Is that a lump sum in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Up early, and after X, Y and Z, P and I out to Bold St, with no clear idea of what we were going to do to ‘celebrate’ my first day of ‘freedom’. (They’d cut my email off, anyway, the unkindest cut, I thought.) I took out an extra tenner! We lunched at Souk, very nicely. Saw J walking by. Walked to the bottom of the road. Oxfam: didn’t buy Geoffrey Hill’s Collected or Mandy Rice Davies’ autobiography. Met C and M. Walked through the Baltic Triangle. As usual, all of the streets and buildings had been re-arranged since we’d been there last. We found nothing, just a bar not yet open, but managed to escape, to the Georgian Quarter (I never use these terms, ever). Bumped into JY, work lanyard dangling. Met DA, who tried to get P to buy one of his photos (Tony Benn) (again). To the Belve(dere), and joined in the usual banter (‘Viagra, that’s to stop you rolling out of bed.’ Or the classic exchange: ‘We love everybody except the Belgians!’ ‘I am Belgian,’ said the Belgian at the corner of the bar (but he was not Van Valckenborch). ‘Are you Flemish or Walloon?’ ‘Flemish, from Antwerp.’ ‘That’s all right then, you make good beer.’ (Didn’t rise to the routine Roger McGough routine: wanted to say he’d leapt across the room to shake my hand in Edinburgh. But just listened: ‘You’d see them in Birkenhead Market with a dollybird on each arm’, the 3 Liverpool poets. More here.)). See here for my last entry on this establishment and my poem (and others') about it. Stayed there hours, drinking very weak halves. DB joined us for a while. DB and O, tickling the latter’s doggy snout. (O is a dog.) At one point 3 of us in a row, born 1955. To the Italian Club Fish. Saw J walking by (again): out to speak to her and A. To the Pen Factory. Met PB – briefly. Drank more weak beer, lots of it. Back (T had phoned to say she’s been trying to re-instate my email) with 2 bottles of wine, to Sinatra, Jobim and Jobim and Sinatra. And Jobim and Elis, until P retired (ha-ha). It was well past dawn before I turned in. Slept till 1.15 the next afternoon.

A great Liverpool day...Now for maturity, I suppose.