I took some images of the daffs out in the Field of Hope at the time too, and while this photo is utterly unremarkable there’s a funny story behind it.

Thing is, the outcrop you can see in the photo is actually the base of a fountains shooting a jet of water a good 20 feet up in the air.

Walking around the park at the weekend I noticed that the fountain was now working, and the swans unsurprisingly had moved on.

What I didn’t expect was to see a drenched coot sat on a nest at the base of the fountain, with a dutiful male bringing bits of grass to shore up the nest, which is presumably in need of running repairs.

Is this an ultra-cunning plan to deter predators? Or are the bird-brained waterfowl just a pair of stupid coots? Tune in next week to find out what happens next…

I love food, but I didn’t love the launch for Liverpool Food and Drink Festival today, taking placed in a fenced-off enclosure in Sefton Park.

I suppose in many ways it was a victim of its own success, but the congestion in the enclosure and queues evident throughout the day weren’t a lot of fun.

In the end I frequented three of the stalls, selected simply because they were the quietest, because the thought of spending any more time than necessary jostling for position to buy a £5 burger may have driven to insanity.

Insanity, by the way, is probably the only thing that would convince me to buy some of the more expensive wares on show.

In the end I managed some takoyaki, some smoked haddock fishcakes and some bits of cake, but to sample any more food would have required a commitment to spend most of the day standing in queues.

Not standing in queues wasn’t much better, as the enclosure on the whole was too small. Kids hated it, and spent their time loudly broadcasting this fact around the site.

It was badly laid out, and badly planned. Maybe they weren’t expecting as many people, maybe the weather or Marco Pierre-White brought more people out of the woodwork. I’d guess that none of the businesses in attendance were complaining but, ironically, I was prepared to part with much more cash than I did.

In the end it was more of a celebration of the British fascination with queueing rather than gastronomy.

Anyway, with that little bitch off my chest I’ll recommend stuff relating to the festival over the following week. There’s a whole host of offers on at various eateries around the town this week.

I think it’s always best to get a personal recommendation with restaurants, as ownerships and talent seem to move around so quickly, so ask around regarding which ones are worth trying.

Still, for £15 a head or at half-price at some of the more exclusive places this week you can’t go far wrong. A great opportunity to try something new, like food festivals should be.

So, Liverpool Food and Drink Festival. I applaud the idea, a better-prepared launch next year wouldn’t go amiss though.

At the end of a weekend the park looks like a bomb has hit it, with discarded bags of rubbish lying around bins like scallies surrounding a newsagents.

Everyone seems to make a beeline for Sefton Park in the summer, and there are endless amounts of festivals, various events and bloody fun runs.

The park’s grassy expanses are perfect for lounging in the summer, but the growth in supermarket booze cruises and portable barbecues rather take their toll on public space in the summer, to my mind.

Sefton is probably at its most boring in the summer: the flora and fauna are at their least impressive and the place takes quite a battering.

Sefton Park CC’s lower ground is a constant attraction to teams of footballers, joy riders and ne’er-do-wells intent on causing trouble, to the chagrin of the groundsmen who fight running battles with ‘Toxtethians’.

But, after all, this is what public spaces are for. It makes it clear just how important green spaces are in the big city for the sanity and health of everyone who lives within one. It was one of things I missed most about living in town.

So, Sefton Park in summer isn’t the intriguing, beautiful, vaguely bleak place it is at other times of year. But it performs an admirable role in the city’s culture, health and life across race, religion and, er, running.

It’s loosely based around Sefton Park Cricket Club, where I play, and the characters therein but it will probably stray further afield from time to time.

The name, Quis est Porcus?, is a daft stab at the latin for ‘What is ham?’ – a notorious question that has reverberated around the club ever since the question was initially asked.

Quite a few of us are journalists at the club, so it seemed sensible to pool our efforts on a collaborative project.

I was hoping for something in the grand tradition of cricket writing: Jim Swanton, John Arlott, Mike Selvey, Simon Hughes, but I suspect the fogeyish whinging of Bob Willis and Ian Botham are probably closer to the truth.

Various people will write on various aspects of cricket and club life, and in the build up to Sefton’s 150-year anniversary it seems fitting to celebrate the club and the often-eccentric stories that emerge from it.

I should point out that the blog has nothing to do with Sefton Park Cricket Club, it’s just where I happen to play most of my cricket and spend most of my time in the summer.

And winter.

Sefton Park is at its most impressive at spring, when it comes into bloom and its thriving wildlife is most evident.

While much of the park still resembles a bomb site, the area near the Field of Hope is thriving, with the daffs coating the ground and the abundance of birdlife heralding the end of winter.

There are dozens of Grey squirrels around at the moment, which I’m ambivalent about as they’ve been driving out native Reds for years.

Still, they’re amusing to watch and can generally be conned quite close with the promise of nuts, even if you don’t have any.

There seemed to be hundreds of birds, not least dozens of magpies – too many to count. Alongside the usual pigeons, wood pigeons and mallards it was nice to see plenty of moorhens, blue tits, coal tits, chaffinches, and blackbirds too.

Over by the Glen of Fairies – which it seems to be called of a sudden – was first a particularly voluble song thrush and a particularly friendly robin.

A male magpie was attempting to court a female with a dance in a scene no doubt replayed across Concert Square this Bank Holiday weekend.

