I frequently use geography as an an anchor, I think we all do. Yesterday, 4000 miles away from here, a 17 year old boy killed three and seriously injured eight others in a knife attack. It's not just the immediacy of Mighty Radio's audio (including the searing description of the scene as "like a horror movie" - I don't like horror movies) that brought this home.
During the late 80s and 90s, I spent my childhood in a village equidistant between Southport and Wigan. Ten miles from the seaside town (although the low frequency with which the sea was actually beside the prom is a running joke). I used to go sailing on the town's Marine Lake with my Dad as a kid. I used to go shopping on Lord Street. I used to go to hospital appointments at the old Infirmary and the new(er) District Hospital where some of the victims of yesterday's attack have ended up. In fact, some were also taken to the other hospital I know intimately - Ormskirk - and further away to Alder Hay and Liverpool. I had relatives doing what many in Southport seemed to do when I was a kid, living out their elderly lives in the quiet atmosphere of the salt-flecked air.
The human geography of this region is strange. The town has an area code it shares with some of the surrounding towns and villages (including the one where I went to high school) in West Lancashire but is in a Preston post code area (the nearest city, in central Lancashire) and is in the Sefton council area of both the post-1970s county of Merseyside and the Liverpool City Region. In other words, it doesn't really fit in with easy definitions in that realm. It's definitely not Liverpool, but years of playing against watching my brother play against Birkdale United can confirm that it *is* (or at least can be) Scouse. Before the Thatcher government, it was in Lancashire - the county palatine (Americans, in this case "county" is very much analogous to "state").
The media reflect this disconnect. Obviously, the massacre of little girls by a relative kid is national news, but the on-the-ground media all come from further afield - the most obvious being Liverpool Echo, which absorbed the Southport Visiter (yes, it was spelled with an "e") in 2018.
Of the two radio stations based in the town, Mighty Radio (a community - non-profit - FM station) has switched to automated mellow music and news updates on the hour. Dune Radio (a commercial DAB station) is broadcasting live, and with a seemingly unchanged playlist. I have a personal preference for the former (as noted above) but I can understand both - given there are three national networks (The Hits, Greatest Hits Radio and BBC Local Radio) and a number of national stations all with coverage of the area and people may want a distraction from the slowly unfolding aftermath.
None of this matters of course, three girls are dead and eight others remain in the region's hospitals, but I felt a sense of urgency to write something. There is a vigil going on in twenty minutes.
