A day out in Merseyside, coloured by a nearby tragedy

Monday was a typical summer’s day, which made it unusual for this summer.

I wasn’t going to miss the chance. I threw my camera in my bag, slapped on some sun cream, and jumped on a train with a Saveaway ticket, which gives unlimited travel across the whole of Merseyside. With it, you can almost reach the Ribble Estuary in the north, and rather strangely, Chester, well outside the Merseyside region to the south.

For me, it’s 20-minute Trans-Pennine Express into Liverpool and then a short walk across town to Central Station where I jumped on a train to Crosby and Blundellsands, a twenty-minute ride north of Liverpool. It’s home to Anthony Gormley’s “Another Place”; an art installation involving a hundred cast-iron life-size statues of the artist dotted covering a one kilometre stretch of beach. The work is only accessible at low tide, so you must plan your visit accordingly. The conjunction of sunshine and low tide made it the first stop on what I hoped would be a busy day.

Crosby itself is one of those places dotted across the North West but usually not so accessible to us common folk. Every house is a mansion, often sitting behind big gates like those in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Get too close and an old guy in a Rolls Royce will pull up with a note telling you to mind your own business. 

But the beach is a close ten-minute walk, one straight road from the station before you hit the dunes, which I crested and then faced the expanse of the Mersey estuary before me. The Irish Sea sits to the right and panning to the left, you see the distant hills of Wales, then the headland of the Wirral Peninsula, and then the huge red cranes in the container terminal at the Port of Liverpool. Yet none of that catches the eye as much as the horizon spinning with turbines of the huge offshore wind farms. Some find them ugly, but I find them singularly wonderful.

I walk out to the statues which are not wearing well. They’ve been in and out of the water twice daily since they were installed in 2005. In less than 25 years, they’ve already begun to degrade, amassing a combination of the usual rust, crustaceans, sea lichen, barnacles, and assorted arthropodic bumps, boils, and blisters. Some show signs of their ironwork flaking and falling away. 

To say they’re there “permanent” makes us reassess what permanence means. Even without student loan debts, fears about house-ownership, and long-term concerns about the environment, these twenty-year-olds are not ageing as well as most twenty-year-olds. By the looks of things, they’ll be lucky to have a normal human lifespan, which, I guess, makes them symbolically meaningful as art. Even given my scepticism about the value of so much public art in the UK, Gormley’s “Another Place” is sight worth seeing.

Like Formby and Southport to the north, Crosby has a beach that feels endless and at times it feels like there’s no water’s edge. Visitors are told not to stray more than 50m from the promenade, which is hard to judge given the promenade is mostly under the ever-drifting sand. But it’s also a beach where you’d be crazy to walk too far. Well before you get to the water, the sand becomes mud and, at times, deep mud.

I walk to the edge of the mudflat. The high-speed catamaran, HSC Manannan, speeds past. It’s an impressive sight. She used to be part of the US Navy but is now used to ferry travellers between Liverpool and the Isle of Man. She leaves a huge wake as she moves out to sea.

I, meanwhile, photograph the statues but avoid the patches of light brown staining I’d seen everywhere the tide had receded. I don’t live by the sea, so I don’t know algae from Algeria. You read so much about our rivers and waters that everything there felt sinister. A scrap of paper poking out of the sand was the end of some long piece of loo roll, still unspooling from some distant bathroom. There is surprisingly little plastic debris, unlike other beaches I’ve visited. Some teenagers caked in mud run past me. Their eyes and smiles break white like shells embedded into their crusted bodies. 

My own fears are getting in my way of enjoying any of this. I now regret picking up a shell. There’s a sludge nearly everywhere that’s different to the normal mud. It’s a shade of brown distinctly lighter. In my imagination, there’s raw sewage everywhere. Even the jellyfish looked like they’d taken on the stain. My memory of my childhood jellyfish is of translucent creatures; sloppy shapes with a tint of something else. Every few years there’d be a scare story about the sudden number of Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish washing up on our shores. 

Now, in my adulthood, the jellyfish were creatures of effluent and spillage. 

Only much later do I learn that what I’m looking at are Lion Mane’s jellyfish and that staining that makes them look like Sauron’s eye is entirely normal. But back then, lost in my fears, I walk back up the beach to sit amid the dunes where I enjoy a drink. 

A small child runs past me, naked except for a large nappy. The child is barely able to run but has still managed to elude its mother who runs after it. I am minded to smile, but not after witnessing the way she handles the child. She grabs the child’s arm roughly and semi-carries/drags him back behind the dune. 

What I hear next chills the day.

“You’re nothing but a f****** brat,” she screams. “I f****** hate you, f****** ruining my life. Oh, you’re f****** wonderful with your Dad and your Aunt, but they don’t know you’re a f****** brat. Well, f*** off. Go and do whatever you want because I don’t  f****** care…”

It goes on and I don’t know what to say or do. Instead, I watch a bee on a nearby thistle which I later discover is Sea Holly. There are lots of bees, which has to be good, though I’m also aware of the stories that all the bees are dying. Just not here and now. I pack up my things and walk away from the ongoing domestic tragedy. I might as well take this chance to photograph the bees before they’re gone.

