All days are special, especially this one. So I decide I’ll walk around and photograph it, as I tend to do.
Walking to work in fact on a gorgeous blue day.
Friday 20th January, 2017. Yes, the day the world gets a chauvinist thug as President of the USA.
Thinking about this as I walk into The Mystery.
And deciding the day is too special and beautiful to spoil it with any more thoughts of him.
Me and an urban goal.
Onto Smithdown.
Past Naked Lunch. Be back here later with a couple of friends.
Drink may even be taken at some point. It is Friday after all.
Opposite the graveyard, matters of life and death.
Sadly not a pub any more, The Royal, but still beautifully tiled.
Happening right now.
Happening some time soon? Hope so.
At the top end of Smithdown.
Closer to the Cathedral.
Both of them.
Across the little park at Crown Street. Walking to work.
Past the former Myrtle Gardens. High quality municipal housing.
Be meeting a friend who used to live here later on.
Even closer to the Cathedral.
My daughter Clare was born here. When it was still Oxford Street Maternity Hospital.
John Lennon was born here too, back in 1940.
And here we are.
In Hope Street. Where Jayne and I work on Coming Home.
Work in a room in here.
At 26 Hope Street.
The view from our window.
At this point my expected and welcome visitor arrives. We go for lunch over at The Pen Factory. And have a conversation so winding and interesting, about Coming Home and social enterprise generally, that I entirely forget I’m blogging the day and don’t take a photograph of him.
So I have to whizz this one of him from somewhere on the internet.
My visitor is Nick Temple, the Deputy Chief Executive of Social Enterprise UK. We’ve known each other through social media for years and it turns out Nick’s a reader of this blog too. But this is the first time we’ve actually met, and a great pleasure it is too.
Nick goes off to his next meeting and I go off along Hope Street.
To 92° Degrees Coffee.
Where I sit and write the first half of this blog post.
Then it’s off along the other end of Hope Street, between the two Archbishops.
Across Falkner Street.
Past the Cathedral.
Along Percy Street.
And on to Catharine Street.
At which point I realise I haven’t now got the time to walk to where I need to be next by the time I’m supposed to be there.
So I get on the next bus.
And go back to Smithdown.
Which is where Naked Lunch is.
Open since September and one of my favourite cafés, Naked Lunch is a co-op run by its forty members, a good number of whom work in here too.
I pick a table by the sunny window and wait for my friends.
There’ll be Carol, who used to live in Myrtle Gardens and Miranda, who is one of the Coming Home advisory team. We’ve all known each other for over forty years since we worked together in the great Liverpool Housing Trust team of the mid-1970s.
And here we are, Carol, me and Miranda. Today, this special day, is our birthday.
Well Miranda’s is technically Sunday, but the celebrations start with coffee and cake this afternoon in Naked Lunch, who kindly take the photograph.
Happy Birthday to us.
A lovely day then and the first time I’ve worked on my birthday in my adult life. Though as you might have noticed, not much work got done.
A very Happy Birthday and good for you for not letting the ‘event’ in America spoil your day, will we see you on St George’s Plateau tomorrow? xx
Happy Birthday Ronnie!
My first daughter was born in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. I still have a very vivid memory of being wheeled along corridors to the post-natal ward clutching her close and being terrified I was going to drop her! My second daughter was born in our bedroom in Elmswood Road. Home birth much more relaxed than hospital.
And a happy birthday to you!
Thanks Robert. Birthdays are a funny thing.