Scouse:
Take a big pan, or if you're saving money - a slow cooker. Some celery, some carrots, an onion, a few potatoes. A dark, fatty meat like lamb or beef. Add some gravy or a stock cube. Salt and pepper. Let the whole thing cook out. Enjoy, by the bowlful.
Like all recipes, this is just a basic one for Scouse. It can be added to, or edited as you see fit. My Mum advises me to push some of the potatoes to mush against the back of the pan to thicken the mixture. She also advises the use of pearl barley or oats for the same effect. I've personally made Scouse as part of an unsuccessful low-fat diet using sweet potatoes. I've even added a dash of soy sauce for that umami hit you need on a Winter's Day.
Proust talks of the rush he got from a bite of Madeline. I remember my Auntie Joan delighting in a box of Matzo crackers. Food does that, it defines culture in a series of bites. I still have fond memories of the Yorkshire Pudding Wrap I had in Bristol that contained a whole roast dinner.
It was the kind of thing that was an innovation in 2018 but is now as cliché as salted caramel.
I can still recall the three courses for ten-euro menu at a restaurant in Dublin. Or the similarly priced platter in what I guess you could call the German equivalent of Wetherspoons (funnily enough, without the anti-European propaganda). A steak, any form of potato you liked, a loaf of bread and a pint of beer. Both, so good I went again the following night.
I still describe myself as Scouse. I've lived in Mid-Devon for what is now approaching six years. I still define myself as Liverpudlian. I mean, I still get asked where I'm from. When LFC are playing, I will wear a shirt that, post-Christmas I can still fit into. I am railing at the TV, getting more Scouse as the game progresses. And I am currently, watching the slow, painful, disintegration of a great team. One that entered The Promised Land in a time of plague. That team is now slowly disintegrating, into a miasma of disinterest, sore knees and a lack of football fundamentals like clean sheets, strikers that don't score and the end of careers planned on Winter grass, ending on Brazilian beaches.
Liverpool seems like a distant land, to me. It is, geographically as much as philosophically. I can remember what I consider my last real visit in 2019. I climbed The Liver Building with my stepson. And that filled me with pride, as much as the kind of vertigo that James Stewart suffered from. See also: a quiet coffee with an old friend in the rarefied air of Bluecoat Chambers.
I walked through the city as much as I was vaguely repulsed by it. I mean, there is still beauty there – if you look high or intelligently enough. But it seems to be covered in a flash of neon or a smear of grease. We’re back with James Stewart again – Liverpool is slowly becoming Potterville.
The council seems keen to sell it as a holiday destination. And yeah, the greatest group there ever was or ever will be. Two football teams, possibly at different states of inertia now, but there you go. And I am now old enough to remember when the puppets of giants roamed the streets. However, Liverpool seems to be suffering from a metaphysical state of mind; where culture equals cash.
But did we really need a branch of Hooters (tits, beer and chicken wings)? Do we really need a zipwire going off St John’s Beacon, past The Hillsborough Memorial? Did we really need to sacrifice UNESCO World Heritage Status for an unnecessary coating of Everton’s new stadium, unaffordable housing, skyscrapers and an opera house? I don't even like opera.
I doubt you’d find anyone in Liverpool who does. I mean, who needs an aria when you’ve got Home and Bargain?
I’d set Liverpool as an independent state. An independent state of mind. I’ve spent the last six years, back-pocketing and working on a novel called Pool of Blood. It’s set in an independent Liverpool, a century ahead in the future. That seems like science fiction. But find the genre Moreish enough to know that science fiction is generally a thought experiment in what life is now; using the model of a dystopia or a utopia.
And that idea – of disconnecting the city from a country that is rotten, corrupt and obsequious to the concept that it isn’t - is delicious. But – it will happen. We have a culture of resistance as part of our own soul. Hungry immigrants, slaves that will not bow to any master, people who will raise a fist when they see a boot coming in.
That will happen. I promise you, it will. If you believe in good times as much as you believe in social justice, you give yourself up to that nebulous, fantastical concept. It's like knowing the melody of a song you'll never hear. Or being content that your great, great, great grandchild has a lovely smile and is a good and decent person.
Liverpool is ground zero, in the early phases of what is a culture war. Where everything we fought for, everyone that we fought with... is being eroded, rolled back, eliminated by a dark and insidious hegemony. Your rights and my rights - even the right to live our lives the way we want it - are being linked to being part of the machine.
The bottom line is: if you don't work (and that includes single parents, the disabled, even those odd-socked urban terrorists who home educate their kids), you shall have no representation. You won't be able to get a house. You can work till you drop and by that insane measure, thou shall have worth.
Even Aristotle, who said "it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it", would regard this as "a pile of bollocks".
Even the mere concept of grief means nothing to our enemies. I have now loved through enough death to last me a lifetime. Hillsborough. Jamie Bulger. Rhys Jones, the innocent death of child who just wanted to play football was the beginning of a seemingly endless round of shootings and stabbings on Merseyside. Basta, as they say in both Spanish and Italian.
Outside of Liverpool, our grief is derided and somehow seen as symptomatic of a sentimental subculture. We can be told by any football team that visits Merseyside that it's never our fault, or we are just bin-divers. Funnily enough, by teams from parts of the country that have similar or even worse social problems than us.
Their public grief is linked to the death of royalty. A minute's silence for a life of wealth and privilege is seen as more apposite than one for the corporate manslaughter of people who just wanted to watch a football match. A minute's silence for that becomes a minute's applause; because Liam from Salford wants to shout "murderers" at us. And you know, free speech. Mad for it.
Don't even get me started on how this country treats anyone who isn't white. I visited London recently; I mean someone has to. It's a beautiful city, but the extremes of wealth and poverty in symbiosis are obscene. A shopping mall in Westfield lies in the ossified remains of Grenfell. It's hard to equate how two apparently disparate concepts lie side by side. That is a crime. But hey, those people who went to prison for using Horizon Software in The Post Office, let's sort those out first. Please hold, your call is very important to us. Honest.
Race, gender, sexuality, class, even genocide are concepts that have been ripped open in this culture war. You can point out the stench of corruption that issues from this government. But if you do, you're racist, sexist, even antisemitic. They are throwing our own hand grenades back at us. It's a page from The Bannon Playbook that wants ripping out, let alone burning.
To quote the philosopher/rollerblading guitar enthusiast George Benson: "I believe that children are our future". We stand on the edge of an electoral apocalypse, one which will see the complete and utter decimation of The Tory Party. Which, like The Superbowl I am going to stay up all night in a caffeinated haze to enjoy.
But Keir, our beige centrist dad is not our own personal Jesus. He will run the machine at a slightly different pace. He'll last two elections, before our next collection of chinless Etonian overlords take power. It would take two, possibly three generations - not parliaments - to solve our problems. The Tory Party has successfully turned us into a cross between Italy and North Korea. Our soul is due a purging that will never come.
It's children, young adults who are going to pick up our shit and make it clean. I'm thinking of my own stepson here. A troubled, but principled, decent, empathetic human. I meet his friends and they all seem pretty much the same. And that gives me hope as I get older. You have to some hope that when I'm not here, a better world will not just become necessary but possible.
That's why occasionally, I'll take a big pan, or if you're saving money - a slow cooker. Some celery, some carrots, an onion, a few potatoes. A dark, fatty meat like lamb or beef. Add some gravy or a stock cube. Salt and pepper. Let the whole thing cook out. Enjoy, by the bowlful.
Scouse: not just a meal, but the taste of a better world.
