Do I have to grab you by the hair to make you look up? An old man of ninety can use the stoop of old-age as his excuse, but you?

I sometimes walk the streets of New Manchester, looking into the faces of people. Or rather at them: their faces are canted towards the ground and scarcely acknowledge the existance of other sentient beings. Their ears caulked with headphones offer them their own individual cotton-wool sanctuary. They have walked this same route to the shop or to their place of work a hundred times and could do with with their eyes closed.

If I am honest with myself, I am guilty, too. Half-awake, half not, I will sometimes stumble along on my own miserable way, narrowly avoiding fast-moving cars and very-stationary lampposts. That’s just lack of sleep taking its toll. I should be more careful.

But look down all your life and it’s not just your line-of-sight which gets low. Look up, remember the sky. Raise your head, and your attitude will follow. You can have no pride without your chin up.

There’s so much to see in my city. But you have to look up to take it in. This place is truly beautiful.

Eyes wide open
Take it all in
Every heartbeat
Makes my head spin.

Concrete contours
City-swinging
Rooftop-racecourse
My blood’s singing.

Make the dream count
Breathe and follow
Blink and miss it
Left just my echo.

I’m trying to write a letter to my younger bro who’s spending a little time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The problem is that I know that everything that he receives will be read, even if only in a cursory manner, by the prison staff.

It’s hard to write anything meaningful, funny or downright cheeky without thinking you might get him in trouble. As a result you develop a funny kind of double-speak. You make an innocuous-looking phrase that you’d never normally make in a million years, something so odd-sounding to his ears that he’d know straight away that this wasn’t an ordinary statement. He then knows to look for a hidden meaning in what has just been said.

 ”Broken Biscuits” we used to call it as a kid. It was a way of holding a completely different conversation to the one apparent to the casual listener. You can be as subtle or as blatent as you like. It can sound like complete gibberish to completely foil and mess with the head of someone who you want to keep out of the conversation. Or it can be slipped cleverly into an mundane discussion about the weather and remain completely undetected. You could never be sure that parents weren’t ear-wigging on your conversations, and this was a fast way of getting your point across – and even have a laugh while doing it.

 Anyone else ever do this as a kid?

I remember my dad and some of his mates trying to teach me various flavours of back-slang. Never quite got it, tho. Must have been a scouse thing.