We had much less time in Liverpool yesterday than we'd hoped for: beware, traveller — the M5 and M6 have so many roadworks … I lost count, the journey up taking almost twice as long as it should have done.
So, a rushed job when it came to the Albert Docks and a bit of the centre, but enough to make me appreciate what a mighty city this has been … and how vibrant it is today, with all its possibilities and problems: European City of Culture, 2008, yet Liverpool University (where one of our sons is studying) lies cheek-by-jowl with some of the worst inner city areas I've seen in the UK.
Down in the Docks, the Tate is very fine. We had enough time to take in the New Realism room in the DLA Piper Series: International Modern Art. I liked the early Chapman brothers' piece, Disasters of War, which I'd heard a lot about and not seen before, the Grayson Perry pots, Germaine Richier's Storm Man and Hurricane Woman, the Giacometti portraits (of his brother, Diego) … I want to come back to Liverpool many more times, see much more of the city, get round all of the Tate and see the Walker and Lever galleries.
When we got back home, there was Tom Coates' posting to read: On the BBC Annotatable Audio project ... — 'a demonstration of a functional working interface for the annotation of audio that's designed to allow the collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music'. Euan Semple comments: 'After 21 years working in broadcasting I reckon this is one of the coolest things to happen for a very, very long time. The ramifications of this will go very deep indeed'.
All the more fitting that our journey back took in some good to outstanding radio on Radio 4. I'd pick out here:
- Antony Beevor and Gillian Slovo discussing the significance of novelist and war reporter Vasily Grossman with Francine Stock (Great Lives). A towering figure — to protect his second wife and her children, whom he'd adopted, he dared even to misquote Stalin in a letter to the head of the NKVD — his masterpiece, Life and Fate, was published after his death. I'm ashamed to say I've never read it, but it's now on my list for the Xmas break.
- David Cannadine exploring the way the UK we know today differs so much from that of those whose lives were rooted primarily in the first half of the twentieth century (A Point of View): if you're in your mid-40s to mid-60s, you didn't know a world dominated by two World Wars and the greatest economic slump the modern world has ever experienced; instead, the social disruption of the Butler Education Act, plus the immense amount of money poured into education, created a country where, for all its faults, "those in charge" today do not have to be the product of inherited or privately financed privilege — he cited (as examples) grammar school boys Melvyn Bragg (In Our Time), Andrew Turnbull (former Cabinet Secretary) and Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England). These short programmes are his for the next 13 weeks and he seems to be setting out to look at the role Universities play in our society and how they are to be funded.
