There's no romance about bus travel. There are no murder mysteries set on buses; people don't have the latitude of action. There are no heists on buses, and action stars never have fistfights on top of them. People don't fall in love on buses, or, if they do, they probably have unhappy relationships. Buses are airplanes that can't fly, and bus terminals are airports with shouting instead of PA systems.
We had an extra half hour in Birmingham because the driver, a friendly northerner to whom all men are mates and all women loves, had to "reset his driving hours". While he did the necessary mystic exercises, we could wander out and see a little of the town -- the bit immediately outside the bus station, generally the choicest part of any city. And there was a good mood on the bus. My seat-mate offered me a digestive biscuit -- not chocolate-coated, but you can't have everything -- and when news spread that the toilets in Birmingham Station weren't free, offers of free change rang back and forth. Real spirit-of-the-Blitz stuff. Cancelled trains are less serious than bombing raids, but a generation can only rise to the challenges it is set. On the whole, though, I'm withholding my endorsement of the 6 hour London-Liverpool bus ride as a vacation activity.
Liverpool had some hard times, but has now transitioned successfully to a drinking-based economy. I thought my hotel was just in the nightclub district, and it sort of is, but beside that is the tavern district and then the Irish pub district and the tourist gimmick bar quarter. Outside the dimmest of the Irish pubs, two men were playing soccer, blootering the ball out onto a major road and then chasing after it like toddlers after a butterfly. Two others were having a stroll along the edge of the roof of the same building, four or five storeys up, to the general wonder of people amazed to see someone walk such straight lines. This is the only city in the world where Uber lets you hire someone to push you home in a wheelbarrow.
Once the understandable excitement of it being Wednesday evening was over, Liverpool turned out to be really quite nice: streets of 19th century red brick and stretches of ornate public buildings. The once working-class neighbourhood of the Cavern Club, where the Beatles got started, is a good one: scrubbed-up rowhouses revitalized when someone somehow hit on the idea of turning them into bars.
By the harbour are complexes of warehouses turned into museums, a daringly modern museum with daringly unusable external stairs, and some grand complexes from the early 20th century. The grandest is the Liver building, erected, if my researches are right, by liver magnate Samuel Liver. Once piled to the rafters with livers awaiting transfer to liver-ships for transport to liver-hungry cities worldwide, it now holds a restaurant and some rather smelly offices.
There are two cathedrals here, both from the 20th century. The Anglican one is as Gothic as people could stand to be when it was designed -- and, at that time, every hour's delay meant a loss of Gothic-ness -- and as overwhelming as any building in the world.
The Catholic one is from the 1950s and looks like a PAR16 light bulb. Inside, it's an immense circle of marble and concrete. One of the side chapels is Astroturfed, there's a kaleidoscopic play of light from the stained glass over the altar, and someone is absolutely freaking out on the organ. It's like a dream you might have after watching a lot of 1960s sci-fi and eating some bad seafood. It's a puzzle for the future. "We think it was either a Zeppelin factory or a storage silo for road salt." To be fair to it, it was built quickly and on the cheap, is definitely striking, and is a fair symbol of its time, which was a disorienting one for Britain.
Strangely, I don't think I heard a single Beatles song here. The buskers know their audience, and what their audience wants is 1990s love songs, preferably performed by ratty animatronic puppets.
