Mr Brocklebank's World Wide Web Log

BRAVO, planners: Not only did Liverpool city planners refuse a wind-turbine proposal in the Back Canning Street conservation area, but the Planning Inspectorate backed their decision. Rodney Street Association head honcho Dr Emlyn Williams thundered: "Maybe at last officialdom is recognising the importance of our heritage by refusing this monstrous proposal."

HONESTY compels Mr Brocklebank to add that a leading journalist of this parish was embarrassed to hear his own mobile field telephone trilling during Friday's executive board meeting at Liverpool City Council's Millennium House (aka "the Fun Palace"), thereby indebting him to the Lord Mayor's Fund.

HOW intriguing that the On the Waterfront - Culture, Heritage and Regeneration of Port Cities international conference, organised by English Heritage, in November at Liverpool BT Convention Centre, has an official brochure featuring a large cover colour photograph of the Mersey Bar lightvessel Planet, whose future here - thanks to Liverpool's "caring" waterfront authorities - is very bleak.

In the interests of accuracy, should not the organisers put stickers over the photograph saying "Going to Manchester", so delegates fully understand how this port city treats our maritime heritage?

IT APPEARS that, to assist the surge of golf-loving passengers through Hillside, Merseyrail introduced a revised timetable with trains every 20 minutes instead of 15 minutes. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Litherland says.

MR BROCKLEBANK is well relieved to see a glamorous toilet installed at Hillside railway station platform.

Could this be anything to do with the presence of the Open at Royal Birkdale? Once the big event has gone, will this lovely convenience, befitting of its international role, be removed with passengers - sorry,
customers - once more hanging on or throwing caution and whatever else to the winds and reverting to the traditional "watering the vegetation"?

HOW odd to see an electronic motorway sign proclaiming "Tall ships use M53". In spite of Mr Brocklebank's brougham wheeling up and down said thoroughfare, he saw no such representative vessels in transit. Could it have been an error for "All skips use M53"?

MR BROCKLEBANK is bemused by the rising estimates provided by the media over the numbers of people attending the Tall Ships' Races event in Liverpool last weekend. With the body count bidding starting at 50,000, at the time of print it had risen to 300,000.

Surely the simplest way to sort this out is to get everyone who attended to return and stand in an orderly queue so they can be counted properly? (Late news: a missive delivered in a cleft-stick by a postal runner estimates 450,000 - equivalent to Liverpool's population.)

MR BROCKLEBANK has the fondest memories of accompanying Prof Tony Bradshaw, the eminent botanist, around St James' Gardens, beneath Liverpool Cathedral. As he lovingly sniffed the wild flowers in his fedora, Prof Bradshaw epitomised that celebrated, but deeply endangered species, the English eccentric. Now Lord Mayor Rotheram has made him Liverpool's first Citizen of Honour.

Prof Bradshaw, a splendid example of humanity and learning, is not so robust as on that happy day in the gardens, and Mr Brocklebank's thoughts are with him.

LIVERPOOL'S much- photographed Wall of Fame is suffering from a slipped disc. One of the brass CDs from the Mathew Street attraction - each represents a number one hit - is missing.

Should not the cultural paramedics race around (in record time, naturally) to the Cavern Quarter?

THE chairman of Liverpool's planning committee Cllr Dave Irving was troubled at last week's committee meeting by a few contentious applications.

"These takeaways are a hot potato," uttered the chairman. Was that a pun, or should that be a pan? Presumably as in a Scouse pun, or pan of Scouse.