January 2009 Archives

IT SEEMS I've been spending half my waking hours on the grim highways of North-West England in recent weeks.
First thing to face every weekday is the tedious slog down the M53 from New Brighton, past the Satanic smoke stacks of Ellesmere Port and on to the posh village in Cheshire where I toil in a lowly cattle shed (converted to accommodate computers and office politics etc).

IF YOU drive through the Wallasey Tunnel from Liverpool you are greeted on the other side by a huge banner sign saying: "Welcome to Wirral: please drive carefully."
How dull. How boring. How utterly lacking in ambition and imagination.
And how appropriate for a borough such as Wirral - where everything that used to be bold, brash or beautiful has been diminished or demolished over the past 35 years by an overblown municipality.

SO the dreaded 2009 is well and truly under way. If any year looked like developing into a full-blow 'Annus Horribilis' this is it.
To slightly misquote Bette Davis' character Margo Channing in the film All About Eve: 'Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy 12 months!'
Even as I write: Gaza city, in the cauldron of hatreds that is the Middle East, burns and crumbles...