Keep on talking...

LIVERPOOL EIGHT HUNDRED
Not many people know this but on August 28th. The city of Liverpool will be celebrating it's eight hundreth aniversary. To mark the event several groups of poets are doing different things, one group is asking local poets to contribute a line to an eight hundred line poem another group is looking for 800 poems to make an anthology http://www.poem800.com/ I even sent in a couple of verses myself which they have accepted. I wrote a third Liverpool poem this week on the strength of it, my new piece is called The Amazing Gormley's and is of course about the naked men on Crosby beach. After completing this one I realised that a Merseyside collection was/is on the cards as I also have a poem about Southport A Limited Sea and another one about the Wirral somewhere!
GREEN GILBERT
We re-cycle everything these days and you'd think the powers that be would at least try to make it easier for people to do just that. But what a kerfuffle all this re-cycling thing is becoming. "We don't take cardboard mate!" said the re-cycling collector, "There's too many different types you see, and a lot of it's covered in that plastic stuff, it's a sort of wax or summit! ain't it? Anyway, we can't tek it!" He continued. Which got me to thinking that forty odd years ago things were much simpler - we recycled cardboard then without even knowing that that was what we were doing. I remember, I worked at the local Maypole store, stacking shelves and stuff after school and once a week we had a big cardboard collection. A man with a van would come and take all the flattened boxes away - I think they had to be not only flattened but put into a forty-eight dozen size egg box. Anyway, how green's that? Not only did we re-cycle cardboard but all glass bottles had a refund price attached to them - remember the milk bottles? rinse and return! Also, pop bottles had a deposit on them as did things like soda fountains that you could get from the off license in those days. And what about all those bring+buy sales? Yes, we've been re-cycling for a long time!
MISSISIPPI MUD PIE
It was Ruth's birthday yesterday and we made Missisippi Mud Pie, HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUTH! Don't you just love cooking? Well, it can be fun! I like making fridge cakes - you do a bit of cooking but you don't bake 'em in the oven - you just slam 'em in the fridge! And Missisippi Mud Pie is the favorite one that I like to make. It all started about twelve years ago. We used to go to a Pizza take-away on Wilmslow Road, one of those student places the other side of Platt Fields Park from the curry mile. It was an Italien place in those days and they used to flop the pizza dough about New York style and make up the pizzas to-order in the window of the shop and a crowd would always watch as the man worked. Anyway, we used to go down on a friday night and get in the queue (it was always busy) and after we'd ordered the pizza the Italian man would say "What you want for your pudding? Hah! I know what you likes! You wants the Missisippi Mud Pie! No?" So, I used to buy the sticky stuff for £1 a slice - every week. Of course one thing led to another and we got the recipe to make it ourselves which was lucky 'cos not long after that the take-away was taken over by a non Italien family and guess what? they stopped selling fridge cakes!
MYSTIFIED SHOPPER!
Last week under this sub-title in this column in this blog on your computer I wrote about Mops! Mop buckets to be precise - Well, thank you for the two e-mails one from anonymous and the other one from Freda. The first one said: I think it's a Vileda you're looking for! And Freda said: It's called a Super Mocio and they're about a fiver! And I wrote back to Freda and said: Can you send me one? I'm still waiting of course, but I did find that my local Asda actually sells them and they cost £4.97 the only trouble is they're so popular that Asda is constantly out-of-stock! Sometimes you just can't win, can you? If you want one, and I reccomend them, they're called Super Mocio (thanks Freda) and yes, anonymous they're made by Vileda!