Confirmed – batty

The little gits - they're leaving in droves. The brain cells, that is. Another piece of incontrovertible evidence this morning that I'm going steadily and rapidly bonkers. Listening to Radio 3 on the way home from a meeting, spent the time from Falkner Street to Ullet Road (this is Liverpool) trying to remember what the piece of music was. In times gone by I'd roll my eyes at my mother's (or other aged adult's) stupidity in failing to recognise music instantly. sigh. My mother's dead, so now I'm it. The daft old bat. It's Sibelius. No, it's something English. But it's not Elgar, or Vaughan Williams. Or is it? No. Ah - that does sound like Sibelius. I know this music so well.
And then it stops. There I was thinking it was the first or second movement, but the audience are clapping. The end. Shit - not Sibelius then. And then the announcer wrecks my day. Meistersingers. Overture thereof.
Oh god. Wagner. Wagner. I am not a Wagner fan. How nuts must I be?
Don't think I'm a pretentious music buff - I'm not. But I know what I know and especially what I like. Or I used to.
That's it, then. Not only on the slippery slope, but on a tin tray, at speed.

Mersey Minis on press

The next book out is now on press in Verona: the first volume of Mersey Minis – a delightful five volume series of little books (postcard-sized, 128pp) that will be published this year – Liverpool 800th anniversary. This is what the editor, Deborah Mulhearn, has to say about them:

"Bursting with brilliant writing inspired by Liverpool and the River Mersey, LANDING includes writers ranging from the extremely famous to the completely unknown, from well-loved novelists to young arrivals, from poets and princes to maidservants. What they have in common is Liverpool. Some of the writers were born in the city, others are strangers passing through, or experiencing their first footfall in Europe. But they have all visited or lived in (and in one notable exception merely dreamed about) Liverpool, and, luckily for us, committed their impressions to paper.
"The notion of bringing all this amazing output together into one series was irresistible. It seemed a simple enough idea, but as I started digging deeper, I was awed by the sheer volume and variety of people who had recorded their time in Liverpool. There was enough material for a shelf full of books, and how to select and present it all became the challenge. Landing is about first impressions, new encounters, beginnings, meetings and openings particular to Liverpool. They are funny, fascinating, touching, churlish, bemused, sad, or downright surreal, but all memorable accounts of this singular city and the often quixotic experiences it offers.

The first volume will be launched on Friday 27 April, at the wonderful new BBC building in Liverpool and will be in the shops the following morning – as well, of course, as online at www.loveliverpoolbooks (hit the link to 'lovely Liverpool books' opposite).
Hurrah!

In the name of freedom

Slavery. Hmm. Well, if people can really learn the lessons from 200 years ago, that's great. But given the number of people being treated in much the same way today, it's a moot point.
And what about those profiting today from 'cheap' labour? What about those profiting from the arms industry? Is it better to enslave a man than to kill him?
Maybe in another 200 years our successors will condemn us for tolerating warfare and mass killing in the name of freedom and democracy.
Think on.

Ran at the top

Just heard from Louise - Ran's minutes away from the summit of the Eiger - just the most fantastic news - am so relieved, and thrilled for him. God, he's brilliant. Well, I've got one easter egg with his name on it, and can now without superstititous fear of jinx, hunt down the biggest egg I can find, as promised.

Malc on the BBC

Well, on the site at BBC Cumbia, actually... but next stop Hollywood...

