EVEN in bizarre and eccentric New Brighton – where I usually feel at my happiest – things have been, as Prince Harry would put it, “pretty poo” recently.
The cold, damp weather hasn’t helped, but also the resort is at its lowest ebb, prior to the imminent regeneration.
Almost everything in New Brighton and Wallasey is run in a half-hearted way just now.

One recent Monday night at about 8pm, Posh Boots and I couldn’t find a single place open for a meal in the centre of New Brighton. Pathetic.
Restaurant-wise the area is a dead loss. As for the local pubs, very few of them are interested in serving food in the evenings.
Dear me, no. Because that might get in the way of crowds of people who just want to cram a load of ale and vodka down their screeches.
Except there aren’t any crowds. Doh! Because so few places can be ar**d to offer bar food, and the ones that do it, do it badly.
They must get their supplies from World of Lard plc.
This is a measure of how things have declined: the centre of New Brighton (formerly northern England’s biggest pleasure resort) doesn’t have a single traditional restaurant that’s open seven-night-a-week.
I understand, however, that one will open soon, near the site of the former pier. That will be called The Green Dolphin – you read it here first.
The hated smoking ban, meanwhile, has knocked the resort’s once lively pub scene very hard.
Even Hell’s Waiting Room is noticeably quieter now. Much of the oomph has gone out of the place. Let’s hope it returns when the warm weather comes.
I have, however, managed to have a few enjoyable nights in the Waiting Room this winter.
One such night, the booming voice of singer Crispy Silk livened the place up – though by playing rude noises on his keyboard he completely ruined Barman Burly’s rendition of Leavin' on a Jet Plane.
Barman Burly’s not enjoying good health right now, and nor is Billy Bustimes – so I wish them both a speedy return to fitness.
I’ve also had a few cheering times in the old place this winter with Mini Marvin, The Beast, Eamonn Lairyshirts (who has taken to going about dressed as a cowboy), Dixie the Jazzman, Annette Kalms and the poet Len Rosso.
More often, though, myself and the lovely Posh Boots have been going for our regular sleeping draught of Rioja to Tallulah’s Bar.
Sometimes, I’ve really needed that. After the illness that afflicted me for most of January, the stuffing was well and truly knocked out of me, so I found returning to work very tiring and stressful.
One night, after a busy day at the office, I went in Tallulah’s and all the muscles in my neck and upper back were knotted. Fortunately, the multi-talented Duncan Kindlyface gave me a massage there and then, which seemed to ease my discomfort.
Mine host Tallulah Swells really does have the perfect pub landlady personality and, ahem, figure.
You will recall she was formerly a barmaid at Hell’s Waiting Room. Her presence there is sorely missed though Blondie Fantail is holding the fort brilliantly with an acid-tongued humour of the sort that, paradoxically, only true softies possess.
I’ve also been over to Liverpool a couple of times with my friend New Brighton Newbie – to check out venues for poetry and music.
I’m a small scale poetry promoter and he’s a rather larger scale music promoter.
At one of his music nights in Liverpool, at the Magnet Club, I again performed by comedy routine about The Wearons – extraterrestrial beings who live in a well known Liverpool landmark.
The piece was well received, though my friends The Beast, Dr Gyggle, Litherland Lou and Eamonn Lairyshirts made up nearly half of the total audience. Well, it was the night of a big international football match...
I’m working out a way to perform The Wearons at a comedy club next time. Though it is a gloriously vulgar piece of writing, I’m really rather proud of it and it certainly gets a lorra lorra laughs.
Posh Boots and me are doing fine, thanks to those who’ve been asking.
She’s absolutely gorgeous and has the loveliest ice blue eyes I’ve ever seen.
We’ve had a few rows by now, as you’d expect. Well, she is a woman and I am a man.
And as I explained at a recent Bards of New Brighton poetry gathering, “men are from Mars, and women are from Wallasey Village” – something like that anyway.
The Bards recent sessions have been raucous and lairy – rather like the mad performance poetry clubs I used to attend in East London in the 1990s.
This riotous atmosphere is apparently quite different to other poetry clubs on the Wirral, which are rather middle class, stuffy and a bit "beige cardigan", even to the point of banning the use of certain “swear words” and sexual imagery in readings.
However, as founder and MC of the Bards, I would never dream of trying to censor a poet’s use of language in such a way. That would be a very anti-poetic thing to do.
It wouldn’t be very Wallasey either … if you know what I mean.
We regularly get a group of poets from Liverpool coming to our Bards' meetings – and they have a habit of bursting into song, which makes the meetings quite hard to chair.
Also, at the most recent meeting, a retired lady called Glenda from Liscard sang a beautiful love song that her late husband wrote for her.
Eyes moistened all around the room – and for once it had nothing to do with booze.
Well known local singer Corky read a couple of poems and also sang at the meeting earlier this month. He seemed to go down well.
He read a poem by the acclaimed US writer Charles Bukowski and gave me a book of Bukowski’s stories and poems.
Thanks for that, Corky, I’ve been reading it and I like it. Clearly Bukowski was not afraid to use salty language and sexual imagery.
I think he would have rather enjoyed the Bards – had he lived to see us burst gloriously into existence.
And finally…Posh Boots has her much-loved brother, Henri, over for a visit . He’s a very practical man who’s been doing some building work for her.
Blimey he’s a fast worker. He’d only been on site for a couple of hours and he knocked a bloody great hole in a partition wall – even though he had a hangover at the time.
I did gingerly explain to him there is another way of doing such work – my preferred way, in fact.
Rather than steam in with a mallet, he could try worrying about the job and fannying around for three years before attempting anything at all.
“I think you’ll find my way is a much more thorough and considered approach, ” I told him. Well, I do speak from direct experience.
Henri is also a philosophical sort of guy. As someone who lives mainly in France, he knows how important philosophy is to humanity.
So I gave him a present – a copy of the (in my view) most important novel written in the past 20 years – Atomised by Michel Houellebecq.
Hope it doesn’t give him nightmares…
* In my next posting – how the State at national and local level is creeping towards a very nasty form of Liberal Fascism.

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