Friday 13 April 2012

L is for Liverpool

Before I get into today’s post I feel the need to advertise the Radio Show I aired today. For those of you who don’t know I presented a show for 3 years called That’s Debatable on my student Radio Station which I am now employed to run. I decided to get back onto presenting so have been doing a Folk music show called Folklore.

It airs every Friday 2-3 pm on
http://www.radiohope.co.uk – I do hope people will tune in and support me!

If you miss it I will put up soundcloud files, today’s has just been put up:
http://soundcloud.com/paul-rawcliffe/


I am a born and bred scouser. This city has been my home for my entire life and I do say I adore it to the max.

What does amuse me is people often do not realise I’m a scouser, especially at University, it would always come as a surprise when people found out. This is because I don’t have a scouse accent, in school they called me posh but I wouldn’t go that far, I just don’t have an accent.

Liverpool seems to get a bad reputation around the country and this does annoy me greatly. I have found the people of Liverpool to be some of the politest, kindest and well meaning people you’ll find. Admittedly there are a lot of strange and bizarre folk here but the major are good. Yes there are those bad eggs who steal cars etc, but they are a minority and are called ‘thugs’ which exist in every city.

During the riots of last summer Liverpool was the first (possibly second) city to organise mass community cleanups and most were organised by young people, the generation getting the bad press as the cause.

There are bad places in Liverpool of course, as there is in London, but for some god be known reason no-one wants to see the positive aspects of Liverpool, they go with the stereotypes. I have recently looked into the Hillsborough incident and it does not fill me with anger as it does most Liverpudlians. It makes me sad because people ignore the obvious facts of that disaster and disrespect all of those who died by falsely blaming ‘drunken scousers’, a theoretical cause which has been officially proven to be complete rubbish.

I feel sorry for the Sun who managed to alienate an entire community with thoughtless lies and rumours. The Sun is mud in this city and quite right too, during times of disaster we should not point the blame at our own countrymen, we should unite together to prevent such problems from happening again.

The world is not a nice place, if we cannot trust our own fellow Brits then who can we?

I love Liverpool, I love Britain, let us earn the Great in our title again by all standing up against prejudices, racism and mass bullying. We can all do it my friends, I have faith!

DFTBA



2 comments:

  1. I'm in a similar boat on the accent front. I was born in West Yorkshire, now live in East Yorkshire, but in between I spent just enough time down south that no one thinks I'm from anywhere near there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've never been to Liverpool, but have just finished translating (from French) a chapter about the International Slavery Museum (and two similar museums in France) from a book on museums. It sounds dull as dishwater the way I'm presenting it, but it was actually fascinating and the author of this chapter was very complimentary about Liverpool and the way it has risen above the "troubles" in the 1980s.
    And when the French students I teach ask about good cities to go to in Britain, I often suggest first Newcastle, because I know it (my dad's from there), but also Liverpool because of the reputation Scousers have for being friendly. Maybe I'm a freak, but I don't associate bad reputations with Liverpool at all - my connotations are of music and comedians!

    ReplyDelete