Vole Explosion

   The week between Christmas and New Year is a strange time. With a bit of forethought it can be a fun and productive period of eclectic activities, or it can be wasted in front of the TV eating festive junk food and drinking weird drinks that you wouldn’t allow into your house at any other time of year. With this in mind, I jumped at the chance when a friend of mine offered me the opportunity of a free lift and a change of scenery for a few days.

   This friend coaches a kids’ football team in which his young son plays and, along with some other dads, had organised a ‘dads and lads’ trip to Liverpool centred around footballing activities – culminating in a stadium tour of Anfield followed by a Premier League match. There was to be a group of twelve of us in all and, apart from three of us, everyone else supported either Liverpool FC or Leicester City. This match was chosen specifically because Liverpool were hosting Leicester for an evening fixture.

    Everyone arrived at different times from different parts of the country, as well as some flying in from Norway, and not everyone was doing every activity. We would all be coming and going, meeting and parting, staying at different hotels, and all having to be in the right place at the right time. Holding all this together was my friend, who did a sterling job of wrangling everyone and making sure we were all where we should have been at any given time – all accomplished with military precision. I had merely tagged along at the last minute, had neglected to bring a small child with me, and had only the vaguest interest in football. Think of me as a war correspondent, embedded in the thick of the action and reporting back from the front lines, but not really involved with the serious work.

   If you’ve read my Pennine Way Diary (and you really should!) you’ll see that random visits to Manchester are becoming a bit of a theme in my life. This trip was to be no different. Before arriving in Liverpool, some of us spent a few hours in Manchester, visiting the National Football Museum. This was surprisingly fascinating even for someone with my limited football knowledge, with an emphasis on the culture surrounding The Beautiful Game rather than just facts and figures aimed at the obsessive fan. By mid-afternoon we were on the train for the short hop to Liverpool.

   I’ve visited Liverpool a few times before but have never really seen the city properly. I can think of at least four visits off the top of my head, three of which were in the 90s. As a student at nearby Lancaster, a carload of us came down for a hastily arranged weekend of clubbing, with very little of the city experienced during daylight hours. We didn’t even visit any culturally important clubs such as Cream, which was at the height of its powers at the time.

   My second visit was to Aintree for the Grand National in 1998, and the third was a sight-seeing day  from Leeds in which I can vaguely remember visiting both cathedrals and going on the Mersey ferry. My only visit this century was for a cousin’s wedding (I have some family connections to the city). So, with only the slimmest of preconceptions to go on, I was unprepared for how strikingly beautiful a city it is. We couldn’t have planned our arrival more perfectly: the sun, which had been dazzling me through the window of our West-bound train, was now starting to set as we stepped out of Lime Street station. It bathed the breath-taking view in a warm, golden glow. This warmth was to be found again and again over the next two days in the welcome of the locals we were to meet.

   There is something about the topography of the land in front of Lime Street station, combined with the grand and distinctive buildings, that makes this one of the most immediately attractive introductions to any city anywhere. I’ve travelled fairly extensively, and many main city stations are located in neighbourhoods that can only be described as dodgy shitholes that have to be negotiated before you can enjoy the nicer parts of town. Liverpool is different. It slaps you in the face with its charm right from the start. “Welcome to our city” it seems to say, “Step inside, love. We’re going to make sure you have the best time ever.”

   But before we get carried away, let’s find our hotel. From the sublime to the Travelodge. It’s very close to the station but still seemed to take an age to find. While a topographically undulating landscape may make for a more appealing cityscape, it is way more difficult to navigate than a flat city grid. Still, we got there eventually. We had hardly checked in when I was dispatched back up to the station to meet another friend, whose house we had stayed at last night in Cheshire. I waited for him near the statue of Ken Dodd – over the next two days we found that Liverpool is blessed with an abundance of statues of local pop cultural icons that, while being recognisable, look ever so slightly unlike who they’re supposed to look like.

   Back at the hotel we settled in to a family room for four of us: three grown men plus my friend’s young son, to whom I can only apologise for the two nights of snoring, farting, and hairy-backed middle-aged men wandering in and out of the bathroom in their underpants to which he was subjected. I hope he won’t be too psychologically scarred by the experience.

