiting Room, but there were also a few Scouse Scallies from Central Casting slithering around on the cadge.
You know the types… always trying to sell you knock-off baseball caps or mobile phone covers for a bit of extra cash to be spend on drug or alcohol abuse when this week’s state benefits have run out.
Now, I wrote the above paragraph with compassion, because I feel a lot of Merseysiders are trapped in a pernicious substance abuse which is linked to the enforced idleness that comes from there being so few decent jobs in this region.
Also, I feel that the depressing culture of dependency on state benefits is highly damaging to society at large, and to Merseyside in particular, because the problem is so much bigger here than in most other regions.
Most of the time these deep-rooted, systemic social problems go unremarked upon, and instead a great deal of rubbish is spouted about Liverpool having regenerated and being led into a glorious new future by booming creative industries.
Such analysis is simply b***ocks. Yes, there are creative things going on in the city, but the truly amazing things are the ones that occur at street level and pub level – the backstreet karaoke and the poetry groups such as my Bards of New Brighton (next meeting, the Little Brighton pub, Rowson St, New Brighton, on Mon 3 September, starting at 8.30pm).
And rarely do such excellent things involve the dead hand of the publicly-funded “arts bureaucracy” which now has such a stranglehold on the few remaining well-paid jobs in Liverpool.
I think the fiasco of the cancellation of the outdoor stages for the Mathew Street Festival, by the panicking idiots of the Culture Company, was entirely predictable and it has wider implications for the European Capital of Culture Year 2008.
The whole approach of the city’s arts and municipal establishment has been wrong – ever since the announcement was made in 2003 that Liverpool had won the “honour”.
The culture fat cats and the political pygmies who rule this city have, from the start, displayed a naïve and very provincial attitude to the coming of 2008.
We have watched in horror as projects failed and bad appointments were made: Merseytram; the Robyn Archer walk-out; the Fourth Grace fiasco; allegations of artistic elitism; Joe Anderson’s prophetic resignation; and the cancellation of the outdoor events of the Mathew Street Festival; all of these have had a deadening, depressing effect, and yet here we still are just months away from 2008.
For those in charge of the cultural development of Liverpool, it has all been about marketing, launching logos, building management teams, and liaising with corporate supporters and "stakeholders" (i.e. other publicly-funded wastrels).
When it should have been about, in this order: finding and developing local and regional talent; planning a few spectaculars that could grab headlines around the world; and arranging for a galaxy of top world stars to come to entertain us in Liverpool.
Instead the suits, and the “great and the good” of Liverpool, have been engaged in a four-year unproductive frenzy – largely comprising fiddling with strategy documents and posing for photo shoots.
And during that time Liverpool’s struggle for a cultural significance that didn’t mean harking back to the bloody Beatles has fallen victim to bureaucratic fatigue and political sclerosis.
Given the type of people we have put in charge of 2008 preparations, no-one should be surprised.
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smokehouse wrote...
Well said about the 08 plans and yes you are right about the disaffected having nothing to do. On the Wirral alone over 30,00 jobs have gone in the last 30 years or so - Cammel Lairds, Metal Box, Austin Packaging, Van Den Burghs and I could go on and on. It's all very well building shiny new apartment blocks but if no one has the job or the money to buy them they are wasted. 2008 should not be about shiny new apartment blocks that few can afford to live in, nor about new museums. It should be about the people - and sadly they have been neglected to the point of criminality. Liverpool should be about more than the Beatles but sadly that is all Liverpool has.
Posted by: smokehouse | August 17, 2007 2:24 PM