WITHERED leaves blew down the treeless street and they scuttled over the bruised paving-slabs, walked by stooped people, holding down an armada of coat flaps so that their shoulders could push more firmly into the unseen force.
For this was surely the windiest street in the world and, if you don’t believe me, you should ask the seagulls or the old tramp, cursing to himself in the doorway, while gripping the neck of the bottle, whose red innards would soon steady his hands.
We were in the grand cafe sitting at our table by the forgotten bandstand, where men in penguin suits once tooted flutes. The philosopher was there, of course, accompanied by the publisher and the young Italian woman, who had just written a book about how her ancestors had settled in Liverpool.
Our conversation hopped around the modern world and what’s wrong with it, a good and lengthy subject, as you know. But I kept glancing surreptitiously at my work-bag to make sure the secret held in one of its pockets was still hidden. I’ll just give you the tiniest hint here. The secret was sheltering in a tight, green cover and it had been presented to me by a young colleague – the one who monthly lays the Oldie magazine on my desk.
“This seems to be your sort of thing,” she says, before swinging around in the blonde confidence of youth to stride like a gazelle back to her own desk. “My sort of thing,” I muttered to myself. “What does she mean by that?”
And my feelings slipped a further notch, as I flicked through its glossy pages. A prominent advertisement featured a woman who could rise from her bath, gleefully enthroned on an inflatable cushion. One must hope that it knows where to stop, I thought, prophetically. “I wouldn’t like to entrust my earthly being to a cushion with a sense of fun.”
A domestic picture started to form in the ruins of my mind . . . The hours had been passing at a funereal pace. Finally, during the commercial break on Coronation Street, my absence was noted downstairs. “Where are you, sweetheart?” I hear my wife trilling, as she steps into the steam-filled bathroom, on the ceiling of which I had been flattened by the insistent pressure of a huge balloon. “Hang on a jiffy,” she says.
“Hang!” I gasp. “Wrong verb. I’m being pressed into the attic. Soon, I’ll be floating over Birkenhead.”
“Don’t panic, I’ll have you down in a mo,” replies my wife, before adding, with the tears of mirth gathering in her lovely turquoise eyes: “Anyone got a pin?”
There were also advertisements in the magazine for baths with doors on the side, so that smiling elderly people could step in and out without the effort of scaling the rim. This, I know, is the future, but I try to delay it with cod liver oil and mugs of strong tea. Anyway, back in the cafe, I said that my knees weren’t as supple as once they had been. “How is that?” asked the philosopher, who likes details.
“Well, when I’m crossing the road, I wait until the traffic has gone. Lost are the days when I could effortlessly jig between the cars.”
Silence followed and the chocolate flakes melted into the froth of his cappuccino coffee. “You know,” he said with ominous emphasis, “you never were one for the jigging, even at your peak. I’ve seen milk turn faster than you. But what’s that in your bag? Your eyes have been fastened to it, like barnacles on a boat.”
Before I could move the bag beyond reach, his hand was on it, faster than a frog’s tongue on a fly. “Look,” he said, triumphantly, plucking the flat, green object from its folds. “Look,” he said again, when he had everyone’s attention and I was cringing, “It’s a Val Doonican CD.”
Now, in my young days, Doonican wore Christmas cardigans and rocked on his TV chair, singing of Patrick McGinty’s Goat and Delaney’s Donkey. He wasn’t cool. But listening to the new record, I recalled how I had secretly enjoyed his songs. The lump swells in my throat again when he sings Sweet Sixteen. “When I first I saw the love light in your eyes . . .”
How times change.
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
