Life in the bus lane

May 27 2008 by Mr Brocklebank, Liverpool Daily Post

HOW time flies. It seems only 18 months ago that the new Canning Place bus station was opened for business, yet it is now closed for the tarmac to be replaced. Or, after the success of Tony Robinson’s Time Team TV documentary on Manchester Dock, is it being dug up for a follow-up programme?

Meantime, with bus services suspended, how can heritage-hungry pensioners get down to The Strand for one last look at the Planet lightship?

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NAMING a library after quango king Steve Broomhead was clearly not honour enough, so grateful is Warrington that its bus company has decided to name a bus, with appropriate nameplate, after the chief executive of the Northwest Development Agency, too.

Where would you put such a nameplate? Would, for example, the back-end of the bus be appropriate?

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LAST week’s visit by the Queen to Liverpool started with journalists being told to check-in with police on Lime Street station’s platform nine, but then to attend a briefing on platform one.

Given Lime Street station is now notorious for enforcing ridiculous levels of security, especially over photographers (in case someone tries to snap a Pendolino to steal later?), such slackness is breath-taking.

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MR BROCKLEBANK felt honoured to see HM the Queen driving past to open the new Echo Arena, Liverpool, accompanied by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh.

He saw the latter look up and point to a forlorn, concrete solitary lift-shaft on an abandoned Strand building site, once touted as the new mini-Manhattan (next door to the Baltic Fleet pub).

According to Mr Brocklebank’s lip-reading, Prince Philip appeared to be saying: “Look, Liz, they’ve got a Windsor, too.”

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WITH his gritty background, one would not imagine that Capital of Culture artistic director Prof Phil Redmond was a natural Royalist.

But Mr Brocklebank was told that, after a presentation to the Queen at St George’s Hall, the good professor could not help but sit himself in the very chair that Her Majesty occupied minutes earlier.

But then she is queen, while we are told he is culture czar.

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IS IT appropriate to display a 100ft high advertising hoarding of a scantily-clad wench promoting H&M’s £9.99 bras on the side of the Holiday Inn, Lime Street, in the World Heritage Site?

Would India allow this alongside the Taj Mahal? Have our city’s top bananas misunderstood the advice to become “bosom buddies” with WHS guardians, Unesco?