Leccións de Scouse (nivel avanzado)

Unha das mellores descricións da cidade, faina Paul Du Noyer no seu libro Liverpool, Wondrous Place: “The most romantic way to enter Liverpool is from the sea, but the next best is by train. The experience starts with the sweeping view from Runcorn Bridge, which carries you across a wide, sleepy expanse of Mersey water and marks, to my mind, the unambiguous beginning of Northern England. The final loss of prettiness, announced by a brutalised industrial landscape, might be felt with a pang by some incomers, but my own pulse quickens. Soon the track is lined with overspill estates, which are in turn succeeded by the south Liverpool suburbia of Lennon and McCartney’s childhoods. On the brink of the city is the station called Edge Hill: hence the wonderfully apt expression ‘getting off at Edge Hill’: Liverpool was always lustful, but it used to be Catholic too, and the only birth control was coitus interruptus ...” Esta estación da que fala está a 5 minutos da miña casa, que á súa vez, está situada nunha das rúas do L8, id est, Toxteth: “When pop became rock and rock went weird, around 1966, the Liverpool groups were left behind. […] Liverpool lost its supremacy in pop music, but suddenly became famous for pop art. The impetus this time came not from ordinary Scousers, but from a bohemian district up the hill from the town centre. Beginning at Harilman Street, the quarter encompassed two Philharmonics (the pub and the concert. hall), the Art College and University, fanning out through wide, handsome streets of Georgian houses around the Anglican Cathedral. While locals always referred to the area by its postal name of Liverpool 8, one day it would be globally known by its Domesday Book title: Toxteth. […] Sloping down to the South Docks, Toxteth was the most exotic vestige of Liverpool’s history. It contained the oldest Chinatown in Europe. There were shops and drinking clubs to cater for every race on earth. There was a sexy, disreputable atmosphere you did not encounter in ordinary Liverpool.” Nel, fai un repaso da historia da cidade a través dos grupos que nela naceron dende os cincuenta ata a actualidade, parándose evidentemente nos Escarabellos e no Merseybeat en xeral. A traxectoria e os datos son devastadores. De Beat city (cidade do ritmo) : “By night they flood out into the raw mistral that rips in from Liverpool Bay; over two hundred semi-professional trios and quartets on Merseyside, trailing their electric guitars, drums, voices and amplifiers into cars and vans. From New Brighton Tower to Garston Baths the ‘beat’ (beat for rhythm, not beatnik) groups thump, shout, kick and tremble in pubs, clubs and church halls ... Derek Jewell in the Sunday Times, September 1963” a Beaten city (cidade derrotada) :

" In your Liverpool slums
You look in the dustbin for something to eat
You find a dead rat and think it’s a treat
In your Liverpool slums.

Football terrace song, 1986

Slavery and famine are the mother and father of Liverpool. No wonder the child grew up so troubled. All the same, it’s a melancholy thing to see your home town in ruins. It happens after wars; it happened to Liverpool and other British towns after the Blitz But here it happened again in peacetime m the 1980s. You’d walk along streets of empty shells of homes, bordered by wasteland. Over there were busted relics of commerce and manufacture. In the mind's eye you'd recollect them in the bustle of their prime, maybe not pretty and not necessarily prosperous but alive and inhabited and purposeful.”

pd1. Descúlpenme os non aglófonos.
pd2. The rest, improve your English!