Inner Shitty Limits

Ok, so you know that I am back Britside so I should lay out the situation as it stands, put you in the picture.

I am in Liverpool, England and Rose is still in Denton, Texas winding up the PhD and closing out her job, plus there is the dog to take care of - a lush German Shepherd as it goes. My task is to get a publisher for my book. I have it in the hands of a UK agent right now and I am looking for a US agent of suitable repute, vision and balls.

Meantime I am scoping out accomodation (rental for now) for Rose and me to move into sometime after Easter this year, plus sorting out a new car and clothing the house-in-prospect, all the practical stuff. To this end I spent today trawling around a freezing, misty Liverpool, all pre-colonial big-brick buildings, post-industrial terraces and brown, brooding churches. I kind of forgot what a spiritual city Liverpool is. It has so many churches (to paraphrase the first gig bar scene in Blues Brothers, 'We have both kinds, Catholic and Protestant'), church societies, Salvation Army outlets. The city's communities are punctuated by their churches, demarcated by them. Like with all cleavages of western religion they bring people together as they drive them apart from others. Chee-zus there are left-footer and right-footer pubs in Liverpool. Pubs! A truncation of 'public house'. Ker-riste.

I went to see these great-looking (on the website on which I had found them) townhouses. To say that the area they had been unthinkingly plonked in was a shithole is really disrespectful to all the shitholes of the world. Seriously, this really was the Inner Shitty, all needle-strewn wasteland, derelict rows of stores held together only by their memories and rat shit, metal grill-covered windows on neighbouring houses, and perhaps most appallingly of all palm trees and hollow plaster gargoyles in front gardens. The houses are off the shortening short list.

Such is the clamorous glamour of the life quotidian for the soon-to-be literary hero. As my most recently completed self-help book insists I chant, 'Shit Happens'.

Next?