Are we getting old ?

As my brother Jeff embarks at last on his journey that started sometime ago his move to live in Spain with his wife Lydia who is Spanish, his journey has been a long and difficult one.

Growing up as we did when we were young in the shadow that is Anfield for me 10 years for him only 6 years and then like all who lived in the terrace house with an outside toilet and no hot water or central heating we moved to a place that we did not know about, Kirkby( I have spelt it the way it was when we first moved and how my mum would always say that we we came from Kirkby not Kirby) a land of high rise flats and lots of green spaces and also lots of us, that is under 16years of age and living in Kirkby, at one time if I remember correctly the biggest population of under 16years old in Europe, some year in the early sixties I'm not sure what year or if that information is right or is it just an urban myth that grew up around where we lived.

In those days it always had a bad press(you had to pay the taxi driver first before he would set off to take you hometo Kirkby)and in later years as well I remember an incident when by now I was working at running pubs, a new manager from the brewery who I was talking to at a conference mentioned that he had been round Kirkby and likened it to Beruit with all the bars on windows and barbed wire on the pubs he had visited , a look of despair,I had to remind him that lots of good people lived in Kirkby and especially 3, my mum, dad and brother: he walked away muttering to himself about me, but for my brother you see unlike myself who has moved around this city,7 times since leaving Kirkby in the early seventies, he has never left his home where we first went to all those years ago.

Now for him and myself 50 years have passed and as I visited the house maybe for the last time with my wife yesterday to go out for a meal with my brother and his wife, I look around the house filled with boxes and memories of happy and some sad,times when we lived there together with my mum and dad,who are both no longer with us, so Are we getting old ? I think so but as my brother and his wife embark on a new chapter in ther lives our home will now fill with other peoples new memories of hopes and dreams maybe similar to those of my mum and dad when we first went there all those years ago in 1958.

So now I wish my brother and his wife well in their new start in Spain and maybe in the future you will see pictures of us all together enjoying the sun in Spain.