No more ‘grot spots’

Nov 6 2007 Liverpool Daily Post

NEW jargon alert: at a conference rallying the great and good to get Liverpool into shipshape for 2008, staged at the FACT centre, it was proposed that instead of referring to “grot-spots” in the city, the words “environmental distractors” should be used instead.

Why not go the whole hog and talk about “regenerationally challenged”, so we know exactly what is being discussed?

IT’S a fact, incidentally, that our dear leader Cllr Warren Bradley was unable to attend this conference due to attending an MTV event in continental Europe, after the music channel agreed to stage its annual award events in Liverpool next year, following the success of the Antiques Roadshow last Sunday at St George’s Hall.

ANOTHER Fact is that Cllr Mike Storey was deployed to lend his special initiative 2008 charisma to FACT.

Forsaking a talk from the lectern, verily Brother Michael passed among the brethren, like a wildly gesticulating evangelist wired for sound. Sensibly, the audience were told to switch off their Blackberry phones so his message was not electronically bounced out of the auditorium. Oh, Lordy!

BETTING firm William Hill has allegedly opened a book on whether Liverpool’s most famous fireman, Cllr Warren Bradley, will be in full firefighting regalia (complete with oxygen of publicity mask) at the World Firefighter Games in the city, which is set to attract 5,000 participants.

THE late great Liverpool jazz legend George Melly, whose terminal illness is featured in a BBC documentary tomorrow, was not short on ego. His son told how the family played a practical joke on George, kidding him that he had been hired as a columnist by Practical Moped (a non-existent magazine). Even when the joke was revealed after he’d written a good many columns, he wasn’t bothered, says his son, as “he just loved the attention.”

NORTHERN Trains has had its share of criticism by Mr Brocklebank. However, to be fair, Central Trains is not much better either. A gasping correspondent reports that on Central’s 5½-hour Liverpool – Norwich journey (Lime Street’s last major cross-country service) there was no refreshment trolley aboard in either direction. Neither was there a scheduled refreshment stop midway for parched and starved passengers to besiege some station cafeteria, as in Victorian days. And these are meant to be more caring times.

CURSE of Lady Doreen strikes again: a huge gaping hole now exists in what was Liverpool’s last complete block of Victorian offices after the planning committee allowed demolition for Iliad’s new hotel. What an effective way of removing evidence of seeming deliberate vandalism to the former council education department’s office when English Heritage were due to call for a reassessment.