It’s time to say goodbye…
It was thanks to an old next-door neighbour from my childhood, Andrew Coleman, that I wrote my first ever review in the February of 2004. I was still recovering from major spinal surgery, and I had been out of the house for six months. My life had reached rock bottom, I had no prospects, almost nothing to live for, no chance of work. The offer came to review a hero, write about 140 words about the former Marillion frontman Fish as he performed at the Bilston Robin and if it was good enough then it would appear in the next day’s Birmingham Evening Mail. It was thankfully not only good enough to appear, it led to more gigs to review, and it introduced me back to writing; a dearest wish of mine to be a writer of words since before I was a teenager.
The rest is history….
Reviewing for The Birmingham Mail as and when my spine would allow, then the University of Liverpool’s media team, then on my own under the banner of Liverpool Sound and Vision. A way to give back to the city that took me in, and for fourteen years I did my best to write about Liverpool and beyond. Age and other pursuits have finally caught up with me and at 55 I want to devote what remains to my novel writing and hopefully attaining my master’s before I turn 60.
It has been a privilege and an honour to write over 10,000 articles, to muse upon all artforms, and to the wonderful city of Liverpool, thank you for the word that gave the site’s name meaning, Liverpool, and coupled with the late great David Bowie, Sound and Vision, it gave me a reason to be.
We will probably not meet again, but if we do, and I wrote about you, and it was kind, please remind me; I only ever tried to be informative, but always kind, never mean.
Whether or not I succeeded I will never know, but I was read over 2,000,000 times across all writings and sites, for me that means the world.
And then it was over…
As Fish sang anyway in Sunsets On Empire, but it is not a closing of a chapter, it is barely even a paragraph of a life nowhere near complete. It remains only to say thank you, to everyone who came along the journey with me; and please know, I loved you.
E.