Not such a big deal? Maybe to the people of a city accused of the most hideous lies imaginable by the paper after Hillsborough.

There are some things I think Liverpool needs to get over, but Hillsborough is a taboo. Emotion is still high and raw, and understandably as far as I’m concerned.

The Sun has bent over backwards in recent years to apologise for its sickening coverage of Hillsborough, but I don’t blame scousers for wanting nothing to do with the paper, especially when it continues to employ Kelvin MacKenzie – something the BBC should also be ashamed of.

Sometime the best thing you can do to make amends is to just go away and leave people in peace.

• You can find my other coverage of Hillsborough, usually involving the Sun, here

• The SunLiverpool account seems very new, but it’s already attracted some unsurprising opprobrium, including:

@SunLiverpool You hideous, hideous lying bastards. Was that what you wanted? Much less than you deserve.

Every @SunLiverpool follower should be ashamed. All 600 of ‘em

@SunLiverpool as if the sun is scum

I’ve only lived in Liverpool for a year, but somehow I think that The Sun might be being a wee bit optimistic with their @SunLiverpool feed.

Good god, I can’t believe this. When will they get the message? We won’t forgive. We won’t forget.

You have afucking nerve don’t you? The lies your shitrag printed and you set up a twitter account?

The @SunLiverpool needs to fuck off

But that’s what Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust has apparently done in developing a room for sperm donors, albeit with costs shared with the private company North West Fertility, which shared the cost of the suite.

So, it actually paid out £3.25K by those calculations, which went towards a computer, a TV and monkey on some Class A grumble (that’s £500 on porn if you’re not up on slang).

Value-of-nothing pressure group The Taxpayer’s Alliance is, surprisingly, ‘astonished’ by this revelation.

“This money could have been spent on treatment rather than on trying to improve on methods that have always worked just fine,” it raged, in its own twatty Little Englander idiom. What ‘methods’ would those be, we wonder.

Maybe, just once, it has a point. Wouldn’t an internet connection suffice? Or a couple of mags? Apparently not, and when you look at the situation at IVF Wales that cash pales into insignificance.

It relies on ‘donations’ by members of the public. And if you expect men to freely donate sperm, surely the least you can do is provide them with first-hand, er, left-handed mags.

Sniggering aside, a friend of mine recently made some sperm pops at the hospital as he was undergoing chemotherapy at the time. While the resulting story, including a discussion of the procedure with his Dad, was undeniably amusing, it left me in little doubt as to what an awkward, embarrassing experience donating sperm is.

So, the price of dignity is £3.5K in this case. Not a lot to ask, surely?

The group is aiming to raise enough cash to take a take club and force the terrible twosome out. It’s a pleasing expression that sometimes there are wider issues surrounding footie than what goes on on the pitch or in the boardroom.

People power, with a bit of help from Aldo, Bish, Fitzy and Shankly’s granddaughter. Apparently McNab and John Power were there too. How boss!

From the Beeb:

Fans of Liverpool Football Club have staged a city centre rally in protest against the club’s American owners.

The Spirit of Shankly Union chose 4 July, American independence day, to protest against US owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

About 2,000 fans turned out to the rally outside St George`s Hall.

Speakers included former player and shareholder, John Aldridge and Bill Shankly’s granddaughter Karen Gill.

Leaders of Spirit Of Shankly Liverpool Supporters’ Union issued their own Declaration of Independence, outlining details of how supporters can buy the club through a partnership with a credit union.

• Images by Dave the Pap

We have it on authority that Hodgson took in a play at The Everyman, a concert at the Phil, admired the toilet’s in the Philharmonic pub, enjoyed a meal at the Carriage Works and rounded off the day by skanking to some dirty dub at The Magnet.

Not really.

Image by Dave the Pap

I’d be minded to give Hunt the benefit of the doubt as suffering a simple slip of the tongue. To anyone not engaging the brain, Heysel and Hillsborough may be fairly interchangeable: both football tragedies that happened within a few years of each other; both involving LFC; both starting with ‘H’.

But a less charitable reading is that it’s simply the Tory mindset that Liverpool fans are hooligans, or it’s a simple ignorance of history in the frozen wastes up north.

The same sort of ignorance that Chris Grayling displayed when he suggested that Gary Neville was a great model to youngster in Toxteth or Boris Johnson deciding that Ken Bigley’s execution was the right time to have a pop at the city for its sentimentality.

It’s a long-lasting enmity that goes back at least as far as Thatcher, and probably much further. Despite recent Tory attempts to reach out to Merseyside, the region shows no signs of entertaining the Tory advances.

With gaffes like Hunt’s, it’s not surprising.

Mischievous, especially given Sven’s recent ‘come-and-get-me’ plea to Anfield, but I’m a bit none-the-wiser at to what it’s all about.

There’s an incomprehensible blog here, but I can’t make head nor tail of it.

If you look closely you can see one of those daft ‘Tell Me Ma’ Everton stickers. Rest assured someone will be telling her you totalled her pride and joy, son.

