BACK FROM YORKSHIRE & BIRKENHEAD . . .

. . . after a quick visit to new grandchild Freddie James Hodgson, and to old haunts Birkenhead and Liverpool. Best-looking was Freddie, followed by Liverpool.

Poor old Birkenhead looked dire: the old main shopping street, Grange Road, has long since been turned into a pedestrianised grey-paved warren of tacky cheap-modern stunted shopfronted buildings, which already look older than their years and ready to fall down from a mix of intrinsic thinness, neglect and well-deserved local indifference. This was once the largest grain port in Europe, lying on one bank of the great River Mersey, served by the great pre-war engineering achievement of the Mersey Tunnel, and with the opulent green and pleasant boroughs of the Wirral Peninsula right behind it. Instead of serving as the natural recipient of these benefits and the central town for these places, it has shrunk, through long-term council mismanagement, neglect and stupidity, into a bleak, decaying eyesore where only a marooned and hapless underclass consents to walk its streets.

Back home, flying from Liverpool to Carcassonne on Sunday morning, a friend had seen and had to buy this spot-on babygro for Freddie:

It came from nippazwithattitude.com.