Liverpool

A five hundred pound day out in Liverpool. We had to get passports for Kirsty and the girls.

We walked against a cold Irish Sea wind, along the magnificent Victorian and Art Deco buildings of George's Dock, trying not to notice the huge black blocks of unimaginative modernism scattered round about. They might have the size but they have not an iota of the grandeur of the older buildings. They look like a feeble bully fencing around a silent, mightier foe.

It was four hours before they could be issued, so we had a look round the Tate. Some favourites of mine were there: Yves Klein's blank blue rectangle of the colour he patented (always introduces a sour note that, to me), some Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, Donald Judd and Gillian Wearing's "Signs" series, the last of which, "I'm Desperate", I have a postcard.

I was surprised to see another in a series by Jeff Koons, which I first came across on Unbearable Banishment's blog a while ago, where he informed us that another in the series had sold in New York for fourteen-and-a-quarter million dollars. I might have given them a fiver for it.

I sprang to alarmed attention as my children walked across across a Carl Andre. "Girls! No!" "It's OK," said Kirsty. "Look."

She directed me to the explanatory plaque on the wall, which says that you're welcome to walk on it, but by then I'd stopped reading the almost entirely meaningless nonsense prose that surrounds the works (e.g., Passmore: "Geometry, though subject to the quoi of personal judgement, is a guide to the organic process.")

It was therefore a relief to come across Rodney Graham's White Shirt for Mallarmé, that presented the latter's prose work The Demon of Analogy, with its precise and painstaking prose to try to catch in writing, in real time, something of the habit, which I suppose we all have, of repeating words and phrases until they become meaningless, or, rather, they acquire a synathesthic novelty.

I was sent back to collect the passports. On my way back, I nipped into a sex shop to buy some poppers. The man wrapped them in a note written partly in capitals, all in red ink. Outside, I unwrapped it to see what it said. "It has come to our notice that a small number of people are misusing our product by sniffing directly from the container, in the same way that a minority misuse glue by sniffing that product. We reiterate that the purpose for which it is sold is purely for use as a room odouriser."

There's something ominous about that, as if someone knows that this miserable Goverment has spotted another source of pleasure to ban.

Kirsty wanted to go to the World Museum but I was aware that I was in one of the finest Real Ale cities in the country, so me and Jenny went to the Ship and Mitre, which was offering eighty [sic] beers on draught. A lovely warm atmosphere, and no fucking music. But I was out of money. "I'll be two minutes Jenny, I've got to go to the cashpoint. Sit there. Talk to strangers."

A minute or two before we pulled into Lancaster station, we started playing a game where they put their heads in between the automatic doors between the carriages, then wait for them to close. It doesn't hurt. A woman glared at us.