One True Friend
More from the Shoebox
By David on 05-30-2008
I have one true friend in prison and he goes by the name of Jimmy. He's a Scouser so he's as good as Welsh. I was brought up in a part of NorthWales which looked to Liverpool as its Capital City. Jimmy is a working class lad from the Liverpool that I knew as child.
Through the Mersey Tunnel and over to the city on the Birkenhead Ferry. Parking the car in Rock Ferry, you couldn't ignore the signs of Social Deprivation. Passing the walls of Camel Laird's shipyards, the public houses on street corners immortalised in Alan Bleasdales's 'Boys from the Blackstuff'. There was a Yosser Hughes in every bar in a city destroyed by Margaret Thatcher's(Spit) spiteful, hurtful and ruthless government. Britian, especially Liverpool has never recovered from this tyrant's domination of British Politics.
Any city which has a mythical bird as its mascot is all right by me as I sit and write this with a phoenix hanging from my neck. Jimmy is a kind hearted chancer, a young man with an eye for a golden opportunity and who can blame him? I certainly don't. Unfortunately his golden opportunities have seen him in jail in Liverpool and in Holland.
Jimmy's good humour and inbred sense of Scouse fun have sustained me in my darkest hours and I feel ashamed at my moaning.
He reminds me of the brighter kids who I used to teach in London. He has a sharp 'Scally' mind. You need that when you fall the wrong side of the tracks.
The weekends drag their feet like Ned Kelly in a full suit of armour and Jimmy let me speak to his friend Tony from Bootle on the phone. An act of kindness that gave me back a sense of reality.
North Walians and Scousers have an understanding and although I have an over romanticised view of Liverpool I was 'over the moon' and 'made up' when I met such a nice guy in a hell hole so far from home.
I hope to God when Jimmy is released he doesn't fall prey to the temptations of the underclass. Why is there an underclass in one of Britain's finest cities, because it has not had the social investment in schools and hospitals that London has. Run down inner cities and tenement blocks built in the 1960's and 1970's scar the landscape from the North to the Midlands. It's a miracle that children from 'broken up' homes survive as well as they do. They survive on their spirit.
Through the Mersey Tunnel and over to the city on the Birkenhead Ferry. Parking the car in Rock Ferry, you couldn't ignore the signs of Social Deprivation. Passing the walls of Camel Laird's shipyards, the public houses on street corners immortalised in Alan Bleasdales's 'Boys from the Blackstuff'. There was a Yosser Hughes in every bar in a city destroyed by Margaret Thatcher's(Spit) spiteful, hurtful and ruthless government. Britian, especially Liverpool has never recovered from this tyrant's domination of British Politics.
Any city which has a mythical bird as its mascot is all right by me as I sit and write this with a phoenix hanging from my neck. Jimmy is a kind hearted chancer, a young man with an eye for a golden opportunity and who can blame him? I certainly don't. Unfortunately his golden opportunities have seen him in jail in Liverpool and in Holland.
Jimmy's good humour and inbred sense of Scouse fun have sustained me in my darkest hours and I feel ashamed at my moaning.
He reminds me of the brighter kids who I used to teach in London. He has a sharp 'Scally' mind. You need that when you fall the wrong side of the tracks.
The weekends drag their feet like Ned Kelly in a full suit of armour and Jimmy let me speak to his friend Tony from Bootle on the phone. An act of kindness that gave me back a sense of reality.
North Walians and Scousers have an understanding and although I have an over romanticised view of Liverpool I was 'over the moon' and 'made up' when I met such a nice guy in a hell hole so far from home.
I hope to God when Jimmy is released he doesn't fall prey to the temptations of the underclass. Why is there an underclass in one of Britain's finest cities, because it has not had the social investment in schools and hospitals that London has. Run down inner cities and tenement blocks built in the 1960's and 1970's scar the landscape from the North to the Midlands. It's a miracle that children from 'broken up' homes survive as well as they do. They survive on their spirit.
[QUOTE] They survive on their spirit. [QUOTE] ... And so shall you.