Pouring My Art Out

As we walked back to the train station, my wife and Mollie stopped to do some souvenir shopping, and while I waited I met this little guy. He is a bulldog, and I think his name was Chumley. I love bulldogs. I like the way they start breathing hard when you scratch them just right.

Liverpool was a fun day trip. We saw the Beatles museum and we saw them doing that scene from an upcoming movie. And I just noticed that somebody scratched part of the ‘m’ off that sign up there… HA!

No, Liverpool is not full of the rare English humped zebra… we saw these signs all over London too. It has something to do with the way that the lines are painted on the street and how pedestrians should cross the street there, but even the English people we asked weren’t really sure what it was all about or how it worked.

That is the front of the Cunnard Line building. They were using the back of this building as a movie set pretending to be 1940’s New York… if this confuses you, I suggest you look at the last post I did in this series.

Liverpool is an interesting place.

It is a port city, a dock city, a maritime city, a working city. It is built around the river Mersey, and has been a center of trade for almost as long as there has been an England.

We were there on a gray, drizzly day that really suited the temperament of the city.

This area was so heavily bombed during World War Two that over two hundred ships were salvaged just in the river and the shallows of the estuary during the war… I read that on a plaque. That means that the Germans sank so many ships in this area… with bombs and mines and torpedoes… that 200 ships sank in waters shallow enough for them to be refloated and fixed. We can safely assume that many more ships were sunk in the deeper waters offshore or were too badly damaged to be used again. This is just one port in England. This gives you some idea of the scale of the war, and particularly the battle of the Atlantic, where England strove to import enough food and supplies to keep itself going.

There are a lot of museums and old historic ships in Liverpool, and if you like boats, it is worth a visit for that alone.

We are nearing the end of our day trip to Liverpool. It is almost time to get back on the train to cousin Dot’s house.

I hope you enjoyed yourself.

I will never forget the weird bit of movie history.. and real history… that we stumbled upon.

These are the kinds of memories that stick with you… because how often do you see a 1940’s New York police car rolling through the streets of Liverpool?