This bureaucratic ban on acknowledging my birth persists to this day. A hypersupercyber, gleamygloomyTesco now sits where Sefton General once stood. The management of this gross grocers have resisted all my entreaties to have a commemorative blue plaque erected in their tinned goods aisle, just above the cans of tuna – the exact spot, according to my researched calculations, where first I drew breath (just after the first of life’s many arse-slappings). My red-tape restricted debut took place in the year of our laudanum some time ago. (A long some time ago.) I have absolutely no recall of the actual event and only my parents’ word that I was not, in fact, the foundling love child of Clark Gable and Aphrodite, discovered under a lotus blossom in Sefton Park - just between the café toilets and the Peter Pan statue.)

 Childhood was a bit of a drag, as I don’t like kids much and had to spend a lot of time in their company. Things improved in young adulthood – the juices bubbling out of control in the compulsive, youngmale quest for the Word and the Flesh, the Madonna and the Whore, the Muse and the Moist, the Soul and the Sex, salvation and fornication, in the vain hope of a buy-one-get-one-free offer. And all that delirious delusion unfolded not on Circe’s isle, or Elysian Fields, or Golgotha, but in Ye Cracke, The Lisbon, The Pig and Whistle, Calderstones Park and Anfield. My siren song – I Heard It On The Grapevine, my angel choir – You’ll Never Walk Alone. An acnied phrase, but (hippy) happy days. Supplanted with all-too-soon inevitability by (Beckett) Happy Days – and up to my neck in it all.

 Most of us recall with fond sentimentality the meadows of our youth. (Actually, the nearest meadows to 71 Muliner Street, just off Smithy Road, near Piggamuck Square (I jest not!) – nearly added with a pub on the corner, but that applied to every street in Liverpool 7 in those days – were the Meadows of neighbouring Scholar Street, a family of gypsies who scared the shit out of me.) This maudlin attachment tends to be more vociferously – and annoyingly – expressed by people from Liverpool (especially those who no longer live in Liverpool). Now, whether stood naked at three in the morning, 20 miles from the Equator, covered in sweat and mosquitoes, desperately trying with an indoor aerial to coax some reception from Malaysian TV of the Liverpool - Real Madrid European Cup Final, or launching with unbidden inebriation into a Beatles’ melody in a bar in Sri Lanka, I am as guilty of this as any of my compatriots and co-exiles. Yet for me, this uncut umbilicus is essentially abstract and psychological. It’s more the ‘idea’ of my youth than the actuality; a resonant echo of people, places, events that may – or may not – have been as I now imagine them in Memory’s hall of magic mirrors. Time passages – lost but not lamented, loved but only loaned. Sand through the hand. Webster Road Primary, the Inny, the Kop, the Bombie, Sevvy Park, Lodge Lane Baths. A three-mile radius that was my entire universe and where an hour was infinity. And now, known only as an essence, distilled through a rose-tinted filter. 

  So now, I am a mere tourist in my past – concerned only with the notable landmarks. So many million unremembered moments. And something of a tourist everywhere else, ever since. A life of rootless wandering (and bootless pondering). For the ties that bind are also chains. Velvet-lined, but chains nonetheless. So – on the road taken – I have always been the eternal outsider, moving through it all, for the most part, with a bemused amusement. Passing time, even though it would have passed anyway. 

  As with all lives, mine has been a bit ‘cracked’. That’s supposed to be how the light gets in – but this is not always the case. My Irish-Scots stock has produced – in me – a rather curious pan of scouse. The problem with being curious is that you often end up like that blind man looking for a black hat in a dark room – which isn’t there. Still – it’s the taking apart that counts, not the whining. And so it comes to pass that, my wandering dues paid in the south and middle of England, across Europe, out to the Far East – sometimes pretending to teach, always preferring to write – I settle temporarily, bags still packed at my feet, at my latest transit stop – Nerja, Spain. 

  For now, it suits me well. And from here, I send my little sparrowbooks out into the world. And cultiver mon jardin……

 Until greener grass whispers its siren-song on the breeze……