I walk the dunes, chasing some red and black flying insect that’s strikingly vivid and beautiful. Never did catch up to it. Never took a good photograph it. No idea what it was.

I head back to the station. This stop had only meant to be for an hour or so. I was planning on taking the midday train into Southport.

It’s meant to be a 15-minute service but people on the platform are already visibly annoyed when I get there. One guy tells me it’s unusual for it to be so late. He’s muttering oaths under his breath. 

I mention this delay on Twitter/X and a friend replies to tell me to avoid Southport. The police had just issued a statement about a “major incident”. It sounds unlikely, I remember thinking. I thought it more than once. Southport doesn’t get major incidents. It gets families who can’t travel to Blackpool. I think about the family of children I’d sat with earlier when I’d got off at Crosby, when I’d been half-minded to just carry on into town. 

So, I don’t believe the story of this “major incident”. I sit waiting for the Southport train until the announcer tells us that our train is delayed because a passenger has been taken ill. I see a Liverpool train approaching so I hop over to the other platform. 

I emerge from the underground at Liverpool’s Central Station and my internet bounces back into life. That’s when I read about the multiple stabbings and the news that children had been killed, with many more injured.

A reply to my earlier tweet about the Southport train hits me. 

“Read the news,” it said. “Your inconvenience won’t seem such a big issue then.”

This is the nature of Twitter. A stranger had been searching for news about Southport, read my innocent reference to a train delay, and used their bit of knowledge to bludgeon me with sanctimony. I was annoyed that anybody would think me so crass or cruel to think my train delay was meaningful in a situation where children had lost their lives or lay critically ill in hospital. 

I tweeted a reply I would regret but, at the same time, not regret. I try to be kind and polite with people. Sometimes it’s impossible. 

By now, I’m aimless. I walk around the city feeling lost. I take photographs. A guy walks past me dressed in a t-shirt emblazoned with a single word. It is the C word. Another guy is wearing “Same Sh*t. Different Day”. Down at the Liver Building, I sit among the tourists, pretending I’m a tourist but I’m not in the mood for the heat, the noise, the overflowing bins, the rubbish thrown on the floor, or even the people only there for The Beatles. 

Suddenly I didn’t want the summer. 

I’m an atheist. Not at all spiritual. At the very most, I could be a deist, who only sees God in the interrelatedness of physical laws, operating on a universal scale. Meaning that the here and now seems little more than chemical bonds. Yet I believe in a few things which I can argue from a biological perspective make sense and have meaning, such as art and beauty, and the value of sanctuary. 

So, I find myself drifting up to the Anglican Cathedral, the biggest cathedral in the UK, the eighth biggest in the world. 

There was some installation work going on and visitors were being filtered through a side entrance. That’s how I found myself in the middle of a tour group of American tourists. They didn’t seem to notice that I was not American but walking among them gave me a sense of escape. I like American tourists. I like how much they’re always like American tourists. Maybe I could slip onto the cruise ship moored off the Liver Building…

I buy a coffee in the cafe. £3.90 for a small oat milk latte. Yes, of course, I drink oat milk latte. I’m told I’m an oat milk latte-drinking member of the liberal metropolitan elite, except I’m as far from the metropolitan elite as it’s possible to be whilst still qualifying for their Groupon code.

The cathedral is enormous and cool and dark. Strange that after hoping for sun all these weeks of summer, I now find myself sheltering there. And it’s hard not to stay. I notice my tour group has stopped speaking like Americans and I realise it’s not the same group. I’m now walking in a group of German tourists. My dreams of escaping to America are quickly readjusted to my escaping to Germany. Perhaps I’d enjoy it more.

I finally stop my wandering before Charles Lutyens’s “Outraged Christ”; a 15 feet-high carving depicting the crucifixion, crudely fashioned from wood and iron, which makes it look even more tortured. It looks entirely out of place in an Anglican cathedral, exhibiting more of that darkly gothic Catholic obsession with pain and suffering.

It made me miss the wind turbines.

Now, I’m not saying I went to the Cathedral out of any sense of running away from the horrors of the world but it’s easy to see how that’s done when times feel hard. Fear is a natural human tendency that narrows our outlooks, opportunities, and freedoms. There I was sheltering before that horrible statue because I’d allowed my naïve fears to get to me: about sewage which wasn’t sewage and some awful domestic situation which was beyond my power to influence. I’d also allowed some awful aside, thrown casually across social media, to colour my day, as if the day wasn’t already coloured by a tragedy unfolding just a short train journey away. 

Britain might be broken in many ways fundamental to who we are as a people, but the path to another place should not begin by turning our back on the sunlight. 

I should have stayed on the beach, enjoying the spectacle of the wind turbines harvesting clean energy, on a beach where the mud and naturally occurring algae are a huge improvement over the kind of detritus that used to wash up on our shores. I should have stayed to watch Gormley’s figures disappear back under the tide, understanding that these things wear us down but, hopefully, we emerge again in another few hours to once again enjoy the sun.

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