Time to set that loerie free

A tale of Liverpool, the sadness of freedom and the search for happiness

On a Thursday a few weeks back, not long after the noon sun had begun to sag slowly to the west, I drove from Norwood up Ivy Road and saw a man staring at a bird. It was a loerie. Inside a cage. He didn’t move. Just stared and then stared some more. I think he was a little stoned.

But, caging a loerie or any bird is evil, a sin against those who can fly, a travesty of those who believe in freedom of any form. After my brother died in 2017, I heard a loerie call, and I felt it call his name. I should have got out and freed that Norwood loerie, but I am not that brave and the moment passed, but the regret remains. As do the reasons I was in Norwood in the first place, which, it seems, has morphed into what Melville once was, without the bouncers and gangsters.

Regrets. I’ve had a few. A few too many. As it goes. And so it goes. And it goes on, as a wise woman once wrote.

On Sunday, watching Liverpool lift a trophy in front of a crowd, I had few regrets. What a day, what a moment, what a time to be alive and slope from objectivity to pure joy. There were no tears. That was for a few years ago during lockdown and the silent celebration of 30 years of waiting, when Jordan Henderson lifted the league trophy that had been begging for red for so many years. Well, according to me.

I cried then. Had to pop two bottles of bubbles because my wife messed up recording the first bottle pop. I drank the second one as I took the rubbish bins out to the pavement the next morning. A lady on a walk past our house laughed as she saw me with the bubbles on the street. “Liverpool!” I sang. “You’ll never walk alone!” was her reply. It was a day of days.

I am still trying to work out how I felt that night in 2020. I cried. I smiled. I was relieved. I was in a fairly good but confused space. The last time Liverpool had won the league I was in my final year at Rhodes, an honours degree that led me to places and experiences that few will visit or know. World Cups, Olympics, Paralympics and everything in-between. It was weird and it was wonderful.

But. And it is that “but” that haunted me.

Liverpool. We had 2005. We had FA Cups and that other cup that dare not speak its name. We had the slip that was heard around the world. We had the horrors of Hillsborough and Heysel. The bites of Suarez. The confusion of Jamie Carragher, a player who was donkey slow but Scouse quick. How he stayed on the park some days was a surprise.

Then there was the Spice Boys era, when hope sprang infernal if not eternal. Redknapp, Fowler, McManaman et al, but they were more Spice Girls than Boys, a vague, made-up band of, well, nothing of substance. Rebuild! But how?

Liverpool made the mistake of signing players based on World Cup form. A warning. World Cups are not a show ramp of what players are capable of but of the moment they are in. It is, like time, fleeting. They lose their rhythm, veer off course and become overwhelmed by the weight of expectation. Impostor syndrome sets in quickly. Ask Darwin Nunez.

And, yet, on that glorious Sunday we rejoiced. I wanted to do it quietly. But, sitting at Pirates sports club to watch the Moto GP, the bar was invaded. A busload of a Liverpool supporters’ club arrived en masse. Fifty of them. Mostly black, and that must be noted not for the sake of noting it but for the reach and joy of a club over 6,000 miles away. They sang. Christ, could they sing. Mo Salah. Virgil. Bobby Firminio. YNWA. They had a full-size replica of the Premiership trophy.

I sang. I went full fan. I had my picture taken with the trophy. And then, 30 minutes after they arrived, they were gone. On to the next pub. I walked home. Slowly. And happy. I felt free and happy. I think I need to go and let that loerie feel the same.

*This column first appeared in Business Day on May 30.