Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

  Inevitably, and for the first time during my walk, we got onto Brexit. We concurred that some of the external forces we’d been discussing probably lay at the root of the discontent people felt, not least the pace of change, and they’d expressed this by kicking out at ‘the system’ at the first opportunity. It was just happenchance that the EU had been the subject made available for a kicking. The subject matter had also allowed a clear level of xenophobia at best, at worst racism and Islamophobia, to surface; even if this was something that had subsequently become the subject that dared not speak its name.

  On the way into Toxteth that morning I’d seen a large stencilled graffito on the side of the university posing the question, ‘ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE?’ It seemed to sum up the question I was ultimately posing, to myself and others along my walk. I asked Jacqui for her response. Luckily, she was an articulate woman and wasn’t too fazed by a question I realised later was the conversational equivalent to suddenly tossing someone a medicine ball in a game of French cricket. She was unhesitating in saying ‘Yes’. ‘You have to stay positive,’ she continued, ‘to people and to change’. I’d enjoyed our exchange and said so, giving her details on how to follow my walk. It was an excellent example of an Encounter of the Second Kind, the first of many I hoped.

  It was time for lunch, so picking up on the mood of optimism I set out in the expectation that something would turn up, and it did. A riverside pub offering the usual fare of something with salad and chips. It was at the end of the long Otterspool Promenade, much of which was constructed as part of the Garden Festival, suggesting its legacy had been more than just a few oriental trees. The day had now turned into a scorcher, and I was glad I wasn’t carrying my rucksack. Views out to the Mersey were bracing, while inland there was a marina and fantastic vistas over to the city’s two cathedrals, with the larger Anglican version, the Cathedral Church of Christ in Liverpool, dominating.

  The playwright J.B. Priestley in his acclaimed 1930s travelogue English Journey described the centre of Liverpool as ‘dignified and darkish’, comparing it to a gloomy Victorian novel. Priestley only ever saw Liverpool in the winter. His description certainly did not apply to the city I saw on this bright spring afternoon. The waterside was populated with shiny new developments, similar to those that line both banks of the Thames in London – all red bricks and blue metal balconies overlooking the water. When Priestley looked for the underside of Liverpool, he headed not for Toxteth but the docks. They wouldn’t be his choice today. The docks I saw were abuzz with tourists, many of them with Japanese rather than Scouse accents. I wondered if they knew about the gardens two miles away, but why would someone from Japan come to Liverpool to see something they had at home? No, they were here for the whole Beatles experience and to have their picture taken by the statue of the Fab Four opposite the Liver Building.

  The docks themselves, once state-of-the-art freight depots, were now state-of-the-art catering and souvenir establishments, with the occasional museum (very good museums as it turned out) to add a veneer of culture. It was at Pier Head that I finally succumbed and had a coffee at the Fab Four Café. I needed refreshment, and I had somewhere I needed to visit – it had become a case of ‘All Things Must Pass’.

  Having failed to find the soup kitchen volunteers that evening, I headed for an Italian restaurant. Opposite me were what appeared to be another mother and daughter pairing, although this one clearly enjoyed a more affluent lifestyle than the duo I’d seen in Norris Green. I guessed the daughter was a student and the mother was visiting. Disappointment fizzed between them like static electricity. The daughter sported a fresh tattoo on the inside of her arm and was explaining it to her mother, whose reaction included the word ‘disgusting’ as she pulled a face to match. Conversation was, at best, sparse. Although intergenerational unease is nothing new, what followed is, perhaps, more recent, as each focussed their attention on their phone, preferring to communicate with others rather than each other.

  Only when the food came, and they were forced to put their phones down, was an attempt made to connect. Even then, the daughter picked hers up again to take a picture of her meal. Until that point, whenever one looked like she was finishing whatever it was she was doing on her phone, the other would start up again on hers – an eternal game of cyber-tag. I watched and made some notes, before returning to checking my own Twitter and Instagram followers. Well, at least I had an excuse, I was on my own and carried a duty to keep my accounts up to date.

