This Is This

I went back to Liverpool with my dad and his brother a few years ago. It had been more than 50 years since they walked to the streets where they grew up and they wanted to take a trip down memory lane.

Except memory lane wasn’t there. Or it was, but the name had changed and it looked different and they didn’t remember it. The street where they grew up, Arthur Street, had been bulldozed along with Herbert Street to make a spacious cul de sac called Herbarth Close. Close, but, as they say in France, sans banane.

Their old pubs had changed for no apparent reason. They were still the same pubs in the same places but the names had been changed. If a pub has been The Green Man for one hundred years, why does a landlord have to change the name to El Hombre Verde just because they put tapas on the menu?

I used to go to gigs at the Odeon. Now it’s called the Hammersmith Apollo, with I think means “Hammersmith with chicken”, or something.

Even the names of cities change. Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City, which by the way has a different name depending on what language you are speaking. The French call it Ho Chi Minh Ville. The Vietnamese, who you would hope know about such things, call it Th�nh pho Ho Ch� Minh.

New Amsterdam became New York. I kind of get that because it was a long time ago, but the Russions with their Tsaritsyn/Stalingrad /Collegegrad/Volgograd is just too confusing. To change it twice in one person’s lifetime is stupid. At least do the background check on the person you are naming it after to make sure he wasn’t a hate figure. For example, Colchester, in the early 1950’s, nearly became Bomber Harristown, before local planners discovered that Sir Athur was responsible for ten of thousands of innocent civilian deaths during the carpet-bombing of Dresden during World War 2.

Some poor old guy somewhere is reminiscing about how he used to drink coffee’s in the Coach and Horses in Constantinople and now for old time’s sake he has to go for a latte in the Fatwa and Firkin in Instanbul.

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So celebrate your differences and don’t worry what other people think. Do what you want so long as no one gets hurt and your intentions are good.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 at 8:40 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.