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Poetry
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| The Birkenhead April Fools | |
| By amboline | ||||||||||||||||
| 20 March 2006 | ||||||||||||||||
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My first attempt at a Lazy Writers homework assignment. Been developing quite a bit of poetic material about my hometown lately (probably as a reaction to being exiled in Milton Keynes...) and this was great source material to write about. The April Fools mentioned were all actual newspaper articles in the Wirral Globe in the 1980s, but I still wonder if the bigger joke wasn't the false promise of resources and regeneration from the government of the day. It was intriguing to see some of the same old guard back on the streets of Birkenhead a couple of weeks ago, re-hashing the same promises; but for me and, I suspect, many others from that time and place, the old cynicism is pretty ingrained. We argue still, my Mum and I, about which of the April Fools came first. One year it was Wirral TV. Unplug your aerial, and re-tune. That’s all you did. Long before cable, or Murdoch with his satellites. Like that could work. One guy pulled his aerial so hard the goldfish bowl flew off the telly top and landed on the shag pile. Suffocated. Then another year, the Mersey Barrage. Renewable green power, years before the buzz-words. Right across the estuary. So big, they had to flood New Brighton seafront. Letters of concern washed in like cockles. After the riots, they sent Heseltine strutting his quiff down several streets like ours to show they cared. Then, poll tax. Never mind the docks they closed, the mothballed submarines, accumulated gutter mounds of turds and un-swept plastic bags. Mum taught a kid whose Saturday hobby was rooting on the tip. Our personal Tory died not long before the ’97 election. More concerned with grammar than with schools, he just about stirred himself to two or three speech days and photo calls with Major. No great loss. The Globe’s best was the tranche of Council cuts. Snatch squads to enter homes for overdue library books. No bins to be collected. You’d take the rubbish to the tip yourself in Wirral Borough Council plastic bags, three fifty each from Wallasey town hall. Schools to be open just three days a week. Water metering and tolls for roads – it all seemed so far-fetched back then. This April, seems they’re coming back: ghosts, strolling through the wilderness they made. New promises, new quiffs, new task forces. New Tories, just in case we’d all forgotten the last lot. Showing they care this time. And who’s that in the photo? Heseltine.
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why can't I use french accents on this site??? 
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