The numbers game

Jul 22 2008 by Mr Brocklebank, Liverpool Daily Post

MR BROCKLEBANK is bemused by the rising estimates provided by the media over the numbers of people attending the Tall Ships’ Races event in Liverpool last weekend.

With the body count bidding starting at 50,000, at the time of print it had risen to 300,000. Surely the simplest way to sort this out is to get everyone who attended to return and stand in an orderly queue so they can be counted properly? (Late news: a missive delivered in a cleft-stick by a postal runner estimates 450,000 – equivalent to Liverpool’s population.)

***

HOW odd to see an electronic motorway sign proclaiming “Tall ships use M53”. In spite of Mr Brocklebank’s brougham wheeling up and down said thoroughfare, he saw no such representative vessels in transit. Could it have been an error for “All skips use M53”?

***

MR BROCKLEBANK is well relieved to see a glamorous toilet installed at Hillside railway station platform. Could this be anything to do with the presence of the Open at Royal Birkdale?

Once the big event has gone, will this lovely convenience, befitting of its international role, be removed with passengers – sorry, customers – once more hanging on or throwing caution and whatever else to the winds and reverting to the traditional “watering the vegetation”?

***

IT APPEARS that, to assist the surge of golf-loving passengers through Hillside, Merseyrail introduced a revised timetable with trains every 20 minutes instead of 15 minutes. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Litherland says.

***

HOW intriguing that the On the Waterfront – Culture, Heritage and Regeneration of Port Cities international conference, organised by English Heritage, in November at Liverpool BT Convention Centre, has an official brochure featuring a large cover colour photograph of the Mersey Bar lightvessel Planet, whose future here – thanks to Liverpool’s “caring” waterfront authorities – is very bleak. In the interests of accuracy, should not the organisers put stickers over the photograph saying “Going to Manchester”, so delegates fully understand how this port city treats our maritime heritage?

***

HONESTY compels Mr Brocklebank to add that a leading journalist of this parish was embarrassed to hear his own mobile field telephone trilling during Friday’s executive board meeting at Liverpool City Council’s Millennium House (aka “the Fun Palace”), thereby indebting him to the Lord Mayor’s Fund.

***

BRAVO, planners: Not only did Liverpool city planners refuse a wind-turbine proposal in the Back Canning Street conservation area, but the Planning Inspectorate backed their decision. Rodney Street Association head honcho Dr Emlyn Williams thundered: “Maybe at last officialdom is recognising the importance of our heritage by refusing this monstrous proposal.”