Did you hear about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to santa?

The christmas lights are all turned on and I for one feel better.

The absence of daylight in winter makes me crazy. I wake up in the morning and I have to turn the light on to get dressed. (Or ocassionally I fail to get up, because my subconscious is convinced that since the room is still dark, I'm not supposed to be awake yet.) Then I work a nine to five job, which means that when I leave work it is once again dark outside. I realise they have it worse in Norway, but still... I miss the sun.

I honestly need things like colourful lights and gingerbread lattes to get me through the winter. So do a lot of other people. There's a reason so many major religions have light-based festivals at this time of year and I'm glad I live in a fairly multicultural society, where I can coast through a good chunk of the year in a glow of Diwamukkmas lights.

So basically, if you are one of those people who likes to complain about how "they get out the christmas decorations earlier and earlier each year", I'd like to offer you a festive mug of shut the hell up. I need those lights; they're pretty and I hope they stay up till March. So there, Scrooge!

Anyway, all this is by way of drawing your attention to the rather odd Christmas lights on Bold Street. One of the displays consists of a pair of stylised stars and a couple of... I'm honestly not sure. Upside down cornucopias, maybe? Anyway, they really look like horns and their positioning on the display means that it reminds me of nothing so much as a baphomet.

When I saw the display last year, I took it as a subtle joke relating to 2004 being dubbed by the LCC as Year of Faiths, (faiths including Satanism, apparently,) but it's still there in 2005, so make of it what you will. It's moved further up Bold street this year, though. It used to be outside Starbucks, so I guess that for 2006 Starbucks is officially non-satanic. *phew*

Like I said before, I need their gingerbread lattes.

Fog in the regions. London cut off.

I don't know if you've read that Stephen King story where people get sucked into a cloud of fog and are eaten alive or the James Herbert novel where people are sucked into a cloud of fog and go insane. Anyway, that is exactly what it looks like outside my window right now.

I know there are ships outside, because I can hear them using their foghorns, but I can't see them. This is a direct contrast to every other day, where the ships still blast their horns, but out of 'river rage' rather than necessity. Seriously people, if you're sailing down the Mersey in a ship the size of six double decker buses on a clear day, you do not need the foghorn to alert people to your presence.

Speaking of people desperate to be noticed, I went into Manchester on Friday to attend a talk on whether the London theatre scene was eclipsing theatre in 'the regions'. I hate that term soooooo much. For those of you unfamiliar with it, 'the regions' = 'the entire rest of the country'. Sort of like if the USA were routinely divided into '"the regions" and Washington D.C.' It makes me mental.

The discussion was chaired by a London theatre critic. Between the panel and the audience there was a fair spread of people from across the North West. There were representatives from Liverpool and Manchester theatres, playwrights from Cumbria and I think I spotted one of my old drama lecturers from Chester. (Which meant that I spent the first five minutes doing that awkward neck-craning thing, where you think you know somebody and you'd like to say hello, but you want to make eye-contact first in case it turns out to be a total stranger instead.)

The debate veered in all the expected directions with just as much 'Well yes, there is a London bias, but we're soldiering on and actually producing some very valuable work up here' as you'd expect. But two points that came out of the discussion bear repeating here...

1.) If the train service wasn't so craptastic, reviewing plays in Liverpool wouldn't require an overnight stay and theatre critics would be more likely to come up from London and review stuff.

I can only agree wholeheartedly. What the hell sort of city doesn't have a mainline station open into the night? After a certain point in the evening, Liverpool is about as easy to leave as the Hotel California. It's really annoying trying to accommodate the stupid train schedule when I go away for the weekend, it's annoying that I can't use the station cashpoints at night and I know for a fact that the lack of night trains annoys the people living in other parts of Merseyside who come into Liverpool for nights out. These people have some serious spending power; wouldn't it be nice if their money were going into Liverpool’s economy instead of the pockets of minicab drivers on the Wirral?

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the efforts they’ve made to renovate Lime Street Station, (except for those neon inflating flowers, which were both tasteless and terrifying) but I’d rather they spent the money on keeping the damn place open at night. In fact as cranky, pedestrian-in-residence, I’d probably divert funding from The Big Dig, because that is another thing that makes me mental. (More on that another time.)

2.) Liverpool has no fringe-theatre scene and what's up with that?

I mean, I guess we have the Unity theatre for small-scale stuff, but even that isn't really what I'm talking about. I had a lot of fun in Birmingham following the fortunes of a theatre company called Maverick, who specialised in putting on plays in pubs, thereby automatically solving one of the most annoying things about traditional theatre venues - the crush at the bar during the interval. Liverpool doesn’t have anything like enough theatre going on in small, non-traditional venues and I think that’s a damn shame.

So your homework for this week is to go form a company specialising in pub-theatre. Speaking for myself I'm just going to sit here looking out at the fog over the river and wondering where Birkenhead went.

Explodey Boom!

Is it just me or are the building works around the city spiralling out of control? I have no idea where anything is anymore. (Except traffic cones, I can always find those. More's the pity.) So it was somewhat predictable that having left the firework display at the Albert Dock last year, I returned this year to find that it was no longer there and was actually taking further down the river at Pier Head. I'd actually been kind of dreading the evening. The weather having been supremely miserable all day, I figured I'd show up, watch a few rounds of fireworks and then die of hypothermia, but fortunately the temperature raised itself to something a little more bearable before the evening got properly underway.

Now, as anybody who has attended one of these shows before knows there are three main activities.

1.) Milling around waiting for the boats to get into position.
2.)Watching the boats intently in case one of them catches fire.
3.)Trying not to get burned by all the small children running around with lit sparklers.

Regarding number two - just so you don't think I'm a terrible person - it's not that I want the boat to catch fire, I just live in terror that the one year I decide to skip the display will be the year a rogue firework plummets back to earth and makes the boat explode. Then the rest of my days I will constantly be having the "Hey were you there the day the boat exploded?" "No." conversation with people.

I was underwhelmed by the announcer. If it was a pre-recorded message, then they should have done a couple of takes until they had one where the guy wasn't stammering his way through it and if it was being done live then they should have got a guy who could tell the time. Maybe he was trying to convince us that the thing wasn't actually starting 45 minutes late, but the clocks on Saint Nicks and The Liver Building were illuminated right behind us, so I don't know who he thought he was fooling.

Anyway, the Liverpool Culture Company has dedicated 2005 the 'Year of the Sea', so all the songs had a nautical theme. They played Morcheeba's 'By the Sea', that one from the Guinnes advert with the surfer and a few sea shanties. All of this led to the newest activity:

4.) Guessing how long it will be before they play Yellow Submarine.

I love my adopted city. I love it very much, but it can be a tad predictible.
Anyway, the fireworks themselves were rad. Highlights were the little fizzly ones that sort of putt-putt-putted into the air, vanished for a second and then exploded into giant concentric circles. These would have particularly rocked set to the 'Tick, tick, tick, tick, BOOM!' part of 'Boom, Shake the Room', but I suppose that wouldn't have really fitted with the nautical theme.

Juvenile creature that I am, I was also very amused by the little white tadpole shaped fireworks that wiggled off in all directions, before vanishing into blue circles. From now on I think all sex education lessons should be taught using fireworks.

I was a little disappointed by the ending though. Since it was the 400th anniversary and they’d already bought fireworks shaped like hearts and things, I was kind of assuming that there’d be a big finale with “Liverpool” written in the sky or something. (Or maybe just “08” since we know how the LCC likes to slap that logo on anything that stays still long enough.) In the end though, there was no big finale and the whole display kind of just fizzled out.

A lot like this post, really.