A straight road, a meandering mind

The colour of the wooden sculpture makes it hard to discern against the stone, and it’s tucked slightly out of the way, so you might miss it anyway. This is the Outraged Christ, by Charles Lutyens, great-nephew of Edwin, who left his mark so colonially on New Delhi.

Jesus was outraged in the temple, when he came to public attention driving out the moneylenders with an improvised whip. Some see that as the beginning of an inevitable end – you don’t live long when you defy such authority quite so openly.

Now he is outraged again, at the injustice, and the inhumanity, of his crucifixion. This isn’t the quiet acceptance of the necessary will of God; this is the human outrage that cries out against gratuitous killing.

I didn’t see it last time I was in Liverpool’s enormous cathedral, performing the Meditation on the Seven Last Words, in Lent. Today there are going to be 1,000 children assembled to sing here, and some of them have already arrived, excited. They’re all wearing industrial hi-vis covers, and making hi-decibel noises.

I weave my way through the soft privacy of back-street Liverpool. Here are quiet roads with oddly exuberant greenery growing through the pavements, old churches converted into student housing, and warehouses converted into new churches with aspirational names. There are little green spaces, fenced, and often locked. There are tight-knit houses, which remind me of where I used to live – not much, perhaps, to look at, but happy and safe community.

And then a much bigger, unfenced, green space, crossed by a wide road. The road is littered with learner drivers, lined up to practise their 3-point turns, or stranded in the middle of them.

John Lennon expresses stencilled hope from a roadside broadband cabinet. And here, on the edge of a wood, is an extravagant shrine to a departed Liverpool supporter.

Ten miles from the city centre I turn left onto a nice road – footballers’ (I’m guessing) houses on one side, and a waving field on the other.

Then ten fast but noisy miles on a good path beside the A580. There’s a limit to how long I can do that, so I divert to the Pennington Flash Nature Reserve, a mile or two in the wrong direction, where the noisiest thing is a duck outside the cafe.

It’s early for lunch, but this is the quietest place I’m likely to find today, and Deborah has packed me a second pork pie “just in case”. I think she was imagining I might not have been able to get to Liverpool at all last night, and she didn’t want to send me provisionless into the night.

A birdwatcher – I noted him earlier in one of the many hides facing the unpopulated parts of the reserve – shows me the amazing pictures of kingfishers he’s taken here. I revert to the main road, refreshed and ready to tackle the traffic noise for another hour or so.

Then, as the urban density increases again, a bit more canal – with a towpath more navigable than Birmingham’s – followed incongruously by the Trafford Centre, with its cycle paths weaving their way through acres and acres and acres of carpark. A primary school suddenly spilling out onto the road, and not quite controlled by its lollipop person. I wonder how the Big Sing went in Liverpool cathedral today?