Sefton Park in spring, brilliant.

• There’s a photoset on Flickr here: Sefton Park in Spring

It’s the time of the year when commercial rents are due and bets are being taken on which high-street names are likely to go to the big white-washed window in the sky.

For some reason that escapes me, commercial landlords collect payments at quarterly intervals, meaning colossal outgoing for tenants every three months.

Pair that to poor trading conditions, and the fact that the post-Christmas lull is a traditionally-slow one, and you’re going to get casualties.

Staff at poor old Woolworths must have known the writing was on the wall when they didn’t get a move to swanky new Liverpool One, although its a sign of how poor Woolworths’ branding and image became that the very idea of a Woolies store in the privately-owned retail Mecca seems bizarre.

I’ve long suspected WH Smiths of being at death’s door, and Waterstones hasn’t been looking to sure-footed of late. A couple of shops in Liverpool One seem to have closed already – ostensibly temporarily – but there are a few trading while in administration. I’d guess the high-end big-ticket shops are likely to bear the brunt first.

Exactly what this would do for the image of the city’s newest tourist trap is unclear, but I’m sure I’ve noticed a few more boarded-up shops around there of late, and if that Liverpool Red Alert report is to be believed we’ll all be trying to eat bit of Liverpool One in six months’ time, so severe will the recession in Liverpool be.

We do know that many shops have had their rents waived, supposedly for up to two years and the good Duke of Westminster is reckoned to be reaching into his pockets to deck out shop units, something the tenant would normally pay for. So the exodus may not happen, at least not yet.

I’m hugely ambivalent about Liverpool One. I understand the thinking behind it – the job and money creation speaks for itself – and there wasn’t much that will be missed on the site, but I rather suspect that retail activity will be sucked from other areas of the city centre in time.

Liverpool One’s private police force and glass-and-concrete architecture trouble me somewhat too. There’s something decidedly Ballardian about both, and while I can see the attraction in some of the architecture, the security people roaming the by-ways don’t attract any horrified fascination, they just get my back up.

I just don’t really get Liverpool One, it just looks like a bloody big shopping centre to me, though the park bit is quite cool.

But I don’t hope for shop closures. Much as I’m ambivalent about it, it’s here now and a disaster for Liverpool One would mean a disaster for Liverpool.

• N.B There are loads of fantastic images of Liverpool One on Flickr. Proof, I suppose, of the quality of some of the building and architecture, although most of them seem to paint it as some sort of dystopian nightmare. Click here to see more.

The Apple image is by afanc and the car-park image by amchu. Both are licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

If you judged today by media reports you’d think of the calamitous effects on the country’s infrastructure, a floating sign reading £1.2bn while Huw Edwards looks stern and a bunch of soundbites from a group of dead-eyed Noel’s HQ-watching berks declaring the UK to be ‘a third-world country’.

What I saw was loads of being being extremely happy and having a laugh. Nothing brings people together like a good snowfall, as evinced by the billions of photos of people having fun in the snow sent in to the BBC.

No doubt some soulless minion from the CBI will be trotted out to tell us how awful this is, and the hand-wringing about why we allow snow to fall on our great country and prevent some people getting to work will commence.

It’s a bit of a depressing sign of how insanely busy everyone generally is in the country that the prospect of people enjoying themselves fills everyone with such horror.

Anyway, I went to Sefton Park tonight quite late on – photoset on Flickr here – and made snowmen and threw snowballs, like you should. There were dogs having the time of their lives, kids laughing with utter glee, and adults throwing themselves around with the sort of abandon usually reserved for a Slater Street binge.

We can all get back to being miserable and stressed out tomorrow. For one day the country kicked back and enjoyed itself.

At this time of year it’s particularly picturesque, with the trees a mixture of deep copper and brilliant red. It’s also nice to tick off the Sefton Park stereotypes: the common-or-garden nutter; the bored children with harassed parents; and my personal favourite – the tracksuited scal braying fruitlessly at an overstimulated dog.

There was a particularly good example this weekend who was actually shouting specific orders at a pair of young labradors. The best one was “Don’t go on the grass! Off the grass! Stop going on the grass!” The dogs ran on regardless.

Also of note at the moment is the return of the Eros statue, missing for over 15 years. It’s been spruced up along with the statue on which it sits and looked great in the fading light.

Opposite is the park cafe – as shabby a hut as you’re likely to see. Being inside, though, brings an oddly nostalgic thrill – it’s like walking into the park cafe’s of the early 80s, all formica, bashed wood and faded posters.

It’ll all be torn up within the year to make way for a swanky new restaurant and there’ll be another by the boating lake now – currently looking extremely sorry for itself, drained and full of junk. Surrounded by idiotic fencing that doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason, it looks more like an internment camp at the moment.

Still, there’s plenty to be enjoyed in Sefton Park all year round – there are hidden parts that make you feel right in the middle of the countryside. Although I’m ambivalent about the presence of grey squirrels, there’s plenty of other wildlife to be seen too – even if that means rats most of the time.

Simple pleasures, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Followed up with coffee and cake in one of Lark Lane’s eateries and then a roast dinner, it’s perfect for a frosty Sunday afternoon.

There’s a Sefton Park photoset on Flickr If you can’t be bothered with an actual walk, why not have a look?