I’m not a fan of Paddy’s Day as I happen to live in Liverpool, a place that tends to be made up two kinds of people: people who are, or are descended from the Irish; and people who pretend to be Irish.
I’ve no quarrel with the former, but there’s a kind of lunatic herd mentality about the latter when it comes to St Patrick’s Day in Liverpool. It’s a time when everyone wears a stupid hat, protests that they have a great uncle McMurphy and grimace through the once-a-year pints of Guinness.
This pretending-to-be-Irish nonsense has reached its apotheosis this year in the shape of Shane Richie’s Make Me Irish.
There’s a bit of a puff piece on Korova in The Guardian today that hits the nail on the head about Korova in that it ignored the jingly-jangly stoned cosmic scouse thing that was all the rage in Liverpool a few years ago,
I urge you to go to a beer festival, and support your local brewer. You’ll find it hard to drink the mass-produced piss that turns up in most pubs ever again.
Red Dwarf is coming back! Is that good news or bad news? I’m not sure either way, and I say that as a man who owns Series 1-6 on DVD, once had an Ace Rimmer T-shirt that said ‘Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast,’ and can recite most early episodes from memory.
It was boozy, musical, cultural and fun and it seemed fitting.
Free Rock’N'Roll is pretty eclectic stuff, and there’s an eclectic audience to match. I always think of the scouse-pub drunken singalongs that any history of the city describes whenever I’m there, especially when Bentham’s anthemic choruses kick in.
The explosion of drinking establishments has turned the Lane into something of a circus, especially of a weekend
Next time you’re in your local, consider venturing beyond that gassy, tasteless pint of non-specific. Even if you don’t like it, you can be assured you’ve done your part for your struggling local brewer.