   Some of our group were not staying at the Travelodge, but at the much more up-market Hope Street Hotel. The Leicester City squad were also staying there, so that was our destination for the evening. Jamie Vardy’s having a party, and while the grown-ups had a couple of beers in the hotel bar, the four younglings had worked themselves up into a frenzy of excitement at the prospect of meeting some actual footballers. From our table we could hear them all the way through from reception, where their increasing volume was starting to test the patience of the hotel staff. Like the responsible adults that we are, we continued drinking and hoped that nobody realised that they were with us.

   At 6pm the two team buses arrived and even the grown-ups poured out into the street to witness the awesome spectacle of tracksuited men getting off a bus. What a time to be alive! Ok, it’s easy to be cynical, but to see the joy and excitement on the kids’ faces when they came back into the bar and showed their autographs and selfies to their dads was genuinely moving. Most of the squad walked quickly into the hotel, but an honourable few took the time to sign stuff for the kids. Special mention to the aforementioned Jamie Vardy, who stopped and took selfies with all the young fans. I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that he probably doesn’t read my blog, but on the off chance that he does: you, Mr Vardy, are a class act, and you made their day.

   Not far from Hope Street we eventually found a pub that could fit us all in for dinner. The food was a bit grim but the staff were lovely, and extremely tolerant of the children. By this point, the kids were starting to flag. Their eyelids were becoming increasingly heavy, dark shadows were forming under their eyes, and their exhausted faces were starting to melt into the table tops. As a semi-Spaniard, I’m all in favour of having dinner at midnight and then dragging kids from bar to bar until at least 4am. However, this isn’t the Mediterranean, so these kids were taken off to sleep at a reasonable hour. A few of us grown-ups stayed out later and a couple of us even managed to get lost on the way back and had to be guided to the hotel by a couple of helpful locals.

   The following morning we had work to do. The children were taken for some kid-friendly sight-seeing, while three of us adults went on a treasure hunt. My friend’s wife runs a business organising events, including self-guided treasure hunts around Britain’s cities. This involves going to different areas of the city, looking for specific landmarks and using them to answer questions. Every few years the locations have to be checked to make sure the answers are still present and visible. This was to be our task for the morning. It turned out to be the most fun activity of the two days and a great way to see the city, revealing details that you might not notice from just wandering around aimlessly.

   We started at the Cavern Quarter, where a real challenge would be to find a local business that isn’t named after a Beatles song. They really push the Fab Four angle hard here, and quite rightly too! The actual Cavern wasn’t open yet, but we enjoyed the statue of Cilla Black just outside. With her vocal support for Margaret Thatcher, and Liverpool’s famously left-leaning politics, I wondered how long it would be before she was yeeted into the Mersey in an Edward Colston stylee.

   From here we headed to the iconic waterfront area and had a good look around. This city has some fantastic architecture, including the remains of a church bombed out during the Blitz – possibly in the same air raid that took down Stan Boardman’s chippy. We managed to check all the treasure hunt locations and most of the answers could still be found. For those that couldn’t we had to set new questions. If I could just be allowed one small criticism here, and there’s no polite way to say this, but what’s with all the dog poo? Seriously, Scousers, what are you feeding your pets?

   After lunch it was time for everyone except me to head to Anfield for the stadium tour. I decided to visit the Walker Art Gallery back near Lime Street station. Liverpool has a wealth of museums and galleries, and you would need at least two or three weeks if you wanted to visit all of them. The Walker Gallery is housed in a beautiful building and has a good collection, featuring a few paintings by Lowry, a couple of Turners, some Post-impressionists, plenty of Pre-Raphaelites, and much, much more.

   With the hotel nearby, I even managed to sneak off for a quick afternoon nap before meeting up with the whole group again for dinner in another pub. Almost everyone then went back off to Anfield for the 8pm kick-off. Only the three of us who had been treasure hunting remained behind, and we found a good pub where we could watch it on TV. Liverpool has a quite jaw-dropping number of pubs and places to eat. It must have one of the highest concentrations of any British city. Despite our best efforts, we only got to visit a small sample. Special mention to The Philharmonic Dining Rooms and Doctor Duncan’s, both of which have gorgeous interiors.

   In the end, Liverpool beat Leicester 2:1, but Leicester managed to score all three of the goals. It’s a funny old game.

Now, since we’re in arguably Britain’s most famously musical city, let’s end on a song…