Price of progress

Apr 29 2008 by Mr Brocklebank, Liverpool Daily Post

Price of progress

BELEAGUERED Liverpool motorists driving around in ever increasing circles to find that elusive parking space have a new threat to contend with.

A new deadly strain of traffic attendants nicknamed Warren’s Warriors is now at large. The feared Warriors are now targeting that last vestige of free city parking, the forgotten enclave of Pall Mall formerly protected by the northern ringroad.

Is the ultimate goal to clear Pall Mall for the countless charabancs poised to bear down on the city, as hordes of excited tourists head for the ultimate cultural knees-up?

Meantime, hard-pressed motor-borne office workers, dubbed the Bootle Irregulars, will colonise ever more distant parking galaxies. Watch out, Waterloo!

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DOZENS of ready-grown trees have suddenly appeared at Liverpool Pier Head to recreate Canada Boulevard’s avenue, which was bizarrely and unexpectedly felled last year.

Regeneration executive member Cllr Mike Storey claimed this axing was necessary as the Pier Head micro-climate was unsuitable for Canadian maples (originally dedicated to Canadian war losses amid much pomp with Canadian top brass). But are the new trees maples (surely crucial)? Will they survive the building work? Why weren’t the still healthy old maples moved elsewhere?

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SHOWBIZ news: Top of the bill at a premiere Runcorn club is radio personality and leading author Pete Price. Surprisingly, he’s described on flyers as a BBC Radio Merseyside presenter, although he broadcasts for Radio City / City Talk. Is he too shy to trumpet this promotion?

Has Pete gone up in the world, paradoxically while descending the Radio City tower? Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Litherland says.

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ONCE labelled the nicest Beatle, Ringo Starr is reportedly in a strop over the failure of his new single Liverpool 8 (confirming his belief the English “really don’t love me enough”) and is disgusted that heritage chiefs branded his former Madryn Street home as of “neutral value”.

The simple answer is for him to buy the entire Welsh Streets and gift them to the National Trust, thereby saving his birthplace and outflanking Lennon and McCartney, who only have one NT house each.

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MYSTERY solved: a correspondent informs Mr Brocklebank that the decapitation of Ringo Starr’s topiary effigy at Liverpool South Parkway wasn’t the action of local music lovers angered by his dismissal of Liverpool to Jonathan Woss, but an attempt to create Kate Bush.

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CONFUSED of Oxton, an attractive female reader of maturer years, writes to Mr Brocklebank with a heart-felt plea. She has just seen a notice outside her local Sainsbury’s which instructs: “Bring your old bag here”. She anxiously asks: “Does it mean me?”