HOT juices flowed long through the bright-starred night of the resurgent city, where the tall, black cabs paraded along the roads, as their back doors swung wide and young men and women, dressed as tarts and nurses, vampires and bishops, cavorted onto the pavements – while the lower cars crept forward honking their hooters, the drivers staring helplessly from the windows, as more carousing girls clip-clopped down the stone steps of the pubs in high-thighed chaos.

This was the city in the full flush of celebration, when you stop noticing the cost of the drinks and nobody cares about tomorrow with its slow regrets, lost passions, aspirins, dried tongues, popping toasters and hazy memories looming into shame.

“Live for the moment” was the spirit of this night and nobody really saw the anger in the staggering tramp, who cursed to himself and occasionally thrust his whiskered face and rotten breath right up to a stranger, so that his blasphemies would frighten the dark. But he was soon gone, forgotten.

Everyone was shouting, singing or blowing whistles. “Hey, hi, over here.” The mood was good and the arms of recognition were waving. It seemed that the whole world was in Liverpool that night – gushing students, trippers and locals, all linking arms in praise of weekends in this city, which has always wanted to be loved.

But sometimes, in the week, when midnight has already called, there is a quiet city. Ssshh now, you can almost hear the shuffle and suck of the underground rats and the occasional, distant clunking of the door on a taxi about to carry a worker home, a siren sounding on the river.

This is the city of the nurses and doctors, the ambulance drivers, the police and the fire-fighters, the ever-vigilant coastguards, the news-gatherers, the soft-soled lovers, the card-shufflers and the lonely, all tuned to the local radio. Remember those nights of exhaustion when you have lain on the bed and stretched into a sleep so deep that you could run your fingernails through the velvet of its cloak and there would be no sound.

Then, suddenly, you awake to hear a voice. Could it be God? There is nobody else there. You listen again and the disembodied voice is reading the shipping forecast and it’s a woman. Good Heavens! I’m afraid, if you’re an old-fashioned chap like me, untouched by political correctness, you expect God to be a man, speaking in the rumbling bass tones of Paul Robeson. God is not a soprano. Then you realise that you nodded off with the bedside radio still on.

To those of us without an understanding of science, these things are miracles. How can there be a voice in a box ready to be released at the push of a button? But, if you overlook the mystical quality of sound delivery, it carries a tremendous sense of romance.

The writers of films and TV plays have often taken up the idea of one person sitting in a studio talking into a microphone with his/her words somehow reaching into the bedrooms of strangers. The DJ becomes an unseen friend. This is the quality that makes radio personal in a way that TV could never be. You find yourself talking to the person in the little box. “No, you’re wrong! Put another record on.”