Skip to main content

On getting out of London and going to…Liverpool!

When I was in my early teens, my mum gave me one of the best gifts she’s ever bestowed on me (save for the woollen jumper she is currently knitting and will send to me in time for British winter). In my early teens, my mum gave me her entire collection of authentic, 1960s Beatles memorabilia. This amazing collection included magazines, records, John Lennon’s book ‘In His Own Write’, her ticket stub from their concert at Festival Hall in June 1964, and so much more. The gift marked the midway point of my blossoming obsession with the Fab Four. An obsession that my mum understood, approved of and encouraged.
The Beatles - an obsession all mums approve of

At this point, you may be wondering what The Beatles have to do with my declaration that I wanted to spend my next weekend doing something completely different. Something I could never do in Melbourne. Well, wait for it…


You don’t get much more uniquely British than trains, train journeys, train stations, girls on trains (ha, sorry got a little carried away there – but don’t get me started on why they decided to move the book’s story to American and not keep it in England). A train journey, therefore, seemed the perfect way to spend my next weekend and an opportunity arose for me to do just that.

For those of you familiar with London’s larger railway stations (and not just from the Monopoly board) like Euston, Paddington, Waterloo, King’s Cross St. Pancras, you’ll know that in around two hours, you can find yourself in places like Oxford, York, Cambridge, Bath, Brighton, Paris, Brussels and so on goes the list. If you’ve been in Australia’s equivalent, you know that you can travel for two hours and still be in the same state you reside. Not quite as fun. When I first encountered the departures board at Paddington station, my entire body tingled with the thrill of opportunity. I loved being surrounded by the excited bustle of people waiting to board trains to their next adventure destination. I imagined them visiting old ruins, traversing the rambling moors of the countryside, drinking in pubs that had been in existence since the 1600s, taking the waters at Bath’s famed spa. Granted, most of these people were harassed commuters just trying to get home, but I preferred my romantic notion of their lives.

And so on my weekend mini break, I found myself at Euston station. I was about to board a train that would deposit me, two and a bit hours later, in Liverpool, aka the home of The Beatles. That, my friends, is something you can’t do in Melbourne.

Now, if you’re lucky, a train trip can be the most pleasant of journeys. I love nothing more than to stare out a train window and watch as the vibrant green of the English countryside goes by. The sun seems to always stream through the window during the journeys I’ve taken, and this creates a cocoon of warmth that is partnered perfectly with a beverage (before noon, tea, after noon, booze).
This, however, was not my experience going to Liverpool.

There we were, in carriage E, surrounded by lads all headed to Liverpool for some football match or other. Their only luggage? Loud voices and copious six packs of larger. (Fosters. ‘Nuff said.) The window we had to look out of was non-existent (I didn’t even know you could get seats without windows) and I was sipping on orange juice because I thought I was getting a cold. After an hour, one of the lads started vaping (the cool of cigarette smoking didn’t really translate to using these vape things did it? Everyone just looks like the Pied Piper) and I thought that the train journey could very well morph into a psychological triller like ‘The Girl on the Train’ but probably more like ‘Murder on the Orient Express’.

Thankfully, the trip got exponentially better once we disembarked at Liverpool Lime Street railway station. For the next two days I walked in the footsteps of John, Paul, George and Ringo right to the entrance of the Cavern Club. I also visited The Beatles Story, an amazing museum dedicated to the mop-haired foursome, and discovered fan offerings that littered the city such as a statue of Eleanor Rigby, created by Tommy Steele in the 80s and dedicated to ‘all the lonely people’. 

But I didn’t feel lonely. I felt part of history.
The.Cavern.Club.

I thought back to my teenaged self, when I could be found, hour upon hour, writing out the lyrics to every song the Beatles wrote, only to discover my mum had done the exact same thing thirty years earlier. And now, here I was, in the city where it all began. My only regret was that my mum wasn’t there with us. But thankfully, in this age of social media, I could tweet about my adventure, my mum could read along, and it was as if she was there is spirit.


And that’s what I call doing something completely different, something I could never have done in Melbourne. And I just know there will be many, many more such adventures in my future yeah, yeah, yeah.
John, Paul, George and Ringo 4eva

Comments

  1. Lovely Nicolette, that sounds like a journey from hell! Glad the Beatles brought you sweet relief.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They did indeed, bless them! The train journey back to London was mercifully much more pleasant, too.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On my first trip abroad

  I took my first overseas trip when I was in year eleven. It was to Noum é a, New Caledonia and it almost didn’t happen. The trip’s purpose was to improve the French language skills of those of us insistent on studying French during our last two years of school, believing the subject a necessity for our futures when we would most certainly be in Paris living our best French lives being all Parisian and speaking fluent French and just being all chic in our Frenchness and you get the picture. The first step on this road to being so Frenchy so chic, was a week’s trip to this South Pacific island wherein we would live with the locals, have 3-hour French lessons each day and immerse ourselves in the otherworldness that comes with visiting a place far removed from that in which you live. But whether it was the 3-hour lessons or the 3-hour flight, not enough of my classmates put their hands up to make this trip a reality. Cue teenage woe-is-me angst, the shedding of many tears, thr...

On the existential crisis of the weekend

  Weekends used to be what life was for. Two days of freedom and relief from the weekday routine, from the grind of office life, from waking up with an alarm. The sweet, giddy euphoria of a Friday night was made all the more intoxicating if you had plans to socialise, go to a gig, watch a film, eat at your local Italian. Not only did you get your socialising/culture/food fix in, but you then had two more days of doing the very same thing. The weekend also offered endless pottering-around-the-house hours since usually it was a space you scarcely saw during the week. A Saturday started with a little light cleaning was one sure way to make you feel as if you were ahead in the productivity stakes, and made the Netflix binge that followed feel earned.   Friday night was balanced out by the cold sweats of Sunday evening but still, the weekend was always worth it, regardless of whether you didn’t move from the couch after Friday night work drinks, or beca...

On learning a new skill

So how many new skills have you mastered during this Covid-19? Are you fluent in Latin? French? Turkish? Is your personal brand lighting up Twitter/Instagram/Facebook as you sell the wellness candles you cooked up in the kitchen after you created an online festival but before finishing a new dress made from scraps around the house you can wear when you next meet a friend for ‘exercise’ with a keep cup full of ‘coffee’? Spoiler, it has wine inside. Thought so. But guess what. It seems that if you haven’t managed to generally improve yourself, and a substantial number of people online, during this dire time of unprecedented crappness, then apparently you’re doing it wrong. (Bonus points if said improvement was expressed in a language other than that with which you were born). Having missed this chance at enlightenment earlier in the Covid-19 mayhem, this week I decided to give it a go. To change up lockdown life for the better. I vowed that no longer would I spend my ...