  A young male gay couple arrived and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. That such public affection between a same-sex couple seemed so ordinary was perhaps something that had changed in the last twenty years. On the other side of the glass, two young women worked their way through a bottle of rosé sharing a packet of crisps. Although this might have happened twenty years ago, what was different was the reason they were outside. They were both smokers. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ came onto the sound system, so I asked for the bill and left, but only after an Encounter of the First Kind with the chatty American waitress while we waited for the card reader to get a signal.

  My two nights in Liverpool over, the next day I headed back to Lime Street Station. Standing at the top of the station’s steps, I reflected that Liverpool wore its history well. Contemporary and Victorian architecture, such as the cleaned-up St. Georges Hall opposite, sat well together. My wanderings the previous day suggested that Liverpool was really two cities. Whilst this might be true of most places, the extremes had felt particularly stark here. I’d enjoyed it all, though, and I decided that I liked Liverpool, with its efforts to make the best of itself (the regeneration of the docks in the 1980s being a notable example of success, even if the Garden Festival had left less of a lasting legacy), and its ‘café society’ feel in the sunshine.

  I clearly wasn’t alone in my fondness. Liverpool has acted like a magnet for travel writers over the years. Perhaps the best-known contemporary one, Bill Bryson, another American, visited in the 1990s, around ten years after his countryman Theroux. While admitting Liverpool was probably his favourite British city (although I liked it, I wouldn’t go that far), he also felt it was a city with more of a past than a future, but I wasn’t sure I agreed. I thought it had both.

  Back on the road, I made a point of greeting everyone like some manic idiot, hoping for another encounter but without success. Were they a particularly grumpy lot in this part of the city? Then I realised why no one was responding. They all wore headphones of one sort or another in their ears. I contented myself with the birdsong and distant traffic noise as I walked past a large solar array in a field to my left. The Liverpool Loop terminated at Halewood Park, a large expanse of grass overlooking a factory with three tall chimneys. I celebrated by taking off my rucksack and stretching. I was wearing one of my T-shirts, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when the encounter I’d been fishing for happened unexpectedly, one of the hallowed Third Kind.

  ‘Walk with feckin’ me? What the feck’s that all about then?’

  Two willowy men were standing behind me, one of them brandishing a dog, the other a menacing expression. I turned around and greeted them, before beginning my spiel. When I’d finished, the response was, perhaps, predictable.

  ‘Feckin’ ’ell.’

  This, I’d found, was a common response, although perhaps not always so succinctly expressed. I’d learned not to start with the details of my quest as it appeared to overwhelm people, leaving them unable to deliver an adequate response. The most common reaction was, ‘Are you doing it for charity?’ For many people this was evidently the only reasonable excuse for doing something so madcap. Doing it for personal challenge didn’t seem to enter their head.

  When I mentioned the end point of the walk as near Dungeness in Kent the response was emphatic and immediate: ‘Never feckin’ heard of it,’ as if the speaker’s ignorance meant it didn’t actually exist.

  His na
me was Andy and interestingly, he’d moved to Halewood from Oxford, where I guessed he hadn’t been a professor, unless perhaps of Anglo-Saxon, which he tended to use in the same way other people use commas. I was right. He had been a painter and decorator and had done all right, retiring to be nearer family six years before. I asked him how he’d found it.

  ‘Feckin’ terrible,’ came the perhaps inevitable reply. Why? ‘All they’re after is me feckin’ money. They found out I had a feckin’ pension pot like, and three feckin’ times they’ve feckin’ robbed me of it.’ Coming from the south, he’d been fair game apparently.

  Young people were another target of his vitriol. ‘No feckin’ respect,’ he said, adding that he hadn’t found the sense of community he’d expected by moving north.

  In an effort to change the subject I asked him if the big industrial plant to the right of the park was the Halewood car plant, notorious in the 1970s and 80s for the strikes by its Ford workers.