There are a few areas around the country that are fairly unimpressed by the England football team, but none so much as Liverpool in my experience.

There are a lot of obvious reasons for this: the large proportion of people descended from Irish or Scots stock; the individual Liverpool identity that resulted from the melting-pot of various cultures and creeds afforded by the docks; the sense of betrayal by Tory governments and national press; and the overstated sense of importance that many Reds display about LFC.

I think there’s also an impression that the England footy team is primarily a Southern- or even London-centric outfit.

So, this sort of thing is rooted in football, but it’s deeper than that. It’s about Liverpool pride. But it’s something that makes me feel a little uneasy too. Sure, it’s meant as light-hearted, but anything that defines people by a shared trait also excludes anyone not sharing that trait. It’s an explicit rejection

Consider the implications of a poster reading ‘We’re not English, We’re Catholic’; ‘We’re not English, We’re Muslim’; or ‘We’re not English, We’re Black’. To take it a step further, what about ‘We are not Europeans, We are English’? Can’t we all be both?

Comparable? Perhaps, perhaps not. Not meant seriously? Fair enough. But there’s more to it than meets the eye, and it never fails to make me feel uncomfortable.

Anyway, some of the answers are predictably hilarious. My favourite is:

Abbey Road cos it was on the cover of the Beatles album

There are plenty of more obvious one there, many of which have a personal resonance for me as I’ve lived in a couple of places that I’d deem fairly famous: Penny Lane, while a student, one of the best years of my life; Lark Lane, for the best part of a decade; and David Street in the Holy Land, that rather odd area in the Dingle (aren’t they all?) comprised of names from the Old Testament.

In the Dingle, of course, there are also Welsh streets, and several named after Dickens characters and novels, and some after Tennyson.

Back around Lark Lane there are the likes of Ivanhoe, Waverley, Mannering and Marmion, named after works by Sir Walter Scott.

Elsewhere there are Russian streets, giving us the wonderful Sputnik Drive. And elsewhere there are less outlandish byways like Seaman Road, which always makes me smirk.

There are thousands more with a story behind them, of course, mostly named after landowners, dockers, mayors or wealthy business types.

Some seem to have been named to be deliberately unpronounceable: Ranelagh, Eberle, Phythian.

Others have a story to tell: Commutation Row, Coal Street, Copperas Hill, Hackins Hey, Huskisson Street, Oil Street, Pilgrim Street, Rock Street

Liverpool has a story to tell through the names of its streets: of merchants and soldiers and slavers and blackguards.

It’s a story I’m increasingly drawn to; a rich and fertile place for an enquiring mind.

Someone recently told me that to understand the future, you had to understand the past. How did Liverpool get where it is today? What forces and trends and people formed the city we now live in? What’s gone on on the streets, above and below?

It’s a story for a different site, albeit one I also have a hand in. Seven Streets tells the story of the first seven streets in Liverpool, and what sprung from them over the next 800 years.

Those roads are still the centre of much that goes on in Liverpool, stretching from the business district across Liverpool One to the Ropewalks, arguably the city’s entertainment hub.

And from them sprung everything that is Liverpool today. Don’t worry, it’s not a website on topography. Well, not just topography. It’s about people, places and things.

And it’s not just me, there are a whole host of creatives with a hand in it, donating their content to a site without a financial imperative, so they’re free to celebrate the really interesting, weird, glorious stuff that happens in Liverpool.

The Culture Blog will tick over, mainly the stuff that’s not good enough to go on Seven Streets, so don’t delete that half-forgotten RSS feed yet.

Just redirect your nodes, and tell your friends. They’ll think it’s boss.

• Seven Streets

That’s not a lesson I’ve really taken to heart over the years, and I currently have several pieces of foaming, spleen-venting real estate around the web. So much for that.

However, in the case of reviewing One Night In Istanbul, it makes things very difficult indeed. I could speak about the singular lack of virtually anything that was funny about it; the sheer ineptitude of it as a piece of theatre and the predictable, numbing lack of ambition to it all.

The fact that Darren Farley, a very amusing impressionist, does virtually no impressions; the awful music; the checklist of references; the wasting of a talented cast; the chip-on-shoulder mentality revealed by the writing in the programme.

However, I’m going to leave it there. I could dissect One Night In Istanbul and prevaricate at length about the social, cultural and political implications of the rise of such ‘scouseploitation’ in Liverpool. But I don’t think there’s much point.

‘It is what it is,’ is probably the kindest thing I can say about Nicky Allt’s latest romp, although there’s no small feat in rounding up a cast and crew largely devoid of experience, staging a multi-run production and selling a reputed 25,000 tickets.

I’m also aware of the kind of shitstorm that such opinions attract, having read Marc Waddington’s piece in the the Echo.

I expect that someone will be along shortly to suggest that I couldn’t possibly find it funny as I’m not from Liverpool, or that I should lighten up a bit, or I should take my Dad’s advice.

All of which is something of a red herring, because the bottom line is One Night In Istanbul is an extremely basic piece of work. And that’s nothing to do with my postcode, my sense of humour, my footie shirt or my birth certificate.