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.   

 The Mind Of Kenneth Williams:

Today, marks what would have been Kenneth Williams 97th birthday.  in April, it will also have been 35 years since what; in many senses was an untimely death.  I recently finished a copy of his diaries (published in 1993, currently out of print).  He kept them, on and off for 47 years.  Russell Davies waded through what amounts for 4m words. You can look at the whole collection in The British Library, if you wish.

A major feat, especially as the author is continually derided and insulted throughout them (IE a disgusting slob).  

Of course, the thing that looms largest over Williams' career was The Carry-On films.  Out of all the actors in them, he made the most appearances over twenty years.  He's continually ruminating on whether to appear in another.  In a way, they appear to him to be comedy hurricanes - massively damaging at the eye, but beautiful at a distance.  But he really enjoys them when they're on TV.  And of course, he is always the best thing in them. 

There's also that darker side to his personality.  And I know now, we can dismiss racism and right-wing politics as archaic.  But if bigotry is the language of people with no opinions; it's becoming the national tongue. 

So, within Williams' diaries you'll find references to that brave woman Margaret Thatcher and the marvellous man Norman Tebbit. You'll also find the worst examples of racist language, even in the published edit. Two thankfully outmoded terms for anyone who isn't white, the cockney rhyming slang for Jewish people. See also: the admiration for Enoch Powell, a man who cloaked his own hatred in references to classical literature.  Powell was right.  They should have deported the lot of them.  All they have done is imported alien cultures and poverty.

And it's incredibly easy to dismiss this as a man who was a product of his own East End upbringing.  The Great Lives profile on Radio 4 in September 2020 certainly did that.  But we can trace that poisonous, acidic line from then to now... it was becoming socially unacceptable then, it would certainly put a firebomb under any career now. Or possibly get him a spot on the cheap sofas of GB News.  

And for a man who inwardly felt those views, put the ink to paper; there is still that cognitive dissonance.  He loves working with Floella Benjamin.  Lenny Henry is one of the few decent talents around at the moment.  Work that one out.  

Williams' sexuality is the real grey/gay area here. It was always a subject for speculation.  And the diaries really don't provide a definitive answer.  There's that Maslovian need for a partner.  But no real, hard (ooh) evidence of whom it might have been.  Instead, there is references to the odd, inconsequential fumble.  Being approached by gay men on the streets.  His regular holidays in Morrocco, with mild incidences of S&M.  Catching crabs. The use of Polari terms such as naff and Marconi. The cockney rhyming phrase The Barclays, which is usually the end of a perfect day.  

His celebrity crushes appear to have been varied, ranging from Kevin Keegan to John McEnroe, to Dirk Benedict, to Gary Wilmot. But his masturbatory activities generally involved fantasy, or even himself. As Peter Cook said, "Ken's not interested in sex, he'd rather have a wank and a Mars bar".  To which he replies in the diary, "I don't eat Mars Bars."

The end of his career comes with a painful diversification.  He's proud of being on Equity's council, but at the same time becomes a regular face on TV chat/game shows; he can even note which anecdotes he's going to use.  He makes one successful foray into directing - Loot, by his late friend Joe Orton.  He appears in the first production, which is disastrous.  Come 1980, he's directing it - even starring in the lead using Orton's playscript; when the actor playing it gets mugged.

At the end of his life, he's the proverbial tear-stained clown.  Literature, poetry and classical music lift him up.  Back pain, a stomach ulcer and caring for an elderly mother push him down.  He's cultured enough to regularly quote Ode To A Nightingale by Keats ("To cease upon the midnight with no pain"), but the most quoted phrase is "Oh, what's the bloody point?"

And that is the final entry in his diary. His death is recorded as an open verdict. 

And where would he be today?  For a man who often referred to other gay men as queue, often dismissing them as poofs, queens or queers, he might be surprised to find societal acceptance of the latter as no cause of shame.  He came from a time when Frankie Howerd was closeted, but in a steady relationship.  Maybe, this would make him a stranger in a strange land.  Would he appear on a chat show with, for example Tom Allen (a huge Kenneth Williams fan)? What would be his thoughts on his lifelong friend Stanley Baxter outing himself at the age of 93?

Like all hypothetical questions, there is no answer.  See also, attempting to contextualise someone 35 years dead.  Williams was a mass of contradictions; as much as he was a talented individual.  He belongs to history, but like all legends - he'll never truly die.