REDCOAT RETREAT

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG BOY in the nineteen sixties, America must have seemed like a different universe for most people in Britain. Yet for those of us who were brought up in Liverpool it seemed to be closer than Manchester, and certainly nearer than London, or “England”. Most of the people I knew at school had dads or uncles who “worked on the boats”, and for a lot of us these “boats” meant the regular shipping lines that went from the port of Liverpool to New York or other ports of call in the USA.

IT WAS DUE TO THIS RELATIONSHIP that so many of those in my generation in Liverpool were able to receive DC and Marvel Comics brought back by our family members far before British comics like the Beano or Dandy became part of our existence. Other people have written at length about how merchant sailors brought back pop music records in the late fifties, stimulating the rise of pop groups in Liverpool that ended up in a music scene in Merseyside that was far in advance of anything else in Britain.

THERE WERE THE OCCASIONAL LINGUISTIC difficulties, of course: whenever Batman went into a city centre I would, at the tender age of five, be confused by “malls”, “malteds”, “sidewalks” and the like, and, watching Top Cat on ITV, I could never understand what a “Pizza Pie” was. I could also never understand what a “Zip Code” was on those adverts for “See thru glasses”.

NEVERTHELESS, IT IS FAIR TO IMAGINE that the commercial relationships between the wider USA and the UK in general were, in the sixties, more or less the beginning of what they ended up being much later on. This was the time when Fords and Vauxhall were saving the UK economy by granting it the status of a new offshore 51st state, something that was hated by the Conservatives with both a capital and small c in Britain.

NOWADAYS THAT DEPENDENCE returns in the hands of the Conservatives and their “big society”. David Cameron and his scissor-handed Tories announce cuts of a swingeing nature on Wednesday; bug-eyed Hillary Clinton makes a speech on Thursday saying that she is worried about Britain reducing its military capability; on Friday Cameron cancels most of the cuts.

IN COMPARISON TO THIS, the fact that Liverpool Football Club, the most successful football club in the history of the game, formerly owned by a consortium from Texas, was sold on Friday to a consortium from Massachusetts, must mean very little. Most Liverpool FC fans would find it difficult to state where New England is, and very few of the most intelligent of their fans might be able to name perhaps one state that belongs to New England other than Massachusetts (but probably not the state capitals). The nice thing is that today Liverpool were beaten by Everton, a team owned, as has always been the case, by a gentleman from Liverpool, and the fans of whom are those whose grandfathers, dads, uncles and older brothers were those who worked on those ships in the old days.