Phil Redmond: Learning from life

May 2 2008 by Phil Redmond, Liverpool Daily Post

Learning from life

CONDITIONING. Something that life does to us all. Good or bad, our life experiences form our conditioning.

How we are prepared, how we perceive and how we react to life. Nostalgia plays a great part in this, a well-recognised part of rehabilitation therapy for stroke patients, and earlier this week I had the privilege to help launch the Memory Lane project at Aintree University Hospital, aka Fazakerley.

It’s a great project, part of the hospital’s overall arts project, and consists of photo-montages from Liverpool’s past, including one which included what appeared to be my youngest son! I saw first hand how older patients were stimulated as they saw them and started recalling their own pasts, and it was a terrific example of how culture is not something we do on the periphery of life, but which is right at the centre of it. It’s part of our conditioning.

It’s well-documented, or at least debated, how years of conditioning have gone into how Liverpool and Merseyside perceive and are perceived by others, all coming from a shared history of the rise and decline of port and empire. It is therefore heartening to witness ever so slowly, ever so grudgingly, external cultural commentators recognising their own negative conditioning towards the city with nods of acknowledgment. To read previously snooty correspondents saying they were wrong is satisfying, but also a signal that their expectations may have been raised. Therefore, they will be watching the future carefully, waiting for the fall. They won’t be able to help themselves. It’s conditioning.

That said, I also have no doubt in my mind that the last seven years has started a cultural process, perhaps similar to the rehabilitation of a stroke victim, of reminding and reinforcing everyone, internally and externally, what Merseyside once was, what it is and what it can become: a cultural crucible for its people and their ideas. The trick then, is to start conditioning them to what comes next.

At the moment, the post-2008 plans are embryonic and, being a cultural crucible, there are at least 10 committees looking at cultural strategies, all with another symptom of conditioning, the hovering consultants! Is no one allowed to think for themselves any more?

The biggest challenge ahead is that our rehabilitated stroke victim will revert to its penny- pinching negativity born from years of conditioning while fretting about managed decline. It’s a bit like all those drivers who are suffering PBDS, post-big dig syndrome, who are still driving down dual carriageways in single file at 25 mph. They don’t seem to notice when the cones go.

Post-election, regardless of result, we are now on the edge of the springboard. Do we want to do a graceful swallow dive or a typical dive bomb? One great inheritance we can pass on is positive conditioning.