IS SOME little corner of the city lighting department in a permanent state of seasonal festivity, one wonders?

Mr Brocklebank was a little surprised to discover the statue of Queen Victoria in the centre of Liverpool swathed in blue lights, hardly appropriate to the good lady’s dignity.

They give rise to the suspicion that Santa’s true kingdom is not at the North Pole but in fact among us within the Liverpolitan corridors of power.

An alternative theory is that the lights are there to discourage the starling population, and any echoes of Christmas are purely coincidental.

Mr B wonders which would have disamused her late Majesty the more: the birds or the lights?

MR BROCKLEBANK prefers his stately velocipede when it comes to two-wheeled travel, but can’t help admiring the Recoil, the customised motorcycle built in Ellesmere Port and now on tour raising money for the Help for Heroes charity.

He was a little bit in awe of the ferocious exhausts, modelled in the style of a Gatling Gun, albeit with peaceful intent.

So too were Her Majesty’s Customs, apparently, who were minded to impound the items when they arrived from America.

It took some high-level intervention, and no doubt some appropriate military language, to get them sent on their way.

WITH news that the deeply historic former White House pub has been sold for more than double its price at auction because it has a two-storey high painting of a rat (which looks like a cat) by trendy graffiti artist Banksy, this may show the way ahead for Liverpool's built heritage.

Surely we should invite Mr Banksy to come and daub his art all over our remaining historic buildings in order to save them from demolition. In spite of the White House having been owned by the Baines shipping family, the model for BBC's acclaimed 1970s series The Onedin Line, the pub's future looked grim until Banksy came to the rescue of this priceless bit of old Liverpool.

PETER Kilfoyle, the splendidly radical Labour MP for Liverpool Walton and scourge of the Militants, will fly off to Australia for some family history research once he steps down from parliament at the general election later this year.

Given that his forthcoming book Labour Pains promises, according to the bookseller Amazon “anecdotes, some none too flattering, and reflections on the two men who, Kilfoyle believes, have ruined his beloved Labour” – ie. Messrs Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson – half a planet might well be the right distance to put between them.