A world connected by string

It took some doing, connecting two bedroom windows across a twenty foot wide avenue by a length of string, pulling it taut. Any ideas we might have had of connecting the whole avenue and roads beyond by over-head string quietly vanished. Still, attaching two empty bean cans to each end of our string was magic enough.

I can’t remember who spoke first or whether we heard anything, but then I never remember half of what I say on the phone – or much of what I said last night – so the issue has little importance. What is important is the magic a small boy imagines and never forgets. The experience is everything.

Mind you, as an early example of ‘Neighbourhood Watch – eyes glued to windows, mouths immersed in cans still smelling of beans – it proved something of a failure.  There weren’t many burglaries in Aintree - but we weren’t looking for burglars; we were looking for spies that congregated on the streets of Liverpool on cloudless nights.

Comics fed our dreams as did the Saturday afternoon matinee  in cinemas with names like: The ‘Palace’ or the ‘Atlas.’  Grand names. I wonder why they didn’t go further, with cinemas named The Acropolis or the Parthenon. But then, thinking back, we didn’t actuallyhave cinemas in Liverpool, at least not by that name.  We called them ‘Picture Houses.’ Much more sensible, though my wife still winces when I refer to a modern muli-plex as the  ‘Picture House.' Empty cans, too, are hurriedly recycled.

But I miss the old Picture Houses, the Saturday Matinees and glamorous usherettes in purple uniforms selling ice cream by torchlight. I miss Flash Gordon in black and white, Cowboys in big hats and horses on amphetamines, their legs impossibly fast.  I even miss the ‘Three Stooges’- my first taste of horror, the smell of stale socks and bubblegum breath, the seats you sank into - some swampy, others small buckets of dust. The Picture House fed us dreams, along with the once-weekly comic; the boredom in-between somehow made the dreams stronger. 

Then like sad dominoes the cinemas were knocked down. The Palace became ‘Lennons' Supermarket’ and later a Shoe Emporium. 
 

The Atlas morphed into Sheltered Housing – And the Aintree Institute, where the Beatles once played, was replaced by a Car Park.

Once there was a world with two tin cans connected by string.