  He said it was, adding, ‘Feckin’ thing. Spews out feckin’ smoke. See the feckin’ flares go up at night, no feckin’ idea what they’re burning. Even on hot feckin’ days like this we ’ave to keep the feckin’ windows shut ’cos of the feckin’ pollution.

  ‘Still, got to this feckin’ age, that’s good enough for me,’ he concluded, fatalistically, adding as he left, ‘Guinness is better here though,’ suggesting it was because Liverpool was closer to Ireland, and thereby demonstrating he had at least a rudimentary grasp of geography.

  I let him and his mate drift down the side of the park before pulling my rucksack back on and was immediately adopted by a dog walker. If Andy had struggled with Dungeness (and very possibly with the notion of Kent), this elderly gentleman seemed unable to talk about anywhere outside an area of two miles’ radius from where we were. We parted ways when his thoughts distilled to the progress of a particular mud patch we were walking through.

  Surprise, surprise, ‘Mr Feckin’’ was wrong when it came to the car plant, which sits, appropriately enough, by the side of a busy road. No longer owned by Ford, it is part of Jaguar Land Rover, now the country’s largest car maker and owned by Tata Motors from India. The plant with the three chimneys was a chemical plant, or possibly pharmaceuticals. The dog walker hadn’t been sure, even though it was on his doorstep. Either way, ‘Mr Feckin’’ was probably right to keep his windows shut.

  I crossed the road and skirted a large estate, which presumably had once housed many of the plant’s workers, although an underpass linking the two was now disused. People were taking advantage of the nice weather to cut their grass; the houses being generally well maintained. There was a church and a doctor’s surgery, the latter surrounded by high security fencing. On reaching a corner of the estate I took a detour off the Trans Pennine Trail down the unpromisingly named Dungeon Lane to take advantage of a section of the Mersey Way, a path beside the river, leaving the housing behind me. The road was unloved, running alongside a tall wire fence protecting what looked like an airfield, watched over by an uninterested-looking man in a small van. Things were quiet, with one or two light aircraft and a wooden hut belonging to a local flying club.

  I found the river and settled down to a good view of an oil refinery on the opposite shore and speculated on how many more years it would be needed if the current progress of solar installations like the one I’d seen that morning was kept up. Making myself comfortable, I extracted the lunch I’d bought earlier and took on some water. Birdsong regained the air and I absorbed my surroundings. A passing cyclist stopped and trained his binoculars on the water, asking me if there was any sign of the dolphins.

  He might just as well have asked me if nightingales still sang over Red Square at midnight. ‘I was here the other day and saw them,’ he explained, ‘but I didn’t have my fucking camera.’ I sympathised. ‘That’s the second time that’s happened to me like. The other time it was otters.’ He finally got around to asking what I was up to, as local wildlife clearly wasn’t my speciality. I explained. ‘That’s a fucking long way,’ he informed me, as if this was something I didn’t know. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘these dolphins …’

  His discourse on the feeding habits of the dolphin was gradually drowned out by the sound of a jet plane, heading straight for us. As it lowered itself over the headland, its easyJet markings were clearly visible. It flew so close I could almost detect the sad expressions on the faces of people in the window seats looking down.

  The airport perimeter I’d passed earlier was that of Liverpool Airport, formerly known as Speke, now more commonly referred to as, yes, you’ve guessed it, John Lennon Airport.

  I’d been beaten by the Beatles.

  3

  Water, Water

  The following day was forecast to be even hotter, so I got up early and helped myself to a modest breakfast from the various cereals, bread and fruit juice left out downstairs in the pub I’d stayed in overnight. Having followed the Mersey Way into Widnes, I’d spent the previous evening enjoying the remnants of the sunshine while partaking of the ‘Curry Special’– a pint, curry, chips, rice and a naan, all for a fiver. What could go wrong? When I’d asked what type of curry, I’d received a blank stare. ‘It’s just curry,’ I was told.