This is a photo from the book 'Time and tide: 200 years of the Bibby Line Group' published on 8 Feb. Malcolm (pictured here with Mrs Liz Goodyear outside the George and Dragon Hotel in Dent) drives a tanker for Bibby Distribution, collecting milk from farms in the South Lakes. Bibby's drivers at Crooklands collect 450,000 litres of milk a day, from 250 farms. These pictures make it look like a cushy number, but it was a glorious August day (all week before it had been hissing down, and the day after it was thick fog) and we were having a laugh. But according to Bibby's fleet manager the milk collection is one of the toughest jobs in distribution - so these pics show the best of a good day. While you're looking at these pics (use this link), overlay sheeting rain and biting wind, or black ice on the roads and frozen mud in the yards. What it takes for us to get our pint of milk...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cumbria/content/image_galleries/tanker_driver_gallery.shtml

Equine posterior of the week

Oh, god...... I'm still only 48, albeit with my 49th birthday next month, but at the rate my brain cells are defecting, I'll be completely gaga before I get a sniff of a bus pass.
I was due to speak on Tuesday evening to a lovely bunch of gournet gardeners in Sussex, about the gourmet life amongst the wild gardens of Transylvania. How delightful - was really looking forward to that, plus the bonus of rambling about West Sussex seeing old friends for two days.
Then the phone rings, and it's the charming woman who booked me, last summer, to speak to a group of formidable ladies about Liverpool. In Liverpool, on Tuesday lunchtime. She's just ringing to make sure all is well for the long-awaited date. 'Ah,' I utter in a tone between a groan and a scream. 'Yes, lovely. Indeed. Tuesday. Of course.'
I will have to phone her back because I have no idea what she told me about times and arriving and suchlike. I was having a fit of hysterics to myself as she was speaking, because I had completely forgotten the promise.
A 45 minute talk about Liverpool, in Liverpool, on Tuesday, after lunch. A 30 minute talk about Transylvania, in Sussex, at 7.30pm. Technically possible, in benign traffic, to make it from Liverpool city centre to Petworth in four hours, but down the M6, through rush hour...... I don't think so.
So I've just had the painful experience of ringing the Gourmet Gardeners organiser to confess. She was sweet, understanding and very polite in the circumstances. She even said she'd offer me another date.
These things may happen, and my not being there on Tuesday won't result in global meltdown, but I feel a complete heel. Or to be precise, a horse's arse.

Ran Fiennes' 6,000 ft Eiger challenge

In about five hours, Ranulph Fiennes sets off for his latest challenge, to climb the treacherous 'death wall', the North Face of the Eiger. Good luck, Ran – I'll have a gargantuan Easter egg waiting for you when you get back.
Do please support this amazing man in this deadly challenge – he's aiming to raise £1.5m for charity, so do follow the links to find out more.
Keep your fingers crossed for him, will him up that cliff, and back home to his family, in one piece and as soon as possible.

www.mariecurie.org.uk/eigerchallenge

Cool - or cold..... getting warmer

We clever evolved technologically advanced humans forget one vital fact: we are mammals, and we still have all our mammalian instincts and drives, albeit overlaid with homo smartarsiensis sophistication. But that's a veneer, and pretending we can ignore our recent past as primates only gets us into strife.
Early on in my year’s training in therapeutic massage, our teacher stated what seemed like an outrageous opinion: ‘If each of us had bodywork every day or even every week, hospitals would soon be out of business.’ He talked about touch deprivation, the lack of simple human contact that means that most of us crave touch, although we probably don’t even realise it. We might call it loneliness – we all know that it’s perfectly possible to be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage. It’s not solitude that gets you, it’s the being out of touch.
Remember the shock of seeing pictures of young children in Romanian orphanages, almost catatonic, standing behind the bars of their cots, faces devoid of emotion. They were starving, not from lack of food, but from lack of human contact. Too many children and not enough staff. No-one with time to play with them, talk to them, hold them. The medical term is marasmus: failure to thrive and dying for no apparent reason.
Britain has been a very disconnected nation since Victorian times, at least; touch is conducted under strict but unwritten rules. In the 1970s a study of 400 human societies found that those who lavished affectionate touch on their children, and were tolerant of teenage sex, were the least violent societies on earth. He also found the converse true.
Touch is the first sense to develop in the human foetus. Frequent pleasurable touch for infants results in positive change in brain tissue, while chronic touch deprivation results in measurable brain damage. Touch-deprived adults may turn to food, alcohol or drugs to make up for the lack of physical contact, or adopt behaviours from promiscuous sex to shop lifting. Touch, or the lack of it, can dramatically affect emotional, mental and physical health. It has huge implications for society, let alone the family and the individual.
The research points to Hippocrates having it right 2,500 years ago. Let’s learn from history, for once, and put more trust in the innate ability of humans to heal with the tools we were born with: head, hands and heart.

