Oudeis

George Melly.

I have, at long last, finished his book;Rum Bum and Concertina.

I had bought the paperback second hand some years ago, I had one attempt at reading it, but had given up. It is not a story I have much in common with. Young public-school boy with homosexual proclivities joins the Navy near the end of WWII.
Perhaps it is his connection with Liverpool and my own, less actual, experiences of the city and it's people that has allowed me to get the reading of the book over and done with.
Anyway, it is his attachment to Liverpool as his home-town that has me writing this as a Blog.

There is little of Liverpool in the book. GM is first at boarding school then off to the Navy. He visits from time to time, speaks of his family ties and the work he had done writing for the local papers. He was there for part of the Blitz, he saw the news reels of the liberation of Belsen and the war does come up from time to time, but for the most part the whole thing all but passes him by.
Yet I get the feeling that Liverpool had it's hold upon him and appears to be an equal alternative site for his future as London, should things not go so well for him there. [This is something my own home town has never offered me. ]

It may be that he has since written more extensively about Liverpool, his time there as a child and right up to the end of his life, through the swinging sixties and beyond, I do not know if he has though. Another thing struck me about this book was that I was able to hear him speak the words. Something which made the whole thing more cosy. I don't know what others that have no knowledge of his mannerism and affectations would make of it all, but that is their problem.

Well. That about wraps it up.
Is there a Lancastrian trait of inbuilt nostalgia? Is it ever possible to leave Merseyside behind?
I am probably asking the wrong people in the wrong place. :)