Here’s an image of scousedelic Liverpool band The Coral clearly relishing the idea of piling into a Ford Transit for a 87-date tour around the UK, back in 2006.

Amusingly, Ford labels the lads a ‘garage rock band’, which may come as some surprise to anyone who’s heard their music.

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

The smell of paint is a powerful sensation to me, and the understanding of the value of good craftmanship that that my Grandfather placed in a job well done is a lasting impression. These things, even in an incremental sense, made me feel like I understood the characters in Robert Tressell’s book a little more.

So, it’s important to me. As a socialist it’s also a hugely important tome. A challenging book, in terms of tone and heft, it’s nonetheless perhaps the best explanation of socialism framed as fiction ever written.

There’s an added poignancy that Tressell, a decorator, died penniless and tragically young in Liverpool in the second decade of the twentieth century. He would never know the success of his book, locked in a trunk in an attic for decades.

I went to see the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists at the Everyman feeling generally positive, but wary that the lengthy book would be tough to recreate on the stage.

In the final analysis, I feel my caution was well placed. This is, largely, a faithful recreation, but fails to do justice to the book.

Characters that are well-drawn in the book are often glossed over in the adaptation, particularly Easton, a generally well-meaning painter undone by circumstance, desperation and ignorance. His plight lends Tressell’s book another dimension among several other protagonists who are rather one-note.

Whereas Tressell’s antagonists are rather more Dickensian in their straight-forward villainy and selfishness, Easton gives the book a more ambiguous aspect. He’s a character from a DH Lawrence novel, rather than a Dickens novel. In the adaptation he is afforded little of the subtlety the book gives him.

The ‘Dickensian’ aspect of the baddies in the play – the town councillors, who also own all the town’s businesses and are thoroughly unpleasant chaps – is conveyed with masks so the actors can double up, but it’s a rather pantomime aspect to the proceedings.

The pacing sags in the second act too, with the action preceding the annual beano and the subsequent speeches serving to stop the momentum that builds up to this point.

However, the performances are generally excellent, particularly Nicholas Tennant as the uncomplicated Crass and Finbar Lynch as Owen, a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

As an adaptation, the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists doesn’t really convey the breadth and depth of the original novel. As a production, most things worked well.

The cast and the set are excellent, but all the good work is heavily, and bizarrely, undermined by two scenes that bookend the play, showing a modern-day couple viewing the house with an estate agent.

It’s shockingly misjudged, utterly pointless and very clumsy. It assumes that the message from Tressell’s book will not resonate with a modern-day audience unless it’s put on a plate – and it’s something of an insult to the novel and those watching.

It’s a shame, as the Everyman’s production has a lot to praise derived, as it is, from a text that must be phenomenally hard to transfer to the stage faithfully.

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 vaguely uncomfortably.