Liverpool‘s Anfield used to be an area of boarded up houses (ideal for setting up Cannabis farms within) and grey clothed bald kids scuttling around delivering drugs on unlit bikes. Nobody had a job, and the people who lived there would only wear a suit to appear in court ahead of their next prison stretch.
In the middle of all this awful scumminess was the place where 22 multi-millionaires would run around after a ball a couple of times a week. An amazing contrast.
That was then and this is now.
Well, the Anfield area has had a lot of investment in it over the last few years. The streets of boarded up houses have been pulled down (probably increasing the street cost of skunk) and the area has nice modern affordable homes. Yes, I know most get snapped up by housing associations and become free houses for those refusing to work, but at least, for now, they look nice.
As Anfield rises from the ashes, maybe becoming more ‘gentrified’, so too come the Costas, Starbucks and trendy places. That’s not actually happened just yet, but there are plans. There’s already places selling ‘healthy’ milkshakes and ‘juice’ and there’s an appetite for more than just greasy spoon cafes.
And as Anfield gets better, it also attracts the loonies. Here’s some evidence. A phone-box not far from the Liverpool Football club has bits of paper sellotaped to it. I’ve seen similar on phone-boxes in town, so can only assume this mental is going around sticking his/her bits of random paper up all over the place.
Highlighting just two of the six or seven things they’d stuck up, there’s the very modern and in touch ‘Coal not dole’. Wasn’t that a phrase from the politics of the 1970s? And aren’t the social justice warriors of today anti-coal because it represents fossil fuel and fossil fuel is instant death to everybody who believes the climate change meme? So, it’s weird that it’s been put up on the phone-box.
The other bizarre missive is a sort of dictionary definition of ‘character assassination’ and a description of ‘Calderstones’. Hmmm. Why would anybody do that?
England's England 