  The final couple of miles into Widnes had been a delight. I met birdwatchers, saw bullfinches and herons and had a few encounters. Maybe it was the weather, but suddenly everyone wanted to talk. One man, holding a dog and waiting for his headphoned-up daughter at Hale Point lighthouse, engaged me in a conversation about house prices, telling me that his first house, bought in 1970, had cost him £600. ‘These days you’re looking at two hundred thou’ for a starter,’ he exclaimed: an impossible sum. He didn’t know how his daughter would ever get going on a mortgage. I sympathised, although I wondered if his real concern was never getting her to leave home. She wasn’t the most exciting conversationalist.

  I didn’t dare tell him that two hundred thou’ wouldn’t get you a garage around my way, but our conversation was a good reminder of the obsession the English have with home ownership and house prices. Throughout my walk, I regularly encountered this fear that a generation was being condemned to a lifetime of renting. I heard news media reporting on it, too, as if it was an epidemic on the scale of AIDS.

  The dog walker directed me towards Hale, and on his advice I diverted down the appropriately named Lighthouse Road. He told me that I had to see the statue of the Childe of Hale, who he was amazed I’d never heard of. This is a life-sized statue of a Hale resident born in the sixteenth century, and when I say life-sized, I mean nine foot three inches tall. The ‘childe’ in question was John Middleton, thought by many to be the tallest man (or Englishman, according to fable) who ever lived. He was said to sleep with his feet sticking outside the window. Presented to King James I he was given the, er, kingly sum of £20 for defeating the King’s champion in a wrestling match. Unfortunately, he was robbed of this when returning to Hale, suggesting both that the locals’ reputation for scallywaggery goes back a few centuries, and that there must have been a lot of them.

  While in Hale I’d shared a park bench with a man with his foot encased in a protective boot following an operation for a metatarsal injury. He was waiting for his mate, who was jogging, which seemed a bit ironic. When he turned up, it turned out his mate was an amateur boxer and knew plenty of professionals who complained that they spent as much time on social media as they did on training, this having become part of the job. It wasn’t time-wasting, but vital work, building their brand so they got invited onto fight cards. I sympathised. I’d already found that constantly updating my various accounts was taking two to three hours out of my day.

  Twenty years ago, the thought that people could make a living out of writing apps, or indeed that using apps and social media could be considered working, would have been inconceivable, and yet here we were. I remembered a conversation I’d had with a friend on millennium night. Seein
g the rate at which traditional jobs were disappearing, he’d wondered how his children would ever make a living. My response was remarkably prescient. I replied that they’d be doing things that hadn’t even been invented. What a clever young thing I was back then. Having bemoaned the way the world was going, I parted company with the amateur boxer and his crocked friend, but not before he asked me for details of my social media. He never followed me.

  *

  Breakfast over, my biggest concern on this fresh day was getting over the Silver Jubilee Bridge linking Widnes with Runcorn, which had been a landmark for most of the previous afternoon. The bridge was shut for repairs and had effectively been replaced by the spanking new Merseyside Gateway bridge, a couple of miles down the road. This was the subject of some controversy as it charged tolls. A court case was being pursued by a so-called celebrity lawyer (I didn’t know such a thing existed, was this one of the new jobs I’d predicted?), who went under the nickname ‘Mr Loophole’. Later in the year the same lawyer got David Beckham off a speeding charge.

  He claimed that Halton Council had not specified the tolls correctly and had failed to give sufficient notice of the fees, both charges the council strongly disputed. The case suggested that millions of payments were illegal and would need refunding. I found this whole case fascinating. It highlighted not only the growing use of litigation, of trying to catch someone out and being cleverer than them, but also attitudes towards the funding of public infrastructure. The bridge had cost £600m to build. To me it seemed reasonable to ask those using it to contribute, leaving public money for other more deserving causes.