If you had seen Liverpool 10 to 20 years ago you would
not even recognise the place now.
It was on it's knees, written off, down-trodden. There has always been art and culture bubbling away, just hidden away.
I had a cracking conversation with an 81 year old scouser last Friday, he had moved to Buxton 30 years ago and never been back. then that day we met he got in the car and came back home. I told him about what was being built and what had been going on and we had a good chat. I don't know his name but he was a really lovely man.
Since then I have met two more people doing the same and I had good chats with them, them filling me in on some past and me filling them in on some future.
Several years spent with half our city cordoned off behind steel fences. Every day on my way to work I watch the little ants in luminous jackets building us a canal, a new museum, a new pier head. We now have new spaces to sit, chat, eat, converse with strangers and we have the Mersey back again now the fences are down.
We had the launch on Thursday of the UK's first comprehensive exhibition of Klimt, we have a new shopping centre, a new canal, new hotels, a new cruise terminal, people pouring in from Ireland for the weekend. Every Friday walking home I have to navigate the Isle of Man Steam Packet arrivees with their suitcases as they ask directions to here there and everywhere. But it's good to see.
And Mr McCartney is here tonight, and Stella launched her new collection at LIPA today. I find it dead exciting when I think back to decades ago when my Mum used to post out the Beatles fan mail from Heswall Post Office for Paul's Dad.
I left Liverpool in 1999 as the job prospects were fairly dire. I wanted to come home in 2004 when things were still a bit iffy so I did, more than anything I wanted to be back by the sea.
There is a sort of buzz in the air now, a sense that the city is changing, new jobs, new places, new faces. a sort of Phoenix from the Flames. Long may it continue...