Cool – or cold?

Talking to a chum in London last night we got to talking about why the English are such a cold nation, how urban cool has turned to chill, why we are so afraid to show warmth to other human beings, even ones we know well.

But we're not a cold nation. Liverpool, where I live for much of the time, is a warmer city by far than the capital – which is one of the reasons I moved up here 18 years ago. Here strangers smile at you, throw out a few chirpy words, pay you an unnecessary compliment (if you're really lucky). Unlikely characters can commit acts of random kindness. Beyond city limits, humans warm up yet more. Courtesy and curiosity prompt conversation with strangers; cuddling a child is a naturally affectionate gesture, not evidence of deviant criminality.

Cram too many people into a space and they have to create the illusion of space by ignoring the crowd. Out walking in my local park, despite the greenery, I am still firmly in the city: I can spend an hour in uninterrupted solitude amongst a hundred other walkers. I'm more likely to have a friendly exchange with a passing spaniel than talk to a fellow city dweller.

Still, it's better than in London where I would avoid catching someone's eye in the street, let alone smiling at them, for fear of – what – ? And that was 20 years ago. My chum Tony was saying last night that these days everyone is so determined to look cool and hard that they'd rather be aggressive than risk looking vulnerable in any way. They'll shove you out of the way to get off the bus in a rush instead of asking you to let them out a few seconds earlier; walk in the road and challenge the traffic rather than having to step out of the way of another pedestrian.

Kids shooting each other dead may seem a bit of a leap from that, but it's not that big a leap. When a society is run on fear, the adolescents – who react the most strongly to every emotion and are least in control of their feelings – will show an extreme response to the fear we all deny.

There are remedies, but they are too simple, too fundamental, too gentle and too free for the policy makers and budget setters to value. More of that later.

Missing person

Yesterday was the third anniversary of my sister's death. Ginny was 56 – she'd have been 60 this July. I spent the morning with my brother in law sitting in the little garden we made for her on the hill overlooking the house on Exmoor, where her ashes are buried and her presence is strong. She had poured so much of herself into the land, creating a farm out of the steep moorland hills and building a herd of sought-after Angus cattle, as well as black sheep and gaggles of waterfowl. That was all after she was the first woman to be awarded the Queen's Polar Medal, and the first woman to be allowed into the hallowed portals of the Antarctic Club. She was no slouch, my sister. 800 people crammed into the Royal Geographical Society for her memorial event. Today the weather was meek. I don't remember the weather the day she died, except that the daffodils were out in the hospice garden. The day of her funeral it snowed. Yesterday morning, sitting up there for a couple of hours, it was all too easy for a moment to believe we'd go back down to the house and find her in the kitchen where she'd have a clutch of newly hatched goslings in a box on the Aga. Brutus was one of her hatchlings. A Hawaiian goose, he was an amazing little bird. He was fierce (although he couldn't peck much above your knee) and hated almost everyone, but because my voice is so like Ginny's, he used to follow me around the place, hooting softly like a clarinet; he got to recognise the sound of my car, and ran to the gate calling for me. Dear Brutus. It was enough to make you weep.

Time and tide

There aren't many businesses that make the 200 year mark; there are even fewer which are still under family control, let alone with the sixth generation having both hands on the wheel. Liverpool has one of these treasures – and a shipping line, to boot. Capsica launched our latest book (TIME AND TIDE) on 8 Feb looking at this intriguing asset – the Bibby Line Group. Remarkable company, fantastic project, terrific people.
For more on the book launch, the book and the business, go to http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpooldailypost/ourview/columnists/peterelson/tm_headline=success-based-on-staying-local-and-ahead-of-the-times%26method=full%26objectid=18611357%26siteid=50061-name_page.html
(If this URL doesn't work, go to http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk, click on Daily Post, find the columnists, look for Peter Elson's column of 12 Feb.)

Solid steel proof

Here's a close up of the star, so you can see the steel rivets. Hard to imagine this thing is made of thick steel plates – including the HUGE arching tail – but it is. See for yourself.

Star attraction

It's Liverpool's 800th anniversary this year – at least the octocentenary of Bad King John's concession to a few local burghers who had been whingeing about paying for King John's new castle so the Bad King could set sail for Ireland with all its Celtic gold, colleens and wolfhounds. But glossing over the expediency of giving the little fishing village a Royal Charter, it now means we, the current denizens of Liverpool, can kick up our heels in fine style. The picture above does not show Liverpool, but Verona. The fantastic thing lighting up the big piazza is not a flimsy special effect, but a solid steel structure created in 1984 by what the Italians call an archisculptor (great name) called Rinaldo Olivieri. It's huge, it's fantastic, it's staggeringly impressive, and if Liverpool's City Fathers chose to commission something of this scale and quality, it would be quite something. OK, City Dads, come on, beat this.
Toodle pip.

Hot and spicy

And while I'm at it, I'll explain Capsica. No-one can spell it, or say it, or knows what it means. Simple, really - it's the plural of capsicum, ie peppers. big sweet ones, like bell peppers, or fierce little biters like these peperoncini, or Scotch bonnets. Full of goodness, hot and spicy. Just like us. 'Us' being me and Fiona Shaw, the two directors of Capsica. Photo of us as the Kray twins to come later. Worth waiting for.
T'ra.

Kind hearts and coronets

This is the neighbour's gaff, just down the mountain from my des res. The most famous past resident was Vlad the Impaler, Voivode of Wallachia and template for Bram Stoker's romantic bloodsucker. The castle (genuine 14th century edifice) belonged to the Romanian royal family until the Communists kicked them out, but last year they got it back. The man who would have been king of Romania is, I gather, an architect in New York called Hugo (correct me if I'm wrong). So the neighbourhood's looking up – from a mere Count to an Almost King. And the other side of me, in the same county, Prince Charles now has a bijou pad – well, a rural building in a Carpathian village. So I'm hedged about with coronets.

Taking wing

Why Batland? Mostly because I'm a dreadful old bat, but also because I have a house in Transylvania, home to the most stylish bats in the business.

For the time being (and for the last 18 years) I live in Liverpool – the original, not one of the 15 or so around the world – and almost make a living as a publisher of gorgeous looking, life-enhancing non-fiction books under the imprints of Capsica and Garlic Press. Have a look at http://www.loveliverpoolbooks.com for some of them.

Garlic Press, incidentally, had nothing to do with the Transylvanian connection. I was taking drawing lessons, and we had to bring in a kitchen implement to sketch. I brought in a garlic press and it occurred to me that it would be a great name for a publishing house. At the time (1992) I was a business journalist and it hadn't occurred to me that it might be me doing the publishing. It's an odd world.

Gagging to know more about Transylvania, eh? It IS a real place and ISN'T full of vampires. Full of vampire-chasers, certainly - lots of foreign (ie not Transylvanian) nutters running around the mountains looking for Dracula. But although Vlad the Impaler's 14th century castle is in the valley below my house, and the village next to mine is named after a bat cave, and you can occasionally hear wolves howl from my back door, the place is idyllic ather than Gothic. Not dark and dangerous, but light and full of wildflower meadows. Much more of that later.

For now, the sun's out and it's Chinese New Year, and Liverpool has the oldest Chinese community in Europe, so I'm off out.

T'ra.